On Hold at the Suicide Hotline

944. CARS, "You're All I've Got Tonight"
Produced by Roy Thomas Baker; written by Ric Ocasek
Did not make pop charts 1978
Did not make pop charts

The one time I ever had an extended conversation with Greil Marcus, after a while the talk turned to his friend Dave Marsh and my semi-obsession with The Heart of Rock and Soul. I talked about how the book gave me a window onto a generational experience that I had never quite comprehended before on a visceral level, but I also mentioned that it was weird for me how there were bands that Marsh discounted that held more significance for those, like myself, of a slightly younger generation. "Like what?" he asked. "Like The Cars," I instinctively blurted out.

I think every generation has bands like this, but for those Americans around my age, the Cars just captured something that was in the air. You could love True Punk in the 1970s and also love the sly subversion that the Cars slipped into the mainstream without most people realizing it. This song may be one of the purest statements of male masochism that has ever made it into regular rotation on classic rock stations. It helped usher in the whole great era of Pop Loserdom that I've referred in earlier postings and will treat at greater length later, but let's just say for now that this song has a kind of John the Baptist relationship to the later post-punk ironic reinvention of masculinity.

And only Ric Ocasek could sing this song. Whenever anyone suggests to me that the Cars were conformist treacle, I remind them to listen to Ocasek's voice. It is innately alienated, no matter what he may actually feel about the words that he is singing. Much like Pee Wee Herman, Ocasek could be singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and it would be conjuring up all kinds of deviant failure.

PS: If you can find a copy of the original demo for this song [featured on Mass Ave, the Boston entry in the old Rhino DIY series], grab it. It was enormously successful on local Boston radio stations before the band ever got a contract, and it is much, much rawer.

Yeah sure I can dupe you a copy . . .

Time Meant Nothin', Never Would Again

254. RICHARD O'BRIEN et al., "Time Warp"
Produced by Richard Hartley; written by Richard O'Brien
1975 Did not make pop charts

As you may have guessed by this point, I frequently measure musical history as being B.R. and A.R.--Before the Ramones and After the Ramones. If I were just speaking culturally, I could use The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a similar watershed, since I believe it marks an important milestone for a sizable segment of my own generation.

But Rocky Horror is only a cultural milestone. It is not a musical milestone. The whole point of Rocky Horror, both on stage and on screen, was its references back to an earlier mode of pop. Like the original stage version of Grease (but not Randall Kleiser's eventual film adaptation), Rocky Horror was part of a general deconstruction of the 1950s that went on in the 1970s. Like the original Grease, The Lords of Flatbush, The Wanderers, etc., Rocky Horror was about uncovering the simmering sexual conflicts that were under the mainstream culture of the postwar era.

But the key to this particular deconstruction (much of it innocuously filed under the greater heading of "rock and roll revival") was that it was innately conservative. The music had to sound like the music of twenty years before so that the sexual undercurrents of that earlier era could be uncovered. From a purely musical standpoint, the only odd touch in a track like "Time Warp" are the theraminlike harmony vocals on the choruses. Those seem like a bit of an overstatement.

At least for this particular song, I think the sound of Rocky Horror was much less transgressive than its image. Listen to the soundtrack recording of this song, and it's just a lovely little dancetrack. But do you see how those people are dressed? If Brad and Janet just stepped out of a 1950s movie, the music wouldn't necessarily unsettle them but the thriftstore aesthetic of the guests' outfits would. Hippies popularized thrift stores, but punks and proto-punks turned them into essential supply depots for subcultural style. Call it postmodernism, call it bricolage, but the youths of the Sex Pistols' generation went into a thrift store to find familiar clothes that they could reassemble into an unfamiliar, slightly offputting ensemble.

Greil Marcus and others later called this detournage. During the 1970s, that's what Rocky Horror did visually to the 1950s and the Ramones did aurally to the early 1960s. They pioneered the mashup in a pre-digital world. Eventually, the technology caught up with them,