Track of the Week: Head East "Never Been Any Reason"

When I say the words "independent label rock" you would normally think of edgy, punk-inflected music deliberately flouting the mainstream.  You certainly don't think of a 70s arena rock band like Head East, but they were what indie was in the days before Pavement and Superchunk.  I honestly didn't know much about them until my good friend and fellow vinyl head (and loyal reader) Brian showed me their Flat As A Pancake record cover some years back.  He noted that it was recorded at a studio in South Pekin, near his hometown of Pekin, Illinois.  (Said town is also name checked in a Wilco tune.)  Before getting a re-release with a major label in 1975, they put it out independently on their own label the year before, hence their claim to be an indie band, despite the fact that their music is a prime example of what I call "8 track Camaro music."  (It's named for the car and tape format, with other representatives being 70s Aerosmith, Foghat, James Gang, etc.)

The album's title was a self-deprecating comment about the prairie landscape of central Illinois, which is indeed quite flat.  (I lived there for six years, so I speak from experience.  I also grew up in central Nebraska, so I know from flat.)  The band didn't meet up in the Peoria area, but rather at the University of Illinois, where they were students.  Champaign-Urbana also birthed another 70s hard rock act, REO Speedwagon, which would go on to have a more storied career and eventually hit the real big time in the early 1980s on the wings of perhaps the greatest power ballad of them all.  I don't think that's a mistake, the central Illinois region just feels like the perfect place to generate a certain kind of 70s hard rock sound.

The landscape referenced as "flat as a pancake" is full of hard, sharp corners, soaring skies, and straightaway highways that seem to go from horizon to horizon.  Given that, it makes sense that "Never Been Any Reason" has a sharp hard-hitting rhythm, soaring harmonies, and straight-ahead, meat and potatoes guitar riffs.  However, none of that can explain the totally rad double Moog synthesizer solo, its far out sounds so much more organic and fascinating than the automated bleeping and blooping of the synths sounds to follow the next decade in the spandex era.

This song did not go high on the charts, reaching only 61, but I heard a lot in my teen years and early twenties when I tuned in to the local classic rock station on way too frequent a basis.  (The local hits station didn't play hip-hop or grunge until my college years, it was still stuck in the 80s.)  I actually wonder if it gets that much airplay on classic rock stations outside of the Midwest.  Songs like this are a vestige of an earlier time when popular music was much more regional in nature, where the rare regional act could generate enough buzz to get picked up by a major or get airplay outside of its region.  (For example, Seattle's mighty Sonics were huge in the Pacific Northwest, but practically unknown elsewhere.)  From what I've read, radio playlists became incredibly limited and DJs without the power or authority to spin what they wanted as FM radio entered the 1980s.  Since the massive wave of consolidation in the 90s, most radio stations are just part of some conglomerate, playing the same stuff in every town, often by satellite.

Like just about everything else in America since the mid-1970s, popular music is in a corporate cage with fewer people on the top with more and more money, and more people further down without much of a chance to get higher on the ladder.  Regional musical scenes exist, but are far less distinct than they used to be.  The heavy Moog synthesizer on "Never Been Any Reason" isn't the only thing making it a relic.

An Underdog When You're Ahead: On Being A White Sox Fan

I grew up in central Nebraska during the 1980s, which meant that when I developed an interest in baseball, the Kansas City Royals were my team.  Sometime in the early 1990s, when I was in high school, that interest waned and I stopped caring all that much about the team.  This apathy coincided with their quarter century in the baseball wilderness, which was mostly likely connected.  When in college, however, I met friends who were big baseball heads, and they helped get me back into the game.  I went to see the Omaha Royals (before their name changes) at the sadly defunct Rosenblatt Stadium, and even road tripped to KC in 1997 to see the first interleague series between the Cardinals and Royals, and to gaze upon Mark McGwire.

Just as my baseball renaissance was beginning, I moved to Chicago to get a master's degree, and was thus living in a big league city for the first time in my life.  This prompted a tough decision: Sox or Cubs.  Most baseball fans in the Chicago area don't have a choice, since geography and family ties usually make that decision for them in their infancy.  I toyed with Cubs fandom at first.  After all, they played in the wonderfully anachronistic friendly confines of Wrigley, they made the playoffs right after I moved in (1998), and Sammy Sosa was setting the nation on fire with his home run prowess.  Despite these facts, I ended up opting for the Sox.  This was partly because I was living on the South Side, and partly because I felt more at home among their fans.  While this faction is a minority of Cub fandom writ large (which is quite broad and diverse), there is a very frat contingent that dominates the culture of Wrigley and the surrounding neighborhood on game days.  Sox fans, on the other hand, tend to be more blue collar, and when they show up to the ballpark are more interested in the game than in taking part in the world's largest open air singles bar.

I also tend to think that my decision reflected my instinctual need to not be on the side of popularity.  I am a bit of a contrarian, to be sure.  The Cubs were and are by far the higher profile Chicago team, and their attendance figures versus the Sox bear this out.  This is partly because there are many fewer Sox fans, that new transplants to Chicago almost always choose the Cubs, that Sox fans are less affluent, and that following from this, are not keen to spend money on a less than stellar team.  As the numbers I quoted show, the Cubs outdrew the Sox even in 2005 and 2006, the year the White Sox won the title, and the year after, when champions tend to get a big attendance boost.  Even when they won the first World Series by a Chicago team since 1917, they were still the second team in the Second City.

The team and its fans are also quite often the target of criticism and the butt of jokes, even among their own.  Fans and outsiders have long ripped on US Cellular Field for being a bland stadium built right before Camden Yards opened up the deluge of retro parks.  In actuality it is a fine place to watch a game (especially since the renovations) and has by far the best food of ballpark I've ever been to, along with great ballyhoo traditions like the Fan Shower and exploding scoreboard.  The horrible attack by two violent Sox "fans" on Royals first base coach Tom Gamboa also gave the team a bad name.  Cubs fans have their own history of hooliganism, but the image of the team as "lovable losers" has never been tarnished. On top of all of this, Ken "Hawk" Harrelson has got to be the most hated announcer in baseball, even though his much criticized homerism is just unveiled honesty, unlike the pretense of objectivity that so many other hometown announcers studiously maintain.

I have begun to relish second class status, however.  By being a Sox fan, I feel like I am not a member of a great mass, or "nation" as Cubs fans brand themselves, but of a tight-knit club.  Sox fans are actually much less obnoxious than those of other teams, in that we don't expect other people to get wrapped up in our drama.  The best example of this came in the team's championship run in 2005, when there was relatively little media attention paid to the fact that the White Sox had gone since 1917 without winning a title.  When the Red Sox won the year before the country was deluged with stories about the "Curse of the Bambino" and fans from Pawtucket to Bar Harbor visiting the graves of their parents and grandparents to tell them the news.  Conversely, when Ken Burns put together his sequel to his series on baseball, he gave the White Sox about two minutes of screen time while lavishing all kinds of Sturm und Drang on Boston's drama and requited agony.  Of course that was an important story, but the fact that White Sox fans had been through similar trials was barely acknowledged.

While that really bugged me at the time, I've come to realize that the lack of recognition for the White Sox' vindication actually says a lot of positive things about us fans of the South Siders.  We were smart enough to know that our team's problems were not down to some vague curse like the Red Sox or Cubs (the famous billy goat, the black cat on the field in 1969, etc.) but to bad management and mediocre play.  If Sox fans were ever angry at anyone, it was at owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who had 1. pushed for confrontation with the players' union, leading to the strike in 1994 while the Sox were in first place and 2. okayed the "white flag" trade of 1997, when he traded top players for prospects down the stretch even though the team was still in contention.  (Apart from Keith Foulke, those prospects didn't amount to much, either.)

This angry feeling towards the team's ownership is less the entitled carping one hears from Yankee fans and more reminiscent of the feelings that most working people have towards management.  It is a healthy distrust born out of the knowledge that the bosses do not have your interests at heart, and must always be resisted.  Other fans seem to interpret this attitude as disloyalty, and continue to show up to the park even when their team sucks.  White Sox fans have a sort of clear-eyed, no bullshit attitude that is ingrained in the South Side and the working class culture of the Midwest writ large.  Living here in the Northeast I pine for the midlands of my childhood and young adulthood, watching White Sox games and hearing the raw cheers of the team's faithful from my living room in New Jersey at least gives me something of that world to hold on to.

Track of the Week: Wire "Map Ref. 41 N 93 W"

I love living in New Jersey and working in New York City, which has become by far my favorite city in America.  That said, I am a child of the Midwest who lived there until the ripe age of 32, apart from a year in Germany.  I haven't had the chance to visit my homeland this summer as I usually do, and some conversations with old grad school pals online have conjured up memories of fields and fields of Illinois corn ready for harvest.  On Friday I watched the Cubs-Cardinals game on TV, on Saturday I caught some Prairie Home Companion on the car radio while running errands.  Needless to say, I am missing the region of my birth and young adulthood.

I tried to think of songs about the Midwest to talk about this week, and realized that one of the most unique songs about its landscape came not from John Mellencamp or Jeff Tweedy, but from Wire, a postpunk band from Britain.  As outsiders to this country they wrote about something that people see but don't think much about when flying cross-country.  Looking down over the Midwest the fields are laid out like checkerboards in a sort of breathtaking symmetry.  Many Easterners criticize that view, thinking it speaks to Midwestern dullness or colorlessness or whatever stereotype they want to foist on the place.  I see a kind of beauty, and Wire did too.

This is one of those "should've been a hit" songs.  It didn't help that it had such an unwieldy, but oh so fitting title.  Only a band like Wire would name one of their catchiest songs after a global positioning point, emphasizing the symmetrical nature of the land below them.  The song itself comes from their third album, 1979's 154, which showed quite a mature progression from the flat-out speed punk of their debut, Pink Flag.  Scratchy guitars and whispy synths create the same air of foreboding mixed with wonder that I always get on an airplane.  The band's punk roots are evident with the off-putting and angular sounds and how singer Colin Greenwood self-consciously intones "chorus" right before the background vocals for the chorus come in and give the song a poppier feel.  There really isn't much out there in the world like this, and though the sound is not what most people associate with the Midwest, it evokes the feelings I get looking out of the window of an airplane as it's descending into Omaha.

Musical Interlude: Midwestern Songs by Midwestern Artists

This morning I cued up some Uncle Tupelo on my iPod while I rode the subway to work, and became surprisingly emotional.  Listening to this quintessentially Midwestern band reminded me of the place where I grew up, a land I have seen very little of in the last four years.  Sure, I am very happy here in New Jersey, but I lived the first thirty-two years of my life in the Midwest, and will never be able to get it out of my system.  Here are some Midwestern songs by Midwestern artists that give me memories of home, and not always the happy variety.


Uncle Tupelo is most remembered these days for being Jeff Tweedy's band before Wilco, which is a shame considering their spot-on evocation of disaffected life in the rural Midwest.  This song in particular strikes a deep chord with me, since I grew up in the kind of "three hour away town" described in this song.  (This means being three hours away from the nearest sizable city.)  I am not keen on going back there for more than a visit, but having to learn make my own fun and learn how to be alone with myself has made me a stronger person.


There aren't many songs that hit the charts in the 1980s that bring tears to my eyes, but this is one of them.  Having grown up in Nebraska amidst the farm crisis of the Reagan, I know the reality behind the "blood on the plough."  Three decades later, the towns my parents grew up in are all but dead and the small farm economy that supported those places is gone forever.  As Mellencamp says in this song, "I'm sorry for you son, those are just memories for you now."  Too bad people there keep voting for the same people who helped destroy their way of life.


If anything makes me feel guilty about living so far away from home, it's that I hardly ever get to see my ninety-year old grandmother.  This song about an old Midwestern couple isolated from their family rips my heart out every time.  The people living in the dying small towns of my home state find themselves increasingly alone, since these places offer nothing for young people, who must seek their opportunities elsewhere.

I'll close things out with a song that I think is one the most sublime ever written.  Jeff Tweedy formed Wilco after Uncle Tupelo, a band that achieved godlike status in the halls of hipsterdom.  Jay Farrar, Uncle Tupelo's primary song writer, helmed Son Volt, whose first album, Trace, is a real masterpiece.  The St. Genevieve of this song is not a holy person, but a town on the Mississippi River trying to stave off the massive flood of 1993.  The plain-spoken resilience tempered with fatalism expressed by this song is to me one of the great attributes of the Midwest, and one I am proud to keep alive amidst the neurotic, high strung nature of life in the Big Apple.