The beginning

I watched two documentaries back to back tonight, sitting alone in my living room with the lights off. If I hadn’t seen them in succession, I may not have ever come to find a common thread between the two. As it is, though, not only did my mind construct a unified narrative running through both, it also jumped farther than that, to the idea that’s been percolating in my mind about a Smallteeth Records blog, one that will shine a light on the aesthetic that governs what we do. Pay attention to this blog entry and the ones that will follow; hopefully you’ll start to pick it up. If not, you’re on your own, because we won’t be giving any overt explanations. We didn’t get to this point quickly or easily, and no one showed us the way. We’ll give a few hints, but that’s all you’re getting. Hopefully it’s enough.

The first movie I saw was called “Desperate Man Blues”, and it’s an Australian documentary about a man named Joe Bussard, who is from Frederick, Maryland, not far from where I grew up in Warrenton, Virginia. As far as I can tell, Bussard’s about 70 years old now, and he’s one of the few remaining collectors of vintage 78s from the prewar era. He was one of the first to start collecting them, too, beginning in his early teenage years, back in the 50s. He likes all of the old-time music styles that flourished in those days—country, blues, jazz, and all the variants that are generally associated with those styles at this point. A good bit of the movie is just shots of Joe pulling various “sides”, as old 78s are generally called, from his enormous collection (at least 10,000, perhaps more) and playing them on his turntable, chattering excitedly about the history and musical qualities of each. The age and style of the records are different from what I’m used to, but these portions of the film remind me of hanging out with many of my friends who share my own passion for music. And Joe’s personal tastes are certainly understandable, based on the sides he plays—delightful tunes all, no matter the era or style they belong to.

But there’s a flipside to Joe’s enthusiasm, which comes on display almost as often—his hatred for modern music. In Joe’s opinion, rock n’ roll was “a cancer on music”. He believes that the volume, the raucousness, the amplification, the modern multi-track recording capabilities, even the ability of people from various locales that used to produce unique strains of folk music to hear each other’s work, all of which he associates with the advent of the rock n’ roll era, were all terrible, pernicious developments. As far as he’s concerned, these developments combined to destroy all of the genres he loved by the late 50s or thereabouts. He considers jazz to have died in the early 30s, country by the mid-50s. Joe is a purist, and while his drive as an archivist is fueled by his purism, the ugly flipside of that purism is an inability to see the worth in anything that falls outside of the narrow criteria by which he assesses the validity of all music.

Still and all, he has arrived at some important insights through his purist stance that many of more catholic taste have completely missed, and would almost certainly scorn. The “Desperate Man Blues” DVD actually contains two documentaries about Joe, as well as an episode of his still-running weekly radio show (which he’s been doing since the 50s). At one point during his radio show, he makes the following statement: “So much talent in those days; no faking recordings like they do nowadays. Everything’s dubbed in and dubbed out, 27 channels and all that stuff. They didn’t have all that baloney in those days—they didn’t need it. All they needed was a microphone, that was it. And they made miracles.” We here at Smallteeth know exactly what Joe’s talking about where that’s concerned.

At another point, he discusses the way, if you listen to 78s from the 20s and 30s, you can often tell what region, maybe even what county, a group or individual performer came from. The sounds were passed down through tradition, and in the days before long-distance travel was easy, the people who played music only really heard the music of their immediate area. The ability to track, in minute, microscopic detail, the evolution of American folk music, back to the beginning of recorded music, or even further, is one of the main reasons why Joe’s archival work is so incredibly important. As he points out on several occasions during the DVD, if he hadn’t started to preserve those records as early as he did, much of that history would have been lost. A significant portion of his collection is made up of sole surviving copies of certain 78s. Without him, no one alive today would ever have heard these songs.

But in the end, it’s a shame that he can’t understand the use of modern music. We here at Smallteeth are children of punk rock; even when the work we do is musically informed by the stuff Joe Bussard enthuses over, we are only ever at that point because of the roads our earlier education in punk rock sent us down. And there are still plenty of musical advancements being made by individuals and groups who have followed the paths laid out by punk rock to their logical conclusions, then pushed beyond those conclusions into virgin territory not yet on the map. Which brings me to the other movie I saw tonight: “Refused Are Fucking Dead.”

Umea, Sweden’s Refused were perhaps the most important hardcore band of the late 1990s. Their third album, “The Shape Of Punk To Come”, incorporated elements of jazz and techno, song arrangements seemingly inspired by hip-hop and funk/soul breakbeats, envelope-pushing lyrical topics and worldviews, and a talent for writing outstanding hardcore riffs (which would have made Refused a world-class hardcore band even without all the added factors) into an album that shattered expectations not just for Refused as a band but indeed, hardcore as a genre.

However, this album, Refused’s greatest, was also their last. Pressures both internal and external weighed on the band so heavily that some members felt unable to live up to expectations, while others were willing to keep pushing to fulfill those expectations, even to the point of complete exhaustion. Still others just wanted to give up and go home. The centerpiece of the short film is a mindblowing live performance of Refused’s magnum opus, the 5-minute “New Noise”. It shows just how brilliant Refused could be when all of them were working together, and equally enthused. But (and I’m sure this is no coincidence) immediately after this performance ends, the documentary takes a turn for the bleak. The rest of it displays just how frustrated the entire band was with their situation. With the release of an album like “The Shape Of Punk To Come”, they’d set themselves up as a band who were capable of magic, and now they were expected to dispense that magic every night, on cue. It was an impossible standard to achieve and maintain, but they felt duty-bound to try.

By the climax of the documentary, a member has already quit the band, and Refused are limping into their last show. This is the final performance they will have before heading home and disbanding. But within two songs, the police have arrived, and cut the set short, killing the power midsong. The movie attempts to draw an uplifting message from these circumstances, focusing on the crowd as they sing the chorus of the interrupted song into the faces of the cops, and ending the narrative with an American roadie (or friend? The voice is never identified) talking about how we should remember the disappointment and failure of Refused’s ending moments in order to inspire us to success and victory in our own future projects. But it all rings hollow, especially in light of drummer David Sandstrom’s expression of immense relief that the show was being shut down. “I could have kissed them,” he says of the intervening police.

Is there a message inherent in the bleakness of “Refused Are Fucking Dead”? I don’t know. You could take it at face value—lingering beauty and inspiration in the face of defeat. You could take it as a cautionary tale—one that says “Don’t attempt to reach for too much, because if you don’t succeed, the pain of failure may devastate you.” There are probably hundreds of messages that walk some sort of middle path between these two extremes, also. I prefer not to even concern myself with the message of the film, though. I take from it the same thing I took from “Desperate Man Blues”—there’s a huge amount of great art out there, including plenty you haven’t encountered yet. As Joe Bussard says at the end of “Desperate Man Blues”, as he clutches a rare blues side purchased at an estate sale, “It’s still out there.” And it is, whether you’re talking about some ancient 78 with a completely unique sound, or the next big advancement in the evolution of hardcore. It’s still out there, in all of the myriad forms it can take. Listen for it.