Wild Flag, Wild Flag. It’d be easy to say Wild Flag’s debut is a throwback to something, but good luck trying to figure what that is. A comeback for four musicians who never really left, Wild Flag’s debut takes teasing, defiantly fun lyrics into the realm of sonic exploration, with guitarist Carrie Brownstein’s impossibly raucous riffs meeting Rebecca Cole’s delightful keyboard. Mini-epics abound, from the head-nodding singalong “Glass Tambourine” to the pure-and-true shredding found on “Racehorse.” The entire album feels like a celebration of a lost feeling, a love letter to the type of loud music that oldies stations would play if they weren’t soulless corporate commodities. “We love the sound/ the sound is what found us/ the sound is the blood between me and you,” they sing on their lead-off calling card, “Romance.” It’s impossible to listen to Wild Flag without dancing, even just a little bit.

Yuck, Yuck. A 1990s revival was inevitable, so we’re lucky it sounds this good. It would be easy to deduct indie-rock band Yuck points for originality, but let’s be honest: When was the last time you put on your Dinosaur Jr. or Sebadoh records? Not as often as these kids from England, New Jersey, and Japan, I can promise you that. Fuzzed out guitars and shoegaze-y monotone lyrics about love and pain (“I’ve had enough of being young and free,” sings Daniel Blumberg) rule the day, and listening to enough of their debut album can bring about a positively tranquil bliss. The guitar solos on “Holing Out” and all-encompassing feedback on “Rubber” would surely make J. Mascis smile. Like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart before them, Yuck is proof that imitation can be a good thing, especially since it’s been too long since we’ve heard the original. And “Suicide Policeman” syncs up perfectly with Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, thus bumping off Pink Floyd-Wizard of Oz for coolest music-movie thing of all time.

Sonne Adam, Transformation. Sonne Adam (Hebrew for “Hater of Man”) turned heads in the death-metal scene this year when the group was signed to Century Media, a label not known for associating with the darker elements in hard, hard rock. Because let there be no doubt: Sonne Adam’s debut album, Transformation, comes from a very dark place: Israel. Hailing from what they refer to as the “sane” part of Israel (Tel Aviv), Sonne Adam plays filthy, Norwegian-style, head-banging guitar music that calls to mind lava destroying an innocent village. Transformation is brutal yet crisp, and its sound is fresh, thanks in part at least to the guidance of the label: Sonne Adam never loses focus, even in its heaviest moments. Finally, proof that death metal doesn’t need to be lo-fi to be taken seriously. Track titles like “Through Our Eyes Hate Will Shine” and “We Who Worship the Black” let you know what you’re in for. It’s a shame that Judaism doesn’t have a Devil, because Sonne Adam makes you want to worship at his unholy alter.

Fucked Up, David Comes to Life. Jewish or not (and we’re counting it as Jewish, considering singer Josh Zucker goes by the nickname “Concentration Camp”), Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life is the album of the year. The Toronto band’s third album—a momentous rock opera—audaciously combines 1980s hardcore punk purity with a seemingly never-dying indie/millennial/DIY optimism. The result takes big ideas, layers over louder guitars, and tops it with a gruff voice howling about love. (Lead singer Damian Abraham’s voice might sound abrasive to the uninitiated, and that’s because it is.) Like the best punk singers, his commitment to the vision he’s laid out is unwavering, except in this case it happens to be a post-modern love story of radical political activists in Thatcherite England. Heady stuff, but it somehow becomes crystal clear on unstoppable freight trains like “Queen of Hearts” and “Serve Me Right.” And if you can’t make out all of Abraham’s lyrics (something he jokes about in the band’s punk-utopia concerts), the point is this: On “Truth I Know,” he growls, “I could feign stories of regret and woe but morals implore me to share the truth that I know.” Fucked Up is mad about a lot of things, but the unadulterated joy of imagination that comes through on every riff—on every track of David—marks it as classic, that one album from 2011 that people will be listening to in 50 years. Get on it now.

To listen to a compilation of music from these albums on Spotify, click here.

Israel’s small but tight-knit psychedelic rock scene was, like its counterparts across the globe, heavy into hash, jamming, and recording albums that never made a noticeable impact beyond local borders. But while bands and solo acts of the era—like Turkey’s Erkin Koray, Brazil’s Os Mutantes, and a number of bands from Cambodia—have lately become favorites among plugged-in collectors and indie rock royalty, the shelves are bare of recordings by Israeli psychedelic rock artists, and probably for good reason. Kraus, who in 1967 composed and produced the first Israeli pop-rock record with the Jerusalem-based band The High Windows, is one of the few Israelis whose work actually seems worth preserving.

Completely devoid of any digital trickery, A Criminal Record is very much a product of its time, with a laid-back vibe and ramshackle sound created by a makeshift band. It is also one of the most unique and fantastic undiscovered albums from the most fertile era of rock ‘n’ roll. According to the liner notes to the 1977 full-length EP released by Hataklit (prior to that, the songs had been released as individual singles), the bulk of the album was created while Kraus sat alone in his cell, humming melodies to himself. He then asked one of the guards who was familiar with his work if he could borrow a guitar. The guard agreed, but set a condition: If Kraus cut his long hippie hair, the guard would find him an instrument. Desperate to make music, Kraus agreed and then worked furiously for the next 24 hours writing music. A few days later Kraus was granted a 48-hour leave from his jail cell, and he went straight to a recording studio, where he had gathered some of Israel’s best rock and jazz musicians, including Haim Romano, the guitarist from the country’s first psychedelic band, The Churchills. The recording was completed in two hours.

Kraus was released from prison on bail a week later, and the album, containing six freewheeling psych-folk tunes seemingly influenced by Bob Dylan and American garage rock, was released in May of 1971 to very little public notice. The one exception was the song “Shishi Ham,” or “Hot Friday,” which became a massive success after the Israeli songwriter Ehud Manor took the tune and rewrote all of the lyrics, changing the title to “Tov Li Lashir,” or “I Like to Sing.” Manor’s version would go on to take first prize at the Hebrew Song Festival of 1972, where it was performed by the group Hatov, Hara, Vehana’ara (The Good, the Bad, and the Girl). The rest of the album—including a version of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son,” with lyrics reworked by Kraus, and the fuzzed out garage-rock sounding “Who Are We?”—faded into obscurity, but has a weird innocence and earnestness to it that may be even more delightful to listen to now than it was then.

Jason Diamond is the editor-in-chief of Jewcy.com, and the founder of Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

While I was living in New Haven a few years ago, I made plans to meet a high-reward, high-maintenance friend halfway at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Bridgeport. It soon became clear that this plan had all the charm of being inconvenient for both of us, and in a hateful place. My friend—I’ll call her Daphne, because that is her name—enlisted her brother to drive to the venue, and it was a great concert: This was during a time that Bruce was closing shows with an apocalyptic, prophetic version of Alan Vega’s “Dream Baby Dream.” After the show, Daphne and I went backstage, and for reasons that escape me, her brother went to move the car, which was ill-advised as there was no way he could get past security without me. Anyway, to bring this on home, we’d been chatting with the Boss for at least 45 minutes, he was telling us about how Philip Roth is his favorite author, and somehow Daphne’s lingering sibling comes up. So we reveal to a very astonished Bruce Springsteen that Daphne’s brother is somewhere in the parking lot waiting for us.

So here’s the takeaway: Bruce is gob-smacked that we have left this poor, lost brother somewhere out there, even though, truth be known, Daphne has issues with anyone she’s related to (and anyone she’s not related to, including people she’s never met), and her brother’s lonely parking lot exile is completely fine with her, I think, and possibly even a desirable thing. In any case, Bruce gets up off the couch, leaves the building, and goes and finds Daphne’s brother, and brings him back to his dressing room.

Now let me make this clear—I’ll even put it in Passover terms: It was Bruce himself and not an angel of Bruce who went looking for the errant brother, even though factotums and minions were here there and everywhere, and could easily have been dispatched.

I really don’t know why Bruce was so kind in this way to Daphne’s brother, who he did not even know, but this story is consistent with others that you’ll hear from almost anybody. People who live in Monmouth County who have been picked up in the Springsteenmobile while hitchhiking, and that sort of thing, is the most common version of this story. I’ve been bringing friends backstage with me to meet Bruce for maybe 15 years now, and he remembers names, he remembers their brothers-in-laws’ names when he signs autographs. He’s a hopeless mensch.

Bruce Springsteen really got any creative person’s dream career, and his good-heartedness and good-spiritedness are part of it: both because it made the people behind the scenes want to do their jobs that much better, but it also means that he connects with an audience in a way that holds them close. Is he really cool? No, of course not. I’m a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world’s hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan’s work for sure—he’s the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public. He’s disconnected and distant in a way that Bruce is present and close, which is, in itself, a talent.

All of this leads me to the strange case of Lou Reed, who makes Bob Dylan look like Will Rogers. Bruce Springsteen, with his good manners and total decency is kind of the nice Jewish boy that Lou Reed—and, of course, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota—ought to be. Which seems counterintuitive—after all, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan are Jewish, and according to Philip Roth (Bruce’s favorite author after all), the hardest thing for a Jewish boy to be is bad, and yet they are both legendarily unpleasant people.

But you know what? The anecdotal evidence—at least among our artistic icons—suggests that Roth got it wrong. I mean, Norman Mailer was not just a wife-stabbing wretch himself—he actually helped get another wretch out of jail to murder again. Woody Allen’s heart wants what it wants and … oh boy. Roman Polanski—dear me. Leonard Cohen—does he seem nice to you? Never mind Roth himself, who both bears witness against himself and has Claire Bloom and others to corroborate his self-accusations.

So all I can say is: What the fuck was Philip Roth talking about? Yes, yes: I know—the CPA who lives in a split-level in Demarest, New Jersey. All the same, as public figures expressing the notion of Jewish identity—or denying their Jewishness altogether, which is of course the most Jewish thing you can do—the creative Jewish man isn’t very nice at all. In fact, he has been an absolute dick.

To get back to the contrary and instructive example of Bruce Springsteen, playing the role of the Christian character known as the Good Samaritan—what could be less Jewish? All that good-natured generosity is way too open-hearted and even obsequious, it lacks the judgmental prickliness that makes Jews so picky and stingy with their love of human beings, despite a huge and unbridled passion for humanity. In any case, this is the best I can do by way of giving an ethnocentric explanation for the fact that I am trying to write a heartfelt tribute to Lou Reed on the occasion of his 69th birthday, and I can hardly find a soul alive who doesn’t have an unpleasant story to tell about some chance encounter that they had with Lou Reed.

If, like me, you happen to be a native New Yorker, there is a good chance that you take Lou Reed’s presence for granted, like the woman you see almost every day walking her Pomeranian when you are out strolling with your dog: He really lives here, he takes the number 1 train, he sees documentaries about R. Crumb at the Film Forum. The only other celebrity who comes close to being as present within the municipal bloodstream is Ethan Hawke, who proves Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said we are what we pretend to be, because Lou Reed has cultivated ordinary-creative-person-ness with such botanical intensity that it’s become who he is. And so it is, with Lou Reed living among us for many years with his wife Sylvia on West End Avenue opposite the Calhoun School, and now with Laurie Anderson on West 10th Street. An unusual number of people have had chance encounters with him, and apparently it’s been universally unfun.

Lou Reed stories are the opposite of Bruce Springsteen stories. No one’s brother-in-law is ever rescued from a parking lot and treated like a king. The pedestrian admirer or the average autograph desirer is greeted with derisive hostility, with the precise prototype of the punk-rock sneer that has made Lou Reed the precise prototype of the sneering punk-rocker. I remember buying a vinyl version of Live In Italy when I was in high school and getting into the 79th Street subway station on Broadway to be greeted by none other than Mr. Reed, who looked like none other than Robert Plant. Of course I was completely excited by the coincidence. It’s not like I’d bought something common like the first Velvets’ LP or something obvious like Transformer—and I was certain he’d be moved by my fanaticism. I started jumping up and down—I really was jumping up and down—and telling him to look and see what I had, which was no doubt annoying, but still, this was long before the reissue of all the Velvets’ stuff, no one cared about Lou Reed unless he/she was also claiming to be named Holly from Miami, and I was a teenager. Instead of responding, Lou Reed walked away and started kicking the tiled wall at the platform where people waited for the IRT, to show his displeasure with my enthusiasm for his work.

After that I learned my lesson. Many years later, I had an experience that might have been phenomenal if I hadn’t thought better of it at the time. At either the behest or the request of an editor I cared about, some time not long after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I was drinking at the legendary Lion’s Head in Sheridan Square with a young painter who had never been out of East Berlin. I don’t mean that he’d never been out of East Germany—for whatever reason, he had never even ventured beyond city limits, which he explained was strangely common in iron-curtain Europe. Somehow I asked who he’d most like to meet in New York City, and he said that the album Berlin had sustained his cohort for so many years, because it was the only way any of them know that anyone on the other side of the wall knew or cared that they were alive. Of course, the funny part about that album is that when it was made in 1973, Lou Reed had himself never been to Berlin, it was about an idea. And I remember sitting and thinking how great it was that this German guy’s misunderstanding—his idea—about someone else’s understanding—his idea—had such great force. And somewhere between thought and expression—go ahead, assume that I’m lying, if I were you I would—into the bar walks Lou Reed himself. If this were a movie, only no screenwriter trying to maintain anything like verisimilitude would put such an absurdity into a script.

Here’s the takeaway: Despite what has to be called a miracle—I will not call it a coincidence, because this was all too much—I did not get up from my barstool to walk over to Lou’s frosty gulag archipelago on the other side of the Lion’s Head. Even the potential for great beauty—it would have been pretty great, and maybe life-alteringly amazing—wasn’t worth what my cost-benefit analysis told me was a more likely outcome of pedestrian unpleasantness, accompanied by that sneer.

This is why Lou Reed’s career has been both extraordinary and uneven. This is why a lot of those RCA albums from the ’70s are not merely produced distastefully—the quality is also actually shoddy: because that is what the career of an asshole looks like. Sometimes incredibly good work will get done because talented admirers will show up willing to do anything, and so you get an album like New York (made in the ’80s for Sire, but same thing), which was good work all around. But too often one is confronted by something like The Blue Mask, a beautiful contemplation of sobriety and love and commitment that has mediocre production values. Lou Reed’s post-Velvet career makes it obvious that it really was a band, because it’s only in those live recordings at the Academy in the early ’70s, like on Rock n Roll Animal, when Mick Ronson is on guitar, that solo Lou comes close to sounding as interesting as VU Lou. For all his talent, Lou Reed’s recorded output would be a whole lot better if a good collaborator—or two or three—were not so hard for him to find.

Lou Reed, of course, ought to be able to behave like a human being. But he’s not in the service industry—he’s not the waiter telling you about the branzino special, he’s not your florist or your cobbler or your chauffeur. It really doesn’t much matter if he’s polite or rude. It ought to matter to those in his intimate circle, and in the media saturated world, we ought to expect a good persona, but why do we need a good person? Because that’s what we need. The Kardashians are a barely-human shrine to the testament that all that matters is Lou Reed’s personality, because ability to create great works of art is no longer as valuable as a family full of K-named girls.

And that’s what I want to say on behalf of Lou Reed—but you can throw Dylan, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, and a few others in there too: He came of age, went through a midlife crisis, and is now heading toward his shuffleboard Shangri-la days, in a time when a musician—and really, I should say, a person—truly could have a career. I mean, a substantial, lengthy career, one that allowed a relationship with an audience to develop with the same rhythms of a friendship, one that allowed for lousy work en route to genius, one that actually did allow the personality of the artist to become invested with meaning and significance that could be either delightful or deranged, one that made the music industry seem like a worthy enterprise and not just a bunch of schmucks who got lucky. And career in this context is a good word, it’s not a limiting notion like choosing to become a lawyer because what else is there; it’s a choice that is a real choice.

You might note that Lou Reed, and all the other people I pointed to almost parenthetically, have not hyphenated their lives. They aren’t designing a line of durable sportswear made of organic fibers for Kmart or running a small production company in a studio bungalow. They do the thing they do well, because it’s satisfying, and it’s a full life. And I’d say that people my age are the last group of Americans to know a life of creativity that can sustain a person financially, but also intellectually and emotionally. After us, it’s as if the world lost its ability to focus and stick to the plot. We will never know the life story of Vampire Weekend, because the curvaceous course of a life stretched out before us like a slinky unwinding is not a narrative that anyone knows how to sustain anymore.

What I think I’m saying is that what’s held my interest in Lou Reed through many anecdotes about his miserable personality and many albums that had maybe one good song on them, if that—“Coney Island Baby,” “The Bells,” I could go on and on—is the reality show that is Lou Reed was being expressed through all those albums, high and low, good and bad. He didn’t always get it right, but he tried to keep us informed, he tried to let us know what was up and what was what. He rightly titled an album Growing Up In Public, because that is what he got to do. Lou Reed gave us the first Velvet Underground album in 1965, when he was 23, which means we’ve had 46 years of living a tattered scattered life, one that was underneath the bottle, that involved waves of fear, that eventually brought him to the last shot, and that has gotten him to the point where he is living with and loving a woman who is his equal, who is a substantial person—an outcome about as unlikely as his recovery from heroin addiction (I’ve been told that about one in 35 manage it).

We got to hear this story. We got to hear a life happen in all its imperfection and misery and elation and contentedness, and realize again that the great thing about life is not that the future is predictable—it’s that you have absolutely no idea what will happen. Happy people consider that good news. And if you want to see that human story unfold, if you want to understand that only the unexpected life is worth a damn, spend some time with 46 years of Lou Reed’s work, music that leaped and then looked. Safety is for the godless and the faithless.

Not, maybe, when it comes to their music: arguably, other bands — you know, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who — have produced more masterful and memorable music.

Nor, mind you, when it comes to popularity: unlike many of the bands that started out with Anvil in the early 1980s, bands like Bon Jovi or Whitesnake or the Scorpions, Anvil had a brief brush with fame and then faded out of the public eye.

But Anvil didn’t care. The band’s guitarist Steve “Lips Kudlow” and “Rabbi Robb Reiner” stuck together, taking pedestrian jobs to pay for the albums they continued to record and release. They never stopped playing, never broke up, never lost faith. And that is what makes Anvil a truly great band.

Their story — deftly captured in the new documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil — has been an unlikely one from the start. Two Jewish kids from middle-class families in suburban Toronto, Kudlow and Reiner met when they were 14, promised each other that they would never sell out and always keep rockin’, and started a band. They wanted to sound just like their musical idols, Motörhead and Black Sabbath and the other heroes of hard rock in the late 1970s. They wanted to take over the world.

For a while, they did. They recorded a few albums, got noticed, toured all over. They played for packed arenas, standing out not only for their fierce music; Reiner, the drummer, is largely credited with inventing a rapid-fire percussion style that has birthed a subgenre of heavy metal called speed metal”but also for their stage antics, which included playing guitars with colorful dildos and wearing ridiculously risqué leather outfits. For a year or two, Kudlow and Reiner were rock stars.

And then, they weren’t. Poor management, flaky record executives, and a fickle market that quickly abandoned heavy metal in search of the new big thing all contributed to leave Anvil, so shortly after the band’s stellar debut, without a record contract and without fans. Kudlow and Reiner returned to Canada, got day jobs, and started families.

Here, however, is where the story gets both very uncommon and very Jewish: instead of hanging up their instruments and succumbing to the doldrums of suburbia, Kudlow and Reiner kept Anvil alive. They invested every cent they could spare and recorded album after album, releasing their work themselves and selling it to the small and dedicated circle of fans that remembered the band’s heyday. Every few years, they’d scrape together enough cash for a miniature tour, playing for exceedingly small audiences. But they didn’t care: they had faith.

And it paid off. In 2006, Kudlow and Reiner got a call from Sacha Gervasi; in the early 1980s, Gervasi, then a hard-living British teenager, snuck into the band’s dressing room after a concert and asked to join their tour as a roadie. Enamored with his enthusiasm, Kudlow and Reiner agreed, taking him along on their North American tour. As Anvil spiraled into anonymity, however, Gervasi became a star, writing the screenplay to Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal as well as a few other successful films. Looking for a new project, he called his favorite band, and was amazed to learn that they were still hanging on. He suggested a documentary.

‘Rabbi’ Robb Reiner and Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow

The result, opening in theaters this weekend, is at once hilarious, inspiring, and heartbreaking. Often referred to by critics as “the real-life Spinal Tap” — the comedy masterpiece about an aging, unloved metal band directed by Rob Reiner (no relation to Robb Reiner of Anvil) — it captures the two musicians as they take one last stab at glory. Smitten with the warm, funny and engaging rockers, journalists and bloggers began hyping Anvil, and when the movie hit the film festival circuit, in 2008, Kudlow and Reiner were invited to all the hippest venues, including England’s prestigious Glastonbury music festival. But it was at an appearance at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, not usually a venue for heavy metal musicians, that the band had its moment of clarity.

“At first,” recalled Kudlow, “I thought to myself, what are we doing here? We’re called the ‘Jews of Metal’ sometimes by fans, but being in this festival of Jewish movies, it was a bit weird for a musician like me, you know? But then, I had an epiphany. All of a sudden, it hit me. You know, Robb’s dad is a Holocaust survivor, he was in Auschwitz. And I thought that him surviving was the beginning of this miracle. Talk about faith, man. Talk about destiny. Because of his survival, Robb was born, and we met and became friends and started Anvil. And here we are, here we are.”

Listening to his friend speak, Reiner smiled coyly. “Lips said all this to me in San Francisco,” he said. “I thought it was just another one of his revelations. But then, a few weeks later, we’re at Michael Moore’s film festival, and he gets up on stage to introduce us, and he says the same exact thing Lips said, that we have to thank God my dad survived Auschwitz, because otherwise there’d be no speed metal.”

And thank God they do, for all of it. “I’m not really wrong,” Reiner said, thinking back of all those years when all those people said it would take a miracle for Anvil to succeed. “I’m not really wrong for believing in miracles.”

With its latest album, Citizen Boris (JDub Records), the band ventures into new territory, performing original material written by its frontwoman, singer and accordionist Annette Ezekiel Kogan. Still multilingual, the songs are about love, death, vacuum cleaners, and U.S. citizenship tests.

Annette Ezekiel Kogan joins us from WBEZ studios in Chicago to talk about the new record.

Listen to “Citizen Boris,” by Golem.

Listen to “Lullaby,” by Golem.

]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/4778/bringing-back-the-sexy/feed/ 0 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/1165/space-time-continuum/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=space-time-continuum http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/1165/space-time-continuum/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:51:08 +0000 import http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/space-time-continuum/ There’s a strange phenomenon among people who become Orthodox—they seem to enter a time warp. Their clothes, their colloquialisms, even their musical choices become frozen in a single moment, like Rip Van Winkle or Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Every time they talk about bands or movies or commercial jingles, they’re back at the moment they stepped into their proverbial DeLorean.

Eliezer Blumen is one of those people. He’s been living as a Hasidic Jew for the past twenty years, and to the casual eye he’s a standard-issue Hasid: white shirt, bushy beard, well-worn hat. The trademark vest he wears (more Montana mountain man than Boro Park shtetl-fabulous) hints at something less ordinary, but it’s barely noticeable—lots of Hasidim have their dress quirks, a bright-colored scarf or the occasional pair of rainbow-striped socks.

On a recent trip to New York from his current home in Israel, Blumen stopped by to drop off Real People, the new album from his power rock trio, Yood. How can you tell that they’re a power rock trio? For starters, the phrase “Power Rock is on the CD cover, emblazoned on a dirty wall behind the band, even though it’s neither the band name nor the album title. If a band is going to call itself “punk”—much like someone wearing a shirt that says “porn star” in shiny letters—chances are, well, it isn’t. If you’re all about heavy crunching chords and big-beat drums, however, you’d sure as hell better say it loud and proud.

Yood

The album is bombastic, but it’s a clean, organized kind of bombast; the kind of rawk that one would associate with AC/DC, or even early Metallica”guys who could destroy indie rock kids with a single shake of their grease-sharpened hair (or, for that matter, their beards). Yood calls to mind an early episode of The Simpsons: driving through Brooklyn on a school trip, Bart spots some Hasidic Jews, pulls down the bus window, and yells, “ZZ Top! You guys rock! Upon hearing this, one Hasid turns to another and says, “Did you hear that? We rock! For a small minority of the world’s population—Hasidic Jews who love themselves some old-fashioned rock ’n roll (and still write it with an “n”)—there’ll always be Yood.

There are many good old-fashioned rock ‘n roll moments on Real People. From the blast-off quality of “Free”—in which the two-and-a-half minute guitar solo seems determined to break free of the song, climbing higher and higher along scales, while the song is determined to chase it—to the wailing, harmonica-backed country rock of “Straight to You,” you could sneak it onto the jukebox of a Chicago sports bar, circa 1985, and have an instant round of cigarette lighters in the air.

At times, it’s difficult to remember this is a religious album. And yet, there’s something religious—even fundamental—about it. Like the fact that the lyrical “you” probably refers to God rather than to a biker chick. Like the “ai-yai-yais” that sometimes sneak through the choruses. Or, indeed, the unabashed power rock vibe, which feels both intimate and anthemic, like someone locked in his imagination and playing to a hypothetical arena—something like, dare it be suggested, a religious experience. It’s almost enough to have you up on the couch, playing air guitar—or to take you back to the last moment before you were too religious to cast off your black fedora and do such a thing.

Listen to “Wastin’ Away” by Yood

Listen to “Free” by Yood

A few years ago, the diva and rapper M.I.A. fused dance music, Bollywood music, and hip-hop, and presented it to the world as the latest in music sampling. It wasn’t the first such fusion, but it might have been the first time it was so seamlessly executed.

Electro Morocco

Although Electro Morocco, a New York-based band of Israeli expatriates, isn’t pushing nearly as many musical boundaries as M.I.A. did, the comparison is inevitable and well-deserved. They draw from different parts of the world, but share an aesthetic, both technical and emotional, with M.I.A.

Both include Eastern belly-shaking samples—Indian in M.I.A.’s work, and Middle Eastern in Electro Morocco’s. But Electro Morocco works hard to establish a fresh sound, layered with organic guitars and synthetic beats, that is clearly their own. Their programmed drums are deceptively simple, but grow more intricate with repeated listenings. The off-beat rhythm, the interplay of tweaked, Oriental-sounding guitars, and the frenzied climaxes call to mind bellydancing music and hard rock. The half-sung, half-spoken choruses are catchy yet elusive; they’re eminently repeatable, but you quickly realize you’re singing syllables, not coherent words. Is it just an accent, or a mystical-sounding foreign language?

Mostly, though, you’ll just sit back and dig it. “Joe Pill” is a four-minute dance party, with whirring Arabic plucked guitars and a full-on club beat. “Monkey Do” starts with a trade-off between keyboard blasts characteristic of Middle Eastern dance music and a furious, distortion-heavy electric guitar. The melody of “Sachbak” is strikingly original, yet strangely reminiscent of a blues band, the kind in which an 80-year-old man plays guitar on a stool, making his fingers dance in seemingly superhuman patterns; it’s a plucked guitar line so complex that it sounds like a sample. In Electro Morocco’s short time together (less than a year) it’s almost suspect how tightly they play together. This Hanukkah, they’ll be co-headlining the Sephardic Music Festival in New York. And from there, it’s easy to imagine them taking over the rest of the country in a matter of weeks.

Listen to “Take Me Back” by Electro Morocco

Listen to “Joe Pill” by Electro Morocco

Fusion has become sort of a prerequisite for popular music these days. Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the Internet—if you can listen to every radio station in the world, you might as well be influenced by the best. But, as an expatriate American Hasidic guitarist playing American hard rock has found—and as a band of Israeli expatriates reaching for their Middle Eastern roots is learning—sometimes you have to leave home in order to appreciate where you’re from.

]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/1165/space-time-continuum/feed/ 0 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/1153/rock-and-a-hard-place/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rock-and-a-hard-place http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/1153/rock-and-a-hard-place/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:42:33 +0000 import http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/rock-and-a-hard-place/

For forty-odd years, people have been writing hit rock songs about war (“Fortunate Son,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Ohio,” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath), although they often sound most at home when they’re singing about youth, love, America, sex, driving, revolution, and not knowing what they want to do after college, because those subjects beget cries to action—let’s do something, now! But as a subject, the Holocaust is pretty resistant to rock; it’s over and its victims never stood a chance. The subject presents scant opportunity for fist-pumping. Nonetheless, a surprisingly large number of bands, which is to say a handful, have written songs about it.

Many of the examples fall into two groups: bands who implicitly acknowledge the apparent absurdity of their undertaking, and those brave souls who just go for it. From the latter group, there is “This Train Revised,” from the Indigo Girls’ 1994 album Swamp Ophelia. Right away, rapid strumming and minor-interval vocal harmonies suggest righteous grievance, and as soon as you hear the first, crisply enunciated lyrics—“Piss and blood in a railroad car/ Gypsies, queers and David’s star”—you understand that this a protest song. By invoking the spiritual “This Train (Is Bound for Glory),” which was sung on civil rights marches in the 1960s, the Indigo Girls cast Holocaust victims as martyrs in an ongoing struggle for justice. The problem is that the civilians that were put on those trains weren’t fighters for a cause; they weren’t picking a fight of any kind, and this is part of the Holocaust’s distinctive horror. The militant tone of the song feels like an evasion of that uncomfortable truth.

But detachment and irony have their perils as well; take the Sex Pistols’ 1977 song “Belsen Was a Gas,” written by Sid Vicious. Like the swastika T-shirt that Vicious famously sported around London, the song is more of a comedy bit than a provocation to thought. In its verses, Bergen-Belsen’s inmates talk about what a good time they’re having, and then Vicious encourages the listener to commit suicide. It might be possible to pull off a Holocaust joke, but this one fails because it’s ultimately self-aggrandizing; Vicious is more interested in showcasing his capacity for irreverence than in saying anything specific about Bergen-Belsen or the way it’s remembered.

The best results seem to come from those who acknowledge the weirdness of singing about the Holocaust while doing it earnestly anyway. An early example of this approach is “Dachau Blues,” from Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s 1969 album Trout Mask Replica. It helps that Beefheart keeps his lyrics oblique: “Sweet little children with doves on their shoulders / Eyes rolled back in ecstasy / . . . They’re counting out the devil with two fingers on their hands.” More important, “Dachau Blues” isn’t a blues that B.B. King would readily acknowledge; Beefheart’s noise-jazz assemblage sounds like it’s trying methodically to get a blues started over and over again but can’t bring itself to do it; the means of expression just can’t be made to fit the subject. This helplessness feels right.

Beefheart’s approach might have informed Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Composed by singer-songwriter Jeff Magnum after reading The Diary of Anne Frank, it’s a literary album, allusive and haunting. In the decade since its quiet release, it’s taken on considerable prestige—indie rock’s great canonizer, Pitchfork, gives it a perfect 10.0, and Jonathan Safran Foer is rumored to be a fan. Its lyrics often describe conversations between the living and the dead; the music, full of saws, horns, and echo effects, old-fashioned and avant-garde elements, is part of those conversations. One of its slightly creepy achievements is the way it’s able to subtly eroticize the Holocaust’s mix of victimhood, premature death, urgency, flight, and ghosts in much the same way as young-adult Holocaust novels like The Devil’s Arithmetic. On the title track, Magnum does this beautifully:

There are lights in the clouds
Anne’s ghost all around
Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees.

Most of the songs on Aeroplane that touch on the Holocaust are laments, using metaphors like a two-headed boy trapped in a jar and subject to questionable medical scrutiny (“they’ll be putting fingers through the notches of your spine,” on “Two-Headed Boy, Part I.”) But halfway through the album, Magnum underscores the irony of making rock ’n’ roll about large-scale inhumanity by opening a song ominously titled “Holland, 1945” with a cheerful “one, two, one-two-three-four,” then plunging into a fast power-chord progression. It sounds like a pop-punk song about a crush, and it is. Magnum’s brilliance lies in his willingness to let it be a crush song, not a dirge, even though the crush’s object is a fifteen-year-old murdered by the state:

The only girl I ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive . . .
Now she’s a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos full of flame.

By avoiding any literal retelling of the Anne Frank story and reducing it to a thwarted teenage romance, Magnum is able to make it raw and strange again.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is unquestionably the most widely acclaimed Holocaust rock effort; Slayer’s “Angel of Death,” a song about Joseph Mengele from the band’s 1986 album Reign in Blood, is the one that provoked the deepest critical disdain upon its release. This is understandable. While Neutral Milk Hotel is interested in empathizing with the Holocaust’s victims and making sense of a world in which innocents are slaughtered, Slayer is mostly interested in imagining the perspective of the perpetrators. While Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band call attention to their own inability to find a comfortable musical form for the Holocaust, Slayer claims the mindstate of a Nazi as the ultimate heavy metal subject matter. And where other bands are suggestive, Slayer is explicit:

Pumped with fluid, inside your brain
Pressure in your skull begins pushing through your eyes
Sewn together, joining heads
Just a matter of time
Til you rip yourselves apart

The lyrics enumerate Mengele’s activities without much illuminating them. But the music, both technically impressive and inadvertently hilarious, is a window into Mengele’s soul, or at least Mengele’s soul as it appeared, in a moment of inspiration, to the members of Slayer. It’s the sound of a band that takes itself absolutely seriously cranking up its speed to maximum. The two rhythm guitar tracks that open the song, and the drum solo that brings it to its climax, are mechanistic and repetitive, but not in the detached, cheerful manner of techno songs; the musicians sound like humans turning themselves into an industrial system. The statistics about the number of deaths at Auschwitz sung in the opening verse are echoed by the incomprehensible speed and repetitiveness of the guitars.

Of course, velocity and repetition are the two most important weapons in the small but time-tested heavy metal arsenal; there’s always been more than a little bit of Futurism in metal, and metal musicians have a tendency to position themselves as supermen. Nevertheless, few seem to really want to explore the Nazis in depth; most mention them in passing if at all. Since “Angel of Death” there have been numerous references to the Holocaust in metal and rap in which “Holocaust” stands for the total devastation of an adversary, or evil or brutality in general. One might perpetrate a “holocaust” on a rival MC, for instance, as RZA does in his song “Holocaust (Silkworm).” The Chicago metal band Disturbed has performed a stage show wherein the singer, David Draiman, the grandson of a survivor, mimes death under a gas-shower prop during a multimedia presentation that shows iconic images of violent intolerance, like illustrations of the Salem witch trials.

But Slayer is not content to use perpetrators and victims as metaphors. They want to be inside a perpetrator’s personal experiences. I would never argue that their poetry ranks with Jeff Magnum’s, but there is some truth in those frenetic, maniacal guitar lines. The Nazis suffered from delusions of grandeur; they believed they could assume a God-like stature on the world stage. Slayer’s overwrought guitar parts evoke that delusional state. It may or may not be intentional, but “Angel of Death” captures something other than the awfulness of the Nazis. It captures their ridiculousness, and in so doing renders them a little more real.

I live two blocks from Haight Street in San Francisco, 1,000 paces from the epicenter of 1967′s Summer of Love, the largest migration of young people in United States history. Every store window on Haight wants to know how you will remember the 40th anniversary: With a tie-dyed onesie? A Ben and Jerry’s cone? A wreath of flowers in your hair?

Yet the one building with the most right to speak that piece of the neighborhood’s history has nothing to say. The Bill Graham Center, part of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, celebrated the anniversary by moving to roomier digs a few miles east. Created to provide affordable heath care and substance abuse counseling to the torrent of young people who arrived that season, it’s now as silent as a dancehall at daybreak.

If scholars of the 60s agree that the Summer of Love actually began in January of that year, thanks to a Jewish poet from Newark, we can probably convince them that its legacy belongs to Bill Graham, a Jewish concert promoter who fled the Nazis as a preteen. Under Allen Ginsberg’s direction, the Human-Be-In, a 20,000-person celebration of the counterculture held in Golden Gate Park, brought hippies to national media attention. Graham (born Wolfgang Grajonca in 1931 in Berlin) took it from there, producing, managing, or promoting nearly every major rock act of his generation and making superstars out of locals like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin.

Timothy Leary, center, leads thousands of people in a song at the Human Be-In, 1967

In doing so Graham not only made San Francisco’s counterculture America’s popular culture, but also transformed the rock concert from disposable entertainment into a way to direct funds and public attention to social causes. Although Graham didn’t invent the benefit concert (that honor probably goes to George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh), his relentless professionalism and trademark marriage of fun and philanthropy perfected it. Without Graham, this summer’s Live Earth would have been Live Couple of Cities.

“Bill Graham raised more money for good charitable causes through rock ‘n’ roll that any other man who will ever live,” says Robert Greenfield, co-author of Graham’s autobiography, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, in an interview in 1992. But that eulogy rubs down Graham’s edges instead of capturing him as he was: A ruthless businessman who made concert promotion a career choice instead of a small-time hustle and viewed how he made money and how he gave it away as indivisible. His enduring legacy may rest with his emphasis on the tikkun in tikkun olam, to repair the world, through work, rather than good intentions.

In 1939, Graham’s mother, a widow, sent her nine-year-old son and his younger sister, Tolla to France in a transport of children fleeing the Nazis. Two years later, after the German invasion, Graham escaped on foot (his sister died in his arms on the roadside), by train, and by boat to Madrid, Casablanca, and finally the United States. Though four other sisters survived the Holocaust, his mother perished at Auschwitz.

Graham served in the Korean War and then bounced around New York with stints as a Catskills waiter and underemployed character actor (the name “Bill Graham” was the closest to his own he could find in the Yellow Pages), before moving to San Francisco in the early 1960s to be close to his eldest sister Rita. In 1965 an acquaintance from his New York theater days introduced Graham to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a struggling political theater group. Graham already had a job as an office manager but volunteered to take charge of the troupe’s business affairs. His first priority was a fundraiser to beat an obscenity charge leveled against the group.

A few days before the benefit, Graham arranged for a motorcade of fully-costumed mimes to file through downtown San Francisco handing out pamphlets. The police threatened to shut down the parade and the incident made the evening news, spurring disparate members of the city’s artistic community who, Graham recalled in his autobiography, had “never been under the same roof at once,” to offer their help. At the show, Lawrence Ferlinghetti shared the stage with jazz saxophonist John Handy and Jefferson Airplane.

Graham also encouraged the audience to be part of the act. His mission was to package the benefit as a show of solidarity. “Any statement or artistic expression you wanna make, fine,” he remembered telling prospective attendees. “A lot of people said ‘I’m gonna bring a stalk of bananas. I’m gonna bring ten pounds of grapes.’… Some guys asked if they could hang bed sheets and do liquid projections on them.” When November 6, the night of the event, finally arrived, the troupe’s 700-person loft filled to capacity by 9 p.m. with some thousand others milling on the streets outside. Beyond Graham’s network, there were “clean cut kids from Marin county whose fathers worked for the phone company,” as journalist Robert Scheer would later write. “Bill turned to me and said ‘This is the business of the future!’”

Graham would later write, “I didn’t know it was the beginning of anything, but I knew it was the most exciting experience of my life.”

Graham introduces a band during final days of concerts at the Fillmore West, 1971

Over the next quarter century, his company Bill Graham Presents amassed an impressive: tours and concerts for The Who, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, and U2, nightclubs like the Fillmore Auditorium and the Winterland Ballroom (a former San Francisco roller rink where both The Band and the Sex Pistols played their last shows) two record labels, artists management and music publishing interests. “Before Bill Graham came along,” wrote rock journalist Ben Fong-Torres in a recent appreciation in 7X7 magazine, “concert promoters flew by night. They’d book a facility and a few bands, using whatever sound system was already in the room, and herd in the kids, taking their money before moving on.” Graham trucked in Broadway-style lighting and stage props; a greeter offered free apples at the door greeter of his Fillmore Auditorium (still happens at the reopened venue) and spent thousands keeping bands happy with backstage amenities like swimming pools and volleyball courts. Even with a net worth estimated at $150 million, Graham would prowl his concerts with a clipboard, checking ice buckets and ashtrays, once telling thousands of concertgoers to stop standing on the chairs so everyone who paid could see the band.

Philanthropically, Bill Graham produced the American half of 1985′s Live Aid (seen by an estimated 1.5 billion people in 100 countries), which raised more than $100 million for Ethiopian famine relief, the 1986 Conspiracy of Hope tour, which helped raise Amnesty International’s profile, and countless benefits for Bay Area school programs, civic events, and political causes. School music programs, public radio stations, and Jewish communities continue to receive support from his foundation, established after his 1991 death in a helicopter crash.

Encomiums to Graham tend to favor either his professional or charitable accomplishments but regarding them separately misses the point. Whereas many wealthy Jews of his generation isolated their business and philanthropic interests, Graham negotiated just as hard and applied the same ferocious diligence to benefit work as he did to commercial producing. In 1975, Graham recruited the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Willie Mays, and Marlon Brando to appear at a benefit with the unsexy mission of saving extra-curricular activities in San Francisco public schools.

Rock ‘n’ roll may have been his business but Graham used it to sell famine relief as easily as it sold records. In this way, Graham’s work not only predicted current trends in Jewish philanthropy (accountability, return, an entrepreneurial approach to giving) but also streamlined competing definitions of tikkun olam. Social justice, liberal politics, ethnic solidarity, all are frequently used definitions of the term argued Rabbi Jill Jacobs recently in Zeek in her essay, “The History of Tikkun Olam.” The life of Bill Graham didn’t leave any of those definitions unexplored.

Yet Graham had a tenuous relationship with his heritage, acknowledging it but only in ways that cohered with his public identity as a producer of large-scale public events. In 1975, the Chabad house in Berkeley asked Graham to fund a giant public menorah in San Francisco’s Union Square. Graham agreed, but at the unveiling refused to light the first candle, saying, “Surely you could find a better Jew to do it,” according to John Glatt’s biography, Rage and Roll: Bill Graham and the Selling of Rock. Soon after, he also funded the construction of an adjacent Christmas tree. Out of view, Graham named his Marin county estate Masada, and when he had to stay at the office late, had his sister deliver matzoh ball soup to his home, where she left it for him in the fridge.

Ten years later then President Ronald Reagan announced he would visit the Bitburg Military Cemetery, where members of the SS were buried. Enraged, Graham organized a citywide protest. Reagan visited, and hours later, while Graham was in Europe discussing plans for Live Aid, two Molotov cocktails were thrown through the windows of his office, burning it to the ground. The walls left standing were spray-painted with swastikas.

Though friends and colleagues volunteered to hunt down the culprits, Graham dissuaded them, arguing that doing so would only incite further retaliation.

“My love for America was always founded on the feeling that here, I had my rights. In this country, in America, I could take my shots,” said Graham in his autobiography. “Obviously, some person had thought I was wrong to declare my feelings in print about the leader of our country condoning genocide. But what right did that person have to throw a fire bomb in my office? Why didn’t they come talk to me about it? I’ve been dealing with the public for twenty years. I knew how crazy people could be. But this one was so cold. I had no chance.”

Haight-Ashbury T-shirt store, 2006

On a typical day on Haight Street, it seems like the neighborhood has never recovered from its Summer of Love hangover. Although stores do brisk trade in 60s nostalgia and neighborhood homes sell for several million, the homeless population is among the city’s densest. As the San Francisco Chronicle recently reported, a cleanup crew in Golden Gate Park recently found hundreds of discarded syringes and related drug paraphernalia.

Haight Street isn’t the world the participants in its Summer of Love envisioned, but it’s close to the one Bill Graham created for himself, a ragged mix of ideals and harsh realities, of a triumphant youth culture somehow shoehorned into the unforgiving mold of business. Bill Graham Presents may have been swallowed by the concert colossus Live Nation, but their business wouldn’t exist without the elevated importance Bill Graham gave to the industry. Nor would we today see live entertainment as much more than entertainment, and poof!—there goes Live Earth, Live 8, The Concert for New York City after September 11th.

I may have arrived in Haight-Ashbury too late to know Bill Graham, and too late to do much but inhale the lingering vapors from 40 years ago, but I see the spirit of both has grown beyond these 20 square blocks. Anniversary or no, that’s something worth celebrating.

Doc Pomus and Joe Turner

Doc Pomus is little known today, except among those who regularly mine liner notes for songwriter credits, but from the late 1950s through the 80s, he brought a certain dark pathos to popular music, writing iconic songs such as “Teenager in Love” for Dion, “Suspicion” for Elvis Presley, and hits for Big Joe Turner, the Drifters, the Beach Boys, and countless others.

Confined to crutches and later a wheelchair by a childhood bout of polio, Doc Pomus began life as Jerome Felder, son of a Brooklyn lawyer. His parents pushed him to become an accountant, but he had other ideas. In Lonely Avenue, a new biography, writer Alex Halberstadt traces Doc’s unlikely rise to fame as a blues singer and influential songwriter.

Nextbook talks to Halberstadt about this man’s remarkable life and work.

Excerpt from Doc Pomus’s uncompleted memoir, February 21, 1984:

I was never one of those happy cripples who stumbled around smiling and shiny-eyed, trying to get the world to cluck its tongue and shake its head sadly in my direction. They’d never look at me and say, “What a wonderful, courageous fellow.”

I was always too fucking mad and didn’t have a chip, but a great big log on my shoulder, daring the world to get in my way or mess with me. I walked slow and straight and never swung my legs fast and awkwardly like the rest of the gimps who got around with braces and crutches. My main thing was to act and look cool—angry, and cool and sharp. I talked the hip talk of the jazzmen and dressed like Bed-Stuy and Harlem. I was gonna be the first heavy-weight boxing champion on crutches—a one punch knockout killer. Or maybe the first major league pitcher on crutches—firing endless, unhittable strikes. Or maybe I’d be the first famous bandleader waving his baton with one hand and leaning on his crutch with the other. And I was gonna make love to the most beautiful exciting women in the world, and they would all love me passionately and forever. I was going to be the most extraordinary and talented and virile man that ever lived.

And underneath I was a frightened little kid—afraid that my limited physical equipment was not enough to get me any kind of piece of the action out there. I would end up a street beggar hustling quarters, or be just another bed in a cold state institution, or live in a welfare hotel sharing a toilet with some diseased junkie or hooker. Most of the time I shut this out with the help of booze, pot, insanity or blindness; or a combination of any or all of it. But once in a while I would lay in a sleazy hotel room with the soiled bedcovers over my head—too scared to move, sometimes for days and nights—sleepless and trembling. And when it got like that I never knew when it would end, or how it would end, or if it would ever end, but it always did. Now, thirty or forty years later, it happens less and less, and I’ve found corners of myself and the world that I own more than once in a while. And some mornings when I wake up and look around, I even smile deep and feel like it’s good to be here and to be me. But it sure took a long fucking time.

Photos courtesy of Da Capo Press