A) 1/2 Japanese - Loud and Horrible
Half Japanese are true rock n roll icons with a well documented history (up to 2 records a year for nearly 20 years!). It took years for me to develop a relationship with Half Japanese (still ½ on this album). I was fortunate enough to see them at some point in 1993, when I was pretty young, on back-to-back nights. The first night in an over-sized club amidst an under-sized crowd. Then the next night in a smallish cinder block basement. My initial impression? Weird, I didn’t get it. I liked their tour-mates, New York Superchunk-alikes, Sleepyhead. I found them [Sleepyhead] far easier to grasp at that time (they would go on to develop into breezy semi-60’s retro-pop). I may say now that I was fortunate to have had this experience, but it took 5 years to become conscious of that fact. I did not dislike Half Japanese in any way. I just didn’t have enough of a history with music to understand their true significance.
This is the lineup I saw:
I believe this would have been when they were releasing records on Safehouse. I’m not sure if they had toured with Nirvana yet. I just remember what it sounded like (shambling, arty and inept) and what they looked like (old, arty and inept). The first night was about complete confusion. They were performing in a cavernous downtown Pontiac nightclub, known predominantly for post-college techno dance nights. It all came together in my mind the next night, one and a half hours away in a basement in Lansing, watching them play their hearts out while lit by 2 bare bulbs in the ceiling. I liked that they were weird and that they rocked. I sensed some kind of excitement in the crowd, the band and the whole event. It can’t say it reminded me of anything because I had never seen anything like it. On the way home, the feeling I expressed was of bemused approval. "But, man, I really liked that Sleepyhead band." The slighter older, all knowing friend (who I can only assume asked me to come along, on what was clearly his adventure, so I would drive) looked over at me with disapproval.
That entire night was filled with a befuddling sense of wild mystery. That was one of first times I took my parents over-sized black sedan onto one of our nation’s highways. The first time I saw a basement show. Barely aware of what the night may have meant, we drove careening down the highway home, coughing while smoking cigarettes. Lansing seemed an impossible distance. The entire occurence would become a hazy almost forgotten memory. I remained conscious of Jad Fair’s seemingly endless collaborations. But, as I grew into the heavier sounds of the post-hardcore, post-grunge indie-rock of the mid-90’s, the tendency for under-produced jangle, the overly sincere childishness and (what seemed like) the pretentious naiveté of Jad Fair remained solely of peripheral interest.
Then five or six years later someone (I can’t remember who) loaned to me Jeff Feuerzeig’s Half Japanese documentary, “The Band That Would Be King” (which, as chance would have it, was actually filmed around the same time I saw them). As I sat with the girl I was living with at that time, watching this collection of the nerdiest half retarded people extol the virtues of this bizarre, seemingly inept band, it all came flooding back. Oh! I saw these guys once in a basement in Lansing. Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. She didn’t care. “These guys are real?!” she asked. "Yeah, it's remarkable but they're very real." She was completely charmed and tickled. I was completely intrigued (as much so as when I first learned that the Ramones were real, years after having seen Rock n Roll High School at a cousin's house). I was particularly drawn to a clip of the band on TV at some point in what appeared to be the early 80’s. They were franticly playing some kind of crazed blues. It sounded like the ultimate Velvet's inspired total-noise-freak-out. It had a great, simple chorus, “I know how it feels [long pause] … Bad!”. There were women dancing, or rather flailing about, dressed in cheaply homemade skeleton suits, half attacking the band. One of the band members was throwing this guitar around (Don Fleming of the Velvet Monkees & Gumball). Psychedelic, rainbow wave patterns were green screened onto the background. Remember those inexplicable, freaky deaky, colored oil and light displays they used to project in theaters before the movie started? Or was that just in my neighborhood? Anyway, everything about the clip was was raw and completely unhinged. It was totally harsh, punk and crazy! What era of Half Japanese was this?
As it turned out it the band who originally recorded that song (off of their 1980 “Loud" Lp) were actually called 1/2 Japanese, as the band called themselves at this point in time, when brother David Fair was playing the role of primary song-writer. The band on this record presents an unbridled assault on all that is musical, fashionable, or, to some, well beyond anything sensible. Instead they created a spastic rock record well outside the worlds of punk, new wave, no wave, free jazz, or any brand of avant-garde pretense. This six piece incarnation of the band (2 saxophones, drums, 2 guitars, bass and both brothers on vocals) cultivated an indefinable sound. Skronk before skronk. Crafted around the Fair’s brutally frank sincerity is a collection of crazed (or ½ crazed as the case may be) sonic blasts of retrograde rock n roll. That is to say, this Half [1/2] Japanese are trying to make a sincere rock record (or at least the two Fair brothers are). A heartfelt rock record in the spirit of the heroes of their teenage years spent in Ann Arbor, Michigan enjoying 60’s pre-punk paragons Stooges, MC5 and Destroy All Monsters, alongside a healthy dose of Detroit soul radio.
With their first single, Half Alive, coming out in 1977, you can draw a straight line from the Stooges and MC5, to Half Japanese (check out “Dumb Animals” and “High School Tonight”, respectively), to contemporaneous, self-conscious rock n roll primitives, the Cramps (“Rosemary’s Baby”), to the most sub-moronic psychedelia of the Butthole Surfers (“Baby Wants Music”), and on and on, to any band that would come to cultivate the use of noise, clutter, chaos and serendipity as a distinct part of their general esthetic. Sonic Youth, the Gories, Boredoms, To Live and Shave in LA, Deerhoof, and every other band with a studied chaotic sensibility, owe a dept to the not-so-studied choatic minds of David and Jad Fair. The primary differences between ½ Japanese here and those ostensibly art house acts being the idiot savant-ish nature of 1/2 Japanese's rock n roll sincerity. Realize that their lyrics come from the Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson, Shaggs school of hyper sappy somance, and one will be forced to face the fact that, while the music Jad and David Fair instigate may call to mind Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground at their most sonically brazen, their hearts and minds lie solidly upon the same early American popular music that informed all of those pioneering acts to make their own crazy sounds. And so the cycle continues.
Listen to "Rosemary’s Baby” and “Vampire" off of Loud and Horrible respectively
at Mild Anxiety podcast
http://mildanxiety.podomatic.com/
B) MIrrors - Another Nail in the Coffin
Born in Cleveland, at the heart of the crumbling post-industrial rust pit that gave rise to punk via the electric eels, Rocket from the Tombs, the Dead Boys, the Pagans, and, later on, Pere Ubu and Devo. Rock journalists would describe such a collection of forward minded rockers as vibrant. Anyone who has borne witness to the ascent of a genuinely homegrown, revolutionary music scene knows that, in truth, the genesis of such scenes, the vivaciousness that fan-boys and scribes revel in from a distance, usually stems from a distinct lack of vibrancy in the immediate environment surrounding the few who would give rise to those movements. Whether it be those willing to brave the downtrodden streets of New York’s Bowery district in the early 1970’s, a beer-soaked group of acquaintances in an equally rain-soaked town in America’s Pacific Northwest reveling in the slowed down rhythms of My War era Black Flag, or a small loose-knit group of working class 20 some-things with similar interests in 60’s rock, early blues and vintage equipment, gathering at a teensy club in Detroit’s notoriously crumbling Cass Corridor.
Whether these movements end up in iconic marginalization (the Ramones) or in platinum records (Nirvana, the White Stripes), their beginnings are always strikingly humble. There is an interesting point in the Ramones documentary, End of the Century, where Dee Dee Ramone defines the quintessential CBGB’s experience as being [to him], “20 people barely paying attention while Television played on stage.” In the case of the White Stripes, Detroit’s Gold Dollar, where they famously played a majority of their formative shows, was a tiny, dingy little club, generally crowded with little more than 30 patrons.
Into this ever-growing pantheon of punk heroes and legends enter the band known simply as Mirrors, founding members of punk rock in their own right, yet barely a blip on the radar of the greater history that would follow them. Accounts of Mirrors history are hazy at best. They reputedly played no more than five (or so) shows in their heyday, one of which was the truly historic gathering of Mirrors, the electric eels and Rocket from the Tombs (all for 75 cents!). They began in the early 70’s in tribute to the Velvet Underground. They bore members of the electric eels, and Rocket from the Tombs, eventually morphing into the equally seminal and (not quite as) obscure proto-punk group, the Styrenes. They never released more than a single or two until well beyond the point of their untimely demise. And thus a legend grows. More history is available on the band but the facts seldom become more concrete than; the band was lead by longtime Lou Reed disciple Jamie Klimek (future Styrene), featured various players (including future Pere Ubu member Jim Jones, and future Rocket from the Tombs member Craig Bell) most active of which was Paul Marotta (concurrently of the aforementioned eels, and future Styrenes leader).
That’s about it. Many bitter tales, and vast amounts of conjecture are available for anyone and everyone to Google away. But, for a band who, in their own way, were integral to the birth of punk rock, precious little concrete info stands to prop up their (supposedly) legendary status. Jean Genet wrote “The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tribute.” In the case of Mirrors we (fortunately) have a collection of songs. A posthumous collection of their early 70’s material entitled “Hands in My Pockets”. And this, crudely recorded and hastily thrown together (according to the liner notes), collection of songs produced in London and the Netherlands by a briefly reunited ('84 to '86) and reconfigured group (Marotta, Klimek & drummer Paul Laurence), these are some rockin’, abrasive pop songs filled with humor, wit, and crazy, noisy, psychedelic guitar solos clearly and heavily indebted to Lou Reed’s most sub-primitive guitar freak-outs.
It’s hard to gauge the nature of their 70’s output from this collection. The songs tend to by self deprecating and deliberately quirky. Klimek’s vocals are of the somewhat whiney, off-key variety that would later become a staple for underground bands of the 80’s and 90’s (i.e. the Cure, the Smiths, Dinosaur Jr.). Some of the songs come off as overly complicated (despite their inherent primivitism), with vocal melodies of a sing-song nature that becomes a little annoying as the collection plods on (in particular “I Love Joan”, “To Do We Do” and “Good To Me”). That is not to say that they [the band and the songs] aren’t without their own charms and merits. The influence of vastly influential pre-punks Jonathan Richman and Tom Verlaine is evident all over this, as much as is the hand and heart of aforementioned rock n roll godfather and fake-fag, Lou Reed. These tunes definitely rock but at 26 tracks (damn CD’s !) the whole collection is, beyond a doubt, overly long. Were this collection whittled down to a more appropriate album length (say a dozen or so of the best track), this band would be well beyond reproach. The 5th track on the album, “I Think I’m Falling”, is a classic, with a brilliantly frenzied guitar solo and an undeniably catchy hook, as great as any material written at this point in time (’86) by other similar acts playing driving, pop-conscious rock n roll with a touch of punk (i.e. the Dream Syndicate, Meat Puppets, Husker DU, etc.) but it seems lost in a sea of excess as much of this material wears on the ear of the listener upon inital and repeated listening.
Listen to Mirrors "I Think I'm Falling" on Gone Vs. Gone's "Mild Anxiety" podcast
at
http://mildanxiety.podomatic.com/
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