Cover Story: Retro culture ain’t just nostalgia anymore

Jack “Woody” Booth is Retro. He’s a member of two area surf bands, the X-Rays and the Mariners, and has performed twangy instrumentals since 1964. He drives a ‘48 Ford which he says “starts quicker and runs more quietly than any car I have ever driven.”
Booth believes the media has sanitized us, sapped us of all original thought. The masses, he says, “are force-fed an idea of what is in style, what music and clothes are cool and, basically, what to think. Conformity is the gospel of the mass media, but many who consider ourselves creative types gravitate toward Retro, as old stuff reminds us of when life wasn’t so complex.”
Modern life’s complexity is directly a factor of the Great Lie of Technology. The speed with which computers enable us to do our work was supposed to give us more leisure time. But computers only make us work faster, harder and longer.
Booth is old enough to actually remember a simpler time. Others, like travel writer Bill Bryson, are left to pine for a place they’ve never been. In his book, A Sunburned Country, Bryson describes the sensation of examining photos taken during the 1950s at Surfer’s Paradise.
“There was something so marvelously innocent, so irretrievably lost, about the world back then,” Bryson observes. “You could see it in the easy, confident gait and sun-drenched smiles of the vacationers in every photograph. These people were happy. Today’s citizens don’t have that happiness in their faces any more. I don’t think anybody does.”
Retro is in.
Look around. From the decor of the Johnny Rocket’s restaurants in the mall to the turquoise-and-white color scheme on the new Gibson SG guitars, it’s impossible not to see Retro in our everyday culture. Commercial radio stations feature programs of “Retro Pleasure.” And if you’re charmed by all those new Beetles and P.T. Cruisers crowding our streets, just wait till you see the 2002-model Thunderbird. The lesson Ford learned with its Retro-styled Mustang was not lost. (Instead of laying off 13,000 Oldsmobile employees, GM should build something resembling the ‘57 Chevy Bel Air. They’d have to open new assembly plants to meet the demand.)
Retro is especially strong in the music business. As of Jan. 20, the Beatles’ 1 held the top slot on the album charts for the seventh straight week, trouncing the Backstreet Boys by over a quarter million in sales. This from a band that broke up more than 30 years ago. That same week, the most touted event on television (complete with its own series of five instantly-collectible TV Guide covers) was the premiere of a new Elvis film — a “special edition” of the 1970 documentary Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.
Every day, rain or shine, tens of thousands of visitors from around the world line up in Memphis to tour Elvis Presley’s mansion, Graceland. Is it even possible to imagine that, decades hence, such sustained international interest will exist for Madonna’s New York loft or whatever cattle barn or outhouse in which the odious Eminem was born?
The Retro lifestyle
Although Retro periodically infringes on mass culture — consider, for example, how often ’60s songs are used in movies and commercials aimed at the wallets of today’s youth — there are some consumers for whom Retro is a way of life, no matter what current trends dictate. This weekend, three events in Atlanta draw upon that reclusive hardcore-Retro crowd.
What’s refreshing about audiences at such events is that they’re generally well-informed fans who buck current fashion and instead pull overlooked gems from the obscurity of the past. The Saturday headliner of the Star Bar’s two-night Dixie Rockabilly Rumble this weekend (which includes a vintage car show) is a fiery female named Marti Brom, who draws her career inspiration from Dorothy Shay, a New York supper-club singer in the post-WWII era. Shay combined a sophisticated torch-song chanteuse image with rowdy hillbilly music and had hits with titles like “Joan of Arkansas.” She may be nearly forgotten (and it’s doubtful that modern icons Kid Rock or Sisqo ever heard of her), but whole new generations are discovering Shay’s delightful legacy through Brom’s knowing re-creation.
Similarly, vintage guitar maestro Deke Dickerson, who performs at the Masquerade this Saturday, mines the ’50s for classic guitars and rollicking inspiration. A tireless champion of overlooked R&B acts, Dickerson resurrected the Calvanes, Claude Trenier and other surviving ’50s artists to participate in recording his last few albums. He admits he himself “used to dream about living to be a hundred,” until divorces and diabetes turned his life upside-down. “Everything used to make sense before, but it’s all gone now,” Dickerson says. He favors looking backward because “next year seems like a preposterous notion.”
For their part, Atlanta’s X-Impossibles — who perform at their album release party this Saturday at the Echo Lounge — make no apologies for playing unreconstructed Retro punk, a sub-genre as relevant today (in the face of charts dominated by rap and teen acts) as it was 25 years ago in the quagmire of art-rock and disco. Frontman Tim Lumley points to bands such as the Rolling Stones, who modeled their initial sound on 10-year-old Chuck Berry records but gave it their own spin.
“We look back,” Lumley explains, “to spring forward.”
Don’t know much about history
In 1963, the Ventures proudly wrote across the back cover of their In Space album, “All of these unusual and other-worldly sounds have been created with musical instruments rather than electronic gimmicks.” But in today’s music, there’s little or no distinction between instruments and “electronic gimmicks.” The Great Lie of Technology enables non-musicians to enjoy careers as music stars.
At its best, technology provides Internet forums in which fans can bid on rare Link Wray promos or compare notes about which amplifiers Roky Erickson used with the 13th Floor Elevators. The “special edition” of Elvis: That’s the Way It Is was successfully promoted via e-mails which included WinMedia clips of never-before-seen footage.
At its worst, technology leads to sampling — snatching phrases from oldies and slipping them into computer-generated soundscapes. It’s a cheap substitute for writing new hooks or actually covering the source songs. Whereas Retro performers will proudly announce, “Here’s a Del Reeves tune for ya” or “This one’s by Rufus Thomas,” modernists freely pillage the classics without ascribing proper attribution.
A prime offender is Beck, who grafted sections from Van Morrison’s arrangement of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” onto one of his own hits. Beck must also be held culpable for inserting the phrase “two turntables and a microphone” into common parlance. Turntable-propelled rap has a certain charm as a form of performance art, but fans who appreciate Sam Cooke or Duane Eddy find it difficult to embrace a genre of “music” in which artists become superstars while neither singing nor playing instruments.
Meanwhile, there are teenage rockabillies knowledgeable enough to discuss the relative merits of the second and the third lineups of Gene Vincent’s Bluecaps — and with a passion unmatched by English Lit professors debating the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. These freethinkers soundly reject the overcommercialized fluff today’s corporate music industry devises to separate them from their lawn-mowing money, and instead seek out something more meaningful from a past they’re too young to have lived through, much less remembered.
While modern pop culture continues to grind along, slowly manufacturing one lowest-common-denominator teenage hit-machine after another, the depth of material that remains uncovered from the ’50s alone remains almost inexhaustible. Saying everything from the rockabilly era has already been discovered would be as premature as suspending further archeological digs in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.
Money, that’s what I want!
Kids who listen to true oldies — ones by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Link Wray, the Ventures, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground or the Ramones — fantasize about getting guitars and making the same kinds of sounds. With a little practice, it’s actually possible. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about those recordings. But try playing Christina Aguilera songs on a pawnshop Peavey, and you’ll get nowhere. Modern hits are so heavily computer-processed (often using the evil ProTools software, which could make Pee Wee Herman sound like Pavarotti) that instruments are indistinguishable and the human element is gone.
The music industry has always been a lot better at the industry than at the music. And with upstart rebels like Napster tying their tails in knots, it seems the industry can’t even get that part right. It’s time to get back to the Music, although even that has been obscured by the cult of celebrity, an unfortunate phenomenon in which the artist’s visual persona is everything. Such excesses are displayed for millions who’ll never hear a note from one of their records, but who would likely recognize the samples included in them.
A decidedly unglamorous yet powerfully influential ’70s band that inspired thousands of kids to pick up guitars was the Ramones. Ultimately, although their music lives on, they proved unable to handle the industry.
“We let the business push us around,” observes bassist Dee Dee Ramone in his autobiography Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones. “It’s a system that controls rebellion for profit, sort of like drug lords do. Originally, maybe it was different. Did ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ stand for that?”
Trad vs. prog
What typically holds a Retro movement back is the factionalism that develops within any given scene. Deke Dickerson observes that, although the rockabilly audience in Los Angeles is larger than ever, attendance at individual events dropped off when fans formed cliques. “Back when the scene was about 200 people total,” he says, “everybody went to the same shows. Now, you’ve got your ‘Reverend Horton Heat’ types going to Bowl-a-Rama, your ‘Swingers’ types going to the Derby, and your ‘authentic rockabillies’ going to Rudolpho’s.”
Authenticity always becomes an issue in Retro, whether it’s Civil War re-enactors scoffing at anachronistic coat buttons, or psychedelic-fuzz fans belittling solid-state Vox amps vs. the original tube variety. But the biggest divisor is the “traditional vs. progressive” rift. Ironically, however, the trad vs. prog dynamic is precisely what keeps Retro fresh.
Early ’60s, surf guitarist Paul Johnson, who composed the classics “Mr. Moto” and “Squad Car” (which are still performed by the modern groups the Penetrators, the X-Rays and Agent Orange), asserts there’s a genuine need for trad and prog in any revival movement. “They’re both vitally important to keeping things alive and growing,” he says.
Tim Lumley, the youthful leader of the X-Impossibles, agrees with his ’60s forebear. “Slavishly reproducing the past is pointless,” says Lumley, “but I think it’s great to get back to what made rock ‘n’ roll exciting to begin with. Consciously or not, all musicians use other songs as models when arranging and writing. Both AC/DC and the Rolling Stones began their careers with sets of Chuck Berry covers. My band takes a similar approach by acknowledging our own roots in punk and ’70s rock.”
Says Johnson: “Ya gotta have deep roots if ya wanna put out new branches.”

greg.nicoll@creativeloafing.com