The Cedar Lounge Revolution

A quick follow-on from the piece on the Fleshtones a couple of weeks back. I wrote:

There’s a book out about them by Joe Bonomo. It’s called Sweat:The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, which seems appropriate. And while I tend to avoid such things (some hideous crimes against the English language have been committed in what are laughably termed ‘music books’) this is one I have purchased

It arrived. I have read it. And mighty enjoyable it was too. Written by Joe Bonomo it’s a far cry from the usual run-through of bands. This was very much warts and all, with a critical - yet appreciative - appraisal of their career. Anyone who has read and enjoyed Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain or We Got the Neutron Bomb : The Untold Story of LA Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen will find that it covers much of the same period but from a slightly different angle. And why not? The Fleshtones were on the ground floor, as it were, with many of the other luminaries from this period.

Do they come out of it well? Yes, but in truth that’s hardly the point. Most of the time reading it one is amazed they come out of it at all, and it’s not just the personality issues, epic quantities of illicit substances and the continual indifference by commercial radio and others to their charms. And their strengths, a dogged commitment to the music and their audiences, and their weaknesses, an inability to transmute the gold of their performances into a coherent sequence of albums allied with a unwavering loyalty to a musical style which faded in and out of popularity, are honestly recorded. It’s well written, interesting, affectionate, honest unlike many such books, and by turns scarifying and illuminating… It eschews concentrating on the music, because the music is ineffable, instead we learn about the personalities.

There are plenty of anecdotes, tales of arriving in small towns and playing to equally small groups of people, but managing to enthuse them to the extent that they built up a remarkably tenacious fanbase, and a history littered with media attention moving towards them and then away again. All this while holding down blue-collar jobs and managing to get on with - ahem - interesting personal lives. They’re also part of that web of relationships that developed in the punk and post-punk era. Some unexpected names crop up, from the Cramps to Gene Simmons to Jason and the Scorchers… they’re all here.

For anyone interested in human persistence or punk, post-punk and garage, and as importantly the roots of that music in soul, r’n'b and rock, more than worth a read…

And after all, any book which includes in the acknowledgements the following has something special:

No thanks to Debby Harry for hanging up on me…