V02-T09 Simultaneous Simultude

.....Having just read Jon Savage's book "England's Dreaming" the year before making this tape, I had a new appreciation for the punk movement that sprung up in Ohio in the early 1970's just after the earliest days of the New York scene and before Malcolm McLaren decided to make a copy of the New York Dolls (and take credit for the idea). As it turned out, I had examples of many of the pieces of the Ohio scene in my music collection without knowing that they could be put together to form a larger picture.

Volume 2:"WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 9

• 03:04 "MY THEORY OF SIMULTANEOUS SIMULTUDE/RED TIN BUS" (The Wooden Birds)
• performed by David Thomas and The Wooden Birds
• original source: LP MONSTER WALKS THE WINTER LAKE TwinTone TTR8661 (US) 1986
• and my source: CD MONSTER WALKS THE WINTER LAKE TwinTone TTRCD8661 (Japan) 1986

.....David Thomas is better known as the lead singer of Pere Ubu, an innovative band well known in the Cleveland area in the mid 1970's. Before 1980 they had already crossed paths with Rocket From The Tombs (the inspiration for the band Rocket From The Crypt), The Dead Boys and Electric Eels. When Pere Ubu lapsed into inactivity in the early 1980's, Thomas reacted by pursuing solo work. In this selection he warms up his assembled studio band with a mental exercise and when one member remains silent Thomas explains in an aside to the listeners that the band member is "from New York", as though no further explanation were necessary.

.....The mental exercise in question is like a cross between a psychologist's word association test and the S.A.T.'s. His conjecture that "Everything is like... something" really asks if everything can be described in terms of other things. For instance: if you look up a word in the dictionary, isn't the definition just made of other words? And if you look up those words, the pattern repeats itself until you reach a definition that hinges on the word you started with. Simultaneous Simultude bypasses all of that by presuming that the natures of things are as cyclical as our language. Anything that has a name or can be described must be defined using words, which in turn are defined using other words which in turn are used to describe some other object. Why not simply compare the original item to that 'other object' and cut out the middle man?

.....Next I'll look at not one, but two New York Legends.