I once read an essay by music critic Simon Reynolds where he pointed out that the fundamental difference between punk music and the new wave and no wave music that followed it is that new wave and no wave bands were formed by art school kids, but punk music was always rooted in literary inspirations — Patti Smith was a poet before she was a rocker, and Tom Verlaine took his pseudonym directly from another verse-slinger.

Now there’s a new book about the influence the New York Poets of the 1960′s had on the punk kids. Here’s PBS with the word…

“Patti Smith, Richard Hell, these people we know as musicians came to New York to be poets,” said Kane. “And they came with relatively old-fashioned notions about what constitutes poetry. These poets gave them alternative ways of thinking about poetry.”

In many ways, Kane shows, these musicians had a love-hate relationship with the New York School poets because of those differences. While these poets were insistent on not taking poetry too seriously (poet Ed Sanders, for example, published a magazine at the time called “F*** You: a magazine of the arts”), these musicians had come to New York with the closely-held ideas that an artist was meant to convey high emotion and speak from a position of authority — ideas taken from earlier poets like the British romantics, and reiterated by beat poets like Allen Ginsberg.

“[New York School poet] Ted Berrigan would say, ‘poetry can be fun, it can be light-hearted,’” said Kane. “He questioned the authority people were investing in figures like Ginsberg. And meanwhile Lou Reed and Patti Smith were enamored of the arguably hyberbolic lyrics of a poem like [Ginsberg’s] ‘Howl.’”

But while musicians like Smith were in some ways resistant to the poets of the day, Kane shows how they were also influenced by them, including by the air of indifference they projected, and even their silliness.

On Smith’s 1975 album “Horses,” for example, she allowed herself to be funny, something she mostly set aside in her later music. “I think that deep, intelligent, rich humor was inspired partly by the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church,” Kane said. St. Marks is also the place Smith first performed.

Here’s Smith and her band live on Swedish television in 1976…

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Last Friday I was posting the latest From the Archives pick when I read about Glenn O’Brien’s passing in The Guardian. Here’s the word…

Glenn O’Brien, the New York cultural figure who was an author, musician, magazine editor, style guru, TV host and key figure at Andy Warhol’s Factory, has died aged 70.

Described by Rolling Stone, one of the publications he edited along with Warhol’s Interview, as a “renaissance man”, O’Brien was perhaps best known as the host of TV Party – the public access show on which he interviewed guests, such as Debbie Harry and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

O’Brien’s show is indispensable for any student of New York’s punk/new wave/no wave underground scene as the candid chaos of TV Party’s improvised anarchy illuminates these people, this music and art in a way that no documentary ever will. Looking back on these episodes is a bit like watching a nature film where you have the opportunity to view wild things in their natural environment.

Here’s a massive playlist I made for y’all: This kicks off with a feature documentary about Glenn and TV Party before deep-diving into a handful of classic episodes and a few spotlit interviews. Keep your eyes peeled for Blondie, Chris Stein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Arto Lindsay, and David Byrne…

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I celebrated the 15th anniversary of 24 Hour Party People in a recent post. And over the weekend I discovered this great old BBC show called The Way They Were. On this episode you’ll find the real Tony Wilson presenting a selection of punk and new wave acts on his So It Goes television show from 1976 – 1978. Here’s the roster:

Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Iggy Pop, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Penetration, Blondie, Fall, Jam, Jordan, Devo, Tom Robinson Band, Johnny Thunder, Elvis Costello, XTC, Jonathan Richman, Nick Lowe, Siouxie & the Banshees, Cherry Vanilla & Magazine

This is on a VHS tape recording uploaded to YouTube. Have at it punks!

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Over the holiday I missed out on posting about the 14th anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death from an un-diagnosed congenital heart defect on December 22, 2002. I celebrated The Clash’s 30th birthday with a slew of posts this last summer and I wanted to revisit this Joe-centric notice to recognize his passing last week. Here’s a bit about the documentary Viva Joe Strummer – The Clash and Beyond followed by the film…

Here’s another post celebrating The Clash at 30: Viva Joe Strummer – The Clash and Beyond documents the British rocker’s childhood as as diplomat’s son, his rock ‘n’ roll initiation with The 101ers, his storied history with The Clash to Strummer’s overlooked later career music which was cut short by his untimely death in 2002. Here’s the word from Open Culture…

Viva Joe Strummer gives us loads of concert footage and interviews with band members and close friends like the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock. The focus remains on Strummer, a frontman with tremendous charisma but also, paradoxically, with a tremendous amount of humility. One reviewer of the film says as much:

Joe Strummer always projected himself as a humble man. Even at the height of The Clash‘s megalomania, when he fired guitarist Mick Jones, Strummer came across like a better read, more worldly Bruce Springsteen. The everyman image has made eulogizing the singer difficult.

This suggests that Strummer’s everyman persona may have been part of his showmanship, but even so, he was respected and admired by nearly everyone who knew him. And his proletarian politics were genuine. As one interviewee says above, “he always had a corner to fight in. He always had someone to stick up for.”

Here’s Viva Joe Strummer…

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Trying to sneak in a few more birthday notices before the year’s up, 2016 marks the 40th birthday of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It’s also the 30th birthday of John Cale’s third album which borrowed its title from Robbins’ novel. Cale’s Cowgirls is a live record/time capsule that captures the New York punk scene one decade later…

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the third live album by Welsh musician John Cale. It was originally released on LP in 1986 and then later reissued on cassette in 1987 with a different cover and drastically altered track listing. In 1991 it was reissued on CD with a third cover design, but with contents identical to the cassette edition. It was recorded in CBGB club in New York between 1978 and 1979 with three former members of Patti Smith Group, bassist Ivan Kral, keyboardist Bruce Brody and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. The LP version contains different track listing than CD.

Here’s a sampler of the album followed by a monster Cale playlist on YouTube…

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With my recent posts looking back on The Clash I’m reminded of all the ways that punk rock influenced the scenes that followed it. Even if the aesthetics we associate with punk music come and go, many of the ethical ideas that punk celebrated and the DIY productivity it inspired have fueled “independent” movements in all of the arts ever since the 1970′s. In my own productivity I haven’t recorded music that I’d call “punk,” but the shoestring budgets, sweat equity trades, and music for music’s sake consciousness that’s shared by all of my collaborators comes right out of CBGB or Warhol’s Factory or a warehouse in London where a band called The Clash recorded an album called London Calling: we’re all clipped-together with those same spikes and safety pins.

One concept I’ve fueled with specifically punk, anti-capitalist ideas is my ongoing war with music videos as advertisements for artists and songs. Since the beginning of music videos it was clear that it was important to treat the medium more like a short film than like an infomercial. With that in mind I’ve been lucky to have most of my videos made by new media artists.

Antonia Oakes showed a collection of art videos that feature my songs as their soundtracks as part of her Future Shock installation at Nashville’s Modular Art Pods event in June. Here’s her breakdown on that otherworldly installation…

FUTURE SHOCK

DREAM IN THE DOORWAY
Dream in the Doorway
A fuzzy dream/memory of a house being built in Detroit c. 1940s.

Here’s the video collection…

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Today I want to take another look back at The Clash as we continue our remembrance of the band 30 years after their breakup in 1986. Check recent posts for commentaries and documentaries about Joe Strummer; the band’s eponymous debut; and their masterpiece, London Calling. This post jumps ahead to the band’s fourth release, a triple album shotgun blast called Sandinista! Nearly every double album is a great single LP wrapped in fur and fat, and lacking the lean integrity of a perfect-seeming, classic collection of songs. That said there are lots of double albums I love, and I also love Sandinista! If London Calling marked the band’s abandoning of punk’s Year Zero dogmatics, Sandinista! is the sound of that declaration of independence coming to full flower in a boisterous blossoming of music that spreads across genres, mixing proven formulas with experimental sounds, and even making some up along the way. Sandinista! isn’t a collection of hits or even a consistent song cycle, but it’s more than the sum of its parts in its capturing of one of the world’s best bands reaching and grasping and trying and failing and flailing and railing with unleashed confidence and unbounded imagination. This record is absolutely self-indulgent, and its joyous, brave, sexy, speedy, pissed-off and legendary.

Here’s Sandinista!

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The Clash is one of my favorite bands. Sometimes they are my favorite band — it goes back and forth.

If you love the band or — at this late date — if you are new to their music, this series of short docs is a great introduction and a remembrance of one of the best groups in the history of rock; record to record, style to style, sound to sound.

The Clash burned bright and The Clash burned short, but they continue to illuminate music that matters, and, in their own way, they cast their light from Elvis Presley to the crunching guitars coming out of garages around the world to this day.

Celebrating the 35th anniversary of their masterpiece, London Calling, here are all the members of The Clash recounting the triumphs and trials of their incandescent career. This is Audio Ammunition: “This is Radio Clash from pirate satellite…”

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As any fan of the Coincidence Control Network knows, we’ve been following the Pussy Riot story very closely since the band/action art collective’s infamous performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012. Although the podcast has committed itself to being a weekly at this point, we’ve experienced a number of technical difficulties that have made our reports more erratic just at a point when the Pussy Riot story has had some major developments.

Here’s the back story: On February 21, 2012 Pussy Riot performs their “Punk Prayer” at the cathedral and by that evening a video of the song has gone viral on the internet. The performance accuses Vladimir Putin of being a tyrant and warns against corrupt ties between Putin and the Orthodox Church. The girls are famous. Their feminist, anti-Putin message is heard around the world and their colorful, knitted balaclava masks become iconic.

In March, 3 of the members of the group are arrested. They are convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Yekaterina Samutsevich is set free, but Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina are sent to separate prisons to serve 2 year sentences. An international backlash pressures Putin to free the girls and on December 23, 2013 they are released from prison in a gesture that is widely seen as a PR stunt in preparation for the coming Winter Olympics in Russia.

So where did Pussy Riot come from? The Wiki has a nice breakdown:

The group cites punk rock and Oi! bands Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects, Sham 69 and The 4-Skins as their main musical influences. The band also cite American punk rock band Bikini Kill, Karen Finley and the Riot grrrl movement of the 1990s as inspirations. They stated:

Tolokonnikova, her husband Pyotr Verzilov, and Samutsevich were all members of the anarchist art collective “Voina” from the group’s early days in 2007, until an acrimonious split in 2009. Following the split, they formed a separate Moscow-based group, also named “Voina”, saying that they had as much right to use this name as Voina founder Oleg Vorotnikov. Pussy Riot is usually considered to be an offshoot of the “Moscow faction” of Voina.

“Voina” is Russian for “War.”

True to their punk/anarchist roots, the band is now resisting efforts to “brand” its image. They’re also claiming that their musical projects may be abandoned in favor of more direct political actions. Here’s The Wall Street Journal‘s take:

“Talking about the brand isn’t really interesting to me,” Ms. Tolokonnikova said.

“We can promote our cause without playing any shows,” Ms. Alyokhina said. “And we will never play any shows for money.”

Even if the band won’t promote their brand, Tolokonnikova was fresh out of prison when she posed for a slide show on the Trend Brands fashion retail site, modeling clothes and returning a favor. Again, from WSJ:

On Tuesday, Ms. Tolokonnikova posted a link to the spread on her Facebook page with the note: “My cool capitalist friends, Trend Brands, supplied me with clothes during the long days at penal colonies where the internal regulations allowed me to freely wear clothes brought by relatives.”

For the best account of the Pussy Riot story I’ve seen yet, watch the documentary film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer on my YouTube Channel

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For every rock band that makes it big there are a million others that disappear unnoticed. However, there is also a rock band of a third kind: A band that makes a deep, narrow mark in its time that influences musicians for decades to come. The Velvet underground is a great example of this kind of band. The MC5 is another one.

For the uninitiated, the MC5 were a Detroit, Michigan rock group that released three records between 1969 and 1972. Their debut album Kick out the Jams is the band’s best known release and its title song their greatest, most infamous “hit.” The band fused the soul of rhythm and blues with the frenzy of garage rock and a love of pure noise into what often sounded like a kind of Motown metal that was as groovy as it was incendiary. The band are now seen as punk rock pioneers whose prescience continues to galvanize their place in the history of rock.

MC5: A True Testimonial tells the story of the group and their music against a backdrop of the art, rock, drugs and radical politics that defined the underground scene in Detroit at the end of the 1960′s.

Watch MC5: A True Testimonial below.

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