I’m not really sure how it happened, but somehow I wormed my way from “hanging out” to “working” at Universal Records, which was the name that The Music Faucet took on when it moved up between Bancroft and Telegraph. This was prime real estate — close to campus, next to Rasputin’s Records and across from Blondie’s Pizza. From here I was to learn a lot about music and life.
I was just one of a really odd cast of characters. Marc Time and Gary Nervo were the guys who ran the place, and I was completely devoted to trying to look cool in their eyes. For some reason, they let me be there, probably because I was doing a huge amount of the used record filing. Marc and Gary were in The Jars, one of the first bands on Berkeley’s Subterranean Records. They were pretty good and opened some interesting shows, including for Flipper. They had two singles released and fit in nicely in the whole early 1980s new wave pop thing. Just to give you an idea of the sense of humor around these guys, on the covers of their first two singles, they planted clues that their guitarist/singer, Mik Dow, was dead. That’s sort of funny, but what was REALLY funny is that they didn’t tell Mik. And then they told all their friends. (at least, this is how I remember it)
Ron was the owner. I couldn’t really read him, but he was always smiling a Cheshire Cat grin. (There may have been good reason for this, but I was oblivious.) He seemed really apart from the life of the store, and yet it was his. Then there was a whole periphery of other folks: Richard, the manic English 100-pounds with the huge nose, convinced that Rocktography would be the Next Big Thing; Gandalf, a spaced-out hippie who passed out “dollar off” coupons for us and once corraled Jonathan Richman into coming in and playing some songs; and Rob, a disaffected punk teen, lead singer of Intensified Chaos, who later gave it all up to become the F Scott Fitzgerald-like “Robert Cameron The Third.”
But I am an MP3 blogger, so let me stick to the music for a moment.
It’s 1980 and I’m buying my first non-commercial, non-parentally influenced records. Can you guess what they were? Obviously London Calling was a biggie. I liked that fine, but it didn’t seem especially punk or strange to me, and I have actually always been a little baffled why The Clash are considered punk heroes. I like them fine, mind you, but it seems like a pretty short street from Bruce Springsteen to Joe & Mick. Joe & Mick just happened to have more diverse taste than Bruce. But that’s another discussion.
The first record of this period that really captured my imagination was Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition. I knew little or nothing of the Sex Pistols’ music, so PiL’s deep dubby grooves didn’t seem as shocking to me as it probably did to my fellow 1980 folk. For me, hearing dance music be treated as avant-garde experiments was competely novel. I realized that it was mostly improvised, but the tracks still held enough interest that I would turn up the headphones and listen closely BETWEEN the bass lines (if you know what I mean). This was completely mesmerizing stuff, full of pain and rhythm and strangeness and drama, and I was hooked.
Ooooh and then I found the Metal Box version! As perfect as the distorted art, silvered ink and scribbled lyrics were on the Second Edition cover, Metal Box was the most unbelievable record package I’d ever seen, and may still be. It’s one of the only records I’ve retained over the years. If you don’t own one, you should. The discs had no song titles and you had to shake the can to get the records out. And on 45, the bass lines sounded incredible.
Asked why the Metal Box, John Lydon answered — Because it made the records hard to get out. The simplicity of that use and the complexity of the package still make me laugh. I also liked the idea from the surrealist standpoint, that to play them was to destroy them, like Andre Breton’s sandpaper covered book that was intended to destroy all the books next to it on the shelf.
The obvious thing to illustrate my feeling about this album is to put up “Graveyard” or “Death Disco,” but since I’m at the end of my bandwidth month, here instead is the 7-minute “Poptones.” Lydon said back then that this was a song about a rape of a man by another man, but you can’t really tell if that’s true or if Lydon (typically) is just trying to tick off his audience. But to me that doubt about the true subject matter of this song makes it even scarier, as it was to an impressionable 13-year old with headphones on and the lights out.
[Soundtrack]
Public Image Ltd – Poptones.mp3
this is what you want, this is what you get
Find a Metal Box
