I continue to keep an eye on the news and post accordingly whenever possible. A few weeks ago I ordered a Beat Happening T-shirt (cover of their first album) from TeePublic; it arrived last week, and I’ve been wearing it every other day since. I’m not sure if that counts as news.
I’m a little surprised that these three songs were released so close to each other. The timeline in my head has “Safety Net” and “Indian Summer,” especially, belonging to two different worlds: the Shop Assistants to the tail end of first-generation punk and new wave, while Beat Happening signalled the beginning of the Nirvana, our-band-could-be-your-life era. I didn’t catch up with either till years after the fact: Beat Happening expressly because of Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, and the Shop Assistants for reasons I can’t remember–probably just something I randomly downloaded in the early 2000s when I was downloading everything. I think I had stayed away from them when they were around for the very enlightened reason that I didn’t like their name–they must be one of those really complicated British bands, I had decided, like China Crisis or Shriekback. My timeline didn’t have much awareness of the Go-Betweens at all–I used to price and shelve a couple of their albums (including the one with “Streets of Your Town”) when I worked in a record store in the late ‘80s, but I never investigated.
Did any of the three sneak onto MTV’s “120 Minutes”? The show, dedicated to independent/alternative artists, debuted on March 10, 1986, a few months before “Safety Net” appeared, so it’s possible. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of bands played on “120 Minutes,” which ranges from New Order and Kate Bush (really? they were too off-the-beaten-path for regular airplay?) to the Jesus & Mary Chain and the Butthole Surfers, I guess I can see them fitting in somewhere. The Go-Betweens strike me as exactly the kind of band “120 Minutes” was created for.
The “Safety Net” and “Indian Summer” videos feel like larks through-and-through, artifacts produced solely for the bands and their friends and no one else. Freedom’s just another word, etc.; we’ll do this because we can, and no one can stop us. Just like punk rock, which they are, kind of. So what do you do with all this freedom? You go with what you know–you walk, run, and motor around. The Shop Assistants appear to be on their way to a gig;* they unload equipment from the back of a van, fuel up at the gas (petrol, I mean) station, take touristy photos, mix with the locals. (A blurry, quickly passing road sign tells us they’re somewhere in Germany.) They clown around for the camera, they hide from the camera. A lot of the time they’re doing stuff for no other reason than there’s a little voice in their head telling them that this is a video, so they’d better do some stuff. The last thing we see are a couple of the Shop Assistants making a mad dash around the deck of some ocean liner as they presumably make their way home to the U.K. It’s all very reminiscent of the Beatles frolicking around to “Can’t Buy Me Love” in A Hard Day’s Night, or, even better, to “Ticket to Ride” in Help! Not necessarily groundbreakingly original, but, in tandem with “Safety Net”–a wash of Jesus & Mary Chain distortion overtop jingle-jangle as nimble as Todd Rundgren’s “We’ve Gotta Get You a Woman”** (I’ve made a mental note to put it #1 next time I draw up a list of my favourite songs ever)–the familiar feels new again. Young, invisible, and lost in the world, no safety net below and none needed. For two minutes and twenty-two seconds, they’re unstoppable.
The video for “Safety Net” was shot in black and white; “Indian Summer”’s is colour, but so muted and beige that it looks like another round of home movies. Beat Happening are also on the move, but no mad dashes or frolicking; it’s more like they traipse, meander, and plod around their home base of Olympia, Washington.*** The desultory pace is perfectly in keeping with Calvin Johnson’s laconic, ultra-deadpan vocal on “Indian Summer.” I didn’t know it at the time, not having yet heard Beat Happening, but if you remember the Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” or “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” from the early ‘90s, you have a pretty good idea of what Johnson sounds like. Brad Roberts tried–and somehow succeeded–in landing Johnson’s vocal delivery onto Top 40 radio with those two songs; I’m guessing Johnson never envisioned anything like that for Beat Happening, although you never know–I can see where he might have thought he had a natural #1 on his hands. There’s a sweet, childlike wonderment about “Indian Summer” (not unlike Jonathan Richman’s acoustic solo work) that suggests a chimerical dreamer.
Although the three Beat Happenings–Johnson, Heather Lewis, and Bret Lundsford–eventually converge on a park bench at the end of the “Indian Summer” video, for most of the duration they walk around alone, lost in their thoughts (“We’ll come back for Indian Summer/And go our separate ways”). Industrial parks, trainyards, alleyways, a gazebo; they’ve travelled these locales a million times before. They walk and walk and walk, barely acknowledging their surroundings. Sometimes they look down at the ground as they walk; to drive the point home, we get some dramatic POV footage of the ground. Halfway through, the editing picks up speed for no discernible reason, then returns to normal for reasons no more discernible. Some shots are run backwards towards the end, or maybe the principals simply reverse their steps (“We’ll come back, we’ll come back, we’ll come back…”). On the song’s final line–“cover me with rain”–leaves descend from above onto the heads of the reunited band. Just some friends playing possum, waiting for something–anything–to happen.
For me there’s a disconnect between “Indian Summer” heard on its own and heard in the context of the video (a disconnect not detrimental to either–I love both, else they wouldn’t be here). Alone, the song is tinged with the bittersweet nostalgia of first love; without losing any of that, it’s the circularity and uneventfulness of the band’s wanderings that come to the fore in the video, that sense of feeling trapped in one place forever. Having been there myself, I reexperience those feelings even more acutely in the Go-Betweens’ “Streets of Your Town,” both song and video. Sorry John Mellencamp, sorry R.E.M., sorry anybody else who ever tried to put small-town melancholy**** into song (including, I’m sure, a few hundred country songs I don’t know; along with celebrating small-town life, I’m fairly sure exploration of that particular melancholy is a natural fit for country); this is the one.
The Go-Betweens approach the subject more like R.E.M.–I’m thinking of “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” but “Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)” fits too–than John Mellencamp: as observers rather than participants. Right from its title (your town, not mine), “Streets of Your Town” is addressed to a lover or a friend. The repetition and day-to-dayness of the “Indian Summer” video is still there, but a level of detachment has been thrown into the mix:
Round and round, up and down
Through the streets of your town
Every day I make my way
Through the streets of your town
Unless, of course, the detachment comes from within: the singer is so alienated from his surroundings, he adopts the “your” as a means of escape, a distancing device, a tiny victory over the life and town he hates.
All of which brings to mind my first encounter with “Streets of Your Town,” from a CD-80 my friend Steve made for me that I was listening to one day on a drive into the small Ontario town I grew up in, Georgetown (to visit my sister, who still lives there). Hearing it in that context has a lot–maybe everything–to do with why I made such a deep and instant connection to the song, a connection visualized beautifully in the video.***** Reversing the rhythm of “Indian Summer”’s video, here the quick cutting happens near the beginning, creating a fragmentary, sometimes vertiginous feeling. Again, a seeming disconnect–the song is mired in drudgery, the video feels anticipatory, on the edge of discovering something–but it matches the way I felt that day, and how I feel whenever I return to Georgetown: trying to take everything in at once, eyes darting all over the place, an overload of things remembered and half-remembered.
The Go-Betweens’ town, if a YouTube user comment is to be trusted, isn’t a town at all but the city of Sydney, population three million when the video was made–I would have thought Brisbane would have been the setting, where the band originated. In any event, we get a succession of rooftops, windows, clocks, benches, city streets, a railway station (a must: trains offer a way out), all of it mixed in with occasional glimpses of band members. We see more of the band and less of Sydney past the two-minute mark, with a nice group shot of the five of them walking one of those bridges at 2:53. They’re happy, not trapped; they’ve got each other. It looks like they’re splitting up right at the end, but no, they all turn into the same opening off the street. No definitive answer on the song’s key lyric–“But I still don’t know what I’m here for”–but that’s only because one doesn’t exist, even if you’ve left and you’re looking back. I’ve written enough on the subject to know that whenever I think “Good, I can finally put those years and that town to rest,” they and it will always find their way back to puzzle me all over again.
I initially paired just “Safety Net” and “Indian Summer” for this entry, with the intention of writing about “Streets of Your Town” later on, in tandem with something else. When I started on “Indian Summer,” I quickly realized that I had to move “The Streets of Your Town” here and find another logical pairing for the something-else. (I did.) The Shop Assistants and Beat Happening are about movement, Beat Happening and the Go-Betweens about stasis. Linking all three might be a little more tenuous, but I suppose on a much smaller-scale I’m trying to do for video (in general, but especially in those years when its cultural import was at its greatest) what Michael Azerrad did for all those pre-Nirvana bands. Michael Jackson and the Go-Go’s, Van Halen and Prince, they all made many fine videos, videos that define that era for millions of people. But not for me. Even when it took me a while to catch up, there was lots going on elsewhere that means much more to me today.
*Or on tour. If they were a hair-metal band and it was 1989, I think you could safely say they’re in the middle of a tour. “On their way to a gig” somehow seems more apropos.
**I don’t know how accurate that is; I’ve literally spent the last week trying to decide if “Safety Net” is power-pop or not, or if I even know what the term means anymore. I encounter this problem all the time.
***My initial assumption, confirmed by a prominent Yard Birds sign that turns up and a little googling: a local mall in Olympia with some history.
****Is it only small towns that provide the inspiration (if that’s the right word) for such songs? For the longest time, and especially when I was stuck in a small-town high school in the ‘70s and obsessed with Neil Young, I heard “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” as belonging to this tradition, a document of Neil’s time growing up in some tiny Manitoban outpost. Years later, I read (or figured out for myself) that he was in fact singing about L.A.
*****One of two on YouTube for “Streets of Your Town,” both featuring the band and clearly done with their cooperation–strange. The one I’m writing about here is where the song starts immediately; the other begins with ten seconds of near-silence, followed by a count-in.
we don't want to know 