April Is The Cruelest Month, Baseball Edition

This baseball season is not progressing as I thought. While my White Sox are playing above expectations, the New York Mets seem to have been cursed by the baseball gods. Seth Lugo and Stephen Matz were quickly out of the rotation due to injury, and today it appears that the might Thor, Noah Syndergaard may soon be out too. In our arrogance so many Met fans scoffed at the earlier injuries, bragging about the depth of Mets pitching talent. Now that overconfidence has been broken on the wheel of the ever-capricious wheel of the pitching arm.

On top of that, the mighty Yoenis Cespedes is also injured, along with fellow slugger Lucas Duda. The team that I thought was poised to compete for a title just dropped six straight games at home in embarrassing fashion. Any hopes for contention seem to be dashed, but there's still five months of games to come that I will have to suffer through.

Oh, I have rooted for many a losing team before, to be sure. After all, I am a Mets and White Sox fan. However, when teams I root for have been crappy in the past, I pretty much expected it. Much worse is the cruelty of having your hopes up, only to have them dashed. That happened last year when the Mets lost their one game playoff, but at least I could be happy that my team battled injury to sneak into the playoffs. This year every game I watch will likely be tainted by the excruciating thought of what could have been. The White Sox have actually done this to me before many times in the past, like the time they signed Adam Dunn and he promptly had one of the worst seasons by a player ever.

It would also be easier to take if I already hadn't experienced a similar cruel crushing of hopes in the election last November. So in that sense the dull pain I feel on a daily basis in regards to the state of the country should prepare me for a similar pain when it comes to baseball.

For in baseball everything, including the pain, is daily. Your football team may suck, but its suckiness will only torture you one day out of the week. When it comes to baseball, the reminders are constant. On top of that, your team will win some games here and there, meaning that your expectations never truly fall to where they should be. Also, if you root for an epically bad football team, you can take a sheepish delight in the occasional win. In baseball even the worst team will win sixty games, so winning one does not bring the same feeling of release. It only serves to fool you that tomorrow will be a brighter day. In that sense baseball's illusions mirror life's.

The Kinks, "20th Century Man" (1971 Project)

[Editor's Note: this is the next installment of my continuing series on the year 1971.]

The Kinks had an amazing run from 1966 to 1971 where their sound matured and Ray Davies' eye for the subtleties of postwar British society got ever keener. Their last album in that run in Muswell Hillbillies, which happened to be their first for new label RCA. (Unfortunately for their new label, they would go on a string of ill-advised concept albums after this point.)

The album is a return to the band's roots, name-checking their London neighborhood of Muswell Hill. The music is rootsier too, much like the rocking folk style that Rod Stewart was popularizing at the time. The best song by far is the opener, "20th Century Man," a rip-roaring lament about the bland, standardized modern world. At the start it sounds like something being played on someone's back porch before the drums and slide guitar kick in to give it an edge. The lyrics are a cross between Davies' nostalgia for a different time and punk rock disregard: "Ain't got no ambition/ I'm just disillusioned."

The song keeps driving, with organ coming in to give it extra heft, the faster tempo ever increasing. The whole thing is a rollicking rave-up concealing a social critique. It is a song deeply suited to the 1971 project due to its themes. The optimism and sense of utopia of the sixties are gone here. All of the attempts to change the social order appear to have come to naught. All that's left is a feeling of alienation and paranoia. It's a very typical feeling for 1971, and one that feels pretty familiar to me.

Echo and the Bunnymen, "Pictures On My Wall"

There is some music that I associate so intensely with certain periods in my life that the flow of memories when I listen to it can be fearsome. One such band is Echo and the Bunnymen. Despite my love of The Smiths and Depeche Mode, I never listened to them until I started my master's program in Chicago in the fall of 1998, and only because a new friend turned me on to them. It was a very strange time in my life. I had been a stellar student in my undergraduate history classes, but the grad classes were very demanding and very difficult. While I had received a fine education at my undergrad institution, I had not been taught by historians who were in tune with the current state of the field. It was disorienting to feel like I suddenly wasn't good at something that I'd always assumed was the thing I was best at. This led to very high levels of self doubt.

On top of that shock, I was living outside of Nebraska for the first time in a big city, and living alone for the first time in my life to boot. Echo and the Bunnymen's first album, purchased around the corner from my apartment, was the soundtrack to so many dark and lonesome nights. There was something erie and new to me about being alone in a city surrounded by millions of people. In the rural town I grew up in those nights were impossibly dark and quiet, the sound of trains like otherworldly sentinels blowing their horns echoing through my window. In the city the sky was never truly dark due to all of the reflected light, and there was a constant background buzz at all times.

There was an eeriness in songs like "Pictures On My Wall" that spoke to me on those nights. In fact, I can hardly think of music more perfect for such moments. Nowadays, married with kids and a dog in a cluttered house with friendly neighbors, those moments don't come around so often. I listen to this song these days and feel glad that's the case.

Trumpist Politics As Spectacle

I just finished teaching a class on World War I last week, and we ended with the last chapter of Modris Eksteins' Rites of Spring, wherein he connects the cultural modernism unleashed by the conflict to Nazism. Eksteins shows how fascism was politics as theater. Outside of its upper echelons its followers were drawn less by ideology and more by membership in a massive spectacle. In those torchlit parades and glittering rituals giving oneself over and turning off one's mind became a whole lot easier. The Triumph Of The Will is to this day a horrifying document in its ability to make evil seem attractive.

As I read that chapter I realized that a lot of people (myself included) who have discussed Trump in the context of fascism have missed the boat when it comes to this particular issue. I was suddenly reminded of the point when I realized that Trump's candidacy stood a good chance of succeeding. It was in September of 2015, when he gave a speech on the deck of the decommissioned battleship  USS Iowa. He did not speak for very long, and he did not seem all that coherent in what he said. The optics, however, were very good. He was positioned right below the massive guns of the ship, leaning over the podium with a red Make America Great Again cap pulled low. This man who dodged the draft bloviated about veterans, the subject of what he was saying, as always, more important than the actual content. Most importantly, he was shot from below, giving this ridiculous figure an air of command. In that moment I realized that the inchoate longings for an authoritarian ruler that have long lurked beneath the surface of American society could be called forth by this man.

Trump is described as a real estate developer, but he is in reality a television personality. His ability to manipulate the levers of television was his huge tactical advantage. He made himself into the spectacle that got the ratings, and so the news stations just aired his rantings unfiltered and unmediated. Too many journalists, happy to cash their checks, failed to take him seriously. I remember watching that speech in September, and Rachel Maddow cutting back in and laughing bemusedly at what she had just witnessed. Too many realized too late that, in the words of Morrissey, that joke wasn't funny anymore.

Trump's obsession with spectacle continues. He still attacks "fake news" even in interviews with the AP and other mainstream news outlets that give him a platform. In his most recent interview he has infamously gloated about how his ratings on cable news were the highest since 9/11. He has defended Sean Spicer's ineptitude by citing his "ratings" as well. He dropped the much-promoted "Mother Of All Bombs" in a military operation that was more spectacle that war. He has called the entire Senate to come be briefed by him in what is likely a photo-op rather than a national security summit.

However, I see signs of hope in all of this. Trump's main avenue of spectacle is indeed cable news, which would have been much more effective in the 1990s. Outside of a campaign, his rallies are only preaching to the converted. Trump may be trying to utilize politics as spectacle, but their effectiveness may have hit their peak in November of 2016. He has built a house on shaky ground, and it is our duty to provide the earthquake.

We Need Social Democracy, not Sanders Worship

I'll take Bayard Rustin over Bernie Sanders any day of the week

There's been a lot of discussion this week about Bernie Sanders campaigning for a Democratic candidate for mayor of Omaha who's sponsored mandatory ultrasound bills and other anti-choice measures associated with the most repressive conservatives. (This is different than maintaining a moral opposition to abortion a la Tim Kaine. If you think otherwise you are blinded by your adulation.)

I find this to be the most recent iteration of a deep problem I have with a lot of people on the left side of the spectrum who support Sanders. They are willing to compromise on or ignore the issues that matter very specifically to women and people of color. (Sanders is also soft on gun control, which is another issue.)  It is the same problem many self-described socialists I know have, whereby they think that if social class is addressed all other inequalities will somehow melt away. It is a narrow and dangerous way of thinking, and it is in fact quite insulting to the people whose grievances are going unheard.

I keep hearing people talk about the Democratic primaries last year as if the party apparatus itself stopped Sanders.

No.

He lost primary votes because he failed to appeal to the specific concerns of many voters due to the narrowness of his message. Most obviously, he failed to get the support of African Americans, who are one of the absolute pillars of the Democratic Party and its most loyal constituents. Those voters clearly perceived Sanders' inability to see their specific concerns as separate from his general bromides about the 1%. While he made efforts to correct this, it was too little too late. His recent support for Mello in Omaha and his assertion that Trump voters "aren't racist" pretty much shows that he is still trapped in a vision of social democracy that is race and gender blind.

We deserve better than this. As loyal readers may note, I have written for both Jacobin and Liberal Currents. I do not see a contradiction, because I define myself as a social democrat, and that is an identity in this country that straddles the line between liberalism and the Left. It's also one that leaves me feeling like a man without a political country. Sanders' message is inherently social democratic, but the cult of personality around him has sucked the life out of any true social democratic movement. Instead, so many people are hung up on supporting Sanders, rather than leading a movement of their own.

That must change, because Sanders' vision of social democracy is wrong and outdated. I want a social democracy rooted in an uncompromising commitment to the rights and dignity of all people. That means treating issues around race, gender, and sexuality with as much seriousness as economic ones, or, for that matter, not treating them as if they are separate, rather than intertwined. (I am not going to say "intersectional" because I want a mass movement on the left that does not resort to grad student jargon.) I appreciate that Sanders has helped popularize a more social democratic politics, but it is time for others to step up and for him to take a step back. If not the current flowering of social democracy in this country will wither and die.

Episode 9 of the Old Dad's Records Podcast, "Signs"

https://soundcloud.com/jason-tebbe/old-dads-record-ep-9-signs

I finally got episode nine of my podcast up. I've decided to go "live on the nines" by having episodes about live music on those ending in a nine. This is partly because so many old cheap records are live albums, and thus deserving of a special place. In this installment I first discuss "Signs" by Tesla, a live acoustic cover of the Five Man Electrical Jam song of the early 1970s. Then I examine REO Speedwagon's double live album, Live: You Get What You Play For. It is one of the finer examples of the double live format, as well as a sign that REO were shedding their hairy hard rock ways for the corporate sheen and big bucks to be had on the FM dial in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971 Project)

The trailer makes the film seem a lot more action-packed than it is

I'd like to start off the 1971 Project with a cultural artifact that is highly emblematic of that year, Monte Hellman's film Two-Lane Blacktop. It came in that truly glorious early 1970s period when Hollywood, desperate to cash in on the success of Easy Rider and to appeal to the younger generation, gave a bunch of aspiring filmmakers money to make low-budget movies that did not fit the norm. It was something that hasn't really happened before or since, and for my money 1971 is among the most fertile years in cinema history.

The film's story is barebones. The Driver and the The Mechanic take their souped-up and stripped down 1955 Chevy across the country engaging in drag races, with very little to be said between them. Along the way they meet The Girl, a young woman who seems similarly lost and looking for meaning, trying to carry on conversation with men who only seem interested in their mission. They also encounter GTO, a middle-aged man driver the car of the same name, who engages them in a race across the country, each betting their car on the outcome. The Driver and The Mechanic were played by neophytes James Taylor (the folksinger) and Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys), and their acting, as wooden as the HMS Bounty, somehow works in this understated film. Laurie Bird, who would die tragically young, has a real naturalism about her. Warren Oates, a great character actor of the 1960s and 1970s, plays GTO with a cocky bravado that barely masks his deep well of sadness.

It is a deeply introspective film. As someone who has driven 800 miles at a time, I feel it captures that Zen-like feeling of relaxed concentration that one gets behind the wheel on long road trips. In Two-Lane Blacktop, that feeling of concentration also feels a lot like ennui, and ennui embedded in the world of 1971.

As I mentioned in the post kicking off this series, 1971 to me feels like the true sunset of the 60s counterculture. In this film The Driver and The Mechanic are still devoted to living outside of society, but they seem tired, and a little broken. The Girl has an air of desperation about her. None of these characters seems like they will last too long in the harsh reality of 1970s America. While they represent the counterculture, with their single-minded dedication to outfitting their own car and living outside of society, GTO is the avatar of American consumer society. He seems affluent, though we don't learn where the money comes from. Instead of putting his soul into outfitting a car of his own, he has merely bought the GTO, a mass-produced status symbol. While the trio of youngsters seems spent or lost, GTO seems spiritually adrift, and aware of the emptiness of his lifestyle but without a clue about what else to do.

Hellman seems to imply (at least to me) that America's soul in the early 1970s is empty. The old consumer values are rubbish, but those that oppose them seem headed for a dead end. Appropriately, the movie ends abruptly during a drag race, suddenly cutting out while the last frames of the film appear to burn up. The road goes on forever, as The Allman Brothers once said. Befitting a time of transition and confusion, there's no resolution in Two-Lane Blacktop, and it would feel completely false if there was.

Introducing the 1971 Project

It's been awhile since I've started a new running series on this blog, which is a shame since I tend to write better when I am thinking about a bigger topic than just responding to the events of the day.

I am a sucker for a lot of genres I should not be a sucker for, and one of them is the "The World In Year X" genre. After all, I am a sophisticated historian, and understand that historical events and trends very rarely conform to arbitrary dates on the calendar. That said, I find something satisfying about books that deal with a calendar year, especially baseball books. (At least a sports season puts greater ontological weight on viewing things by year.)

I am currently reading Heather Ann Thompson's deservedly lauded history of the Attica Prison uprising in 1971, and that triggered in me a long-held notion about that particular year. I now see it as the apotheosis of the 1960s in many respects. Not just the sixties as the time of radical protest and social change, but also the sixties as a time of resentment, backlash, and rise of the modern conservative movement. The brutally violent suppression of the Attica uprising, perhaps more than the Kent State shooting the year before, showed the willingness of authority to use its full power to destroy the voices of dissent. After all, it was in 1971 that activists broke into government offices and revealed the machinations of COINTELPRO.

On reason why I keep writing on this blog is that I lack the expertise, talent, and time to write books, but something in me compels me to keep writing. So instead of the book about 1971 I wish I could write, I'll be giving y'all a bunch of blog posts.

So I will leave this one off with "Can't You Hear My Knocking" by the Rolling Stones. It has an air of desperation mixed subtle violence that seems so fitting for the times. There's also an extended solo section in the middle, a sign of changing musical times for a band once known for its compact, explosive singles.

Palace Coup

In the Bible the people of Moab descended from the children conceived incestuously between Lot and his daughters. The MOAB name is fitting for another abomination.

This week saw maybe the most stunning presidential policy reversal I have witnessed. Just days after the Trump administration said that it was basically accepting that Assad would maintain his position in Syria, it ordered a large missile strike and started talking about regime change.

What happened, of course, is that we are currently witnessing a palace coup in the White House. Bannon and his ilk are being pushed aside at the behest of Ivanka and Jared. As I have said before, Trump is really just an old, mad king. He appears to be highly suggestible, and not quite in full command of his mental faculties. He does not want to govern, he wants other people to do that for him. That allows maximum time for television and golf. Because he does not take an interest in anything, he is easily swayed by those he thinks he trusts.

It was inevitable that Jared and Bannon were going to clash. Bannon is an anti-Semite, for one. Kushner is a fellow sleazebag, to be sure, but one gets the sense that he does not buy into Bannon's worldview, which is a mishmash of xenophobic French novels and minor fascist theorists. Throughout his entire life Trump has used people then tossed them aside when it was convenient. Did Bannon think he would be any different than Lewandowski, Manafort, or innumerable contractors? Like the mafia don that he is, Trump will protect and trust his family above all others.

Also, since he is ignorant, suggestible, and lazy, and Jared and Ivanka are equally inexperienced, Trump is now just leaning hard on the military. His statements seem to say that he will let the military leaders do whatever they want, and what they want, as always, is more war. We are killing more civilians and even friendly rebels because the generals have allowed to run wild. Presidents are supposed to be above the military, but Trump has basically let himself be their servant. Ironically, this man obsessed with projecting strength comes across now as a pathetically weak leader. He lets the leader of China tutor him on the things he should already know. He throws a temper tantrum and refuses to shake hands with Merkel. He is so clueless about war that he just lets his generals do everything, and he reverses policy because a different person has his ear.

It would be funny if it wasn't so serious. What scares me is that the current palace coup could solidify his presidency like nothing else. Americans have become so accustomed to war that those in the middle will rally around the flag if Trump makes a bigger military commitment. If you remember, Dubya was an unpopular president with questionable legitimacy until 9/11, and that coupled with the invasion of Iraq ensured his reelection. I fear that unless the pressure is kept on, Trump may well get away with recasting himself as a wartime president. Don't say you weren't warned.

New Essay At Liberal Currents

I had a very productive spring break. My second recent article, following the one I did for Tropics of Meta, is up now at the new site Liberal Currents. It's called "Trump's Jacksonianism And Its Needed Response." I've written about the current relevance of Andrew Jackson on this blog before, but this essay is a much more comprehensive take on it.

You should also check out Liberal Currents, which I think is doing valuable work in trying to wrest liberalism from its slide into an overly centrist position divorced from the concerns of its constituents. You may wonder how I can publish with a liberal site and with a socialist one like Jacobin, but I would say in return that I believe that the left side of the political spectrum needs a healthy dose of ecumenicalism. We'll all hang together or we'll all hang separately, y'all.

Memories Of The Joshua Tree At 30

It was a gorgeous spring day today. Due to the Passover holiday, I don't have to go to work tomorrow or Wednesday, so when I stepped off the commuter train into brilliant sunshine, I felt a brush of the divine. The long dark winter seemed to melt away in an instant.  When I got in my car, I knew what to do. I rolled down my windows, and fired up "Where the Streets Have No Name" and drove home with the wind in my hair.

I suddenly remembered that the The Joshua Tree turned 30 in March. Its music was some of the first contemporary music that ever meant anything real to me. The reason isn't a happy one, though. It was thirty years ago this April that my grandfather passed away, the first person I was very close to who ever died. He lived about thirty miles away from my hometown, in a tiny rural village that required lots of backroads driving. On the many days we drove back and forth from Hastings to Lawrence for funeral preparations, the funeral itself, and to check in on my grandmother, the radio in my parents' van seemed to play "With Or Without You." To this day I still cannot listen to that song without thinking about my grandfather's death. Even though it's a love song, it's one drenched in a sense of loss and powerlessness, things I was feeling very intensely in my 11 year old soul at the time.

It is very easy to mock U2 these days, it's practically become its own cottage industry. But in 1987, in the midst of the stasis of the later Reagan years and pop music and hair metal with about as much soul as a slice of processed cheese, U2 was a breath of fresh air. As insufferable as Bono can be in his constant political moralizing that lacks a proper level of self-awareness, after years of Reagan and Thatcher and the big dumb lobotomy of 80s pop culture it was exhilarating to hear the anti-imperialist critique contained in a song like "Bullet The Blue Sky."After years of Cold War bullshit, hearing a song about the Mothers of the Disappeared, their children murdered by regimes that had the support of the United States government, felt positively revolutionary.

The songs that were warmer to America (the subject of most of U2's music from about 1984-1989), were more inclined towards the places most Americans choose to overlook. I think here especially of "In God's Country," a wonderful evocation of what it's like to drive through the expansive deserts of the American west. In their video for "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" the band wanders around Fremont Street, in the seedier, now forgotten part of Las Vegas.

It took awhile before I was sophisticated enough to know that this album was reflecting my country back to me from the point of view of outsiders. That moment I think came when I was in college, when through my Latin American history classes I learned about the real Mothers of the Disappeared. It's also when this album took on another meaning. My friend Lorna really loved it, and back then, I had it on tape, a tape that pretty much lived in my car. On more than one occasion we'd be driving back to the dorms (I was one of the few car owners in our circle of friends on an urban campus), and she'd demand we drive around the block until the last song on side one finished. That song was "Running To Stand Still," a ballad ostensibly about heroin abuse. I hear it now, twenty years after those young and free days, and only think of the blazing fire of college friendships, a fire that lives on in my memory, a fire that those old photos on Facebook can only barely represent.

The Joshua Tree may be the only album in my collection with two such powerful memory triggers spaced ten years apart. It's a wonderful record and it still holds up. Forget every annoying thing Bono has done in the last twenty years and the fact that they put that crappy album on your iPhone without your permission. Give a new listen, and hear the dreams of a time not unlike our own.

Old Dad's Records 8: Bette Davis Eyes

Episode number eight of my podcast has finally dropped! The theme for this one is "Reagan Dawn," a concept I have discussed on this blog before. Basically, this is the period from 1979 to 1981, where popular culture has a foot in the seventies, but is looking to the eighties. I discuss "Bette Davis Eyes," Genesis' Duke album, and Tim Curry's "I Do The Rock," a forgotten artifact of that time.

https://soundcloud.com/jason-tebbe/old-dads-records-episode-8-bette-davis-eyes

New Article at Tropics of Meta

As readers of this blog know, I have often talked about America's recent history as its Brezhnev Years. Well, I finally got off my butt and wrote about it for a better venue than this one. They published it over at Tropics of Meta, and I hope you check it out!

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Red Rider "Lunatic Fringe"

[Editor's Note: I've been swamped with work, a commute made difficult by a train derailment yesterday, and writing and editing articles to be published on more renowned websites than this one. So it's time for the equivalent of a Notes From The Ironbound clip show. This is a post from when this blog was new and a series I need to reanimate.]

I used to talk about having guilty pleasures when it came to pop music, but my friend Rachel L. convinced me that I should just like the stuff I like, and therefore not feel guilty about it.  I think she's right, and consequently, I feel no guilt about loving cheestastic ABBA and rock snob-approved Pavement with equal feeling.  That said, I do get a little embarrassed about admitting some of my musical preferences to the my more discerning friends.  My emotions about this less than exalted music is more sheepishness than guilt.  I hope to have a running series on this blog about sheepishmusical pleasures.

What better place to start than with "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider?  It's a song I've heard for years, but I never knew the artist until recently, when I saw it featured on a Vh1 "one hit wonders" countdown.  The band is the north of the border combo Red Rider, featuring future "Life is a Highway" singer Tom Cochrane.  "Lunatic Fringe" is one of those songs that seems to have just been dropped out of the sky solely for the purpose of being pumped through the sound systems of pickup trucks in the heartland as it's being played on the local classic rock station.

You can tell it's from 1981, because the drums and guitars are leavened by a good dose of synthesizers, which give the song the added ingredient to put it over the top.  Like their Canadian peers Rush, Red Rider (at least on this track) figured out how to make synthesizers work in the interest of the song, rather than the other way around, especially in setting an ominous mood at the beginning.   The loud splashes of synth in the breaks raise the drama, too.

My favorite part about the song, however, is the fantastic rolling rhythm established at the beginning, which suggests a semi-truck of pure rocking power cruising down a glorious highway.  By the early 1980s, most classic rock had become completely uninteresting from a rhythmic point of view.  I also really dig the soaring steel guitar solo, which sounds like something the Edge would have played had he grown up in Winnipeg rather than Dublin.

Furthermore, I've recently discovered the political meaning of the song; the title refers to the rise in right wing, racist extremists at the time the song was written.  Very rarely can such a pointed political song ("you're not gonna win this time") rock this hard without devolving into sanctimony.

Of course, there's plenty here to make me sheepish, from the 80s production to the simplistic nature of the lyrics (lack of sanctimony only carries you so far) to the fact that this is the kind of song that Kenny Powers listens to.  But hey, I am sure there are others of discerning taste who like this song.  I know you're out there.

Iggy and The Stooges, "I Got A Right"

I finally got to see Jim Jarmusch's documentary about The Stooges this week (yay spring break), and it was interesting to see them in the context of their time. I've always thought about Iggy and the Stooges as being timeless, their music so unique and strange and exciting that it just doesn't exist in my mind as a cultural product of the 1969-1973 period when they put out their records. This is also because they set such an obvious template for punk, and that their music was so radically opposed to the trends at the time. It became clear to me that they were in some respects the most radically oppositional musical product of the counterculture more famous for producing hippie bullshit.

"I Got A Right" may be their one song that managed to seamlessly combine both their potential for catchy riffs and total rocknroll mayhem. At this stage in his life Iggy was rock's true Dionysus, making people like Jim Morrison look like Gene Pitney by comparison. The song is also the closest thing the Stooges had to a manifesto: "I got a right to move."

The sound is also appropriately grimy and immediate. It sounds like a caged wolverine being prodded by electric shocks, whirling and lashing but still not totally out of control. By this time James Williamson had replaced Ron Asheton on guitar. Asheton's style was even trashier (and the one I prefer), but Williamson could play with flashes of truly jaw-dropping dynamism, which you definitely hear on this song and classic ravers like "Search and Destroy." The craziest moment of the documentary for me was finding out that Williamson, who always looked super tough and scary in the Stooges, went on to be a computer engineer and corporate guy after the band broke up.

I doubt I will ever run for public office, but if I do, I will have two campaign songs ready for the moment I hit the stage: "(For God's Sake) Give More Power To The People" by the Chi-Lites, and this song.