Janszoon

Heh. Well you certainly had a way cooler soundtrack to your experience than I had for mine! It would have been pretty sweet to skate around to Massive Attack, though of course they hadn't even put out any albums yet in 1988.



I've always liked that song too, though I didn't realize it was popular enough to be played at roller skating rinks. Or maybe your rink was just a lot more hip mine was.

It's funny, I actually saw the Cardigans in concert when that song was new but I remember next to nothing about the show.

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jackhammer

Really good read fella. I don't do skating but love the connection of music, growing up and nostalgia.

Besides this track is killer I had a massive crush on her. Still do really.

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Engine

I know all of those tracks by heart, and yeah I used to hang out in roller skating rinks for kids' birthday parties and such at the same time that you did. Your post is almost too familiar for words.

Yeah, uh, late-80s Belinda was one of my first sexual experiences so to speak

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Trollheart

Uh, more a Suzi Quatro man myself (reveals age...) --- man she looked hot back then! Probably still does...

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Janszoon

I don't know her, and she doesn't look like she'd be into men, but Wikipedia tells me she was an influence on Tina Weymouth so she's a-okay in my book.

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Trollheart

Oh wow! You don't know her? Now I feel OLD!
Suzi was the original rock chick, way before even the likes of Joan Jett or Lita Ford. The first famous female bass player ever, she fuelled many a young man's fantasy (including, of course, mine!) back in the 70s and 80s, and yes, she was married. Twice. To men. And has kids.

Here she is in action... how could you resist?

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Janszoon

Heh. I'm glad to hear someone can relate so much.



I think mine was probably Lisa Bonet, who had that amazing Rolling Stone spread in the very same year I was writing about.

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Janszoon

Nine Curzon Place: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Goin' down now

Don't ask me how far down

Don't ask a drowning man how far down

All I know's I'm goin' down.
—Harry Nilsson


Act I

The lights come up on Harry Nilsson, standing center stage with a suitcase in one hand. His newsboy cap is squashed down on his mess of blonde hair. His beard is scraggly and unkempt. His sensitive eyes shine with a mixture of good humor and immeasurable disquietude. The scene is a small London flat in the early nineteen seventies and the idiosyncratic American songwriter looks relieved to finally have a permanent place to sleep in this city. After crisscrossing the Atlantic one too many times, he finally decided to buy this flat, number twelve at nine Curzon Place, Mayfair. It's right in the heart of the city and essentially across the street from the Playboy Club, something which he is all too happy to point out to his friends.

Ringo Starr and his business partner Robin Cruikshank enter stage right. Their interior/furniture design company, ROR, has been hired by their friend Mr. Nilsson to decorate his new home. They take turns shaking his hand and then begin to dash about the place, quickly whipping it into shape with the hippest of seventies accoutrements.


Act II

A warm late July night in nineteen seventy-four. The flat a nine Curzon Place is filled with police, moving from room to room with jumbled purpose, like ants at a picnic. In the bedroom, a large shape lies under a white sheet on the bed. A ham sandwich sits on a plate on the nightstand.

The shape under the sheet is one Ellen Naomi Cohen, better known to the world as Mama Cass. Nilsson is back in L.A. for a bit and she had been staying in his flat while playing a number of solo shows on this side of the Atlantic. She had received standing ovations at her two Palladium appearances on recent nights and was thrilled by the prospect of her horizons broadening beyond the confines of her old band. She went to bed happy and filled with champaign and she never woke up.

Standing at the front of the stage, Dr. Anthony Greenburgh, the medical examiner, makes an unfortunate comment to the press about the ham sandwich, which fuels endless media speculation and decades of urban legend. The simple fact, though, is that Mama Cass didn't choke on the sandwich. She died of myocardial degeneration—basically her fluctuating weight had caused her heart to simply stop beating.

In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson hangs his head.


Act III

A mild September morning in nineteen seventy-eight. The infamous wild man of The Who, Keith Moon, reclines in bed in the flat at nine Curzon Place. Once again, Nilsson is out of town and letting a friend stay at his home. Moon smokes cigarettes and watches the movie The Abominable Doctor Phibes, occasionally harassing his girlfriend, Annette Walter-Lax. When she objects to his demands for her to cook him steak and eggs, he yells, "If you don't like it, you can just fuck off!"

She storms out of the room, and perhaps in response, Moon downs thirty-two tablets of clomethiazole, a sedative he had been prescribed to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Unfortunately, six of this tablets are enough to be lethal and he soon loses consciousness. When Annette returns that afternoon, he is dead. The stage goes dark.

Spotlights now illuminate a sequence of brief scenes: Grief-stricken over the loss of his friend and disturbed by the seemingly cursed nature of that bedroom, Nilsson sells the flat to Pete Townsend. A series of residents come and go from the flat throughout the eighties as it grows more and more worn out looking. The nineties come and it sits vacant.

In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson collapses to the floor and dies, both broke and broken.


--


Afterword

For anyone interested, I've posted three wonderful Nilsson tracks below, each one reflecting a different side to his often dark, yet oddly humorous and upbeat songwriting. All three tracks come from his penultimate release, Knnillssonn, which was the last album he put out while still the owner of the flat at nine Curzon Place. It's an absolutely brilliant attempt at a comeback album which, sadly, was completely eclipsed by the death of Elvis Presley shortly after it after it came out.

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Janszoon

A true story, incidentally. Except the stage direction.

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San Jose, California:
Holy Mountain of Technology, Underdog of Art

San Jose, for those who don't know, lies about a 50 minute drive south of San Francisco and is the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley. With a population of almost a million it's actually quite a bit larger than it's famous neighbor to the north but you'd never know it to look at the place. Its downtown lies in the airport's flight path which means all the buildings have to be relatively low and it's the quintessential sprawling western American urban model—more like a gigantic suburb than a real city. It's also a very new city overall, partially because earthquakes keep knocking the old buildings down, but mostly because, before it was home to the likes of eBay, Adobe and Cisco, San Jose was largely farmland.

So why on earth would I choose to write about this place in terms of music? Well, I lived there for a while a few years ago and you know how, once you've owned a certain kind of car you can't help noticing that make and model every time you're near one? That's a little like my experience with music from San Jose. Before I lived there I couldn't name a single band from that city. Afterwards I kept noticing them. I make no claims about quality here, I'm just going to throw the names out there.

The bigger artists from the city are an odd hodgepodge of styles really. Smashmouth and Papa Roach are two of the more well-known examples—not exactly a strong selling point but something you might expect from a sprawling California quasi-suburban metropolis. On the other hand, weirdo experimentalists Xui Xui call the city home as well. Garage rockers The Count 5 were also from there and were the first band from San Jose to have a hit—with their song "Psychotic Reaction". The Doobie Brothers and Chocolate Watchband popped up not long after. Peanut Butter Wolf grew up there, and during my stint in old SJ I even had the pleasure of seeing him do a DJ set at a bar right across the street from my apartment. Mathcore goofballs Heavy Heavy Low Low hail from there as well, as do doom metal legends Sleep.

These last two bands I mentioned lead me to my personal experience with the San Jose music scene: loud music. As a person who spent considerable time perusing the "musicians" section of craigslist while I lived there, I can tell you there are a hell of a lot of metal bands there as well as a good amount of punk. This was further demonstrated to me both in hearing the other bands at the practice space I wound up at, as well as from the sounds emanating from the clubs downtown, such as Voodoo Lounge (now closed), Caravan Lounge and Blank Club. Caravan Lounge in particular was a wonderful, slightly seedy spot for local metal.

I assume it isn't the beautiful Mediterranean climate and sunny skies of San Jose that made people want to kick up such a ruckus. I assume it also isn't all the technology and wealth. Maybe it's those countless miles of suburbia that were so often traffic-clogged that you would frequently get to say, Guitar Center, only to have to wait for a parking space to free up in the lot. Or maybe, just maybe, it's a kind of second city primal scream. Maybe, like a couple other cities I've lived in, it was the bellow of the overlooked, a demand to be acknowledged. Maybe it was even a sort of first cry of a newborn, for a new city whose artistic zenith has yet to come.

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