kleph
29-03-2007, 03:37 AM
When you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, it’s tough to know what direction you need to go. Living in the vast vacuum of mid-America in the 1980s made it damned hard to figure out what your options were after you got sick of Huey Lewis and the News.
There may have been a burgeoning indie scene in some of the major urban areas on either coast but that didn't do much for those of us in the sticks. You kept hearing about these wild bands fueled by surburban ennui and middle-class angst but you certainly weren’t going to hear their stuff on the local Top 40 radio station.
The problem was there was either a complete absence of information or way too damned much.
So you would read the small notices in the music mags and hear bits and hints or you would get fanzines now and then that were chock full of all these bizarre and out there bands. There was no way to separate the good from the downright crappy. And for all the backward looking laudation that goes on from here, two decades after-the-fact, the truth is there was a lot more crap floating around than most of us would like to admit.
That was where Repo Man soundtrack was a godsend. This record was the Rosetta stone for understanding the indie scene, hardcore and West Coast punk.
The view of hardcore and punk from the vast interior of the US of A was simply loud fast rules. The lounder and faster the cacophony – the better. But that’s simplifying something that was, in reality, a much wider artistic movement. The Repo Man soundrack was the first hint that might be the case.
First, a little bit about the movie. Repo Man was director Alex Cox’s 1984 masterpiece that starred a very young, very pre-brat pack Emilio Estevez. It’s basically the story about a Los Angeles punk turned repo man and the search for a ’64 Chevy Malibu. None of that really matters though since my chance of seeing the film was hovered between nill and no fucking way.
This was a cult film in every sense of the word. It opened on less than 40 screens and unless you were living in Los Angeles or New York, you weren’t going to find a theater playing it. And remember, this was way back in the era when home video was an exotic technology being fought over Betamax and VHS.
It wouldn’t be until the early 1990s that I finally got a chance to see the thing and – needless to say – it wasn’t at all what I expected. Basically it was a glorified student film whose stated theme is the danger of nuclear war. Whatever. It’s really about punk and so is the soundtrack.
(Director Alex Cox went on to direct the vastly influential Sid & Nancy as well as Straight to Hell that spotlighted the Sex Pistols and The Clash respectively. He is almost as famous for not helming Robocop, The Three Amigos and The Running Man.)
More importantly, this was one of the first films where the cool came before the concept – an idea that Quienten Tarantino would parlay into a not insignificant amount of success ten years later. And that cachet in Repo Man was due to the clear importance of punk.
Cox’s distillation of the Los Angeles/West Coast punk scene to its bare essentials on the soundtrack album makes the record an artistic statement in it’s own right.
There is speed and force to be had here. In spades. Iggy Pop’s blasting “Repo Man” is a barrel full of high-octane frantic dystopian nightmare. A few tracks later Fear blasts through their classic “Let’s Have A War” one of the most brutal criticisms of mid-80s conservativism committed to magnetic tape.
And the selection of several of the punk tracks is pristine. The Circle Jerks, “Coup D’Etat” and the Suicidal Tendencies “Institutionalized” have become indie-scene classics. Their inclusion here opened the door for music-hungry kids like me who went on to follow these bands and those like them and all the weirdness that followed.
But Cox isn’t interested in the simple assault of hardcore - he pulls from the whole of the LA scene's eclectic glory. The Juicy Bananas’s album ending “Bad Man” is an acid burnout instrumental serving as the background music for a soliloquy culled from the film itself.
The Plugz “El Clavo Y La Cruz” is a mariachi-influenced fandango sung in Spanish, for Christ’s sake. (One of the most compelling aspects of the soundtrack is how it embraces the Mexican influences on Southern California’s music scene – something overlooked by many other chroniclers.)
Perhaps the most important song on the soundtrack for me personally was The Burning Sensation’s “Pablo Picasso.” A song I found delightfully amusing at first but learned to really appreciate musically as time went by. Eventually I figured out it was a cover and went on to find out about a little New England band from the late 1970’s, The Modern Lovers.
Before this record my view of punk was something played super fast by kids in mohawks. The Repo Man soundtrack showed me that was just one extreme subgenre of what was a very dynamic musical scene.
After the Repo Man soundtrack you had a sense of what was what in the indie scene. This record was critical in getting across the idea of DIY – that punk was as much about doing something else as it was about anything. Sure, a lot of it was done as a joke but that didn’t mean it wasn’t good.
And once you understood that you could find your way through the wilderness. If not for this record I would have dismissed The Minutemen as just another hardcore band which is probably the last thing that applies to what the trio from San Pedro was doing.
The lesson I learned with the Repo Man soundtrack was not to dismiss something just because it was weird and unknown. I loved this record so much and I was acutely aware of how close I came to missing out on all it gave me by simply not giving the music it contained a chance.
Sure, that means I've endured some really crappy music in my time, but I've also discovered things that have become an integral part of my life as well.
This essay also appears on my website, Klephblog (http://www.kleph.com/blog.php?v_blog_id=1).
There may have been a burgeoning indie scene in some of the major urban areas on either coast but that didn't do much for those of us in the sticks. You kept hearing about these wild bands fueled by surburban ennui and middle-class angst but you certainly weren’t going to hear their stuff on the local Top 40 radio station.
The problem was there was either a complete absence of information or way too damned much.
So you would read the small notices in the music mags and hear bits and hints or you would get fanzines now and then that were chock full of all these bizarre and out there bands. There was no way to separate the good from the downright crappy. And for all the backward looking laudation that goes on from here, two decades after-the-fact, the truth is there was a lot more crap floating around than most of us would like to admit.
That was where Repo Man soundtrack was a godsend. This record was the Rosetta stone for understanding the indie scene, hardcore and West Coast punk.
The view of hardcore and punk from the vast interior of the US of A was simply loud fast rules. The lounder and faster the cacophony – the better. But that’s simplifying something that was, in reality, a much wider artistic movement. The Repo Man soundrack was the first hint that might be the case.
First, a little bit about the movie. Repo Man was director Alex Cox’s 1984 masterpiece that starred a very young, very pre-brat pack Emilio Estevez. It’s basically the story about a Los Angeles punk turned repo man and the search for a ’64 Chevy Malibu. None of that really matters though since my chance of seeing the film was hovered between nill and no fucking way.
This was a cult film in every sense of the word. It opened on less than 40 screens and unless you were living in Los Angeles or New York, you weren’t going to find a theater playing it. And remember, this was way back in the era when home video was an exotic technology being fought over Betamax and VHS.
It wouldn’t be until the early 1990s that I finally got a chance to see the thing and – needless to say – it wasn’t at all what I expected. Basically it was a glorified student film whose stated theme is the danger of nuclear war. Whatever. It’s really about punk and so is the soundtrack.
(Director Alex Cox went on to direct the vastly influential Sid & Nancy as well as Straight to Hell that spotlighted the Sex Pistols and The Clash respectively. He is almost as famous for not helming Robocop, The Three Amigos and The Running Man.)
More importantly, this was one of the first films where the cool came before the concept – an idea that Quienten Tarantino would parlay into a not insignificant amount of success ten years later. And that cachet in Repo Man was due to the clear importance of punk.
Cox’s distillation of the Los Angeles/West Coast punk scene to its bare essentials on the soundtrack album makes the record an artistic statement in it’s own right.
There is speed and force to be had here. In spades. Iggy Pop’s blasting “Repo Man” is a barrel full of high-octane frantic dystopian nightmare. A few tracks later Fear blasts through their classic “Let’s Have A War” one of the most brutal criticisms of mid-80s conservativism committed to magnetic tape.
And the selection of several of the punk tracks is pristine. The Circle Jerks, “Coup D’Etat” and the Suicidal Tendencies “Institutionalized” have become indie-scene classics. Their inclusion here opened the door for music-hungry kids like me who went on to follow these bands and those like them and all the weirdness that followed.
But Cox isn’t interested in the simple assault of hardcore - he pulls from the whole of the LA scene's eclectic glory. The Juicy Bananas’s album ending “Bad Man” is an acid burnout instrumental serving as the background music for a soliloquy culled from the film itself.
The Plugz “El Clavo Y La Cruz” is a mariachi-influenced fandango sung in Spanish, for Christ’s sake. (One of the most compelling aspects of the soundtrack is how it embraces the Mexican influences on Southern California’s music scene – something overlooked by many other chroniclers.)
Perhaps the most important song on the soundtrack for me personally was The Burning Sensation’s “Pablo Picasso.” A song I found delightfully amusing at first but learned to really appreciate musically as time went by. Eventually I figured out it was a cover and went on to find out about a little New England band from the late 1970’s, The Modern Lovers.
Before this record my view of punk was something played super fast by kids in mohawks. The Repo Man soundtrack showed me that was just one extreme subgenre of what was a very dynamic musical scene.
After the Repo Man soundtrack you had a sense of what was what in the indie scene. This record was critical in getting across the idea of DIY – that punk was as much about doing something else as it was about anything. Sure, a lot of it was done as a joke but that didn’t mean it wasn’t good.
And once you understood that you could find your way through the wilderness. If not for this record I would have dismissed The Minutemen as just another hardcore band which is probably the last thing that applies to what the trio from San Pedro was doing.
The lesson I learned with the Repo Man soundtrack was not to dismiss something just because it was weird and unknown. I loved this record so much and I was acutely aware of how close I came to missing out on all it gave me by simply not giving the music it contained a chance.
Sure, that means I've endured some really crappy music in my time, but I've also discovered things that have become an integral part of my life as well.
This essay also appears on my website, Klephblog (http://www.kleph.com/blog.php?v_blog_id=1).