RiffRaf

Fugazi and Me

         

In our Writers and Music series, authors discuss the music that has either been included in their most recent project or the influence music has had on their work overall. 

Dennis Mahagin is a poet and musician from Washington. His first book of verse, Grand Mal, is available at Rebel Satori Press and is coming soon to Amazon.

It was in the autumn of 1998, when I first heard Fugazi.

This was at a time in my life when I foundered, virtually drowning, on the shoals of addiction. I had dreams, but they were setting down, an evening sun. Saturated with chemicals and craving, I stood a shaky six foot three, weighed about a buck seventy five. It’s a wonder my best friend from Arkansas, who’d lately come out west to visit, recognized me. He might’ve considered staging an “intervention,” but that’s really not his style. Instead, he gave me a CD.

“Dude, you’ve got to listen to this,” my friend told me.

The CD was called End Hits.

“Who’s Fugazi?” I said.

My friend shook his head. “Just listen,” he reiterated.

Then, in the semi-darkness of a seedy little kitchen on 45^th and Belmont, I proceeded to cue the disc up on a cheap portable player with busted belt clip, and tattered earphones, foam mostly rotted away. “Who the fuck are these guys?” I cried, after hearing the opening measure of a number called “Break” at maximum volume.

My friend smiled. I removed the headphones to hear his reply: “You can keep that…”

End Hits.

I’ve never stopped listening to it.

Now, a few lines from the song “Recap Modotti” come to mind:

…Recap in taxi,

No clothes, no food

Take care of the children

We’ll send for you soon …

Oh, I remember that version of me, in my sorry Belmont kitchen, pushing forty, possessed of all the pallor and disfiguration of a scarified poppy, and yet then, still, coming alive with the strains of that music – watching my own rail-thin shadow get down with its bad self on the wall, moonlight pouring through a little window above the sink: this shadow, who clutched a battered Sanyo CD player like a lucky hymnal, commencing to fist-pump, to hum and dream and hope via pantomime, the old hip sway with chest bump, my eyes glued to the ear drums insisting everything could still turn out okay, blown away by this strange new music -- beside myself:

…Alien,

you find you feel at home

Everywhere

you get by with so much less

than anyone …

 

My friend returned to Arkansas a couple days later.

I would not get clear of my chemical dependency for four more years; wouldn’t publish my own poem called “Abduction” – (about aliens, transubstantiation, hospice and hope; and borne upon the current of the aforementioned music, surely as I’m sitting here) – for four years beyond that. But I’ll never forget the night I heard Fugazi for the very first time. No turning point, per se, but a vector, a euphony I can still point to – its sonic trajectory a little ahead of me, and a touch behind, recursive and propulsive at one remove, like a riff you simply can’t get out of your mind. Or a friend, who comes to visit from far away:

…Outside my window

the passing night sky

full of people I know

taking me…

 

Today, I’m totally engrossed in a You Tube video: a talented filmmaker has put together some stunning imagery to accompany the Fugazi song “Turkish Disco.” Behind Brendan Canty’s signature snare drum cum tom-tom pulse, and Joe Lally’s bass line (thumping like a dogged hot spring of the heart’s natural magma) – there, on the screen sits a forlorn barn, cupped by this cozy pastoral snow bank. And as the song commences, this barn slowly begins to change colors, hue to hue to hue, as the haunting bars drive by:

Rust -- to russet. Vermilion, bleeding cerise. Baby shit blue morphing into stone cold indigo. Forlorn forest green, in time, becoming lime.

Reader, believe me: I’m happy as hell to be a fan of Fugazi.             

          

5 Amazing Autumnal Tracks

Autumn in New York. Ahhhh!!!! My season of choice. Spring may be the season of rebirth, but for me autumn is the season of possibility.

Okay, so it's not quite fall - it officially arrives September 22nd - but can't you just feel the crisp autumn air on the back of your neck and smell the smoldering fireplace in your nose? Can't you?

Here are five amazing songs that celebrate my favorite three months. 

"Harvest Moon" by Neil Young

Mr. Young's quiet song is a lullaby of sorts. He sings with gentle ease, while the lush acoustic guitars and the harmonica solo contribute nuance to such a wistful number.

 

"Autumn Sweater" by Yo La Tengo

Great album. Great song. It makes you feel warm and fuzzy like that ratty old cardigan you own. The one with the moth holes in the sleeves. Yeah, that one:

"When I heard the knock on the door, I couldn't catch my breath. Is it too late to call this off? We could slip away. Wouldn't that be better? Me with nothing to say and you in your autumn sweater."

 

"Moondance" by Van Morrison

Van The Man makes use of the not-so-brilliant portmanteau "fantabulous" in his brilliant song "Moondance" on his brilliant third album, Moondance:

"A fantabulous night to make romance / 'Neath the cover of October skies / And all the leaves on the trees are falling / To the sound of the breezes that blow." 

 

"Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin were never one to shy away from their influences. In "Ramble On," Robert Plant borrows from his muse, J.R.R. Tolkien's poem "Namarie" from The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's poem was certainly the inspiration for the song's entire first verse:

"Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way/ Thanks to you, I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay / But now it's time for me to go / The autumn moon lights my way / For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it's headed my way."

 

"Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" by The White Stripes

"Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" is the raunchy opening track to the White Stripes' 2001 album White Blood Cells. Judging by the song's title, we can surmise that autumn isn't Jack White's favorite time of year. Perhaps winter is.  

"Dead leaves and the dirty ground / when I know you're not around / shiny tops and soda pops / when I hear your lips make a sound."

It's Better That I Don't Sing

   
In our Writers and Music series, authors discuss the music that has either been included in their most recent play/novel/poems or the influence music has had on their work overall. 

Scott Adkins received his MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College in 2006. His plays have been heard via radio waves (WFMU and WNYE), appeared at the U.N., in unassuming locations under Brooklyn like RabbitHole Studios, in various NYC downtown theaters as well as in the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks Readings, at CATCH, in Little Theater and annually at the Cho Chiqq Backyard Theater Festival. His play The Anti-Gardener appears in the 2011 Spring issue of PAJ and his play Running Commentary No. 4 was published by 53rd State Press in the Joyce Cho Anthology. He co-founded the Brooklyn Writers Space with his wife, Erin Courtney, in 2002. He is a co-curator of the Obie award winning Little Theater that presents new work monthly at Dixon Place. He co-founded Sock Monkey Press in 1996 and has released a new book of poetry by Terence Degnan earlier this month.

I grew up singing, mostly in church. But I also sang in ‘that’ swing choir in high school, chamber choir, even sang for a couple years in college. Maybe I used to be a good singer but now, well now it is better for everyone that I don’t sing, too loudly anyway. I’ll tell you though, there is nothing more fun on a Saturday night than getting together with friends and picking up our instruments and ripping out a “Hey Good Lookin'” or a “Beat on the Brat."

My first plays had no songs in them or if they did they were other people’s songs, a lullaby or old simple melodic songs ("Hush Little Baby" and "Amazing Grace") that would evoke some memory for me.

My latest work, The Kioskers, which is about a mysterious family traveling the world in a floating kiosk, has all original songs and music composed by the amazing Alaina Ferris. 

Alaina Ferris' music for The Kioskers illustrates her passion for Rimsky Korsakov, Eastern Europe lullabies and Sea Shanties.

I've also had the pleasure of working with Rebecca Hart and Robert Wagner.

Rebecca makes progressive folk rock magic and wrote the music for Running Commentary No. 4. I am thrilled to say that to this day she plays some of those songs at her gigs.

Robert Wagner comes from New Orleans jazz and composed most of the music for the Klezmer All Stars. He composed the music for Black Dot for three a cappella voices using his influences from the middle east, eastern europe and world jazz.

All these plays would deflate without the juxtaposing songs and music clocking the rhythm of each piece. There is something remarkable about having performers engaging with us, the audience, with spoken word then suddenly revealing a sincere song. As individuals we rarely tell stories just one way. We use monologues, dialogues, poems, exposition, narrative, gestures, visuals, and songs. So as a playwright, I do the same thing.

Songs being, in my mind, the most powerful way to tell a story, compress elements like perspective, exposition, raw emotion, memory, nostalgia, visuals and most importantly an opportunity for sincere goofiness. (Sincere goofiness being the ingredient of the most entertaining theater no matter how dramatic or sad or dangerous.)

My songs don’t always have overtly meaningful language. Sometimes they pop up in order to cast a different perspective on moments past or moments to come. Kind of like the sweet frosting in between the two chocolate wafers of an Oreo cookie.

Songs and singing and music let us get the crazy out as writers, performers and listeners. If we don’t get the crazy out, well we might just explode or something. Whenever I do a reading of a new play with songs in it, there is usually not an opportunity to compose, learn, and perform a song so I always have the actors use a melody they know well and fit the words to it. Then I say commit, fearlessly commit. It is always beautiful when a performer fearlessly commits, and also I get to really see if the rhythm of the lyrics is working.

Anyway, I have songs in my work sometimes simply to break the predictability of what we are seeing. A kind of way to say directly to the audience, come with us now. I use songs as tools to retell everything that has happened. I want songs to be gifts to everyone, the performers and the audience. I never want to torture an audience. I totally get it when you come to a play exhausted, have that one beer and after fifteen minutes of words coming at you the eyelids get heavy as lead. 

So I put in a song, not so intentionally or formally, but I know that when someone who has dozed off snaps awake for a song they won’t be lost, they’ll be right with the play. Maybe in a way the songs are there to minimize any sort of theatrical suffering that might be happening, but mostly I can say I put them in instinctually because they make me feel good.

           

Nathan Englander's "First Concert"

                                                  

In First Concert, all kinds of folks have discussed their first live music experience and the impact it might have had on their life and for some, their art. Dozens of creative people have shared their amazing stories of unhinged live performances or forgotten B-sides. So here goes another installment of First Concert.

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, as well as the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. Along with What We Talk About, Englander’s translation of the New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) and his co-translation of Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door were also published in 2012. His play “The Twenty-Seventh Man” will have its premiere at The Public Theater in November. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

What was the first concert you ever attended? How old were you?

The first person I saw in concert was Adam Ant. I was probably 14 or 15. 

What do you remember about the performance?

I remember that he was wearing jeans so utterly shredded that they didn't really qualify as pants anymore. And, simply, that it was a lot of fun for a deeply religious, sheltered kid to be at a concert.

How do you think that experience affected you as an artist?

It's the first time I ever saw anyone work the room. There was a store in suburbia called Mutts & Butts that sold dog food and cigarettes. And Adam Ant made a joke about the store - it was him sharing local, insider knowledge, a nod to the place he was performing. I have no idea why my teenage self would note that, but it did.             

            

Gabriel Cohen's First Concert

In First Concert, all kinds of folks have discussed their first live music experience and the impact it might have had on their life and for some, their art. As we've talked to dozens of creative people, we've discovered amazing stories of unhinged live performances or forgotten B-sides.

Gabriel Cohen’s first novel Red Hook was nominated for the Edgar award for Best First Novel, and he is also the author of The Ninth Step, The Graving Dock, Boombox and Neptune Avenue, as well as the nonfiction book Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce. He has written for such publications as The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Shambhala Sun, Gourmet.com, and Time Out New York, and is included in the anthology Best Buddhist Writing 2009. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches writing at Pratt Institute, and his website is www.gabrielcohenbooks.com. He still has his old guitars, and every once in a while he takes one out and plucks the intro to “Over the Hills and Far Away.”

What was the first concert you ever attended? How old were you?
In about 1976 I watched my best friend Kier play guitar at a high school keg party. I was fourteen or fifteen.

What do you remember about the performance?
Somebody’s parents were out of town and my friend’s band played at this raucous, sweaty party in their garage. It was weird because this was Washington D.C. in the mid-70s, and we were on the cusp between two great musical eras. My friend had a cover band, playing Led Zeppelin and the Stones and Hendrix. They had long hair, and the singer whipped his around and ripped his shirt off as he strutted his best Mick Jagger moves. The prettiest girls went crazy.

But there were kids hanging out on the fringes of such parties who would later turn into “Ian MacKaye of Fugazi” and “Henry Rollins of Black Flag.” At the time they were just fellow knuckleheads hanging out, desperate for something to do besides sit in somebody’s car in the 7-Eleven parking lot.

My friends and I were listening to Led Zep’s “Kashmir” or Queen doing “God Save the Queen.” Soon we’d be listening to the Buzzcocks and to the Sex Pistols doing a totally different “God Save the Queen.”
How do you think that experience affected you as an artist?

It showed me that galvanizing an audience was something that was feasible for kids in a garage, not just rock stars in an arena. That was a great inspiration, seeing that art is something you can actually make, not just what famous people produce and you consume. I was so enthralled watching my friend play the riff in the intro to Led Zep’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” that I was moved to buy a guitar, and eventually—after college—I even co-started a band, a trio called Valley of Kings. I was the singer and guitarist. We put out an album, did a couple of tours in a van, and opened for bands like Husker Du, Modern English, The Alarm, The Del Fuegos, and The Smithereens. I was very excited when we signed a contract with Columbia Records. It said our records would arrive in four to six weeks. (Sorry—old joke. Kids today probably won’t know that Columbia Records put discount sales offers in magazines. Actually, they probably won’t know what a “record” is.)

Anyhow, after five years I realized that I didn’t have what it took to make it as a rock star (a good voice, for one thing). I switched to writing books and journalism, where I didn’t feel that sense of built-in limitations. (Though I still have dreams of being about to go on stage.)

I look back on how exciting and freeing and vital music felt to me when I was younger, and I think that watching people—famous or not—play it also showed me that art isn’t just self-expression. Ideally, through the craft of communication, through songwriting and playing, or constructing a novel, you hope to stir other people and move them and provide some kind of essential experience.

         

Israel Horovitz's First Concert

  

In First Concert, all kinds of folk have discussed their first live music experience and the impact it might have had on their life and for some, their art. As we've talked to dozens of creative people, we've discovered amazing stories of unhinged live performances or forgotten B-sides.

Israel Horovitz’s memoires Un New-Yorkais a Paris were recently published in France, where he is the most-produced American playwright in French theatre history. Awards include OBIE (twice), Prix Italia, Sony Radio Academy Award, Writers Guild of Canada Best Screenwriter Award, Christopher Award, Drama Desk Award, Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Lifetime Achievement Award from B’Nai Brith,  Boston Public Library’s Literary Lights Award, Massachusetts Governor’s Award,) and many others. 

Horovitz was recently decorated as Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest honor awarded to foreign artists.  He is Founding Artistic Director of Gloucester Stage, and active Artistic Director of the New York Playwrights Lab. He is co-director of Compagnia Horovitz-Paciotto, a theatre company in Italy. NYC’s Barefoot Theatre celebrated Horovitz’s 70^th birthday by organizing The 70/70 Horovitz Project, a year-long event with 70 Horovitz plays having had readings and/or productions by theatre companies around the globe. 

What was the first concert you ever attended? How old were you? 

My 1st concert was in Montreal, Québec. My father was a truckdriver and, as a family, we were given to copious long rides. As I remember it, my father drove us from Wakefield, Massachusetts (where we lived) to Montréal in order to buy inexpensive (tax free) china to give to a cousin as a wedding gift. I was around 12 years old. My first day in Montréal, I met a local Québecoise girl named Bloomer, who was slightly older than me, maybe 15. I told my parents I was going to a 6pm movie with her. She took me to an underground R&B club. The bouncer at the door knew Bloomer, let us in, but warned us not to drink too much. 

What do you remember about the performance?
The concert was amazing. After five or six Little Richard imitators, Earl Bostic played a magical set, followed by free-form jazz and R&B by local musicians joined by whomever happened to be in town. 

How do you think that experience affected you as an artist?

It almost ended my life. I got back to where we were staying around 3:30am. My parents thought I was dead. The police were out looking for me. When I fessed up and told my parents where I’d been, they wanted me dead. I went back home to Massachusetts wanting to be a black musician. I sang “Tutti Frutti” a cappella in a talent show. Having failed as a soul singer, I wrote a novel at age 13, which I sent to a publisher in NYC. The novel was rejected but praised for having “a wonderful childlike quality." Having failed as a novelist, I wrote my first play, which was performed when I was 17. Nobody said it was a good play, but everybody said “It’s a play.” So, I was a playwright. 56 years later, I’m still trying. 

      

Hal Sirowitz's First Concert

                                                                                                            (Photograph by Kim Soles)

In First Concert, all kinds of folks discuss their first live music experience and the impact it might have had on their life. As we've talked to dozens of creative people, we've discovered amazing stories of unhinged live performances or forgotten B-sides.

Hal Sirowitz is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, NY, serving for three years under Borough President Helen Marshall. He's the author of five books of poetry. His first book, Mother Said was translated into nine languages and is the best selling translated poetry book in the history of Norway. 

What was the first concert you ever attended? How old were you?  

The first concert I ever attended was when I was twelve years old. I was sitting in the living room. My parents decided to do a duet. I was the only captive audience. They opened their windows, so the neighbors could hear. But the neighbors were free to rush inside their homes and put in earplugs.

What do you remember about the performance?  

My mother sang opera and my father accompanied her with his violin. They were putting on a concert for the block to show that they had culture. My mother sang in Italian, mispronouncing words and not understanding anything she was singing. My father was trying to drown her out with his violin, playing as loudly as he could.

I remembered the Memorex commercial with Ella Fitzgerald breaking a wine glass by hitting a high note and was afraid my mother would shatter both the living room and the adjacent kitchen windows. But no such luck. Because as embarrassing as that might have been, at least that would have stopped their performance.

My mother was a stickler for safety – she’d have stopped singing to pick up the shattered glass. My father played as badly as the comedian Jack Benny. But at least Benny was playing badly on purpose. Badly was the only way my father knew how to play.

After their performance they sat on their front steps, waiting for the neighbors to praise them. Most neighbors avoided them like the plague. But one neighbor wanted to know if that was a recording or live. My parents said it was live. He thought so. Recordings could not be that bad.

They went inside, away from the barbarians who couldn’t appreciate culture even if it was thrown at their faces. I went to my room and read a Philip K. Dick science fiction novel. His novels helped me to escape reality, and I was in need of much escaping.

How do you think that experience influenced your poetry?

I realized, unlike Dick who had to set his novels in the future and on different planets, like Mars, to create unrealistic and hellish settings, I only had to set them at home, and if I was good enough, maybe I might achieve the same results.

           

(Sirowitz was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. He was once the opening act for They Might Be Giants. One of his poems was selected to be posted on buses and subways in NYC. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Artist Colony. Jonathan Ames said, "Hal Sirowitz is the bard of the deadpan delivery." Gil Scott Heron said, "Hal Sirowitz is one funny motherfucker." He has been in anthologies edited by Billy Collins and Garrison Keillor. He now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and poodle.)

(Technorati tag - JXZE2FUDFES2)

Out of His Mind: Brian Cogan and the Writing of the Encyclopedia of Punk

 

Question: What kind of person spends years of his life writing and compiling historical events, stories, anecdotes, data and facts for an Encyclopedia of Punk Rock?

Circle one of the following: a) a true devotee of punk, b) someone who has bit off more than he can chew, c) foolish, d) out of his mind, e) all of the above.

Writer/professor Brian Cogan is "e," all of the above.

Mr. Cogan, who has also co-written The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal Music with Bill Phillips, discusses the influence that 60's garage rock has had on punk rock, The Replacements' song that has articulated his life, where punk and metal intersect and how he got hell from Richard Hell. 

You must be out of your mind to write an Encyclopedia.

I am out of my mind, but I figured nobody had done an encyclopedia before. People had done a lot of great books about punk – Legs McNeil’s book, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, is great. Jon Savage’s book, England's Dreaming, is really great.

It was something that I thought I could do, but it was completely biting off far more than I could chew. What got me through it is that I love to talk about punk and hence, I like to write about it.

It’s an academic book. Isn't that right?

The first one is definitely an academic book. It’s asking essentially, "What is punk?" Is it a cohesive culture that has characteristics that are not just music, fashion, ideology etc.? It’s still pretty accessible. The second book was can I explain this stuff to people who have never heard the music?

The academic version was done in 2005. Sterling - Barnes & Noble’s arm - bought it in 2006, made me rewrite it, add 100,000 words and cut out the academic jargon.

I get a lot of people saying they really liked it, and a lot of people saying, "How dare you write this." I never get a compliment without “where’s so and so” or “you got that date wrong” or “that picture is mislabeled.”

The Punk Police are out there in full and everyone thinks they need to correct you. Write your own book. Write your own version of it. Everyone should.

You couldn’t possibly include every band, but looking back, are there any glaring omissions?

There’s a bunch. Crimpshrine, a very important band from Berkeley, is not in there at all. I could probably make a list of about ten pretty important bands that are obvious glaring omissions. I got a letter a couple of months ago...“What about the Christian Punk Scene?” I don’t know where to put it all. Should I include the Hindu Punk Scene?

         

You interviewed Legs McNeil. Who else did you interview for the book?

Legs was very nice. I talked to John Holmstrom who was a very nice person to talk to. I especially wanted to talk to those two because they were there at the very start, and they applied the word to the movement. I was trying not to talk to big name musicians. Like I didn’t want to get John Lydon on the phone. I was looking for people who did zines.

I heard Richard Hell gave you some "hell."

Richard Hell gave me "hell" in that – he was nice enough to answer my questions via email – he’s still bitter about Television. This is forty years ago. I got this email, all caps, “NO THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENED. VERLAINE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING.” Really? You hold a grudge that long? That’s kind of astounding in a lot of ways.

Did you find that people were willing to talk to you?

A lot of the punks feel that they were burned. I never got a chance to talk to The Ramones because most of them were dead. A lot of the punks did not want to talk to anyone. I think a lot of them thought of me as the creepy guy, the guy at the bar who slips you a Rufi.

Why do you think you’re drawn to the Punk ethos?

The punk ethos is about developing a set of critical tools to look at the world. It’s not to divorce yourself from the world. To ask, “How do you affect the people in your environment?” Punk was never meant to be exclusionary. When you say, “This is what it has to be” is when you lose the spirit.

John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil from Punk Magazine said that punk ended around '79, '80 or '81. I think it never ended. I think it pre-dated CBGB’s. I think it’s still going on. Punk is a cultural virus that pops up independently of where it should have been stamped out. 

Who do you think was the first punk act in rock and roll?

In rock and roll it’s hard to say. I’d say the garage rock people in the 60s, bands like The Sonics, The Monks. The guys who did “Psychotic Reaction.” Count Five. A lot of those bands had ferocity. I’m still convinced that the first hardcore beat is from “Psychotic Reaction,” where it speeds up in the breakdown section.

Would you include The Who?

Definitely The Who. A lot of punk elements. “Hope I die before I get old” is a punk statement. Some early Rolling Stones’ stuff. Still, a lot of those bands don’t really say this is what we’re for or against. You can argue that The Beatles are punk, in a way too, that they’re saying don’t do what people are asking you to do.

Musically, most people would say The Stooges and MC5 are the first bands that got the sound. Iggy Pop is one of those guys who just nails it. 

What was your favorite punk show?

I saw The Ramones play sixteen times. Early on it was never to be missed. A couple of weeks ago I saw a band called Screaming Females who were just astounding. They are a fascinating band. [Marissa Paternoster] is one of the best guitar players I’ve ever seen. She has these great lyrics. She’s interesting. It’s very oblique and you can read stuff into it.

Tied for Last (great rockabilly punk) and Left on Red (great socially aware/folky/old-timey) who keep renewing my faith in music.

Seeing Iggy at 62, asking people to invade the stage and just being surrounded by people singing "I Wanna Be Your Dog." The energy.

The Replacements when Bob was in the band. It was a great show at Irving Plaza. They were doing their drunken encores. At one point, they are way gone. Tommy the bass player walks off the stage, and they keep doing another 3 or 4 songs and the audience is screaming, "Where’s your bass player?" Paul finally looks around and says, “I guess he went home.”

                 
If you could have been at one show, what would it have been?

I saw a lot of bands later in their careers. The Dead Boys' reunion was amazing. Suicide was amazing, and they were scary.

Did they play “Frankie Teardrop”?

Yeah. They’re a scary band. Even in their late 60s. Still. I didn’t want to get too close to the stage. Obviously, I wish I had seen the Sex Pistols tour of America. I wish I had seen early Clash. I wish I had seen Black Flag more. I’d only seen them once.

The Undertones. I would have loved to have seen them. They are the Irish Ramones. “Teenage Kicks” is one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

You have also written the Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal Music too.

Yeah, that’s with my friend Bill Phillips. He did the virtuosic metal, more or less, and I did the out-of-left field weirdo metal. He did the section on amps. All the bands that could play really well he did.

Where does Punk and Metal intersect?

I’m guessing in the mid-80s. Metallica was one of those bands that were wearing Misfits’ shirts on stage. A lot of thrash metal sounds a lot like hardcore.

Napalm Death is so intensely brutal. I love them. They have this one second song – “You Suffer” – (makes puff sound). You can’t understand any vocals (speaks gibberish). Bass and drums. To me, it’s kind of a punk thing too.

Why do you think some Metalheads are so reluctant to embrace Punk and Grunge?

As much as Metalheads say they are victims and put down, they were always ten steps above the punks. They were cool. They got the girl. They got something in life. They got the money. Recording contracts. And they still thought of themselves as outcasts and put down. What are you rebelling against exactly? You never were the dispossessed and the outsiders. You never were abused in high school. You abused people in high school (most likely).

                               

Without Punk, there wouldn’t be Metal, so in a sense some Metalheads are rejecting their history.

Punk was a marginalized thing. It’s for the losers. “We’re not Gonna Take It” did not articulate my life. “Unsatisfied” by The Replacements articulated my life almost exactly.

Why do you find more female Punks than Metalheads?

Metal chicks can’t be involved. Although the joke is “Why does a guy bring his girlfriend to a punk show? Somebody has to hold his jacket, while he jumps into the pit.” Punk women could do the same things that the boys could. 

Are you working on something now?

I’m working on a book about Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I’m co-writing it with my friend Jeff Massey who teaches with me at Molloy. It’s called Everything I ever needed to know about _____________* I learned from Monty Python (*Including History, Art, Poetry, Communism, Philosophy, the Media, Birth, Death, Religion, Literature, Latin, Transvestites, Botany, the French, Class Systems, Mythology Fish Slapping, and many more!)

It’s coming out early next year, depending on how many revisions we have to do.

          

(Dr. Brian Cogan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications at Molloy College in Long Island, New York. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of numerous books, articles and anthologies on popular culture, music and the media. His specific areas of research interest are media studies, music, fandom, punk rock, popular culture, comic books, graphic novels, and the intersection of politics and popular culture. He is the author of The Punk Rock Encyclopedia (Sterling 2008), which explains his lifelong obsessions with all things Strummer.)

How I Learned to Sing

   

In our Writers and Music series, authors discuss the music that has either been included in their most recent novel/play/poems or the influence music has had on their work overall. 

Susan Tepper’s fourth book is titled From the Umberplatzen (2012). It’s a quirky love story set in Germany and told in linked flash fiction. Susan is the series editor at Fictionaut for the Monday Chat Interview column and hosts FIZZ, a reading series at KGB Bar in NYC.

As a kid, I would lie on my bed and recall every chord and nuance from my dad’s Frank Sinatra records. I could hear it all as if Frank were standing at the foot of the bed serenading me. In retrospect, those were kind of strange and uncanny events, though at the time I took it all for granted. It was fun.

In 5^th grade, my family moved from Nassau to Suffolk County on Long Island, which meant a school change for me. All the little girls in my new class were part of a choral group that practiced each day after lunch. They were sweet girls and encouraged me to join, so I tried out. 

The music teacher, Mr. Acappella (name changed to protect the not-so-innocent), said he was "sorry," but I didn’t have "a voice." Sad and shamed, I had to sit with all the boys after lunch while the girls practiced. But here’s the thing: our classroom teacher, Mr. Wonderful (for real, he was wonderful), read Huckleberry Finn aloud. When that book was finished he read Tom Sawyer. 

Not only did I no longer care about being excluded from chorus, I waited with bated breath every day for the appointed hour when the girls would exit the classroom in a giggling stream and the stories of Huck and Tom and the mighty Mississippi began to unfold.

When I was seventeen I went off to drama school. It was there I discovered I had near-perfect pitch. I went on to perform with all kinds of bands as the "girl singer." Up and down the Jersey shore, we played rock, folk, country and pop gigs. This from a girl who didn’t have "a voice."

There was a movement I heard about years ago called "Anyone Can Sing." I don’t know if it still exists, but I saw it on a TV documentary, and it followed people in that group from their first croaking attempts at song to their colossal debuts as singers who could do it really well.

The psychology of this group was that "anyone can sing." I believe that. It’s as natural as talking. I think somewhere down the line, people encounter their own "Mr. Acappella" and big fear sets in. I didn’t own that fear, but I could have been crippled by it, were it not for the arrival of Mark Twain’s stories at that precise moment.

I also discovered that I liked the company of the boys, quietly entranced by those stories.

             

Rick Moody's First Concert

              

In First Concerts, authors discuss their first live music experience and the impact it might have had on their work overall. We've talked to dozens of novelists, playwrights, and poets and discovered amazing stories of the unhinged live performances or forgotten B-sides that have inspired their work and kept them writing. 

Welcome to First Concerts.

Rick Moody is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, and, most recently, a volume of essays on music. He also plays in and writes songs for The Wingdale Community Singers. 

What was the first concert you ever attended? How old were you?

My first concert was a Halloween show at the Palladium, in NYC, by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. I think I was 15 at the time, though I have had this fact-checked in the past by a magazine, and they insisted it was a year later, when I was 16. I guess it doesn't make that much difference. I was in my middle teens. It was either 1976 or 1977. My older sister, who had introduced me to Zappa a year or so before (during a year when I memorably encountered a lot of music that would really change things for me - Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Todd Rundgren, etc.), got us the tickets for my birthday. She was sort of a bad influence. We took a guy who'd been my roommate that year up at boarding school. He was called Andy.

What do you remember about the performance?

It was a vintage Zappa concert of the period that produced the LIVE IN NEW YORK album, and, later, SHEIK YERBOUTI, which I think was comprised of players like Terry Bozzio, and Patrick O'Hearn on bass, and maybe Adrian Belew. I can't remember all of them. It was a mixture of really complex stuff ("The Black Page") and really profane stuff ("The Illinois Enema Bandit"). I was the perfect age for the profane stuff. I remember that Don Pardo was a sort of announcer for the show (he figured in "The Illinois Enema Bandit" a little bit), and that Zappa unfurled a banner, at one point, that said "Warner Brothers Record Company Sucks," which struck me as remarkably combative, even at that age. There were some dripping, lava-lamp style projections which I loved. Zappa played some remarkable guitar solos.

Andy, my roommate smoked a lot of pot and drank some, courtesy of the unknown guy sitting next to us, and threw up during the encore. This was very uncool. Everyone moved away from him as quickly as possible. I'm sure he felt very bad about it. My sister was probably just hoping he wouldn't throw up in her car on the way back to Westchester County.

  
How do you think that experience affected you as an artist?

It's funny that, as a 16-year-old, I was in those days mostly taken by the adolescent humor side of Zappa, because it is his remarkably complicated time signatures and instrumental passages that, in the end, had a mark on me, and led me to hard bop and serious music and Stockhausen and Stravinsky and Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra and African music, and, of course Captain Beefheart. Zappa was a gateway drug for very serious listening, which commenced not long after this period. It was all because of my sister the bad influence, really.

I still listen to Frank Zappa a fair amount, and, these days, it's mostly the authorized live recordings that Gail Zappa has been releasing a little bit at a time on the Internet. I think he was a real American original. The Charles Ives of California rock and roll. The idiosyncrasy of him definitely helped me to become the writer I imagine I am. For example, Zappa once said: Anything Anytime Anywhere for No Reason At All. I definitely try to live by this code.

                                  

RICK MOODY'S MOST RECENT BOOK
On Celestial Music and Other Adventures in Listening, 
Hachette Book Group, 2012