Thursday, 21 March 2019

Don’t forget the second division


I am a massive football fan. That’s football aka soccer, not football played with an oval ball. That said I have been known to be a couch potato for any World Cup regardless of ball shape. Actually let’s face it, I’m a massive sports fan full stop. If I hit on sports when I’m channel surfing I’ll stop and look regardless of what it is. But football’s what I grew up with so it’s always going to be number one.

Promotion to the big league
My approach to music is similar to my approach to sport. If it doesn’t give you a thrill and make you sweat it isn’t worth it. But the similarity doesn’t end there. In football you have absurdly overblown clubs with all the money in the world sucking up the resources of its supporters and giving them sometimes soulless teams that are only in it for the money in return. In music you have overblown record companies sucking up the resources of fans to provide a soulless mainstream product of no real value, for their ‘entertainment’. The difference is that music fans put up with it whereas football fans will boo a boring team off the field. That doesn’t change the fact that at the highest level in football you can get teams that are so full of talent that they cancel each other out. End result, technically proficient games with no real highlights. Go to a big money, energy drink sponsored gig and what do you get? Hmmm.

In football some of the best competition exists at the second tier. The fight for promotion to the top divisions produces some of the edgiest, most committed games you will ever see, with some of the wildest fans along for the ride. It comes down to commitment and a passion to prove yourself worthy of the big time. When it comes down to it, the only real difference between the first and second division is the money to put on the gloss and pull the big name sponsors.

The highest tier of music is generally defined by major record companies with the money to force their turgid mainstream product onto as many people as can stand it (or who simply don’t know about anything else because it isn’t pushed). Occasionally you get someone who gains promotion to the big time, but watch how quickly they change and start to sound like everyone else, or crash and burn from the pressure to sell out. The first division of music is a factory cataloguing a few acceptable designs using pre-determined and proven components following the time honoured “if it worked yesterday it will work tomorrow” method of production. Start beat A, add synth line B, get pretty performers (vocal talent optional), teach them dance move C for use in glossy soft porn video style D. If possible try and generate some kind of crappy controversy around them to get social media going and Bob’s your uncle. Job done. Let’s do it all again tomorrow with the next celebrity sucking sap waiting in line.

Concrete Blonde
None of this is new of course. It’s how showbiz has always worked. Taking risks is bad practice. It could affect the bottom line. Risks are left to people with less to lose. But that’s where things start to get a bit more interesting. This post was inspired by me coming across a CD by Concrete Blonde for $2 in a charity shop. It came out in 1987, at a time when the music biz had a serious strangle hold on what people had access to, similar to the way the biz is now but without the streaming options. There was a massive gap between the first and second division in what could be achieved commercially in other words. At that time independent labels were struggling against MTV and the absurd money being thrown into pushing crap at the highest levels. Think hair metal. Think synthesizers with everything. Think primitive digital studios producing the same robotic drum sound on every hit record. Indies had to come up with the goods to survive, and they did. The second division was where the only real action could be found in that hideous cultural wasteland.

My Concrete Blonde CD is a time capsule. It’s an awesome slab of pure rock made at a time when pure rock was not included on any major label’s sales sheet. This was their first album and they made a few more great records without making it ‘big’. Johnette Napolitano had one of the best female rock voices in history and should have been massive but was just too real for the majors to accept. Which is a tragically familiar story no matter what the date is.

So who else was playing hard in the second division in our late 80’s time capsule?

The Replacements - Tim
Most of the action was in the USA. In fact most of the action was focussed on Minneapolis and LA. In Minneapolis, Husker Du made it to major label status (Warner Bros) and then promptly imploded after a couple of okay albums that filed off their hardcore edges and left the songs as the focus. Probably one of the least likely acts to ever perform such a trick, but the band were nice guys and that probably made it more likely than someone like The Replacements from across town. Led by an eminently nice guy in Paul Westerberg, booze and other substances were The Replacements undoing, and they got to the play offs for the first division before scoring an own goal by getting drunk on Saturday Night Live and saying a rude word to the audience. Neither act was likely to endear them to the chairman of the board, and they eventually faded away after some thrilling, emotionally rich and powerful albums. Pleased To Meet Me and Tim are the ones that brought them close to the big time, but Let It Be also includes bits of their earlier hardcore roots and is probably the pick of the bunch. Here Comes a Regular and Little Mascara off Tim pack a real emotional punch and I admit to getting a little choked up by them at times. Definitely not music for the good times but it will surely help you get through the bad. The Replacements are another one of my favourite bands.

Soul Asylum - Grave Dancers Union
Also from Minneapolis were Soul Asylum. They had more commercial appeal and released albums on A&M and Columbia, eventually selling enough to get a platinum album off the back of Nirvana’s success, but they only released a couple of worthy products and after grunge became passé to record companies they quickly faded back to their roots. Pre-Megaupload’s massive fail, I managed to find a set of demos for their A&M album Hang Time on a blog somewhere. They have a more rock n roll edge than the commercial product and are recommended if you can track them down.

Dream Syndicate - Days of Wine and Roses
From LA, well Hicksville California actually, The Dream Syndicate provided a Velvet Underground inspired wall of noise that had strangely appealing pop hooks. Leader Steve Wynn had a voice that wasn’t about to challenge Seal in the chanteuse stakes, but he and the band did a convincing job of merging artiness and rock n roll without sounding pretentious. Debut album, The Days of Wine and Roses was easily their best and they were more influential than commercial, dogged by line-up changes that killed any momentum. Kurt Cobain’s vocals owe a big debt to Steve. So do mine for that matter.

Rain Parade - Emergency Third Rail Power Trip
Definitely from LA, The Rain Parade were lumped in with the Dream Syndicate as part of the Paisley Underground – a marketing term from the early 80s for rock acts that had a 60’s psych influence. The Rain Parade produced a fairly gentle take on things in comparison to The Dream Syndicate but held their own along with bands like Green on Red and jangly girl group The Bangles. What I like most about The Rain Parade are their album titles and covers more than the sounds within. Emergency Third Rail Power Trip and Explosions in the Glass Palace are nice listens, but without a commercial point of reference they were ultimately destined for obscurity.

Gun Club - Fire of Love
Completing the LA legacy are the hardest case band on the page. The Gun Club would have been huge on any planet that worships deep rooted, blues based, hell raising rock n roll, but sadly Planet Earth is not one of them. Leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce raged more than Nirvana against ugly bullshit, wrote better songs than any MTV hogging mega act and had the balls to call The Cramps tame. What prevented them from reaching promotion to the big time were two things: Jeffrey Lee had alcohol issues even AA would struggle with, and their live act was scarily aggressive at best and dangerously deranged at worst. That is not a winning combination for major label A&R men on the lookout for the next Huey Lewis. Somehow they kept going for a decade or more before Jeffrey Lee reached the end of the road and became another ghost on the highway. Any of their albums are worth checking out, if you can excuse some of their more excessive peaks.

I’ll leave the last word on this post to Jeffrey Lee as a challenge to all mainstream power brokers: “it is not an art statement to drown a few passionate men”.

For music without division check out:


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