Summer Jamz ’08 #5: Stewart Voegtlin & Jayson Greene
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Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with Screw Rock N’ Roll and What Was it Anyway.
KISS “Love Gun”
RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS, “Love Comes in Spurts”
AC/DC, “Rising Power”
ROLLING STONES, “Stray Cat Blues”
LED ZEP, “Lemon Song”
BUZZCOCKS, “Orgasm Addict”
THE STOOGES, “Shake Appeal”
NIRVANA, “Moist Vagina”
ZZ TOP, “Pearl Necklace”
GHOSTFACE KILLAH, “Wildflower”
FLIPPER, “Sex Bomb”
LIZ PHAIR, “Flower”
SIR LORD BALTIMORE, “Aint Got Hung On You”
PJ HARVEY, “Sheela Na Gig”
SOUNDGARDEN, “Big Dumb Sex”
WEEZER, “Tired Of Sex”
MC5, “I Want You Right Now”
Threaten to follow a question with more of the same.
Q: Chastity?
Q: In the full-tilt swing of summer?
Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran? When the cheep swill, greasy food and sticky gropes marked the day-to-day as hounds pissin’ upon hydrants? Shit, I know I did. Shoulda, woulda, coulda kept at bay with lock & key. A big motherfuck to camp, stuck-inside jobs or dreaded “college resume building” interning. It was odd-job-ad-hoc that allowed that ol’ initial momentum, then the arc. And as logically follows: the denouement—all limp, all feverish, all photo flash instant, 1,000 words past.
Never really gave much thought to what was playing on the hi-fi in those swipe-the-ticklers-français from the Rx counter momento mori. Never really cared.
Guesses are mostly good: A mélange of Metal and Anthem Dandied? —Voivod and Slayer. —Roxy Music and Bowie. —Maybe the Velvets. They all “worked.” Sound-tracking the pre-party partying, a mixtape crammed into a mom’s minivan and wailed away while nitrous oxide brought ye knuckle-draggers one less grunt closer to Quest for Fire. Agh! Agh! The admitted—no, really—the brandished Weltanschauung was all cock and cunt and some things “worked” better than others.
The 70s worked mostly for me. A taut opalescent boil of Heh-Vee Psych grime slicked with STP und jissom, inflated with self-worth, self-loathing, an impending eruption just a motherfuckin’ given. Plant & Page, Stanley & Simmons, Kramer & Smith, et cetera, et cetera. Here was majik, real check-the-tophat stuff. No bunnies. No bullshit. But we were mostly worried we’d find gods. —Perhaps the whole fuckin’ pantheon. Dive into that dark headfirst. The most unusual suspects for more of the same summer sportfuckin’. Nothing so different from handjobs-to-blowjobs-to-vaginal-to-anal. (Incidentally, I recall a particularly unsavory memory involving Miracle Whip as lubricant…)
What is it supposed to say? Why were we playing this shit and why must we continue to do so? These are questions best left unanswered. There’s just not enough mystery nowadays anyway.
And so, anywho, best defense is no defense. Play it as it lays. Hence, the boudoir ambient: Kiss wields the pistol of ess-eeee-eks and its inevitable entelechy: Trouser snake as shapeless Platonic Form. A quality never agreed upon, since it seemed to never change—only reoccurring in different gradations of strength and weight. Like the Washington Monument’s obelisk erect. The great phallic wand of megadeth, its palpitating apex revived and died a billion times. Might as well not exist: Plant’s paean to his prick. Like the Sumerian calendar? Like fuckin’ Vico. Like the rouge of Eve that clouds as a spoon of currant jam in a tumbler of tap. Oh, Iggy Stooge: ass-shaker of ill repute, butt-plugged and dolled-up for the stage, vein-tapping into Little Richard and all the other folks’ boogie-woogie pathos he managed to rip off to excellent effect. Then there’s The Top channeling the pre-pubescent white boy blues for boys who never had none of neither. There are not-so-hidden connections. “Pearl Necklace.” Speak it to yourself. Write it out. Say it aloud. It comes with a single breath, flung from the palate as ah bucket of gullshit. Say it again. Sheesh. Like a loogie. Each vowel upon a raft of flan-hued snot… There are nudged winks as plentiful as locker-room underarm farts. Remember: The same river, always the same river. —And yet always different water. Then there’s Flipper, with the most un-Flipper bit ever branded upon quarter-inch tape, nothing less than the throne of Mighty Egypt left warm for the next pair of Pharaoh buns. Smarmy gear-headed come-ons from rock’s community chesta has-beens the Lord Balt and then some oh-so superlative lyrics from Chrissy Cornell. To wit:
JAYSON GREENE: BIG DUMB SEX!!!!! Fucking awesome. The last time I heard “Louder Than Love,” my hair was cut into a bowl shape and I had braces.
STEWART VOEGTLIN: You are insane. That song is so fucking dumb. But so incredibly wonderful. I saw them on the LTL tour, opening for VOIVOD.
JAYSON GREENE: Wait, so why am I insane? We agree on “Big Dumb Sex,” right? That’s it’s awesome?
STEWART VOEGTLIN: Your bowl cut and braces. That’s insane. Yeah we are in ACCORD.
And so The Motor City Five pull it slow(ly) into the station and leave us wonderin’ who ever thunk the Whip wuz dressing for salad greens after all. A sketch, roughshod and rapid. Not so sweeping. Not so “encapsulating.” But what is? And on the fly? Surely not.
11:19 AM me: I didn’t know we had to actually “write” stuff for this. WTF.
11:20 AM I have ZERO time to do this. Should we just submit our e-mails… Hahaha.
Jayson: We could both write 150 words or so?
I could probably scratch it out tonightish
11:22 AM me: Jesus…
OK. Maybe. MAYBE.
11:23 AM Jayson: write three sentences about wanton lust, and I’ll write three or so about the slimy underbelly easy
11:25 AM me: Yeah. Sounds good.It does. Three sentences metastasized as they always do. So. As Heraclitus offered, the gift of what is, is not. Put it all together and drink it deep(ly). I did/do.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
“Three sentences about wanton lust.”
This was Stew’s assignment, and he took it about as far into the gnarled, dirt-clump roots of his humid brain as he could. As a result, we have the above magnificent testament to tantalizing mythical hoodoo: I could spend eleven months in a cabin in the Montana woods, drinking nothing but absinthe and reading the collected works of Bangs, Meltzer, Faulkner, and Hubert Selby, Jr., with only a blotter of acid and multiple bags of irregular pork rinds for sustenance, and not produce a single sentence that radiated that level of grizzled insanity.
So let’s, instead, quote Nick Tosches, on The Killer, Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis, whose shoes were once smudged by the reverent lips of a supplicant John Lennon, who once shot his bass player in the chest with a .357 Magnum, who in 1976 arrived impromptu at the gates of Graceland armed with a .38-caliber Derringer at 3:07 a.m., yelling for Elvis:
“Of all the rock-and-roll creatures, he projected the most hellish persona. He was feared more than the rest, and hated more too. Preachers railed against him, mothers smelled his awful presence in the laundry of their daughters, and young boys coveted his wicked, wicked ways … Believe it: Jerry Lee Lewis is a creature of mythic essence, a Set, a Baptist Dionysus aflame with glorious cowardice and self-killing guilt.”
There ain’t no more to say: this mix finds the queasy, certainly fluid-slicked middle ground between Robert Plant, exulting at length about the juice running down his leg, to the leering, self-punishingly sexless rictus of Richard Hell, mirthlessly mocking you for buying into the brief glow of good will that follows the few minutes immediately after orgasm.[Jayson Greene]
***
More summer:Summer Jamz ’08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.
Summer Jamz ’08 #3: Dear Summer… by Jonathan Bradley
“My mix is for the times everything is still and quiet and perfect … I haven’t included any yacht rock or Eagles tunes, but that’s all I can guarantee.”
Summer Jamz ’08 #2: State of the Union, Jack by Mike Orme and Nick Southall
“Two former Stylus Magazine compatriots … celebrate the summer by splitting halves of a mix CD, each trying to fill their side with songs the other writer would put on a summer mix.”
Summer Jamz ’08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
“In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly…”
Labels: Summer Jamz ’08
