A Word or Two about "Downtown Bands"

880. NEW YORK DOLLS, "Personality Crisis"
Produced by David Krebs, Steve Leber, Paul Nelson & Sylvain Sylvain; written by David Johansen & Johnny Thunders
1973 Did not make pop charts

881. LIVING COLOUR, "Cult Of Personality "
Produced by Mick Jagger & Ed Stasium; written by Living Colour
Epic 68611 1989 Billboard: # 13

"Downtown bands"--I've used the phrase at least once, and I probably should explain it before I get too much further. As far as I can tell, the phrase is specific to New York City. Bands that played Providence, for example, would never be referred to in that way, because in Providence a small club like Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel is in the same part of town as a big indoor arena like The Dunk. Both venues are "downtown," so the phrase is meaningless there. In New York, though, especially back when the Nokia was still a huge movie theatre called the Loews Astor Plaza and Bond's was only intermittently open, the big shows were in midtown, usually at the Garden, and the small clubs were all "downtown."

As my namechecks would suggest, the phrase's peak usage was probably limited in time as well, mostly to the 70s and 80s, maybe a little into the 90s. It reflects, not just a geogaphical or demographic distinction, but a cultural one as well: a two-tiered vision of the local music scene, not quite an avant garde, more of an ersatz bohemia, centered most famously around CBGBs but also around other Village venues like Kenny's Castaways or even a little further north to the late, lamented Max's Kansas City. There was a certain reverse snob appeal to these venues, the idea being that the smaller the club was, the better (or more "authentic" the show) would be. In point of fact, quite a number of acts that later played arenas started out in clubs like this, but if you wanted bragging rights among the cool kids, you had to say you saw those bands in a small club first.

Did downtown bands actually sound any different, though? I don't know. Here are tracks from two exemplary downtown bands, both off their first albums, and the only telling aspect of their sound is how clean it isn't. Instruments and vocals are falling all over each other here. There's no real attempt to separate out each element so that we can hear the lyrics and parts distinctly. It's more like listening to Louis Armstrong playing fills in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band than listening to the carefully crafted (if still improvisational) sonic architecture of the Hot 5s and 7s.

Indeed, one could argue that the downtown rock scene was to New York in the 1970s and 1980s what transplanted New Orleans jazz was to Chicago in the 1920s. More precisely, if we can move beyond Armstrong, downtown bands were to both New York and popular music in the 1970s what bebop combos were in the 1940s: an escape valve for an artform that had moved from cult to mainstream in too short a time for its diehard fans to fully absorb the shock. This is no knock on the mainstream pop forms of those eras--as you can probably tell, I'm very fond of arena rock and I'm as likely to listen to swing as I am to bebop--but rock was going through an identity crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, just as jazz was in the 1940s and 1950s. In both cases, the two-tiered performance system allowed the connoisseurs a listening space of their own, even if some of us still liked sampling both kinds of performance.

If this means, however, that around about 2020 some restaurants are going to start serving "punk brunch" on Sundays . . . well, that's where I draw the line.

While America Slept

501. RAMONES, "I Wanna Be Sedated"
Produced by Tommy Erdelyi & Ed Stasium; written by the Ramones
1978 Did not make pop charts

502. SONIC YOUTH, "Teenage Riot"
Produced by Nick Sansano; written by Sonic Youth
1987 Did not make pop charts

Two songs about rock bands, a bracket of narcolepsy to cover a decade.

When the Ramones recorded "I Wanna Be Sedated," it was a narrowly biographical work, just a song about a desperate urge to block out the bombardment of sensation that attended a nonstop tour, one that the band sometimes seemed to be on for its entire existence.

Very quickly, though, the song became an anthem, maybe one of the most widely recognized rock songs ever that never made the Billboard Hot 100. That in itself says something. The song didn't hit suddenly. It spread like a virus. Once exposed ,75% of the youth who heard it could never get it out of their heads. Yes, that was what it felt like, even if you weren't in a rock band: jesus christ it's just too much make it stop just give me my head back from all this overstimulation sure I'll try ritalin whatever.

Fast forward nine years to Sonic Youth, everybody's new favorite downtown New York band, who sometimes played Ramones covers for their encores at Maxwell's, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s. (Because of Manhattan's draconian cabaret laws, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s was in Hoboken, New Jersey.) Despite their affinity, Sonic Youth was in some ways the Ramones' mirror image. The Ramones always wanted to be widely popular but ended up serving a sizable cult. Sonic Youth always wanted to be a cult band and tried to hide their true love of pop under an overcompensating level of postmodern winking. They knew enough Madonna to cover her in the late 80s but hid it under the moniker of Ciccone Youth; they covered the Carpenters's best song, but they did it for a pro-choice benefit album.

The most important difference, though, is one of time: in "I Wanna Be Sedated," Joey Ramone wanted to keep sleeping; in "Teenage Riot," Thurston Moore wants to wake up. And while the Ramones aren't singing about anything more than a rock and roll tour, Sonic Youth is purposefully singing about something much larger. As critics realized from the second Daydream Nation (the album on which the song appears) was released twenty years ago, this is an indictment of young apathy in the Reagan era, and it's pretty scathing if surprisingly indirect.

As a member of the generation under indictment here, I could point to all sorts of things that we successfully resisted in those years--apartheid, US involvement in Central America, etc.--but the very fact that I'm emphasizing resistance rather than direct political confrontation might be enough to constitute yet another charge against semi-conscious ol' us. But your honor, you can't indict an entire generation on the basis of just two rock and roll songs. Look at all that these other, worthy, alternative teens accomplished in that decade, the ones who didn't fritter away their time going to rock clubs. Basta. We slept, in part because we were tired of the 60s, which seemed to drag on endlessly into the 70s, and of hippies and their phony Beatlemania and their endless to-do lists because the planet was never perfect enough for them.

Eventually, we did wake up, but we should have set the alarm earlier. We had too much to do that day.

Walking in Central Park, Singing after Dark

330. ROLLING STONES, "Miss You"
Produced and written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards (aka "The Glimmer Twins")
Rolling Stones 19307 1978 Billboard # 1

This is a ghost story, pure and simple, and the spirit in question is a love that's going or gone, quite possibly because of the singer's own actions. If you want to be narrowly biographical about it, it may be about the slow dissipation of Mick's marriage to Bianca, which would still technically last two more years after the single was released. If you want to wax musicological, it may be about the slide from discotheques to disco, fed by a beat that Billy Preston allegedly passed on to Charlie Watts during the Stones' dates at El Mocambo in 1977; about how, even if you frequent 54, you can still wish you were going to a go-go the way you used to back when. But personally I've always thought that this is a song about New York, as so much of Some Girls is about that city in the odd cultural twilight of the 1970s. When Mick and Keith chose it as one of the two songs they sang at the Concert for New York two months after 9/11, I was even more convinced. This is a song about remembering what used to be, what should be, but secretly wanting to revel in the dirty truth of what is. And if that doesn't describe New York City in the late 1970s, then I don't know what does.