EXILED ON MAIN STREET #9

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· 2 hours ago

If TV has taught me anything, it's that miracles always happen to poor kids at Christmas. It happened to Tiny Tim, it happened to Charlie Brown, it happened to the Smurfs, and it's gonna happen to us!

- Bart Simpson

THANK YOU, SOLOMON BURKE

Seems like every year, I get the ol' Christmas Spirit later and later. In fact, the last couple of years, I probably didn't get it until Christmas Eve. This year the odds were against me, as I've been working temp at Big Department Store in downtown Minneapolis, and to leave the store for lunch or home, I must take the escalator through the store. Call me cynical (or maybe just a holiday purist); but crowds of people shopping, in a hurry, not smiling (except the elderly folks, who bless their hearts always have a smile for me...), pushy, and wearing cheesy holiday-decorated sweaters do not exactly inspire me to say "Ho! Ho! Ho!"

On top of the shopping-hungry throngs who annoy me to no end, I missed the broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas. For my money, this is the only Christmas television special that matters; although The Simpsons one is also becoming vital viewing. Yeah, I know, everyone out there is going to write me and talk about The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or whatever it's called. Sorry, folks, that one has never done it for me. As a preschooler, ma and pa had me on a strict regimen of Curious George and Clifford the Big Red Dog. When subsequently exposed to Dr. Seuss while in elementary school, I found the books bothersome and too cute. Because by then, I was into comic books, and Dennis the Menace, Sergeant Rock, and Batman just had a lot more credibility than the Cat in the Hat, y'know?

The Grinch takes place in Weeville or Whoville or somewhere else that has hints to it of being created by someone who was smoking something funny. On the other hand, Charlie Brown is all real life, taking place on the snow-covered streets and playgrounds of Everytown, USA. The enemy is not some mysterious bogeyman who raids houses and takes away trees and gifts. No, the enemy is all of us - the kids who want real estate and tens and twenties for gifts, the dog who shamelessly decorates his doghouse for cash, the kids who dance endlessly instead of rehearsing for their Christmas play. The show asks "are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution?" And in end, Linus lays down the Truth about Christmas (only TV special to do so) and all the kids chip in to help Charlie get his tree set up right. And dig that music! The cool-boppin' sounds of the Vince Guaraldi Trio! "Linus and Lucy" is far and above better than "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" in my book! Soundtrack available in stores now!!

So Charlie Brown is my Christmas guy - man, I love that show. Like when Lucy says "it's (Christmas) all run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know." Boom! Right there, even as youngsters, we were all warned about the commercialization of Christmas...

Anyway, I sat here at home not feeling the Yuletide spirit and then late on a Sunday afternoon (a great time - not many lines), I made a daringly brilliant Christmas shopping run. In the span of two hours (includes travel time), I got most of it done, and also picked up a three-foot tree and lights for my home here in Number Nine. And then after wrapping the presents and while setting up my little tree ("it's not bad at all, really, maybe it just needs a little love"), I popped in some Christmas CD's and heard Solomon Burke's "Presents for Christmas."

It's on the always-reliable Rhino Records' release titled The Best of Cool Yule. Also on this disc is (among others - some of it is great, but admittedly it's tough for me to dislike Christmas music) James Brown doing "Santa Claus, Santa Claus", in which he pleads his case for presents; Jack Scott singing "There's Trouble Brewin'", where he thinks Santa's after his girlfriend, so he might have drop Kringle to the pavement; and the Sonics doing a garage rock "Santa Claus". I especially like this last one - recorded in the year of my birth, they anticipate my wish list thirty-two years later: I want "a cute little honey and lots of money."

The Burke tune is early on the disc and it did the trick. "We wanna give out a present to everybody this Christmas" he exhorts in his magnificent, compelling voice, "all around the world - for every man, woman, boy, and girl...are you ready right now? C'mon!" With that voice and the solid, booming rhythm of this tune - I got in the mood and quick. The tune inspired me to put my Batman action figurine on the top of my tree instead of an angel (a move I ripped off from Jack Fountain), and I have the Dark Knight holding a tree light over his head. And I remembered that I have Charlie Brown AND The Simpsons on tape, so I'm set. Holidays? Bring 'em on...

ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO
(THEN IGNORE VALENTINE'S DAY)

Thanksgiving was a blast here in Number Nine. A can of Pringles, some Wheat Thins with nacho sauce, a Tombstone pizza and a six-pack of James Page Brown Ale (one of which I did drink out on the front sidewalk - probably the quietest day in my neighborhood since the Fourth of July, people occasionally walking by stuffed to their gills, giving me funny looks - all I had to eat at that point was a couple of bowls of Berry Colossal Crunch and half a bagel so I wasn't feeling bloated.)

To fill my mind, I watched PBS' Liberty! The documentary was pretty good, but not great. In order for a documentary about the American Revolution to be great, it must have me jumping out of the futon yelling "USA! USA! USA!" at least every half hour. Liberty!, alas, didn't do that. (The History Channel had one on a few years ago that did.) But I did learn some stuff I didn't know before (new hero: simple country lawyer John Adams), and it did a good job of reminding me of the basic principles on which our country was founded. Like the basic right not to be ruled by effete fops across the ocean whose families practice inbreeding. Man, that King George was soooo smug.

It was disheartening, though, to see and hear James Taylor singing across the ending credits. A better choice would have been the mighty Metallica singing their "Don't Tread on Me." Why? Well, James Taylor has started exactly zilch grassroots revolutions in his lifetime and the most impressive thing he's done is marry Carly Simon. Metallica married thrash punk and no-frills metal into a relentless grassroots revolution that was termed speedmetal. A listen to James Taylor makes me want to walk a golden retriever down to the espresso shop for some drink with ice cream in it; a listen to Metallica makes me want to start a revolution, or at least call King George III an "effete fop." (Hey, let's reenact the Revolution with Oasis - good, but not as good as they think they are, bloated with arrogance, talking trash - playing the British Empire. Then we could have Met - who with "The Memory Remains" have once again proven themselves to be the biggest and baddest band in the world - take them on in the roles of the radicals. To paraphrase Tony Stockton in the latest Spin: "Metallica would kick their ass like it's 1776.")*

Anyway, I liked the fact that the world's first zine, Common Sense - written by Tommy Paine, roused the common people into rebellion. The rebels went on to kick the ass of the World's Greatest Empire; and beat 'em again in the rematch, too - just to prove we could do it without the French's help. And as my pal Kendall Harms once said when somebody told him he doesn't speak proper English: "Yeah, well we beat them in those two wars so I can talk however I want!"

* yeah: a pretty weak analogy - I was just lookin' for an excuse to use the Stockton quote.

WHAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS...

Spent way too much time in the Liquor Depot haggling with the cashier over the fact that they were trying to charge me for a case of Grain Belt Premium ($12.99/case) instead of Real Grain Belt ($8.49/case.) Even walked over to the display with her when she asked me to show her where I saw that price. "Brown bottle," I said, "different beer than Premium," not saying, "you know: the Real Grain Belt with the small bite, the brand my uncles drank back in the old old days. Premium in a bottle used to be a great beer in a tapered longneck and now they've gone and changed the taste into something way too sweet and it's being drank by the same Beautiful People who are getting bored with Rolling Rock, the same folks who used to mock me for drinking my Grain Belt (Real or Premium) and Schmidt, and still give me grief over my Schlitz and Pabst."

Anyway, things got straightened out eventually and I also picked up a case of Huber Bock! Say it loud, say it proud - Huber Bock! The beer that is as much fun to say as it is to drink! My favorite memory of a 1991 Neil Young show actually happened before the show. We were walking towards one more bar before heading over to the Target Center, and my main man Okie was talking about Huber Bock and how he buys it for his hockey team. "Huber Bock?" I asked. "HUBER BOCK!!" He yelled, than began trotting down Sixth Street with his right index finger pointed to the sky kinda like Joe Namath after Super Bowl III, yelling again "HUBER BOCK!!" Call me silly, but after that performance, "Cinnamon Girl" just comes up a little short.

PUTDOWNS BY PAULA BELMONT

Me: When I go up North, people say "you're not from around here, are you?" It's funny because when I first moved to the Twin Cities ten years ago, people would say, "you're not from around here are you?"

Paula: Some people still say that.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

"Ahhh, fuck." This was my reaction at approximately 12:10 a.m. on a Sunday morning upon arriving at my car after leaving the 400 Bar and finding the passenger side of my Sleeper Hatchback smashed into little pieces that gathered on the seat and floor. That's right - "Ahhh, fuck." with a period at the end, no exclamation point. Don't know why I didn't get worked up. Ya know - whatya gonna do? The perpetrator is long gone, I have insurance... maybe because it was a relatively nice criminal (I'm assuming lone nut here, and not a conspiracy) who did this, I didn't blow my top. I had left my glasses near the radio and the punk left them on the driver's seat in plain view for me. Not one smudge on the lenses either. He/she didn't bust anything else and most importantly didn't take my choppers - I'll be needing those this winter.

So I cranked the heat and took off, yelling "El Nino!" as I rolled down 35W at 60 mph, because it was a balmy twentysomething degrees instead of being cold. I got home and added a special holiday touch to the Sleeper: I found a dry-cleaner's bag covering a suit I never wear anymore, and the bag says "Happy Holidays" all over it in red and green letters. I taped that over the missing window and for a couple of days the Sleeper was appropriately decorated for the holidays.

I didn't curse or yell while taping that plastic on the window. I simply did the job, then came inside, cracked a beer (which I wasn't even thirsty for, but I logically decided this was something traumatic that had happened and I should have one), and channel surfed. Then, oddly enough (or maybe not considering it's me), got pissed when Access America declared Billy Joel to be "rock 'n' roll's original piano man." "HEY WHAT ABOUT LITTLE RICHARD AND THE KILLER??!!" I yelled, at that point wanting to commit a random act of vandalism myself.

Come to think of it, the real trauma of the evening was finding out the 400 Bar doesn't serve Real Grain Belt longnecks anymore. It used to be just like at home! I asked for one and Neve Campbell (I swear that it's her) told me that they don't serve them anymore. Then later I saw members of the performing bands walking around with those beautiful brown bottles with red diamonds on them. Yep, Rock Star Elitism at its worse - or maybe the bar is just unloading its excess Belt on freebies for the bands. Lucky folks either way.

THE FRAUD THAT IS THE COMPANY HOLIDAY PARTY

Be brave: don't get conned into thinking that the Company Holiday Party is a worthwhile thing to attend. Stay home. It'll probably be on a Saturday, and you gotta dress up - just like a weekday. And then you gotta go hang out for hours upon end in some suburban hotel ballroom with the same people you see every weekday. Your coworkers 1) also have been conned or intimidated into attending and aren't happy about it, or 2) actually think the event is fun. Hey, that's good company! And you don't get paid to attend this bore-a-thon either. Even worse, there are whispers in the hallways of the workplace that if you don't attend the Party, the Boss frowns down upon you. (Like who the hell is the boss: Santa Claus?)

Supposedly, one of the advantages of attending the Party is free food and drinks (if you are on the fence about attending, people will constantly tell you that "you get free food!!" - usually whoever says this are the same ones who post up around the table in the lunchroom on Friday, making access to the doughnuts difficult-if-not-impossible, chowing down on those jelly-filled ones like it's their last meal, leaving you the coconut ones after they've gorged themselves. It never ceases to amaze me how some people's lives fucking REVOLVE around food.) For dinner, you always seem to get some sort of lukewarm chicken dish with rock-hard bread on the side. Plus, the drinks are only free until dinnertime and then because you'll need lubrication to hang out with the same folks who annoy you to no end all week long, you end up paying three bucks plus for some hotel beer where your choices are between the Anheuser-Busch family and the Miller family. Trust me, you actually save money sitting at home drinking your locally-brewed longnecks and having a pizza. And then you can pocket that savings for when you go out and experience real life later that night at the dive bar of your choice.

If you're single and don't bring a date (and what date would want to go meet all the people that you constantly mock and/or bitch about?), you get seated with all the other singles at one table. That way you're all in one location and are easily located so the married people can look down upon you (just like a weekday again - damn!) So you usually drink to try to ease the torture, but then again you can't drink too much otherwise you'll say how you truly feel about this party, the company, your job, and your coworkers. Just be sure you make your break for the exit (and sweet freedom followed by Taco Bell, as that chicken-whatever dish won't fill you up) before the dancing gets going.

Otherwise you'll end up like a buddy of mine a few years ago, dragged out onto the dance floor by a married, rather tipsy, female coworker who then proceeded to dance around him. With every pass by him, she would whisper "you can have me," "I want you," "name the time," etc. into his ear - while he lamely danced, smiling dumbly throughout the song, some seventies disco tune that wouldn't end... finally, the tune was done and she looked him right in the eye and slurred "I think you're a very sexy man." Poor alcohol-impaired thing - of course, he didn't help much by then quipping "tell me something I don't know!" before bolting for the back of the ballroom, for fresh air and cold brew; leaving her to stumble back to her husband.

Damn, that was a good year for quotes on my part.

THE GREATEST GIFT EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN HOLIDAYS. NUMBER TWO: KISS ALIVE!

A couple of springs ago, from the library I checked out a biography of Rod Stewart, which was written by Lester Bangs and Paul Nelson in 1981. Bangs wrote most of it, some of which he admitted he made up. So in between glossy fan-ready photos of Hollywood-era Rod were the fantasies and asides run amok that was Bangs' prose. I sat on the patio of a coffee shop, laughing out loud while reading. I eventually had to go home, as too many of the shop's patrons were giving me funny looks and I was getting a little self-conscious.

Anyway, you too can enjoy Bangs' work - with his anthology titled Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ten years ago for Christmas, I received it from my brother and sister-in-law and it is the best gift I have ever received. Bangs has been my numero uno influence as a writer, the man who taught me how to ramble on and on with your pen as you never know what corridors you'll stumble upon while your pouring it all out onto paper; you might find out that you think a different way then you did previously, and you may end up questioning yourself, which is always healthy.

Bangs was a stunningly brilliant writer. By placing himself near the center of most of his pieces, he dealt in writing about music as a highly personal subject. His writing dealt with the very democratic ideals that 1) anyone can make rock 'n' roll, and 2) rock stars are people, too. The natural consequence of #2 was that if a rocker started acting phony (or worse, acting better than the rest of us), than said rocker was to be openly mocked in Bangs' essays. "Bah!" he once wrote, "the whole musical world is packed with simpletons and charlatans, with few a genius or looney tune joker in between." He was also once banned from writing for Rolling Stone because Jann Wenner felt he was too disrespectful to artists. Further proof that Lester was on the right track.

Bangs wrote from 1969 until his death in 1982, so his salvos were timely during that dark age known as the seventies, when it was taken for granted by too many in post-Woodstock America that Decadent Rock Stars were to idolized and revered (LB again: "It is ineluctable fact that beneath all that makeup, silk, Beelzebeads and hoodoo-voodoo drag, lies a true dork.") On the other hand, to read about artists Bangs loved and championed (Yardbirds, Clash, Lou Reed, among many others) is just as fun. And after seven years, my pal Turk and I read and re-read "The Guess Who: Live at the Paramount" and still can't figure out whether he dug their unassuming gutbucket attitude or is just being sardonically wicked.

Many Bangs cultists are quick to revel in his early-to-mid seventies output (with titles like "James Taylor Marked for Death," "Jethro Tull in Vietnam," and "How to Succeed in Torture Without Really Trying, or, Louie Come Home, All Is Forgiven"), when he mainly wrote for Creem, but it would be a shame to ignore his more contemplative late-seventies work. His pieces on the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Lennon are brilliantly insightful, while "The White Noise Supremacists", a piece on racism in the then-burgeoning New Wave scene, is still a timely read; which is a sad thing when you think about it.

What Bangs' writing ultimately comes down to is a love for the music. His emotion, whether he was writing about one-hit wonders like the Count Five or legends like Van Morrison, burned through the pages and makes you want to turn up the volume at home. So I suggest any fans of fantastic high-energy writing put Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung on their holiday wish list or maybe just buy it for yourself.

And now I leave you with one my favorite Lester quotes (read it aloud for best effect):

"So perhaps the truest autobiography I could ever write, and I know this holds as well for many other people, would take place largely at record counters, jukeboxes, pushing forward in the driver's seat while AM walloped you on, alone under headphones with vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in the brain through insomniac postmidnights, or just to sit at leisure stoned or not in the vast benign lap of America, slapping on sides and feeling good."

REFERENCES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

My 1998 New Year Resolution is to not date, sleep with, or marry anyone unless she can advance my writing career! Call me opportunist or slut, I don't care! No more goofing off around here...anyway, see you all in '98.

INFO

Everything written by me, except where noted.

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