Rubber City Review

We’ve covered guitarist Robert Quine pretty well in this blog, especially here and here. But I had to throw this post together after my sister came across a long-lost article in the bottom of a box at her house in Akron, just a block from where Rob grew up. I think she got it from Rob’s mom, Rosalie, who did a fine job of chronicling her son’s career, starting with the trailblazing NYC punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids back in the mid-70s, then with Lou Reed, then on to a whole slew of guest appearances – from Lydia Lunch and Marianne Faithfull to Tom Waits and Matthew Sweet.

The article, titled “Run – Don’t Walk,” was written by rock journalist and musician Rick Batey (author of “The American Blues Guitar: An Illustrated History”… you can buy a copy below) and appears to be from a UK music magazine, probably Melody Maker. I couldn’t find any evidence of it online, even over at the uber-research site rocksbackpages.com, which lists 32 articles about Rob. I’ve dated it from 1990, since Batey references “a 47-year-old ex-lawyer” and Rob was born on December 30, 1942. Rob seems especially wound up and expansive during the interview, which really nails his skewed wit and musical wisdom (in writing my posts, I was disadvantaged by not having tape running during my conversations with Rob). He talks at length about influences, his approach to playing, the state of rock at the time, and even his favorite gear. And he betrays a deep appreciation of rock’s roots, which might seem surprising given the shrieking, often atonal solos that defined his playing with the Voidoids. As Rob liked to point out, “by many people’s standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I’m a virtuoso.”

Before I share some excerpts (with music samples for those of you who want to play along), I’ll offer this in the way of “full disclosure”… Rob is my second cousin, which makes him second cousin once removed from Daniel Quine Auerbach of The Black Keys (which explains the “DQA” on Dan’s guitar strap). Needless to say, Rob was a big influence on Dan, who regrets not having the opportunity to play and record with him (Rob died in 2004 from a heroin overdose).

Rob on Influences:

• I’ll buy almost any European reissue of totally obscure rockabilly bands; there’s a wildness, a freshness in those records that came from discovering things for the first time. Try to recreate that music, and you’d never even come close.

• I’m listening to J.J. Cale constantly at the moment. People are either bored by him, or completely hypnotized. You couldn’t call it innovative, but he’s a genius. I’d put him right up there with the great blues soloists, even though he can obviously play jazz as well. River Runs Deep

• And some time ago I started listening to James Burton again. I hadn’t heard him since 1962, so I checked out Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, the later Ricky Nelson, and even the Elvis stuff – which is pretty dire listening! Most guitarists burn out, it’s inevitable – even the caliber of Hendrix’s work fell off in the last year and a half of his life – but I saw James Burton with (Elvis) Costello and he’s still doing new things. He doesn’t copy his early work, but his identity is intact. How many players can you say that about? Susie-Q/Dale Hawkins with James Burton

• Initially I never dreamed of playing lead, I just wanted to play acoustic guitar like the Everly Brothers. I remember being shocked on hearing the flipside of Bye Bye Love and discovering a steel guitar hidden in there! I thought – these guys are hillbillies! But then, in almost the same month, Link Wray’s Rumble and Duane Eddy’s Movin’ ‘n’ Groovin’ came out… Link Wray was the one that really grabbed me. I even got to meet him in 1975 because the Voidoids were using the same studio as him while we were making the “Blank Generation” album. I told him about some pretty obscure things of his that had really inspired me, and I think he appreciated it. He left his amplifier lying around, an Ampeg with four 12-inch speakers, so heavy it took five people to shift, and I used it for some of the better solos on that album. If he reads this, I hope he forgives me. No one was supposed to touch it. Ace of Spades/Link Wray

• I really got into electric guitar by playing along to Ritchie Valens records. I later found out that a studio musician called Rene Hall had played a lot of it, but Valens himself was a great guitarist and some of his instrumentals were really innovative. Fast Freight was the first record with two bassists – Red Callender on double bass, and Rene Hall getting a totally different, clanky sound from a six-string Danelectro. Valens was so young at the time – he died aged 17 – but you could hear him stretching out, even then. Fast Freight

• (Watching Buddy Holly play at a 1957 rock ‘n roll review) Buddy Holly playing a Stratocaster was an amazing thing. The image of Elvis banging away on an acoustic guitar was well-known, of course, but suddenly here was this guy with this Martian-looking guitar. What’s more, he was doing the singing and taking the solos. The other acts – Frankie Lymon, The Clovers, The Drifters – all used the big house band, but the Crickets were doing everything by themselves. I thought, “that’s bizarre.” And because this was 1957, it was before Buddy Holly had cleaned up his image: he had a baggy suit, un-capped teeth and wire-rimmed glasses! He covered a lot of Little Richard songs, funnily. Blue Days, Black Nights

• (Seeing John Coltrane in concert, 1966) I’d been getting into jazz, and I’d barely just figured out bebop when I went to this concert and sat in the very front row. There I was, analyzing it, trying to understand this out-there jazz, but these horns were going full velocity right in my face and all of a sudden I realized that there was nothing to understand. It was coming from the same place as a Charlie Patton or Howlin’ Wolf record. Living Space

• Hearing Eight Miles High was one of the final breakthroughs for me. It was the first hint of something real, as opposed to all this fusion trash. Lou Reed was listening to them, too. Back then, when we first met, Roger McGuinn was the only guitarist he had anything good to say about. He also liked (saxophonist) Ornette Coleman’s Ramblin’, and exactly the same thing happened to him as to me; he was trying to understand it all, when suddenly he realized “shit – this is just rock ‘n roll.” Eight Miles High

• Sometimes you can be struggling along, when all of a sudden the things you’ve been listening to come together with a snap. And the next guitar solo after Eight Miles High that came to terms with free jazz was the Velvet Underground’s I Heard Her Call My Name. At first I thought it was terrible, awful. The way he let the wrong harmonics feed back was totally unacceptable at the time but it was completely intentional, he knew exactly what he was doing. I Heard Her Call My Name

On Playing/Practicing:

• Sometimes I look out there and see a bunch of 11-year-old girls who don’t care, and I’ve got a stock solo that I can fall back on. Other times you want to keep yourself on edge, hopefully without destroying the song. Then again, there are places where I can show a total lack of respect for the songs if I want. But sometimes you get up there and nothing works, it’s just total frustration. So you decide to play it safe – and you can’t even do that right.

• A big part of understanding the Velvet Underground is realizing the guitars are detuned. When I worked on “Blue Mask,” Lou Reed played a great deal in D, which I find very hard to play along to. I ended up lowering the whole tuning of my guitar to D and still playing an E shape, and it’s that drone factor that’s the key to the whole thing.

• 

  Albert Collins

  I have no qualms about using a capo these days… I used to think of them as purely a crutch for beginners, until I did a session with Albert Collins. It was amazing to be there, playing right next to him. He was using a capo on everything, putting it right up to the ninth or tenth fret. He used his Telecaster, the studio’s regular Fender Twin set clean on 5, and no boxes whatsoever – and yet all this distortion was coming out, just from his fingers. It was really quite distressing. Melt Down/Albert Collins

• Ever since the Voidoids, chord playing has been the priority; with Lloyd Cole, I’m trying to leave the high and low E’s ringing as much as possible, and then sliding chords around inside of that. My confidence has grown over the years, but I’ve never been entirely comfortable with solos. The way Richard Hell got them out of me was to make me do it over and over again until I got so angry and frustrated, I’d just smash away at the strings. Lou Reed generally left me alone. Some people think that the solo on Waves of Fear from “Blue Mask” was the best thing I ever did, and that’s all they want to hear, but I’d like to think I can play lyrical stuff and still put as much emotion in as that. Not the same kind of emotion, thank God… I really put myself in a state to play that part – it wasn’t fun at all. My biggest break, a Lou Reed album for RCA, and I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown and that they’d have to call a taxi and send me home! Waves of Fear

• There’s only one way I practice; for 15 years I’ve had this system of mixing the guitar in with a record and hearing it in stereo over headphones. I play along to blues things, or jazz if I’m feeling adventurous. I don’t enjoy sitting on my own and working out guitar parts, so this way it’s very immediate, I’m right in the middle of it. I remember once doing it with a song called Pharaoh’s Dance off Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew.” It’s very ambiguous, you don’t know what key it’s in, and I found that I could play along with it using any notes I wanted and whatever I played wasn’t wrong – just so long as I did it with confidence. Finding my way around the fingerboard by doing things like that is my alternative to playing scales up the neck. Pharaoh’s Dance

• They just brought out the Little Richard boxed set. Something as savage as Good Golly Miss Molly, the scream of those sax solos – I’ll never tire of it because there’s something there that cannot be recaptured, not even by him; he tried, and he never came close. That what I try to do in a solo, to capture something that people can relate to, musically and emotionally. And I would rather listen to someone who can barely play, who had some soul, who made mistakes, than hearing jazz-rock scales all night long. I think that people like that kind of music because it doesn’t threaten them, and they like to live ordered lives. Ultimately, I don’t think they want to come to terms with their own emotions. Good Golly Miss Molly

• The only piece of advice I have to give is to listen. I violently disagree with people who never listen to other music for fear of being influenced. Other music is not a threat! You cannot harm yourself by listening to a Charlie Christian solo over and over again. Just give yourself over, inundate yourself with it. You don’t need to worry about losing your own identity. Breakfast Feud/Charlie Christian break

• I’ve got my own style, I suppose, but I play both good things and bad things. My idols are basically Charlie Christian, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, and if you worship people like that – as anybody that has a brain should – then even if you could play a thousand times better than you do, it would still keep your ego under control. It keeps you from getting a swell head, to say the least.

On the state of rock music (1990… but he could be describing 2012):

• I don’t want to get too deeply into my Rock is Dead lecture, and at least Guns N’ Roses are a basic band with guitars, but I can hardly see how things can get much worse, really. On the other hand, music of such bad quality is so generally accepted these days that I’m afraid things will get worse. If you look at the sales figures, you can hardly say that rock is dying. But most of the rock around now is borrowing so heavily from the past that I’m scared that in a few years people won’t remember who Van Halen were, let alone Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix. Perhaps there is good music, but I’m not hearing it.

• I can’t see what the “next step” is going to be; it seems as though all the obvious combinations, like jazz and rock, have been experimented with already. One of the last really new things for me was Brian Eno’s ambient music, and that’s just basically stuff on one chord – he’s a genius. Music’s the only thing that makes any sense to me, and if I really believed everything I’m saying here, I’d go back to being a lawyer. But it disturbs me that I have to wait for some unissued Charlie Christian or Jimmy Reed record for my musical enjoyment.

Rob shreds his way through the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat… Live at the Bottom Line, NYC, 1983:

In my recent post on guitarist Robert Quine, I pulled together a few personal stories while carefully sidestepping any attempt to define his musical legacy. That’s better left to those who can speak with a lot more authority on all of the disparate influences that came together in downtown NYC in the mid-‘70s – punk, new wave, no wave, avant garde… I’m sure someone will argue that I’m already using the wrong terms here.

Art Garfunkel, The Boxer

I can’t even lay claim to my favorite Rob story. According to his friend The Hound (whose blog is listed at right), Rob was once punched in the face by Art Garfunkel when Rob told him that his act with Paul Simon was “for people too dumb for Bob Dylan.” So my cousin may have been the only person on the planet (other than Simon, maybe) who could say he was sucker-punched by Art Garfunkel.

My post on Rob certainly gave me a greater appreciation of the size, scope and reach of his output over 35 years as a working musician. And sometimes it takes an unexpected source to really drive it home – like the jolt of hearing Rob’s jagged guitar closing an episode of HBO’s fine new series, “How To Make It In America.”

Now that CD box sets are going the way of the cathode-ray tube TV and, well, the CD, it seems unfortunate that Rob’s career never got the full box treatment. I mean, the German Bear Family label delivers a 12-CD set of the “Singing Ranger” Hank Snow, and we got bupkis on Quine? OK, maybe that’s not a good example – I’m just the kind of nutball who would plow through 12 CDs of Snow.

But a stray comment following one of The Hound’s posts on Rob got me thinking, what would even the most basic compilation of his stuff sound like? Just a quick look at Rob’s discography would scare away even the most disciplined producer. Recordings with Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, John Zorn, Marianne Faithfull, Brian Eno, They Might Be Giants, Lloyd Cole, Matthew Sweet… full-bore rockers, experimental soundtracks, atmospheric instrumentals, catchy pop songs, off-kilter blues and R&B… How could anyone create a seamless, cohesive listening experience out of this body of work?

Maybe that’s not the point. You could certainly separate the pop/rock stuff from the soundtracks and instrumentals, but you’d still be jarred by sudden shifts – from low-fi to high-quality production; from gentle, airy soundscapes to angry squalls of distorted guitar. But why should listening to a Quine compilation be any different from a conversation with a guy who could go from Link Wray to Miles Davis in 10 seconds flat?

I won’t even try to offer the definitive list of Rob’s essential recordings. But I have a few favorites that should be part of any meaningful attempt to capture the high points of Rob’s career, and I’ve included samples to get the argument started.

Most worthwhile box sets start with those early, formative recordings – think The Band (aka The Hawks) with Ronnie Hawkins. And we now have a few good ones featuring Rob, courtesy of his old friend and bandmate, Barry Silverblatt, and posted by The Hound here. Back in the Sixties, Rob and Barry played together in a band called Bruce’s Farm. This solo from a cover of the Kinks’ Where Have All The Good Times Gone offers ample evidence that Rob already had his chops together before he hit NYC (excuse the sound on this one). Where Have All The Good Times Gone/Robert Quine solo (Bruce’s Farm)

Recorded in 1977, Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids is an undeniably great record. And it underscores a comment Rob made to The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach (another cousin): “Everything I do is just a variation on Chuck Berry.” He was only half-kidding. In some of his rock ‘n roll solos, Rob seems to take the same basic licks that Berry used to great effect on his classic hits and turn them inside-out, almost beyond recognition. Almost.

The next sample starts with Chuck Berry’s solo on Thirty Days and moves to Rob’s playing on Love Comes In Spurts. Is it just me, or does Rob sound like Berry trying to play one of his signature solos while getting zapped by a bad amp? Thirty Days/Chuck Berry + Love Comes In Spurts/Richard Hell and the Voidoids

Most of the critical praise is heaped on Rob’s recordings with Lou Reed, and that probably has as much to do with Reed as it does with Rob. I sampled two favorites in my last post – Betrayed (“Live in Italy”), because Rob’s convoluted country solo seems to be a tip of the shades to ace string-bender James Burton, and Waiting For My Man (“A Night With Lou Reed”), from a filmed performance at the Bottom Line in 1983. Rob’s playing on the latter is as potent as anything I’ve heard from any guitarist… simply brilliant. In the video at the end of “Encounters,” Rob’s first solo starts at around 2:00, and he comes back in at 3:40. Here’s another standout cut from the Lou Reed era, The Gun from “The Blue Mask.” The lyrics set the dark mood, but the tension builds with Rob’s sinister fills. A lesson in how to serve the song… The Gun/Lou Reed with Robert Quine

Move to 1984… I’ve always liked this number from Rob’s collaboration with drummer Fred Maher, “Basic.” I’m not exactly sure what he’s doing here, but it’s a fairly unusual chord progression – maybe something that rubbed off when he took jazz guitar lessons from the great Jimmy Raney. And he’s adding a little dissonance with a few well-placed overdubs. So it’s one of those “something doesn’t sound quite right, so it must be right” numbers. The programmed drums come across as a bit dated, but not heavy handed. Is he re-imagining the Sixties from a more cynical time and place? Maybe, but it sounds heartfelt to me. ’65/Robert Quine and Fred Maher

The next year, Rob teamed up with Rolling Stone Keith Richards, fellow Akronite Ralph Carney and others to record “Rain Dogs” with Tom Waits. Rob only appears on two cuts – Blind Love, featuring some fine interplay between Rob and Richards, and Downtown Train, which eventually became a monster hit for Rod “The Bod” Stewart. Rob’s contributions on the two songs are fairly minimal, but his insistent rhythm on Downtown Train was picked up on the remake by Stewart’s guitarist, Jeff Golub – another Akron native. This is starting to get complicated… Downtown Train/Tom Waits with Robert Quine

Now we get to Rob’s first and only appearance on a bona fide hit – as guitarist on Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, a Top 10 single in 1991. I’d argue it features some of the most dangerous guitar playing ever heard on hit radio. But I’m family… you be the judge: Girlfriend/Matthew Sweet with Robert Quine

Rob had finally rubbed up against some mainstream success and recognition. So what did he do next? Play even more obscure and challenging music, of course – including an ongoing collaboration with avant-garde composer and saxophonist John Zorn. Here’s a 1995 duet with fellow NYC guitarist Jody Harris (who Rob described as “tragically underrated”) from a compilation titled “Come Together: A Guitar Tribute to the Beatles” – Rob’s guitar is the dominant voice on this sample: Yes It Is/Jody Harris and Robert Quine

Rob had an especially productive year in 1997. He contributed to a few albums by Zorn, worked with Marc Ribot on Ikue Mori’s “Painted Desert” (sampled on my previous post) and took part in what he described as his most positive experience in the studio – “Valdun: Voices of Rumantsch” by Corin Curschellas. Rumantsch is a rare language spoken by only a few thousand people in the Alpine valleys of Switzerland. But Corin’s music approaches almost mainstream pop, which makes this an unusual outing for Rob. I like his relaxed, expansive playing on this number from “Valdun”: Al Mar/Corin Curschellas with Robert Quine

I’ll close with a recording Rob did in 2001 with legendary R&B showman and pulp author Andre Williams. After he burned his way through this one, Rob reportedly said, “Now I’ve worked with two geniuses, Lou Reed and Andre Williams.” Head First/Andre Williams with Robert Quine

So those are just a few of my favorite Rob moments… and they’re certainly not based on an encyclopedic knowledge of his recorded oeuvre, as the Times might say. I’ll also fully admit that I came across a few cuts that didn’t move me at all.

I’m just a guy who plays broke-dick guitar, paying tribute to a true master – an underrated one at that. And just a single-disc compilation from an enterprising label (Nonesuch, are you listening?) would help right that wrong.

Robert Quine with Matthew Sweet on the Dennis Miller show – 1992… workin’ that whammy bar. Former Gang of Four bassist Sara Lee is on the other side of the stage. You’ll have to suffer through about 30 seconds of Miller being a dipshit (turn up the volume on this one).

From the same show – Sweet’s I’ve Been Waiting. Rob was a huge fan of The Byrds, so this was like tossing raw meat to a junkyard dog.

Big week for The Black Keys – “Brothers” is the Number 1 new rock album in the country (Soundscan)… Number 3 overall if you count “Glee” – which is exactly what you’d expect if you brought a high school glee club into a studio to cover hoary rock hits – and “Exile on Main Street,” which the Stones spent a small fortune promoting. So congratulations, Dan and Pat… an amazing achievement that may have missed the attention of the local press, but now is gaining notice throughout the RCR blogosphere (mainly, those of you who didn’t get the email from Dan’s mom).

Oh, they also played the Letterman and Jimmy Fallon shows. Here’s the Letterman performance of Tighten Up, followed up by the “official” video of the song, which is easily one of the funniest music videos I’ve ever seen:

This article was first published as “Guilty Pleasures” on Blogcritics.org.

It’s all in the ear of the beholder, isn’t it? For a blues hound, a guilty pleasure might be ZZ Top. For a soccer mom, maybe it’s 50 Cent or Kanye West. If you’re a fan of New Orleans music, it might be a tune that Steve Zahn wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot Mardi Gras scepter (more on that later).

For me, it’s really quite simple… Given that some of my friends and family members are a little nutty about American roots music, it’s usually anything that would make these music snobs recoil in horror if I admitted that I own it, much less listen to it.

In the movie “Office Space,” a computer-programming Michael Bolton calls his more famous namesake an “ass-clown” – then tries to ingratiate himself with a couple of soulless consultants (the two Bobs) when he tells them that the other Bolton is “pretty good.” In one of the movie’s best moments, the first Bob then confesses, “I celebrate his entire catalog.” So basically, a guilty pleasure is like admitting you’re a bit of a Bob, or even worse.

Recently, I connected with an old friend from college (check him out here). We quickly shared notes on stuff we’ve been listening to – turns out both of us are addicted to Sixties jazz – then we started talking about albums we couldn’t do without back in the Seventies. It got even better when we compared our expansive playlists of songs from the era.

Both of us listed the obvious culprits – the Rolling Stones, Taj Mahal, Joni Mitchell, the Allman Brothers Band, the J. Geils Band, Bob Marley, Little Feat… then things started to get a little more debatable, with forays into blooze-rock limbo (Humble Pie, Foghat, Savoy Brown), prog-rock purgatory (Yes, Genesis, the Moody Blues), and glam-rock hell (David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music). Now I enjoyed listening to the latter dreck back in the day, just like any other self-respecting stoner. But it’s hard to slap on the Pie’s “Rockin’ the Fillmore” or Yes’ “Fragile” today without a healthy dose of ironic detachment – the old wink-nod, as they say. And god help the ass-clown who whips out “The Best of Bread.”

Most of my guilty pleasures probably fall more into the category of cocktail music, and I can probably blame college life for this too. Back when I was struggling to graduate from Ohio University (see post on “Guns, Drugs, Money and Vinyl…”), I fell in with a few misanthropes who had lost the will to rock – probably the result of spending countless hours during our teen years in front of huge banks of PA speakers, head-banging to the Pie. We were searching for more sedentary pleasures involving smoking jackets and cocktail dresses (from Goodwill, of course), mixing high-balls in front of the hi-fi, and slow-grooving to Frank and Dino.

Yeah, I know… it’s a tired cliché. But it worked for us at the time. And we somehow convinced ourselves that we weren’t turning into our parents, mainly by throwing a few contemporary artists into the mix. The clear favorite? Robert Palmer… blue-eyed soulman Robert Palmer, that is – not the guy who hit the jackpot on MTV with his backup band of supermodels. (About 20-some years ago, one’s preference regarding the two Palmers seemed like something worth arguing about… today, not so much.)

Anyway, Palmer put out a few albums in the Seventies that seemed to us like unabashed love letters to the cocktail culture – particularly “Pressure Drop” and “Double Fun.” Since then, I’ve discovered the obvious pleasures of reggae legend Toots Hibbert, which makes it even more difficult to listen to Palmer’s cover of the Maytals’ Pressure Drop. But some of the stuff on these records holds up surprisingly well, in an earnest, pseudo-soul kind of way. Just don’t toss out any Marvin Gaye to make room for it on your CD shelf.

As I grew older, I abandoned any pretense of being “relevant” and started celebrating the catalogs of other artists from the original cocktail set. And I’ll thank the movie “Big Night” for giving me a greater appreciation of Louis Prima (a New Orleans native) and his sultry sidekick, Keely Smith. The movie is really an extended riff on “Waiting for Louis.” In short, a hapless entrepreneur and his brother, a master Italian chef, bet that their fortunes will change when Prima pays a visit to their struggling restaurant (he never shows up, but the party goes on without him). It’s also a commentary on the age-old divide between elitists and “philistines,” as the chef – wonderfully played by Tony Shahloub – likes to call diners who don’t appreciate his carefully prepared seafood risotto.

I certainly was familiar with Louis Prima before I saw the movie. You had to be if you spent any amount of time in Akron’s North Hill or Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhoods. But I used to think of him more as a jokey purveyor of novelty songs (Just a Gigolo, Angelina/Zooma Zooma), as opposed to a real player, with a first-rate band run by fellow Crescent City badass Sam Butera… Oh Marie/Louis Prima with Sam Butera

Louis Prima and snobbery – cultural, musical, culinary, you name it – are just two of many topics covered on “Treme,” HBO’s new series about post-Katrina New Orleans. I’m getting a little tired of the show’s constant trashing of tourists, the very people who help keep the city afloat. And I’m still hoping to find one character I actually like. But the music alone makes “Treme” worth watching. In one episode, an especially annoying DJ portrayed by Steve Zahn refuses to play any of the old warhorses – like Iko Iko or Walkin’ to New Orleans – during a fundraiser for his radio station (you’d be hard-pressed to find more self-righteous blowhards in one program). Instead, he sits back and savors the joys of a less-obvious choice, Prima’s Buena Sera: Buena Sera/Louis Prima

A nice moment, musically speaking – but not exactly what I’d call “sticking it to the man.”

There’s really no moral to my story, other than this: With a little time and the right context, one man’s garbage can turn into the same man’s gold. Or vice versa. And if you visit New Orleans, don’t be afraid to request Iko Iko.

At the risk of losing my mail-order degree in ethnomusicology (and your attention), I’ll leave you with a few more of my guilty pleasures:

• “Reggae Pulse 2 Hit Songs – Jamaican Style”: Reggae versions of Motown and soul hits like Just My Imagination, Ain’t No Sunshine and Papa Was A Rolling Stone… Beats the polka covers.
• Dolly Parton – Jolene: Honky-funk? Jolene
• Ramsey Lewis Trio – The “In” Crowd: It’s a real toe-tapper, daddy-o! The “In” Crowd
• Shakira: You had me at hola.
• Junior Brown – Venom Wearin’ Denim: Sometimes the name of the song is all you need.
• Dazz Band – Let It Whip: The Bucket Shop was Akron’s ultimate den of iniquity. When this song started playing at glass-shattering volume, you’d just blown right past the point of no return. Let It Whip
• Lou Reed – “New Sensations”: I’d never admit it to cousin Robert, who left Reed right before this album was recorded, but I’ve always had a soft spot for I Love You, Suzanne.
• Greg Allman – “Laid Back”: The Voice of Southern Rock croons over big, orchestral arrangements. This album was big in Milledgeville GA back in ’73… Maybe the locals had it right all along. Multi-Colored Lady
• Chris Isaak: because he steals from the right sources.
• Mahavishnu Orchestra – The Dance of Maya: Head-banging for nerds, in a time signature I couldn’t even begin to identify (a waltz, maybe?). The Dance of Maya
• Robert Gordon: Reheated rockabilly… But when your guitar players are Link Wray and Danny Gatton, who cares?

What are some of yours? If you prefer to send them anonymously, don’t worry… I’ll only share your true identity with a few friends and family members.

Robert Quine backing Richard Hell

My cousin Robert Quine was a bona fide guitar hero (number 80 on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” – right after Cliff Gallup of Be Bop a Lula fame and before Derek Trucks). But I wasn’t aware of his playing until a couple of years after he blasted his way into New York City’s vibrant punk scene with “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids: Blank Generation/Richard Hell and the Voidoids with Robert Quine

In the liner notes to “Spurts: The Richard Hell Story,” a very thoughtful Hell had (hath?) this to say about what you just heard: “It sounds to me like the solo is coming from another dimension. I don’t know if it has any relationship to anything in history. Though of course everything does, and that solo specifically refers to certain records Quine liked.”

I was raised on jazz, blues and bluegrass music, so punk rock wasn’t something that I naturally embraced. Then a college buddy took me to CBGB in New York’s seedy Bowery area to see The Dead Boys from Cleveland (even though I could’ve driven a couple of miles from my mom’s house in Akron to see them at the Crypt).

The first thing I noticed when we walked in the club was the disproportionate number of people jammed into the back of the room, by the bar. Meanwhile, a big bouncer separated the “hoi polloi” from the empty VIP section, which was the entire expanse of the club (in other words, about 30 feet) in front of the stage. Must’ve been a showcase gig for a record label. My buddy and I did some quick thinking and convinced the bouncer that we were reporters from some rag back in Ohio, and we grabbed a table up front.

The opening act (name escapes me) made quite an impression when the lead singer tossed his mic over a pipe hanging from the ceiling, pulled the cord back down around his neck, hung himself in the air for a few seconds and then collapsed on stage. That, my friends, is rock ‘n roll! The Dead Boys’ set wasn’t nearly as memorable, although we were invited backstage by a band member’s mom for some birthday cake. I have to say, seeing a middle-aged matron and her friends handing out birthday treats to Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome was a surreal experience, especially in that shithole.

But I was glad to visit an American rock shrine, the place where bands like the Voidoids, the Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Television, the Talking Heads and Blondie defined New York City punk and new wave in the late-‘70s.

Robert Quine was probably the least-likely rocker of them all. Born in Akron in 1942, he went to a prep school in the area, eventually earned a law degree (from Washington University in St. Louis), and even passed the Missouri bar, but never practiced law. Rob (his parents called him Rob, so I did too… most everyone else called him Quine, which I didn’t for obvious reasons) probably shared a few stray genes with his famous uncle, Willard Van Orman Quine – a brilliant philosopher whose work in analytics and “semantic holism” remains an essential touchstone for deep thinkers around the world. Just don’t ask me what it all means.

Rob moved to San Francisco in 1969, where he first met Lou Reed while taping a gig by Reed’s influential band The Velvet Underground. Rob was obsessed with the band, and his tapes of several performances in the Bay Area and at Washington University were released in 2001 as a 3-CD set called “Bootleg Series, Vol. 1: The Quine Tapes.”

He landed in New York City in ’71, where he wrote tax law treatises for a publishing company, worked at a film memorabilia shop and eventually fell in with a rag-tag group of downtown musicians, like fellow guitarist Tom Verlaine (Television) and Richard Hell. Then “Blank Generation” set the stage for Rob’s strange musical odyssey, which included studio work for Tom Waits, Marianne Faithfull, Matthew Sweet, avant-gardist John Zorn, R&B legend Andre Williams, and many others.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids

Someone once described him as looking like a “deranged accountant,” which pretty much nailed it. He usually wore a sport jacket and almost always wore shades, even indoors. And he was quite a bit older than most of the folks he played with (although Reed also was born in ’42).

I never saw Rob play live, but I visited with him several times at his parents’ house in West Akron. His dad, Bob, and mom, Rosalie, were good friends of my parents and also were close with my sister Mary and her husband, Chuck, who lived a block away from the Quines. Bob had inherited his father Cloyd’s business, Akron Equipment (mostly tire molds), but he apparently had little enthusiasm for management and especially the brutal realities of labor relations. He retired at the first opportunity and spent the next 30 or so years of his life traveling the world with his charming and colorful wife Rosalie (she grew up in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn and claimed to have been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in her younger days, which seems almost quaint today when you consider the horrors of 9/11).

By the time I met Rob, the Voidoids had already imploded and he’d gained greater notice as Lou Reed’s guitarist. Critics fawned over Rob’s solos on “The Blue Mask,” which was widely viewed as a return to form for Reed after years of abusing various substances. Although I can’t say that “Mask” is one of my personal favorites, I’ll admit that anyone who records a solo like this has balls of steel (Rob claimed that Reed annoyed him so much in the studio that he could barely contain himself when they rolled the tape on this one): Waves of Fear/Lou Reed with Robert Quine

Rob recorded two more albums with Reed – “Legendary Hearts” and “Live in Italy” – before he left due to differences that were probably personal as well as musical. He told me the record company sent a test pressing of “Legendary Hearts” to his parents’ house in Akron, and he was so infuriated with the final mix (some of his guitar parts were mixed out altogether) that he grabbed a hammer, walked out on the driveway and smashed the record into little pieces.

Rob would spend a couple weeks in Akron every year, mainly to decompress and get away from the indignities of life in New York’s Lower East Side, back when squatters and drug dealers were taking over empty buildings (he said he was mugged twice just taking out the garbage).

Rob’s social skills were somewhat lacking, to put it kindly. Rosalie would invite us over, but I think Rob would’ve been perfectly content spending his time in Akron without seeing a soul other than his parents. He would barely acknowledge my presence when I first showed up, then when he realized I wasn’t leaving right away, he’d reluctantly engage in a little conversation – mostly quick responses to my questions about his guitar playing and influences.

But once he decided I actually knew what I was talking about, we were off and running. His stories (like the driveway incident) could be hugely entertaining, and he had a wonderful way of describing other artists – his rants about Lou Reed were priceless – and the recordings that really inspired him.

I was surprised to find out he had a jazzman’s sensibility and a deep, heartfelt appreciation of the blues. He actually took a few lessons from the great jazz guitarist Jimmy Raney, whose work with Stan Getz alone was enough to make him a legend. And you can hear a little of that jazz influence in Rob’s later recordings with Zorn, drummer Fred Maher and percussionist Ikue Mori. Here’s a cut from “Painted Desert,” Rob’s 1997 collaboration with Mori: El Dorado/Ikue Mori with Robert Quine

Rob’s first great inspiration, though, was the country-influenced string-bender James Burton, who made Ricky Nelson’s rockabilly sides far more legitimate than they should have been and eventually settled into a comfortable living as Elvis Presley’s main guitarist. Although he seldom played it straight, Rob seems to pay tribute to Burton in this strangled solo from Reed’s “Live in Italy”: Betrayed/Lou Reed with Robert Quine

Rob with The Hound (far left), WFMU studio

Rob told me he had a blues radio show when he was at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and one of his favorites was Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. He also loved Jimmy Reed – which I also found surprising, given Rob’s shrieking, atonal solos with the Voidoids and the other Reed. On another occasion, he asked me if I’d heard of Ted Hawkins, the former street musician from Venice Beach whose warm, soulful voice seemed to convey a world of sadness. Once again, I was floored… Is this the same guy who shredded his way through Love Comes in Spurts?

During one of Rob’s visits to the Rubber City, my sister Mary and I stopped by and asked him if he wanted to head up to Kent with us to see the legendary 15-60-75 (aka The Numbers Band). I could probably spend the next 12 paragraphs or so trying to describe the Kidney Brothers and their amazing legacy in Northeast Ohio (future post?). But if I had to offer a brief description of their four-decade career, I’d say they play highly original, somewhat eccentric and often frighteningly intense blues-based music – basically street poetry for rubber rats. Here’s a little taste, recorded live in ’75 at the Cleveland Agora when the Numbers opened for Bob Marley during his first American tour: About Leaving Day/15-60-75 The Numbers Band

Back to Rob and our invite… he threw us another curve by agreeing to go. We strolled into the Numbers’ main home, JB’s, which smelled a lot like Marley’s dressing room, and stood near the stage to watch an especially riveting set. I thought their guitarist, Michael Stacey, would recognize Rob – his playing seemed to have that punk-rock edge to it. But Rob went mostly unnoticed. Although he kept glancing over his shoulder (with shades on, of course) in an odd kind of way, like he was expecting some crazed Kent State student to jump on his back and start pummeling him. Just when I thought we should whisk him back to the security of his parents’ house, he admitted that he enjoyed the band and really appreciated us dragging him along.

The last time I saw Rob was after his father passed away – probably around ’99. By then, he’d married a lovely woman named Alice, who was everything socially that Rob wasn’t. She appeared to be his complete support system, which Rob sorely needed given his paranoid nature and darker tendencies. He had just bought the complete Columbia studio recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, which was playing in the background. “What do you think of this?” he asked. I told him I was working my way through it too and loved virtually everything Miles recorded in the Sixties. He nodded quietly, way beyond the point of being phased by our shared tastes in music.

In 2003, Alice died suddenly at their Soho loft (for an intense account of this event and others involving Rob, check out this piece by The Hound – one of my favorite bloggers and probably Rob’s closest friend when he was living in NYC). Without Alice’s love and support, Rob went into a tailspin, and he died from a heroin overdose less than a year later.

Rob is conspicuously absent from the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, which probably suits him just fine. But he remains a major influence on younger musicians like my nephew Dan, who once took the short walk to Bob and Rosalie’s with guitars in hand to jam with Rob.

Dan Auerbach on Robert Quine… “Pat (Carney) and I had just formed The Black Keys and signed a deal with Fat Possum. Meanwhile, my dad browbeat Rosalie into letting me stop by to meet Rob, who begrudgingly agreed to do it. I’m sure he was expecting a high school kid with a shredder guitar and a Limp Bizkit CD. Then I showed up with a couple of Japanese Teisco Del Reys and some stuff by Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford. He walked out of a really dark study, with his shades on, and complained that he had a hangover and a headache – could’ve been in withdrawal – but once he saw those guitars he took off his shades and his eyes lit up right away.

“I played him ‘All Night Long’ by Junior, who he’d never heard of, and he was completely blown away. Then we talked for a couple of hours about music and even noodled around on guitar together. He told me everything he did was just a variation on Chuck Berry. He also spoke fondly of (guitarist) Marc Ribot… said he was very grateful for all the gigs that Ribot lined up for him. Of course, Pat and I later brought Marc in to play on ‘Attack and Release,’ along with Pat’s uncle Ralph.” Ralph Carney and Robert Quine played together on Tom Waits’ classic album, “Rain Dogs” (along with Keith Richards) – an unusual connection with The Black Keys that’s rarely mentioned.

“Robert used a Peavey solid-state amp [Dan prefers tube amps], which made sense when you consider the sound he became known for at times – so jagged and in your face. A lot of punk-rockers’ guitar playing came across as ‘fake’ aggression… Robert had the ability to be atmospheric and airy or aggressive and edgy but in a ‘real’ way… and in a style that became all his own. Probably all that pent-up rage from getting sent off to prep school by his parents!”

They got together again after that, and Rob encouraged Dan to look him up in New York City. “He said he’d always been in the phone book – spelled ‘Kwine.’” But Dan never had the opportunity. “We had our first sold-out show in New York in 2004, I think it was at the Roseland Ballroom, and I was really looking forward to having him at the show. But he passed away right before we hit town.”

One of the tragic realities of Rob’s passing is that he never had an opportunity to collaborate with Dan in the studio. But Marc Ribot’s biting guitar on Oceans & Streams gives us a sense of what could have been: Oceans & Streams/The Black Keys with Marc Ribot

Robert Quine on video… Nasty guitar solo from a night with Lou Reed, 1983. Lou needs to work on that Clint Eastwood impersonation.