PREAMBLE:
On Friday morning, I received my bivalent booster — the fifth shot I’ve taken in aversion of the coronavirus (an affliction which, as it happens, I have still not experienced first hand). Having now had a number of these shots, I had certain expectations about how I was going to react, but this particular one landed like a scud missile. I spent the entirety of Saturday feeling like my limbs were made of rusted, groaning metal and nursing a nagging headache that simply would not go away. But hey … I imagine it beats getting COVID, right?
In any case, in the middle of all this, word `round the campfire came down that Keith Levene, the original guitarist of Public Image Ltd. (and a founding member of the nascent Clash) had passed away. Hyperbole aside, it really cannot be overstated what a profoundly innovative and influential musician this man was. In my bivalent-addled mental fog, I immediately started typing up my own brand of eulogy — half-using it as an attempt to get my mind off the state of discomfort I was enduring. What resulted was a meandering series of slavishly overwritten, self-indulgent paragraphs that probably had much less to do with the man himself (who I never met, of course) than anecdotal information about where I was and what I was doing when I first experienced his music. I’m including it below, as I spent so much time on it, but it’s far from “my best work,” so to speak.
Once again, having never met the man, I cannot speak to his purportedly cantankerous nature nor his alleged drug problems, but I find it strikingly distasteful that a day after news of his passing, the official Public Image Ltd. social media channels opted not to make any mention of Keith’s passing, but rather highlight the anniversary of the release of some latter-era (and comparatively inconsequential) single. I find it shameful, embarrassing and petty that John Lydon cannot extend the courtesy of acknowledging the death of his former creative partner who played as equally significant a role in defining the band’s sound as Lydon’s contributions. It’s frankly pathetic. ADDENDUM: Lydon's official social media channels finally posted a terse acknowledgment on Monday, Nov. 14.
Here’s my original post. Apologies in advance:
I don’t really have criteria for what makes for suitable posts here and what doesn’t — it’s more of a gut feeling sort of approach — but this one struck me as too big not to address. As such, it’s two obits in a row.
It’s all a bit clichéd to dust off the old “I remember the first time I heard …” anecdote when penning a eulogy for a fallen musician, but I’m afraid I have no other way in. I cannot for the life of me remember the geographic particulars of where I might have been and under what circumstances I first heard the song “Public Image” by Johnny Rotten-née-Lydon’s new post-Pistols venture, but I do remember a certain amount of incredulity being involved. I believe it was via my friend Chico (not his real name — immortalized here). Half expecting the same variety of buzzsaw-guitar-driven attack, I remember being stopped dead in my tracks first by that big, bulbous bass sound and the echoey drums ushering in a guitar part that dispensed with all semblance of hackneyed power-chord heroics or noodly soloing in favor of a cascading torrent of staccato-melodic chiming. Even when Johnny assumed the mic, it wasn’t the spittle and snarl of the Pistols but more of a sort of artfully shrill keening. As Lydon part-sung/part-wailed/part-spoke through proceedings, it was only the rhythm section (then of bassist Jah Wobble and shortly-to-depart drummer Jim Walker) that adhered to the song-structure with any real commitment, leaving guitarist Keith Levene (formerly of the fabled London SS and an early iteration of The Clash) to color proceedings with his instrument in a manner that seemed both intriguingly wrong and revelatory. Welcome to Post-Punk.
Shortly after that, I remember picking up the LP from whence said song sprang, First Issue, at Crazy Eddie on West 57th Street. That summer, I seem to remember both my mother and sister hating not only the music (hardly surprising), but regularly insisting on turning the front cover over when I’d leave it on the coffee table next to the communal stereo of the house we were renting, as Lydon’s unblinking, bug-eyed stare gave them the willies.
But “Public Image,” the song, was kind of a ruse — a, by comparison, deceptively catchy track that in no way really prepared the listener for what awaited across the rest of the record. From the willfully ponderous pound of “Religion II” to the discordant agony of “Annalisa” to the surreally (and deliberately) annoying stomp of “Fodderstompf,” First Issue was never intended as family-friendly easy listening and very much did not behave as such. But where First Issue was an opening shot across the bow, its follow-up opus, Metal Box was the point of departure.
I’ve spun this shaggy yarn elsewhere here, but I came to possess my own copy of the unwieldy Metal Box quite undeservedly.
A year or so after divorcing my step-father, my mother had briefly started dating this guy called Arthur (although I believe I assigned him a different pseudonym in earlier posts — whatever, he’s not reading this). Upon learning that the petulant, teenaged son of the woman he was courting was evidently a budding music snob, Arthur thought it would be a grand idea to try to “win me over” by making me a (roundly unsolicited) mixtape. He mailed me a cassette — titled, if memory serves “It’s Gettin’ Hott!” — rife with extended mixes of songs by dance and R&B acts like Shalamar, Debarge, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, Nu Shooz, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Chaka Khan etc. etc., clearly not at all realizing the tastes, sensibilities and predilections of his intended audience. As someone otherwise preoccupied with bands, at the time, like The Exploited, Venom, Theatre of Hate and the Circle Jerks, suffice to say, I was not enthused. With a rude flair for the dramatic, I actually took a hammer to Arthur’s cassette, broke it in two, unspooled the tape, wrapped it around the broken shards and mailed it back to him. Delightful, right?
Evidently Arthur had a sense of humor, so didn’t hold that episode against me. In fact, a couple of months later, Arthur called me up to tell me that he was parting with his entire vinyl collection and going completely digital, instructing me to come to the lobby of his apartment building next to the Frick Museum to pick up crates of LPs he was discarding. Given the music Arthur had shared on that ill-fated mixtape, I didn’t have high expectations, but dutifully told him I’d take it all off his hands. I recruited my friend Jeff (who had a car, at the time) and we drove over to pick up the crates.
To make an already long story much shorter, suffice to say that I was entirely wrong about Arthur’s musical tastes. Sure, he might have liked a ton of cheeseball R&B bullshit, but that was only a fraction of his wider collection. In these crates were stacks upon stacks of crucial LPs by bands like The Fall, SWANS, The Au Pairs, The Individuals, New Order, Rip Rig + Panic, The Blasters, Romeo Void, Glen Branca, The March Violets, Nash The Slash, Pigbag, The Dance, Bow Wow Bow, Toyah Wilcox, Altered Images and — right smack in the middle of all of it — the coveted Metal Box by Public Image Ltd.
I’d heard of the Metal Box and probably spied it from a distance on a high shelf at Bleecker Bob’s, but now … it was mine. True to the legend, the packaging was sort of a chore to prize open, and the vinyl inside had to be handled just so lest one scratch the shit out of the grooves. And if my mother and sister thought they had reservations about my repeated airings of First Issue, they had a very rude awakening coming their way.
It’s hard to characterize the music on Metal Box at this late stage of the proceedings without lapsing whole-hoggedly into insufferably pompous hyperbole, but the record almost demands it. Gleefully burning the bridge behind them that could have easily taken them back to more conventional territory (or even, dare I say it, success), Metal Box eschewed all things “rock” in favor of a sound drenched in heady dub, sonic experimentation and abrasive noise. Lyrically, Lydon ruminates on his mother’s death from cancer (“Death Disco,” featuring Levene’s jagged approximation of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”), the strife in Northern Ireland (“Careering”), the suffocating doldrums of suburban life (“No Birds”) and, on “Poptones” (arguably the album’s most accessible track), a vague-but-harrowing account of a brutal kidnapping. Throughout, Keith Levene’s guitars sound like bloodied, broken glass above Wobble’s deep, bowel-worrying bass and Lydon’s baleful bleating. It’s a bleak, claustrophobic and uneasy listening experience, but still quite unlike anything I’d ever heard.
Of course, Keith Levene wasn’t to last in the ranks of Public Image Ltd. He did one more studio LP with the band after Metal Box, that being Flowers of Romance, which continued the band’s experimental streak.
———— end of draft
At was at this point wherein my headache got the better of me and I stopped writing (probably for the best).
Farewell, Keith Levene. Regardless of what John Lydon continues to not say, you were a genius.
The below comes courtesy of the incomparable Mike Coles of Malicious Damage.
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