I have cruel friends who like to play God Over Riboflavin; it’s their favorite pastime. They know my tastes as well as I do myself, and they like to withhold information from me, anticipating my reaction of equal parts enthusiasm and frustration. “Moe Tucker and the Bishops from Sun City Girls had a band once? They recorded an album? Why didn’t you tell me sooner, I know that you knew this all along! How long have we been friends again?!?
Before the stupid “Tea Party-gate,” before twee-immortalizations by way of “quirky” millennial movie soundtracks, before playing with the Kropotkins, and before the (un)necessary Velvet Underground reunion in the 90s, Moe Tucker joined up with Alan and Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls, as well as fellow AZ collaborators David Oliphant, Bennie Baresi, and Jesse Akkari, and made an album. It’s an amazing mixture of early SCG-experimentalism, Velvet-inspired bashing, and howling, immediacy captured by way of equipment prone to tape hiss, as well as a living illustration of the link between the two generations. From this band, SCG would form, and the evolution seems as much obvious as it does brilliant, like one of those moments when you predict the end of a film and still find yourself totally immersed.
Influence is strange; often we associate influence with what is immediately available, with what bits of similarities and languages are in the songs at first listen. Then there is that which comes more apparent over time. If one were to listen to SCG’s Dante’s Disneyland Inferno for the first time, I’d gamble that the first words out of the mouth of said listener wouldn’t be “Velvet Underground.” But listening to Paris 1942 next to Torch of the Mystics, there are definitely signs of what was and what became. Influence doesn’t always translate literally, and for the most part, for the better I’d argue. If we were to learn correctly from The Velvet Underground, it would be that form isn’t an adherence, and that the point is not to be rewriters, but rather translators. Somewhere along the way, they cover Syd Barrett’s “Long Gone,” and it too couldn’t feel more as close and as far away as possible from its source.
That being said, some of Paris 1942 feels very close to the source — “Move Out Of Wichita,” and “Pontious Pilote” specifically — but the album doesn’t play out like a form or genre exercise playbook. The more experimental tracks such as “Conversation,” or the songs that worked somewhere between the two, such as “Berlin Mood” or “Hex,” are easily as enjoyable as those closer to the VU heart, as well as making the two sides of the band (between form and experiment) more exciting.
Outside a few links on the internet, little has been said about Paris 1942, and besides the occasionally excited blogger, reception seems pretty negative. User “teenagegurls” from the terminalboredom.com message board calls it, “ready-made recipe for the worst music of all time.” Same forum, “panama fist” says, “add this to my ‘no one actually listens to’ category.” User “frankie teardrop” simply calls it “fag crap.” But it’s when “Whet Bull” says that Moe Tucker is “Velvet Underground’s LVP (Least Valuable Player)” that the sort of fear regarding lack of traditional rockist value is succinctly articulated. Tucker’s “career” (if it could even be called that) was by no means financially successful, but the scope of her influence seems to have had the most artistically interesting effect. Whereas Lou Reed and John Cale currently tread into their own forms of “adult contemporary,” somewhat trapped within their own constraints, Tucker grew out of her self-imposed limitations. On “Hex,” she plays a full kit, if just to show us that she could have played that way all along, but had the foresight and understanding to know what central force of the VU would be so identifiable. The 12-minute long “Headhunters” reinforces what can be found in every version of “Sister Ray” available: that Tucker could hear a song better than about anybody else, and could hold it together accordingly.
Her simplicity, matched with what would become the identifiable experimentation and instrumental work of Sun City Girls, is a sort of one-two punch at traditional garage rock tropes, striking the fear in “panama fists” and “teenagegurls” everywhere. Both sides of the Paris 1942 coin have been involved in work that is definitely more worthy of critical praise, but it’s amazing to see the brief moment in which these two converged. Escaping the easy designation of “super-group” by way of being relatively unknown at that point, it goes to show that those “fantasy bands” you form in your head while you’re really stoned may or may not have actually existed at one point.