FANZINE

The Two Thousands¹, it’s too complicated to say, right?  Seems people have settled on the term “the aughts.”  Which is fine. It’s been an overall shitty ass decade if you asked me (or weighted heavy at least).  Even before September 11th and the paranoia that subsequently, quickly, ensued over this land, all was not beginning right.  A dubious election had been held, many felt stolen. A second intifada quickly began raging in Israel/Palestine.  Amidst this, a band called The Strokes released an album and then rereleased it with one song cut from the LP – “New York City Cops,” whose chorus repeats those four words a few times and then croons (ha… crooning about cops): “They ain’t too smart.”

Now had NYC not been attacked on 9/11/01, and thusly had so many police officers not lost their lives, the song would have remained on the early LPs and come across as yet another throwback for The Strokes’ sound, which borrowed from late 70’s powerpop, mixed with a Feelies angularity and speed, and a Johnny Thunderish postpunk play on the same era of downtown New York rock; but coming from uptown prep school kids with the smarts, looks, and damnit – you couldn’t help but admit they were cool….aggh….ahem. First time I saw them in San Francisco, I remember the band playing a very short, and not their greatest set (looking back on it), but the crowd went wild, ate it up. And afterwards, at the bar, of course Julian Casablancas has to walk up in his white suit, aloof, and start talking to my girlfriend at the time, giving me this looking awry handshake dismissal. (oooh… wasn’t gonna be upstaged by these kids.  Nope, not gonna meet them for drinks later. WTF…?

Looking back on it, he might have done me – and her – a big favor.)

Writing that might get me in trouble no matter how I type it, but oh well. I just want to come clean and full circle, musically with this decade, and admit that maybe the British NME’s pick for best or most defining band of the decade wasn’t such a bad decision.  I’ve grown to like The Strokes, who grew up unfazed by the term “hipster,” which many have blamed them for proliferating, for instilling by their doings, stirrings, stylists, legerdemain, whatever it was.

I was thinking about them again when blurbing The Love Language article, which Brian Howe nailed, but I wanted to argue with his conception of “lo-fi,” an unplanned (believe me) movement that had been ushered in at the beginning of the last decade, with albums from Pavement and Sebadoh charting the course. Later, towards the tail end of the fin de siecle (middle of the the 90s), a band from Dayton, Ohio started grabbing the spotlight with a new spin on lo-fi. A Vampire on Titus/Propeller double cd came out in 1993 – mailed to me by Dennis Cooper – and was the first thing I heard from this band², and like The Love Language, Guided by Voices was cloaked in even more (well ten fold more) of a backstory.  GBV’d been around for years. YEARS. Robert Pollard was a school teacher from a military town, a once high school athelete who dreamed of arena level stardom. He was also a kind of genius poet, capable of David Lee Roth style leg kicks³ with a Pete Townsend sensibility leading a band of 30 somethings that almost seemed as if they would have missed the boat had not Thurston Moore and Pete Buck “discovered them.”

I had the good fortune of seeing GBV at a legendary kind of coming out concert⁴ in Los Angeles (at Jabberjaw in June 1994) with Buck and Moore and my friends Dennis Cooper, Jesse Bransford and Matt Greene in the audience.  To me it was an equivalent of being at the first Sex Pistols show. Guided by Voices showed another generation that anyone could start a band.  You didn’t have to be cute kids. You could play for 20 years and then explode onto the scene and charm audiences for at least a decade before touring (and/or your liver) starts slowing you down.

I could go on about GBV. Maybe not as much as band member Jim Greer (read this), but when I saw in Stereogum this morning NME’s list of the 50 most influential albums that Is This It was at the top for the last ten years, I was like, hmmm, yeah…  Later I was listening to youtube, finding some great alternate versions of The Love Language‘s infectiously danceable “Lailita.” It reminded me of the first Strokes song that had me hooked, even if I kept it to myself, “Someday.”

And then later today I find this video I’d never seen before. It was, or may as well have been, the passing of the torch to a new generation, the pivitol beginning of the aughts.  The fatherly Pollard and GBV playing against The Strokes on a mock-up of Family Feud, a video to “Someday.”  One of the questions from the host: “If you were the world’s biggest slob, what would you go a year without washing?”

“Hands,” Casablancas says pretty assuredly (the band claps behind him, also confident)… Later, as they win, another Strokes’ hand is offered to GBV in consolation. The shake isn’t reciprocated.⁵

Which means nothing (hey, he said he didn’t wash his hands, right?). To me GBV’s songs are eternal. Which is why it didn’t matter what age they were when they got started, noticed, ended, what have you. The Strokes – well they had youth and beauty on their side, and an attitude that, in retrospect, opposed to a lot of bogus Strokes’ ripoffs over the decade, has been incredibly sincere. They had/have a kind of dangerous allure, like they just might steal your girlfriend, and if that’s not what rock has been about (I say ‘should be about’) since the Beatles, well, then I have no idea what all the screaming was for the past few decades (I can actually hear Paul McCartney when he plays live now, which means…less).

Wonder what the tens will hold for music? Besides – I bet – another “lo-fi” revival.

-Casey McKinney

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Oh, couldn’t embed that video of “Someday”, which the initial image above is taken from, so go here again to listen watch and enjoy. Look for some GBV too while you are it.

_{1. Is ‘the two thousands’ harder to say than Bee Thousand?  We sure liked that phrase in the 1990s.}

_{2. I first had some dates wrong about cds when I originally posted this from memory, then today thought aha, the internet, it has a plethora of date information…I’ll double check. And sure enough this cd that I thought wasn’t released till later (due to other erroneous internet info tricking my mind) had actually come out in 93, the double combo release of Vampire on Titus & Propeller.  I originally wrote the Fast Japanese Spin Cycle EP was the first GBV cd I heard, but that came out in 1994.  Hell maybe I didn’t hear any of it till 1994, and maybe Dennis sent both, but anyways afterwards I did listen to plenty of it, even before Bee Thousand arrived, and soon saw them first at the Jabberjaw show in June ’94 and then soon again catching up midway through a Lollapalooza tour they were on that summer that I covered for Spin. Ages ago.}

And then I didn’t  go right out and start a rock band… but I did quit journalism …for a while.

3. If Pollard ever ran for President, he’d also certainly be the one you’d choose to have a beer with. Then again, The Strokes can do a very nice “Salty Salute” (the GBV drinking anthem) too. et.

^{4. I think it was the first show after (the album that made them legendary) Bee Thousand came out.}
_{5. But then again, shortly after it’s all over, Casablancas runs over, tackles GBV, and a hugging melee ensues.}

* Last Image note, from Jesse Bransford, outside Richard Telles in Los Angeles, from a show titled The Freed Weed (1994) that featured the work of Bransford, Greene, Fances Stark and so on.  Dennis Cooper and I wrote the “dossier” for the show.  Opened within days (maybe the same day, I can’t recall) of that GBV Jabberjaw show.