We Are Only Strangers

Another week gone - easy to despair, with our Senate bravely shoving a bill through to get rid of Obamacare, to finance tax cuts for the rich from the blood and treasure of everyone else... Transparent theft, open repudiation of campaign promises even Donald Trump made (though who didn't know he was lying through his teeth?) I despair. The Republicans seem determined to extract every penny from the country before it burns down that they can get - the Democrats - somehow manage to end up seeming to be more concerned with sup[pressing the wrongthink on their side than in stopping the GOP. Maybe that's a symptom of reading Twitter, where people seem to spend all their time mocking their enemies, and shivving whoever is standing just to your right or left.... I suppose conservatives do that as well, but they still seem to somehow keep the votes in line.

There is only so much of that we need. Instead, let's talk music. First, June 22 marked the 40th anniversary of Peter Laughner's death (19771) - my opinions of Pere Ubu are no secret, and though their legacy came mostly after Laughner left, he was certainly instrumental in their sound. And I like Rocket From the Tombs almost as much - and in fact, like Laughner's work, separate from Thomas and company, almost as much. He was different from Thomas - and different from Cheetah Chrome and Stiv Bators, as well, though he overlapped with them all. RFFT mixed up the Velvets, the Stooges, Captain Beefheart and Cleveland - Pere Ubu dialed up the Beefheart (so to speak), Dead Boys the Stooges - Laughner doubled down on Lou Reed, and used that as a departing point to bring in more folk, more mainstream rock - blues, Richard Thompson, The Stones. If he'd lived (if he hadn't killed himself on booze and speed at 25), he might have been really big - maybe not record selling big, but reputation big. He wrote great songs, he was a very good guitar player, he was a passable singer with a distinctive voice... He should have been somebody. Here, in any cae, is a Stones cover recorded, I believe, the day he died...



And a Peter Laughner tribute, from Wilco:



Meanwhile, on a less depressing front - I was doing some cleaning, trying to get some of my junk in order, looking at my boxes of cassettes and trying to get them down to something manageable, and I found this: Translator's second record, No Time Like Now, with the son Un-Alone on it. I had forgotten about Translator - forgot they they existed. Usually that happens rooting around YouTube - stumble on some band that sounded really cool 35 odd years ago... but sometimes, it happen in the atom world too. I wish I hadn't forgotten them - they were pretty damned good. They sound like a nice bridge between new wave and the kind of psychedelic jangle pop that filled certain radio stations in the 80s - that is to say, they sounded like a west coast version of REM, more or less contemporary... Some win, some lose, I guess... but they were good.

Here is the video for Unalone, good sound, and what looks like scenes from Twin Peaks, of all things...



And a very energetic live performance, on old videotape...



And also live, their first single, Everywhere That I'm Not. That's impossible, that's imposs...