The Hard Way on Purpose

by David Giffels

  The most profound truth of the Bank was how dramatically it represented the collapse of the prevailing culture, a major downtown financial institution overtaken by punk rock, right there square in the middle of Main Street. And there were dozens and dozens of other examples—theaters, bowling alleys, churches, warehouses. Some people might have found that sad. I never did. I always found it thrilling, this notion of decadence and of abandon and of availability and of possibility. There’s a quote I love, by the composer Ned Rorem (by way of Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence)—“Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.”

  That’s exactly how I felt there, then.

  * * *

  The house music stopped and the Generics began. Because they knew only four chords, they chose covers to suit their limitations, playing “Clash City Rockers” right after “I Can’t Explain,” the former having exactly the same choppy rhythm and progression—E-D-A-E—except with a G tucked in the middle to avoid wholesale plagiarism. They had one original, called “Twirl Around,” which used the same chords in a different order.

  They played “Clampdown” and “Death or Glory” and “I Fought the Law.” Having overmined the Clash catalog, they turned to the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” and, oddly, “Downtown” by Petula Clark. I didn’t know in any critical way whether they were good, but I knew for sure they were amazing, simply because they were doing something, doing this, right there, live, on a stage that may as well have been in the middle of Shea Stadium. John was a catalyst—that was his true talent—and the dance floor immediately was full and frenzied. Somehow he lost his shirt, and then, as the set reached its climax, he pulled out a guitar and strapped it on, a guitar with one string, not plugged into anything. At the end of the song, he smashed it, which might have elevated him into some godlike status had I not seen him do this every single time they’d played, including once in the school cafeteria and even once in practice, and watched him methodically hammer the thing back together in preparation for the next show.

  * * *

  We had happened into what seemed like a uniquely strange moment, but which now I understand was the only way such moments can occur in cities like mine: strangely.

  Cleveland and Akron, through a combination of bizarre misunderstandings and ham-fisted manipulation, had become, momentarily, a focal point of American pop music.

  A term had emerged in the international music press—the Akron Sound—and it wasn’t intended to be ironic.

  It stemmed from the large number of like-minded artists and musicians who had just recently departed Akron on their way to illogical mainstream success. A half-decade progression of notoriety unfolded like this:

  Chrissie Hynde, an Akron native, had moved to London, wandered more or less by chance into the midst of the burgeoning punk scene, formed the Pretenders, and become a major rock star. Her mother learned of this when she was at the local mall one day and saw her daughter’s picture on the cover of NME.

  Devo, which had begun as a local band at a dinky club that predated the Bank, had departed for Los Angeles and scored a Billboard No. 14 hit with “Whip It,” which still stands as the quintessential New Wave pop song.

  The Waitresses, a locally formed offshoot of a band called Tin Huey, had an MTV hit—“I Know What Boys Like”—and played the theme song to my favorite TV show, Square Pegs.

  Rachel Sweet, whose brother was our paperboy (yes, we cling to these connections), had sung “Everlasting Love” as a duet with teen idol Rex Smith; it was all over the radio.

  The Cramps’ singer, Lux Interior, was from Akron. Robert Quine, the guitarist for Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Lou Reed, was from here too. The director Jim Jarmusch, an Akronite who’d moved to New York and had a strong connection to the music scene, was getting lots of attention for his first film, Permanent Vacation, and was about to be awarded the Camera d’Or for Stranger Than Paradise at the Cannes Film Festival.

  All of them had come from here. In addition, the Bank’s most popular draw, a gritty power-pop band called Hammer Damage, had lost its lead guitarist to the Dead Boys, the freaking Dead Boys! In the hipster underground, the Akron celebrity-association meter went haywire.

  In the midst of this, an interviewer in England asked Mark Mothersbaugh, the Devo front man, what Akron was like. “It’s a lot like Liverpool,” he responded, referring to the dingy industrial vibe. But the quote was misinterpreted to mean “musical hotbed.” Before long, London-based Stiff Records released an album called The Akron Compilation, which included a scratch-’n’-sniff cover that smelled like rubber.

  Meanwhile, as Akron was becoming identified with adventurous, mold-breaking new music, Cleveland, driven mainly by the mainstream AOR, behemoth rock station WMMS, had declared itself the Rock and Roll Capital of the World, a wild hyperbole that was accepted by the populous as gospel.

  Regardless of the catchphrases and the hype, these were great rock-and-roll cities, and not just Akron and Cleveland, but Detroit and Minneapolis and Chicago and Youngstown and lots of places in between. This reflected not an inherent coolness, but rather more like the opposite, something bred in the nature of our existence. Rock and roll needs a void, and we had that, in abundance. We had empty garages and basements and warehouses, and great stretches of empty time, and—most important—no one paying attention.

  Few bands in pop music history have been as calculated and inventive as Devo. But Devo spent years fucking around, sorting and sorting through the junk surrounding them to assemble their creation, writing manifestos, and developing broad personas. If Akron is a place that does things the hard way on purpose, then Devo could be our patron saint. They couldn’t have come from any other place, at any other time. The junk would have been wrong. Or someone might have cared.

  * * *

  On January 3, 2012, the “classic lineup” of Dayton-based rock band Guided by Voices appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman. Guided by Voices has always represented exactly the kind of fucked-up we understand, especially in its earliest incarnation—a brilliant singer and lyricist stuck in a schoolteaching job; a guitarist who looked like an adjunct professor; another guitarist who looked as if he were in Black Flag; a bassist who looked like one of Herman’s Hermits. Up until, say, the Internet, the best Ohio rock bands always looked like this: an intuitive, adamant imitation of something we thought we were getting right (but probably weren’t) while also pretending we didn’t care (but did).

  And then, through the usual series of inexplicable circumstances, Guided by Voices became one of the most influential bands of the 1990s and 2000s, and one of the most beloved, sort of the Grateful Dead of indie rock. The singer, Robert Pollard, was the only constant through all those years, and the original members never got to experience the height of the band’s success.

  So then, nearly thirty years after their formation, those original members, now middle-aged, made their network television debut. You might call this a moment of nostalgia, as long as you recognize the difference between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is what a friend of mine from Youngstown calls “happiness rusted over.”

  Letterman held up the new album, introduced the band, and off they went.

  Guided by Voices kicked in immediately with earnest deliberation, playing a new song, “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” a terse staccato with open spaces between power chords. In the opening moments, guitarist Mitch Mitchell strummed a chord and struck a pose, hand raised in the devil-horn configuration. Fifteen seconds later, bass player Greg Demos, sporting his trademark striped bell-bottoms, made his own rock move, bobbing intensely to the beat, then spreading his legs wide, and then his feet went out from under him and down he went, hard, on his ass.

  The moment was beautiful, a complete triumph of a truth well-known in Dayton and Akron and all these other places: we are the ones who always try too hard. That’s how we rise and that’s how we fall. And there isn’t much difference between the tw
o.

  * * *

  I was riding in my friend Jim’s car, eighteen years old, going nowhere. He was driving with one hand and punching his other fist against the ceiling to the beat of “Precious,” the first track on the first Pretenders album, two chords set against a heavy backbeat with an odd time signature that all led up to Chrissie Hynde’s epic, sultry, post-guitar-lead vocal breakdown that, as far as I was concerned, was equal to any Robert Plant squeeze-my-lemon invocation and also was the first time I had ever heard a grown woman say the word fuck. It was thrilling.

  After an unhinged squall of lead guitar, the rhythm section dropped into a driving, primal drumbeat, the bass continuing underneath, as Hynde, sounding earnestly, ambitiously jaded, riffed on about feeling ethereal, and having her eye on an imperial and something about Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress, an impressionistic scat that rose to a steel-tongued testimony: “But not me baby, I’m too precious . . . Fuck off!”

  Let the mad punching begin.

  So Jim rammed his fist rhythmically against the ceiling, and the other three of us all soon followed because what else are you gonna do? Four of us in a Pontiac on a late-spring afternoon with six Mickey’s big mouths between us and a two-quarter-time pulse buzzing from the blown speakers, punching the ceiling as hard as we possibly could. It doesn’t hurt under those conditions. Testosterone in high doses produces in the human male a temporary imperviousness not just to pain but sensitivity to every human feeling except lust (which is of course indelible). We punched away, feeling it, until, one by one, we stopped to listen to that climax:

  But not me, baby, I’m too precious . . . Fuck off!

  And then began punching again.

  After a while, it did start to hurt. When the song ended, in the tape hiss before the next track, “The Phone Call,” began, I ventured: “Why are we doing this?”

  Jim turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at me, wild euphoria mixing with vague disappointment and judgment. “Because this is what we do.”

  So, for the time being at least, I had no real context for this song, whose lyrics were explicitly about the place where we’d grown up, with lines about “moving to the Cleveland heat” and direct references to streets we knew—East Fifty-Fifth and Euclid Avenue and the Shoreway, so when Chrissie Hynde sang “duet duet duet do it on the pavement,” I knew exactly which pavement she meant, which, for me anyway, made for a peculiar, tangibly harsh specificity in an otherwise uncertain sexual fantasy. I had seen those streets and their scattered gravel and ground glass. Doing it on that pavement would be very uncomfortable.

  But I wondered most about another line.

  I had the album at home on vinyl, and at first, joined by Ralph in clandestine congress, with the volume set low enough that we didn’t think our parents could hear, we repeatedly moved the needle back over the previous few grooves, to hear her say it again: “not me baby, I’m too precious . . . fuck off!” The imprecision of the needle drop, however, meant that most of the time I also heard the previous phrase: “Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress both stayed, trapped in a world that they never made.” I knew Howard the Duck was some sort of druggy comic-book character from Cleveland; copies of those comics were passed around high school along with Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, and they’d begun to replace Sgt. Rock and Batman. Howard the Duck comics were like rumors of cocaine, part of some subculture that I knew existed but only in theory. And I knew from Scene, the local music paper, which I picked up every Thursday at the record store up at the strip plaza, that Mr. Stress was the name of a popular Cleveland blues band.

  Trapped in a world that they never made.

  This song was a story about where I lived. But I couldn’t put it all together, and before I ever had a chance, Chrissie Hynde spit the expletive again and I moved the needle once more. Repetition, more than anything else, is the curse of adolescence—you do everything over and over and you never feel that you’ve gotten it right and then something new comes along and further confounds you and you never have a chance to get back to the original conundrum.

  But the most important thing was something we did know for sure: Chrissie Hynde was from here. That meant something. She was a rock star. She was famous. And she was from here. To us, that was proof that we were from somewhere. Sometimes we would drive by a house we had been told was her parents’ house, where they still lived, where we imagined maybe she had lived. Which meant this woman whose voice had captivated us existed, for our purposes, in two specific places:

  1.Inside the red leather jacket and matching high-heeled boots on the cover of Sire Records #6083-2 . . .

  and

  2.There in the rustic, contemporary bungalow on Olentangy Drive, a short distance from our own homes.

  The song ended on Jim’s tape deck and I stopped punching because my knuckles were hurting, but Jim kept going, looking back at us wild-eyed, and I wasn’t sure if I was wrong for not wanting to join him or he was wrong for continuing. So I punched with all my might, but only against the gauze that draped from the steel, faking it.

  * * *

  By the time the Bank was established as the center of Akron’s music scene, all of those artists—Devo and the Waitresses and Chrissie Hynde and Lux Interior and the rest—were from here. None of them had stayed. They’d all gone off—to London and New York and LA—and so, like the empty factories, they left the impression of something that had been profoundly here and now was profoundly gone, and so recently gone that their energy field remained. There was a mood, a tension, that lingered.

  What happened amid the whole “Akron sound,” “new Liverpool” hype was a feeding frenzy, with record-label talent scouts flying in from all directions, combing through the clubs and the local 45s in the record-shop bins, mining for gold. So by the time I arrived at the Bank, a highly unusual culture had been established. Almost every significant original rock band remaining in Akron had either (a) been signed to a major label and somehow failed to make it any further; (b) not gotten signed and therefore carried an unusual burden of rejection for what would otherwise be a normal state of affairs for a local band; or (c) formed with the delusion that celebrity and commercial success were not only possible, but probable.

  Everyone who has ever formed a rock band believed at some level that he was going to become famous. Few ever did it in a context so psychologically complex as early-1980s Akron, Ohio, a place that had always believed it was bigger than maybe it really was.

  This put me, and just about anyone else of my generation with an interest in music and art and celebrity, in an interesting position. Although all of this prime activity had begun in the traditional model of the DIY underground, and all of this had happened recently and literally within the same footsteps I traveled every day, I only knew about it through the mass media, which is to say from above and afar.

  The first time I heard of Devo was when they played on Saturday Night Live. I found out afterward they were from my hometown. I saw the Waitresses on MTV before I ever saw them play in a club. This created a strange disconnect, and a strange relationship to the idea of associating more closely with someone famous because he or she came from the same place as we did. In theory, I should have felt no more kinship to the Pretenders than I felt to, say, Dexys Midnight Runners. But that wasn’t the case. And it wasn’t the case because Chrissie Hynde’s parents lived around the corner from my cousin. Which is obviously meaningless, except I put a great deal of meaning into that correspondence. Somehow, in my mushy and convoluted logic, because I could identify the mailbox of the parents of a young woman who played in a rock band in London that I saw in music videos in my living room on national cable television, I wasn’t nobody.

  The other, and perhaps most important, aspect of this was that I was significantly aware of having Just Missed Something Important. Just a few years before, these clubs and stages had been vital and exciting. Robert Christgau, the rock critic for the Village Voice, had come to Akron and lived here for a week, r
eporting a lengthy, thorough, deeply insightful, and thrilling story about the significance and range of Akron’s rock scene. Not Cleveland, even though it was the perceived cultural center of our region (sometimes called the Paris of the Rust Belt), but Akron. Because it was special. I knew this had just happened, and so I was achingly aware of its absence. I had just missed something musically, culturally, artistically important, just as I had just missed the importance of Akron industrially. What does it mean to be eighteen years old, to begin defining yourself as a particular individual, in a particular place, of that particular place, when that place has just lost its own identity?

  It means you begin to define yourself in a void. It means you learn how to listen for echoes. It means you begin looking at empty bank buildings as opportunity.

  * * *

  The Generics are opening for the Wombats. The Wombats have signed with Bomp Records. This is huge. We know Bomp Records. That’s the label name on the back of the Stiv Bators solo record, the one he made with the guitar player he stole from the Dead Boys, whom the Dead Boys stole from Hammer Damage. John Puglia and I talk about these things as though we know these people and their gossip. As though we have taken a side in the Hammer Damage / Dead Boys controversy. We talk about how the Wombats are leaving on tour the next day as though they had shared this information with us in the dressing room, which is rumored to be accessible via a secret trapdoor from the bank vault.

  We have never actually seen the Wombats.

  The Wombats take the stage. Either the one guitar player is unnaturally tall or the other guitar player is unnaturally short, or (probably) a combination of both, but juxtaposed they look like mutant versions of Bomp Record Recording Artists the Wombats, or however we had imagined them, which I suppose is something overly romanticized, like Joe Perry in a band with Link Wray. Which they are not. They look like two wrong pieces that got stuck together. The one guitar is buzzing so badly that everyone is yelling at the little guy and trying to find him a better cord. The lead microphone is not working properly, but neither is the backup mic, so the singer takes them both and clamps them together in some misguided equation of sonic math, which fails.