New York in
the ‘70s
Cherry
Red
director's cut, The Wire, May 2014
by Simon Reynolds
Pushed by music magazines and rock documentary makers,
“the place to be” is a perennially alluring notion. The conviction that a
single city – London, San Francisco, Manchester, Seattle, Berlin—is currently pop
culture’s energy center, a vortex fermenting
new sounds and styles that will bubble up from the underground to
transform the mainstream, draws the ambitious, the curious, and a legion of misfits
chafing at the constraints of their suburban or small-town home. Retro culture adds a layer of elegiac
wistfulness to this “anywhere but here” impulse, instilling the belief that that
there was “the time to be” too, that born-too-late sense of being one of History’s
provincials, stranded faraway in time from the action.
On New York in the ‘70s Luke Haines seems at
once seduced by and sceptical toward this idea that certain towns at certain
times buzzed with extraordinary energy. A
mildly
provocative figure on the periphery of the U.K. pop/rock mainstream for two
decades now, Haines was the driving force behind The Auteurs and Black Box
Recorder, and, since 2001, he’s been a prolific solo artist. New York is actually his tenth solo
album. It also closes out a diverting if opaque-in-intent trilogy that began
with 2011’s 9 and a half Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling From the
1970s and continued with
last year’s Rock and Roll Animals.
Haines’s meta-musician tendencies were apparent from the
start: The Auteurs’s 1993 debut LP was
titled New Wave, featured songs with
titles like “American Guitars”, and was framed by its author as a celebration
of quintessentially English “wryness and dryness” (think Kinks) in defiance of
then dominant grunge aesthetics. More
recently, “The Heritage Rock
Revolution”, from 2006’s Off My Rocker At the Art School Bop, mocked the
reenactments of past glories served up by rock’s nostalgia industry. “It’s a
middle-aged rampage/NOW!” Haines sang, wittily inverting the chorus of The
Sweet’s glam-anthem “Teenage Rampage”. Whether
tacking against the tide of the contemporary scene or playing games with
history, Haines’s music always seems to be commenting on other music.
The
odd thing about New York in the ‘70s
is that the period Haines is revisiting—post-Warhol decadence, protopunk, the
Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs milieu—is that this was the point at which rock
itself took a self-reflexive turn. The New York Dolls were Stones impersonators
and girl-group fans who quoted The Shangri-Las and hired their producer Shadow
Morton to do their second album; Patti
Smith covered The Who and Them, wrote elegies to Jim Morrison and Hendrix; Suicide’s Alan Vega channeled Elvis; The Ramones and The Dictators were virtually scholars
of teen delinquent rock. So what does
adding another layer of reflexivity and reference contribute, when the music in question is already
self-consciously tangled up and tangling with rock history?
Listening to New York in the ‘70s, it’s not readily
apparent what Haines is trying to say. Just like that flatly descriptive album title,
the songs sit there, blank regenerations of time-honored templates, ranging
from precise pastiches of legends like Suicide (“Drone City” duplicates “Frankie Teardrop” complete with psychotic
gulps and gasps) to generically NYC/1970s-evoking
songs in a “Loaded” Velvets/ Lou Reed-solo style. Not content with giving his ditties
titleslike“Alan Vega Says”, “Jim Carroll” , “Dolls Forever”, and “Lou Reed Lou
Reed”, Haines often lets his lyrics devolve into a string of citations and
famous-first-name allusions: Debbie, DeeDee, Bill (as in Burroughs), and so on.
Lloyd Cole, another Manhattan-infatuated Brit
songwriter, dubbed this lyrical technique “proper noun as metaphor and simile”
and claimed to have invented it (Bryan Ferry got there first, surely?). Cole is a telling comparison, actually: like
his immediate predecessors Orange Juice, he translated Reed-isms into an
authentically U.K. realm of bookish bedsit romanticism (girlfriends who
drive their mother’s old 2CVs, etc). But on New York Haines does nothing
with the source material: takes its nowhere, barely even twists it.
Really, the only tint of difference is tonal:
droll, with a hint of smirk. New York in the ‘70s ought to be filed
under parody-rock, next to Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoia, the XTC side/psych
project Dukes of Stratosphear, and ex-Bonzo Neil Innes’s tunes for The
Rutles. As the literary critic Linda Hutcheon observes, parody sanctions
what in any other context would be dismissed as derivative and redundant.
Laughter (and perhaps also a smidgeon of appreciation for the craft involved in
these replicas) excuses what otherwise is merely empty impersonation.
The mirth on offer here is thin fare, for the most
part. Certainly compared with New York’s
immediate predecessor Rock and
Roll Animals, whose Mighty Boosh-like conceit --rock history reimagined as
an anthropomorphic children’s fable, starring “Jimmy Pursey, a fox... Gene Vincent, the cat... and a badger called Nick Lowe”-- was strong
and strange enough to sustain a whole album.
The only time New York strays into a similar zone of surreal whimsy
is “Cerne Abbas Man”, in which the 180-foot-high priapic figure cut into Dorset
hillside turf aeons ago comes alive and goes to war with the Lower East Side’s
junkie poets. Swinging “his giant glans
straight into Manhattan,” the original Rude Man gives Richard Hell the
“heebie-jeebies” and jolts “the ghost of Johnny Thunders,” who rasps “don’t
point that thing at me, buddy”. The idea
seems to be a battle of primordial mojo between ancient Albion and “mythic
motherfuckin’ rock’n’roll,” with the older culture wiping the floor with those
young pretenders from the New World.
The blurb for Post Everything, the second of
Haines’s two Britpop memoirs, argues that “if it feels like there's nothing new under the
sun, that's because there is nothing new under the sun”. The same applies to New York in the ‘70s which oddly resembles a project from the early
‘90s, roughly contemporaneous with The Auteurs: Denim, a group created by
Lawrence from Felt, in which he swapped his own VU/Dylan/Television fixations for Seventies English glitter pop at its
most lumpen and trashy. New York
and 1992’s Back in Denim share the same boxy sonics and vocals that
clone Lou Reed’s sing-speak drone. But
not only were Denim’s hooks zippier and lyrics funnier, Lawrence’s polemic also had real bite at that
point in time: songs like “Middle of the Road” junked hip taste and canonical rock for the uncool
thrills of plebeian tat. What came through too was Lawrence’s love for
the music, his delight in rediscovering records by The Glitter Band and Hello.
But it’s never clear what Haines really feels about
the proto-punk New York of the Seventies. (Personally the period after Loaded and before Marquee Moon
strikes me as historically significant and importantly transitional, but
surprisingly thin in terms of actual musical achievement). My guess is that his younger self’s fascination for the era of Max’s,
Mercer Arts Center, etc, and for that whole bohemian quest for some kind of
truth or ultimate reality (Patti Smith’s “outside of society/is where I want to
be” ) via hard drugs, onstage self-harm, and other extremes, is cancelled out
by a middle-aged man’s feeling that such
anti-heroics were misguided and futile. All a bit silly. Like a man who’s fallen out of love but can’t
leave the relationship, Haines sees through the myth but is unable to move on. So he’ll keep on picking at and picking on rock
history; he bickers with it, parrots back what it said in an arch mocking tone.
