Music Book Review: Who Cares Anyway? Post Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age by Will York

Who Cares Anyway? Post Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age
by Will York (Music 781.66 Yor)

 

Who Cares Anyway? looks at part of the musical history of a city that has been important in modern popular music. Heading back to the 1960s, San Francisco was the epicenter of American counterculture, and as one might expect, lots of music related to hippie culture was born there, including bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, and Janis Joplin. By the 70s, punk was taking over, but the city was slow to respond to the punk movement. Instead, as we’ll see in this book, some of the weirder elements of San Francisco’s music culture created a nurturing environment for a truly unique underground music scene, which featured occasional bands that rose to national prominence. Author York conducted extensive interviews for this book, making it a fantastic primary-source document of dozens of bands important to the San Francisco underground in the 80s and 90s. With so much great insight from interviews, York establishes the narrative of this book by simply setting up basic contexts for various bands, zines and venues important to the scene, and then lets the participants themselves do most of the talking.

 

Contrary to the book’s subtitle, the first section of the text spends some time setting up the context for all of these bands by taking a look at the earlier portions of the 70s, when punk came to town. This is followed by the “post-punk” conditions of the late 70s. In reality, these transitions between scenes are always quite blurry, and York does a good job of articulating how new kinds of music gradually gained a foothold. There is still an overlap with punk—the Dead Kennedys, for example, are probably the most well-known punk band from San Francisco, and they were active initially between 1978 and 1986. The larger underground music force was probably the oddball band The Residents, whom many recognize from their period of wearing costumes consisting of eyeballs with top hats on their heads, along with tuxedos. The Residents were musical influences on the new stranger underground bands, and their record label, Ralph Records, was also an influence, documenting their own work as well as other well-regarded locals like Tuxedomoon, Chrome, and Rhythm and Noise. Their general aesthetic must have been a significant influence, too: many bands who followed them wore costumes that obscured band members’ identities, and the fact that they started as mostly non-musicians who figured out how to play as they went along resonated with many bands (and of course a similar attitude was common in punk scenes, too).

 

Stylistically, it was hard to describe what many of these San Francisco bands were doing during their heyday in the 80s and 90s, and frankly it remains difficult today. The general “experimental” music umbrella applies to many, but it’s not a very descriptive stylistic term. In general, most of this material gets lumped into “post-punk,” which is descriptive in the sense that some of the wild energy and simple, elemental approach of punk was retained, but now it was filtered into bands that used keyboards and synthesizers, bands that had various kinds of conceptual art or theatrical presentations woven into their performances. It was a complicated spectrum of bands, though, many of whom didn’t adhere to these general commonalities. Flipper, for example, had the energy of punk, but basically focused on simply writing compelling songs and putting on hard-hitting shows. They were a tremendous influence on Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and their overall sound has a kind of proto-grunge music vibe. On the opposite end of the spectrum were bands like Mr. Bungle, who embraced the notion of weird costumes, but rapidly became legitimate virtuoso performers and composers, writing some of the most complex music ever recorded. And there were other bands who hovered somewhere in between, like Faith No More, who eventually took on Mike Patton, the vocalist of Mr. Bungle, as their lead singer and lyricist. They took a relatively less intense approach to genre-hopping than his other band onto radio, MTV, and arena tour success in the 90s.

 

If you’re not already familiar with some of the bands from this scene, you’ll learn about some truly bizarre acts that are among the most creative bands to grace stages in San Francisco or elsewhere. To name just a few, Caroliner was a bizarre collective who played a very noisy brand of post-punk while wearing elaborate costumes with deliriously strange multicolored stage decorations. Faxed Head is another of the ultra-strange bands to come out of the scene, featuring members of Mr. Bungle, Caroliner, and other acts on Amarillo Records, playing a very skewed kind of death metal influenced by some of the noise music coming out in the 90s. Despite the sometimes dramatic stylistic diversity shown by these and many other bands from this scene, another useful way of thinking about the time period covered by the book is referenced in its subtitle: “the end of the analog age.” York notes in his preface that the period he focuses on here can also be viewed in terms of technology: in the beginning of the period, one found some of the first Xerox copiers, synthesizers, and consumer multitrack tape recorders. By its end, digital recording and computers started to take over. Future scenes, in San Francisco and elsewhere, would be using different tools, and those inevitably change the music and the communities.

 

Overall, I really like this book. The things I don’t like about it are bands and labels associated with this overall scene that aren’t included, or are only mentioned in passing or in footnotes. The Units aren’t mentioned in the late 70s/early 80s section, though they really seem to fit. Negativland isn’t discussed, and they seem like an important element of the San Francisco scene over a long span of time. And some of my own favorite bands from the late 90s Bay Area scene, like Idiot Flesh and Charming Hostess, and their local record label, Vaccination Records, only appear in a single footnote. In terms of closing up the book, I would have liked to see a brief mention that this scene has continued to inspire and influence contemporary music in San Francisco. Many people around the country and the world heard about the modern San Francisco/Oakland scene in the aftermath of the horrible Ghost Ship fire in late 2016, so there would be some context for readers latch onto. I think just mentioning some of the bay area record labels like Resipiscent Records, Ratskin Records, and Weird Ear Records, Public Eyesore, etc, as well as some of the acts that they feature, would have put a nice ending on the whole chronology and hopefully inspire readers to start looking into more about the scene themselves. But those omissions aside, It’s a very well-researched book, and this is the first time that many of these bands and their contributions have been documented for posterity in music history, so I would recommend it whole-heartedly for anyone passionate about experimental or underground independent music and its complicated history.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Williamsburg Avant Garde by Cisco Bradley or Faith No More in the 1990s by Matt Karpe.)

 

( publisher’s official Who Cares Anyway? web page )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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