A PILlar of My Youth

There is a grainy photo of some young post-punks squatting about in an alley somewhere and a heavy bass sound is flooding the room.  What is this tune?  It’s an out-take from the second Public Limited Image album.  I haven’t wilfully listened to PIL since I was a teen.   Trouble, from WFMU on “This Is The Modern World” has, as usual, reconnected me with a PILlar of my youth.  

At thirteen, I would needed to find all of the Public Image albums.  It was 1979 and I was the eighth-grade president.  I’d ran on a platform of music in the cafeteria.  I would bring a record player in and play tunes.  I don’t know that I had anything else to offer.  Perhaps I promised justice.  But music at lunch was part of my platform, I do recall.  And I also remember,  I won.  And I can forward to the frame to me in the cafeteria playing albums.  I remember people wanting to hear Led Zep, and me forcing them to hear the Pistols "EMI" or the Ramones "Commando."  Some may have regretted their votes. 

At thirteen I was one of a handful of people in Pleasantville, New York who was aware of the wondrous chasm they’d ripped open.  As I recall, my eighth English teacher Mr. Johnson was also hip.  He loved “Pretty Vacant” and repeated that line and laughed over and over.  It was the same time that the Pistols broke up, and it was a New York story, with Sid was arrested down in Chelsea, and Sid was interned out in Rikers Island and Sid OD after his release . . . and Johnny went off and founded PIL which was decidedly not Punk, nor anything else “the Pistols killed rock and roll” claimed our-man Lydon. 

I dutifully bought the first album and then the box set they delivered the second one in, I gave a miss, but I got the vinyl in he grey jacket.  The “Paris au Printemps" live album followed, and then, I think there may have been a fourth release before the threw in the towel.  The second album was one I lent to a guy I was in a band with at the time  I never got the album back, though I later heard he died, early in life.  Truly sorry to have heard that.  I presume his folks took my grey PIL album to the dump or in some other way disposed of it. 

                                                

Listening to this cut that Trouble has recovered for me, I would enjoy a chance to throw on my old vinyl, scratches and all. 

Monday, 10/22/18