Woodstock

Aaron Cometbus writes to say, "After coveting your copy of Woodstock Nation for two decades (!), I finally found my own at a sale a few weeks back. Also, at a different sale, an original copy of Guitar Army, which I've also always wanted."

Really? Two decades? I remember him remarking on it - and yes, that would have been somewhere around 1989 - at my house up on Spy Rock, where I enjoyed the luxury of an entire room devoted to books, though it sounds a bit grandiose to call it a library (grandiosity was not, however, a quality I lacked in those days). And I remember him making mention of it occasionally - very occasionally - over the ensuing twenty years.

But I don't recall ever getting the sense that he was truly covetous of it, because most likely there are several points at which I'm sure I would have just given it to him. To be quite honest, I'm not even sure, having disposed of large numbers of my personal possessions as I downsized from a six-room house in the mountains to a modest apartment in Brooklyn.

And to be even more honest, although I will, the first chance I get, rummage through my remaining books to see if the hardbound original printing of Abbie Hoffman's acid-drenched (in more than one sense) memoir of the biggest countercultural event of modern times, I'm unlikely to read it again anytime soon. I'll be more motivated by the awareness that if Aaron, an avid and devoted book collector, has had to search that long and hard for it, it's probably worth a fair bit of money.

Oh, I know, that sounds terrible, especially on this 40th anniversary, where every doddering old hippie with half a functioning brain left (actually, I think the bar has been set considerably lower) is joining with youthful romantics who weren't even born in 1969 to weigh in on What It All Means.

Not a heck of a lot, I'd venture to say, and before you accuse me of being one of those doddering old hippies myself (oh, what the heck; go ahead), allow me to point out that I at least have the advantage of having been there. Well, for a little while, anyway. Less than 24 hours, actually, since I'd apparently I'd already formed my lifelong habit of arriving late and leaving early when it comes to rock and roll shows, but enough, I think, to get in the proper spirit of things.

The San Francisco Chronicle (of course) hosted this charming discussion, hosted by The Worst Rock Critic in the History of Rock Criticism (that would be the ever-vapid and unctuous Joel Selvin) among three old-timers who had not just attended Woodstock, but performed there, and while much of it sounded like three cranky old men (it was actually just two cranky old men; the guy from Santana, still in his early 60s, sounded reasonably coherent) whiling away yet another afternoon in the arts and crafts lounge at the retirement home), it did bring up the interesting point that it's very difficult to establish agreement on exactly what happened and when.

In the age of cell phones, blogging, Youtube and ubiquitous handheld videocams, that may sound like a strange notion, but for the Woodstock story we're largely reliant on the pre-modern oral tradition. Oh, there's the movie, of course, which I haven't seen since the 70s and could probably not sit through ever again without the aid of powerful drugs, but that was constructed more as a commercial ("Come Visit Hippieland!") than a documentary, and bears about as much resemblance to reality as the musical Hair.

And with both age and - in many though certainly not all cases - a lifetime of drug use diminishing and distorting the recollections of those Woodstock veterans who remain among us, it's likely that the festival will eventually pass into the realm of pure legend. If it hasn't already. Which it probably has.

I've caught myself being scornful of those who endowed the story of a few hundred thousand people standing in a muddy field with more significance than it merited, as well as those whose memories of it have gone slip sliding away into la-la-la-we-all-loved-each-other-land, only to discover that my own grasp on matters was by no means as firm as I would have liked to imagine.

In connection with this Guardian article by a lady who presumably wasn't there and thus bemoans how modern rock festivals don't have the same "spirit" (perhaps, but they certainly have better bands, better sound, better facilities, etc.), there's a link to an alleged (hey, it's on Wikipedia) schedule of the bands who played at Woodstock. The first shock was at how many crappy bands were allowed on the bill (Quill? Who the hell were they? Sha Na Fucking Na??), but the real bitchslap to yours truly's grip on reality came in discovering that either I saw a bunch of bands that I don't even remotely remember, or that my recollections of how and when I arrived at the festival are questionable at best.

For years now I believed that the first band I saw on arriving Saturday afternoon (more about that in a minute) was the Grateful Dead. According to the schedule, however, they didn't play until 10 o'clock that night. There should have been four of five bands before that I did see, including a couple that I quite liked and a couple others that I don't think I would have liked at all. Don't remember any of it.

Bear in mind that I hadn't had much if any sleep since the previous Wednesday; on Thursday my friend Jim and I had finished our shifts as University of Michigan janitors at 11 pm, loaded up the VW (naturally) van, and left Ann Arbor at about midnight. With us were Leslie, Jim's long time girlfriend, and Mo, a girl I'd met a week earlier and in a moment of late-night amphetamine-fueled madness, invited to go with us. Jim's van being incapable of more than 50 mph, and that on level surfaces only, we figured the trip would take about 14 hours, providing we didn't waste any precious time sleeping or eating.

There may or may not have been stimulants involved in this cockamamie plan - this being the summer of Nixon's Operation Intercept, marijuana had become almost completely unavailable, with various kinds of speed rushing in to fill the gap - but we did have a glove box full of LSD and what was allegedly mescaline, but could have been anything, including the aforementioned amphetamines. We also had a giant American flag, large enough to cover everything and everybody in the van twice over, which Jim and I had "liberated" from the University flagpole back in Ann Arbor.

I don't recall having packed any other essentials, or perhaps nothing else seemed essential; at any rate, things went smoothly until somewhere in western New York we were pulled over by a state trooper who first threatened to shoot Jim's obstreperous German Shepherd (in retrospect, it's hard to blame him; that dog was truly obnoxious), then accused us of stealing our flag from the University of Michigan (I was truly astounded at his detective skills, which seemed to border on the psychic, until, many years later, it occurred to me that in a university town, there weren't many other places one would be likely to come up with a flag that size), and then announced that he was going to search our van for contraband.

Well, we were ready for that, just about. As designated shotgun-rider, and therefore the one with quickest access to the glove box, it had fallen to me to begin devouring our entire drug supply the minute the red lights had come on behind us. I still had a mouthful of gelatin caps when he knocked on our window, but through subtle but assiduous chewing I was able to get them all down before he asked me to say anything for myself.

How many pills? My guess is about 25, maybe 30. I wasn't that bothered, figuring that I'd just be extra high when we arrived at Woodstock later that day. The cop, having found nothing to arrest us for, then advised us that all roads leading to the festival were backed up "at least 20 miles," that no further traffic was being allowed into the area, and that we'd be best advised to turn around and go back to Michigan.

You can imagine how likely we were to take that advice, and in case you can't, not very. We plowed on, the journey becoming increasingly colorful for me, probably less so for the others, as we hit the mountains and the van's top speed fell precipitously, to the vicinity of 25 mph, which didn't make us too popular on whatever expressway we were traversing. It was already dark, and I think we'd been on the road 19 or 20 hours ("But as near as I can tell, we're no more than 50 or 100 miles away," Jim cheerily declared), when the van's engine gave up the ghost and we drifted over to the shoulder where we sat marooned for the night.

We tried sleeping on the side of the road, but unfortunately it was a little steep for that and I'd no sooner get relaxed than I'd start rolling downhill. Not that there was any way, considering the chemicals coursing through my system, that I was going to sleep anyway. Around midnight it started raining, which meant the four of us, five, counting the German Shepherd, who was nearly as big as I was, spent the rest of the night in the van.

Morning dawned bright and sunny, and we started hitchhiking. I reiterate: four full-grown hippies and an outsized dog. What were our chances? A VW bug pulled over, driven by two college boys. Despite the gravity of our predicament, we laughed. Yeah, sure, that was gonna happen. I recalled that once in high school we'd managed to cram sixteen (maybe it was 13, a lot, anyway) kids into my friend Mike's VW for a stunt that wound up on the front page of the school paper, and the college boys said, "Well, then six people and a dog shouldn't be any problem at all!"

I still have a hard time believing this actually happened, but I don't have any other explanation for how it happened, and by that I'm referring not only to how we all crammed into the car, but also how we managed to thread our way through the epic traffic backups and highway closures that had many attendees abandoning their cars and walking the last 10 or 20 miles (performers had to be brought in by helicopter).

But here's how it seems to have worked: arriving at a little crossroads village, we went into the general store to ask directions. Ever since I've pondered whether the proprietor, fed up with a seemingly unending procession of hippies all wanting the same thing, provided us a with a completely nonsensical route to follow in hopes that we'd drive off a cliff somewhere, or whether he for some reason took pity on us and clued us in on a genuine shortcut.

In any event, after a couple hours of attempting to follow his rather complex and confusing directions, we found ourselves on the side of a mountain, in a field, following two tire tracks that might have qualified as a cowpath but probably not as a road, unable to go any way but forward, since to attempt to turn around would have almost certainly sent us plunging to our doom several hundred feet below.

"Haven't we already driven all the way around this stupid mountain?" someone said, just as we rounded one more bend and saw, splayed across the hills and valleys just below, the festival in all its sodden glory. The "road" widened and turned downhill, and ten minutes later we pulled into the main parking lot immediately adjacent to the stage.

So, we were there, we walked around being awestruck for a bit, discovered there was no food - I was able to buy an orange for what then seemed like the outrageous price of 25 cents; apparently that same fruit stand was later wrecked in a mini-riot provoked by what festival-goers saw as price-gouging - and settled down on a hillside to watch the show.

The ground was muddy from the previous night's rain, but not unmanageably so, and the weather a bit chilly for August, especially once the sun went down. The falling temperature made sitting in mud a lot less pleasant, especially when our blankets began to disappear into it. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I had an unpleasant vision of myself and my erstwhile girlfriend as two pigs rolling in slop, a vision made more vivid by her having one of those unfortunate pug noses that do tend to make one look, well, a little porcine.

I jumped up, mumbled something about going for a walk, and disappeared into the night. I spent the rest of my Woodstock experience on my own, wandering through the crowds, stopping to marvel at the Who's show-stopping hymn to dawn (that one about "Looking at you, I see the glory, etc."), not to mention the rather picturesque sight of Abbie Hoffman getting knocked cold by Pete Townshend's viciously swung guitar, which elicited wild cheering from the peace-and-love hippie crowd.

It was full daylight, maybe 8 or 9 on Sunday morning, by the time the Jefferson Airplane, then one of my favorite bands, took the stage, and after watching them for about 20 minutes, I realized I was completely exhausted, and, like the kid who's just eaten an entire chocolate cake and a gallon of ice cream, just couldn't take anymore. I started walking, in no particular direction at first, but gradually I realized I was wandering further and further away from the music, until I could barely hear it anymore, past dozens, then hundreds of hippie encampments, little and large. Many people slept, others sat glassy-eyed, like displaced persons after a great war, watching their fellow refugees stream past with great resolve but little visible purpose.

Eventually - it must have been midday - I found myself on the side of a four-lane highway and stuck out my thumb. That's the last thing I have any clear memory of. I woke up in my bed back in Ann Arbor sometime Monday afternoon, with no recollection of how I'd got there, though by going through my pockets I was able to piece together some fragmentary idea. I had a receipt for a youth fare ticket from New York to Detroit, a New York City subway token, and a couple other bits of paper that made it pretty evident I'd managed to hitchhike into New York and find my way onto a plane back to Michigan. I even had a very vague, but fairly certain memory, of standing in front of the building on E. 2nd Street near Avenue B where I'd briefly lived the year before which had now been taken over by a new band of squatters.

My brother showed up at the end of the week; although I hadn't even known he'd been there, he'd stuck around not only till the end of the festival, but for a few days more to help clean up. Like many others who'd stuck it out to the end, he was raving about Jimi Hendrix, who'd wound things up on Monday morning, and for a number of years I felt regretful, even resentful, that I'd missed out on the whole third day (not to mention the first day). But while I'd have liked to see Hendrix (as things would turn out, I never would), a quick look at the aforementioned schedule assures me that I didn't miss much else. Okay, maybe Crosby, Stills and Nash would have been interesting, but I couldn't stand their records, so I don't know why I would have liked seeing them live. And a couple others, but oh, what the heck. I'm sure I also needed my sleep.

And what about now? What do I think, forty years on? Woodstock falls neatly under the heading of things that I'm glad I've done but would never want to do again, sort of like my trip through Poland shortly after the fall of Communism. I think there are much better bands around these days, I'm glad that I don't have to take drugs to enjoy them (or to take drugs at all, which just by itself makes our present time greatly superior to the 1960s), and frankly, despite some moments of great excitement that I'll always treasure (as much because they happened to me in my apocalyptic and hyperdramatic youth as because of it being "the 60s"), that whole period, both culturally and musically, strikes me as being a bit boring and overrated.

Every generation has festivals, social movements, wild and wacky fashions; the 60s generation seems to have got a disproportionate amount of attention because a) there were, thanks to the postwar baby boom, so many of us; and b) because its own self-important commentaries have so completely dominated the culture and media for so long that they seem to have taken on the aura of self-evident truth.

So yeah, it was interesting to be there, interesting to be part of, but hey, kids of today: don't let the parents or grandparents fool you into thinking that your own lives can never possibly be imbued with such Importance and Meaning as theirs were. Ultimately it was half a million mostly middle class kids gathering together in a field to take drugs, have sex, and listen to music. Happens dozens of times every summer, all over the world, every year, and probably always will as long as there are kids, fields, drugs, sex and music.

Green Day At The Garden

It's been a couple days now and I'm still buzzing from the two Green Day shows earlier this week. I feel more like a teenager than I did when I actually was one. Back in May I said that Green Day's Webster Hall show was possibly the best I'd ever seen, but I must admit that it paled into near-insignificance compared with the spectacle I witnessed at Madison Square Garden.

I've never been a big arena rock kind of guy; most of my MSG-type shows were in the 60s and 70s and involved the likes of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, etc., and as I think I've noted, I'd only been to Madison Square Garden itself once before, on July 28, 1973, the night Led Zeppelin were being filmed for The Song Remains The Same (and, incidentally - though I still maintain I had nothing to do with it - the night they were robbed of their share of the box office receipts, some $300,000, which, believe it or not, was quite a bit of money in those days).

In the 90s I saw Green Day play at Wembley and Oakland Arena, but both experiences left me, if not cold, at best slightly lukewarm. Maybe it was because on both those occasions I was up in the seats looking down on the arena floor, whereas this time I was on the floor, only a few feet from the stage. But to be fair, the floor itself was a very different affair for these shows; in Green Day's early arena-rock days, nearly anyone who wanted to be on the floor could get there, and the result was a seething, swirling maelstrom of flying bodies and - sometimes - flailing fists as thousands of people struggled to cram themselves into a space that could comfortably fit no more than a few hundred.

This time, the standing room near the stage was tightly controlled, accommodating, I would guess, about 500 people and leaving plenty of room to wander around or stand quietly if you weren't among those who simply had to be face-to-face with the band. When I say tightly controlled, put it this way: our way was barred by a snarling MSG security guard even though we were wearing passes that allowed us to go pretty much anywhere backstage. We had to spend the first part of the show a few hundred feet back, until the wonderful Carly intervened. Carly was there to look after the several children who were traveling with the band, and for purposes of getting to where we wanted to be, we became, essentially, three more of her charges. She escorted us up to the front, patiently explained to the security guard that she was responsible for us, and turned us loose into what might have been the ultimate punk rock playpen.

I don't say that disparagingly, either. Oddly enough, it felt a bit like being at Gilman (which also was described as a playpen or "punk rock Romper Room" by those who felt it wasn't truly punk if limbs, teeth and blood weren't at risk). There were almost none of the boneheads whose idea of a fun show involves beating up those smaller than themselves, and almost everyone right up front knew and loved the band's entire catalog, from 1988 to the present, well enough to sing along all the way through, and to cheer ecstatically when some of the long-neglected songs from the first two albums were resurrected.

It wasn't until I got home, till the next day, actually, that it occurred to me that those sitting up in the seats, especially in the upper balconies, would have had a very different experience, and that the almost intimate little concert we enjoyed at the very front was only possible because the vast majority of the audience was barred from being there.

But it really did feel intimate. At times, like when Billie was out at the end of the catwalk that protruded into the crowd, we were actually behind him, looking out at the audience from a very similar perspective to what he was seeing. And I found myself thinking, "This place isn't that big, in fact it feels almost kind of cozy." Of course, a great deal of this is probably down to Billie's ability - whether he's bellowing AY-O and insisting that people put their hands in the air, or singing a heartfelt ballad accompanied only by an acoustic guitar - to connect with people throughout the amphitheater, those marooned far up in the nosebleed sector as much as those standing awestruck at his feet.

I've often spoken and written about how, when I first saw Green Day (then known as Sweet Children) playing for five kids in a candlelit cabin in the Mendocino mountains, Billie performed like "the Beatles at Shea Stadium." Even though he was just 16, and the band was playing only its third or fourth show ever, I could, I thought, easily envision them displaying the same commanding presence on the biggest stages in the world. It seemed like a crazy idea at the time, and most people I told about it laughed at me and/or told their friends that I was losing my mind.

Well, I may not have been right about many things in my life, but I think I nailed this one. I've seen Green Day in bigger venues - headlining the 2004 Reading Festival, for example - but I've never seen them or any other band so thoroughly command a stage and an audience. The Rolling Stones at the LA Forum in 1973 might have come close, and Alice Cooper at Cobo Arena in 1971 made a good stab at it, but... ah, I can think of one performance that might have given Green Day a run for their money: the Who at Woodstock in 1969. But while that performance might have contained moments of grandeur and majesty that surpassed what Green Day produced at the Garden this week, it was also diminished by lulls, longeurs, and the simultaneously satisfying and upsetting spectacle of Abbie Hoffman getting knocked cold by Pete Townshend's guitar.

There have been times in my life when I was enough of an unbearably punk purist to turn my nose up at the elaborately produced and tightly choreographed sort of rock show that Green Day have now honed to a fine art, but that's just one of many ways in which I've succumbed to the prevailing idiocy rather than think and judge for myself. When I went to see La Traviata at the Sydney Opera House, I didn't complain that the production was too ornate or expensive, or that the sound was too slick and clean; instead I marveled at how the talents of the set and costume designers combined with those of the composer, the performers, the sound and lighting engineers, even the ushers and ticket takers, to create a living monument to what was bright and glorious about not just art and civilization, but to the very essence of what it is to be a human being: the desire, no, the need, to constantly transcend oneself.

Okay, before I risk climbing any further into the heights of grandiloquence, let me point out that, yeah, dude, this show also totally rocked and they played (almost) all my favorite songs, etc. I was especially ecstatic to, early on, hear the opening chords of "Holiday", which was noticeably missing from their New York shows in May. In fact, that's exactly when the feeling kicked in, the one that let me know I was in for one of those shows that I would remember and treasure all my life. What more could I have asked for? Well, "Christie Road" would have been a thrill (he did sing a couple bars of it during his "Shout" breakdown near the end, and on Monday night Nate Doyle and I were screaming like crazy for "Dry Ice", a song I've been (mostly unsuccessfully begging them to play ever since they dropped it from their repertoire sometime in the early 90s.

Someone also threw an outsized pair of men's briefs at Billie, on the back of which was emblazoned "No One Knows". It was going to happen, of course, but it was a sentiment I heartily endorsed; for many years I cited it as my favorite Green Day song ever.

But between the two nights we did get to hear "Going To Pasalacqua" (aka "Here We Go Again"), "Who Wrote Holden Caulfield", "2000 Light Years Away", "Welcome To Paradise", "Disappearing Boy", and a not nearly so old, but equally unexpected treat, "Macy's Day Parade", enough to satisfy all the most curmudgeonly old school Green Day fans (there are still some who bristle any time the band plays anything newer than Dookie, but since American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown are my favorite Green Day albums of all, I had no problem at all with hearing much of the former and most of the latter.

The band played two hours and forty-five minutes on Monday, which cost them quite a bit of money, since they were heavily fined for going past the Garden's curfew. So I halfway expected them to cut things a bit short on Tuesday. Instead, they played almost three full hours. There are not many bands - in fact, of the bands active today, I can't think of any - who could pull this off. I usually get impatient when a band goes over 30 minutes, unless it's one with a lot of history and hits behind it, in which case I can stretch to 45 or 50 minutes. But not since my days of watching the Grateful Dead on seven hits of acid have I voluntarily subjected myself to multiple hours of of one band's music, and yet I could easily have watched at leat another half hour of Green Day. More that that if they'd dug up some of the more obscure gems from 39/Smooth, Slappy, 1,000 Hours and Kerplunk.

I've already commented on the inspiration provided by Stephanie's guitar playing on "Jesus Of Suburbia" (and was totally stoked when she responded to my blog entry!), but her star turn shouldn't obscure the fact that nearly a dozen other kids were invited up on stage over the course of the two nights, and all - all but one, I should say - acquitted themselves magnificently. So much so that many people have expressed suspicion that these little guest spots are planned in advance, but it's just not true: Billie indeed does pick people right out of the audience. His wife was telling me how he's developed a real sense for who is up to the task and won't succumb to crippling stage fright. The boy who looked to be about 12 or so and played bass on "Longview" showed no such tendencies; before he was halfway through the song he was tearing around the stage as if he'd been born on one, and at the end jumped up to the mike and shouted, "Thanks, Madison Square!" He also walked off stage with a brand new bass, courtesy of Mr. Dirnt.
On Tuesday night, my friend Jim Kim was standing more or less behind me for the entire show, and he's posted this portfolio of photos that should give you an idea of what things looked like from where we were. However, the photo above was taken by my 13 year old nephew, Jackson, who, despite it being his first attempt ever at photographing a big rock concert (and using my new camera for the first time ever), produced a number of pictures that totally eclipsed any of my efforts. To be fair, on Monday night, when I had the camera, I wasn't quite close enough to get any really good shots, and on Tuesday night, when I was, Jackson had the camera, but was farther back engaging in kid-type shenanigans with the Armstrong boys and other members of Emily's Army. I never saw any kind of show until I was 16, so I can't even imagine what it was like for him, but as far I was concerned, if there was anything greater than seeing Green Day at the height of their glory, it was being able to share that experience with my completely awesome nephew.

And, late-breaking development: almost as if he'd been reading my blog, Billie busts out his acoustic guitar and delivers a partial (all but the final majestic bridge and chorus) rendition of one of the greatest Green Day songs ever, "Christie Road". It's got to be only a matter of time before the full electric version once again becomes a concert staple. To all of you out there in lands where this Green Day tour hasn't yet arrived, I beseech you: put aside any prejudices you may have against "big" or "commercial" or "arena" type rock shows and do whatever is necessary to witness this one. Miss this and I can virtually guarantee that a couple decades from now your kids will be hitting you with the mid-21st century equivalent of, "Mom/Dad, how could you have been so unbelievably lame?"

The Jersey Beat

I didn't think I liked the Screaming Females, but it turns out I may have been wrong (yes, imagine that; it does happen from time to time!). Check out this video, directed by Don Giovanni Records' Joe Steinhardt:



Reminds me a bit of the late 70s/early 80s, but in a good way.

Stephanie Rocks Out With Green Day

Much has been said and written on the subject of empowering young girls to take their rightful place in the traditionally male-dominated rock and roll world. My friend Jessica Hopper has recently published The Girl's Guide To Rocking, which appears to be getting a great reception, and deservedly so.

But Monday night at Madison Square Garden, I saw Green Day and - more importantly - a girl called Stephanie do more for the cause of girls rocking out than all the riot grrrl bands in history laid end to end, and sorry if that sounds like a poor choice of words, but I honestly didn't mean anything salacious by it.

Those of you who follow Green Day will be aware that it's a long-standing tradition to invite audience members up on stage to sing or play instruments on some of the songs. Back in the 90s, most of the invitees would be boys, but nowadays the gender balance tends to be pretty equal. What people may not know is that those invited up are not chosen in advance; Billie picks them out of the audience based on his gut feeling as to whether they'll be up to the task.

Monday night he was looking for someone to play guitar on "Jesus Of Suburbia," a nine-minute rock epic with multiple chord and tempo changes. Much as I - like, no doubt, a million other fans - have occasionally harbored fantasies of jumping on stage with the band (I've actually played guitar with Billie in the studio once, back in the Neolithic era, but never on stage), I found myself ducking behind somebody else when he was recruiting a JOS guitarist, because there's no way I could play that song sitting alone in my room, let alone in front of 20,000 people.

But Stephanie swore she was up to the task, and boy, was she. She was so at ease with her guitar that before long she was wandering the stage just as the Green Day guys do, and singing along with Billie on the lead vocals. At the end, Billie got down on his hands and knees in front of her and did the "I am not worthy" bow, before leading all of Madison Square Garden in a "Steph-a-nie" chant.

I can only imagine what it must have been like for Stephanie, who, with her torn Misfits shirt and matter-of-fact attitude, didn't look like the kind of girl accustomed to being on the receiving end of wild adulation, but she took it in such stride that I'm inclined to think of it as a life-changing experience. Look it this way: from now on, any boy unwise enough to taunt her to the effect that "chicks can't rock as hard as guys" or somesuch similar foolishness can quickly be put in his place with a well-timed, "I had Madison Square Garden in the palm of my hand; what the hell have you done, sucker?"

Here are a couple videos of Stepanie's performance (Green Day were no slouches either):





There's also a nice little blurb about it in today's Times.

Acting Stupidly

I wasn't there, so I have no way of knowing if, as President Obama claimed, the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, but I feel pretty safe in saying that Obama spoke stupidly in making this apparently off-the-cuff comment. It's the first time I've seen the Prez seriously blow it in terms of both leadership and public relations, and while George Bush could and frequently did manage half a dozen bigger gaffes in the course of a 10 minute press briefing, Obama's shoot-from-the-lip not only gave his opponents a valid talking point with which to lambaste him; it diverted precious time and attention from the far more vital matter of health care reform.

To his credit, the President apologized - well, almost - for speaking out of turn, and will probably, with his invitation to the police officer and the professor involved to meet him at the White House for a beer, end up turning the whole business to his and the nation's advantage. Nonetheless, if I were Obama, I'd have apologized even more forthrightly, or, better yet, not made the remark in the first place. When asked about the controversy at his press conference, an appropriate answer would have been, "I honestly don't know enough about the matter, and what's more, Professor Gates is a friend of mine, so anything I did say would probably be biased." He managed the second part all right, but totally blew it on the first.

I don't personally know much about Professor Gates, either, but from what I've read, his behavior was a throwback to another time, almost another era, and while he may not have created the unhappy situation, his hostility and hauteur (that's a fancy word for "Do you know who I am?" syndrome) almost certainly exacerbated it. Trying to turn a case of mistaken identity into a racial incident (or evidence that we are living "in a police state," as one of the lefter-that-left whiteys on the Counterpunch site had it) would of course come naturally to someone whose entire career revolves around uncovering ubiquitous examples of structural racism, but it's too bad the President had to buy into this 20th century sort of thinking.

Put it simply: anybody, even the most uneducated street bumpkin, should have enough common sense not to hurl verbal abuse at armed police officers, especially when they are there looking after your interests (stopping people from breaking into your home presumably being one such interest). When a Harvard professor, who leads a life far more privileged and comfortable than that of most Americans, regardless of race, behaves like such a bombastic blowhard, it's not necessarily an arrestable offense - okay, not an arrestable offense at all - but it's hard not to sympathize with the police officers, who lay their lives on the line for a fraction of the pay and benefits enjoyed by Professor Gates if they lost their patience with his foolishness.

Well, everyone involved now seems to be saying that this is a "learning opportunity," a "teachable moment," and I'd like to believe that, too. I'm not naive enough to think that racism has entirely vanished from our society just because we have a black President, but neither do we need to continue searching for racism under every rock the way a previous generation did with Communism. For Gates to try and turn his ill-tempered reaction and the police's overreaction into a racial incident (for crying out loud, at least one of the "racist" officers was black) was both dishonest and counter-productive. I'm sorry the President bought into it, glad that he saw and corrected his error, and now can we move on and fix this accursed health care system?

Aaron Cometbus: The Spirit Of St. Louis

You've probably heard me tell this story before, but it bears repeating: how I encountered my first issue of Cometbus. It was sometime in the winter of 1985-86, and I had been walking and riding buses around San Francisco distributing issues of Lookout magazine to the various stores and hangouts where they were welcomed or at least tolerated.

I had one last stop to make, at Bound Together, the anarchist bookshop over in the Haight, and rather than walk over Buena Vista Hill on what was turning out to be an unpleasantly cold and windy night, I hopped on the bus at 14th and Market, the one that goes straight up 14th and over the hill. Nowadays it's the 37, but I keep thinking it was a different route number back then. Not that it matters in the slightest, but still...

The bus was nearly empty, so I took my time walking down the aisle, deciding which seat I wanted to sit in. The ride only took five or ten minutes, so it was kind of ridiculous making a big production of it, but that's the way I was in those days. About two thirds of the way to the back of the bus, I saw a little xeroxed magazine lying on one of the seats, and immediately knew that that was the seat I had been looking for.

That was my introduction to Cometbus, and it was only a matter of weeks, if that, before I met its creator, also known as Cometbus, first name Aaron, at Violent Coercion/Youth of Today show at the New Method warehouse in Emeryville. I asked him how his magazine might have ended up on a bus seat in San Francisco and he told me, "Oh, I sometimes leave copies lying around in hopes that somebody interesting will find them." This didn't sound at all crazy to me, since I had been doing the same thing with Lookout.

By then Aaron had already been publishing Cometbus for something like five years (he was fond of pointing out that it predated Maximum Rocknroll; if my calculations are correct, it's now only a year or two shy of marking its 30th year in print. In recent years, some issues have taken the form of short novels, and that is the case with the newest one, #52, "The Spirit Of St. Louis".

Having read almost every issue Aaron has published, I can unhesitatingly say that this is one of the best. He returns to the subject matter he's best known and loved for, the trial and travails of a bunch of marginal punks struggling to eke out an existence or an identity or at least a place to hang out and put on shows. While many of Aaron's past efforts in this vein have come across as thinly veiled romans à clef (those of us who knew him could usually pick out who was supposed to be who within the first few pages), this newest one is more clearly fictional and - ironically - more realistic because of it. I'm pretty sure Aaron never spent enough time in St. Louis to have created the world portrayed here out of anything other than his vividly creative imagination. And he'll probably call me tomorrow and say, "What, you didn't know about my St. Louis years?" And I'll have to say, no, Aaron, I really didn't.

Enough of that, however; if you're any kind of Cometbus fan, you'll be wanting to read this straightaway, and if you're not familiar with the Cometbus oeuvre, this would be an excellent place to start. You can order it through No Idea or any number of other distributors; if you're insistent on doing it the old-fashioned way and don't mind waiting a while, you can always write to the official Cometbus address, PO Box 4726, Berkeley CA 94704. Price? It says $3 on the cover, and I'd throw in at least another dollar for postage. It's been a while since I've done mail order, so don't quote me on these prices. But Cometbus #52: it's a winner. Get it.

Sink With California

The unsurprising news that once again California can't agree on a budget and/or come up with enough money to pay even its most essential bills has Time Magazine wondering if the federal government needs to step in, i.e., if the nation's biggest state is, like AIG and Citibank, "too big to fail."

The article sketches out two grim scenarios: if the feds let the fruit, nut and flake state go its merry way to perdition, i.e., bankruptcy, the failure of the world's eighth largest economy could and probably would endanger the entire global financial system. If, on the other hand, the US does as the wingnuts allegedly governing California are asking and acts as co-signer on the state's outstanding loans, the credit of the entire US could be undermined and possibly wiped out.

California, once one of the most progressive and best-run states in the nation, is largely the author of its own misfortunes; the current troubles had their origins back in the Me Decade, when voters, befuddled by too much dope smoking and/or naked self-interest, used the referendum process to give themselves a big and poorly thought out tax cut.

Actually, it wasn't so much poorly thought out as it was maliciously; Proposition 13, which limited property taxes to 1% of assessed value (not necessarily a bad idea in itself) was the brainchild of right-wing "government is the problem, not the solution" forces, and it did its real damage by a) preventing property values from being reassessed until such time as the property is sold, creating the ludicrous (if it weren't so tragic) situation where billionaires can be paying a couple hundred bucks a year tax on a multi-million dollar property just because they happened to buy it before California's real estate boom. Secondly, Prop 13 required that any significant change to the tax code had to be approved by two thirds of either the Legislature or the voting public, with the result that the anti-government crowd, a perennially strong minority in California politics, can short-circuit just about any kind of tax hike or reform.

But just as it took a coalition of right-wing ideologues, apolitical greedheads, and left wing space cadets to pass Proposition 13 in the first place, a similar logjam of conflicting but mutually oblivious interests has produced the impasse which may soon force California to slash some of its most fundamental services and start issuing IOUs in lieu of cash payments. The Republican dingbat faction has its fingers in its ears while it chants "La la la, no new taxes" and their Democratic counterparts can only respond with, "But you can't cut THAT program, think of the children/illegal immigrants/endangered lemonthroated warblesuckers...etc."

In short, California is burdened, and has been for some time, with a wholly dysfunctional body politic which, if not beyond redemption, is nonetheless unlikely to respond to any conventional remedies. The only way the federal government should even consider becoming involved in this mess is if it effectively nationalizes the state and starts running it direct from Washington. The people of California have demonstrated conclusively and definitively that they're incapable of governing themselves; handing them more money and/or credit would be like furnishing a wild-eyed drunk with another quart of whiskey and a loaded gun.

Fest: Winners And Winners

Nephew Jackson and I are holed up in a quiet corner of Washington DC after three incredible days in Baltimore, during half of which I was too sick to move but did anyway, albeit with considerably less alacrity than I'm usually known for. Also missed, due to illness, about half the bands I really wanted to see, and half the people I really wanted to talk to, but it still added up to - and I know this refrain, repeated year after year, must get tiresome to you non-believers - Best Fest Ever.

I'll admit I had my doubts, and that they persisted well into the second, maybe even the third day. No real drop-dead headliners, half a dozen competing fests around the country, the absence of some notable Festers from years past, all seemed to conspire to create more of a low-key vibe for this year's event. Or maybe it was just a case of lowered expectations, but at some point it occurred to me that the first Fest, which some still insist was the very best of all, had virtually no expectations at all. It was just a couple hundred (if that) friends getting together in a corner bar in a desolate backstreet in Baltimore to watch each others' bands, most of which were completely unknown to about 99.99% of the American population.

The magic kicked in that time when - maybe it was during Delay, or the Copyrights, or the Steinways - it became obvious to all in attendance that unknown or not, our obscure little bands were at that moment making some of the best music in the world. Three years later the size of the audience, the number of bands, the venues, the stages, all have tripled, quadrupled, even quintupled. Delay, the Copyrights and the Steinways are now old standbys, and might only be unknown to 99.95% of the American public, but otherwise, not much has really changed. Each of those bands, not to mention a dozen or more new arrivals, is still capable of standing the Fest on its collective ear, and that's exactly what happened, again and again again, until any remaining doubts or fears or hesitations were, in the words of old Mr. Dylan, driven deep beneath the waves, until we could forget about today until tomorrow.

There's also those bits about dancing beneath the diamond sky, one hand waving free, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow, etc. etc., but even if we are talking about the pop-punk Woodstock, I'll spare you any more hippie blather (but man, that young Dylan could write a song; how in the hell did he turn into a gnarly tuneless old pseudo-blues grump?): now tomorrow's here and the full magnitude, the full excellence of yesterday's today begins to dawn on us.

Ironically - tragically, even, though not perhaps for those of us wishing to do something else with the next 72 or so hours of our lives - the PPMB, where the Fest would normally be being hashed and rehashed until readers' eyes bled, has crashed, possibly in response to everyone's simultaneous attempts to post their favorite photos, videos and recollections, along with the annual fevered debate over who "won" the Fest. So although I don't have much in the way of photos or videos, I'll have to settle that question for you here.

The answer, of course, is that we all won, the only losers being those who couldn't, due to obligations or financial hardship, or wouldn't, due to sheer oblivious bloody-mindedness, make it to Baltimore. But I said no more hippie blather, and I almost meant it, so here's a few of the high points; apart from my illness, I don't think there were any lows, though some of the walking wounded I saw staggering away late Saturday night may feel differently.

Thursday night undeniably belonged to The Max Levine Ensemble, whose Weasel-skewering antics won over even that portion of the crowd that was completely unaware of the band's feud with/vendetta against the Godfather of Pop-Punk himself. The background is that sometime last year, Mr. Weasel, apparently in response to hearing me praise TMLE so highly, checked them out and found them, shall we say, not to his liking. Among his more colorful remarks, delivered on his popular Weasel Radio broadcast, was, "If this band was a horse, I'd take it out and shoot it."

Most of us working in the genre would be, at the least, crestfallen at being so definitively damned by one of our idols, but the Max Levine boys managed to recover sufficiently from their depression to kick off their appearance on the Ottobar stage with a deadly medley of Screeching Weasel classics ("Hey Suburbia", "Cool Kids", and "I Wanna Be A Homosexual") that, despite the TMLE's being only a three-piece (OG Weasel had four members), managed to capture almost perfectly the sound and spirit of the Weasels' late-80s/early 90s heyday. They followed that up with the announcement of their "split single" with Ben Weasel, the cover of which featured a cartoon rendition of the Weaselmeister himself sporting an "I heart Max Levine" t-shirt. "Are we gonna get sued?" they wondered privately, but considering that the net worth of the band would barely pay for pressing up 300 copies of the limited edition 7", probably not.

TMLE were followed immediately by their brother band Delay, and at the close of Delay's set came back to join them for a finale that, even though both bands are firmly rooted in the 21st century stripped-down DIY punk rock mode, could teach a thing or three to the 1970s Dinosaurs of Rock generation about how to put on an arena show. If the Fest had ended Thursday night, it would have been Max Delay FTW hands down and no questions asked.

But technically speaking, that was only the "pre-show," and about 25 hours and 75 bands still lay ahead. Friday belonged to the Steinways and the Copyrights from what I saw, but an awful lot of people whose opinions I trust swear it was the Dopamines who ruled the day, if not the entire Fest (this was one of the many moments I missed due to my tragic illness). I had to drag myself back from my deathbed just before the Steinways to do my own turn on stage with SUCIDIE, during which Matt Lame's eyes bulged out further than ever before seen in public (see the photographic evidence here) and I managed to sing an old Lookouts song without falling over, dropping my guitar, or having a nervous breakdown, all of which could be expected to happen when I actually was in the Lookouts.

By Saturday I was mostly recovered, thankfully, because this was the day that really delivered the goods. I mean, nothing, really nothing could be said to have gone wrong with that day, the bands kept getting better and better, and I witnessed some performances that I'm pretty sure will be emblazoned on my memory till the day I die. Dear Landlord set the bar pretty high early on, but then came the Leftovers, four-Fest veterans who spanned at least four generations in their 60s-meet-the-2000s rock and roll sweatfest-cum-tent-show-revival. I first saw these kids when they were skipping school to come down and play house shows in New York and marveling at the wonders of Ikea ("We don't have anything like that up in Maine"); now, at 21 or 22 frontman Kurt Baker can work a room with the likes of James Brown up in heaven. I went crazy. Everybody did.

That should have been it, with the rest of the Fest being anticlimax, but then I walked in on the Kepi show. This longtime Ghoulie, now solo and/or with-whatever-band happens-to-turn-up act has been getting better and better these past couple years, but Saturday night was just completely sublime and transcendent, closing with about half a dozen (maybe it was a whole dozen) guest artists joining in for a finale that collapsed time and broke down all the barriers. I was laughing, I was crying, I was dancing like crazy: these are the moments when you not only want to live forever, but see no plausible reason why you can't. Kepi FTW. I don't think any further discussion is necessary or possible.

Not that there wouldn't be hours more of brilliance to come, and if I had hours more to write about it, I'd say tons more. But we're here visiting in Washington for the day, and Jackson and I want to get out and see stuff, so let me just quickly mention a few other highlights, like Squirtgun's cover of "The Science of Myth" featuring several former Weasels and at least one present-day one, Pansy Division doing a straight-up rock set that completely won over the pop-punkers, the Methadones doing one of their best sets ever, Lost Locker Combo with pushbrooms cleaning up their own mess before the club could even notice it was there, Sick Sick Burgers, my nephew and Tre Uncool (both at their first Fest ever) attacking and thrashing Matt Lame, the parking lot congregation that seems to be one of the best parts of every Fest, and one of my personal favorites: Paddy from Dillinger 4, with whom I've exchanged a few less than flattering words, seeking me out after the Fest to mend fences, bury the hatchet, and in general comport himself like the gentleman I should never have doubted he was. Prince of a fellow. Okay, that's it for now; I'm off to see the nation's capital. If you want to see DeutschMarc's incredible gallery of FestFotos, look here. Have a great day!

Fest '09

Photo courtesy of A. McGee

The Last Fest?

Admittedly it wasn't the best of planning, but my nephew really wanted to go to England, and the only time available was right before the Fest. Time was still so tight that I arranged for us to have only a few hours between arriving back in New York and setting off for Baltimore. No great strain for a 13 year old, apparently, but a little more hectic than I might have liked.

Still, it shouldn't have been a problem - there were at least a few hours available for rest in between Fest activities - except that I seemed to have picked up some sort of bug in England - well, Wales, to be specific - that followed me home. Or perhaps it was food poisoning, which I'd prefer, since I'd hate to think I infected any of the hundreds of people I've come in contact with these past two days with some version of Limey Flu.

But whatever the cause, the result was that I was unable to keep any food down or get much in the way of sleep for three days, and when I took my first steps out into the blast furnace heat of midsummer Baltimore, I might as well have asked the powers that be to take a cosmic sledge hammer to my midsection.

Thankfully, most of this town is air conditioned, the Fest venues included, so I was able to maintain some equilibrium - if only just. And if I were here to quietly spectate from a comfortable bench at the back of the room, I should have been fine.

But the Fest, more than being one of the biggest pop punk/punk rock/rock and roll shows of the year, is also kind of like an annual convention for the fans, musicians, scenesters, makers and shakers of the genre, and it's virtually impossible to shake the proverbial stick, let alone walk 20 feet in downtown Baltimore without banging into someone or several someones who need to be met and gret (?!) with an appropriate degree of enthusiasm.

And let's face it: as much as I love these people, it required a real effort on my part to show any evidence of it. Usually at these events I'm jumping around like a hyperactive monkey, shouting encouraging if sometimes nonsensical words at everyone I encounter, but for the first two days it was all I could do to manage a weak, "Good to see you! Me? Oh, I'm all right."

Even that wouldn't have been unmanageable, but greater duties loomed: in a fit of madness I'd accepted the responsibilities as second guitarist and vocalist for the hardcore combo SUCIDIE, scheduled to play a fast and furious eight minute set on the main stage in what was arguably the primest of prime time Friday night slots, just before Fest favorites, the Steinways.

Thanks to SUCIDIE's leader and resident genius MATT FAME living in another state, we were only able to practice his intricate musical compositions twice in advance of the show, once in May and once in early June. Of course we could also practice on our own, but I wasn't able - okay, wasn't willing - to haul a guitar around England and Wales with me, so during the last couple weeks before the show, I hadn't had a chance even to run quickly through the set list.

I figured I could make up for that by practicing by myself the night before leaving for Baltimore, and then with the band on Friday morning, but neither proved feasible, and I found myself, as showtime approached, feeling much like the student who has recurring dreams of showing up for an exam only to realize that he's totally forgotten to read the book the exam is based on. Oh, and that he's also managed to come to school completely naked.

I was even having trouble with the one song that I'd written myself, albeit some 21 years ago. My illness had left me not just physically weak, but mentally deficient, to the point where, even if I could remember what the chords were and where they were located, my brain couldn't get a message to my fingers fast enough to find them. It was a little like what I've always imagined senility would be.

I ended up having to miss most of the afternoon's bands in an effort to get some rest (I'd barely slept at all the night before), and when I showed up back at the venue with my borrowed black and gold GPC Weaselrite guitar in tow, I was far from ready to take the stage. In fact, what little brain activity I was capable of was mainly directed at figuring a way out of this. For instance, when Pansy Division broke the kick drum and a 10-minute delay was announced, I volunteered that by giving up our slot, we could put the show back on schedule.

No such luck, however, and anyway, by that point I'd become a little charged up, both from the Copyrights' exceedingly powerful set and from being repeatedly attacked by a youth coalition consisting of my nephew and (almost) 10 year old Tre Uncool teaming up to try and knock me to the floor (they never succeeded). So I did my duty, jumped on stage, bounced around, grinned probably a bit too much, at least for a hardcore band, and only made two or three flagrant mistakes (actually, it might have been someone else making some of them). It was, after all, as people kept pointing out, "only eight minutes."

We didn't get a resounding ovation, but neither did we get booed off stage. The only blatantly acerbic reaction came from Jon Pansy Division, who greeted me with, "Whose idea was THAT?" I refrained from pointing out that we had headlined over his band.

Then it was into the pit for the Steinways' Last Show Ever, and it was here that it all caught up with me. The adrenaline was still coursing through my system, and being further amped up by the band and the crowd, but by the time the set was halfway through, I had to retreat to the sidelines. I genuinely felt in danger of collapsing, and though my heart ached as I saw all my friends still thrashing like mad to the final strains of "Carrie Goldberg", I wasn't about to try to make my way back into the frenzied throng.

It was then that I thought, "Maybe I finally am getting a bit too old for all this." I mean, in principle, sure, I could keep coming to this for quite a few years to come, even if only in a diminished capacity, but wouldn't I rather go out in a blaze of glory (by which, no, I don't mean dying of a heart attack in the middle of the pit)? The chances of getting asked again to play on the main stage are at best minimal, and I've already been dubbed "Mr. Fest" and "the mayor of Fest-town," so maybe now would be the time to bow out gracefully, to retreat to my rocking chair and internet message boards.

Well, maybe. Today I feel considerably better; I've been able to eat two meals, one late last night and one this morning, without unfortunate results, and a whole day of Festing still lies ahead. I'm sitting here in my shorts and my classic sleeveless Crimpshrine shirt, getting ready to rock out to, let's count them, 42 (?!?!) bands between now and sometime after midnight, and I don't feel that overly daunted by the prospect. Maybe I've got another Fest or three in me after all!

What Else Was He Going To Do For An Encore?

Though I was never a huge fan of the man or his music, there's no denying that Michael Jackson was prodigiously talented, and if I didn't enjoy his classic work as much as a few hundred million others did, that's probably more a matter of my having spent the 80s rather monomaniacally wrapped up in punk rock than with any shortcoming on his part.

Still, by the time he passed away this week, even the most charitable apologist would have to acknowledge that his best days as a performer and/or recording artist were far behind him. That's sad in itself, since under the right circumstances - the right circumstances being his not turning into a circus freak - he could have carried on for many more years. A bit of the spring might have gone out of his dance steps, but it could have been more than made up for by the experience and wisdom gained from a life well lived.

That didn't seem to happen, either, though it's also dangerous to make assumptions about people whose only presence in our lives is via the media. But in this case, one could make an exception, because, based on all available evidence, there doesn't seem to have been much to Michael Jackson beyond a media image.

That's an unhappy thing to say about someone recently deceased, and I'm not even sure why I felt compelled to say it, except that his life and death seems like such a valuable object lesson into not just the cult of modern American celebrity, but also the dangers of choosing an insular and self-absorbed existence just because you're able to. You don't have to be famous or fabulously successful to do this, either, but if the unfortunate death and even more unfortunate life of Michael Jackson teaches us anything, it's that no matter how rich you are, you can't afford it.

I've been on TV a couple times and had some stuff written about me in magazines and newspapers; even that minimal level of "fame" made it evident how quickly one's view of oneself and objective reality can be distended and distorted by the looking glass eye of a voyeuristic world. When I was a young hippie on acid, I would sometimes spend hours staring into a mirror watching myself morph into unrecognizable shapes and personas at the rate of millions per millisecond, simultaneously believing myself to be in possession of infinite creative power and wondering why, with the entire universe seemingly at my feet, I still felt so terribly, ineluctably lonely.

Is that anything what Michael Jackson might have felt like in his declining years? If, in the face of what may have been chronic drug abuse, he felt much at all, I'm guessing yes. One report has him being regularly injected with the powerful synthetic narcotic Demerol. I was given that stuff once, in a hospital emergency room, and it was just awful. Yes, it's effective at temporarily taking away the pain, but it takes everything else with it. If you're familiar with the Harry Potter books, think of the Dementors, who suck all the hope and joy out of life. Yeah, it's like that. If I were having my leg amputated, I could see where something like Demerol could come in handy. But to live like that on a daily basis? You could forgive somebody for asking, "Why bother?"

That, ultimately, may well be what happened to Michael Jackson. 20 years ago he was the most famous and possibly one of the richest performers in the history of show business; everything since then has involved a sometimes slow, sometimes precipitous decline. Some people, especially those who've had to struggle with the conventional vicissitudes of life, can adjust and even thrive in the face of diminished circumstances, but to others it's a fate worse than death itself.

Face it, the man was never going to recapture more than a modicum of the brilliance he once possessed as a performer, and if he was as doped up as current rumor has it, his attempt at a comeback would have more likely become a study in unrivaled bathos. What else was he supposed to do? Someone possessing normal social skills and moral perspective might have downsized, given up the trappings (and isolation) of megastardom in favor of the simple joys of family and friends. But Michael Jackson, whether through his own poor choices or - more likely - the misguidance of the sycophants and leeches who inevitably attempt to attach themselves to any star, no longer seemed to have that choice. That being the case, his death, even at the relatively premature age of 50, probably comes as a blessing, not only for the man himself, but for his children, who might still be young enough to have a chance at a normal life.

Harsh words? Perhaps, but they needed to be said. I've made - perhaps most of us have - some of the same mistakes, albeit on a far smaller scale, and I've also known the kind of loneliness and depression where my only desire was to die. Thankfully life is not like that for me anymore, and hasn't been for quite a while. Michael Jackson, it seems, was not so fortunate.

I don't rejoice in his death, but neither is there much to mourn in this passing. He was, in Claude Brown's phrase, a manchild in the promised land, perpetually hamstrung between youth and senescence, capable of manifesting all and touching or enjoying none of it. May his soul finally find some rest, and those he has left behind, some joy and some peace.

Green Day And Wal-mart: "There's Nothing Dirty About Our Record"

News that Wal-mart has been using its immense commercial power in an attempt to influence or control popular culture shouldn't come as a shock; the giant retail chain has been doing that all along. Nor should it come as a surprise that Green Day feel confident enough in their ability to move copies of their new album that they can afford to tell Wal-mart to go do something unprintable with themselves.

While I commend Green Day for sticking to their guns and insisting that their album be sold as it was intended to be heard, I don't go along with the notion that Wal-mart has some sort of obligation to sell records that deviate from their company policy. No matter how big and powerful they are, after all, they're still a private business, and as such, it's their privilege to sell or not sell whatever products they want. It's a shame that many people who live in the American hinterlands where Wal-mart is often the only record shopping option will have greater difficulty obtaining the new record, but hey, that's why God invented the internet.

No, what really bugs me about this brouhaha is the notion that somehow there is something wrong or obscene about Green Day's record whereas Wal-mart is, while perhaps a little old-fashioned, merely acting as the guardian of "decent" American values. Singer Billie Joe Armstrong put it best: "There's nothing dirty about our record," despite Wal-mart's attempts to brand it as such.

What exactly is wrong with 21st Century Breakdown in Wal-mart's view? Presumably, it's that it uses vulgar language, i.e., swear words, i.e., the exact same language that practically every American - no, wait, every human being - including, most likely, Wal-mart executives, uses from time to time. Swearing may not always be the most elegant or effective use of language, but it's nearly universal and sometimes the most powerful if not the only way to get a certain point of view across. To pretend otherwise is either blinkered or hypocritical.

America has a funny relationship with language: while most modern countries have little problem television programs or movies that portray people talking and acting as they normally talk and act, in this country a broadcaster can be removed from the airwaves or forced out of business by enormous fines for letting an errant expletive or nipple be heard or seen by the public. Yet most of those same countries would never dream of routinely executing criminals or allowing poor people to die for want of health insurance. Different strokes, you might say, but which, if any, is the greater obscenity?

I might be a bit more sympathetic to Wal-mart if their lyrical oversight were limited to those records - and there are quite a few - that promote or glorify violence or sexism or rape - but Green Day records don't even remotely fit that description. The sole objection to their content is that they use real language to talk about real feelings and situations. Some of their punk rock fans might bristle at the description, but it's art, just as surely as anything that hangs on the walls of a museum, and any attempt to bowdlerize the lyrical content is just as stupid as those religious fanatics who at one time insisted on fig leaves being placed over the "dirty" bits of classic paintings.

No, if anyone involved in this controversy is obscene - and I use that word in its true sense (from the dictionary: "disgusting to the senses, abhorrent to morality or virtue"), it's Wal-mart itself. This is a company that has laid waste to the economies and cultures of hundreds, if not thousands of American towns, forcing long-established local businesses into bankruptcy, turning downtowns into dead zones and promoting a suburban-sprawl, automobile-based design model that has littered the landscape surrounding nearly every town with mile upon mile of garish neon strip malls and fast food franchises.

No, of course Wal-mart is not solely responsible for this development, but its entire business model is one that promotes its continued spread. If, instead of its big box stores surrounded by hundreds of acres of parking, Wal-mart would locate new stores in the heart of town, accessible on foot and by public transit, it could single-handedly revitalize many moribund cities, but because that might slightly diminish profit margins, executives continue to insist on gobbling up farmland, creating endless traffic nightmares, and perpetuating the way of life that virtually guarantees continued oil shortages (and the wars that they provoke), destruction of the environment, and disastrous climate change. Compare that to a punk rocker saying a naughty word on a record and then tell me who's the real dirty bastard here.

I don't even need to get into the devastating effect Wal-mart's horribly hypocritical and phony "Buy American" policies have had on our economy; suffice it to say that by "Buy American," Wal-mart means, "Spend your money in our stores." They certainly don't mean it to apply to themselves, since even a cursory examination will reveal that almost everything Wal-mart sells is made in China or some other developing country. Yes, it produces cheap prices for the American consumer, but simultaneously destroys the industries that used to employ those consumers. Obscene, disgusting, or just not very nice? Do you think the guy who has been outsourced out of a job and can't earn a living wage or provide health insurance for his family is more upset about that, or the fact that Billie Joe said a "bad" word on a record album?

Perspective, people, perspective! We got the same crap that Wal-mart is dishing out all through the Bush years: obsessive concern with private morality, riling up the rubes over stem cells or birth control, while at the same time destroying our economy, waging idiotic and mindlessly destructive wars, and giving bankers and corporate executives carte blanche to loot our wealth and resources on a scale probably unprecedented in history. Oh, but at least our precious little children didn't hear anybody say "shit" on TV. No, for that they'd have to walk into the next room where Daddy is looking at his unpaid credit card bills, reading his pink slip, or just watching the home team blow another lead. As Yakov Smirnoff used to say, what a country!

Maybe The Best Show I've Ever Seen

Not words to be tossed around lightly, especially by someone who's been going to shows for almost 45 years now, and has been lucky enough to see, oh, just for starters, the Supremes, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, the Ramones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Dead Kennedys, Avengers, the Stooges, the MC5, Alice Cooper, Operation Ivy, Screeching Weasel and dozens - hell, probably hundreds - more, either in their prime or when they were just starting out, or both.

But having arrived home a couple hours ago from seeing Green Day at Webster Hall and still unable to sleep because of the sheer euphoria of it all, I may just have to elevate this show from my top 5 right into the all-time best show ever spot. I'd thought last night at the Bowery Ballroom was as spectacular as I was likely to see in a relatively small club, and indeed, Billie had told me ahead of time that the Bowery show was the one to watch if I had to pick one or the other.

But this time his normally unerring show business instincts weren't as finely attuned as usual, because as good at the Bowery show was, Webster Hall blew it right out of the water. It might have been the superior sound system, or the bigger, more enthusiastic crowd, or the set list that expanded just enough to allow room for a couple more classics from the early days, but whatever it was, the Green Day that we saw Tuesday night was Green Day at their absolute finest, and I think it's been pretty well established by now that it doesn't get much better than that.

A couple purists - well, Grumpy Chris Grivet, for one - were complaining that the crowd didn't get sufficiently excited when the band dug into their back - way back - catalog for such Lookout-era gems as "At The Library" and "80", but I don't know what he expected; although the audience was almost elderly by Green Day standards - average age might have been late 20s/early 30s - most of them were still children when those records were released. This was a Dookie/American Idiot generation, and naturally songs from those albums got the biggest response (still no "Holiday", however, darn it!).

But there was plenty of singing along to the brand new songs from 21st Century Breakdown, despite their only having officially been released four days earlier. A couple more weeks and they'll already be classics, as was more or less predicted in this very space a week or two ago!

I didn't stick around nearly as long at the requisite after-party as I'd done the night before, partly because I was tired, partly because this "party" was mostly a bunch of people standing around (and two or three, including, most notably, Brooklyn's own Jackie O. and Cristy Road, doing some crazy dancing). There was also the usual open bar, but to a non-drinker like myself, that rates little more than a big meh (except of course that it ensures plenty of sloppy drunks to keep me entertained and amused).

Even more so, though, I was pretty exhausted by the time the show was over - a good kind of exhaustion, I should note, the kind that comes from total physical and emotional involvement... Oh, wait, all I did was watch; it was the band who did the total physical and emotional thing, and came off stage practically glowing with the knowledge that the night had been one of those very rare and special ones.

It might have had at least something to do with the fact that keyboardist/saxophonist/accordionist/vocalist Jason Freese had received the news just before showtime that he was a father; on Monday night he was practically beside himself with worry because his wife had gone into labor, but on Tuesday, the worry was replaced by a beatific smile and a performance that had jaws dropping even among his bandmates.

But most of all, I think, it was just one of those nights when everything gelled. The band was relaxed without being sloppy, adventurous without overextending themselves, finding the perfect middle ground between promoting the new record and having a great time with a bunch of old friends. One of the many images that will stay with me was that of Billie, having borrowed a pair of outsized pink sunglasses from an audience member ("What, you're from Oklahoma? My mom's from Oklahoma!") and wrapped a white silk scarf (no idea where that came from) around his neck that left him looking like Snoopy vs. the Red Baron by way of Edith Piaf. I really do hope there's video of that somewhere out on the interweb.

Although they'll still be in town for a couple more days, it was the last I'll see of Green Day for a while, as I'm headed out to the seaside first thing in the morning. Those of you in the New York area still have a chance to see them play, provided you're willing to get up early enough (or stay up late enough) to be in Central Park by 6 am Friday when they'll be performing for Good Morning America. I know I promised to find out whether they would be playing a full set or just a song or two, but, well, I forgot. My offhand guess is that while only one or two songs will be broadcast, they'll probably play more than that. Sue me if I'm wrong. Anyway, it's supposed to be a beautiful, warm, early summer morning, so it'll do you good to be out in the park regardless.

There will also be appearances on the Letterman and Colbert shows, so don't come crying to me if you end up not seeing Green Day at all, because if you didn't, you weren't even half trying. And with that I'll bid adieu to a pretty amazing week, in which I learned what it's like to be, as it were, king for a day. Okay, maybe not king, but at least a fairly advanced prince. It's really fascinating to see how life operates inside the inner circle: I'm tempted to say I could get used to that kind of treatment, but I'm note sure I could. It's great for a few days, but I seriously have to wonder if I would like it if my life were like that all the time, or at least all the time that I was on tour.

On the plus side, you get to eat and drink very well, attend all the best parties, and meet some truly fascinating people (more than I could possibly list here, but some of my favorites were Bob Gruen, who's been photographing rock royalty for more than 40 years, and Tony-winning director Michael Mayer, whose next big project is the stage version of American Idiot, premiering in Berkeley this September. And set designer (and crazy dancer) Christine and musical arranger Carmel, both awesome!). On the not so plus side, it's difficult to step outside the bubble without people swarming on you demanding, well, just about anything. There was a tense moment on the Lower East Side Monday night when some autograph-hunters who were clearly in it for the money rather than love of the band got kind of abusive when they didn't get what they wanted. And as pleasant and fun as it is hanging out every night with what ultimately feels like a great big extended family, I wonder if sometimes you wouldn't wish that you could just go hop on the subway or wander around the East Village like a regular person.

Well, I don't know. We all make accommodations to suit the demands of our particular jobs or lifestyles, and despite its various drawbacks, there are probably worse jobs to be had than that of rock star. I will say that Billie, Mike and Tre seem to be having every bit as much fun - albeit of a slightly different nature - as they did back in the days of driving around the country in a rattletrap old van and playing any basement, garage, two-bit bar or living room that presented itself. And anyway, it's not as though they could easily resign their positions: as long as they keep making the best music of their lives, fame and fortune are going to keep piling on, invited or not. It's a tough job, but they seem to be handling it better than anyone else I know could.

Shoutouts also to Jason White, who I've known almost as long as the Big Three, and Jeff Matika, who I just met. This is Jeff's first tour with Green Day, and he represents the latest in a long line of Little Rock-East Bay connections. I drove through that town in 1970, liked it so much that I swore I'd come back one day for a proper visit, and never have. If nothing else, I'd like to find out why everyone I've ever met from there seems so goshdarned nice. Well, almost everyone. I'm still not completely sure about that Bill Clinton guy.

Okay, bedtime now, and I realize that even though I'm having my first quiet night at home in a while, it's late enough that I could have just as well been at another after-show party instead of sitting in this quiet room with only the clack-clack of the computer keys keeping me company. But that's just how it should be; writing is this thing I do, and even though it's frequently a great big pain in the ass (I imagine some of you have similar feelings about having to read it), if I don't do it, I get pretty crazy. So that's it for now. As soon as the sun comes up, I'm off to the beach.

Small, Rabbitlike, Eyelinered

That's what the critic from the New York Times had to say about Billie Joe Armstrong, who last night led Green Day through a triumphant return to New York City in the more or less intimate surroundings of the Bowery Ballroom. My first reaction on reading that description was to say, "Oh, good, I'm going to torment Billie mercilessly about being rabbitlike," until I remembered that I had turned over a new leaf after my bad behavior with Tre on Saturday (I apologized profusely, because I really did feel bad about it) and was not going to tease people anymore, even when they deserved it, which Billie, after his stunning performance of last night, certainly does not.

On top of that, I recalled that there was a period in my own life when I was frequently described as resembling a rabbit, not that this has anything at all to do with the subject at hand, but when did I ever let that stop me? It was in the 60s, when I somehow emerged as the first among equals (I think because I had the biggest mouth and was the least incoherent) in this particularly demented and vaguely Mansonian (fortunately for the local villagers, our pursuits ran more along the lines of sex, drugs, and deconstructing the latest Donovan album than the ritual slaughter and evisceration of the bourgeoisie) Midwestern hippie commune.

Having remarked often enough on my alleged leporinity (okay, rabbit-ness), my colleagues took it upon themselves to cut out a picture of a rabbit and paste it above my bed (okay, my mat and/or pile of rags) with the legend, "Our Leader." As it happened, however, they were so stoned that all they could come up with was a National Geographic photo of a kangaroo. And if you can see where I'm going with this, you have a more incisive mind than I.

Oh yes, the Bowery Ballroom. Well, as it happens, I was fortunate enough to be there (my first full-fledged Green Day show in almost five years!), and if this is any indication of what the summer tour is going to be like, audiences have something pretty spectacular to look forward to. It's not always easy to extrapolate from a club-sized show to an arena or stadium-sized one, and it's also quite challenging to shrink the sound and performance geared to Madison Square Garden into a 550-capacity Lower East Side club, but apart from a few mid-show glitches with the guitar sound, the band and their astonishingly adept crew pulled it off seamlessly.

For the first 10 or 15 minutes and the last 20 or 25 minutes I'm just about prepared to say it was the best show I've ever seen (some competitors for that title: the Supremes at the Michigan State Fair in 1965, the GoGos in San Francisco in 1980, and the Ramones at UC's Pauley Ballroom that same year). In fact, about 10 minutes in I loudly declared that to be fact, which might have been premature, since one of the most vital criteria for "best show ever" is that all through the show there's never a doubt in your mind, not even for a millisecond, that what you are witnessing/participating in is perfection itself. Never once do you stop to think, "I wonder how much longer they're going to play," or "Oh, I wish they'd play such-and-such song instead of this one."

And while Green Day never played any songs I didn't want to hear, I could compile a substantial list of the songs I wish they did. I know, hideously ungrateful of me, especially since they'd already torn through a dazzling set that would have left most bands gasping for air by the midway point. The trouble is that when you've been a band for as long as Green Day have (21 years, as Billie proudly pointed out), and have written so many of outstanding songs, it's just not possible to play them all in one show.

That's what the more reasonable part of me says. The unreasonable part says, yeah, but if only I could have heard "Holiday", "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams", "Whatshername", and maybe a couple more from "the old days." But hey, we did get to hear "Going to Pasalacqua" (!), (and with a personal dedication to me, no less; if I hadn't been so startled, I would have been able to scream a lot louder), "Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?", and "Dominated Love Slave". "No!" I shouted "Don't let him play guitar," thinking back to Lookouts practices when Tre would abandon his drums and start jamming on my guitar the minute I left it unguarded. When Billie had to remind Tre of how the chords went, the girl next to me said, "I see what you mean," but actually, I had to admit to her, Tre's a very good guitarist. Probably better than me, which was the real reason I didn't like him playing mine.

Oof. There's much more to tell, but I've got to be off to the city. Here, read Bill Moon's review on the PPMB for the set list and some further mostly cogent ravings about how awesome it all was, and I'll be back later with (hopefully) some more stories about last night's show and maybe tonight's as well.

Saturday Night Live

Most of you who have mothers have probably at one time or another heard some version of "Wear clean underwear because you never know when you might get hit by a car and taken to the hospital." I can't remember if my mother also told me about not letting the laundry pile up because you never know when you might need clean clothes, but if she didn't, she should have. When I got back from London last week (who am I kidding, it's getting closer to two weeks now), it was my intention to go down to the laundromat my first night back, but being pleasantly surprised to find several clean t-shirts and an extra pair of jeans in my dresser drawer, I decided it could wait.

The result being that when I unexpectedly got an invitation to come watch Green Day appearing on Saturday Night Live, I had almost nothing to wear except some ratty old things that made me look even more than usual like some bewildered tramp who'd wandered in off the street. If I'd only been sitting in the audience, this wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world (and, on reflection, it's still pretty far from the worst thing in the world regardless of how you slice it), but as it happened, I spent most of the night backstage, cheek-by-jowl with more TV and movie stars than I could shake a stick at (or name, for that matter; I kept having encounters with people where'd I'd be like, "Oh yeah, it's that wacky guy from Forgetting Sarah Marshall), but even weirder was running into people who seemed so familiar that I was sure I'd known them half my life before realizing that while I had indeed known them half my life, it was from the movies, not real life.

Which is better than I did with Tom Hanks: standing right next to him and didn't even recognize him. Wait, it gets worse: I didn't even realize he was there, let alone on the show, until someone else mentioned having a conversation with him. At least I recognized Will Ferrell, but then I must have seen a dozen of his films and I'll admit I'm kind of a fan. Did I meet him? No, not really, but he came bounding into Green Day's dressing room (his was next door) after the show to discuss the song he'd jammed on with the band (more about that in a minute), and then a bit later reappeared wearing a rather astounding two-piece orange velour lounging suit that in color and texture was straight out of a 70s blaxploitation flick and munching on a banana. He easily got the award for most costume changes over the course of the evening, and that's without counting the show itself.

Speaking of which: not only was it the first time I'd ever visited an SNL broadcast; it was also the first time I'd even watched it in quite a few years (nothing against it, just that I'm usually out on Saturday nights, and then there were the 10 years I spent in England where, if it was shown at all, was generally only in reruns). So I was pretty unaware as to who most of the cast members were, and many of the in jokes sailed right over my head. But most of it seemed pretty hilarious to me, and SNL connoisseurs seemed to concur that it was an especially good episode, particularly in terms of Will Ferrell's contribution.

Having the best band in the world (sorry if you disagree, but I'm sticking with it) as musical guests couldn't have hurt, either, and it was only when Billie started strumming his acoustic guitar during the rehearsal of "21 Guns" that I realized just how long it had been since I'd seen the band close up in a small room (the SNL studio is not even as big as many bars and clubs where I've watched bands play), which was exciting enough, but when the whole band kicked in with sound quality that would have been at home in an enormous arena, it gave me shivers. I must have seen Green Day, oh, I don't know, 100 times? Probably more than that, but most of them were many years ago, often in basements or backyards where pro sound quality - or any sound quality - was, shall we say, not the first priority. If it was even an issue at all. Hey, there were shows where the entire production crew was yours truly, in that I plugged their microphones into my Peavey 600 Mixer and cranked it as loud as it would go without feeding back.

Today they have production values that are as good as if not better than any band in the world - no, more than that, that are simply breathtaking, and that's before you even get to the music itself. On one hand it's staggering to see how far they've come these past couple decades - I continue to maintain that they're making the best music of their career right now - but backstage, you can sometimes forget that anything has changed at all: the goofing around, the jokes, the conversations that spin from silly to deadly serious and back again in the blink of an eyelid could make you think 1989 never went away at all.

Or maybe it's just me. Especially with Tre, who I've known seven years longer than Billie and Mike, i.e., since he was a small child - I'm likely to regress to old behavior, and at one point - I feel really bad about this now - I started picking on him by making fun of a painting he'd bought and which he was very proud of. He got me back pretty good, however, by accusing me of "blogging with 12 year olds," and though I'd swear at least some of you reading this are a bit older, I didn't have a decent comeback. I thought of a couple good ones once I got home; isn't that always the way it is? On the other hand, at a party the night before, Tre kept trying to wrestle me and I'm pleased to report that after all this time, and with me only a few years away from Social Security, he STILL can't take me down. And he's got some serious muscles now, folks. I assumed he must have been hitting the gym, but he swears he never sets foot in one. It's all just from drumming, but from the way he hits (the drums, not me), it shouldn't be surprising.

I got to the NBC studios when the pre-show rehearsal was about halfway through, and we watched that on a TV monitor in the dressing room, except for when Green Day played, when we went out into the studio and watched from the side of the stage. Then when the actual show started, I, along with the WAGS (English football-speak for "Wives And Girlfriends") went up into the balcony to watch. They weren't ideal seats, but at least they were seats; next to us a huge knot of celebrities, including what looked like half the cast of 30 Rock, had to stand for the whole show.

It was surprising how much of the show was cut out or changed between the rehearsal and the actual broadcast. The swear words, for example, but one thing I wished they'd kept was Amy Poeler and Seth Myers trading (well, actually it was mostly Amy) Chewbacca imitations during the Weekend Update. And the part where Green Day joined in on the Saigon singalong was thrown in at the last minute and hadn't been rehearsed at all.

But possibly the very best segment of the whole show came after the finale and was not broadcast at all: Green Day came back out and played two more songs, "She" and "East Jesus Nowhere." A minute or so into EJN, Will Ferrell suddenly appeared on stage banging on a cowbell (in reasonably good time with the music, it must be said), and generally hamming it up to hilarious effect. At first the band were kind of unsure what was going on, but then they rolled with it, even when Ferrell took up a position behind Billie for a shameless bit of monkey-faced mugging that while putting the audience in danger of falling out of their chairs with laughter, somehow didn't detract from the song at all.

When the song went into a kind of breakdown, Ferrell was temporarily at a loss for what to do, since there was no clear cut rhythm to bang his cowbell to, but he recovered any lost aplomb and then some when the band went back into the power finale by sticking his head in front of Billie at the microphone and inquiring loudly, "Is this song still going on?"

After it was all over, the party started, and I'm not just talking some little intimate encounter where the cast sits around and hashes over the episode concluded, but some pretty glitzy do (recession? not here?) for one or two thousand people on the ground floor of the building and spilling out into what I just now realized was the Rockefeller Center ice rink (which explains all those puddles of water I found myself wading through). But mostly we just sat and talked about, well, stuff, until I realized it was getting on toward 4 am. I hopped aboard my pumpkin to Brooklyn, in the form of the F and the L trains, and returned to normal life, or at least the life where my shabby old clothes would fit right in. That being said, I swear I'm doing laundry tonight, and maybe even finally breaking down and buying a new jacket. Just in case, because as Mom may or should have said, you never know.