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Pure Punk Picks
Death Valley ’69 – “Sonic Youth with Lydia Lunch”
Listening to this song makes me imagine I’m on a California road, hitchhiking. I’ve got my thumb out and I’m eighteen. And the car that’s slowing down, pulling up towards me. Is opening the door to let me in. Let me into my perfect nightmare.
If Iggy Pop had ever collaborated with Ministry I imagine it would have sounded something like this. And maybe if my worst nightmares ever came to life and devoured me whole, ripping out my intestines while I was still breathing- it would feel like this.
A threatening, ominous, blood curdling horror vibe inhabits this tune.
But really it’s Lydia Lunch collaborating with Sonic Youth.
From the first scream into the harrowing guitar lick sounding like a car who has lost its’ brakes, whipping around treacherous lanes going down a mountain. Tom-tom drums and bam-bam bass beating, bearing down towards an awesome breakdown (long before breakdowns existed!) that brings us along our journey.
Oh, and this is about the Charlie Manson Clan butchering a bunch of Hollywood stars and starlets in ’69, including a pregnant Sharon Tate.
“I didn’t wanna, but she started to holler. So I had to hit it. Deep in the valley, in the trunk of an old car, in the back of a Chevy… Hit it.”
A dissonant, Asian like motif acting like the jaw of a wolf leaping upon its prey, played on guitar leads into:
“Coming down, city I love- Venice. Down, down, down. Death Valley sixty-nine.”
This song, I realize, has the blood of the “Hippie Generation” dying, bleeding, leaving red spots, coagulating on a tie-dyed t-shirt strung, loosely across a black light poster, reflecting the careless, laid-back, bong hit, “Do your own thing,” hippie counter culture, fraught with contradiction and hypocrisy.
And this song makes me think of my own, decades ago, possible demise:
There are poems that are written in the gutter. That are made when you’re ready to be swept down the tubes, into the grates that lead down into the sewer. I was going there but survived. Some of us, who do get swept away in life’s whirlpool, end up there. But our dreams, our beliefs, our inspirations move onward and live on, even if we don’t.
Hippie ideals get swept away while punk ideals hold more sturdy. I think because punk was built on nihilism- and while we had no dreams, no beliefs, hardly anything we believed in- it seems we did strongly believe in reality and truth and no bullshit. Maybe this song then, does kill off hippie rock and hippie ideals and leads us musically, to some of the soon coming sounds at the time- of grunge, riot grrl, industrial. grindcore, power violence…and Rob Zombie! (I can hear all of that in this song.)
This song is pure, it is perfect, it is punk.
I’m also rethinking my choice to open that car door, on that hot summer day on that road in California, in the valley, in ’69.
Thinking back it was probably the wrong choice, a bad choice, a bad move on my part. One that I wouldn’t ever, ever think of doing again.
That is, unless, this song was playing inside it.
(Slimedog)