I could be their dad, and I think I’m about six months (probably nine) behind the young crowd who’ve known of them for at least twelve. I don’t care, because lag time is relative now. Or at least I tell myself that because finding music takes time, and the sheer volume of what’s available sometimes overwhelms when I’ve got tea to drink before my sensible bedtime. That’s a joke, but only just. I don’t feel like an old guy, but the skeleton hurts sometimes in ways it did not when I was twenty.

On Monday, February 19th, over schnitzel, and burger, and beer at Doug Fir, my middle-aged best friend and I discussed that the place seemed empty, and it would be, uh, a shame (sort of sorry about that one) if the band didn’t pull a big audience. They’re shame (lower case ‘s’, I believe, but it probably doesn’t matter), and they are, in the most apt usage of the word I’ve ever deployed, brilliant.

The debut album Songs of Praise was released in January, and could not have been made in America. They are quintessentially British, with obvious lineage to Mark E. Smith and the Fall, Blur, and are maybe not too far away from something late-80s/early-90s mid-English indie. You’ll have your own reference points, but those are accurate enough.

My friend and I were both immediately smitten after hearing their One Rizla a month ago. It’s anthemically perturbed without being pompous, and intelligent without being academic. The whole of the album is equally grand, smart and seething.

So, after a search and seeing they were playing Portland, I snapped up tickets for a rare ‘school night’ show. Monday came, and as I do for Sunday-through-Wednesday night shows, bargained with myself that ‘it’ll be OK that I’ll be exhausted tomorrow at work, but I’ll go to bed early tomorrow night and be fine by Wednesday morning…really, you will!’Well, it didn’t work. Again. But, on Thursday night, still tired, I could not care less.

They’re a group of five twenty-ish Londoners, and right now are touring the US for the first time. They’re angry and agitated, a little snotty, a bit sweary, and have been tagged by (mostly) UK press as the bright young things for guitar music. One article a few weeks ago called them “Britain’s Most Exciting New Band.” So many – so many! – bands release debut albums and are touted for their ability to make music feel alive and new again. This time it’s different because shame have palatable white-hot charisma that was tepid in almost all those other bands that have come and gone in the last fifteen years. They are that great.

Yet, shame don’t do anything distinctively new. Really, they don’t, and that’s not meant a slight. It’s innocuous fact. Mark Twain said there are no new ideas, just old ideas seen through a new kaleidoscope, or something like that. This is the case with shame, and their ‘scope sparkles. That I just referenced Mark Twain would make it an accurate assumption that my friend and I started the concert sitting in the back of the venue sipping our artisanal beer comfortably in chairs because we need back support. As it always has been, it’s great to go shows, and even better when there’s a place to sit. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. That sit didn’t last. It couldn’t with shame.

They walked on stage, the crowd applauded, and the relationship began. Before the end of the first song, the energy in the place had exploded. They are a wall of guitars, but they’re equally stompy. We forfeited the chairs by the end of the first song, but they were never claimed by anyone.

The aggression and agitation shame deliver, and their aforementioned seethe is tempered by enough nuance in the songwriting (and playing) that you know they actually do care. And f course they do, as they should. In 2018, any sort of punk aroma and snottiness feels dead on arrival, and maybe that’s because we all have smartphones now. The ability to move on to the next exciting thing is just a swipe away. Everything is consumed faster now, and when so many attempt to get attention by being clever, shame succeed because they have a temper and it’ legitimate, honest, and affirming.

Shame write songs that at first come off rude, like the euphemistic Gold Hole, and other lyrics like “My nails ain’t manicured. My voice ain’t the best you’ve heard. And you can choose to hate my words. But do I give a f***?”

But then they’re also smart enough to end the same verse with “Socks are old and shoes are broke. Lungs are tired ’cause they’re filled with smoke. Wallet’s empty I’m going broke. But I’m still breathing.”

You see, they add the hope there at the end. It’s not cloying, but it is there, and it’s genuine and believable in the way it’s delivered. They’re a band living out their growing pains in front of some of us who have already lived those same pains, and are going through new ones now. The only difference is we’re older with a relationship or two behind us, a kid or two with us, and a mortgage that owns us. It’s the same agitation, only aged and more refined. They don’t come across as singing to or at us, as much as they are sharing it with us. They’re as honest a band as I’ve ever heard, and it makes me wonder what it’s like to be twenty something listening to them now. It must be euphoric to see your peers make such music.

The band was tight, confident, and completely connected with each other behind singer Charlie Steen. The four of the band with instruments were totally absorbed into their own world and didn’t overtly interact or make eye contact with the 50 or so of us creeping closer, song by song, to the stage. Steen, on the other hand, had us his palm from the start. He has said in interviews that the “Idea of a rockstar is offensive.” If he believes that, he has some explaining to do, because if there was a rock star frontman, it’s him.

Maybe he does believe that statement, and maybe because of that belief he is a star. He’s 20, fidgety, confrontational, and absolutely magnetic. Two songs in, he took off his shirt. Three songs in, he sneeringly fondled his nipples. Six songs in, with the band musically solid and physically berserk behind him, he stood at the edge of the stage both flirting with, and seemingly despising us all. His charm is undeniable, and we all moved closer.

The focus is naturally on him, but they are unmistakably a band. Their combined abandon and commitment is gravity that pulled everyone to the stage. There were moments near the end when the crowd felt like we were unravelling. He knelt at the edge of the stage and rattled the microphone like the rattle of a snake while staring at us like Dad after we’d walked in past curfew. His confidence belies his age.

He jumped down amongst us for half a song, made his way to the back and pretend-anointed a few in the crowd. Most of the rest of us, I’m sure, were jealous. It was a silly moment during a show from a band with something to say, and I cannot imagine anyone else pulling it off so convincingly.

Watching a band so consumed with their youthful wit, and energized by their own commotion is invigorating. It magnified my own current middle ages, but was so mesmerizing that I also forgot time. The show was short at just under an hour. They didn’t play everything they’ve recorded, but it was perfect. The band acknowledge the crowd and left, while Steen walked the edge of the stage shaking and touching hands. If he despised us earlier, he seemed grateful then, and I can say without shame (actually, I am sorry for that one), that his right hand is soft.

Days later I was still tired from being out late. But, oh, was that worth it. If a band unmistakably in their zenith can make a guy (at least) chronologically-past his feel happy to be tired, then there is something to these five. It’s indisputable.

Having their record on in the next room brings me right back to the show. It’s loud, and thrilling, and I love it. But the tea has steeped, and I need to lay this skeleton down for the day. After hearing my phone announce that bedtime is nearing, I’ll finish this jasmine green and call it a night, resting assured that there are a group of young guys playing a show somewhere tonight and fighting the good fight better than anyone has in years. I’m proud of you, Dad…uh, Son.

Listen to Tasteless HERE

Listen to One Rizla HERE

Hello Rachel, I would like to introduce you to our readers so let’s talk a little bit about you, shall we? Your main focus as a musician is singing. How and when did all this start? When did you know this is what you want to do?

My mother had a extensive record collection. When I was three, she grew tired of changing records for me and I was taught how to do it myself. I had the ability to hear a song once and be able to sing every word in tune. I’ve always been mesmerized by music, I could sing along to all styles. My first gig came when I was just four, busking on my street corner in inner SE Portland, collecting nickels by singing Barbara Streisand and Carole King.

I must sing, and I sing everywhere. It’s not really a choice. It’s only  in the last few years that I’ve realized I could do it for a living. I’ve been a member of the bluegrass band The Rail Runners, and the folk/blues band The Wild Firs, where I sang backup vocals. I’m currently the vocalist with Nuclear Green, who have a pop/punk and eighties style. I make solo appearances as well.

Apparently your mom played a major role in building your interest in singing. Did your mom ever sing with you or to you? Did she encourage your interest in singing? Beside your mom, who else had a major influence towards further developing your skills?

My mom introduced me to music for sure. She had eclectic taste. My older sister was another major influence. She was 20 years older than me and always seemed so cool, so I liked what she liked. My mom did not encourage me to sing. Her interest in letting me listen to her records was primarily to keep me busy and to leave her alone.

I always found my own opportunities in music. I was in the choir and orchestra throughout school. I first played piano and trumpet, and later took up tuba, baritone, and trombone. I won a music scholarship to Mt. Hood Community College where I studied voice and orchestra. I’ve studied voice primarily over the last 15 years, and taught myself ukulele, guitar, and bass four years ago. I like working with different vocal teachers because they all have their own styles and specialties.

What is your favorite genre to sing to? What makes it so appealing from a vocalist viewpoint?

That’s a really tough question… My favorite is whatever I’m currently working on.

If you could share the stage with three singers who would they be and why?

Another difficult one! Only three? (laughs) Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Michael Jackson, Prince, Chrissy Hynde. Just because they all were or are such great talents, extraordinary entertainers, and amazing humans.

Ha ha! This might be a simpler question, what are the biggest goals you’d like to achieve as a singer?

Technically speaking, I’m always trying to expand my vocal range, which is a challenge as I age. I want to perform more, both locally and nationally, with a hope to tour in Europe in the future.

Last question. How would you define singing in your own words? What does it mean to you?

For me singing is communication. It’s the way I express myself. All my triumphs and tribulations are expressed in my songs. In fact, it’s easier for me to sing than to hold a conversation.

Thank you Rachel for taking the time to do this interview with me, and thanks to all Freeform Portland visitors for reading this article. You can catch Rachel at a songwriter showcase at the Jade Lounge on March 9th.

With music one can jump back to a different time, a different space…

It folds time so that as you listen now to a steady beat, now to an aggressive guitar, you are easily transported to the first time you heard the song…

Or some other emotionally infused moment at which the song was present…

Such as sharing the song with a friend. Seeing the band perform in concert. Perhaps a sexually charged moment at which the song in question was playing in the background, or some poignant moment in which the season and sunlight were perfect, striking your eyes like polite needles through bare tree limbs in winter, as you walked along listening to a song that you had heard before, but will forever now be part of this particular memory, now. In addition to all the other times. Hearing it again later might open a cascade of events or times. Memories stacked or unfolding one upon another.

In many ways, the threads of emotion and feeling entwined in the music you love provide a greater gravity of sorts than visual or olfactory events. Listening to music is like dropping a black hole on your chest. Every time you drop a needle on a record, cue up a cassette, press play on your cd player or Ipod, you are at the event horizon of a lifetime of experience, awaiting to repeat over again and again this new/old aural adventure.

Any song can be a trigger. Any record can draw you through to the past, based on your personal experience with any particular song. It does not always have to be a favorite song. It can any random song or ditty, that invokes the past experience like a movie projected on your memory eye.

Sometimes this can be evoked by the very first time we hear a song. So that each subsequent listen takes us back to the initial exposure.

For instance, when I play Can’s “Ege Bamyasi” I can feel myself almost physically back in the record store in which I worked, playing the record for the first time after purchasing a copy from a customer’s stack of used records.

Or a song with which we are already familiar creates a new memory that supersedes prior listening.  For me, for instance, this happened with “The Gift” by The Velvet Underground … which I heard one night or early morning … around 3 am … driving with two friends across the country, somewhere between Colorado and Iowa … racing in the flat dark on a highway, and the song came on over the radio … heightening the mood with a more intense sense of fear as half-asleep, I absorbed the lyrics and rhythmic feedback guitar.

And now whenever I play that track, there I am again, flying in a car across the plains.

Or the time I took acid and put on a record by Sonic Youth. “Expressway to yr. skull” ends with a locked groove, which means that the needle does not pick up when the song ends. Instead the record continues to play the same 20 or 30 seconds over and over, until you physically remove the needle from the record. But in the state I was in, and with time itself dilated by the drug, the locked groove might have played for an hour or more before I noticed it was repeating. Or was it only a few minutes that felt like an hour? Regardless, whenever that song comes up on my Ipod, I am hurled through a narrow tunnel of self experience, standing out of my head again in my small second storey apartment, the music swaying against the walls forever.

A very different, and emotionally charged, moment for me came after I first met my wife. We had only been dating for a few weeks when we went to her parents home and played some records. I remember her putting on “Seventeen” by the Sex Pistols, a record that, as a punk rock kid, I was extremely familiar with. Its meaning was changed in an instant. Now when I play that song I am back with my future wife in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by happy abrasive guitar.

These are but a few examples of time travel that I have experienced, thanks to music. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such situations. I have been listening to music all of my life and collecting such memories and moments, piling them up and gathering new ones each time a song replays. I am then whisked off through my life which is now bigger on the inside.

I am sure you have the same sort of experiences. Music, after all, is  a universal force that draws us together, from the past into the future.

God forbid I should ever be nice to people: it would ruin everything. – Lou Reed

Anthony DeCurtis’ Lou Reed: A Life, is likely to go down as the definitive biography of the legendary street poet rocker. As one of the few music journalists that the infamously prickly Reed got along with and a professor of creative writing, DeCurtis has the connections and the chops to thoroughly examine his subject’s life and art. One of my favorite parts of rock biographies is learning about the aspects of the musician that are unlike their stage persona. Not so with Lou Reed. He was on a lot of drugs (mostly speed) when he jammed out the original Velvet Underground songs with John Cale in a squalid apartment. He was in a very public three year relationship with a trans woman during his glam and “Rock and Roll Animal” phase in 70’s. He was sober, married and avidly into the NFL when he wrote “Average Guy”in the 80’s. His wonderful 1992 album Magic and Loss was about his friends who were dying at the time.

I have more Lou Reed solo records in my collection than any other artist. All of them, besides Berlin, have at least a couple irredeemable songs and a few of his albums are so misguided that I’m not entirely sure if the parts I like about them are even good. All of that said, I always come back to Lou Reed because he’s more on than almost anyone when he is being real. DeCurtis skillfully weaves what was going on in Reed’s life at the time with the songs in a way that keeps an impressively consistent psychological through-line on a volatile life. One aspect that struck me was Reed’s lingering resentment about the Velvet Underground. Although there was the short lived reunion in 1993, there are numerous stories of not just journalists, but close friends getting totally closed down by Lou for bringing it up. The famous Brian Eno quote about how “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band,” was more of a reminder to Reed about the slights the group suffered decades ago than something to be incredibly proud of. He always thought his next record (perhaps even Metal Machine Music) was going to be not only his best, but also his big break into the mainstream, all the way up to the near universally derided Metallica collaboration, Lulu, which was his last major release before his 2013 death at the age of 71.

Iggy Pop said of Reed, “I think he’s one of the few guys or gals who’s been in this biz a long time and still has a feeling for the world around him. Most of the others just end up singing to the mirror.” When I put on a Lou Reed album, I know that I’m going to have him front and center, confronting me without a care for how it’s going to make me feel . He’s going to disappoint me with some misplaced jazz number, an unfortunate reworking of a Velvet’s song, or blow me away with how he can blend tenderness and cruelty with aplomb on the three part song “Street Hassle.” He does not comfortably slide into a new role like David Bowie or find a new sound to match the same relatable message like Bruce Springsteen. Instead, Reed inhabits a place where the antics are uncomfortably real, what sounds upbeat is going downhill and that he had no intention of writing a “Perfect Day”or “Heroin” again.

For a guy who shot up on stage, fired John Cale and openly sang about spousal abuse, Lou Reed found a kind of redemption in his relationship with musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson. DeCurtis goes into detail about the truly remarkable union between these equals, that is relatively rare for famous artists, especially given how late in life they met. The balance that they struck to continue their creative endeavors while still be a regular sight together in New York was the most unexpected and illuminating part of the biography. It is almost improbable to think that a man whose career aim and life choices were geared towards driving gaps between himself and his listeners and those close to him, found a such a resonant coda in his last marriage.

Lou Reed was extremely generous with friends who were dying, almost becoming as close in the final days as the family members. He worked to revitalize the careers of some of the fifties and sixties rockers he grew up idolizing such as Doc Pomus. He grew to be remorseful about his prior drug abuse and violent behavior toward women and was quite explicit about discussing it in his music. All of that said, Reed kept true to his maxim about being difficult. There are far more important things than being nice, but I found a few nuggets of Reed breaking character and decided to pair them with songs that aren’t so nice.

Known for a stripped down sound, Reed was a surprisingly serious music gear fiend who would show house guests his pedals and amps for hours. He also was an early adopter of the Atari system and would readily play video games with family friends’ children after he gave up the drugs and alcohol. Probably not where he was going with “Video Violence,” but it’s easy to imagine him getting really competitive in Pong.

As many New York celebrities in the 60’s and 70’s, Reed was on familiar terms with Dr. Richard Freymann, otherwise known as Dr. Feelgood for his special shots of amphetamine and vitamins. When boozy writer Ed McCormack was ill after a binge, Reed showed up early to drag him to Freymann’s office saying, “Don’t worry about it. This guy gets in early. And he can cure anything – including cirrhosis – as long as you’re honest with him about your habits.” Although McCormack only received X-rays on his liver and bill of good health, Reed footed the medical bill in advance. Here’s a knowing drinking song called “Underneath the Bottle” from the excellent Blue Mask.

Reed was supporting the release of his 1979 album The Bells at the Bottom Line and confronted his producer Clive Davis onstage, saying, “Where’s the money, Clive? How come I don’t hear my album on the radio?” Uncharacteristically, for the man who named his prior record Take No Prisoners, Reed issued an apology, saying, “I’ve always loved Clive and he happens to be one of my best friends. I just felt like having a business discussion from the stage. Sometimes out of frustrations you yell at those you love the most.” Apologies are pretty nice, especially when you can acknowledge your failings in business and friendship. Here’s “Stupid Man,” from the same album he thought was going to do so well on the radio.

Leonard Cohen fell for Nico from a distance and followed her around New York when he first arrived in the city. About one particularly lonely night, he said:

“I remember lingering by the bar, I was never good at that kind of hard work that’s involved with socializing, and a young man came over to me and said, ‘You’re Leonard Cohen, you wrote Beautiful Losers.’ which nobody had read, it only sold a few copies in America. And it was Lou Reed. He brought me over to a table full of luminaries –  Andy Warhol, Nico. I was suddenly sitting at this table with the great spirits of the time.”

There is nothing that lifts a depressed writer’s spirits more than recognizing their obscure book and introducing them to the person they are hopelessly in love with. We’ll end with “Berlin,” which sure seems like it is about Nico.

Sources

DeCurtis, Anthony, Lou Reed: A Life. Little Brown and Co., 2017.

Simmons, Sylvie, I’m Your Man. Ecco, 2012.