The Junky's Christmas

Chelsea Light Moving, Talk Normal, and Merchandise at The Earl, March 8, 2013

I'm falling slightly behind in my concert posts, so I'll just keep things going until I catch back up.

Last Friday night, Thurston Moore brought his Chelsea Light Moving project to The Earl while on his way to Austin for SXSW, with Merchandise and Talk Normal in tow.  Once again, I had to drive from Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta to see the show, but this time without the specter of having to drive back the next morning.  I'm back home now, at least for the time being.

The opening band, Tampa's Merchandise, kicked the evening off in a muscular fashion, playing an energetic post-punk/punk-pop hybrid, with elements of Echo-and-the-Bunnymen New Wave goth thrown into the mix for good measure.  Or something like that.  Here's a sample for you to be the judge.

For the last couple songs of their set, they brought an alto sax player on stage with them, lending a James White/Contortions-like bite to their sound.

Talk Normal were up next, introducing themselves with the line, "We're a Brooklyn band."  Guitarist/bassist Sarah Register and drummer/vocalist Andrya Ambro play a unique blend of driving noise rock, with feedback-drenched guitar tones and jarring rhythms.  To give you some idea of their performance, on the second or third song of their set, Ms. Ambro placed a guitar over her floor tom and played it by beating the strings with her drumsticks.  Their songs at times sounded tribal, other times primal, and always interesting.  Due more to the compatability of their sound than due to the similarities of their names, they should consider touring sometime with Portland's Talkdemonic.

The stage was lit with two red spotlights placed on the floor, rendering photography nearly impossible, so apologies in advance for the quality of these pictures.

Here's a picture from their Facebook page of all of their equipment "politely ejected out the back door" of The Earl after their set.

Headliners, of course, were Thurston Moore and Chelsea Light Moving.  Commenting on their March 2 set in Hoboken, NJ, NYC Taper noted ,

"I had to remind myself at several points during this show that the exuberant, youthful guitarist and vocalist on the cozy Maxwell’s stage in his band’s own t-shirt was a 54-year-old member of rock royalty who I had seen perform in front of crowds hundreds of times this size. Sonic Youth may be on hiatus or it may be gone, but Thurston will keep playing – and keep playing well – for as long as he’s breathing. Chelsea Light Moving, as a band, isn’t Sonic Youth, but it isn’t just a dim facsimile of it, either. With Samara Lubelski (a well-known solo artist and member of Thurston’s solo band) on bass, John Moloney (Sunburned Hand of the Man) on drums and Keith Wood (Hush Arbors, Wooden Wand) on guitar, Chelsea Light Moving has an accomplished cast and its own personality. In some ways, CLM feels more like SST-era Sonic Youth – younger, hungrier, rawer. It seems fun to be in this band, in a way that’s almost impossible in a more established one."

Chelsea Light Moving is more a real band with real songs than a Thurston Moore & Friends jam session.  As a bandleader, Thurston Moore was calm, engaging, relaxed, and free of expectations. Chelsea Light Moving stands as a great band in its own right, and as a second act, it’s a more than worthy one.  By their own description, "the band is ready to detonate any birthday party, wedding or hullaboo in any country, planet or stratosphere that doesn’t support right wing extremist NRA sucking bozo-ology."  Keeping true to their word, and prompted by a Brooklyn Vegan comments thread, the band recently played a birthday party in a basement at a house in Northhampton, Massachusetts (video below). 

Chelsea Light Moving delivered a great set at The Earl, opening with Burroughs (one of the first songs ever posted to this blog) and including all the songs from their debut album that I know, including Groovy and Linda, Lip, and Alighted, as well as Empires of Time (dedicated to Roky Erickson), some new material, and my personal favorite, Frank O'Hara Hit.

On a personal note, I have to point out that somehow I managed to wind up standing at the best possible spot in the whole club, right at the stage and directly in front of Mr. Moore.  Two feet from a modern rock legend.  The pictures below weren't shot with a telephoto lens - I had to go wide-angle on Mr. Moore's face to avoid documenting his dental work.

Chelsea Light Moving

 

This blog was born out of the feral energy of Velvet Underground, Chelsea Light Moving, and William S. Burroughs, so it's fitting that we finally get a chance this evening to hear Thurston Moore and his Chelsea Light Moving project at The Earl.

Dylan

In Thursday's interview, William S. Burroughs talked about visionaries and forward thinkers such as Galileo, Cezanne, and James Joyce, and how their work and vision was not only initially misunderstood, but attacked, censured, and ridiculed until the shock of the new had finally worn off, and how, once the public's eyes had been opened, the creative process marches on.

Here's Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "delivering rock n' roll to the dissident soul of folk music and poetry."  Note the booing at the end of the set, as the audience was not yet capable of understanding the new version Dylan was presenting of their beloved protest music.  As Thurston Moore noted years later, "For many it was already a viable meeting, but Dylan set it on fire for the world to see."

It's easy now to dismiss those who were booing the "electric" Bob Dylan as being short-sighted and provincial, but one has to understand that they legitimately believed they were defending and preserving the purity of their cherished folk music.  Rock music fans today who react in a negative way to hip-hop, to electronic dance music, and to other cutting-edge forms of music are really no different from that critical audience of 1965, and rather than ridicule Dylan's hecklers, they should recognize them as their aesthetic predecessors.

Like A Rolling Stone has been hailed by many critics as the single most important American song of the 20th Century, and while that's certainly debatable, it's delivery and impact on arrival was unquestionably one of the most revolutionary.  According to NPR, Dylan had finished recording the song just 10 days before the Newport festival.  "As usual, he didn't bring arrangements or charts to the recording session. He came in, taught the musicians the song and then they recorded take after take, experimenting with different tempos. The version of Like a Rolling Stone that ultimately got released was six minutes long, almost twice as long as most standard pop songs. That made it difficult for radio disc jockeys to program, but they did." 

Well, some did.  AM radio station WABC, the dominant Top 40 station in New York at the time, didn't play it, and I never heard the song, or any Dylan for that matter, on the radio, although I was familiar with Dylan's name and the reputation.  I didn't actually hear his music until sometime around 1967 or '68, to the best of my recollection, when I purchased a copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits unheard, based solely on reputation and the press.  I was only 13 or maybe 14 years old, but I can still remember putting that record on for the very first time and hearing that nasal voice on Side 1, Track 1, singing "Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good. they'll stone ya just like they said they would",  and thinking to myself, "What the hell is this?"  I had never heard anything like that before and his sound took some time for me to get used to, but I stuck with it and by the end of Side 2 (Just Like A Woman) it had become my favorite album and I was forever changed.

Very shortly after that, around '68 and '69, FM radio came to my attention, first WABC-FM, a more album-oriented version of it's Top 40, AM sister, and then later WNEW, which departed even further from the commercial mainstream into what was then called "underground rock."  The FM stations played Dylan, as well as the Beatles and the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and The Who. It was the start of a musical exploration for me, a journey which I'm still on to this day. 

Not to get too far ahead of myself, but it was on WNEW where I first heard King Crimson (In the Court of the Crimson King), which led me even further down the rabbit hole. Over the next five or six years, the voyage took me away from the radio altogether and to the import bins at the back on the record stores, where King Crimson led me to Robert Fripp, and Robert Fripp led me to Fripp and Eno, and Fripp and Eno led me to Brian Eno, and then things really began to get interesting.

But that's another story for another day.

Burroughs

I know that I'm skipping ahead by more than a few chapters, but there is a direct lineage from the music of the Velvet Underground to Thurston Moore's Chelsea Light Moving, and in honor of my Thanksgiving tradition, I want to post CLM's Burroughs.

A little William S. Burroughs goes a long way, of course, but this being Thanksgiving and all makes me want to indulge in a just a little more.  Director Gus Van Sant cast Burroughs as a character in his brilliant 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy, but the role was really more of a elegiac tribute to the man than any element of the film's plot.  Someone stitched all of his scenes together into one clip, presented below.  With his Kansas accent and odd cadence and rhythms, Burroughs talked like almost no one else before or after, but he was also about the most honest, direct, and insightful individual you'd ever want to meet.  Just listen to his prophesy starting at about the 3:56 mark in the Drugstore Cowboy clip, and the wisdom evident in an excerpt from an interview with journalist Jurgen Ploog after the Cowboy clip.

Finally, here's a fascinating clip in which Burroughs explains not only his cut-up technique but also hints at possibilities for time travel and also foreshadows Steve Reich's early phasing experiments.  There's a direct  path from this spoken word piece to Reich to My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and to all of hip-hop.