Caryn Rose

IT’S REALLY, REALLY HAPPENING

Bruce Springsteen – “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’” Sneak Peek from Columbia Records on Vimeo.

I called her Miami, because she (like me) had a thing for Steve Van Zandt, back when he was Miami Steve, back when this was a band that wore hats! She wore hats, too. We all had nicknames for each other, stupid, dumb, nicknames – I quite honestly cannot remember any of mine – because we wanted to be a gang, an exclusive club with nicknames and handshakes and secret rituals and inside jokes.

I met Janet in 1978 or 1979, when I saw a little ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine advertising a fanzine called “Who’s News”. It read something like “Who fanatics? You’re not alone. C’mon and Join Together with the band!” I sent my $3 or whatever it was and then waited. I am sure that you are snickering at how trite and corny it was, but at the time it was a beacon in the wilderness. What arrived in the mail was beyond my wildest dreams: a fanzine. A magazine dedicated solely to one band, MY band.

It’s hard to describe that feeling now, what it was like to find and connect with a group of people who cared about music as much as you did. Now, you tap tap tap on your computer and no matter what band you like or think you’re the biggest fan of, there’s already two fan pages, a Yahoo group and a Flickr feed. Back then, the best I could do was skulk around the hallways of my high school with a record album under my arm and hope that someone, anyone would see it and recognize it and and talk to me about it. That never happened; I wasn’t cool enough, I didn’t smoke pot, I hung out with the wrong group of people (who were listening to Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd or worse).

30 years ago, you had fanzines. And where you had fanzines, you had penpals. “Who’s News” had a classified section and a letters section and they PRINTED PEOPLE’S MAILING ADDRESSES and excerpts of their letters, and that was where the madness all started. I don’t remember if Janet wrote to me or I wrote to her, or if I met her through another friend – that was the thing, once you reached out to one person you were immediately connected to this cross-country – hell, CROSS GLOBE network of Who people (I still want to draw the little arrow coming up from the O, even when I type it) but soon letters were flying across the distance between Cincinnati and Stamford, CT. Then phone calls.

Then a large group visit, with people from all over the country – because it was a small world, us insane crazy Who fans. I started getting random phone calls: “You don’t know me, but I know so-and-so, and I heard that X, Y and Z are coming to visit you in New York? We live in Virginia/Delaware/Buffalo, could we come too?” It was on Halloween in 1981 and we called it “WHO-loween”. The photo at the top is me, Janet and Mary (who was from Michigan, another Who person), all dressed up to go see Siouxie & the Banshees down at the Ritz. We were so excited when they played the new Stones video on the big screen. We danced and acted as cool as we could, me in my thrift store vintage best, Janet in a loaned faux-leather coat that I insisted she take back home with her, Mary rocking the Keef schoolboy cap.

We never got to see the Who together, despite wishes and hopes and plans, believe it or not. There were jobs and classes and distances and money to be dealt with. And then, of course, the band broke up, and that was, as they say, the end of that.

But not the end of the friendship. Janet and I stayed friends for years and years and years. We talked music and life and boys and music and boys again. Tapes were sent. Clippings were xeroxed. Packages were assembled. I managed to be in Cincinnati a few times, and I am to this day amazed that her door was always open and she was always ready for whatever crazy scheme I had cooked up this time. And there were always phone calls, which were crazy expensive back then, but it was an expense we – and people like us – shouldered as the cost of doing business. This was as real a friendship as anyone who lived in my area code.

The friendship survived a bad marriage and a cross-globe (and back again) move. She diligently kept up with me all the way up until Seattle, where she would eventually email me – her email address was Miami something something @ aol.com. Even if we hadn’t talked at all, there were always birthday cards; her birthday was in early August, and it would pop up on the calendar and I would find her address (she bought a house years ago, and never moved) or she would find mine (I moved all the time, but she somehow managed to keep up).

And eventually, communication faded out, but it didn’t mean that I didn’t think about her or didn’t tell stories about her. When the anniversary of Live Aid rolled around, I kept telling the story about what it was like to watch that in an internet-less age, how I took the train up to my parents’ house in Connecticut (because I didn’t have cable), and sat in front of the television from the first note until the last with a bottle of diet Coke in one hand and the telephone in the other. That when the satellite went out during the Who’s set, the signals on the phone got crossed because people were freaking the fuck out and I managed to pick up three calls at once, somehow (we had call waiting, which meant I could do two), while everyone else got crazy busy signals and assumed the phone was broken, which meant that everyone tried calling everyone else which didn’t help the situation. (My father finally physically removed the phone from my hands under protest and hung it up for 30 seconds – which felt like a LIFETIME – but it fixed the problem.) Janet was on the other end of that phone multiple times that day, as we laughed and agonized and analyzed and DISCUSSED. Pete’s hair. Roger’s jeans. John being John.

This morning, I got an email from a name I hadn’t heard from in a very long time. It was from Mary, whose snail mail address I had tracked down last winter but hadn’t done anything about yet. The subject line of the email read About Janet. Please call. I knew, like you know, that there was no way this was going to be good news. To be honest, I hoped it was something critical but did not believe that it would be something final. She wasn’t that much older than me.

Janet died of a massive heart attack on Saturday. She was only 48.

If there is a friend who you think about every day and haven’t told them that, please go find them on Facebook or search them out wherever and let them know.

[And in case you were wondering - YES. We ALL owned that goddamned black and white MAXIMUM RNB shirt that at the time you could buy in any good head shop anywhere in the USA.]

The last time I saw Arcade Fire, in 2007, I said that I was pretty sure that the next time I saw them would be at Madison Square Garden. So it was with relish I purchased tickets to this event.

Night one at the Garden was the see-and-be-seen night; it was a good night to have done GA and found a spot against the back rail with tons of room in front of you. We were there early enough to have had the chance to get a spot on the front rail but chose to hang back. This is the first time I’ve been to a show where the videos projected along with the songs were interesting and not a distraction (or worse, boring). I loved the stage set, with the overpass and the light banks and the billboard, but that the rest of it was so raggle taggle gypsy. There was a tiny step for Win to use front and center but he had to climb over cords (cords!) and monitors and between mic stands. The stage was deep but not wide, and even with the depth, they all bunched themselves together at the front, probably for protection and camaraderie (and more practically to make the merry-go-round of changing instruments for every song go quicker). The physical proximity also connected them energetically, it kept a pace and a flow. (I do wonder, though, if there isn’t some way to compromise even a teeny tiny bit on who plays what when to maintain even better flow between songs and not necessitate the Chinese fire drill every time.)

That said, it was fascinating and delightful to watch the flurry of energy. I do not know how they remember what instrument to play on what song. When the SO complained (lightly) that he thought 90 minutes was a little short for a set, my thought was dear lord I don’t know how they keep track of it. I’ve made the Dr. Zoom reference before, but it came up again (me also not remembering that I had) – “Yeah, I’m in Arcade Fire, I play drums” because EVERYONE (almost) plays drums in that band, whether they are good at it or just utilitarian. I love the punkness of that, of the multiple instruments and yeah we have three string players in our band, so fucking what?

The set was perfectly structured, at least to my taste; I hate artists who tour a record and then don’t play a majority of the record. I felt the transitions between new and older material worked well – again, there was flow and continuity. I thought the encore on night two worked better with “Keep The Car Running” as the last song in the main set instead of the first song in the encore.

I keep taking video of “Wake Up”. I shot some in 2007 with deliberate intent in mind, wanting to capture the moment of a band about to explode; now I shoot it for the same reason I have about a dozen video clips of the bridge of “Born To Run” -and yes, I just did what you thought I did. I’m doing it. It’s up there for sure, familiar as an old jacket but that doesn’t make it less compelling. (I am, however, a sucker for ritual, so I do not claim to be objective.) Night one it just made sense it was going to be where it was – you can’t follow it, really – either you start with it or you end with it – and night two I had the goosebumps on my arm when the bass drum was brought out. My only disappointment night one was that it was not one of those everyone on their feet, let’s raise the roof of this sucka!! MSG moments that I am lucky enough to have in the memory banks. Night one, again, had too many looky-lous, the type of people who start talking the minute they get there and do not shut up for one half a second. And maybe there was a little bit of what Win mentioned the next night, when he intro’d “Neighborhood #3″ by talking about if you were standing in front of someone who asked you to stop dancing because they were trying to watch the show, and that you should say, “Sorry, I respect your personal space, but I’m at a rock concert” (big paraphrase, I don’t have the show yet) and then BOOM. There was abandon in the crowd on night number two, the people who were there wanted to be there, even if it wasn’t near sold out and the nosebleeds were curtained off and the 300s were only full halfway back.

I wasn’t even going both nights until about five songs in on night one, when I realized I had to do it again, had to have something to compare it to, had to make sure it was real. I spent all day Wednesday hitting Ticketmaster, pulling and throwing back seats in 306 and 307 and despaired I would be home watching on YouTube until about 3:30, when the sidestage seats dropped. Night two was a more relaxed performance, a stronger performance, something I had worried about given the usual way things fall out when a show is being recorded for anything. The forays into the crowd were funny, and yes, at least partially planned, but going out into the audience with the world’s longest mic cord just can’t feel contrived by its very nature. At some point I decided it was a certain frustration with the size and the scale and going into the crowd was bringing them into the show, as much as you can have audience participation at a huge arena show. It worked. At the very least, I found it charming.

I like Arcade Fire because they leave blood on the stage, because they care, because they don’t care what you think about what they’re doing up there. I love that there is no irony, that Regine wears a sequined majorettes dress and twirls around with ribbons like some modern day Stevie Nicks. And I love the songs, because they grow and unfold and stay with you and last. They are big songs, and they take chances. The songs like are like setting a big jack-in-the-box onstage and turning the lever and BOOM – it’s in your face and you can’t ignore it. Either it’s loud or it’s curious or it sneaks up on you. In 2007, I was not sure that this was my band, was not sure that I belonged; they are both more trendy and less trendy now, and are big enough for people to sneer at them. They’re not cool any more, which means there’s room for me. I am still not sure they are my band, but I like them well enough to try. They resonate stronger with me than other bands that ‘should’ be in that spot (Wilco is the first one that comes to mind – I AM NOT COMPARING THEM, back down, just that I always feel like I should love Wilco more than I do). I love the records, and I adore the live show. I like what they do, I like protecting the fans and paperless tickets for GA, I like GA down front so the seats can’t be sold. I like the packaging and the artwork; I bought the vinyl simply for a vote of “I am glad someone is still doing these things in this way”. I loved the assemblage of the show, of putting Spoon on the bill. (Who also get credit for bringing something special to the night with the horn section. It was funny to me the second night to see that Britt Daniel had abandoned night one’s all white ensemble to what I was calling the “Mick Jones At Shea Stadium” special, black and red so that he *could be seen*).

But mostly I love that I am never bored, that I have plenty of chances to sing and jump and shout and wave my hands in the air and clap along. I don’t know if people don’t really do those things any more; I kind of started to get that feeling the first night, but night two we were surrounded by plenty of people happy to be there and didn’t care who knew that they were. I am happy that both nights we spilled onto the subway laughing and sweaty and feeling like I was 15 and going to concerts at the Garden for the first time.

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Sorry for previous commenters, I was migrating the site to a new host over the weekend & as a result, lost the comments on this post.

The corner of 7th & Main in Downtown Los Angeles. If you know what it is, you know what it is; if you don’t recognize it, it won’t mean anything even if I explained it to you.

(Of course, if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you saw this last week, so I apologize.)

I have to say that this was one of the coolest rock and roll things I have gone looking for in a long time. It was so much fun figuring out where this was, realizing it was still there, and then going there and putting the puzzle pieces together.

As much as I always wanted to, I never made it to Minneapolis until this year. Probably because I was smart enough to know that it wasn’t like every band I cared about would be standing on the street corner waiting for me as I got off the bus. The closest I came was when I was moving back to NYC from Seattle six years ago; a logical overnight stop was just outside of Minneapolis, and I took a morning detour long enough to stand in front of the Let It Be house for a few minutes and take a few pictures.

It was odd to drive around and look at the sights and walk into what was once Oar Folkjokeopus (back when record stores mattered, back when it was a point of pride to know the names of the cool record stores in every city), to walk across the street and have a beer at the CC Club, to stand in front of the stars on the wall at First Avenue (even though it was the weekend they decided to REPAINT them!), and quietly, find the bench that was dedicated to Bob Stinson’s memory, and sit there for a while.

Some friends had recently visited Johnny Cash and June Carter’s grave, and related how they pulled out their iPhone and sang along to a tinny version of “Jackson”. I seized inspiration from that thought and started to play “Here Comes A Regular” until I deemed it maudlin, and instead found a live version of “Little GTO” from CBGB’s and played that instead. I think Bob would have appreciated the latter.

The weekend was capped later that day, sitting in Target Field as the sun went down, as “Unsatisfied” boomed over the loudspeakers. It was serendipity and it was heartwrenching and wonderful all wrapped into one bright shiny moment.

I hated Malcolm McLaren when I was old enough to have an opinion about him for the same reasons I hated Aerosmith and KISS back then: I saw him as having ruined, and then stolen, the best of my beloved New York Dolls. Through the lenses of my blinding teenage love, the Dolls broke up because he killed them, while their pale, feeble imitators were able to make a living at it. And later, every time I’d find myself in the “who started punk first, the US or the UK” argument, his name would be invoked and I’d point out that he stole it lock, stock and barrel from Richard Hell and every kid hanging out at CBGB before there was anything resembling punk fashion.

You could also hate him for turning the word “punk” into the thing that made your parents lock their doors, robbing the Ramones of “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker” finally giving them their first hit. But would it have been so monumental and enduring a force if it hadn’t been so divisive? We’ll never know.

I hated him because he never gave his partner, Vivienne Westwood, any credit for being his partner in crime (or at least not publicly enough), and Jessica Hopper reminds us of his svengali-esque exploitation of an underage Annabella Lwin.

But he was an influencer and he added something to the culture. He had a profound influence on my world. Begrudging respect is given, although Malcolm would have loved and fed off my hatred.

I am heartily tired of writing obituaries and I haven’t even started.

I owe everything I know about Big Star and Alex Chilton to the dB’s, who namedropped them to enough of an extent I had to check it out. And then it was the Eggleston cover photo that drew me in, teenage photography snob that I fancied myself to be, followed by listening to Radio City nonfuckingstop. I was too much of a music snob to buy the double album reissue, oh no, I had to plunk down $20 I did not have to buy the ‘real’ album, and then of course once I’d heard it I had to go buy the reissue anyway because I had to have everything, immediately, all at once, and I immersed myself completely and totally, the way you could when you were 19 or 20 and could spend an afternoon drowning in music. I even spent a pretentious six months listening to his stuff with Panther Burns to the utter annoyment of my roommate at the time (who could tolerate Big Star, but as she would remind me, “NOT ON FUCKING REPEAT SIXTEEN TIMES A DAY.”)

And then there were the legends, the stories about R.E.M. going to Memphis for the first time and Peter Buck going to look for Alex and being told to go to the big hotel, that he’d be there, and Peter thinking he lived there, only to be told, no, he drives a cab and would be waiting there for a fare. We thought we were on the verge of losing Alex back then, but then we didn’t, and he was out, playing with everyone. And we took it for granted, you know, at least I took it for granted, that he was just there and around and then we had the luxury of GOING TO SEE BIG STAR (or what he decided he was ready to call Big Star). Watching the happiness on Ken Stringfellow’s and Jon Auer’s faces getting to sing those songs. Watching the faces of people who thought they’d never get to hear Alex sing “September Gurls” live and in person.

The songs were dense and carefully layered and rich and rewarding, Alex’ voice a palette of multiple levels of longing. I always thought the timbre in the vocals was the reason for the layers and layers and layers, because it would have cut you like a knife otherwise. It still did, but the notes were there to cushion you.

Westerberg encapsulated the zeitgeist of everyone I knew when he wrote: “Never travel far / without a little Big Star”. Big Star was lingua franca. You looked for those records in someone’s collection the first time you went to their house to see if they were worth knowing. Those were some of the first records I bought with the advent of CD. Those were some of the first albums I loaded onto that gizmo called an iPod back in 2003. Those are some of the songs on the eternal soundtrack that rings in my head, now and forever.

Children by the million indeed.

A few days after John Lennon was shot, I cut off my completely unmanageable perm into a daringly short pixie cut and started wearing all black to school. I also started wearing my Clash t-shirt, my Ramones t-shirt, my Velvet Underground t-shirt, and any of the other shirts surreptitiously purchased at either Trash & Vaudeville or Manic Panic. It was not long after that that I was shoved into a locker for the first time with a comment along the lines of “Grateful Dead rules” and “punk shit sucks”. I remember this, because in the process I dropped a vintage copy of Creem magazine with Iggy on the cover that I had hidden in the back of a notebook to read during study hall. I was more worried about the magazine than I was my bruised ribcage.

When Iggy got onstage tonight, after greeting the ballroom with the double-fisted Detroit salute, he said, “Well, roll over Woodstock – we won.” And 20 minutes later, as the Stooges played “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in the Grand Ballroom in the Waldorf-Astoria, I had to agree. We won. As Billie Joe Armstrong read through an impressive, highly accurate, very meaningful list of 20 or 30 bands who owed their existence to the Stooges, I was already thinking that we’d won. As Josh Homme appeared in the tribute film and said, “As far as I’m concerned they’re the greatest rock and roll band ever,” I raised a fist in triumph from my lowly position on the couch in my living room. It only took us seven years, but they’re in. They couldn’t get them in while Ron Asheton was still alive, but – they’re in. It’s done.

We won.

And a double-fisted Detroit salute to every asshole in my senior year who beat me up for liking different bands than you did. Seriously.