Ultravox!, "Saturday Night in the City of the Dead"

DATELINE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29 (PARK CITY, UTAH)

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have a good time on New Year’s Eve, and those who tell the truth.

What a bogus holiday. What a noxious social norm. Calling on us all to celebrate rather than begrudge the brutal march of time that drains our health and vitality, wrenches our children out of our homes into “adulthood,” and plunges us into—God help us all—a presidential election year. Let’s all put on cardboard top hats, performatively drink, and butcher a Robert Burns poem.

One year when I was a kid, my sister, cousin, and I shredded a half-dozen editions of the Tribune and Vindicator, then dumped the resulting confetti on our grandmother’s head at midnight. That celebration of the calendar turn was about as good as it got, and we spent the first hour of the New Year cleaning up the mess.

I’m writing this from my sickbed in a Holiday Inn Express in Park City, Utah. The Three Amigos is playing on AMC, and I actually laughed three times during the first act.¹ That as much as anything else describes the amount of stir crazy I’m feeling.

Two days ago, as I boarded the plane out here, I remarked to Kate:

Do you know that scene in all the movies where the character coughs up blood onto a handkerchief and we all know he’s gonna die? That’s what I feel like right about now.

Four hours later I was so wracked by chills at 35,000 feet that I think I shook the landing gear loose from the underside of the plane. Upon arrival, my family dropped me at this hotel and forged on ahead to my father-in-law’s place. He’s immunocompromised and I have no business even being in the same zip code as him. On Wednesday afternoon my fever spiked to above 103˚. Flu A, it turns out, and now I’m reflecting on the hundred times it occurred to me this fall to take a minute and go to CVS to get the vaccine. New Year’s Resolution: work on your follow-through.

$250 a night + taxes/ fees to sit here, drink Gatorade, and not see my family. Some vacation this turned out to be. At least I have work obligations leaking in around the edges, to help fill in all this spare time. That was sarcasm. You could cut the sarcasm in this room with a knife, except all I have is this spork they gave me at the front desk to eat my Progresso soup.

Still Life, w/ Spork and Cough Drops

There’s a lot of self-pity in this room, too. It rises and falls in inverse proportion to my body temperature. This may seem counterintuitive, but the truth is, when you’re spiking a fever, you don’t have the energy to scale any kind of rhetorical heights about your predicament. It’s when you bounce back, when you’ve recovered some energy and have nowhere to put it, that you have recourse to self-pity. So it is that right now the Holy Trinity of Advil, Tylenol, and Tamiflu have exorcised the fever-demon, leaving me wide awake, embittered, and fully convinced that “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Apple Music, Spotify) was written about me, to tell my story of the last three days. Consider the following:

Too late, my time has come. Sends shivers down my spine, body’s aching all the time. Goodbye, everybody—I’ve got to go.

Spare him his life from this monstrosity.

So you think you can love me and leave me to die? Just gotta get out—just gotta get right of here.

Seriously, who and what else could Freddie possibly be singing about? It’s not so fantastical to think rock stars were put on this Earth to speak exclusively to my experience. I mean, Morrissey, right? Who else suffered like I did as a teenager? Look, I accept I’m not the Absolute Center of the Universe, but I literally did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

I will be with you again, Bono sings on “New Year’s Day” (Apple Music, Spotify). I went to consult the full lyrics just now, and when I typed new year’s day lyrics into Google I got a Taylor Swift song. Now scroll on up to the second paragraph of this post and insert “subordinates U2 to Taylor Swift” into the growing list of Father Time’s offenses. I don’t know what the hell Taylor Swift is singing about, but dollars to doughnuts (as we say in the Home of Dunkin’) it has to do with some boyfriend who dumped her, and blah blah blah. Whereas the U2 song is about striving to overcome the wretched external circumstances that tear families apart:

We can break through. Though torn in two, we can be one. I will be with you again.

Just as soon as I get out from under these blood-red sinuses.

DATELINE: SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30 (IN TRANSIT)

I’ve given up any hope of a vacation and am flying home early, alone, from Utah. The flight tracker is showing we are somewhere over the Dakotas—meaning 2.5 hours before we land. 2.5 hours seems like a reasonable amount of time to reflect upon 2023, noting in particular the songs I fell in love with over the past calendar year. In fact, here’s a playlist I’ve been digging on this past week:

You’ll see none of the songs are new releases. Some of them I’ve even known for years, but it took 2023 to put them front and center. TV did some of that work: R.E.M.’s “Strange Currencies” (Apple Music, Spotify) continues to turn up at key moments in The Bear, and Ted Lasso made great use of “Why Can’t I Touch It?” (Apple Music, Spotify) in the series finale. But hold on: a Top 5 All-Time R.E.M. song … off that Monster album? A year ago I would never have believed it. And if asked to name 20 great Buzzcocks songs, I don’t expect “Why Can’t I Touch It?” would have come to mind. Thank you, Gen X showrunners, for fishing these tracks out of my library.

Also, “Sharp Dressed Man” (Apple Music, Spotify)! I pulled a copy of Eliminator in Columbus a couple months ago. I felt a bit conflicted about introducing ZZ Top to the hip-as-hell artists in my vinyl collection. I mean, come on: they’re George Dubya Bush’s favorite band. What kind of northeastern elitist am I? But Krautrock Carla was shopping alongside me, and she gave me the nod. No looking back. Good things can come out of Texas after all.

We talked a few months ago about Siouxsie and the Banshees (see “Helter Skelter”), but I didn’t mention “Into the Light” (Apple Music, Spotify), so I’m correcting that oversight now. Big in my 2023, that Siouxsie Sioux.

In April Florian and I took a week to scout some colleges. My car’s Classic Alternative streaming channel is agreeable to both of us, so we listened to that for most of the road trip, and Sublime kept coming on. I mean, they kept coming on: five, six different cuts from the self-titled LP. It felt like The Intelligence Behind My Dashboard was determined to get me to buy that record. Starting first with the singles—“What I Got” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Santeria” (Apple Music, Spotify), and so on—it pushed deeper and deeper into the album as the trip wore on. By the time “April 29, 1992 (Miami)” (Apple Music, Spotify) surfaced in a parking garage in downtown Philly, I was resolved to find a record store that day and drop the $40 for that double LP. Which I did, at Repo Records on South Street.

Somewhere in the 1990s, a younger version of me is right now seizing up on the ground. I had no time and no room in my heart for Sublime, back when that record was hot. But there I was yesterday, rocking the album front to back whilst I took my morning constitutional around the several contiguous parking lots of the Kimball Junction amenities complex. The number of bangers on this record is astonishing, and the many ingredients in the brew here—reggae, ska, hardcore, hip hop, metal, and funk, to name six—give this band a signature sound I hadn’t appreciated. And with all these inputs, Sublime could and did make that sound dart and swivel in all manner of directions, just by adjusting the ratios. So they were as varied as they were distinctive.

Huh.

So there I was, standing outside the Del Taco punching the air and lip-syncing 187 ON A MOTHERFUCKING COP, not that I harbor any special animus against the police, but because somebody needed to pay for the absolute bullshit turn my week’s vacation had taken. But just as quickly Sublime swung me back in the other direction, so that I could make my peace—or at least a truce—with the world and just bask in the sunshine and car exhaust for a minute.

Life is too short, so love the one you got. Let the lovin’, let' the lovin’ come back to me.

Heel-turn time: 2023 is also the year I came to appreciate Brian Eno. I’d been circling around this guy for a while, and truth be told, even now I can’t say I’m ready to deep-dive into his massive discography. But Dude shows up everywhere lately. That’s him exercising considerable yet benevolent influence on Bowie’s Low and Heroes LPs, which are finally starting to make sense to me, after all the years I spent begrudging Dear David’s breakup with Mick Ronson. Of course it was all this Krautrock, and specifically the wonky ambient electronics of the “Düsseldorf School,” that softened me up to the synths and tape work on Bowie’s Berlin records. The connective tissue here is Eno, who played Cluster and Harmonia records and dashed off down the Rhine to work with Roedelius, Moebius, and Rother—going so far as to wheedle his way into an in-progress Harmonia gig at the Fabrik in Hamburg, in 1974. From there it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to Hansa Studios in Berlin to tutor Bowie.

And at Hausfrau Record Shop in Cleveland last month, I picked up a copy of Eno’s Another Green World, which … my God. When I started writing this sentence, I was going to argue that this record is parked right on the fence between Roxy Music-style guitar rock and the heart-swelling synth smears that were Harmonia’s bread and butter—but the truth is Mr. Eno tore down that wall completely. I don’t love his bland vocals, which have limited my ability to promote this record to my gang. Even so, tracks like “Sky Saw” (Apple Music, Spotify), “The Big Ship” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Everything Merges with the Night” (Apple Music, Spotify) sound like a future I might want to live in. And to think he spun this up in 1975!

DATELINE: SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31 (BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS)

Back home at my desk, with my turntable. Time, now, to talk about Ultravox! (self-titled), yet another Hausfrau acquisition, which it turns out Eno produced. There’s a lot not to love about Ultravox[]—all that neo-Classical Vienna! and Dancing! with tears in my eyes nonsense. But before Ultravox! gave up their exclamation point,² their name was worth a good, hearty shout from the rooftops.

I made a miscalculation buying that Ultravox! album. I had always loved their “Young Savage” (Apple Music, Spotify) single, which is pure rocket fuel, so when I saw the self-titled record, also released in 1977, I snatched it up, thinking I’d be getting more of that manic, slashing guitar rock. Turns out “Young Savage” marked a significant punkward departure from the sound of the self-titled record, which had come out three months earlier. No doubt Ultravox! were moved by the Spirit of 1977—or maybe they were pulling a Barry Bonds and telling the punks, That’s all well and good, but imagine if someone who is actually good at this tries it. In any case, I dropped the needle on Ultravox! and was deeply disappointed at the florid arrangements and low BPMs I was hearing.

Three months later, something clicked. No: this wasn’t the peppier Sex Pistols or more gentrified Damned I had hoped to find. Rather: THIS is the missing link between the 1970s and Duran Duran. Or at least Ultravox! and Duran Duran branched off the same tree. The traditions and sensibilities of the New Romantic school—baroque eccentricity, dramatic artifice, rhythmic complexity—are positively bleeding out of the speakers here.

Far from severing ties with the acts they listened to and loved growing up, Ultravox! were mixing them, adding to them, synthesizing them. You hear Bowie on Ultravox!—theatrical and majestic, “I Want To Be a Machine” (Apple Music, Spotify) could have come straight from The Man Who Sold the World. Amid the dense poetry of this track, Foxx even drops a line eerily foreshadowing Kraftwerk’s magnum opus of a year later (Apple Music, Spotify):

In mitternacht, die Mensch-Maschine kissed me on my eyes.

You hear Eno’s Roxy Music on this record: see “Life at Rainbow’s End (For All the Tax Exiles on Main Street)” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “The Wild, The Beautiful & The Damned” (Apple Music, Spotify). You hear T-Rex and rockabilly and Link Wray. And it all comes together and works. Kinda like Sublime, now I think of it. Maybe I should call 2023 the Year of Synthesis.

I spent so much time in my younger days bouncing between one or another strain of musical fundamentalism. Insisting on purity. Depeche Mode is a synth band; Martin should not be playing a guitar. ZZ Top is for Republicans. And of course punk, to which I gave easily five years of my life, is the most fundamentalist rock form of all. Aside from James, I never knew what to do with bands with layered, multi-instrumental sounds and wide-ranging influences. Now I know exactly what to do, which is play the hell out of them.

Hacking and coughing and filled to the brim with soup stock, I bid adieu to The Year of Our Lord 2023 with Ultravox!’s “Saturday Night in the City of the Dead” (Apple Music, Spotify) rocking the turntable. I appreciate it’s not literally Saturday night. But of course, whenever it lands, New Year’s Eve is Saturday night on steroids, and in any case I grant myself some poetic license today, given all that was denied to me by influenza this past week.

Sat’day night in the City of the Dead. Can you feel the time bomb ticking in your head?

Again, written specifically for this iteration of me—in this condition, in this moment, in this place. Thank you, Fantastic Mr. Foxx.

1. Third act now, and this movie is actually pretty funny. I think I was in high school when I last saw it.

2. Which, as I understand, they adopted as an homage to Neu!—always a good sign.