Of all of the many things I never imagined I would find myself doing in 2017, very close to the top of the list would have been listening to a new Dream Syndicate song featuring vocals by Kendra Smith.
And yet here we are.
People seem to put their first album, "Days of Wine and Roses", on a pedestal. I'm certainly not going to argue with that, but speaking only for myself, the second side of their follow-up album, "Medicine Show", gave me a way out of the three-minutes-good, two-minutes-better mindset of much of what I was listening to back then. I had had the good fortune of being able to pick up 2JJ of an evening, floating in and out of the AM airwaves depending on the weather conditions. A couple of the night-time DJs there had tastes that straddled pre- and post-punk, so in many ways I had the best of both worlds. I was obsessed with Television's "Marquee Moon", without having the good fortune to find out what it was until many years later. So the long tracks at the end of "Medicine Show", like side two of the second Roxy Music album, filled an important vacuum, while also, I can now see, teaching me what I needed to know in order to better appreciate the music, primarily from the States, of the present moment: your Ryley Walkers, Chris Forsyths and so on. Curiously then (and disappointingly), "Medicine Show" seems to be the one Dream Syndicate record that isn't presently available.
Kendra Smith, meanwhile, walked away from the Dream Syndicate after "Days of Wine and Roses", teamed up with Dave Roback under the name Opal to put out the most underrated, and possibly, with the passage of time, the most important, album on the SST label, made a couple of frequently astounding solo records, and then, apparently, went back to the land, leaving music behind. Until now.
2017 has been a thoroughly bizarre year in so many ways, not many of them positive. But then you get something like this. It may be my imagination, but the music here, and in other places on this album, also seems to slot very nicely into the same groove that I'm picking up on the new Slowdive album, with maybe a bit of MBV rolled in. Or perhaps that's just me.
So, the first Holger Czukay record I acquired came as an incentive to take out a subscription to Melbourne radio station / institution 3RRR, in what must have been 1984 or 1985. It was "Der Osten Ist Rot". At that point Can were just a name to me, albeit a name that seemed to be a reference point for pretty much all of the music that I liked. My good friend Russell (still miss you, buddy) had a copy of "Ege Bamyasi", which, from the record cover on, I found totally incomprehensible. Czukay, though, I was aware of independently from Can, mainly thanks to the "Snake Charmer" EP (with Jah Wobble and some guy from U2, and which was also, I now know, my first exposure to Arthur Russell) and, more importantly, his work on David Sylvian's early solo records. "Der Osten Ist Rot" was a record that, as with "Ege Bamyasi", was perplexing, but it was also, in its own way, charming.
At some point I found a second-hand copy of "Movies", Czukay's first solo album, from five years earlier. "Movies" made a lot more sense to me. At least, it had a structure: each side featured one shorter, ahem, "accessible" song followed by a lengthy, well, something less accessible but nevertheless fascinating. It probably remains the best way in.
Many years later, Czukay for me has blended into the fabric of a lot of what I listen to. I know Can, not as any kind of expert or afficionado, but I can at least hear why they are so highly regarded. I know where the use of dictaphones and shortwave radios in music comes from. I know that there was a sharp sense of humour behind everything he did, even what sound like the serious bits. I also know he created an entire galaxy of music, only a few of the beautiful stars in which have as yet been visible to me.
Here's a song you might know.
2. Grant Hart.
At some point in 1986, and for the next couple of years, my musical diet shifted, for reasons I couldn't explain then and can't now, except to say that I had no choice, to a steady intake of: Minutemen. Big Black. Butthole Surfers. Feedtime. Dinosaur Jr. Einsturzende Neubauten. Sonic Youth. And, possibly towering above all of the others, Husker Du. (Then, in 1989, in what I now see was frighteningly close succession, but which seemed forever at the time, Adrienne appeared and my father departed, and what I drew from a lot of that music I no longer needed.)
The thing Husker Du had, and which I had perhaps been missing without knowing it, was an overwhelming sense of melody, of how to (de)construct a nice tune. A tune buried under a ton of noise and aggression, admittedly, but a tune nevertheless. There was noise, but there was almost always beauty within the noise. In another universe, Husker Du could have been all over everything.
The other thing about Husker Du, it turns out (you couldn't learn much from either radio or magazines in those days), was that they were a paradigm example of what can happen when two fiercely creative individuals, each with his own outlook, ideas and aspirations, work collectively towards a common end. (See also: The Go-Betweens.) The union might not be pretty; there might be personal damage; the enterprise is more likely to burn out than to rust. The history of Husker Du is of two such people, who climbed up to spectacular heights but destroyed their relationship in the process. The story is, actually, terribly sad. You can't listen to the records now without dwelling on the pain that went into making them. But the music itself somehow remains as uplifting as it ever was, and if anyone is finally able to orchestrate reissue rights for the albums, it might finally sound as it should always have sounded at the extreme volumes it should always be heard at.
Here, again, is a song you might know.
3. Harry Dean Stanton.
Favourite father-and-son moment: when, during "The Avengers", I was able to lean over to Carl and whisper, "Hey, that's Harry Dean Stanton". (To which his response was, "Who?")
Intentionally or not, Stanton had a habit of appearing in movies which, for me, were as much about the music as the film. (I do not include "The Avengers" in this.) Thus I continue to associate him with music that, really, is nothing to do with him. Maybe. Which means that whenever I listen to Ry Cooder's remarkable soundtrack to "Paris, Texas" (which, I have to say, is one of the great films), or to, say, "TV Party" or "When The Shit Hits The Fan" or "Institutionalized" or one of the many other fine and upstanding songs from "Repo Man", or Dylan's "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid", or Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle's charming "One From The Heart" soundtrack, I am also seeing HDS's gnarled visage.
And so will you, as you close your eyes and listen to this.
This is such a good song. And surprising. Your expectation (mine, anyway) is some kind of front-porch understated strummer, in the nature (v loosely) of, say, a Marissa Nadler or a Joan Shelley. (This idea may have been brought on by the black-and-white cover image.) Instead, here is someone with urgency in her voice, who surrounds herself with electric guitars (and flute!), who sings like an angel, and who even throws in an F-bomb for good measure. Plus, when the song really gets going it reveals itself to be a solid early-eighties-style power-pop banger, perfect for throwing pinwheels around the living room. And then it just stops. Dead. No baggage whatsoever.
