FRANTIX

Local Anesthetic/

Alternative Tentacles

In the summer of 2013 Jello Biafra's label, Alternative Tentacles, asked me to write some notes for their upcoming release of everything they could get their hands on that had been recorded by the Frantix, a seminal Denver punk band from the early Eighties. I seemed a logical choice for this task since, through the Denver Wax Trax Records store, I had released the first two EP's by the band back in 1982 and 1983...

 

Frantix Liner Notes

When Dave Stidman and I bought the original Wax Trax Records store from Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher in late 1978, something was happening in Rock n Roll and we wanted to be part of it: the Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam and Elvis Costello already had their first albums out. We saw safety pins, dog collars, spiked hair, black leather and ripped jeans at the store and at shows at the Malfunction Junction and the Mercury Cafe, both venues less than a block from Wax Trax.

Punk Rock had come to Denver.

And then things really started to happen: the Eighties began: It was Morning In America and the darkness spread.

In 1981, in Washington, D.C., Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr. and Pope John Paul II almost died after being shot entering St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. That summer, the Centers For Disease Control determined that five men in LA had a rare strain of pneumonia associated with weakened immune systems and thus gave a name to the coming plague of AIDS.

Prince Charles and Lady Di were married. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were born. And so were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, slouching their way toward Columbine High School.

Bob Marley died. Bill Haley stopped rocking around the clock and Karen Carpenter starved herself to death. Muddy Waters slipped into his last mojo.

Ronald Reagan, if he didn't invent Hardcore Punk Rock, was its (anti)figurehead and, both symbolically and really, its very reason for existence.

The Frantix weren't in the first wave of Punk bands playing in Denver in the late 70s & early 80s: the Rok-Tots, the Violators, Defex, Dancing Assholes, Jonny 3, the Varve, Gluons, the Front and others were first, and, true to the Punk rock ethos, they fell apart and recombined with astonishing speed.

 

Punk Rock nostalgia seemed to settle in immediately. Johnny Rotten was a sneering Cheshire cat disappearing up his own ass while in the slam pit mohawked Phoenixes in doc martens and butt-flaps rose out of the tattered burn-out flames of the first generation skankers.

The guys in the Frantix started hanging around Wax Trax at this time. They did not look like Punk Rockers. They looked like what they were: working class kids who had grown up in blue collar families that moved to the suburbs looking for the Ozzie & Harriet Nelson Family life – they found part of it, neat houses, trimmed yards, new schools, safe streets. But there was another part that wasn't as nice: rootlessness, bitter class rivalries between those who had just a little less than enough and those who had more than enough, and, at the mall, a zeitgeist of casual violence and mindless nihilism the kids seemed to imbibe with 3.2 beer and 7-11 roller dogs. Shopping mall nomads and cineplex Lost Boys (& Girls) who didn't shed a tear when Yes announced in the Spring of '81 they were breaking up.

Caught up in the howl and fury of Black Flag and the sound of the LA Hardcore scene, the Frantix banged out their own version in drummer Davey Stewart's mom's basement, tapping into the reckless, hurtling speed of singed chords, breakneck drumming, sucker-punch bass and ear-shattering yowls of pain and anger that somehow transitioned from an explosion of unholy noise into something that you knew was music because it felt like it even when it didn't always quite sound like it.

But they were never, especially at their best, never, just Hardcore. You can hear it in their very first recordings from 1980: beneath the amphetamine stutter and sonic tachycardia of the songs are strands of Rock n Roll DNA belonging to Johnny Thunders and Keith Richards. On 'Dancin' To Punk' and 'FM Ear' you find lipstick traces of the Modern Lovers all over Marc's vocals, a flat, guarded quality, like that kid who gets to the party late but just walking in knows he's higher than everyone else but doesn't want anyone to know it just yet.

 

And the classic, 'My Dad's A Fuckin' Alcoholic'. Punk? Yeah, punk as fuck. Except it's not just punk. It's equal parts Black Flag 'Damaged' and 'Generic' Flipper with a touch of the Dolls' 'Personality Crisis': a slow-grind, audible Rorschach Inkblot where the reference grid shifts wildly between harrowing and hilarious, between grim reality and goofy, hopeless absurdity. The mix of Ricky Kulwicki's unstoppable lava-flow guitar, Matt Bischoff's droning, carpet bombing bass, Davey Stewart's insanely counterpoint trainwreck drums and Marc Deaton's teenage zombie vocals creates something greater than its parts. Here are four nice kids and you jam them together in the Supercollider of 80s Punk and you get something with a halflife of mere moments, a particle unknown before, slippery, evasive, burning out from the very moment you begin to see it.

So. The band had a tape. We had a radio show, RockPile, on the old free-form KFML. I liked the tape and aired it on the show. Then we had a record label, Local Anesthetic Records. Our first release, in 1981, was the Gluons, a local band closer to the Boomtown Rats than to the Circle Jerks. One side featured the Gluons with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Second release was Your Funeral, a gloom & doom trio of young women with sad faces, black hair and bad attitudes. Then, in quick succession, the Frantix, White Trash, Young Weasels, Bum Kon. By 1983 the label was pretty much over. The bands had broken up or were about to. Everyone was moving on.

Though I didn't know it then, one of the last times I would see the band was when they opened for the Circle Jerks at Denver's Rainbow Music Hall on October 27th, 1983. Confounding expectations, they opened with a cover of Pink Floyd's 'Interstellar Overdrive', five minutes of Ricky's guitar burning over our heads like like a sonic crownfire before an inebriated Mark (true to his nom de guerre, Marc Fuk) stumbled out on the stage and the band lurched into a juggarnaut of Hardcore assault.

And then they went their ways, other bands, other nights.

******

Ricky Kulwicki, RIP 

 

 

THE SCIENTISTS:

'A Place Called Bad';

Box Set w/ 4 CDs, 67pp booklet, Band Genealogy Chart (Numero Group, 2016). Also available as a Double LP Vinyl set with a drastically reduced track list.

A restless, irritable dissatisfaction, a hurried, sardonic contempt, a seething impatience that '...no, man, you still haven't got it, still not got it right, still not got it they way I meant it, man, not got it at all...' simmers and boils in the background of just about everything Kim Salmon does in the way of music.

Hailing from Perth, Australia, a fine town I'm sure, but, really, the back end of nowhere, Kim Salmon is, improbably, one of those rare individuals who, as Ezra Pound once said of T.S. Eliot, 'made himself modern all on his on.'

And if not modern, well, at least a punk of sorts.

Not unlike being in Denver at the time, Kim Salmon's first exposure to hints of a new trend in pop music came not from hearing the music but reading about it in the magazines of the day. So, in the mid-Seventies, a teenage geek already hopelessly out of touch by being into Star Trek and Lost In Space, Salmon would read an already six weeks old New Musical Express featuring pieces on the Heartbreakers, The Modern Lovers or The Ramones and, well, imagine what the music was like.

And then start a band to sound like what he thought that should sound like.

Yeah, a bit of tough going that.

Still, it wasn't a vacuum. Australia, like many outposts of empire, had (and still has) a thriving kitchen sink avant-garde: kids who, pre-internet, read the papers, went to the movies, sought out the records: and recognized themselves in what they saw and heard: raw, razored, wrecked.

Besides the proto-punk of Aussie renegades like Radio Birdman and The Saints, pre-Punk Australia had a lot to be proud of, a lot to draw on: the four volumes of the vinyl bootleg series, Ugly Things, amply attests to this. Bands like the Easybeats, The Wild Colonials, The In-Sect, Machine Gun Kelly's Rejects and, maybe best of all, The Birds (with, you know, an 'i' instead of a 'y' like that American band) showed the way. At their best, these Sixties Garage bands from Down Under were hard, fast and precision tooled: again, at their best, they sound like The Hollies crossed with The Shadows of Knight.

So the first iterations of The Scientists, circa 1979-1981, sound like a really good garage band from somewhere you've never heard of who got to record a few tracks but went nowhere. Kim Salmon's very first release as a Scientist was 'Frantic Romantic', issued on 7” single in 1979 on D.N.A. And it would sound perfectly in place on a Nuggets collection, nestling comfortably between a Nashville Teens track and something by The Standells. And there are a bunch more like that: hammered, tight, snotty: power pop with attitude. Fine stuff.

Retreating back to Perth from the big city, Sydney, where they had tried to break through with their first generation of songs, The Scientists changed their line-up some (they would do this almost daily it seems for the next few years!) and started listening to their inner Iggy: The Stooges, Suicide, The Cramps, The Modern Lovers, The New York Dolls: thick, dark, ragged... fucked up.

They headed back to Sydney to try it again. 'We didn’t want to continue with the tradition of paisley shirts and the Talk Talk retread riff,” Salmon says. 'We had our own agenda. I think for a lot of people in Sydney it didn’t occur that you could do anything different.'

This version of the band owed a lot to the above mentioned bands but especially to The Cramps, The Gun Club and to one not mentioned yet, Nick Cave's gloriously chaotic, harrowingly self-destructive and ear-bleedingly powerful, The Birthday Party (also from Australia).

Whatever the actual alchemical make-up, in 1981 The Scientists hooked up with Melbourne's fledgling label Au Go Go and started recording: midnight to morning when the rates are cheapest and no one's around to tell you you are doing it wrong. In these hours, fueled on alcohol, speed and sleep deprivation, the band found its way.

The first result was a 7” single, released in 1982 on Au Go Go, 'This Is My Happy Hour' b/w 'Swampland'. Ostensibly the 'B' side, 'Swampland' became the band's first real success, getting radio play and selling some 6,000 copies. Borrowing Johnny Kidd & The Pirates 'Shaking All Over's shimmery, shivery opening riff as well as tearing a page out of Nick Cave's obsessions with the American Gothic South, the song is slippery and seductive: inside a brooding, claustrophobic Blues structure, Salmon morosely intones, 'my mind returns to the everglades / a place of green mangroves and brine / shotguns and snakes, alligator wine...' – probably the first, and only, song, to rhyme 'piranha' with 'nirvana'!

A year later came the seminal, career-defining six-song mini-album, 'Blood Red River', also on Au Go Go. A long, slow grind 'down the blood red river to your heart', this set, with the stand-outs 'Set It On Fire', 'Rev Head' and the title track, 'Blood Red River', is a Goth classic where every color is black, every love doomed, every hope crushed. Yeah, the kids ate it up.

Success in Sydney was followed, perhaps inevitably, by a jump across the pond to London and The Big Time. More recordings, more touring (opening for The Gun Club and Siouxsie & The Banshees), more alcohol, more drugs... more fucking-up. Even as the band perfected their sound with howling workouts like “Hell Beach', 'Atom Bomb Baby', 'Travis' and, their most Birthday Party like track, 'Demolition Derby', the band fell into all the cliches of The Band That Almost Made It But Didn't. Inter-band squabbling and dissatisfaction over creative input, i.e. why did it seem that everything was Kim Salmon, was followed by the soul-killing banality of war with their label, Au Go Go.

It's an old story though always fascinating in its details and you can read up on it in the box set's booklet. What remains, what counts, is the music and here the box set shines: 4 CDs, 80 tracks: pretty much everything the band released as well as a 12 song setlist from a live show in 1983 that shows what I missed by never having the opportunity of seeing them live: churning overdrive guitars, frayed miserabilist vocals, drums and bass meshing the sound into a desperate, darkling therapy session gone postal that burns into your ears and down that blood red river to your heart.

Out now and priced at a staggeringly low $34.98 – yeah, $34.98 for 4 CD's, 67 page booklet and band genealogy poster. Kudos to the Numero Group for this one – it's a keeper.

 

 

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS:

'Skeleton Tree' CD & Vinyl

'Fall if you will, but rise you must'

James Joyce/'Finnegan's Wake'

'I can't go on. I'll go on'

Samuel Beckett/The Unnameable

Nick Cave has always played for high stakes in his songs, his writing, his performances: life and death, love and hate, ecstasy and pain, celebration and desecration, joy and sorrow, sacred and profane. And the list could go on.

Whether he's howling out the surreal post-modern blues of Grinderman or moaning strange updates to the eerie 19^th century song collection put together by Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, or ringing changes on Orpheus in Hell killing Eurydice with a song (and not so softly), Nick always goes for broke, always risks the whole pot, all in, all or nothing.

'Skeleton Tree' (2016), is more of the same – only, in a terrible and harrowing way, it is much, much more of the same.

A lot has already been made of the sad circumstances surrounding the release of 'Skeleton Tree' – Nick had already started recording the songs when, in July, 2015, Nick's son, 15 year old Arthur, fell from a cliff and died. I can't even begin to imagine what this kind of loss must do to a father, to a mother – here is a hole in the heart that can never be filled, never be healed. It must seem that the world has stopped, right at this moment, and will never, ever go forward again. How can it, how can you deal with something this awful, this final: You can't go on. You go on.

Art, creating with music, with words, with performance, is Nick's work and has been for the entirety of his adult life. That art, obviously, is made out the deep resources of his own life and experience and in that sense, for himself – but it, the art, has also been his work, his job, his meal ticket: what he makes his living by doing and putting out for a public to support.

The songs on 'Skeleton Tree' are not, for the most part, about his son's death; it's not clear how much was already written or even recorded before the loss. Much of the album is, as is often the case with Nick's work, about the trials and tribulations of love, about living with oneself during, for want of a better phrase, those 'dark nights of the soul' that come over the lonely and the lost, the broken, the defiant, the wasted and the wanton: well, about you and me in our worst, and maybe even our best, moments.

That's what art is. That's what work is.

I'm reminded of a passage from the French writer Maurice Blanchot's book, The Writing of the Disaster: 'For work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. And the workplace is everywhere; worktime is all the time.'

And the disaster too is everywhere.

I had written above that this new album is more of the same and yet much much more of the same. What I mean is that the words, the melodies, the structures are very much in the vein of the softer, more introspective musings that we have become familiar with on albums like 'The Boatman's Call' (1997), 'No More Shall We Part' (2001) and 'Push Away The Sky' (2013). What's different here is something intangible: a tenderness in the performance, a vulnerability in the voice, an almost unbearable weight that is somehow miraculously borne up by the very struggle with sorrow and overwhelming loss: 'Fall if you will, but rise you must.'

It's only an opinion of course but I believe this is a work that will raise you up, that will whisper to you of not just loss and fear and sadness but of love, regard, care, tenderness... of going on – of going on when you most think you can't go on.

 Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Review from Rocky Mountain News (2006)

 

This is my review of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, The Road -- which won the Pulizer Prize in 2007. The review was published in the now long-gone Rocky Mountain News. 

 

'Road' scholar - Cormac McCarthy proves he's still in the driver's seat with raw apocalyptic tale Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) (Published as Rocky Mountain News (CO)) - September 29, 2006
Author/Byline: Duane Davis, Special to the News
Edition: Final
Section: Spotlight
Page: 27D
 

Cormac McCarthy is 73 years old, and with the novels Suttree, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain) firmly established in the canon of American literature, he might be expected to rest on his laurels as one of our best living novelists.

Instead, hard on the heels of last year's bang-up, noir-ish No Country For Old Men, we have in hand a brand new work, his 10th novel, The Road - and, despite his age, it is clear that McCarthy is not going gently into that good night spoken of by the poets. If No Country hit rimshots off the noir/hardboiled thriller conventions, The Road takes us deep into the post-apocalypse sci-fi territory of Mad Max and The Road Warrior.

 

Using a plot as simple as any devised by Samuel Beckett (who once wrote a whole novel about a man crawling through a mud field), McCarthy sets this book in a ruined landscape of ash and desolation, a nuclear winter in which not a blade of grass, not a tree, not a bird, not a living thing other than man, degraded and reduced to starvation and scavenging, has survived.
 

Through this cold and blighted world, a man and his son walk south on highways littered with the debris of a dead civilization, pushing all they own in a grocery cart as they dodge bandits and cannibals. In a terrible irony, the man is armed - he carries a revolver with two bullets hoarded against the time when, all options gone, he will have to shoot first the boy and then himself.

 

This being McCarthy, we find this violent, grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences: "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe . . . Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

There is much here to suggest that this is McCarthy's valediction to his time and place, a summoning and summing up of last things, a worn rosary of those astonishingly few things we truly need in our lives: the touch of a hand, the soft whisper of words in the night. To be protected and to provide protection, to be safe- in a world that will ever deny us those very things: "The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true." The world grinds us down; and it grinds us ceaselessly.

 

Make no mistake: This is a lurid and horrific world - The Book of Job retold by Wes Craven: "The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latter-day bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth."

 

But if the dead are everywhere, it may be that they are the lucky ones for this is a place "largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes." A world where our great cities are held by "blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell." A world where the road itself is no longer a symbol of freedom and movement: "A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling."

 

This is "the road" as an anonymous and unnumbered circle of hell.

 

In the ash and debris, the litter and burnt clutter of this book, there is clearly more than a hint of a post-9/11 world in which terror is no longer particular and isolate, but general, the very air through which a handful of survivors move. But if that were all - if the book merely followed the bloody tracks of a pair of survivors stumbling across a wasteland - it would simply be a ledger of loss, an account figured in nothing but negative sums. But McCarthy has crafted something more.

 

In the bond between the boy and his father, the reader finds the barest beginnings of hope, the flicker of a possible future rising out of heaped slag and havoc. In the midst of a desolate and ravaged countryside, remaining human becomes the most difficult of tasks and responsibilities. Reduced to the most mean and bare of circumstances, this is a place and time where the cliches of care and love and sacrifice are lifted up and made new and whole again: The man tells the boy, "This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up."

 

This is a Fable of Ending, a glossary of goodbyes written in the very grammar of sorrow and loss. Here's a promise: When you finish this book, if you should happen to wake in the middle of the night, you will long for the touch of a hand in the darkness, the soft whisper of words in the silence - and you will know their worth. Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book.
 

INFOBOX
The Road
* By Alfred A. Knopf, 241 pages, $24.
* Grade:A

Copyright: Donated to the Denver Public Library by the Rocky Mountain News, under the permission of the City and County of Denver, other rights
reserved. Copyright © 2006 Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.

'Dirty Wet & Wobbly...' The Only Ones

THE ONLY ONES

  Getting together in London in the summer of 1976, The Only Ones were a four piece band fronted by Peter Perrett's dark, sardonic lyrics and glitchy, unstable singing.

    The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote a friend that the ocean was dirty, wet and wobbly -- which is a fair description of Perrett's voice: a voice that rides under the lyrics like a buried river of falls, pools and rapids -- an unpredictable display of fluid dynamics in action.

    The band got their first 7", Lovers of Today, out in 1977 on Vengeance Records and though that was well received, they really struck paydirt with Another Girl, Another Planet, released on Columbia in April, 1978.

    Despite this early success and the release of three pretty decent albums, The Only Ones succumbed to the RnR cliches of drugs and excess, breaking up rather acrimoniously in1982.

    Perrett spent quite a bit of the following four decades in the grip of heroin and crack -- how he managed to pull himself out of this and get back to making pretty good music is nothing short of a miracle.

    Perrett tours occasionally (on stage with his two sons!) and has put out two solo albums that are worth searching out: How The West Was Won (Domino/2017) and Humanworld (Domino/2019).

    Perrett may have cleaned up his act... but that voice -- it's still dirty, wet and wobbly.