Loud and Louder

Higher Ground

2011-07-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

Ben Harper has always been inspired by roots music. But when he made a gospel album with the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, he found himself truly moved

By Steve Appleford

They are old men now, all well into their 70s, three blind men sitting like Buddha on folding chairs in a place called Studio B. And they know this room, somewhere beneath the ancient tower headquarters of Capitol Records, where they have come again and again to make music of infinite warmth and salvation in studios once used by Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole in their better days. Today, the Blind Boys of Alabama are at work on a brand-new spiritual written by a much younger man, singing and harmonizing together from behind their dark wraparound glasses to a sweet melody of hope and release.

“We’re going to make it TO THE CHURCH ON TIME,” they sing, voices blending into something powerful, soulful, and deep, drifting into wordless humming and grandfatherly affection. “Ooooooo-mmmm-make it! … Keep on movin’, keep on movin’ to the church on time!”

It is gospel music largely as the Blind Boys have sung it since their earliest days in the glee club at the Talladega Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind, just outside Birmingham, Alabama. They were children then, finally leaving the school as teenagers in 1945 with two sighted friends, all of them crowded into a 1939 Buick and calling themselves the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, with the name painted in big, fancy letters right on the door. By the next decade, they were known as the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, scoring gospel soul hits and refusing any suggestion that they sing secular songs of love and lust.

There are just three original Blind Boys left now. And singing with them this afternoon is Ben Harper, who wrote the song “Church on Time” and is guiding the session anxiously from the control room. It is dark, and somewhere here is a “cuss jar” ready for a financial deposit from anyone with a loose and wicked tongue. (Ben knows the jar well: “That was the shit! That was the bomb!”) Harper bounces behind a microphone, hands in his pockets or pumping the air as he sings a lead vocal on what is only supposed to be a “scratch” track, to be replaced later by one of the Blind Boys. But the man is on fire himself, doing a fine Otis Redding approximation, like something right out of the Stax/Volt vaults. He goes deep into his “soul voice” to shout of Revelations and his Sunday best, as if he’s back in church or just tapping his memories of growing up with Blind Boys records spinning at home, along with others by the Mighty Clouds, Mahalia Jackson, the Golden Gate Quartet, and doomed soul man Sam Cooke. One record cover in particular burned into his memory: depicting the old Blind Boy gospel singers dressed in long robes, ready to testify.

Between takes, Harper steps into the vocal booth to sit with the Blind Boys, talking excitedly about their performance, offering the old men pillows, taking a call on the cell phone from Juan Nelson, musical and physical anchor to Harper’s band the Innocent Criminals. They all listen to the tape.

“I think it sounds fantastic, and I don’t want to wear it out,” Harper says, moving around the room. “It sounds perfect! To even suggest another take is absurd.”

Which is how it’s been these last two days at Studio B in Hollywood. Fast, effortless. It is late January 2004. Harper’s last album took three months to record, hardly long by industry standards, but now the Blind Boys are about ready to record a fifth tune before the day is done. And all of it comes after Harper initially turned down an offer to produce an entire album for the Blind Boys. He was set to collaborate here on just two songs, if that many. But now something is happening – something Harper is beginning to feel himself: These joyous, wounded throwaway scratch vocals he’s recording are among the best performances of his seven-album career.

“You don’t have time to overthink it,” Harper says later. “I try to keep things raw, anyway. But this – there’s no time for anything more than two takes.

“I want to strive to imperfection,” he continues. “The recording process has sterilized music. The more time you have to make things perfect, the more you tend to. When you don’t have time to, they’re just left perfectly undone.”

Harper is an obsessive student of rock and folk and blues and soul, a follower of mortal deities Hendrix and Marley and the great bluesmen and genuine hardscrabble folkies. He is a man with a weakness for the culture of music, a bearded collector of Nudie suits, those intricately cut and embroidered Western threads, just like the ones Gram Parsons and Gene Autry used to wear, singing and twanging in epic style. This explains why the man frets about any move that might feel or seem not genuine or true to the old traditions … which is maybe unfashionable at a time when the kings of classic rock are selling their histories to the highest bidder (Led Zeppelin to Cadillac, Aerosmith to Buick, Bob Dylan to Victoria’s Secret, ad nauseum). And this is not the first time Harper has reached back for guidance and inspiration: As a teenager, his mentor was folk bluesman Taj Mahal, the first to draft the young singer and side-guitarist from the small-town obscurity of Claremont, California, for some quality time on the road.

Harper has recorded with the likes of Motown’s supernatural Funk Brothers and John Lee Hooker, sometimes just sitting with the old bluesman on his couch to talk about the damn Dodgers. He found another brand of soul and salvation for his last album, 2003’s Diamonds on the Inside, by bringing in Ladysmith Black Mambazo for the dreamy, a cappella “Picture of Jesus,” a SoCal rocker who somehow fit in like a permanent member. His ease with a variety of righteous sounds and styles has left some confused, but it’s fully recognized and embraced by some of the originators, if not always by the critics.

The album he would eventually complete with the Blind Boys, There Will Be a Light, is focused entirely on the gospel he heard growing up, with some modern flashes of rock, reggae, and soul from the Innocent Criminals. Released by Virgin Records last September, the album is a contemporary exploration of the old-timey roots of American music, which owes its heart to gospel. The songs are not museum pieces. At their best, they are raw and wounded, heard in the hard twang and Delta echoes of “Well, Well, Well,” a Dylan song from his Born Again years, and transformed here by the Blind Boys into a timeless meditation on faith. Harper dug deep into his cache of gospel songs that never quite fit onto an album, stepping back from the microphone during “Satisfied Mind,” an epic showcase for the aging, still-strong voices of the Blind Boys.

Between sessions at Studio B, Blind Boy leader Clarence Fountain heaps praise. “He writes in our style,” Fountain says, his voice a sharp, comfortable rasp, his hair pulled back into a small knot behind his head. “When you find a guy that’s right, you can always sing better. The words are familiar. There’s no complication … . He writes what we can understand.”

Sitting beside him is Blind Boy Jimmy Carter, a smiling gentleman in suspenders, gospel partner for life. “If he throws it our way,” Carter says with a laugh, “we’ll take it.”

Fountain adds simply, “He loves the Blind Boys, and we love him, so that makes a difference.”

This was not the first time the Blind Boys collaborated with younger generations of players; in recent years they’ve worked with a range of singers and musicians, including Tom Waits and Chrissie Hynde. But with Harper, who occasionally performed with them on the road, the Blind Boys imagined an entire album, hearing sweet melodies and a spiritual connection in the younger man’s songs. Each of his collections have at least a moment or two of a spiritual bent, from the heartbreaking vulnerability of 2003’s “When She Believes” to the sound of faith and agony on the 1995 slide-guitar epic “God Fearing Man.” These tunes can be profoundly moving even to nonbelievers, as Harper is never proselytizing but merely reflecting depths of feeling understandable to anyone. But the Blind Boys are believers, who have vowed for six decades to never perform secular music, though they’re unafraid of exploring new sounds. (They once recorded “Amazing Grace” to the music of “House of the Rising Sun.”) Harper’s spirituals work for them.

Fountain still dreams of finally selling a million copies with this one. There Will Be a Light has already been nominated for three 2005 Grammy Awards. The Blind Boys have won before, but it is Harper’s first time as a Grammy nominee.

Harper first heard this kind of music as a child in Claremont, a small town outside Los Angeles with tree-lined streets and old storefronts, quiet rows of antique shops and ice cream parlors, much as it was when Harper grew up there. It’s where he discovered music, where he learned to play and build guitars amid the ancient instruments of his family’s music store, the Folk Music Center and Museum, founded back in 1958 by his grandparents. It was there that Harper first attempted to push roots to new levels, to find something personal, intimate and urgent in the old ways.

One day, Harper turned to the wall of instruments at the Folk Music Center and pulled down an obscure lap steel guitar called the Weissenborn, an instrument traditionally used by jazzy Hawaiian combos. It was not meant for the blues. Harper tried it anyway and immediately found his own voice. He’s expanded on that now, reaching both forward and backward for new energy and ideas, either from his own formidable band or the last surviving members of a group of blind seven-year-olds in Alabama who discovered a life and a future by singing the spirituals of the Deep South during the Depression, surviving right up into a new century.

The only momentary bump in the road during the making of There Will Be a Light came when Fountain was briefly unsure about the spiritual content of a particular song, still committed to avoiding the secular without apology. The song ultimately met his approval, as did more than a dozen other gospel tunes Harper had waiting.

“I’ve always been hyper-conscious and aware of not overweighing a record with gospel. I’ve walked that line,” Harper says. It turns out that the Blind Boys had been the missing ingredient. “To be able to bring these out and bring them to life at the highest level of living, breathing gospel music has been the shit for me.”

Two days before Christmas, Harper and his band are reunited in spirit once more with the Blind Boys. In a West L.A. studio, the singer-songwriter and his circle of sidemen are watching a video edit of a live concert by Harper and the Blind Boys last year at the Apollo Theater in Harlem – immortal venue to generations of soul, blues, gospel, pop, and hip-hop. It’s being prepared for an upcoming DVD release, and the sound and pictures are astonishing in their power and immediacy.

So Harper is back in another dark room, watching a large video monitor of the show, which erupted on the old stage after just one day of rehearsal. Juan Nelson is behind the soundboard, dressed in baggy denims, a large hoop earring against his cheek. On a nearby couch is actress Laura Dern, cradling her second child with Harper, a daughter still unnamed. Nelson, who has been Harper’s musical partner since his second album, 1995’s Fight for Your Mind, raises an eyebrow. “Juanita?”

Recently, Harper had lunch with an old friend who wondered if the gospel album indicated a new, permanent direction for the musician. He almost seemed worried. There Will Be a Light is his first album to concentrate on a single genre, but it remains only one flavor in his repertoire, like the old-school reggae album he still wants to record (echoing Marley and Tosh), or the folk record he plans to make someday with his mother.

Near the end of the film, Blind Boy Jimmy Carter wanders off the stage and into the audience, a fearless moment of musical communion, with only a helper carefully guiding him down the aisle, until Carter falls backward in a moment of musical, spiritual ecstasy. And as the musicians file off the stage, Harper can be seen hopping in excitement over what has just occurred, literally leaping over instruments and chairs.

When it’s all over and the screen goes black, there are cheers in the small room. But Nelson is quiet for a moment, clearly moved, even as he regrets the small errors that seemingly only he can hear. He looks at Harper, who appears elated. “We’ve been to church, baby! We’ve been to CHURCH!” says Nelson, his voice rising like he’s there in the pews right now. “And you sang your butt off, you really did.”

Los AngelesCityBeat, January 6, 2005

Photography by Steve Appleford

Patti Smith’s Revolutions

2011-07-12T18:58:00.000-07:00

The singer, writer, artist, and muse on a life of invention and fury

By Steve Appleford

She doesn’t seem to hear the motorcycle. Or to even know it’s there, roaring and coughing and rumbling only a few yards away. Patti Smith is immune to it, sitting calmly on a commissary patio outside NBC’s Studio 3, where she’ll soon be taping an appearance on The Tonight Show for a quick burst of stormy weather and her version of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” The other guests tonight? Dr. Phil and “the Jay Leno of Australia.” But it could just as easily be Leno himself on top of that rumbling motorbike, revving up another one of his custom hogs, and she wouldn’t know the difference. Smith makes her own noise.

“I guess it’s an interesting time for me,” she says, staring straight ahead, concentrating on her own words, maybe visualizing them right in front of her. “I never dreamed that I would still be performing at this time in my life, but I am. And I still think I have something to contribute.”

Her latest contribution is Twelve, a collection of new interpretations of old tunes, from Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” to a vaguely bluegrass take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Covering the songs of other artists has always been a part-time pastime for Smith, whose eruption from the New York rock underground essentially began with her stretched-out, free-verse explosion of Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” which Smith began cryptically with the words “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine … .”

When “Gloria” appeared on her 1975 debut album, Horses, she was nearly as old as Mick Jagger, but it still represented a clear generational break from the classic rock past, a rebellion against the overkill of the corporate rock machine. Smith would become the “punk priestess,” a singer-poet-sage, a South Jersey girl feeding off her obsession with the Stones, Dylan, and the great epic poets of France and the Beat Generation. She helped reinvent rock as a setting for bold, even literary revolt that can still be heard in much that has followed. Her 1979 “retirement” was a devastating loss for fans and the punk genre she helped create. But after the 1994 death of her husband, the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, she returned to action just in time for the ’90s alt-rock movement. Now 60, Smith’s renewed career proves that age is no hurdle as she approaches the BIG themes (death, love, war, politics, etc.) with an astonishing blend of ease and fire.

That original punk revolution was turned in on itself, as all revolutions do, becoming just another pop niche, another clique and fashion statement for kids in mohawks and piercings picked out with mom. In 2007, Patti Smith’s deeply personal music wouldn’t qualify on the punk-rock corporate scale. It’s too raw, too intimate.

Locals can see for themselves when Smith and her band perform the songs of Twelve, and others from her three decades of recordings, in a free August 16 concert at Santa Monica Pier’s Twilight Dance Series. (Info at Twilightdance.org.)

CityBeat: You’ve always included material by other songwriters in your work. What led you to record an entire album like this?
Patti Smith: I always wanted to. I just never felt qualified in the past to do a wide range of cover songs. I’ve tried all kinds of songs, and I always sing ’em bad or I can’t hit the notes. I’m no Christina Aguilera, that’s for sure. I just feel like at this point, I know everything I’m going to know about my voice, and as a human being I’ve gone through a lot of different things and I just felt ready to tackle challenging songs.

How did you choose the tracks?
It took a couple of years for “Gloria” to evolve into what it was. And in this instance, you know, you go into the studio and we have like a Vulcan Mind-Meld and see where we go with the song. Most of these songs happened organically in the studio. We didn’t work on them for two years live.

Some of them were very deliberate choices, like “Are You Experienced?” That was the first song we cut. We did it at Electric Ladyland [studios]. The spoken-word part is really Jimi’s lyrics from “Moon, Turn the Tides.” I chose [Tears for Fears’] “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” really for the lyrics. I was in a café and just feeling so frustrated and aghast at the news and what’s happening in our world, whether it’s just corporate globalization and just the greed of pharmaceutical companies, what’s happening in Iraq. And this song comes on, and it was just like a little answer. And I felt that song, just a little pop song, says in the sentence exactly what is systemically wrong with our world because about one percent of our population is ruling our world instead of the people.

With “Gloria,” you a spent a couple of years with it before recording it, and it became as much your song as Van Morrison’s.
Yeah, but also I have to say that you can’t really do that with most songs [anymore], because artists won’t give you the licensing. I developed [a version of] the Prince song “When Doves Cry” and put a biblical verse in the middle of it, and he blocked it. He made me take off the Bible verse, and the Hendrix Foundation does not allow you to put your own poetry on a Jimi Hendrix song. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to do that, and I actually had to pull songs off records and hold up release dates of records because an artist didn’t want poetry on their song, which is their right. So I didn’t want to screw around with that on this record, because it’s painful. You know, you work really hard on a song and you invest it and embellish it – whether it’s from the Bible or one’s own poetry – and it just winds up in a can somewhere like some old Orson Welles movie. So I just decided on this record to remain as true to the artist’s lyrical conception as possible.

What biblical verse was that?
It was from the “Song of Solomon,” where she says something like: “Oh my love, my dove, I wait for you.” It was really quite beautiful, there was nothing compromising to it. I mean, Prince writes great songs, and I chose to do this song because he wrote such a beautiful song, but it’s really his right, so I don’t want to criticize another artist to exercise their right.

So on this record my aim wasn’t to develop my own poetry. My aim was to take songs that had either beautiful or relevant lyrics and make the lyrics very articulate and make them so people can hear them. I have danced to “Gimme Shelter” a thousand times and was never totally aware of the potency of that song lyrically. I knew it was a great song, but the fire of that song is so overwhelming that I never even thought about the lyrics. So my agenda was to be very attentive to each artist’s lyrics.

Who are your inspirations as a singer? You have a very unique style.
I never really had aspirations of being a singer. I liked to perform, but I grew up in a time where everybody sang on the streets in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and most of my friends sang better than me. We just all sang really to amuse ourselves, and I can’t say where I got my singing voice from because I still don’t really understand it. I know who influenced me as a performer, whether it was Lotte Lenya or Nina Simone and Darlene Love. I study Maria Callas all the time. I guess what I learn from other singers isn’t really vocal technique, because I’m totally unschooled, but I do learn how to deliver the inner narrative of the song emotionally or to tell a story.

Grace Slick was a really big inspiration. She delivered something revolutionary poetically, with strength that was really beyond gender, and she made a big impression on me. But I never thought of singing. When I first started performing I was doing poetry, and I fell into chanting and then a little bit of singing. It just happened organically. But I didn’t know anything about singing when I did Horses. I was just singing from the seat of my pants.

I read that you met Hendrix in New York.
I met Jimi Hendrix in 1970 when they had a party at Electric Ladyland. I was pretty young, 23 or something. I didn’t have the nerve to go in, so I just sat on the steps. And then he was leaving. He was on his way to England to do the Isle of Wight Festival and he was by himself and he saw me on the steps. He started talking to me, and then he told me all about what he was going to do with the studio and his rock ’n’ roll as a universal language. I was so excited, and then he left and never came back. But I remembered what he said, and I’ve always tried to incorporate his hopes and dreams for rock ’n’ roll into my own philosophy.

One song of yours that is often performed by others is “Dancing Barefoot.” It’s practically a standard. Does it surprise you when a song has that kind of impact?
I’m always real optimistic. I always think every time we do something that the whole world is going to love it. I don’t do things hoping that I’ll stay in a little underground room and that just a handful of hip people will like it. Every record I do, I always have hopes that everybody will like it. I have a big imagination.

It’s often been written that Dylan and the Stones were important influences for you, and also the Beats and other poets. Was the first thing to open your mind music or poetry?
Books. I always wanted to read, and I loved reading. When I was a kid, I read fairy tales and classics and Peter Pan and Pinocchio, and it was just always books. And then when I got older, rock ’n’ roll really took over everything. I loved art. I loved Picasso, the abstract expressionists, French film. But rock ’n’ roll encompassed everything: political feelings and poetry, sexuality, revolution. It was all there, and we had such a strong sense of community. We were all sort of listening to the same stuff and being guided and expanded by our music. There was just so much happening, but it all seemed a part of this big collective that had to do with politics, art, poetry.

Were you reading the Beats from early on or did you find them later?
I didn’t read them until I met them, truthfully. When I moved into the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, I met these people. I met Gregory Corso and William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and they became my friends and mentors. Then I was doing readings with them. So I was hearing them and listening to them and learning from them, and to this day I’m still mining Allen Ginsberg. But the great thing about the Beat poets is they were doing something new, but all of them were highly connected with the past. They had their mentors, too. To read Allen Ginsberg is to read William Blake and Walt Whitman. To read Gregory Corso is to read Byron, Keats, and Shelley. So these people, as political and groundbreaking as they were, still kept the thread with the great work of the past. I believe in that. That’s how I conduct myself.

That thread seemed to come very naturally to you.
I was given the tools. You look at Jim Morrison, obviously reading Rimbaud, and so was Bob Dylan. You have your blood ancestors and you have your spiritual ancestors, and I think that all of us, some who feel disenfranchised from the world or our families or our community, can always find friends and mentors in this spiritual line.

After the ’60s were over and you began making your own writing and music in the ’70s, did you feel like you were continuing something – or that you were part of something new?
I wasn’t even sure how I felt. I know what my goals were. I had an actual cognizant goal to create a bridge between our past, or our very recent past, and our futures. In ’73, ’74, I felt a floundering. We lost some of our great people – Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Bob Dylan had retreated after his motorcycle accident. There were new things happening, and a lot of it seemed very self-indulgent, glamorous. We weren’t growing in the way that I imagined we would grow, and I was very concerned about the state of rock ’n’ roll. It might seem presumptuous, but in that period of my life I loved rock ’n’ roll probably more than anything, and I didn’t want to see it get so decadent. Basically, I just wanted to be some clarion call and to remind the new guard to take over rock ’n’ roll. It’s the people’s art, and I really felt that we needed to step up and not let it get into the hands of corporations and big business and merchandising and rich rock stars.

It also led to another kind of audience. It opened up the minds of those who were hearing it.
Everybody did their part. Now I think we’re on the tip of another interesting time. I feel the same kind of energy brewing as I did then. I can’t say that I completely comprehend it, but I can feel that the new guard is up to all kinds of stuff, and they’ve got whole new tools and a whole new landscape that we didn’t have. They have the Internet. They have file-sharing. They work under the radar of the music business. They’re feeling things out, and they will gather their strength and see that collectively they have a huge amount of power in this world to make political change, to merge really quickly through technology. And if they set their minds to it and decide to make change – whether it’s toward developing new political parties or uniting to make change in terms of our environment or just musically, completely transfigure the landscape – they’re on their way.

You’ve had a special relationship with photography, initially as a kind of a muse for Robert Mapplethorpe and other important photographers.
I was really proud of that. I’ve always loved photography. When I was young, I loved looking at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and looking at the great photographs by Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Avedon, William Klein. There are so many great photographers just in the fashion world. And then going out of that, Stieglitz, Robert Frank, Julia Margaret Cameron. I’ve always loved art, and I’ve always loved the idea of the artist’s muse, whether it was Frida Kahlo, being both artist and muse for Diego Rivera, or just the famous models of the late 19th century. To have a place in the canon of muses is a very nice thing. I was the first person that Robert Mapplethorpe photographed, and I was his first model, and I know he liked to photograph me.

You lived together for a while?
About five years.

When he was photographing you, was it always a serious session of “We’re going to make photographs now,” or could it sometimes be casual?
At the Chelsea Hotel, he just followed me around endlessly, taking photographs. You know, he was figuring things out, which he did very quickly. After a short period of time, he knew exactly what he wanted. He wasn’t a snapshot guy. And he wasn’t a guy who did motor-driving. He took 12 pictures or he’d take six. He knew what he wanted, and when he got it, that was it. He never labored. I always think it’s funny when people want to take my picture now and they tell me how much they like Robert, and then they want to take 300 pictures to get one shot. And I always say, after they take the eighth one, by now, the cover of Horses would have been done.

Did seeing how his photographs captured you affect your own perspective? Or surprise you?
No, because I just was the way that I was. I could see how much he cared for me in his pictures. So that’s still something that I see when I look at a photograph that Robert took of me. I know what’s in his mind. I know the aspect of me that he saw in that photograph, that maybe someone else wouldn’t have seen. He was my boyfriend for some years, and then we evolved in different ways and we were best friends.

Recently in Aperture magazine, you published some photographs of your own. How long have you been taking pictures?
I’ve taken pictures throughout the years. After Fred died, I picked up the Polaroid camera and started taking meditative still-lifes. It was a way of dealing with the complexity of my feelings or grieving. I wasn’t able to write, because the things that I was processing – losing Robert and then Richard Sohl, my piano player, then Fred, then my brother – I could hardly speak about it. Taking photographs was a very abstract and silent way of dealing with my feelings.

When I started going back on the road, I find when I’m performing and singing on the rivers of the road, it’s very hard to write. But it’s a very good place to take photographs, and especially because you visit so many interesting places. Therefore, I have pictures of Keats’s bed and Virginia Woolf’s desk or Herman Hesse’s typewriter. I might be in 30 countries in 40 days, so it gives me all of these different points of view. When you’re performing, my concern is how the people are doing. Are they having fun? Are they being challenged? Are we building an interesting night? Are we communicating? So it’s very nice for me to have something that’s just mine that I can do in solitary. I really just like going off down an alley somewhere, finding a little church or courtyard or child or something and just having a moment that’s mine.

Los Angeles CityBeat, July 26, 2007

Cover illustration by Nathan Ota

L.A. Times Video Interview: Maroon 5

2011-07-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

Interview by Steve Appleford

Beasts to Men

2011-07-11T03:07:00.000-07:00

Two decades after their alarming debut, the ex-jerks of the Beastie Boys have survived to create a new concert film, a lot of smart music, and some really dumb jokes

By Steve Appleford

The good people crave enlightenment. They seek answers to the eternal questions. Things like: Do you guys smoke pot? Will you come to Lima, Peru? What about the Knicks? Will you play my house party next weekend? Why do every one of your songs make me want to dance my ass off? Aren’t you supposed to be Buddhist or something? Any regrets? The brotherhood of Beastie is here to help, ready to solve these confounding mysteries at last.

And what about Three 6 Mafia winning the damn Oscar? “Dolly Parton was robbed,” says the Beastie known as Ad-Rock, a.k.a. Adam Horovitz, now squinting and chewing gum on stage with a face as rubbery and cartoon-elastic as Popeye’s. The Beastie Boy called Mike D., a.k.a. Michael Diamond, concurs: “Someone was clearly the victim there.” The bearded longshoreman dude in the down jacket to their right says nothing. Adam Yauch sits back and smiles. He knows nothing serious will transpire here. And that is their rare charm, coming off at once stupid and brilliant, three urban knuckleheads now cracking 40 who have survived the decades as hardcore, hip-hop, jazzbo, underground, overground pop sensations. They have grown into Beastie men, a trio of musical visionaries and accidental comics, even as the time between albums seems to grow longer and longer.

It has brought them now to this small stage deep in George Bush country at the South by Southwest music fest in Austin, Texas, prepared to explain themselves in a panel discussion timed to the coming release of a new concert film directed by Yauch himself, under the farcical nom de plume Nathaniel Hörnblowér.

So someone asks: “Tell us about your movie …”

Yauch starts off: “It’s about a guy returning from Vietnam …”

“Now?” says Ad-Rock. “He’s just returning now?”

None of this is true. Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! is high-concept and lo-fi, a Beastie Boys concert at Madison Square Garden documented on video cameras handed out to nearly 50 fans and about a dozen crew members. That amounts to 90 minutes of squealing, grooving, thumping, rhyming sounds and pictures as seen from right up front and way out in the cheap seats. It opens with an overhead shot of nighttime Manhattan through a fisheye lens, gliding right over the Statue of Liberty before landing backstage with the Beasties in a huddle, wearing their matching green tracksuits before marching to the stage as DJ Mixmaster Mike rocks Hendrix on the turntables.

What follows is a sound true to the Beasties’ roots as lovers of original-recipe hip-hop, but still vivid, raw, and fresh, with funky, loungy, spacy interludes that play something like Isaac Hayes sharing a bong with Esquivel. The images are a mix of hi-def and low-budget, blown up on the big screen as crisp, pixilated, and grainy, zooming in on an oblivious Ben Stiller in the stands shouting along to the rhymes. The cameras follow not just the guys on stage, but fans on a beer run, stepping into the bathroom, sneaking backstage. And one amateur cameraman can be heard yelling at a quiet, disbelieving corner of the crowd: “We’re doing a DVD! Get real excited!”

Most of the fans already seemed to be. In New York City, Beastie history runs deep. They began as teenage wiseguys thrashing out hardcore punk, then witnessed the birth of hip-hop. They toured as rappers with Run-D.M.C. and helped discover Public Enemy. And their 1986 debut album, the brilliantly offensive Licensed to Ill, sold millions, fueled by the ridiculously overflowing testosterone of the single “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).” Few expected an encore. But what followed revealed a range the Beasties themselves couldn’t have predicted, moving to Los Angeles to piece together the maximum mixing of Paul’s Boutique, followed by albums (1992’s Check Your Head, 1994’s Ill Communication, etc.) that found the dazzling nexus between rap and hardcore and lounge and deep, fuzzy funk.

None of it sold quite so much as Licensed to Ill, and some fans actually lost contact with the Beastie Boys, now that their livid party anthems were behind them. “There’s a lot of people that are into that first record that are like, ‘What are you guys doing? You guys still put out tapes?’” says Ad-Rock later. “Well, yeah, actually.”

Making Awesome documented the connection with the fans that remained, and the many forward-looking musical connoisseurs who followed. Not that the band felt the need to make a concert movie. It was inspired by an image from a Beasties show captured on a fan’s camera-phone. Yauch found it online. He had always dabbled in film, worked in developing the band’s music videos, always as the mysterious Hörnblowér. He’d built his own darkroom in junior high school, and he even made an animated, stop-motion film with a friend’s Super-8 camera. And now there was something special to be done with the fans.

Many of them were different people than the crowds who were drawn to their earliest shows, back when the Beasties sprayed beer over listeners, spewed obscenities, and pumped up a giant inflatable dick onstage. Those fan-dudes had freaked out a delicate Kurt Cobain when they began showing up at Nirvana concerts after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” erupted all over the airwaves. They were the same guys who used to beat him up back in Aberdeen.

The Beasties didn’t know who they were, either.

“In a way, we were goofing on frat boys or imitating frat boys or whatever it was,” Yauch says now. “And it was definitely surprising that it shifted. We were coming out of, first, being in a hardcore scene and then going on and opening for Run-D.M.C. – basically playing to rooms where there was almost no white people in them. And then all of the sudden, when License to Ill exploded and we had frat dudes – that was definitely a weird turn. We were kinda like, ouch.” He laughs. “Who are these guys? How did we get here? But I guess we kind of knew how we got there.”

*

The Beasties are nowhere. It is 1989, and I am standing outside Ad-Rock’s apartment in Hollywood, and I am alone. The new Beastie Boys album has been on the streets for a week, and a Village Voice headline has already declared: “Three Jerks Make a Masterpiece.” But they are not home.

Mike D finally rolls up in his blue-gray BMW, and soon we’re cruising anxiously down Sunset Boulevard, maneuvering through late-afternoon traffic toward Tower Records in West Hollywood. Paul’s Boutique is the hip-hop trio’s first release in three years, and Diamond is ready to check how things are going, pulling up to this supermarket of music and unplugging the cell phone from a cigarette lighter. As his front wheels roll up onto the driveway, beneath a blow-dried Neil Diamond grinning down from a billboard, he sees it, incredibly: a Batman insignia the size of a flattened Volkswagen Bug painted onto the asphalt.

“Whoa! This is heavy,” Diamond says, passing slowly over the ominous black and yellow bat symbol. “That’s intense. Batman has a lot of juice. We had our flag in the back of the parking lot, but they took that down.”

Inside, Diamond finds Paul’s Boutique displayed prominently in the front of the store, right above an Allman Brothers boxed set. But as he stands admiring the two albums, the Beastie Boy whose Licensed to Ill took rap to the very top of the pop album charts for the first time, goes unnoticed. Dressed in jeans, basketball shoes, and a Knicks T-shirt, he looks like any other kid searching for the new record by his favorite band.

“You know, maybe we sold a bunch of records, but people aren’t into treating us like we’re Sting or something,” he says. “They still kind of look at it like it’s an underground thing, I guess.”

Paul’s Boutique comes after a long period of musical inactivity and continuing legal battles with the band’s former record label, Def Jam, that involve millions in unpaid royalties. It was recorded in Los Angeles, with local street people and prostitutes brought into the studio for wild inspiration. Mike D, Ad-Rock, and Yauch coproduced the hour-long recording with the Dust Brothers (John King, Mike Simpson, and, for this album, Matt Dike of Delicious Vinyl).

Together they mixed bits and shards from the Beatles, James Brown, the Sweet, movie soundtracks, and other lost and obscure tracks from 99-cent used records with the rappers’ improvised words of raw comedy, streetwise delinquency, and hip-hop bravado. It is a more complex work than the Rick Rubin-produced Licensed to Ill.

Ad-Rock is now standing excitedly over a DJ’s console in his second-floor apartment, working the two turntables and twisting, jerking, scratching an old R&B disc into a scattered collection of beats. “Did you hear the new Beastie Boys song?” Ad-Rock says. “I know you haven’t heard it in a while.”

“That’s true,’” Diamond says, wilting slightly in the summer heat.

“It starts out like this … .” And Ad-Rock works an old record by the Crusaders, spinning it with quick reverses before finally letting it turn casually into a warm, soulful groove, accented with sparks from a slow, sparse guitar lead. “All right. everybody,” Ad-Rock shouts, swinging his hips to the music, “it’s time to do this, it’s time to sooo-umph – speech at the beginning! – a-chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka. That’s def, right? Man, I got the whole song written.”

The interview is already an hour behind schedule, and Yauch still hasn’t shown. Another local writer, Shredder from the L.A. Weekly, has now arrived and waits on a nearby balcony. He will be there for another hour at least, after making the mistake of arriving on time.

Aside from the same reckless humor of the band at its beastiest, Paul’s Boutique offers some unexpected moments of social commentary among the beats. “Egg Man,” an otherwise brutal, comical document of egg attacks and drive-by eggings that draws to a close under a mix of the shrieking themes from Psycho and Jaws, concludes: “You made the mistake, you judge a man by his race/You go through life with egg on your face.”

And on the track “Johnny Ryall,” named for a fallen rockabilly star now reduced to homelessness and living outside Diamond’s apartment in New York, the Beastie Boys chant, “Living on borrowed time and borrowed money/Sleeping on the street, there ain’t a damn thing funny.”

“It’s just a document of time, and that’s where we’re at,” says Diamond. “One of the cool things about our work is that we get to do narratives. A lot of times you’re just telling a story, but it’s stuff that comes to mind and stuff that’s around you. You walk outside every day, and somebody is sitting on your stoop, someday you’re going to do something about it.”

The band is newly signed to Capitol Records, but the Beasties’ relationship with Def Jam continues in the courtroom. The dispute stems from the company stopping its royalty payments to the band at $100,000 for the four-million-selling Licensed to Ill. This, says Def Jam owner Russell Simmons, is because the band broke its contract by refusing to deliver a followup record. “We didn’t get paid for our albums,” Ad-Rock says simply, fast becoming bored with the subject and returning to his turntables.

Yauch finally shuffles into Ad-Rock’s apartment, a shaggy beard hanging from the end of his chin, completely uninterested in the bad vibes being discussed. More important to him is the removal of the Beastie Boys flag, and its vertical red and white stripes, from the top of the Capitol Records building.

“The president of the company, Joe What’s-his-face, walked up, had seen the flag, and decided that he wanted to put up a real American flag instead,” Yauch grumbles. “And I don’t really know what’s going on here –”

“And not only that, they’re also making excuses for taking it down,” Diamond jumps in. “Like, they said some people called up, and they were complaining that the word beast was written across the American flag.”

“I think we all can relate to what appears to be a welsher here, okay? We’ve been welshed on. It was supposed to be up for a year. They took it down already.”

There will be no live instruments on the coming tour. Not yet. “I hate tuning guitars and taking them out and having amps and all that,” Ad-Rock says, leaning back on a leather couch. “We’re not really that type of thing. It means we’re freer and get to do more. But I’m not good enough to really play in front of people. Maybe if I practiced a while.”

*

“Ooh, wow, my apologies.” Mike D doesn’t actually remember our earlier interview, but still feels kinda bad about it. So does Ad-Rock: “I’m sorry.” They know how they were in those days. But if they were being difficult, I didn’t know any better at the time. No eggs were tossed in my direction. A bucket of water was not poured over my head.

It does go back to a question asked more than once by fans in Austin: Any regrets? Few acts survive long enough to answer those kinds of questions, at least in public. Amazingly, the Beastie Boys date back to the days of Huey Lewis and David Lee Roth and Bananarama. They were still teenagers when the world discovered them, and there is plenty of evidence to remind them how things were.

“It’s an honest question. I guess just because the lyrical content on the first record compared to, like, the last one are very different,” says Ad-Rock, nodding.

“But that’s also part of our process,” adds Mike D. “A lot of people are in college when they’re 19 years old. We happened to be on a world tour and with an album selling millions of copies. So our life is a lot more well-documented.”

It began in the early ’80s as a new generation of lexicon devils turned to hardcore punk. Yauch and Diamond were in the initial hardcore incarnation of the Beastie Boys, and Adam Horovitz was in the Young and the Useless.

“It’s an amazing period of time, looking back,” says Yauch. “It’s when we met each other. There was still some bands like the Ramones or Johnny Thunders or Dead Boys, sort of the remnants of junkie-type punk rock. But there was this small scene that was forming of kids that were too young to really be a part of that scene. I mean, we’d go to a club, and there would be all 30-year-old junkie dudes in the corner. So all these bands formed that turned into the New York hardcore scene. That’s a really cool time for us to look back on, because it was just a handful of friends, maybe like 30 kids who used to hang out, and we were all in bands. That’s what Beastie Boys was formed out of.”

At that time, hip-hop was just another corner of the underground, a small scene of devotees and a few crossover hits. And the Beasties would hear new tracks by the Sugerhill Gang, Spoonie Gee, and other early hip-hop voices at the Mud Club. “We were really into it, and I used to listen to that stuff. Even though I was, like, into punk and, like, dressed punk, I would be listening to hip-hop records and learning the rhymes off them.”

After Licensed to Ill, the Beaties ended up here, where they found crucial collaborators, from the Dust Brothers to Money Mark, the organist whose endless funk jones played a big role in the instrumentals that emerged in the ’90s. The Beasties set up their Grand Royale label, with a studio in Atwater custom-built with a skate-ramp and an elegant velvet painting of a Great Dane on the wall. “I don’t know about you, but I loved it,” Ad-Rock says to the others. “I thought it was hilarious. I thought all the people were hilarious. I thought the whole thing was just weird. All these Hollywood kids that we hooked up with, it didn’t seem like anybody worked.”

Mike D still keeps a place in L.A., but the band now is essentially based in New York, which seemed inevitable after they sampled a weary homesick vocal by Bob Dylan (“I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough”) on Check Your Head.

“When we went back to New York, we probably were like, ‘Oh, man, what were we thinking going to L.A.?’” says Mike D. “But, that being said, the L.A. time, for Paul’s Boutique it was important for us to geographically get away from New York and be somewhere else. Hooking up with the Dust Brothers was a particularly positive experience, and Check Your Head was like another step further.”

Yauch adds: “I kind of missed New York. The first couple years, it was definitely interesting, but then I started to miss it. I started to miss walking around, and most of the people that I grew up with, like family. I kind of wanted to be back in the city as much as possible. Then I think Adam started feeling the same way.”

*

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” The woman behind me is a little excited. The Beastie Boys have just stepped onstage, as Mixmaster Mike somehow blends Rush’s squealing prog epic “Tom Sawyer” into the squeals and beats of “Brass Monkey.” It’s a song from the old days, and a hundred glowing cell-phone cameras are aimed at Yauch, Mike D, and Ad-Rock.

This is a surprise gig at Stubb’s in Austin, and the set is strictly hip-hop, so the band digs deep, everything from Licensed to Ill and Ill Communication to Hello Nasty and To the Five Boroughs. During “Eggman,” Mike D adds an impromptu “Eek-awk-oh-ah-ah!” over the sampled Psycho theme riff. And Ad-Rock has a message: “Hey, kids, stop all the downloadin’!”

It’s another joke, a wink to the fans who already know the Beasties have put up some a cappella vocals for free downloading and wild experimentation. Ad-Rock has been obsessed with loops and scratching ever since hearing his mom’s dusty copy of the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls get stuck in one groove, repeating the same guitar and sax pattern looping on forever. It’s been his life ever since, and fans are free to join him there. The Beasties have never been much afraid of the future. No reason to start now.

Los Angeles CityBeat, March 30, 2006

Photographs by Steve Appleford

Return of the Four Horsemen

2011-07-05T06:17:00.000-07:00

Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax Invade Coachella

By Steve Appleford

The rise and rise of Metallica into one of the major forces in rock has unfolded over the decades like a brilliantly executed surprise attack. Consider where they began: as a SoCal quartet obsessed with the loudest, fastest, darkest heavy metal imaginable in 1981, clawing and scratching for gigs while the Sunset Strip was awash with longhaired boys in lipstick and spandex.

Metallica played thrash, not pop, then fled to San Francisco and thrived.

They also reflected a rare kind of evolutionary imperative, rising forcefully from the original thrash underground they shared with Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, to arenas and stadiums, then shifted gears just enough in the '90s to vanquish the alternative nation. Metallica elbowed their way onto the KROQ airwaves and headlined Lollapalooza. Now comes an invasion on the hallowed site of Coachella itself.

Far bigger than a simple stadium show, Metallica will bring together the preeminent originators of thrash metal on Saturday for a daylong "Big Four" fest at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, just a week after Coachella's remnants are swept away.

It follows a Big Four tour of Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax last year in Europe, but the hugeness of bringing these four horsemen of thrash together for the first time in the U.S. should not be lost on the fans who will transform the site into a massive version of the cult short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot.

A crowd of 50,000 is expected. "The mainstream ended up embracing us," Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich told me the day the show was announced in January. "That obviously doesn't suck."

Birthed largely in Southern California, thrash was a collision of British heavy metal and hard-core punk, a revolutionary noise that was too fast and even a little scary in the right hands. Unlike other products of the '80s, the genre has never faded into nostalgia and obscurity — instead, it continues to renew itself with generation after generation of disaffected teens in black T-shirts and pierced flesh.

"It hasn't strayed away from its attitude, that punk root that it's attached to," says Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo. "The music isn't fake. The people who are associated with thrash metal, they like their music. It's stayed true and people respect that."

Following the founding fathers, a number of later acts emerged playing even faster, but it was a pointless exercise, more macho than musical. Meanwhile, Metallica became one of the biggest rock bands in the world, filling stadiums as easily as U2 or the Rolling Stones, and got themselves voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, where frontman James Hetfield humbly described his quartet as "somewhat of a heavy band."

The other three bands on this weekend's bill did all right in the money-and-fame game as well. Slayer earned their first gold record in 1986, with the Rick Rubin–produced thrash-horror milestone Reign in Blood. Hitting platinum that same year were Megadeth, a jazzier thrash act formed by guitar-shredder Dave Mustaine after he was fired from the original lineup of Metallica. New York–based Anthrax became stars of MTV, collaborating with Public Enemy on the influential 1991 metal-rap mash-up "Bring the Noise." The once-preposterous idea of thrash reaching world domination was only a joke until it wasn't.

"There's a lot of intelligence in the music, in the lyrics, in the business of all four bands," says Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian. "Maybe we don't look like the smartest dudes in the world, but every one of these four bands has some really smart people in it — creatively, professionally. We all had a very strong vision."

Why, a neophyte might ask, are these particular four bands universally acknowledged as "The Big Four"? What makes precisely these longhairs (and shaved heads) so damn big? Surely other bands of their generation were equally fast and furious, just as committed to darkness and gloom. Their fellow travelers in Testament and Exodus and elsewhere also carried the uncouth thrash flag in the awkward days of hair metal.

What separates the Big Four from their brethren is the reality that Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer were not only originators of the thrash sound, but each transcended their own genre. Their names are known to those who have never heard them. Bad reputations precede them.

The idea of a Slayer/Megadeth concert remains a vaguely threatening concept to the uninitiated. Last summer, a small crowd of Christian protesters stood vigil outside their show at the Long Beach Arena, still fighting a culture war that ended long ago (maybe when Ozzy Osbourne moved next door to a chummy Pat Boone in Bel-Air). Slayer frontman Tom Araya was raised a traditional Catholic, and Megadeth's Dave Mustaine and David Ellefson are openly born-again Christians. "It just shows that [the protesters] don't know me," Mustaine says. "If you really want to preach the Gospel to people, you have to do it with your deeds and not your words."

Mustaine stopped drinking, tries not to swear onstage and has happily accepted the warming of relations between himself and Metallica. The outspoken red-haired guitarist was famously ejected in 1983 during a road trip to New York to make the debut album, and sent home on a Greyhound bus. (His immediate replacement was Kirk Hammett.) The insults were hurled back and forth for decades after, sometimes in fun, sometimes not.

The warfare between the metal camps is long behind them, evaporating completely during a Big Four concert last year in Sofia, Bulgaria, when members of all the bands jammed through Diamond Head's "Am I Evil?" together onstage.

"We've gotten beyond all the tension of the past," Mustaine insists. "When you're looking at an audience of 100,000 several times a week, it has a way of making you forget about the petty stuff. Honestly, it's like fly shit on a dance floor."

LA Weekly, April 21, 2011

Photograph by Steve Appleford

New Wave or the Truth?

2011-06-29T02:43:00.001-07:00

Writer Joe Carducci relays the story of iconic L.A. punk label SST Records through the eyes of its photographer, Naomi Peterson

By Steve Appleford

The secret history of punk sneaks up at unexpected moments. It’s well after midnight on the Loyola Marymount campus, and the place is deserted, except in the little fourth-floor studio of KXLU, where a couple of punk-rock vets and impresarios are the guests on Stray Pop, a weekly radio show. One is a punk-rock intellectual, the other is not. Joe Carducci smiles beneath the fluorescent tubes but looks damn serious with his graying beard and Jack Nicholson hairline. He’s here with a bag of CDs and ancient LPs to share some choice cuts of noise and dysfunction, of sounds ingenious and unlistenable, and songs of brilliant melody and attack. There is punk and original-recipe hardcore, some avant-garde, even a bit of Wyoming bluegrass.

And the dude sitting next to him is called Mugger.

They once shared ownership of the mighty SST Records with founder Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, back when the label was a center of the secret rock & roll underground, home to Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, the Meat Puppets and other musical malcontents. Back then, Mugger “loved trouble and laughs,” Carducci remembers, and you can still see some of it in this fit, surf-city joker with his on-air raunchiness. But he’s also the father of an 11-year-old son in Long Beach who goes to Catholic school on the weekend, and whose name is definitely not “Little Mugger.”

Carducci hands an album to host Stella Voce, a champion of outsider rock and indie sounds since she first took the FM microphone, in 1980. It’s called Chunks, a DIY, punk-era Nuggets-style punk compilation from 1981, and on the back cover is the familiar, cryptic handwriting of artist Raymond Pettibon: “Guns don’t kill people, songs do.”

Soon, we hear Mugger’s voice on the vinyl, a track from a quarter-century past by his old band, the Nig-Heist. His snarling “Fuck!” is blown right over the early morning airwaves. Carducci looks up. “Oops.”

This stuff is dangerous, and that was part of its charm, before punk became a fashion statement and major-label marketing plan, instead of what it first represented: a venue for unpredictable aggression and the avant-garde. SST in Hermosa Beach was about something else. And in 1990, Carducci wrote his own history lesson and 300-page manifesto, fueled by a desire for a return to the carnality of pure rock & roll, and fearing that the whole movement would be forgotten otherwise. HisRock and the Pop Narcotic was as startling and obsessive a statement on rock and its impostors as Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rockhad been for another generation of disagreeable rockroll thinkers.

Carducci’s now done the same for Naomi Petersen, the house photographer for SST, who died in 2003. His memoir, Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That, takes a hard look back at his time in L.A., at the music and contradictions of that scene, and what it meant to be a woman in the uncompromising world of Black Flag. He’s talking about this on the air with Voce, as the clock edges toward 3 a.m. and the next DJ is anxiously setting up. Mugger has a flashback to another time in local punk-rock cuisine as he leans into the mike: “So, are we going to Oki-Dog’s tonight?”

It was art, not politics, that fueled the SST revolution, that sent no-frills van tours by Black Flag and others rocketing across the country, planting seeds even they were unaware of. “If you were after money, you just weren’t in our scene,” Carducci says now. He arrived at SST in September 1981, right before Black Flag’s Damaged hit the street, selling a quick 60,000 units locally but facing ambivalence from East Coast distributors. “They couldn’t imagine punk rock coming out of L.A.,” he says. “It’s hard to believe, but it was conventional wisdom.”

Money was tight. Ginn and his partners lived at the office, sleeping under their desks, on couches, sleeping bags, with no money and no regrets in their strange commune. If they were hungry, they might walk over to the nearby home of Ginn’s parents for a sandwich.

One night in ’82 at SST, Naomi Petersen, then just 17, hooked up with Mugger in his van. He immediately retreated under his desk, leaving her to drive back to Simi Valley at least a little drunk. When she got home at 2 or 3 a.m., her father locked her out of the house. Then the phone rang at SST. Dukowski answered. It was Petersen, calling from a phone booth, her wrists slashed, “throwing herself again on Black Flag’s mercy,” writes Carducci. She was told to come back, and she slept there. No one could tell if she’d been serious, but friends could still see the scars a decade later.

Carducci heard she had a Nikon camera, so the next morning, she was hired as a photographer. Her first assignments were Saccharine Trust and St. Vitus. And Carducci was thrilled to have photos to send to the fanzines and college papers hungry for SST news, even if the mainstream media were generally oblivious. Petersen became a key figure there, a rare female peer in the Black Flag orbit and something more than another momentary conquest. By 1985, she had her own rep on the national indie scene, while keeping her day job as hostess at the Black Angus restaurant in Northridge, where she worked with her friend Duff McKagan, bassist from a new band called Guns N’ Roses.

“There was something of a toll that women or girls paid when they got next to Black Flag,” Carducci writes. He spoke also with Black Flag singer Henry Rollins. “He said if you were a girl around Black Flag, you were going to get fucked. Not raped, but fucked,” says Carducci. “The girls who came up to them, some were troubled or drunk, some were extremely intelligent and were operating on the same level we were: art and action.”

The label was home to a full roster of sonic revolutionaries, bands that were freeform and unique and shared a true DIY ethic. The Minutemen were “fucking corn dogs” from Pedro led by the great singer-guitarist d. boon, and the Meat Puppets “were a mix of heady and redneck,” writes Carducci, and the only band everyone at SST could agree on.

I got to be a tourist in that world for a time, as a student journalist as obsessed with the SST roster as any miscreant or college boy looking for raw kicks on the fractured punk-rock scene. There were other bright spots smoldering within the underground during those years just before punk (and Nirvana) broke, but SST was the only brand that mattered, a real stamp of approval for an alternative state of mind. So there were far-flung shows and interviews with Sonic Youth, the Puppets and Minutemen, and then my pilgrimage to the Ginn family home in Hermosa to interview Rollins himself.

We would talk in the backyard, where a large pair of plaid pants hung from a clothesline, and then step for a moment into the Shed, Rollins’ elevator-sized hovel on the Ginn property that was crammed with cassette tapes and a cot, all beneath the burning gaze of a menacing Charles Manson poster. But on the way in, as we passed through the living room, he introduced me to Pettibon, who is Ginn’s brother and the unpaid SST artist and inventor of the ominous Black Flag logo, still one of the most distinctive trademarks in rock: four black vertical bars in the abstract shape of a flag rippling in the breeze, a design that also suggests pistons at work. Pettibon’s art didn’t come out of punk rock, but it was a crucial venue for him, with an audience of freethinkers and misfits hungry for dangerous images. He sat in an easy chair. But he didn’t look up when Rollins and I passed by. He just glared into space.

Soon after, I was at the SST offices to interview Ginn, a bong at his feet, his hair long and tangled, barely a year before Black Flag disbanded. And before leaving, I briefly met Naomi Petersen, whose name I knew and envied from the series of publicity photos she created. Those raw black-and-white images were a crucial document of an otherwise unknown scene, whose lasting impact would not be fully appreciated until the ’90s, when it was all gone. Petersen’s pictures could be grim or silly, depending on the mood of the band and the moment, created during low-rent photo sessions at a time when major labels typically spent thousands on an artist’s photographs.

Carducci left SST back in 1986, amid growing tension at the label. He wanted to get back to writing. He kept in touch with Petersen for another decade by mail after returning to his former home of Chicago, then moving to Wyoming. She contributed some photographs to hisRock and the Pop Narcotic. But he lost touch with her until hearing of her death, after years of fading health and heavy drinking.

Carducci wrote Enter Naomi not simply because Petersen had died, but because it took two years for him to even hear about it. “It really was like a gut punch,” says Carducci, now 52. “And it goes back to that night when she was bleeding on the floor from her wrists. I was afraid of this in some way.”

Enter Naomi is lovingly researched and bluntly told in rich detail, sometimes lifting from Petersen’s journal entries (“Fucked day — someone shot my car”). It’s also an impressionistic view, at times requiring some awareness of the SST scene and certain events to fully grasp. But Carducci takes it deeper, as only one who knew the players could.

Petersen never made the leap to solvent rock photographer. Some of her earliest work was lost in a shipment to Zurich in the early ’80s, and she was evicted from an apartment in D.C. several years later, her possessions dumped on the street. Petersen and Rollins had talked of doing a book of her pictures in the mid-’90s, but it never happened.

A day after his KXLU visit, Carducci is at Book Soup preparing to read from Enter Naomi. In the crowd is Petersen’s older brother, Chris Petersen, who has a small collection of her pictures in his hands. The book was difficult for him to read, and impossible for their parents, but he and Carducci hope to see a collection of her photos published soon.

“I know it’s important,” says her brother, a real estate investor who, with some partners, recently bought the old Club Lingerie on Sunset, where Petersen once spent so much time. “It would be a shame to hide it.”

Voce has brought her teenage son. And in the front row is Saccharine Trust singer Jack Brewer in a leather blazer, a graying high school dropout who still can’t understand why “all these intelligent people would throw themselves into this thing.” Carducci understands, but there remain a few unanswerable questions from that time, about that scene, about Petersen.

“The music scene is full of pretend nihilists,” Carducci says from behind the podium. “And maybe we didn’t catch the real thing in our midst, because she was such a bright spot.”

LA Weekly, July 4-10, 2008.

Rammstein Turns Up Heat for Metalheads

2011-06-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

By Steve Appleford

Rammstein is not a band built for subtlety. It is tribal metal for your midnight ride to the Euro disco, a precise construction of Teutonic grunts, computers and electric guitars led by singer Till Lindemann, an ex-Olympics-level swimmer with the voice of Nosferatu. For non-German speakers, he might as well be singing of daisies and unicorns, except you know he isn’t.

Tours of the U.S. are rare for the Berlin industrial-metal act, so the Forum in Inglewood was packed Friday with fans ready for a brutal, action-packed pummeling. They were rewarded with thundering beats and guitars and pillars of fire right at the front of the stage — close enough to nearly scorch the first rows of fans surging forward.

Explosions and fireballs weren’t reserved only for peak moments but used for virtually every song. A growling “Wiener Blut” delivered exploding plastic babies with laser-beam eyes, and “Feuer Frei!” erupted with shouts of “bang, bang!” before band members put on facemasks with built-in flamethrowers.

Dressed something like Gothic foundry workers and standing on a stage resembling an industrial torture chamber, Rammstein blended Fritz Lang and “Saw IV,” with lots of moving parts and billowing fog. The commitment to excessive pyromania was epic stagecraft on a Wagnerian scale, several notches up from most arena rock.

More important was that the six-piece band — in addition to Lindemann, guitarists Richard Z. Kruspe and Paul H. Landers, keyboardist Christian “Flake” Lorenz, bassist Ollie Riedel and drummer Christoph Schneider – wasn’t dependent on those fireworks but could have easily punished and soothed the senses to nearly the same effect with music alone.

From the band’s earliest albums, beginning with 1995’s “Herzeleid” (a.k.a. “Suffering”) and 1997’s “Sehnsucht” (“Longing”), Rammstein has been as satisfying to metalheads as to the urges of modern electronic dance music, comfortably blending worlds without compromise. At times, the songs swung between the blips and beeps and slabs of industrial buzzsaw guitars as Lindemann grunted and wept of sadomasochistic woe. “Du Hast” was a raging, swirling anthem on love and hate, genuinely melodic amid the heavy riffing and operatic self-loathing.

From the band’s newest album, 2009’s “Liebe Ist für Alle Da,” came the wistful, lustful ballad “Frühling in Paris,” which still inspired some sharp elbows in the mosh pits, spinning slowly to the urgent plucking of acoustic guitar. Lindemann’s vocals burned of anger and real vulnerability, something too rare in modern hard rock, making Rammstein a band of metal doomsayers with a tough, tender touch.

For nearly two hours at the Forum, the effect was so serious and driven that the result could be as funny as it was unsettling. And yet the sextet was also less rigid than one might expect, finding melody amid the morbid and melodramatic, fueling the rage and morose sing-alongs.

One notorious song from the last album urged immediate fornication (with a title unprintable here), and climaxed with Lindemann saddling himself onto a cannon that sprayed fans with foam. Maybe it was fire-retardant.

Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2011

The Metal Family Moshes On

2011-06-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

By Steve Appleford

The boy looked to be about 4 years old, a smiling little kid in spiky hair and green camouflage short-pants. And all around him were dozens of ecstatic young men, swirling in the usual violent circle, pushing, shoving, tumbling into one another in either rage or brotherly affection. A preschooler was in the mosh pit.

He was too young to pay attention to the signs posted outside the Hyundai Pavilion box office in Devore: “Enter moshing at your own risk.” He’d been led there by a shirtless, reckless father figure holding a beer in his other hand, a cigarette burning between his lips. The kid was thrilled, and he definitely didn’t belong there. Another metal generation was taking its first baby steps.

That was one interpretation of Family Values, the name of Korn’s traveling hard-rock festival, which landed Saturday at the outdoor venue for nine hours of very hard rock.

Standing outside one mosh pit, a 22-year-old man who called himself Nathan P. was picking apart bits of marijuana on a paper plate. Five minutes before, he’d been in the pit himself, feeding off the music and adrenalin of the moment. “There is so much electricity in the … air,” he said, “it’s beautiful.”

As he spoke, a tall man with shaggy dark hair fell hard to the ground and was immediately surrounded by several shirtless young men. A few kicked him where he lay. His eyes rolled back, but soon he was on his feet, stumbling out of the pit.

Nathan has been there. “Everybody gets hurt, bro,” he said. “All you can do is get up and just wipe it off and get back going, dude. It’s like life.”

Most do get back up, but not everyone. At the July 30 tour stop in Atlanta, a fan suffered a fatal brain injury after being sucker-punched during an argument. Andy Richardson, 30, died two days later. Police have since made an arrest.

It was no Altamont. Blood is spilled at metal concerts every weekend, just as there are drunken brawls at county fairs and baseball games. Even Depeche Mode fans will riot under certain conditions (and have). There’s one in every crowd. And some crowds have more than one.

Earlier in the day, singer Chino Moreno of co-headlining band the Deftones expressed real regret over Richardson’s death.

“I always make a point, when we’re playing, if I see someone fighting we’ll stop the song and tell them to chill out. Then we’ll continue with the music. The music is secondary to people’s safety.”

“We were real sad,” said Korn guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer of the death, reclining backstage hours before the night’s closing set. He looked up with a knowing expression and suggested that rock concerts can sometimes be like that. “It’s not the safest place to go, no matter who you are. Last night onstage I got hit in the back with a quarter, also with a cellphone. I get [stuff] thrown at me all night long.”

But the contact with fans is mostly positive. Only minutes earlier, Shaffer and the rest of Korn were greeting fans and signing autographs for a long line of contest winners. He was typically upbeat but tired, after recent tours of Europe and Asia. Family Values was the band’s second tour of the U.S. since the December release of its album “See You on the Other Side.”

Korn meets with fans at every tour stop. “I’ve been fortunate enough to learn a lot from different people, being around the world,” Shaffer said. “Everybody has the same problems, the same four or five things that they all struggle with: relationships, finance, personal issues. It keeps me grounded, you know?”

During Korn’s 90-minute performance, the band faced a wide landscape crowded with excited fans raising up the devil’s horns salute or middle fingers at the band’s creep-show melodies and explosive slabs of guitar. The messages could be agonized, dark, confused, but what might be reasonably scary to some is a thrill to others. A fan has got to know his limitations.

Rage is easy to come by in metal, so it takes more than volume and a bad attitude to last. The best hard rock is fueled by a singular, even deviant point of view, a striking voice and persona to transform the obvious into the provocative. Korn has had that from the beginning.

During the Deftones’ set, Moreno showed himself to be – like Korn’s Jonathan Davis – one of hard rock’s most distinctive voices. His desperate groans and whispers wandered and wailed across the grinding foundation of guitarist Stephen Carpenter, outclassing much of the rest of the day.

The remainder of the bill did have its moments, from the melodic hard rock of Flyleaf and Stone Sour to the wild-eyed thrash of Japan’s Dir en Grey, which roared with hard rock stripped down and incomprehensible.

Between band performances, fans strolled amid the food merchants and booths offering jewelry, shades and bandanas. In the booth selling glass pipes for smokers, a young woman in a shirt boasting “Yes … they’re real” lifted her shirt to demonstrate.

Later in the evening, a trio of 17-year-olds from nearby Fontana slumped at a table, taking a break before the final set by Korn. This was the first concert for Matthew Macias, who had his arm around a girl in braids. He tried stepping into a mosh pit but was bounced right out. He’ll be back.

“It was awesome,” he said. “People bouncing off of each other, going off each other, just going off. It was crazy.”

Earlier, a man with a bruised face had sat near him and his friends. “A big ol’ black eye and everything,” Macias said. “His whole face was just purple. Didn’t bother me.”

Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2006.

Photograph by Steve Appleford

In the Studio: Gym Class Heroes

2011-06-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

By Steve Appleford

"Yeah! now we're cookin', boy!" Travis McCoy yells, pacing the main room at the Deathstar studio in Los Angeles, still sporting his backpack and hoodie. With a new Dodgers cap cocked sideways, the Gym Class Heroes MC shouts, "Drum-and-bass! Drum-and-bass!" He's leading his band through a rhythm-heavy new tune, as guitarist Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo strums his white Stratocaster through a wah-wah pedal like he's playing with Sly and the Family Stone. It's still before noon when McCoy begins rhyming: "Tell hip-hop I'm not illiterate/I got greater expectations than Oliver Twist/I went postal before Bukowski did/Tell Jack I'll go out on the road with him. . . ."

Slouched over an upright piano wearing a porkpie hat is Patrick Stump. On a break from Fall Out Boy, Stump is producing today's session — for the Heroes' follow-up to 2006's As Cruel as School Children, which included the radio hits "Cupid's Chokehold" and "Clothes Off!" "They're totally serious musicians," says Stump, eager to demonstrate the Geneva, New York, band's musical chops. "Travis is a dead-serious MC. He's very smart and very sharp and has said some brilliant things. And they have a blast doing it. Hopefully people will get a sense of that."

McCoy steps out of the booth to pour himself a sweet blend of merlot and Sprite, a new drink he calls the Travalanche. But he's soon back in the room as the band slips into a classic roots-reggae groove and McCoy spits rhymes about a postmodern romance: "We can't, more like we shouldn't. . . . It's hard to be a good man." "It's about what happens when you have a little too much merlot in you and you have access to a phone and a ton of girls' numbers that you wouldn't call otherwise," he says. He thinks up a song title on the spot: "Drunk Text Romeo."

It's mid-January, and the band has been in the small studio, located behind a Koreatown barbershop, for a week. The big-screen TV is permanently tuned to the Food Network, with the band members hoping for a glimpse of sexy Italian host Giada De Laurentiis between takes. "We've been on a roll, pumping out a song a day," says drummer Matt McGinley. "When things are going good like this, you just need to be in the studio and pour out creativity."

McCoy later retreats to his rented SUV with a fistful of cigarettes to play back some tracks recently recorded in Miami with producers Cool and Dre (best known for the Game's "Hate It or Love It" and Ja Rule's "New York"). "It's beautiful how Dre works with melodies and shit," says McCoy with a grin. "We consumed a lot of greenery."

One of the Miami tracks is the brooding jam "Peace Sign," which features guest vocals by Busta Rhymes. "The hip-hop enthusiasts didn't really take me serious as an MC," McCoy says, "and I'm making for damn sure they do on this record." He cues up an unfinished track called "I'm Home," on which Hall and Oates' Daryl Hall will be adding vocals. McCoy is a hardcore fan from way back: "It's like a cream dream to have this dude not only into what we're doing but wanting to be part of this record," he says, eyes widening. "I don't even know where to go after that."

Rolling Stone, February 22, 2008