SOUNDTRACK: U.K. SUBS-Another Kind of Blues (1978).
In this essay, Rebecca Kushner mentions a bunch of punk band members that she either knew or hung out with. I was amazed at how many of them I’d heard of but didn’t really know. So this seemed like a good opportunity to go punk surfing.
U.K. Subs are a punk band that I’ve heard of but really knew nothing about. A little research tells me that they have been active all of these years–their latest release was in 2019. That’s some serious staying power. According to Wikipedia, there have been about 75 members of the band over the years.
This first album is a pretty fascinating listen. Most of the seventeen songs are under two minutes long, but they’re not blisteringly fast or anything. The songs are more or less blues based (as the title indicates) but faster and grittier
This is definitely a punk album. But they follow a lot of rock song conventions. Indeed, “I Live in a Car” is a minute and a half long but it’s got verses a chorus and two guitar solos. “I Couldn’t Be You” even has a harmonica solo.
But songs like “Tomorrow’s Girls” offer good old punk chanting choruses. And “World War” which is all of a minute and twenty three seconds is actually over 20 seconds of explosion.
“Stranglehold” was a pretty big hit in England and it’s easy to see why. It’s got an immediate riff, a three chord chorus that’s easy to sing along with and a bouncy bass line. And it’s all of one minute and fifty-seven seconds.
Checking some of their other releases through the years, UK Subs definitely went through a metal phase in the 80s and 90s, but their 2016 album Zeizo has found the punk spirit again. I think I like Zeizo better than their first.
[READ: February 2, 2021] “The Hard Crowd”
I’ve read a few things by Rachel Kushner, although I’ve never given any thought to her biography. I never would have guessed that Kushner was part of a San Francisco pub scene when she was growing up (or that she is essentially my age).
This essay is about that time in her life. When Jimmy Carter was president and he quoted Bob Dylan in his acceptance speech “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
She says that being born is an existential category of gaining experience and living intensely in the present. Conversely, dying doesn’t have to be negative–the new stuff is over but you turn reflective you examine and tally–it is behind you but it continues to exists somewhere.
She says she’s been watching film footage found on Youtube shot in 1966 or 1967 from a car moving slowly along Market Street in San Francisco, where she grew up. She assumes it is B roll from a film, because it is professional grade (she imagines it was for Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, but that’s not based on anything).
She worked at the Baskin Robbins making $2.85 an ahour. The shop is now gone and she thinks it’s weird to be sentimental about a chain store, but when her mother took her to the IHOP years after she worked there, it all came flooding back–sights, smells. Despite every one being identical, this one was hers.
At 16 she started working at American Rag a vintage clothing store. She worked with Alvin Gibbs, a bass player from UK Subs.
She talks about her friend Emily who got a tattoo at 16 (the tattoo guy wouldn’t give it to them if they were drunk, but he didn’t care that they were under 18). Rachel didn’t get one. Tattoos were not the huge business they eventually became, they were a more underground thing at the time.
Rachel worked as a bartender at the Warfield and saw Agnostic Front at the Rendezvous along with Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. (The new wave Pearl was dressed in a nurses uniform and watched from offstage as the Agnostic Front guys got into a fight with someone in the front of the crowd).
She talks about all the places she used to shoplift–at the Woolworths of course and the Emporium-Capwell. She was caught shoplifting there and was handcuffed to a metal pole where they took her Polaroid which was put on the wall of criminals. (She rather liked the picture and wishes she had it instead of the dozens of photos of herself that she doesn’t like). She was banned for life from the store. The store is closed now–she outlived it.
She also worked at the Blue Lamp–her first bartending gig–in the early 90s–the patrons were violent or had violent phases. She knew a guy who lived in the back of the bar living on the motto “will work for beer.” He restocked coolers and fetched ice and drank forty bottles of Bud a day. But he always looked out for her when she closed up.
There was a lot of drugs back then too. She had a friend (name redacted) who stayed with them in high school but who has since been in and out of rehab and prison. This friend had a drug dealer who liked to eat cocaine instead of snorting it. He would slice pieces of a rock and nibble on them ( had no idea that was a thing).
When she worked at the Blue Lamp, Oliver Stone was filming The Doors. rachel and her friends hated hippies (having grown up in Portland) and tried their best to mess up the shooting. She’s not sure why exactly–she always liked “Peace Frog.”
There’s a funny direct address in this essay in which she complains that in “White Album” Joan Didion says that Jim Morrison’s pants are “black vinyl” at least three times.
Dear Joan: Record albums are made out of vinyl. Jim Morrison’s pants were leather, and even a Sacramento Debutante and a Berkeley Tri-Delt should know the difference.
Sincerely, Rachel
When she was a freshman at Berkeley she befriended a Hare Krishna who sold vegetarian cookbooks. He was unusual in that he had grit and a neck like a wrestler. She later figured out that he was very likely Harley Flanagan, the singer of the Cro-Mags who toured with her friend Alex’s band Gorilla Biscuits. She also had friends in bands called Touch Me Hooker and Free Beer.
When Rachel was in Haight Ashbury it was no longer good feelings and free love, it was sleazier and darker. Skinheads and skateboarders came and changed the scene. She is ambivalent about the so-called golden age of skateboarding because the scene was misogynist with a constant belittling of women even though they were friends and part of the circle. But then maybe she was the soft one in a hard crowd
She first heard Cream’s “White Room” at a head shop called White Rabbit. She liked the line “‘At the party she was the kindness of the hard crowd’ or is it ‘the kindest in the hard crowd?’ Either way the key is that hard crowd.”
To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present not to dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home.
Kushner’s writing seems more genteel than you might expect from someone who came of age in that scene.
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