Three Records, One Fanzine, Too Many Metaphors
The article below is from the Wax Trax fanzine Local Anesthetic circa 1982, more than 44 years ago. Ronald Reagan was only a year and half into his eight-year run and at his lowest point in public polls thanks to the worst economic recession since the Great Depression (starting to sound familiar?). More importantly, Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’ were duking it out for the top of the Pop charts. The charts were finally being invaded by the New Wave. Alongside the usual suspects like John Cougar, Fleetwood Mac, Toto and Chicago, the Top Ten boasted Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ and the Motels’ ‘Only The Lonely.’
Here in Denver, Wax Trax was about three and a half years into our current run of 48 years. Barring the occasional car smashing through the store re-arranging the inventory and employees in sudden and surprising ways–we seemed to be getting the hang of it.
One sign of this was that the original Wax Trax fanzine, Events, which had been typed up and photocopied on regular 8 ½” x 11” copy paper, had up-scaled or ‘paper-maxxed’ as we like to say in the 21st Century, to a tabloid size (and style, dare we say) pulp newsprint like the Enquirer and Weekly World News (and, yes, we missed the scoop about finding Elvis on Mars).
The issue of Local Anesthetic featured here is Vol 1; No 7, 7/1982. he first issue had come out November, 1981–a print schedule we seldom matched in coming years. This #7 was our fanciest yet: not only did it have our very first use of two colors, the usual black plus red, but there were 300 copies of the rag that also included a 7” single by one of Denver’s finest post-punk bands, the Young Weasels (and I don’t bandy about that ‘finest’ just because two members of the band happened to work at Wax Trax. See sidebar below)
We were particularly happy with the cover. Designed and laid out by another Wax Trax stalwart, Jeri Rossi, the front had a grainy black & white photo of Black Flag singer Henry Rollings with bassist Chuck Dukowski just behind him with both caught in mid-turmoil at the band’s very first ever show at the Mercury Cafe just a couple of weeks before this issue came out. Hot off the presses, as they used to say! (Again, see sidebar below)
Okay, fair warning. My last Resonance piece was about the German band Oval and included a brief mea culpa about my over the top writing style of the time. The piece below shows just how early I was in getting to that. But, it seemed at the time, that the music required it: these three albums sounded new and different back then: Lydia Lunch combined torch-song fatalism and No Wave abrasions; the Flesh Eaters mixed Los Angeles punk with horror flicks, hard-boiled crime, and a hard, jagged blues; X twisted C&W, rockabilly and Sixties garage into songs of urban dislocation with Ray Manzarek from The Doors presiding over the record like the ghost of an earlier LA.
When I wrote this the records were new and I was new enough at the game that I believed the three LP’s could reveal the unknown spiritual condition of America. I may still believe that, though I would now use fewer corpses per paragraph.
One update to the article – the Mary Cervenka who Exene dedicates the song ‘Come Back To Me’ is not her mother but her older sister, Mirelle Cervenka, who died on April 12, 1980 in a hit and run accident on her way to see X perform at the Whiskey a Go Go.
THE ARTICULATION OF THE CORPSE
Lydia Lunch — 13.13 (Ruby Records)
The Flesh Eaters — Forever Came Today (Ruby Records)
X — Under The Big Black Sun (Elektra)
These three records recount the efforts of the dead attempting to talk themselves back into life again. As in the myth of Frankenstein’s creation, the piecing of stolen parts, the suturing of alien vein & tissue, the transforming shock of power and knowledge and the grotesque fumblings of a life barely removed from the butcher’s block provide a harrowing animation to a well-worn theme: I feel like I’m dead — make me alive again.
In the songs we find the notes to an occult search, a fumbling after meaning in a dark arena of pain, loss, futility & humiliation. So much that attaches itself to us thru family, school, & church, so many of the things that we were told give meaning to our lives have been either stolen or revealed as lies, so much has been lost that living seems to have simply slowed down into death. This is the holocaust we weren’t told of: the one that moves into your skin & begins to shut down the systems until you no longer feel anything, until the only difference between you & the dead is that usually the dead at least have someone to mourn them.
“Forever Came Today” is The Flesh Eaters’ third & strongest lp. The group is really Chris Desjardins & whoever he asks into the studio with him at the time of recording. The lyrics are hyperbolic, swollen w/ violent, bloody images & stories of betrayal & revenge. They are set in a harsh monotony of abrasive guitars but it is the monotony of a man fascinated & surprised to be listening to his own heartbeat. Exaltation, the dream of the ’60’s, the voyage to the inner-self, the chance to be truly alive in the world, these have wasted away & the bones are showing thru. Degradation, deprivation, starvation, humiliation. All this in the land of plenty.
Lydia Lunch sings a fascinating dirge for herself. In the songs, she sees herself at a distance, unreachable, unsalvagable. She watches as others approach her and begin to kill her, slowly, deliberately, inexorably. Again & again, the only way someone else can relate to her is by treating her as tho she were dead. In this extreme metaphor, any attempt to communicate, to relate to another, is revealed to be a limiting gesture, a stripping away of potentials, a desiccation of life. To love is to engulf, to introject the other, the object into the psychic body of Self, leaving nothing of the other but dead meat, a corpse: “He says he loves me when I’m dead so he just kills me until then.”
X’s is clearly the most commercial of the three lp’s here under discussion. Exene & John Doe’s songs have the knack of recycling an old vaguely familiar rock n roll cliche by isolating it in an alien setting. It makes an interesting music that seems at once familiar and yet unsettling, old but twisted into a new life and new intent.
Stylistically, the most surprising song here is “Come Back To Me,” a sad, lilting lament on which Exene sounds, of all things, like Maria Muldaur. What is most poignant about the song, which is dedicated to Mary Cervenka who I assume is Exene’s mother, is the use of realistic detail in the lyrics. Instead of a sappy tribute to a dead mother, there is instead a genuine feeling of loss & sorrow at the realization that someone important is simply gone and will never again be near except in memory:
“You were walking thru the house last night/I knew it was you/from the space in your steps.”
In the other songs, X’s more common themes of the hunger for life, the futility of love & sex, the failure of communication, the subversion of joy all find ample demonstration. In “Because I Do” Exene cries out “I am the ghost of all my dreams/To me its all pretend/I pretend I’m alive or just not dead.” Here again is the confusion of death in life, the groping after some kind of experience that will prove to her she is alive & able to feel, to love, to make a difference in her own & someone else’s life.
“Under The Big Black Sun” (the title song), is a fascinating portrait of a woman hardening into death thru the constant losses forced on her by life: “If it isn’t me it’s death/It’s the same old testament.” At the end, she is alone, deep in the lonely night with nothing left but the stoic commitment to continuing in spite of it all: “So one has a smoke/One has a drink/The man is gone. Mary’s dead/Good morning midnight.”
So, here where we have everything to live for, here at the very heel of heaven, is the terrible irony of our “living” – we don’t need “love”, we need an autopsy.
*****
Weasels Single
Three hundred copies of this issue of Local Anesthetic contain the Young Weasels first 45: “Twist And Burn” b/w “Happy Feathers.” Recorded a few months back at Straight Johnson’s, the songs show the Weasels’ mastery of form and sound, fusing power and hesitation, attraction and fear, into a dark, chilling statement of the human heart.
In particular, “Twist And Burn” fixes with horrific precision the engulfment of love, the skirmishes of sex, the ironies of caring: “You twist, I burn” and all the tangles of attachment that ensnare us. The song is a casualty report from a survivor who cannot even know that he survived -- and all that holds him together are the scars of love.
The Young Weasels are currently in the studio recording material for a 12" EP to be released this Fall. They will be playing venues in the area for the rest of the summer so be sure to catch them often.
Later in the year they plan to travel to New York for a few weeks, hoping to capitalize on the success of their recent stay there when they were featured in a stage play, “Stuck Inside of Lubbock,” as well as playing dates at CBGB’s.
*****
BLACK FLAG AND THEIR AUDIENCE: NEW INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE DEAD
(Mercury Cafe – June 25 & 26)
“Praying that thou wilt merge, in a halo of rainbow light, into the heart of Vairochana, and obtain Buddhahood in the Central Realm of the Densely-Packed.”
—THODOL BARDO, THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD—
The THODOL BARDO is a book of instructions that must be read in the presence of the dead lest their spirit upon reaching the other world become confused and attempt to take form again as either human or animal. The dead waken slowly & find themselves in a strange and frightening place surrounded by demi-gods of horrifying appearance.
I felt more than a little like one of those spirits at the recent Black Flag performances at the Mercury Cafe.
The band’s music is an assault on the body of the audience. Without warning, without preamble, it begins at its own peak, never slackening, never lessening its furious slash and press, a storm of guitar chords & feedback play like crownfire over a manic bass and drum. And then the voice. Henry Rollins' raven-hoarse shouting, hits you like a physical presence.
Like the music, the audience reaction is immediate and all out, a galvanic reaction that jerks thru the crowd like a jolt of lightning. Bodies explode in a hurricane of arms & legs & heads shoving/pushing pulling/falling/rising, like funeral rites in a madhouse, terror & pain & loss are changed thru an alchemy of noise & motion into a celebration of living.
Black Flag’s three performances at the Mercury Cafe w/out doubt offered the best music in Denver so far this year. On the dance floor, in the “Central Realm of the Densely-Packed,” a new instruction was shouted out again & again: WAKE UP DEAD MAN!
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