The Physics Of Music, Justice and Time

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The Physics Of Music, Justice and Time
by Norm Geddis - March 19, 2009

second heaven

The key to good music is years of unholy terror followed by rage inducing boredom. For this reason, music sucks about half of the time. You can't get much done waiting for the Luftwaffe to drop a doodlebug on your home. That comes years later, when the whirl of the V1 remains in your head and you've lived through a decade of post-war rationing. Much has been written on why there were Mods, Hippies, Punks, Grunge kids. It's all this same cycle, the same clock coming around to twelve again.

I remember one midnight vividly.

My little corner of the world was Los Angeles, California in the late seventies and early eighties - not the Los Angeles of Less Than Zero, but the one of steelworkers, auto workers and longshoremen. Now I didn't grow up with doodlebugs overheard. My terror was more in my imagination, and the wellspring of the imaginations around me. My terror came from the Great Would. Would the economy collapse. Would inflation take my last dime. Would the middle class disappear. Would America degenerate into a society of armed drug gangs battling in the streets, and displaced industrial workers existing behind the counters at McDonalds. Would the Soviet Union give birth to the end times. Would there be a nuclear war. Would Armageddon come.

Outside of my imagination, the eighties were boring - that is until Challenger crashed, Reagan's people were caught with a bag of gunpowder in one hand and a bag of cocaine in the other, and Communism crashed for want of blue jeans and washing machines. And yes, that is how it all happened. Anyone who says differently just wants their PHD.

Out of this fear and boredom came an unimposing Chinese woman, Esther Wong. For a short, or long history of her restaurant, Google or wiki Madame Wong's. Briefly, she possessed the genius (or desperation) to turn her suffering Chinese restaurant into the premier club for punk and new wave bands in the Los Angeles area. I have no great Madame Wong encounter story, more or less I existed as a bystander. I went there first and foremost for the same reason I went to most Chinese restaurants, cheap booze and a lax ID policy, as I wasn't quite 21 yet.

Lots of bands played Madame Wongs who everyone knew were going to be huge, The Police, Go Go's and Bangles to name a few, but that wasn't why I fell in love with place. Now in the cloud of my memory, which I'm never sure is my own anymore, I may not have seen all of my favorite bands at Madame Wongs, but in the perfect place in my mind, and blanketing the Great Would, that is where they are always playing; Green on Red, The Dream Syndicate and The Rain Parade are the holy trinity of my youth, and Madame Wong's is the pearly gates.

All three of these bands played in my backyard so to speak, and not a one of them got the justice they deserved. They came close but still fell short in the UK and Europe. By the early nineties they had all moved on, some finding a little more success in bands like Gutterball and Mazzy Star. These are the bands about whom PBS should be showing documentaries during beg week. They should fill the Los Angeles Colosseum during their reunion tour.

By the way, none of the members of these bands would want any of this. But I don't care. I'm an old fart in my chair and I want it, for myself and to piss my good taste on the world.

See, about an hour after this midnight something diabolical happened. And more than software, downloads and trading, this next thing killed the music industry. Control. Maybe some of it was the best of intentions. They didn't want another Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix to meet a tragic end. So instead of using a band like Green on Red itself, who had something of an unstable front man in Dan Stuart, the big-time music industry found substitutes, like R.E.M. - more stable personalities. Anyone else notice how much Creed sounded like Pearl Jam? That wasn't a mistake or co-incidence. It's called marketing.

That was the morning it all started. And I'd say by now it's close to midnight two days later. We've been terrorized and now we're getting quite bored. So just to show I'm not so much of an old fart, I'm going to spend the rest of the day enjoying Skullflower, Boris and Sunn.

Norm Geddis
Along with his wife Jane, Norm owns Counter-Clock Records and co-hosts the show, Accidental Nostalgia, on Radio Dentata every Thursday at 7pm EST.

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