Armageddon/Pearly Gates

I’ll probably sound like an obsessive obscurantist, but there’s this moment in this song called Sometime World on this album by Wishbone Ash called Argus. Upto the point this moment arrives the song is a fairly stately balladic effort, vague lyrics interspersed with some ‘70s guitar. Around the two minute mark cymbals are rattled, voices fade and the song appears to wrap up. But then guitars are heard again in the distance, this time much faster. And the bass starts…

There is no bass line in all of rock ‘n roll like this one. It comes careening in out of nowhere and just moves up and down, up and down the scale, each individual chord distinct and rich. The band takes this as a cue to go nuts around it for about three minutes; they could have spent thirty and it would still have been interesting. Its unlike any bass line you’ve ever heard. It can be played solo, you can put a piano in the background, or guitars, or a fucking brass band - the effect would be the same. It sounds simultaneously unhinged and logical as clockwork. It can be played when Armageddon finally comes or when one is nearing the pearly gates. It makes you wish it was being played behind John Coltrane, so he could have improvised around it. It makes you want to play it yourself, even if you can’t play bass. It makes you go “Do do do do do do” because you can’t play any damn instrument, and you can’t really sing either, but there’s no other way to convey the brilliance of what you’ve just heard to your puzzled friend at the other end of the telephone line. It makes you want to stop reading this article and download the damn thing so that you can write back and tell me that you’ve heard a thousand better bass lines. Go ahead. I doubt I’ll agree, but will still feel content in the knowledge that I’ve done my bit towards making this world a better place.

Hikaru, raised with love

8 months back I was a Research Executive (hushed voices heard saying over power lunches "He has it in him to be the best we've seen here since, i don't know, 2003...")

Then, 3 months ago, I became a Research Associate (voices echoing in the corridors of power "He has that indefinable quality thing going for him. He must be groomed")

Today i find out that I have become an Associate Research Manager

If you're startled how somehow can move up the corporate ladder with such astonishing rapidity, you really shouldn't be. My designation hasn't changed since the day I started working here. They've just re-designated the designation.

And yeah, no pay rise.

Go figure.

Haiku Blues

Does the man become the work?
Or does the work become the man?

Its worth considering

Becoming my work
would necessitate
my turning into
a zombie of death
or a corporate stooge
or, even worse, an unoriginal
or, worst of all, an unoriginal corporate stooge who is also a zombie of death

Whereas my work
becoming me
would transform
it
into something
which would find sense in the Deleuzian time-image analysis and its relation to Tarkovsky's Zerkalo
and would fall
in the general sonic environment
of punk rock

Vedder again, with his cult classic of a speech, inducting the Ramones into the Hall of Fame, and himself into the Hall of Fame for Hall of Fame Speeches.

Good evening. Hey. Ho. Let's go. Y'know, if it weren't for Johnny Ramone, I would have come here not knowing who Brenda Lee was. But that's part of the story you'll get in a bit. And yeah, I do have a Mohawk. No, I didn't get it to pose up here as a punk rocker for this exalted occasion. It actually stems from my frustration with world events and bombings and things like that. I took it out on my own hair. Sometimes you feel powerless and you do sometimes silly things.

Two days after it was done, back in November, I walked in a shop to buy Christmas gifts and I was accused of shoplifting. So even though the Ramones are being inducted into the Hall of Fame, it doesn't mean punk rockers, or looking like a punk rocker, has become respectable.

The Ramones didn't need Mohawks to be punk. They never had one. I don't think anyone in the band ever had one. They were visually aggressive. They were four working class construction worker delinquents from Forest Hills, Queens who were armed with two-minute songs that they rattled off like machine-gun fire. It was enough to change the earth's revolution, or at least the music of the time. It was an assault. Someone asked Johnny Ramone once why the songs were so short. He said, "They're actually fairly long songs played very, very quickly."

First time I saw the Ramones I was pretty young. Before the show even started, I was trying to get closer and closer and got up to the stage. I got up there packed and ready and even a little bit nervous. The crowd was intense, the look of the crowd. Outcasts one and all. They were hardcore punkers with spikes on their jackets, chains on their boots. Skinheads, horror film fans, nerds and geeks and outcasts, they were all ready to get out all of their aggression in the next hour and 15 minutes. As I was getting closer I saw something really strange about the microphone stand in the middle. It was about ten feet high. There was something really strange about that I saw a roadie put the set list down. He stood up and he was half the size of the microphone stand. I thought, "Who the fuck is going to sing at that microphone stand?" It was very unsettling. Then looking at the amount of amps that they had symmetrically placed at either side, and knowing that there was a huge amount of volume that was going to come out of that, it was very unsettling. Then the lights go out and they start playing "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." The crowd starts getting into third and fourth gear. Then they come out. One two three four! Into the first song. All hell broke loose. It was complete chaos. The guy with the boots and the chains ... all of a sudden they were right in front of your face swinging by. It was terribly frightening and totally blissful at the same time.

I think of the amount of intensity in that show and in that one night, and then I think of how many times that happened. The Ramones played 2269 shows. J.Lo's got a lot of catching up to do!

Speaking of J. Lo, disco was huge in the '70s. Disco took over the clubs and the airwaves, along with the indulgent guitar solos and seven-minute songs that was the musical landscape of 1976. The Ramones made a record in 1977. There's a black and white photo of four guys in leather jackets all with the same last name, Converse shoes and jeans standing against a brick wall. This became a beacon for anyone who ever wanted to be in a band, those disenfranchised by the dynasties of giant rock bands.

They obliterated the mystique of what it was to play in a band. You didn't have to know scales. With the knowledge of two-bar chords, you could play along with their records. That's what people did. They sat in front of their parents' hi-fis and played along with Road to Ruin or It's Alive. Within weeks, they were starting bands with other kids in town who were doing the same thing.

You could be on stage, getting it out, saying what you feel, singing about sniffing glue and not be a virtuoso or genetically gifted with Elvis' cheekbones, either. You could look like an outcast and still be cool. Talking Heads were the same thing in a different way. [Applause.] It's a big night.

The Ramones were a blueprint, a blueprint so necessary at the time. That fact alone is so important for everything that came after. Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth was saying that he can't think of a band or a musician these days where the Ramones weren't a very important part of their life. John McBain, a great musician from Seattle that I know, said something - and I think he spoke for the whole Seattle community when he said, "The Ramones were our Beatles."

Going back to that time at CBGB and the New York scene, Patti Smith said it was a reclamation of rock 'n' roll, but we created it and we're gonna take it back. Let's take it over. [Applause. Eddie drinks wine.] I'm up here for a bit ... I need to ... It may have to happen again, because Thurston and I were talking, and now it's Disney kids singing songs written by old men and being marketed to six and seven year olds. So some kind of change might have to happen again soon. But that's a whole 'nother thing.

After the initial surge of the late '70s, commercially the Ramones were never embraced. Bands around them were, but never them. Virtually ignored by radio, '80s MTV and even other artists, they never stopped and regardless have a following worldwide that's as devoted as ever.

I went with them once to South America. There was 50,000 people. Riots for tickets. People screaming outside. It was the reaction I always thought they deserved.

When punk finally broke in '91, the Ramones still weren't brought along for the ride, even though the bands Nirvana, Rancid, and Green Day wouldn't have existed without them. Punk bands' first or second records now sell ten times the amount of records the Ramones did throughout their career of 20-something records. That's why I go over to Johnny Ramone's house and do yard work three times a week, just to absolve some of the guilt. A bunch of people do it. Bono and Edge do their windows. Kirk Hammett, the guitarist from Metallica, he dusts, house cleans, makes French toast ... that's a true story. Even Kurt Cobain wanted to be as good as the Ramones. The list is endless. Turn page.

They never had a top ten hit. You know it's crazy when Phil Spector produces your record and you still don't have a top ten record. But it's really circumstantial. It doesn't alter the fact that they were one of the most important bands in rock 'n' roll. They accomplished a lot for a punk band. Most of the others, like the Sex Pistols, crashed and burned. Most punk bands pretty much crashed and burned. In the Sex Pistols case, thank you Malcolm McLaren for being an ego-driven fool or fuck for the non-edited version of this VH1 televised event.

They existed for 22 years with the same level of intensity the whole time. They may not have gotten along the whole time, but that was touring for 22 years in a van for fuck's sake, so you have to understand ... it's a highly respectable thing to travel in a van and not go up to a tour bus, not get your separate planes because you don't get along with the other guys in your van. It's torturously insane to stay in a van for eight years, but they did it. Even after Dee Dee left the band - and he was such a huge part of the band - he still wrote songs for them, which I think speaks to the brotherhood they had, an intense brotherhood of sorts.

After Dee Dee left, there were some intense Converse shoes to fill. The guy who did it, his name was C.J. For whatever reason, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame chose not to include him with those being inducted. It's a Hall of Fame thing, I wouldn't understand. But he played 800-something shows, he participated in three or four records, wrote a lot of songs and really importantly, he was accepted by the hardcore Ramones fans. The Ramones kept playing and were able to play for another generation because of C.J. C.J.'s been working 12-hour days cleaning pollution out of the air ducts down around the World Trade Center. He's here tonight. He might not get up here, but I was going to ask him to stand up and be recognized. C.J. Ramone!

I'll mention that Johnny Ramone's been an extremely great friend. His wife and he have been such great friends to me and taught me a lot about music I was too young to see. Going back to the Brenda Lee comment, and Gene Pitney ... I was introduced to them by John. He's been a tutor of sorts. The guy saw Hendrix and was sitting down. The whole crowd was sitting down. He saw the Who open for the Doors. He himself has more information than probably the institution to which he's being inducted into tonight.

Okay, at this point I've spoken long enough: we could have heard three or four Ramones songs. And after this, I'm sure the evening will move quickly. But it's the Ramones and it's punk rock and I'm just about finished and I hope you're okay with that. Apparently you're not. Fuck you. Take it easy, Eddie. All right.

The last thing I was going to say was about when the Ramones' manager Gary Kurfirst first talked to me. He said there was a night back in December of the year 2000. He got a phone call from Joey Ramone. Joey had had an accident in front of his apartment. He slipped and fell on some ice. I guess he was just lying there for a bit, tangled up. He ended up breaking his hip. He wasn't getting any help. People were just walking by, either side of him. He was pretty upset by it. At the end, I guess he called Gary and he said, "The worst thing about it was that no one would help me. I was down and nobody would help me."

Maybe they didn't know it was Joey Ramone. He was tangled in black hair and they thought he was a bum or whatever. But in a way, it's only mentioned because it's analogous to the Ramones' career. It's hard. Then obviously Joey died on Easter of 2001, less than a year ago. I'm sure he would have loved to be here tonight.

The only reason I mention that is that's why tonight's really important and special. Because I'm sure there's a number of bands and people who never get to be up here and never get to be brought up before all you people and applauded. I thought that would probably happen with the Ramones. Something very unusual is happening here tonight, and that is that this industry is paying some respect to the Ramones. So with the power invested in me, I'd like to induct Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Tommy, Marky, C.J. which we've talked about. The Ramones.

Qu'est ce que c'est déguelasse?

Man travels to Paris to reclaim money and tell a girl he wants to sleep with her because he’s actually in love but because he thinks he's as tough as Bogart he can't tell her that straight. A carjacking leads to a shootout, he kills a policeman and drives off addressing dialogues directly to the camera. Reaching Paris, he meets Jean Seberg, looking fantastic in a New York Herald Tribune T-shirt and the best movie haircut until Juliette Binoche in Blue, and playing hard to get. He spends the next hour or so trying to extract money from an associate and also get the girl into bed. Bed is where they spend an inordinately long twenty minutes talking, Patricia teasing Michel, who displays the amazing patience shown by men with sex on their minds. Later, the director leads the police to their quarry, we watch with frozen disbelief as the neon news tickers flash warnings 'Arrest of Michel Poiccard imminent'. Is this a joke? Yes and no. The man is gunned down, and Seberg, complicit in his death, utters the weirdest last line of any movie before or since, variously translated as "What's a louse?" or "What's a bitch?" or "What is puke?" (the last being the Criterion Collection translation, which should be accepted as the definitive one, simply out of pure gratitude for the fact that Criterion exists at all).

Even with Tennyson there to remind me that jump cut piled on jump cut were all too little, I must admit that they do not do much for me. Its not like I'm opposed to innovation for its own sake, as long as it is accompanied by a punk attitude and a desire to overturn things as they currently stand. What endures from Breathless finally is not the technique, which has become de rigueur through imitation – but details like Belmondo’s performance, a fore-runner of other talkative, flawed leads like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. Or the obsessive cinephilia – Bogart movie references, roles for Truffaut, Godard, Melville - a trend which Tarantino reprised three decades later. Or the impression that the final cut leaves - always self-aware, never self-conscious - no matter how many risks it takes along the way. Or how we get Paris as we’d like to imagine it – classy and dangerous, teeming with scheming charmers and broad-minded girls and other low-life. And that haircut.

Head-scratchers

• "King illegal forest to pig wild kill in it a is!"

• “We are now the Knights Who Say Ecky- ecky- ecky- ecky- pikang- zoop- boing- goodem- zoo- owli- zhiv”

• "Frankly my dear, i don't give a damn"

Regression

Too tired to make an effort to frame a structured slew of letters, the heroic blogger resorts to random rants about shoes and ships and sealing wax and I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the Walrus…

Everything here is in regression. There hasn’t been a movie worth seeing since Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, which was some five years back. Instead, they put all their money into self-congratulatory crap like Om Shanti Om, which, in its effort to milk ‘70s nostalgia actually gives you a crash course in how things got to the sorry state they are in today. There hasn’t been a truly memorable ad on TV for a long time. Television has been stuck in a horrible stupor for about a decade. Brain-dead for all practical purposes, it raises its head only to look to Bollywood for inspiration, which just makes things worse. And music may be the saddest scene of all, because you have a bunch of diverse talents all wasting their fucking time trying to be the bastardized son of Laxmikant-Pyarelal with Bhangra beats, while Rahman continues to innovate from a brilliant parallel universe.

Literature doesn’t seem to be going anywhere significant either. When will that book come along, that elusive rebel yell I’ve been waiting for all these years (and which I doubt I want to read now because it must be a young book or else its useless), the one whose realities are our realities, whose dreams are our dreams, whose broken, innovative, transfigured language is the kind that we, young of this country, have spoken for close to a decade now. Give me no more NRI displacement sagas, no matter how sensitively wrought. And stop showing me Rushdie, we do not speak like he thinks we do. We are a unique generation, rapidly growing old, and in need of a good chronicler.

Take me back to those last 2 years of school. In rock ‘n roll terms, that time was like a fantastic chorus; it all came together, and we brought it all back home. Fifteen jugglers, five believers. I’ve never known a crazier bunch of people; it was like we were all wired together, but the wiring was loose. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we were all together today. I should probably call them…

Anything else? Yeah, the Government. As the Stiff Little Fingers said “Its time the bastards fell”. And corporate culture. And ranting self-obsessed bloggers. I hate them the most.