Songs of Excess

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

     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

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

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

“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

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

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

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.

     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

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*

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

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

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

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

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

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

     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

Satin Shoes and a Feather Bed

I Saw an Angel Die - Bobbie Gentry

Hurry, Tuesday Child - Bobbie Gentry

From the 1967 debut, Ode to Billie Joe.

It Was Only a Matter of Time

Get Out of Denver - Bob Seger

School Teacher - Bob Seger

Need Ya - Bob Seger

1973.

Bravo

I'll admit it, I usually don't read the real estate section of The New York Observer - not that I'm better than that: I'm worse than that. I get made sick by what I can't have, which is a lot. Anyway, I saw this item with Phil Lesh's name and a big price tag and something caught my eye. I made an exception. I don't know Max Abelson, perhaps Lefty can pass along props, because this opening graph about a sort of mundane condo sale deserves recognition:

"Years of appreciating the Grateful Dead’s music leaves one with the impression that the band’s surviving members all maintain a certain kind of house. Surely, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir lives in a moss-covered mansion where little pixie servants tend to his benevolent whims, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann resides below the oceanic photic zone with kindly umbrella mouth gulper eels, or, at the very least, bassist Phil Lesh makes his home with dancing bears in a rainbow-colored cave."

That bit about residing "below the photic zone with kindly umbrella mouth gulper eels" is just massive. I'm tapping my rolled-up paper program on my knee, now clapping, now standing to my feet and cheering, nodding in approval and looking with a knowing grin at my neighbors.

Vacation Foundering

It’s that most sad of days – the Sunday at the end of vacation. Back to work tomorrow. There’s despair, moaning, gnashing of teeth, all kinds of pain in different muted runny colors. We had a brief taste of sun-kissed, whiskey-soaked joy, the bliss provided by the steady hum of the internal combustion engine. There was even a Driftwood Singers powow in the mountains of western NC (thanks DD and L). This is where we walked. This is where we swam, hunted danced and sang. And now it’s back to angst-ville. Even nature’s chipping in with a little pathetic fallaciousness, sending in the dark clouds, crazy winds and rumbling thunder. Ominous. Ominous.

The gentlemen from Fearns Brass Foundry have already covered all this. They’ve got the groaning taken care of. I got this comp: Hide & Seek: A Collection of British Blue-Eyed Soul 1964-1969 a while back, and I just didn’t pay enough attention. The first thing that comes to mind is Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” with its mundane details and atmospheric sadness. Then it makes me think of Dylan’s response to that hit, “Clothesline Saga.” And then it gets me thinking of our man Joe South, my one degree of separation from everything. The singer is like the male Dusty Springfield, employing all manner of artful sighs and tuneful exhalations. I’m dying to know more about Fearns Brass Foundry – the name is a tip off that the band has workmanlike, high temperature powers of expressive transformation.

“Now I Taste the Tears” - Fearns Brass Foundry

Listen My Friend

I thought I might have reached the point in my life where Saddle Creek Records no longer meant much to me. But then I got a hold of the newest Neva Dinova record, You May Already Be Dreaming, their first on SC. It’s a good’n. Hitting all the ragged-glory sweet spots, evoking sandy buttes, high plains drifters, bug juice, tongue paint, mutations of Omaha. I saw these guys open for Ladyhawk in Northampton a while back. They were plagued by a caricature of a club-ass soundman, but they managed to rock the 6 or so folks in the crowd. Songs about death, weather systems, old cars. Saddle Creek is giving away what I consider to be the two best songs from the disc. Here they are:

“Clouds” - Neva Dinova

“Will the Ladies Send You Flowers When You Die?”- Neva Dinova

I’m the Taxonomy Man

Hey, look, a distillation of the Driftwood aesthetic, a meditation on liner notes in the new music issues of The Believer, an essay filled with multiple hyphenations, compound adjectives, agitated prose about agitated prose about music, high praise for Joe South, Sammi Smith and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; it’s like that Borges story where the guy re-writes Don Quixote and it takes on a totally different meaning, only not really.

The Sisterhood of Stevie

Like David Attenborough stalking the lyrebird through a dense rain forest this video of Stevie Nicks swaying at the center of an impromptu, backstage Wild Heart feels so rare, raw. Stevie is at the height of her powers here, still at the start of a solo career, surrounded by a sisterhood, singing. Her magic is made material. The Three Graces in early eighties sun dresses: a make-up artist, a back up singer and Stevie.

My friend, Ace Black, who brought this gem to my attention, watched it again and again upon finding it. She says, "It was not unlike riding my rocking horse as a girl, physically mesmerized by the rhythm and full of a strange excitement." Indeed.

Where You've Been

     My dear Wife gave me an ipod Nano for my birthday.  As many of you may know, it's a curious thing to select songs for said device.  I've discovered that ones I thought for sure I'd want on there, well, it turns out I really don't, and I don't know it until I'm out running, and the ABBA tune "Take A Chance On Me" comes on, fr'instance.  Not to slight the preternaturally blonde Scandinavian popsters--love 'em, been meaning to write about 'em--but do I really want that song on the ol' digital listening contraption?  No, I do not.  What I realized I do want more of is Dinosaur Jr, for some reason.  I first really, really got into J Mascis and pals back when I was attending (briefly) Hampshire College, up in Amherst, MA, which is J's hometown.  (I was talking to my therapist at the time about how much I liked the band--how does such a topic come up in therapy?  I don't know--and she said, "Oh, my sons were friends of his in high school."  How cool was that, at the time?  She was a lovely lady).  I saw them play a couple of times in Amherst.  At one of the shows, Murph broke a drumstick and the battered shard flew out into the crowd and landed in my hands somehow.  I still have it somewhere, I think.  I  saw J do an acoustic show at CBGB's later on when I was living in NYC and going to art school.  I remember looking over at one point and spying Matt Dillon in the crowd.  I always liked that guy.  I can't remember if it was around the same time or not, but I was once up in midtown--I don't know what I was doing exactly, maybe I had gone to a gallery or the Museum of Modern Art or something--and much to my surprise I spied J amid the bustling crowd.  Needless to say, he looked a little out of place.  He was wearing those big goofy glasses and a NASA baseball cap.  Perfect.  I didn't approach him, I just sort of slyly observed him for a few minutes, and he seemed to be taking in all the frenetic activity at his own pace, unperturbed.  I think he ended up going into the FAO Schwartz toy store, or maybe I just pictured him doing that as a private joke, I really can't recall.

     Dinosaur Jr was perfect music to go along with that college/art school period of my life.  Hell, I was miserable a lot of the time, and J's creaky voice, mopey lyrics and thunderous, nay, majestic guitar-playing provided solace of a sort.  I'm not one of those fans who say the early albums are the best (I remember hearing this idiot say that they weren't as good after they had to add the "Jr" for legal reasons!).  Green Mind is the one that really got me, and I also like Bug a whole lot.   I'll admit that I haven't listened to anything since Where You Been--and I'm guessing that not many people have listened to it either, so I figured I'd include a coupla tracks from it.  Cue up some sandblasting sonic power.

Out There--Dinosaur Jr

Get Me--Dinosaur Jr

Morning Wood

We have a special place in our hearts for all things wood here. Driftwood. Roy Wood. Ron Wood. Into the Woods. Wooden riffs. Wooden beats. Wooden Wand. Wooden Indians. Wooden ships on the water. And so, the Wood Brothers.

If I’m honest with myself, opening up to the Wood Brothers took some mental house-cleaning to overcome the vestigial quick-draw judgmental baggage, the instinctive, ingrained, dismissive reflex triggered by the Medeski, Martin and Wood connection, the Norah Jones effect, the artfully distressed textures, fear of the Epcot Center jukejoint exhibit factor (complete with fake outsider art paintings of old blues men, washboards and BBQ kitsch as decor), the redolent spiced-tea jam-band emanations, the made-for-Bonnaroo suspicions. But once I purified myself of bad thoughts, I was able to see the beauty of the Wood Brothers, and the ugliness in me (never difficult).

This is for Dewey Dell and Lefty. The title track from the Wood Brothers record always conjures the best old Bonnie Raitt and early Little Feat for me. And, just because all things seem connected, here’s a link to a great story about hunting wild hogs in Texas. And, speaking of wild hogs, here’s a link to A.O. Scott’s review of the Tim Allen/John Travolta movie Wild Hogs, from last year. One of the greatest take-down reviews I’ve ever read.

“Loaded” - The Wood Brothers

I’m Down, Indeed, Comrade, I’m Being Bombed

I give you “The Friendly Ranger at Clontarf Castle,” the first song on the first Thin Lizzy album. Here’s a challenge to all intercontinental drifters who pass here. Is there a better bean analogy in all of rock? All of music? Is there a better mock-hipster-heroic spoken-word intro? (Listen at 00:27 for what sounds like an Elmer Fuddism “the friendly wanger waits”). Also listen for the physically tricky image: “To walk down the street with my arms around your hips, side by side.” Listen for the pointillistic funk bass and pitter-patter drumming. But more than anything, listen for the earth-shaking made-for-the-drift-atron staggered QUADRUPLE-tracked guitar solo at the end!!

“The Friendly Ranger at Clontarf Castle” - Thin Lizzy

Sign Language: Shred Heads

As Frankie Lee said, today is our birthday. (Cue Beatles song). I guess this is probably true of people of all zodiacal persuasions, but I tend to know and be close to a lot of fellow geminis. Nutbags mostly. Here's to them, my former Scottish/Canadian boss (the ghost at the banquet), Assegai (fathering children, teaching English, studying Tai Chi, laying some Mande beats on the villagers in rural China), my niece (OCD'ing her way through college), baby Rosa (no signs of gemini characteristics as of yet) -- shredders all. Long may we shred.

"The Shredder Sequel" - Little Wings

The Title Of This Post Says It All

     As James Stockdale (H. Ross Perot's running mate) once asked during a debate, "Who am I?  Why am I here?"  Well, here's my answer.

Dirty White Boy--Foreigner

     And, since tomorrow is both Mr. Poncho's and mine's birthday,  I thought I'd share these tracks from the Gino Vanelli album The Gist of the Gemini.  Listening to them makes me feel like an alien visiting from another planet.  It's utterly baffling that this music was written, recorded, released, etc.  with straight faces all around.  I love the fact that he had the nerve to call a song "Carnal Question" and use the term "A post-war eunuch".  How does this happen, I ask you?  (The second side of the record has a bunch of songs grouped together under the title "The War Suite", of which "Carnal Question" is one.  Heavy stuff).  Vanelli was born in Montreal--I think the Canadian hypothesis is beginning to unravel.  A bona-fide head-shaker.

A New Fix For '76--Gino Vanelli

Carnal Question--Gino Vanelli

Cache in the Attic

While Lefty struggles with being the Chardonnay-swilling target demo for the Restoration Hardware masterminds, I'm still coming to terms with being an uprooted 20th century post-urban American mongrel (by Monsanto), a fig-plucker by blood, but one who likes to dabble in the simple feel-good pleasures of lachrymal pedal steel, corn-fed fog-horn white-man vocal melisma and anything that conjures work requiring knowledge of a grease gun. The truth is: we have no idea who we are anymore, if we ever did. It's not as if we don't like it this way.
I could live inside a teepee. I could die in Penthouse 35. Etc.

As promised, here are some more tracks from the John Anderson archives.

"Stop in the Road" - John Anderson

"San Antonio Rose" - John Anderson

"Don't Think Twice It's All Right"- John Anderson

White Wine Manifesto

A friend and I were joking on the subway platform the other morning that the Robert Plant & Alison Krauss album was probably market-tested and produced with a group of NPR yuppies having a dinner party in the studio to determine just the right mix. It's just that kind of album, a tastefully antiqued Crate & Barrel-quality production for the living room environment, featuring two tried-and-true legends of the upwardly mobile demographic. (I imagined producer T-Bone Burnett having one of those "smooth" knobs on the mixing board, like in episode #9 of Yacht Rock.) Fittingly, the best song on the album, "Killing the Blues," was used in a Target commercial, which I first heard during the Super Bowl. And yet, as difficult as it is to give myself over to the publicity and marketing cycle of a popular phenomenon aimed directly at me, I can't help myself: I am the target and the Plant-Krauss arrow has struck dead center. I love everything about the record, especially the Target tune. The slow, languid atmospherics and porcelain harmonies, the Al Gore earth tones Whole Foods production quality, the way it turns my living room into a soft, cottony, candle-lit hideaway far from the madness of workaday life. It's a really good album.

This might not seem like a big revelation, but for one whose musical world view was built on the defunct late-20th-Century indie-DIY-hippie-punk model of anti-capitalist "authenticity" and "integrity," it's been hard to accept my slow-but-sure devolution into the Dad Rock category. It's like waking up one day and realizing you've qualified for Medicare. I suppose the tipping point -- and I even hate that phrase, coming as it does from the Crate & Barrel intellectual of our time, Malcolm Gladwell -- was my acceptance of the simulacrum rock of Fleet Foxes and all the other Millennial-generation folk-rock precision re-creators. But whatever. You can't stop the future. So here I am, Professional NPR Yuppie Dad Rocker rocking my Plant-Krauss download from iTunes and just flowing into the 21st Century like a streaming video. I'm letting go. I celebrate myself. Hear my white wine glass clink!

"Killing the Blues" - Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

(Editor's Note: I found the above photo by Googling "intimate dinner party")

I, Claudius (I) : Reduce, Re-use (Roots)

Claudius Linton was a blind spot for me. Sometimes it seems like it’s all blind spots, really. I got a copy of this comp called Roots Master, and the man has clearly got the power. With a majestic name like Claudius Linton, it’s no surprise. Part Burning Spear, part Linton Kwesi Johnson, CL has got the soulful roots all wrapped up, the dub testifying, too. The band performs that expert sonic rollercoaster, with muskrat-like keyboard parts poking a head up here, a big underground bass line diving down and blowing your hair back, some exuberant morse-code hand-percussion sending messages of i-ree into the cosmos.
I have no idea what “Backra Massa” is about, but it’s definitely some DNA-level joy – soul sun pleasure. At our Driftwood Singers communal family barbecue this past weekend, I came armed with music to go one-for-one in an anticipated cosmic drift-atron late-night music duel with Lefty, but the fatigue set in, the bone tiredness won out. So I didn’t get to unload the amo. My powder stayed dry. But speaking of arms, the thing I love about “Reduce the Arms Race” – aside from the “you ain’t goin’ nowhere" commitment of the stoned-anemic groove – is the aim-low implication of the verb “reduce” in the refrain; from that word alone, I feel like James Wood would be able to unpack all kinds of biblical portents and historical, imperial, cultural nuggets.
I’m not unpacking no portents.

“Backra Mass”- Claudius Linton


“Reduce the Arms Race”- Claudius Linton

Quasi-Errand Into the Quasi-Wilderness

Armed with child-friendly insect-repellent wipes, ample fizzy water, manageable stacks of moldy vinyl, a portable turntable, an impressive array of grilled meats, and small-batch bourbon, a quorum of the northeast chapter of the Driftwood Singers family met in bucolic Pound Ridge, New York, for what has now become our semi-annual errand into the semi-wilderness, a quasi-utopian shindig involving naked toddlers caked in mud, the strumming of acoustic guitars, DNA replication, and wild-eyed speculation about ill-informed land buys in the Northeast Kingdom. Needless to say, we pondered the genius of artists like Robert Palmer, J.Geils, Freddy Fender, Fleetwood Mac, Karl Blau and Thin Lizzy.

I had promised to share a few tracks from a cache of John Anderson records that I’d purchased back in the winter in a lucky strike at a Goodwill in Middletown. Here’s one. Early in his career, Anderson had a baby face, but his voice was oak-aged, double-smoked and love-damaged. All American.

There’s always more.

“Arms of a Fool” - John Anderson

Our Song

     I discovered this tune by accident tonight.  Written by Glen Campbell collaborator Jimmy Webb ("Wichita Lineman", "By The Time I Get To Phoenix", etc.)--perfect, right?  I think it's got the requisite combination of dissonance, misplaced fanfare, shaky-voiced singing, and questionable lyric choices to make it a good theme song. 

 

     Wild and free

     Like you and I

     Like driftwood blown back to the sea

Driftwood--Jimmy Webb

Civilizing Influences

I was in Paris a week ago. It seems ridiculous now, as it did before we went. The older of my two older brothers and I went to spend four days with our other brother, the oldest, and his family, who have been living there for the past year (academics, years off, Canadians). The goal was to eat, drink and walk, basically. We weren’t even set on going to the Louvre. We started off pretty strong, heading to the neighborhood market, buying a big hunk of pork for roasting, some figs, five or six different kinds of really unbelievably stinky cheese [the French-speaking brother told the cheese dude (who, by the way, was wearing a beret) that he wanted some “flavorful” cheeses, which evidently is Gallic code for gross], we had some pear cider from Brittany, and there were pates of rabbit and duck, plus some ultra-thin cured meats, and a sausage called andouillette that really was cloacal. Bottles and bottles of wine. Righteous coffee. Croissants and fruit tarts in the mornings. Later there was foie gras, blood sausage, escargot, more rabbit, steak tartar. It was ugly. It was good that we were only there for four days, because with the U.S. dollar sucking so noisily, the fiscal pain would have risen to levels comparable to the self-inflicted spiritual and intestinal pain.

Here’s what I learned: the French are serious about politeness. They’re so polite that they’ll be really rude to tell you how impolite you are. It’s intense. Don’t fuck around with bonjour and pardon without the proper title affixed to it.

The whole thing about French people making out in parks is true. They do.
Same with baguettes. Everybody’s got one.
They like to smoke, more proud about it than we are.
They know how to dress.
The food, as is the case in Spain and Italy, is just about 45 times better than what we have here, just on average, across the board.

The reason everyone loves Paris so much is that it’s basically taken the idea of civilization and
perfected it. The public transit system works, and even bozos from another country can use it with ease. There’s culture everywhere. History and art in your face all the time. We heard a street musician nailing the Bach solo cello suites at this courtyard, with those tunnels of leafy canopies and long shady walkways lining a sunny square. Saw a guy singing in a sort of counter tenor style; he was posed with this 18th century-looking velvet hat, with his hands behind his back, turned rigidly to one side, singing some castrato-sounding aria with accompaniment on a boom box. Made me want to go eat some more blood sausage.

And there’s no time here, but seeing the dizzying profusion of religious imagery at the Louvre made me wonder all over again if maybe the majority of human energy from the last 2000 years in the West has been devoted to fetishizing sado-masochism, dressed up admirably as spirituality. With tourists relentlessly snapping pictures of themselves in front of old masters, you have to think about the insatiable hunger for frozen glimpses.

The French have it better. And the return to the manic tumor-inducing bustle of the banana bin that is the work week was traumatic. I thought all my hair might just fall out in clumps. Or else patches of it would turn bright white like in a Crash Test Dummies song. Or maybe I’d just start choking on bile.

As is always the case, I had to try and recover from my gout-packing vacation by taking the opposite approach for a bit. Going all ascetic, monk-like, miserably deprived. I made lentils and roasted vegetables. It was short-lived.

The other day, as my heart-rate climbed and climbed as I got closer to the work place, this song came on the iPod. It’s one of many great Ray Davies songs glorifying the idea of chucking it all and saying “thanks, but no thanks” to civilization. This is from Lola/Powerman, which Wes Anderson mined wisely for the soundtrack to the Darjeeling Express (a movie that in some ways resembled my three-bros trip to France). If someone hasn’t already written a post-colonial senior thesis on “Apeman” -- with its Caribbean borrowings, its now-offensive equation of voodoo with primate living – well, it’s time to get on it.

“Apeman” - the Kinks

Not a Puritan

     I love the fact that this guy shares his name with the celebrated theologian.  Do they have anything in common?  Let's see.  Jonathan Edwards the preacher/theologian was born in Connecticut;  Jonathan Edwards the singer/songwriter was born in Minnesota.  Jonathan Edwards the preacher/theologian formulated a metaphysical system that was designed to challenge Aristotelianism; Jonathan Edwards the singer/songwriter formulated a country/folk/rock sound that was popular in the early '70s.  Hmm, I guess not.

      This is yet another disc culled from the motherlode (so to speak) I wrote about in a previous post (here it is, if'n you hain't read it yet).   I seem to remember hearing this song a long time ago, when I was a kid, but I never knew who sang it until I found this record.  It has a nice 'n cozy sort of homespun feel to it, and yes, there are times when you just kinda feel like you'd like to do what he's singing about.  It doesn't seek to challenge Aristotelianism or anything, but it's still a worthwhile pursuit, in my book.  (I like how he says "put" instead of "get" a good buzz on.  We could quibble over the semantics for hours).  The harmonica part may be annoying to some, but all in all it's an enjoyable little ditty.

     Jonathan Edwards the preacher/theologian died from complications following a smallpox inoculation.  Jonathan Edwards the singer/songwriter is still alive & performing, as far as I know.

Shanty--Jonathan Edwards

Contact, Pt. 3: Lady Marmalade In Space

     First of all, is it not just so awesome that people dressed up like this, in the name of...something..., back in the Seventies?  Yes, yes it is, thank you.  

     This tasty bit o' space funk is from the same LaBelle album (Nightbirds) that gave us "Lady Marmalade", and you can hear it.  But in this tune they're not warbling about some hooker on the streets of New Orleans.  Oh no.  They're singing about children.  Space children.  (This was one of the records from the lesbian treasure trove of which I wrote previously).  

     Boom.  Genius.

(P.S. Read, or re-read, Contact Parts 1 & 2 if you must).

Space Children--LaBelle

Midden Mind: the White Dub Workflow

If there were a Mt. Rushmore of Driftwood-ism, if would be adorned with the faces of Percy Sledge, Bread, the Bee Gees, Buffy St. Marie, and the youngest member of the pantheon would be our man Karl Blau – multi-instrumentalist, wielder of sewing machines, chameleon-like sideman, white dub pioneer, hijiki hipster and he-who-communes-with-the-corral. Blau is the Augustus Pablo of the Pacific Northwest. I just stumbled on these three downloads from Blau’s new record, AM (the songs were inspired by the poems of A.A. Milne). “Stream” could be filed next to your Beefheart, Polvo, Jim O’Rourke and any other melt-guitar visionary. “Spring Morning” is so completely excavated, like a sonic archeological site. You find tantalizing shards, inscrutable bone and burnt something-or-others from the midden mind. All of these songs have the new animism, the spirit worship. This music has a different, porridge-like, sub-aquatic viscosity.

“Spring Morning” - Karl Blau
“Lake King’s Daughter” - Karl Blau
“Stream” - Karl Blau

Carolina Dreamin'

     My in-laws live in a smallish town in South Carolina, and  every few months or so the missus and I go down there for a visit.  There isn't really very much to do, which is kind of nice, but when we feel like venturing forth we'll sometimes go downtown to check out the thrift stores and see if there's anything worth spending a few bucks on.  There's one store in particular that's run by a crazy cat lady, and although it can be a somewhat disgusting experience to go in there--you risk being exposed to foul cat smells, dust balls, decaying book matter, etc.--there are usually a few good records to be found, which makes it worthwhile.  (The last time we were in there, the lady tried to foist some stale holiday cookies on us, but we were somehow able to escape unharmed).  So this post is really about a bunch of music that doesn't have much in common except for where it was found.

     One record I scored there is this Ornette Coleman disc from 1976 called Body Meta.  (I was reminded of it whilst reading a post of Mr. Poncho's that mentioned the recent New Yorker article about him).  I don't think this one is considered to be on par with some of his 

other LPs, but I've been enjoying the out-thereness of it lately.  I like listening to the guitar--there's some nice distorted playing, and there's actually what you'd call a riff happening in this tune.  The record has a gatefold sleeve with some psychedelic-looking artwork and minimal text (the cover is by one Chief Z. K. Oloruntoba).   (I think there was supposed to be a booklet, but it's missing).  The players include Bern Nix and Charlie Ellerbee on guitar, Jamaaladeen Tacuma on bass, and drummer Roland Shannon Jackson.

Home Grown--Ornette Coleman

     I don't know about you, but it's hard for me to resist buying a record with the title How About Uke?  So that's what I did.  The playing is fine, not much more than just pretty, but it's a neat little curiosity, especially for those of us who are fans of the ukulele.  From "free jazz" to "square jazz" in one easy step.

Tangerine--Lyle Ritz

     Isn't this just one of the greatest songs?  Ever?  (From the 1975 Capricorn LP Struttin' My Stuff, which includes the tunes "Slick Titty Boom" and "I Love The Life I Lead").

Fooled Around and Fell In Love--Elvin Bishop

     Finally, to the Mamas and the Papas.  The record is called If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears, and it includes "Monday, Monday", "California Dreamin'" and "Go Where You Wanna Go".  Good songs, but we've heard all of them enough times, haven't we?  Here's something else from it, written by John Phillips.  If you know what I mean.

Straight Shooter--The Mamas and the Papas