4/16/02 Hot Town, Summer In The City (5 stanzas)
[Note: this column originally appeared in Unzen Koans on April 16th, 2002. Since I'm sitting at my keyboard freezing my knuckles, I thought you might enjoy this flashback to a warmer day. - LR]

After nearly a three-week hiatus from UnZen Koans, I am once again moved to clack the keys. Perhaps it’s the record-breaking heat spell in Chicago (temps reached 88 Fahrenheit yesterday, and are expected to top 90 this afternoon) but the circulation seems to have finally returned to my lateral absurdity lobe. That, and I just finished doing my first Illinois state tax forms yesterday.

This onslaught of July weather has created a bizarre phenomenon (we’re not talking Speedo-ed Rollerbladers and roof surfers) – bare grey trees and bald lawns with burgeoning daffodil beds in the sweltering heat. It’s just not natural, I tell you. Personally, I blame this meteorological shotgun wedding on the Britney Spears/Justine Timberlake breakup. Freudian slip…I meant to write Justin Timberlake. Same difference. It can’t just be El Niño’s doing.

I. Mango Tango
Along with daffodils growing at a shocking rate, paleteria vendors on bicycle-driven carts are popping up all over Chicago’s streets, jingling their handlebar bells to announce the arrival of 25 (or more) different fruit flavors of Spanish popsicle. If frozen juice isn’t your speed, how about elotes (corn-on-the-cob-on-a-stick, seasoned with hot sauce, butter, lemon and/or mayonnaise), mangoes-on-a-stick (a handy way to eat this messy fruit, but you get all those stringy fibers stuck in your teeth), cucumbers, and plastic bags of crunchy chicharrones – fried pork rinds stamped into 6-sectioned circular shapes, like wagon wheel pasta; their carnivorous nature cleverly disguised. I’ll save my discussion of Chicago as the ‘Meat City’ for another column.

II. Mambo Sun
Now, before hitting the road, what better way to celebrate midsummer’s sudden arrival than an early-morning rifle through the old cassette box for some ancient tunes on tape? Something nostalgic to accompany the 45-minute morning crawl down Lake Shore Drive in the blazing sunshine. But what if 10-15 years of storage has reduced my collection to scabrous spools of peeling oxide, gooped up by putrescent foam-rubber pressure pads?

Fortunately, those dozens of dusty used (and homemade tapes) seemed not too much the worse for wear, and a peek at the faded spines brought back a flood of memories. Today’s menu is:

• The Bongos, Drums Along The Hudson
• Billy Joel, Glass Houses
• Rough Trade, For Those Who Think Young
• The Clash, Combat Rock
• Cocteau Twins, Blue Bell Knoll
• Steely Dan, Gaucho
• Styx, Caught In The Act

That bunch is nothing, if not eclectic. My music-buying days have waned from the Eighties and early Nineties, when a large chunk of my disposable income got, well, disposed on a couple thousand used LP’s, cassettes and (later, after my first CD player in 1987) compact discs. It didn’t hurt to be working in the radio industry at the time, and I had a pretty comprehensive collection of popular music ranging from the birth of Rock n’ Roll to the death of Kurt Cobain.

Drums Along The Hudson is popped into the tape deck first. The Bongos were an obscure mop-top New Wave/punk band from Hoboken led by squirrel-voiced Richard Barone (whose atmospheric guitar work on later solo albums like Cool Blue Halo, Primal Dream and Clouds Over Eden epitomized pre-Chris Isaak neo-twang Pop); their 1982 effort has the goofy feel of 60’s “low-f-IQ” offerings like “G-L-O-R-I-A” and the intoxicated harmonizing of Spanky and Our Gang. The almost reductionist simplicity of cuts like “Three Wise Men”, “Video Eyes”, “Clay Midgets” and “Glow In The Dark” recalls the bouncy mindlessness of flocked-plastic dashboard creatures with spring-mounted heads. Bing, boing, bonk. Twing, twang, twonk. This isn’t the Eighties of skinny ties, beatle boots and the Mullet: this is pure, beer-drunk Jersey garage-band pop at its black tee-shirted, ripped-jeans best. My wacked tape head azimuth doesn’t even matter…“Let’s glow in the dark tonight, yeah yeah!” Not too hard if you’ve lived in New Jersey all your life. (press eject now)

III. Unpretty Sights
In the early Eighties, just about everyone owned a copy of Billy Joel’s Glass Houses - including Garth Brooks, who recorded a surprisingly close cover of “You May Be Right” (which has since grown to be a live audience favorite); in the stark light of this technologically advanced 21st century, the song sounds almost more Country than Garth’s version. What up wit dat? Ever notice how many “dirty” songs slipped through the mental cracks when you were an “innocent” kid? Like the Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight”? Or “Sometimes a Fantasy”? I hadn’t heard the song in at least 15 years, and I remembered I had no clue when I was 10 that it frankly discussed phone-whoopie. Not that that’s any big deal today, but I’m sure it could be adopted by some charitable agency as the Safer Sex Theme Song. Joel pants and vocally gyrates like Elvis on Viagra. No doubt it would have hastened the King’s demise had the blue pills been on the market back then, but he might have had a more dignified final pose. But do try to think of him (Joel, that is) in his early thirties when you listen to the song. Thinking of his current Orson Welles look, ringing Christie on the hands-free just doesn’t appeal, capische? Billy Joel is still alive, isn’t he? Tonight: the drive home with the Clash’s pasty-white-boy reggae classic Combat Rock – “Rock the Casbah” was never more urgent than today. Colin Powell, take heed.

IV. Let It Whip
On the other hand, there’s nothing coy about Rough Trade’s For Those Who Think Young, also from ’82 (on Boardwalk Records, whose biggest offering to date was Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ I Love Rock N’ Roll). Toronto’s Carole Pope and Kevan Staples made Rough Trade a Grand Guignol spectacle of sophisticated, S&M-flavored debauchery - at least in Ontario. I probably would never have heard of the band had I not been living just south of Montreal, in its northern-New York suburb of Plattsburgh, NY. Carole is perhaps now best known as the author of “Anti-Diva”, a tell-all autobiography that names names, more names…and then some more names, including British pop legend Dusty Springfield, whom Pope was involved with at the time. How involved? I don’t know, I haven’t read the book. My favorite radio stations were CHEZ 106 FM and CHOM 97.7 FM; formerly ‘modern rock’ and classic rock respectively, at various times the two have played “Format Swapping”.

V. Quebec Shoe Smugglers
Fifteen to twenty years ago, on Any Given Sunday, thousands of Quebecois hit the road - not for ball games, but for Sabbath-Day shopping deals south of the Border – that was, back when the Canadian dollar was roughly equivalent to the Yankee sawbuck. We New Yorkers had the cheap groceries and clothes, the Canadians had culture by way of restaurants, concerts, and haute couture. When ‘blue laws’ kept establishments shut down Sundays in Canada, Plattsburgh mall parking lots were often littered with old shoes and outerwear, cast off by scofflaws to avoid paying duty at Customs. Too bad you can’t wear a case of wieners and laundry detergent. It worked. It was a system, a fair trade of sorts, sometimes rough? Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Somebody turn on the air conditioner, already!

---