1 My madeleine
I first heard the song "Wake Up", by Essential Logic, on their first album. It was released by Rough Trade in December 1979, but I probably heard it in winter 1980, in a loaned cache of new releases from J2. I liked the album, and taped it on the reel-to-reel I had bought a few months earlier (replacing the one borrowed from my father). I don’t think that this particular song stood out at the time; the album was quite strong overall, fitting well into the quirky, off-kilter sound of what we then called New Wave but which would come to be known by the more expansive term "post-punk".
Lora Logic was originally in the punk band X-Ray Spex, but was pushed out by lead singer Poly Styrene. On the first X-Ray Spex album, one can hear Lora’s sax charts, but they aren’t played by Lora. (It was the title track of that album "Germ-Free Adolescents", originally released in 1978, that I thought I heard on a Toronto street in 1986.) Lora’s saxophone plays a major role in Essential Logic’s music. Both bands broke up shortly after their first album; both women separately joined the Hare Krishnas and radically altered their styles of music. They tried collaborating again decades later, but their shared religion could not bridge their differences.
The UK music critic Greil Marcus wrote "Lipstick Traces: A Cultural History of the Twentieth Century" in 1989. It wasn’t the kind of book acquired by the libraries I had access to, and I didn’t get to read it until several years later, when I found a deeply-discounted used copy in a Berkeley bookstore. It attempted to connect the punk movement with Dadaism and Situationism. I thought the premise a little thin; they had little in common besides a desire to épater la bourgeoisie.
Johnny Rotten / John Lydon is prominent in the book, but Lora Logic also makes appearances. Marcus seemed taken by the romance of Lora turning her back on her very interesting early career and living a dignified, quiet second life, in contrast to what happened to Guy Debord and what would later happen to John Lydon. He was also adamant that an earlier version of "Wake Up", which appeared on an EP on Virgin Records, was superior to the album version.
File-sharing was on the ascendancy, but I didn’t know the mechanics of it. I inquired on a mailing list which was prone to far-reaching cultural conversations; another list member discovered that Rough Trade had released a companion compilation on CD, and managed to get hold of a rip of it. I said I wouldn’t post links here, but this is obscure enough that you might have trouble finding it also.
Hearing the two versions side by side, I had to agree with Marcus. The EP version is more driving and dynamic; the album version, in comparison, seems a little too self-conscious. I understand the evolution, and perhaps the album version fits better on the album, but the EP version shows more of its roots and conveys more of the urgency of its times. The EP version became one of my favourite songs. I would program it when I got a chance to curate music. I used quotations from it for chapter epigrams in a book on logic that I wrote, and when I used that for a course, I played the track at the start of the first lecture.
In 2003, the label Kill Rock Stars released a 2-CD compilation of Essential Logic, titled "Fanfare In The Garden". Greil Marcus wrote the liner notes, which you can find on his website. He talks about the superiority of the EP version of "Wake Up", but the compilation has the album version. He struggles to find something to say about the insipid later material that Lora released under the name Essential Logic and insisted on including in the compilation, as the price for letting them reissue the earlier good stuff. And I think he misses the convenient narrative of his 1989 book.
We can forget all of that later awkwardness while listening to "Wake Up", written and performed by a nineteen-year-old woman at the end of the Seventies, two minutes and thirty-one seconds of perfection.