Local round-up 2000

High tide and green grass

by Carly Carioli

As my main man Matt Ashare is fond of saying, sometimes the best rock and roll happens when nobody's looking, in those moments when all hope of reward has vanished, when the money men are off tightening their belts and handing out pink slips.

That's certainly the case with Scissorfight, who a couple of years ago did the whole let's-get-signed shuffle, got the runaround, and wound up with their asses in a sling. So they switched labels -- from the small but established Wonderdrug to their friend Mark Thompson's new and unheralded Tortuga imprint -- and, thinking the jig was perhaps up, made New Hampshire, an album they figured no one would want to hear. It ended up, of course, being the best thing they've ever done. A paltry few hundred people noticed, to which the band responded -- heeding, perhaps, Andy Warhol's old credo "Always leave them wanting less" -- by heading directly back into the studio and pounding out another EP, Piscataqua. "It's just some bullshit," opined their singer, Ironlung, before climbing on stage a couple of weeks ago, but I beg to differ. Its two new songs are as good as, if not better than, anything on New Hampshire, especially "Outmotherfucker the Man," which at one point rips off Cake ripping off Zeppelin, only with a terminal case of elephantiasis of the gonads. After the two new ones comes something like Scissorfight's "American Trilogy" (of course their trilogy would have to be four songs long): quick, sleazy, raw takes on the Dead Kennedys' "Too Drunk To Fuck," G.G. Allin's "Drink, Fight & Fuck," Aerosmith's "Lick and a Promise," and the Nervous Eaters' "Just Head." I have not been around since the beginning, but henceforth when I am called upon to back up my opinion that Boston rock and roll is as vital and aware as it has been in years, I am going to play Scissorfight covering the Nervous Eaters. Nobody asked for it, it should never have come to pass, and yet there it is.

So it was that a few days before Piscataqua hit the shelves, New Hampshire's "The Ballad of Jacco Maccaco" -- casually known as "the monkey song" -- began to receive regular airplay.

You can smell it in the air -- things are brewing. It may be because the labels have taken their ball and gone home, thereby removing the impetus to make horrible music and leaving people to their own base instincts (see the Gentlemen). It may simply be a new generation gap -- every five or 10 years, there's a new batch of kids who haven't yet been told that everything's all been done, and so can see no reason why they shouldn't do it themselves, any way they want it (see Waltham). Or that the veterans who've stuck it out this long are finally out of give-a-fucks (see the Shods). In any case, like the first snowstorm of spring, the unlikely is beginning to seem possible -- even vaguely inevitable.

If you read between the lines you can see a bit of this in this year's Best Music Poll -- which is at least as remarkable for the quality of the runners-up as it is for the winners themselves. And that's exactly as it should be: as a snapshot of what's actually happening Out There, you get the sense of rising tides, of a new wave balanced precariously on the verge of becoming.

Later this summer, two of my favorite bands will pile into a van and set out, in tandem, to conquer the country. Nothing particularly special in that. Except for the odd fact that both are from Boston, and I can't remember the last time I had one favorite band from around here, as in an in-the-whole-world favorite, let alone two. Also, the prospect of these two particular bands -- Cave In and the Explosion -- playing to the same crowds every night for three weeks is almost unfathomable; besides their area codes, they have little in common. Cave In, whose members have not all yet reached the legal drinking age, are about to release their third album, Jupiter (Hydrahead), which charts a post-metal course toward such prog-rock gas giants as Yes, Rush, Queensryche, and Shudder To Think; the Explosion will be releasing their debut album, Flash Flash Flash (Jade Tree), an incandescent blast of unsullied punk rock. Traffic patterns are being rerouted. Allegiances are being formed. Secret handshakes are being
exchanged.

And they are building. Last summer in Narragansett, Rhode Island -- just an hour's drive outside of town -- musician Jodi Buonanno put down her guitar for a hammer. I took the train down to visit her; just across from the station there was, on the wall of a factory, a mural that looked like a slightly more naive version of a Bolshevik agitprop poster -- great exaggerated caricatures of the Working Man, steel beams and punishing tools drawn to loom at odd angles, perspective turned inside out. The building Jodi was working on, a couple of miles away, had been, until just a few years ago, the Naragansett Grange Hall, and the purpose she had in mind for it was not unlike the purpose for which that great populist agrarian collective had originally built it -- to be a gathering place, a social locus, a home away from home. Seventy-five-year-old songbooks were stacked on the ancient piano that had been left behind; the small stage on the first floor was being restored. A recording studio and several multipurpose workspaces were being installed in the basement. One of Jodi's bands is called the Secret Stars, in tribute to her own whispered canon of unheralded friends and acquaintances; the Grange Hall would also be their shrine, a place to work and eat and sleep, rooms that would know art and solace and song.

In Roxbury, a buncha skate punks wielding cameras and paintbrushes have turned the offices of a small record label called Big Wheel Recreation into their own loft gallery.

Outside of Union Square in Somerville, in an unmarked storefront nestled among the greasy taco joints and auto-body shops, a handful of holy fools calling themselves Surefire Distribution keep tabs on box after box of records almost no one ever asked to hear; the money from the distribution racket allows them to release still more obscure and unwanted absurdinalia in tiny editions on their own tiny labels. It is the stuff of either love or madness, but the distro keeps growing, the noise on the records unlike anything being made anywhere else. If you want it -- if you want the Prehensile Monkeytailed Skink or Mr. Quintron albums on Bulb -- you've got to come here.

Two of the seven signs of the apocalypse contain references to all-ages gigs and independent hip-hop nights on Lansdowne Street. The Dropkick Murphys (another runner-up) are playing Avalon. Mr. Lif (and another) put out a single on the Beastie Boys' label. Virtuoso (winner, local hip-hop; and he's not just bragging about the virtuoso thing either) is opening for Big Daddy Kane at the Middle East. What town are we in again?

Tree get played on the radio. Half Cocked are moving to LA, where they're expected to sign to a subsidiary of DreamWorks.

Here's a short list of bands that did not win -- or place -- in the Best Music Poll: Lockgroove, Ghetto Thunder, the Medea Connection, 7L & Esoteric, Anal Cunt, the Showcase Showdown, the Real Kids, the Bourbonaires, Roadsaw, Come, the Wicked Farleys, the Damn Personals, the Grand Island, the Ducky Boys, Karate. All I'm saying is, if this is who got left off your ballots, then we're in fine shape.

Oh, and so what, right? I've got my favorites; you've got yours. This being a democracy, we occasionally feel compelled to vote on these things, to cast of opinion's glumpy molten magma a cold, hard, steely Consensus. As if we're all required to suddenly dig the Douglas Fir now. It's a tyrannical diversion, ultimately harmless, a silly enough way to pass an hour or two if you've got a few to spare. We separate the winners from the losers, the wheat from the chaff, the (Sheila) divine from the (Gravel) pits of despair. Insert sigh of relief here. Onward.