The first song on This Perfect World, “Bad Reputation,” seemed to sum everything up for me at age 23. The first verse went, “I know I got a bad reputation, and it isn’t just talk talk talk / If I could only give you everything, you know I haven’t got / I couldn’t have one conversation, if it wasn’t for the lies lies lies / And still I want to tell you everything until I close my eyes and suddenly I’m on the street / seven years disappear below my feet / Do you want me now, do you want me now?” Seventy five words contained everything that my little Holden Caulfield mouth had been trying to say for months and months to all my friends and former associates. Right there in music was everything I needed to get off my chest.

Freedy Johnston is very good at that. Robert Christgau called 1992’s Can You Fly (Bar/None)

... a perfect album. Not a world-historical album or a ground-breaking album or even a concept album; not an album that will grab you by the neck and change your life. Just a perfect album - thirteen songs, thirteen discrete, discreet little moments that connect lyrically and stick musically

If anything, Freedy Johnston is the master of the musical short story, the Eudora Welty of the rock world. Each one of his songs is a perfectly self-contained snapshot of a moment or a feeling complete with a history and a future (if you care to imagine it) with all the loose ends tied up and not a word wasted. His melodies and arrangements tend to be simple, pleasant and catchy, and his music inhabits the middle ground between simple folk and four-chord rock. In a way he’s the opposite of Springsteen, who is all about the grand gesture, the fist in the air, the tornado and blood on the highway. Freedy Johnston is about the hand on the shoulder, the whispered secret, and the love letter delivered years too late.

The centerpiece of Can You Fly is the title song about a farmer and his son who come across something in their fields. Over a quiet bed of acoustic guitar and mallet percussion, Johnston sings,

Can you hear me?
Now the wind is dead
You fell from the cloud,
In the frozen mud
Can you see me
And my idiot son?
Down in golden light
Thrown out of the dark you came
Down down down down
on a midnight storm.
Down down down down
on a midnight flash.
We’ve all been looking at you,
I must know, is it true?
Can you fly?
Can you fly?

Can you hear the wind?
Now the light is dead.
You flew from your bed
Woke up on the floor
Can you fly tonight?
From my pointless fence?
Back up to the cloud
Up into the wind you came
Down down down down
on a midnight storm..
Down down down down
on a midnight flash.
We’ve all been looking at you,
I must know, is it true?
Can you fly?
Can you fly?

Is it an angel? Is it a metaphor? Who can tell? This is a perfect little lyric, utterly descriptive, finely drawn, and full of hidden nuance (Why is the fence pointless? Was it poorly built? Did the crop fail? Were the cows all sold?), and this is what Freedy Johnston does best.

Unfortunately, he didn’t do it for very long. To my ears at least, Johnston started on a path of diminishing returns with 1996’s Never Home (Elektra, 1997), tracing a career path a bit like Elvis Costello’s post-Armed Forces. His albums have their charms, but they cannot help being measured against his first few and often found wanting. For this reason, I found the new Bar/None compilation of early Freedy Johnston demos, amusingly called The Way I Were, particularly intriguing.

Recorded on four-track between 1986 and 1992 (the year he made Can You Fly), The Way I Were chronicles Johnston’s early experiments as songwriter and singer. Despite the primitive recordings, the arrangements are tasteful, intelligent, and above all proportional. These are not big songs, and big arrangements would overwhelm them. Strikingly, Johnston’s gifts for economy were there from the beginning, as was his unique songwriting voice. At no point does he seem to be ripping off anybody, though rumors of the Pretenders, the Raspberries, and the Replacements surface from time to time.

The liner notes give no clue as to what was recorded when, or in what order the songs came. Thus, it becomes a game for the listener to try to figure out if the neat pop of “She’s A Goddess” predates the messy and ridiculous “This Really Happened,” or the other way around. The only way tell is by the sound of Johnston’s voice-- his tenor warble appears in various stages of refinement on the fourteen tracks here. My best guess is that the more mannered vocal performances are the later ones, after Johnston got his ya-yas out.

But what ya-yas did he have? Early recordings are always dicey affairs. Have you ever heard the Replacements’ first record, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out The Trash? It’s a boozy punk stew that doesn’t even sound like the same band who would within a few years record Let It Be or Tim. It sounds like a bunch of idiots more concerned with chasing tail and taking speed than being a band. By way of contrast, this is the sound of Freedy Johnston’s ya-yas:

So it’s your birthday
(yes it is!)
Happy birthday!
(thank you!)
Happy birthday!
(yes it is!)
Happy birthday!
(thaaanks!)
(I got some records… from my mom, and I got a couple tickets to see Madonna from my sister, and then… I got-- well I mean, I didn’t get-- I kind of went out and spent-- you know, I bought some stuff for myself.)

All this over a loop and a skeletal bass and guitar line. The song is called “Happy Birthday.” And yet within a couple years, he would be writing an elegantly drawn song about buying a mail-order bride called “I Do, I Do.”

Shine up those city lights, Dust off the Empire State / My baby’s flying to the city tonight, I’m gonna meet her at JFK. / Straighten the towers, paint the avenue, she’s my Polaroid bride / Won’t understand a word I’m telling you, Or the neon signs.

The voice is the same, the sound is the same, but somehow between 1986 and 1992, Freedy Johnston learned how to turn quirk into consequence.

http://www.freedyjohnston.com

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EchoStar knows the limitations of their current sat with respect to HD...they want to achieve rapid leadership in HD, ahead of DirecTV.

By buying the Voom satellite and uplink center, they have a turnkey HD broadcast system, with just about all of the kinks worked out, good and cheap STBs from a well-known provider, a DVR around the corner, and a starting subscriber base of 26,000.

Marketing goes to work selling an all-new EchoStar HD+ service. Yes, if you’re an existing EchoStar customer you’ll need a new dish, but EchoStar is locking in that customer at higher rates (presumably) over a long term. For existing EchoStar HD customers, bite the bullet and pay for the new install, for them. They’ll be eternally grateful. Give them free upgraded HD programming for 3 months, then back to their original subscription. They’ll call and buy the upgraded package, and it’s one year to payback on the free install.

An upgrading current EchoStar customer keeps everything they have now in terms of channel but now is receiving unbeatable HD capability. EchoStar trashes the Voom originals and condenses the content down to five or six really good HD channels (Rave, Rush, Equator), once again to provide advantage of DirecTV. They can possibly use the spot transmission support to do locals in key markets, and rely on the STB’s OTA tuner everywhere else. Remove the SD/HD doubling that Voom inexplicably does and make use of the bandwidth for key locals.

What’s not to like about this plan? Ink an agreement with Motorola to ramp up STB (set top box) production, advertise like crazy (starting in a few months) to your own subscriber base, upselling to the new service.

Your turnkey HD operation can include significant parts of the current Voom technical staff for even faster startup time. Get the HD DVR support off and running, fast, and find a way to make it cost half of what D*’s does...then watch the new subscriptions roll in…

Where’s the flaw?

EchoStar didn’t buy Voom’s programming, but Voom’s own programming is fairly poor, with a couple of notable exceptions. EchoStar already has contracts with many of the pay channels that it could extend to get their HD versions (it’s just more money for HBO, etc). It already has contracts with all the SD channels. With the MPEG-4 compression upgrade in place they could do spot beams to a number of the larger markets with full HD locals (MPEG-4 doubles bandwidth with same PQ, so there are 80 HD channels. That’s 40 new ones, plus you can recover 12-14 more by dumping a good slice of Voom content (assuming EchoStar would want to find “showcase” HD programming to put on the remaining Voom channels. That gives you 50-60 HD local channels you can broadcast...Also, I don’t know if the bandwidth is limited on the way up, or on the way down...if spot beams are used more channels might be possible.

The Voom technology really does have the possibility of “doing it all” in a very short time frame, if the right deals are cut and the decisions are made…

Well, guess what? It turns out that Live at CBGB is a must-see for any punk fan, an outstanding snapshot of a great but half-forgotten punk band in their prime. Suffice to say the Dead Boys, five pallid lumpy morons who just drove in from Cleveland, are more powerful, more friggin’ awesome then any five hundred bands that lay claim to their legacy. What’s more is, everything punk kids do today out of tradition (scowling, singing the chorus off-key, being gross onstage, smashing drums), the Boys were doing when it was practically brand new (ish. Newish. Iggy did it first.)

It doesn’t hurt that they had good songs, either.

The band open the show with a blistering version of their classic “Sonic Reducer.” For a band remembered mainly for being loud and snotty, their stage show is surprisingly tight and professional. Not that the playing is perfect (this is punk rock, after all), but it’s great to see a band work well together on stage. Lead singer Stiv Bators has an undeniable stage presence and innate sense of drama and the other players are as anonymous or flamboyant as Stiv’s antics will allow them to be. Guitarist Cheetah Chrome in particular gets good mileage out of a limited repertoire of crosseyed-scowls and guitar shakes.

But the star of the show is clearly Bators, a scrawny teenager who on this night was doing his level best to claim his place in the all-time punk pantheon alongside Iggy Pop, G.G. Allin and Johnny Rotten. Five minutes into the show, during a grinding version of the singalong “All of This And More,” Bators kneels to eat a slice of the aforementioned bologna off the stage, and a minute later bloodies his nose on… well… something, and uses another slice to blow his bloody nose. As he sings a verse, he regards the ensnotted meat distractedly before popping it in his mouth. The ensuing meat-muted chorus goes “Deah’ Boah’… Know a’ ‘ahm jus’ a Deah Boa’… Ah wa-ah’ be a Deah’ Boa.’” Not that this is so very different from Bators’ usual enunciatory standards, but the effect is Iggylicious. And make no mistake; Iggy is the main influence here; Stiv even adopts the trademark full backbend and arm whirls of his idol. Bators literally throws himself into his performance with the stamina of the young and high, and the audience (which now includes us) reaps the rewards.

In between all the stage theatrics, the band manage to pull off outstanding versions of “All This And More,” “Down in Flames,” “I Need Lunch” and lesser-known songs like “Revenge.” Although the Dead Boys owe huge debts to the New York Dolls, the MC5, Alice Cooper, the Stooges and Cleveland’s own Rocket From The Tombs (from whence two ‘Boys came), the songwriting is strong original, and strikingly self-assured. The band closes with (naturally) a loose and scorching version of the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy.” Throughout the performance, the cameras focus mainly on the band, with only a few shots of a surprisingly normal-looking crowd (this was the days before safety pins and leather) thrown in for relief, and in general director Rod Swenson does a great job capturing a fantastic set.

The best part of the DVD experience is the extras, and Live at CBGB is no exception. The producers have thoughtfully included band interviews recorded at CBGB that range from the blissfully inarticulate (Johnny Blitz) and the amiably inarticulate (Cheetah Chrome) to the endearingly naïve (Stiv Bators, who offstage looks all of twelve years old). A 2003 interview with an all-grown-up Cheetah Chrome (“Eugene Richard O’Connor”) sets all in context. Disarmingly honest about his days as a Dead Boy (“we were a bunch of morons”), the native Clevelander reminisces at length about driving back and forth from Ohio to New York, living on $5 a day just to hang out at CBGB, and about the New York scene in 1977. According to him, the Dead Boys were “volume, speed, action, light, frustration, [and] beer,” which sounds about right. Also agreeing to an interview is CBGB founder Hilly Kristol, who argues that the Dead Boys were set to conquer the world. Interestingly, it becomes clear that Kristol was somewhat of a father figure to the band, although his guidance was not enough to keep the band from disintegrating within two years of recording their first album.
From an anthropological standpoint, nearly more interesting than even the Dead Boys themselves is the bonus footage of the opening act. We all remember the Dead Boys, the Germs, the Damned, the Clash, Television, etcetera and so on world without end. But what of the bands that didn’t make it? Who were 1977’s also-rans, and what were they thinking? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Steel Tips.

I don’t think I will ever get tired of watching an aggressively spaced-out dude with one solid dreadlock set his shirt on fire, igniting strings of firecrackers hidden underneath. I will also never get tired of watching a fah-laming baldheaded 300-lb biker who moves justlike a Supreme and a fresh-faced teenaged girl in a Catholic school outfit handle backing vocal/dance/handclap duties for a three-piece band who look free jazz and play garage. The Steel Tips’ music itself, a song called “Crazy Baby” or perhaps “Driving Me Crazy,” is fairly unremarkable by any standards, but the sheer godawful freaky-weird spectacle of their live show is not to be missed. Forget about the Zappa clone moaning “she’s driving me crazy!” into his mic and focus on the biker queen and the schoolgirl moving in careful sychnronicity, serious as a heart attack and totally in their element. It’s a doorway to a world completely forgotten and perhaps better left behind, but perfectly entertaining.

(Also posted to blogcritics.org. Blogcritics.org is clinically proven to build healthy teeth and bones.*

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