I was going through some old writing and ran across this one. I always dug Concrete Blonde, so I figured I would dig this one up from the digital grave. Concrete Blonde is one of those bands that I feel gets left out of a lot of discussion, and I’m not exactly sure why.
The music industry is loaded with talented women. It always has been. Whether they’re behind the scenes, behind the stage, behind the pen, the motivation, or playing the instruments, they’re ubiquitous.
It’s safe to say that, in one way or another, women have been the driving force for much of… well, for much of music’s history.
It’s also safe to say that, taken as a whole, women have been marginalized and much-maligned… well, for much of music’s history.
We could easily argue that the patriarchal structure of the music business allows only one female Queen at a time, currently Taylor Swift, but that is not the argument here.
Similarly, we could argue about which era of music is the true “golden era” of music. I suspect it would create a rabble of noisy music fans. Ultimately, it’s safe to say that the definition of “golden era” would fall along generational lines.
That being said, the 80s and 90s were genuinely modern music’s heyday.
Concrete Blonde
Concrete Blonde was a three-piece LA-based band led by lead singer Johnette Napolitano. Despite having one of the best voices, male or female, in rock, the closest that she, or the band, could get to entering the court of rock deity was peering through the gate.
The first time I heard Concrete Blonde was also the first time I saw Concrete Blonde. I saw the video for “Still in Hollywood” on MTV, on whatever “alternative” midnight show was popular at the moment.
I was immediately smitten with the band. It wasn’t just because I found Johnette Napolitano attractive — it’s the dark hair folks… gets me every time. Sure, that was the initial attraction, I’ll cop to that, but that faded by the first chorus.
Christ knows Concrete Blonde, led by lead singer Johnette Napolitano, didn’t fit in with Madonna and whatever other pop pablum that MTV was pumping and dumping on society in the mid to late 80s.
Now my knowledge of female singers at the time was limited to the big names — Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, Heart, Aretha Franklin, Chrissy Hynde, Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Starship, et al.), and there are loads I am forgetting. So my apologies in advance, but I don’t have the bandwidth to troll the deep recesses of my mind trying to recall them.
And female pop singers were primarily ingenues until Madonna started futzing with that paradigm. Of course, there were others before Madonna, but let’s be honest, Madonna achieved what many other women couldn’t. I think it’s worth noting that it’s not that previous artists wouldn’t, but they literally couldn’t (see the last comment about patriarchy). Love her or hate her, what Madonna did was say: “Fuck. That.” and she did it.
As I watched Concrete Blonde and Johnette Napolitano bang out “Still in Hollywood,” it was Napolitano’s voice. That voice! I hadn’t heard anything that grabbed me by the balls like that since I first heard Janis Joplin. But Joplin wasn’t of my generation.
And then Chrissy Hynde, well, she didn’t grab me in the same way — her grab was paired with a more seductive purr (and leather pants).
Napolitano’s energy in “Still in Hollywood” was relentless… and she was playing bass! She had done to me what both Joplin and Hynde did, but it was different. She sounded like Janis Joplin and Chrissie Hynde had a child. I was no longer smitten; by the end of “Still in Hollywood,” I had fallen in love.
[Fun fact: Concrete Blonde covered Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” on 1996’s Recollection: The Best of Concrete Blonde.]
While I knew enough to recognize the song as “punk-ish,” Concrete Blonde had something I had never heard in the punk I had been exposed to — melody, structure, and proper tuning. Aside from The Clash, my feelings about punk were, and remain, that it’s primarily fueled by energy and anger. Punk doesn’t always focus on melody and structure.
Which is fine for some people, and as time has gone by, I’ve come to appreciate punk, but I love me some good melody.
If I wanted someone to yell at me recreationally, I’d call an ex-girlfriend.
In addition to “Still in Hollywood” sounding, well, just different, the video itself was also different. The video had a punk DIY vibe.
My visual sensibility and understanding were beginning to percolate, so the black-and-white, grainy video with a jerky camera, quick cuts of the band playing live, interspersed with all kinds of Hollywood landmarks, spoke to me. It had a real Jim Jarmusch feel to it.
From my Midwestern sofa, the video seemed arty — at least the kind of arty that resonated with me — accessible instead of weird and alienating.
“Still in Hollywood” was on Concrete Blonde’s self-titled debut, released in 1986. The band was Johnette Napolitano on bass and vocals, James Mankey on guitars, and drummer Harry Rushakoff.
The song begins as if we’re listening to the band rehearse. The chatter and then the instrument plug-in flowing right into the song is an effect rarely used and even more rarely successful.
Concrete Blonde was produced by Earle Mankey, a member of the seminal band Sparks, brother of Concrete Blonde guitarist James, and producer of a slew of LA-based bands — including The Runaways. It’s his production on this record that would help shape the band's sound.
His production gave the record a “big” sound, almost like it was recorded in a high school gymnasium. This sound works to the band’s advantage, in particular on songs like “Still in Hollywood,” “Dance Along the Edge,” and “Your Haunted Head.”
The rest of the album highlights the band's lyrical and sonic diversity. It includes a ballad — in as much as one can be called that — “Song for Kim (She Said),” an instrumental “True II” (which is just the song “True” without vocals, but still effective), and even a faithful cover of George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness.”
By and large, this debut album has Concrete Blonde staying in its lane of rock, garage, and a dash of punk… they’re just doing it better than some of their contemporaries, who were primarily men.
With 11 songs, Concrete Blonde clocks in at about 38:00 minutes, and in the era of cassette tapes, that was the sweet spot. A remastered version from 2004 includes a 12th song, bringing the total runtime to about 43:00.
And as if having a great voice and playing a mean bass wasn’t enough, she was also the primary songwriter. Today, we may read that and shrug; however, I assure you that women band leaders like that in the 80s, signed to a major label (okay, mini-major label) was rare… not unicorn rare, but rare.
Concrete Blonde garnered some worthy buzz at the time. Not just because they had a great sound, great songs, great energy, and seemingly a shit ton of attitude, OR that they were led by a female bass-playing lead singer and songwriter — those were many of the reasons they got noticed.
But what gave them the ultimate seal of approval while still keeping their street cred was being signed to I.R.S. Records.
[Fun fact: It would be label mate Michael Stipe of R.E.M. who suggested the name Concrete Blonde because of the contrast between their hard rock music and introspective lyrics — a tip of the hat to you, Mr. Stipe.]
Despite the label’s influence, the I.R.S. catalog and panache, it was limited to only a few gold and platinum records — The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat and Vacation, The Raw & the Cooked by Fine Young Cannibals, and every album of original music released by R.E.M. on the label:
Murmur
Reckoning
Fables of the Reconstruction
Life’s Rich Pageant
Document
Including gold certification for Concrete Blonde’s third album, 1990’s Bloodletting.
The slog for Concrete Blonde to get to that 1990 gold album wasn’t an easy one… but it was a famous Australian band who astutely noted that it was “a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll.”
In 1988, the band released Free, a solid successor to their first record. The album leads off with the explosive “God is a Bullet.” As a band from Los Angeles, the song ostensibly addresses the escalating gang violence, which was approaching its apogee at that point.
Through a modern lens, though, it’s almost too prescient:
They’re gonna call me sir they’ll all stop picking on me
Well I’m a high school grad I’m over 5 foot 3
I’ll get a badge and a gun and I’ll join the P.D.
They’ll see
Then, in 1990, came Bloodletting. This would garner the band’s only Top 20 hit in the United States, “Joey” (peaking at #1 on the Modern Rock Charts).
In her book Rough Mix, Johnette Napolitano mentioned that “Joey” was written about her relationship with Marc Moreland. The song serves as a nice bookend to “(You’re the Only One) Can Make Me Cry” off their debut.
The two songs serve as a seven-minute run-through of a relationship. “(You’re the Only One) Who Can Make Me Cry” marks the beginning of a relationship, and “Joey” is the song in which she turns her back and walks away from it. Not because she wants to, but because she has to. Sometimes, the last thing you want to do is walk away, and yet, the only thing you can do:
Thematically, the idea of having to turn your back on someone you love resonates universally, and it is that universality that explains why the song was a hit and helped drive Bloodletting to be their best-selling album.
Right around the same time Concrete Blonde was getting some success with “Joey” and Bloodletting, Johnette Napolitano got a call to work with The Replacements for their final album All Shook Down… which was a Replacements album in name only (a story for another time).
Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg had written a song called “My Little Problem” and always intended it to be a duet with a woman. Wisely, Napolitano was his first choice, and, luckily, she was available and agreed.
“My Little Problem” remains one of All Shook Down’s highlights. However, the recording didn’t go so well. Folklore is such that the recording forced Napolitano to pull one of the most legendary Irish exits in rock.
After being cajoled to re-record her vocal part repeatedly, she left, saying she had to get cigarettes.
“It was done, but Paul wanted to do it again and again, and I ended up saying I’m going to get some cigarettes, and then I didn’t come back, famously I guess — sorry! But because it was done.” — Johnette Napolitano.
To paraphrase New Jersey's poet laureate: she “went out for a ride and she never went back.”
Concrete Blonde followed Bloodletting with Walking in London, but failed to replicate their commercial success. However, they did increase their fan base to include showrunner Shawn Ryan (The Shield), who would end up using the Walking in London song “…Long Time Ago” to play over the ending credits of The Shield’s series finale — a sweet pole position for a song, ask Journey or Badfinger.
Concrete Blonde would release two more albums — Mexican Moon in 1993 and Concrete Blonde y Los Illegals in 1997 — before hanging it up.
And in the tradition of every great rock and roll band, they reunited in the early aughts, releasing Group Therapy in 2002 and Mojave in 2004; however, the band has been silent since 2012 and, for all intents and purposes, is finished.
Of course, there have been live albums and greatest hits packages in between, but (at least to date), Concrete Blonde has released eight studio albums, which is a pretty good career in music by any measure. More impressive is the band's commitment to excellence and the fact that Johnette Napolitano kept her lyrics and voice consistently incisive.
Sure, once in a while, you’ll hear “Joey,” and it’ll take you back. But Concrete Blonde shouldn’t just be considered an oldies act. Just because “Joey” may now fall into the “classic rock” paradigm, it doesn’t mean it is. Give the song a good listen; it sounds just as fresh and relevant today. Then go back and listen to Concrete Blonde, and that too will sound just as good now as it did then.
If you’ve never heard Concrete Blonde or anything besides “Joey,” you should, but consider yourself warned.
It’s a shame that not only one of the greatest female voices in rock but one of the greatest voices in rock and roll as a whole is mainly remembered for one song, albeit a great song. But even worse, she and Concrete Blonde may be being overlooked.
Creating a body of work that transcends decades of shifting commercial tastes without losing any of its initial impact and power is no small task.
Concrete Blonde may never have chased the spotlight; they just kept telling their truth. The world catches up with the truth eventually.
I had been trying to think of whether I heard their cover of Everybody Knows in Pump up the Volume or Joey first, but then I listened to Still in Hollywood, and totally remembered that song once I heard it. I don’t remember anything off of Free, but I had Bloodletting on cassette. And a couple of years ago, I bought it on vinyl because right when I was looking to add more female artists into my small vinyl collection, I heard Tomorrow Wendy on the local alternative station (they play 90s during the lunch hour) and remembered how much I loved that song.
Love the song My Little Problem and totally love the story of her Irish goodbye!