Look Back And Wonder

My Mod Roots? That Would Make Me A Phony
Fair warning: This entry is going to be a stream-of-consciousness trip through my CD and LP shelf. It might get a little obscure.

I've been listening to a lot of Paul Weller lately as I picked up even more of his work for $10 per CD at one of these dodgy CD shops. Some of his work with The Jam on the double CD The Jam: Gold has been really interesting as it sounds nothing like the way I remember them. Indeed, they sound freshly-minted with New Wave, and hardly punk.


Man, Weller looks so young on the right hand side there. He reminds me a bit of the way James looked when I first met him aeons ago. :)

In fact it's been pretty hard to pin-point the initial moment of my contact with the Weller oeuvre but I'm sure I've been interested in his work for a long time without having the luxury of being able to throw money at his work until recently. I guess he was at the end of the queue and his time came up. However what put him on the queue in the first place is his guitar work on 'And Through The Wire' on Peter Gabriel 3.


It's a right little rocker and my favourite moment on the first side of the album which has many colours and moods. More famously it is the first side of that album that gave us THAT Phil Collins Sound on 'Intruder' but it is Weller's guitar work on 'And Through The Wire' that has kept that album in my high estimation through the years (That, and 'Not One Of Us', another guitar-rock rave up).

Peter Gabriel never quite makes it back to guitar rock after that moment in his career. Not that he was ever big on guitar players letting it rip; the other great post-Genesis guitar moments are all on Peter Gabriel 1 & Peter Gabriel 2. Have you listened to 'White Shadow' lately? Anyway, Weller's moment on PG3 is about the last good guitar moment in Gabriel's oeuvre.

Having lavished that bit of praise, the reason he was at the end of my queue-of-interesting -artists was because I have long owned a copy of 'In The City'. As first albums go, this one is pretty underwhelming.


So much so I dreaded to hear their second album. Purist Jam fans will always find a reason why this album is a great album. However if you were coming from where I'm coming from when I was a teen (wind-milling my black Les Paul Custom knock-off), then this album was a big disappointment for the $5.00 I shelled out. That's exactly $5.00 for the 2nd hand copy that was possibly better spent on buying a 2nd hand Rick Wakeman solo LP. Possibly - not definitely. Sometimes when you experiment, you come up a cropper. I figured, live and learn, it's a foolish man who rushes in to make the same mistake twice, right?

The other reason he stayed at the end of the queue was the fact that I was suspicious of the 'mod revival' that was springing up around me in the early 1980s. The Mod Revival. If you can remember that as a first hand experience, you're definitely a Gen-Xer.

The way it manifested in Sydney was the line of Vespas outside the Valhalla Cinema whn they played the doublee bill of 'Quadrophenia' and 'The Kids Are Alright'. It's a far cry from Brighton and there never really was a big brawl between the bikers and the Vespa-boys, but you know, it really was a bit hokey. It seemed contradictory for there to be a retrospective revival fad for something that was about being on the cutting edge. It's like trying to come up with a re-heated souffle.

Plus the bands were shi'ites. I never liked The Sunnyboys. I never liked Spy Versus Spy. They were really un-musical bands, short of about 10 good songs per 10 song album. Then, there was The Jam. It was too easy to tar with the same brush.

Then, there was the inherent phoniness of being in Sydney Australia and trying to vicariously identify with such a British phenomenon. I reasoned: It's got to be crap because the authentic moment of Mod had passed into history, so it felt like everybody was faking it, and the only thing holding the revival together was everybody's commitment to keep on faking it. No wonder it promptly died with the advent of New Wave. Meanwhile I figured, better to plug oneself into the authentic sound of history than the phony moment. Everybody else had more fun. I turned into a record geek. :)

It's not a better way to be, it's just that one is rarely there to get the authentic experience of the authentic moment in recorded music; therefore one must choose one's poison. I chose to be phony in order to get at the authentic experience, partly because I am in no way British so I'm already doomed to phoniness in listening to mod rock to start off with. It's the same phoniness of a 14 year old kid today who tells you how GREAT Jimi Hendrix is/was.
"Jimi was the real deal, but come on, you were born while the 3rd Jimi revival fad was on 14 years ago!"
At that point I was like that kid.

Anyway... with my once-bitten-twice-shy wallet and suspicions about The Jam, I sat out the heroic demise of The Jam as well as the Style Council period of Weller's career. Instead, I listened to The Who, which of course is a phony experience of an authentic moment rather than an authentic experience of a phoney moment. Now, I'm not here to write about the superiority of The Who over The Jam or any such boring nonsense. I'm just saying I chose to miss the actual moment unfolding in front of me (The Jam) and chose history (The Who).

Let me explain that bit.
It's the peculiar predicament of people who are interested in the music instead of the fashion of pop. You have to dig deep into the history of pop and rock to arrive at an understanding of how this music works, where it comes from and why it's doing what it does. By the time one has investigated the history, one is no longer a consumer, but a cultural investor in the passage of pop music. At that moment, one is inevitably a phony. And it makes one wonder if it's not all wasted on the masses, and suddenly you're like Rob Gordon and the Musical Moron Twins in 'High Fiedlity'. :)


You don't have the The Who without the Beatles, you don't have the Beatles without Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis. You don't have The Jam without The Who, and you don't have this blog here without any of these musos. We see each of them suffer under 'the anxiety of influence' as critic Harold Bloom termed it, while the Madonnas and the Britney Spears of the music world go careening through the marketplace like errant comets.

Meanwhile, we in record-buying land (as opposed to mp3-download land) shelling out our cash have to sit and ponder if there really is a zeitgeist in there to be deciphered or if it's just worthless time-consuming crap; another diversion on our inevitable road to death. Meanwhile a new generation of kids are discovering Jimi Hendrix and they're tellng you he is the greatest, most mind-blowing guitarist that ever walked this earth - as if that thought never crossed our sorry minds - or as if we never got told that by aa 14 year old 10 years ago.
"Kid, check out Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Danny Gatton, and Frank Zappa and get back to me on Monday!"

Just to wrap up this discussion, one of my favorite Who songs from their early period is 'So Sad About Us' off A Quick On While He's Away.


The song got described as inconsequential pop fluff by David Marsh (or words to that effect) in his seminal book about The Who, 'Hope I Die Before I Get Old'. Yet I've always thought it was a hidden classic in their song catalogue. It's got a great chord progression, moon-and-june-lyrics about a break up, and a knockout of a great melody just to be sure. And lo and behold I'm not the only person who thinks so because The Jam did a cover of it; and it's more musically credible than the Sex Pistols' version of 'Substitute'.

In fact, in the 2000 charity concert DVD of The Who, Paul Weller makes an appearance as one of the guests and sings 'So Sad About Us' with Pete Townshend.


It's a pretty cool moment for that song.
You get the feeling that Weller really is/was about the music and not the flash/image. Moreover, he is a real record fan. While it took me years to get around to listening to Weller's work because all along I was suspicious of his phoniness, there was actual aa side door into his work. When it really comes down to it, it seems he truly was a music fan just like you or me; and therefore the same kind of phony as you or me.

Flicking through his page on Wikipedia, you get the feeling he wasn't happy with his own phoniness as he eschewed being the voice of his generation. Well, I applaud that. In interviews, Weller is a lot more boring to listen to than Townshend. In his recent interview for the Times which is available as a podcast, he goes on and on about bus rides and tours. He says he cannot fathom why fans have a deeper interest in his life outside of music. It's quite remarkable in how bland the man is in conversation.