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City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recurring, subtext
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Circles. The Fleur de Lys. Immediate. 1966.

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme
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Cinnamon Girl. Neil Young with Crazy Horse. 1969. Reprise.

Exiled from banality, the outsider expatriates to borders within rock and roll desperate to outrun reality’s status quo. Finding there only others of the same ilk, we storm our new topography with an inebriated passion that ultimately reorients our psychological weaknesses towards a new understanding of the realities of vertigo. On Neil Young’s debut record with Crazy Horse, the mythological conceit of the outsider, along with the outsider’s primary theme, absence, haunts its most well known single, Cinnamon Girl. Two versions of that single exist; the version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and the version originally recorded for that record which includes a co-lead vocal sung by the late Danny Whitten, whose vocal track Young had erased for the now familiar FM radio staple. On Cinnamon Girl, absence makes itself known with the phantom non-appearance of the titular girl, whom we experience only as an object of desire, vibrant inside of two individual imaginations, the lyric narr
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CIA Man. The Fugs. 1967. ESP Disk.

  The excitement begins almost at once. An introductory guitar lick followed by the authoritative voice of the Ghost of History Present, also known by his stage name, New York genius Tuli Kupferberg. Equal parts reportage, cultural unmasking, and satirical agitprop—all of it definitively rock and roll—the Fugs’ CIA Man generates excitement by shrinking the distance between audience and performers, the Fugs’ instinct for spontaneity connecting us with inspired creative thought processes rooted in the traditions of high and low cultural Jewish modernity. Before the academic and literary acknowledgment of the voice of multiculturalism, post-modernism drew attention to the artistic potential for restating twentieth century modernist ideas in audio, video, and written languages appropriated from popular culture. This, along with Kupferberg’s personal history of lower east side radical bohemianism and political left wing activism, shaped the sensibility that emerges from CIA Man. Both Kupfer
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Christiansands. Tricky. 1996. Island.

  Released twenty eight years ago, Christiansands still hisses with visionary acuity in its account of the fluid interchangeability of identity around the time that social destabilization became a norm. Using whispered intimacy as the subcultural voice of the coming rampant pathologies—incel active shooter, suicide jihadist, cartel drug mule—Tricky sets a furtively disquieting mood to play upon his contemporary listenership’s heightened awareness of emotional     manipulation and compartmentalism. Christiansands is one of those epochal recordings like Sign O’ the Times or Nirvana’s Polly that isolates with chilling accuracy the tipping point at which violence segregates its desperate antagonist from the relative anonymous security of the common human milieu before turning his virulent ire on an unsuspecting public. Starting with a boy-meets-girl metaphor—the girl sung by the incomparable Martina Topley-Bird—the record deliberately paces itself to give the listener enough space to accom
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Choking Kind. Mavis Staples. 1969. Volt.

  Written by Nashville stalwart Harlan Howard in 1967, Choking Kind appeared that year as an RCA issued single by Waylon Jennings. Two years and a clutch of     distinct variations later, the song shows up on Mavis Staples’ eponymously titled debut record on Volt. From a twenty first century perspective, the two recordings play out like a genre exercise in bias confirmation, fulfilling long held expectations that surround country and western’s idealization of the status quo, its tendency to court market success by often—but not always—reimagining verisimilitude through a personal lens of stasis. In 2024, we call this style conservatism. Mavis Staples’ artistry is kinetic. Her singing voice, like Jennings’, has the power to connect viscerally with an audience without overwhelming you. The major difference between versions is vocal narration. By means of tempo and voice control, Jennings reduces the action of the world around him to a couple’s personal drama, allowing the prevailing emot
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Chipina. Santiago Jimènez Jr. 1990. Arhoolie.

  In those days, in the time before Starsky and Hutch, in the TV broadcast era of Mary Tyler Moore and Lawrence Welk, if you walked out of the front door of my father’s house at the corner of Drew and Bryan, and took a left, you’d be walking east in the direction of Interstate 35-W. The second house on your right was where my best friends Junior and Paul lived, in a three bedroom house—their family had converted an attached garage into a bedroom—with their parents and an older sister, Kathy, another brother Louie, and two more sisters their senior, Janie and Stella. Remember that scene in The Exorcist when, near the exorcism’s grim finale, Karras comes back into the bedroom from having taken a well deserved break, and discovers Merrin’s dead body; remember that look of dumb uncomprehension on the girl’s face, before the demon Pazuzu has fully grasped that Merrin is dead? Stella always looked like that, like an aggressive demon paused, but she did decipher for Paul and me the whispered
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