From the Mouths of Babes: Gene Loves Jezebel

The Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard. Home of rock & roll legends, renamed the Riot House from the fabled days of Led Zeppelin leading their magus-metal children through nights of Crowley-inspired debauchery. Many an infamous deed transpired behind the doors of that oh-so-bland-looking building, many a myth was built, many a TV flung from the balcony (or so the legend reads). 
 

How appropriate that I’m going to meet Gene Loves Jezebel here. It’s part of the strange order of things that the two leaders of the Jezebels, Mike and Jay Aston, could possibly awaken in a room where Jimmy Page might have drawn pentagrams on the forehead of his groupie love. Or so we would like to imagine it, and imagination seems to be a crucial element in the Jezebels’ presentation.

The night before at the Palace I’d seen the Astons go through the kind of flamboyant stageplay that was at its prime in the flower-power ‘60s – lots of silk, velvet, satin, scarves flung and flowers tossed to the audience, plenty of heavy-lidded glances and pucker-lip pouts, with Michael assuming your basic Ninja pose while brother Jay squawked in a high-pitched, nasal Celtic wail, “Magic!” We would have cried, if we hadn’t seen these routines a zillion times before. 

But the Astons’ saving grace, and the Jezebels’ redeeming factor, was a sense of friendly camaraderie, a feeling that all the preening and primping was only so much rock & roll goofiness, a joke rather than an ego-centered commitment. Silly, but fun. And the music, with its driving, soaring melodies, creating moods both euphoric and slightly melancholy, served the identical twin voices of the Astons well. And, oh yes, the little girls got real excited by this stuff, which seemed to be all about glamour and fun and communication and fantasy, as these two teen gods acted like total fops and got away with murder. 

Jay and Michael Aston have something more than the voices for the music they’re doing – they’ve got the lips. Fans are not really that finicky, and if you’ve got some of the standard equipment, the fame game is not that hard to play. The Astons have got lots of hair to fuss with, to twist and turn around with their fingers, a definite prerequisite for any decent rock god in these days of cliched revivalism. But more important are those lips – they’ve already caused the groupie patrol to put out the radar. The Aston mouth belongs in the Rock & Roll Physiognomy Hall of Fame, right next to M. Jagger’s pendulant pucker and Steven Aerosmith Tyler’s full-lipped puss-face. Yeah, the fame of Gene Loves Jezebel is sealed with a kiss. 

These are the It Boys of the moment, the gods of the month for all those teen dreams just starting to come out of the Dark Ages of Goth-rock. The Jezebels are offering color! glamour! (“We like everything from Edie to Dorian Gray!” They tell me with perfect seriousness.) Never mind that the costuming, your basic pseudo-Renaissance rock gypsy, is the kind of drag that Brian Jones and Nico were sporting at the Monterrey Pop Festival in the ‘60s; these kids are not historians, and nobody’s consulting the history books. 

I can’t help but smile at the irony, though, when the Astons tell me they were reticent about playing outdoor festivals (their recent appearance at the LA street scene was their first), because they “didn’t want to associate with the whole ‘60s connotation.” 

The Astons have progressed from their beginnings in Wales as two people who only wanted to “make great records” to being a pop band on the verge of international fame. Their journey has been a series of coincidental but inevitable events, starting with a tour the band never planned. Though somewhat known in cult circles in England after releasing a few promising records on the Beggars Banquet label, the Jezebels weren’t prepared for their first look at the U. S. of A. 

“We were supposed to do this tour of Italy,” Michael recalls, “but the promoters called it off after some problems with the Italian Communist Party. So we decided to go to America. We had the typical arrogant British attitude about America. We had no idea. Suddenly, two years ago, we find ourselves traveling across the wilderness, going through whole states just to arrive at a really small venue full of people who didn’t have a clue as to who we were or why we were there. We thought, “My God, this doesn’t make sense!” But we were received well, and as a result we decided to tour more. It was strange, but it had this sense of adventure, this sense of doing something you really shouldn’t be doing.” 

“People in New York told us that by the time we go to the Midwest we wouldn’t be able to walk the streets, because people would try to burn our hair,” adds Jay. “But it wasn’t like that at all. We’re more threatened with violence in England that we’ve ever been here. People in cowboy hats were coming up to shake our hands. Because, essentially, we are a rock band. And we do it quite well.” 

These boys are full of themselves, and why not? Their timing is impeccable. They represent the new breed of postpunk crossover. They play for the new group of glammy babies, the serious Simple Minds and U2 fans, and the dressier aberrations from punkdom. 

“We’ve even been written up in heavy metal magazines,” exclaims Michael. “The metal crowd is going through a Sex Pistols type of situation where they’re embracing these types of bands that traditionally they’re not supposed to embrace. 

“We can see you’ve got a wide spectrum of music in front of you in this country,” notes Michael, “and that there are fairly few British rock bands here. That’s why we’ve been compared to things like U2. But our sound and approach to music is completely different. A lot of bands like U2, or even Springsteen, are into this kind of chest beating. They appeal to the lowest emotions in people. I think we appeal to higher emotions,” Aston states. Can he be serious, I wonder? 

Actually, if Michael Aston’s participation at the recent New Music Seminar in New York was any indication, those higher levels are making him a bit giddy. As the panel was making serious statements about the struggle of musicians and how they had to hold on to shitty day jobs until they made it, Aston interjected something about how people must give up their day jobs and how all they need is to be vibrant, spirited people. He also deflected a few of panel member Jello Biafra’s comments, about how musicians should address social concerns, in a less than penetrating manner, leading many people to think that this Jezebel was an airhead. 

Michael defends himself: “I was really shocked at how unwilling people were to quarrel on that panel. With the exception of Biafra, I found it really frustrating. I don’t think there is any struggle for a musician, especially in comparison to anybody else’s struggle. The frustration of unemployment is far greater than that of a band that has to wait half an hour for room service. 

“Of course I remember the frustration that these people were talking about,” he continues. “We were on the dole for years. Most of our family is still on the dole. And the thing with the dole is that it gets worse and worse and you don’t realize it at first. You think you have time on your hands, then you realize you don’t have money for clothes, you have no money to go out with, you can’t plan anything, there really is no future. So I can hardly get worked up over the so-called struggle of a musician. Sure, there are frustrations there, but those are things you aspire to. You don’t have to do it. It’s not like some cross to bear. It’s your choice.” 

Have the Astons chosen to buy into the same old pop game? Are they going to become just another cog in the corporate wheel of the record industry? They don’t seem to think so. 

“I think the pop scene could use more of what we do,” claims Michael, “not that we’re used by them. Because our band is so close, and we’ve always been in control of what we do, we’re conscious that we’re not a strutting, macho band. And we’re conscious that our lyrics don’t contain the crummy, more pathetic male ideas.” 

What are those lyrics about? It’s a bit hard to tell with the earlier, surrealistic song like “Cow” (which is about icon worship), but the new songs seem to be basically retakes on the same old love themes. However, there was a time when some people assumed that the Jezebels were part of the contingent of musty gloom-thrillers once known as “positive punks.” It’s a comparison that raises their hackles more than the U2 or Simple Minds connection. 

“We were enraged when they first compared us to positive punks,” Michael declares. “Listen to our records: There are no crosses or graveyards, no references to Arabia. We just put that comparison down to lazy journalism. We could never get into this self-selling attitude that positive punk bands like the Cult have. We find that very ugly.” 

The Astons then go on to claim they’re not going to wind up like the survivors from the first generation of English punk bands. One might think they would be fans, for instance, of Siouxsie and the Banshees (especially since they share the same American label). Far from it.

Michael: “It’s surprising that bands like the Banshees and the Damned are still around. They seem to have picked up all the elitism that the bands they replaced had. I could never bear Siouxsie’s vocals; she was always a non-singer to me. I saw her once, and I didn’t like her attitude. I found it very alien.” 

Jay elaborates: “We found it dark, insular, non-communicative. And we think music is about expression. That’s what we are about – communicating and not making people feel small. Making them feel big.”

Okay, big boys, now that you’ve been to LA a couple of times, what are your particular takes on the scene here, especially since you were definitely the toast of the underground during your stay? Jay thinks the LA kids at clubs like the Scream “have a slightly more glamorous street thing. There’s also more of a violent edge.” 

“In London and Holland, things have settled down,” notes Michael. “The only thing that seems to have changed is the color of the clothes – everybody is moving away from all that black.” 

Michael and Jay disagree about the violent natures of Angeleno teens. What concerns Jay most is the amount of drug use: “LA’s always a little scary, more than any other place. There are so many young kids – 16, 17 – on drugs,” notices Jay, though he is also quick to point out that there’s a rampant heroin problem in England. “It’s so sad to see someone with all that energy, all that youth, and they’re just washed out. I hope people can look at us and see that all we take is fresh air.” (Hey, maybe I’m right about their being airheads after all.) 

“If I went into a dressing room and saw some kid shooting up, I’d freak out,” claims Michael. “I know people are influenced by their friends, but I think heroin is the stupidest, dumbest way to go about doing things. With other drugs you might get something out of them, but really, they’re not that good! Cocaine? It’s boring. I think if they made it legal no one would bother with it. It seems to me that drugs are big in LA because the kids have a lot of money and nothing to do.” 

The talk continues amiable chitchat about hobbies. Michael Aston likes to read Anais Nin and Hermann Hesse, and has dabbled a tad in Crowley-like occultism, but it’s no big deal. Hmmm, old Aleister and magick – I seem to recall that Jimmy Page had a thing for the guy . . . which brings me back to my original Led/Jezebel comparison. I tell the brothers about it and they laugh. They didn’t even know they were in the Riot House. 

“I can’t understand why groups used to behave like that,” Michael muses. “But then, if I had to tour for 10 months in America, I might wind up throwing a TV set out the window, too!” 

 

 

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