Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  In their music and their forbearance, Doe and Cervenka asserted that some traditions should withstand the necessary negation that comes along with modern times and new values. X never made this claim more meaningfully than in Ain’t Love Grand.

  As for the Go-Go’s—I have to admit, I had a hard time liking them. The band’s first album, Beauty and the Beat (1981), was an eager though savvy attempt to meet commercial expectations of new wave diffusion, and their second (Vacation, 1982) was merely the obvious follow-up attempt at cranking out more surface-fun fare. But the third record, 1984’s Talk Show, proved to be something more than their vindication—something closer to a self-directed work of vengeance, as if the group had something to make up for by upsetting their former pop refinement. In any event, some twist of thinking—or perhaps just the internal friction within the band during that season—occurred to make Talk Show a surprisingly hard-edged revelation. In fact, the record was so good it had the effect of splitting the group up—though not forever. When the band returned in 1994 with Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s, they sounded like they were playing just for the mere fun of it. Yet “mere fun” can also be its own deep truth—especially in Los Angeles. As Greil Marcus noted in Mystery Train, L.A. is a city where Nathanael West’s and Raymond Chandler’s dark version of urban realism are no more reflective of deep truths than Brian Wilson’s fun-in-the-sun view of the city’s ethical climate. Pop, as a medium of fun, and fun as a purpose of pop, is still an inevitable and necessary tradition in the L.A. scene.

  LOS ANGELES in the 1980s also produced two other bands I’d like to comment on briefly. One is the Minutemen, a three-man outfit made up of guitarist D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt, and drummer Mike Hurley, who were part of the scene nearly since its inception. In the early 1980s, they released what were two of the most impelling of all American hardcore albums (and perhaps the most inventive punk-style recordings since the Clash’s debut LP): The Punch Line and What Makes a Man Start Fires. They were politically and musically involving works, full of quick, hard thinking, and quicker, harder tempo changes.

  The Minutemen were at once both the thinking listener’s and thinking musician’s hardcore band—which is to say they wrote and performed art-informed music from a singular and committed political point-of-view, and they played from a funk-derived punk perspective. Big, hard, fleet shards of bass guitar cut across the contending structure set up by the impetuous guitar lines and eruptive drum patterns, and in that vibrant webwork, surprising references—everything from Chuck Berry to Sly Stone, from Miles Davis to James “Blood” Ulmer—exposed themselves and took on new identities, and, in the process, new histories. Seeing them live, they made me feel I had finally seen Moby Dick onstage, and had finally understood why Ahab lost. Some things are too big to get over or around, and too irresistible to ignore.

  On December 22, 1985, D. Boon was killed in an automobile accident, and the Minutemen necessarily came to an end. The loss was immense. In his quest with the Minutemen, Boon clearly worked more as a comrade in action—an equal—than as a lead figure. In fact, sometimes on record it was hard to sort out his particular songwriting style from that of Watts and Hurley, which may be a tribute to the sense of unity and functional democracy that the trio achieved—much like that achieved by groups as disparate as the Band and the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Onstage, though, Boon often seemed the more central and commanding figure in the Minutemen, and not merely because of his obvious physical bulk, nor because his vocals tended to sound a bit better humored and ironic than Watts’. Actually, what made him such a dominating performer was that he seemed to have some kind of imperative physical involvement with the music. I can recall shows in which he seemed to be wringing his guitar, pulling and twisting wondrous, complex clusters of notes from it, then reshaping them into new patterns to fit the vaulting rhythms being served up by Watts and Hurley.

  D. Boon and the Minutemen left eleven albums and EPs and one epic-length cassette, comprising some of the most probing, resourceful, and continually surprising American music of the 1980s. Watt and Hurley went on to form fIREHOSE with guitarist and vocalist eD fROMOHIO, and in 1995, Mike Watt released a widely respected album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, featuring contributions by Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, Evan Dando, and members of Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets, and Soul Asylum.

  PERHAPS MY FAVORITE 1980s L.A. punk group was the one that, at moments, also disappointed me the most: Dream Syndicate. In the early 1980s, I was working evenings in an L.A. record store, Westwood’s Rhino, alongside a young, friendly guy named Steve Wynn. I learned that Wynn had formed a band, Dream Syndicate, and he invited me to catch their maiden appearance at a Valley spot, the Country Club. From their first moments onstage, I was in love. They had that ideal mix of reference sounds—part Bob Dylan, part Velvet Underground, part Neil Young, part John Fogerty—but they also had something all their own: a willingness to take their music anywhere it might go at any given moment, even if that moment resulted in chaos or decomposition. They also had spirit and humor. The audience that night—who’d gathered to see some no-account new-wave headliner or another—hated Dream Syndicate on the spot. They booed the band, pelted them with beer cups, spit on them, and demanded they GET OFF THE STAGE. Finally, Wynn said, “I’ve got some good news for you: This is our last song of the night,” and for the first time in Dream Syndicate’s set, the audience erupted in a cheer. “The bad news,” he added, “is that it goes on for a really long time,” and the audience groaned as one. And the song did go on for a long time—about twenty-five minutes. By the time it was over, there were only maybe five people left seated in the hall, myself among them.

  Dream Syndicate’s first full-length album, Days of Wine and Roses, was one of the best works of 1983—boisterous and reckless, and full of a weird and stirring beauty. That was when Dream Syndicate caught the ear of A & M Records (you remember them from the Go-Go’s, right?), and suddenly something went terribly wrong. Some said it was outside pressures, some said it was internal problems, but whatever the cause, Dream Syndicate seemed to freeze up right before our eyes and ears. The group’s A & M debut, Medicine Show (1984)—which had taken months to make and had cost a fortune—ended up sounding more drenched in attitude than meaning, and was utterly without the spark of spontaneity that had made their earlier music so riveting. Worse, the group’s live shows, which had once seemed so chancy, degenerated into pat, heartless performances. What had begun as an inspired vision had turned simply into another guileful career, and it was hardly surprising when, a few months later, we learned that the group’s leaders, Wynn and guitarist Karl Precoda, had parted ways.

  But the best dreams die hard, so the tale moves on. In 1985, Dream Syndicate regrouped, with a new guitarist and producer, Paul Cutler. Their next album, Out of the Grey, was a bracing work of redemption. In particular, it seemed to be a record about what it means to lose one’s way and to summon the will to find a new direction and start again. In such songs as “Dying Embers” and “Now I Ride Alone,” Steve Wynn conjured bitter, dark remembrances of blown chances and bad choices, and while he clearly cared a great deal about the people who get swallowed up in such dissolution, he refused to surrender to the romance of it all. “Spit out the poison and get on with it,” he sang at one point, even though he was singing about somebody whom he knew could never let go of his own decline or his own broken past. Maybe Dream Syndicate lost their crack at the big time, but they still had music to make, and Wynn sounded as if he intended to make it as honestly and compassionately as he knew how. Dream Syndicate broke up and regrouped more than once and Wynn went on to make two fine solo albums, Kerosene Man and Dazzling Display. But Out of the Grey was the best music Dream Syndicate ever made.

  I wrote about Dream Syndicate often in my days at the Herald Examiner. One smog-bound, gray-brown winter day, I was driving to work, listening to KROQ—L.A.’s new wave station that played mainly cloying music. Then the D.J. said a few words th
at perked my interest. “We’ve been reading a lot about this L.A. band the Dream Syndicate,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything by them yet, but we believe in giving new bands a chance at KROQ, so here goes.”

  With that, “Halloween,” from The Days of Wine and Roses, began blaring from my car speakers—its frictional, slow-moving-but-exciting sound unlike anything I’d yet heard on that station. It reminded me of the sense of daring that causes one to fall in love with rock & roll in the first place, that sense of inquiring emotion that can pin you like a bolt of recognition. There it all was: flashes of the Velvet Underground, Television, and white noise Rolling Stones, in the collision of guitars and the hard, uncompromising beat and . . . and . . . all of a sudden, it was gone. After only thirty seconds of rapturous cacophony, it disappeared with soundless abruptness.

  The D.J. fumbled his way back on the air, his voice shaky with anger. “That’s all I need to hear,” he said. “I like to give new local bands a chance, but this is ridiculous. You won’t be hearing more of that band on this station.”

  And indeed, I never did.

  I told this story to Wynn one day during an interview, while we were seated at a hamburger stand on Santa Monica Boulevard. He looked wonderstruck, then just shook his head, laughing.

  “God, that’s wonderful,” he said. “To think we could disturb somebody who’s supposed to be as aware of ’new music’ as these people are supposed to be . . . ” He let the thought trail off into a bemused smile.

  “At least we won’t be overexposed,” he said after a while, laughing once again.

  BY THE LATE 1980s, L.A.’s punk scene no longer meant as much. As it developed, though, punk was something that was now all over the world—in fact, maybe it had always been in the air, in the history, in one form of voice or another, from Robert Johnson and Presley, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Sinatra. But without what punk accomplished in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s, American artists like R.E.M., L7, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, or even (God help us) Alanis Morrisette, and U.K. acts like ABC, Human League, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, U2, Sinéad O’Connor, and the Prodigy, might never have happened or meant as much.

  But as the 1990s began, the place where you could hear punk at its brightest and most exhilarating was in Seattle, Washington, especially in the music of a trio called Nirvana. But we will come to that story later.

  van halen: the endless party

  Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle antique ways our hearts are pledged. Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator’s way. . . .

  ROBERT ARDREY

  FROM AFRICAN GENESIS

  It’s like we always say: There’s a little Van Halen in everybody—all we’re trying to do is bring it out.

  ALEX VAN HALEN

  David Lee Roth makes quite a picture as he stands in front of his dressing-room mirror backstage at Detroit’s Cobo Arena. Arching his hips lewdly and tugging at the waistband of his ruby-red spandex tights until the elastic crotch zone bulges like a gaudy Christmas stocking crammed with apples and bananas, Van Halen’s lead singer preens and postures like a bestial champion of autoeroticism. Actually, this steamy display is a thoughtful gesture for the ladies who will crowd around the stage tonight—the idea being that when they look up and behold David, they also behold his Goliath.

  After a quick check to make sure the view looks as mouthwatering from the rear as from the front, Roth swaggers over to where I’m sitting and plops down in a folding chair. “Hey, man,” he says, tossing his woolly tresses back from his shoulders with a blasé flick of the head, “I want you to feel free to ask us anything you want, write about anything you see. Van Halen’s got nothin’ to hide. But,” he adds, leaning closer and slipping deeper into his patented street patois, “let me forewarn you: What you’ve walked into here is a self-created fantasyland, where everything happens four times as much and four times as quick, like an around-the-calendar New Year’s Eve.

  “It’s like, anything you desire you can find here—whatever your vice, whatever your sexual ideals. Whatever somebody else can’t do in his nine-to-five job, I can do in rock & roll.”

  Tickled by his description of rock & roll privilege, Roth laughs lustily and bounds back to the mirror. “I guess what I’m saying, man, is that I’m proud of the way we live, not so much because of the records we sell or the money we make, but because of the party we’re going to have afterward to celebrate all that.”

  ALL THINGS considered, Roth and the other members of Van Halen—bassist Michael Anthony, guitarist Eddie Van Halen, and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen—have plenty to celebrate. Their most recent album, Women and Children First, vaulted into Billboard’s Top 10 only one week after its release. The band’s previous LPs, Van Halen and Van Halen II, have reportedly sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. In addition, the pair of sold-out shows in Detroit—part of the 1980 Invasion tour, the group’s most extensive and extravagant headline trek to date—denotes an even more crucial triumph of the marketplace: a fervid acceptance of Van Halen by America’s heavy-metal heartland. The group is now one of the undisputed kingpins of hard rock, ranking alongside such venerable Visigoths as Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, and Aerosmith.

  Van Halen, though, differs from the current crop of metal bands (such as Rush, the Scorpions, UFO, and Triumph) that have been enjoying a formidable resurgence in popularity. Their ignoble posturing is a welcome reprieve from the empty-headed pomposity of blowhards like Rush, and their music is concise, tuneful, and impelling.

  Van Halen, however, isn’t an example of resurgent heavy metal so much as the inevitable progeny of yesteryear’s metal epoch. Roth blusters and blares onstage like a brazen, self-endeared crossbreed of Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy Mangrum, Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner, and Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. Eddie Van Halen, the group’s musical conscience, plays guitar like some pyrotechnical, virtuosic offspring of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. Altogether, Van Halen comes off as intuitively smart and scrupulously artless—perhaps the most satirical symbols of metal mythology since Nugent, or at least Cheap Trick.

  But, like many of their heavy-metal brethren, they can also come off as a band of vulgarians. At the outset of this tour, at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, group and crew members trashed a dining room, dressing room, and restroom after the caterers refused to remove some brown M & M’s from a plate of candy. (Van Halen has a clause written into their performance contracts that prohibits the serving of brown M & M’s backstage. When asked why, Alex Van Halen replied, “Why not?”) The result of that little lark, according to one report, was $10,000 to $15,000 worth of damage and a ban on rock concerts in Pueblo for the forseeable future.

  Instances like that one have prompted some critics to describe Roth as “vainglorious” and “brutish” and to view the band itself as a pack of lack-witted, carnal-minded musical barbarians—a common enough appraisal of heavy-metal groups. Sitting with Roth backstage, watching as he pulls on a pair of scarlet-plumed boots, I ask what he thinks of the critics’ aspersions.

  “You want to know if we’re animals?” Roth says, gazing at his feathered footwear. “Let me put it this way: When I’m onstage, with the volume rippling my body like a glass of water, and thousands of people generating heat in my direction, there’s no pause for thought. My basement faculties take over completely.

  “Sure—it’s animal. I mean, people might like to talk about art, but look where art is: It’s in the fucking gutter, starving. Van Halen likes to keep things simple; none of this vague, symbolic shit. All we’re doing is giving our daily lives melodies, beats, and titles—what we sing about is what we live.”

  WHEN DAVID LEE ROTH declares that the life Van Halen leads is the same as the one the band sings about, what he’s saying is that it’s a life brimming with easygoing sex and unabashed affluence. Like many of their comrades of the metal persuasion, Van Halen ballyhoos the
time-honored ideal of ceaseless, remorseless, inebriated partying. In fact, in their capable hands, the party ideal becomes a hard and fast commitment: that no matter where Van Halen alights, a boisterous, full-blown saturnalia is bound to follow.

  Tonight, the appointed place is the Cobo Arena, where nearly twelve thousand heavy-metal zealots—all with more than just a little latent Van Halen in them—have gathered to lend their voice to the party. And lend it they do. When Van Halen hits the stage, heralded by Eddie Van Halen’s storming prelude to “Romeo’s Delight,” a thundering yowl of acclamation greets them from the floor. “Let me tell ya,” says Roth from the lip of the stage, “when Detroit raises its voice, it’s fucking scary.”

  Everything about this show—from the titanic, military-motif stage to the overhanging rainbow-spectrum light system (touted as the largest such setup ever taken on the road)—is designed to search out even the most narcotized kid in the furthest reaches of Cobo’s three-tiered balcony and thump him in the chest, good and hard. The big thumper, of course, is the music, a sense-numbing blend of Alex’ double-barreled drum bursts, Michael Anthony’s hulking, palpable bass lines, and Eddie’s fleet, blazing guitar.

  Eddie, in particular, accounts for the bulk of the sound. He plays with unbridled strength, stacking up layers of leviathan chords, then cutting them down with volleys of staccato fireworks and glimmers of harmonic-phrased melodies. At certain moments, when Anthony’s bass hammers out a steady rhythm-pulse, and Eddie’s guitar and Alex’ drums interknit into a cacophonous counterpoint, Van Halen’s heady brand of heavy metal aspires to a near-orchestral scope (which is not to say near-classical).