(Backbeat Books)

www.backbeatbooks.com

BY REV. KEITH A. GORDON

(Dateline: the Future) Gather 'round, young 'uns, 'cause Grandpa has a story to tell ya snot-nosed little miscreants! Take those earbuds outta those pincushion lobes for a minute, sit back in your officially-licensed Misfits^TM beanbag chairs, and listen to what the doddering old fool has to say....

Now, I know that you kids these days don't have any proper musical culture of your own to speak of, just that dreadful, droning muzak that Sony Universal Music downloads to your sound implants at $20 a pop...which is probably why y'all have become obsessive nostalgists genuflecting at the mention of St. Cobain's name and eagerly buying all that "collectible" grunge crapola on the Sony Universal eBay auction website. Lemme fill you drooling cretins in on a dirty lil' secret, through...there was more to rock music in the 1990s than Nirvana, Sir Edward and Pearl Jam, and those Soundgarden fellows (yeah, years before they were android superstars, they were real flesh-n-blood musicians).

Bubbling under the mainstream during the decade of the '90s was an entire shadow scene of honest-to-dog rock 'n' roll bands that had nothing at all to do with Seattle, Athens, or Austin. Bands like the New Bomb Turks, the Supersuckers, the Lazy Cowgirls, the Dwarves and others were too reckless, too raucous, too filled with the spirit of St. Iggy to appeal to the hype-jaded ears of the flannel-clad, unwashed masses. While Ruling Stooge magazine and other middlin' mainstream music rags featured St. Cobain and his evil transvestite bride on the cover, and a generation of dim-bulb record-buyers fell for the hype, some of us oldsters were groovin' to madcap tunes like "Born Toulouse-Lautrec."

Little Suzie Q, pull down that book with the orange spine from the shelf...yeah, We Never Learn by author Eric Davidson, and published by Backbeat Books. Yes, I know that only canines and old geezers like the Reverend still keep these wood-fiber antiques around anymore, but We Never Learn is an important tome, ya know! Davidson, ya see, was a rocker, and a member of one of the underground scene's best bands, the New Bomb Turks. From his rare viewpoint at the forefront of what we rockcrit types called "garage-punk," and Davidson terms the "gunk punk undergut," the book documents the musical achievements and failures of the era, roughly 1988 to 2001, in brilliant (and, often sordid) detail.

We Never Learn works 'cause Davidson was there, riding the ramshackle rollercoaster that was underground rock during the 1990s, and the words here are written in his blood, sweat, and tears, and more than a little spilt beer. Wearing his most erudite rock-writer hat, Davidson interviewed dozens of musical fellow travelers from like-minded guitar-wielding gangs, folks like Eddie Spaghetti from the Supersuckers, Mick Collins from the Gories, Blag Dahlia from the Dwarves, and too many more to tell you bloody test-tube babies about in one short sitting. He also talked to deal-makers and scene-breakers like Crypt Records' Tim Warren and Long John of the Sympathy For The Record Industry record labels, as well as show promoters and zinesters and other satellites that orbited the gunk punk planet.

While you black leather-brained perpetual teens may deem your senile ol' grandpa a relic from another age, back in the day the one true spirit of rock 'n' roll continued to thrive decades after its "sell by" date. Davidson's We Never Learn chronicles the wild-n-wooly era of a fragmented and marginally-popular music scene that was never going to challenge Nevermind for chart hegemony, much less make even more than a slight imprint on an increasingly corporate-dominated decade of music that would come to a crashing close with clowns like the Backstreet Boys and Britney topping the charts.

Still, for a short while, cold-blooded rock 'n' roll dinosaurs stomped across America, Europe, and even Asia with a disdain for the popular music of the day, and a penchant for the absurdly reckless and self-destructive sort of behavior that killed off the reptilian age in the first place (meteors my tired old ass!). It was bands like the aforementioned that breathed new life and fire into a moribund musical scene that, thanks to their efforts, managed to keep rock music inspired well into the 21st century or, at least...ahem...until President-for-Life Palin outlawed music.

Davidson does a fine job of collecting these dodgy stories from the scene's participants, and weaves them into an informative narrative that accurately sketches a portrait of the grime and grit that personified the "gunk punk undergut." That Davidson downplays his own band's experiences in favor of those stories from other bands is admirable, but it is his firsthand knowledge of the scene and its players, and his own stories that help shape the book into more than a mere personal memoir.

So, the lesson that Grandpa is trying to teach you too-young pinheads is this: instead of pining for a long gone and tired '90s music scene that was over-hyped and under-criticized, take a damn nanosecond to check out We Never Learn and bring a little white light to your cerebellums. You'll discover a lost world of great rock 'n' roll that, if you give it a chance, will have all of you strutting down the cyber-hallways of your virtual high school like streetwalkin' cheetahs with hearts fulla napalm!

Cryogenically-preserved Ed. note: We have picked up a transmission from BLURT magazine circa 2010 in which author Davidson was interviewed about his book. Go here to read part one of a two-part feature, and then go here to view a photo gallery.