Richard Meltzer and Kickboy Face aka Claude Bessy. Both born in 1945 (May 11 and June 20 respectively) and among the select group of music writers whose work transcends the genre. Both based in Los Angeles during a golden age of American music (approximately 1976-1983) and both with pretensions to act as rock frontpersons in their thirties (not that there is anything to fault with that).
So who knew that the Metal Mike/Brendan Mullen
spat dates back to at least 1978? I have previously written about it
here. It's like Bessy drafted Mullen's talking points a couple of decades in advance. In the present day I like both Catholic Discipline and VOM, though given Catholic Discipline's VU/Can/Nuggets hybrid it would have produced one of the finer lps to come out of post-Masque/pre-hardcore Los Angeles if someone had dragged them into a studio. One could assume that Meltzer felt no animosity to Bessy by 1979 (see "Cocktails With Claude,"
LA Weekly 1979 interview of Claude by Meltzer, Meltzer’s review of the Germs “G.I.”). What Bessy writes is really about more than VOM. What were his thoughts on the Dictators fer instance - did they get a pass even though a writer was in their midst? Mind you Chris D. and Ranking Jeffrey were on the
Slash staff. How harsh is this: "they couldn't be naive enough to think that even on the fringe of that fringe phenomenon there is room for a bunch of would-be satirists with resentment and bitterness in their hearts, pot bellies behind their their tattered stage costumes and panic at their sudden irrelevance behind their contrived aggressiveness. They couldn't be vain enough to hope that the punx might fall for it and actually (irony of irony) make them into heroes or villains." No really Kickboy, how do you feel about VOM? An hey, enough with the slams of would-be satirists with resentment and bitterness in their hearts, and pot bellies behind their their tattered stage costumes and panic at their sudden irrelevance behind their contrived aggressiveness. Hitting a little too close to home buddy!
Over to Metal Mike in his attack on Mullen and Spitz'
We Got the Neutron Bomb : The Untold Story of L.A. Punk:
Not once in this book is there a mention of the March 1978 Dickies/VOM 2-night, 4-sets stand at the Whiskey, which was one of the wildest,craziest, most chaotic spectacles of "punk rock," anyplace, anywhere, anytime. Re: Paul Grant's 2-page article describing the opening night show in national slick-mag NEW WAVE ROCK...I was there (at the Whiskey), it was that hysterical/nutty/wild and then some. Never laughed so hard in my life. Ah, wait, wait, wait, back up the truck-there is no mention of 1977-78 LA punk band VOM (with rock critic and brilliant Blue Oyster Cult lyricist Richard Meltzer) anywhere in this book.Now this is getting interesting.
Uh, "wildest,craziest, most chaotic spectacles of "punk rock," anyplace, anywhere, anytime." Are we talking about the same set of shows here?
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haha, i was intentionally baiting drunk dumbfuck mullen (with the VOM comment), and he took it hook line and sinker. but fwiw, the board tape (of most of th efour sets over the two nights) that gregg passed on to me IS musically chaotic/wild/wtf, maybe like an early bags show except with a better drummer (haha. no, seriously. the bags' drummer was borderline lousy! compared to yours truly on drums who was 1966-garage-rock-style (or our other favorite drumming role model, jerry nolan/heartbreakers era) definitely a half-notch better than just average)
ReplyDeletethe part that i had forgotten to call fucktard mullen's whatever on -- was that HE BOOKED OUR BAND in sept 1979, and HIS NAME AND PHONE # WERE ON HIS FLIER FOR THE GIG. Kings Palace, hollywood blvd (which was guitarist PJ's first gig with the band). what a dumbfuck. (implying or outright claiming that our band "crashed the scene" years later). phfffffsht. a halloween weekend SF Mab gig in october 1978 aka "LA punk rock night at the Mab" with SHOCK / the Zeros / angry samoans didn't exist? what a piece of shit that drunkfuck was. a faux-"gatekeeper" who had no idea of where the gate was in the first place. just a waste of space for the human race. (and his co-author for that lazy-as-shit book, mark spitz, died young from drug abuse, bye bye glad to see you go, asshole). -30- typed while listening to the re-run of last night's SF Giants / metal mike, hayward CA since june 1980