This Is Not Only A Test

      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

Recover the Life that was Once Your Own

Solitude and isolation have their place. But -- in honor of four years of digital musico-kaffee/(bean/bourbon/weed)-klatching -- here's to solidarity, computer-aided communistics, brother/sisterhood, shared strife, shared joy. Altogether now.

This first one comes from the ultra-rare 1968 debut single by singer Kathy McCord. It's the first track on the fine compilation Women Blue: 16 Lost US Femvox Classic, released in August on the Past and Present label. McCord sings with overflowing emotional quaver, shivering vibrato and bluesy phrasing. The tune is "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and "You Are Always on My Mind" locked in an estrogen death match. There are murky sonic sub-basements of slightly out-of-tune backing, weird spectral guitar lines, rusty scaffolding seen through a distant crepuscular heat haze. There's a flickering soul-spook at the foundation. "My eyes see so much clearer when my head is upside down." (McCords 1969 full-length solo on CTI is pictured here.)

Off the same anthology is the enigmatic Emily, singing "Song of Decision." She's a little like the female version of Arthur, one of the first Emily is Emily Bindiger, who got her start in the Greenwich Village folk scene and then went on to play and record in France, backed by a band called Dynastic Crisis. She later sang with Leonard Cohen and Neil Sedaka. As the tune says, "Someone has written a song of decision, its contents are still left unknown. You can recover, uncover, discover, the life that once was your own."

"I Will Never Be Along Again" - Kathy McCord

"Song of Decision" - Emily

TIME OUT OF MIND

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

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

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

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