The Dirty Projectors "Useful Chamber," from their 2009 lp Bitte Orca, replicates the sensation one might experience inside an enormous clothes dryer cycling in slow motion; there is a wicked tossing about, but there is a feeling of prolonged suspension. The humidity makes you shiver instead of sweat. The heat makes you sleepy, and the fatigue makes you giddy, and the giddiness arouses your libido, and the longing finds the hottest space inside of you and melts slowly like a thick pad of oozing butter on a biscuit, and then the desire becomes a low comfortable electric buzz between your eyes; suddenly the dryer stops, and you're sinking into a mountain of soft, warm fabric, and there is nothing to feel but complete and total contentedness with the universe. I would hesitate to call "Useful Chamber" epic, clocking in at six and a half minutes, but the song runs the gamut from mellow electronica to noisy industrial. If the arrangement of the song were a pill, one would have to break it in half to swallow it. "Useful Chamber" is experimental rock at its finest.
The song opens with a hypnotic electric drum pulse complimented by a synthesized string arrangement, and does not deviate from this arrangement throughout the first verse. The lyrics are mild and poetic: "She is an emerald in a shining, shining winter / Rosette in a snow globe / Write it up, clean and gold / I spread love." Abruptly, the song shifts, and the instrumentation turns acoustic: a picked folksy guitar arrangement augmented with a heavy distorted crunch at the beginning of each measure to build tension. Behind this, a quiet chorus of female voices sing feathery harmonies. There is another abrupt change; a drum break serving the same empty purpose as Ringo's drum break in "Birthday," but significantly subdued. There are a few understated vocal chants before the song explodes into something entirely and vastly different from where it should be going.
Somehow, we find ourselves in the world of rift rock. A pounding yet understated drum kit smashes and splashes behind the repeating riff. Over this, the album's title is sung: "Bitte Orca, Orca Bitte / Bitte Orca, Orca Bitte." Above the riff and behind the vocal, a looped electric guitar sounding very much like something Andy Summers of The Police would have played trickles down between the rocks and hard places of the riff and arrangement. Then the song cycles back to its place of origin.
The hypnotic sequenced drum beat returns, but this time instead of being washed over by a synthesized string arrangement, The Dirty Projector's trio of female vocalist harmonize the string arrangement: a clever reintroduction to the main theme. The performance is spot-on and clean, and thick like wet red paint running down a white wall. Behind the lead vocal a subtle acoustic guitar track is heard, reminiscent of the arrangement after the first verse, and at the conclusion of the verse, there is an abrupt pause, then the Summeresque guitar repeats, isolated until the riff rock returns, pauses to make way for the folk guitar again, soaring female harmonies, then the chanting of Bitte Orca over the riff, culminating in a noisy finale which ultimately hits a brick wall and dies instead of ending properly.
Upon the first listen I didn't particularly like "Useful Chamber;" it was more like I enjoyed it. I tried squeezing it into a few different playlists and mixed CDs: impossible. Finally, it found a home at the end of a playlist, preceded by Dosh's "Mpls Rock and Roll" from the '06 album, The Lost Take. After repeated listening, "Useful Chamber" went from enjoyable to intriguing. It takes multiple listens to completely absorb the track, and it's an easy track to return to even if the first few listens don't hook you because its aftertaste resonates on your palate and becomes a stalactite which tickles the buds of your tongue until you have to scratch that itch. And I'm still scratching.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Friday, August 6, 2010
Revisiting the Impact of New Wave: Four Unlikely Records Which Captured the Spirit of the Times
This is New Wave
In 1974, the group Television played their first gig at Hilly Kristal's CBGB club in New York City. Speaking in retrospect about the performance, Kristal said "I think of that as the beginning of a new wave" (Heylin). Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, the term New Wave would be used to identify the underground music movement, particularly for groups who weren't abrasive enough to be considered Punk. In 1980, Sire Records adopted the term New Wave to market its roster of misfits, one of them being Madonna (Gendron). When MTV launched in 1981, New Wave groups found a springboard from which they could jump, landing in the living rooms of American homes with premium cable packages. Though the better half of generation did not witness it, The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star" took to the airwaves at 12:01 a.m., August 1st, 1981, launching the pop culture institution which would become known as the world's first music video channel (CNN.com)
The impact of MTV was felt immediately. Record stores within the demographic regions where MTV could be picked up began selling albums by artists who were not receiving local radio airplay (Denisoff). The Police had already broken into top forty rotations around the country, and their album cuts had also infiltrated the FM AOR format. Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson would also enjoy moderate chart success in the U.S. At the peak of the movement, New Wave was earmarked with the spacey sound of modern synthesizers played by men and women with Punk hairstyles. Much like the Alternative music of the 1990s, the New Wave sound spilled over into the mainstream, assimilating itself so well that the New Wave sound became the sound of rock and roll for a period.
By 1983, Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler was producing records for Bob Dylan, and a plethora of 70s stadium rockers made room for keyboard tracks on their records. Oddballs like Devo and A Flock of Seagulls began charting singles on Billboard's Hot 100, and a moderate ska revival blended itself with Punk and Post-Punk. New Wave kicked the door open for a number of underground acts, most of which self imploded by the mid 1980s, but the ears of established acts perked up to the sound they were making. New Wave became most interesting when preexisting groups began tinkering with mini moogs and FM Synthesizers. Artists the likes of Yes, The J. Geils Band, Rush, and Van Halen produced their biggest records during this period, reinvigorated by the British underground and American New Wave.
Most would agree that the major criterion for a classic album is the test of time. This test of course is partial to the ear of the beholder, and said beholder would be partial to the way they were introduced to these records. Generation X was introduced to Bob Dylan through MTV. This is why you are more likely to find Infidels in our vinyl collections and not Blonde on Blonde, and why "Sweetheart Like You" ranks much higher on our playlists than "Like A Rolling Stone." My first Yes record was 90125, not Fragile or Close to the Edge. I fell in love with Rush because of Moving Pictures, not 2112, and I find it relevant to point out that in 2010, Rush are not performing the entirety of 2112 on tour, they are performing Moving Pictures. Music Nazis are particular about their rock and roll timelines. I conclude that Dire Straits' Making Movies was a great New Wave record, because that's the way I remember it: it was recorded by a subterranean three piece Rock Band; I didn't hear "Romeo and Juliet" on a classic rock station, I saw it's video on MTV (witness its New Wave magic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9MzrirPrCI). When I blow the dust from my record collection, by the time it settles, I've reached the conclusion that the most interesting New Wave records were recorded by artists who are not canonical New Wave.
The Buggles say YES!
Before its iconic status of being the video that launched MTV, "Video Killed the Radio Star" was just a cool New Wave song by a New Wave outfit from Britain called The Buggles. The Buggles are often referred to as a one hit wonder, and that they may be, but it is far from the end of their story and legacy. What happened next is ultra-significant in the annals of Rock and Roll. The odds of what happened are quizzically low. How could it happen? The only way it could happen: by accident.
The group Yes are known for their tremendous rate of personnel changes, some members only lasting for one record. In 1980, after losing both a vocalist and a keyboardist, Steve Howe, Alan White, and Chris Squire, the remaining members of Yes, were laying some basic tracks down in the studio. Next door, The Buggles were working on the follow up to their British smash album The Age of Plastic. Being Yes fans, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, better known as The Buggles, decided to drop in to meet their idols. A few beers later, they were in Yes.
Yes' most successful album is 1983's 90125, which probably wouldn't have happened if it weren't for Drama, the Yes/Buggles record. Though both Horn and Downes disbanded from Yes after Drama, Horn went on to produce 90125, giving tracks like "Owner of a Lonely Heart" a pop edge to propel the album. Downes and Steve Howe quit Yes after Drama to form the supergroup Asia, which meant Emerson Lake & Palmer were out a drummer, leading to the release of Emerson Lake & Powell's self titled album, featuring the single and MTV staple, "Touch and Go." This gives you a pretty good idea of what wouldn't have happened if Horn and Downes hadn't venture in to the Drama sessions.
Drama is unlike anything Yes had previously recorded. The record sounds like classic Post-Punk, but the arrangements are undeniably progressive. The opening track, "Machine Messiah," blares out heavier than anything Yes had done, sounding more like the intro to Asia's "Time Again," giving listeners a preview of what was to come. "Machine Messiah" contains signature Yes and Buggles properties. This ten plus minute operatic lead in gives way to the under two minute "White Car," a symphonic synth pop commentary on greed and ambition, which was extended in live performances to include pieces of "Video Killed the Radio Star." Side One rounds out with "Does it Really Happen," the most overtly punk song on the record with flourishes of loud guitar, ass-backward reggae rhythms, and up-front keyboard embellishments. In fact, it sounds more like Jane's Addiction than it does any of its contemporaries. But the standout tracks on this record are on its flip side.
Side Two opens with the largely progressive "Into the Lense," later recorded as "I Am a Camera" on The Buggles second record, Adventures in Modern Recording. This track was pre-written by Horn and Downes, and embellished with what Steve Howe referred to as Yes "fiddle-faddle" (YesYears). Everything about "Into the Lesne" indulges in New Wave, which probably frightened the hell out of New Wavers because it is sub-subterranean progressive punk. Clocking in at eight and a half minutes, "Into the Lense" is more of an experience than it is a song. From the opening complex time signatures to the abrupt ending, "Lense" is wide enough to make you wonder when it will end, all the while hoping it won't. More ambitious than "Machine Messiah," "Lense" was edited down to a four minute single included as a bonus track on the Drama remaster. Obviously the single, which was released as a one-sided 12" single in Europe, was a commercial failure, "Lense" has reached cult status among Buggles and Yes fines alike. Listen to "Into the Lense" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvz6cUWsw9w&feature=PlayList&p=5D9C72A57B9D1539&playnext=1&index=27
See the video for The Buggles re-recording of "Into the Lense" as "I Am a Camera" at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjHi6-bpdQ&feature=related
The album's final track, "Tempus Fugit," probably should have been the single. "Fugit" is progressive Post-Punk Power-Pop at the highest octane. Squire's shredding bass line sends the track into overdrive. Anyone with spiky purple hair at the time would never have balked at it had they not know it was Yes. Downes' use of the vocoder dresses the song in a New Wave overcoat.
Trevor Horn hung around the Yes camp until the late 80s. His departure from the production of Yes' 1987 effort Big Generator stained his relationship with his former Yes bandmates in bad blood, but the legacy of what they accomplished is documented on the Billboard album charts. And a close listen to Big Generator indicates why the record was much less well received than 90125. Horn, as producer on the follow up record to Drama, washes away the progressive edge of the group so much that the first time I heard "Owner of A Lonely Heart," I thought it was the new single by The Police. (See a video performance of "Tempus Fugit" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78BivgombIE&feature=related)
The Police, Arrested by The J. Geils Band
This is the story of how the warped-from-play eight track of The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta was replaced on my stereo by a static-and-pop free LP record of Freeze Frame by The J. Geils Band. I was nine years old when Zenyatta was released. I heard "De-Do-Do-Do-De-Da-Da-Da" once on an AOR station from Philly pulled in via a cable connection; this was before it was released as a single, and to a nine year old, the title of this song was as fucking cool as it gets. That tape played endlessly on my deck for almost a year. Then I heard about "Centerfold." I didn't actually hear it yet, I just heard my friend Jeff talking about it, and at the ripe old age of ten, "Centerfold" sounded much cooler than Sting's pseudo-intellectual rhetoric. Jeff, after waiting for what seemed like days (it was probably only a couple of hours), captured the song on a cassette tape as it played on the local top 40 station. And then we listened to it. Over and over. Relentlessly. For days: about this, I'm sure it was days, or probably weeks. Jeff purchased a cassette version of the LP, but for some reason we never ventured past the first three songs: "Freeze Frame," "Rage in the Cage," and "Centerfold." Then I scored a ten dollar bill from my grandmother. At the time, everybody bought their records at Woolworth's or Listening Booth. I'm pretty sure I bought this at Woolworth. Even at the age of ten, I was a completist. I played the whole first side and told Jeff about "Do You Remember When" and "Insane, Insane Again."
The cover art for Freeze Frame was is exotic as the music contained within its vinyl grooves. We stared at that cover ceaselessly as we played the record. (Study the cover at http://lh6.ggpht.com/_SF_3y4LL7X0/SOMht4vzMTI/AAAAAAAAAzI/IwPBJk8mSjI/2
008-09-30+078.JPG). We drew it with crayons. We drew haphazard lead pencil renditions on our Catholic school notebooks. And when that fucker came to life in the "Freeze Frame" music video, we jumped up and down like we were watching the World Series. Eventually, we made it to Side Two of the record, and we fell in love with the entire content: a love, for me, which endures to this day. At the time, I couldn't have told you why I loved it, other than it sounded cool. I had no idea that the Geils crew were an R&B influenced outfit leaning on blues rock. And if I had known it, it would have made little difference to me. When I did learn this, I thought all of their other records sucked. Now I understand why those records don't suck, and what makes Freeze Frame such an important record in my collection, and why it qualifies as one of the best records of its era. (See the "Freeze Frame" video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo43B6nu60&feature=related )
Geils and company had already been credited with innovative use of harmonica on a pop record, but what Magic Dick did on the Freeze Frame album is not only beyond anything I've ever heard before or since, it's something I would never even consider as something that should or could be done. The intro to "Rage in the Cage," as a riff, is odd enough: add to it Dick's harmonica and it becomes unnerving in right way, in the rock and roll way, in the New Wave way. Dick blows a blistering solo after the bridge of "Rage." It's a harmonica solo the way you would approach a guitar solo, compounded with Danny Klein's manic bass line, fingers sliding over the frets between riffs. It's a crime that this man is not widely known for his innovative approach to the Bass Guitar. And then comes another solo, this time a guitar solo, not the way one would necessarily approach a guitar solo, played over a deep synth bass Missing Persons style. It's not technically brilliant, but it is tasteful, and could only be tasteful in "Rage in the Cage." This is probably due more to Seth Justman than J. Geils (hear the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3X9BW1ylg4 ).
Aside from being the band's keyboardist and principle songwriter, Justman also served as the sole producer of the album. In 1981, groups producing themselves were becoming less and less common. EMI granted Justman creative control. It was the right thing to do considering it not only sounds great, but the record was a huge chart success. Justman was also the group's main arranger. The arrangements on this record are clever in that way that New Wave was clever. The added percussion on "Do You Remember When" rhythmically drives a song that upon writing it probably contained no rhythm. The Thomas Dolbyesque string arrangement comes strait at the heart rather than from it; this is that rare song that you crank to full volume when the string arrangement kicks in instead of a blazing guitar riff or drum passage. (Hear the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-0isZGHQsM&feature=related )
The track "Insane, Insane Again" finds Klein playing unconventionally behind another misfit Dick solo. The rest of the bass line is pure funk, which is treacherous against the arrangement of "Insane," but Kline makes it work. Everything else about "Insane" is Jazz influenced with a New Wave attitude.
The most interesting and complex arrangement on the album is a song called "River Blindness." Mildly psychedelic, no-mistake New Wave, partly progressive: "River Blindenss" sounds like Justman borrowed Genesis' drum machine from "Man on the corner" Before they loaned it to The Who for It's Hard. There is a beautiful break in the song where Justman strips it down to the drum machine, then drummer Stephen Bladd adds a soft tribal floor tom, Geils strums a few clean chords, and Klein performs an unlikely but trance inducing bass solo. (Hear River Blindness at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krki2NDq1MU )
The album wraps with the sly "Piss on the Wall," and because it is post Pink Floyd's Wall, which is everything that a chart topping album should not be, I wonder if the title found its origin in that sentiment. "Piss" is New Wave by way of Bow Wow Wow with a little Stray Cats rock-a-billy thrown in before The Stray Cats recorded Built To Last. Freeze Frame alienated some of the original Geils fans. Freeze Frame is kind of like The Beatles jumping from For Sale to The White Album. But in spite of that alienation, it took Geils and company to the top of the album and singles charts with "Centerfold" holding to top position for six weeks. Freeze Frame remained on my platter well beyond those six weeks, and remains a sentimental treasure in my collection.
Rush Puts Out Signals
There's a purity to the way we listen to music that gets lost in our adolescence. Songs begin to take on deeper meanings, and we begin choosing what we listen to based on the level or our adolescent joy or angst, whichever one we are predisposed to. I remember an age when the songs chose me. It didn't matter what the lyrics were about, who the band was, and how many records they did or didn't sell. It was all about the sound and the way it drew me in. I can still remember the first time I heard Rush's "Tom Sawyer." It was the summer of 1981; I had just turned ten and my favorite band was The Police. I was on a tiny boardwalk in North Beach, Maryland, when I heard a song which I believed was called "Spacey Invaders." It turned out to be "Tom Sawyer." It was playing on a jukebox inside one of the restaurants on the boardwalk, oozing out into the open Chesapeake air. I froze in my tracks. My parents and my brother kept walking. I couldn't. I barely understood what I was hearing. I didn't know it was Rush, or who Rush were, I didn't care that Geddy Lee's voice was crazy high. The song had just been born; it didn't come to me with that "Stairway to Heaven" baggage that most classic rock songs seem to acquire with time. It came to me as something new and fresh. Something that made me either want to jump up and down on my bed, or play Atari 2600. It sounded like outer space. It sounded like a computer. It sounded like a haunted house. It took me by the psyche right then and there and rattled me relentlessly. I needed to find out what it was. I needed to. I couldn't think about anything else until I knew what the name of that song was. I wanted to hear it along with M's "Pop Music" and Gary Numan's "Cars." That's what it sounded like to me. It sounded like New Wave. Even the groups name, Rush, sounded ferociously rock and roll and outlandishly underground. The word looked cool on my notebooks. It lured me into adolescence. I would be identified by and with it.
Moving Pictures is regarded as Rush's hallmark record, and while it propelled them to stadium rock status and landed their single in jukeboxes, it was merely a stepping stone for what was to come. Rush drummer Neil Peart understood Ultravox and the rest of the British New Wave he'd been listening to since the late 70s, which led to Rush dabbling in New Wave and ska as early as 1980's Permanent Waves. The opening track to that record is an essay in itself, as is Rush's entire New Wave era output: their best fucking records. When Rush released Signals in the fall of '82, I was ready for it. I was a grade away from junior high, and the hormones were working their black magic. My ears were too big, my glasses were nerdy, suddenly I had pimples, and suddenly there was "Subdivisions," the lead track on Signals.
"Subdivisions" resonated with me. I was too young for the backs of cars and basement bars, but I understood the message: "Conform or be cast out." "Subdivisions" comes down on you like a first broken heart with its massively thick Oberheim OB-X synthesizer and whining mini-moog. It is what A Flock of Seagulls probably would have sounded like after some steroids and a few music lessons. Signals was a massive success in the UK, and "Subdivisions" was one of two hit singles across the Atlantic released from Signals. The video for "Subdivisions" was in moderate rotation on MTV, and the sight of it broke my heart. It was like watching video surveillance of myself: just a boy lost in the shuffle of everyday conformity, standing out no matter how hard I tried not to. It never struck me odd that Rush didn't look like they sounded. They were three men in their thirties wearing some typical 80s apparel, but their hair wasn't spiked or green or even that long. They reminded me of me I guess. And I felt their pain. They were my initiation to adolescent longing, sleepless nights of anticipating the things I always hoped would happen and never did: "Detached and subdivided in the mass production zone / nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone." It took me to nowhere, and nowhere is not non-existent, it is a very real void in which everyone of us scrambled to crawl our way out of, to break into those basement bars, to find any escape to "help to smooth / the unattractive truth." This song is a beast, to introspective to be Punk, and just neurotic enough to be New Wave. (See the music video for Subdivisions at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu9Ycq64Gy4 )
I leaned hard on "Subdivisions" in sixth grade, and drove around the valleys in stoned stupors as it played on the tape deck of my best friend's '74 Nova when we were in high school, but it is only in retrospect that I understood just how significant Signals is as a whole. I'm talking cold war artifacts, living with the possibility of incineration in a nuclear holocaust and waking up one day to find that somehow it didn't happen in spite of the odds, and that the machinery making this modern music was no longer the soundscape of a future which we would never see; instead, it is the dated past, glowing in archaic analog, an overture to adulthood which now sooths the mediocrity of living an adult life in a constitutional republic governed by the moral majority, because it takes us back and makes us fantasize about the what-ifs. Signals is now a snapshot of simpler aspirations rather than the signpost of teenage tears and bruised hearts. Rush, like most teens struggling to find their identity, were forcing their way into the video age, shaking off their progressive dinosaur identity in an attempt to find relevance in the digital age of music.
Not only was I spiritually subdivided, I was "The Analog Kid." The album's second cut is Rush doing what they do; ripping riotous riffs and working their way around each other in complicated embellishments, but the choruses are deliberate New Wave. The song screeches to half time, the Oberheim rears its head, and Lee sings a melody of Peart's composed lines about longing to depart to a place where we belong, or where we think we would rather be.
"Digital Man," as striking as a track it was, strikes me even harder now. When I hear it, I find myself thinking, my God, Rush is playing reggae, that's fucking ska their playing. And they play it in that awkwardly fitting white-boy New Wave style. The mid-section breaks down to Peart and Lifeson playing strait reggae as Lee walks around on his Rickenbacker bass. The build is slow, but by the time it erupts into full force Rush, Lifeson is torturing his guitar strings, making them scream and squeal only the he does, and Lee shreds out jazzesque riffs in perfect synchronization to Peart's furious fills. (Sample "Digital Man" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCFcWdco1nw )
"New World Man" is perhaps Rush's most amicable attempt at composing a cohesive single. Introduced by a sequenced synth bass, the song is reggae from start to finish, with a catchy chorus and a ripping bass line, and lyrics that reflect the climate of the times: "He's not concerned with yesterday / He knows constant change is hear to stay / He's noble enough to know what's right / but weak enough no to choose it / He's wise enough to win the world / but fool enough to lose it / He's a New World Man." (see a spirited live performance of New World Man at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkAtgX-HT4 )
Finding kinship with the space age rock of A Flock of Seagulls, the album wraps with "Countdown," a strait forward narrative recounting the group's trip to Florida to witness the launch of the space shuttle Columbia. The song was released as a single on both sides of the pond, charting significantly in Great Britain. ( Envy Lee's Rickenbacker and see the music video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnD2VUo16PQ )
Signals is that album that gives you a taste of what it might be like if we could go back to our plastic pants and jackets, to an age which we were uncertain would ever pass before the world exploded, to Rush before you knew them as Rush, and looked down your fucking arrogant musical nose as if you ever even fucking knew them in the first place. You become that asshole trying to slam the books out of my hands in the hall, and I'm laughing because I know what your missing, and what you chose to miss, and where you're going to end up, and you look, for that lack of a better word, stupid in your overalls, in your GM style work uniform, in your cotton jacket with your lap top purse and in your middle class Ford Focus. You are expendable and underpaid: congratulations on your trip to nowhere.
It's Safe To JUMP! - We're All Wearing Plastic Pants (and the houselights are still on)
Eastern Pennsylvania, circa 1984: the adolescents of Schuylkill County clad in synthetic clothing materials await the skating bus on the designated corners of the four northern boroughs and the city of Pottsville: a bus in which smoking and armature necking were not forbade. This smoking yellow rectangle of sexual tension arrived at The Roller Roost, 7:00pm, every Friday and Saturday night. For three hours, we would rent skates, even if we were not quite adept at the sport, in order to look like we fit in, to smoke Marlboro Reds without drawing disapproving looks from adults, and wear outlandish New Wave clothing without soliciting scoffs from our peers. For two nights a week, we were cool: we were badass. The high point each weekend was the moment when the DJ in the booth dimmed the house lights and fired up the strobes and multi-colored bulbs. This cue meant that the first three tracks of Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil would be played in succession, uninterrupted. And it meant that someone would most likely get a concussion. At least once a month, some poor schmuck would get carted off in the local firehouse's ambulance to the Good Samaritan Hospital. We Catholic school boys attributed it to some kind of demonic activity conjured up by The Crue's "In the Beginning."
The New Wave sound had spilled over into early 1980s heavy metal in small increments. You could detect its attitude on Shout at the Devil, Aldo Nova's Fantasy bore the earmarks, and Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages" was considerably more obvious, but in January of 1984, everything changed. Van Halen's new single came out, and the DJ retired Shout at the Devil. Nothing could prepare Schuylkill County for the amount of head trauma "Jump" would unleash at the skating rink. Mainly because, when David Lee Roth said it, you believed you could, and you tried to, even the kids like me who clung to the carpeted wall around the whole rink because our skating chops were non existent, tried to jump; and we landed on our asses, and we didn't care, and we thought: "Can't you see me layin' here I got my back against the skating rink floor." By the end of that winter, all of my friends could skate. Not well, and really bad things happened when we tried to jump, but we tried nonetheless. Because of Van Halen, I learned to skate backwards. This escalated my chances of finding a partner for the couples skate: thank you Eddie.
It used to piss me off that the DJ, unlike with Shout at the Devil, didn't start the record with the title track before "Jump." I can remember a few purists being put off by the album's introductory track; but not me. I became a Van Halen fan when I heard those synth sweeps, not before. "1984" has an ethereal quality: by the song's fifth chord every star in the galaxy has a sound, you can smell colors, your body becomes weightless, you're spinning and levitating, an endless exhale which never leaves you breathless - maybe it's a good thing the DJ skipped it. By the end of that opening track you've forgotten that you're listening to Van Halen, then suddenly you remember, and after 81 seconds, the idea that keyboards are sissy subsided.
While the opening chords of "Jump" are among the most instantly recognized pop song introductions of all time, the chords behind the lyric "Can't you see me standing here / I've got my back against the record machine" which lead the verses into the chorus give "Jump" the same ethereal quality as the title track, and it is this teetering between arena rock and New Wave that safely balances the song from being too much either or. And whereas Eddie V's guitar solos are often too sporadic to form a cohesive melody, the keyboard solo in "Jump" illustrates his melodic sensibilities.
1984 recoiled from complete New Wave saturation. Tracks like "Girl Gone Bad" and the MTV favorite "Hot For Teacher" rocked hard enough to prevent the alienation of the VH fanbase. And yet, Alex Van Halen's drum intro to "Hot For Teacher," sounding like the engine of a motorcycle, both in style and recording technique, is ultimately New Wave. In spite of the record's reluctance to shrug of its hard rock roots, the VH camp found itself divided about the 1984's musical direction, ultimately leading to Roth's departure.
The most controversial track on the album, "I'll Wait," is also the most overtly New Wave, and it almost didn't make the cut. Producer Ted Templeton and David Lee Roth campaigned against the song's inclusion on the album, but Eddie refused to relent (classicvanhalen.com). Michael Anthony's presence in the song is nonexistent; the heavy synth bass coupled with the dissonant chord structure of the composition allowed little room for traditional arrangement. "I'll Wait," unlike "Jump" and "1984," is dark, delinquent and devious. The keyboard composition is ultimately more complex and illustrates E.V.H.'s determination to churn out a synthesized track which could hold its own between "Hot For Teacher" and "Girl Gone Bad," which it undeniably does. Jon Vaughan puts it like this: "For what it's worth, particularly House of Pain, and to a slightly lesser extent Girl Gone Bad and I'll Wait are three of the most underrated rock songs ever to be placed in succession on an album in which every other song is infinitely more liked and recognizable amongst the main stream." Against the sophisticated keyboard backdrop, E.V.H. restrains his manic guitar soloing for something a little less brash: uncommonly melodic and tasteful compare to the majority of his solos, "I'll Wait" finds Eddie relenting rather than competing with the arrangement; and it works in his favor. The single charted into the top twenty, signifying approval from record buyers and program directors. Charting within the top fifteen positions without the aid of a music video was more rare than common during this era; "I'll Wait" was an exception. And ultimately, it is a kick-ass skating song.
The bus ride home from The Roller Roost was always rowdier than the ride there. The adrenalin coursed through our bruised but undaunted bodies. It was dark, so the smoke was thicker, and the only thing louder than the sound of sloppy tongue kissing was the music. The Williams Brothers, armed with a Panasonic ambience-enhanced boom box packed with six D sized batteries, provided the soundtrack for the ride home. That January, all anyone wanted to hear was 1984. And after thirty-three minutes, we wanted to hear it again. Most nights the album played two and a half times before we were dropped off at our corners. Our parents picked us up, and we could never hear them asking us if we had a good time because of the violent ringing in our ears, and fear that the smell of smoke would be detected by their parental strength senses.
How It Was and How We Remember It
History is subjective, much like our taste in music, and much like the taste of those with the largest pens. Left to the recounting of mythology spinning nimrods at Rolling Stone, Drama, Freeze-Frame, and Signals are largely forgotten, and 1984 is safely and neatly preserved as Roth era Van Halen. I can assure you as a youth having been saturated in the music of this chaotic period, these records are worth remembering. They deserve their place in the annals of rock and roll, and the impact that New Wave music had on their creations is not to be discounted. Other noteworthy records from this era by artists not commonly associated with New Wave are Dire Straits' Making Movies, Bob Dylan's Infidels, The Who's Face Dances, Pete Towsnshend's All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, Genesis' Abacab, and Roxy Music's Avalon. The New Wave era also has its share of forgotten pioneers: Wire Train, The Translators, The Producers, Pete Shelly, Lloyd Cole, The Waitresses, The Members, The Nerves, Landscape, BB Gabor; all of whom found their way into the public consciousness for that brief period thanks to MTV, USA Networks Night Flight, and New Wave Theater.
The millennium brought with it a New Wave revival of sorts. Countless acts such as The Killers, Editors, Boy Kill Boy, Ladyhawke, Okkervil River, Ra Ra Riot, The National, Interpol, The Futureheads, Cut Copy, M83, Phoenix, Arcade Fire, Mew, The Helio Sequence, The Sounds, Neon Indian, Tokyo Police Club, Empire of the Sun, The Dirty Projectors, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Ariel Pink, The Sea and Cake, Blonde Redhead, and so many more owe a great deal to the original New Wavers.
In 1974, the group Television played their first gig at Hilly Kristal's CBGB club in New York City. Speaking in retrospect about the performance, Kristal said "I think of that as the beginning of a new wave" (Heylin). Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, the term New Wave would be used to identify the underground music movement, particularly for groups who weren't abrasive enough to be considered Punk. In 1980, Sire Records adopted the term New Wave to market its roster of misfits, one of them being Madonna (Gendron). When MTV launched in 1981, New Wave groups found a springboard from which they could jump, landing in the living rooms of American homes with premium cable packages. Though the better half of generation did not witness it, The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star" took to the airwaves at 12:01 a.m., August 1st, 1981, launching the pop culture institution which would become known as the world's first music video channel (CNN.com)
The impact of MTV was felt immediately. Record stores within the demographic regions where MTV could be picked up began selling albums by artists who were not receiving local radio airplay (Denisoff). The Police had already broken into top forty rotations around the country, and their album cuts had also infiltrated the FM AOR format. Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson would also enjoy moderate chart success in the U.S. At the peak of the movement, New Wave was earmarked with the spacey sound of modern synthesizers played by men and women with Punk hairstyles. Much like the Alternative music of the 1990s, the New Wave sound spilled over into the mainstream, assimilating itself so well that the New Wave sound became the sound of rock and roll for a period.
By 1983, Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler was producing records for Bob Dylan, and a plethora of 70s stadium rockers made room for keyboard tracks on their records. Oddballs like Devo and A Flock of Seagulls began charting singles on Billboard's Hot 100, and a moderate ska revival blended itself with Punk and Post-Punk. New Wave kicked the door open for a number of underground acts, most of which self imploded by the mid 1980s, but the ears of established acts perked up to the sound they were making. New Wave became most interesting when preexisting groups began tinkering with mini moogs and FM Synthesizers. Artists the likes of Yes, The J. Geils Band, Rush, and Van Halen produced their biggest records during this period, reinvigorated by the British underground and American New Wave.
Most would agree that the major criterion for a classic album is the test of time. This test of course is partial to the ear of the beholder, and said beholder would be partial to the way they were introduced to these records. Generation X was introduced to Bob Dylan through MTV. This is why you are more likely to find Infidels in our vinyl collections and not Blonde on Blonde, and why "Sweetheart Like You" ranks much higher on our playlists than "Like A Rolling Stone." My first Yes record was 90125, not Fragile or Close to the Edge. I fell in love with Rush because of Moving Pictures, not 2112, and I find it relevant to point out that in 2010, Rush are not performing the entirety of 2112 on tour, they are performing Moving Pictures. Music Nazis are particular about their rock and roll timelines. I conclude that Dire Straits' Making Movies was a great New Wave record, because that's the way I remember it: it was recorded by a subterranean three piece Rock Band; I didn't hear "Romeo and Juliet" on a classic rock station, I saw it's video on MTV (witness its New Wave magic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9MzrirPrCI). When I blow the dust from my record collection, by the time it settles, I've reached the conclusion that the most interesting New Wave records were recorded by artists who are not canonical New Wave.
The Buggles say YES!
Before its iconic status of being the video that launched MTV, "Video Killed the Radio Star" was just a cool New Wave song by a New Wave outfit from Britain called The Buggles. The Buggles are often referred to as a one hit wonder, and that they may be, but it is far from the end of their story and legacy. What happened next is ultra-significant in the annals of Rock and Roll. The odds of what happened are quizzically low. How could it happen? The only way it could happen: by accident.
The group Yes are known for their tremendous rate of personnel changes, some members only lasting for one record. In 1980, after losing both a vocalist and a keyboardist, Steve Howe, Alan White, and Chris Squire, the remaining members of Yes, were laying some basic tracks down in the studio. Next door, The Buggles were working on the follow up to their British smash album The Age of Plastic. Being Yes fans, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, better known as The Buggles, decided to drop in to meet their idols. A few beers later, they were in Yes.
Yes' most successful album is 1983's 90125, which probably wouldn't have happened if it weren't for Drama, the Yes/Buggles record. Though both Horn and Downes disbanded from Yes after Drama, Horn went on to produce 90125, giving tracks like "Owner of a Lonely Heart" a pop edge to propel the album. Downes and Steve Howe quit Yes after Drama to form the supergroup Asia, which meant Emerson Lake & Palmer were out a drummer, leading to the release of Emerson Lake & Powell's self titled album, featuring the single and MTV staple, "Touch and Go." This gives you a pretty good idea of what wouldn't have happened if Horn and Downes hadn't venture in to the Drama sessions.
Drama is unlike anything Yes had previously recorded. The record sounds like classic Post-Punk, but the arrangements are undeniably progressive. The opening track, "Machine Messiah," blares out heavier than anything Yes had done, sounding more like the intro to Asia's "Time Again," giving listeners a preview of what was to come. "Machine Messiah" contains signature Yes and Buggles properties. This ten plus minute operatic lead in gives way to the under two minute "White Car," a symphonic synth pop commentary on greed and ambition, which was extended in live performances to include pieces of "Video Killed the Radio Star." Side One rounds out with "Does it Really Happen," the most overtly punk song on the record with flourishes of loud guitar, ass-backward reggae rhythms, and up-front keyboard embellishments. In fact, it sounds more like Jane's Addiction than it does any of its contemporaries. But the standout tracks on this record are on its flip side.
Side Two opens with the largely progressive "Into the Lense," later recorded as "I Am a Camera" on The Buggles second record, Adventures in Modern Recording. This track was pre-written by Horn and Downes, and embellished with what Steve Howe referred to as Yes "fiddle-faddle" (YesYears). Everything about "Into the Lesne" indulges in New Wave, which probably frightened the hell out of New Wavers because it is sub-subterranean progressive punk. Clocking in at eight and a half minutes, "Into the Lense" is more of an experience than it is a song. From the opening complex time signatures to the abrupt ending, "Lense" is wide enough to make you wonder when it will end, all the while hoping it won't. More ambitious than "Machine Messiah," "Lense" was edited down to a four minute single included as a bonus track on the Drama remaster. Obviously the single, which was released as a one-sided 12" single in Europe, was a commercial failure, "Lense" has reached cult status among Buggles and Yes fines alike. Listen to "Into the Lense" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvz6cUWsw9w&feature=PlayList&p=5D9C72A57B9D1539&playnext=1&index=27
See the video for The Buggles re-recording of "Into the Lense" as "I Am a Camera" at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjHi6-bpdQ&feature=related
The album's final track, "Tempus Fugit," probably should have been the single. "Fugit" is progressive Post-Punk Power-Pop at the highest octane. Squire's shredding bass line sends the track into overdrive. Anyone with spiky purple hair at the time would never have balked at it had they not know it was Yes. Downes' use of the vocoder dresses the song in a New Wave overcoat.
Trevor Horn hung around the Yes camp until the late 80s. His departure from the production of Yes' 1987 effort Big Generator stained his relationship with his former Yes bandmates in bad blood, but the legacy of what they accomplished is documented on the Billboard album charts. And a close listen to Big Generator indicates why the record was much less well received than 90125. Horn, as producer on the follow up record to Drama, washes away the progressive edge of the group so much that the first time I heard "Owner of A Lonely Heart," I thought it was the new single by The Police. (See a video performance of "Tempus Fugit" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78BivgombIE&feature=related)
The Police, Arrested by The J. Geils Band
This is the story of how the warped-from-play eight track of The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta was replaced on my stereo by a static-and-pop free LP record of Freeze Frame by The J. Geils Band. I was nine years old when Zenyatta was released. I heard "De-Do-Do-Do-De-Da-Da-Da" once on an AOR station from Philly pulled in via a cable connection; this was before it was released as a single, and to a nine year old, the title of this song was as fucking cool as it gets. That tape played endlessly on my deck for almost a year. Then I heard about "Centerfold." I didn't actually hear it yet, I just heard my friend Jeff talking about it, and at the ripe old age of ten, "Centerfold" sounded much cooler than Sting's pseudo-intellectual rhetoric. Jeff, after waiting for what seemed like days (it was probably only a couple of hours), captured the song on a cassette tape as it played on the local top 40 station. And then we listened to it. Over and over. Relentlessly. For days: about this, I'm sure it was days, or probably weeks. Jeff purchased a cassette version of the LP, but for some reason we never ventured past the first three songs: "Freeze Frame," "Rage in the Cage," and "Centerfold." Then I scored a ten dollar bill from my grandmother. At the time, everybody bought their records at Woolworth's or Listening Booth. I'm pretty sure I bought this at Woolworth. Even at the age of ten, I was a completist. I played the whole first side and told Jeff about "Do You Remember When" and "Insane, Insane Again."
The cover art for Freeze Frame was is exotic as the music contained within its vinyl grooves. We stared at that cover ceaselessly as we played the record. (Study the cover at http://lh6.ggpht.com/_SF_3y4LL7X0/SOMht4vzMTI/AAAAAAAAAzI/IwPBJk8mSjI/2
008-09-30+078.JPG). We drew it with crayons. We drew haphazard lead pencil renditions on our Catholic school notebooks. And when that fucker came to life in the "Freeze Frame" music video, we jumped up and down like we were watching the World Series. Eventually, we made it to Side Two of the record, and we fell in love with the entire content: a love, for me, which endures to this day. At the time, I couldn't have told you why I loved it, other than it sounded cool. I had no idea that the Geils crew were an R&B influenced outfit leaning on blues rock. And if I had known it, it would have made little difference to me. When I did learn this, I thought all of their other records sucked. Now I understand why those records don't suck, and what makes Freeze Frame such an important record in my collection, and why it qualifies as one of the best records of its era. (See the "Freeze Frame" video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo43B6nu60&feature=related )
Geils and company had already been credited with innovative use of harmonica on a pop record, but what Magic Dick did on the Freeze Frame album is not only beyond anything I've ever heard before or since, it's something I would never even consider as something that should or could be done. The intro to "Rage in the Cage," as a riff, is odd enough: add to it Dick's harmonica and it becomes unnerving in right way, in the rock and roll way, in the New Wave way. Dick blows a blistering solo after the bridge of "Rage." It's a harmonica solo the way you would approach a guitar solo, compounded with Danny Klein's manic bass line, fingers sliding over the frets between riffs. It's a crime that this man is not widely known for his innovative approach to the Bass Guitar. And then comes another solo, this time a guitar solo, not the way one would necessarily approach a guitar solo, played over a deep synth bass Missing Persons style. It's not technically brilliant, but it is tasteful, and could only be tasteful in "Rage in the Cage." This is probably due more to Seth Justman than J. Geils (hear the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3X9BW1ylg4 ).
Aside from being the band's keyboardist and principle songwriter, Justman also served as the sole producer of the album. In 1981, groups producing themselves were becoming less and less common. EMI granted Justman creative control. It was the right thing to do considering it not only sounds great, but the record was a huge chart success. Justman was also the group's main arranger. The arrangements on this record are clever in that way that New Wave was clever. The added percussion on "Do You Remember When" rhythmically drives a song that upon writing it probably contained no rhythm. The Thomas Dolbyesque string arrangement comes strait at the heart rather than from it; this is that rare song that you crank to full volume when the string arrangement kicks in instead of a blazing guitar riff or drum passage. (Hear the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-0isZGHQsM&feature=related )
The track "Insane, Insane Again" finds Klein playing unconventionally behind another misfit Dick solo. The rest of the bass line is pure funk, which is treacherous against the arrangement of "Insane," but Kline makes it work. Everything else about "Insane" is Jazz influenced with a New Wave attitude.
The most interesting and complex arrangement on the album is a song called "River Blindness." Mildly psychedelic, no-mistake New Wave, partly progressive: "River Blindenss" sounds like Justman borrowed Genesis' drum machine from "Man on the corner" Before they loaned it to The Who for It's Hard. There is a beautiful break in the song where Justman strips it down to the drum machine, then drummer Stephen Bladd adds a soft tribal floor tom, Geils strums a few clean chords, and Klein performs an unlikely but trance inducing bass solo. (Hear River Blindness at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krki2NDq1MU )
The album wraps with the sly "Piss on the Wall," and because it is post Pink Floyd's Wall, which is everything that a chart topping album should not be, I wonder if the title found its origin in that sentiment. "Piss" is New Wave by way of Bow Wow Wow with a little Stray Cats rock-a-billy thrown in before The Stray Cats recorded Built To Last. Freeze Frame alienated some of the original Geils fans. Freeze Frame is kind of like The Beatles jumping from For Sale to The White Album. But in spite of that alienation, it took Geils and company to the top of the album and singles charts with "Centerfold" holding to top position for six weeks. Freeze Frame remained on my platter well beyond those six weeks, and remains a sentimental treasure in my collection.
Rush Puts Out Signals
There's a purity to the way we listen to music that gets lost in our adolescence. Songs begin to take on deeper meanings, and we begin choosing what we listen to based on the level or our adolescent joy or angst, whichever one we are predisposed to. I remember an age when the songs chose me. It didn't matter what the lyrics were about, who the band was, and how many records they did or didn't sell. It was all about the sound and the way it drew me in. I can still remember the first time I heard Rush's "Tom Sawyer." It was the summer of 1981; I had just turned ten and my favorite band was The Police. I was on a tiny boardwalk in North Beach, Maryland, when I heard a song which I believed was called "Spacey Invaders." It turned out to be "Tom Sawyer." It was playing on a jukebox inside one of the restaurants on the boardwalk, oozing out into the open Chesapeake air. I froze in my tracks. My parents and my brother kept walking. I couldn't. I barely understood what I was hearing. I didn't know it was Rush, or who Rush were, I didn't care that Geddy Lee's voice was crazy high. The song had just been born; it didn't come to me with that "Stairway to Heaven" baggage that most classic rock songs seem to acquire with time. It came to me as something new and fresh. Something that made me either want to jump up and down on my bed, or play Atari 2600. It sounded like outer space. It sounded like a computer. It sounded like a haunted house. It took me by the psyche right then and there and rattled me relentlessly. I needed to find out what it was. I needed to. I couldn't think about anything else until I knew what the name of that song was. I wanted to hear it along with M's "Pop Music" and Gary Numan's "Cars." That's what it sounded like to me. It sounded like New Wave. Even the groups name, Rush, sounded ferociously rock and roll and outlandishly underground. The word looked cool on my notebooks. It lured me into adolescence. I would be identified by and with it.
Moving Pictures is regarded as Rush's hallmark record, and while it propelled them to stadium rock status and landed their single in jukeboxes, it was merely a stepping stone for what was to come. Rush drummer Neil Peart understood Ultravox and the rest of the British New Wave he'd been listening to since the late 70s, which led to Rush dabbling in New Wave and ska as early as 1980's Permanent Waves. The opening track to that record is an essay in itself, as is Rush's entire New Wave era output: their best fucking records. When Rush released Signals in the fall of '82, I was ready for it. I was a grade away from junior high, and the hormones were working their black magic. My ears were too big, my glasses were nerdy, suddenly I had pimples, and suddenly there was "Subdivisions," the lead track on Signals.
"Subdivisions" resonated with me. I was too young for the backs of cars and basement bars, but I understood the message: "Conform or be cast out." "Subdivisions" comes down on you like a first broken heart with its massively thick Oberheim OB-X synthesizer and whining mini-moog. It is what A Flock of Seagulls probably would have sounded like after some steroids and a few music lessons. Signals was a massive success in the UK, and "Subdivisions" was one of two hit singles across the Atlantic released from Signals. The video for "Subdivisions" was in moderate rotation on MTV, and the sight of it broke my heart. It was like watching video surveillance of myself: just a boy lost in the shuffle of everyday conformity, standing out no matter how hard I tried not to. It never struck me odd that Rush didn't look like they sounded. They were three men in their thirties wearing some typical 80s apparel, but their hair wasn't spiked or green or even that long. They reminded me of me I guess. And I felt their pain. They were my initiation to adolescent longing, sleepless nights of anticipating the things I always hoped would happen and never did: "Detached and subdivided in the mass production zone / nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone." It took me to nowhere, and nowhere is not non-existent, it is a very real void in which everyone of us scrambled to crawl our way out of, to break into those basement bars, to find any escape to "help to smooth / the unattractive truth." This song is a beast, to introspective to be Punk, and just neurotic enough to be New Wave. (See the music video for Subdivisions at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu9Ycq64Gy4 )
I leaned hard on "Subdivisions" in sixth grade, and drove around the valleys in stoned stupors as it played on the tape deck of my best friend's '74 Nova when we were in high school, but it is only in retrospect that I understood just how significant Signals is as a whole. I'm talking cold war artifacts, living with the possibility of incineration in a nuclear holocaust and waking up one day to find that somehow it didn't happen in spite of the odds, and that the machinery making this modern music was no longer the soundscape of a future which we would never see; instead, it is the dated past, glowing in archaic analog, an overture to adulthood which now sooths the mediocrity of living an adult life in a constitutional republic governed by the moral majority, because it takes us back and makes us fantasize about the what-ifs. Signals is now a snapshot of simpler aspirations rather than the signpost of teenage tears and bruised hearts. Rush, like most teens struggling to find their identity, were forcing their way into the video age, shaking off their progressive dinosaur identity in an attempt to find relevance in the digital age of music.
Not only was I spiritually subdivided, I was "The Analog Kid." The album's second cut is Rush doing what they do; ripping riotous riffs and working their way around each other in complicated embellishments, but the choruses are deliberate New Wave. The song screeches to half time, the Oberheim rears its head, and Lee sings a melody of Peart's composed lines about longing to depart to a place where we belong, or where we think we would rather be.
"Digital Man," as striking as a track it was, strikes me even harder now. When I hear it, I find myself thinking, my God, Rush is playing reggae, that's fucking ska their playing. And they play it in that awkwardly fitting white-boy New Wave style. The mid-section breaks down to Peart and Lifeson playing strait reggae as Lee walks around on his Rickenbacker bass. The build is slow, but by the time it erupts into full force Rush, Lifeson is torturing his guitar strings, making them scream and squeal only the he does, and Lee shreds out jazzesque riffs in perfect synchronization to Peart's furious fills. (Sample "Digital Man" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCFcWdco1nw )
"New World Man" is perhaps Rush's most amicable attempt at composing a cohesive single. Introduced by a sequenced synth bass, the song is reggae from start to finish, with a catchy chorus and a ripping bass line, and lyrics that reflect the climate of the times: "He's not concerned with yesterday / He knows constant change is hear to stay / He's noble enough to know what's right / but weak enough no to choose it / He's wise enough to win the world / but fool enough to lose it / He's a New World Man." (see a spirited live performance of New World Man at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkAtgX-HT4 )
Finding kinship with the space age rock of A Flock of Seagulls, the album wraps with "Countdown," a strait forward narrative recounting the group's trip to Florida to witness the launch of the space shuttle Columbia. The song was released as a single on both sides of the pond, charting significantly in Great Britain. ( Envy Lee's Rickenbacker and see the music video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnD2VUo16PQ )
Signals is that album that gives you a taste of what it might be like if we could go back to our plastic pants and jackets, to an age which we were uncertain would ever pass before the world exploded, to Rush before you knew them as Rush, and looked down your fucking arrogant musical nose as if you ever even fucking knew them in the first place. You become that asshole trying to slam the books out of my hands in the hall, and I'm laughing because I know what your missing, and what you chose to miss, and where you're going to end up, and you look, for that lack of a better word, stupid in your overalls, in your GM style work uniform, in your cotton jacket with your lap top purse and in your middle class Ford Focus. You are expendable and underpaid: congratulations on your trip to nowhere.
It's Safe To JUMP! - We're All Wearing Plastic Pants (and the houselights are still on)
Eastern Pennsylvania, circa 1984: the adolescents of Schuylkill County clad in synthetic clothing materials await the skating bus on the designated corners of the four northern boroughs and the city of Pottsville: a bus in which smoking and armature necking were not forbade. This smoking yellow rectangle of sexual tension arrived at The Roller Roost, 7:00pm, every Friday and Saturday night. For three hours, we would rent skates, even if we were not quite adept at the sport, in order to look like we fit in, to smoke Marlboro Reds without drawing disapproving looks from adults, and wear outlandish New Wave clothing without soliciting scoffs from our peers. For two nights a week, we were cool: we were badass. The high point each weekend was the moment when the DJ in the booth dimmed the house lights and fired up the strobes and multi-colored bulbs. This cue meant that the first three tracks of Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil would be played in succession, uninterrupted. And it meant that someone would most likely get a concussion. At least once a month, some poor schmuck would get carted off in the local firehouse's ambulance to the Good Samaritan Hospital. We Catholic school boys attributed it to some kind of demonic activity conjured up by The Crue's "In the Beginning."
The New Wave sound had spilled over into early 1980s heavy metal in small increments. You could detect its attitude on Shout at the Devil, Aldo Nova's Fantasy bore the earmarks, and Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages" was considerably more obvious, but in January of 1984, everything changed. Van Halen's new single came out, and the DJ retired Shout at the Devil. Nothing could prepare Schuylkill County for the amount of head trauma "Jump" would unleash at the skating rink. Mainly because, when David Lee Roth said it, you believed you could, and you tried to, even the kids like me who clung to the carpeted wall around the whole rink because our skating chops were non existent, tried to jump; and we landed on our asses, and we didn't care, and we thought: "Can't you see me layin' here I got my back against the skating rink floor." By the end of that winter, all of my friends could skate. Not well, and really bad things happened when we tried to jump, but we tried nonetheless. Because of Van Halen, I learned to skate backwards. This escalated my chances of finding a partner for the couples skate: thank you Eddie.
It used to piss me off that the DJ, unlike with Shout at the Devil, didn't start the record with the title track before "Jump." I can remember a few purists being put off by the album's introductory track; but not me. I became a Van Halen fan when I heard those synth sweeps, not before. "1984" has an ethereal quality: by the song's fifth chord every star in the galaxy has a sound, you can smell colors, your body becomes weightless, you're spinning and levitating, an endless exhale which never leaves you breathless - maybe it's a good thing the DJ skipped it. By the end of that opening track you've forgotten that you're listening to Van Halen, then suddenly you remember, and after 81 seconds, the idea that keyboards are sissy subsided.
While the opening chords of "Jump" are among the most instantly recognized pop song introductions of all time, the chords behind the lyric "Can't you see me standing here / I've got my back against the record machine" which lead the verses into the chorus give "Jump" the same ethereal quality as the title track, and it is this teetering between arena rock and New Wave that safely balances the song from being too much either or. And whereas Eddie V's guitar solos are often too sporadic to form a cohesive melody, the keyboard solo in "Jump" illustrates his melodic sensibilities.
1984 recoiled from complete New Wave saturation. Tracks like "Girl Gone Bad" and the MTV favorite "Hot For Teacher" rocked hard enough to prevent the alienation of the VH fanbase. And yet, Alex Van Halen's drum intro to "Hot For Teacher," sounding like the engine of a motorcycle, both in style and recording technique, is ultimately New Wave. In spite of the record's reluctance to shrug of its hard rock roots, the VH camp found itself divided about the 1984's musical direction, ultimately leading to Roth's departure.
The most controversial track on the album, "I'll Wait," is also the most overtly New Wave, and it almost didn't make the cut. Producer Ted Templeton and David Lee Roth campaigned against the song's inclusion on the album, but Eddie refused to relent (classicvanhalen.com). Michael Anthony's presence in the song is nonexistent; the heavy synth bass coupled with the dissonant chord structure of the composition allowed little room for traditional arrangement. "I'll Wait," unlike "Jump" and "1984," is dark, delinquent and devious. The keyboard composition is ultimately more complex and illustrates E.V.H.'s determination to churn out a synthesized track which could hold its own between "Hot For Teacher" and "Girl Gone Bad," which it undeniably does. Jon Vaughan puts it like this: "For what it's worth, particularly House of Pain, and to a slightly lesser extent Girl Gone Bad and I'll Wait are three of the most underrated rock songs ever to be placed in succession on an album in which every other song is infinitely more liked and recognizable amongst the main stream." Against the sophisticated keyboard backdrop, E.V.H. restrains his manic guitar soloing for something a little less brash: uncommonly melodic and tasteful compare to the majority of his solos, "I'll Wait" finds Eddie relenting rather than competing with the arrangement; and it works in his favor. The single charted into the top twenty, signifying approval from record buyers and program directors. Charting within the top fifteen positions without the aid of a music video was more rare than common during this era; "I'll Wait" was an exception. And ultimately, it is a kick-ass skating song.
The bus ride home from The Roller Roost was always rowdier than the ride there. The adrenalin coursed through our bruised but undaunted bodies. It was dark, so the smoke was thicker, and the only thing louder than the sound of sloppy tongue kissing was the music. The Williams Brothers, armed with a Panasonic ambience-enhanced boom box packed with six D sized batteries, provided the soundtrack for the ride home. That January, all anyone wanted to hear was 1984. And after thirty-three minutes, we wanted to hear it again. Most nights the album played two and a half times before we were dropped off at our corners. Our parents picked us up, and we could never hear them asking us if we had a good time because of the violent ringing in our ears, and fear that the smell of smoke would be detected by their parental strength senses.
How It Was and How We Remember It
History is subjective, much like our taste in music, and much like the taste of those with the largest pens. Left to the recounting of mythology spinning nimrods at Rolling Stone, Drama, Freeze-Frame, and Signals are largely forgotten, and 1984 is safely and neatly preserved as Roth era Van Halen. I can assure you as a youth having been saturated in the music of this chaotic period, these records are worth remembering. They deserve their place in the annals of rock and roll, and the impact that New Wave music had on their creations is not to be discounted. Other noteworthy records from this era by artists not commonly associated with New Wave are Dire Straits' Making Movies, Bob Dylan's Infidels, The Who's Face Dances, Pete Towsnshend's All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, Genesis' Abacab, and Roxy Music's Avalon. The New Wave era also has its share of forgotten pioneers: Wire Train, The Translators, The Producers, Pete Shelly, Lloyd Cole, The Waitresses, The Members, The Nerves, Landscape, BB Gabor; all of whom found their way into the public consciousness for that brief period thanks to MTV, USA Networks Night Flight, and New Wave Theater.
The millennium brought with it a New Wave revival of sorts. Countless acts such as The Killers, Editors, Boy Kill Boy, Ladyhawke, Okkervil River, Ra Ra Riot, The National, Interpol, The Futureheads, Cut Copy, M83, Phoenix, Arcade Fire, Mew, The Helio Sequence, The Sounds, Neon Indian, Tokyo Police Club, Empire of the Sun, The Dirty Projectors, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Ariel Pink, The Sea and Cake, Blonde Redhead, and so many more owe a great deal to the original New Wavers.
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