#and i would say the best thing to come out of the u.k. is prog rock but honestly italy did prog better

[calicojo]

the best thing to come out of america is jazz

[chuckprophet]

Warren zanes on The Rubinoos

Warrenzanes

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Aug 23, 2019

· 13 min read

Berkeley, California presents . . . .

The Rubinoos, bringing you their new recording . . .

fifty years in the making. . . From Home

In a just universe you would give this bio your full and sustained attention. And in a just universe the story contained herein would be adapted and produced as a PBS American Mastersprogram (four-parts, ideally). Why? Because this bio has in it the story of The Rubinoos, a tale that has all the peaks and valleys of Shakespeare’s best. It’s the story of America’s favorite band (if only America had paid better attention). But it’s not a just universe, and this is not a story that comes to us froma just universe. It couldn’t. There’s no good music in a just universe. They don’t need the good music there. We need it here. That’s why we have the Rubinoos. Music for an unjust universe.

The occasion for this bio is a new album. A remarkablenewRubinoos album. I’m not being paid enough to lie about that (sorry, Yep Roc). I believe From Homeis an event, ifyou know enough to be ready for it. So, before turning to the specifics of this new recording, some set-up is required. Meaning, I want you to know enough to know to be ready for it. But, first, can we linger for a moment on this number? The Rubinoos stayed together fifty years to bring you From Home. How long did your band stay together? I’m referring to your band that recently had a reunion show and told a local newspaper you’d been “six years in the trenches together.” You said,“We’ll always be brothers, like family.” We’ve all said stuff like that. But next to the Rubinoos, our bands met in the morning and broke up that afternoon.

This is something else. Fifty years of pop exploration, of four people singing and playing as one, fusing themselves together. 10,000 hours? In Rubinoos terms, that’s a mere beginning. The Rubinoos adventure began in 1970, at a Berkeley, California middle school. Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, gave the order to spray tear gas into a crowd of radicals on the UC Berkeley campus. The prevailing winds, blowing in from the Pacific, carried the tear gas onto the playground of that middle school. The future Rubinoos breathed it in. In that moment, they became a part of the fabric of American history. Or something like that.

And then, over fifty years, things including the following took place, listed here in no particular order. The Rubinoos:

1) Appeared on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand

2) Did 56 dates opening for Elvis Costello during the Armed Forcestour (playing encores at 55 of those shows — they were still “figuring it out” during the first show).

3) Appeared multiple times in Tiger Beat.

4) Were at one point produced by Todd Rundgren.

5) Had to sue Avril Lavigne for lifting their song “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” eventually settling out of court.

6) Acted as Jonathan Richman’s backing band, The Modern Lovers, on classics including “The New Teller” and “Government Center.”

7) Completed more than 15 tours of Spain . . . since 2000.

8) Had a top fifty hit in the U.S. covering “I Think We’re Alone Now,” originally by Tommy James and the Shondells.

9) Had a hit in the U.K. with “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.”

10) Recorded the theme for “The Revenge of the Nerds” and lived through the experience, their dignity intact . . . for the most part.

11) Have a band member who made demos for Holland-Dozier-Holland and another who wrote for Modern English.

12) Recorded their second record at The Who’s Rampart Studios, finding themselves frustrated that a singer down the hall was wasting studio time beating up the vocal line, “Whooooo are you? Hoo hoo, hoo hoo,” causing one Rubinoo to say, “When are these old fucks gonna be done so we can record?”

13) Were opening for Jefferson Starship and covering the Archies “Sugar, Sugar” when they were booed off the stage at Winterland (yes, this is on the things-that-went-right list)

14) Responded favorably to Chuck Prophet (the Alan Lomax of San Francisco pop?) when he suggested in 2018 that they record a new album.

14) Actually continued to enjoy one another’s company through five decades.

15) Recorded a live album or two in Japan.

16) I could go on, but I think you get my point.

You can’t get all that done in six years. Obviously. But what made The Rubinoos stay together? What allows that to happen? How does one great band manage to remain in working order when most great bands burst into flames? The answer to the question, I believe, is in the history part of it.

So, again, Ronald Reagan’s tear gas. The stuff came onto the middle school playground. And though one can’t be conclusive about direct effects, after that Tommy Dunbar and Jon Rubin both started having trouble in math class. Frustrated, their teacher would send them into the hallway, an ineffective form of punishment if the idea is to improve a student’s math skills. But it was a good move on the teacher’s part if the real consideration was Bay Area rock and roll. Tommy had been asking people to join groups since he was seven. He was that kid. In the school hallway a bond formed between the two mathematical exiles. And soon enough, Tommy popped the question. They were thirteen, and it was 1970. The Rubinoos came into being. Or something like that.

Tommy’s brother, Robbie, enters the story as soon as it starts. Robbie was in the band Earth Quake (originally Purple Earth Quake). To Tommy and Jon, Robbie was a symbol of possibility. Through his example the younger men could believe that, yes, bands can form, flourish, make records. In fact, with Robbie as a model, Tommy and Jon came to believe that if you form a band, that band should and willdo all of those things. When they eventually landed on American Bandstand, the feeling was less one of pinch me!than it was, “Yes, it makes sense that we’re here.” Raised in left-leaning Berkeley, tear gas in their eyes, this almost casual relationship with commercial glory can be partiallt explained by the fact that American Bandstandand Tiger Beatdidn’t register as heroic activity with the Berkley locals. The Rubinoos enjoyed what came their way, but it wasn’t going to attract the Troyskyite girls back home. But Robbie, that elder brother, did more.

In an act that may have seemed insignificant, Robbie Dunbar gave his younger sibling Tommy the Cruisin’collection. Cruisin’would haunt cut-out bins across the nation for years to come. It was classic rock and roll, year-by-year on nine albums, 1955–1963, with dee jay’s air checks, patter, and vintage ads spliced in. On the 1955 Cruisin’ album you could hear the Penguins “Earth Angel,” The Moonglows “Sincerely,” The Platters “Only You.” Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley were in there, as was Ray Charles. Good stuff. An education. Tommy and Jon spent hours and days pretending to be dee jays, singing along year-by-year. It became an obsession. They thought people harmonized because . . . that’s just what people do. Doo wop shaped their world view. Inadvertently, they found their way to the same kind of experiences that gave both The Beatles and The Beach Boys musical foundations in group vocals. When drummer Donno Spindt joined the band, he brought with him an opera-singing mother who helped the boys find the full natural resources in their lungs and throats. From the start, The Rubinoos had a gift for welcoming teachers, in any form.

This is not to suggest that doo wop and early rock and roll were exclusive interests. They were musical omnivores. They ate everything on their plate and picked things off their neighbor’s. It didn’t matter if it was the DeFranco Family or Hendrix, Toots and the Maytals or the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa or Iggy Pop. They didn’t differentiate, didn’t establish hierarchies of value. They just wanted more. Early on, they felt they were kind of a Prog Rock thing. But also an oldies band. Huh? It was as if they were cloaked in some kind of productive innocence, an openness to the world of music that in the end would give the band the widest possible pasture in which to run naked, musically speaking. It’s a quality they share with a few legendary outfits, including, in different ways, NRBQ, The Band, The Lovin’ Spoonful. But where NRBQ, for instance, would drift between the silly and the serious, The Rubinoos wouldn’t sleep with a song they couldn’t respect in the morning. They loved novelty records like “Purple People Eater” because they were funny, but The Rubinoos ultimately stayed with that same song because they saw it as . . . art! They were incapable of irony.

As Tommy explains, when they started covering the DeFranco’s “Heartbeat is a Lovebeat” they laughed until they found themselves forgetting to laugh, taken away by an honest admiration for the song’s internal order and beauty. Once they gotinside a song, they couldn’t put themselves above it. They maintained their wonder. Similarly, when they first started playing rock and roll classics from the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, they thought playing the simple rock and roll would be, well, a simplematter. Not so. As Tommy describes, they found it was very difficult to make those songs sound as good as the original recordings. With Cruisin’as their first dunking in the holy waters, the experience of actually playing the songs from Cruisin’gave them their second. They were converted, young missionaries. Put another way, they quit school in ninth grade but were immediately enrolled a school of their own founding. And they always left the door open for visiting faculty, whether Donno’s mother, Robbie, and the others who would come to the door, something to offer.

Earth Quake would soon be a part of the scene forming around local label Berserkley Records. And the Rubinoos would follow. But The Rubinoos, by the time they signed with Berserkley, were in the kind of shape The Beatles were in when they arrived in George Martin’s world: fully fucking formed. A listen to their 1977 debut is all you need to know to grasp this for yourself. The teachings were all in there. If the timeline locates that first album in the punk era, the almost obsessive precision and craft the debut displays puts it somewhere else. Not everyone knew where. They still don’t. New York Rockertook a shot at it, describing it thus: “The best pop album of the decade.”

That first decade of The Rubinoos was crowned two years later with the release of a second masterwork, Back to the Drawing Board. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” was the single and got a lot of airplay in the U.K. and elsewhere. The track’s co-writer, James Gangwer, had first approached Tommy asking if the young guitar player could tackle the “I Love Lucy” theme song on guitar. Tommy could. As Jon elaborates, it was James Gangwer who advanced The Rubinoos’s R&B and Soul education. The Elvis Costello tour came that same year, and Jon remembers watching Elvis Costello and the Attractions every night, studying them, moved by their power, looking for the lesson. There was a purity in that decade of teachers and students spilling into one another. But how could it last?

When Berserkley Records turned from a label into something much more like a management company for Greg Kihn, The Rubinoos continued to study, not always liking the subject matter. The lessons in that era would be less joyful, often relating to the sad cruelties of business than to music. With occasional respite, the band entered a long period of false starts and fodder for broken hearts. Meaning, they hit some of the stuff that makes bands break up. Yet they didn’t. Yes, they took on different shapes, witnessed some comings and goings of band members. But The Rubinoos didn’t die. There was concern in the Bay Area when Tommy got a driver’s license. “Have you heard? Tommy’s getting his license.” A kind of hush was heard. All over the world.

All of this is to say: there’s another list. And on it are the plot twists that chipped away at the inner workings of the band, including the following:

1) An extended residency in Lake Tahoe, The Rubinoos suddenly a lounge act playing for tourists. And it’s hard to back out of those kind of places without turning to see where you’re going.

2) Rumblings within the band, tremors of dissatisfaction that brought The Rubinoos as close to a break-up as they would come.

3) Bassist Al Chan’s departure, despite his natural fit as a Rubinoo. The worst part? He became an accountant.

4) Donno’s departure. Taking with him a piece of the band’s soul.

5) A move to Los Angeles, a city arguably different from Berkeley.

6) A deal with Warner Bros. and a producer by the name of Todd Rundgren, who at that time thought too little about the act he was producing.

7) Recorded vocals stacked in ways they never needed to be, bringing Jon and Tommy to a place many worlds from doo wop.

8) A Rubinoos quickly dropped by Warner Bros.

9) Less glorious work, including sessions with Kim Fowley on sessions for drag queens.

10) Jobs in wedding bands.

11) A bitter relationship with Beserkley Records that held up publishing and record royalties.

The producer of From Home, Chuck Prophet, was around fourteen years old when he fell for The Rubinoos. They were hissymbol of possibility, his Earth Quake. It took forty years of training for him to be ready to produce The Rubinoos. Over that time, he thought a lot about the band. I had Chuck Prophet on the phone, and he said, “You know Joseph Campbell’s idea of the ‘hero’s journey’? That’s a good frame of reference for understanding The Rubinoos.”

Chuck went on to suggest that the band’s arc echoes the hero’s journey as Campbell has defined it. I was compelled by what Chuck was getting at. After all, in those “missing years,” what really happened to The Rubinoos? If they didn’t break up entirely, what was happening? Chuck believes that Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero narrative as a cross-cultural phenomena — The Odyssey,Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Star Wars — could be mapped onto The Rubinoos career. They didn’t break up, Chuck suggested, they went into what Campbell thought of as the unknown, the special world, where various trials and temptations and losses and hallucinatory wanderings lead to a heightened stage of consciousness. How interesting, I thought. It gave a framework for the less glorious twists and turns that led from the first records to the present, where they returned, more essentially and profoundly themselves. As I listened, I believed Chuck had something. “What does the band think of this theory?” I asked. Chuck paused. “They think it’s total bullshit,” he said.

As I already knew, The Rubinoos have, for a long time, taken an unconventional view of the markers of success, the American Bandstandstuff. They’re from Berkeley, after all. They didn’t see themselves as lost for forty years. They were touring Japan and Spain, showing up to the gig to find there was always an audience waiting. They loved singing together, were always making music. As Jon Rubin said by phone, “How lucky are we that we are still getting to play together? I enjoy the rehearsals as much as the shows.” Joseph Campbell might have felt a twinge of disappointment in hearing this. No suffering? No magical gift to illuminate the darkness mid-journey? No Yoda or Frodo? Depends who you ask, the interpreters or the participants.

From Homeopens with “Do You Remember?”, which feels a celebration of the return home from the other world, from the wilderness. “I want to tell you a story!” That shouted declaration opens the song, and then takes us through scenes from that first decade of Rubinoo life, when the boys were “singing acapella and getting it all wrong.” It recalls “DiFranco Family B-sides and the one by the Troggs.” For the lover of real group singing and smart pop songwriting, which is the stuff in which The Rubinoos partake, these are heroes returned to us. No, they were never lost to themselves. But I do believe they were lost to us. Our fault, not theirs.

But they’re back. From Homebreathes in the energy and recalls the crackle of the first two records, but with a difference. The Rubinoos have returned . . . slightly wizened? The second cut, “January,” is like a summer song that’s lived through a few break ups and seasons of worry, the harmonies as gorgeous as ever. Yet it’s not that The Rubinoos got serious and no longer live at the old address. They’re not indulging in melancholy or pondering mortality while strumming twelve-string guitars. That’s not the story. Listen to “Honey from the Honeycombs,” a beautiful musical lift that serves as a tribute to a legendary female drummer, Honey Lantree of British group The Honeycombs. Honey’s dead now, but the song resurrects her. For three minutes, it seems she could never age, and the young Rubinoos return with her, staring at their Honeycombs album covers, looking at that drummer, with her beehive hairdo behind the drum kit.

I’m not going to go song-by-song. You have to. But I’ll tell you a few of my very favorites. “Phaedra.” The mythological and art historical references somehow put this song out of time entirely. It’s perfect pop. “How Fast.” A car song that my kids understood immediately. They knew the hook line almost before they heard the song. “How fast does thing go?” A timeless sentiment from the backseat, for boys or men. “Masochist Davey.” “He’s only happy when you make him cry.” C’mon. More likely it’s divorce this time, not just a high school break-up, but The Rubinoos are still the best band to tell that sad bastard’s story. This band has given us a record as good as anything they’ve done. And they’ve showed us great since they were kids. Fifty years of showing up. Four voices falling together as one. It’s as beautiful as this music thing is going to get.

No one gives pop music credit for aging well. But they’re not thinking about greatpop. The Rubinoos prove that angle wrong. The good shit grows deeper. And the good bands, the ones that make it home? The same thing happens to them. Deeper. Not more somber, not more serious, not broken, not less alive. Deeper. I’m inclined to go with New York Rocker on this one: “The best pop album of the decade.” You choose the decade.