homage to zippy

This came the other day in an e-mail from a friend in Forest Hills:

The Feast of St. Joey

In case you haven’t heard, Friday, May 19 is Joey Ramone’s birthday, and for the sake of all New York (and possibly the world), we will be paying him the homage that his spirit so richly deserves.

It’s not too late to get involved: We still need people to help carry the Joey giglio from Tompkins to CB’s, to participate in the Zippy the Pinhead look-alike contest, and to bring gifts to appease the spirit of our favorite late punkrocker.

. . .

And why do we do this?

In the five long years since Joey Ramone left home, our city has been afflicted by grave misfortune: mass carnage, regional blackout, crippling strike, Republicans! Clearly something is amiss. That’s why the Hungry March Band has decided to undertake the first ever Feast of St. Joey on his birthday.

Couldn’t hoit.

STRANDED — The Countdown (12)

BURNING SPEAR, Garvey’s Ghost (Mango). The dub twin to Spear’s Marcus Garvey, which despite its classic status strikes me as a rather dreary collection of doctrinaire recitatives. This is moderately more engaging: the dub mix gives it depth and echo, it’s both more fun and more sinister, and the vocals are brief and occasional. I admire Marcus (Greil, not Garvey)’s formulation of this as “Jamaican surf music . . . slave ships are visible on the horizon.” But you could say that about so much ‘70s reggae — all sun, sand, splash, and politics, a beach party that became a protest rally, or vice versa — and this doesn’t have the abandon or wail or surf-equivalent spirit of Marley or Tosh or Toots. Or alternative Spear, for that matter: his 1974 Studio One LP Rocking Time, which I’m listening to this very instant, is a delight of rhythm, harmony, happy-sadness. The politics are implicit — but in pop music, aren’t those usually the best kind? 1976.

BUZZCOCKS, Spiral Scratch (New Hormones/UK). Four songs inspired by the Sex Pistols – inspired, that is, to burn off the social rage and glean the chart gold. I like the Buzzcocks a lot, because they’re fast, they can write a tune, the boredom pose is one they wear so happily (it snaps them out of their boredom), and I like watching my wife dance to them. But they basically had one song – and in its best incarnation it was called “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve Fallen in Love With).” That’s not on here, and that’s what I’d take to the island. 1977.

BYRDS, Mr. Tambourine Man (Columbia). Half of this, face it, is plug dull: flawless harmonies flying over flat tunes; a long, bad Dylan cover; a Jackie De Shannon sure-shot badly botched; and a Strangelove theme presumably included for that touch of humor – in denial of the obvious fact that the Byrds weren’t funny. But for a group with so little collective personality, the Byrds certainly invented something remarkable, and did it timelessly well. The beauty here is not so soft or evanescent as it sounds at first: it’s protected by the velvet armor of ringing guitar, cloaked in the warm fog of harmony. It’s stood up well all these years. The great songs (the title track, “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” “Bells of Rhymney,” “I Knew I’d Want You”) still sound tingling and rich and untouchably distant, as if played and sung by sad, manly ghosts reaching through a veil separating their world from ours. And that bum bass note on the last verse of “Spanish Harlem Incident” is a pop moment to be prized. 1965.

—–. Turn! Turn! Turn! (Columbia). The ratio of great to good to so-so remains the same, but every level moves up a notch. The middling songs achieve a higher middle, and even the repeated meager joke of the final song is not quite so meager – though that’s not a distinction worth making more than once. Gene Clark writes morose, contemplative originals, there are a few cold, sharp, no-nonsense throwaways, and the JFK-updated “He Was a Friend of Mine” — whatever ‘60s veterans may feel about its evasive sentimentality — achieves, like the best of the Byrds, the feel of real lamentation. Not to mention it has, like the first album, one of the loveliest jackets ever. 1965.

—–. “Eight Miles High” (Columbia). Helpful household hint: use this whenever you need to blast the effluvia of bad music from your mind – a poison-pill ad jingle, or heinously catchy teen-hit. The harmony, guitar, tempo, elusive lyric, frenetic climax – it sounds so unlike anything else that it effectively obliterates, for a key three minutes, the memory that other music exists. 1966.

—–. The Notorious Byrd Brothers (Columbia). The Byrds’ great album, I think, and one of the greatest pop albums there’ve been. It gathers in a moment of time – not just ‘60s time but a time in anyone’s life – between childhood and adulthood, a long hanging, reverberating moment of first feeling age and the true terrifying size of things. It lingers on violence, and songs end when characters disappear before your eyes into madness or fantasy. The sound is all vibrating steel, cold sunlight, the voices of angels and hum of machines. The Byrds always sounded like specters, invisible men, and never more so than here, when the words they sang reached the hardest for human emotion and straight contact. Sad. 1968.