Book Review: No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens

Almost Like Being There. Almost.

I've been on a bit of an indie / underground music history reading kick lately. It started with Jesse Jarnow's Yo La Tengo biography, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. I followed that up with Michael Azerrad's essential Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. And I just completed No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens by former regulars of the Trenton club, Amy Yates Wuelfing and Steven DiLodovico.

No Slam Dancing... works nicely as a companion to the other two books and helps to complete a picture of the underground music scene -- especially in New Jersey -- during the 80s and early 90s. Azerrad paints the "big picture," a picture in which bands like Black Flag carved out a network of clubs across the country where underground and punk bands could play. In North Jersey, the area covered by Jarnow's book, there was Maxwell's. To the south, in Trenton, there was City Gardens.

Wuelfing and DiLodovico conducted what must have been hundreds of interviews with the likes of Ian MacKaye, Henry Rollins, Gibby Haynes, Keith Morris, and (former bartender / current Daily Show host) Jon Stewart along with former City Gardens regulars and employees -- including former stage manager, bouncer, and current great FoCDM, Gentleman Jim Norton -- to compile a chronological, show-by-show history of the Trenton institution.

One of the main characters in No Slam Dancing... is City Gardens show promoter, Randy Ellis (a.k.a. Randy Now). Randy turned a warehouse-sized former car dealership -- owned and operated by Frank "Tut" Nalbone -- in one of the worst parts of Trenton into one of the most important underground rock clubs in America. In the words of Kevin Patrick of New Math and Jet Black Berries, "...everybody played there. Bands put their stake in the dirt, and playing there established you as a band at the level you wanted to be at."

With a few exceptions, bands in the book describe Randy Now as someone who treated them well and, maybe more importantly, loved music. He put together eclectic bills and provided a place for bands to play when there really was nowhere else.

The book's other main characters are the City Gardens regulars and employees. Whether skinheads that attended hardcore shows, bouncers and bartenders that saw everything, or the people who came to Thursday's 90-cent dance nights, the people at City Gardens formed their own community with its own set of rules and customs. The sentiment that crops up over and over in interviews is one of finally feeling accepted, of finally finding a place where it was ok to be different. Dance Night regular, Doug Reineke sums up that feeling:

"I tried to start a typical career working 9-5, and then I realized I didn’t want that, I wanted an alternative life. I want to get up every day and do something I enjoy, and if I don’t, I’m going to find a path with something different and better. I just want to live an honest life. I feel like that whole period of my life at City Gardens really gave me the strength and the vision to know that that is a real choice."

Regulars tell stories of going to three and four shows a week, of being driven to all-ages shows by their parents who waited in the back or in the parking lot, of fights and skinhead "walls of death," of unselfconsciously dancing alone on a Thursday night. Employees talk about some of the regular characters and about some truly historic shows.

A book so heavy on details can't help but feel a little long in some places, and some of the anecdotes repeat at different points in the book. But No Slam Dancing... is an important record of one of the New Jersey stops on the indie / underground railroad.

I wasn't into hardcore or anything much more "underground" than The Clash, The Replacements, or R.E.M. when I was a kid growing up in Jersey. No Slam Dancing... did make me feel a bit like I missed out on something by not being more adventurous when I was young. More than that, though, it allowed me to experience vicariously a time in music -- in New Jersey -- that's never coming back.

And I've got to talk to Jim Norton about Dave Navarro and that pitcher of ice water.

No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens is due out on March 10th.

Book Review: Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock by Jesse Jarnow

No Sex, No Drugs, Some Rock and Roll

To paraphrase the introduction at the beginning of each episode of Brian Fellow's Safari Planet on Saturday Night Live: "CoolDad is not a trained music journalist, nor does he hold an advanced degree in any of the media arts. He is simply an enthusiastic middle-aged man with a masters degree in economics and an abiding love for popular music."

Placed up against the encyclopedic knowledge of the members of Yo La Tengo or their biographer Jesse Jarnow, my personal level of indie music knowledge should disqualify me from ever writing another word about it. One outcome of reading Mr. Jarnow's book for me, therefore, has been to add to my reading / listening list many of the selections in Big Day Coming's bibliography. Jarnow's knowledge, research, and attention to detail help take what could be a relatively narrow subject and expand it to show the part that New Jersey, and Hoboken in particular, have played in the development of the musical genre we now describe with the catchall term "indie."

Yo La Tengo have meant a lot to me over the years. Part of their appeal for me, I think, has been their low key public persona and their "normalness." Understandably, this makes for probably the tamest rock biography ever written. Anecdotes range from the band's annoyance with the constant misspelling of their name to singer/guitarist Ira Kaplan's losing his wallet in the snow upon jumping out of the car. While this may not make for a voyeuristic page-turner, the story of Yo La Tengo and their steady persistence over nearly 30 years is inspiring on a certain level.

Jarnow points out that, at any given point in time, Yo La Tengo could be a cover band, a folk duo, a power pop trio, or a shoegaze noise machine. Kaplan is usually the guitarist; spouse Georgia Hubley is usually the drummer; James McNew is usually the bassist. But they may change that around at any time. Basically, Yo La Tengo are a group of people who have been able to make a living doing what they love pretty much the way they want to do it for almost three decades.

In order to provide some context for his main subject, Jarnow also chronicles the development of indie rock. He discusses the elements that were present in Hoboken (and Minneapolis and Athens, etc.) that made the development of a scene possible: a low cost of living, a college radio station in nearby WFMU, and a homebase in the form of Maxwell's. In addition to individual biographies of each member of Yo La Tengo, Jarnow covers fanzine culture, the history of the important Matador records, the effects of the Internet, MP3's, and indie taste-making sites like Pitchfork.

Jarnow does sound (justifiably) wary of the developments in the world of indie rock over the past decade: NPR's purchasing of much former independent college radio bandwidth, blog culture, coporate sponsorship of artists, the importance of a Pitchfork rating, and the compartmentalization of music via outlets like SiriusXM; but he doesn't come off as overly curmudgeonly.

Everything is covered with an impressive level of detail. That detail, while valuable, can also make the book drag in some places; but I'm glad it's all in there. And a book about a band who, according to the author, have performed over 1,000 different covers in their career just couldn't skimp on the minutiae.

Fans of Yo La Tengo or those interested in the part New Jersey has played in popular music beyond Frank Sinatra, Bon Jovi, and Bruce Springsteen will get the most out of this book. And if you think you know your indie music history, Big Day Coming could provide you with a nice reality check.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

First Attempt at a Book Review

CoolMom and I have this thing we do where one of us recommends a book to the other that the other, for various reasons, never reads.  "Oh, the book I've had on reserve for a month just arrived."  "I want to finish the last book in this series first."  It's weird.

Almost every time one of us breaks this pattern, though, the results are positive.   I spent months trying to get CoolMom to read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.  When she finally did, she loved it.  I'm currently trying to get her to start Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series without much success.  CoolMom's been working on me to read Ernest Cline's 2011 novel, Ready Player One, for the last several months.  I finally gave in, and I'm glad I did.

Ready Player One takes place in the post-peak oil year of 2044.  Much of the world lives in poverty, and the only escape for almost everyone is the massively multiplayer online universe of the OASIS, a virtual reality created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow.  Upon his death, James Halliday, whose avatar in the OASIS is called Anorak, releases a short film called Anorak's Invitation.  The film outlines a contest.  In short, three keys that open three gates are hidden somewhere in the OASIS.  The first player to find all three keys and to clear all three gates will inherit Halliday's considerable fortune along with a controlling interest in Gregarious Simulation Systems, the company Halliday and Morrow formed that controls the OASIS.   The prize becomes known as "Halliday's Easter Egg," and those who devote their lives to searching for it are egg hunters or "gunters."

James Halliday grew up in the 1980's, obsessed with video games and the pop culture of the time.  Players in his OASIS have a guarantee of privacy and pay no fees beyond the single quarter required to begin.  In an effort to locate the egg, gunters obsessively study 1980's pop culture for possible clues to the locations of the three keys.  Those scouring the OASIS for the egg include organized gunter clans and the ruthless IOI corporation that wants to control and commercialize the OASIS.  The novel's main character is Wade O. Watts, known as Parzival in the OASIS, a solo gunter and impoverished high school student.

The novel proceeds much as you might expect given the setup.  Parzival and his friends Art3mis, Aech ("H"), Shoto, and Daito battle the evil IOI to be the first to find Halliday's Easter Egg.  While the plot is conventional and movie theater-ready, the constant references to touchpoints from my own early years made this book something special for me.

In trying to understand Halliday's mind, Parzival becomes expert at early coin-op video games like Space Invaders, Pac Man, Joust, Defender, and Tempest.  He obsessively watches films like War Games, Real Genius, Ladyhawke, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  The "sitting room" in his virtual stronghold on the planetoid Falco is a replica of the living room from Family Ties.  Tandy's TRS-80, the Commodore 64, Atari's 2600 and all of its games figure prominently in the plot along with the music of Rush, Oingo Boingo, Frank Zappa, and Schoolhouse Rock.  And the entire novel is one, big tribute to the work of William Gibson with its corporatist dystopia and its virtual reality in which people can live out the past and even the dead speak to you as if they'd never gone.

My friends and I experienced, in the real world, almost all of the technology and pop culture that the characters in the OASIS experience virtually.  We sat on real basement sofas and argued over movies the way Aech and Parzival do in Aech's "basement."  We watched Monty Python movies together on cable or VHS.  We played Asteroids and Defender in the mall or at bowling alleys, and we challenged each other to games of Pitfall on the Atari or Jump Man on the Commodore 64.

With Ready Player One, Ernest Cline has created a little virtual reality in which I can go back to that time and, in a way, talk to someone as if he'd never really gone.