Alec Empire's Empirical Revolution

One of the most exciting artists in music today, Alec Empire has been recording and producing music for over twenty years, and is still more contemporary and alive than most music being produced today. An Alec Empire record could be electronic, it could be punk rock, or it could even be very ambient in the Brian Eno mode. One thing's for sure, Empire is one of the most unpredictable (read: uncategorizeable) artists in music.

My introduction to Alec Empire's brand of sonic skronk came not from his popular band Atari Teenage Riot, but from a wild compilation series of electronic noise, "Electric Ladyland" (no connection to the Jimi Hendrix album). Tracks like "Caucasian Death Mask" and "Naive Fake Jazz" as well as his brain scraping collaborations with New York band Techno Animal got my attention. All this and more guaranteed groove based musique concrete and ear blasting dubstep workouts.

Seeing the name Alec Empire over and over again provoked further investigation into this character and finding out that he also made some insane rock records, like "The Golden Foretaste of Heaven" which features the great "New Man" which sounds like Gary Numan with deranged Iggy Pop vocals (currently on my jukebox to the right) and "If You Live Or Die". There's still lots of great electronics, more of a rock action beat going on, with Empire crooning nihilistically all over the mess.

"Futurist" is a more punk album, giving substance to his Digital Hardcore manifesto. His brand of Digital Hardcore is way more punk than Ministry or Nine Inch Nails. The hardest tracks are "Gotta Get Out" and "Overdose" with his screaming and synth screeching ripping your skull clear off your neck in 3/4's of a second! A completely different release is "Shivers", more groove/dance oriented with the standout track being "Baby Skulls", a cold hard look at the fascist attitude of the United States Government and its overbearing and invasive foreign policy, dressed up as peace and freedom loving. In a pig's eye.

After all this Empire worship I finally decided to go back and listen to his main project Atari Teenage Riot, and while I still find some of the punkism a little too Hot Topic I still think it's more admirable that the band play at Anti-Nazi rallies and every so often the band bust out a wild jam like "Revolution Action".

If you don't know who Alec Empire is I strongly urge you track his stuff down - he's definitely not hiding in a cave, he's out and about on Tumblr, You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and other digital watering holes for your review. The guy's not too shy about switching styles so there's something for everybody to enjoy from him, and if you don't try I'm going to get in your face about Amon Tobin, Kid Koala and DJ Spooky.

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When I think of the Seventies and all the darkness I went through following the loss of my parents which introduced me to my teenage years, two songs haunt me even to this day: Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper" and Steely Dan's "Do It Again". Both songs appeared as if bookends during different sides of that decade, "Reaper" in 1976 (pre-punk) and Steely Dan in 1972 (pre-glitter). This is no coincidence as both songs almost seem to be waiting for those two powerhouse trends to finally manifest and bring on the fun, but until then...we have these two brilliant but sad songs to fill in the pleasure void.

BOC was ahead of their time with the "Agents of Fortune" album, forerunners not only of punk but of goth music as well. Dark themes of ghostly apparitions (The Revenge of Vera Gemini), S&M (Dominance and Submission), black magic and even Joan Crawford were explored by the band and it was a lot less broad than Black Sabbath's take on darkness.

Steely Dan were just plain weird and conjure up so many memories of teenage years going to West Hollywood and meeting hustlers, mentally disturbed teen runaways and trannies - Ricky Don't Lose That Number, indeed - at Arthur J's and The Other Side aka OS and seeing The Deadly China Doll perform. The haunting sounds of "Do It Again" conjures up a sleaze stew equal parts Jean Genet and William Wellman's "Wild Boys On The Road". Sex was still scary and homosexuality was even scarier, naked men with awful sideburns and hairy bodies! Steely Dan captured that cocaine meets that Locker Room butyl nitrate stench down Santa Monica Boulevard groove with "Do It Again", the tale of a loser who dabbles with the seven deadly sins, Drug Addiction, Alcoholism ("you'll be on your knees tomorrow"), Murder, Gambling ("you must put your cards on the table") and the whole damn thing.

With all the talk about the wheel turning round and round and a sitar solo you know there's a Hindu higher power beckoning from behind the curtain, evidence in their rockabilly jazz classic "Bodhisattva". Just think, The New York Dolls were also waiting in the wings to make life fun again. It's all too much!

I've Got Friends: The Sunset Of Celso Chavez

On May 9, 2012, my friend and colleague Rob Zabrecky reported the sad news that Celso Chavez had passed away at 1:42 pm that afternoon from pneumonia due to complications brought on by lyme disease. The news was surprising because of all the musicians I’ve ever played with he was probably the healthiest and most physically fit.

I first met Celso in early 1989 when Lucas McClelland, my bassist, brought him to our rehearsal. Celso picked up the songs right away and brought a great positive attitude to a band of jaded cynics like us. To be perfectly honest I look back on the 1989 edition of Trash Can School with affection and nostalgia. After searching for so many years for players that shared my quest for musical exploration it was a genuine gift to have Celso, Lucas and Manny share my enjoyment in exploring new sounds and sonic landscapes.

Celso was responsible for our most memorable song, a cover of Patti Smith's “Horses”. At one of our rehearsals out of sheer boredom we started playing a feedback-laden version of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, and instead of crooning the familiar opening line of “Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today”, I went into “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”. Lucas and Manny followed Celso’s and my lead and, well, the rest is history. In fact, when you hear the opening chords to our recording of “Horses” that’s Celso you’re listening to.

One of his favorite stories he liked to tell was the time we recorded that single at Radio Tokyo. When it was time to record “Phantasm III” I asked him, “Well! Are you ready to lay down your solo?”
“I’m playing the solo? No way”. (Getting nervous)
“Didn’t you prepare a solo?”
“No! What am I gonna play?”
“I don’t know but you’re gonna have to come up with something amazing in about five minutes”.
“Dude, I’m totally scared. I’ve never played a guitar solo before!”
“Perfect, you’ll be great. Take all the fear that’s inside you and pour it out of your guitar”.

Celso recorded his guitar solo in one take, a manic, screaming slice of atonal brain shred sounding like a Latino Sonny Sharrock at his most homicidal. For the rest of his life every time Celso saw me he said, “You told me I was a lead guitarist and I wouldn’t believe you but you made me believe!” His gratitude always touched me because it was genuine, like everything he felt.

In the brief time he was in the band (less than a year) he made a substantial impression on our music as he co-wrote “Baby Lust”, another one of our biggest songs. Celso’s knack for writing and arranging great, catchy rock songs was always fine tuned.

Celso shortly left Trash Can School to play with Possum Dixon, writing and recording “Friends”, a hauntingly brilliant song about the irony of friendship with layers of feedback guitar and an eerie reverbed vocal.

“I’ve got friends who sit around
And laugh each time you walk in the room
With your candy clothes and cigarettes
The way you smile and undress
I’ve got friends…”

© 1990, Apartment Music, BMI

We went our separate ways, but in 2002 I left a comment on the message board for his new band, Pill Module. He called me shortly after and we started meeting for lunch periodically. He was working for the LA Unified School District or a similar non-profit educational agency and I worked for the LA County Department of Children & Family Services. Celso was always happy to see me and fun to talk to, telling me about how proud he was to be a father and how much he loved his wife and son.

During the time I saw him I turned him on to Emmitt Rhodes and David Garza since they both played pop music with an edge, both of whom Celso never heard before. When I told him David Garza was going to play Café Largo soon we almost went, but we both lamed out and flaked.

After another lunchtime I remember taking him to the Jewelry District downtown to my favorite jeweler because he was getting a diamond necklace for his wife, Veronica. I totally hooked him up and he never stopped thanking me for it. Another time I took him down to the LA County Department of Human Resources to check out the clerical positions there because he wanted something that paid better and had better job security. He was pretty serious about keeping his life together. Eventually we drifted apart again; I guess friendship has its irony all the time.

When I think of Celso I remember a man who always maintained a positive attitude, an open mind to new ideas, and a free-spirited willingness to gamble with a crazy bandleader who always went for broke. Although the sun has set for my friend Celso, after the sunset is the coming of the stars in the sky, and the brightest star in the Hollywood sky tonight and every night is Celso Chavez.

Photography by Chris Blum

Rip, Rig and Panic

Back in the Pleistocene era of punk rock (1977-1979) the top fanzines of the West Coast were Slash (Los Angeles) and Search & Destroy (San Francisco), which were both written and designed by people that worked in the field of graphic arts, cinema and publishing. This meant that both fanzines not only covered the new music that was emerging at the time, but also covered cutting edge artists, filmmakers and performance artists. Performance artists got an extraordinary amount of coverage in Slash/Search & Destroy, and a lot of these artists were every bit as exciting as any punk band.

In an era of Siouxise Sioux, The Slits, and Cindy Sherman, no other artist embodied femininity gone awry better than Johanna Went. Playing every feminine role with the manic ferocity of a mental patient, Went portrayed nuns bathed in blood carrying crucifixes, violent housekeepers throwing flour around the stage with baby dolls tied around her neck, speaking in tongues, babbling and shrieking into a microphone. A terrific jazz-noise combo would punctuate her whirling dervishes, creating an aural wallpaper as disturbing as her I Am Woman nightmarisms. She even released a great EP of jazz-noise bludgeon called “Hyena” (available on eMusic with bonus tracks, yes!).

 

If there was a British Music Hall act from Hell it would be The Kipper Kids. Two stocky men who favored a cross between British lorry drivers and The Blue Meanies from “Yellow Submarine”, a performance from them would include: a boxing match between them clad only in jock straps – who would you root for, Harry Kipper or Harry Kipper?, a version of The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” on ukulele, or an argument between them in a language only they knew. And of course, a lot of blood, animal entrails, food product and fluids all over each other, which is the sort of “Johnny B. Goode” or “New York, New York” of the performance art world. No performance artist could complete their show without making a mess all over themselves.

But performance art was more than just a spectator sport. When I lived at The Masque (1978) I once woke up to the sounds of metal being banged around, kind of like a garbage can fighting its way out of an alley. When I got up to see what the racket was all about I saw Z’ev auditioning on stage, which meant him hurling a gauntlet of metal cans, pots and scrap metal all tied together and creating a cacophonous metallic soundscape. I thought he was great, but I wanted to jam, so I busted out my saxophone and walked into the hall blowing some wicked atonal tenor saxophone. Z’ev looked shocked and probably a little pissed that I was playing along, but Brendan Mullen and company were entertained by my contributions.

 

Word got around The Canterbury (where I lived after the Masque) that Hermann Nitsch was doing his“Orgien Mysterien Theater” (trans: Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries) at The Otis Institute of Art and if you had a horn you were invited to play. My neighbors Don Bolles of The Germs and Pat Delaney of The Deadbeats were going but I couldn’t make it, and I was bummed. The day after the performance Pat had dried blood all over him, and he said I missed a great show. Naked men and women were tied to crucifixes behind hacked animal carcasses as Nitsch poured blood and cow entrails all over them while the horn players blew a wall of noise. I kicked myself all week for missing that one!

Another phenomenon that was fairly big at the time was tons and tons of loft parties in the warehouse district in Downtown LA where all you had to do was show up with your horn and blow. Sometimes with a band, sometimes just by yourself along to prepared tapes, it was important for the maximum effect of the loft party. Nobody played crummy rap records, it was all about the originality of the environment and even if youdidn’t know the host of the party you were welcome to play. Shit done changed after all these years. People need to loosen up!

At the risk of writing yet another whiny piece about how cool the scene used to be I just want to testify that there was a time when punk rock was more than just a lot of bands and party merchandise. It was a living, breathing wall of sound and vision, and I’ll always fondly remember those days of watching, listening, and even participating in the sonic outrage of the Seventies.

Did Somebody Mention Patti Smith?

Once upon a time, many great new bands would forego playing auditoriums and instead do three night engagements at The Whiskey A Go-Go, The Roxy Theatre or The Starwood. These engagements would of course be over the weekend, and right around the time Patti Smith’s groundbreaking debut album “Horses” was released she booked a weekend engagement at The Roxy Theatre.

When buying tickets for a weekend engagement this was the rule of thumb: Friday, opening night, was always sold out and so packed that standing in the club was sweaty and uncomfortable. The performance was usually wobbly because the band was feeling out the shit PA and acoustics. It was so funky you never felt like you got your money’s worth. I avoided Fridays, which was easy because they sold out the quickest.

Saturdays were better, the band gaining more confidence with their material and understanding how to work the room. I remember a Saturday at The Whiskey A Go-Go featuring Blondie and her openers, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. Both bands were having a lot of fun on stage. I shook Petty’s hand when it mattered(1977).

Sundays were the best. Nobody went out on Sunday night, it was closing night, the bands were fully confident and experimented on stage and interacted with the smaller audience and it was big, big fun. Did I mention that bands always played an early show and a late show? If you went on Sunday night you got to stay and watch the late show for free! I saw Patti Smith on Sunday night.

I had tickets for the late show (12 midnight) and stood in a longish line (Patti was already big because she pulled a bigger line on Sundays than anyone else). As I stood in line waiting for the early birds to leave I saw Peter Falk, Columbo, quietly strolling down Sunset Blvd. with his wife holding hands. They were so dressed down they fit in with everybody on the street, him in uncombed hair, dirty t-shirt and scummy jeans. The wife wore a plain house dress and didn’t give a Hollywood fuck what anybody thought. What a killer couple.

So! Anyway, Patti’s first set finally ended and out filed out the largest conglomeration of tragic lesbians I’ve ever seen: the bulls with their Ziggy Stardust Bowie haircuts in jumpsuits, the stark ‘n skinny folkie Peggy Liptons with no man-forced make-up on, angry debs in leather motorcycle caps, not a smiling dyke in the pack. It was severity on parade. Suzi Quatro was probably jealous as shit.

Patti Smith was not really punk rock but a kind of garage noise band. While Patti would recite her free-form poetry on “Birdland” her guitarist Lenny Kaye would make percussive noises on his guitar. I loved that line she sang in the Velvet Underground cover: “Don’t you know the blackest thing in Harlem is white?”

More Pattisms: “Redondo Beach is a place where women love other women”…”Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”…She kept her between-song patter to a minimum and kept the yackety-yak to performance poetry. Legendary shit. It’s one of those shows you’ll remember even when you’re seventy-five years old.

A year and a half later Patti came back for a spoken word show at The Roxy. By this point she was the toast of the town and this show was a star-studded event, a garage punk version of “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”. While Patti scatted and recited selections from her books “Witt” and “Seventh Heaven” she was getting support from her band and John Cale, Buddy Miles (!), Iggy Pop, Ray Manzarek, and some guys from The Byrds, etc. The real show was outside: an extremely drunken Arthur Lee from Love was fighting with the bouncers outside and pulled a gun on them, by which point Sheriff’s Deputies were called and Lee ran down glamorous Sunset Blvd. cussing and yelling like Uncle Humphrey at the Easter Sunday BBQ church picnic. Love may have set the scene on the Strip way back when but The Roxy wasn’t having it.

At this point Patti’s head was getting bigger than ever and was given to silly dance moves (eventually breaking her neck at one show from it), even sillier statements to the press, posing as a PLO terrorist in photos and the audience shifted from the Beebo Brinker Knitting Circle to the Gabba Gabba ramones clones and Johnny Rotten wannabes. Our cult of misfit toys no longer had our beatnik cheerleader anymore; she was now the public domain of shopping center punks in suburban Southern California. But it’s cool. To be honest it never really had anything to do with Patti Smith, anyway.

The Jesus And Mary Chain Will Drive You Insane!

Just like thousands of music fans I couldn’t play “Psychocandy” by the Jesus and Mary Chain often enough. The way pop melodies would be offset by continuously howling feedback guitars and a bottomless pit of reverb on the vocals was an irresistible exotic music nightmare. They were compared to the Velvet Underground quite a bit but they never seemed clumsy like the Velvets did.

I caught them at The Roxy Theatre shortly after, and it was quite possibly the worst show I’ve ever been to. Following a painfully awful set from Frightwig (who opened with “Delta Dawn”, so much for alternative music), the boys finally got up and dosed us with their psycho candy. And it tasted like dog shit.

The guitar had the tinniest tone with more reverb on it than I’ve ever heard on a guitar, so it sounded thinner than tin. The bass was inaudible, so all we were left listening to was bad ghosty guitar and the stand-up drumming from Bobby Gillespie (who shortly quit the band to sing for Primal Scream).

Lousy sonics aside, the band was so loaded they played “In My Hole” a second time…two songs later. By the time they played it a third time, two songs later, they were getting booed big time by a sold-out crowd. Their set only lasted thirty minutes, shorter than their album. It reminded me of the Woody Allen joke where he said, “Oh! The chicken they serve is so awful…and in such small portions.”

So after getting burned by these junkie dicks I wrote JAMC off as the greatest joke in music. For awhile they were, too, putting out pedestrian junk like “Sidewalking” (Ouch, sorry for the pun) and those boring duets with the girl from Mazzy Star who seemed to have been beaten with the untalented stick.

It all turned around when I was on tour in South Carolina, setting up my gear and the PA was playing intermission music when on comes “Blues From A Gun”, explosive drums kicking the room around and the most lethal guitar (no longer reverb diarrhea), and I thought, “Nothing I play tonight will sound as powerful as this. Shit!” As soon as I heard the whispery cool kat vocals I knew it was the fucking Jesus and Mary Chain, rising from the dead like it’s Easter. You couldn’t write them off, the bastards.

Other manic recordings soon followed, like the amazing “I Hate Rock ‘N Roll”, with the lines, “I love the BBC, I love the way they’re shittin’ on me, I love MTV, I love the way they’re pissin’ on me”. And of course the vocals are all lovely melody with more growling guitar than the last sonic skull fuck they recorded. The coda at the end is the greatest of all time, with the prettiest melody sung, “Rock and roll hates me, I hate me, I hate me, I hate rock ‘n roll hates me”. Genius.

Their final hour was the sequel titled (of course) “I Love Rock ‘N Roll”, with it’s reptilian slide guitars and All-American horn section, sounding so crassly commercial and yet so powerful like the best rock music. Needless to say the song infuriated their purist fans to the point of dementia.

A true sampling of their ability to split music fans straight down the middle can be found on the message board of any YouTube video that shows their videos. Here are a few comments:

“The COOLEST band ever!”

“They’re boring and pathetic now. Psychocandy 1985 was the only good thing they ever did”.

“I loved this band for 23 years and I am not giving up on them. They are hot!”

“Oasis and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are MUCH better than the JAMC”.

“Still wild after all these years!”

To offend your fans 25 years after your first album is a major accomplishment. It’s also a true testimony to their ability to be the most controversial band of all time. For that reason The Jesus and Mary Chain have outpaced their peers like The Psychedelic Furs, Bauhaus and The Birthday Party in terms of sheer outrage. The zombie keeps rockin’ and bullets to the brain cannot stop them.

Einsturzende Neubauten

The hottest punk band from Germany in the early Eighties was called MDK (Mechanik Destruktiv Kommando) and they had a great song called “Werewolf” and they had a blazin’ skronk sax player. I saw them play at a cool gay bar in Echo Park, when such things were done, called the Other Side. I thought they were wicked.

MDK disappeared and the next big thing from Germany was an industrial band that combined no-wave anti melodies with power tools blasting in the background for percussive and extra sonic dissonance. The band looked like lager-gutted construction workers named Horst and were fronted by an emaciated jumbo haired glam-fop junkie creep named Blixa Bargeld. They were called Einsturzende Neubauten. Translated in English it’s “Collapsing New Buildings”. Scheiss!

I heard they were the opening act for a bogus glam act from England called the Specimen at a forthcoming show in Pasadena at an old-time theatre called Perkins Palace. I wanted to see the boys from Berlin but didn’t have any interest of sitting through a clownish drag-pop joke like Specimen. What would you do?

Half a day later I got a call from Ella, my platonic girlfriend. We met at the Dick Grove School of Music in North Hollywood, a jazz music school where we shared classes in Music Theory and Harmony (Harmony is the science of building chords, Theory is basically the study of everything else). We tried to make a go of being lover boy and girl but it didn’t work out. When we kissed she had the coldest lips of any girl I’ve ever kissed, and she even smelled like an aquarium. When she told me her sign was Pisces the Fish I wasn’t surprised.

When she was in Europe she met Neubauten and got to be chummy with them, so on the day of the show she got a frantic phone call from them, asking her in their 1st grade Englisch if she had a chainsaw they could borrow. Ella said her Daddy had a well-stocked tool shed, but needed a hot thug to carry the Makita for her. “Do you want to go to the show with me? We’ll get in for free”, she said.

“Yeah, let’s go!” I said, my inner hot thug emerging from my wiry wood-worker’s frame.

3 hours later: We got out of Ella’s car with her carrying little V8 tomato juice style canisters of petrol while I carried the heavy chainsaw that didn’t have a case nor a blanket around it. As we made our way past the goth crowd standing in line waiting to get in I glanced over and saw the most terrified vampire kids I’ve ever seen. Haven’t they ever seen a 6 foot tall hot thug carrying an enormous chainsaw in the middle of Old Town Pasadena in the dead of night before? Poseurs!

We walked up to the backstage door and saw an even more nervous bouncer in front.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, where do you think you’re going with that thing?” the bouncer barked.
“The band requested a chainsaw for their show”, Ella responded.
“No way. Is this a joke?”
“No, we’re on the list. This thing’s pretty heavy. Could you get somebody in the band to pick this up right now?”
The bouncer called for another guy. “Hey, Smitty!”
Smitty walked over and did a horrified double-take at the ominous tool in my hands. “What the fuck is that?”
“They say the band requested the chainsaw for their show?”
“Uh…are we insured for this?”
“Fuck, I don’t know…get those Germans”, he yelled. A minute went by and there was nervous silence. “Do these guys play music?”
“Yeah”, I quipped, “but they might build a table by the end of the show”.
The bouncer gave a sarcastic, nervous laugh. Three minutes later and 2 perky guys from the band showed up.
“Ella, Ja, you brought der tools!” they laughed. “Gut! You are die freundlich gut!” they grabbed the chainsaw from my aching arms.

Showtime: The band took the stage and while guitars and basses were howling other guys from Neubauten were manning noisy power drills and circular saws with sparks flying all over the stage. For their (what ended up being their) last number, the chainsaw finally got pulled out and growled all through the next noise-fest. The fans were on their feet and tearing their poorly dyed hair out and screaming. Finally a fire broke out on stage and the band’s amps and mikes got turned off and the curtain closed on them. Everybody went crazy. Specimen were fucked; they couldn’t follow this – nobody could! And I was a part of musical history…AGAIN.