“What’s this?” my son said, as he blearily marched into my studio at 2 AM. Apparently, my attempt at keeping the volume low failed.
“It’s called ‘Decades’, and it’s by Joy Division.”
“THIS is Joy Division?”
“….uh…yeah?”
“Wow. All these years I’ve seen that poster (pointing to the framed, zoomed graphic from the “Unknown Pleasures” album that I have on the wall in the studio) but I don’t think I’ve ever heard you play any of them. This is great.”
“Yeah…it is.”

And he’s right; I haven’t actually sat and listened to any Joy Division in years. It’s just not necessary, and my listening bandwidth is always crammed with other stuff. By now, I have every nuance committed to memory, every inflection so fluently memorized that I can spot an alternate version in seconds. The mp3 player that is my head doesn’t need me to play it the music in real space anymore. There are several bands like this, but Joy Division is probably the most intense. My fortunate early exposure to the band (while they were still current) and the timing of their appearance in my life (Late in the summer after my freshman year in college, late August 1979, when I received a copy of the Unknown Pleasures album for my birthday. It was shortly after my mother’s death.) catapulted the band to idol status at that tender young age. All through college and shortly thereafter, I tracked down every bootleg live recording I could find – pretty much every live gig is committed to vinyl – and I still own about a dozen or so, the remainder having been sold upon my fall to the temptation of insane collectors waving mountains of green at me. But some were just too precious to part with.

I recently saw the Ian Curtis biopic, “Control”, which I pretty much hated. More about that in a moment, but I think that’s what has put the recent bug back into me to listen again. And then learning of the theft of Ian Curtis’ gravestone also got my adrenaline pumping for the band again. Ya know? People are, ironically of course, calling this “an atrocity”, but I think it’s just great. Honestly, I’m completely stunned that his original grave stone remained in place for almost 30 years! All this time, I just assumed it was the first thing someone would have attempted. It’s one thing to own an original copy of the Warsaw seven-inch, or a first press of Dead Souls, but Ian’s fucking gravestone? How fucking cool would that be? JD fans, especially of the legacy variety, are a fanatical bunch. Since there are no surveillance cameras in place at that cemetary, it seems like it would have been relatively easy to get away with that. What would be nice is if someone would make a casting of it and make some poured concrete reproductions, so we can all have one. Of course, there is nothing like the original, but…

And yeah, take the above in the fashion in which it was meant.

Seriously, though, this does raise him to the gold-medal platform level of Jim Morrison, now, doesn’t it? It would be fitting – and the proper payback – since early reviews of the band compared his booming voice to Morrison’s. And now he’s shrouded with even more mystery.

But yes, I hated “Control”. Not the whole movie, but mostly, the ending. The rest of the movie, I dunno…it reeked of being told my a woman scorned. It was *her* story more than it was *his*, and that just left me feeling a little bit resentful, and the rest of the band was treated like an afterthought throughout the movie. The DVD comes with the video of the Killers performing “Shadowplay” – which, in itself, has no bearing on the film, and indeed is not included in the film. But the video superimposes the song over snippets from the film of the band about to view their own TV appearance. The song is cool – with a little willful suspension of disbelief, because the “woohoo” thing just kills it – but the video left me scratching my head.

And the debate continues. Which of the two Joy Division stuio albums do you prefer? The punkier, grittier, whiskey chaser “Unknown Pleasures”? Or the cerebral, ethereal, clove cigarette and halogen light “Closer”? What I liked about Unknown Pleasures was that it was definitely a punk rock album, but it set the standard for creativity in teh following “post-punk” wave that was about to wash over us. “Closer”, on the other hand, redefined the way a band used a synthesizer. It became an instrument of terror rather than another synth-pop idiom. Its flickering brightness in “Isolation” and inconsolable sadness in “Twenty Four Hours” were new and unexpected. There is a recording available of Martin Hannett’s personal mixes of Joy Division tracks that allows a glimpse at the process of transforming the raw tunes into the tracks we heard on the albums. Some of the tracks were previously available in much less produced forms. “Interzone”, for instance, appeared on the Warsaw demo – released as a bootleg LP – in a much more basic arrangement.

So, my choice? Closer. I love Unknown Pleasures, but Closer is the one I reach for first…