This Ain't the Summer of Love

Career of Evil

I have hit something of an ethical dilemma here. Science Girl says I’m over-thinking it. She may be right – the odds are certainly in her favor there – but it’s still something I’m thinking though. This seems like as good a time as any to take y’all along on my train of thought. Please keep your hands and arms inside the car at all times.

As I’m sure you already know, the RIAA are evil. Through their single-minded focus on their clients’ bottom line, they are doing their level best to destroy the music industry they exist to support. Their latest unbridled dickery is their (quite likely successful) attempt at crushing streaming radio with unreasonable, if not astronomical, “licensing” fees. Fees which are not levied across the board, by the way – deep-pocketed creeps like Clear Channel pay no such fees. Big surprise there, eh?

As a sometime streaming broadcaster (I had my own stream for awhile & occasionally spin at a community website), this is yet another slap in the face. Get slapped often enough and eventually you tire of turning the other cheek. Most of the contemporary music that I buy is released on independent labels; for the rest, I would happily turn “pirate” at this point, if it weren’t for the fact that I firmly believe that artists should be compensated for their work. (Don’t let the RIAA fool you on this count, by the way; they represent the interests of the labels, NOT the artists signed thereto.)

What does all this have to do with a blog dedicated to music of the seventies? Well, back in the bad old days, if you didn’t record for a major label you most likely didn’t record at all. I would venture to say that something on the order of 90 – 98% of the music I want to cover here was/is released through RIAA-member labels. By encouraging people to go out and hunt down the music of the artists I write about here, am I in turn promoting the idiocy of their record labels? I’ve been working on a piece on Blue Öyster Cult. They originally recorded for Columbia, who’ve since been swallowed up by Sony. BÖC mean a lot to me; they played the first concert I attended, they provided the name for this here blog, and their first four LPs (Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny and Mutation, Secret Treaties, and the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees) are perennial faves of mine. Yet I feel uneasy finishing the piece now, as I don’t want to direct custom toward the dunces bent on killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

While I certainly have no intention of shutting things down, I’m unsure as to how to proceed. I’d be interested to hear what you folks out there think about this.

Do Death Dwarves Dream of Narcotic Sheep? Part Two: Don't Wanna Be No Hero, Just Wanna Be A Zero

“A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.”
- Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves," March 1975

Lester Bangs, through no fault of his own, is one of the people who made me want to write. The other big culprits are Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Brautigan. All three had what we now so quaintly refer to as substance abuse issues. All three are dead now, by their own hands. Thompson and Brautigan both shot themselves, and Bangs floated out of this world and into the next on a cloud of painkillers. Not intentionally, of course. He’d had the flu, he took some Darvon (and maybe some Valium, too – no one seems too sure), and he died. I don’t imagine a lifetime of self-inflicted chemical imbalance did him any favors in that respect. Not quite as speedy as gun to head (Brautigan) or chest (Thompson), although the result was just the same.

Of the three, Bangs is probably closest to my heart at this late date. Not so much what he wrote – some of his pieces are staggeringly off the mark – but the way in which he said it. I try like hell not to ape his stylistic tics, with varying degrees of success. Hey, at least I cop to it. The other big draw for me is his passion for what he wrote about. Yeah, I know, the word “passion” has been misapplied and misused so many times now that it verges on being almost meaningless, but I really do think it is the best description for what he was about. I suppose we could say “enthusiasm” and it wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it does seem a bit pale, really. “Passion” suits him much better.

Lester had this real love/hate relationship with Lou Reed, as documented in the book Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung. (If you don’t have your own copy, drop everything RIGHT NOW and rush out to your local independent bookstore and get one. You cannot hope to lead a fulfilled life without it.) I’ve been flipping through my very dog-eared copy while putting together this piece.

Do Death Dwarves Dream of Narcotic Sheep? Part One: Rock & Roll Animal Reconsidered

“Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock 'n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch.” -- Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or How I Slugged it out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake," March 1975.

One of the things that spurred me to start This Ain’t The Summer Of Love was a sort of throw-away comment in this post from Timedoor: “Hey, people of 1970s Earth: how were you ever able to sit through the ‘Intro’ to Lou Reed’s Rock & Roll Animal to find out if the record was any good or not? I can’t last 30 seconds through that atrocity without turning it off. How in the sam hell did you do so when skipping ahead meant getting up, picking up the stylus, and putting it down again and again until you found where the lameness mercifully stopped?”

Rock & Roll Animal (recorded live at Howard Stein's Academy of Music, New York, on December 21, 1973 – the day before my thirteenth birthday, for you completists out there) was one of the touchstone albums of my teenage years. I played the hell out of it at home; on my show at the high school radio station, I don’t think I ever completed a shift without playing either “Sweet Jane” or “Rock & Roll”. It was just huge for me, a key album that led to exploration of things other than the hits of the day. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that it helped make me the musical idiot I am today.