EMP Pop Conference 2011 — Friday presentations

Okay! It’s that time of year and for the first time ever it’s in LA — very handy, I must say. Feel free to review the official site of the conference to see what’s happening, while #PopCon2011 is what to search for on Twitter. As per usual I’ll be updating this entry throughout the day, so keep checking back; I’ll be doing similarly with entries for Saturday and Sunday.

It’s going to be a heck of a crunched time this year — everything’s packed into three days and in some cases there will be five panels and discussions going on at the same time, so what you’re going to read here will only be a small slice of everything going on. Happily there should (I think!) be even more coverage on this than ever from attendees.

Looking forward as well to seeing everyone there! Say hi if you see me around!

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Juan Carlos Kase, “Go-Go Dancer and One Hit Wonder: Toni Basil as Embodiment of Cultural Mobility in 60s Los Angeles” — Toni Basil mostly associated with “Mickey” and the accompanying video that she choreographed, banished to VH1 nostalgia specials and the like. Short-sighted! She had a different impact in the 1960s/early 70s as a dancer/choreographer in film and TV, an active visualization of the time. An exchange of sexuality, cinema and sound. TAMI Show, Shindig, Hullabaloo, various B films, dancing in the go-go style of the Sunset Strip. There’s a semantic excess in her style, goes beyond the terms. Clip from _Village of the Giants_ shown — no Tom and Crow though! — Jack Nitzche music and she shakes groove thing to Beau Bridges’ giant leers. Great blue bell bottoms. Classical training, modern dance moves, improv all at once. The film is goofy and formulaic, but still altogether stranger. Representing the social energy of the era — theorist cited on go-go dancing, an icon like the 20s flappers. “The girl is free to let themselves go, as wild as they feel.” Little scholarship here on popular dance of the time, but a change in gender roles, quick turnovers, solo dancing. “Dance, Gender and Culture” cited, males not defining the dancing, a new variety where female physicality is shown. Hoskyns cited on Fred C Dobbs, gathering place of shapers of youth cultures, bohemians into hippies, Basil as a bridge. 1968 Basil works on the Monkees _Head_, heterodoxy in impact — Basil appears in _Easy Rider_, a blunt cultural object, registering sinister connections. Dennis Hopper’s crossing of roles/interchange noted, artistic crossovers noted throughout LA, visual art, etc. Hopper’s photographs, Basil’s films. Samples and stills shown. Didnt start with James Franco! Clip from the opening of her film _Breakaway_ shown. Pleasure and provocation in her motion and gestures in sync with the song, various costumes, set against her Motownish song, her one off for many years before “Mickey.” Stockwell photo of Conner filming Basil shown, studied, lots of back and forths. Sontag invoked, “Against Interpretation,” a neurotic art, textured. Concludes a bit broadly…but hey.

Not Just the Ticket — #25, Morrissey, November 1, 1991

Then current album: Kill Uncle

Opening act: The Planet Rockers

Back of ticket ad: free popcorn should I have deigned to go to AMC Theatres to watch…what would I have watched, actually. Fall 1991, a dim and distant place in many ways.

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And, yes, I did add a ‘NOT!’ after Morrissey’s name there after the show. Mike Myers, inflicting a scar that never actually healed.

Thing was, of course, I did actually see him. But it wasn’t all that long of a show, which remains one of the most notorious ones I’ve attended.

I am, in retrospect, kinda glad I didn’t get into the Smiths and Morrissey in high school, given how disconnected I feel from that time. I’m sure I would have appreciated them greatly — then again, would I have done? I knew of them, the first ever song of theirs I heard was “Bigmouth Strikes Again” thanks to a friend in 11th grade English, remembered thinking both the singing and the lyrics were pretty weird, while my sis owning the Pretty in Pink soundtrack helped me get very familiar with “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” — and she ended up with a copy of Louder Than Bombs for Christmas 1987. (And remember, my sis is younger than me; she would have been halfway through eighth grade.) I only bought my own copy of that in spring of 1989 so I like to think of my first ‘real’ Smiths song experience being the start of “Is It Really So Strange” — and that start is actually pretty locked into my memory for some reason, listening in my dorm room right before the start of spring break. From there I got it, more or less, and slowly but surely built up my collection of Smiths and Morrissey solo releases over the next few years, a poster or two as well.

I never could be said to be a hyperfan, for all that — collecting every pressing or knowing every cover image or literary reference or so forth — and I’ve known some obsessives then and now, and still do. Morrissey is if nothing else someone who knows how to sell himself just so, a button pusher when given the opportunity, somebody who pulls off the push/pull impact of privacy and fame more readily than most; little surprise he’s been able to cultivate audience after audience, that with his American relocation he eventually commanded a Latino following in SoCal that baffled many who could only imagine him as someone who sang bedsit anthems to nobody when one of his greatest gifts remains knowing how to capture a feeling, a situation, a desire in a way that translates, that transcends. I could rattle off most everything he’s written and performed without having to think about it and for all that his insular muse writes off entire sonic approaches — hell, societies — as not worth it, something I find baffling given my own reference points, that same muse is what’s driven him all this time with the collaborators he’s had.

1991 was in many ways his year when it came to Southern California. He’d already played out here a couple of times with the Smiths, so it wasn’t unknown territory or anything, but when the (in retrospect perfect) delay between his last turn and his first full solo go-round wrapped up earlier in the year with an appearance at the Forum, it was a sold-out frenzy by all accounts. Not that I was there, and not that I was surrounded by people who were or wanted to be — Steve M. was the guy who introduced me to the Warlock Pinchers’ extremely rude “Morrissey Rides a Cockhorse,” while around the same time I am pretty sure I first heard long time Squirrels member Joey Kline’s debut album Pomp and Circuspants, beginning with a note-perfect parody of Viva Hate called “Mrs. Smith” that I still adore. Steve and Kris C. and plenty of others vented away about him while we listened to all sorts of things and went to all sorts of shows, not a constant theme but it fit in with a general sense of ‘argh, new idols please’ at work during that time. (And as someone who had kicked U2 to the curb a couple of years back and was about to be utterly horrified at their return with Achtung Baby, I could sympathize.)

But as I mentioned, I knew obsessives, one of whom was the younger sister of my roommate Jen. (And logically I’m completely blanking on her name so I’m going to apologize in advance. [EDIT: Kelly! That was her name, thanking Xana down in comments.]) Jen’s family lived in north San Diego County so I had a chance to meet them on the way home during the previous holiday season; her sis was very friendly, pretty smart and intense, quite attractive and loved the Smiths and Morrissey. A lot. A LOT. I seem to remember lyrics written all over her bedroom wall — not written on paper put up on the wall, written ON the wall — and general bemusement at her antics by her mom and stepdad. There was also the story about how a friend of hers apparently did a very good Morrissey himself while singing with his band — not in a parodic way, he was a total hyperfan too — and how a tape had gotten to the man himself and he’d apparently expressed interest in hearing more.

So when Morrissey first toured that year, he started in San Diego and I’ve no doubt Jen’s sis was there going happily nuts — this return tour also featured a San Diego stop but the LA one was perfect for me in many ways — like some of the previous shows I’ve mentioned, it was right on campus at UCLA, only in this case at Pauley Pavilion. No surprise there; given the size of his last stop through it was unlikely Ackerman Grand Ballroom would be anywhere near big enough, and by the time I got tickets, we were tucked away to side of the stage and a little behind it — not completely behind it, which would have been pretty pointless, but it was a slightly odd over the shoulder angle, if at a distance in the upper level of seats. Still, it was a show, I had tickets and Jen’s sis came up from San Diego for it. Couldn’t complain, and didn’t!

We walked over from the apartment easily enough — I don’t remember much about getting in and finding our seats but no question that the place was as packed out as the stage set-up allowed for. It might not have been the same overwhelming levels of obsession as Depeche Mode was but this was a crowd fully, completely into the headliner in a way I’d rarely sensed up until then. We settled in and chatted but her focus was much more on the show than anything else, even though he hadn’t appeared on stage yet and wouldn’t for some time. Which all made perfect sense.

The Phantom Rockers did their rockabilly thing and left and that’s about all I can say — I think it was good, I just don’t remember much about it, and again, three guys mostly facing away from us makes for a slightly uninvolving show to watch and get into. Next thing I can remember is Morrissey on stage and…not quite chaos, but definitely an appreciation for how I was up in the seats and not down in front. Being able to see a swathe of the faces pressing up against the stage, arms extended, all the cheering and shouting and more besides, it wasn’t quite a view from the performer’s eye but it was still pretty impressive and unsettling at the same time.

Getting used to things like the odd dance/lope/flail/strut that defines how he moves (or at least moved) at the time was its own experience — it’s all slightly muddy in my memory there, it wasn’t like he ever pretended to be a choreographer, though I wonder how often he practices anyway. And the set, full of familiar songs from the two albums and huge run of singles he had put out in the UK under his own name, was good enough as I remember it. But I remember more a statement he made in between songs that ended something like: “You don’t have to stay in your seats if you don’t want to!” There were cheers and I probably thought something about how he wanted people up out of their seats and dancing or whatever, understandable enough.

Then a minute or two later I looked in bewilderment at the stream of people charging down the aisle next to where we were sitting. But there’s nowhere to go…?

He definitely did not say that the crowd should charge the stage, and I heard that being alleged a few times. The danger of being crushed at a concert is no joke — happened before, could all too easily happen again — so the fact that things were eventually shut down wasn’t surprising. Seeing the intense crowd get more and more packed in was a little uneasy but the band and the man kept performing, and I’ve told the story a few times since: stage invasions are part and parcel for Morrissey appearances, people running up and giving him a hug, but seeing upwards of five or so people on stage grabbing him at the same time from various limbs — and seeing him continue to sing through it all — is something I’ve never seen since. He knows how to deal with it all, I guess.

But it couldn’t last that night. After a warning that the show was at risk of being shut down, he introduced a new song, “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful,” then about half a year away from release, and about halfway through the song it all got too much. The crush up front was too strong, too many people were on stage, and I don’t recall him leaving so much as being bundled off by a combination of security and fans and who knows who else. The band left and there was a limbo of about thirty minutes as some unknown guy spoke into a microphone about how everyone would need to step back or else Morrissey wouldn’t return, fans waited to see what would happen, cheers and shouts and more all mingling together. We just sat and waited and wondered and talked.

Eventually the announcement came that he wasn’t coming back, the show was cancelled, and the booing and complaints began. I took it as a sign that it would be best to get out and leave whatever mess was to come to itself (which, if you read this concert report, was best avoided), so we decamped and walked back to the apartment being surprised about it all. But I don’t remember feeling disappointed or bummed that seeing Morrissey had turned into a wash like that — maybe a little, but it wasn’t some wrenching thing, and while Jen’s sis obviously wasn’t completely happy either I don’t remember her having a fit over it. If the show had never happened at all I suppose we would have felt differently; I think I was laughing about it all by the time we got back to the apartment.

There were reports and apologies and more the following day and KROQ eventually broadcast a tape of a show from earlier in the tour by way of a make-up gift or the like to the audience. A Santa Monica show went off without a hitch a couple of days later, so maybe it was just all about one inopportune turn of phrase in the end. Wouldn’t see him again in concert for another six years, but that would be at a UC campus and that would be a legendary show as well. I’ll yet get to that.

Not Just the Ticket — #13, Jesus Jones, May 15, 1991

Then-current album: Doubt

Opening act: Soho

Back of ticket ad: did The National spend all their money on these Ticketmaster ads? Does that explain why they’re not around anymore? (At least, I assume they’re not around anymore…)

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Another browning ticket, another hole punched through it, it’s almost like a pattern. It also reminds me of the fate of the Martians in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, though perhaps more appropriately it should be Shelley’s “Ozymandias” I’m thinking of.

Meantime, a show by the group that had the song that invented the nineties and created alternative as we know it today. Bear with me.

I love contrasting then and now sometimes. Jesus Jones seem so utterly of their time that it’s almost befuddling now, and yet there they were, there I was, once again at a show at UCLA’s Ackerman Grand Ballroom but this time right near the front with a crowd going crazy, once again at a show riding a massive feeling of success, and if it wasn’t anything like Depeche Mode’s firmament-destroying impact it was still a hell of a feeling, with a song whose sentiments seemed to be keyed in to just that kind of feeling, however much of a statement about the state of the world it professed to be. (And give Mike Edwards this much, in writing a song about sitting around and watching things unfold on TV he pretty much described how ‘events’ happen for a lot of us, endlessly mediated.) They wore (and in Edwards’ case endlessly talked about) a rhetoric and style of how rock and roll had to be updated and electronic and of the now in order to survive, which was true enough on the one hand but which was about to be undercut on the other, so as with all other futurists they ended up becoming pretty dated pretty quickly.

There are two arguments that I’ll forever make, though. The first is the one that I need to do a little more research on, but it was advanced by a few people in the industry in contemporary articles over the following year — as well as Mudhoney, in at least one interview — and it runs something like this: “Right Here Right Now” was a crossover hit from the ‘Modern Rock’ charts, and such a big hit that it couldn’t be ignored. Almost immediately on its heels and following a similar path was EMF’s “Unbelievable,” even more of a confection and an earworm, sold as if a version of Jesus Jones’ aesthetics had been welded to the Beverly Hills 90210 version of rave and the last hangover of New Kids on the Block’s popularity. The end result was that a lot of radio programmers around the country thought to themselves “Hey there’s something going on here in this ‘modern rock’ thing and we shouldn’t miss out” and thus were a little more open to the idea of at least test listening to things that they wouldn’t have touched otherwise.

Which proved to be extremely convenient for DGC a couple of months later when they sent around a slew of copies of a song called “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Talking about all that some more would require another essay and a lot more research. Suffice to say the other thing that I’ll always tell people was that this show was really, really good. In fact it remains one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, a slam-bang, busy from the get-go, entertaining as all hell concert from a bunch out to entertain without apology. Perhaps perversely, there’s almost nothing I remember about it in terms of the specific details. Though I’d argue that kinda helps in the mind’s eye, it all becomes this big huge thing in my head that I had a great time at. Plus, being another UCLA show, I could just walk to the show and back as I did with the Charlatans. Can’t go wrong.

I had missed their show the previous September — I was out of town and felt annoyed I couldn’t make it, and apparently they’d previewed “Right Here Right Now” there as a new single, though still months away from any American release. Would have been fun to hear and judge that at the time, but I was at least already a fan of the band, having played Liquidizer to death in the months beforehand. So the fact that they were playing UCLA was something I took as a very good omen, and like the Charlatans while I could have snuck in to hide at KLA I ended up going the regular ticket route as before. And as before I remember a bunch of people crammed into the station waiting for enough people to be milling around outside so they wouldn’t be noticed in the crowd.

It helped too that there was a small screen of plants (artificial? maybe) in a planter that blocked the door into the station from general view, a kind of lobby of sorts with a bench. Being able to just sit there while everyone else was crammed at the other end of the ballroom proved pretty handy — nobody thought to wander over there much and we could all chat a bit and kill time.

I went up close for Soho, who were a real one-hit wonder thanks to their song “Hippychick,” which notably (and for a lot of people at the time, notoriously) sampled the opening guitar from “How Soon is Now” by the Smiths. Arguably even more than Jesus Jones, that song — thanks to it getting a fair amount of KROQ and otherwise related airplay — helped get people just that more used to the idea of sampling, remixes and more besides, only this time in an explicitly ‘modern rock’ context, the equivalent to the previous year’s omnipresence of “U Can’t Touch This” and “Ice Ice Baby” in terms of the (over)familiarity of the main riff. Keep in mind that Morrissey was at one of his own high points in LA around this time too — he either had just played or was about to play the Forum — and the clash of his rock purism with Johnny Marr’s dance experiments in Electronic as well as the use of That Riff in “Hippychick” was emblematic of a larger split that would intensify with the debut of MARS-FM in coming months, and even that was just a hint of how rave had fully started to lock down into LA in general…but again, another essay, perhaps.

The Soho set was fun, two singers and the one dude doing their thing, while two of the Jesus Jones folks ended up onstage for “Hippychick” itself, dancing and playing along, it was all good fun. Again, it’s all a feeling of a moment in history looking back at this whole show, something that was so itself. Similarly when Jesus Jones took the stage and, as mentioned, everything went nuts.

Mike Edwards was, of course, up front and center, and it seems now that I think he was almost stolidly planted there, guitar in hand and singing — well, rasping — away. Meantime, his bandmates were living up to an image that was running rampant in UK band circles around then — it was the antithesis of shoegazing, instead being a lot of leaping about and jumping in place and otherwise being as active on stage as the audience was (or hopefully was) in turn. In retrospect one almost wonders how much all the instruments were plugged in but it all seemed to work, and after all, why not? A couple of specific songs stick in the memory — “Welcome Back Victoria,” “Stripped” (not the Depeche Mode one, but imagine if…) — but otherwise I just remember being massively entertained, not caring about the eternal memories or anything. I am pretty positive that they kept being called back for multiple encores as well, not something I’ve seen with most bands — there might have been at least three?

I mentioned in the Charlatans entry about ‘that’ KROQ haircut that I seemed to see everywhere, long/bushy on the top, shaved at the back and sides, and it was definitely everywhere here. There was definitely a LOT of day-glo color in the audience as well. Add it up and the show is all the more emblematic of this time that is the nineties that is conveniently forgotten, the nineties that isn’t ‘the nineties,’ in the same way that the earliest part of the eighties isn’t ‘the eighties,’ and so forth, a time when there’s no codification yet of what’s going on, at least consciously. The stereotypes of easy cultural memory are handy precisely because they are so convenient and lazy, they allow for a summing up that is widely understood. Almost everything about this show — the bands involved, the looks of the people in attendance, the presumptions about where things would go from there — is far more lost to time than any overall decade’s portrait, real or imagined.

But a great time was had in the moment and at the moment. Who needs a greater justification?

Not Just the Ticket — #9, The Charlatans, Feb. 15, 1991

Then-current album: Some Friendly

Opening act: School of Fish

Back of ticket ad: once again, a importuning to consider The National as a source of sports information vis-a-vis the fact that the ticket currently under consideration might just be a Super Bowl ticket. Thrills.

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A little more beat up, this one, a touch more ragged on the perforation and with a jagged hole where the pushpin held it up.

Also, it’s a sign of a situation where I wussed out and could have gotten in for free, but then again if I had gotten in for free I wouldn’t have had a ticket, so.

A little explanation: as you can see from the ticket, this show was at UCLA in Ackerman Grand Ballroom, a location which was just that, located in the student center area (and presumably still is, though I haven’t swung through the building itself in many years). It was a room I had gotten to know for very good reason by this time in my UCLA career, well into my junior year as it was — it was where, at the rear of the ballroom, tucked away into a small series of rooms, the campus radio station KLA was tucked away.

The importance of KLA can’t be underscored enough — it was the first real campus organization as such I joined and about the only one that I really stuck with, outside of formal honors societies and all that. I’ve mentioned before how it was a key to my social life in turn, making and still keeping friends through it all these years along. It was pretty much my home on campus if I had time to kill between classes, I knew every nook and cranny of it — not hard, since it wasn’t that huge, really, but it did have a slew of rooms packed in and all around, the studio booths, the music library and so forth.

Ackerman Grand Ballroom was notable mostly for various events and movie screenings and so forth but it did host shows, though I honestly don’t remember too many there before this show — I have half a memory of Michelle Shocked performing at some PETA-related thing that was a free show in any event. This show was not, obviously, and there were a few questions going around the station as to how to be able to essentially sneak in without any questions — after all, it was clearly necessary that a larger than normal complement of DJs had to be around the station that evening to ensure that nothing went wrong. You know, the redundancy factor. You can never be too careful.

I think I would have stuck with this noble sentiment and the attendant plans if it weren’t for a couple of logistical issues. First, there was no other way into the station except via the ballroom, so it wasn’t like we could sneak in through a back exit. Second, the station lacked a bathroom — I forget where it was located but I’m pretty sure it was out in the lobby area or its equivalent, in any event on the wrong side of the main doors. So as the show approached I wrestled with both my conscience and my physical limitations and figured I’d prefer being able to simply swan in whenever I felt like it, so I didn’t have to worry too much either way. I got my ticket and on the night of the show after the doors opened I peeled off from where the crowd was heading over to the station doors and found something like ten to fifteen fellow KLA folks stuffed in there. Not too surprising.

The show itself? Well, School of Fish opened, and they were one of those bands that have this weird kind of reputation in retrospect for a couple of reasons. At the time they were seen by a few of us as just another sort-of alternative band in a sense that was going to be heavily outdated within a year’s time, signed to a major label, terribly earnest and polite and all that but not otherwise remarkable. Somehow I keep lumping them in my head with Jellyfish though there’s no real connection per se outside of a sense of tunefulness and melodic power-pop, perhaps a little more studiously earnest in the case of School of Fish. They actually had a really elegant take on George Michael’s “Father Figure” I enjoyed a lot, a harbringer of indie-covers-pop in later years that worked nicely enough. After the band broke up members went their various ways — Michael Ward went on to the Wallflowers, Josh Clayton-Felt pursued a solo career and very sadly passed on in 2000 due to cancer. I’m almost seven years older than he was when he died, and as with anyone who passes young it’s a weird feeling to sense that difference, when I remembered seeing him onstage, however briefly, alive and doing what he liked. Can’t add much more than that, though.

The Charlatans, meanwhile, and the reason why I was there at all. I’d picked up on their big-hype-new-wave-of-this-Madchester-thing almost by osmosis, and I also remember that as I tried to puzzle out the various shifting allegiances and perceptions of it from thousands of miles away and absolutely no context at all to bring to bear that supposedly the Stone Roses were the gods, the Happy Mondays were the thuggish types, the Inspiral Carpets were the retro psych guys and the Charlatans were the flash in the pan one-hit wonders who were clearly not going to survive “The Only One I Know,” which had been a big hit in the UK and had gotten some attention in the US in turn.

Nearly twenty years on and the Charlatans are the only ones still kicking, as it turns out. It’s as good a reminder that you just can’t predict these things in the end — oh sure, the Happy Mondays have reformed and all but that’s been a grueling disaster, but the supposed also-rans were the winners, one supposes, with their eleventh album — eleventh! almost impossible to believe it — currently being recorded. Of course, nobody knew that at the time, but as I look back on that show now I wonder a bit if there were any signs or hints that they would keep it going in the end. Hindsight being what it is I don’t entirely trust my judgment but I do think that what were the most memorable parts of the show do suggest, just, that they weren’t around to mess around.

More on that in a second — but this show, more than any other KROQ friendly show I’d yet attended, was the first where I definitely remember a certain look and hairstyle that to me defines this whole stretch of time, from late 1989 to late 1991, this period before ‘the nineties’ became ‘the nineties’ in stereotyped simplicity. There wasn’t any one look or style even in the city, much less nationwide (and never would be and never has been etc.), but there’s this one hairstyle that to me just sums up KROQ youth right at that moment — growing the top and upper sides of your hair out (not long like my hair but just out a touch more) while closely trimming the lower sides and back of your hair closely so your hair on the top could more easily flop over it. God knows where it came from, but I would be seeing a lot more of it over the course of the year.

Meanwhile, the Charlatans themselves were on the first full tour of the US but not their first appearance — indeed, they were one of the featured bands at a concert that I didn’t attend and which has been lost to history, but is in retrospect a bit of a fascinating one-off given everything that’s come since. A year before Lollapalooza was dreamed up, Ian Astbury of the Cult had conjured up something called the Gathering of the Tribes, held at a spot not far from where I live now, the Pacific Ampitheatre in Costa Mesa, as well as at the Shoreline up in the Bay Area the day before. If you read this old EW report, two to one says you’ll be a little startled to realize just how much of what went on there became an accepted part of the whole nineties concert experience for a LOT of folks, and via that the 21st century Coachella model as well.

So, first full tour, returning to California, they’re introduced — and by a guy who said something like “Ladies and gentlemen, Marc Riley and the Creepers!,” which itself was worth the ticket price just because I couldn’t guess how few people there knew that was a reference to a fellow Manchester band who would have only been known in the States at all for being one of the eight million spin-off bands created by former members of the Fall. A bit of attitude at work, obviously, and there I was playing rock snob and congratulating myself for knowing the joke, but hey, I wasn’t complaining.

There were lots of oil projections and lights everywhere (you wanted sixties revivalism, you got it), they come on stage and they kick in to…”The Only One I Know.” This was honestly surprising to me and I probably wasn’t alone, but the crowd got into it and it was a strong version, Tim Burgess grooving around on stage with a bit of attitude but not acting pissed off or anything. In retrospect, this was clearly a brilliant, nervy move — having already known exactly what they would be most expected to play and what was the one song they figured most of the pretty big crowd would actually know, they resisted the temptation to save it till later (and the possibility that people might leave right afterward) and just got it out of the way flat out. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen any other band in a similar position early in their career do the same, and it immediately increased my estimation of them then and it still holds now.

From there it was other single cuts and forthcoming B-sides like “Happen to Die” and even more obscure early songs like “Indian Rope,” and the performance was enjoyable enough though it all blends together. But it ended on just the right note, THE right note, and the other indication that the Charlatans had something to offer beyond the here and now. Their debut album, Some Friendly, is a classic debut as such in that it’s a little patchy, some high points and some timekillers that I think even dedicated fans would be hard-pressed to remember. It ends, though, on a sweeping note with “Sproston Green,” a song that wears its Who-derived “Won’t Get Fooled Again” drive and sense of arrangements just enough without being a fully-obvious knockoff (and I’ve heard far worse knockoffs, trust me). Rob Collins’ keyboard break and the charge of the chorus are the most noticeable elements on first blush but the song as a whole is a good instance of everyone meeting in the middle and wrapping up the album on a high note.

Live, though, the song has become the band’s anthem since, basically due to the evidence of what I saw that night — it was and is an absolutely killer song live, and the good-enough studio version becomes a total monster in concert. I’ve heard a slew of live versions over the years that take different approaches and takes while still retaining that quality, and it’s not too much to suggest it has a pride of place much like “A Forest” does for the Cure, it’s the BIG song in the set which can take on a variety of forms. It’s all the more striking for this song because it was only ever an album track.

But I remember the swell of the overall arrangement, how Collins’ work on the keyboards on that majestic, amazing break was thrilling, how the lights and projections went bananas, and how Burgess just sold the vocals, the song turning into a real frenzy by the end. It was a damn spectacular ending, pretty sure that was the last song and that there wasn’t an encore, but they didn’t NEED an encore. Again, it’s only in retrospect that the full quality of the moment took shape in my head but I had to have left there thinking something like “Damn, that was GOOD.”

Though I probably didn’t leave immediately. Hey, there was a radio station to visit.

Ron and Russell Mael take their bows after another great Sparks show

After my pretty obsessive coverage of their 21-night-stand in London covering their entire career I didn’t want to go too much into the run-up for Sparks’s Valentine’s Day show at UCLA, with full performances of two albums, but suffice to say I was pretty well excited. Having caught the band six times over the previous decade — living in LA has its advantages, as they’ve always played at least one hometown show if not more for each new album — I knew they still had it while even the sometimes choppy webcasts from the London indicated their new full rock band lineup was firing on all fours.

Still, this was definitely a cut above, and probably the most exciting LA show they’ve done since the first time I’d seen them in 1998 at the Key Club. The place was packed with plenty of familiar faces from the mael-list and more besides — Rob and Jean, who stayed with me over the weekend, were just two of the people who had flown in for the show specifically — and Royce Hall, which I hadn’t been in for almost two decades since I attended UCLA, made for a truly theatrical settting for this most theatrical of bands.

Thanks to a very lucky break courtesy of a mael-list member — thanks again, S! — I was able to watch the show from third row center; I’ve been up front for as many shows they’ve done as I can manage over the years so this got added to that happy total, and being able to take in what is essentially a wide-screen performance from that distance is almost overwhelming. But it also helps with the detail, such as seeing Ron’s quizzical looks as his clones surrounded him during “(She Got Me) Pregnant” or his looks of head-shaking ‘You fell for it!’ hilarity on the chorus of “I Can’t Believe You Fell For All the Crap In This Song,” two of the highlights from their run-through of the latest album, Exotic Creatures of the Deep.

The Maels’ dedication to focusing on the present has paid greater dividends over the years, I think — when you consider that they’re a couple of years away from four full decades of formally released work, it would be so easy and so simple to coast. Certainly part of the hook of the show was the full performance of Kimono My House and stellar it was, the band’s full-bodied slam-through of that hysterical-in-all-senses classic one of the best rock shows I’ve seen. But my friend ML noted after the show that much as he loved that, he loved the Exotic Creatures run-through even more, and I’d have to agree — like their past few albums, what sounds enjoyable and lovely in studio form takes on greater depths live, bringing out an indefinable something that goes beyond simply the ability to reproduce it live or their various films and projections and set-pieces. That they kept the concluding film from the London performance was only appropriate — as the rest of the band sang the wordless falsetto section the ends “Likeable,” Ron ‘set fire’ to each of the band’s past album covers, acknowledging them and then moving beyond them to get to the present. Whatever their next album is will set fire to Exotic Creatures in turn — and that’s as it should be.

The career-sampling encore was an equal treat — personally I was thrilled to finally hear a full version of “The Number One Song in Heaven” live, as well as a welcome return to “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’?,” while “Dick Around”‘s majestic performance and the now-traditional show-closer of “Suburban Homeboy” also stand out — and it was the capper to a perfect evening. All that and the threatened rainstorm held off until today so we didn’t have to worry about traffic snarls — I call that a fine Valentine’s.