UPLAND SLAPDOWN

Joe Carducci and David Lightbourne, founders of the Upland Breakdown, on why you listen to crappy rock ‘n’ roll

By ELLIOTT JOHNSTON
Rocky Mountain Chronicle

Joe Carducci is in the back corner of Grounds Coffee Lounge with a ball cap on and reading the New York Times weekend arts section when I step inside. The windows of the small shop look out onto Laramie’s main drag, which treads a fine line between rustic and plain old rust, and hardly obscures the massive, wind-battered Wyoming landscape in the distance. The stereo is emitting modern, sappy pop, and before I even introduce myself, I wonder if the music is pissing off Carducci. In print, Carducci comes off as a character who wouldn’t put up with a situation like this, who wouldn’t sit tight while noxious music litters the public’s gullible, fragile eardrums. I half expect him to start flipping chairs over and hold the speaker wires hostage.

His influential-in-some-circles-but-hardly-ever-in-print challenge to the establishment of music criticism, 1990’s monkey-wrench on rock, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, is so clear about what is good and what is bad in rock, and so abrasive in its approach, that it’s difficult to watch the author sit quietly and politely as a bouncy song about smooching boys blasts through the sound system.

The first section of Rock and the Pop Narcotic, entitled “The Riff,” is an unprecedented bitching out of the rock critic, in particular those who pioneered the trade at Rolling Stone in the late sixties and early seventies. After disclaiming that “rock music isn’t the only music worth listening to,” Carducci charges that real rock criticism hardly exists; it is so blinded by its own liberal, collegiate upbringing that it lathers all kinds of bogus criteria — political and social relevance, the lead singer’s literary abilities and charisma, unnecessary pretensions like technical skill, studio trickery and more — on top of the music. Perhaps most heinous, by Carducci’s rule, is a rock critic’s rampant susceptibility to the ever-fleeting, ever-market-driven Next Big Thing.

Carducci, who once considered himself an anarchist and now plainly ascribes to the apolitical title “do-it-yourself intellectual,” and Narcotic are far from PC. The book indicts David Bowie as a key instigator of “fag” rock and claims that bands who strive for a female audience are so pop and not rock that they might as well give up and start dry-humping the Walt Disney Company. For Carducci, anything besides the simple live equation of three or four (usually dudes) in everyday clothes with standard-issue rock instruments (guitar, bass, drums), no game plan for stardom and a whole lot of untrained energy is not rock but pop.

That Carducci helped manage SST Records from 1981 to 1986, the trailblazing indie label owned by the iconic, hardcore punk band Black Flag, is a context that strips naked the belligerence of his argument. Carducci’s gig at SST demanded arguing the label’s consciously noncommercial bands like Black Flag, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Husker Du and The Descendents into the print media, onto radio and into record stores at a time when punk was thought to be dead and overproduced arena-rock bands and Reaganomics were clouding the cultural climate.

When Black Flag broke up, Carducci moved to Chicago and spent four years on Narcotic. In 1990, he self-distributed about two thousand copies of the meticulously researched, left-field attack on music scribes. Though the book has since been through three small printings and was updated in 1995, it remains primarily a jab at champions of Bruce Springsteen, Sting and “girly” European New Wavers who had ignored, willfully or not, the importance of Carducci’s friends and former coworkers, like Henry Rollins and Mike Watt.

Carducci presents more rock history in Narcotic than just his small part in it. The second half, “The Psychozoic Hymnal,” is his attempt to sum up the last fifty years of rock worth listening to. He sends his rock theory back to organic, untainted fifties groups (led by Muddy Waters, Elvis, Chuck Berry), argues the virtue of sixties instrumental surf music, and champions early Black Sabbath as rock royalty. His purposefully loose prose attacks are aimed at subverting familiar, over-educated odes to wussy, studio eggheads like The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

“No one wants rock ’n’ roll, really,” Carducci says, with a calm, almost scholarly seriousness. “But bars will take it if girls are interested in the music, because if they are there, then the guys who will buy them drinks are there and, suddenly, you are making money. You don’t make money on Black Flag fans. Some people made money, but it was a hassle. You had to have a certain kind of PA that kids could climb on, and extra bouncers and police detail sometimes and all this stuff. So rock ’n’ roll has always been a problem. I don’t glorify that particularly, but I did intend to make fun of the people who think they are into rock ’n’ roll.”

One of the many targets of the book, Robert Christgau, the self-appointed “Dean of American Rock Critics,” who has filled plenty of column space in Rolling Stone over the years, wrote a review of Carducci’s book for The Village Voice in 1991. After calling Carducci a “flaming homophobe” and all but a misogynist, Christgau wrote that although Carducci’s argument is sloppy and narrow in scope, it is an important book, one that “deserves the attention of every disgruntled clubgoer out there.”

Today, Carducci muses pendulously about Narcotic’s impact.

“I think the book changed the later generation of rock critic,” he says. “But it’s hard to tell exactly. They would hear from someone that they had to read this book, and then they at least got in touch with a counterargument.”

Seventeen years since the book’s first edition, Carducci’s theories are still relatively cemented. There is still a small spittoon of quality in an ocean of crappy rock. And damned if those critics — those who are, in Carducci’s view, responsible for siphoning out the good stuff for the public — know the difference.

“So much rock criticism is just a fantasy,” he says. “Just a fantasy of the writer. And the early ones in particular were college kids in the late sixties, and they were writing as if to justify the music with their parents or their English professor. Like, ‘This is literature’ or ‘This is important’ or ‘This is as good as Shakespeare’ or whatever. And again, that’s wrong. That’s collegiate and white, and you’re gonna kill rock ’n’ roll if you stay on that track.”

Thus, white equals upper class equals pretentious. Pretentiousness then takes rock away from its black roots as rhythmically powerful dance music. Carducci says this race-based critique is influenced by his friend David Lightbourne, who is keen on “focusing on what black blues musicians were before white hipsters believed they identified them as something they were not.”

For the past seven years, Carducci and Lightbourne have curated the Upland Breakdown, an outsider roots and alt-country festival held in a homey cafe in Centennial, Wyoming. And although Carducci and Lightbourne are both as white as the people they attack and many of musicians they congregate with, they speak as if the discrepancy has never crossed their minds.

“The first impulse of white people is to remove the black from rock ’n’ roll,” Carducci continues. “And then rock criticism becomes an exercise in convincing you it is still rock ’n’ roll.”

A central legacy of Carducci’s critique delivers a challenging addition of class awareness to the genre: aggressive and smart, but not conceited, rock enjoyed and played by the working and middle class = good; overly arty rock that is philosophized over by the academic and upper classes = bad. This awareness, he says, along with his complete contempt for political correctness, is a direct byproduct of his involvement with SST.

“The hippie thing was righteous and punk was not, to say the least. … I wrote the book because rock music deserves a definition and a defense.”

For those not versed in the cultural about-face that occurs in the hour-long drive between Fort Collins and Laramie, the sheer number and variation of mounted animals that border the upper walls of the Buckhorn Bar in Laramie is a ponderous sight. As I take inventory of the stuffed menagerie — double digits of elk and moose heads, a bison head, an owl, a calf, a turtle, a fox, a badger, a boar — I’m well aware of my not-from-around-here faux pas.

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m here for Lightbourne’s weekly open jam, where the Laramie-based singer mines his encyclopedic memory of songs, playing bygone American rhythm and blues, and invites locals and passers-through to join him onstage, follow along and play their own material when he takes a break.

Tonight he is joined by Laramie mandolinist and songwriter Birgit Burke, a young banjoist and a young violinist from a Chattanooga roots band who happen to be in town, and three or four more folks that trade time among the stage, the barstools and the smoking circle outside the Buckhorn’s front door.

Lightbourne — accompanied by an acoustic guitar and what he calls a jazzhorn, a makeshift instrument worn around his neck that sounds like a cousin to the kazoo — has been playing professionally since the 1960s. In many ways, his appreciation for obscure and antique American musical styles came by way of necessity. When he was playing coffeehouses during the sixties’ folk revival, there was a kind of folkloric Darwinism afoot: The songwriters who knew the most original, rarified material were invited to sing another day.

Lightbourne moved to Laramie from Chicago in 1995 and started the Stop and Listen Boys, a revolving lineup that helps him realize his sincerely obsessive take on early twentieth century American folk forms. And while it may seem to some, especially those born in late seventies or early eighties, that Lightbourne is playing roots music, maybe folk-blues or maybe bluegrass, Lightbourne says, in a one-half disgruntled curator, one-half crazy old man manner, that what he plays is rock ’n’ roll.

“I formed my first band in the mid- to late-seventies, ’78 for the sake of argument,” he says. “And in 1978, the only venues available to you were NHL arenas. There were no bands that didn’t have a stack of 27 Marshalls on top of each other for every instrument.

“They were putting drummers in cages. And I said, ‘No. Give me an acoustic guitar, one microphone, a washboard and a mandolin, and I’ll show you what rock ’n’ roll is supposed to sound like.’ And it’s just my reaction against the arena-rock era. I tried to take it all the way down to Elvis and Sun Records in ’53 with just a Martin acoustic bluegrass guitar. He didn’t have a synthesizer. They couldn’t punch in and punch out bad notes. That’s rock ’n’ roll. Not Sting saving the hummingbirds.”

Like his friend Carducci, Lightbourne can spend hours railing against the gargantuan cultural landfill that he opposes, sifting out the pristine gold that he ardently stands up for. It’s almost Southern Baptist in its self-assured pinpointing of good and evil. Unlike Carducci, Lightbourne, who is twelve years older than his friend, never cared much for rock with electric guitars. When he saw what was becoming of rock music in the late sixties, he dove back in time and never returned.

“I couldn’t be interested in Black Sabbath because I was listening to everything recorded between 1920 and 1940. From ’67 on, you couldn’t listen to The Eagles because you were listening to everybody better than The Eagles between 1925 and 1940. You know, it’s like these people don’t count.”

In fact, Lightbourne took his antimodern credo so far that on a radio slot he once held in Portland called “David Lightbourne’s Rock ’n’ Roll House Party,” he had an uncompromising rule to not play any music made after December 31, 1959. His stand turned controversial when local Portlanders would request 1955’s “Louie Louie,” a hometown hit when Portland didn’t have many.

Lightbourne refused, because The Kingsmen recorded “Louie Louie” in ’63.

“I’d offer to sing it over the phone,” he says. “And early Beatles. They’d say, ‘Ahh, we want early Beatles!’ Fuck The Beatles. If you can find me some live recordings from some den of sin in Hamburg in ’59, I’ll put it on, no fucking problem.”

As far as Lightbourne’s own music is concerned, he takes substantial offense to the notion that some may notice the mandolins and the washboards surrounding him and call it bluegrass. Lightbourne says modern bluegrass, another topic he can riff on for days, has morphed from its original incarnation as a Southern lower-class art supported by “people who sit in church pews holding rattlesnakes” to a music taken over by urban intellectuals who impose their European performance standards on it. Lightbourne says now, with all the decedents of original bluegrass fans “at NASCAR races,” bluegrass has been taken over by “egomaniacal technical musicians.”

“They may not really have any soul in their music, but they can sure outplay anybody on the block,” he says, adding that the music has “run out of all of its original purpose for existence.”

“It’s in this weird limbo in which no one takes it seriously, no one is any good, and the people who are the most undisciplined, they go into jam bands.”

Lightbourne does appreciate the musical innovations of black Southerners from the Mississippi Delta and from Memphis in the twenties and thirties. As Carducci puts it, Lightbourne “wants to play guitar like the Delta players Charley Patton or Son House and then have a jug band behind him.”

“My music is more rhythmic than it is melodic or harmonic,” Lightbourne says. “So the emphasis on rhythm means that it’s not like white pop music before my generation. Before my generation, there was hardly any rhythmic ideas at all in white music.”

Tonight at the Buckhorn, the men and women onstage with Lightbourne are jovial. Burke and her friend, who sings along from her seat, are particularly passionate and know most of the songs. Lightbourne has led the bunch through a song that “was at the top of the charts during the Civil War,” “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotton, and other dusty faves about ramblin’, gamblin’ and going out on the town.

Target: Audience

The first Upland Breakdown was held in 2000 in Centennial, where Carducci now lives.

The original intent of the Breakdown was to promote Upland Records, an alt-country offshoot of the Fort Collins-based punk label Owned and Operated Recordings, run primarily by former ALL/Descendents/Black Flag drummer Bill Stevenson, who still logs hours at his nationally renowned studio, The Blasting Room. Upland Records was helmed, sometimes by default, by Carducci. The inaugural concert featured the now-disbanded Drag the River, Grandpa’s Ghost, SST-producer-turned-solo-oddball-folkie Spot, and Lightbourne’s group.

Along with a heap of formerly ardent punk rockers, Carducci’s tastes have mellowed over the years to a more roots-influenced music.

“A lot of these folkies are really ex-punk rockers,” he says. “They were listening to punk when they were kids, and they just couldn’t hack the band thing.”

Seven years later, with Upland Records now defunct, Carducci and Lightbourne still maintain the Breakdown yearly in Centennial. The small town is thirty miles west of Laramie, a locale Lightbourne lovingly calls “a failed ski town — it’s Aspen three hundred years ago.”

The event has always had a sort of purposefully outsider quality to it, and not just because the musicians who play it are sometimes better known on either coast than in Wyoming or Colorado. It’s also been a logistical issue: Highway 287, which runs north and south along the northern Front Range to Laramie, is a picturesque though sometimes death-defying one-lane trip, where even those who carefully keep their eyes on the road are subject to ravenous, ticket-mongering highway patrol and all kinds of furry animals crossing at will.

Partly in response to this inconvenience, the eighth annual Breakdown will hold a second day at the Swing Station, the honky-tonk in LaPorte. On Sunday, August 26, psychedelic alt-country groups The Places and Souled American will join eccentric folk veteran Michael Hurley and Breakdown-mainstays Stop and Listen Boys and Spot.

The Breakdown, Lightbourne says with unveiled pride, attracts “musician’s musicians who aren’t in it for commercial success. People who have an insanely huge positive rep in the musical community, old timers who are playing for the fun of it” and fans who “want the most un-fucked-with music.”

Despite their façades as antisocial musical curmudgeons holing up in the Cowboy State, Carducci and Lightbourne have ties in faraway musical centers. During the past few years, Lightbourne has been asked to play at the Knitting Factory in New York, because, as he puts it, the city’s musical elite have taken a liking to string-band music from the twenties. Carducci, besides his friendships with now culturally important figures Henry Rollins and Mike Watt, has written sporadically for the influential L.A.-based music, arts and political monthly Arthur Magazine, which, despite going out of business for a spell, is sponsoring this year’s Breakdown.

Last October, Carducci and Lighbourne were taken aback by just how “with it” they were by booking avant-folkie Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy) at the Buckhorn. On an icy Wednesday evening that made Highway 287 all the more treacherous, the Buckhorn was loaded with young indie-rock fans. The hipsters thought the stuffed animals on the wall looked funny, but the bartenders thought the hipsters did. Carducci reports that Oldham may play next year’s Breakdown if his schedule allows.

But while both Carducci and Lightbourne say they want to correct the public record in their respective field of homemade expertise, they both scoff at the idea that they may be going about it the wrong way. Both could care less that their language can be polarizing. In fact, that is often their intention.

“We didn’t make this stuff up,” Carducci says. “I mean, there are different people, whether in the social sciences or in the arts, they feel something about their world, and they can’t let it go just because everyone around them is oblivious to it.

“Dave and I, a long time ago, decided we don’t care about things most people care about.”

“Um, what we really want to do,” Lighbourne says, “is we want to offend anybody who has anything to do, on any level, with lifestyle culture: designer music, designer magazines, designer clothes, designer skateboards, designer guitars, designer houses, designer cars. Anything that’s just specifically serving a niche that wants comfort without any type of artistic challenge. And they are all over the fucking map. These lifestylers are all over the map.

“There goes one right now,” he says, tilting his head toward a pedestrian. “And you know, if they are offended by that, they are not circumspect enough to realize that a great deal of the culture is mediocre.”