Wreckless Eric has a new album out today, a record called Leisureland that bristles with psychedelic garage band energy.
The album comes as a bit of a surprise — I honestly didn’t realize that Eric was still recording or that he’d wended his way through so many twists and turns of life. But I don’t want to focus so much on Eric — read Alexis Petridis’ piece in The Guardian for that — as I do on the record that introduced him to me in the first place, Live Stiffs Live, which featured two Eric songs and performances by Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Larry Wallis, and Ian Dury.
The album was released in 1978, as English punk and new wave were making their way across the pond. It was a propitious moment for me, the first crack in my consciousness, the break with the album-oriented-rock stuff (what we now call Classic Rock) that was prevalent on the radio. I wasn’t into disco, though that was growing in popularity at my high school in suburban Central Jersey. And the big, bombastic stuff being put out by Kansas and Styx, or the new Southern rock bands was starting to feel stale and overdone.
I remember driving with my dad back from Korvette’s on Route 1. I’d bought several LPs — Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, Some Girls by The Rolling Stones, and Dire Straits eponymous debut, a trio of albums now in regular rotation on Classic Rock radio, but that occupied a very different space than much of what was in rotation then. These records were more stripped down, though not subdued. And they offered an onramp to other bands — Joe Jackson and Graham Parker, The Cars, Blondie, Patti Smith.
I was working at The Garden and Playhouse movie theaters for part of the year, and then moved on to the local A&P. A friend who was into what Rolling Stone’s Encylopedia of Rock and Roll “British Pub Rock” pointed me to this live compilation from England. I found a copy in a cut-out bin (where they used to sell discounted records to liquidate stock), took it home and dropped it on the turntable.
Cheers. An announcer with a thick Cockney accent. “Are you ready for some Stiff music?” Cheers. Nick Lowe introduced as “Nick Lowe’s Led Zeppelin,” launching into a “I Knew the Bride” and “Let’s Eat” on hyperdrive. Wreckless Eric grinding out “Semaphore Signals” with a level of smarm and aggression that was shocking, before the softer, irony-laced love song “Reconnez Cherie.” And Larry Wallis’ “Police Car” closing out side one, a bit of ominous, driving rock.
Elvis Costello (Elvis the C as he was often dubbed) opens side two with Burt Bacharach’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself.” EC singing Bacharach does not seem odd today, but in ‘78 most rockers dismissed the American songwriter as someone our parents would dig. Costello nails it, teases out the longing, before the band launches into “Miracle Man.”
Ian Dury then lines up “Wake Up and Make Love to Me” and “Billericay Dickie,” before the entire crew return to the stage to close with Dury’s “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll & Chaos.”
Thirty-six minutes. Ten songs. I’m purposely not focusing much attention on any of the individual songs. Each warrant attention in their own right. I’m more interested in Live Stiffs Live because of its cumulative effect, the way it helped reset the synapses in my brain that govern musical taste, galvanized a shift that had been in motion for me. The album is raw energy. Cumulative because it encompasses all — the drums, the no bass, the keyboards. It flies by with a urgency that seemed absent from other records.
There is an essay to be written about how 1978 was a year in music that rivals 1965 or 1966 — usually and legitimately described as rock music’s greatest years — but I’ll hold off on that.
For now.
In the meantime, go back and listen to Live Stiffs Live and tell me what you hear now.