Sonic Highways-Austin & D.C.
You used to be nobody. Los Angeles and New York were a dream. Rather than build a shrine to yourself on social media, you became engrossed in media, in music and films, and you went to the theatre, to the show, to get closer.
Nowhere as much as in Washington, D.C. Where there was a live Go-go scene that most of the country never heard of when it was peaking and still have no idea how to characterize. We had the Go-Go’s. The sound was big at the beach. Was this some kind of surf music? Or soul, akin to “Under The Boardwalk”?
“Sonic Highways” is the first explanation of Go-go music to make it comprehensible. As an interviewee claims, it was what shoulda been rap. If you don’t feel like you missed out when you see the Go-go show, if you don’t want to get in your car and drive there right now, you’ve got no soul, and certainly no ears. It was about the drums, the beat, it was participatory, it was about the interaction between performer and audience.
That’s today’s conundrum. All the action is at the show and all the publicity surrounds the record. It’s hard for musicians to flip the switch, to realize live has triumphed over recordings. That they can make it if they really try. But they must try harder.
It’s easy to fake it in the studio.
It’s almost impossible to fake it on stage. And that’s one of the reasons so many acts carry huge production, to cover up. If they had to be there naked it would all fall flat. But not for Trouble Funk at the Go-go show.
You’re watching Dave Grohl talk to this big black guy and you ask yourself…WHO IS THIS? Just another guy from the Chocolate City? No, it turns out to be Big Tony, Trouble Funk’s majordomo. But then Big Tony starts to testify about Chuck Brown. WHO?
But once you see the recently departed Mr. Brown on stage you get it, he was the progenitor of Go-go.
And that was the highlight of these two episodes, along with Steve Earle singing his Townes Van Zandt song. How is it that someone we all know the name of could be broke? Especially before the days of the internet, when it was nearly impossible to get noticed. But being a songwriter used to be enough, it still is, if you’re great.
And once upon a time a song was a story. Something heartfelt, that would make you cry, as Nanci Griffith does when Steve sings on “Austin City Limits.”
But the point is the seventies and eighties were a long, long time ago.
If you think music ruled in the sixties… It was even more dominant in the seventies, when it had an established place in the firmament, when FM ruled and the hardest part of going to the show was getting a ticket.
In the eighties…Â What can I say, we had MTV. Musicians triumphed. You wanted to be one.
And then VH1 catalogued everybody’s exploits on “Behind The Music” and the past imploded. The scorched earth formula took what was personal and special and made it pedestrian, with the arc of a film, and the truth is every band has its own arc, every band tells its own story.
So you’re in Austin and a blues fanatic, Clifford Antone, opens a club to showcase his favorite sound. Was he doing it to get rich? Of course not! That was the difference between then and now. Today everybody wants to ring the bell, make a billion, back then we thought if we were paying our bills, if we were doing what was important to us, if it was fulfilling, we were happy. You remember happiness, don’t you? That’s when you pursue your dream. And if you take the money out of today’s dreams, do they still fly?
Rarely.
And the highlight of the Austin episode, other than Mr. Earle’s performance, is the Roky Erickson footage. And just when you figure he’s never going to be on camera, Roky is. Not all there mentally, but certainly all there physically. It’s astounding these people are still around.
That’s what you don’t realize, your heroes, the icons, they’re reachable, they’re here, touch them while you can.
And Willie Nelson only triumphed when he returned to Austin. Footage of his Fourth of July picnic will also have you lamenting you missed it. Once again, this was a minor story in “Rolling Stone,” most people were unaware of it back when, the boomers did not yet control the mainstream media, music was huge, but it was still outside.
And now Austin is booming. Willie just says to move west. The way the arts have taken hold in the old industrial areas of western Massachusetts. Artists need time to be able to create, they need to pay almost no rent and no overhead. But today that’s impossible in the cities.
And the cities pay the price, our whole country pays the price. Money has certainly triumphed over music. We want statistics, data. That which touches the heart is unquantifiable, and therefore doesn’t get much press.
And although Dave Grohl can be sycophantic, the truth is he’s doing God’s work here. He’s treating the music and the history with respect. Want to inspire the next generation? Show “Sonic Highways” in schools.
Because that’s not what music is today.
Stardom has triumphed over art. How do you look? What is your plan? Who do you know? As opposed to inspiration, and following it.
If you haven’t watched “Sonic Highways,” borrow someone’s HBO GO log-in and log on. Because it will take you to a different place, one you remember if you lived through it, one that will be intriguing if you did not.
When you had to make the record sleeves yourself, as they did at Dischord, as opposed to clicking a button and pushing your music into the online abyss.
I’m not saying that the internet is bad, I’m just saying you lose something with every advancement. And what we’ve lost is the local scene. The same way we’ve lost it in radio and concert promotion. The entire nation is homogeneous. It’s the same everywhere, the same TV shows and fast food. Maybe that’s why the restaurant scene is burgeoning. Cuisine is different at each and every establishment. Sure, Danny Meyer may rise above, but that’s the same way the Beatles and the Airplane rose above. But that didn’t mean we didn’t play music at home, that we all weren’t happy where we were.
Now no one’s happy where they are. They have to measure themselves against the titans of not only music, but tech. Everyone feels inadequate, and burdened by the self-promotion online. Everybody wants to be important and with everybody vying for attention, almost no one is.
But it used to be different. You used to be part of your own local community. Your identity was three-dimensional, your influences more important than your number of followers.
Then again, this insularity caused bigotry, caused us to leave and go to the big city to find our people.
Like I said, something is gained and something is lost in every revolution.
