Entries tagged with “punk” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York
Yesterday, David Byrne and Brian Eno released Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, their first full-length album together since 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Unlike that album, this one actually features Byrne's vocals. It holds its own against recent Byrne albums and other late Eno collaborations, with the exception of last year's release from Robert Wyatt, Comicopera, which contains what I think are the finest Eno co-writes in years.
I'm almost more interested in the duo's demeanor and m.o. on this release than in the music itself, though I've enjoyed streaming it while puttering around the house catching up on work yesterday and this morning. I'm interested not just in the fact that the collaboration happened, this go around, via email (Eno writing tunes and hooks and laying down beats and Byrne composing songs and lyrics from these building blocks), but also in their decision to self-publish and -promote. "In the past, I might have undertaken all kinds of expensive marketing
plans to prepare for a record release," Byrne wrote on his blog a couple weeks ago, announcing the early release of a free MP3 from the album. "[T]here would be a teaser, live
shows, posters, magazine ads, interviews, and advance CDs sent to
writers and reviewers. We've done a few interviews, but that's about
it." For this record, though, the "Internet word-of-mouth" experiment seems to be part of the fun. According to the Times, the free download, "Strange Overtones," saw 40,000 downloads in the first three days it was posted. (If you've never read Byrne's online "journal," by the way, you should know that he's among the best contemporary NY bloggers.)
They've now made the entire album available for streaming, and even set up a nice little widget that allows you to stream from blogs like ours if you'd like:
Byrne and Eno met on May 14, 1977, the day Byrne's band, the seminal New York art-punks Talking Heads, headlined their first show in England, where they had traveled to support another New York punk band, the Ramones. Eno, an experimental musician who had played with the legendary glam outfit Roxy Music and was currently guiding David Bowie through one of his most fertile periods, was in the back of the club recording the gig illicitly; the band's management confiscated his recorder and sat him closer to the stage. In some versions of the story, former Velvet Underground member John Cale (who had worked with other downtown New York acts since) was at the same gig. David Bowman, in his biography of Talking Heads, says that Eno and others recall Cale saying something to Eno like "Get out of the way, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, I want them, you bugger." Cale says he wasn't there.
Eno did wind up producing Talking Heads records; he spent more and more time in New York, which he thought of, according to Bowman, like a "medieval European city":
If Everything That Happens doesn't fully live up to expectations, recall just how much its creators have shaped the soundscape of our own contemporary NY scenes -- and how much better even their late efforts are than most of the crap rolled out and cut from corporate cookie-cutter music factories.
I'm almost more interested in the duo's demeanor and m.o. on this release than in the music itself, though I've enjoyed streaming it while puttering around the house catching up on work yesterday and this morning. I'm interested not just in the fact that the collaboration happened, this go around, via email (Eno writing tunes and hooks and laying down beats and Byrne composing songs and lyrics from these building blocks), but also in their decision to self-publish and -promote. "In the past, I might have undertaken all kinds of expensive marketing
plans to prepare for a record release," Byrne wrote on his blog a couple weeks ago, announcing the early release of a free MP3 from the album. "[T]here would be a teaser, live
shows, posters, magazine ads, interviews, and advance CDs sent to
writers and reviewers. We've done a few interviews, but that's about
it." For this record, though, the "Internet word-of-mouth" experiment seems to be part of the fun. According to the Times, the free download, "Strange Overtones," saw 40,000 downloads in the first three days it was posted. (If you've never read Byrne's online "journal," by the way, you should know that he's among the best contemporary NY bloggers.)They've now made the entire album available for streaming, and even set up a nice little widget that allows you to stream from blogs like ours if you'd like:
Byrne and Eno met on May 14, 1977, the day Byrne's band, the seminal New York art-punks Talking Heads, headlined their first show in England, where they had traveled to support another New York punk band, the Ramones. Eno, an experimental musician who had played with the legendary glam outfit Roxy Music and was currently guiding David Bowie through one of his most fertile periods, was in the back of the club recording the gig illicitly; the band's management confiscated his recorder and sat him closer to the stage. In some versions of the story, former Velvet Underground member John Cale (who had worked with other downtown New York acts since) was at the same gig. David Bowman, in his biography of Talking Heads, says that Eno and others recall Cale saying something to Eno like "Get out of the way, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, I want them, you bugger." Cale says he wasn't there.
Eno did wind up producing Talking Heads records; he spent more and more time in New York, which he thought of, according to Bowman, like a "medieval European city":
Eno liked shopping in Chinatown for weird odds and ends. The smell of burned meat was in the air from a shish kabob stand. He passed by windows hung full with dead red ducks. Windows full of water and huge fish with the faces of old men. An Asian dwarf writing calligraphy on the window of a bank.Eno's 1978 pop album Before and After Science includes a Heads-style homage to the band called "King's Lead Hat," an anagram for the band's name. That same year, Eno also made downtown NYC music history by curating the album No New York, a compilation of four post-CBGB/post-punk minimalist bands: the Contortions, Mars, DNA, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (fronted by Lydia Lunch). In many ways, the No New York album is the bridge between the mid-70s downtown scene and 80s post-punk New York landmark bands like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo.
If Everything That Happens doesn't fully live up to expectations, recall just how much its creators have shaped the soundscape of our own contemporary NY scenes -- and how much better even their late efforts are than most of the crap rolled out and cut from corporate cookie-cutter music factories.
Last night we planned to see the new Woody Allen film (though they never bill them as the new Woody Allen films these days). Turns out we had the dates wrong and it doesn't open until Friday, so we caught a quick cab down the street to Film Forum where the Patti Smith movie (mentioned here earlier by Cyrus) was already a few minutes in progress. From what I understand we missed some opening footage of horses, horses, horses, horses.
The audience was made up mostly of fans (like me), judging from the appreciative response. If you plan to see it but don't know the basic outline of her career, I'd suggest reading Sharon Delano's New Yorker profile from several years ago, which isn't on the magazine's site but may be accessible here or via Lexis-Nexis if you have an institutional subscription.
Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an impressionistic film, dreamlike (as the title would suggest), alternating between candid moments and short, tightly composed sequences rather than offering a traditional documentary narrative. We get a sprinkling of early footage, lots of photos from the 1970s, some memories of CBGB and the Chelsea Hotel, but this isn't an account of her rise to stardom so much as a portrait of her return from retirement. She gets the important details out of the way fast via a sometimes stiff voiceover: Living in Michigan for 16 years with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and their kids, Jackson and Jesse, she'd been a homebody rather than the punk rock icon she'd transformed herself into by 1975. When Sonic died in 1994, she decided to return to New York and to performing, her kids in tow, and she hasn't stopped since.
The movie, which involved over 10 years of filming, has only the barest hint of chronology, and even then it relies on you to recognize her kids as teenagers and then as early 20-somethings, as it toggles back and forth through those ten years. She mentions musician friends who helped her return to the public -- Dylan, Michael Stipe -- but the comeback isn't really what anchors the narrative. Rather, the film grounds itself via two recurring sequences. First, she announces that she's sequestered herself in a corner of her bedroom until the film is finished. Sitting there, she unpacks boxes of mementos -- a guitar given to her by Sam Shepard, her favorite childhood dress, her son's baby shirt from the hospital, an antique Persian urn containing a portion of Robert Mapplethorpe's remains -- and uses them as touchstones for reflections on her life.
The other pattern is weirder, and is what I think really makes the film: The woman loves graveyards. If Smith's self-conception as a Romantic poet isn't evident enough to her fans, the point is hammered home here. She sees herself as an Artist in a genealogy that stretches from Blake to Shelley to Whitman to Rimbaud to Picasso to Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs to Jackson Pollock and Bob Dylan to herself. These folks provide her with sacred texts that govern her cosmology; they also structure her world travels. She references all of them over the course of the film; she also visits most of their graves -- and in the case of Rimbaud visits his outhouse for good measure.
There's little in this world that could be more Romantic (in the capital R sense) than visiting graves of the poets, unless you want to go the Gregory Corso route and actually have yourself buried at your master's feet (we find him, in the film, buried as close as he could get to Shelley). When I asked, during a Q&A with the director, the fashion photographer Steven Sebring, about the tension between the film's emphasis on "life" (as in her life after the death of her husband) and its preoccupation with death and cemeteries, he made the point that Smith very self-consciously shapes her living in relation to loved ones and heroes dead and long gone: when she travels to a city she often books her hotel in proximity to a graveyard she wants to visit. "She seems to know where everyone's buried," he said.
The subject of literary tourism (and "necrotourism" in particular) has its own minor publishing cottage industry in the academy, one which interests me professionally. But it's rarer to find someone who carries on the practice today to the extent Smith does. She defines herself in relation to the dead -- family and friends, but the writers who shaped her personal and artistic identities (which clearly can't be separated for her). In our jaded, 21c world, it seems a little ridiculous: identifying as a Poet (black hood and cloak and all), taking appreciative rubbings of headstones, scribbling in notebooks everywhere you go, never getting tired of William Blake. But Smith comes to figure, in the film, as an alternative not simply to contemporaries like George W. Bush (whom she indicts in high style late in the film) but to those members of her generation who gave birth to postmodernism as well. She comes off not simply as the last great Romantic but as someone who advocates Romanticism as a way of life -- as a way through life. As much as the film relies on graveyard scenes, we find these visits (and her reflections on fallen friends) giving her the strength to survive her husband.
None of this should suggest that the film lacks when it comes to music. It's not a concert film, and some of the music will be unfamiliar to those (again, like me) less familiar with her recent work than with her classic recordings. But from her punkrock reading of the Declaration of Independence to spittle-laden, vein-popping renditions of "Land" and "Rock n Roll Nigger," the film reminds you that, contemporary peace activist or no, this woman still earns every bit of her title as the Godmother of Punk.
Smith appears in person at select screenings this week and next; see Film Forum's website for more details.
The audience was made up mostly of fans (like me), judging from the appreciative response. If you plan to see it but don't know the basic outline of her career, I'd suggest reading Sharon Delano's New Yorker profile from several years ago, which isn't on the magazine's site but may be accessible here or via Lexis-Nexis if you have an institutional subscription.
Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an impressionistic film, dreamlike (as the title would suggest), alternating between candid moments and short, tightly composed sequences rather than offering a traditional documentary narrative. We get a sprinkling of early footage, lots of photos from the 1970s, some memories of CBGB and the Chelsea Hotel, but this isn't an account of her rise to stardom so much as a portrait of her return from retirement. She gets the important details out of the way fast via a sometimes stiff voiceover: Living in Michigan for 16 years with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and their kids, Jackson and Jesse, she'd been a homebody rather than the punk rock icon she'd transformed herself into by 1975. When Sonic died in 1994, she decided to return to New York and to performing, her kids in tow, and she hasn't stopped since.The movie, which involved over 10 years of filming, has only the barest hint of chronology, and even then it relies on you to recognize her kids as teenagers and then as early 20-somethings, as it toggles back and forth through those ten years. She mentions musician friends who helped her return to the public -- Dylan, Michael Stipe -- but the comeback isn't really what anchors the narrative. Rather, the film grounds itself via two recurring sequences. First, she announces that she's sequestered herself in a corner of her bedroom until the film is finished. Sitting there, she unpacks boxes of mementos -- a guitar given to her by Sam Shepard, her favorite childhood dress, her son's baby shirt from the hospital, an antique Persian urn containing a portion of Robert Mapplethorpe's remains -- and uses them as touchstones for reflections on her life.
The other pattern is weirder, and is what I think really makes the film: The woman loves graveyards. If Smith's self-conception as a Romantic poet isn't evident enough to her fans, the point is hammered home here. She sees herself as an Artist in a genealogy that stretches from Blake to Shelley to Whitman to Rimbaud to Picasso to Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs to Jackson Pollock and Bob Dylan to herself. These folks provide her with sacred texts that govern her cosmology; they also structure her world travels. She references all of them over the course of the film; she also visits most of their graves -- and in the case of Rimbaud visits his outhouse for good measure.
There's little in this world that could be more Romantic (in the capital R sense) than visiting graves of the poets, unless you want to go the Gregory Corso route and actually have yourself buried at your master's feet (we find him, in the film, buried as close as he could get to Shelley). When I asked, during a Q&A with the director, the fashion photographer Steven Sebring, about the tension between the film's emphasis on "life" (as in her life after the death of her husband) and its preoccupation with death and cemeteries, he made the point that Smith very self-consciously shapes her living in relation to loved ones and heroes dead and long gone: when she travels to a city she often books her hotel in proximity to a graveyard she wants to visit. "She seems to know where everyone's buried," he said.
The subject of literary tourism (and "necrotourism" in particular) has its own minor publishing cottage industry in the academy, one which interests me professionally. But it's rarer to find someone who carries on the practice today to the extent Smith does. She defines herself in relation to the dead -- family and friends, but the writers who shaped her personal and artistic identities (which clearly can't be separated for her). In our jaded, 21c world, it seems a little ridiculous: identifying as a Poet (black hood and cloak and all), taking appreciative rubbings of headstones, scribbling in notebooks everywhere you go, never getting tired of William Blake. But Smith comes to figure, in the film, as an alternative not simply to contemporaries like George W. Bush (whom she indicts in high style late in the film) but to those members of her generation who gave birth to postmodernism as well. She comes off not simply as the last great Romantic but as someone who advocates Romanticism as a way of life -- as a way through life. As much as the film relies on graveyard scenes, we find these visits (and her reflections on fallen friends) giving her the strength to survive her husband.
None of this should suggest that the film lacks when it comes to music. It's not a concert film, and some of the music will be unfamiliar to those (again, like me) less familiar with her recent work than with her classic recordings. But from her punkrock reading of the Declaration of Independence to spittle-laden, vein-popping renditions of "Land" and "Rock n Roll Nigger," the film reminds you that, contemporary peace activist or no, this woman still earns every bit of her title as the Godmother of Punk.
Smith appears in person at select screenings this week and next; see Film Forum's website for more details.
