Thursday, June 14, 2018

“Mondo Deco” — A Panel on THE QUICK at Beyond Baroque

Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar magazine was one of the best literary magazines published in the 1970s, although categorizing it as a “literary” magazine minimizes its cultural contribution. Cooper wanted poetry to be read with the same pleasure and admiration as the best of pop music, but he also wanted poets to listen to pop music with the same level of appreciation that they had for Frank O’Hara. Little Caesar did not keep its affections for pop music in its back pages. A full frontal shot of Iggy Pop stands out as one of its issues’ classic covers.

Tonight, at Beyond Baroque, there will be a panel discussion devoted to The Quick, one of the bands that Dennis Cooper incisively championed. The Quick only performed for about three years in the mid-1970s, and they seem to have had the bad luck of emerging just before the lassitude of the post-1960s cultural success of pop music collided with the Punk movement. If any account of an artistic period almost always oversimplifies things (and the statement I just made is a prime example), then it is the inexplicable failure of gifted artists to attain proportionate recognition that provokes reassessments of those accounts. While tonight’s panel, which features the main songwriter for The Quick, Steve Hufsteter, along with Lisa Fancher, the founder of Frontier Records, will no doubt talk about the inability of the band to break through the stultified filters of the music industry at that time, I would hope that the conversation would devote itself to a mood of celebration.

The Quick’s first and only album, Mondo Deco, was far from a commercial success, but it was not forgotten by its devoted listeners. It is finally being re-released over 40 years after its first appearance, in a version that includes a second album’s worth of additional songs that were subsequently recorded before the band broke up. I hope the success of the panel tonight, which has added a 10 p.m. follow-up to its sold-out 8 p.m. presentation, helps spread the word about some of the music that fascinated the youthful insurgency of poetry in Los Angeles in the 1970s.

I wish I could attend this event, but I am teaching English 474/574 in the first summer session at CSULB, and it meets in the evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

For further background information:

http://www.laweekly.com/music/best-of-la-music-rock-and-metal-bands-venues-a-video-and-a-record-store-9555978

http://www.laweekly.com/music/power-pop-icons-the-quick-finally-find-heaven-after-decades-in-rock-and-roll-purgatory-9565219

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSo98Iyxh94