Unleashing on a Pet Peeve: "The Wise Ancients Believed [FILL IN THE BLANK]..."

The following is a response to a friend of mine, who had re-posted a third-party comment about what ancient Egyptians "really believed." As a postmodern mystic Pagan fantasy author who's spent decades with his face buried in occulto-spiritual/ historical texts and who has read a metric shit-ton's worth of "facts" regarding people and societies whose daily lives remain virtually inconceivable to us, I have a Kong-sized pet peeve regarding this sort of thing. Sure, we can make educated guesses about the "real facts" of bygone days. But - as the Internet reveals about the age we live in - the subtle totality of human experience and belief, even now, is a vast enigma, not a certainty.

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I'm gonna get smacked for saying this, but...

We have no earthly idea about who meant what to the ancient Egyptians. All we have to go on are a reconstructed language that was translated from a Greco-Roman transcription tablet found accidentally by French soldiers almost two centuries ago. The fragments of that language are based on suppositions, little bits of modern Egyptian interpretation, a predominantly male academic tradition, and a whole lot of guesswork. Even then, the fragments of authentic Egyptian lore are pictograms (often incomplete) gleaned from the few remaining fragments of temples and government records. Those pictograms are extremely basic, with little nuance, no distinct subtle grammar, lots of room from interpretation, and a very high percentage of erroneous interpretation.

Saying "the ancients really believed such-and-such" is an absurd proposition. Even when we have detailed transcriptions in still-living languages (say, the Bible), the "real" meanings behind an author's thought are suppositions at best. The idea of insisting that "the ancient so-and-so's believed [Bleh]" is as accurate as assuming that a Sino-Hindustanian visitor from the 25th century would know what you "really believed" because they'd read a reconstructed version of English based on fragments of a menu found at an excavated Dennys. In France.

Pet peeve on the loose! Run for your lives! :)

Late Celebrity You Miss Most? Wendy O. Williams

Question: RIP John Lennon. The list of sudden and unexpected celebrity deaths is long—Princess Di, Heath Ledger, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe, and many more. Which one affected you the most on an emotional level?

No question: Wendy Orleans Williams of The Plasmatics. (1949-1998)

One of my favorite rock bands to this day, The Plasmatics were a pack of musical terrorists who provided my first real taste of Punk Rock in 1980. I caught them on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show, the first mass-market stage of the Punk invasion, thanks to some savvy music directors and Tom's snide willingness to play along with the insanity. Immediately, I was hooked, both on the sheer ferocity of the band and on the Kong-sized balls of its singer, Wendy O. Williams.

While many of the most visible Punk bands were (and remain) drunken goons, The Plasmatics had definite methods to their madness. One of the first bands to merge Heavy Metal with Punk Rock, The Plasmatics declared war on the materialistic excesses of American consumerism in general and the 1970s in particular. Although each member was a walking affront to society (especially tutu'd beanpole Richie Stotts and Haitian-giant-with-white-mohawk Jean Beauvoir), the band's lead shock trooper was busty Wendy, whose daredevil antics and ample charms both seduced and repelled mainstream America. Wendy sang like a trash compactor and castrated guitars with glee. The press - and fans - could not get enough of her. Neither could I.

Roughly 15 at the time I first saw them, I had finally found music that fit the smash-em-up mood of my adolescence. Thanks to a new school and a short-lived residency with my father ('78-'80 or thereabouts*), I discovered a succession of bands that blew my world inside-out: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Led Zepplin, Van Halen, Queen, The Sex Pistols, Rush, AC-DC, The Ramones and The Plasmatics, among many others. Unusually savvy for his generation, Dad had told me about the existence of Punk. He even rather liked The Ramones, and we planned - but never made it - to go see Rock-n-Roll High School together when it first came out. Dad had heard of The Plasmatics and Sex Pistols, and although he wasn't a big fan of their excesses, he seemed to respect their spirit. Intrigued, I caught the infamous Tom Snyder show episode featuring Wendy and Co., and was totally floored. I've loved 'em ever since.

It wasn't just that Wendy was hot, although that part certainly didn't hurt. What blew me away - then and now - was the raw daring of the so-called "Demon Queen of Destruction." In an era where few rock women even picked up a guitar, Wendy hefted chainsaws, guns and dynamite. She drove buses through walls of TVs, jumped cars loaded with explosives off of piers, and eventually skydived off a biplane (after wing-walking it) naked. She fought cops fist-to-face, and spat out war-cries against the status quo. An avowed vegetarian and animal-rights activist, she walked the walk even as she blew it to pieces. To this day, Wendy's life and career make most rock stars - male and female - look like utter pussies. How could I not love that?

The band's first several album-length releases - New Hope for the Wretched and Beyond the Valley of 1984, plus the EP Metal Priestess - (**) remain some of my all-time favorites. Sadly, The Plasmatics began to decline, first by releasing a fairly lame Metal album called Coup d'Ea't and a weird concept album called Maggots. By then, the band and its schtick were wearing thin. Wendy broke away for a solo career - jump-started by Gene Simmns and several members of Kiss - and that's when I finally got to see my beloved Demon Queen of Destruction live.

It think it was 1986, on her tour for Kommander of Kaos, that Wendy came to Richmond, VA. The fact that my friends in Death Piggy(***) were opening for her made the show that much more essential. How can I describe this? It was one of the most intense concerts I have ever seen, with bodies flying and danger swirling in the air. Wendy's fan base of skinheads, metalheads, punks, bikers, anarchists and gods-knows-what-else made for a wild and uncompromising mosh pit. I literally hung onto the stage for the first few songs, taking pictures, but when a H-U-G-E dude ripped me out of his way and flung me back several feet so he could have a better view, I decided to take my chances in the pit. If I had my flatbed scanner and photo albums here in Seattle, I'd post the shots I did get that night. As it was, the show wound up with Wendy topless (as usual), sweaty and cheered by a packed-house crowd. The next day, the local music reviewer wrote, "Weep, moan and gnash your teeth if you missed the best rock concert in Richmond this year." I didn't miss it, and I'm very glad for that.

Wendy more-or-less retired soon afterward, retreating to Conneticut with her former manager and long-time companion Rod Swenson. By then, her face had grown hard and her voice was almost completely destroyed. She worked as an animal-rights activist, health-food store employee, and occasional guest star on MacGyver(****). Aging apparently did not agree with her, however. On the same depressing week in which Rozz Williams of Christian Death hanged himself, Williams committed her final act of mayhem. Appropriately enough, she blew her own head off with a shotgun, after writing:

I don't believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.

Rest easy, Ms. Williams. you earned it.

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* - This period also introduced me to roleplaying games. Dad lived in Springfield, Virginia at the time. Being shy and knowing no one, I spent a lot of time walking to Springfield Mall or listening to Dad's stereo, which was set to DC101 and WAVA105. Through the first pastime, I discovered the newly-released Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books and related miniatures; through the second, I discovered Hard Rock Music after years of listening to Top 40 stations or Dad's old '60s albums and Doo-Wop tapes. Sadly, the stores and stations of my youth are long gone, but the impact they'd had on me then remains strong.

** - This is not actually the cover of the album's original U.S. release, but it's the only one I could find online without lots of digging.

*** - The band that later morphed into Gwar. Their CD collection Smile or Die features photos I took at that very show, given afterward to Russ Bahorsky, who was in my Theatre Lit class at the time. (Thanks, Bunche, for giving me a copy of that CD!)

**** - Supposedly, she dated Richard Dean Anderson during part of the show's run. I recall reading about this, but haven't looked it up.

"Information Should All be Free?" Really? Think About It...

The following is a response to someone on my "Has Rock Rolled" thread. I thought the whole "all information should be free" thing had gone out with the '90s. Obviously not, and so the issue is worth a larger discussion.

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I agree with you in theory about the MP3/Internet revolution. In most regards, it's been good for artists and fans, if lousy for an admittedly bloated record industry. Your "information should be free" statement, however, comes from from people who don't make their living creating intellectual properties - ie, music, books, etc. As one of the people who does make my living that way, my perspective is, shall we say, somewhat different. It's a nice idea in theory, but creating that "information" involves a LOT of WORK - inspiration, emotion, skilled labor and innate talent. And just as you wouldn't expect a stranger to come tile your bathroom, grow your food or fix your car for free, it's unreasonable to assume that an author or musician should just create neat free stuff for everyone with a computer.

File-sharing in small, consensual doses is viral marketing; on the scale it had attained before the Napster suit, however, it had become a one-sided "deal" in which hard-working musicians, producers and the labels that had put up thousands (if not millions) of dollars to record their work were having that work taken by people who were offering nothing in return. Sure, it's easy to say, "Dude, Metallica doesn't need a the money - they have plenty!" Thing is...

1: Metallica works REALLY GODDAMN HARD for that money. You think it looks easy? You try becoming a world-class musician, writing, composing and recording albums worth of material, than then spending most of your life on the road promoting it, playing it near-perfectly several hours a night for months on end. It's not easy, trust me. Just ask S.J. "Sooj" Tucker, who does it.

2: Metallica and their label spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars creating that material. Why do you think you should be entitled to have it for free? Just because of some shop-worn hacker slogan? Fucking please.

3. Metallica's label depends on the money generated by that "information" to pay its employees. If everyone suddenly downloads the music without paying for it, who pays those employees for their labor - and with what?

When you're talking about "information" like stories, music or artwork (as well as computer software), your "information" becomes someone else's labor - and very probably their living as well.

If those parties choose to share it for free (as I do when I blog), then that's cool. However, if you just download my books - books I had written to pay my rent and without which I could not eat - because you thought you had a "right" to them, then we, my friend, have a problem.

Ditto that - and square it - if you think you've got the "informational right" to take my work and claim it as your work (maybe even profiting from it) just because - hey, it should be free and unregulated. Now you know why copyright law exists. :)

You may still buy CDs from artist you support. Many other folks, though, don't bother. And who defines "support," anyway? "Yeah, I kinda like that dude's music, but it's not like I support him or anything." How does "that dude" pay the bills or get compensated for his labor if even a small part of his audience says something like that? And given that situation, why should he bother putting anything out at all? Is it his "right" to work for nothing so you can share it with 10,000 of your friends?

Sure, I believe in small-scale personal-use copying, especially when the source of the work is publicly attributed to the creator. There's s huge gulf, however, between that usage and a "totally free and unregulated flow of information" - a gulf that we're only now beginning to address.

And Sooj's work can be supported at itunes (under S.J. Tucker), at her website (http://www.skinnywhitechick.com/), and at http://www.cdbaby.com/.

End of an Era: Forrest Ackerman R.I.P.

Dammit.

Forrest J. Ackerman dies at 92.

Popular culture, geeky and otherwise, would not be what it is without the Ackermonster's gentle hand. If not for his groundbreaking fan clubs, his musem, his endless convention appearances, and most of all his magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, the world might lack Star Wars, Close Encounters, White Zombie, Fahrenheit 451, "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Ticktock Man," and many other mainstays of geek and popular culture.

A generous, enthusiastic fan of weird and science-fiction media, Ackerman discovered (and sponsored) young Ray Bradbury, coined the term "sci-fi," made Boris Karloff, King Kong and Vincent Price into household names for thousands of readers (including George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Rob Zombie, Tim Burton and Yours Truly), and introduced those readers to everything from Kikaider to Harlan Ellison to A Clockwork Orange to Plan 9 From Outer Space. Much to Ellison's disgust, the term "sci-fi" has become the shorthand term for the most influential form of fiction in the last century. And throughout the near-century of his life, Ackerman not only witnessed the future he both feared and adored come to pass, he himself became an agent of its fruition.

Rest well, Ackermonster, and thank you for all you have inspired, created and shared with us.  

Has Rock Finally Rolled Away for Good?

Yesterday afternoon, I was listening to Pearl Jam's masterpiece Ten, when the thought hit me:

The early-mid '90s were the last time a Rock music movement really sounded interesting to me.

Let me clarify: I don't mean that I haven't heard a decent Rock(*) record since the '90s, nor am I indulging in that patented old-fart chestnut You kids today don't know REAL music - why, when I was your age... It's not that I like only the stuff that came out at the age when my musical tastes were supposedly set in stone. Nope. I've heard some pretty damned good Rock albums these last few years (Thea Gilmore's Songs From the Gutter, Muse's Absolution, Flogging Molly's Within a Mile of Home and The Sword's Age of Winters, among others), and really enjoy a number of recent artists (again, Thea Gilmore, Flogging Molly, Muse and The Sword as well as Placebo, Gnarls Barkley, The Decemberists, Nouvelle Vague, She Wants Revenge, and more). Still, I can't remember an explosion in Rock music that has really lit the world on fire since the early 1990s. Since then, even the best artists have been riffing on earlier achievements by earlier bands.

Really, think abut it: Thea Gilmore sounds like a distaff Neil Young; Flogging Molly is a direct descendant of The Pogues; Muse melds Queen with U2 and Pearl Jam, while The Sword records the best Black Sabbath albums that Sabbath never recorded. P!nk riffs on Madonna, She Wants Revenge riffs on Bauhaus, The Killers riff on Queen, and Gorillaz riff on everybody. Almost everyone in popular music these days sounds like earlier artists. I had hoped at one point that the Neo-Cabaret sound of bands like The Dresden Dolls, The Decemberists and The Ditty Bops would break into something larger, but... nope. The best Rock albums of the last decade or so have either come from older artists (Velvet Revolver**, the Rolling Stones) or from new artists who sound like older artists (Coldplay, Nickelback, Muse, Placebo, Flogging Molly, etc.).

The sad epitomes of this trend arrive with the hype over new albums from Metallica (Death Magnetic, their best in nearly 20 years because it sounds like what they did 20 years ago) and Guns-n-Lawyers... *ahem* I mean, the Axl Rose Ego Experience. Both dangle brand names with over two decades of shelf life, and while neither album is bad, exactly, they're just... OLD.

In contrast, think back to 1990-95: Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Nine Inch Nails. Ministry. Hole. L7. The Smashing Pumpkins. Tori Amos. The Indigo Girls. White Zombie. Soundgarden. P.J. Harvey. Alanis Morrisette. The Offspring. Live. Their names and music still have a classic sound to them. That's the last time I can recall turning on the radio and actually wanting to listen to it for more than a song or two. Yes, those artists were also riffing on the music they grew up with, but... I dunno, there just seems to have been something more exciting and innovative about the movement as a whole. Before the scene turned into Whiny White Boy Wave (Candlebox, Creed, Matchbox Fucking 20), heroined itself into oblivion (Ministry), or disappeared up its own ass (with The Smashing Billy Corrigans being the prime offender), there was a visceral power to the era's ROCK that reverberates even now. I didn't wanna pump my fist in the air to Ten yesterday because it came out during my impressionable teens - I was almost 30 when it was released. I found my heart pounding to every song on that album because it's still a great fucking album. I haven't heard its like in years.

I'm not saying there are no good Rock artists out there. I have yet, however, to see a movement where a torrent of artists combine into something memorable - a new "wave" of Rock that sweeps over the shoreline of popular culture again.

So, thoughts? Am I just getting old, or has Rock finally rolled itself out? What am I missing? Or is it Rock itself that's missing in the age of Rock Band?



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* - I'm not referring here to Hip-Hip, Soul, Electronica or Rap, although those genres seem pretty played out right now, too. The most intriguing artists in those arenas are mining their old influences to death as well - yes Kanye West, Joss Stone, Thievery Corporation and L'il Wayne I am talking about you.


** - Aka, the real Guns-n-Roses.

Albums You Probably Haven't Heard Yet: Rats (1994)

Sass Jordan - RATS (1994)

Music and drugs have a long and checkered history. No cause, perhaps, has racked up more corpses among the popular music set (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Presley are only the biggest names on a very large, very black wall). Yet, paradoxically, no other human experience besides sexual passion has inspired more powerful popular music. And during the 1990s, the queen of popular music drugs was heroin.

In the early 1990s, a friend appalled my former wife Cathi and me with the desire to try heroin. “Why the fuck would you do THAT?” we replied: “They’ve known that shit would kill you since the ‘60s.” Apparently, our friend knew something we didn’t, because she wasn’t alone in curiosity. Heroin was THE glamour drug of the 1990s. Crack cocaine may have given that era the musical mystique of Gangsta Rap, but heroin gave it Grunge. Immortalized in songs like “Under the Bridge” and “Mr. Brownstone(*)” as well as rocker flicks like Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction, heroin exerted a sick fascination over popular culture. And while Kurt, Courtney and Kate reigned as the (un)holy trinity of heroin chic, an obscure Canadian Blues singer named Sass Jordan was forging her own testament to the drug.

Rats depicts the harrowing relationship between Jordan, her lover, and her lover’s addiction to smack. Vomited up with raw vocals and naked emotions, this album sweeps through your room like a storm of glass. Although it’s usually shelved with Rock, Rats is essentially a Blues record in the hybrid tradition of Susan Tedeschi, Kenny Wayne Sheperd and Faces-era Rod Stewart. Shot through – almost literally – with that genre’s gut-wrenching love stories, Rats must have been an excruciating experience to record. Already acclaimed for her powerful pipes, Jordan became one of the few singers who could accurately be mentioned in the breath with Janis Joplin(**). Her shredded singing on tracks like “Damaged,” “Honey” and especially “Pissin' Down” literally makes my throat hurt in sympathy. The rusty guitar-slinging (courtesy of Stevie Salas) cuts like a complimentary buzz saw. This is the Blues the way they should be played – with a dirty broken bottle down gritty steel strings. The rhythm section (Brian Tichy on drums and a variety of players on bass) rocks hard behind the groove while a selection of other instruments (Hammond organ, harmonica, and occasional strings and piano) adds polish to the mix. Every track on Rats is hit hard out of the park by Jordan and her band. And though each song is distinctive, the arrangement of them drives – or, more truthfully, drags – the listener through Jordan’s personal hell.

“Hell” is an overused concept in popular music. Certainly, Black Metal and Gangsta Rap make flamboyant appeals to the Pit. But for all that fire-n-brimstone, the musical style that most accurately depicts human suffering and the hope that makes it worthwhile (yet renders it all the more excruciating) is Blues. How? Because the Blues are real. The emotions wrought up through Blues music are archetypal in scope yet shattering in intimacy. The Blues won’t tell you about Satan slaying multitudes – they’ll tell you how the singer’s heart was fed into a meat grinder and the singer helped Satan put it there. Rats is the epitome of this approach. From Jordan’s opening salvo on “Damaged” to the quiet affirmations of “Breakin’” and “Give,” Jordan charts the smacked-out slide of a relationship from rage to giddiness to eventual surrender.

Despite this grim focus, Rats is exuberant, not morose. It kicks off with a ragged yowl and ends with a Gospel organ. In between, the album rocks like a Brewtown bender. The beefy production, courtesy of Nick DiDia (who performed similar miracles with Pearl Jam) and Michael Wagener (Metallica), sounds dirty but not messy. Propelled by monster Blues riffs and that raging voice, Rats sounds wounded yet compelling. Strung out on the tension between allure and rejection, the album plays out a domestic tragedy in which Sass is a willing (if unhappy) partner to her lover’s self-destruction. Rats is not a concept album per se(***), but the sequence of songs cannot be accidental. The Hell they depict is not the conventional horrorshow of beatings and thievery, but a corrosive decay of love into ruins.

The stark artwork within the CD captures the jagged reflection within its music. Despite the denunciations of “Pissin’ Down” and “Slave,” the real object of Jordan’s loathing is herself. She freely admits that “Dirty is my style/ And I like my oil crude/ You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen/ And I think I love you.” After lacerating her nameless lover and his needlephilia on the album’s first four tracks, Jordan owes up to her end of the problem: she likes her bad boy being BAD. The songs “Ugly,” “Honey” and “Wish” reveal that Sass is as addicted to her partner’s dysfunction as he is to “your old lady heroin.” Like a junkie, she tries to kick him cold-turkey with “High Road Easy” and “I’m Not,” yet keeps backsliding. “Sheeeet – ugly sucka!” proclaims guest vocalist George Clinton on “Ugly.” That "sucka" is Jordan’s kind of “Ugly,” though, and even as she shows her lover the door yet again (“Breakin’”), she doesn’t seem at all sure that she can ever truly be rid of him. One of the album’s many epiphanies occurs in the split-second glide between the cacophonous “Ugly” and the smooth intro to “I’m Not”; musically, it’s like a raucous bender followed by the hung-over morning after and its futile resolution to never do THAT again. Despite an insistence that “I don’t wanna kill myself yet,” the album never really resolves the issue. Its last track asks “In this world I’m livin’ in/ Is it cruel or is it kind?” Like love, like heroin, and like Rats, it’s both.

After a harrowing period that Jordan later called “a descent into the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Jordan apparently kicked that Bad Boy’s habit for good. Her subsequent albums are happier affairs (one even got the double-edged title of Present), and she eventually became a judge on Canadian Idol(****). But although her most recent album, Get What You Give, displays some of the old grit, Sass Jordan’s dysfunctional ‘90s relationship(s?) seem(s) to have provided her greatest inspiration. None of Jordan’s albums, before or since, packs the punch of Rats. Sass Jordan still has the voice of a scalded nicotine angel, but her Blues have lightened spectrum and those milder tones of blue just don’t run as deep – or as dangerous – as Rats.

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TRACK LISTING

1. Damaged

2. Slave

3. Pissin' Down

4. High Road Easy

5. Sun's Gonna Rise

6. Head

7. Ugly

8. I'm Not

9. Honey

10. Wish

11. Breakin'

12. Give

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* - Actually released in 1987, but it’s close enough for government work.

** - Sass later went on to play Joplin on stage in a musical called Love, Janis. How they tamed Jordan’s cover-girl looks down to Janis’ homely appeal remains a mystery.

*** - An expression I’ve been cringing from using since the “Goth kids” episode of South Park, even if it is used correctly.

**** - “Good lord! *choke*”

Albums You Probably Haven't Heard Yet: Bloodletting (1990)

Inspired by geekalpha's post a day or two ago about "opus albums" (that is, albums in which every track is a killer), I scanned my music-geekish brain cells for the albums I knew and loved as examples. One of the most prominent of them is the album that earned Concrete Blonde their frequently-attributed (and fairly inaccurate) standing as a Gothic Rock band: Bloodletting.

Song for song, this album is a masterpiece. It's short by most album standards, but there is not a second of filler to be found. The band still uses most of the songs on Bloodletting during their sporadic concert appearances, and if you've heard a Blonde song on the radio, chances are it came from Bloodletting.

The expanded version of the title cut(*) remains an obligatory dance-floor favorite at Goth clubs; I've often said that "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is the Gothic "Free Bird," "Temple of Love '92 is "Stairway to Heaven" and the expanded "Bloodletting" is "Hotel California" - they're the classics everyone loves to hate but everyone gets up and dances to when the DJ sets 'em spinning. Even without the tongue-in-cheek theatrics of the expanded version, "Bloodletting" is one of the better songs from the era between New Wave and Grunge. Its bass hook remains one of the most recognizable openers in post-60s rock, and the sing-along chorus is as infectious as a vampire bite.

And that's just the beginning.

When I first bought Bloodletting (around 1991 or early '92), the cassette was in a bargain bin. I guess the album had yet to catch on, because it's since become Concrete Blonde's most commercially successful release. Immediately, it floored me. I'd liked The Blonde since first hearing them on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 soundtrack(**), but this was far better than their previous albums. From the title cut, the album roars into "The Sky is a Poisonous Garden," another vampire-based song that reveals the band's Punk roots and becomes Bloodletting's obligatory "thrash the floor" track(***). Without missing a beat, the groove deepens with "Caroline," another signature song detailing singer Johnette Napolitano's trademark dysfunctional relationships. Slowing down further, "the Darkening of the Light" turns meditative, with a perfect counterpoint in "I Don't Need a Hero." This reflection closed Side One of the album, which allowed you to flip it over and rock out to "Days and Days," which features one of my all-time favorite bass guitar hooks. Breaking up the introspective mood toward the end of Side One, this song leads straight into "The Beast," a full-blown FUCK OFF to love as a concept. Performing a graceul mood-flip, the next song reveals the touching dedication of love in "Lullabye" before breaking it down through the band's most popular and enduring song, "Joey." Although I prefer the anguished live acoustic version on Still in Hollywood, the studio version of "Joey" remains the archetypal plea to the fuckup you just can't let go of no matter how hard you try. It's so popular because it's so true.

Overall, the album revolves around predatory relationships, needy-bleedy love, and the ultimate disappointments of mortality. The latter theme is underscored by the album's closer, "Tomorrow Wendy"; originally recorded by Wall of Voodoo (frequent collaborators with The Blonde), this bitter requiem for a friend dying of AIDs remains one of the bleakest songs of that era. Its naked emotionalism still disturbs me, and I used to dislike the track intensely, especially back when I was with my now-former wife Wendy. Now, though, I can hear the song for what it is: a slap in the face of a God who Napolitano calls on the carpet throughout her career yet never quite abandons. An ironic counterpart to the vampiric immortality of the first two tracks, "Tomorrow Wendy" stands as a testament of the days when AIDS was the scariest kid on the block, yet never actually mentions the disease by name. Like almost every other song on the album, this one raises goosebumps on me every time I hear it.

Musically, Bloodletting is gorgeous. It rips and chimes in all the right places, with a production that lets the band breathe yet never smothers them. (A shortcoming of their later albums, especially Mexican Moon.) James Mankey's guitar work is stunning; the fact that this guy is rarely mentioned in those obligatory "best rock guitarists" round-ups shows just how underrated Concrete Blonde continues to be. Although he draws obvious influences from Jimi Hendrix(****), Mankey sounds like no one else I can think of. His guitar provides an eloquent counterpart to Napolitano's haunting vocals, seeming to weep, choke and scream like a phantasmal human voice. That element of mortality earned the band its Gothic tag, even though their roots draw more from West Coast Punk than from, say, Bauhaus. The drum-work is spare but elegant, provided partly by terminal fuck-up bandmate Harry Rushakoff (who might have been the inspiration for a few of the album's dysfunctional "heroes") and partly by Paul/ Porl Thompson from Wall of Voodoo. The real foundations of The Blonde's sound, however, are Mankey's guitar and Napolitano's naked-sounding bass and voice. Bloodletting displays all three elements to devastating effect - the best the band ever achieved.

Although they would go on to release a half-dozen other albums (including the fantastic collection Still in Hollywood, another album you MUST hear), Concrete Blonde never again nailed the musical and emotional synergy that makes Bloodletting such an underrated classic. If you haven't heard it, give it a listen. If you have, dig it out again anyway.

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TRACK LISTING

"Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" 6:04
"The Sky Is a Poisonous Garden" (Moreland, Napolitano) 2:36
"Caroline" 5:30
"Darkening of the Light" (featuring Peter Buck) 3:24
"I Don't Need a Hero" 4:25
"Days and Days" 3:12
"The Beast" 3:52
"Lullabye" 3:56
"Joey" 4:07
"Tomorrow, Wendy" (featuring Andy Prieboy) (Prieboy)

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* - ...which is not actually on this album - it was a German single later re-released on Still in Hollywood.

** - A fantastic grab-bag from the Independent Record Syndicate (REM's original label) which featured tracks from yet-to-be-released newcomers Concrete Blonde and Timbuk Three, as well as Oingo Boingo, The Cramps, Lords of the New Church and more. The movie was kind of a mess, but the soundtrack was a killer in every sense of the word.

*** - Concrete Blonde featured one or two of these songs on each of their first several albums - fast-paced bare-bones rock-outs that sent concert-goers moshing at their gigs.

**** - Shown to great effect on their cover of "Little Wing," from Still in Hollywood.