'Into You Like a Train'

The Psychedelic Furs, live from 1981:

'Brand New Cadillac'

"I said, 'Jesus Christ, where'd you get that Cadillac?!!'"

The Clash: 

'Personality Crisis'

The New York Dolls. 

How Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot Escaped Russia (VIDEO)

I don't listen to this band. Not particularly to my tastes, though your mileage may vary.

I like their rebellious politics though. Frankly, what other politics could they have in Putin's Russia?

There new music video is here, "Hate Fuck." 

At the New York Times, "Leader of Pussy Riot Band Escapes Russia, With Help From Friends":

After more than a decade of activism, Maria Alyokhina disguised herself as a food courier to evade the police — and a widening crackdown by President Vladimir Putin.

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Maria V. Alyokhina first came to the attention of the Russian authorities — and the world — when her punk band and performance art group Pussy Riot staged a protest against President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.

For that act of rebellion in 2012, she was sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.” She remained determined to fight Mr. Putin’s system of repression, even after being jailed six more times since last summer, each stint for 15 days, always on trumped-up charges aimed at stifling her political activism.

But in April, as Mr. Putin cracked down harder to snuff out any criticism of his war in Ukraine, the authorities announced that her effective house arrest would be converted to 21 days in a penal colony. She decided it was time to leave Russia — at least temporarily — and disguised herself as a food courier to evade the Moscow police who had been staking out the friend’s apartment where she was staying. She left her cellphone behind as a decoy and to avoid being tracked.

A friend drove her to the border with Belarus, and it took her a week to cross into Lithuania. In a studio apartment in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, she agreed to an interview to describe a dissident’s harrowing escape from Mr. Putin’s Russia.

“I was happy that I made it, because it was an unpredictable and big” kiss-off to the Russian authorities, Ms. Alyokhina said, using a less polite term. “I still don’t understand completely what I’ve done,” she admitted, dressed in black except for a fanny pack with a rainbow belt.

Ms. Alyokhina, 33, has spent her entire adult life fighting for her country to respect its own Constitution and the most basic human rights, like freedom of expression. After being freed early from prison in December 2013, she and another member of Pussy Riot founded Mediazona, an independent news outlet focused on crime and punishment in Russia.

She also wrote a memoir, “Riot Days,” and traveled internationally performing a show based on the book. Though her dream was to tour with it in Russia, only three venues agreed to host the show, and all faced repercussions.

Ms. Alyokhina was committed to remaining in Russia despite regular surveillance and pressure from the authorities. But now she has joined the tens of thousands of Russians who have fled since the invasion of Ukraine.

Alyokhina, whose friends call her Masha, had bitten her nails down to stubs, and she puffed almost unceasingly on a vape or on Marlboro Lights. She made the journey in black, three-inch platform boots without laces — a nod to her many stints in jail, where shoelaces are confiscated.

In prison, she and others instead threaded moist towelettes through the eyelets of their shoes to keep them on. As a statement, she and other members of Pussy Riot will wear them while they perform during a tour, starting on May 12 in Berlin, to raise money for Ukraine.

When it first began more than a decade ago, Pussy Riot seemed as much publicity stunt as political activism. But if their protest in the Moscow cathedral — where they sang a “Punk Prayer” ridiculing the symbiosis that had developed between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin — seemed overwrought at the time, today it appears prescient.

The church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill, recently blessed Russian troops going to Ukraine, and the European Union put his name on a proposed list of people to be sanctioned.

Exactly 10 years to the day after the cathedral protest, Mr. Putin delivered a ranting speech in which he called Ukraine a country “created by Russia,” laying the groundwork for his invasion.

Ms. Alyokhina listened to the speech on the radio from a jail cell. The invasion, she said, had changed everything, not just for her, but for her country.

“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore.”

During the interview she was surrounded by other members of the group, now a collective with about a dozen members. Most of them had also recently fled Russia, including her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein.

Ms. Shtein had chosen to leave Russia a month before, also evading restrictions on her movement by sneaking out in a delivery-service uniform. Her decision came after someone posted a sign on the door of the apartment she shared with Ms. Alyokhina accusing them of being traitors...

Keep reading.

 

Black Flag Defined Punk of the 1980s

A book review, at the Los Angeles Times, "Review: The L.A. man behind the music that defined the 1980s."

I saw them play many times, though I didn't care much for Henry Rollins. 

Black Flag's co-founder and original lead vocalist, Keith Morris (of later Circle Jerks fame), was irreplaceable.

The band played Baces Hall in Los Angeles, October 24, 1980 (set list), and I was there with Gerry Hurtado (a.k.a., Skatemaster Tate), my best friend friend at the time. We got there late. The band was just starting to shred when I heard commotion and saw fans fleeing out the side doors of the club. Thank goodness there were side doors. I sorta didn't realize what was happening. But I saw a row of cops, with billy clubs and riot shields, pushing the crowd toward the front of the hall. 

It was proverbial pandemonium. I look over at Gerry and he was scared shitless. I'd never seen that look on him before, which was complete terror. I said, "Come on!" And we ran out the side, and luckily my car was just across the street. We get in and another car backs up into mine, bashing the front bumper, but we didn't care (I had a 1970 Volkswagen Bug, and their bumpers where pretty hard and durable.) After the little "fender bender" we scrammed. I have a very good recollection of it --- and this was 40 years ago. 

In any case, the books under review are, Glenn Friedman, What I See: The Black Flag Photographs of Glen E. Friedman, and Jim Ruland, Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.

From the review:

The June 29, 1980, edition of this paper spoiled Angelenos’ Sunday morning by dropping a dire warning on their doorsteps: The punks had arrived, and they were murderous.

Audiences at punk shows “mug each other,” Patrick Goldstein reported. “Accounts of reckless violence, vandalism and even mutilation at some area rock clubs read like reports from a war zone.”

At the center of this alleged chaos was the band Black Flag, whose shows had become a magnet for police crackdowns since its formation in Hermosa Beach in 1979. They brought some of that scrutiny onto themselves: Founder and guitarist Greg Ginn finagled a slot at a family-friendly festival at Manhattan Beach by saying they were a Fleetwood Mac cover band, then delivered a typically loud, profane set. But the media’s pearl-clutching was disproportionate to the danger. Ginn wasn’t trying to sow anarchy, just locate the spaces that wouldn’t reject punk outright.

In “What I See,” his lively, lavishly assembled collection of Black Flag photos, Glen E. Friedman recalls the violence as wholly on the police side of the ledger. Promoters called in the LAPD, scared by “overwhelming crowds that were showing up that often looked threatening to them.” The band goaded the cops with songs such as “Police Story,” and its fury is palpable throughout the book — even rehearsals look like barnburners. But the response — SWAT teams, billy clubs, helicopters — was absurdly disproportionate. “Corporate Rock Sucks,” Jim Ruland’s well researched history of Ginn and the label he founded, SST Records, puts some context around the absurdity. And it’s a thrilling story in the early going, the tale of a culture being stubbornly constructed from the ground up. In its 1980s heyday, SST released at least a dozen canonical rock albums that were notable for their rejection of convention. Black Flag’s piercing hardcore and Sabbathy sludge shared little with the Minutemen’s springy, spiky punk-jazz fusion, the Meat Puppets’ Dead-like excursions or Hüsker Dü’s blend of pop savvy and stun guitar. But together, they made SST the decade’s preeminent indie label. As Ruland writes: “Ginn was interested in punk rock as a concept — a creative call to arms — not as a specific style of music.”

In that regard, it’s a little disappointing that Ruland — a fiction writer who’s also co-authored two earlier books on Southern California punk — generally sticks to label history and doesn’t make a stronger argument on his subject’s behalf. SST’s accomplishment wasn’t just signing a host of enduring bands; it became the wellspring and prime mover for much of Gen X culture and the indie rock that followed. Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins exemplified a generation’s sour, antiestablishment, heavily ironic posture. The second side of its 1984 album, “My War,” was a grunge touchstone. Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth gave the ‘90s alt-rock explosion its melodic textbook. Negativland set a template for anticorporate pranking and culture jamming. The touring paths that indie bands across the country took — and still take — were largely developed at SST’s Torrance offices. Its ads and review copies fueled a generation of zines and their writers.

So much of this sprang from Ginn — or more precisely, from his resentment of authority and institutions. Beyond the police bullying and hyperbolic media attention, Black Flag’s recording career was stalled by an extended legal squabble with MCA Records after an exec dubbed 1981’s “Damaged” an “antiparent record.” (The band made that into a literal badge of honor, slapping stickers with the quote on copies of the LP.) Ruland’s chapter titles are framed as confrontations led by the label — “SST vs. the Media,” “SST vs. Hardcore” — but the battles were often Ginn’s.

Still, Ginn wasn’t anybody’s idea of the leader of a cultural movement. He grew up obsessed with ham radio and other engineering-geek phenomena. (SST was originally a small electronics outfit, short for “solid-state transmitters.”) He spoke little as a musician or label chief — and not at all to Ruland, who was told, “I retired from interviews a long time ago.” In “What I See,” Ginn is usually dressed as if he’d just come off a shift assistant managing a Kroger’s.

What made Ginn, Black Flag and SST so distressing to outsiders was partly a matter of aesthetics. Cover art and show flyers designed by Ginn’s brother, Raymond Pettibon, featured feverish, provocative imagery obsessed with sex and death. It was also a matter of timing. The soporific Reagan era made the music and lyrics SST trafficked in seem an active threat. The infamous 1982 punk-rock episode of “Quincy, M.E.,” plainly inspired by news coverage of Black Flag from The Times and elsewhere, was so determined to depict the scene as violent and nihilistic that Jack Klugman’s no-nonsense Quincy took the remarkable step of defending the ‘60s counterculture to make punk seem all the worse.

SST’s contempt for law-and-order conservatism didn’t exactly make them what we’d consider progressive today. Women and people of color were scarce; Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler curtailed her recovery from a hand injury for fear of being booted from the band, leading to permanent damage. Songs like Black Flag’s “Slip It In” were overtly misogynistic. Cover art and SST letterhead flirted with Nazi rhetoric. Bad Brains frontman H.R. was known for homophobic outbursts. The label came grotesquely close to releasing a Charles Manson album...

I still have a few of the Raymond Pettibon concert flyers, packed away somewhere.

A great moment in rock and roll history. An iconic band for the ages.

'Double Vision'

Foreigner, absolutely rockin'. 

'Open Your Eyes'

From the Lords of the New Church:

Video games train the kids for war.

Army chic in high-fashion stores.

Law and order's done their job.

Prisons filled while the rich still rob.

Assassination politics.

Violence rules within' our nation's midst.

Well ignorance is their power tool.

You'll only know what they want you to know.

The television cannot lie.

Controlling media with smokescreen eyes.

Nuclear politicians picture show.

The acting's lousy but the blind don't know.

They scare us all with threats of war.

So we forget just how bad things are.

You taste the fear when you're all alone.

They gonna git'cha when you're on your own.

The silence of conspiracy.

Slaughtered on the altar of apathy.

You gotta wake up from your sleep.

'Cause meek inherits earth...six feet deep.

Open your eyes see the lies right in front of ya.

Open your eyes...

Red Hot Chili Peppers Out with New Album, First with John Frusciante Since 2006 (VIDEO)

At the video, the band's first single from the record, "Black Summer."

Here, "‘Unlimited Love’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers Is the Group’s Mildest Album Yet":

The 12th studio LP from the band features their classic sound but little that’s new or exciting.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have often seemed on the verge of implosion, but so far the group has always bounced back. The Los Angeles quartet, whose mix of punk and funk proved hugely influential in the 1990s and beyond, has scaled heights few current rock acts can touch—a performance at the Super Bowl in 2014, 100 million records sold. But every few years the hard-living outfit finds itself on the brink of collapse. After the massive success of the band’s 1991 breakthrough “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” wunderkind guitarist John Frusciante left the Peppers and struggled mightily with heroin addiction. Lead singer Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith have all had their share of substance abuse issues as well.

Mr. Frusciante rejoined and then left once again after 2006’s “Stadium Arcadium” to focus on his solo work, which is strange and sometimes wonderful and has earned him a cult following. The two records without Mr. Frusciante were decidedly uneven—one poor (2011’s “I’m With You”), the other intriguing (2016’s unusually lush “The Getaway,” produced by Danger Mouse and mixed by Radiohead associate Nigel Godrich ). Yet despite all this tumult, somehow the Red Hot Chili Peppers have endured.

On “Unlimited Love” (Warner), the group’s 12th studio LP, out Friday, Mr. Frusciante returns to the fold, for the first time in 16 years, as does super-producer Rick Rubin, who was integral to the group’s earlier success but hasn’t worked with them in over a decade. With the personnel behind the band’s biggest hits all back in place, it’s not surprising that the new set feels like a deliberate return to basics. The production is ultra-simple, keeping the focus on the group’s most identifiable qualities—Flea’s percussive bass, Mr. Smith’s rock-solid backbeat and Mr. Frusciante’s minimalist guitar.

And then there’s Mr. Kiedis. Plenty of people have poked fun at the silliness of his lyrics over the years. When he’s not crooning a ballad, his primary strategy is to deliver stream-of-consciousness observations pitched somewhere between a hepcat disc jockey from the 1960s and an old-school rapper. But if he’s heard the complaints, he’s chosen to ignore them, and goofy choices abound. This is apparent from the opening track and first single on “Unlimited Love,” “Black Summer,” which finds the frontman tossing off non sequiturs such as “My Greta weighs a ton” and “platypus are few” in what sounds like an Irish brogue. But the tune’s catchy and memorable chorus—traditionally a band speciality—blots out the song’s shortcomings.

Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions—the following “Here Ever After,” “These Are the Ways” halfway through the record—killer choruses are in disconcertingly short supply on “Unlimited Love.” The songs are well played and logically arranged but also weirdly inert. As one midtempo groove follows another, we recognize Flea’s popping bass and Mr. Smith’s steady snare, but the song constructions are rote, enlivened only by the occasional guitar excursion from Mr. Frusciante.

On the one hand, the band and Mr. Rubin show remarkable restraint—there’s no attempt to dress up the group’s sound or bring it in line with current trends, and the simple arrangements will be easy to replicate live. But many songs feel half finished. As is typical for Mr. Rubin’s productions, each instrument is loud, heavily compressed and in your face. Which is ironic given that this is easily the Peppers’ mellowest record: The tempos are mostly slow, and there’s very little in the way of power chords. Unless you’re listening closely, the songs on this lengthy album—17 tracks, 73 minutes—bleed together.

The skeletal, funk-inflected R&B of early Prince seems to be a primary influence. This sounds promising on paper, but Mr. Kiedis’s attempts at lyrics about love and companionship fall flat. He has little to say about the finer points of relationships, and on the bland “She’s a Lover”—the most obvious Prince nod here—he falls back on groan-inducing come-ons like “She’s so full of learning curves.”

Here and there, Mr. Kiedis looks back on his life in music. The third track, “Aquatic Mouth Dance,” pays tribute to some of the group’s early influences over a busy bassline while horns add a touch of color; the fifth cut, “Poster Child,” is especially nutty, as he free associates about music history with no particular point in mind (“ Steve Miller and Duran Duran / A joker dancing in the sand / Van Morrison the astral man”). Mr. Kiedis sounds like he’s having fun, but these songs don’t hold up to repeated listening.

The penultimate track, “The Heavy Wing,” is one of very few places on the record where the Peppers really rock out, but the closing “Tangelo,” yet another quiet ballad, brings them back to earth. It’s so spare, the only things that pop out are awkward lines like “the smell of your hello” and “the smile of a knife / Is seldom befriending.”

The band and Mr. Rubin have been at this far too long to make a truly awful album—these are pros who know how to get these songs to the “listenable” stage, at the very least...

Dude's a little critical, eh?

Ima listen to the record and I'll let you know.

Still more.

 

The Professionals — 'Little Boys Like You, They Got a Job to Do...'

The Professionals — "Little Boys."

Live version is here.

And the lyrics are here (scroll down a bit past all the Google ads).

'Nervous Breakdown'

Keith Morris sang the original "Nervous Breakdown" on Black Flag's breakout EP in 1978. Totally cool:

Ooh Woo ... I Feel It Still (VIDEO)

So, I'm just back from Cerritos, where I came from visiting my young son, who was hospitalized this last week (due to a psyche breakdown dealing with his A.S.D.). He's coming home tomorrow, so I don't need to say too much more about that, other than, "Thank God," because working with these numbskull so-called "professionals" at such places is a nightmare.

Okay, in any case, driving back down the 91 freeway to I-5 South, I did have on 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles, and it turns out they've screwed up their website, and I can't find the "playlist" of recent songs just aired, like I used to post back in the days of my regular "drive-time" musical updates. (I guess the station had to "consolidate" with some others on "radio.com," or some such bull, but no matter, at least it's still on, shoot.) 

I mean, 95.5 KLOS Los Angeles is still going strong, since back in the day when I was in high school, and K-EARTH 101 Los Angeles, which 20 years ago was an "oldies but goodies" station, playing everything from the Beach Boys to the Beatles to Sam Cooke to Dobie Gray to Elvis to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles to the Temptations, and more. Now it's just, basically, another "classic rock" channel, with a few 80s "new wave" hits thrown in, which is okay, but I miss KKLQ 100.3 FM "The Sound" Los Angeles, which, frankly, was just as good, and even better, when you figure in the nostalgia, as the old KMET Los Angeles, a.k.a., the "Might Met," which used to have D.J.s like Jim Ladd, who used to smoke "doobies" while on air, as well as Cynthia Fox, who years later, was back "spinning" the classics, at "The Sound."

The one other radio station I really miss was the Long Beach-based "Pure Rock" 105.5 KNAC, which used to have the most hilarious morning D.J., Norm McBride, who after I'd had a couple of "tokes" in the morning, my eyes would be watering and my stomach aching, non-stop, because I'd get the "lolz" bad. 

In any case, it's all iTunes and whatever the f*ck nowadays, so who really gives a rat's ass? Most of the old "classic rockers" are starting to kick the bucket now anyway (R.I.P. Eddie Van Halen), so I know I'm getting too old for this stuff anyway.

But I like Portugal. The Man, so I guess I should count my blessings that I'm still here, and I never O.D.'d on some damn stupid coke-cocktail, or some such dumb sh*t (heroin, f*ck, hated the "junk" myself, holy motherf*cker, and I only tried it once, and that was once too many, jeez), that some of my long lost buddies, from back in the day, succumbed to. 

And pfft, don't even get me going about "KROQ," as, frankly, with folks like "Darby Crash," former alcoholic lead singer of the "Germs," now also dead, I don't need to relive the experience; and Rodney Bingenheimer, the stuck up old c*nt, used to spin records at the "Starwood" punk nightclub, in West Hollywood, at the time, when I wasn't so smart as I am now. No need to relive that sh*t, sheesh.

Thanks for checking back in at this old fart's old blog.

Can't keep my hands to myself

Think I'll dust 'em off, put 'em back up on the shelf

In case my little baby girl is in need

Am I coming out of left field?

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

I been feeling it since 1966, now

Might be over now, but I feel it still

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

Let me kick it like it's 1986, now

Might be over now, but I feel it still

Got another mouth to feed

Leave her with a baby sitter, mama, call the grave digger

Gone with the fallen leaves

Am I coming out of left field?

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

I been feeling it since 1966, now

Might've had your fill, but you feel it still

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

I been feeling it since 1966, now

Might've had your fill, but you feel it still

We could fight a war for peace

Is it coming?

Is it coming?

Skateboard Legend Jeff Grosso (VIDEO)

I didn't know him well. 

He was sorta crass, actually. But he was a great skater, and extremely well-loved in the skate community.

The LA. Times has a big write up, "Jeff Grosso: The life and death of skateboarding’s soul":

Jeff Grosso’s first skateboard wasn’t much.

It was a hand-me-down miniature-sized banana board he got from his mom’s boss when he was 8 years old. Even for 1977, it was antiquated, with rickety old clay wheels and worn-out bearings. Grosso barely knew how to stand on the thing, struggling to keep his balance without toppling to the ground.

But for a curious boy whose childhood home was next to a steep hill, there was an instant connection. He would sit on his back or lie flat on his stomach and let gravity take over. Every time he bombed down the street, he fell more in love with the feeling.

“Initially, it was the rush of going down a hill, and the wind in your hair,” Grosso once said. “Poetic nonsense.”

The skateboarding world looks much different now than it did then. Its ever-increasing popularity is pulling the fundamentally subversive sport into the mainstream. Formerly relegated to back alleys and sparse concrete parks, it is now set to debut on the Olympic stage during this summer’s Tokyo Games.

But somewhere at its core, the lust for that poetic nonsense remains.

No one understood it quite like Grosso.

“He was the gatekeeper to why skateboarding was cool,” said skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.

Grosso looked an unlikely figure for such a role. He didn’t have a long pro career, flaming out at the end of the 1980s, hardly spanning the decade. He battled drug addiction and suicidal depression. By his late 20s, it seemed like his life had bottomed out.

But then he rebounded, embodying the resiliency that has defined the entire history of his sport.

Grosso became an ambassador, speaking for skateboarding’s soul through his beloved “Loveletters to Skateboarding” YouTube show. He was a guardian and a helping hand to skateboarding’s newest generation.

In many ways, he was like a north star, his effervescent personality and endearing pertinacity emitting a guiding light through the sport’s most transitional times.

And when he died unexpectedly last March of an accidental drug overdose, it left a void the skateboarding world is still trying to fill.

To best understand skateboarding — its counter-culture roots, its rise to the Olympics, its helter-skelter tale of competing styles, clashing customs and self-sabotaging plot twists — it’s best to understand someone like Jeff Grosso.

Complicated. Flawed. But an authentic source of joy to the end.  

“It’s a total rush. It’s the feeling that when you go out there with your board, it’s a no-hero type of thing. And you either accomplish something or you don’t.” — Jeff Grosso, to the St. Louis Dispatch in 1986.

The rarest sight in skateboarding might be a frown.

Even after a failed trick or nasty wipeout, most skaters are wired to smile, laugh, shake off the dust, and climb back on their boards.

That carefree disposition is what initially captured Grosso’s interest. A stubborn and expressive freckle-faced kid born in Glendale in 1968, he felt like an outcast from a young age. He liked to draw, read “Lord of the Rings” and listen to punk rock. He picked contrarian arguments during conversations simply to spark a debate. And he moved around a lot as a kid: from the hillside house in Eagle Rock, to Las Vegas for a year with his mom, and then to Arcadia for the start of fifth grade.

Though he was naturally athletic, he found the structured pressure of team sports arbitrary and suffocating.

Only when he was on a skateboard did Grosso truly feel free.

“You have this culture of kids that need that,” said his mother, Rae Williams. “They need to go and do this and be creative and come up with new tricks and try different things.”

The newly opened parks soon faltered under liability issues and financial distress, and the young demographic of riders once fueling the boom grew up and moved on. By the time Grosso discovered the sport at the end of the ‘70s, only a small community of self-willed skaters remained.

“Skateboarders were very rare at that time,” said Grosso’s childhood friend Eric Nash, the only other kid at their Camino Grove Elementary School who matched Grosso’s passion for the sport. “Jeff enjoyed that rebel spirit. I think that’s who he was.”

Grosso and Nash spent almost every weekend at one of the few Southland skate parks that were left. Grosso was a perfectionist — at home he was constantly rearranging the furniture in his bedroom — and practiced for hours to perfect a trick. Skate City in Whittier became their home base, though sometimes they snuck away to more secluded spots — a cement ditch behind a church in Glendale, an empty washway nicknamed the “V bowl” in Irwindale.

One of their friends, future pro skater Lance Mountain, had a ramp in the backyard of his Alhambra home where the group would spend hours together honing their technique and embracing a recalcitrant culture few others could comprehend. “We were a bunch of nerds, we were weirdos, we were social outcasts,” Grosso said in a 2015 episode of his “Loveletters” series. “We were the people that nobody wanted to be, doing things that nobody wanted to, and that nobody understood. … We were the freaks. That’s how you rolled. That’s how it was. That’s what drew us to skateboarding.”

“The little wooden toy is a kiss and a curse. It’s everything. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to me, all rolled up into one.” — Jeff Grosso, to Juice Magazine in 2006.

Like any good parent, Williams tried to get her son to think about his future as he went through grade school. Skateboarding, she told him, “is fun and can be a pastime, but you can’t make a career out of it.”

Reliving the memory during an interview, Williams stopped herself and laughed.

“Boy, were we wrong.”

Instead, as Grosso went through his teenage years in the mid-1980s, the sport became cool again...

There's still losts more at the link.

The thing about the "counterculture" aspects of the old skating scene is certainly the punk rock and drugs --- lots of drugs. 

Three of my best friends from back in the day are dead, one from a heroin O.D. years ago, and two of my other best buddies died of drug-related illnesses more recently, especially liver disease. 

That Grosso overdosed himself is extremely sad, but not surprising at all. His death is loss for the sport, but he leaves a great legacy of commitment to the genre.

I'll leave off here with a photo of myself (below), from around 1980, at the Upland Pipeline skatepark, back when the old "pay to play" parks were the big thing. But because I had won so many amateur contests (like the one at the photo, where that "layback" finale scored well with the judges), I had an "all parks" pass to skate for free, at any SoCal skatepark; and in 1984 I turned pro for just one contest, where I was killing it in the banked slalom, but on my first run I lost control going around the third cone, and tumbled badly, breaking my wrist. I didn't quit the contest, though. I got up and completed my second run, and you only get two runs through the course, so that salvaged my self-esteem, and a few folks came up after to praise me for my hard-charging style. 

Nowadays, I still skate once in a while, most recently at the Redlands skatepark a few weeks back, although I mostly putter around the "freestyle" area, like the old man I am. 

  

'I won't apologize, for acting outta line. You see the way I am, you leave any time you can, 'cuz ... I'm crazy and I'm hurt. Head on my shoulders. Going ... berserk...'

I'm not leaving Facebook nor Twitter. 

"I'm going to rant like a mofo for the next four years. Won't change a thing, of course, but it gets the aggression out, at least. Better here [Facebook] than elsewhere, wtf?"

'Everylong'

From my drive-time this morning, while out running errands.

The Foo Fighters, "Everylong," at Jack FM 93.1 Los Angeles.

Rio
Duran Duran
11:50am

Give It Away
Red Hot Chili Peppers
11:45am

What's on Your Mind?
Information Society
11:41am

Lights
JOURNEY
11:38am

Only Happy When It Rains
Garbage
11:34am

Rock The Casbah
Clash
11:31am

Blasphemous Rumours
Depeche Mode
11:21am

Unforgiven
Metallica
11:15am

Don't You Want Me
Human League
11:11am

You're My Best Friend
Queen
11:08am

Radioactive
Imagine Dragons
11:05am

Panama
Van Halen
11:01am

I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)
Daryl Hall & John Oates
10:52am

Everlong (Acoustic)
Foo Fighters
10:47am

Take On Me
A-HA
10:44am

Margaritaville
Jimmy Buffett
10:39am

The Doyenne of the New Romantics

It's Perri Lister, of whom Billy Idol just posted. They had a 9-year romantic relationship.

From her Wiki page:

In 1978, she was a member of the dance troupe Hot Gossip, which performed on British television's The Kenny Everett Video Show. They were noted for their sexually suggestive costumes and risqué dance routines. Lister was one of the original Blitz Kids, a group of young, flamboyantly dressed people who patronised the elitist Covent Garden club night Blitz in the early 1980s, among whom were Boy George, Steve Strange, Spandau Ballet, and Marilyn. She appeared as a dancer in the 1980 film Can't Stop the Music and performed in the 1981 Visage music video for "Fade to Grey".

Lister began a relationship with rock singer Billy Idol in 1980, over whom she allegedly exerted a big influence. She sang the French lyrical backing vocal chorus, "Les yeux sans visage" on his 1984 hit single "Eyes Without a Face", and appeared in several of his music videos, including "White Wedding" in which she played the bride; "To Be a Lover", and she was the girl bound to a cross in the second video for his song "Hot in the City". Mademoiselle described Lister's sexy performance in the latter video as "sizzling".She danced topless in the 1982 Duran Duran video for the single release "The Chauffeur", and sang backing vocals for the band Visage, and August Darnell's band Kid Creole and The Coconuts.

She was a member of the short-lived pop music group Boomerang, which consisted of two former members of Kid Creole and The Coconuts: Adriana Kaegi and Cheryl Poirier. The group released an album titled Boomerang (1986) and a cover version of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'".

https://t.co/PTZRQPqteC #perrilister new romantic icon & she is great!

— Billy Idol (@BillyIdol) July 28, 2020

By 1982, Lister had linked up with Billy Idol who had just released his first solo album, Billy Idol. She appears as the starring role in the goth-adjacent “White Wedding Pt 1” music video as the pirouetting bride (and is one of the dancers that smacks her own butt at the end). Additionally, Lister contributed backing vocals to Idol’s songs, including the infamous phrase les yeux sans visage on “Eyes Without a Face.” This allowed her to appear onstage with Idol during his television performances for the song, including Top of the Pops. Despite her accomplishments, her career took a backseat to Idol’s worldwide stardom and she regressed to “the girlfriend,” oftentimes belittled to a groupie. In photos, Idol and Lister complement each other, her with an array of hair styles and colors, a chic fashion sense that was never overshadowed by Idol’s tough leather and layers of rosaries.

However, the couple’s time together would soon be rife with controversy and infidelity. Idol was arrested alongside another woman during a drug bust in 1987, which prompted Lister to call a press conference to confirm that she was, in fact, still Idol’s girlfriend. This drama eclipsed her career and, despite their attempts to repair the relationship (and having Idol’s child in 1988), Lister separated from Idol soon after.

Lister attempted to reinvigorate her star power with the short-lived band, Boomerang, in 1986. Consisting of former backup singers from Kid Creole and the Coconuts—in which Lister was a member of in 1983 for the album Don’t Take My Coconuts—the trio covered the song “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”

As an actress, Lister made minor appearances in television and movies such as an episode of the spinoff show Freddy’s Nightmare in 1988 and in the 1990 noir film Bad Influence alongside James Spader and Rob Lowe. And, even though her experience and talents were vast, she never quite made it back into popularity. But her influence and legacy lives on, especially in some of the greatest music videos ever made to date. Lister is much more than Billy Idol’s ex-girlfriend—she is a New Romantic icon.

'Brain Stew'

From yesterday's drive-time, Green Day, via Jack F.M.

Thats All
Genesis
9:55am

Broken
lovelytheband
9:51am

Desire
U2
9:48am

American Girl
Tom Petty
9:45am

Brain Stew
Green Day
9:41am

Sweet Dreams
EURYTHMICS
9:38am

Legs
ZZ Top
9:34am

Jumper
Third Eye Blind
9:21am

Sweet Emotion
Aerosmith
9:17am

'Self-Esteem'

From Thursday morning's drive-time, the Offspring, at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles.

Under The Bridge
Red Hot Chili Peppers
6:45am

The Chain
Fleetwood Mac
6:41am

Send Me An Angel
Real Life
6:37am

Daughter
Pearl Jam
6:33am

When Doves Cry
PRINCE
6:22am

White Wedding
Billy Idol
6:18am

I Need To Know
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers
6:15am

Demons
Imagine Dragons
6:12am

Animal
Def Leppard
6:08am

Lovesong
Cure
6:05am

Self Esteem
OFFSPRING
5:53am

'Vacation'

The nostalgia is killing me!

These women are so hot!

Heard yesterday on K-EARTH 101 FM Los Angeles:

'Sheena is a Punk Rocker'

I had this song on the brain for almost a week, since Jack F.M. was playing it repeatedly during my drive time.

Well the kids are all hopped up and ready to go
They're ready to go now they got their surfboards
And they're going to the discotheque Au Go Go
But she just couldn't stay she had to break away
Well New York City really has is all oh yeah, oh yeah
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Well she's a punk punk, a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Well the kids are all hopped up and ready to go
They're ready to go now they got their surfboards
And they're going to the discotheque Au Go Go
But she just couldn't stay she had to break away
Well New York City really has is all oh yeah, oh yeah
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Well she's a punk punk, a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now...

'New Rose'

Since The Sound L.A. went off the air my drive time music listening has become decidedly more eclectic. I guess that's good, because for all of The Sound's greatness (and it was especially great from the point of view of building a fanatically loyal radio-listening community), the weekday 9-5 playlist was actually pretty boring. You heard super popular hard rock hits all day long, with very few off-beat or underground songs (songs you would hear, though, on the weekends, at the odd hours of the day, or during special programming).

So yesterday I had KLOS 95.5 on while doodling around town, and a little before I came home I listened to Guns & Roses' "New Rose," which is a cover of The Damned's original hit punk rock single "New Rose" which came out in England in 1976, when I was in 10th grade.

So, yes, KLOS does have a bit more diverse daytime programming that The Sound used to have. In fact, it turns out that Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones has a daily two-hour show on the station, from Noon to 2:00pm, called Jonesy's Jukebox, which is hilarious because he literally does "whatever he wants."

So, change is good, as they say.

Here's Guns & Roses:

Victoria
The Kinks
12:33

New Rose
Guns N' Roses
12:25 PM

Miss You
The Rolling Stones
11:57 AM

Urgent
Foreigner
11:52 AM

Learn to Fly
Foo Fighters
11:49 AM

All Along the Watchtower
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
11:44 AM

Comfortably Numb
Pink Floyd
11:38 AM

RLRP_SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY (BONO)
U2
11:33 AM

You Give Love a Bad Name
Bon Jovi
11:29 AM

Man In the Box
Alice In Chains
11:25 AM

Hangman Jury
Aerosmith
11:10 AM

Changes
David Bowie
11:06 AM

Pour Some Sugar On Me
Def Leppard