Meltzer, second from right

At the absolute height of my collectional zeal, bloated by too many years on the promo-album dole, my LP stash numbered in the THOUSANDS. Three? Four? Five? I now own, well, hundreds—many, most, almost all of which I never play, probably will never play. True—many or most are scratched, warped, caked with beer, wine and fingerprints. But even among those eminently playable, there isn’t that much turntable action. (I also have, oh, at least a thousand CDs—so what’s new? My acquisitiveness appears undiminished.)

Thousands down to hundreds—for all the fine and stupid reasons I or you or anyone periodically tosses stuff. Every time it seems like I’ve hit rock-bottom, nothing left to toss, it turns out there’s another item or five to weed out. In any case, it feels mandatory to regularly check the stack, and rarely if ever is playability, alone, a criterion. (It’s far more neurotic than that.)

Hundreds; how ‘bout we go for fewer hundreds?

Retaining…tossing…merely FUSSING WITH.

Even with a drastically shortened stack, an unending chore.

The question is this: Have I saved the LP version of the Germs’ (GI) (Slash-SR103) as an “investment” or as the one Los Angeles punk-era thingy I might wanna ogle and caress someday: my designated L.A. Punk keepsake? To make the rent, sure, I’d probably sell it for 50 bucks, no it would hafta be at least 100 — 75? — but for now it’s a keeper, even though the CD reissue, Germs (MIA) (Slash/London 422-828 808-2), sounds pretty good, pretty close. Which is something you gotta consider with digitalized analog rock — if you’re thinking replacement — ‘cause all hype to the contrary, CDs do NOT sound better, and rarely anywhere as good. Even recordings not butchered in remix (eat shit, Paul McCartney!) tend to lose more in mere remastering intangibles like “presence” and “warmth,” in addition to simple aural data—(the forest and the trees) than decades of surface destruction can ever take away. The fact is: pre-digital rock ALWAYS sounds superior, even with all the destruction factored in — for moments anyway — enough to supply GLIMPSES, at least, of not only an imaginably better sonic world, but an actual preexistent one…

Anyway, PUNK as once upon a time actual…more than a metaphor…’79: a verrry good year. L.A., a worthless sucktown for just about everything else, has somehow become the locus for probably the vitalest, most interesting assortment of punk groups in the country…a small miracle. Three-four nights a week I went and saw ‘em play and on Saturdays I hosted an all-night FM punk hoot where one week, from the sweaty palm of my guest, Slash mag editor Kickboy Face, I received a copy of the first 12-incher pressed by Slash Records. It was also Darby and company’s first (and as it turned out, last): a perfectly executed knee to the groin of life-is-a-gift precept and practice which today, nearly 20 years later, appears to have been the highwater mark of L.A.—Anglo U.S.—make that WORLD punk recording...this is it.

I haven’t let the cover—shiny black w/ the famous Germs blue circle—go to seed, and even the taint of the woman then managing them, my v. worst ex-gal to that point of my life, worst as gal and just as bad as ex, one of the few exes I’ve never jerked off thinking about, whom in the wake of Justine Carr’s ignobling departure I’d on several occasions lain with, has been insufficient to indelibly sully this sacred object.

If that seems a longgg time—like excessive deadtime—I’ve got albums that haven’t kissed stylus SINCE BEFORE KENNEDY—the first-Kennedy!—got shot. Played or perennially un, when something lingers that long, just eyeballing the damn thing outta be good (if it’s good for anything) for triggering the occasional ancient memory. Because music has been so central to my, um, being, records are the only collective heap of stuff I’ve maintained continuous hands-on control of and since played and un are stacked together—what would be the point of not?—a goodly percentage of even the uns have been, and remain, the material and efficient cause of towering mountains—avalanches—gravel pits—of recollective blah blah blooey.

They would seem in some cases the only dependable, the only conceivable general faces of such biz (certainly not letters, photos, books, toys or nasty license plates). Not much otherwise, short of dreams, happenstance, or the memory bank itself spitting out interest I wasn’t expecting nohow, could serve as so efficient a provoker.

Reminder. Prompt, Intimater. Mnemonicon.

Axis: Bold as Love (Reprise RS 6281). I peck and it says to me, smiling, Ah, shit, man. Nice artwork. I’ll admit it’s nice artwork: Hendrix as a Hindu god with many arms, surrounded by cobras and elephants and little Keystone Kop types with angry demons on their tongues. But not so terrific an album—his second—a big letdown after he first. Didja know I did the first American feature on Jimi Hendrix? For Crawdaddy! (Rolling Stone didn’t exist yet), which I’d started writing for while at Yale, but which a year-plus later still didn’t pay anything. Yes: having by then INVENTED rock criticism as we know it, I sought not only recognition but a mess of potage…a couple of bucks.

Out of academia almost a year, I had no job but was writing lyrics for, and sometimes living with, the Soft White Underbelly, a not-bad psychedelic combo who would eventually surface as the 2nd-rate pseudo-metal (though some would say metal) Blue Oyster Cult. Don the guitarist had a girlfriend named either Cindy or Debby who behind her back everybody called Ah Shit Man (rarely did she go ten words without saying it). A fond mem’ry, the time I went to piss and there she was on the floor, naked, hugging the toilet, trying to vomit—she was on mescaline. She turned her head just enough to recognize me—“Oh, hi,” then “Ah, shit, man, I sure do love Donald.” Three days later, they split. She had a great ass.

It turned out her father was the classical editor for the Sunday N.Y. Times, possibly music editor overall, this guy who’d been there 20 years. She set it up and we met at his office—grey hair, grey tie, immaculate, polite, an upper-middleclass square, a CUBE, who’d probably seen Tosca and Tannhauser 13 times each; I think I was wearing purple bell-bottoms, hair as long as, oh, George Harrison’s. We shook hands, exchanged nothings; yes he knew who Hendrix was. Was anyone scheduled to review Axis? (Back then, before they realized the killing to be made in record ads, newspapers ran the occasional rock review—it wasn’t compulsory.) Nobody was, but he wouldn’t assign it, it would have to be on spec. No kill fee. Whudde I know, I’m 22, a dumbass neophyte, I buy the record, play it a week, never quite get “into” it, but write the fucker anyway, waxing arcane for 300, 400 words which of course they pass on…like shit, man.

Before a set by his quartet at the Village Vanguard, summer of 1970, Ornette Coleman declared: “Music is a way of remembering.” It probably is—but how so?

Back to Justine: her ’77 abortion.

Everything was fallin’ apart, fallin’ apart…dwinking, dwinking: dwunk!...biggest lush I’d ever known and/or loved. She wrecked my car and was bit by bit wrecking my life, yet I woulda done ‘most anything to keep her around. Including: give up my own drinking (“set an example”); have a baby with her (a prospect she often raved about)—two things that ran violently against my grain, ‘specially babying. When she got pregnant (drunk, she could never get her cycle right), a golden opp presented itself, but her choice was to terminate. Femmes fatales are nothing if not capricious.

I dropped her off at the clinic, then hit a record store and browsed the used bins. When I picked her up, she was a bit shaky but said she was starving, so I took her for steaks and, when she couldn’t finish, ate both myself. Everything was cordial enough till we got to my place, where, wary of exposure to microbes so soon after surgery, she refused to sleep in the same bed with me, insisting I was “coming down with something”—I sounded congested from all the meat—so I dragged the couch a discreet distance from the bed and occupied it.

For our sleepytime kicks, I put on the day’s purchase, pianist Jaki Byard’s Freedom Together! (Prestige PR 7463), which I immediately felt pleased about having got—first album by Jaki as leader that measured up to those he did backing Eric Dolphy. I hadn’t cared for a couple of others, but lying on the couch I didn’t mind this one, and we both really dug Jr. Parker’s vocal on “Getting to Know You” (at a moment—no irony—where we knew each other too well), though when I play it today it sounds like the mannered labor of a 50th-poercentile ‘40s big-band singer, a few pegs up from Earl Coleman, yeah, but a few down from Johnny Hartman just as sure—and I don’t think it’s my retro view of the day-o-purchase which alone drives the rating so low.

In any event, there was no drinking that night. And not the faintest threat of sex of any sort—then or ever-as they’d told her to abstain for two, or was it three, weeks (could the romance last that long?).

***

If there is a “Rosebud” to my collection, Ray Charles/Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (ABC-Paramount ABC 410) may be it.

The first time I heard “I Can’t Stop Loving You” — wait a sec, we could look up the date. It was on the radio when I got home from watching Benny “Kid” Paret get killed by Emile Griffith, well, he didn’t die for 10 days, but the fight took place March 24, 1962 — Griffith knocked him out in the 12th and he never got up. I was in high school, it was the first boxing I saw live, and a few weeks later I bought my first LP, the one from which “Can’t Stop” was taken.

Which in its own way transformed family life as much as the Elvis “Hound Dog”/”Don’t Be Cruel” single, which six years earlier had given me the upper hand vis-à-vis my Parents and their Bing Crosby and South Pacific 78s. Rock-roll singles went a long way towards offsetting the musical squalor chez Melz, but having the means to command 20 minutes of turntable time—consecutive—ultimately proved a lot more EMPOWERING than unit bursts of 2 ½ to 3. Thank you, Ray.

Empowerment…musical wisdom…not to mention: one of my most applicable all-time musical conceits: the Unknown Tongue (see pp. 113-127 of The Aesthetics of Rock).

After Modern Sounds I got Genius Hits the Road and a couple more ABC-Paramounts, then moved on to his earlier albs on Atlantic, which along-side goodies familiar from the radio—“Yes Indeed!,” “Swanee River Rock”—featured some archetypal outpours of the blues, real hardcore blues, not just blues-y: the tension-release, catharsis/transcendence, headlong dives into the abyss, the whole torrential gamut of FEELING, intensity as musical form, the technology of grief reduction, of its transformation to joy—umpteen varieties, As a bonus, Atlantic inner sleeves then had these neat little repros of album covers from other acts in the stable—the best artwork of the era—the lure of which led me instantly, inexorably onwards to JAZZ: Ornette, Coltrane, Mingus, Monk with Art Blakey, Lennie Tristano.

Plus those sunglasses with the wide black plastic frame: “Genius shades.” My freshman year of college, I wore them at night—to those in the know, they signified abandon. (Just as Ray’s music still lingeringly defined hip for a certain sub-class of white teenagers only a tad or three behind things.)

The problem is, I haven’t been able to STAND the ABC stuff since I weaned myself off it in favor of the blues, no later than fall-winter of ’62. Play it now and the tempos feel slow as molasses, the string arrangements gloppy as raspberry mouthwash, and the omnipresent whitebread chorus…keep it.

***

From the night in ’70 he was on my radio fandango to somewhere in the ’80s, when our correspondence dwindled to nothingness, Mark Smith of the Fall and I were something like friends. When he played L.A. we hung out, preferably in bars where he didn’t expect to meet members of his band (“It’s a bad idea to socialize with your musicians”). On one occasion, he berated me for going home with a woman he’d introduced me to, a rockwriter who when I kissed and fondled her had no panties and a dangling tampon string, oo wee. (“Sex is not a good motivating factor”). Before my VCR got stolen, I ran him a tape of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and he played me a cassette of songs about trucks by some actual trucker trying hard to sound like Dylan (“It’s not the Dylan part that matters—it’s the truck part”). He decried London as “too French,” unlike Manchester, his home (“The Norman Conquest didn’t make it that far north”). Back there during the Falkland Islands thing, he feigned a rooting interest in the U.K., contending it was “much too easy to side with Argentina.” Mark E. Smith: a man of pith and whimsy.

As a band, as a musical realization of something, the Fall were more intelligent, more after-the-end-of-the-world (a/k/a/”post rock”), AND more sonically compelling than Sonic Youth (if less nerd empowering). The last of their albums he sent me was Grotesque (After the Gramme) (Rough Trade 18), which I must’ve played but don’t remember, I’m sure it’s a good’un. The cover is an old Dick Tracy-type guy gritting teeth like the likeness of Phil Alvin on the cover of the second Blasters LP. Speaking of which, of whom, the last time I saw the Fall play I was standing with Dave Alvin, who after a couple songs said, perplexed, “There’s no hooks.” ”Well,” said I, “that’s the point.”

Do I namedrop too much? Here’s a name y’don’t know: Ed Abramson, 53-35 Hollis Ct. Blvd., Flushing, N.Y. Rubber stamped on the back of Bobby Darin’s That’s All (Atco 33-104), containing both “Mack the Knife” (though different from the ’59 single version) and “Beyond the Sea,” plus sixteen tons of hotcha-style pop filler. I haven’t seen Ed since ’66, but we lived in the same wing of the dorm, and somehow the alb ended up in my stack (I didn’t steal it).

In November ’63, he and I drove to Philly for a double date with high school cheerleaders. The big homecoming game, however, was canceled when the, uh, President got shot, as was the date itself when I didn’t behave aggrievedly enough. On the ride back, all you could hear on the radio was dirges and stuff, except for Canadian stations, fading in and out, on one of which we heard (for the first time) the Beatles, who would soon supply the accompaniment for post-JFK Ameri-teen whoop-de-doo, them and — that’s right — the fabulous TRASHMEN, givers to the world of punk 13 years before the fact: “Surfin’ Bird.” I can’t think of those weeks up till Christmas without feeling an equal rush of Beatles and Trashmen, who together, where I lived and breathed, kind of reinvented rock & roll, dead as a donut (as full-field hell-&-gone you name it) since, well, before Bobby Darin. Hey, believe it: that was the Gestalt, the context, the nexus, the TEXT. The literal HAND AS DEALT.

You take Sally and I’ll take Sue…

It isn’t so much that rock history is or must be revisionist (it generally is, but so what?) but simply, and more to the point, that it is and can’t help but be visionist. Historical hands, insofar as they’re dealt at all, are dealt to persons — to singles and multiples of ‘em. Persons are touchstones of the efficacy of chronology; how history did its thing. What exactly happened? Everything. But sequence, hierarchy, synchronicity — scratch that — the assertion of all such meat ’n’ taters, of a calculus and phenomenology of micro-moment progression, scale, nuance and tangent, is a least two thirds the statement, voiced or unvoiced, of each and every rockcritperson. His/her stab, strut and (in a nutshell) oeuvre.

Or let’s do it this way. Every rockwriter (sportswriter) (geekwriter) has his/her own book of genesis. Has? Exudes. An Old Testament concatenated fable, Gospel according to fill-in-the-blank. Every critic a “witness,” a zealot and crackpot, and everyone’s testament different, heck, It had better be A fragment from MY glorious goddam scripture — the Absolute unfolds itself, thusly (take it or take it):

Re: anything besides punk that has had mainstream play since 1970. Things either get filed with the ’70s (Alex Chilton, Steely Dan, the Replacements, R.E.M., Nirvana, Metallica) or the ’80s (Sonic Youth and its partisans). There’s no room left in the ’60s, they’re completely full (were full by late ’67!; the ’70s and ’80s are still very sparse. Rap files perfectly with the black ’60s — a separate warehouse finally almost full. Madonna goes with the pre-rock ’50s, alongside Eddie Fisher, Springsteen is on the plane with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper (Buddy Holly took the bus) (or rather: never quite fully existed). Did I say the rock ’50s were over before Bobby Darin? They were over before Elvis entered the army (true). Hardcore Metal fits in with 19th Century classical — the intervals, the bombast, the ponderousness—nothing later than Bruckner. The ’90s are an empty room.

***

It would appear there’s a lotta Lavender Hill Mobs around. Perhaps you’ve seen Lavender Hill Mob the film, but I bet you’ve never seen Lavender Hill Mob the band or heard either of their TWO eponymous longplayers released within a year of each other, by the same label yet. And isn’t there also a Lavender Hill Mob turkey breast, and a Lavender Hill Mob deodorant stick?

Wow and hey and fuckaduck, but I was actually at the session that produced the first of the L.H. Mob elpees (United Artists UA-LA719-G), late ’76, the only time I got flown somewhere by a record company, as opposed to already being in the vicinity, just to attend a recording session. Snowy blowy Quebec, an hour from Montreal, wonderf’ly scenic, great food, nice kids in the band, incredibly civil for rock-n-rollers. A company gladhander gave me perdocans. The Parti Quebecois won a big election that week: dancing in the streets. A goodtime all around. As a quid pro quo, I was all set to call this wholesome, some would prob’ly say innocuous, 6-piece combo, I dunno, “genuinely innocent,” “vanguard of the anti-punk backlash” — whew — I can fling it with the best of ‘em — but when Creem deemed them too marginal to bother with (unless, of course, U.A. advertised), I didn’t have to.

These were also days of goodtimes with Justine, you remember her — before her alcoholin’ got the final better o’ things. A song on the album, “No One Compares,” inspired me to compare her, all too favorably, to my previous galpersons. Clearly, I was asking for it. But for a brief twinkling even she would acknowledge that we were, yes, in RAPPORT — reference to a line in Creation of the Humanoids where the sister of Don Megowan, head of the robot-bashing Order of Flesh and Blood, boasts that she herself is in an advanced relational state with a robot, a “clicker” “Pax and I are in rapport.” Justine was gonna print up announcements—“Justine and Richard are in rapport” — but never got around to it.

Fast forward to her abortion, to the day some weeks after it when, she was told a penis would again be fine, dandy, at least physiologically permissible. This could be the night I got lucky. She hadn’t, far as I knew or believed, had a drink in the interim. Ring ring, door unlocked; there she was on the floor, an empty liter bottle at her feet. Couldn’t shake her awake, she scowled and pushed me away. On a coffee table, a water glass with two inches of wine sat on my copy of Lavender Hill Mob, a red ring at its base. She probably hadn’t played it (Abba was on the turntable), only used it as a coaster — how fastidious.

I split and returned with some objects she’d left at my place, dumping them beside her still comatose figure, which this time I made no attempt to disturb ‘cept to pay and sniff the enormous dark spot on her crotch and find it, yup, cold wee-wee), arranging them in a pile: her unread copy of my second book, a sneaker she’d once aimed at my TV, various undergarments a cotton blanket, her vegetable steamer and cosmetics case, a jar of French-import strawberry jam, half a box of Kotex nappies.

To the pile I added my wine-stained album, on the jacket of which I scrawled, J — Thanx for the rapport R.,” then changed my mind, snatched it back, and have toted it with the rest of my lifeless belongings ever since.

Editor: This is an abridged version of Meltzer's 1999 cover story in the Reader titled "Vinyl Reckoning."