from L.A. Style, August 1990
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Much has been written about rock & roll as a product of urban or rural environments -- or as a combination of the products of urban and rural environments. "In rock and roll, the strident, repetitive sounds of city life were, in effect, reproduced as melody and rhythm," writes Charlie Gillette in The Sound of the City (Pantheon). When the rock historian digs for roots, he typically sets his pick upon the cobblestones, or the significant soil; there is very little regard for the well-kept lawn, emblem of white, middle-class soullessness. Yet there is a portion of pop that comes to us down neither mean streets nor rutted roads, but rather grows with the dichondra, and while it is generally white and middle-class, it is not without soul. In fact, it is often about the very process of discovering or defining soul, as undertaken by those who have been told that, by dint of their (materially comfortable) circumstances, they have none. |
A career in pop as an escape from poverty is a story older than Elvis; American show biz has long been the province of men and women escaping the tenement, the workhouse or the farm. (The new rap millionaires are, some of them, quite in this tradition.) Indeed, we define success by the adversity that must be overcome to achieve it, and we are prone to the peculiar, fundamentally Christian notion that suffering makes our lives profound. The real travails of the children of the (usually white) suburban middle class, since they are not based on physical, financial or social hardship, are sometimes held to be illusory, self-created self-indulgences. This is why arty bohemians of good parentage have long aspired to poverty -- or, rather, the trappings of poverty -- or to drug addiction or self-destructive love affairs: they believe it gives them personal depth, and their art a validity it would otherwise lack. And once in a while, it might. As deep thinkers Crosby, Stills and Nash have it: "To sing the blues/You got to live the dues." |
The Beach Boys, from Hawthorne, California, were the absolute prophets of suburban rock, and no group since has celebrated that landscape with such élan or success. Surfing safaris, car clubs, pom-pom girls, roller coaster rides -- this is the legacy that keeps the band solvent into its dotage. Yet quite early in his band's career, maestro Brian Wilson turned his eye inward to express the psychic unease that belied his well-manicured surroundings. "What good is the dawn/That grows into day?" he was wondering way back in '63. "In My Room" is about holing up to cry, sigh, dream, scheme, "lie awake and pray." Even such likable novelties as "When I Grow Up To Be a Man" are informed by a kind of dread. And Pet Sounds, recently issued on CD (Capitol) and typically and rightly called Wilson's masterpiece, is an orgy of anxiety; every song on the record is shot with frustration or fear. It's the testament of a man who can say for certain only that "I know perfectly well I'm not where I should be." Or: "I keep looking for a place to fit in.... They say I got brains, but they ain't doing me no good.... I guess I just wasn't made for these times." |
Or, as another suburban band, Bad Religion, put it 20 years later, "I've got this feeling/And I don't know what it is." It's precisely that inchoate suspicion that something is awry, coupled with the inability to say just what that something might be, that defines the suburban malaise, that forms the burr under the skin of The Rebel Without a Cause. Not coincidentally, it was from the same south-of-L.A. tracts that birthed the Beach Boys that Southern California hard-core punk came screaming in the early '80s, and while suburban circumstances may have changed for the worse -- more divorce, drugs, the raw greed of Reagan in place of the more apparently benign boosterism of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years -- the complaint was the same: a nagging feeling of emptiness in the midst of abundance, a vague antimaterialism, and, frequently, a distrust of one's parents, as the nearest representatives of authority, and therefore the probable cause of one's alienation. ("My Dad Sucks," from L.A.'s Descendents, was a typical punk screed; "I'm Bugged at My Old Man" was the Beach Boys' take.) If rap (often) fixates upon the material equality that white society denies the underclass, suburban rock limns the limits of the supposed Good Life that material is expected to provide: It stands at the edge of the lawn, stares into the pool, facing a spiritual void that mere stuff cannot fill, and against which religion, family or a college education no longer seem effective bulwarks. |
Middle-class American new wave and punk bands of the late '70s and '80s sometimes wore their roots as an ironic badge, taking such names as the Suburbs or the Suburban Lawns. A band called Middle Class recorded a song called "Suburban Suicide." Some made it a point to actively embrace the trash culture that gave them suck, to sanctify the plastic that upholstered their lives. The Dickies covered the themes from Gigantor ("The Space Age Robot") and The Banana Splits. Redd Kross wrote songs about Linda Blair and Tatum O'Neal, covered "Sunshine Day" by the Brady Bunch, and recorded with Danny Bonaduce of Partridge Family fame. Lawndale, from the Hawthorne-adjacent city of Lawndale, play surf 'n' spy-influenced instrumentals with titles like "The Story of Vanna White" and "The Days of Pup & Taco." The Descendents have a song about another fast food chain, "Der Wienerschnitzel." And Black Flag threw themselves a "TV Party" -- "We've got nothing better to do/Than to watch TV and have a couple of brews" -- a snippet of which is sung by Emilio Estevez as the punk protagonist of Repo Man. |
Other films exploit this milieu: Director Penelope Spheeris followed her The Decline of Western Civilization, a documentary on L.A. punk, with a fiction film called Suburbia, in which runaway kids move into an abandoned tract house and get domestic -- an echo of the climactic scenes of Rebel Without a Cause. (Spheeris later became story editor on Roseanne.) And Jonathan Kaplan's 1979 Over the Edge makes thrilling use of the music of Cheap Trick (from Rockford, Illinois) and Van Halen (Pasadena), as alienated middle-class teens get wasted, have sex, housebreak, play with guns and finally lock their parents in the school auditorium, then blow up their cars in the parking lot. |
"Two TV sets and two Cadillac cars" sang Lou Reed (from Massapequa, Long Island), "ain't gonna help me at all." But he posed a possible solution in the refrain: "Despite all the amputation/You could just dance to that rock & roll station." Or play the music yourself. And this is why one takes to the garage: to be part of something bigger, something transcendent, to find in the making of a big noise an identity, an outlet, to crack the comfortable, crushing sameness that can make a sargasso of an apparently lucky life. To "rise above" -- the titular imperative of a tune by Black Flag. "If English punk and New Wave was born of kids bored with rich rock stars and five-minute guitar solos," wrote Ken Tucker, "then a lot of American New Wave erupted because nice young middle-class eccentrics wanted a place within the rock and roll pantheon, where they could blow off their peculiar steam, too." |
No one fits that bill better than Jonathan Richman, a singer of markedly limited technique who came out of the Boston suburb of Natwick, and who now delights his happy cult with songs about the ice cream man, roller coasters and a chewing-gum wrapper; unlike some of similar background, Richman never blamed the 'burbs, never took out his own confusions on his parents, whom he confessed in song, quite unfashionably, to love. Still, he knows the undefined longing of his breed: On his first album, named for his band The Modern Lovers and recorded in the early '70s when Richman was just out of his teens, he haunts bakeries to make up for "a lack of sweetness in my life." He's as moody and as disconnected from his fellows as Brian Wilson ever was. But where Wilson took to his room, Richman heads for the turnpike, and in "Roadrunner" he finds his release, driving at "suburban speed" past "suburban trees" to the Stop and Shop, cruising Highway 128 "when it's dark outside/with the radio on." A close cousin to Lou Reed's "Rock & Roll," the song offers rock as healing balm: "I don't feel so bad now in the car/I don't feel so alone with radio on." To this Valley boy, that sounds like more than a prescription -- it's an anthem, brothers and sisters. Open that garage door, here we go.¶ |
Copyright Robert Lloyd © 1990 and 2006