The Driftwood Singers Present

Flirtin' with Disaster

2011-09-13T12:24:00.000-04:00

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

A friend stopped me on the street yesterday to point out that I was riding a skateboard with an iced coffee in one hand and an iPhone in the other. Not a pretty sight, I conceded. Forty-year-old father of three, skateboarding. I only bought the board last week, my first time riding one in 22 years. It felt like plugging in an ancient lamp and finding out it still works, miraculously. Oh! This is something I can still do! I guess I'm not dead yet after all ...

When you're in the forest dark, shame doesn't factor anymore. I bought the board at the mall from a punk kid who was born the same year I last rode a skateboard, 1989. My 4-year-old was tugging on my pants, begging to leave. "Can we go home, Daddy? I'm boooored."

As we tried to get out of the mall, some smiling guy in a zoologist outfit tried to sell us a pet marsupial that looked like a squirrel crossed with a monkey.

Everybody keeps telling me I'm going to get killed on this skateboard.

Then two contractor buddies come over yesterday to assess how much I'm going to fork over to insulate my basement. Both of them are southern transplants like me, one from North Carolina, one from Texas. The NC guy is bald with tufts of red hair on the sides and a fu manchu beard, looks vaguely like a redneck Harpo Marx, and quiet like him, too. The Texas guy is tall and rangy, tells weird jokes, likes free jazz. Anyway, before they left I made them both stand in my living room while I blasted "Flirtin' with Disaster" by Molly Hatchet at top volume on my stereo. I looked at them while air-guitarring that hickory-smoked solo. Right? Yes? See? Remember this? Figured they'd get this. Back when men were men, before the dandifying effects of liberal arts educations and the testosterone-vaporizing effects of fatherhood. Doughy, chinless white dudes in denim with flowing locks and really bad split ends, driving loud and fast in cobalt-blue Camaros on sizzling interstates in August. Big gnarly laughter, beer dribbling down beards, hellbound and heedless ...

I'm travelin' down that lonesome road

Feel like I'm draggin' a heavy load

They both nodded politely and looked at me with a faint air of sympathy. $460, just for the materials. Did I mention that I spilled coffee all over my laptop last week and destroyed it? It's a paper weight now. Had to fork over more money for a new one, which I'm tracking via FedEx as it makes its way here from Shanghai.

Welcome to the new Driftwood Singers. Same as it ever was.

Fix My Mind

2010-05-12T23:32:00.002-04:00

I've been stewing in this new/forthcoming Damien Jurado record for a few weeks now. The alchemical transformation of downerism into uplift is an ongoing mystery. There's a stretched horizon of mellotron, a staggered backing vocal response to the main lyric, echoing hand-claps, a bleak crossroads where Lambchop and Lee Hazlewood intersect under it all. JP was listening the other day before she knew what it was and said "I guess I like My Morning Jacket more than I thought."

"Cloud Shoes" -- Damien Jurado

WE TWEET! (FOLLOW USTH)

2010-05-09T20:49:00.004-04:00

Here at TDSP, the rate at which we go back in time is at least five times the rate forward, essentially leaving us terminally in the 1970s. But we still do go forward occasionally. Some. A bit. Now and then. And now, after Hugo Chavez finally made the world safe for Twitter, when it's probably nearly jumped the shark, we're now on board for this thing. Lefty, me, is getting his Tweet on.

RIGHT HERE!

If you bother with this sort of thing, follow us. It's where a lot more do-nothing gets done nowadays, and with terrifying efficiency, so it can't be all bad. Time wastage as a news ticker. The urgent sense of going somewhere while going nowhere. Hey, maybe we've finally come full circle! Ouroboros and what not. Anyway, let's see if this lasts longer than the podcast did.

Meanwhile, Bonnie Prince Billy covering the Grateful Dead:

"Brokedown Palace" - Bonnie Prince Billy

Mogrify Me

2010-02-20T20:07:00.002-05:00

There was some delicious false hope in the air today. A taste of spring that was snatched back as soon as the sun went down. But while the fantasy lasted I got out with the kids (waddled in mud and slush), pretended it was warm, stood in the sun and walked around the block. Started reading the most recent Nick Hornby book -- a pleasant, sensitive plot-centric counterbalance to the awesome manly pressure-cooked rage and absurdist dissolution of the new book of Sam Shepard stories (like a tincture of Thomas McGuane and Cormac McCarthy served as a literary boiler-maker) that I just finished. Impending spring lights the fuse, March -- bathed to the root in liquor and all, and then when April rolls around it starts to feel cruel and impossible. Overripe. I'm just ready for the liquor-root-bath. Here's some music that's just out or is being released in the coming months. It may give you hope.

The Sam Amidon draws on folk material, taking spooky murder ballads, sibling death romps and religious passion (or an R Kelly track, which he does, too), and delivers the songs with a strange moving aloofness, and the string arrangements by Nico Muhly provide surprising movements and spikes, harmonic ripples and rhythmic snaps. It might bring to mind Gavin Bryar's "Chris Blood Never Failed Me Yet," or Harry Smith, or John Adams, or Steve Reich, or the band Midlake.

The Free Energy (pictured) sends you back to 2004, to 1994, and then back again to 1974, maybe. There are waxy gobs of Thin Lizzy, Pavement, Spoon, Weezer and the Hold Steady all mogrified and muddled. I was ready to love something. And I love this.

The Ravenna Colt is the new project by Johnny Quaid, the first guitarist from My Morning Jacket. You can hear many of the MMJ trademarks in this music. His somewhat pinched trebly tone is unmistakable, the hang-gliding vocals, the taste for epic riffage (with implied beards), and even the thinly masked Kentucky pride makes you want to get all windbaggy about limestone aquifers and the Ohio River.

I'm gonna go make some pizza.

"How Come That Blood" -- Sam Amidon

"Hope Child" - Free Energy

"South of Ohio" -- The Ravenna Colt

Knights of Infinite Resignation

2010-02-13T20:28:00.002-05:00

The Detroit Harmonettes pass the obscurity test. Can't find much of a trace on wikipedia or elsewhere on the web, and one has to bore down deep into rare European compilations to track down a trail. Their apparent vanishing act is probably complicated by the fact that their name is very much like a more well known gospel vocal group, the Harmonettes (out of Chicago, I think). I got this track off of a record called Detroit Gospel. It was on the Gospel Heritage label, a division of the British label Interstate Music. There are about six other groups on the record, with lineups and mini histories for each one, except the Detroit Harmonettes. I didnt' realize the extent of the data black hole until after transferring this one from vinyl. Detoit's gospel groups funneled right into the Motown machine, but who knows what became of the I don't know where the Detroit Harmonettes. I get the feeling that the two tracks of their featured on Detroit Gospel are maybe the only to recordings from a single 78 they cut. DeLuxe Records, 6039. The shuffle-swing on the drum kit pumps some secular muscle into things here. The voices sound like nothing quite so much as a shiny and bright horn section. And the sentiment, "I Gave Up Everything," well, it's something you either can relate to, or will be able to relate to.

"I Gave Up Everything" - the Detroit Harmonettes

BIG AND RICH

2010-02-04T22:13:00.009-05:00

Found a beautiful compilation of early Charlie Rich in a junk shop in Red Hook today (Songs for Beautiful Girls, Pickwick/33). I'll forgo the overstatement: maybe the most soulful white man ever recorded. As Mr. Poncho put it: sounds like Elvis, only smarter. Britt Daniels of Spoon weeps into his pillow at night wishing his band could achieve the sound in these songs. The production is pure late 50s Sun Records [Ed.: Well, sorta; see comments], but even more subtle and sophisticated than usual, pushing more into black music than others were willing to go, more jazz and gospel bits brightening the corners. And Rich's blues vibrato is a lost treasure of 20th Century music history. No wonder Peter Guralnick, the Elvis biographer, dug him back up in the early 90s and produced his last album.

YOU GOTTA LISTEN!

I Can't Go On - Charlie Rich

It Ain't Gonna Be That Way - Charlie Rich

A Field of Yellow Daisies - Charlie Rich

Cellular Accounting (Yogic Integers)

2010-01-16T16:20:00.003-05:00

I used to work on a farm with a couple yoga teachers, and they'd stop in the row and teach us some stretches. We came up with the theory of "opposite yoga postures" with regard to bending and weeding or standing and hoeing -- basically mixing up the effort to not get all bunched up and knotted. Some tension. Some release. I went to a yoga class this morning. My first. The class was just the thing. A vacation from the self. A deep-breathing encounter with all the inconvenient truths of the body and the mind. There's some deep-tissue reckoning that needs to be made. The instructor kept reminding us to witness the body, the breath, the surge and flow of it all. (I've witnessed the body plenty, I think. It all comes back to the Fat Elvis Paradigm.)

To fully explore the material at hand. To take the form, the repeated form, the confines, the limitations and make a full cellular accounting. The idea made me think of Lefty's post about The King (witness the body), about completely inhabiting a song, about transfiguration and transformation through the full embrace of matter. And that got me thinking about these songs from the unbelievable collection Fire In My Bones, a three-disc compilation of African-American gospel from 1944 to 2007. This is a herculean effort, sort of along the lines of a Harry Smith or John Fahey-type esoteric epic archival grappling. I loved when The Art of Field Recording came out, revealing that there were still loads of raw and inspired performers to be tracked down and documented, some of them just up the road. But Fire in My Bones is sort of the American Anthology of Folk Music flip-side to that; it demonstrates that tons of incredible music has been recorded (or performed on the radio) that might otherwise just slip through the cracks of our media-saturated lives. (The set was compiled by blogger and music writer Mike McGonigal and released on Tompkins Square Records)

To hear Precious Bryant take something as worn-by-use and so-familiar-as-to-be-empty as "When the Saints Go Marching In" and perform some kind of dual spirit substance-swap, turning it both to radiant fire and gnarly rock, is to realize the liberating powers of constraints and limits.

Isaiah Owens performs a complete electric shamanic possession, squeezing oil from shale.

I also started listening to George Meredith's The Egoist on a book on tape. I heard this:

"To begin to think is the beginning of disgust of the world."

I guess that's a warning.

"When The Saints Go Marching In" - Precious Bryant

"You Without Sin Cast The First Stone" - Isaiah Owens

A Selection From Harry Reid's Ipod

2010-01-12T21:32:00.004-05:00

The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch--Brian Eno

That's the Way It Is

2010-01-03T23:17:00.010-05:00

[REVISED!]

Every couple of years, I return to the question of whether there's such a thing as a musical "canon," a hierarchy in pop history. It's not fashionable to believe so, what with alternate pop realities going on around the world while we soaked in the Western supremacy of our Beatles and Dylan. We ignored Chinese Nuggets. But I realized recently that I personally do have a basis for how I view Greatness with a capital G: through the prism of biography.

For me, the best and greatest artists have a narrative arc to their lives that organizes and illuminates their catalog, a great mythology that transcends the ephemeral nature of pop music altogether. Case in point: the Beach Boys. Think about it: A sensitive child-like prodigy and his brothers are controlled by an abusive patriarch until the boys throw off the shackles of the 50s and embrace the freedom of the age; when they finally ditch the God/Dad figure, they find themselves lost in the haze of modernity, fighting among themselves, Eden corrupted, God dead, the man-child abandoned to his achingly lonely sand box. The choral work of lost boys in America. You can trace the story through the music, almost song by song. As a bonkers Brian Wilson said in the amazing mid-80s documentary, The Beach Boys: An American Band, "I mean, we started out as little babies. And we grew up into men. And that's a dramatic story."

Maybe it's simply that the more you know about an artist, the deeper the music becomes. And maybe it's simply that subconsciously -- or collective-unconsciously -- I relate to the tales of naive white males brought to their knees by fate and experience. Oh do I! But whatever: for my money, there's no American myth as powerful as the Elvis story. And that story really reaches the apex of its power, the full catastrophe, in the later period, the "fat Elvis" times, especially in this album, That's the Way It Is, from 1970.

This isn't quite the tragic aftermath of irrelevance, but the moment when the aftermath of irrelevance is falling over Elvis Presley like a shadow, portending the end. Our mythic hero begins to grapple seriously with the weight of what he's become (and the weight he's about to become), what he can and cannot be, the fun house mirror of himself warping and stretching over him like a ghoul. Think of it: the man never wrote his own music. So he had to take the songs made famous by the new guard in pop culture -- the Beatles, the Dylan -- and figure out how not just to cover them, but to conquer them. It's Don Quixote versus a windmill.

Elvis didn't necessarily see the futile tragedy in this, but the sweaty, heaving effort he puts into defeating a song like "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," a song made famous by the Righteous Brothers a full five years before he got to it, is so intense and funny and overwrought and entertaining, it's way, WAY more personal than the originals could ever be. Here's a man fighting at every note to keep from turning into a marble statue.

And when he finally gives in to his own unfurling grandeur, the bombast of his own stardom taking flight, it doesn't matter if he's a joke or if he's irrelevant. Because he's finally just accepted himself. He doesn't care. He's free. The walls are closing in, the doors are shutting, the cement is hardening, the end is near -- and the man keeps singing! That's the moment when these songs kill you. And I defy you to listen to them and not come away just a little bit moved by how powerful they are. Even "You've Lost that Loving Feeling," which has no right to be better than the original, is simply amazing for the important reason that he's trying to make it better because it's all he's got left.

"Baby, I'd get down on my knees for you -- if this suit wasn't too tight!" That's an comic lyric he adds to his version, echoed by his backup singers, The Sweet Inspirations (Aretha's former group). This is a song that fits into a years-long epic narrative, not just a single moment. That added level of personal biography takes the music to a new level, let's the lyric "you've lost that loving feeling" double down on what it's saying. YOU, O public, have lost your love for me. And this is how I feel about it. "Listen to me! I'm talking to you!" he sings. His performance is a gauntlet thrown down and the tragic weight of the gauntlet at once: That's the way it is.

"You've Lost that Loving Feeling" - Elvis Presley

"Just Pretend" - Elvis Presley

"I Can't Help Believin'" - Elvis Presley

[ORIGINAL POST]

Everybody here knows I'm a big fan of the 1970s "Fat" Elvis, so lemme cut to the chase: I hadn't realized how deep my fascination was going to run until Dave W. dropped the boxed set, "Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential 70s Masters," on me. It's a massive, devastating, moving, triumphant, tragic, funny, oddly experimental and seriously surprising listening experience. If you're not ready to embrace the Big E, a bunch of bloggy words won't necessarily help sell you, though I'd highly, HIGHLY recommend the second volume of Peter Guralnick's biography, "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley," which covers these final, shocking years. Anyway, these two tracks floored me. Big, lush, strangely subtle American country-soul music. His voice is flawed and human and doesn't bleed into caricature -- or rather, he's grappling courageously with caricature, trying to forge gold out of sequins, country out of Vegas. It's amazing and beautiful -- and not just meta-soulful, but actually, really. As Dave points out, few were more committed to a song and a performance than this fella.

We Can Make the Morning - Elvis Presley

I'm Leavin' - Elvis Presley

Yep, It's That Time of Year Again: SNAP, CRACKLE & POP, VOLUME 7

2009-12-20T11:29:00.011-05:00

I love vinyl record albums -- a LOT. But when you're approaching 40, it starts to get a little embarrassing, doesn't it? It's like, dude, get a job and raise your frickin' children stedda taking up shelf space and piping off about Gilbert O'Sullivan, will ya? Believe me, I know. But to paraphrase Woody Allen trying to justify his affair with Soon-Yi, the ear wants what the ear wants. So here's what mine wanted this year, more or less: an assortment of crackly old vinyl tracks pulled from hither and yon, from stray stacks on sidewalks in Brooklyn and crusty old smoke-stained street vendors, from a Chinese woman in an upstate Amish village, a salvage warehouse in Queens, Gimme Gimme Records in the East Village and eBay after my itchy clicker finger followed some foolish fancy. Mr. Poncho delivered a couple gems, especially the Charlie Rich track, which may be the best on this the seventh annual Snap, Crackle & Pop. There was a vague attempt at a recessionary vibe and, curiously, the year 1972 seemed to keep popping up, but there's really no rhyme or reason to the selection, except that in the case of each and every song, a needle bit into a vinyl groove and beautiful analog sound came out (before promptly being converted to crappy mp3). What's sort of pathetic and hilarious is how much of the year I spend thinking about this mix, hustling to find something lovely or amusing or just soulful to hear. It gives form and shape to the pursuit, I guess, a circuitous road and a destination. Anyway, here it is. Hope you dig it.

You can download and print out the CD cover by clicking

>> HERE <<<

Then download all 22 songs by clicking

>> HERE <<

Here's what you'll find:

Street People - Bobby Charles (Bobby Charles, 1972)
Lost Paraguayos -Rod Stewart (Never a Dull Moment, 1972)
God Help the Girl - God Help the Girl (God Help the Girl, 2009)
Break Your Promise - The Delfonics (The Delfonics Super Hits, 1972)
Running Close Behind You - Dion (Suite for Late Summer, 1972)
Let Me Kiss Ya - Nick Lowe (Nick the Knife, 1982)
Yellow Star - Donovan (Essence to Essence, 1973)
Juste Quelques Flocons Qui Tombent - Antione (Je Reprends La Route Demain, 1965)
Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye -Freddy Fender (Before the Next Teardrop Falls, 1975)
Work to Make It Work - Robert Palmer (Pressure Drop, 1976)
Just A Gigolo - Thelonious Monk (Thelonious Monk Trio, 1954)
Bird of the World - Bill Fox (1996)
Dixieland Delight - Alabama (The Closer You Get ..., 1983)
He Was Too Good to Me - Nina Simone (At The Village Gate, 1962)
Sandy - The Hollies (Another Night, 1975)
I Don't Believe in Miracles - Colin Blunstone (I Don't Believe in Miracles, 1982)
Milk Train - Jefferson Airplane (Long John Silver, 1972)
For Your Precious Love - Aaron Neville (Orchid in the Storm, 1986)
Patches - Jerry Reed (The Man With the Golden Thumb, 1982)
Come to Me - The Travel Agency (The Travel Agency, 1968)
I've Lost My Heart to You - Charlie Rich (Lost Weekend, 1960)
Thank You for the Party - Bugatti & Musker (The Dukes, 1982)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

Blah Blah Blah Top Ten of 2009 (Minus Four)

2009-12-19T23:02:00.008-05:00

I listened to more new music this year than I have in a long while. Not sure why. A new phase. Obama. End of the World. But even so, music made by people under 40 (or for that matter, living people) still constituted only about 15% of the music in my life. Most of it was still crackly old jazz and soul albums. I only supply this Top Six list out of some misguided need to tell people I still care about social conventions and hierarchies and 20th Century magazine year-end roundups and, generally speaking, other human beings. I'll supply mp3 downloads if requested, but you can easily find any of this stuff at elbo.ws.

1. Dirty Projectors "Bitte Orca" - I could just as easily put the Bill Callahan or Girls album here, but in the tussle between supreme ambition and uncanny intimacy, I'm tilting slightly toward the former. This sounds like what would happen if Yes came from Senegal, were born in 1990 and tried making music that a girl might like. This record surprises again and again and manages to just avoid feeling suffocatingly indie and rockist. I shook my head in disbelief through the entire thing and, crucially, still do. It's a huge achievement, especially for people who love listening to entire records on headphones.

2. Bill Callahan "Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle" - Completely strange and original, yet as warm and comforting as a Navajo blanket sewn by Neil Young. The lyrics are as like abstract poetry held in a glass of water in the sunlight; sounds like: Gen-X getting serious as a heart attack. And it's recorded so beautifully, with such depth and dimension and breadth, it makes other "folk" albums feel 2D. How about this: It's the "Avatar" of indie folk. Go find "Too Many Birds" and see what I mean.

3. Girls "Album" - I try really hard not to get caught up in Pitchfork's buzz making, but if the shoe fits, wear it. This album is extraordinarily beautiful and lushly emotional. Sounds like: a bisexual skateboarder runaway who's never heard anything but quivery 50s doo wop ballads. Imagine if Jonathan Richman and Antony were smashed together in a particle collider and then outfitted by American Apparel. I'm STILL obsessing on it. Go find "Hellhole Ratrace" and sit and listen to it.

4. Flaming Lips "Embroyonic" - I'll always have a soft spot for psychedelic music, especially raw, garage-y, Nugget-y, Floyd-y primitive freakouts that seek to shock your stoned mind with vision maps and vortex revelations and revealed mind hearts. It's as old as the hills, this stuff, but much harder to do than it appears, and most people fail. Like some epic Stan Brakhage film, this record just expands and and ripples and curves and confounds and implodes just right. It felt like the last two albums were cotton candy meant to lure the new generation into a sweat lodge. Ka-POW! Again, headphone heaven.

5. The Clientele "Bonfires on the Heath" - My fascination with this band may be peculiar to me, but I love their smooth-as-silk, wispy-as-Monet, airy-as-autumn 60s sound so. The well-tempered drums and deceptively plangent, interwoven guitars, the whispered poetry of it all. The best word I can use to describe everything about the Clientele is "leafy." If ferns had audio, they'd sound like the Clientele.

6. Sunn O))) "Monoliths & Dimensions" - Saying you love this record is like saying you love a forbidding mountain off in a cold distance. It's utterly abstract, but the fascination is so profound and lingering, like you're being shown an unexplored valley full of ghosts and ledges that leads, circuitously, to everything Alex Ross wants you to like, like modern classical and Mahler. I kept listening and listening, simultaneously amused by how boneheaded the whole thing really is, and awed by how wonderful it is that boneheadedness can actually take you to interesting places like this. Isn't that what Sabbath taught us?

See the People Run and Gather, Something High Has Caught Their Eye

2009-12-19T20:45:00.003-05:00

I stumbled on Jim Sullivan, streaming on dinky speakers on my laptop. It's shaggy music, with one toe water-logged in the rippling, sometimes scum-topped, pool of soul-folk -- some damaged DNA shared by Van Morrison, Joe South and maybe even Mac Davis. The other toe, I don't know. It's an adult portion. Sullivan sings in places with that wonderful self-limiting effect used by people like George Jones, it's like applying a volume pedal to your vocals, so that the signal sort of swells and then fades, with a weird tapered curve. The energetic strumming brings to mind Gordon Lightfoot. There's promiscuous harpsichord and strings poking through in places. There's something almost heavy metal about this tune, "Johnny." And Sullivan's singing here reminds me of Ozzy and Ian Anderson. This record, U.F.O., sounds very Blind Faith-ish. The drumming is jazzy, but in that British, overzealous way -- getting busy with the triplets -- that turns from cool to menacing. And the groove starts to come unhinged in places. There's upright bass lurking, not saying much, but shadowing the whole affair. And then the creepy Bobbie Gentry strings come in, adding negative energy to the vocal lines, ballast to the airy subject. Turns out that Jim Sullivan has some major ties to titans of rock and pop. He played on a Walker Brothers record. Get this, he played on "Itchycoo Park" by the Small Faces, he played on "Ferry Across the Mersey" by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Played on Vashti Bunyan tracks. Friends with Tom Jones and Elvis Presley. Got Jim Marshall to make amps. Dude looks like Meher Baba. Evidently Sullivan appears in the commune scene (one of my favorites) in Easy Rider.

"Johnny" - Jim Sullivan

"Roll Back the Time" -- Jim Sullivan

Just Let Go of Your Mind

2009-12-01T22:42:00.001-05:00

The first step is admitting you have a problem. There's also a step involving the realization that you don't have control. I just reached the step where I find some scrap of music on my iPod and I don't know where it came from (I have this feeling that Lefty may have dropped it on me, or maybe even posted it here already) or who it is, and I have to accept that it's the abiding mystery -- and the vaporous otherworldly shapes that form between my ears when I put this music on: the assertive tambourine, the lush-and-lumpy horns, the billowing backwards shit, the funky drummer business put to the service of soulful sap-rising psychedelic soft pop -- that keeps blowing sparks off the dusty coals.

This is music made by a Canadian teenager in the late '60s. The record was re-issued in 2001.

"Fly" - J.K. & Co.

"Christine" - J.K. & Co.

This Is Not Only A Test

2009-11-13T12:24:00.009-05:00

Today I am reminded of the famous Herman Melville quote: "To produce a mighty blog, you must choose a mighty theme." Done and done. I didn't get on the bus until it was down the road a ways, but I'm enjoying the ride. Thanks, boys.

Part One

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, let's get down to brass

tacks. Every so often I like to perform a test on myself (no, not that kind, silly!). It's quite simple: I listen to the Billy Joel song "Uptown Girl", and try to register my reactions in a brutally honest fashion. I did this a year or so ago--well, I should say that I attempted to, but I just couldn't bear it for more than, I dunno, 45 seconds or so. Last night I tried again, and lo and behold, I was able to listen to it all the way through. Granted, I periodically burst out laughing every few bars, but the fact remains that I listened to the whole song. You may be wondering (and well you should): Why would someone do such a thing? And what does it all mean? Well, I've been wondering that myself. I admit that I've crossed many a line in the last few years: the Huey Lewis line, the REO Speedwagon line, the Foreigner line. (You get the picture). And when you realize that you no longer have any shame (or at least possess very little), naturally your thoughts turn to Billy Joel. "But wait!" I can hear you saying. "This is madness! Is there no limit? Is there not a line that shall never be crossed?!?" Okay, whoa--calm down... I believe there is, or at least I hope so. I do this in the spirit of fearless research into the deepest recesses of human consciousness. Future generations will benefit, I assure you. [An aside: I just reread Lefty's post on BJ (still can't get over that ankle watch), and recommend his take on the issue]. Okay, I admit that I also listened to "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)", without many feelings of revulsion. It made me realize something: The only Billy Joel album that ever crossed the threshold of the family home (if memory serves) was one that one of my older sisters borrowed from a friend, and I'm pretty sure I heard that song being played a few times when I was a wee lad. (I've been blessed--and I use that term unironically--with four older siblings who all had positive influences on the formation of my musical tastes). So I'm thinking there must by some sort of subconscious--oops, not anymore!--deep-rooted Billy Joel aversion dating back years, simply because none of my siblings ever bought one of his albums. Quite the revelation, I know. So where does this leave me, or any of us? It's hard to say. I still don't really understand why I now enjoy listening to certain songs that I used to sneer at when I was a high schooler. Maybe it's just the fact that the shame/cool factor has slowly whithered away. Some might say I'm the better for it. I'm not sure. Anyway, go ahead and do the "Uptown Girl" test--it's fun, and the results are always interesting! (And hey, "Movin' Out" isn't so bad, really...) (Uh-oh...)... (I almost forgot--check this clip out--it still cracks me up every time...)

Uptown Girl--Billy Joel

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)--Billy Joel

Part Two

We decided to take a different route, and ended up driving through a small town called Graniteville. We passed some old factories that looked like they had been dormant for a while, and rows of small, tidy houses that were probably built for the no-longer-working factory workers. We crossed a canal and some railroad tracks, and saw a few nice old houses. We found out later that there had been a terrible accident there a few years ago, something involving railroad cars and chlorine. That didn't stop us from driving back through a few days later, though. After a few miles we happened upon an old junk store. It was really a classic, straight out of central casting. Old black guy sitting in a chair on the side, staring. A ton of mostly useless stuff. I asked the lady who ran the place if there were any records, and she pointed me in the right direction. Like a junkie desperate for another fix, I started pawing though the musty, dusty stacks of vinyl, and soon that old familiar feeling started to set in. It's sort of like nausea, or maybe nausea is just one component of the over-all feeling. You could say it's existential, I suppose. (But who would want to?) It's partly due to the physical sensations--the dimness, the dust. But there's also that feeling of pointlessness, and the thought "Am I really that much of a loser?" never fails to creep into the brain. Sometimes, there's really nothing, not even a funny album cover, and that's pretty depressing. But then sometimes, like this time, you find a record like the Raspberries' first one, and all those thoughts of loserdom vanish. I had known about the Raspberries for a while, Eric Carmen, etc., but I never listened to them before. More importantly, I never knew that this album had a scratch 'n sniff sticker on the front. You heard me right. How cool is that? Yes, I scratched, and I sniffed, and there it was--I could still smell the scent of raspberries (or at least, manufactured raspberry aroma). Sometimes the album jacket is more interesting than the music inside. It reminds me of the Hargus "Pig" Robbins album I found one time--it's got Braille on it. Him being a blind pianist and all.

Go All The Way--The Raspberries

I also found this Ambrosia album, which I hadn't even realized I wanted. I love the lame high-school-art-class-psychedelia cover.

It was 1975, but they didn't care! Perhaps psychedelic art never goes out of style, for some people. Apparently these guys all played on an Alan Parsons record. So there you go. The one hit is "Holdin' On To Yesterday", which I believe is the perfect tune for this here blog. For isn't that what we're all doing? Holding on to the music of yesterday, in a vain attempt to [fill in the blank]?

(Come to think of it, I can't believe that no-one's ever written about the Raspberries or Ambrosia on this blog. Strange). Besides those two albums, I also found a Hall & Oates record--the one with "Kiss On My List" and "You Make My Dreams" (a must-have, in other words); The Best of Freddy Fender (which features a picture of him with a huge fake cactus between his legs); and something called Les Baxter's Jungle Jazz. The beat goes on.

Holdin' On To Yesterday--Ambrosia

TIME OUT OF MIND

2009-10-31T14:28:00.010-04:00

Here's a Driftwood statistic worth noting: this site's authors have made five children since we began four years ago on Nov. 1, 2005, at 8:45 p.m.

A lot has happened, but perennial themes tell a story: controlled spoilage, the curdling of tastes, aesthetic relativity, the world-weary shrug one eventually adopts in the face of overwhelming evidence that things probably aren't going to get much better than they are right now. You'd think we would have quit by now.

But always, eventually, somewhere in the hidden folds of the crow's feet of a leathery gaze into the sunburst desertscape of our spiritual condition, we find reasons for joy and hope. In records, albums, songs, melodies, beats, lyrics, riffs, barbaric yawps, fay whispers, harmonic convergences, thunderous licks, melted time signatures, all manner of stoned philosophy, rough mixes, ripples of phaser and dollops of wah-wah, sonic wizardry of pretty much every stripe and stipple. If there's a sparkle in the groove, we'll fish it out. We're as moved by an epic failed attempt as by the soulful note perfectly struck.

As people, we grow ever more barnacled and bloated, what with jobs and kids and mortgages (gulp), untethered from a long-lost center that didn't hold and was never destined to hold. We need stronger liquor now, it's true. A revelation: people our age, Gen-X, have realized we're finally just a subset of the Baby Boomers, our cultural circuit-board built to believe we were extending the 20th Century narrative on some inevitable arc to somewhere (over the rainbow?), never suspecting we'd just end up digitizing the whole human drama and folding it all into an archival box for a flattened, airless age. End of History and all that. We're still a bit stunned that it turned out this way, aren't we? I think that's what The Driftwood Singers has always been about: for us, old LPs and quasi-salvageable bygone pop isn't just the flotsam and jetsam of a faded generation, it's a flotation device to keep us from going under the waves. We collect them like scrap metal for some kind of floating junkyard paradise where we can hang out and talk shit, drink bourbon and eat beans around a fire when the rest has turned to Waterworld. Inside a grain of sand, a universe: here's ours. A little reefer in a hand-rolled cigarette, settle in for the gauzy journey to the stereo, the blue-green glow, the first shocking notes, the quivering vocal, the tremolo guitar trembling between the speakers like a shimmering sun, the enveloping rapture of a musical moment.

It'll do in a pinch. Here's to four more years ...

Divine Daze of Deathless Delight - Donovan

Yellow Sun - Donovan

Modern Love

2009-10-28T22:37:00.008-04:00

1.) It's hard to believe, but the rate of retro exploitation has sped up so fast that it's now acceptable to cop Pavement records, as if new listeners were too young to actually pick up on it. This either signifies that I am officially ancient or history is folding in on itself so fast that 2012 will indeed herald the end of the world. Never had I imagined a day when my own generation's music would become source material for boutique replicators. Then I heard this band Cymbals Eat Guitars, which sounds so much like Pavement I'm almost convinced Stephen Malkmus invented these guys in his basement in some kind of a cloning experiment gone haywire. I sound like I'm complaining, but it's actually pretty amazing!

Tunguska - Cymbals Eat Guitars

2.) Lefty is presently loving two albums: the new Flaming Lips, Embryonic, which is so heavy with deep-dish psychedelia it's basically an ode to the impending legalization of pot in California; and the new Clientele album, Bonfires on the Heath. These records are great for entirely different reasons, the first for undermining all expectations, the Clientele for continuing to sound exactly like they always have, like the Byrds, the Zombies and the Left Banke were poured in a vat of green cough syrup, which you drank before falling asleep in a park in suburban England. It's perfect.

Silver Trembling Hands - Flaming Lips

Wonder Who We Are - The Clientele

3.) Mr. Poncho pointed me to the music of Ernie Graham, which seems to merge Bobby "Santa Claus" Dylan with Bobby "I live in a trailer on the Bayou" Charles. More acurately, it sounds like Ernie rolled up the year 1971 in a Zig Zag and smoked it.

So Lonely - Ernie Graham

4.) I'm not sure if I'll be the first to observe this, but Julian Casablanca may be the first of Gen-Y's retro-refurbishers to mine Eddie Money. Watch his much ballyhooed appearance on the Tonight Show and then compare:

(Can't really touch Eddie though, right? Casablanca needs a touch more Rodney Dangerfield to pull it off; JC's drummer is working some outer borough retard magic though.)

5.) Somebody dropped this track on me a few months ago and it keeps coming up in my shuffle. It's getting under my skin, slowly.

Modern Love - The Last Town Chorus

Ain't No Velvet Glove

2009-10-23T21:50:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned, my brother dropped by the other week. He had his external hard drive. There was a lot of data dumpage going on. I retrieved some tidbits from the memory banks. I'm still excavating and unpacking. This was one of those tracks that I remembered from a mixed tape. It got played over and over. Etched in. Intaglio of the air. Wax print on the brain folds. Sonic seepage. There was so much transpiring in so little real time. Southern-fried tabla. Synth squiggles, muskrat sounds, circuit-board didgeridoo. Cornmeal drone. And the lyrics: "milquetoasted love." I could never sign on fully for the heavy-lidded beach music vibe of Little Feat, and Lowell George's Zappa connection always seemed like as much of an indictment as a point of pride. Bonnie Raitt's rec means more to me. This is one of those songs that point to all kinds of frightful possibilities.

"Kiss It Off" - Little Feat

Take Your Pick

2009-10-20T23:53:00.002-04:00

You Better Run--Pat Benatar

You Better Run--Dorothy Love Coates & the Original Gospel Harmonettes

You Better Run--Iggy & the Stooges

All Bets Are Off

2009-10-16T21:01:00.000-04:00

I Give Up, Why Can't They?

2009-10-10T14:42:00.002-04:00

I had one of those mystical communions with this song, years ago. In a piny subdivision, watching a video documentary about the band. Maybe having smoked some weed. Probably. The tuneful summing up. The strange uplifting hopelessness.
DJ Bonebreak was one of the great drummers. Muscular and crisp and driving, without ever being showy or too spastic.
Shocking how much John Doe and Exene sound like Grace Slick and Marty Balin. Billy Zoom was like a robot god inhabiting a punk greaser.
Shocking, too, how much this sounds like a lost track from the cast recording of Hair.
The title always seemed like the best, most sound punk rock advice you could ever get. The So-Cal name-checking is so "positive scene."
X was exploring the punk/hippie symbiosis/continuum long before it was sanctioned. They were like some deformed Platonic ideal of a band.
Did you know Exene was married to Viggo Mortensen?
Weird.

My brother stopped in last night. Down from Quebec. He got out the external hard drive and did a major excavation/plundering from my music files. I did the same. Found this, and many other nostalgic nuggets.

"I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" - X

Dap This

2009-10-02T08:37:00.003-04:00

Last night my dear wife and I went to see Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. I happened to stumble upon this cd a while back, and we both liked it a lot. Then she was on Austin City Limits, and pretty much tore it up live. So it was a must-see situation. (Plus it was free! And it was on our anniversary!) Charles Walker and the Dynamites opened (I guess it was an and the kind of evening). Mr. Walker is a veteran soul artist who's been recording since the '60s, and he's having a late-career resurgence backed by a bunch of young Nashville musicians. He's pretty amazing. Sharon Jones was great too--she's probably only, what, five feet two, but she has this incredible energy, and her band is tight and funky as hell. At one point in her show she has to take her shoes off so she can really, truly get down--I mean, she just goes off in this paroxysm of stomping, shaking soul dancing. It's a sight to behold. The (mostly white) crowd was way into it. (One could probably write a dissertation about old-school funk & soul bands and the makeup of their audiences, but I won't go into that here). I'll just say it was a great night of music here in Music City. Sharon Jones is a force of nature, my friends. You should see her live if you ever get the chance.

100 Days, 100 Nights--Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Answer Me--Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Visions of Bacharach

2009-09-21T23:44:00.026-04:00

[EDITOR'S NOTE: THERE USED TO BE A PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHORE HERE, BUT THE LAW CAME AND TOLD US TO TAKE IT DOWN. WE DID, GLADLY. HERE THEN IS A LINK TO THE PHOTO WE REFERENCE IN THE FOLLOWING POST.]

The thing about loneliness is that everybody is lonely differently, in their own way. Which is either, a) why it's called loneliness to begin with, or b) doubly lonely, when you think about it, or c) both. It's like when a song comes on the radio and you're suddenly filled with the sweetest reverie for a bygone moment and the person you're with says, "I hate this song."

By now I've accepted that I'm alone in certain things. And one of those is my continuing fascination with the instrumental albums of Burt Bacharach. I just found a copy of Make It Easy on Yourself from 1969. Upon first listen, a lot of people, Dewey Dell included, immediately reject what they're hearing. The 1960s "period" sound strikes people first and usually blots out any further consideration. That's fair. It sounds like muzak or something your parents once heard in a hotel lobby in Vegas.

But bear with me.

What begins to happen when I listen for a while, with imagination, even meditation, is that I can start to feel like I'm walking in a museum of pop gestures, a melodic Pop Art exhibit with huge canvases of glockenspiel and trumpet and tremolo surf guitar. That probably sounds like an "ironic" experience, Warhol lite. And occasionally it is. But sometimes a revelation can happen when a mellow horn line or a leisurely piano melody suddenly bonds with a personal association, like an image seen in a musical Rorschach: a green vacuum cleaner being run over an orange carpet by a brunette in curlers in a cool, sunless room, white curtains, a Hawaii Five-O re-run in the background; the brightly-lit popcorn maker at Sears; a sea-green counter at a Woolworth's diner on a winter afternoon; the silhouette of a man in a long burgundy Buick driving at dusk across a flat landscape in warm 35 millimeter. I'm reminded of the photographs of Stephen Shore, the Warhol acolyte, who drove around America in the 1960s and 70s taking pictures of hotel rooms and empty parking lots (see above, Room 110, Holiday Inn, Brainerd, MI, July 11, 1973).

When you let this music sit like a still life, without received judgment, the inspired images can have an oddly emotional tincture, the distillation of some faded American loneliness, like a recovered memory belonging to someone else, but no less sad for that. And maybe sadder. The real irony of this music is not in its cliches, but in the embedded human sympathy that's somehow revealed in these faceless orchestral vistas. I start to imagine Burt Bacharach as the loneliest man who ever lived while making these songs. Because nothing in the music is about him, personally. He's utterly solitary with a full studio orchestra, painting these lush and gleaming landscapes. And we can see ourselves in them, lost in time.

[Editor's Note: links to these songs were taken off to satisfy copyright warnings.]

She's Gone Away - Burt Bacharach

The Guy's In Love With You - Burt Bacharach (Listen for Bacharach humming along to the melody

Pacific Coast Highway - Burt Bacharach

Scottish Georgics

2009-09-20T21:18:00.003-04:00

These days, my life, my anxieties, my hopes, my whole scene, could be summed up, or put in place, or undermined by its own essence, with any number of vaguely agricultural get-up-and-go aphorisms. The early bird gets the worm. You reap what you sow. The sun also rises. Make hay while the sun shines. Ecclesiastes. Etc. It's either birds, worms, seeds, sun or hay. Throw in a little "Muck is the mother of the mealbag" and you've got it covered. Shit be elemental.

But talk of shit and talk of sun and talk of hay always makes me think back to the characters I spent time with on farms. Ernst Larson, Buck, Kenny. Dudes who whose proximity to the life force seemed to place them farther from actual civilization. Hoisting grease guns, getting augers and hoppers and silos all lined up. Birthing calves. Weening. Putting up fence. Standing in fucking frigid and fetid water with rats scurrying around, trying to hack into a frozen pile of silage. More than anything, bailing hay. It was hellish. Infernal. All itchy and rashy on your arms, shirt soaked with sweat. Blowing beats of sweat off your nose. Bailing twine tearing through your fingers. These guys seemed powered by some kind of mute masochistic energy. They'd work until their hands, lungs, muscles, backs, brains and skin were just shot. Then they'd get up and do it again. They wanted to see you pass out from heat stroke so they could laugh at your college-boy ass.

I remember Kenny sneering and offering what to him was the harshest put-town he could make of the wealthy wanna-be farm-boy son of the wealthy businessman owner of the farm. "The sun's not his blood," he said.

There's a lot to be learned from putting up hay, aside from the lessons of the punishing labor required. You really do have to act when conditions are right. It's a shit load of work at a time when everyone else is vacationing, but you're stacking away loads of stored-up energy. You've got to cut it, you got to let it dry, rake it, bail it. It's like the feeling of stacking cord wood while the weather is still hot in September. You're so in touch with the seasons and the cycles that you practically want to just stop speaking altogether. The sun is your blood.

We've been big fans of Gerry Rafferty here. I'm not sure if the sun was his blood. But there was definitely something other than blood in there. That might be why he wound up at a London hospital being treated for liver problems last year. And then the story of his escape to Tuscany showed that the Scottish singer had a lot of sense. Maybe he'd stored up some energy years before and was getting the last laugh, living off his labors from earlier days.

This tune, "Jose," is off of Stealers Wheel's greatest hits. I love the fact that these guys were produced by Lieber and Stoller, doesn't make any sense, but I love it. This tune is in fact written by Joe Egan, the other half of the band. I'm officially on the lookout for Egan's 1979 solo debut, Back on the Road, if anyone spies any moldy vinyl by that name.

"Jose" is great for a number of reasons. It starts out with about three red herring instrumental blues-zombie parts, none of which actually make sense as lead-ins to the actual tune. And the song is really about how it's time to turn the hay. There's some hard-learned Scottish focus in there. Your life is a mess, but you got to get up and get to it.

"Jose" - Stealers Wheel

Say Uncle, Part Two: Here's Johnny!

2009-09-19T18:33:00.003-04:00

A while back I wrote this post about Uncle Bill, an old family friend (my parents just visited him and his wife in Germany, and they had a great time). On a recent visit to NYC and VT, I found this record (I still have some in my old apartment in the city, where my brother and his wife reside) and it made me think of another uncle--Uncle Johnny, my mom's younger brother. He was an erstwhile folk-singer back in the '60s and '70s--the kind that scoffed at Neil Young's success with "Heart of Gold". More of an amateur ethno-musicologist, I guess. He'd come up to visit us in his orange VW bus (which eventually caught fire somehow and burned up) and at some point he would haul out his hammered dulcimer--the big guns. He played guitar too, and wrote some pretty clever songs--there was one which gently lampooned the back-to-the-land types:

Marvin tills the soil, he's livin' naked out on the land

He only eats what he can grow, they call him Organo-Man

The strangest thing about Marvin is, I'll never understand

I saw him out just the other day with an ice-cream in his hand

There was a time when Uncle Johnny was breeding Siamese cats, and he brought a couple with him. One of them got so freaked out that it ran up in the rafters of our still-unfinished house and refused to come down. So, we ended up with a pet Siamese cat by default. In short, a real character: Tall, with long black curly hair, glasses and eyes that always seemed to be bugging out of his head. But a really good-hearted person. He would always send us records at Christmas, and they were invariably by people we had never heard of--obscure folkies, primarily. That's how we got the Joe Hickerson disc. I'm not sure how it ended up at my brother's apartment. (He gave us a couple of records by a guy named Ed Lipton, who did children's songs--"Fly, Hippopotamus, Fly" and "Jump, Elephant, Jump" are two song titles that spring to mind. I don't think he ever experienced Raffi-type success).

My brother and I were always inclined to make fun of the music on the records Uncle Johnny sent us (then again, we were inclined to make fun of just about anything), but I eventually grew to like some of Joe Hickerson's stuff. It probably requires growing up and becoming interested in music of the old, weird America. Hickerson's delivery is a bit stilted--he really sounds like the folk scholar that he is--but there's something sort of charming about that. Anyway, the songs don't suffer too much from it. I like Rolling of the Stones in particular. It has a really haunting melody and lyrics that leave you scratching your head (I'm pretty sure it's a Child ballad). Shingling the Rum-Seller's Roof is funny--it's both an anti-alcohol tune and a good drinking song, and it's a metaphor I want to start using more often. The record came out in 1976, on the Folkways label (appropriately enough).

Drive Dull Care Away--Joe Hickerson

Shingling the Rum-Seller's Roof--Joe Hickerson

Rolling of the Stones--Joe Hickerson

American Apparel

2009-09-08T23:44:00.007-04:00

California Fleece Track Jacket - Price: $45

Barry Sunglass, Vintage Eyeware - Price: $55

Dixieland Delight - Alabama: Priceless.

(Mark Herndon, drums, 1983)

The Dream Lives On

2009-08-29T11:43:00.003-04:00

I heard this track on WFMU the other day and was so bowled over I emailed the DJ, Todd-o-phonic Todd, who directed me to the source, the 1974 Hollies album Another Night (above). Just when you think you can't be surprised and delighted by another third-tier, off-track moldy-oldy, along comes the disco-era Graham Nash-less Hollies covering Bruce Springsteen. Prepare to be wowed, it's a major winner.

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) - The Hollies

Hell Yeah, Part 2 (Massive Afro Edition)

2009-08-24T19:26:00.000-04:00

[Hat tip: T-Ro]

Hell Yeah

2009-08-23T14:15:00.001-04:00

[Hat tip: M-Ro.]

Mind Games

2009-08-12T22:46:00.020-04:00

1. The other night I was telling Dewey about a new band called Lake who had a new song I really loved, called "Madagascar." In the course of this same conversation, the so-called Monsters of Folk also came up, that supergroup featuring Jim James, Bright Eyes and M. Ward. Next thing you know, Dewey plays a song clip from the iTunes store and I couldn't believe what I was hearing: the Monsters of Folk had evidently taken a wildly artistic left turn into "Wasted on the Way"-era CSNY, complete with sleek disco-era production, pristine and feather-light six-part harmonies and Styx-like prog instrumentals. I thought, Brilliant move, fellas. Wow. Who's the genius in the group? Jim James?

Well, of course, it wasn't Monsters of Folk at all. It was Lake -- but NOT the new band called Lake, who are on K Records. Dewey had tripped upon a 30-year-old German prog-pop group called Lake, who some apparently consider "one of the great unknown bands of the 70s." As it happens, two days later I was flipping through some vinyl in Manhattan and happened upon their second album, which I bought immediately, if only to make Dewey laugh. It's entitled Lake 2 (1978). Without saying too much, let me ask that you simply listen to this from beginning to end. Yeah, I know, unbelievable. Paging Ween! But then imagine for a moment that it's a brand new Monsters of Folk single -- and then see how you feel about it. For a moment, if you can suspend disbelief, it almost reveals something corrupt about postmodern taste-making and the way the mind forgives when it forgets.

Scoobie Doobies - Lake

2. A long time ago -- in fact, my very first post in 2005 -- I surmised that my musical tastes might have been formed listening to AM radio in the back of my parents' VW microbus on family vacations in the late 70s and early 80s. But there was another sacred location: laying on a sheep skin rug in front of my dad's Kenwood in the living room at night while gazing at LP covers and listening through those massive 1970s headphones. Some of the first inklings of what adult love and lust must be came to me while staring at the pictures of Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt inside the gatefold of the Endless Love soundtrack. I was 10. When I hear it now, wow, it envelops me totally, revealing an unexpected pocket of warmth beneath the cold surfaces of present life, one so deep and pure that calling it nostalgia doesn't even begin to touch it. It seems to bend time like light through curved glass and suggests for a brief moment the impossibility of mortality. So close, yet so far away. This, my friends, is why I love pop music.

Dreamin' - Cliff Richard

THE MONEY PIT

2009-08-04T20:33:00.008-04:00

For the first time ever I plunked down a large sum of money for a record. As a rule, I pay no more than $15, usually between $1 and $10. I'm what is known as a "bottom feeder" by the record store geniuses who sell vinyl LPs. What happened was I was walking down a hot August street thinking of other things when blammo, here's this record store. A RECORD STORE! A rare discovery in Manhattan, where rents have killed off most of them. So next thing I know I'm flipping through the stacks and listening to this clerk, a pink-Izod-wearing 50-something effete stereophile snob in Lenscrafters faux-architect glasses, groan to a customer about people who think they're getting a "bargain" off the Internet only to find the rare Blue Note album they ordered has a huge gash in it when it arrives. "Idiots!" he declared. "They get what they deserve! Yeah, I'm sure an album graded 'excellent' sounded super on a $99 record player in Texarkana."

OK, on-site perusing has its virtues, sure, but this is a guy who charges $65 for a Glenn Danzig album on vinyl. If I could sell my own collection for the prices he's charging I could retire right now. Thing is, so rare are these bonfires of 20th-century vanity in the digital age, these record stores, it takes very little time for you yourself to become warped into thinking this is a reasonable reality. The kids are really into vinyl nowadays, this guy argues to a customer, so the prices are going up, up, up, up, UP!

All of which is to say I bought Money Jungle, a 1962 United Artist import of Duke Ellington with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, for $60.

SIXTY! DOLLARS!

I don't know why. I was about to stick with a $10 copy of a lesser Jerry Butler album, but then I saw this sitting up there on the wall, beckoning. I'm sure Mr. Poncho bought this album 10 years ago for about $7, if that. And it's not like I wanted to impress the Pink Architect. I pretty much despised him from the minute I walked into the place. But I despised him for a very specific reason: out of a visceral fear that we shared some essential DNA. Or rather, a rare and alarming disease that leads to the belief that collecting vinyl LPs is a worthy way to pass the time -- a life's pursuit in which there are winners and losers, and not just a bunch of suckers all the way around.

A bright spot: the Ellington record is totally and utterly awesome! And Mr. Poncho says we might fund our kids' college degrees when the vinyl bubble comes and an early Bee Gees record is suddenly worth $50 (thanks for that, Mr. Poncho, but here's my projection for that scenario: the year 3033). In any case, the very least I can do is bring pleasure to my friends now. Herewith, the sound of three giants of jazz in a bare bones trio, egos a-blazing, bass, piano, drums, sparring, ribbing, jabbing, winking, rocking, tearing it up, then going placid and blue and profound, Mingus and Roach making room for master Ellington, Ellington trying to prove he's still got chops beyond the conductor's baton. Mingus levels entire modes of Western thought with his fiercely monosyllabic bass solos against Duke's basso-profundo left-hand jabs and Roach's shimmering minarets of cymbol-work. The name of the record feels right, too, timely, fatalistic and ultimately clear-eyed, an agreement on plight, a killer jam session the only route to existential detente. And maybe that's what I'm seeking from it: a vision of clarity and piercing recognition of what matters in the age of meltdown and reappraisal and thrift. Money is what ails us, but music is what matters, what cures, what calls. Right? I hope so. I just spent $60 for it. Anway, listen.

DOWNLOAD SIDE A

Money Jungle
Le Fleurs Africaines (African Flower)
Very Special
Warm Valley

DOWNLOAD SIDE B

Wig Wise
Caravan
Solitude

Recorded: New York City, Sept. 17, 1962

Tropical Hot Dog Day Day

2009-07-31T20:59:00.002-04:00

Everything’s all moldy. We got ourselves an airborne toxic event up here in New England, wet wise. A white-nose fungal situation. Trench foot, on a spiritual level. But with the high spore count comes a kind of equatorial mush-mind, a humid/tumid world-view. Tropical hot-dog night. We mostly like to keep our eyes cast behind us, against all the best ancient advice. But the dust blows forward and the dust blows back. And, though it is not now as it hath been of yore, same is true of how it will be. I’ve had a few ear-glimpses that make me less forlorn. The apiary, the aviary, the binary barber shop. People turning the melt on, full-force; people working their face-painted shaman thrum; people letting/getting the brittle post-punk get cross-contaminated with/by the polyrhythmic call-and-response aural-quilt patternings.

“Apology to Pollinateurs” – Karl Blau

“Sunlight” – tUnE-yArDs

“Digital Haircut” – dd/mm/yyyy

More Midlifery

2009-07-20T20:56:00.009-04:00

The crush of middle age is upon me, folks. Full bore! And I've got blogger's block something fierce too. Bad combo. But I'm giving it a go here, attempting to snatch victory from the jaws of spiritual defeat. Look at me: buying some real estate and adding another social security number to the rolls during an economic depression. Dicey! [Breaking News: Actually TWO new SS #'s!!].

Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've become a "content provider" scraping for a shred of dignity in the digital age. How poetic! Then one day you wake up and find yourself on your knees on the sidewalk flipping through boxes of crappy $1 vinyl like some vagrant off his meds: Hey, maybe this Strawbs album will be good. Pathetic. (Btw, it's horrible.) Can't remember who said it, but life is

just one

I Don't Believe in Miracles - Colin Blunstone

distraction

Goin' Down to Laurel - Steve Forbert

after

Oh Yes My Lord - Voices of Conquest

another.

Calico Silver - Write Me Down (Don't Forget My Name) - Kenny Rogers & the New Edition

Well, it'll do in a pinch.

Two-Fold Spooge

2009-07-14T22:15:00.001-04:00

Back when I traveled around playing music, we were once staying in Huntsville. Alabama (northern Alabama in general, and The Tip Top Café in particular, is where I had some of my most anarchic, rowdy and most “rock-and-roll” rock-and-roll experiences.) We had friends there who would put us up. The husband was a scientist – a cryonics expert – at NASA. And one night he took us to the lab to fuck around with some liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing bananas and turning them into brittle things that would shatter on the floor – shit like that. Back at their house I remember reading an essay – maybe in a Robert Anton Wilson book or something – about an optics experiment in which subjects are shown a series of letters displayed on a wall just at the outer limits of what they can decipher. So the subjects basically can only see a hazy blur of unreadable text. But researchers found that once the subjects were told what the letters spelled out, they could then somehow “read” the letters. The point being that what was once beyond their ability to process and read would somehow become readable, even though all that had changed was that they were told what the letters were. The experiment demonstrated something that was maybe obvious to a lot of people: basically that your brain does a big part of the work of making sense of the data that your sense organs take in. So if you know what you’re looking at, you can then understand it. I think the same is sometimes true of music and desire; if you know what you’re wanting to hear, your mind will spooge in the mortar between the bricks. In this case, the spooging was two-fold. My mind wanted to like this Chris Darrow record in part because of his having been on sessions with people like Leonard Cohen, Gram Parsons and others. I also learned coincidentally a few months back that Darrow was an early guitar teacher (maybe the first?) for Stan Ridgway, of Wall of Voodoo. The cover art on this re-issue of Darrow’s early solo stuff is awesome – the country-hippie existentialist “I advance masked” element. (I’m still not sure if it’s “good”.) There was also a mondegreen situation at work. My copy of this disc didn’t have any song titles on the CD sleeve, and I kept hearing the chorus of the first track as something like “there’s a crooked rainbow shining in my eyes,” which just seemed like a pleasantly absurd image in a kind of country-fried soft-rock scenario. There’s lots of endearingly questionable production on this record – pillowy toms are rolled on in sleepy tribal elaborations, cymbals seem to have been in short supply at times (thankfully), at one point a Moog-ish synth provides out-of-place futuristic robot-swamp bass lines to a booze-boogie jam. There are strange dueling fiddles. Nasally bag-pipe-type things drone in places. “Take Good Care of Yourself” sounds like “The Harder They Come” transmuted on an ethanol-powered Nitty Gritty Dirt Band quantum molecule swap.

“Albuquerque Rainbow” – Chris Darrow

“Take Good Care of Yourself”- Chris Darrow

The Ballad of Benji Hughes

2009-07-01T10:40:00.003-04:00

There are a plethora of conflicts of interest and quasi-ethical issues in telling our dear readers they should check out a story in THE BELIEVER magazine this month. One of us may have written it, another was probably the source for it and possibly the drummer in a rock band mentioned therein. But what the hell, we've never billed ourselves as objective. So: It's a profile of Charlotte, NC-based singer-songwriter Benji Hughes, who is, besides being a gorgeous chunk of hirsute humanity, a pop savant of the criminally unsung variety. If Randy Newman and Prince were put into a particle accelerator built on a NASCAR speedway you'd probably end up with Benji. There are music samples in the story, but here's a download of "So Much Better," the song that tipped me into a full-on rabid fan.

"So Much Better" - BENJI HUGHES

Too Hot To Come Up With A Clever Title

2009-06-28T13:30:00.008-04:00

It's hot. Blisteringly, mind-numbingly, hallucinatingly hot. This morning my wife said, "The high today is supposed to be 91." "Oh, good", I responded, "it's cooling off." That's how hot it is--I can't even think of a good joke to make about it. I'm reading Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (thanks Mr. P), the first part of which takes place in Venice, and it's incredibly hot there. So it's kind of nice how that's jibing with the actual weather here. Also too, it provides a good excuse to stay inside and read, listen to music, paint, which is what I prefer to do most of the time anyway. So don't get the wrong idea--I'm not complaining. Heaven forbid.

So what does that have to do with the subject of this post? Nothing really, just a way to kick things off I guess. It's just my favorite song of the moment. It's got some clever lyrics, some of which refer to the CBC and hockey (yes, she's Canadian, bless 'er), and it sounds like the Jayhawks are backing her up, though I don't think any of them play on the cd. I like the languid pedal steel lines. Her voice reminds me of someone, I can't quite pin it down, and the way she sings makes it seem like she isn't trying too hard, which I tend to like in a singer. Maybe she is but she hides it well. This is from Asking for Flowers, which came out last year. I haven't figured out whatever in hell she's saying in this song, but it sure stimulates the pleasure center in my little brain.

I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory--Kathleen Edwards

Metal Buffoonery

2009-06-27T14:21:00.002-04:00

Welp, just watched the Anvil documentary last night. Devastating. I know everyone keeps talking about how Spinal Tap it is, but you can't even begin to grasp it until you start soaking it in. There's riffage, there's tour retardation, there's lots of wasted time, energy and talent. But there's also some redemption -- just enough -- and some real emotional spots: family coming through; reckoning with parents; trying to maintain dignity when there's little to allow it.

It made me think of this Manowar documentary that a friend had worked on years ago. He gave me a VHS copy back in the 90s, which I mistakenly loaned to a former co-worker who never returned it. This is metal buffoonery Phase VIII, where it's all headed. Trying to decode whether the band is being ridiculed by the film-makers they hired to celebrate them is half the fun. When they visit Wagner's estate you know it's for real.

Thoughts on MJ

2009-06-25T23:39:00.010-04:00

When I saw him do the moonwalk for the first time on TV in 1983, sitting in my living room with my parents in Ohio, I gasped. We all did. Everybody tried it at school the next day, EVERYBODY.

Now it's over and one of the big iconic American storylines of our lifetimes is officially written. So much like the Elvis story it's almost a Joseph Campbell archetype at this point. Uncanny talent. Innocence lost. The self-made prison. Money, high walls, the weirdness, then the curdling darkness. Marries Elvis's daughter! Multiple personas, story lines, periods, myths, rumors, faces, all constantly at odds till the images of the man escape the man entirely, leaving a wretch, a ghost, a bad dream. Felt like he died before he actually died. What remains are his songs, which are like pure charisma captured in sound. They're cultural bedrock now. Feels like a cord to the past was cut today.

The New York Times has a poll asking readers to pick their favorite of MJ's No. 1 hits. In the comments section I said this: "'Rock With You' splits the difference between the innocent years and the evolving adult incarnation of MJ. There's a sweetness to it, pre-weird, romantic, yet still has the sharp, ultra-tight Quincy Jones production that let's MJ's quirky funk angles poke through. Makes me miss him."

Rock With You - Michael Jackson

Washed Away By Magnitude

2009-06-24T13:47:00.003-04:00

JP and the kids and I just got back from a week at the beach in NC. Kure Beach, near Wilmington. We had a duplex with loads of family – moms, in-laws, nieces and nephews, siblings. We just drank and watched the little ones pretend they were super heroes, spies, or nurses during a catastrophe. I love how people just set up chairs and blankets and shady structures and just hang out facing the ocean. The sun and wind, the sound, the salt breeze, the sting and stupor of the heat, the powerful push and pull of the water, the grinding going round, the drop-off expanse of horizon – there’s plenty of reason to stand vigil there, but I just appreciate the air of spiritual pilgrimage to the whole affair. It’s not Varanasi or Canterbury, but it works. It helps if you’re sozzled from bloody marys or sleep-deprivation or just in a baked stupor. I always thought of going to hear loud music as being kind of the urban, dark, smoky, night-time, electric version of a day at the beach. You face the noise, and soak it up. It can hurt you, but it feels good. It’s a doom aesthetic. But everything is, as Lefty has noted.

I’ve recently had a mid-life return to criminal file-sharing. I guess I have pangs of guilt. Anyway, one thing I had been looking for forever and finally "found" was this tune by Don Covay. If you’ve never heard Covay, listen to just how much he sounds like a famous big-lipped singer from England. Mick has spelled out his debt to Covay in places, I think, but once you know to look for it, the connection is almost distracting at times. But beyond that, this tune operates with the one of the mystical core values of musical greatness: the slowness. It’s got an elemental, glacial, unperturbability. It’s really meant for surprise exposure in the Driftatron, a stealth sonic attack, spring it on a muddled friend, stump the host, but this will have to do.

The absurdist deconstructed horn accents. The warped reverb guitar filigree. The ghostly choir. I had hoped to have this tune handy when I did my wind-themed (it recurs with me) post a while back, but here it is now.

"It's in the Wind" -- Don Covay

Speaking of Bert Jansch

2009-06-07T17:12:00.003-04:00

And speaking of getting your roots of Led Zeppelin on, and speaking of infinite revival, and speaking of great band names, and speaking of folks who look like the ecstatic crowd shots (floppy felt hats) from the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, and speaking of potent Scottish situations, here’s a track from Trembling Bells. Listening to the vocalist, it drives home just how few people sing without affect these days. The drumming – a bit like Pentangle – is heroically jazzy and brawny, not something one expects from thoughtful folk revivalists. Even the repurposed Dylan Thomas-ism of the chorus points to some fruitful throwback. I understand that the lead singer is also a student of medieval and Renaissance music, so the band is clearly ready to dredge where they need to. The record, Carbeth, is leavened nicely, with bits of festive madness, filtered through a free jazz perspective, to keep the museumy aspect in check.

“When I Was Young” – Trembling Bells

Mellow Out

2009-05-29T21:13:00.001-04:00

Exultation of Despair

2009-05-19T20:30:00.002-04:00

Roscoe Holcomb is a sonic memento mori. A skull on the desk. Switching between banjo and guitar and employing a style on each that evokes the other, Holcomb sounds like Dock Boggs superimposed on a Skip James jam. It’s bluesy, but it’s also high lonesome, deep holler, mountain madness – stretching back to hermit monks in beehive caves, the rocky coast of some desolate fringe of Ireland or Scotland, waiting for the invaders to wipe away history. And he looked like William S. Burroughs leading a scouting troupe. This version of “Moonshiner” makes me think of Cormac McCarthy, both because of the bug-juice theme, the backwoods spookiness, the revenue coming to get you, stilling up all his corn, etc, but also for the bone-dry aesthetic, the compressed-into-dust austerity. Cat Powers, Uncle Tupelo and Dylan (all of whom have done versions of the song) need to take it home and work on it for a while longer. Someone once referred to Holcomb’s “exultation of despair” and I think that’s about right. You can see footage of Holcomb on YouTube -- and there's a movie, The Lonesome Sound, which features him as well. I love the thought of Holcomb sitting alone on his front porch in Daisy, Kentucky, not far from the lumber camp, singing Old Regular Baptist hymns. I’m not sure what the physical-physiological factors are, but this one of those performances that always sets up sympathetic vocal harmonies in my head whenever I hear it. I’ve seen others express the sentiment about Holcomb’s music and I share it: it’s what you want played at your funeral. But even more, it practically makes me want to hop on a pyre and light a match.

“Moonshiner” – Roscoe Holcomb

“The Wandering Boy” – Roscoe Holcomb

DOOM METAL SPELUNKER

2009-05-11T07:57:00.011-04:00

Here's a tale that readers of The Driftwood Singers may find familiar: a curious writer takes a trip into the sub-basement of heavy metal and lives to tell about it. A look at Boris and Sunn O))) in this week's New York magazine.

Meanwhile, Dewey Dell and I saw the Japanese psych rockers Ghost over the weekend. We're too old to be standing on our feet for that long, but I have to say, they were really sensational. They had the cello player/singer from freak-folkers Espers with them, a woman who looks like a hollow-eyed Gilda Radner in an Edward Gorey skit. They played all manner of Japanese wood instruments and also clarinet and saxophone to build these expansive psychedelic suites that sounded like Fairport Convention and Jefferson Airplane and Can, but all of it off by whatever subtle number of degrees that Eastern culture is off from Western. The singer/shaman, Masaki Batoh, was a quiet force of mysticism, swinging what looked like a wooden lantern on the end of a rope and producing a ghostly drone, swaying about like he was in a trance. And when guitarist Michio Kurihara, who I discovered through his work with doom metallurgical stars Boris, went into his off-the-chain solos, it was like you were driving through an electrical storm at night, except later you realize you're in that submarine in Fantastic Voyage and you're actually inside the nerve center of a wizard's brain. Here's some hazy pictures I took using my new iPhone (click through for larger versions).

Ghost - Hazy Paradise

The Curious Case of Scott Walker

2009-05-05T21:48:00.009-04:00

My dear wife and I saw the Scott Walker documentary 30 Century Man recently, and it left me befuddled and bemused. Many of you may be familiar with the Walker Brothers, thanks to oldies radio (I heard the song included below the other day whilst perusing the used clothing and records at Goodwill). They weren't brothers, and none of them were named Walker. But that was swinging London in the '60s, I guess. Scott was born Noel Scott Engel in Hamilton, Ohio, and found pretty major success and fame in England as part of the aforementioned group. Scott was clearly the auteur, the artistic one, and couldn't stand the strictures of pretty-boy pop stardom for long. Before you could say "Jaques Brel", he was off on his own, recording album after album with only his first name and a number as the title. Pretentious? You betcha. Here's a sample song title, from Scott 4: "The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime"). And dig these lyrics from "It's Raining Today", off of Scott 3: "It's raining today/And I watch the cellophane streets/No hang-ups for me". It's like the Carpenters for denizens of the Left Bank.

The Walker Brothers eventually reunited and put out a few albums in the latter half of the Seventies; one of them is called Nite Flights (David Bowie, one of the famous or semi-famous Scott fans featured in the documentary, included a song entitled "African Night Flight" on his album Lodger, which I suspect is a tribute). The stuff from Nite Flights that they put in the doc sounded pretty good to me, but the album is out of print and prohibitively expensive so I probably won't own it anytime soon (unless I happen to stumble upon it in the crazy cat lady's store). In the last twenty-five years or so Scott has only recorded sporadically--he's the Thomas Pynchon of pop, occasionally surfacing to lob another musical missive at a largely unresponsive public (which doesn't seem to bother him very much).

I was struck by a few thoughts while watching 30 Century Man: it's probably not a very good idea to have people listen to music and film them while they're doing it (does anyone really want to watch Radiohead listen to the music of Scott Walker? Not me!); a side of beef makes an intriguing visual statement in the recording studio, but it's not the best percussion instrument (take a listen to "Jolson and Jones", from the 2006 album The Drift, and you be the judge); and is it possible to get around that vibrato of his? It's pretty off-putting to me, disturbingly so. "Jolson and Jones" is nightmarish, there's no other word for it. (It also features the braying of a donkey). It's like one of the people featured in the documentary said--he finds a chord, and then finds the dischord. (You gotta love the line "As the grossness of spring lolls its head against the window", though). This is music for a bad, bad trip--a far cry from the perfect pop

of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", which I prefer. I know he's considered to be a brilliant artiste by some, but still. He comes across as a thoughtful, intense guy in the film, and his music is definitely unusual, but I find it borderline unlistenable, and therein lies a problem--it all but screams, "Listen to this! This is difficult, brilliant music, and you should listen to it simply for that reason!" It's kind of hard to believe these two songs were done by the same person. Maybe it's persons.

The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore--The Walker Brothers

Jolson and Jones--Scott Walker

Got a Bag of Red Man and a Bottle of Beaujolais

2009-05-02T17:55:00.003-04:00

Being ahead of your time in 1989 could mean any number of things. It could have meant that you were making the kind of bad rap-rock garbage that became prevalent 10 years later in the 90s. It could have meant you were a testosterone-spewing proto-nu-metal meat head. But in the case of Urge Overkill, I think it meant something about understanding the fundamental silliness of all the established big-rock gestures while at the same time realizing the transformative power of the bombast. Instead of signing on for the punk-grunge Dogma-style refutation of stagecraft and riffage, UO came up with some noms de rock, put on medallions and jumpsuits and pretty much fused arena preening and hooks with the sonic sneer of Chicago noise rock. These guys were rocking ascots and cummerbunds, smoking cigars and hoisting snifters, long before anyone thought that was okay. I’m feeling nostalgic, I guess, and so I’ve got to share – these tunes are fist-pumpers and booze-swilling anthems. If Polvo warned their fans that they’d “just got a sitar, so be prepared” on Celebrate the Next Dark Age, Urge Overkill went practically as far, maybe further, by rocking the fake-sitar-sound guitar solo on “Positive Bleeding.” I still find myself thinking of the Darkness and the Hold Steady when listening to these. A weird midpoint.

“A Ticket to L.A.” –Urge Overkill

“Out on the Airstrip”- Urge Overkill

“(Now that’s) the Barclords” – Urge Overkill

“Positive Bleeding”- Urge Overkill

Exit Reality

2009-05-01T12:47:00.003-04:00

Hearing Rodriguez’s debut record when it was re-issued last year served to rekindle the idea that not everything had been dredged up and pawed over yet – there’s still gold in the hills, you just got to dig. The people at Light in the Attic are sonic saints in my book. Selflessly preaching to the barnyard animals, mortifying the flesh to fortify the ear holes. Light in the Attic is releasing Rodriguez’s sophomore record from 1971, Coming From Reality (out next week), a genius title, I think you have to agree for its ambiguity. (Is the music rooted in reality, or are we entering a realm outside of reality?) And title of this track – “Heikki’s Suburbia Bus Tour Ride” – sounds like something from the coffee and bongwater-caked scrapbook of Robert Pollard. Rodriguez still sounds a lot like Donovan here, but the folkie troubadourisms of Cold Fact (his first record) have given way to a more softened soft-rock pantheism. He sounds like Dion. At the rate he’s going, his third record will likely just sound like Don, which will be cool, too.

“Heikki’s Suburbia Bus Tour Ride” -- Rodriguez

King and Queen

2009-04-25T22:47:00.020-04:00

This record -- Juju Music by King Sunny Adé and His African Beats (1982) -- is amazing. It's hard to believe I've gotten this far into life without hearing it, but I got it on vinyl today for $1 at a yard sale and it's like I just heard Bitches Brew for the first time or tripped upon a bootleg of a secret jam session involving Animal Collective and Steve Miller Band. At times it sounds like drums/space for Mensa members. Other times like Blues for Allah as interpreted by a supergroup composed of Lee Scratch Perry and Yes. Or it's as if Girl Talk is blending together rare outsider funk samples from Ohio and later it turns out it's just one band playing all the samples and they're Nigerian. You get the idea. A revelation.

Sunny Ti De Aribya - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats

Mo Beru Agba - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats

Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats << If you just want to dip your toe, start here.

Samba/E Falabe Lewe - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats

The more I've listened to Betty Davis, the closer I've come to deciding that she is a major musical figure. Majorly unsung, certainly. I can't think of anyone else who sounds like her. It's funk rock stretched to near-Beefheartian looseness, the singing just wig-out, bat-shit crazy, almost 3D. She wields estrogen power like a rocket-propelled grenade. Booty will move. The bass player on this track (Larry Graham, from Sly & the Family Stone) is so monstrous, so assertive and in tune with Davis' funk, it's like they're having an affair behind Miles's back.

Don't Call Her No Tramp - Betty Davis

40 Years Too Late

2009-04-20T23:02:00.012-04:00

"I'm So Sick of the 21st Century." Now there's a sentiment I can get behind. This song makes the case for Younger Brother Complex as indie rock attitude, guys shamelessly copping Dylan vocals and Strokes riffs, but in the noble pursuit of hating the present they've inherited. It's like they just threw up their hands and gave in to their older brother's continual arguments that the new shit sucks and it used to be better and he was there back in the day and they weren't. Ipso facto, you suck. I feel almost guilty about it now, beating on the brats, invoking fogy precedent to bolster superiority. But the honesty here somehow makes it sound fresh. I'm feeling nostalgia for things I've never known. It's funny because it's true.

I'm So Sick of the 21st Century - Radical Sons (link fixed)

Dead Horses Beaten Here: Nick Lowe!

2009-04-17T12:34:00.009-04:00

I know, I know: Enough already with the Nick Lowe! After writing 10 or so posts on him, I should take the crickets-chirping silence from my colleagues as a sign that they simply aren't on board for his idiosyncratic genius. But give him one more chance! Or in this case, five more. Five songs, below, each a polished gem from an alternate Top 40 universe where the IQ of the listening public is about 50 points higher. What's interesting about Lowe's 1984 album, Nick Lowe & His Cowboy Outfit, is that it's clear he's actually responding to the Top 40 radio of the time. In some of these songs you'll hear bits of Dire Straits, Springsteen, Billy Joel, Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, all reconfigured with Lowe's pop classicism. My read of the cover of Lowe's album is that he's saying, "OK, move over and let me show you blokes how this is done." Gotta love the hoisting of the slacks. A pub scrapper with a pop hook. In "Love Like a Glove," it almost seems like he's writing a better Billy Joel song than Billy Joel can write. In the case of "Half a Boy and Half a Man," I think there was actually a counter-response a year later with Dire Straits' "Walk of Life" and John Fogerty's "Centerfield" (listen to Nick's song: there's just no way these guys didn't hear it). The stuff from The Rose of England sounds more like his take on The Byrds, almost the blue print for Teenage Fanclub.

>>> DOWNLOAD THESE FIVE SONGS HERE <<<<

From Nick Lowe & His Cowboy Outfit, 1984:

Love Like a Glove - Nick Lowe

The Gee and the Rick and the Three Card Trick - Nick Lowe

Half a Boy and Half a Man - Nick Lowe

From The Rose of England, 1985:

Everyone - Nick Lowe

The Rose of England - Nick Lowe

[Note: If I don't get some feedback on these songs, I'm going to have to continue my Nick Lowe jihad for a few more weeks. Whether that's a promise or a threat is up to you!]

New (Oxford) Speedway Boogie

2009-04-12T02:15:00.006-04:00

Lefty, you'll like this: After I read your post, Mrs. F.L. and I got into the car to go somewhere, and we turned on the radio. Wouldn't you know: "Truckin'" was playing, and we immediately heard the most oft-quoted line in Dead history: "What a long strange trip it's been". Not only that, but I was looking at the grid of photos from the NYT project you mentioned, and I clicked on one at random. It was from the Oxford Speedway, Maine shows in July of 1988--the first time I ever saw the G.D. Wow, man. (No, but seriously, you gotta admit that's a little weird). There were probably, oh, 90 thousand people at that show. Pretty overwhelming. I only ever saw 'em one other time, at the Cap Center outside D.C. that same year. I remember meeting the Rainbow People, who kind of freaked me out. One of them was stirring a huge pot of stew or something, and he was using a canoe paddle. (There's an image that'll stick with ya). My friends and I were staying in a tent, and somehow I got stung by some sort of caterpillar while I was tripping. I remember looking down and seeing a huge welt on my arm. (I'm serious--it really happened. It wasn't a hallucination or anything. Really.)...I guess that would qualify as a "bad trip".

I think the first time I heard the Dead was when the older of my two sisters was living at home for a while after graduating from college--she had the two-record Long Strange Trip best-of collection, and she would play it from time to time. I must've been a freshman in high school. I remember hearing the line "We can share the women, we can share the wine" and thinking "That doesn't seem right..." but I liked the music anyway. Later on in my high school years a friend made a tape of Live Dead for me and I listened to it quite a bit. I went through an anti-Dead period after getting into other stuff, but I eventually came back around and wound up really liking American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. I have to say, "Box of Rain" is one of my faves. I guess I've always been more of a studio-album guy instead of a bootleg-tape guy (although I do have a copy of the Oxford Speedway show somewhere).

I like this cover a lot (it was on the Masked & Anonymous soundtrack). Some nice guitar work from ol' Jerry. Quite lovely, really.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Dead Days

2009-04-11T16:47:00.017-04:00

If you haven't seen it yet, you better check out this photo project assembled by the New York Times (god bless'em) in which they invite readers to send in their personal photographs from Grateful Dead shows. It takes you on this great, faded-glorious and democratic journey through the years-long subculture of space noodling and noodle dancing. If you were ever part of it, you'll invariably see some snapshot of your own youthful past. In my case, the late 80s/early 90s, before it all went kaput. In the captions, they never once mention drugs, but you can plainly observe that almost everyone in the pictures is stoned. Though I still have lingering feelings of embarrassment and self-loathing about my Grateful Dead past, I figured we should talk about this, because it's funny and we're old now. And we're all friends here, right?

I first heard the Dead when a stony, crusty friend played "Dire Wolf" on a cassette tape in my dorm room in 1989. I immediately hated it. Sounded like bad country music. Then I went to an off-campus party a week later where the first thing I saw was a sundress-draped girl putting mushrooms on a peanut butter sandwich. The guys who owned the house, Will and Dave, were campus legends for having seen more Dead shows and taken more acid than anyone ever should or could. Their black Labrador retriever was named Space. Next thing I knew I was taking my 14th bong hit in a 30-person hippie circle in a tapestry-covered living room while listening to "Going Down the Road Feelin' Bad" and I was hooked (the abundance of smiley-flirty bra-less girls didn't hurt). In any case, within six months I had my own case of bootleg tapes. I saw them for the first time at Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts in July 1990. We had bought some tickets from a scalper in a McDonald's not far down the road. It was 95 degrees out and we drank beer and smoked pot and then scored some whippet balloons, which basically put me into a wobbly, tweaked-out first-man-on-the-moon condition while I stumbled around the scorching, dusty parking lot gawking at the dirty hippie bazaar. Next, we met a seedy guy in a red VW who was selling large quantities of acid. My friend bought a sheet while I kept a bloodshot eye out for the fuzz. As if. The tabs had blue unicorns on them. I took one about 30 minutes before showtime. My friend and I got in line, giddy. The ticket-taker tore my ticket to see if it was real -- it wasn't! Of course it wasn't. My head kind of imploded temporarily and I stumbled away in a confused daze, back into the now-explosively chaotic parking lot. My friend and I decided to wander around separately and meet up later. Ha! Minutes later I was offered a sandwich from a random dude sitting in a small circle of hippies next to another VW bus. I sat down and next to me was an old quasi-homeless burnout in his late 40s with a bandanna around his head. He was rocking back and forth and complaining nonstop about his miserable life and how everything had gone wrong for him. His story struck me like waves of emotions pounding on a rock. Vibes. Sad, pathetic ones. I asked him if he wanted a hug. He did. "I'm sorry, man," I said, hugging him as the smoke from tofu hot dogs burning on the mini-grill wafted over us. It was as incredibly intense as it was ridiculous. I got up and wandered around some more until I saw my car. I got in and locked the door. I wrote in my notebook for maybe an hour and a half -- drawings, poems, observations, philosophical ramblings. Eventually I went looking for my friend. When I found him, we heard tell they were about the let people into the show for free for the final 45 minutes. We rushed into the gaping coliseum door and ran up some stairs and the next thing I knew I was staring out at 90,000 people roaring and sparkling like confetti. Helicopters circled the sky shooting purple laser beams. The stage swirled. Jerry was a solitary speck. Goin' down the road feelin' bad... They closed with "We Bid You Goodnight," which I loved. When we got back to the car, everyone was wasted and I was the only one fit to drive. Me! I remember how much concentration it took to keep the tail lights in front of me from fanning together into fractal patterns. I had to slap myself and roll down the windows. We drove all night up I-95 to get home to Maine. The clouds in the dawn sky kept forming Jerry Garcia faces with long flowing beards (that's when I knew my brain was tapped out of interesting hallucinations). The boy that my parents saw the next day was sunburned, bleary, greasy, wearing beads and a dumb steal-your-face t-shirt and generally giving off a bad funk. Two days later my dad found the notebook lying around in my room and read it. Let's just say there was a crisis around the Lefty homestead until I returned to college (where my friend still had the sheet of acid and we both nearly failed out that semester as a result). I stopped listening to the Grateful Dead around 1993 and have since dipped back only briefly now and then. It's hard to separate the songs from the memories. But hearing "Attics of My Life" while peaking on acid was a highlight of my youth that I like to remember. Eyes closed, I soared through a white marble palace of multicolored windowed vortexes and was dipped in a golden lake of infinity. Felt pretty good.

You also don't want to miss this related Times article, which takes you down the wormhole of Grateful Dead taping and "best show ever" arguments among hardcore heads and how the myths of Cornell '77 and other "greatest shows ever" actually occurred because of non-musical events (when a sound engineer's home went into foreclosure, hundreds of hours of beautifully-mixed original tape were sold off, including Cornell '77). The podcast that goes along with it is four Deadhead nerds, including Ben Ratliff, geeking out in a way that is simultaneously embarrassing and awe-inspiring.

If you've got a story -- and don't lie, you know you do -- post it.

Eternal Uplift

2009-04-11T12:39:00.004-04:00

I interviewed Brendon Massei, aka Viking Moses, not too long ago. We talked about, among other things, the saint-like genius of Dolly Parton. The Viking Moses cover of “I Will Always Love You” is a beautiful profound and skeletal thing, like he turned a Whitman’s sampler into a piece of Shaker furniture. Going back and looking through the Driftwood archives here, I’m shocked, and a little embarrassed that we’ve not featured Dolly here. I was telling Massei about “For the Love of Dolly,” a fascinating documentary about 5 super Dolly Parton fans. The film captures both the unrealistic devotion of some of Parton’s biggest admirers – a couple of whom are mentally and emotionally impaired in one way or another -- but also Dolly’s surprising humanity in dealing with must at times be creepy levels of fan obsession. I remember when they re-issued a handful of deluxe editions of classic Dolly a few years back – Jolene, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Coat of Many Colors and others – reading up on her, one was struck by how many hundreds of songs she’d written, including dozens of hits and great tunes. It’s easy to forget that Dolly is on par with Willie and Merle – don’t try to give me any attitude about that because I won’t hear it – because one gets blinded by the boobs and rhinestones. I just got a re-issue of 9 to5 recently. It’s a record I’d not listened to much, but there are gems. One thing about Dolly that always perplexed me was the way that some of her songs seem to evoke the melodies of other classic tunes – “Jolene,” for instance, always reminds me of Dylan’s “Wedding Song” off of Planet Waves, and with someone like Dylan, you never know who got where first (both came out in 1974) – and I’ve never known if she was soaking up other people’s tunes or vice versa. Don’t really care, I guess. These two tracks are mysterious. “Working Girl” reminds me of one of those weird Neil Young cromag disco/Kraftwork tunes, the plodding eighth notes in the verse with clipped vocals, the slightly out of place wailing guitar mini-riffs, and the general country template. I love the themes of uplift, the of-the-people vibe, the return to constant love. “You Know That I Love You” sounds like Brian Adams and Mutt Lang might have stewed in its juices (gross, I know) for a while.

“Working Girl” - Dolly Parton

“You Know That I Love You” -Dolly Parton

“Jonas Boys” – Viking Moses

Like the Corner of My Mind

2009-04-09T21:40:00.009-04:00

Hey Frankie Lee, remember when we saw Willie Nelson at Tramps back in the '90s and we smoked some grass and everybody was really rowdy and drunk and it was one of the best shows ever? That's the night we realized Willie was playing jazz guitar, his riffs like Charles Mingus bass solos played on a Spanish guitar.

And, Frankie, remember when we saw Gillian Welch and David Rawlings open for Whiskeytown in that tiny club in the East Village? And we couldn't believe how great they were? How amazing Rawlings' guitar playing was? What was that place called? I think I got drunk and mooned some people in the park afterwards.

And Mr. Poncho, remember when we (again) were smoking grass in my apartment in Fort Greene and Dewey was there and we were inventing the prototype of the Drift-o-tron and Dewey put on Gillian Welch's cover of "Hickory Wind" and it was the heaviest, most devastating thing ever? And Dewey kind of won the contest?

I started out younger
At most everything
All the riches and pleasures
What else could life bring
But now when I'm lonesome
I always pretend
That I'm gettin' the feel of
Hickory Wind

Anyway, I was thinking of olden, golden days. Later, Mr. Poncho and JP Mystery and Dewey and I all went to see Willie together. More jazz. No weed though. Yesterday I was was watching a video on my iPod of the last concert Elvis gave before he died. He was bloated and puffy, six weeks from death. In it he had an assistant handing him white scarves, which he would put around his neck to collect a little sweat, then fling into the screaming audience. Imagine where all those scarves are now. In grandma's attic. In somebody's ex-brother-in-law's sock drawer. All the years combine, they melt into a dream...

Hickory Wind - Gillian Welch

Elvis Presley Blues - Gillian Welch

Young & Innocent Days - The Kinks

Stella Blue - Willie Nelson

At A Loss For Words

2009-04-08T10:41:00.006-04:00

I don't know, sometimes I just...I mean, I can't...you know. It's just hard to...I mean, this is...oh, never mind.

Homely Girl--The Chi-Lites

Elvisland

2009-03-31T13:29:00.010-04:00

In perhaps the biggest book-reading feat in my recent adult life, I finished the two-volume Elvis Presley biography by Peter Guralnick last week. All I can say is, it was a devastating experience. You can't come away from reading that much about Elvis Presley and not be a little bit obsessed with Elvis Presley. He's such a genre unto himself, it's almost pointless to try explaining how all-encompassing and metaphorical he is in American life and history, but suffice to say, more books could be written, probably are being written, and probably should be. The most obvious takeaway: He had a massive virgin/whore complex, and consequently also a bifurcated sense of America, a God-fearing Southerner of the Nixon-majority stripe who toted his collection of honorary police badges around with him in a leather bag, but also an Aquarian-age sexual libertine and man of social justice for whom jeweled bat capes, Edwardian collars and gold-plated belts were as American as apple pie. The center could not hold. It's sick, but there's no end to the pleasure in reading about a man who bedded every 16-year-old he could get his mitts on while popping enough speed to kill a horse and injecting himself with Demerol every day -- and then spending his off-hours singing gospel hymns, praying with the same 16-year-old girls and regaling anyone who would listen with stories of his dearly departed mother.

What you'll find in the video clip above is astounding, to say the least. The bass playing by Jerry Scheff, who had at one time played with Coltrane and was generally regarded as a jazzhead, is the pulsing, crazy-fingers heart of Elvis stage act. I'm pretty sure this is from one of a string of hugely successful Vegas shows he did at the Hilton. He's not yet completely insane with drugs and depression yet -- not yet spending every day in a 30-foot bed drowning in prescription pills (prescribed by his own personal Dr. Feelgood) -- but you can see the eccentric signs of coming madness, including the karate master delusions and winking self-loathing. Knowing the detailed back story allows you to see layer upon layer in every moment. Caught in a trap. I can't walk out. Because I love you too much. It's savagely entertaining. Once you get past minute 2:30, you're off to the races. Just watch.

You Know Who's Great? Nick Lowe

2009-03-28T20:51:00.023-04:00

[Postscript added!]

You know how some Native-Americans assigned people "animal spirit" names to honor their connection to nature? If people were assigned pop spirits instead, honoring their connection to the sacred stereo, I think I'd be He Who Digs Nick Lowe. For me, it's the whole romantic disposition, the scalpel-sharp wit, the air-tight hooks, the warm, distinct production and wide-ranging genre-hopping -- it all adds up to a kind of musico-spiritual kinship. (Not that I'm worthy, but I try to live up to the example of my pop spirit.)

This was hammered home once again when I found Nick the Nife (1982) in a vinyl bin up in New Hampshire a couple weeks ago. Funny story, that: I was in a place called Bull Moose Records, which is a regional chain started in Brunswick, Maine, in 1989. I only know this because I moved to Maine in 1989 and was wandering around the sleepy village a few weeks before starting college when I found a tiny music shop on a back street with two greasy Bowdoin grads on the floor opening cases of new cassette tapes. The store was probably 14 feet by 14 feet, carpeted, florescent lights overhead, and the sole product was cassette tapes. I remember the guys were living in the back room in sleeping bags. It was barely a store, really. I was a new kid in town but happened to have a superior attitude about punk rock and so I started up a conversation, jibber-jabbering about Bad Brains and wiling away the afternoon trying to be cool. I wanted them to like me and I bought a Sonic Youth cassette. I think I probably showed up every day for the rest of the summer, too.

Well, you know how this story ends: They have this massive chain of record stores now. And they're great shops, too, lots of vinyl, packed with bored college kids wiling away their afternoons surfing the bins. What's the Maine motto? The way life should be. Anyway, I found this amazing Nick Lowe album there and now have to listen to these three songs over and over and over and over again because they're just so damned frickin perfect.

Heart - Nick Lowe

Let Me Kiss Ya - Nick Lowe

Raining Raining - Nick Lowe

And check out the completely different version of "Heart" from the Nick Lowe/Dave Edmunds supergroup Rockpile that came out the year before, it's also sensational:

Heart - Rockpile

Finally: I also found a vinyl copy of Rod Stewart's Never a Dull Moment (1972) at a used book store down the block and was rewarded with that increasingly rare music-lovers high that junkies absolutely need to live: a song that captures that mysterious amalgam of nostalgia and triumph and hits that least-expected-to-be-hit button just when you need it hit and the way you need it hit:

Lost Paraguayos - Rod Stewart

Postscript: CAN IT BE POSSIBLE THAT NO ONE WAS ABLE TO ANSWER MY NICK LOWE TRIVIA QUESTION AND WIN MY CONTEST?!

Finale of Seem

2009-03-28T16:45:00.003-04:00

I’ve always thought it would be hard to come up with a list of core tenets for the NPR/Murrow feature “This I Believe.” Whenever I hear the segment I think: What do I believe? These days belief is more a matter of seeming and feeling than anything else. But one thing I believe is this: the Papercuts make lovely music. The sound of the organ is pervasive. You might want to say something about being “blanketed” or “bathed” in organ, except that that sounds kind of gross. You’re definitely awash in something. It’s a little like Stereolab as conceived by Brian Jones or Lee Hazlewood, factor in Mazzy Star, factor out the futuristic French disco, and divide by a vast sun-bleached desert.

“Future Primitive” - Papercuts

Life In This World Is But Preparation

2009-03-25T10:58:00.005-04:00

My wife and I are pretty big fans of the films of Werner Herzog. (We might be a little too into him, actually). He always seems to have interesting music in his movies; The White Diamond comes to mind (I'd recommend that one, fer shur). The other night we watched Little Dieter Needs to Fly, which is about a German fellow who joined the U.S. Air Force during the Viet Nam War, and was shot down and taken prisoner in Laos. He eventually escaped and was rescued, and seemed to cheat death many other times as well. (Herzog based Rescue Dawn on Dieter's story--it's the Hollywood version, I guess). I realized that there's usually something that borders on sadism in his movies--he had Dieter reenact certain episodes from his trials in the jungle; in The White Diamond he has the central figure go over the death of his close friend, in agonizing detail; in Grizzly Man there's a scene in which he listens to a recording of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend being mauled by a bear, while telling Treadwell's friend she should destroy the recording. I don't know, maybe these things are cathartic or something, and maybe "sadism" is too strong a word, but it's kind of disturbing nonetheless.

Anyway, the point of this post is that at the very end of Little Dieter Needs to Fly Herzog uses some of the best music I've ever heard, so I have to thank him for that. There's this amazing footage of acres and acres of desert covered in airplanes of all shapes and sizes. It just goes on and on, and it almost starts to look like an installation (it reminded me of the character in Don DeLillo's Underworld who is working on an art project in the desert, using old Air Force planes). The music is from Madagascar, and was recorded in the 1930s. Thanks to the great Yazoo label, there's a cd that I was able to go on Amazon and order, and I had it in a few days...there's something, well, awesome but disconcerting about that... The main instrument is called a valia, which reminds me a little of the gamelan (the woman in the picture above is holding one). You can hear some violin as well. There's something about the voices that's just so moving; the harmonies are so beautiful. Both of these tunes are by a group called Hiran'ny Tanoran'ny Ntao Lo.

Oay Lahy E (O! Dear Friend)

Mazava Atsinana Ny Any Aminay (Clear Bright Day In My Country)

Footwork

2009-03-20T23:33:00.001-04:00

I’ve always been kind of suspicious of exercise. Over the years I developed a lot of elaborate justifications for my hostility. First it was some sort of logical fallacy, or bogus rhetorical leap, equating it with sports and competition. If you sort of hated the football players and wrestling dudes in high school, you could lapse into hating everything they liked, just to keep your identity in line. If they liked beer, we liked weed. If they liked Guns N Roses, we liked Black Sabbath. It was easy. If they liked exercise, we liked not. Or maybe it had something to do with my genetic inheritance. My peasant feet were made for tromping through a potato field. They never looked good in slim running shoes. And then there was the whole muscular Christianity of the gym. Physical self-improvement seemed so unaccepting of the nature of things, of decrepitude. Not to mention the seven deadly sins, which eat had its charm.

Listen to “The Jogger,” a funny anti-jogging tirade from what must have been the early days of the past-time’s popularity. It was written by Shel Silverstein, as were many of the songs on Lullabys, Legends and Lies. Bobby Bare was kind of like a cross between Roger Miller and Jerry Jeff Walker, with boozy humor on the one side and boozy something else on the other.

Qualudes again, just for fun.

“The Jogger” – Bobby Bare

“Qualudes Again” – Bobby Bare

Ohne Krimi Geht Die Mimi Nie Ins Bett (and other songs from my youth)

2009-03-16T23:21:00.019-04:00

This happy looking fella is named Bill Ramsey, but to my siblings and me he'll always be Uncle Bill. He's originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, and my dad has known him for the longest time. Uncle Bill taught himself how to play piano when he was a teenager, and went into the Army in the '50s and was stationed in Germany. He started doing a lot of playing and recording there, and eventually became a really popular singer and entertainer, singing in both English and German. It's one of those unusual, quintessentially American stories. He'd always send us his records, so we'd sing along with these really catchy German pop songs (without having any idea what we were saying, of course). He had a sort of ladybug mascot he called Maria Kafer, so he would also send us things with ladybugs on them, or made to look like a ladybug (I remember a little ladybug watch with wings that opened to reveal the watch face). He'd come to visit us occasionally, and he always struck me as one of those larger-than-life characters--great sense of humor, warm and incredibly generous. My parents are still in touch with him (he's probably in his seventies now), and as a matter of fact they're going over to visit him this August. Recently my brother discovered that there are some Youtube videos of him, so have a look.

This ties in quite nicely with a recent find at the crazy cat lady's store, down in the small South Carolina town where

my in-laws live. (I've written about her & her funky bookstore once before). I swear, it's the oddest thing--I always find something of interest there, and tolerating the rank odors, dust and her nuttiness is always worth it. (Although I have to say that the odors weren't quite as bad this last time). This is a compilation of German bands from the early '80s. I loved the title and the cover, so I pretty much decided to get it regardless of what was on it. There's a track by Trio, who I think are pretty great (I have one of their albums somewhere--come to think of it, where the hell is that one?!?--that has the song "Broken Hearts (for you & me)" on it, which is such a great tune). They were the only band on the record that I knew, so that made it even more appealing. It's a funny little record, and it must be fairly obscure 'cause I couldn't find an image of it on the web. "Anna" must've been one of Trio's early hits, and it's kind of plodding & endearing at the same time. I like all the noises and the woman laughing in "Zauberstab". The third tune, I guess I just liked the lady's voice. This is definitely a cool, weird time capsule, so if you ever come across a copy of it you should take it home and curl up with it. You know how cuddly Germans can be.

Anna--Trio

Zuberstab--Zaza

Marmelade--Jawoll

That's Rich

2009-03-09T18:20:00.003-04:00

Share Your Love With Me - Charlie Rich

FLASHBACK: The link to Mr. Poncho's previously-issued Rich-ness has expired, so here it is again. I wish like hell I'd remembered this for last year's Snap, Crackle & Pop compilation, but you can rest assured it will appear this year, it's just too damned good:

I Lost My Heart to You - Charlie Rich

Joy, Thy Name is Lindisfarne

2009-03-02T10:35:00.002-05:00

These Last Strands of Man In Me

2009-02-28T19:22:00.001-05:00

They’re laying off a shit load of humans at the work place. We’re all meditating on our dispensability. It’s like corporate zen. People are playing the game of trying to figure out who will go first – pairs of peers congregate outside (the water cooler’s no longer safe, and, plus, they’ve stopped providing us with coffee, so there’s less of a reason to be there), whispering, some teary-eyed, some giddy from the whole facing-the-firing-squad-concentrates-the-mind effect. It’s like the opposite of fantasy sports leagues. Nightmare employment league. Who would you throw overboard? The rodent-like mind takes over, and the gnawing and clawing survival instinct starts to do shameful things. But I’m trying not to feast on carrion comfort. Like G. M. Hopkins says, “my chaff might fly.” It’s all in the wind.

“The Wind” – The Diablos

“Ill Wind”- Lee Morgan

DIARY OF THE DAMNED

2009-02-21T10:37:00.016-05:00

I'm two years, nine weeks and fives days from turning 40. I seriously re-wrenched the back injury I sustained from an Olympics-worthy agony of defeat moment while trying to (ahem) snowboard over New Year's. Apparently we're about to witness Great Depression II: Wraith of Khan and my 1 year old wants to wear flip flops in 20 degree cold. Of course this all means I've now become a full-on devotee of Doom Metal.

Now, this is a genre I barely knew existed until a year ago when I saw the Japanese practitioners, BORIS, but it was a nearly instant conversion experience. Allow me to quote from a 2006 New York Times article about Doom Metal to get across the general idea:

The music was unbelievably loud — so loud, in fact, that the sound waves made your rib cage vibrate like a stereo cabinet and your teeth literally rattle in their sockets — but the effect was somehow more meditative than violent. The overall experience was not unlike listening to an Indian raga in the middle of an earthquake.

In other words, it's like a yogic spa treatment in black Satan t-shirts. I had originally planned on getting expansive on this subject, but no amount of fancy words is going to open this portal for you. Just check your local listings and try radiating yourself in the therapeutic effects of extreme volume (but DO wear earplugs). Plus, there's some of the most ambitious, creative, thoughtful, experimental, highly-orchestrated and dare I say "progressive" music being made under the guise of "metal." Almost all of it can be categorized as "psychedelic" and, in fact, cannabis is a preferred supplement to the affair. Incidentally, a lot of the practitioners happen to be people (including some gals!) approaching my age and even beyond. A friend recently described himself as "imploding gracefully," and this is pretty much the soundtrack for that. It's the natural maturation of the Black Sabbath sound and I compare it to the evolution of comic books into graphic novels. But again, I've said too much already.

The recorded version of this music is utterly inadequate and a mere vapor of the live experience. But check out Southern Lord Recordings to get the flavor and plenty of free samples. Here's some choice doom, including the first song I ever heard live from BORIS, which gives you the general idea of what happened to me:

[Ed. Note: For the last week I've had the wrong link on this first track, thereby misdirecting dear readers to the wrong doom. If anybody's reading this, retry "Farewell" and experience what I was actually talking about. It's impressive!]

Farewell - BORIS

The Driver - Earth

Orosborous - Earth

PLAY LOUD

Don’t Doom Your Life To Death

2009-02-08T14:27:00.003-05:00

I semi-squandered much of my weekend. My laptop fried out last summer, and on it were a bunch of music files, many MP3s converted from old vinyl for the purposes of sharing with the digital peoples. Luckily, I had been in the habit of burning mix CDs of all the blogarbage I’d been accumulating. Only thing was – over the years, these discs were growing more and more unplayable on the temperamental (read: mental) CD players we have in our kitchen and in the living room. And since I’d only scrawled cryptic names on the discs and never actually made proper playlists, I never quite knew which disc had that righteous Thin Lizzy track and which had the overdriven transfer of that Merle Haggard song. So I spent much of yesterday re-ripping some of this stuff from the discs, and then manually going through the unlabeled tracks and renaming them. It was a big time-consuming data-dump, a file-storage reclamation worm hole. But there were a lot of gems I’d forgotten about. And I read in the NYT today that digital data storage/transfer/management is a new career line.

Maybe as folks lose their jobs they have more free time to fiddle around with all the digital clutter accumulating. That’s one of the points touched on at the end of a recent story by Ann Powers in the LA Times. The piece is, on the surface, a review of new music by Animal Collective, Bon Iver and recent stuff by the Fleet Foxes, but it’s also a meditation on the pack-it-in paradigm and an exploration of how technology can aid the effort to just burrow down in some creaky cabin and explore the wind-blown corridors of the mind. Powers cites a recent column from Arthur Magazine in which the writer speculated that the economic slow-down would bring about a beneficial slow-down in all kinds of psychic metabolisms. As liquidity firms up, so too does the frantic flow of time. We’ll all have a chance to chill, and grow shit once we get fired and the banking networks and international commerce just totally shits the bed. Time to take up needlework and gardening. Have a summer-long clam bake in PEI. Remember how to be all Quaker-like, quiet with yourself. I hope so.

In the meantime, with the stimulus plan needing a nudge, this bit of man-on-the-street economic philosophy from Swamp Dogg seems particularly apt. As he says, “there’s just a little time left.” I posted this one in the early days here, but it was a short-lived link, and I thought it warranted a re-up. Plus, end-times rants never get old.

“There’s Just a Little Time Left” – Swamp Dogg

Winter Tracks

2009-02-06T19:52:00.004-05:00

The Bottom Line - Big Audio Dynamite
Too Much Time - Captain Beefheart
So Much Better - Benji Hughes
Milk Train - Jefferson Airplane
Death Valley - BORIS
Let's Duet - John C. Reilly & Angela Correa
Madman - The Jayhawks
Have You Seen the Stars Tonight - Paul Kanter & Jefferson Starship
The Sinking Belle - sunnO))) & Boris featuring Jesse Sykes
Visions - Super Fox
Mobile Blue - Mickey Newbury
Mary Skeffington - Olivia Newton-John
Cocaine Lights - Phosphorescent
Minsmere Sphagnum/Medeival Seinese Acid Blues - Bevis Frond
1 Hour 1/2 Ago - Rain Parade
Satori Pt. II - Flower Travelin' Band
Blue Water - Percy Sledge

DOWNLOAD WINTER TRAX

Free and Clear

2009-01-25T16:06:00.003-05:00

I just learned about Jimmie Spheeris, in a quest for dusty unexplored corners of Soft Rock wilderness (cursory web searches failed to even find a Wikipedia page – the true proof of obscurity). My brother gave me Tom Moon’s “One Thousand Recordings You Should Hear Before You Die” and Moon gushes nice about Spheeris. There’s a lot of muskrat love flowing through this music. Spheeris was something like the male Joni Mitchell, writing tender art-folk complete suspect clarinet glissandos tootling through the mix. It’s nature-love music. These others come to mind: Carole King, Bread, Gary Snyder, James, Walt Whitman, John Phillips, America, Charles Wright, Chicago, John Denver, even Nick Drake (sort of a sunny, gay, Cali incarnation). (I think I just heard a line that said “Isn’t it sublime to lay you’re your load… This planet is a’swellin’ like a salty summer melon.”!!) Further web exploration indicates he may have been a Scientologist, which I kind of dig, and which may explain everything. Spheeris died in 1984. Get this for a dangerous confluence: he toured opening for the Moody Blues AND the Jeff Beck Group. He recorded with Chick Corea AND Jackson Brown. Potent.

These are from 1971’s Isle of View.

“Seeds of Spring” – Jimmie Spheeris

“I Am the Mercury” – Jimmie Spheeris

Negative Certainty

2009-01-18T21:12:00.004-05:00

Initially when planning the post about honorifics and songs about “Ladies,” I’d intended, as an aside, to include Neil Young’s “Borrowed Tune” off of Tonight’s the Night. “I’m singing this borrowed tune I took from the Rolling Stones,” he sings. The tune he borrowed was the one from “Lady Jane.” I guess the irony had never occurred to me that Neil Young came out and acknowledged that he’d jacked a melody from Mick and Keith, and he got away with it. Others haven’t been so lucky – like the Verve, not that they didn’t have it coming. The Stones weren’t always so up-front about their appropriations, not that they needed to be. They swiped what they liked, and if they could get away without paying royalties, they would. They certainly weren’t going to say, “I’m singing this song I borrowed from Slim Harpo.” But they sure did know what to steal, what to borrow and what to artfully model their work after. And some people outdid Jagger/Richards at their game. Chris Farlowe, at least, seems to have launched his career by covering the Stones.

I’ve been having something of a snowy sort out here this weekend. Muffins in the oven. Bunch a CDs in the rotation platter. I dug out an old Mojo Stones compilation and was struck by how awesome Farlowe’s cover of “Think” was. Then, all chance-like, I stumbled on this great Shuggie Otis tune and was reminded that Otis had allegedly been invited to audition for the vacant seat as guitarist in the Stones after Mick Taylor left the group. Evidently Otis decided to pass.

Also percolating in the wintry mix was this record by Dolorean. I’m down with dolore. And they keep true to their name. The record is called You Can’t Win, a title that deserves awards for its simple truth. Dolorean are definite miserablists, but that’s part of the up-lift. There’s something comforting about the negative certitudes of songs like “You Can’t Win” and “You Don’t Want to Know.”

“Think” – Chris Farlowe

“Knowing (That You Want Him)”- Shuggie Otis

“You Can’t Win” – Dolorean

“You Don’t Want to Know”- Dolorean

Reflections, Ruminations, Regurgitations

2009-01-12T11:09:00.008-05:00

Greetings, friends! (Sorry, I just couldn't resist). It's been a wild and wooly time, hasn't it, and I suppose it must be 2009. Yes, it sure is, quite so. I think I've joined the legions of Slow Bloggers (there was an article about it in the NYT recently--I'm forever seeking legitimacy)... So what did I learn, musically speaking, in the past year? Well, for starters, I got "turned on" to Terry Reid (by listening to the soundtrack to The Devil's Rejects, oddly enough), and boy, am I glad that he didn't become the lead singer for Led Zeppelin! (It was better for everyone involved, I'd say). This song is so damn beautiful it almost makes me cry. (I'm comfortable enough in my putative manhood to say that).
Brave Awakening--Terry Reid

I know, I know, I'm a little slow to see things sometimes, but I've finally come to realize the brilliance of ELO. This song is just about perfect, pop-wise. They out-Bee Gee the Bee Gees, if I may coin a phrase (sorry, Lefty!) But, you know.
Strange Magic--ELO

Oh, and by the way, had I mentioned how great AC/DC is? were? am? I'm talking about the Bon Scott years, of course. Fucking brilliant, my friends.
Problem Child--AC/DC

And my favorite song of 2008? This one, okay? It's, well, really good. Just go with it. (Nitpickers: The album was released in 2007, yes, but the single didn't come out until January of last year. So there).

Don't Stop the Music--Rihanna

Many Fat Men Listened

2009-01-01T14:13:00.002-05:00

I ended 2008 with a feat of holiday gluttony – all three meals on New Year’s Eve consisted of sausage. A chorizo and egg taco for breakfast, a spicy Italian sausage grinder for lunch, and kielbasa for dinner. It was unintended, but I can still take pride in it. The end of the year and the end of the holidays is a time to reflect on overdoing it, overeating, overdrinking. When it comes to eating, I like to think that I can sometimes pack it in – not like Jim Harrison or A.J. Liebling, but still, I can compete with most quahogs. The Times ran a piece yesterday about the alleged eating prowess of Diamond Jim Brady, and it contained this hopeful bit of information:

“The stomach … is simply the digestive system’s holding tank — ‘a receptacle equipped with the intelligence to meter out molecules to the intestine at a prescribed rate.’ While the intestine can’t handle an overload of molecules, the stomach, a highly elastic organ, can be gradually enlarged, via progressive overeating, to hold more and more food.”

So there’s something – stomach expansion – to look forward to for 2009. And here’s something more, a reminder from some mystic Canadians. The words are by Leonard Cohen and the music is by Buffy Sainte-Marie. It’s the first track off the record Illuminations, which has Buffy in full witchy-woman mode on the cover. The record also includes an “electronic score by Michael Czajkowski: realizes at the electronic studio of N.Y.U. School of the Arts. .. synthesized from the Buffy’s voice and guitar.” Let’s hope Buffy and Lenny were on to something, god is alive, magic is afoot.

“God is Alive, Magic is Afoot” – Buffy Sainte-Marie

PUT THIS IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT: HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

2008-12-23T09:53:00.008-05:00

Whelp, here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore, ringing in the yuletide and gettin' our dradle on, Kwanzaa stizz. Longtime readers of THE DRIFTWOOD SINGERS PRESENT know what that means: the return of the best compilation of vinyl rips this side of the Euphrates, SNAP, CRACKLE & POP. Believe it or not, we're up to VOLUME SIX, and this one's a doozy, chock full of moldy old pop gems of yesteryear, each lovingly transmogrified to zeros and ones from the original diamond-tipped stylus entering an inscribed modulated spiral groove on a specially-lathed disc of polyvinyl chloride (sounds dirty, doesn't it?). All said, you can't go wrong at the price of free.

To download the official CD cover, specially designed by professional designer Dewey Dell, you can can click

>> HERE <<

THEN! You can download all 24 songs in a ZIP file by clicking

>> HERE <<

Your humble (and generally humiliated) editors Mr. Poncho & Lefty spent months and years coming up with this stuff in consultation with Dewey Dell, JP Mystery, Frankie Lee and a secret star chamber of trogs chained to a radiator in a sub-basement in Minnesota. I, Lefty, was the final arbiter, mainly because nobody else would do it and Mr. Poncho is too deeply ensconced in the R&D lab, developing the next generation of DRIFTWOOD SINGERS and lovingly naming each one after a late 60s rock icon (welcome to the club, Keith!). Soon there will be more of us than there is vinyl to collect, listen to and ponder ponderously. Until then, here is what you'll find inside the latest edition of SNAP, CRACKLE & POP:

Good Times - The Persuasions (Street Corner Symphony, 1972)
Get Out of Denver - Bob Seger (Seven, 1974)
Don't Think Twice It's All Right - John Anderson (I Just Came Home to Count the Memories, 1982)
Fool Me - Joe South (Joe South, 1971)
Why Keep Breaking My Heart - Nina Simone (Wild Is the Wind, 1966)
Geno - Dexys Midnight Runners (Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, 1980)
Out of the Question - Gilbert O'Sullivan (Back to Front, 1972)
In Terms of Two - Chicago (Chicago VI, 1973)
The Good Love - Percy Sledge (I'll Be Your Everything, 1974)
When I Write the Book - Rockpile (Seconds of Pleasure, 1980)
Satin Sheets – Jeanne Pruett (Satin Sheets, 1973)
Rapid Fire - The Commodores (Motown Instrumentals, 1978)
Let's Go Get Stoned - Ray Charles (Crying Time, 1966)
Come Again? Toucan – Grace Slick (Manhole, 1974)
I Need You So - Freddy Fender (Rock'n'Country, 1976)
Back in My Arms - Robert Palmer (Pressure Drop, 1975)
Joe - Dusty Springfield (A Brand New Me, 1970)
This Flight Tonight - Nazareth (Loud'n'Proud, 1974)
Come On Over - Bee Gees (Main Course, 1975)
Running Back - Thin Lizzy (Jailbreak, 1976)
Robot - The Mighty Sparrow (Pussy Cat Party, 1979)
White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes, 2008)
Mole in the Ground - Pete Seeger (Birds, Beasts, Bugs & Bigger Fishes, 1955)
American Trilogy - Elvis Presley (Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite, 1973)

PLAY IT LOUD.

Lefty's TOP TEN ALBUMS in the Year of Our Lord 2008

2008-12-22T10:12:00.017-05:00

1. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes

2. Ponytail, Ice Cream Spiritual!

3. Benji Hughes, A Love Extreme

4. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals

5. Karl Blau, AM

6. Jamie Lidell, Jim

7. Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit, The Very Best

8. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War

9. The Hold Steady, Stay Positive

10. Pinataland, Songs for the Forgotten Future, Vol. 2

Given the annoying constraint of choosing only music made or released this calendar year -- an increasingly irrelevant category, the whole "present day" thing -- here they are, all ten. I'd like to have thrown in Bobby Charles, BORIS, Panda Bear, early Bob Seger, the 2007 Blitzen Trapper album and Robert Palmer's 1976 album Pressure Drop. But alas ...

Fleet Foxes is #1 simply because I kept putting it on the turntable and enjoying it immensely every time, especially "White Winter Hymnal," over and over again (easily the best song of the year).

Listen to it >> HERE << .

Ponytail, who I'm currently in love with, is the distilled essence of everything I love about rock and roll, Captain Beefheart as an exploding cigar that explodes into psychedelic confetti and punk estrogen and Walt Whitman run through a RAT distortion pedal with amps on 11.

LISTEN to "Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came from an Angel)".

Girl Talk is the best thing you can hear in a moving vehicle, period end of story don't argue. Also, he makes me realize I can love dirty rap music if it has Rick Springfield on it.

LISTEN: "Here's the Thing".

Benji Hughes is L-O-V-E and he's not afraid to let it show and also he's from Charlotte, NC, and he's not afraid to let that show either (maybe they're connected?).

LISTEN to "All You've Got to Do is Fall in Love with Me."

Karl Blau makes music so organic and introverted and gauzy and wobbly that you feel stoned even when you're not stoned, which is very pleasurable to hear, especially when you're baked.

LISTEN to "Stream."

I know not everyone can sign on for white man soul stylings, but if you can listen to "Another Day" by Jamie Lidell and not get an instant mood lift, then I must ask: what's wrong with you, pops?

I'll admit, Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit is the cheap way out: everything that's cool in the indie blog coolplex, but remixed as African music, featuring European production team Radioclit and Malawian-born, London-based singer Esau Mwamwaya.

Download the entire album for FREE right >> HERE << .

Erykah Badu channels the spirit of Rev. Jeremiah Wright with stoned-out-of-her-gourd, nutbag freak funk. Timely! The Roy Ayers sample on groove #1, "Amerykahn Promise," is just about as mack as you can get. You can hear the original 1977 sample, "American Promise," by Roy Ayers >> HERE <<.

LISTEN to "Amerykahn Promise."

This is the year I came around to the Hold Steady in a big way, even though everyone else decided Stay Positive wasn't as good as the last one and I was late to the party (still, you can't argue with these lyrics: "it was back in the day back when things were way different/when the Youth of Today and the early Seven Seconds/taught me some of life's most valuable lessons").

LISTEN AND WATCH this fan-made montage to "Stay Positive" right >> HERE << .

Pinataland aren't just any band -- they're friends of mine! Ironically, that makes my judgment on them even clearer, not cloudier. Their 2008 album wasn't given nearly enough publicity or appreciation or, for that matter, exultation and hosannas, so I herewith rectify that error by telling you that they're marvelous. And sui generis. And just plain old generous. Also: melodic, brainy, old-timey and new-timey at the same timey.

You can LISTEN >> HERE << .

[Editor's note: Previously, TV on the Radio's Dear Science was posted as No. 10. I liked the album, but I didn't love it. Though it certainly has pioneering soundz and arrangements, the record lacked emotional resonance for me. They're Tin Men compared to Benji Hughes. Still, I'm giving them the bonus track, No. 11, as a consolation prize for being so popular.]

The Honor System

2008-12-13T15:08:00.003-05:00

Rock and roll likes to wear its debased status proudly. Fantasies of class imbalance play out in sartorial themes. The Stones are always singing about their torn and frayed coats, how tattered they are. Derelict characters flaunt their thread-bare scenarios. Stained overcoats, ripped jeans. The apotheosis of scuzz. I don’t have the feminist/Freudian firepower to totally excavate this idea, but there’s some kind of connection between thwarted worship of a pure feminine archetype and self-immolating male dissipation exemplified by shoddy duds. The pale white idol is put on a pedestal. The “drunken vagabond” croons after her. Chivalric wet dreams. I read that the Guardian stopped using honorifics last year in their official style guide. It’s something we miss out on here in the states – bogus titles, land-based systems of respect and unjustified privilege. Lords and ladies.(Pictured, "The Lady and the Monkey").

“Lady Geneveve” – The Kinks

“Lady Eleanor” - Lindisfarne

“Lady Jane” – Rolling Stones

Three Is the Luckiest Number That You've Ever Heard

2008-12-06T12:18:00.030-05:00

1. My pal Hector and I were discussing how both our wives indoctrinated us in 1970s light rock, starting with Olivia Newton-John and ELO. As lifelong music snobs, we'd shunned this music for years, but our Achilles Heel, it turned out, was a childhood attachment to Grease, which secretly inculcated us in ONJ and served as the gateway drug to Xanadu and ELO. As we learned about l-o-v-e, of course, we gravitated to music made for adults, stuff with a certain romantic and progressive/feminine emotionality, i.e. willowy women and bearded men in satin and denim who sang about feelings, nothing more than feelings. I've covered some of this in previous posts, how certain childhood touchstones direct our personal tastes and how certain 70s artists (Bee Gees) erased sexual and racial barriers in ways that probably made Barack Obama inevitable. (Yeah, you read me right: I just said that the Bee Gees made Barack Obama possible.)

And so: Robert Palmer, a member in good standing of the late 70s soft rock industrial complex. After his two-dimensional 80s outings, he's probably nobody's idea of a visionary or even an interesting person. And yet his 70s blue-eyed R&B period is full of unexpected pleasures and subterranean connections, the godfather to modern blue-eyed belters Jamie Lidell and Robin Thicke. On his second LP, Pressure Drop from 1976, he's got members of Little Feat and The Meters laying down some of the tightest funk grooves ever put on tape, with Palmer as the suave band leader cum sex symbol. This is music that speaks more to the body than the mind, but that's not a fault, it's the point. The result, in this household, is presently napping in her crib.

You can download the entire A side of the LP HERE, wherein you'll hear:

Give Me an Inch
Work to Make It Work
Back In My Arms (<-- fantastic)
River Boat
Pressure Drop

[Duly noted: Robert Christgau, who detests Palmer, was compelled to improve his grade of Addictions, Vol. 1 because his wife really likes him -- kind of says it all, no?]

2. Until now, I never really liked The Bad Plus. For me, their jazz-nerd deconstruction of "Iron Man" is really interesting and clever, but a tad studious and inside-jokey, like two protractors and an abacus making fun of a moss-covered stone. "Ha!" What they've lacked, for me, is emotional resonance and a certain lyricism. But on their latest record, For All I Care, they've brought in a relatively unknown singer named Wendy Lewis and injected something lyrical and, importantly, feminine. It's still a very "cool" sounding album and there's plenty of pomo jazz-boy quantum mechanics going on, but the excellent cover choices (Bee Gees, Roger Miller) and the need to stifle it and let the singer sing have penned in the Bad Plus's more obtuse impulses. And Lewis's singing style never gets too mawkish, although she's not afraid to let a note croon when it needs to. For my money, this Yes cover is one of the best things to happen this year:

Long Distance Runaround - The Bad Plus

3. The crooked path between cabaret and rock is a treacherous one because the chances of falling into the adult contemporary ditch are very high. You may be surprised to hear this, but a master of threading the needle is k.d. lang, who I've only discovered in the last year. Her vocal presence is unbelievably warm and potent. Like The Bad Plus, she has a smart ear for good songs and, crucially, exquisite taste in arrangements and production quality. Her 1988 countripolitan album Shadowland is one of the best sounding albums produced in the last 20 years. And I discovered this cover, below, over the summer while trolling the CD collection of the hippie parents of a friend of mine. It's from 1997's Drag.

The Air That I Breathe - k.d. lang

My Sad-Eyed Lady of the Shoe Store

2008-12-01T20:32:00.015-05:00

As a writer of magazine profiles, one thing you're constantly asking is: What is the motivation of the protagonist? We know what he or she did, but why did he or she do it? But the same question also applies when you're writing about yourself. As in:

But why am I writing about Boz Scaggs?

Story: During summers in my college years I worked in a shoe store in Maine and one time I ended up holding the foot of Dan Quayle's wife Marilyn in my hand while two secret service agents hovered nearby. This was while her husband was still VP under Bush Sr. and I was putting different sized pumps on her. "How's that feel?" I'd ask, squeezing her toe. I also put a shoe on Julius Irving once. Size 14 boat shoes or something. Anyway, the assistant manager of this shoe store was a middle-aged blond who smoked those skinny Silk cigarettes for women and appeared, with her tired eyes, bad skin and heavy makeup, to have spent her twenties partying too much with the boys and now found herself 40-something and single. I was this college dork who after reading Dostoevsky thought he'd just invented existentialism, so we were world's apart. But she had a certain sad soulfulness to her and she loved music, so we always smoked cigarettes by the dumpster out back and talked about what we heard on WBLM, 102.9. It was vaguely flirty. So one day, as I was gassing on about the Grateful Dead or some "acid rock" shit I was listening to (as a result of my then-fascination with "drugs"), she said her favorite music was Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs. And I'll never forget my response: "Ack! Kerplewy! Ugh! Boz SCAGGS? Ew. No way. Blech." (Raitt's "Something to Talk About" was a huge hit that summer, so that was just a non-starter.)

But here's the truth: I couldn't have picked a Boz Scaggs song out of a lineup. Not even the hit, "Lowdown." I was just being a blowhard and she was speaking her heart. In retrospect I feel really awful about it and wish I could take it back, tell her I'm sorry and I really hope she found love and happiness in her life. Because I really LIKE Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs now.

I tell this story to set up the premise for why I like Boz Scaggs: low expectations. Ever since I asserted my ill-informed opinion that summer (based on my absolute certainty that I could not like the same music as this sad-eyed lady of the shoe store), I basically wrote off Boz Scaggs and just knew that if and when I finally heard him I'd absolutely hate his guts. But around the same time that I was discovering Philly soul from the 70s, I tripped upon Silk Degrees in a junk shop near my house and decided to give it a spin. See, by the time you're my age, 37, you've been wrong about so many things you just figure, 'What the hell, maybe I was wrong about this, too.' And it turned out I was wrong. At least relative to this falsely established opinion, which I'd used as a wedge issue in some early music nerd throw-down with a shoe store assistant manager.

So now for the ex post facto justification of Boz Scaggs: For the same reason I love late '7os Bee Gees, the way they blew up their pop hooks with Harold Melvin/Teddy Pendergrast/Billy Paul-style R&B grooves, I kind of loved Boz Scaggs' smoove groove, the sleek and slinky polish. And his lyrics really are better than average, sort of worldly wise -- like he'd partied a lot in his twenties, messed around with the wrong women and was looking for the love that would finally end the lonely years. See, it was adult and romantic and sexy and truly existential in a way that only people who had lived a little could truly get. It's a feel you don't necessarily understand when you're 22 and frying your cerebellum on acid rock. With Scaggs, the romance is right there in the title of his 1976 album, Slow Dancer, which came out right before he broke big with Silk Degrees and the hit "Lowdown." There's some poetry on the back of the LP and when I read it, I just can't help thinking of the secret dreams of a middle-aged blond smoking Silks out by the dumpster behind the shoe store:

i committed today.
bought some shoes
what a luxury also to
comment on my work 3
years ago slow dancer
is an image i grew up
with johnny helped me
learn to sing this is an
attitude like walking
doing the old left right
a few secrets hear some
romance a nod to some
old idols some idle lovers
some idle lovers

november 1976

And then the other day I was reading that before the producers of Saturday Night Fever hired the Bee Gees to pen the soundtrack, they were using Boz Scaggs numbers as the fill-in music. Makes sense. Listen, I'm not saying these are the greatest songs ever made. They're not. But if you're feeling lonely tonight, if you've seen a few things, a little too much, they might just surprise you.

You Make It So Hard (To Say No) - Boz Scaggs (from Slow Dancer)

There is Someone Else - Boz Scaggs (from Slow Dancer)

Georgia - Boz Scaggs (from Silk Degrees)

And why not, it's fucking great:

"Lowdown" - Boz Scaggs

The Enigma of Joe South

2008-11-29T16:17:00.002-05:00

I just read Joan Didion and Daryl Pinckney’s meditations about the meaning of the Obama victory in the New York Review of Books.

Joan Didion’s comments about the worrying implications of the “irony-free zone” surrounding Obama are worth stewing over for a bit. Didion has chronicled a lot of complex cultural and political change in America, never flinching from the troubling truth.

Speaking of troubling truths and zones of irony, I’m still not sure what zone Joe South is operating in for me. Probably trans-ironic, definitely post-, possibly bi-ironic. Not just plain old, that’s for sure. I’m definitely projecting some unreasonable hopes and expectations onto Joe South. I keep wanting him to be more than he is, and I keep being incapable of gauging whatever it is that he has been. From his record covers he looks out like a cross between Jeff Bridges and Brian Wilson, blessed-out, possibly cantankerous, maybe wasted.

Joe South’s records are almost worth buying for the merits of their liner notes alone. Lefty already expounded on this earlier. Here are a few lines from the back of “So the Seeds Are Growing”:

"Joe South is the sort of person who personifies his times and makes them beautiful.
Joe South is the sort of person who has seen the pain, the rage, the possibilities.
Joe South is the sort of person who has captured the passing moments of a world that’s changing every instant."

And, so, on the one hand, you come to this music looking for so much. What you get, on the surface, is somewhere in the Engelbert Humperdink/B.J. Thomas/Mac Davis zone. But, then you keep listening and looking, and you find something. Maybe it’s there. Maybe not. Check out the dobro slide, which is something like an overdriven kazoo, at the start of “Revolution of Love.” And the feverish string and horn arrangement ups the anticipation. There’s also a kinship to Lee Hazelwood and Bobby Gentry, a little Elvis, if the King was an acid casualty. Raspy soul singing. Reverb-heavy hand-claps. Hyper bass lines try to approximate grooviness with sheer pep. Funky cymbal pattern, heavy on the bell of the ride. It’s swampy. Not without cornmeal chunks. As he says, “The past is gone.”

“Revolution of Love” – Joe South

Life is Just Mythical

2008-11-16T20:56:00.002-05:00

Lefty asked for this one special. I posted a slightly crappier version of this here nearly three years ago, along with some whisper singing from Burundi and an unusual bit of early sampling from Joni Mitchell off of Hissing of Summer Lawns. Links are all dead now.

Oddly enough, just the other week I interviewed John Kelly, the performance artist who channels Joni Mitchell in his show Paved Paradise. He’s bringing his show to Hartford in January.

In going to search for this track, I was struck with the almost scary realization that I have four Nazareth records on vinyl. I’m pretty sure this all stems from a mixed tape that Frankie Lee made for me years and years ago which opened up on one side with “Razmanaz.” And I’m also pretty sure that it was Frankie Lee’s sis who mentioned the Nazareth version of “This Flight Tonight” in one night of epic drinking. So it all comes together, family style.

After re-listening to this a few times, alls I can say is fuck Chinese Democracy. The Scots had it down. Dig the senseless reprise of the battering-ram rhythm and riff. Immigrant Song. Baracuda. Whatever. You can picture the guys in the front line – singer holding a mic stand, bassist and guitarist, all standing in a row, rocking sideways on the balls of their feet, in time, choreographed you might say, as the crowd loses it. Gaelic aerobics. Did you know that the Youngs – Angus and Malcolm, of AC/CD – were originally from Glasgow before the family relocated to Australia? Explains a lot.

“This Flight Tonight” – Nazareth

Back To Ohio

2008-11-16T09:54:00.003-05:00

When they called the Buckeye State on election night, that was when we all knew it was over. Anyway you stacked it after that, the math was for Obama. So, be thankful for Ohio – Guided By Voices, Taft, Play-Doh, Bill Fox – it’s given us a lot. Add Blue Ash to the list. This one's for Lefty.

Power-pop fanatics already hold their debut, No More, No Less, one in high regard – naming it along with classics by Big Star, the Raspberries and Cheap Trick. There’s a little of whatever it was that made Mott the Hoople, Kiss and Motley Crue whatever it was they were. Maybe a kind of ingrown testosterone-thwarted glam androgyny, but with denim and bell bottoms instead of kabuki. Shades of steroidal power-playing evoke Blue Cheer and the Who. But Blue Ash – from Youngstown – released No More, No Less in 1973, a time when wankery and skin-tight buffoonery dominated rock music. Sticking to your guns about the glories of the three-minute song, tight harmonies, verse-chorus-werse, was kind of like preaching against free-market fundamentalism just a few years back. The record title -- No More, No Less -- is kind of a mission statement masquerading as a pithy chorus.

“Wasting My Time” – Blue Ash

The G Gnome Project

2008-11-09T20:07:00.003-05:00

I’ve been cranking this new-ish Love As Laughter all weekend. It gets my vote for rock song of the year. These guys traffic in the semiotics of slackness, but then they pull a sucker-punch on you, turning around to give you massive, monolithic arena rock moments, artfully mussed up with just enough noise and mutter to make you think they can’t really mean it. This tune has one of those Rock and Roll take-offs that gets me playing the air drums every time. The way the drums come in would get my vote for the Drunk McArthur Grant. The two-beat kick serves as a rhythmic hook for the song, very Zeppelin III. But the southern-fried 4 a.m., sonic Robert Frank-isms are very much from the Sticky Fingers/Exile family of classic rock products. I get twinges of Moonlight Mile. The DNA map gets even more complicated when I start to hear connections to Third-Eye Blind, just in the shameless fist-pumping-ness of it all. They confuse the scent with I-don’t-give-a-fuck Pavement riffs, thrown in to lead the dogs down the wrong trail. There are lyrics about In-A-Godda-Da-Vida and chariots, and stars and melting snow, and sending for people to tend to you.

“Konny and Jim” – Love As Laughter

He's In

2008-11-05T09:42:00.003-05:00

Let'em In - Billy Paul

And Then There Had Been Three

2008-11-01T09:42:00.002-04:00

Today marks the third anniversary of the Driftwood Singers Present. And I’m filled with feelings--shame, guilt, pride, awe, shock, anger, intestinal distress. There have been a lot of lessons learned, primarily regarding Lindisfarne, the Bee Gees, Stealers Wheel, Karl Blau, Robin Thicke, Bob Welch. Continued pioneering of the taste-transgressing frontier. Stimulated aural receptors. Ever-receding horizons. Burn-out artists. Pop culture credit-default swaps.

This is from the new one by the Viking Moses, with the void-probingly evocative title of The Parts That Showed. This music gives me all the feelings. Aches. Moved to tears. Consult-your-doctor kind of stuff. Pluperfection.

“Life Empty Eyes” – the Viking Moses

Ooh, It Makes Me Wonder

2008-10-31T00:34:00.005-04:00

But is it even close to being enough?

Seven Hundred Elves--Steeleye Span

Sub-Prime Scenario

2008-10-28T21:25:00.003-04:00

With the fundamentals of the soft-rock economy all cratered out, seeping thick plumes of sulfuric smoke, and with consumer confidence in the coke-pop sector showing signs of kamikaze-esque nose-diving, the northern branch of the Driftwood Singers Presents convened an emergency summit here at the Pioneer Valley retreat this past weekend. With one big cosmic credit-default looming, we clutched to moldy scraps of vinyl and malfunctioning strings of digital music in hopes of squeezing a drop of solace out of the justifiably forgotten jams of yesteryear. When that didn’t work, we turned to the sure-fire comforts of controlled spoilage – cheese, wine, and self-immolation (not quite controlled, but definitely spoiled). As our soul-financing team huddled in a borrowed minivan, exhaling a mix of hand-roll tobacco smoke, fumes of Belgian ale, essence of Rioja and ganja smoke, (cue Songs of Excess) the answer came to me in the form of a No Country For Old Men-style pressure-gun blast to the forehead. And then it was gone. I’ve been holding a smoldering vigil for that pearl of wisdom ever since. Going into the crisis, I’d intended so share a few soothing tidbits. It may have been only the beginning of the Big Big Bailout.

“Live For Today” has, for my money, the best “1, 2, 3, 4” in all of rock and roll – and it doesn’t even come at the start! Add to that the righteous “sha-la-la-lala” and the devastating retarded triplet business at the end, not to mention the whole reckless premise of the song, and you’ve got a mammoth achievement.

“Live For Today” – Grass Roots

Hey Dummy!

2008-10-28T19:48:00.011-04:00

Ever since some researchers discovered that the Internet has crushed our attention spans and fostered a new kind of "reading" that causes users to "'power browse' horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins," I've decided to stop writing so many "words" and just make our readers "winners." Also, I've changed the font size for E-Z ree-ding.

1. Last weekend The Driftwood Singers viewed "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the 1978 movie musical. No plot to speak of, but lots of satin pants and soft rock, including these two gems:

Got to Get You Into My Life - Earth, Wind & Fire

Oh! Darling - Robin Gibb

2. If like some people I know you were drunk and baked in a minivan on Saturday night while the rain poured down and the stereo blasted at top volume and someone attempted to smoke tobacco from a modified soda can, you may or may not have enjoyed these songs by the estimable New Orleans drifter par excellence, Bobby Charles.

Street People - Bobby Charles

I must Be in a Good Place Now - Bobby Charles

3. Since you probably rejected our other posts for having more than two sentences per paragraph, you likely missed these previous entries. Too bad, because these songs are FUCKING AWESOME!*

In Terms of Two - Chicago

The Good Love - Percy Sledge

The Look of Love - Burt Bacharach

* I suspect Internet users prefer ALL CAPS F-BOMBS, so let's just watch the site meter jump, shall we?

Songs of Excess

2008-10-19T19:52:00.003-04:00

Last night I watched the new Holy Modal Rounders documentary, Bound to Lose. Talk about cautionary tales. Acid, booze and ass, for sure, and speed and heroin thrown in to the mix as well. Beat folkie proto-punk wiseguys thumbing their nose at the Sing Out crowd, transmuting the songs of the people into prurient nut-job lullabies and sing-alongs. It’s as much Beefheart, Ween and the Butthole Surfers as it is Bob Dylan and The New Lost City Ramblers, though it’s that too. The fact that Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber are, more or less, still alive is some kind of testament to the transformative powers of substance abuse; the fact that they can still sort of rehearse and get up on stage together is a triumph of dumb flesh over self-destructive energies, time, gravity and fate. Oddly, since he’s likely the more erratic and ultimately impenetrable of the two, the film tends to delve more into the life of Weber, leaving the genius of Stampfel largely unexplained. Christgau makes a funny appearance and delivers a juicy one in championing the Rounders as the next greatest folk geniuses after Dylan: “Joan Baez …. P.U.,” he says. Another choice moment comes when the surviving members of the band get back together for a reunion tour on the West Coast. The bass player, who appears to basically be living in a bus in the foothills surrounding Portland, Oregon, stands outside of a crappy club, after a crappy soundcheck. “After the utter humiliation of it all, there are some fun times to be had,” he deadpans. Other than the tune on the Easy Rider soundtrack, the Rounders had always existed as more of a legend than actual music. I had a friend who spoke about “The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders” as the sacred text of the music we listened to. The foundational document of freak music. But I had never heard it. I guess I heard them playing along with the Fugs on one of those classic records, but I never knew it was them. It’s nice to know that they were as much of a mystery to themselves as they were to everyone else. Stampfel doesn’t quite know why they never got any cash from the royalties. Footage of the band playing on Laugh In – with Ruth Bussy goofing around, getting up in the band’s faces – is hard to believe, too. In fact, drummer Sam Shepard (yes, that Sam Shepard) doesn’t even remember the appearance.

The film announces interviews with Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, Loudon Wainwright III, Wavy Gravy and others, but the last two only show up at shows, and listen with smiles on their faces while the lunatic Weber entertains/scares them. Weber and Stampfel engage in some Dinosaur Jr. style onstage bickering, none of which is much fun to witness. But the music is so compellingly bonkers.

“Half a Mind” conveys the general spirit of the Rounders pretty well. I wanted to save it for the next Drift-a-tron battle royal, but I couldn’t hold off.

“Half a Mind” – the Holy Modal Rounders

Big Baby

2008-10-19T18:14:00.005-04:00

My, but this is some funky stuff. It's got sublime horns, dirty guitar, screams (as James Brown once inquired, "Can I scream, brother?"), and it was produced by Curtis Mayfield-- 'nuff said. Check out the picture--the muu-muu, the Picture Cook Book. So awesome. I love the references in "Mighty Mighty"--red beans & rice, oxtail, Thunderbird, etc.

James Thomas Ramey, aka Baby Huey, hailed from Richmond, Indiana (see, it isn't just the land of Larry Bird and John Mellencamp). Unfortunately, he was a rock 'n roll casualty, in 1970, at the tender age of 26. "I'm big Baby Huey, and I'm 400 pounds of soul. I'm like fried chicken, girls, I'm finger-lickin' good." Mmm-hmm.

Listen To Me--Baby Huey

Mighty Mighty--Baby Huey

Chicago Contra Chicago

2008-10-18T08:17:00.005-04:00

I don't approve of Chicago. WAY too many horns. The whole band sounds like a warring group of hirsute session nerds who can't decide what they actually want to sound like and so end up sounding like a committee formed to preserve the idea that white folks are funky too. That said, like a lot of groups that have, like, 45 members and at least three who think they're the "genius," you get such a hodge-podge of experiments -- "let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks" -- you're occasionally going to get something interesting. In the case of Chicago, the ones that work are typically by Peter Cetera. If you just compiled Cetera's stuff you'd probably come away with an entirely different band. So on side two of Chicago VI, from 1973, you find "In Terms of Two," which is a truly strange piece of work, an experiment in left-turn chord changes and the welding together of disparate styles, some kind of Celtic folk-rock a la Fairport Convention soldered on to some kind of mongrel country-folk pop experiment by Cetera. My friend Doug thought this sounded a lot like solo Frank Black stuff, how Black Francis likes to throw a counterintuitive chord into the mix and achieve an angular, bent quality that still sounds pop-ful. All in all, I think it's a great Chicago song, despite the presence of Chicago.

"In Terms of Two" - Chicago

The Optimist

2008-10-17T22:08:00.028-04:00

That's what Percy Sledge is. An optimist. And I think that's why he kind of topped off and faded away: You can't stay satisfied for long and still be a "soul" man. He was courting over-happiness from the start: You'll remember that his biggest hit was basically a peon to just plain old loving a woman. I'll Be Your Everything is from 1974 and it really seems Percy Sledge's soul-man narrative arc has reached a crossroads, where he can continue the manic depressive life of the traditional soul belter -- suffering lost love in the depths of misery and then soaring high again on new love -- or he can embrace emotional health. In the traditional style, it's Jesus who is about to kill his career. He's got religion and royalties and he needs to sing it in that direction now, celebrate that. And since he's got to be true to himself, to his soul, there's something slow and attentive here, a savoring of every little guitar filigree and rim shot, like he knows this is the last declaration, some parting advice to the listener. Though it's the fourth cut on the first side, it sounds like his last song. And as it builds, the tall glassy symphonic orchestra rising, choral angels with matching golden vocal pipes like a single miraculous golden church organ, Percy Sledge is right where he's always wanted to be, right at home, the gates of heaven wide open. And where can he really go from there? The message is basically the denial of suffering through higher power. This is my theory on why you never really hear from Percy Sledge again. Sure, he could have pretended and powered through on fumes as a "suffering" soul man, become a collection of well-practiced feints and mimes that telegraph "soul." But the last message of love on the last good album by Percy Sledge may be the deepest and closest to home because he doesn't.

The Good Love - Percy Sledge

Age of Nostalgia

2008-10-12T20:39:00.027-04:00

“The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia,” wrote Geoffrey O'Brien in his music memoir Sonata for Jukebox. It's such an obvious observation -- if it's recorded, it already happened -- and yet not something you immediately think of when you're wailing on your air guitar to Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak," is it? But in the last couple of years I've really come to embrace the idea that musical taste is basically memoir, a subtle social and personal pyramid scheme. As Stephen Metcalf, a great critic, wrote while reviewing the O'Brien book: "When anything can be made to last forever, the process is inherently deflationary -- too few lives chasing too many memories. For respite we cleave to monuments: Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles." Right, and the monuments are therefore a social handshake so that whatever bond that music created in us doesn't break apart and leave us wandering all alone with our Iron Butterfly albums (heaven forbid). The end result is you'll never run out of bands who replicate Neil Young and the Beatles. It's a canon of comfort and it's called being a conserve-a-tive.

This is all a long way of saying there's something about Burt Bacharach that I've only just begun to put my finger on lately, but it's deep. O'Brien wrote a whole essay about Bacharach and how he informed a kind of urbane, commercial lifestyle in the 60s that was embedded in advertising and TV. It seems so obvious, but I wasn't around in the 60s, so as I listen to Reach Out, an album Bacharach conducted and arranged in 1967, I realize how so much of this style -- the symphonic horn lines and cleanly executed exotica rhythms -- crept into my brain almost subliminally in the 70s and 80s. Mainly through TV theme songs and incidental "clean up in aisle five" K-Mart muzak. If I think of my music experience linearly, his sound was probably the first track laid down in a 64,000-track recording that culminates in a mix I call my "taste" -- the pop Rosetta Stone.

It took me some time to find my way to this realization, but if you listen to these songs, which I love against all good judgment, you may begin to see/hear what I'm talking about. It came to me through appreciation of 60s-era Duke Ellington, the post-rock of Air and Tortoise, the Bachrachian jazz of Ben Allison, some Dusty Springfield cuts, some early 70s Bee Gees -- but really, a whole helluva lot of things that seemed to ultimately converge at Bacharach. And I've concluded that's because Bacharach is not just the sum of his parts, but a kind of one-man pop gestalt, a cultural uber-shape that informed everything. When I hear his arrangement of "The Look of Love," I can feel the shape of my living room while watching "Barney Miller" at my father's feet, the shape of the brightly-lit aisles at Sears with my mother in the late 70s, almost touch the long lines of the boat-sized Buicks and Oldsmobiles in the parking lots outside that Sears. It's like the part of my brain that was molded in the 20th Century starts to glow in the dark, illuminating the architecture of memory -- as if it IS the architecture of memory, and the therefore subconscious cue for why I like Duke Ellington, Air, Elvis Costello and all manner of melodic pop set to lush accompaniment. Realistically, I know it's just because the Bacharach sound came to represent a polished professionalism that absorbed all styles, the pop template of all that was completely acceptable to anyone anywhere at any time. He bridged the Greatest Generation's big-band to the Boomer's groovy swing and therefore single-handedly poured the concrete on which mainstream American pop could be housed. But that's where I grew up: Inside an aural JC Penney, wandering the wide, illuminated aisles of pluralism and style and hope, the unified field of commerce set to flugel horn and cha-cha-cha.

So as the world breaks apart (like, MAJOR cleanup in aisle five) and something unrecognizable takes its place, for better or worse, it's come to this moment where I'm sitting here listening to "Bond Street" -- which is, as far as I can tell, that ridiculous song they play when Benny Hill is chasing girls about the lawn -- and I'm hearing how, wait, hold up, there are parts of this that are really great and somehow ... pure. Like, what's with that strange bent horn note at the end that races off into infinity? And how great are those leisure-wear horns on "The Look of Love"? Why do I get subtly emotional when those backup singers start up on "Reach Out to Me"? Why is it so comforting to me when that little trumpet squiggle pops up at the end? Why is that little Mary Tyler Moore piano tinkle in "Are You There (With Another Girl)" so downright tragic? Honestly, it's nostalgia. But all recordings being equal, what isn't at this point?

The Look of Love - Burt Bacharach

Reach Out to Me - Burt Bacharach

Bond Street - Burt Bacharach

Are You There (With Another Girl) - Burt Bacharach

In the course of posting this, I tripped upon this amazing blog called Malls of America, featuring vintage photos of malls, exteriors and interiors, over the last 50 years.

Affirmative Action

2008-10-11T08:46:00.003-04:00

In the spirit of echoing Liza’s and Lefty’s Nietzschean yeasaying, I thought it would be good and fitting, in this election season, to dust off one of the golden chestnuts from the American Song-Poem Anthology. The questions, set to a syrupy disco groove, remain: Can our government be decent and honest? Jimmy Carter said yes.

“Jimmy Carter Says Yes” – Gene Marshall

Say Yes: The Driftwood Singers Inaugeral Podcast

2008-10-07T19:29:00.010-04:00

I don’t wanna know ‘bout wrong or right
I don’t want to know
- I’m anywhere tonight

-- Captain Beefheart

It was only a matter of time until TDSP dragged its sorry ass into the future. Truth is, it's a miracle we're even on the Internet. But now we've gone and done it: created a podcast. Actually, I did this alone without Mr. Poncho's knowledge or seal of approval, so it's a bit of a half-breed, an off-the-reservation vision quest that may or may not lead my people to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Consider it test marketing. This was created about four months ago but I let it sit in the wine cellar for a bit to see if it turned to vinegar over time. Turns out I didn't yammer on too much. In fact, I stopped talking altogether after about the fourth song and mostly just let the playlist run on and on in an imitation of free-form FM radio (a la WFMU). Eventually we'll just start recording our interplanetary space travels in the Drift-o-tron (a stationary car and select driftwood on the hi-fi), which will take you deep into the Driftwood braintrust where no one other than us should really be. And maybe not even us (grown men, supposedly). Until then, give this a test drive.

LEFTY LEARNS TO PODCAST - THE DRIFTWOOD SINGERS PRESENT

(NOTE: If you wonder what the songs are, just email us and we'll send you the playlist.)

With the Quickness

2008-10-04T21:00:00.002-04:00

In the words of Suzanne Somers, “I wore my green sweater today, and smiled.”
The chill is on, here in western Mass. I’ve been living in New England now for 10 years, and today I went apple picking for the first time since I’ve been up here. When I was a kid growing up in Duchess County, NY, we used to live across from acres and acres of apple orchards. We’d pick as many apples as we wanted, practically in the back yard, so the thought of making a quaint family outing of wandering around an orchard always seemed kind of weird. Next to the orchards we’d go and play in these sand and gravel holes– we called the whole place The Pits. My brother would set traps for raccoons and ground hogs, and he’d go out in the ice and snow and mud to club the poor fuckers who were left alive in the traps. Then he’d clean the pelts and get a few bucks from somebody. We were all headed for such a life of great northern redneck realities. I remember – you’ll like this – getting a BB gun for Easter one year (pretty awesome, weapons for Easter), and my brother took me out to The Pits in the snow, we set up some spent cans of spray paint at a distance and started shooting at them. I remember one of the cans, punctured by my little shiny bb, spinning, and flipping and hissing as it painted the snow red.

Lately I’ve been thinking of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For the New Millenium. In it Calvino champions sets of opposed polar qualities – I remember he writes about the virtues of quickness and the beauty of lightness. Embedded in his argument is the equal praise for the opposite quality; quickness gains its charm in part because of the balanced appeal of slowness, likewise fizzy weightlessness and gravity. I thought of Calvino again when listening to some free MP3s I got from Light in the Attic Records. They’ve got some high life and afrobeat samplers coming out and they’re giving away a few typically long songs. The three-minute pop song has so many devout believers, but the epic jam seems like a more suspect and often-maligned endeavor. This tune by Rex Lawson isn’t quite a marathon, but boy do the slide-rule effect of piled-on coiled guitars, disorientingly relentless syncopation, and stately horns upset the temporal flow.

“Oko” – Rex Lawson and his Rivers Men

D.A.C., O.G.

2008-09-26T18:23:00.005-04:00

I can't help thinking that David Allan Coe has more in common with some hip-hop artists than he does with, say, Keith Urban. It's that hard-core attitude with the bordering-on-ridiculous insistence on one's authenticity. I mean, yeah, he spent some time in prison, etc., etc., but the more he makes his claim the less believable it seems. But that don't mean the music ain't any good. I love the way he opens "Longhaired Redneck" with the line "Country d.j.s knows that I'm an outlaw". That's some bold grammatical territory--sounds like an outlaw to me! The song is pretty damn funny... and "Revenge" is about as bleak as you can get. "Laid Back and Wasted" is somewhere(s) in between. (Great title, by the way). It's a shame that he didn't refrain from utilizing the cornball harmonica and '70s phase-shifter guitar on these songs. It'd be nice to be able to listen to them without cringing so much.

D.A.C. has definitely got the Merle Haggard/Ernest Tubb sound down pat, but does he really need to do so much name-checking?

Longhaired Redneck--David Allan Coe

Revenge--David Allan Coe

(from the album Longhaired Redneck)

Laid Back and Wasted--David Allan Coe

(from David Allan Coe Rides Again)

Shriveled and Bundled

2008-09-20T09:41:00.002-04:00

There’s a saying in Japanese – “atama ga piiman” – which translates roughly to “my head is like a pepper.” It used to be slang for something like “I’m baked.” I always loved the explanation for the saying, which related to the hollow dried-out insides of a pepper, with the little seeds kind of shriveled and bundled in the center, clinging to themselves by that pale stringy flesh; it evokes an image of a puckered and used-up brain.

My head has been like a pepper for a while. Not in the baked sense, but in the desiccated way. My whole scene is parched. Been taking Nyquil. It’s the end-of-summer start-of-fall thing. The frost hasn’t come here yet, but they’ve been talking about it on the radio, for the hill towns at least. The leaves of the walnut trees are taking the hint. Dropping in the wind. Going green to yellow, with dark black spots. Like a banana peel.

I’m in the final stages of getting my vinyl-conversion system back up and running, after a hard-drive fry out. And since September is also the season of loads of new music releases – Okkervil River, TV on the Radio and lots more. Here are a few more of the free new and recent releases that I’ve gotten hooked on lately.

“Places Visions the Sea” – High Places

“From Stardust” – High Places

“Hologram Buffalo” – Brightblack Morning Light

“Trust to Lose” – South San Gabriel

“Here With Me” – Jennifer O’Connor

David Foster Wallace, RIP*

2008-09-14T11:32:00.013-04:00

It was shocking and terrible to read the three-paragraph AP report when it popped online Saturday night near 11 PM. Dead at 46. When I read Michiko Kakutani's moving elegy to David Foster Wallace today, it reminded me of that huge, 20,000-foot view of American life that so few brass-ring-grabbing savant literary egotists even attempt any longer, the one that once seemed possible and today less so. It must have been so overwhelming and solitary to attempt to capture it in the 1990s, at the end of the 20th Century -- to capture, as Kakutani writes, "in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad 'deep and meaningless' facets of contemporary life."

You could see it in Foster Wallace's face and manner, the way he wore the ten-ton weight on his shoulders so delicately, how shy and funny and precise his personality when he was interviewed, how he seemed like a POW who'd spent a decade imprisoned in a library. Here he is talking about his failures at understanding Italian while at an overseas conference:

Like so many of my generation, I didn't quite finish "Infinite Jest," but just hefting it around on subways in the 1990s was a rite of passage, not to mention a bicep-builder. But DFW's literary spike in the ground announced the arrival of our 1970s-baked consciousness to the national conversation, all screwy and tortured and long-winded and air-quoted in triplicate, and everybody had to listen. That was a huge moment. He opened the door and added footnotes with other tinier doors. We needed them all to get through and be understood. Could there have been a Dave Eggers without DFW? I once quoted him quoting someone else in a floridly overwrought newspaper article I wrote about Stephen Malkmus, the shadow of DFW's arguments hovering over my review.

But as David Foster Wallace, quoting the writer Lewis Hyde, wrote: ''Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.'' That Stephen Malkmus still traffics in winky references like Underdog signifies that he has grown comfortable with his sound and with his coterie of critic-fans who reflexively buy and praise his music.

His nonfiction, it turned out, was his true and righteous talent, maybe because his infinite smarts were harnessed by magazine length limits. His tennis profile in Esquire, 'String Theory', was the first one I read and still stays with me, how four dimensional and meta-magazine profile it was. Tennis was beside the point, even though he really did love tennis. His brainy explorations were as deep and map-like as an ant farm. In some ways it's not terribly surprising that he couldn't live with his own mind and all its dark sub-basements. But I'm just so upset that he killed himself. I wish he could have rallied and tied all those kinky strings together and unified our story, finally, especially now as our cultural fissures threaten to widen and bleak Palin-esque clouds darken our horizons. But that's too much to ask of anyone. Still, that he couldn't bear living any longer is itself hard to bear, especially considering what he knew about our collective souls in America.

In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”

* February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008

Room #8

2008-09-06T22:19:00.034-04:00

A few days ago, Dewey Dell, Rosa and I stayed in room #8 at the Joshua Tree Inn, where Gram Parsons died on September 19, 1973 of a drug overdose. The establishment is now dubbed the "Cosmic American Hotel" by its proprietor, a reed-thin and sun-baked young man with faded green tattoos, dusty cowboy boots and a weather-beaten straw hat. It's located in the arid and alien desert near Joshua Tree National Park, where if per chance a brontosaurus were to come ambling out from behind the boulders you wouldn't really be surprised given how amazing and magical everything is, the lizards darting in the shadows under the heavy, penetrating silence that saturates the sky. Coz. Mick. The room where Parsons died (#8) has been lovingly un-refurbished, looking just as it did in the early 1970s, complete with the smell of grandma's house and vaguely Navajo bed sheets that have probably been washed 4 million times (or maybe only four times?). In a courtyard outside the room is a shrine of booze bottles and various tokens and tchotchkes arranged in worshipful order a few feet from a turquoise swimming pool lined with cracked tiles and shimmering in the middle of Joshua trees and cactus. A distant church has a giant "Jesus" sign in the sky.

On the bed stand is a guest book signed by visitors from all over the world (see top photo above) espousing all manner of broken-heartfelt, world-weary and vision-quested sentiments. You probably already have the song "Love Hurts" in your collection, but not this particular and exact mp3: it's ripped from the homemade CD compilation on the same bed stand in the room where Parsons died, hand-labeled by the proprietor "Room #8." (The third picture in the above set is the view of the courtyard from inside the room.)

Love Hurts - Gram Parsons (with Emmy Lou Harris)

Over in nearby Pioneertown, a 1950s Hollywood set built for shooting Westerns, there's Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace, an old road house as dusty and drunken as it sounds, its walls lined with pictures of all the famous musical guests who've passed through, from Lucinda Williams and Robert Plant to the Solace Bros. (on the night we were in town) and Camper Van Beethoven. Tales of boozy nights under the sweep of stars and peyote-chewing jaw sessions around crackling fires are legend. While in town, we met a mellow stoner fella named Dave who took us into his glass-blowing workshop in his timber-frame Old West house where he makes glass beads and marbles with psychedelic swirls inside them. Cosmic? You bet.

Wheels - Gram Parsons (from Room #8)

But that was only the start. We spent an afternoon visiting the "Integratron," a giant domed building that looks like a cross between a community playhouse and a planetarium. It was built by George Van Tassel, who claimed to have been visited by a UFO from Venus in the 1950s. He downloaded from a Venusian fellow named "Solgando" all the interplanetary knowledge afforded space peoples (Solgando was photographed and looks strikingly like a dapper human man in a three-piece suit) . Based in part on the scientific ideas of cult inventor Nikola Tesla, the edifice was operated as a UFO buff's palace of wonder and many years after Van Tassel's death in the late 70s people still come from far and wide to enjoy a "sound bath" in the domed room inside, where if you stand in the center you hear your own voice in triplicate vibrating inside your skull. When people lay under the dome in this acoustically perfect tabernacle and energy machine" and listen to Mozart or New Age music they apparently connect just so with all kinds of mystical cosmic vibrations (apparently the circumference of the Integratron is exactly that of a single person's magnetic field -- 55 feet -- but Von Tassel didn't know that when he built it). You can't help but believe.

Hot Burrito #1 - Gram Parsons (from Room #8)

That's not all we did. We also ate heaps of cheese-covered and lard-based Mexican food in Palm Springs (not far from Gene Autry Trail), roamed about the desert snapping photos of rock formations and gigantic wind farms with lazily turned against massive mountain ranges and eyed temperature gages that read 100 degrees and higher. We radiated in the sun and breathed the pure, dry air and gazed over vast, Mars-like horizons and moonscapes seemingly untouched by humans. On the flight home, it was hard not to notice that the world was winking at us a little more than it had before. Things were changing. Or so it seemed. Perhaps they hadn't changed at all.

100 Years from Now - Gram Parsons (from Room #8)

Call of the Wild

2008-09-06T11:07:00.001-04:00

This new Blitzen Trapper record is splendid.
Love the feral vulpine Jack London theme.
They’ve shaved off some of the more prickly Beefheartisms from their last record.
I can’t get Stealers Wheel out of my mind when I listen to this one.
The classic folk-rock surface married to the dubbed-out echo-chamber studio wig-wammery makes Furr go nicely with the Rodriguez from a little while back. It’s like Teenage Fanclub with root magic instead of booze. Makes you want to put on the buckskin coat and polish the rifle, go round up the dog team. Sell some eggs to the miners.

“Furr” – Blitzen Trapper

Doobage

2008-09-01T04:40:00.001-04:00

Well, somebody was bound to do it. With every other mossy stone of 70s rock turned over and dug out under, it’s just a surprise that it took this long for some band of counter-intuitive hipsters to arrive at the shocking truth: the Doobie Brothers, Joe Cocker, Blood Sweat and Tears. We’re not ready, but it’s the place we need to go to.

“Set in Stone” – Catfish Haven

Pour Some Sugar On Me

2008-08-19T09:31:00.003-04:00

Oh my god, this is good. I'd just read about this one the other day in Mojo, and here it is, seemingly the signature track given away by the wonderful, wonderful people at Light in the Attic Records. It's an amazing story -- surprise success in South Africa (read more). You've got to listen to this one. Donovan meets Gil Scot-Heron. Alien transmissions, Zombies vocal timbres. Is that an oboe!

"Sugar Man" - Rodriguez

Dolphins and Donkeys

2008-08-16T11:46:00.003-04:00

Mid-August is working its peculiar barometric razzle dazzle everywhere, as Frankie Lee says. Pollen. Pods. Mud. Storms. Runny noses. Flashes of doom. So much impending. Gearing up for the metabolic blow-out of September, the time of back-to-it. Pulling out the pea coats from the closets – preparatory nostalgia, whatever that would be. Getting ready to look back. I’ve been stewing a little on the forthcoming disc by this band, the Donkeys. Beasts of burden, they’re carrying the tradition of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty steadily on their solid shoulders. No stooping. One other commendation for these fellas: they have a song with a lovely and hard-to-understand chorus that goes “I might end up in a dolphin center,” which strikes me as new territory for the cosmic American song.

“Walk Through A Cloud” – The Donkeys

@ Loose Ends

2008-08-15T17:43:00.006-04:00

It's a funny time of year. Another epic journey to VT has come and gone. (Lots of rain, some canoeing & kayaking, softball, croquet & badminton, walking in the woods, grilling of grass-fed beef, swilling of Long Trail IPA, etc). The girls are back in school (way too early, if you ask me). Our okra plants keep churning out the pods, and we have to be vigilant about harvesting 'em or they become woody and inedible. The Reds are languishing in the basement of the National League Central, having gotten rid of two of their stars (Ken Griffey Jr. and Adam Dunn). (Luckily, preseason football has started, so I can start shifting my attention to the Titans, who made the playoffs last year).

Today I finally got rid of my '87 Pontiac Grand Am. I bought it soon after moving to N-ville, and it served me well--until around March of last year, when I finally gave up on it. It had been sitting in the driveway accumulating tree detritus and staring gloomily at the street. The time had come, we decided. On my way home from work one day I noticed a small sign attached to a telephone pole: "Cash For Junk Cars" w/ a telephone number. I punched it into my cell phone memory, and today I finally called. "We'll give you $150 for it," the guy said after I told him what I had. I was surprised and pleased. Eventually a guy named Bobby showed up, and he successfully wrangled the Pontiac onto his trailer. "Who's the Bettie Page fan?" he asked, after noting one of the stickers on the dash. I told him I used to be, before I got married. (What a lame response, I thought to myself. Is this what it's come to?) Anyway, the guy was nice enough, and after peeling a bunch of bills from his cash wad and handing them to me, I bid farewell to the ol' Grand Am and he drove off down the street.

Girls Got Rhythm--AC/DC

Gimme All Your Lovin'--ZZ Top

Learning To Fly--Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers