Friends And Fall Fanhood In Motion Across America: A Personalized Report
By David R. Stampone
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 03:04:49 -0800
From: David R. Stampone <stampone@hotmail.com>
To: puckett@crash.cts.com
Subject: Re: the Fall?
Mr. P't -
The whole exchange - hey, why not, right? Do it to it ... Shouldn't be much to catch, spell-wise - and you'll recognize any presumably intended idiosyncratic orthography, eh? What's the site called, full name?
Best,
D*
p.s. Just heard the news today, oh boy ... George Harrison dead at 58. Yessir, all things must pass, too true ... "The Quiet Beatle," sure, but essential - and credibly spiritual/altruistic enough to believe his reported final statement ...
Know what two of my fave Beatles covers are?
There was this early tribute/benefit rec back in the later 80s - before that concept was so burnt - called "Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father," released in honor of Sgt. Pep's 20th anniversary if I recall, a different indie/alt act covering every track in sequence ...
Of course, I dug the Sonic Youth take on Beatle George's fine 'n' droney "Within You, Without You" ...
And then there's this great Liverpool-meets-Manchester reading of "A Day in the Life" done by ...
The Fall.
p.p.s. ... "Love one another." His last words. Amen.
--------------------------
From: Scott Puckett <puckett@crash.cts.com>
To: David R. Stampone <stampone@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: the Fall?
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 21:23:07 -0800 (PST)
You know, I've got an idea (only one for a change) - if you're okay with it, I'll just run the exchange ... save spelling. I'll do a quick spell check and up it goes. Sound good?
--Puckett
--------------------------
On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, David R. Stampone wrote:
U scribble:
From: Scott Puckett <puckett@crash.cts.com>
To: David R. Stampone <stampone@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: the Fall?
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 10:48:55 -0800 (PST)
Hey David,
I've been saving that Fall email you sent out for a while. Do you mind if I add it to the Punk Rock Academy site? You'll be appropriately credited, of course.
--Puckett
I scrabble:
Scottron -
Hey, that'd be fine - good idea, and I'd be honored ...
But could you send it back my way once just to see if it's okay spelling/punctuation-wise? 'Cause I've not read it for a week or so, and just sent it out to folks w/o too much looking over and no spell-checky-check, y'know?
Aw, never mind if it looks/scans okay, I guess ... will I ever learn to keep the perfectionist in me at bay? Tryin' ...
But, yeah - if you could just put it up as is, w/o any change to content (I'll not modify anything either), that be swell ...
One thing, now that I think of it ... some lines of set-up would help, minimal explanation, maybe even w/ a semi-goof title, like this:
Friends and Fall Fanhood In Motion Across America: A Personalized Report
The following is an e-mail, presented in its entirety, originally sent by SD-based Fall fan David R. Stampone to Philly-based Fall fan Laurel Lee Katz (and CCed to other potentially interested friendly parties). Stampone had seen the first concert of The Fall's brief mid-November 2001 US tour (at
the Knitting Factory up in LA), and was responding to Katz's request for a report/recommendation as to whether she should catch one of The Fall's imminent tour-closing dates at the Knitting Factory up in NYC (she eventually did - and thoroughly enjoyed it).
Cool 'nuff?
D*
p.s. Dude! Maybe, ah, we go punk rock in a maximal way: just stick this whole e-mail over top the original, let the folks sort it out, start the initial e-mail right here ...
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 09:09:38 -0800
From: David R. Stampone <stampone@hotmail.com>
To: david4sixers@hotmail.com
Subject: the Fall?
L -
So, the Fall this weekend in NYC? I'd say go. I would if I were there/nearby. Even after seeing the rather puzzling show I saw in LA last week (first music perf. on a tidy US tour: 3 nights in LA to start, 3 in NY to close, one each in SF, Seattle), which, true enough, left me w/ a sackful of caveats to pass on to you ...
For all I'd heard about this latest line-up being best in a while, I found 'em kinda undistinguished and straight ahead, churning r-o-c-k vigorously delivered by younger short-haired Brits. Good, but basic gtr/bs/drms, no expected keybs at all; suitably pounding like FallMusic can/should be ... but nothing close to the nuanced weirdness of past ensembles (like the only other time I saw the band, Halloween '85 or 6).
Not much older, familiar material either, playing half the set from their new "Are You Are[cq] Missing Winner?" album, as yet unreleased in the US and apparently not available for sale at show (huh?) ...
They did do the vintage elliptical Can-man tribute "I Am Damo Suzuki" (from mid-80s high-point This Nation's Saving Grace LP) as their second/last encore, and that made the show for some folks. Also, they did a a cool version of "Mr Pharmacist" the old garage stomper by the Other Half that they've covered for a while; and they did "F'oldin' Money," an early rock 'n' roller originally done by Sun Records dude Tommy Blake that they recorded a few years ago (any cover the Fall/Mark E. Smith render, of course, comes out sounding like nobody but the Fall, whether its Lee "Scratch" Perry or R. Dean Taylor, the latter being a guy they've covered twice, a white songwriter who worked for Motown and had a fluke hit in the early 70s with "Indiana Wants Me").
Brand new and recent stuff is good tho, and what lines/words can be made out sound like Smith still has his trademark caustic 'n' cantankerous - and dryly humorous - lyrical wit intact ...
But M.E.S. looked/looks like hell. Scary. Years of booze and presumed speeding away and it's just so there in his prematurely wasted face, his old-man stagger, his twitchy mannerisms. Low energy on stage, too, like he's not sure he wanted to be there. A couple times he seemed to lose interest and, as if to amuse himself, wondered over to the gtr/Bs amps and fiddled w/ the settings as the lads played (they readjusted when their scrawny boss returned to mike, wasn't looking). At one point, he took (fresh?) lyric sheets out of pocket, sang-spoke 'em (and well, good lines, too) ... and couldn't seem to stuff them back in his pocket ...
And yet ... that blasted "poete maudit" appearance/air is nothing new in great language arts, no? Rimbaud, Burroughs, Bukowski (one newer song by Smith is apparently a sorta tribute to him) and so on, all looked dangerously worked years before their time. Then there's the odd way Smith did seem to be more in control than you might think - the way he'd get a bit into it, then resist and slyly sneer off the moment ... one friend of mine commented that he couldn't figure out if he was doing some "Andy Kaufman of rock" routine or what ...
And that's it: hard to assess. I'm not alone in, a week later, still not being sure how I feel about the show. I mean, I didn't wanna see the onstage intra-band violence that marked the last time the Fall played America (NY, '98, Smith was arrested for assault, the Fall appeared kaput), but I would hope he could be a more spirited performer ... although, damn, his anti-charisma/black-hole-of-presence thing was ... kinda ... fascinating. Or was he just pathetic?
On the last count, I must say this: his actual vocal skills are still quite strong if hard to compare; that unique nasal sarcastic/whiney tone and affecting delivery - it's is all there ... and I haven't gotten the sound out of my head for days.
One good - favorable - bottom-line assessment might be ... is there anybody or anything else even remotely like this out there? Isn't most rock, most music, most art, so fucking safe and easy and unchallenging these days? Isn't it great to, on the one hand, recoil at how messed up this guy appears, yet strain to hear whatever the accented cheeky bastard is ranting over the non-glamorous racket? And then you clearly catch a few stinging lines - "I'm in a bourgeois town-uh / It's so bourgeois, man / I've got the bourgeois blues-uh" - and you think, well, there ya go: I knew there was something here, I knew he was onto some truth, I knew he had some pearls he just had to deliver somehow ...
Or am I being deluded by the romantic notion of even that?
Sooo cool to be left guessing ...
Here's something I wrote for a review of the show, a paragraph that I'm not sure I'll ever actually use ...
Yes, it's the Fall, creaky Manchester's cranky own, an enduring worldwide cult band, a key inspiration in far-flung fertile scenes (Iceland, New Zealand), a traceable influence on some of the most demonstrably excellent American bands of the 80s/90s (Sonic Youth, Pavement). Legendary, historical - respect is due to Mark E. Smith for keeping something going non-stop like this/that since 1977, an unbroken line of potent experimental post-punk industrial skiffle w/ a rockabilly backbeat, tweaking things here and there - now more poppy (when American ex-wife/gtrist Brix was in tow), now more dancey/faux-'lectronica (last few years) - but essentially the same, pretty damned idiosyncratic, pretty non-mainstream, pretty not-pretty but pretty f'in' hard to deny once you've deciphered a bit o' the code ...
- D*