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. (more…)
