Fri. Sept. 16

    In the 1980s, Boston rock fans knew Warren Zanes as the younger, guitar-playing brother of Dan Zanes, leader of the Del Fuegos. Warren was just 17 when he came down from Andover, NH to join the trio. His bandmates nicknamed him Ork Boy. This, Zanes, notes Zanes did not exactly help him with the ladies. That and the fact that he looked about 12.
    “I walked into the madness of band life and the haze of a fantasy of what it might be,” said Zanes, 46, looking back. “I came out of it off the rails and insane.”
    Big in Boston, the Fuegos had moderate national success. Warren lasted five years, and fought with his brother about not being allowed to contribute songs. (They’ve since made peace and played two Del Fuegos reunion concerts at the Paradise earlier this summer.)
     But it’s in his post-Fuegos life, where Zanes has blossomed.
     He wrote a bio of Dusty Springfield. Martin Scorsese asked him to interview George Martin, Eric Idle, Jeff Lynne and others for a documentary on George Harrison. (It airs in Oct. 5 and 6 on HBO.) Zanes is currently working on an authorized biography of his friend Tom Petty.
    His day job? Zanes is Executive Director of Steve Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, which is creating an on-line rock ‘n’ roll curriculum for middle and high school students.
     And he’s just released his third solo album, “I Want to Move Out In the Daylight.” It’s a brooding, emotionally charged album, with many catchy, mid-tempo rock songs. Zanes and his wife, Elinor Blake (also known as singer April March) have separated and are in the process of divorce.
    Breakup songs and albums are staples of rock ‘n’ roll.  “This just felt like I was chronicling a breakup without pointing fingers,” said Zanes, by phone from his Montclair, NJ home. “The word I would choose wouldn’t be ‘bitterness.’ I might say there’s more anger. You can see the way the sequence goes. It’s almost like those cycles of grief they talk about.”

Thurs Sept. 15 & Fri. Sept. 16 

     More than a few rock acts – The Who and David Bowie come to mind – have threatened final tours, only to re-launch again.
      There have been rumors that Widespread Panic, which kicks off its 25th anniversary fall tour at the Orpheum Thursday and Friday, Sept. 15 and 16, may be on its last run. The reality is that the sextet’s future is uncertain.
   “I’m calling it a sabbatical, sort of a research vacation,” said bassist Dave Schools, 46, from his home in Sonoma County, California. “We are gonna take a bit of a break. I’m freshly married. We have guys who have kids who are about to go to college, and no one wants to witness their kid growing up through Skype, though I guess it’s the modern way. People want to feel they’re not living a double life all the time. When you’ve been on the road for 25 years, you go, “Where am I?’”
     Schools reckoned the band has played over 2700 concerts. The chance that you’ll hear from Widespread Panic again after this tour? 
     “Greater than 50 percent,” Schools said. “You want the next time you get together to create some new music to be really fresh and not seem like something that’s expected of you. That’s not the most conducive way to create new music. Everyone can go off and spin around with their own ideas, and then a year or so later, show up with a bunch of great stuff.”

Thurs. Sept. 8

    Pick any tune on Two Door Cinema Club’s debut CD, “Tourist History,” and you’ll hear fizzy electro-pop that bubbles over with youthful enthusiasm.
   The three guys in the Northern Ireland-based band are just acting naturally.
   “I think it’s to do with the fact that we’re really good friends and we’ve known each other for years,” said guitarist Sam Halliday, on the phone from Glasgow, Scotland. “We’re all pretty upbeat people. Whenever we come together, it’s fun for us to do. Instead of some friends who play sport together, for us it’s been coming together with guitars and making music.”
   Two Door Cinema Club may be this year’s Phoenix - a new European band making infectious, bouncy synth-pop. (Two Door Cinema’s first US tour was as an opener for the French act.)
   A critic for Britain’s NME reviewed Two Door Cinema’s CD favorably and opined, “Don’t tell the emos, but it seems like being happy is the new being sad.”
   Halliday laughs at the comment. “When that emo scene happened,” he said, “we weren’t really so much into it. We’re kind of an alternative. Also, we love touring and having a good time on tour, so it would be strange to make depressing music. I don’t think it would work.”

Sept. 7  will mark the eighth anniversary of Warren Zevon’s death. To use the cliché, so close, so distant. I wrote something a few years back, and am revising it now to commerorate his life and death. It has nothing to do with going out to see anything. It’s just about someone I admired and respected very much ... We were friends and, yes, we had disagreements, one pretty bitter fight - not uncommon, as I learned later in his wife Crystal's bio, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." But fences were mended and I'm very glad they were.

No contemporary singer-songwriter wrote about death as much as Warren Zevon, from "I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead’’ to "Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead.’’ (There’s plenty more.) Those songs tended not to be morbid, really; they were more celebratory, as in "Live now, because death awaits you.’’ For years, the emblem he used – on back stage passes, album covers, etc. - was a grinning skull smoking a cigarette.

I once asked him about "Play It All Night Long,’’ a song about a dysfunctional, incestuous family that revels in playing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s "Sweet Home Alabama’’ – "Play that dead band’s song/Turn the speakers up full blast/Play it all night long.’’ It’s how the broken family copes with its horror. Was it funny?

ongoing 

    I remember the Ramones' Joey Ramone singing "I don't care about history/Cos that's not where I want to be" in "Rock 'n' Roll High School." And I thought then: So right! But history is where everything ends up, as much as you want to seize the moment you have now and hang onto it. And, of course, Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone are all dead now. ... And the punk rock of that era is something we now look back on, hopefully not through a misty nostalgic lens, but with a realization that this was an amazing, important, defining moment in music and pop culture

    The Harvard Film Archive kicked off a series Friday Sept. 2 called "American Punk,," although one of the opening films, "D.O.A.: A Right of Passage," is not about American punk. It's about the most infamous English punk band, the Sex Pistols, on their first, only and fatal American tour, starting in January 1978. I was there for the first concert, in Atlanta at the long-defunct Great Southeast Music Hall. Third row. I bought two tickets from a couple of English kids in line for $80. (The photo is from that show.) It was one of the most incendiary gigs of my life, full of piss and vinegar. "D.O.A." is Polish film-maker Lech Kowalski's take on that trek, with bits of English punk bands and a sort of narrative about a struggling dead-end kid in London.
 Here's my take on "D.O.A," which screens Friday at 9:15 ...
      "The children are the sufferers," says Mary Whitehouse, who was England's noted morality crusader back in the day, near the beginning of "D.O.A." The force of punk rock is shaking London as it hasn't been shaken in years. Whitehouse says she's shamed by punk. ("The children) should be full of life and adventure.")

Up to a point, she's right. Young people are the sufferers. That, however, is the point. And, frankly, early punk rock was full of life and adventure. Just not the kind of life and adventure Whitehouse imagined. When you stare the future in the face and see unemployment and boredom, you don't rejoice. You do, however, seize adventure in the angry, emotional release of punk rock. You reject a rock 'n' roll mainstream that's become staid; you reject a society that's already rejected you; you make your own fun.