"Terminal Preppie" / Dead Kennedys / Plastic Surgery Disasters

I really began to get into punk music between 8th and 9th grade. My interest in it came about rather naturally from my immersion into the skater / townie culture that I started dipping my toe in around the same time.

I really have to thank an old buddy of mine, Worth Parker, for getting me started. He was the first dude to get a skateboard (the Vision Gator), buy Thrasher magazine (only posers read Transworld), and buy punk records. He let me tape his copy of The Dead Kennedys' “Plastic Surgery Disasters” which I listened to incessantly, which led me to buying Agent Orange, The Sex Pistols, Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies (which, awesomely, I begged my Mom to buy for me at the old Ruthless Records downtown on her way home from work. What in the world was she thinking?), and Black Flag tapes.

As I listened to this stuff, I became really obsessed with it in only the way a fourteen year old can really be. To trot out an old cliché, the lyrics really spoke to me at the time and caused me to completely reexamine the social constructs of my school, community and family. I bought a Black Flag T-shirt and began wearing that and an old olive green Army jacket of my Dad’s and started looking at my old friends who were still into Van Halen and Zeppelin with a critical eye. I got lots of shit for my new attitude, wardrobe, and interest in music, but of course that only fed it further.

Bought at Ruthless Records, of course

Eventually I began to reconcile that punk ethos with the reality of being a responsible citizen who, after all, lived in a secure, middle class , two-parent home and had no conceivable right to complain about things (“I am NOT walking the dog, Mom! I’ve had it with your bourgeoisie paradigm of suburban life!”). Plus, in the end, I was too nice and raised with too much politeness to be a good punk. I will admit, though, that I’ve internalized much more of the views of Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra than I may have realized. Even though what I went through was Teenage Rebellion 101, there are still some aspects that I can’t completely let go, and that in all honesty surprises me. I’ve always appreciated music which, at it’s heart, believed in more than chicks and beer, (and damn did they believe), and in the end, I think that’s what still sticks with me the most.

"Punk Ain't no religious cult / Punk Means thinking for yourself / You ain't hardcore 'cause you spike your hair when a jock still lives inside your head"


“Terminal Preppie” is, like most all other DK songs, delivered as a sarcastic, sneering screed,a minute and a half buzzsaw. Jello Biafra does what he does best here – assuming the narrative voice of the object of his scorn and ridicule.

My ambition in life
Is too look good on paper
What I want is a spot
In some big corporation

This sounded great to me at the time, a condemnation of people focused on the dollar and getting ahead, with no thought to what’s “real” in life (again, this from a kid who had his folded laundry lovingly placed on his bed once a week.. What the hell did I know? Who was I to criticize?)

Beliushi’s my hero I lampoon and I ape him
My news of the world comes from Sports Illustrated

Here’s where I ran into a little disconnect. My buddies and I did worship Animal House's Blutarsky, and I couldn’t hide the fact that I loved sports. And now, er, subscribe to SI. Sorry, Jello

I’m proud of my trophies like my empty beer cans
Stacked in rows up the wall to impress all my friends

I came back to this lyric a bunch in college and grad school at a million apartment parties I attended. At least half (more if it was a guy’s) had a line of beer cans or liquor bottles lined atop of their kitchen cabinets. It always gave me a snort.

Now I’m not here to learn
I just want to get drunk
And major in business
And be taught how to fuck

UGA in the early and mid 80’s. That about covers it, no?

I want a wife with tits
Who just smiles all the time
In my centerfold world
Filled with Springsteen and wine

Uh-oh. Starting to his close to home here (well, at least the Springsteen shot)

Someday I’ll have power!
Someday I’ll have boats!
A tract in some suburb
With Thanksgivings to host

Yeah, the last two lines busted me. What can you do? We all sell out eventually, don’t we? We just negotiate our own internal price and eventually justify it to ourselves.

The last thing I’ll point out here is one of the most underrated musicians of all time – the DK’s bassist, Klaus Floride. You can tell from the first riff in this song what’s up, and he's is just incredible on this whole album. His bass launches many of the DK’s songs, and he always has some major riffs and innovative lines. Great stuff.

In Memoriam : Michael Jackson

Man, what a strange, strange, summer.

I'm not going into a long narrative this week, as you've probably seen and heard enough over the last few days by much more skillful writers than myself.

Let me just run two things by you:

1) A performance by a young Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack on a song from "Free to Be You and Me" from the 70's. I'd never seen this before, but caught it in the mix of tributes on Sunday. If you watch the video and listen to the song, it's really, really poignant and sad, and would have been even before his death. I'm not gonna lie; I teared up just a bit.


2) I made a Michael Jackson cake for the Barnett Shoals Cake Fair in Fifth Grade. Sweet.

The Georgia Theatre: In Memoriam

For those of you who have been away in the remotes of Argentina the past week, the landmark Georgia Theatre burned down last Friday. The cause of the fire is still unknown, and the place was consumed quickly. As I read on a message board, if you take a wooden building that old with no sprinklers, soak it in alcohol for thirty years and light a flame, the results are inevitable.

Even though the Theatre with its frequent jam and cover bands didn't always cater to my tastes, I still mourn its passing. In tribute, I'd like to list a few of my favorite memories about my experiences there:

-The first show I ever legally saw in Athens was Dreams So Real at there, about a week after I turned 18 in 1990. This was when they had that bar smack in the middle of the place when you walked in. It was one of those moments that actually felt as important at the time as it really was.

- Seeing Social Distortion there around 1992 with all the scary skinheads and inadvertently getting my buddy Trey clocked by one (read the gory details here)

- The infamous GWAR show that was shut down for obscenity by the ACC police which ended up with the city defending itself in a (losing) lawsuit

- Dancing onstage with NYC ska band The Toasters and running into my future wife onstage while skanking.

Those are off the top of my head, and I'm sure many more will arise the more I reflect upon it. The last show I saw there was in 2008 when I saw The New Pornographers and got to see and hear Neko Case live, so that's a fine way to bow out. I also had tickets to see Jenny Lewis there July 1st, but that has since been rescheduled for the 40 Watt.

I'm also thankful my son got to experincve the Theatre a mere week before it burned when he saw a Beatles cover band play a special all-ages show (and, no, he didn't have a 32 oz beer). It's great that Quinn has now been to both the 40Watt (seeing Uncle Monsterface last summer) and was at the Theatre. He's an Athenian through-and-through.

So, in the comments, share with us some of your memorable shows and experiences with the Theatre. Hopefully, the preliminary talk of rebuilding will be seen through and we will have more great shows to remember in the future.

"Young Americans" / David Bowie / Best of Bowie 1974-1979

Bowie is another one of those artists I enjoy because he keeps things fresh. He may be second only to Madonna (or third to Neil Young) in the many iterations of his musical and performing personality over the years.




My first experiences with Bowie remind me of how I also encountered Bruce Springsteen, through 80’s pop radio. Like many Xer’s, I initially heard of him through the singles “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl” (which, if you remember, got lots of press for being scandalous) I recall the media making a big deal about David Bowie suddenly becoming an MTV star, but couldn’t figure out what the big deal was supposed to be about him.

On a totally unrelated note – I distinctly remember being at a neighbor’s house watching the “Let’s Dance” video, and having one of the kids say, “You know he gives blow jobs on stage”. I had NO idea what blow job was, but not wanting to appear lame in front of a cool older kid, said, “Yeah, I know”. Then, of course, he says, “Do you even know what a blow job is?” “Sure”, I say, seeing the hole I am digging for myself yet not avoiding it. “Well, what is it?” And I think that’s the point at which I excused myself and ran home.

Later, I would get the gist of it after Bowies released possibly the most homoerotic video in history, a cover of “Dancing in the Streets” with Mick Jagger.
Ummmmm....yeah


As I grew up and started delving into classic rock via 96 Rock, I started seeing what more there was out there. I heard “Suffragette City” once and remember thinking, “Oh, that’s David Bowie too?” Then all the 70’s hits seemed to start pouring in and giving me a more complete picture – “Fame”, “Golden Years”, “Heroes”, “Space Oddity”, etc. You know all the ones.

This particular song I got off a two-CD compilation “The Best of Bowie”, which I bought because it had some deep cuts there which I found to be just as great as the radio hits (“TVC 15”, “DJ”, “Boys Keep Swinging”). I’ll admit that my Bowie knowledge is not where it should be, and I need to buy some albums to remedy that. I borrowed “Aladdin Sane” from a co-worker once based on liking “Panic in Detroit” which, for some odd reason, a local radio station decided to put in heavy rotation.

Today, much like I mentioned with Cash in the last post, you can hardly find an artist or big-time music fan that doesn’t claim an appreciation for David Bowie. He even got down with the kids in the 90’s with a Trent Reznor collaboration (and the less said about Tin Machine, the better).

In “Young Americans”, Bowie goes Soul. With the opening drumbeats, piano flourish, and especially the saxophone styling (a key element of this song), you can immediately tell you’re a ways away from the glam of “Ziggy Stardust”. The soul touches continue throughout the song with Bowie’s phrasing and delivery, the syncopated beat, and most of all the background singers, who, along with the sax, hit the song’s hook with their “All night / all right” refrain (and check their quick shoutout to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” at 2:14 – “I heard the news today, oh boy”)

I had to take a look at the lyrics for this song. It’s one of those you’ve heard over and over, but don’t have a clue what the words are or what it’s about (at least for me). For instance, I thought he was always singing “She was a young American”, but it’s actually “She wants a young American”. The “she” of the song is a character he follows though the duration of the song, starting with the first verse:

They pulled in just behind the bridge
He lays her down, he frowns
"Gee my life's a funny thing
Am I still too young?"
He kissed her then and there
She took his ring, took his babies
It took him minutes, took her nowhere
Heaven knows, she'd have taken anything

That’s much more serious subject matter than I suspected this to be about. In fact, this seems as if it’s a song that’s commonly misunderstood as a celebration of American youth culture, where actually it’s an exploration of the loss of the American dream (see “Born in the USA” for another famous example). Check out the middle verse:

Have you have been an un-American?
Just you and your idol singing falsetto 'bout
Leather, leather everywhere, and
Not a myth left from the ghetto
Well, well, well, would you carry a razor
In case, just in case of depression?
Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors
Blushing at all the afro-Sheeners
Ain't that close to love?
Well, ain't that poster love?
Well, it ain't that Barbie doll
Her heart's been broken just like you have

That’s pretty bleak isn’t it? Let’s keep in mind too, that this was written in 1974, right after Watergate (“Do you remember your President Nixon?”) when America was thought to be shooting straight down the tubes. Taking the song from that “loss of innocence” theme, the repetition of “She wants a young American” looks to be a yearning for a more untainted, optimistic outlook for her, and by extension, her generation and entire country. The upbeat nature of the music only serves to make it palatable to the listener and subversively slip that idea within it as you’re grooving along.

"On The Evening Train" / Johnny Cash / American V: A Hundred Highways

As I'm sure anyone who reads this blog is aware, the Rick Rubin produced American series completely revived Johnny Cash's career and changed him from a marginal (but influential) washed-up country artist into a full-fledged American icon. It's hard to recall now, but the prevailing thought at the time when news was coming about about this collaboration was, bluntly, "What the fuck?" That first American album, though, traced a direct line to the biopic "Walk the Line", if you think about it. (And here, I must implore you, if you haven't seen the movie "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" and it's Cash / Carter parody scene, please do so posthaste).

But now, do you know anyone that doesn't like Johnny Cash? I think any musician from any genre of music will tell you that, at the very least, they appreciate the guy's mettle, individualism and spirit.

That's right, Mofos...


Rubin's formula for Cash was to basically strip his sound down completely. Most songs in the American series are only Cash's voice, sounding haunted and carrying the weight of years of hard living, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and perhaps a piano or other instrument for shades of color. He also had Cash primarily cover songs by other artists with the exception of maybe one original or re-recording each album. The most memorable of these, of course, is his take on Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt", which, with the incredible accompanying video, Cash made his own forever.


It's a formula that was obviously successful, duplicated by Jack White with Loretta Lynn, and a little less successfully again (commercially, not critically) by Rubin with Neil Diamond.

"On The Evening Train" is a cover of a Hank Williams song, but it's impossible not to read Cash's life into it. Many of the songs on American V deal, literally or symbolically, with death - Springsteen's "Further Up the Road", "God's Gonna Cut You Down", "A Legend in My Time" by Don Gibson, "I'm Free From the Chain Gang Now"(a re-recoding of his own song). Of course, with Cash nearing the end of his life during his American recordings, it was only natural for him to explore that theme (though it could be argued that was always one of his major subjects).

"On The Evening Train" has a narrator who is simply watching the casket of his wife being loaded onto a train with his infant son. Even though the song tells us in the first verse "...they're taking Mama on the evening train", it's not until halfway through the song in the second verse that he mentions the "Long white casket in the baggage coach" (harsh!), which is jarring if you don't know it's coming (I didn't).

The lines where you can read again into Cash's life occur in the final verse -

I pray that God will give me courage
To carry on til we meet again
It's hard to know she's gone forever

It' hard not to believe he's singing about June Carter Cash, his longtime wife and love, who passed away before he did. It makes an already sad song even more poignant.

Interestingly, out of the four verses, the first is from a third person point-of-view, while the other three are first person, from the man whose wife has died. Intentional or not? What's the narrative purpose there? Another question - why is the dead wife's casket being loaded on a train? Where is she being buried? Why isn't there a funeral at the place where the family lives?

Anyway, here's the song (nothing happens in this homemade video. It's a train and....a train. But at least you get to hear it.)

"I Just Want to Love U (Give it to me)" / Jay-Z / The Dynasty

It's hard to believe this song is almost ten years old, isn't it? I'm not a huge Hova (that's what the kids call him...or used to call him; I can't keep up any more) fan, but I do have a couple of CDs, and that's not including the "Grey Album", the (unauthorized) project by Athens' own Danger Mouse mixing his "Black Album" with the Beatles' "White Album" , which I am probably obligated to own as a music blogger.

Two great tastes that taste great together

If you remember anything about rap back in the late 90's, it was all about gloss, bling, and ridiculous excess. It was the heyday of Puff Daddy and he churned out hit after hit based on old 80's pop tunes. The record industry was as strong as it has ever been (and will ever be, in my opinion), there was lots of money to be made, and by God, the hip hop artists of the era were celebrating it.

"I Just Want to Love You" is a pretty good example of the type of music and lyrics we were getting at the time. The Neptunes were the hot producers at the moment (and they were pretty good back then), and Pharrel Williams has the best part of the song - the falsetto chorus that calls back old-school funk songs and is also a lyrical shoutout to someone who hadn't been heard form in years at the time - Rick James


Jay Z, in a typical act of rap artist modesty, calls himself "The greatest rapper alive". I'm not willing to go that far (give me Rakim, Q-Tip, or Chuck D), but the dude's good. I think with him, it's more a "sum of the parts" situation. I can't put my finger on any one thing that makes him stand out, but he does lots of little things really well. I think the best thing about his rapping is his phrasing. He doesn't strictly go line to line, verse to verse in the same rhythm. He mixes his delivery up really well which keeps any of his songs from getting monotonous and keeps you listening and interested. For an example of what I'm getting at here, check the "It's - about -to- go-down" delivery about a minute into the song. All the hallmarks of "bling" music are there - Cristal champagne, Prada, Gucci, Remi Martin, "cheddar", weed, ecstasy, Belvedere, and the like. Hell, even Atlanta's infamous Cheetah is name checked.

Lyrically in this song, and I know you may not believe this, but Jay Z seems to have many, many women after him. He warns these ladies that they must be sexualy proficient to spend time with him, but be warned! Although he has lots and lots (and lots) of money, he's NOT willing to spend it on you.

I kid with this, obviously it's not a weighty message of social commentary like "Fight the Power", but I've always felt it's unfair to hold rap songs to standards like that. Shit, 90% of rock music is about chasing tail and getting fucked up, but no one is calling out Van Halen for not having an uplifting, responsible message. Plus, you have to have chuckle at a couplet like this :

Yeah, save the narrative you savin it for marriage
Let's keep it real ma you savin it for cabbage

Embedding is forbidden! So, click here if you'd like to watch the video. It's a party!

"In The Light" / Led Zeppelin / Physical Graffiti

For previous Zeppelin musings, check here. As a general rule, I don't repeat artists that appear unless they are one of my biggies. Zeppelin is, for sure.

This song is one of my favorites on Physical Graffiti , which is a double album that takes the genre-expanding possibilities hinted at in Led Zeppelin III (my personal favorite, by the way) and delivers, bigtime. From classic Zeppelin cock-rock to lengthy blues romps, roots bluegrass, and beautiful instrumental ballads, Physical Graffiti has it all.

"In The Light" was the first song on side two of the Physical Graffiti tape (date myself? Nah), and I have very specific memories of listening to this "tape" over and over at a friend's house in high school, his bedroom filled with green light from a Kroger party lightbulb, probably finishing up some marathon role-playing game. So, believe it or not, those are good, comforting memories.

This song has a very long intro, which features Page producing an eerie sound by using a violin bow on an acoustic guitar to act as the bass. It also features an instrument relatively new to the Zeppelin sound up until then - the keybord. Also new was the total turn from the blues-based formula for which Zeppelin had become famous. You can hear the Middle Eastern influence creeping into the song right from the start, a style with which Jimmy Page would become more and more fascinated with until he finally unleashed it in the astonishing No Quarter album years after Zeppelin's demise.

Nigel Tufnel - an obvious influene on Page's style
(Interesting, also, that this song follows "Kashmir" on the album, considered by some the quintessential Led Zeppelin song and itself a tune with stong lyrical and musical roots in the Middle East.)

Plant and Page come in with the first lyrics at 1:44, hauntingly harmonized and heavily reverbed. Then at 2:45, another keyboard kicks in, a monstrous descending riff backed by John Bonham's first appearance in the song. They settle into a nice groove here for a while, then suddenly at 4:11, literally halfway through, there is a thirdkeyboard break followed by Page's wonderful ascending riff at 4:25 (contrasting nicely with the earlier descending scale). Stylistically, it's a whole new song here, and, reflective of the title and lyrics, brings the listener "In the light", highlighted by a change from a minor to a major key. Do you see how they manipulated you there? Don't you love it, though? It's brilliant stuff and the kind of mature songwriting these guys never get credit for.

Then, five minutes in, we suddenly go back to Kashmir, as it were - the strange, droning sound that began the song. They lock into that bluesy groove again, then hit the descending riff immediately followed by the ascending guitar. That riff and Page tracking some solo work over it takes us home, this time leaving us "In The Light" (and if we don't get it, I've always liked the way Plant sings "Light, light, light...In the Light" at the end of the song.)

Think about it: in the five years since their debut, which was essentially heavy covers of blues standards, Zeppelin had grown as artists to produce a song and album like this. It's a phenomenal growth curve for a band in such a short amount of time, and explains why every generation for decades now has come to revere Zeppelin and claim them as their own.

Note: I couldn't find a YouTube video of the song. Apparently Led Zeppelin is very protective of their image as such. I'm sure anyone bothering to read this already has a coy of "In the Light" you could cue up, but if you don't, you can download the song below. I've also included a pretty cool alternate take of the song I did find. Obviously, my notes above are about the studio recording.