Popless Week 18: The Mind-Changers

By Noel Murray
May 5th, 2008

The Gun Club

Years Of Operation 1980-96

Fits Between The Cramps and The White Stripes

Personal Correspondence I had a friend in 10th grade who loaned me punk albums when I was first getting interested in the genre's history and canon, but my friend was no punk scholar himself, so his recommendations were often fairly random. He just picked things up here and there, and then he'd pass them on to me, usually without comment, leaving me completely at sea as to where these records came from and whether anyone else in the world cared about them. One of those albums was The Gun Club's debut, Fire Of Love, which I recorded on the flipside of my tape of The Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet—a good match, as it turned out. In the years to come, I'd stumble across The Gun Club in strange places. I found a cassette copy of Miami in my brother's college roommate's collection, a live bootleg in a used record store, a budget-bin copy of The Las Vegas Story, a cheap import of Mother Juno at a thrift shop, a copy of bandleader Jeffrey Lee Pierce's solo album in the collection of my first girlfriend, and so on. But none of these pieces of music seemed to connect up, and I couldn't find much written about Pierce or The Gun Club that wasn't skimpy and often somewhat derisive. (I remember a quote from former Gun Club associate and spook-rock stalwart Kid Congo Powers, complaining that Pierce "was singing about hellhounds on his trail while he was living with his mom.") I found out later that The Gun Club's meager fortunes were largely maintained by the Euro-circuit, where people have generally been more forgiving of adulteration, and where Pierce's blend of faux-blues, gutter-punk, gauzy goth and heavy echo resonated more than at home. In the alt-country era, The Gun Club had a minor revival, and I've heard some of Pierce's songs covered here and there. But because he was yet another lousy addict who died young, Pierce never really got to manage his legend. Was he a poseur or a prophet? A colossal fuck-up, or merely human? The Gun Club story, properly told, deals with appropriation, maturation, expatriation, and validation. It's the story of rock 'n' roll.

Enduring presence? For all the band's ups and downs, The Gun Club discography is surprisingly strong, and mostly in print. Their best-known album is Fire Of Love—my high school friend started me off right there—but from the moment I heard it on the tape I boosted from my brother's roommate, my favorite has been Miami, a shoddily recorded, country-tinged death-rock record that reeks of pulp novels, tourist traps and graveyard shifts.

Hall & Oates

Years Of Operation 1969-present

Fits Between The Righteous Brothers and Boz Scaggs

Personal Correspondence My soft spot for Hall & Oates dates back to an HBO concert special I saw sometime in the early '80s, around the Private Eyes/H2O era. The duo was pretty ubiquitous by that point, seemingly popping out new hits every few months, with said hits ranging from the blandly innocuous to the genuinely catchy. In concert though—in cablecast concert anyway—the succession of familiar songs was impressive and infectious, and Daryl Hall's full voice and slick stage presence made sense of all the lip service he'd paid in interviews to his Philly soul roots. From a skeptic's perspective, Hall's a talented vocalist who's spent his whole career straining to sell out, by burying his influences behind whatever his expensive producers wanted to throw into the mix. But you could just as easily look at Hall—and Oates of course—as smarter-than-average pop stars who elevated chart-ready material via their more expansive tastes. After years of being content with my copy of the singles collection Rock And Soul, I went on an H&O binge on iTunes one day a couple of years ago, and cherry-picked the best songs from all the albums I could find. I enjoyed hearing the duo transition from folk-pop to pillowy soul to punchy pop, all while maintaining an identifiable core sound. From "Sara Smile" to "Out Of Touch," they're basically the same dudes, wearing different clothes.

Enduring presence? In my experience, more people are willing to adopt Hall & Oates as a guilty pleasure than just about any other "guilty pleasure act" of their era (outside of maybe Billy Joel). Perhaps that's because there's not a whole lot to feel guilty about with Hall & Oates. Sure, there are some songs of theirs that are more enjoyable as kitsch than great pop—"Adult Education," for example, and "Method Of Modern Love"—but songs like "Everytime You Go Away" and "One On One" are pretty unassailable, and Hall & Oates has a wealth of lesser-known material that holds up as well as the hits.

Stray Tracks

From the fringes of the collection, a few songs to share….

Grafton, "The Best Part Of La Grange"

This song belongs in the ranks of killer small-town kiss-offs. It reminds me of Hüsker Du crossed with neo-garage, then twanged-up a little, and it's another one of those songs that found me rather than vice-versa. I was sent the CD it came from, I played it dutifully, and my ears lit up when this song came on. That was a good day.

Grandaddy, "El Caminos In The West"

When Jason Lytle's California indie-rock collective showed up on the pop-culture radar in the late '90s, their attempts to integrate sputtering electronics into country-tinged loping resulted in an impressive match between music and message, as Lytle's lyrics about decaying technology and his shambling compositions evoked the bleed of the futuristic into the mundane and vice versa. Grandaddy subsequently smoothed out too much, but on songs like the steady-rolling "El Caminos In The West," Lytle crafts trinities of humanity, landscape, and machine, putting the three in opposition to each other to establish a feeling of inescapable loneliness. The quintessential Grandaddy character sits brokenhearted and lost on a stretch of hot pavement, next to a malfunctioning car. The quintessential Grandaddy sound melts pretty Todd Rundgren piano balladeering with melancholy Neil Young twang and a modernism-damaged sensibility equally derived from Pink Floyd, Pavement, and Radiohead—all musicians who like to celebrate the sad little triumph of being.

Grandpaboy, "Hot Un"

Here's an example of how badly critics want to hear something amazing in the past-their-prime output of musicians who used to be amazing. It's what I call it The Chrissie Hynde Effect, named in honor of the way that nearly every mediocre Pretenders album post-1985 (which is to say all of them) has been miraculously hailed as a return to form by critics who apparently forgot that they said much the same about the previous Pretenders album. When Paul Westerberg released an anonymous EP in 1997 under the moniker Grandpaboy, critics called it a welcome retreat to the rough-and-ready sound of The Replacements… which it's clearly not. Songs like "Hot Un" are enjoyable, certainly, but they're still tamer and slighter than Westerberg at his best. But people so badly want to hear him rock out again that they're willing to accept any uptick in tempo as a full-on resurrection.

Great Lake Swimmers, "Various Stages"

These whispery Canucks came out of nowhere a few years back with a self-titled debut that plunged into quietude with a reverence rarely heard since Cowboy Junkies turned a church into a recording studio for The Trinity Session. Great Lake Swimmers' sophomore effort, Bodies And Minds, traded the makeshift grain silo studio of its predecessor for the softer acoustics of a country church, and the songs were a little fuller too, with banjo, lap steel, and watery organ shading bandleader Tony Dekker's stark acoustic-guitar-and-percussion outlines. The cozily honest "Various Stages" is perfect make-out music for sensitive singles in off-campus housing, after a bottle of 10-dollar merlot and a gourmet dinner straight from Kroger's freezer section.

The Greenhornes, "It's Not Real"

I used to tell people that I was building up an eclectic library on my iPod so that I could set the device on "shuffle" and make some unexpected connections between different eras and styles of popular music. But there have been unintended consequences as well. I was gung-ho for neo-garage act The Greenhornes when the genre exploded at the dawn of the '00s, but one day one of their songs came up after an actual Nuggets track, and the contrast between genuine garage-rock and The Greeenhornes' overly rigid retread shook my faith. I still basically like the band, and they've taken some strong steps towards loosening up on their last couple of records, but I find I've gotten less and less interested in retro for its own sake, unless the musician has found a vein that's under-mined, or they have a unique take. Otherwise… contemporize, man.

Greg Ashley, "Fisher King"

As a solo artist and with his band The Gris-Gris, Greg Ashley provides a good example of how to give older styles a fresh spin. His music takes the basic atmosphere of garage-rock, Euro-sleaze and murky basement folk, but his particular combination of surrealism, literary flourish and unexpected lyricism feels wholly personal. Ashley's recorded output so far has been small but solid, and I get the feeling that he could be a very big deal before the decade is out.

Greg Kihn, "For You"

That alternate history of '70s rock that I spoke of in the Graham Parker entry would do wonders for Greg Kihn, an erstwhile barfly who scored two fairly big hits in his career ("The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)" and "Jeopardy") but mostly languished in the limbo that swallowed up countless gimmick-less rockers in a fast-changing era. This Kihn cover of an early Bruce Springsteen song—originally recorded at a time when Springsteen was on his way to being a non-starter—shows how Kihn fits in with his contemporaries. He was a clean-sounding post-boogie boy, who sounded best at 11:30 PM, well into his second encore and thinking about a third.

The Grifters, "Eureka I.V."

There was a time when I would've counted myself a fairly big Grifters fan, and expressed appreciation for the way the Memphis indie-rockers seemed to build sounds haphazardly, nailing good riffs to interesting lyrics whether they could support each other or not (and often savoring the collapse when they didn't). But I've been whittling my Grifters collection down further and further each year, until this week I was surprised to find before I'd even started listening that I only had 10 Grifters songs left. But at least I didn't cut any more. That 10 is a good 10.

The Guess Who, "Sour Suite"

Give me The Guess Who. They've got the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic.

Guns N' Roses, "Nightrain"

I'm not sure if rock history has properly registered the impact that Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction made when it was released in 1987. At the time, the hard rock scene was fairly splintered, with fans of the loud, fast and ugly dividing their attention between thrash, hardcore punk, art-metal, newly synth-heavy dinosaur acts, and power-ballad-wielding hair bands. Guns N' Roses roared off the Sunset Strip looking like just another hair band, but with a sound informed by The Rolling Stones, early '70s arena-rock and proto-punk. The band's subsequent elevation to Gods Among Men status—and the inevitable bloat in their sound and style—kind of obscures the fact that in the late '80s, it was rare to hear a song as smart and savage as "Welcome To The Jungle" on the radio. One could argue—and I definitely would—that there would've been no Nirvana breakout without the market first having been softened up by GNR. And ironically, in the wake of Nirvana, GNR sounded instantly out-of-date. No wonder we've been waiting so long for a new album.

Guy Clark, "Black Diamond Strings"

Clark's one of those old-guard singer-songwriters who's penned hits for big-time country artists and released thoughtful solo albums that sell mainly to other aspiring singer-songwriters. Songs like this paean to cheap goods are exactly what makes Clark a songwriter's songwriter. You could spend all day analyzing the simple structure and direct-but-profound message of "Black Diamond Strings," and only scratch the surface of what Clark does here that's so beautiful.

Haircut 100, "Love Plus One"

I could probably just cut-and-paste the entry I wrote on Aztec Camera back in January in order to describe the appeal of Haircut 100's breezy Britpop, with its luxe orchestrations and faintly tropical feel. I don't know whether a whole generation of young European men were actually jetting from ski resorts to Ibiza in between stints at university, but a bunch of UK musicians certainly tried to create that illusion in recording studios. It's like they were making music for Howard Hughes: arid and germ-free. There was a subset of indie-rock in the early '90s that tried like hell to recreate this sound, but it's hard to do on a budget, and without the original impulse. But I understand why people would want to call back to the crisp early '80s. It's like double-escapism, retreating to the nostalgia of an earlier era.

Half-Handed Cloud, "The Famine's Hard"

Here's another one to bring back up when I write about Christian Rock in a few weeks. Half-Handed Cloud is the Biblically informed, whimsically inclined outlet for charismatic singer-songwriter John Ringhofer, who on the recent album Thy Is A Word & Feet Need Lamps offered musical versions of Old Testament stories, delivered in a high, flat voice that's like a cross between Michael Stipe and Wayne Coyne. Ringhofer favors brevity, and shows a real gift for combining hummable melodies with avant-garde structure on songs like the explosive 90-second historical sketch "The Famine's Hard," a tight burst of experimentalism that proves it's possible to cram Syd Barrett and The Who into a single song.

The Halo Benders, "Your Asterisk"

I've been asked several times why I didn't write about Beat Happening back in the "B"s (or during my backtrack week), and the reason is both simple and shallow: I can't stand Calvin Johnson's voice. I abide it in The Halo Benders because it's tempered by the sweet whine of Doug Martsch, as well as his uncoiling guitar. But when Martsch and Built To Spill re-recorded The Halo Benders' best song, "Virginia Reel Around The Fountain," for their 2000 live album, I realized how much more I'd like my Halo Benders albums if one key element were removed. (Although actually I had that revelation a few years earlier, when I was enjoying The Halo Benders on the living room stereo and my wife wandered through, stopped, and said, "This may the worst thing I've ever heard.")

Harmonica Frank Floyd, "Swamp Root"

As Greil Marcus would eagerly point out, this rambling mid-20th-century roots musician had a much further-reaching influence than his scant recorded legacy would indicate. Harmonica Frank's short stint on Sun Records reportedly convinced Sam Philips that a white musician recording black music might be very successful, if said musician weren't an old coot. And it's not too hard to listen to "Swamp Root" and imagine a teenage Robert Zimmerman in rural Minnesota having his mind re-wired with each sputtering line.

Regrettably unremarked upon: Grace Jones, Grant Green, The Grass Roots, Greg Trooper, Grizzly Bear, Guster, The Hacienda Brothers, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Hank Williams, Hank Williams Jr., Hank III, Hanson, Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes, Harry Chapin and Harry Connick Jr.

Also listened to: The Gossip, The GoStation, The Gourds, Gow Dow Experience, The Grabs, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Graham Coxon, Graham Smith, Grails, Gran Torino, Grand Champeen, Grand Funk Railroad, Grand Ole Party, Grand Prix's, Grand Serenade, Grand Theft Audio, Grandmaster Melle Mel, The Grandsons, Grant Lee Buffalo, Grant McLennan, Grant-Lee Phillips, The Grates, Gravel Pit, Gravioli, Grayson Capps, Great Lakes, Great Northern, Green Jelly, The Green Pajamas, Green Pitch, Green To Think, The Greenberry Woods, The Greencards, Greens Keepers, Greg Foresman, Greg Hawks & The Tremblers, Greg Lake, The Greg Lowery Band, Gregory Douglas, Greta Gaines, Greta Lee, The Grey, Grey Does Matter, The Grey Race, Greyboy, Griffin House, Grinderman, The Groop, Groove Addiction, Groove Armada, The Groove Farm, Ground Components, Growing, Guards Of Metropolis, Guff, Guppyboy, Gurf Morlix, Guru, Gus Black, Gustavo Santaolalla, Guv'ner, A Guy Called Gerald, Gwen Guthrie, Gwil Owen, Gym Class Heroes, H.I.M., Ha Ha Tonka, Hail Social, Hajime Tachibana, Half Man Half Biscuit, Hallelujah The Hills, Halou, Hammell On Trial, Hamilton Camp, Hanalei, The Handsome Family, Hang Ups, Hangar 18, Hangnail, Hank Cochran, Hanne Hukkelberg, The Hanslick Rebellion, Haram, Harmonizing Four, Harold Burrage, Harold Hill, Harper's Bizarre and Harold & The Majestic Kind

Next week: From Harry Nilsson to Idaho, plus a few words on glorious crackpots

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