Originally issued in 1981,
The Other Side of Town is terminal L.A. hipster
Chuck E. Weiss' debut album on the Select imprint. He's claimed on at least a couple of occasions in print that it was a demo and issued without his permission. OK.
Weiss' biography reads a little like Neal Cassady's, whose fictional incarnation was the hero of
Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
Weiss, who hails from Denver, was the son of parents who owned a record store. He was originally a drummer who played with
Lightnin' Hopkins and gigged with
Muddy Waters,
Willie Dixon,
Howlin' Wolf, and
Roger Miller, to mention a few. He has been immortalized in song by his old running mates
Tom Waits and
Rickie Lee Jones -- right, that
Chuck E. -- and had characters loosely based on him show up in
Sam Shepard's plays; what these three all have in common with
Weiss is that they all lived in the Tropicana Motor Hotel in Los Angeles at the same time. While the rest have all gone on to various forms of legend,
Weiss is still hanging out in Los Angeles, talking to anyone who will listen about the old days and banging about on countertops in coffee shops and the like. He's a rascal and proud of it, and he's recorded three more albums between 1999 and 2007. There isn't anything particularly special about
The Other Side of Town other than the fact that it goes back to an earlier time in much the same way
the Red Devils and
the Blasters did with the blues and rockabilly. Some guy named
Mac Rebennack (aka
Dr. John) plays piano like a firehouse burning down, and
Jones in her beat angel voice sings a duet on the track "Sidekick."
Larry Taylor plays bass,
Alvin "Shine" Robinson wails a pretty mean guitar, and Freddie Stahle plays drums --
Weiss sings and plays percussion. It sounds like a demo, but it's full of great wit, charm, and an utter carelessness that makes it feel dangerous in a time when music is anything but. It is reminiscent of old rock & roll, blues, and raggedy R&B because to
Weiss it's not remotely revival music. He's actually playing that stuff because that's who he is -- he was a relic even then.
A mere 25 minutes in length, these aren't so much songs as musical vignettes, all of them streetwise, hip, and uncompromising in their guttersnipe intensity. If
Weiss had recorded these tunes with a lesser group of musicians, they'd come out around the same -- perhaps more dangerous because then the listener would realize he wasn't trying for a record deal, but to be heard, to speak, to get it out there in the open. Yeah, that is a good thing. It may seem quaint to those kids getting their kicks on piercings, tribal tattoos, and personal scarification in order to showcase their individuality; it may seem distasteful to those from an earlier generation who'd like to forget they once lived precariously through the lenses of
Kerouac, the younger
Tom Waits,
William S. Burroughs, and
Iceberg Slim as they dig into their latest bland "sophisticated pop." To those who come from privilege and spend their time listening to generic-sounding bluesmen from Chicago who play 20-minute guitar solos and wear big ugly hats, loud designer Hawaiian shorts, and smoke expensive cigars while trying to "get down," this raucous swill will sound like noise. It is noise, thank God. Whether it's "Saturday Night Fish Fry," the title track, the brief rambling spoken word story set to music that is called "Luigi's Starlite Lounge," or the cranky wildman barely keeping his lines inside the verses of the bonus cut "Down the Road a Piece" (it could have been a lower-rent outtake from
Waits'
Heartattack and Vine), it's all racket and impolite and a downright nasty doesn't-give-a-rat's-ass-what-you-think kind of rock & roll; it doesn't fit now and never did, and if you heard people playing it from some garage on your street you'd call the cops. Select claims that
Weiss persuaded them to re-release this, so apparently he's given it his blessing. Maybe he needed to hear it again, too. ~ Thom Jurek