So on Saturday evening I somehow did an Old Man Thing (TM) and put my back out, or nearly out, to the point where I was kind of afraid to move lest my spine shatter into a million delicate pieces.
And top of my mind was “Oh crap, I hope I can still go to the Amyl and the Sniffers concert Sunday night!”
Fortunately for your hero, a bucket of painkillers and super-hot bath helped and I hobbled into the sold-out Powerstation for the Aussie punk act’s final sold-out New Zealand show. And after 90 minutes or so of amped-up feminist punk anthems and cautiously staying well away from the heaving mosh pit, lo and behold, I felt healed. (OK, I was still a little sore. But you get the picture.)
The Melbourne band has been kicking around for 7-8 years now but really broken through with their excellent 2024 album Cartoon Darkness, and the very NSFW single “Jerkin” which slams toxic masculinity in a grandly profane fashion.
Watching frontwoman Amy Carter and the band stomp, bounce and shimmy through their propulsive catalog, I kept thinking, “This band should be a household name.” Maybe they will be soon – they’ve got the talent, and the fuck-the-system ethos that 2025 is desperately calling out for. Amy is a whirlwind of motion on stage, bouncing, sticking her tongue out and gobbing a bit in the time-honoured punk fashion, tossing her blond hair around and climbing up the speakers. She has true star power and it’s easy to imagine she’s just at the start of where she’ll go. “How you f—in’ doing?” she asked several times, and we were doing fine.
For “Me and the Girls,” Amy welcomed on stage a random chorus of audience members of all shapes and sizes and it felt bloody celebratory. Amyl and the Sniffers’ tense anthem about violence about women, “Knifey,” struck a chord with never-ending misogyny still everywhere you look, while poppy nuggets like “Chewing Gum” and “U Should Not Be Doing That” marry plentiful hooks with a bit of throbbing anarchy.
I wrote more about punk (and Amyl) not too long ago and if anything, the vibe has gotten even more spirit of 1977 in my headspace lately. What a joy, then, to see Amy take the stage with swagger and anger, but also, kindness. Her first words to the audience were if you see someone fall in the mosh pit, pick them up, and don’t touch anyone who doesn’t want to be touched. Don’t be a jerk. It shouldn’t be that hard.
It was a show full of joyful rage against the cartoon darkness we’re all living through. I thought a bit about one of my favourite writers, Tom Robbins, who died just last week at age 92, and his mantra: “My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything.”
There was joy at Amy and the Sniffers Sunday night, in spite of everything. Even my back.
A couple other great reviews by people who are not me:
One of the secrets of Bob Dylan’s success is his enduring mystery. Dylan has forged a 60-year career out of being opaque, inscrutable…. a “complete unknown,” if you will.
I’ll admit, I’m kind of a sucker for rock star musical biopics, even when they’re terrible. I watched Elvis and Walk The Line and Bohemian Rhapsody and I embrace the cheesy “rags to riches to overdose” narrative of such films, even when my head admits they’re not always great movies.
A Complete Unknown is a deep dive into Bob Dylan’s early years that does its share of romanticising and mythologising… but then again, hasn’t Dylan himself been doing that since he was a kid? For me, it hit the spot by embracing the many mysteries of Bob, revelling in music biopic cliches while being just prickly enough to feel real.
Timothée Chalamet is really far too pretty to be young Bob, who had a reedy, squinty babyface, but he nicely summons up the keen intelligence, peculiar charisma and somewhat mercenary ethics of young Bobby. Dylan rode into New York from rural Minnesota pretending to be everything from a hobo to a carnival worker. He threw aside his birth name of Zimmerman and became a kind of perpetual musical sponge, absorbing everything and synthesising it into something kind of new.
A Complete Unknown is about the birth of an artist who’s also a magpie, a wry cynic and also kind of a genius who’s not really a very nice guy. Dylan is called an “asshole” a couple of times in the film, which thankfully doesn’t try to show him as some kind of saintly hero. We avoid some big teary monologue where Bob Dylan reveals all the dark secrets that motivate him.
This exchange is as close as A Complete Unknown gets to peeking behind the mask: “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.“
Chalamet’s natural teen idol charm is cleverly subverted just enough to make his Dylan feel like an echo of the thin wild mercury sound of the man himself. (And while he doesn’t sound exactly like Dylan singing, he sounds close enough to make it work, and lipsynching Dylan would’ve been even weirder.)
A Complete Unknown takes the great Bob Dylan creation myth and hits all the beats – his turn from folk music to electric, his wry confidence, his thorny romance with Joan Baez, his worship of Woody Guthrie. The movie follows Dylan from his arrival in New York as an eager kid up through his explosion into stardom in the mid ‘60s, and its big emotional turn is in Dylan’s moving from stark and preachy folk into raw and raucous rock, culminating in his famously defiant “electric” performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
A Complete Unknown wrings Dylan’s transformation for a lot of drama that might seem a bit hokey from 2025 eyes – so he’s playing an electric guitar now, so what? – but it’s worth remembering that Dylan’s “betrayal” of folk was a big deal back in the day. (Ed Norton‘s marvellous supporting turn as folkie Pete Seeger really captures the man’s uniquely kind heart and endearing dorkiness.)
As anyone who’s dipped their toes into the vast waters of Dylanology knows, there’s an infinite number of Bobs in the Dylanverse. (At least 80, as I painstakingly rambled on about a few years ago!) There’s no way A Complete Unknown, which follows a fairly basic biopic blueprint, could satisfy everyone, and we’ve certainly got cinema bizarro like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There or Bob-starring oddities like Masked And Anonymous to fill any taste.
Watching Martin Scorcese’s superb documentary No Direction Home again recently, which follows Dylan’s 1966 tour of Britain in some dazzlingly vibrant footage, I was struck by how angry many of the British fans interviewed at the time were with Dylan’s new style. “I think he’s prostituting himself,” one barks. Yet to my eyes now, the hyper electric Dylan of 1966 is quite possibly his finest era. God only knows what would’ve happened if social media existed at the time.
Unknown works for me because it never quite pretends to be definitive, and knows there’s many more alternate Bob stories to be told. But hey, it’s turning new audiences on to Dylan music, got a bunch of Oscar nods, and is a reminder that after nearly 84 years walking this Earth, there’s still nobody quite like him.
Is it 100% true? It’s pretty and darned entertaining, but perhaps its biggest success is in carefully keeping Bob Dylan’s true motivations a complete unknown.
So I’ll join the chorus – 2024 really did kind of suck, eh? For me, by far, the biggest blow was the death of my father in May, and I guess nothing has truly felt the same since. There’s been a lot of lousy things happening in the wider world as well, of course, and the general sense that everything is just careening out of control in the cosmos.
Pop culture – be it book, comics, movies or music – is one of the few saving graces we’re left with when nothing else makes sense. Thus, in a burst of optimism, here’s my 10 favourite culture moments of the year:
Now is now – Perfect Days by Wim Wenders: An awful lot of the ‘best movies of 2024’ haven’t screened in New Zealand yet, and a lot of the 2024 movies I have seen have been hit or miss. But of the new-ish films I saw this year, the beautiful tone poem Perfect Days by Wim Wenders about a humble Japanese toilet cleaner lingers the most. It’s a movie about taking the pauses, about accepting what happens and enjoying every sandwich. And it felt like the most human thing I saw on a screen this year. (Runner-up nods for movies seen in 2024: the supremely creepy Longlegs which was right in my wheelhouse, heartfelt and hilarious The Holdovers [technically a 2023 holdover itself], the utterly unclassifiable no-budget slapstickHundreds of Beavers, and Furiosa, which confirms George Miller’s Mad Max is the only extended cinematic universe which really matters.)
Absolute ultimate totally comics, dude: I’m on the record that I’m not generally a fan of the endless reinventions and multiversal takes on superheroes that are a sign of comics eating themselves. Ohhh, a dark alternate Superman? How daring! Yet… I’ve been generally rather enjoying DC’s latest “Absolute” line of comics starring the hyperbolic Absolute Batman, Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman. Yes, yes, it’s yet another reimagining but the actual comics have been pretty … good? Absolute Wonder Woman is the gem so far with stunning art and myth-inspired epic storytelling, and Absolute Batman not far behind with its mysterious ultra-jacked Bruce Wayne stripped of money and privilege. I don’t know how long I’ll stick with them – these “new universe” stories far too often end up tangled in the continuity of existing comics and giant crossovers and the like, but so far, it’s a pretty electric and novel take on some very well known heroes.
You’re never too old to make rock music: I’m old and getting older, but a lot of the guys I grew up listening to are somehow even older. Massive applause, then, for near-geezers like Nick Cave and Robert Smith staying true to themselves – The Cure’s comeback Songs From The Lost World is just as moody and epic as any classic Cure album, touched even more by the unsparing grip of mortality. At 65 (!!) Smith still sounds exactly like he always has, and that’s a wonderful thing. Meanwhile, Nick Cave’s slow turn into a kind of confessional high priest continued with the excellent Bad Seeds album Wild God. At 67, Cave has suffered unbearable loss in his life and will always seem heroic for unsparingly turning it into such cathartic art. In contrast, The White Stripes’ Jack White is a mere child at age 49, but he blew me away just a few weeks ago in Auckland and his No Name feels like the rock album of the year to me. Not bad for a bunch of old guys who are all getting older.
Just asking questions – the books of Percival Everett: Percival Everett is one of those cult authors one keeps hearing about and meaning to read, but his astonishing Huckleberry Finn reinventionJames truly broke him through into the mainstream this year. Every Everett book I’ve read this year is quite different and excellent in its own way – the existential spy satire Doctor No, the haunting Mississippi lynching black comedy of The Trees, the wry literary racial spoof Erasure (which was also turned into an excellent movie, American Fiction). Everett doesn’t fit any easy box but I’ve been so impressed by his eclectic invention that I’ll be happily catching up on his prolific bibliography well into 2025.
Sticking the landing on the small screen: I can’t keep up with all the streaming things these days, but bidding farewell to a few longtime favourites reminded me of how tricky it is to end things on the perfect note, and how good it feels when it does. These favourites of mine all said goodbye in a pretty perfect fashion – Superman and Loiswith perhaps the most bittersweet and beautiful ending to a superhero screen adventure yet, the kooky What We Do In The Shadowsmanaging to make its insane vampire spin-off parody far funnier and longer lasting than seemed possible saying goodbye after 6 seasons, Larry David at long last ending Curb Your Enthusiasm after 20+ years with a perfectly wonderful lack of remorse. (Bonus point to the much-missed Our Flag Means DeathNew Zealand-filmed gay pirate comedy, which ended its second season in ’23 but we didn’t know for sure it was gone for good until this year.)
Charles Burns still haunts us all: Charles Burns is the patron saint comics artist of Gen-X, and his stark tales of teenage alienation have been blowing me away since his Curse of the Molemen days in the 1980s. As he ages, Burns has constantly kept to the same tight themes he always has – teenage alienation, romantic yearning and spooky surreal horror – but gosh, does he do them well. This year’s Final Cut is one of his finest works, ostensibly about a group of teenagers shooting a no-budget movie, but it’s also about love, choice and regret and told with his unforgettable intense style.
The films of Samuel Fuller: Like I said, I’m behind on the newer films of 2024. But film history stretches back over a century now, and there’s always time to fill in the gaps. A big hole in my cinema knowledge was the pulpy movies of Samuel Fuller. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen fierce noir gems like Pickup On South Street, Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor and Park Row until the past year, and I keep discovering new Fuller to catch up on. His bold movies bucked convention and still feel starkly modern decades on. Bonus point: His memoir, A Third Face, is an absolutely great chronicle of Fuller’s days as a spunky young New York journalist, harrowing World War II heroics and his dive into Hollywood.
Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee: There’s precious little mystery in pop culture these days, so every little bit of it counts. Cindy Lee is a cross-dressing Canadian musician named Patrick Flegel whose drifting, sultry songs have really gotten into my brain. Not on Spotify, not on Tidal, the sprawling double album Diamond Jubilee is only available as a single file on YouTube and soon, a physical release. Anointed by the hipsters, it’s got the gorgeous low-fi wistfulness of early Guided By Voices meets Roy Orbison, like the soundtrack to the most lonesome-hearted David Lynch movie that never was. It’s two hours of mysterious bliss and while its stealth release style might be a bit of a marketing technique there’s enough talent in Diamond Jubilee to make it feel like far more than a stunt. Diamond Lee feels like 2024 in musical form to me.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, because love is really all around: Yes, I’m the guy who’s picking a 50-year-old sitcom as one of his favourite pop culture moments of 2024. But I picked up a cheap DVD of the complete series on a trip to Reno earlier this year, and it reminded me exactly why I love this classic sitcom so much. It’s got Moore at her loveable screwball peak, Ed Asner is one of the best editors of all time, Ted Knight’s pompous doofus act which never gets old, in a seven-season run of absurdity, crack timing, sitcom pratfalls and journalistic dilemmas that still stands up with the best of ‘peak TV’. Sometimes all you want out of life is a 20-minute playlet of banter and Lou Grant and Ted Baxter, and in this weird, wicked year, bingeing The Mary Tyler MooreShow made me feel like we might just make it after all.
Selfishly, the Year of the Amoeba: Yeah, I’m putting myself on the list – not because I think I’m the best small press comics geek out there by any means but because I ended up putting out a heck of a lot of Amoeba Adventures stuff this year and it gave me a peculiar kind of inner satisfaction that nothing else really matches. I published two ‘regular’ issues of Amoeba Adventures this year, getting up to #35 of the series I somehow started way the hell back in 1990 (!!!), and I finally decided to embrace Amazon’s print on demand as a cost-effective way to bring my comics back to a wider world (yeah, I know, evil empire, etc, but this KDP stuff has been very good for my needs). A big old 350-page collection of The Best Of Amoeba Adventures that I started over the last holidays came out in February and presents my favourites of my 1990s work, while the smaller Amoeba Adventures: The Warmth Of The Sun book presents the first six of the “new” Amoeba Adventures stories I started telling in 2020. I’m not going to get rich doing this stuff, I accepted long ago, but I’m really grateful to get this stuff out in the world and out of the dusty small press past, and hey, if you like it, I’m just grateful I got the chance to tell you a story.
Next: My top pop culture disappointments of the year!
People have been saying rock and roll is dead or dying for decades, but in a whirlwind blast through Auckland this week, guitar hero Jack White was determined to prove them all wrong.
After my friend Chris said they blew the roof off the intimate Powerstation Monday night, White and band put on their final show of the year at a filled-to-capacity Auckland Town Hall Tuesday night, pounding through a frenzy of his solo work and hits with the White Stripes.
Somehow, it’s been 25 years this year since that first White Stripes album came out and helped launch the brief garage rock revival of the early 2000s, but White still looks lanky and youthful even as he’s, shockingly, about to hit 50 next year.
His career has gone through all the configurations – scrappy indie stardom with drummer (and ex-wife) Meg White as the Stripes, top ten records and breaking up the band at the height of success, followed by a series of solo albums that range from rowdy to wildly eccentric, all culminating in this year’s stellar No Name.
No Name has reminded fans that while White isn’t quite the omnipresent music hitmaker he was a few years back, he’s still one of the best guitar slingers out there and keeping that rock and roll flame burning high.
Auckland Town Hall’s crowd knew they were in for something special when White kicked off not with one of his standards, but a roaring, simmering take on the Stooges’ underground touchstone “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” For nearly two hours, White and band spun out a stew of garage rock nuggets that dipped into punk, blues and country with ease.
Genial but focused, White stood tall at the town hall, ripping through the music with a few friendly smiles, a little polite banter and a whole lot of windmilling guitar solos (I lost track on how many different guitars he rotated through, but it was at least half a dozen).
He played several jaunty White Stripes tunes like “My Doorbell” and “Hotel Yorba,” but the band also stretched out for ecstatic takes on bluesy gems like “The Hardest Button to Button” and “Catch Hell Blues.” There were also deep cuts from his other bands The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs, including a fierce take on the latter’s “Steady As She Goes” just before the encore.
“The new stuff” doesn’t always go down well at big shows but ripping and propulsive No Name songs like “That’s How I’m Feeling” and “What’s The Rumpus?” were strong highlights, and the terrific insistent quirky preacher’s rant “Archbishop Harold Holmes” particularly stood out from the encore.
Jack White, at 49, knows who he is and plays with the confidence that decades surviving in the music biz brings. Famously, he’s in love with the retro aesthetic and been known to ban or discourage cellphones from his shows. Fortunately the town hall crowd seemed on the same page and a little less clogged up with the endless glowing screens than some gigs are these days. Sure, you could try to capture the whole thing for your TikTok or you could just put the phone away and bask in the ringing chords.
Of course, the show had to end with perhaps the White Stripes’ biggest hit, the clap-and-stomp along anthem “Seven Nation Army.” To see the jam-packed Auckland Town Hall floor filled with hundreds of fans waving and singing along, the crowd rippling to the music, it felt like rock and roll was not only not about to die, but it might just take over the pop culture world again at any second.
White’s probably played “Seven Nation Army” thousands of times by now, but the wide grin on his face as the crowd pulsed along made you see this was a man who loves his job. “Merry Christmas,” he shouted during the standing ovation at the end – and to all a good rockin’ night.
I haven’t written much of anything about the re-election of You Know Who You Know Where, because, frankly, like an awful lot of people, I’m just (A. exhausted and (B. apathetic about the whole damned thing these days. I’ve said enough about it all the last 8-9 years or so. You do you, Yanks.
I do know one thing for the strange brave new world of 2025, though – I’m gonna keep listening to a lot of punk.
Loud music makes sense when the rest of the world doesn’t and while I’m an increasingly old geezer who doesn’t quite get what the youths are listening to these days, I’ve always got time for something with an echo of that Ramones/Sex Pistols/Bikini Kill vibe of reverb, snarl and rage. Nothing blocks out the crazy like a blast of guitar.
We went and saw Hüsker Dü’s legendary frontman Bob Mould perform a solo show in Auckland the other weekend, and it was a fantastic hurricane of sound – Mould, 64, put to shame kids half his age with his chaotic energy as he ripped apart Dü and his solo songs and put them back together in feedback-drenched blasts. He made a punk band’s worth of noise all by himself.
And meanwhile, I bought a ticket for an up and coming band who weren’t even born when Bob Mould put on a guitar strap, Melbourne’s terrific fun and filthy Amyl & The Sniffers. I know they’ll tear up the joint when they play Auckland in February and while I’m at least 20 years too old for the mosh pit I’ll try to get a good spot to watch the ecstatic release as they blast through their fiercely progressive, f- the Nazis and trolls tunes. Gacked on anger? Baby, we’re all gacked these days:
Punk is old and punk is young and everywhere in between, nearly 50 years after punk broke through.
What even is punk? Back in high school friends of mine wore mohawks and we chanted the chorus of Suicidal Tendencies “Institutionalized” at each other and that was already a good 10 years after punk’s first flames. These days who cares about genre taboos and what’s “proper” and what isn’t, really? “Selling out” is a gone concept in the viral age and if you like the music, good on ya. Sid Vicious is long dead and Johnny Rotten isn’t looking too hot himself. If it feels punk to you, it’s punk.
So for me listening to the Stooges over and over is punk, but hell, so is Nine Inch Nails banging on that downward spiral. Listen to Joy Division live and they were pretty punk even if they were post-punk. I can’t say I think Taylor Swift is punk, but Chappell Roan with her give-no-fucks attitude is definitely a little bit punk.
But that’s just me.
Everyone used to go on and on about the dangers of rock music and punk and metal and Satanists hiding in your backyard back in the day, but it turns out the ones to REALLY be afraid of are the dead-eyed compulsive liars, fascists and grifters and hustlers and un-Christian fundamentalists who just keep on coming back over and over again.
To quote someone most people don’t think of as punk, but whose whole career has been pretty punk as hell, Bob Dylan said it best: “I used to care, but things have changed.”
Stepping back from the situation for a while isn’t giving up forever. There’s still an awful lot of beauty out there away from the doomscrolling and outrage machine, no matter how bad it gets. It’s a pretty frustrating world, but god damn it, we’ll always have music.
What is it? “The greatest concert movie of all time,” capturing the Talking Heads at their very best during a series of shows in Hollywood in 1983, featuring frontman David Byrne’s jittery pop-funk songs and directed by future Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme early in his career.
Why I never saw it: Blame laziness, blame cultural overload, blame the fact there’s only so many hours in the day, but finally seeing this one fills in a major gap in my hipster brain. I’m actually a big fan of the Talking Heads and Stop Making Sense has been on my list to see forever, but the talk about the recent 40th anniversary re-release made me realise though I’ve seen excerpts over the years I still had never seen it in full – despite David Byrne’s more recent theatrical show American Utopia being one of my favourite concert movies of recent years, despite playing my favourite Heads classic Remain In Light on repeat for years now, despite having a well-worn copy of Byrne’s great book How Music Works, I somehow missed out on the movie that captures the Heads at their brilliant peak.
Also, a confession: Concert movies tend to be a little hit or miss for me. There’s no substitute for seeing music live, the thrum of the instruments shaking the little hairs on your arm, the chaotic buzz of the crowd. And while there have been many terrific concert movies – Gimme Shelter, Amazing Grace, The Last Waltz, Summer of Soul, Sign O’ The Times, etc — to me the best way to see them is still in a crowded cinema so you can get close to the communal experience. All that said, Stop Making Sense is the rare exception that breaks that barrier between screen and artist so thoroughly, even if you’re watching it alone in your bedroom you nearly feel as invigorated as you would if you had actually been there to see the Heads live, four decades ago. (Although probably less sweaty, hopefully.)
Does it measure up to its rep? The marvel of watching Stop Making Sense so many years after it’s been crowned the “best” concert movie is seeing exactly how it earned that trophy. The staging is tremendous – starting out with Byrne, alone on stage, gyrating through the twitchy “Psycho Killer,” but slowly joined in the next numbers by the rest of the band. It builds the spirit of the music from personal into something broad and communal, a circle of friends that make life better than it is. By the time they’re wheeling out elaborate drum sets and keyboards on risers on stage, you’re filled with glorious anticipation over what escalation you’re about to see next. It’s a building of momentum that means Stop Making Sense keeps rising and rising in energy until the cathartic release of “Take Me By The River” explodes forth.
It’s also fascinating to see how the late, great Demme changes the visualisation and energy of each song, the insanely cheerful energy of “Life During Wartime” where Byrne ends up running entire laps around the stage, the brilliant contrasting shadowy close-ups of “What A Day That Was,” the iconic “big suit” dance of “Girlfriend Is Better.” David Byrne is like an animated cartoon come to life in many of these songs, making moves with his body that seem to defy physics but somehow perfectly fit the moment.
And while Byrne’s wired, brilliant energy is the guiding light of Stop Making Sense, it’s also a fantastic showcase for the entire band – Demme doesn’t ignore the rest of the band, the great backup singers and guest performers, with pretty much everyone getting a showcase. Stop Making Sense is filled with great tiny gestures, from bassist Tina Weymouth’s shy smile to the brilliant grins of guitarist Alex Weir. More than any other concert movie, it shows how music builds, how a great band is a team, a series of parts working together in perfect synchronicity. Music is a remarkable thing that we tend to let wash over us without appreciating the talent and precision that goes into it, and without becoming some kind of academic lesson, Stop Making Sense takes us into the sweet, building mystery of sound.
Worth seeing? Without a doubt, unless you’ve got stone in your heart, Stop Making Sense is one of the great life-affirming slices of musical cinema humanity has to offer. Some of the movies in this long-running series I’ve watched kind of dutifully to fill in a film history gap. But this one is the kind of movie that just leaves you feeling good about our silly little species on this silly little planet, and of the things we can make when we’re not busy screwing everything up. I can see watching Stop Making Sense once a year for the rest of my life just to get a dopamine buzz and forget all my troubles for 90 glittering minutes. And somehow, that truly makes sense.
I’ve loved the sounds of Big Star and Alex Chilton for years, and the simple glittering heartbreak of their best songs still gets me with every single listen.
How often can a song do that after dozens, maybe hundreds of spins?
Those Big Star songs shimmer, 50 years on now after the fall 1974 recording of what ended up their final album, Third/Sister Lovers.
I can’t listen to the ringing chords of “September Gurls”, without summoning up visions every teenage love affair there ever was, of the burning intensity that, maybe, your life can never quite reach again after 18 years old. The words are deceptively simple – “September girls / Do so much / And for so long / ‘Till we touched.” But the vibe, man, the vibe – that’s eternal.
The genius of Big Star was the utter lack of rock star swagger in their boy-loves-girl pop, a kind of bemused casual sincerity that never really seems to age. Their feelings tapped into the universal, girls, cars and nights of confusion.
Take “Thirteen”, written by Chilton and poor doomed Chris Bell, who left the band after their first album and died in a car wreck at just 27. A fragile and trembling little song, in its first little conversational couplet it sums up a whole world of teenage hopes and dreams – “Won’t you let me walk you home from school? / Won’t you let me meet you at the pool?”
A buried gem for me has always been “Life Is White,” which contains the entire frustrating agony of a breakup in its simple words – “Don’t like to see your face / Don’t like to hear you talk at all.”
Written down, their words don’t exactly leap off the page, but between Chilton and Bell they feel real, in a deeper way than the stadium rock and pompous prog lyrics of the era.
The true art of Chilton’s lyrics was their plain-spoken language. “Hanging out / down the street” is hardly Shakespeare, but it’s a word picture that worked so well that That ‘70s Show used it to be the theme song for the entire decade. (Still annoyed they drafted Cheap Trick to cover it, though.)
Of course, part of Big Star’s charm is their found mystery – barely registering while they were briefly a band, three albums and done, and only slowly growing in cult power years later. (I first discovered them myself in the early 1990s, when a series of Rykodisc CD reissues hyped up this old forgotten cult band from Memphis, an hour’s drive up the road from where I was going to college. And for once, a band lived up to the hype.) Everybody loves to think they’ve discovered a hidden gem, and Big Star was one of the shiniest for a power pop lover back in the day.
I’ve written about my love for Alex Chilton’s epic disheveled and messy solo career that unspooled post-Big Star before his sadly early passing in 2010, but while Big Star were sometimes low-fi and unadorned, they were never sloppy. They meant every word, while Chilton in later years would kind of lean into a debauched troubadour vibe, singing songs with a wry smirk.
I sometimes think that Chilton maybe felt he’d perfected pop music with Big Star so much that he became bored by it, that he never wanted to take a song quite so seriously again.
There’s a reason people still listen to Big Star more than 50 years after the boys from Memphis started doodling out songs. They strike a chord, and every time I hear that clarion call of “September Gurls” glittering out of the speakers, I hear it ringing still.
I had always wanted to live in New York City. I’d seen Woody Allen movies, I’d been addicted to Seinfeld, I’d watched Ghostbusters and King Kong and Do The Right Thing.
The internship at Billboard magazine was great fun, but living in New York City as a perpetually broke 22-year-old? It was a bit scary. I was put up at New York University dormitories in the East Village, as part of my internship. I was stuck in a utilitarian multi-bedroom apartment with a few other starry-eyed interns, although my actual roommate ended up being a friendly Black 40-something military veteran. I didn’t spend a lot of time in my room, really – there was too much to see and do.
My late dad was very smart with how he taught his spendthrift son to spend money, although it took me years to realise this. He’d never let me starve to death, but neither would he give me an infinite line of credit to spend on books ’n’ CDs and delicious knishes.
So with the paltry paycheck from Billboard and a limited allowance from Dad, I got by. I ate an awful lot of Top Ramen and peanut butter some weeks, as my bank account regularly dropped to two figures. Truth be told, I couldn’t imagine how one could actually afford to live in the city without being a millionaire.
Times Square, where I went to work each day, hadn’t been quite so gentrified then, and was a buzzing, sleazy place with wide-eyed tourists mingling with businessmen, hookers and panhandlers. Cheap trinket shops mixed with fancy Broadway theatres and bizarre shadowy tombs showing all kinds of porn.
In those pre-digital, pre-streaming glory days, New York was a wonderful arcade of eccentric gritty book stores, record stores and junk shops. I discovered the amazing sprawling Strand Bookstore not a few blocks from my dorm room and fell in love in the intense way that only a really good used bookstore can make you feel.
I spent a lot of time in the East Village, where a dirt-poor intern on his days off could just spend the days people-watching in Washington Square. I sat listening to a cassette of Elvis Costello’s Get Happy on my Walkman and reading a paperback of cheap Chekhov plays and imagining how cool I must be. Sitting on the edge of the fountain I’d see people of all races and colours and lifestyles washing by, a far cry from college in rural Mississippi.
The city could be scary at times, but I was six foot two, able to fake an intimidating stare for strangers and knew enough not to take dumb chances.
The author, far right, wearing what history would judge, poorly, as quite possibly the most incredibly 1990s bohemian outfit of all time – tie-dyed shirt, black vest and most likely cut-off jean shorts as well.
But I also had friends there – pals I’d made in the small press community I got to hang out with for the first time – jumpin’ Joe Meyer, trippy Tim Kelly, amicable Amy Frushour and several more who helped guide me around the crazy, confusing labyrinth of New York. We ate cheap Sbarro’s pizza and wandered the endlessly fascinating streets doing cheap things and visiting museums. I marvelled at the World Trade Center, not knowing it’d be gone in seven years.
It was a summer that felt filled with weird coincidences. My oldest childhood friend happened to be touring the country post-college and we met up and climbed the Empire State Building together. On a busy random Manhattan street corner, I literally ran into an acquaintance from Mississippi. On a train heading upstate, the woman sitting next to me was a young writer I knew at Billboard.
I kick myself today over missing some things – never made it to the Statue of Liberty, never got to Harlem or Brooklyn, didn’t have the money to bounce to all the hip clubs and shows that were going on all around me. I was 22, and I didn’t know all the things I could have been doing. I’m sure I missed a lot.
In hindsight, I wish that maybe I’d seen more and done more in my time in New York – not knowing that 30 years later, having moved to the other side of the world, I’d still never have returned there. Maybe I shouldn’t have bought so many dog-eared paperbacks at the Strand and bought so many CDs at St Mark’s Sounds. But heck, that was part of the experience, wasn’t it?
I was young and naive and the city was a playground of novelties. But it was also exhausting in a certain way, and after three months I longed for a little Mississippi calm and the sound of crickets on a humid Southern night. I didn’t become a seasoned, sarcastic Manhattanite like I’d imagined I might, but I had a taste of the city that never sleeps. That was enough, and 30 years on, unforgettable.
Somehow, 30 years ago this summer, I had my New York City adventure, a near-college graduate from Mississippi who ended up working at a major international magazine.
In my last few months of university, I stumbled into an internship with Billboard magazine, the music industry bible. I’d been signed up for a “trade magazines” internship program and apparently the few awkward music reviews and pieces I’d slapped together as clippings was enough for me to get a three-month tour aboard one of the industry’s biggest magazines. (Later, I met other people who were part of the same trade internship who ended up at magazines with titles like Tractor Parts Weekly, and who were a bit jealous of my fumbling luck getting a “cool” internship.)
For a college boy from Mississippi, it felt like I’d dropped into another world. I had never been to New York City or even America’s East Coast, and suddenly I was tossed into a real Manhattan magazine office which was both more and less than I expected. It had the warren of cubicles like you’d see on TV and movies, the bustle of constant weekly deadlines, but while it was magical, it was also sometimes mundane and in the end, a place where people just worked.
Each day I would put on presentable clothes (the tie and slacks, I discovered in the very first week, were a bit much) and take the subway from my dorm room at NYU up to Times Square, where I’d grab a New York Daily News and coffee and head up to the Billboard office.
In 1994, the music industry was a very different place than it was in 2024. Sure, you still had hustlers and hopefuls all angling to make it big, but there was no Spotify, there was no social media. There was cold black ink on glossy magazine print worth its weight in gold to any musician. Billboard told the world what the number one song was, what the biggest selling album was. It mattered, in an age before media splintered into a million subsets.
The CD was king, and it’s hard to explain now how these shiny disposable discs were valuable hard currency to music lovers for a while there. We’d get dozens of CDs a day from bands hoping for a line or two of print, and each day, dozens of them that the editors were either done with or never listened to at all would be “dumped” on a small “free” shelf right across from my cubicle. Like a dinner bell ringing, the “dump” would be accompanied by other office workers scurrying to the shelf from all over the building, scooping up the glorious free music, no matter what it was, hoping to find treasures.
I ended up with several boxes full of CDs stamped with “promotional copy” on the front to ship back to Mississippi. That summer I discovered bands I would love for years to come – the surreal rock of Guided By Voices, the lonesome beauty of Freedy Johnston, the Britpop charms of Blur – along with dozens of other bands whose names I’d soon forget, whose CDs I’d eventually trade in for credit somewhere.
I worked, briefly, with some music legends there who are now all gone, like the warm-hearted late Irv Lichtman, a true New Yorker to his bones, or Eric Boehlert, a genial young editor only a handful of years older than me who went on to become a fiery critic of online misinformation before his terribly early death in an accident in 2022. The Billboard editor-in-chief, Timothy White, was a bow-tied wearing blur who zipped past my desk several times a week. We exchanged maybe a dozen sentences but that was enough for a striving wanna-be journalist to soak up. He was hugely respected in the industry, but died suddenly of a heart attack at only 50 years old a few years later.
Billboard was full of kind and crusty journalists in equal measure – one of the editors never addressed me with anything more than a grunt, while another often took me out to lunch and once regaled me of tales of the interview he’d just had with Erasure’s Andy Bell that morning. One rain-soaked weekend half the staff went upstate to Woodstock ’94 and I vicariously took in all their madcap stories of this rather muddy fiasco the next week. I was an observer on the edge of it all, but it confirmed for me this weird, pressure-filled life of journalism was where I wanted to be.
Please note my magnificently disheveled makeshift cubicle at 1515 Broadway, Times Square complete with prominent trash can and empty bag of bagels.
I lived the true intern’s life of being the office errand boy, in that pre-digital era – helping sort the massive sacks of mail of review CDs and books that were dumped out daily, answering phones, working in a tiny storeroom jammed with file cabinets to organise the horrifyingly cheesy band photos sent in by every would-be superstar in the land, and sometimes, getting to write short pieces.
I had maybe 10 bylines in Billboard that summer, each one feeling hard-won.
An article on Oxford, Mississippi band Blue Mountain was a Billboard highlight for me.
I was briefly, part, of a newsroom and a team, and all the years since then I’ve found myself drawn to that weird companionship of the news. It gets in you.
I never got a front-page scoop or anything. I was an accessory, a kid learning the ropes. One tangled industry piece I did ended up being rewritten so comprehensively that I think I recognised a dozen syllables as my work in the final product, but I took it all in – you were there to learn, after all, and the 22-year-old intern couldn’t afford to get angsty about credits.
I did not end up staying and working in Manhattan – I had one semester of college to finish, and ended up getting hired by the local Mississippi paper that fall and working there for a few years before fleeing back to my native California and continuing my quixotic career.
Since the summer of ’94, I have never been back to New York City, and now live almost on the opposite side of the world. I’d like to go back, someday.
But it was enough to be there, for a summer in Manhattan, walking through Times Square every day eating a bagel and feeling like you were part of something greater.
When I think of New Zealand music, spawned way down here at the bottom of the world, the very first thing that always pops into my brain is the brooding, bouncy opening chords of The Chills’ “Pink Frost.”
Martin Phillipps, the lead singer and driving force behind the Chills, died this weekend at just 61 years old, and for any fan of NZ music, it hits hard. Gorgeous and mysterious and intimate and epic, the best of the Chills’ music evoked New Zealand for me in a way that nothing else quite ever could. There is a beautiful mystery to it.
I wrote a lengthy post back in 2019 about Phillipps and the Chills after being fortunate enough to see him at the premiere of the excellent documentary on the band’s twisting career: Martin Phillipps and the endless cool of the Chills.
It says everything I still feel now about this wonderful curiosity of a band, who maybe never quite became a household name in the wider world, but who had a knack for perhaps music’s most elusive, perfect quality – the ability to instantly send you away, into a new place.
Thanks for everything, Martin. The music lives on. Crank up “Heavenly Pop Hit” and enjoy what he left behind.
Nik Dirga 