Founded in 1975 to release "Little Johnny Jewel", the debut single by Television, Ork Records had a brief but influential five-year run. The brainchild of West Coast weirdo Terry Ork and art school dropout Charles Ball, the label was blessed with a number of big firsts. Ork released not just the first Television single, but also the first music from poet and punk rock originator Richard Hell and the first singles by Memphis-based musician Alex Chilton following the dissolution of Big Star. This in addition to great power pop by Chris Stamey as well as new wave groups like Marbles, Student Teachers, and the Revelons.
Compiled by Numero Group, the lavishly packaged and thoroughly researched Ork Records: New York, New York collects the label's complete 13-single catalog along with a number of related releases that never made it to shelves during the label's existence. Among these are a scrapped single by New Jersey's the Feelies and a sidelined 7" by the rock critic Lester Bangs that ultimately saw daylight via Spy Records, an imprint run by John Cale.
In 2015, nostalgia for late '70s New York City can feel oppressive, given its documentation in an endless stream of record reissues, memoirs, films, and biographies. If you grew up during the '90s, your entire cultural coming-of-age might have been spent surfing successive waves of the city's punk-era remembrance—from "Saturday Night Live" reruns to Julian Schnabel's Basquiat biopic, the Strokes to LCD Soundsystem. But New York, New York is a significant artifact.
The music and photographs capture the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined. It's a glimpse at iconic personalities in a moment of vulnerability, before they were fully hatched and before anybody cared. By contemporary standards, these songs might not register as wild or controversial. In the context of the '70s—a time of slick pop and bluesy choogle—Ork's artists were from another planet. The first sound on Television's "Little Johnny Jewel" is not a squeal of feedback or an expertly rehearsed riff, but the thin and elastic tone of Tom Verlaine's guitar plugged directly into the mixing board. Hell's "(I Belong to The) Blank Generation" is a bizarre throwback of a different kind—a skewed and slanted remake of the Rod McKuen's jazzy 1959 novelty song "The Beat Generation" that was a far cry from the buzz saw tones and pop minimalism of the Ramones.
Listening back now, the music is familiar because these sounds have become so deeply embedded in the DNA of today's indie rock. Chris Stamey's "The Summer Sun" is nostalgia-tinged bubblegum pop, buoyed by jangling acoustic guitars and backing "oohs/ahhs." Chilton's singles are charmingly stoned and discombobulated proto-slacker rock. A one-off studio project, Prix delivers the pained power pop that Ork probably wanted from Chilton, but the singer was then unwilling to deliver. Others offer slightly fudged takes on the more established downtown bands. The Erasers' clean guitar tones and slanted melodies recall Television. The Student Teachers' stripped down and hookly "Channel 13" is not too far flung afield from Blondie, whose keyboardist, Jimmy Destri, produced the band's single. These bands weren't necessarily biting a successful style, just taking cues from their peers.
Bangs' "Let It Blurt" is an outlier, in that it is terrible. The music—a Beefheart-inspired and Quine-penned backing track—isn't the problem. It's the singing. Bangs slurs and blubbers about the details of a break-up. The details are ugly and unflattering. If Television's music attempted ecstatic transcendence, "Let It Blurt" represents the opposite end of the spectrum—earthly woe, gracelessness, the sadness and confusion of lonely dudes. Perhaps this was the intent, though. For what it's worth, the critic seems aware that both the song and his lyrics are absurd.
A California counterculture type lured east by Andy Warhol's Factory scene, Ork met Verlaine and Hell when the latter was a clerk at Cinemabilia, a Greenwich Village film memorabilia shop that he managed. He took an active interest in their musical pursuits, set them up with guitarist Richard Lloyd, and when they formed Television, Ork became the band's first manager. In 1975, when the group—by that point in its official, Hell-less lineup—recorded a few 4-track demos, Ork agreed to press a single. The record did well enough to warrant a second release, Richard Hell's first two songs with the Voidoids. Because Ork was a good scenester but a poor businessman, Ball came on to help professionalize the operation.
Initially, Ork's mission was to capture a local scene that had grown up around CBGBs but over time there wasn't much incentive to keep going. The bands were not popular and there was little hope of financial reward. It was hard for bands to get booked outside of New York, even regionally. In the liner notes, the Feelies' Dave Weckerman explains that there was only one new wave-tolerant venue west of the Hudson.
Many of Ork's artists were not particularly fond of their singles on the imprint. At the time, Television's Richard Lloyd told interviewers that he hated "Little Johnny Jewel"—"It worked primarily as a demo," Hell said of his single, "I can't stand to hear it." But the lack of polish is what makes many of these recordings compelling. On Marquee Moon, Television sounded immaculate and artful. Here, the band is sloppy and primitive, but also unconventional and free. On their debut album, Crazy Rhythms, the Feelies sounded tense and jittery, but Ork's version of "Fa Cé La" is fast and blisteringly loud.
Eventually, the money ran out and Ork folded in 1979. Ball would go on to found the influential no wave label, Lust/Unlust and Ork left both New York and the music business, returning to the West Coast. Both have since passed on (Ork in 2004, Ball in 2012). When the label fizzled, punk and new wave were still very much underground. Of the bands that populated the CBGBs scene, only Blondie and Talking Heads had found anything resembling national success.
For all the talk of doom and gloom in today's post-Internet music world, some comfort can be taken in the fact that, even when people were still buying records, Ork's prospects seemed equally grim. The label's biggest hit sold 6,000 units, but, according to the set's liner notes, most releases were lucky to sell a third of that. If you're running an independent record label today, those numbers might not be that far out of reach.
In Ork's case, the label wasn't ultimately a lark or a waste of money—the music was heard. These singles diffused out into the world and found their way into the hands of weirdos in far-flung locales. When promoting Hell's single in 1976, Ork ran advertisements with the singer's phone number and suggested that people, "Call Hell." "I called him," Minutemen bassist Mike Watt told author Michael Azzerad in the book, Our Band Could Be Your Life. "I said, 'Is this Hell?' And he said, 'Yeah.' And I got scared and I hung up." That accessibility stuck with Watt, though. "That, to me, was punk."
No comments:
Post a Comment