Downsizing

The other day as I was driving through Fremont, California, on my way home from Oakland, I turned on the radio and heard the words “Fremont California” in a story about Tesla, and then when I got home the words “Fremont California” jumped out at me in a Facebook post for a house concert there. So I thought, well, that must mean it was meant to be, and bought a ticket for it.

I wasn’t quite sure who Eric Bachmann was but I did remember his old band the Archers of Loaf: an early 90s indie band on Merge with a Pavement vibe and a college radio presence. To be honest, though, I was more attracted to the idea of a house concert in Fremont. 

A house concert is one at a person’s home, where the money goes directly to the artist. Usually they are in hipster places like city lofts or craftsman mansions: having a house party in Fremont seems almost antithetical to the concept. Fremont is a place where art cannot exist. Back when I was little, my parents used to take us there on Sundays sometimes, in order to visit the model home open houses that so many of the housing developments were putting up. My parents didn’t want to buy a model home, however. My dad was an architect, and I now realize that going to see these abominable homes was the equivalent of when I go see Def Leppard play an Indian Bingo Parlor. He went there to mock them.

A half century later those developments are still there, and if anything, uglier. But when I was a rock critter, I had a mandate to go to the weirdest shows possible. So come Friday night I crossed the Bay on the Dumbarton Bridge to experience the full Fremont effect.

Fremont’s geographical setting isn’t naturally ugly – it’s nestled between the Bay and some golden velvet hills – but once you leave the freeway, you will only see one of two things: high beige stucco walls surrounding hideous subdivisions, or industrial parks and strip malls mostly taken up with storage units. There are so many storage units that its hard not to think about what awful things must be packed inside them. As I drove towards the street that house concert was on (appropriately called “Grimmer”) I passed every possible low-end box store you can name, a bunch of Chipotles, and something called “Unitek College.” I don’t believe that Unitek College is really a college, do you?

In short, Fremont still reminds me of those ten story buildings in Seoul and Beijing that are crammed to the brim with T shirts and handbags and knockoffs of everything. When capitalism comes to an end, all that stuff will be the cause of it, but in the meantime, I drove on and on down Grimmer lane, and presently, I came to the location I sought, which was not a house at all, but a brew pub in a storage unit called Das Brew.

The concert was not in the brewpub, though, it was in the back storage unit where the vats where they brew the brew were. A nice woman named Priscilla, whom I discovered was the owner of the brew pub, ushered me back there and for a few terrifying minutes, I was alone, sitting on a couch surrounded by a few beat up folding chairs. Priscilla served me a beer and handed me a bowl of broken pretzels.

So I sat. For a little while, the only people there were me, Priscilla, her husband Jan, and Eric Bachmann himself, but presently, we were joined by exactly 16 other patrons. It was extremely intimate, and also a little bit spooky. Suffice to say, sitting on a battered old couch surrounded by beer vats in the back of a storage unit in some industrial park in Fremont – that isn’t a place I’d envisioned myself being. Ever. But that was also the beauty of it. And then Eric Bachmann began playing, and the beauty part intensified.

In case you missed it, Bachmann’s work in the Archers was jumpy, tuneful, verbose, poppy. Songs like “Web In Front” and “Revenge” are essentially band driven compositions that beg for drums and bass and remind you of hopping up and down in a sweaty club in a college town: they are the embodiment of a sound that suffused the youths of a very, very few of us. By contrast, his solo work, often recorded under the named Crooked Fingers (and more recently under his own name), is more contemplative, even folky. It features intricate fingerings and long drawn out chords, and sometimes is played on banjo, and the lyrics are more like short stories, rather than the fleet, sonic emotions that get caught and solidified into a chorus and then shot back at you the way a great indie rock song does. Bachmann’s solo work like “Mercy” and “Carolina” are in a wholly different mood than that stuff; a different key of life. At Das Brew, he played both types, on acoustic guitar and on banjo, and they all sounded just great.

Of course they sounded great. He was so close to our faces that we could watch the chord changes, and check out where the capo was, and see exactly what craft goes into that kind of very intense musicality. And I was reminded, as he played, of the healing effect that music has: any music, any notes, any chromatic rendering of sound waves, can actually go into your heart and mend it. It can mend you, and it can mend places as well. For that evening, it mended Fremont, and instead of seeming like a wasteland, I was able to see it as it really is beneath the buildings, as the Costanoan Indians saw it. Green, warm, charming…a place where the light is very lovely in the evening. And I saw more than that. I saw into the future, when all the empty Walmarts and Best Buys that the coming apocalypse will create will become warm little spaces where small bands of likeminded people will gather to listen to music, and artists like Bachmann will be paid a living wage.

Because here’s the thing. There were nineteen people in that room, including myself and the owners, and for ten of them, huge Bachmann fans already, this was the greatest night of their life. Not only were the songs beautifully performed (and the sound in storage lockers turns out to be excellent) but Bachmann took requests, answered questions, exchanged quips, told everyone how he wrote each song, and even, at one point, left the room to get his little dog Lupe, who was cooped up in the van.

A long time ago, I wrote a column in which I mused on why the least expensive concerts are often the best, and this was a case in point. I know a lot of people who have paid four figures to see Bruce Springsteen play Broadway this year, and while I definitely get that, it’s hard to compare it to this concert, which cost $30, but you got to write the set list and pet the artist’s dog. Surely there is no comparison. 

All you had to do was know about it. The two men sitting next to me were from my neck of the woods. They were on a platonic boy date (ie wives left home) and I asked them how they got into Eric Bachmann. One said, he’d heard the song “Rotting Strip” somewhere and had immediately bought all his records. When Bachmann played that song upon his request, I had to look away so as not to witness his emotional collapse. 

As for the other audience members, for them the whole show was a revelation. “But…how did you even find out about him?” asked the people behind me, who were Priscilla and Jan’s next door neighbors. “Why isn’t he better known?” They bought every one of his CDs. Another concert goer, Don, who was in his 60s and had to share the couch with me because his back hurt, told me he listens obsessively to college radio. Remember those days, before the media got detached from time and space by the internet, when you used to wait breathlessly for a special time to turn on the TV or radio? Don still lives in that world. “Listen to KKUP tomorrow from 3 to 6,” he told me. “That’s the very best show out there!”

As for Priscilla and Jan, they told me they first heard of Eric Bachmann when their son played a Crooked Fingers record on a cross country journey they took in their van. I am not sure what the leap between loving that record and booking him for a house concert at their brew pub in a storage locker in Fremont was, but I salute the spirit that made that happen, and the forces at work that are doing it. Watching Eric Bachmann play utterly artisanal music at an artisanal brew pub made me wonder if we’re all on the wrong tack these days, with our data mining and our google analytics and our obsession with followers... Instead of looking for the widest possible audience, from now on I want to look for the smallest one. I want to look into my reader’s eyes, and write for them one by one.

Sorry To Bother You!

One of the most memorable things about last year’s blockbuster film “Get Out” was the sunken place; that is, the image that described how racist interactions can bury a person’s self worth. In “Sorry To Bother You,” a new film by Boots Riley, that image is taken one step farther, as the route to the sunken place is mapped in real time, in a scene that acts like one of those literal-lyric videos. 

It happens when the film’s protagonist, Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield) is attending a party held by Steven Lyft, the evil CEO of a company that supplies slave labor, and Lyft asks him to rap.

Cassius demurs. “I can’t rap,” he says, “but I’m pretty good at listening to it.” Unfortunately, egged on by Lyft, the other party-goers insist, chanting ‘Rap! Rap! Rap!’ until Cassius is forced to try. At first, he fails miserably, but eventually he just starts chanting the phrase “N — N — N — shit!” over a beat, while Lyftand his crew chime in, cheerily shrieking “N—-shit!” along with him.

And in the balcony of the Castro Theater, where I was attending a screening of the film at the San Francisco Film Festival, I thought: “Damn!” Because that scene perfectly captured what I’ve always secretly thought was so many white people’s appreciation of rap: i.e. that they think it gives them permission to give in to their stupid Ids and merrily chant “N —- shit!” over a beat.

The scene is emblematic of the half-funny/half-horrified tone of “Sorry To Bother You,” as it excoriates many of the immoral, unethical, and just plain mean aspects of modern living that are currently plaguing our planet. Another good example is how, throughout the film, there is a reality game show in the background called “Get the Shit Kicked Out of You!” in which contestants are beaten up and humiliated for laughs. It resonates in the same way that the rap scene does, for what are reality TV contests if not platforms for public punishment? “You’re Fired.” “The Tribe Has Spoken.” “Ladies, There Is Only One More Rose Left!” Those shows (and phrases) are ones that symbolically deprive people of food and shelter and employment and even love, yet it’s all done as a competitive sport. “Sorry To Bother You” merely suggests that these televisions shows just cut to the chase and kick people in the balls instead.

In short, “Sorry To Bother You” spoofs a lot of important targets, like telemarketing call centers, viral videos, and reality TV, but it also takes on some less naturally humorous things, like over privileged white men, creepy sales managers, and America’s prison industrial complex. It’s a noble movie and a funny one too, similar in spirit and tone to the music that director/writer Boots Riley’s music produced with his band the Coup.  As critic Mark Kemp put it in his review of the 2012 album of the same name (and the genesis of some of the characters in this movie), Riley has “always been one of the few contemporary rappers who's kept the spirit of Public Enemy and Dead Kennedys alive through years that have watched rappers and rockers alike nearly sap punk and hip-hop of their searing social commentary.”

As Kemp points out, the Coup’s work is both uber-political and uber-danceable:  songs like ‘The Guillotine” and “I Want To Piss On Your Grave” and “Fat Cats Bigga Fish” merge danceable fun beats and with a sharp and even jaundiced, view of the historical, institutional, and global forces that conspire to keep a body down. This is the band, you’ll remember, whose record “The Party” featured a cover image of the Twin Towers being blown up – in May of 2001.

That same prescient spirit animates “Sorry To Bother You” throughout. It does it in the scenes of union-busting, which bring to mind current teacher strikes in Oklahoma and West Virginia, in the telemarketing scenes, which invoke the intrusive reach of technology into our private  lives, and finally, in the premise of a company which will solve all health care, housing and wage problems in one simple, final, solution.

In other words, “Sorry to Bother You” bothered me – but in a good way, in the way we should all be bothered, constantly, by the incredible hypocrisies and violations that surround us on the daily, but which seem to slide on by, connived at and accepted by an increasingly spineless public. Things like the fact that rape, child molestation and people blowing the heads off little children aren’t even blinked at by our government. Things like the double standards surrounding drug laws and jobs and housing and immigration and education. Things like casually bombing Syria to distract from a stupid sex scandal. Things like Taylor Swift releasing a ‘country tinged’ cover of the song “September” by Earth Wind and Fire, as if there is not a single person anywhere who had the courage, good taste, or just plain decency to tell her not to.

Obviously, Swift’s bad music decision isn’t on par with bombing a country, but in a way it’s all of piece, in that people like her, who have a shit ton of power, are never held accountable, and in any case just earn money on whatever bullshit they perpetrate on the masses. Boots Riley’s art has always been in opposition to that mindset, and surely we’ve never needed that kind of moral rectitude more than we do now.

The film also features the enormously likable actors Danny Glover, Terry Crews and Armie Hammer, and given this film’s dark content, I think Hammer in particular should be commended for offering himself up as the human embodiment of toxic white masculinity in a film like this. Buzzfeed recently excoriated the poor guy for being a super-rich and privileged person in real life, which I think is so unfair – no one asks to be born rich, any more than they ask to be born poor. Hammer’s willingness to be the butt of this movie is way more than most rich white guys do, so, respect.

I mention Hammer’s role in this film only because I’m a white person myself, and some white people are turned off by films that critique their participation in a racist culture. But although “Sorry To Bother You” is a film made from an African American perspective, the vision of America that it paints — the field of play, as it were — includes all of us, and that’s why all of us should go see it.  As Ta Nehesi Coates writes in “Between The World and Me,” it’s not really the job of African American community to convert white people – the people he calls ‘Dreamers” — into warriors for the black cause; rather, he writes, “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.” “Sorry To Bother You” makes that clear as day. Apology accepted.

With A Little More Love

A friend of mine who worked at Elle once told me about an article they ran in which they showed a whole bunch of different men photos of the same woman, photoshopped into different hairstyles and outfits, and asked them to which woman they were most attracted. They asked all kinds of people -- business men, students, stevedores, punks -- and every one of them said they were most attracted to the lady when she was wearing a fluffy pale blue angora sweater. 

That story reminds me of the music of Olivia Newton-John, the Australian singer who epitomizes, both visually and vocally, a fluffy pale blue angora sweater. When I was a little girl, in the 1970s, her music was ubiquitous on the radio. She sang soft, soft songs about lurve in a quavery, fluttery voice, and they were all massive, massive hits, because she was the Katy Perry of her era – only whiter and more bland, if you can imagine such a thing.

I always used to think she was supposed to be G rated, but in retrospect, I see how wrong that was. Indeed, even now my discomfort with her music is probably because she was so palpably packaged as the perfect subject of some horrid old man’s wet dream. Emanating out of her every breathy vocal was weakness, vulnerability, and submission. The lyrics to the songs were like “Sex And The City” scripts gone awry, in which the protagonist, i.e. Olivia, offers herself up to men as a genus, promising endless, “hopeless” devotion and deep well of anxiety to boot. For what is a lyric like her aching couplet, “on those days when nobody wants to know you/and your smiles keep falling on stony ground” if not an ode to all the women in the world who have been forever chastised for frowning, who are never allowed to just flaunt their natural resting bitch face, who would like to roll their eyes or slap someone’s hand back, but instead, just smile and laugh?

Or so I used to think.  

Newton-John was always way too pretty and innocent to hate on very hard, but despite the absolute blanket nature of her presence in the world  – “Grease” is literally one of the best-selling albums of all time ever -- her work didn’t really stick around the zeitgeist. In her later years, she became more of a real person, both as a cancer survivor and advocate for various humanitarian causes. But she came back to my attention recently because former Blake Babies bassist Juliana Hatfield has just released a record on which she covers all these hit songs, and it’s fantastic. Hatfield says in her liner notes that she has always found Newton-John’s work inspiring and positive, and that completely virtuous stance shines through in her interpretations of it: there’s nothing cynical or kitschy in her choice of artist. Unlike the usual goofy ‘70s covers many bands choose, there’s absolutely no irony here: instead, Hatfield successfully injects her vision into ours, so that, at the end of the record, rather than dismissing her, we learn to have that same kind of faith in her too. 

In other words, rather than cover Newton-John’s music, Juliana Hatfield reclaims it, singing these songs as they should be sung and performed – exactly as they could have been performed, had the era not dictated that fluffy blue angora sweater mic setting that so offends me even now. On these new versions, the quaver is gone, as are the fluttering, downcast eyelids (or their vocal equivalent.) In Hatfield’s version, the singer looks straight into her object’s eyes, and tells them what they need to know. Thus, in Hatfield’s mouth, the statement “I honestly love you” sounds like a powerful assertion, rather than a doormat’s squeak, and “Have you never been mellow?” sounds like a really pertinent question with an answer that’s going to change your life.

It’s not really surprising that these versions sound more assertive than Olivia Newton-John's, of course. Hatfield’s own work, from the Blake Babies through to her most recent collaboration The I Don’t Cares, aligns a little bit more towards punk antecedents than to mainstream country rock kitsch. Also, she plays guitar and sings on all the songs here, except the ones in which, Prince-like, she plays bass and drums as well, and that is another thing that sets these versions apart from their originals. Divorced from their orchestral settings and blah 70s tempos, performed in a rock trio format by an accomplished musician of the grunge era, the material on this record sounds like a Pazz & Jop finalist circa 1996: like Veruca Salt, or Liz Phair, or the Breeders, or Hatfield’s former band the Blake Babies. The way she’s arranged them is spare and uncompromising, with guitar chords that get leaned into, and singing that sounds unaffected and clean, and for me, that changes them into serious music that I want to listen to over and over. Indeed, it turns out that Newton-John’s songs themselves are exactly what Hatfield claimed for them – i.e. positive and inspirational. 

Of course, there’s maybe a little bit of a gut level nostalgia that goes into to liking this music: I probably like hearing poppy hit songs like “Magic” or “A Little More Love” more than most, because it takes me back to when I was really little and listened to this stuff on the car radio of my brother’s red barracuda – and because I was a Blake Babies fan. But it also made me rethink some things about that era, and how it differs so radically from now. Most of all, it reminds me of how one of my TAs at UC Berkeley once pulled me aside and said, that she’d like me to stop responding in class with remarks that I phrased as questions instead of statements. Her name was Andrea, and she told me that I should get rid of the upwards tilt to my voice every time I raised my hand. 

I don’t always succeed at that, even today, but I try really hard to, and I think Juliana Hatfield does too. On this record, at least, she’s taken the question marks off these lyrics and turned them into audible declarations.

Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John is available for purchase here. 

One dollar of each sale goes to the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre (ONJ Centre) a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing patients with cancer access to leading medical treatment, breakthrough research and the best in wellness and supportive care.