The Steaming Heap O' Turd that is Radiohead's Amnesiac, and, uh, Steve Wynn

So…finally not everyone’s buying it anymore. The enigmatic (and quite frankly it turns out, weird) Radiohead phenomenon evaporates as I write this and more than a few unholy fools are jumping from the fiery bandwagon just to save a little face. God’s own Rock Band, it would seem, has slipped one too many mickey’s into the drink of mainstream rock culture. The final dose being an oblivious heap o’ turds gracefully titled Amnesiac (as in, forget it pal, we’ve gone off a short pier at ninety-eight miles an hour) - a fitting title for an entirely unmemorable record.

Now, I’m not just getting my charlies off by bludgeoning this damn thing, I really thought I’d always like, or rather, wanted to always like these guys. Or at the least, I liked the idea of Radiohead. I mean, hell, who wouldn’t have? Every bleepin’ rockroll soul on the Planet was publicly diggin’ these cats with so much goddamn gusto you’d think they had a stake in their game or something (save Dean Bob Christgau - who gained a good chunk of cred in the daily ‘lose some/gain some’ sway I have for the man when he very publicly listened to the records and went “huh?”).

These were supposed to be the madmen ghosts of rockroll present who were delivering rock’s “future” a silver platter. And not only on time…but early!

Radiohead: the self-appointed deconstructionists set to tear down all of the walls so everyone else can get a glimpse of what might exist on the other side (for a few bucks of course) before someone started building it back up. So like any sensible rockdog with a penchant for buying malicious hype I said, ‘sign me up boys!’ This would be the train, buy your ticket, and take the ride. You couldn’t miss this one or you’d be on the queer side of everything that was gonna matter from here on out.

Something odd happened on the way to those Elysian fields: I went to see a Radiohead gig. It was a spectacle in support of their (Pink) Floyd-ian freakout OK Computer and I remember (well, I can piece together a hazy recollection - the drink, you know?) being ecstatic about the gig.

Blathering on and on in people’s ears at the show, in the bathroom, on the floor, about how this was it. This is what rock and roll needed, where it would go from now on was in the hands of these glorified shoe gazers. Hypnotized into basically spewing the dullards’ party line on the band. Driving home I felt totally high. Revived in every sense. Rock and roll would be OK.

The next day I nursed my head back in line with the rest of my spirit by painting a room in my joint a stark crimson red while listening to OK Computer endlessly. I even called a few folks between paint strokes to tell them that we were all safe now…just listen, and you too will know. I finished painting the room and put the disc away - and never listened to it again. Never wanted to. Not because of any sort of cosmic shift or any shit like that. I just never reached for it again when I wanted to hear some music.

So when Radiohead re-saturated our world with the release of a “concept” record called Kid A I started to wonder about this bunch. Why did they become so easily forgotten? When I finally got my hands on Kid A I cringed and then wrote a lengthy essay/review that somehow wound up trying to convince somebody that there was a distinct kinship between Radiohead and Ennio Morricone. I shipped the thing around to some outlets that I’d conned my way into before without giving the thing any thought whatsoever. Of course it was a great record. It had to be.

But, as anyone who tried to listen to Kid A knows, the record was an unmitigated disaster. Unlistenable as pop music, and utterly boring and confused as the neo-jazz, prog rock it sought to be, the record committed the greatest crime that a record can - it was flat-out competently boring. I quickly e-mailed the folks I’d sent the review to and demanded it be retracted, I was wrong and I needed people to know it. So desperate to be righted that at one point I even argued my own very existence with a web-site boss who planned on running the thing. I wrote to him confessing that “I” didn’t really exist, that in all honesty (the best of policies) I was actually only a fifteen year old girl in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who’d been doing essays under this pseudonym in an effort to be taken seriously.

Moreover, I was a fifteen year old fake who had actually just been plagiarizing old reviews of folk records by writers from the 1950’s that no one had ever heard of, altering them slightly to make it seem as though I had a very weird and eclectic approach. I swore up and down that my bit on Kid A was actually a thieved piece from 1956 about The Decataur Boys only record When the Grass Isn’t Greener (a move I’d used before, but not in this instance) which would only get the web ‘zine into deep legal trouble which I would be safe from because of my “confession” prior to publication.

It didn’t work. So, in the end, I’m forever the asshole who, in print, said that Radiohead’s Kid A is “a post modernist’s mirage; the despairing enigma knowable only to the sufferer’s of a thousand days and nights under the defeating anguish of the hottest rays of the sun” and “Ennio Morricone once painted this same discord, this floating, tumbleweed’s view of a harsh world made more harsh by those who are supposed to make it livable - us.” I’m sorry. I am very, very sorry. Self-loathing couldn’t fix this mess. Kid A, obviously, was a weak stab at art by a band that has a loose grasp of the concept. Either that or it was the first stage of the most elaborate spit-in-their-faces joke in modern pop culture history.

I’d rather cling to the latter as the ideal - Radiohead playing some sort of a massive, wicked joke on everyone. “Let’s toss out the most inane drivel we can and watch them fall all over themselves to justify calling it art!” I love the concept. There does, however, remain one fatal flaw in such a nifty idea - Radiohead’s music is just too damn boring to have been contrived as a stab at humor - and, from the messy sound of things on Amnesiac, they did it twice! Nobody has the balls to try that one - even Lou Reed jumped ship back into some of his most accessible pop after the horror show of Metal Machine Music. The sad fact of the matter is that Radiohead’s noise art explorations are terribly cold and utterly, unequivocally humorless. I doubt that anybody could fire off as lifeless a pair of records (Kid A, Amnesiac) and not absolutely mean it, but Radiohead seems to claim that they do mean it, and that is what makes this whole sordid affair so terribly sad.

Steve Wynn sure as shit means it. That’s the easy obvious on his staggering and astonishing new double disc Here Come the Miracles. Wynn cut his formidible teeth fronting one of the finer post punk bands of its era when he and the Dream Syndicate battered their own rarefied version of the punk form with healthy doses of sonic blues and an anti-punk embrace of rock icons like Dylan, Lou Reed, CCR amongst others. On the salvation seeking Miracles Wynn spends the greater part of nineteen songs struggling to exorcise the haunting ghost of California from his own psyche as though it were more a plague than a place, and in turn his own past - lives and loves alike. Miracles comes on with such a diverse racket that it becomes a backwoods journey through post punk’s highest and most ambitious possibilities. It’s filled with grating, wailing guitars, steadily brilliant keys playing, stark and poetic imagery, and a fantastic blur of the Reedian and Dylanesque influence that sparked so much of Dream Syndicate’s best work.

But by no means is this mimicry of those idols; this is an assertively assured record that will define Wynn for the ages. It’s got all the moxy of an enduring, emotive, and intriguing listen that will rate along side of many memorable double disc efforts that inspired it (the Stones Exile on Main Street, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Husker Du’s Zen Arcade - to name a few).

Here Come the Miracles is an utterly fulfilling rock record in every simple sense of the form. Loaded with enough guitars, piano, drums, high lonesome drama, and gut wrenching soul baring to be the panacea to all of rock and roll’s current lifeless ills, the record is quite simply indispensable.

“I’m really glad it seems to come across the way people say it does,” a soft-spoken Wynn told me before hitting the stage to bring the already lively songs to their life-affirming peak. After fifty European shows (where, in a sad state of American apathy, Wynn keeps the better portion of a fan base) Wynn and his band were brilliantly spot-on tonight - an early stop in the bands American tour - mixing the record up and obliterating any foolhardy sense that rock and roll may be waning in these early days of the new century. The classically simple guitar-guitar-bass-drums lineup fired on all cylinders as Wynn and company sweat passion from every pore. The show had a spirituality to it that amounted to a revival of sorts - the sort that that tends to bring the faithful back into line, and the strays back into the fold. Unlike the recent Springsteen and E-Street Band reunion gigs which found the Boss aping ministerial and rolling through an uninspiring, scripted Preacher Bruce schtick, this was the sort of unspoken anointing that lives in the music itself. All you had to do is listen. No one need say a word about what it all meant.

Perhaps that’s the biggest rockroll problem in these days of fear - the listening. It seems to be the forgotten art in the equation these days - the call and response of passionate music. While the Radiohead’s of the world seem ardent to announce a shifting emotional chill - the humanity in our world chaffed to a hardened callous - Steve Wynn (and there are others - also sadly ignored) still thrives in the spiritual quality of hands-on sounds and the unparalleled experiences of simply living a life.

Music, be it rock and roll, the blues, jazz, reggae, gospel, rap, whatever, has, at its very finest, always been profoundly personal. It’s about internalizing and viewing the world, and life, from the inside out. It’s about finding out where you fit into things, or how you can fall away with grace. It seeks others, yet stays in solitude. It is universal, yet confined to each listener’s singular experience. It is life’s urgent heartbeat no matter what the form. It tells stories, teaches lessons, entertains, escapes, endures, is beloved, reviled, forgotten, and embraced. And above all else, no matter how cold it feels or pretends to be, music is about warmth. No matter how downtrodden and dark, it remains covertly optimistic; no matter how violent or defeated, how tired and lost, how fearful or depressed, it’s ultimately an extraordinarily human art form that in the end is nothing but life affirming.

So in Wynn’s glorious struggle for redemption, in his sometimes dark and gloomy stretch for rockroll salvation, in the radiant and white noise that sets Here Come the Miracles ablaze, I find nothing short of life itself. A reason for living until the next rocknroll supernova explodes before me. And I believe (because I have to). Steve Wynn just makes it a little bit easier for now.

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