Monday, July 19, 2004
HOUSE AND POST-PUNK NOSTALGIA
Thanks to the wonderfully generous Matos and Daddino (I owe, I owe, so off to rip I go!), eMusic, and Mick Jones and Pennie Smith, I have been swimming in nostalgia all weekend.
The first two compiled a humongous discog of Simon Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy. (Matos just boiled it down to a 6-CD box set) I'm not ashamed to admit I can't get beyond the 80s. All those late 80s house and techno discs make me pine for the crate of records some (very smart or just very lucky) asshole swiped from me as we were dismantling after a gig one night at a club on Durant Avenue. If anyone out there wants to give me back my complete collection of Bonesbreaks records, rare-ass Metroplex records and other-stuff-that-fetches-mad-loot-on-eBay no questions asked, I promise I will not prosecute or otherwise beat the shit out of you.
eMusic has the entire early Gary Numan discography. Forget "I, Robot"! Note to electroclashers: this is why most of you suck.
And thanks to Mick Jones, we now have the rehearsal tapes for the London Calling sessions. Appropo enough, he found these tapes recorded in a garage in a box in his garage They're called The Vanilla Tapes and they're being released as part of a 2CD+DVD London Calling set this fall. The DVD includes about an hour of footage of the making-of-the-album, including a Don Letts doc and videos for "London Calling", "Train In Vain", "The Clampdown" and the famed "Fridays" appearances. I'll detail the tapes another time in some review for somebody.
I first heard of the Clash with their "This Is Radio Clash" video and my cousin (who soon after got a college radio show at KTUH and called himself "Tommy Gun") turning me on to "The Magnificent Seven", probably in the impressionable summer after eighth grade. I was mesmerized by Futura's mural and the b-boys and rappers. Then I found out these guys did reggae too. Whoa! I got to London Calling and the US debut and was hooked.
It's funny because in Honolulu, punk was accessible first mostly to the haole and Local kids who could afford the imports and black leather jackets, so in my private-school setting the context was funny: it signified wealth and brattiness, forget eating canned beans and eggs and recording demos in a dirty, carfume-filled garage.
Not that I was a Marxist then, or even prole for that matter--although summer jobs cleaning restaurant toilets and cooking huge vats of rice (not at the same time) do develop sections of the brain that remain inert in vast swaths of the planet...
Weirdly enough my exposure to good post-punk that didn't come through sifting through my cousin's 45s happened via trips to the Hawai'i State Library downtown which, thankfully, stocked all the Rolling Stone 5-Star Records like Gang of Four and Talking Heads. (No Gary Numan that I remember. Critics hated him!) Anyway, that's what you gotta love about socialism--bureaucrats filling the Library record bins with funky agit-prop.
By the time I was in college, I had complete access to all this stuff at the KALX library-a home away from home for a while-not to mention free tickets to see the bands at The Stone or the Berkeley Square and student loan money to go and buy stuff on the return-it-for-full-credit-if-you-don't-like-it-or-just-want-to-build-up-your-cassette-collection-plan from Rasputins. But I had already been deep into hip-hop and was reading about house in British music mags.
So on weekends like this, it's cool to catch up on things I missed.
You live long enough, you learn about shit you should have known the first time.
posted by Zentronix @ 4:37 PM
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