Show Some Respect: Emil Amos (Om, Grails, Holy Sons) Talks Bread and the Genius of David Gates

One day in early 2000 I was working the front desk at a homeless shelter in Portland, Oregon, listening to early mixes of the first 'mid-fi' HolySons record. As a rolling bass line kicked in on one of the tracks, a sweaty speed addict lying in withdrawal about seven feet from my desk sat straight up in a daze and yelled out, "David Gates, 1970, Make it With You!" to no one in particular and laid back down. It was some sort of synchronicity that he'd heard that melody in the song as I'd been playing 'Make it With You' live most nights as a sort of defense mechanism in my early days on the West Coast. That era of Portland was being defined by Electroclash and bands like Glass Candy, so forcing Bread on people was the precise epitome of the very last thing anyone wanted to hear. This forced an unwanted confusion by lackadaisically asking "what form does punk music take now?" to an indifferent crowd that would've much rather preferred to achieve some form of escape or meat market ecstasy.

At this point in my life I hadn't yet accepted that crate digging was very worthwhile, or that smoking too much pot and being miserable in general wasn't really worth my time. So I proceeded through a morbid mid-twenties haze, sealing myself off inside a chamber of the past where only the classic songs preserved under the harsh lights of Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special could comfort me. Turning back to a more familiar time when entertainers were still pock-marked and desperate underneath pancaked make-up, suffering from multiple kinds of withdrawal while trying to smile through a quick and insincere love song just to get to the next fix. Within this pantheon of broken-8-track-tape-on-the-side-of-highway-legends and stoned Sunday sonic therapists, lies the abandoned genius of David Gates. Feeling the familiar burn of wasting my life and sitting on a healthy portion of general hate towards my fellow man, I slouched on a flowery bongwater-stained couch daily as the ultimate king of yellowed and burned out melodies sung to me about an innocent girl that seemed certain to have never existed. As my best friend had once said to me, "The world is harsh and these are the sounds that it needs, man." The beauty of Bread is encased in sour-ness and protected by a subtly profound repellant shell. The shittiness of a song like "Fancy Dancer" (which is also pretty fucking catchy) pushed up next to track like "Lost Without your Love" only builds a higher castle wall that listeners have to scale to get to the jewels inside.

I hadn't completely processed it back in '92, but writers like Gates (and Neil Young, et al…) had ultimately served as an

unconscious

guide for young punks everywhere who were beginning to understand the seduction of the dark side of the 70s. It was inevitable that a new breed of songwriters would need a bridge out of the violent hardcore assault of the 80s towards a new blueprint. As the pattern often goes, we grow to exoticize what we don't understand and initially reject… and then get pretty comfortable sidling up next to it & eventually commodifying it. So, in holding the hand of an old enemy, a new industry was born out of punk and into something yet to be known, as songs like 'Soul & Fire' knowingly presented a fresh take on the soft-rock renegade to a new generation.

Looking back now, it's becoming obvious that "indie rock", as a movement, was the first underground wave of punks acknowledging the true power of hooks songwriters like Gates had laid down (see: "Crooked Rain,Crooked Rain"), after we'd spent the 70's and 80s rejecting those same fruits.

These days bohemian listening habits have become stylistically scattered like a million google shards. So my implication that Gates was ever some sort of cultural underdog may not even read as a legitimate possibility to the modern mind.

Genres were much more segregated when I was a kid and I remember thinking there were secret backroads that led you into the wrong part of the woods, where contradictory moments of backwards beauty could radicalize you. There was always a sense that you weren't supposed to stray towards the 'other side of the tracks' and that releasing yourself from what you knew and into the reality of the 'other' was considered dangerous… a forbidden place where Faustian benefits could be pursued.

I think a lot of the music of the past we generally exalt (from Frank Zappa to Bob Marley) was made in these more naive nexuses where boundaries existed to be broken, creating an exoticism that gave way to excited and romantic states of mind that simmered over into what might have been actual rebellion and cultural change.

Regardless, the modern virus of humanity tumbles forward in its semi-accidental way. I'm not really trying to expound an over-serious thesis or reclaim some lost world. Examining the things we forget, but that remain in our DNA, is just part of a therapeutic combing over of what made us who we are now. I'm pretty sure its never too late to get fired from your job, get high and spend the day depressed on a half-broken couch pumping a quadraphonic Bread 8-track on only two speakers in a vague attempt to reach a kind of losercore Samadhi. May that state of mind never die if it only creates the market for healing music like David Gates' Bread.

Look out for the new Holy Sons LP The Fact Facer, due via Thrill Jockey on September 23rd. Preorder yours.