Of course, any book that involves revolving underground pleasure nexuses is bound to be full of surprises, but the most surprising thing about Underground USA is what isn't in it: While burgs like Portland, Oregon; Columbus, Ohio; and Louisville, Kentucky, are listed, Dallas-Fort Worth is not.
Puzzled? Join the club. Although Street Beat loathes self-reference in music journalism, it has to be noted that I've lived in many of the cities listed in UUSA and have more than a passing familiarity with most of the others. A fertile music scene isn't necessarily proportional to size, of course, and the inclusion of indie hot spots like North Carolina's Chapel Hill/Raleigh/Durham area is understandable. But to list Louisville and omit Dallas is inexcusable. I've lived in Louisville--it's a lovely, verdant town, but it doesn't have one-tenth the music that Dallas does.
And Columbus? How much credit do you want for the New Bomb Turks, anyway? More credit than that accrued by the Toadies, Tripping Daisy, Horton Heat, Al Dupree, Ronnie Dawson, Donny Ray Ford and Barry Kooda, the Tomorrowpeople, the Old 97's, Slow Roosevelt, Brave Combo, Robert Ealey, the Lucky Pierres, Little Jack Melody, Caulk, rubberbullet, Gene Summers, and Corn Mo? Even if you interpret "underground" in such a way as to eliminate MIAs like Tablet and Funland and/or popsters like Deep Blue Something and Jackopierce, Dallas still deserves inclusion, is still (to use UUSA's language) a "top music city." Besides, if you were to be rigorous in your definition of "underground," wouldn't you avoid "top music cities" entirely?
Of course, if this "guide" were really intended as such, wouldn't it make sense to include major destinations? Common sense indicates that there are probably more overnight visitors cooling their heels in the Dallas area, wondering what there is to do on a Wednesday night, than in Memphis or Columbus.
Granted, putting together such a list is an exercise in irritating local boosters; somewhere in West Virginia the music editor of the Tidley Corners Picayune-Intelligencer is no doubt muttering to himself as he writes a screed similar to this one. A call was put in to UUSA's publicist almost a month ago in order to give Duncan Bock, the book's editor, the opportunity to cast some light on Spin's city-picking rationale, but neither that call nor its numerous follow-ups elicited a response.
That leaves us with but one option: to assume that this is yet another of Spin's gratingly hipper-than-thou exercises, building on the foundation of lazy ineptitude laid by the magazine's execrable Alternative Record Guide in 1995. Designed not to convey any real information but to make clear how much more the folks at Spin know than the rest of us morons, publications like UUSA are the reason many music fans define "tragedy" as a busload of rock critics plunging off a cliff with two empty seats.
Rock journalism is an unusual field: No other form of writing tolerates so much contempt for both audience and subject, and Spin is the most contemptuous of a cranky, self-indulgent lot. Take this excerpt from Mark Schone's "The Song Remains the Same," a look at the odd persistence of classic-rock radio that appeared this July and is 100 percent pure Spin. Schone is sitting in one such radio station's control room on the night shift, listening to idiot-citizens and their pathetic requests. One guy calls in and asks to hear some "older Skynyrd."
Finally, after 16 hours of reruns, and five of giggling stoners, I've had enough. I break in before Ryan [the caller] can answer.
"Ryan?"
"Yeah?"
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Yeah."
"What would newer Skynyrd be?"
"I really don't know."
"There's no such thing. You heard about the plane crash? The plane crash that killed the whole band?" Before I can add that people who want something "newer" don't call classic rock stations at 2 a.m., Ryan hangs up. I have bummed his trip."
The smug, self-satisfied arrogance with which Schone concludes the paragraph would be reason enough for breaking a chair over his head, as is the writer's completely gratuitous insertion of himself into a story, but we may ignore these for now. What makes Schone such a quintessential Spin writer is the fact that he is completely wrong: the 1977 plane crash took the lives of only three of the 10-member band, which re-formed in 1987 with most of the surviving personnel. Since then, they have released 11 albums--some of them containing all new material--and have had a movie made about them. They tour large outdoor complexes like Starplex almost every summer and are nearly as popular now as in their heyday; more significantly, their critical acceptance has grown.
All of this, apparently, was unknown to putative music writer Schone, who was too busy being vexed by all the idiots around him to notice that he was the idiot--just as Spin was too busy pandering to the tastes of its contributors to worry about what UUSA should really be. Columbus may well have been included because contributor Ron House is one of the most dreaded of all rock-crit subspecies: the writer with a band, in House's case the enormously influential Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments. While you really can't fault House for thinking that his hometown is cooler than Dallas and that his band is more worthy of note than any Dallas band, you really can fault Spin for going along with the notion. Whether Dallas was left out of the Underground USA "guide" because of laziness or stupidity, it was still a mistake, and it's far from blind boosterism to say so.
Scene, heard
Club GridLock will present a "futuristic evening" of international Latin music called "El Santuario" (the Sanctuary) on Thursday, December 4, in honor of Enrique Iglesias' concert the next day. Jesus Chairez of KNON's (89.3 FM) Sin Fronteras radio show will be host; Rock en Espanol (and other Latin styles) records will be spun in the main club space, with salsa and merengue on the patio...Insomnia, the "caffeine nightclub" in Deep Ellum, has announced that it is incorporating live performance into its format and is looking for new acts that want to perform on the club's two stages...
Grammy-nominated reggae star Freddie McGregor is coming to Tropical Cove Friday, November 28. Don't forget, Cove dress code means no tennies...Atom 12 is holed up in the studio with producer David Castell working on their first album and reports that work is proceeding apace. The band hopes for a release date sometime in the beginning of 1998; catch them at Club Clearview Saturday, November 29...The musical mixmasters of the Vas Deferens Organization have yet another new release, this one bearing the charming, appetite-suppressing title Sweat Your Cheeses, But Not in My Salad. This release is on the challenging San Francisco label Charnel House, and VDO knobmeister Matt Castille reports that the group's increased media coverage--'97 was a banner year in that respect--is beginning to show some results. "The first pressing of 1,000 has already sold 700 copies, and that's prior to shipping," an obviously delighted Castille reports, adding that the group is planning live shows sometime in the not-so-distant-future...There will be a free classical music symposium on Saturday, November 29, at the Dallas Museum of Art. The 1 p.m. lecture on "The Classical Ideal in Art and Music" will be followed by a 3 p.m. concert...Congratulations to the Arthur Riddles Jazz Quartet on hitting the three-year mark with their Sunday-evening gig at the Balcony Club...
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