hot out here

…to Crazy for You.

My RFT streak continues with this Best Coast interview from this week’s print edition.  Despite my snark about the short interview time, this is one of the few times I’ve actually adhered to my music editor’s word count.  Usually I go way over.  Maybe this means more bands should place severe time constraints on me.  Who knows?

Got about half a dozen RFT assignments in the pipeline for the next month.  Here’s the first: Heart at Family Arena, last night.  I went in no expectations and honestly enjoyed the show, power-balladeering aside.  The problem is I assume every band should get the All Tomorrow’s Parties treatment.  If I was Heart’s manager, I’d be booking them in small clubs and cutting out their entire ’80s catalog from “What About Love” onward.  So it’s probably a good thing for Heart (and their accountant) that I’m not their manager.

Ah, City Gardens of Trenton, NJ.  Home of a thousand hardcore matinees and two thousand 90-cent dance nights.  The place where R.E.M. got the idea for “Perfect Circle.”  The club where a young Jon Stewart bartended for awhile.  The recording location of Venom’s classic (and very unauthorized) Live in NJ.  And let’s not forget the infamous beef between CG promoter Randy Now and the late Paul Decolator, as played out in various fanzines and over the air on WPRB.

And currently: the vacant building up for sale or lease.

This news brings up a couple of questions.  First of all, is it proper to have nostalgia for a club that I only attended maybe a dozen times in my life?  Even though City Gardens was only about 45 minutes south of me in high school and college, I would always choose Maxwell’s or the Court Tavern given the choice.  Besides the rotten neighborhood, I just knew more people at those other clubs and always had more intimate concert experiences there.  Nonetheless, when the City Gardens book finally comes out, I will be first in line to buy it.  Perhaps it’s nostalgia for a bygone era rather than a specific location.

Second of all: what must this place look like inside now?  City Gardens closed in the ’90s and became Club XL, a hip-hop/dance spot notorious for its shootings and alleged prostitution.  (All of a sudden, rioting punks must have seemed quaint in comparison.)  Club XL finally ended sometime in the mid-00s, and I can’t imagine the owners left it in great condition.  $225,000 is cheap for such a huge space, even in the bowels of Trenton, so you have to imagine it’s been trashed.  Or better yet: with the doubtlessly tacky Club XL fixtures intact.

It would be cool if a group of local disaffected punks chipped in and turned CG into a Gilman-esque cooperative.  If Maxwell’s could come back from being a bad brew pub and Gilman could recover from the MRR folks pulling out, it could surely happen.  Not that it will.  But an awesome fantasy, right?

Obituaries and show reviews: these are the things that apparently get me blogging.

My brother’s wife died this week.  I hesitate to call her my “sister-in-law.”  We only met half a dozen times, tops, and I don’t think we’ve seen each other since my wedding in 1999.  Our family has never been the closest-knit, and sometimes it seems like I’m so busy keeping a roof over my head in this gruesome economy that I neglect them.  I’ve never even met my niece, the six-year-old daughter who is now without a mother.  So I’m not really sure how to react, other than to offer my condolences to my brother and concern for his daughter.  If you know him, maybe send him an email and do the same?  He’s on Facebook.

What’s interesting is the side effects of such a circumstance.  Like this writer, who shares my brother’s wife name and now has the odd experience of seeing her doppelganger’s obituary.  I left a comment about it; I think she was embarrassed, but I assured her that I took it as a tribute.  It’s always fascinating to note the connections between strangers, especially in this age of social networking.  In this case, the strangers are literally mourning.  If there’s such a thing as an afterlife, I hope this provides some comfort.

Thinking seriously of closing this blog down permanently. There have been plenty of behind-the-scenes matters to which I need to attend, and I’ve felt neither inspired nor motivated enough to write anything here. I don’t know; do I even have any readers anymore? Would anyone miss this blog if it went away? Or are most of you already on Facebook and Twitter and get enough of me there?

Longtime readers may recall my impassioned plea for a job in late 2008.  I received many helpful and wonderful responses, one of which was from the office manager for the St. Louis Circuit Attorney.  If that person is out there and still reading, could she please email me privately?  I lost your name and contact information (along with several years’ worth of similar data) when I switched from PC to Mac last year.

The rest of you may be wondering what’s going on and where I’ve been.  More soon.

OK, who wants to fill me in on this?  The referenced website is pretty barren, and I haven’t been in touch with the band in years now.  Could there finally be a proper Dolly Mixture reissue on the horizon?

As 2009 slowly sets into 2010, it seems like everyone’s looking forward to a better year/decade/life.  Me too, although when I compare 2009 to the hell that was 2008 – climaxed by a plea for a job, any job, on this very blog – I can’t help but think that I’ve at least turned a corner.  At least I’ve worked this year, which is more than many can say.

Let’s back up for a second, though.  Before I got the lawyer job, before I got the evening/weekend call-center job, I was temping.  After months of no assignments, I finally got offered a job.  I would be working at another call center processing W2 requests.  I was in no position to say no.  Anyway, I’d done call center work before; how bad could it be?

The answer came within 15 minutes of orientation, which began the first Monday after New Year’s Day.  Almost immediately, the trainers started yelling at us not to fall asleep during training, or that would be immediate grounds for termination.  Thus began three days of vague instructions, aimless Q&A sessions, and many, many reasons that we could be fired from this stupid job.  It was the closest thing to military basic training I ever hope to experience.

I had to pass a written exam and provide a urine sample in order to get this stupid job, but you’d never know from some of my coworkers.  Like the lady who spent an entire lunch hour telling me how the Bush administration deliberately set up 9/11.  She didn’t even offer the standard theory of a Mideast oil pipeline or corporate interests.  No, apparently Bush, Cheney and Rove crashed four planes for the hell of it.  Say what you like about the Bush administration, but that makes no sense.

Anyway, I managed not to fall asleep (which was not easy), so that Thursday I was off to work the phones.  The call center was tucked amongst the maze of office parks off Page Avenue near Westport.  My shift was 11:30 am to 8 pm, which was about as inconvenient as it could be.  Amazingly, the job was actually much worse than it seemed during orientation.  There was no separation between phone agents, which meant that callers could hear everyone else’s conversations.  There was no tech support whatsoever.  And the callers were unbelievably rude.  You wouldn’t think that people calling for W2 forms could get abusive, but I was cussed out far less when I did phone surveys in college.  The whole thing literally feels like a bad dream now, like it didn’t really happen.

Fortunately, that job only lasted four days.  One of the local legal temp agencies bailed me out with a document review job at a downtown firm.  I announced my resignation from the call center at 8:00 pm, and the supervisor didn’t seem all that surprised about it.  Neither did the temp agent for whom I left a message that night.

The document review job was better, insofar as the people were nicer and my contribution more appreciated…but anyone who’s done document review can tell you how deadly boring it is.  Easy money, but dull.  At least I was back to normal hours, and I could take MetroLink.

That job lasted about a week.  I’d managed to find time, during that stupid call center job, to interview at a small law firm in St. Charles.  I’d left the interview feeling OK about my chances, and when the managing partner had me come in on a Saturday to help file a Chapter 13 petition, things looked even more promising.   I couldn’t have been happier when the offer came through.  Had to give one day’s notice again, and the legal temp agent was not happy about it…but I really had no choice in the matter.

That brings us to late January.  Although the lawyer job was an incredible break, the fact was that it wasn’t going to pay our mortgage and bills.  So I thought back to the other call center job I applied for back in December, the one at the car rental company.  They had actually approved me for full time employment, so I called and asked if they’d consider hiring me part time.  Fortunately, they said they could – as long as I provided a bunch of paperwork within 24 hours.  It wasn’t easy, but I got it done.

And that’s pretty much where my life has been ever since.  Three days each week, I start working at 8:00 am and do not stop until 10:00 pm.  Most Saturdays I work at least a few hours at the law firm, and Sundays I work a full shift at the call center.  Fortunately, it’s all worked out.  My managing partner has been accommodating about my quirky schedule, and the conditions at the call center are much, much better than at the temp job – so much that I was promoted to second-tier help desk over the summer.

This means that I haven’t gone out much this year.  Vacations are out of the question.  I’ve bought precious few records and attended only a few shows.  I’ve had to cut back on my RFT writing, which I loved.  I do see my kids every day – we have breakfast together – but I miss them on work evenings.

At the same time, I’ve often reflected on just how lucky I was in 2009.  I actually get to practice law, which is not true for every recent graduate.  And I’m fortunate to have one job, let alone two.  Many people had none in 2009 – and being a bankruptcy lawyer, I see it every day.  People who lost secure factory jobs when the factory moved south.  People who were just barely scraping by until the layoffs hit.  People, mostly honest and hard-working, who were mortified to step into my office, let alone hire me for their Chapter 7 or Chapter 13.  So many of them expressing embarrassment or disbelief that they were even considering this step.  So although I averted unemployment this year, I definitely had a front-row seat for the so-called jobless recovery.  Some of my clients have stories that would make you cry.

There are other things to remember.  We still have our house.  Our kids are both healthy and happy.  The music I did hear meant more to me than it has in years, literally helping keep me sane during this busy time.  Although things could have been better, they have also been much worse.

I’m 43 years old now.  I knew, when I started law school, that I would be starting over for hopefully the last time.  It’s a hard thing to do at any age, in any economy, but I hope that I continue to learn and grow in 2010, and I definitely hope my family and I see a little more financial stability.

That’s it.  Bring on the ’10s.

*  source: here.  Embrace is my least favorite of the Ian MacKaye bands, but it seems to fit here as a title.

Last night I got a lesson about St. Louis’ punk past.  Let me state that I love St. Louis; I’ve lived here for more than six years and have come to think of it as my adopted home.  But I know little to nothing about the music that’s come from here.  Obviously I know about the blues, Chuck Berry and Ike Turner; but ask me about the “legendary” bands of a more recent vintage, and I’ll tell you about Drunks With Guns, Uncle Tupelo, Bunnygrunt. and maybe a few others.  In other words, the same bands I knew before I moved here.  It’s been my understanding that St. Louis never produced many post-punk regional classics.  I’m happy to report that my understanding was profoundly incorrect.

It’s not really my fault, though.  No one thought to document a lot of this stuff until BDR Records made its recent debut.  The product of Bunnygrunt’s Matt Harnish and local DJ Jason Rerun (who was kind enough to send me some MP3s of old New Brunswick bands recently), its purpose is to excavate the forgotten St. Louis punk/pop scenes of the 1970s and ’80s.  BDR has just released Raymilland‘s Recordings ’79-’81.  In its honor, Raymilland reformed to play a one-off set at Off Broadway, and brought fellow STL new-wavers The Welders along for good measure.

Appropriately, the opening bands each included BDR members.  The Medical Tourists was a three-piece of guitar, bass and swooshy synth overtones – Bis meets Big Black meets Lene Lovich, if you will.  Bunnygrunt were their usual selves; it’s amazing to think that I first saw them 15 years ago.

Then came History Lesson Part 1.  The Welders existed between 1976 and 1981-ish and apparently recorded a 7″ worth of tracks with Steve Scariano (Finn’s Motel).  That’s My Daughter covered one of their songs with a raspy energy befitting Scrawl.  Playing their first show in almost three decades, they were impressively tight and nonstop fun.  I heard echoes of the B-52s, Blondie and (especially) Nikki & The Corvettes – that so very ’80s mix of girl-group kitsch, punk sass, power pop smarts, and lyrics about debased debutantes and so forth.  Their short set included what must have been all of their originals, and a well-placed cover of the Dolls’ “Looking For A Kiss.”  The place was packed and it was clearly reunion time, but I – who could barely find Missouri on a map in 1976 – was singularly impressed.

Then Raymilland came on and kicked off the art-punk section of the evening.  They were present at a number of important events – opening for Magazine and Ultravox in STL, contributing tracks to the first Sub Pop cassette, almost opening for Joy Division in Chicago before fate (and a rope) intervened – but somehow fell between the cracks.  Like the Aerovons – a late ’60s STL band that recorded at Abbey Road and hung out with the Beatles – they were musical Zeligs, falling between the cracks even as history was being made around them.  Apparently Raymilland performed live less than a dozen times during their whole career, but three of the band members have continued to live locally and jam privately.  This may be why there were no cobwebs whatsoever to their sound or appearance.  To put it bluntly, they rocked the place.

Guitarist David Sundberg and bassist Greg Black maintained a Peter Hook/Bernard Sumner approach; often the bass would carry the melody while the guitar chopped out a staccato rhythm.  Bob Trammel was a rock-solid post-punk drummer, holding down the regulation Krautrock and mutant-disco beats with expertise and effortlessness.  Lead singer Rick Buscher looks like a New Romantic in the cover art of Recordings ’79-’81, but he’s since matured into a crazy college professor.  He plays the Brian Eno/Allan Ravenstine role well, coaxing white noise from his primitive synths and occasionally ranting into the mic.  You could suggest Eno’s early solo albums, The Fall, Closer-era Joy Division (of course) and 154-era Wire as influences, and you’d probably be right.  However, Raymilland reminded me most of Mission of Burma; their approach sounds every bit as contemporary in 2009 as it must have in 1980, and lends itself to the present as well as the past.

The packed crowd was evenly mixed between old-time STL scenesters, current music nerds, and curiosity-seekers like myself.  Funniest audience heckle of the night: “Fuck Joy Division!”  I know I’d be scarred for life if I’d been booked to open for Joy Division in May 1980.  I’d have even felt that way as a ticketholder.

A very special night, one of my favorites since moving to town.  I can hardly wait to hear what BDR unearths next.  (Coming for sure: a Welders EP and Test Patterns, a 1981 compilation album.)

1)  Liechtenstein, Survival Strategies in A Modern World 10″ (Slumberland)
2)  Dum Dum Girls, “Brite Futures” (HoZac single) and self-titled 12″ EP (Captured Tracks)
3)  Titus Andronicus live at the Gargoyle, 2/5/09
4)  Grass Widow, self-titled CD (Make A Mess) and four-song EP (Captured Tracks)
5)  The xx, “Crystalised” (Rough Trade)
6)  Frankie Rose & The Outs, “Thee Only One” (Slumberland)
7)  Mayfair Set, 7″ EP (Captured Tracks)
8)  Big Star, Keep An Eye On The Sky box set (Rhino)
9)  Yo La Tengo, Popular Songs CD (Matador)
10) Jeff Mangum, “Sign The Dotted Line” from Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox compilation (Merge)
11)  The Fall Colors, self-titled CD (self-released)
12)  Camera Obscura live at Vintage Vinyl, 12/1/09
13)  Brilliant Colors, Introducing (Slumberland)

Favorite non-2009 discoveries:
1)  Sybille Baier, Colour Green (Orange Twin CD reissue, 2006)
2)  Bridget St. John, Ask Me No Questions (Dandelion, 1969)

Record that would have made my top list if I’d heard it:
1)  The Mountain Goats, The Life of The World to Come (4AD)