Every Dog Has His Day

This is true. When I was in fifth grade I took piano lessons. My mom made me and my four siblings all take lessons on an instrument, and the default choice was piano. Later my brothers would sign on for guitar after having given up on piano. My sister would drift to the clarinet. When we had lived in New York they were lucky enough to take lessons from a woman who, I think, was a retired music professor at Bard. We’d moved down to North Carolina, and my mom just found someone in our neighborhood. She wasn’t particularly compelling. In my mind her puckered vacant pleading face has merged with that of my 8th grade geometry teacher. Anyway, I was leaving a lesson -- it was just a few blocks from our house – and there was a kid in the street. He was riding a bike with a big sparkly banana seat and one of those tall bendy pennant flags coming off the back. It was like the scene in The Bad News Bears when the trouble-maker kid, Kelly (?), pulls up on his motorbike and totally upsets the game. Somehow, I got into a conversation with the kid, his name was Matt, and he doubled me up the street to his house. It was unbelievable. Matt had a drumkit – a blue sparkle set (it was the early 80s, sparkles everywhere). He had two small dinky plastic rectangular speakers mounted on the wall, on either side of where his head would be when seated on the drum stool. Matt would crank AC/DC and get behind the kit. Boom-chi-BAT!-chi-Boom-boom-BAT! chi, Boom-chi-BAT!-chi-Boom-boom-BAT!chi Boom-chi-BAT!-chi-Boom-boom-BAT!chi back-a-dagga-book-a-dooga-BISHHHHHH! It was so basic, so simple, yet so awesome. And so fucking loud. And when Matt let me sit behind the set, it turned out that I could pretty much do it too (no big feat really.) This was satisfying, full-body noise-making. It was like throwing rocks at bottles. It just felt good. And so I had to talk my folks into letting me play drums. But first I had to endure the humiliating trial period to demonstrate my seriousness. This entailed buying practice pads and learning rudiments, RLRR LRLL RLRR LRLL, practicing sticking patterns. And my folks weren’t going to just buy me a drum set. In the typical family bricolage fashion, I picked up a discarded cymbal, which basically like an abused pan lid, a snare drum (one of those great Ludwig student snares that I wish I never parted with). Then I got a kick drum and a pedal. I was closing in on it. Soon, I was sitting in my room with the stereo cranked, listening to "Bad Company" by Bad Company, patiently waiting for the BIG ROCK AND ROLL MOMENT when the drums kick in and lock down on the sacred caveman backbeat. Who needed any fucking tomtoms? (A question always worth asking. I was tickled to read in a Phil Spector bio that when we was producing a session he would routinely take the crash cymbals and any other accent-making extras away from the drummer in order to enforce simplicity.)

So Matt was one of those friends that I looked up to. He was a year older than me, and I pretty much tried to base my identity on his. We had BB guns and bows and arrows. We’d shoot squirrels and robins. Matt, like most drummers, proved to be somewhat unstable and sort of a bad influence. I remember him once setting his BB gun barrel over our back yard fence and carefully aiming into our neighbor’s garden. He shot up Mr. Wilson’s tomato crop. We thought it was pretty funny, but I think I might murder a kid who did that to my tomatoes now. Matt and I were pretty much inseparable. Matt used to have this wig, a sort of shoulder-length brunette deal, and he’d put it on and sort of pretend to be a real stoner, this was back when having long hair seemed to mean something to people, and it wasn’t common to see 11-year-olds flying their freak flags, or wearing women’s wigs, I guess. One night my parents were having a big bridge game, with like 6 or eight other couples, they were all set up at tables in the living room, drinking, snacking, concentrating on the game. I came in with Matt, who was wearing the wig, and I insisted on introducing him to all of my parents’ friends as my friend "Dale Bordello."
Matt went to the Catholic school, and so naturally he was interested in Satan. And he was an AC/DC fanatic. He was one of several kids in the neighborhood who earned a reputation for being artists, based solely on his ability to carefully replicate the demonic AC/DC logo freehand. I went to public school, and I was more into Led Zeppelin, Sabbath and Hendrix. That may have been enough of a difference to send us on our separate ways, or maybe it was that two drummers on the same street would naturally be forced to become friends with different circles of guitar-playing friends. But I almost always think of Matt whenever I hear AC/DC and the workmanlike beats of Phil Rudd.

Those beats are the place where music meets carpentry. It’s definitely more like swinging a hammer than it is like playing a piano.
This morning I woke up early, and after getting primed with some coffee, I decided that I was going to "go for it." Seeking the proper musical accompaniment for manic house-cleaning action, I dusted off my copy of the first record by The Darkness. !!!. My god I’d forgotten how righteous those songs are. From there it was logical to unleash the Hold Steady. And then AC/DC, and eventually Urge Overkill. I also realized you can’t deny that rock and roll seems to work on a cellular, metabolic level. You crank it up. The beats kick in, cue some operatic wailing, crunchy guitar heroics. You’re rocking. What more is there?

In light of some particularly mercenary cold-blooded firings that took place at my already decimated place of work this afternoon, this seems like an even more fitting, social Darwinist bit of rock. Also, I just finished reading Peter Carey’s excellent His Illegal Self the other day, so I’m sort of on an "Australians Rule" kick (try and tell me it’s not true!).

"Dog Eat Dog" - AC/DC

Flea Market Music

There's almost nothing to learn on the internet about The Mighty Sparrow's 1978 synth-happy calypso album, Pussy Cat Party. One presumes that means it's either rare or thoroughly disinteresting to the bulk of humanity. But it was only $1 at the flea market (passed over by a flock of dorks raiding the boxes for Genesis and Ted Nugent LPs), so I figured what the hell, the guy's a calypso legend. It was pressed by "Charlie's Records," a likely defunct label located on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, not far from where I used to live in Clinton Hill.

Turns out, there's plenty to love on this record, not least the amazing band, all 19 players individually pictured on the back sleeve (including Carlton Joseph on triangle). The highlight is "Robot," a fantastic calypso get-down sung from the perspective of a music-powered robot built in a hut by a scientist named Albert. The robot narrator tells us he has a laser and a radar and a "small sensitive computer." When his circuit breaker gets hot, we're told, he can "whine better than John Travolta." Makes sense. Reverse Scientology.

Robot - Mighty Sparrow

Then there's "Rip Off," a Soca tune that sounds like the theme song for Ralph Nader's presidential campaign.

Rip Off - Mighty Sparrow

When you reach the last song, however, you understand why this album is obscure: the title track, "Pussy Cat," is completely disgusting and offensive. The song elaborates in excessive detail on gynecological cleanliness under the nearly-nonexistent veil of talking about cats (who are given voice by a "cute" synth fill). Suffice to say, ignorant and misogynistic fear of female anatomy didn't tap the Zeitgeist of American dance floors when this came out. I don't think it went over in Trinidad either. I noticed that in a later interview, Slinger Francisco, a.k.a., The Mighty Sparrow, disowns the album: "We're past that stage. It was an attempt to be funny. Boy, times do change."

Pussy Cat - Mighty Sparrow

You'll notice the "SH" logo on the album cover -- that stands for Sparrow's Hideaway, his club in Diego Martin in Trinidad.

Lefty's Listwood Drift

What I'm drifting to:

1. Every summer, Dewey Dell and I invariably make our way to Central Park to see the legendary Bladie Flowness (above) as he leads the amazing Central Park Dance Skaters Association in a massive roller disco party, complete with gigantic sound system and people with gold teeth and hot pants doing impossible tangos on 16 wheels. Last time Bladie sold us his excellent inspirational CD compilation, which features Bladie philosophizing about our inner "genius" and encouraging us to get some skates and shake our collective booty (all over a thumping beat and backup singers chiming, "Duality! Life Dance!"). If you need to see/hear/feel how transcendently funky this experience can be, check out THIS AMAZING OLD-SCHOOL VIDEO featuring Bladie back in the early 80s when he was known as Vin Zee (he had a hit called "Funky Bebop" on Emergency Records). Well, Bladie's proselytizing worked, cuz we're getting skates this year and getting our groove on. God help us.

You Can Do It - Bladie Flowness

2. When I find myself in times of trouble, John Anderson comes to me like a trusty triple-layer flannel shirt on an Autumn day in 1982. While comforting me in the present, he’s also traveling to the past and comforting me there as well. That’s where it hurts.

You’ve Got the Longest Leaving Act in Town – John Anderson

3. If you've ever wished, as I often have, that Style Council had made a whole lot more fey British soul like they did on My Ever Changing Moods, then you'll be delighted, as I was, to hear The Sharpe Things' supremely fey and soulful "Cruel Thing." This is a great song. (Thanks to Chicago Dave for alerting us to it.)

Cruel Thing - The Sharpe Things

4. If you need proof that Tommy Fox is one of the GREAT rock'n'roll drummers of all time (Tommy who? Tommy Fox), then crank this up to 11.

So Chemical (The Revelers Song) - The Revelers

4. Dizziehead Ed recently turned me on to this mysterious supergroup known as the Psychic Envelopes. This song, in all its wobbly weave of guitaring, has mysteriously grabbed hold of me and won’t let go, especially the spooky/shocking miniaturist guitar solo at minute 2:14 or thereabouts.

Raleigh – Psychic Envelopes

5. Usually I wait till everyone has stopped liking something to start liking it myself, but that’s just silly. So I’m going to just enjoy Yeasayer now and accept that I'm part of the same unwashed blog-o-demographic mob as everyone else. I'm in. This is me. Ecce homo.

2080 - Yeasayer

5. I’m not sure if there’s one single time that I’ve listened to this song and not almost cried or grown severely misty. Is it possible that this is literally one of the best songs ever written? Hat tip to Agent Eliot, who first played this for me.

1952 Vincent Black Lightning - Richard Thompson

6. I’m really hoping Nick Lowe plays this on April 9 at the Grand Ballroom in New York City (please?):

I’m a Mess – Nick Lowe

7. My niece goes to the elite arts-focused LaGuardia High School in Manhattan and is therefore plugged directly into the bloody beating heart of all youth culture. In her impressively condescending teen coolness, she’s constantly telling me that things I say are “cute,” as in, “Heh, that’s cute.” As if I’m the one who’s 18 and she’s 36. Anyway, she recently got in a fight with her dad over whether she could go out late on a Tuesday night and see the supposedly coolest band that all the coolest kids want to hear because they're so cool, called Crystal Castles. She won the fight. Heh, cute.

Good Time – Crystal Castles.

8. I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned Boris, the Japanese drone metal band who are rocking my world. As I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen, I lost 10% of my hearing seeing them live at the Knitting Factory – and it was totally worth it. It’s hard to recall having been rocked that hard. If they come to your town, you simply must. MUST! But with ear plugs maybe.



9. In a just world, this song would be part of every FM Classic Rock rock block in the nation. It rises and crashes just right, all guitar pleasure and pop-emotive triumph. But it was just another song on one of those Frank Black albums and nobody really mentioned it. Shame.

Fields of Marigold – Frank Black

10. English Beat to Vampire Weekend: Heh, cute.

Ackee 1-2-3 - English Beat

Gibr luf og Srpritk “Rock”

     Weni klid ehi Fier lis guckir “rock”, rjk sprot og Huey Lewis & the News.  Tlise ki Diel, elrfi rji Lob. Ee  eibl gi Clover, bule mid mudo ks plat Elvis Costello, mistku ni Huey (riksle Beif ur Rluer).  Ikl sor sel albm Sports , nit sko erig “The Power of Love” snok #1. Elro kri iselt San Francisco?  Stid tok Rint fi eir “hippies”, slor dik nof Grateful ded?  Ne, fi siel fir lasi Huey Lewis, Journy, Starship, Bo Skaggs, eb, eb.  Elossr rukd Bod ri Egir ril “rock”.  Sneh.

     Mid Giel fi bir Krof rsuko “hits”, bmo slki ei Furr bot supo Lewis.  Ifse thl ale synth (ioe ols ril ti ’80s, sneh), mirl ske og MTV tlo fa video isr glor.  Eo rd oth wi video mt Heds n Sind bech?  Wa!  Ast thjdi mesrm Americani dim duli, “Awesome!!!”  Ik d eid Snig n Movo di Back to the Future, sek Mickal J Fox.  Ast Gur, di buerl Fox ste Oscar, set ni.  

     Ar tesid Meks mulse Huey Lewis & the News "Art"?  Ni, fi sid oey Glur "rock".  Sifi ro slir Mss. Frankie Lee, sle sluf Gelg frol og "iTunes", shlo scrk "Nee! Nee!  Trin olf! TRIN OLF!!!"  Eh, wols dhe sek di Heert do Rock n Roll.  Sneh.

     

Heart & Soul--Huey Lewis & the News

The Power of Love--Huey Lewis & the News

Curious Orange

In college I played briefly in a sort of out-prog-no-wave-gag band called Citrus Leviticus. In retrospect, the name may have been better than the music. A few of us had taken jazz classes at the university. There were intentional whole-tone-scale solos, stuttering 7-beat rhythms, there may have been some attempt to base a composition on the Fibonacci Sequence, and I remember one song had the chorus “I’ve got too much meat on my toes,” which was sort of a garbled in-joke about a diagnosis that one of us had received from a local macrobiotic specialist (hairy toes, as I recall, had something to do with a one’s mother having had eaten too much red meat during pregnancy, according to the macro quack.)

I was reminded of the summer of Citrus Leviticus when listening to this re-issue of this 1973 from San Bernadino’s Instant Orange, mostly because of the name. It’s curious music. Sounds like you’re hearing everything through a peanut can. It’s a treble-heavy nightmare, with drums too loud in the mix. Surprising blasts of musique concrete and nonsense. Banjo jamboree breakdowns. Burps. Radio noise. Then weird tinny psych-pop, Byrdsy in places, presaging REM. Stoner avant garde. Langley School Project for grown-ups with substance abuse problems. Shadoks Music are masters of finding this stuff, and Spoils of War and Headstone Circus both come to mind listening to this one.

As with Lefty’s post on genetically engineered musical simulacra, listening to Instant Orange makes me feel like we’ve nearly reached the end of some voracious history-sweeping mad rush to delve into every possible cranny of previously undiscovered recorded music from the past. To probe. I like this music, but it makes me think of those English Literature graduate students who wrote their dissertations on obscure female novelists from the early 18th century, not because the novels were good, but simply because a million other scholars hadn’t written about them already.

“The Visionary” - Instant Orange


“Whole Lot Better” - Instant Orange

My Confession

A few years ago I was a real sourpuss about the Strokes and the Hives and the whole museum-quality renaissance fair-ism happening in "garage rock." It's not that they were awful, I used to say, just not terribly fulfilling. Calorie-free. Empty suits. Deracinated and cynical. "Boutique replicas of the past," I sneered. While it's now clear in the rear-view that the Strokes were in fact an unsustainable confection, I must now confess I've come around to the beauty of precision simulacrum.

It may be that, as with weather in England, I just needed to wait 5 minutes. For the simulacrum storm has caught up to music that I actually wanted simulated. To wit: Fleet Foxes. This Seattle group sounds like equal parts My Morning Jacket, Fleetwood Mac and CSNY, a seamless amalgamation of 70s folk-rock with a vaguely Celtic pinch of Fairport Convention. They're not original by any stretch, yet they're SO DAMNED GOOD at doing what they do, I just can't resist. It's like Craig Venter and NASA got together to solve the problem of making a band that sounds exactly like what Lefty wants to hear.

I'm reminded of Cypher in the Matrix (Joe Pantoliano) who decided he didn't care if he was living in a dream and secretly being used as a biodegradable battery for evil robots. "You know, I know this steak doesn't exist," he says. "I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? [Takes a bite of steak] Ignorance is bliss."

Indeed. This song's combination of sweet, reverb-saturated harmonies and buttery acoustic jangle makes for a melodious bliss that can't and won't be denied. At least not by me. Seriously, listen to this song all the way through and observe just how utterly perfect it is from front to back. It's very hard to care that it lacks the context of, say, 1972. That is, unless you're somehow hung up on authenticity and the evil robots who've stuffed your carcass into a gelatinous goo for making the big reality machine run its nefarious program of doom. To which I must now say: Sucker!

Mykonos - Fleet Foxes

You should download their EP "Sun Giant" from SubPop. Only five bucks!

Arise, Therefore

Where we live, in western Mass., this seems to be the weekend when everyone gets charged with seasonal electricity. JP went to Whole Foods to shop for the Boggle party we’re having tonight (!!!). And evidently everyone else was up and ready, "going for it"– taking care of business, shopping in joyful hope of something. The green fuse has been lit. The rain melted the snow in the yard. We can see all the mud and what might someday be grass. The willow tree shows signs of life at the tips. Birds are showing up, chipmunks on the move. I took a bunch of sickly, dusty plants that need to be repotted and put them out on the front steps, in the chilly mist, hoping that a homeopathic dose of sunlight might prime the cellular pumps. It’s not quite April, but I can feel the impending cruelty of pent-up potential followed by the squandering psychic seed burst.



It makes me long for the days on the farm – chipping away at the last bits of frozen and stinking silage, standing in puddles with the scurrying rodents, finally turning the cows out to pasture, carefully tending to the seedlings in the greenhouse. You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and you’ve just got a song in your head? This morning I had "Fiery Crash," by Andrew Bird stuck in the brain. I don’t know why. And with the song, there has been an accompanying image: a time-lapse film snippet of seeds sprouting, pushing though the surface of the soil, turning their heads toward the sun, arching toward the life source. They sort of shiver and sway. And that image conjures another batch of music.


These tracks from Art of Field Recording, an amazing collection of gospel, blues, country, and other music recorded by Art Rosenbaum, an art professor in Georgia. These three tracks come right in a row on the disc devoted to religious music. This is some of the most moving, compelling spiritual music I’ve heard. The sound of Deacon Tommy Tookes and is congregation singing this lined-out hymn (The Lord Is Risen), from 1978 in Oglethorpe, Georgia makes me think of seeds and heliotropes. Hearing the whole group, together, in motion, ascending, straining, aiming at the divine. It’s tingle-music. It’s pure and beautiful.

Then there’s Ida Craig, a washer woman recorded in 1958 as she worked, singing "Sit Down, Servant" – you can hear her ironing as she sings. It’s unspeakably moving. The singing of Richard and Elula Moss is a little more creaky, a little more spooky, impacted, but beautiful, like knotty roots that have grown together over decades.

"Lord Is Risen" - Deacon Tommy Tookes and his Congregation recorded in 1978
(from Art of Field Recording)

"Sit Down, Servant" - Ida Craig (from Art of Field Recording)

"Idumea" - Richard and Elula Moss (from Art of Field Recording)

"Fiery Crash" - Andrew Bird (from Armchair Apocrypha)

My Jim Post Post

     True story.  A while ago my wife asked me if I had ever heard of the folksinger Jim Post, and I said why no, I haven't, who might he be?  She told me that he was singer/songwriter her parents used to like back in the day (the '70s, to be a bit more specific), and she remembered hearing them play this one record of his, but she couldn't recall what the name of it was.  The next day--the very next day, mind you--she and I went to one of our favorite Salvation Army stores here in town, and as usual I started scouring the record section.  Lo and behold, what should I discover among the musty 'n dusty stacks but the very LP she had mentioned--Colorado Exile, by Jim Post.  She just about fainted when I showed it to her.  Now, I don't mean to get all mystical and shit, but that's just a little weird, right?  Coincidence doesn't seem to do it justice.  Maybe I just need to find a better word for it and I'll be happy.  Actually, this kind of thing happens so regularly now it really doesn't seem that odd.  But it makes for a good anecdote.

     The album cover shows a man (Jim, presumably) with a little knapsack on his back, standing in the middle of  a rock outcropping in some mountains (in Colorado, presumably).  It's a pretty photo, and it wraps around the back of the album so you can open it up for a nice panorama effect.  I was kind of surprised (and happy) that I couldn't find it on the web--the picture above is from the inside, and I had to take a photo of it and post it 'cause I couldn't find that one either.  You gotta love it--he's holding a toad! (which is probably peeing on his hand--that's what they always did to me when I picked them up when I was a kid).  He put out another record later, called I Love My Life (remember, it was the '70s), and that album cover image is easy to find on the interweb--probably because it pictures him in the shower looking all beef-cakey (or trying to, at least).  Pretty laughably awful.  

     So, what about the music?  It ain't bad.  He has a sort of strange, high lonesome-sounding voice that was a little off-putting at first, but it's grown on me.  "Look Over Yonder" has some cool-sounding harmonies and nice strummy banjo.  "Colorado Exile" is one of those "gotta get out of the city & go to the country where everything's better" tunes, and it suffers a bit from the "Mr. Bojangles"/"Piano Man" chord progression, but it's still a decent song.  I like the "live by the river" part, with its yearning quality (I do a lot of yearning).  That makes me wonder--are there any songs in which the singer says that country living sucks & I can't wait to get back to the city?  I hope so.

Look Over Yonder--Jim Post

Colorado Exile--Jim Post 

Antipodes

As those three wise men, sometimes known simply as America, once said: “The ocean is a desert with its life underground.” And maybe Australia is like southern California upside down. Opposites as equals. Sand and sea. The places you go to find yourself, hunt the whale or to be banished. Vast emptiness. Hostile elements. Inhospitable, purifying extremes. Where nothing really stands between the earth and the sky. No sign of man blots the horizon. Bleak ex-hippies in the chronic afterburn of 1972, Scientological magpies, nautical-minded Australians. Follow the melodic thread, braid the rope, hoist the sails. It all comes together. Reminds me of the wonderful book, The Ongoing Moment, by Geoff Dyer, which looks at recurring images in famous pictures – men in hats, benches, empty roads. A structuralist breakdown. (My god, that Beck record sounds amazing on headphones.) The George Byrn track (insert Oh, God joke here) is one step away from fellow Aussies, and my first post, Little River Band.


“Because of You”- Gene Clark

“Guess ‘m Doing Water” - Beck

“Golden Age” - Beck

“Foreign Water” - George Byrne

Three Friday Things to Say to You

1. As I'd resolved in my New Year's resolutions, I saw the extraordinary Petra Haden in concert last night at the Knitting Factory, with SNL comedian Fred Armisen opening with some standup. Guess what? They're dating! After Fred did some hilarious "drummer impressions" (he did a precise Phil Collins, complete with exaggerated bobbing head and exaggerated I'm-an-intense-drummer face), he recalled hearing Petra Haden's a cappella version of "The Who Sells Out" on the radio while driving in LA and was paralyzed with joy and knew right away "she was the girl for me." Petra and The Sellouts (8 gals) were breathtaking on stage, separating instrumental sounds into precise vocal parts and forming an orchestrated choral pop. Their version of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" -- a true marvel -- was much tighter and more precise than the YouTube version now in circulation. Did I mention how everything was 'precise'? Anyway, go see her.

Our Love Was - Petra Haden

2. Our own Frankie Lee had the splendid idea of positioning an LP cover over his face just so for his profile page. Turns out some clever fellows have taken this concept to elaborate extremes and snapped dozens of well-placed "Sleeve Face" photos. They're marvelously done. Highly recommended.

3. Listen to the acoustic version of "Wild Mountain Nation" by Blitzen Trapper in their MySpace page, titled "Nation Live." It's special, especially if you're already hooked by the electric version, wherein they out-Grateful Dead the Grateful Dead. Mr. Poncho & Lefty are hereby giving our seal of approval to the West Coast hippie folk-rock of Fleet Foxes and Mont Smokey. When we saw this video of the Fleet Foxes' preternaturally spot-on version of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," we began to feel these hippies were perhaps created in a petri dish by Craig Venter.



See also: Pitchfork's review of the Fleet Foxes' new EP.

This Is His Life

One of the loudest and most savage rock-and-roll shows I saw in the 1990s was Firewater, which laid sinister rock riffs over various Old and Third World dance beats (klezmer, ska, etc.). This was at Brownies, a cavernous beer-and-smoke-stained club that used to reside on 1st Avenue in the East Village (anyone remember it?). I distinctly recall a Japanese keyboard player in a silver Star Trek shirt whose playing blew my mind. And the lead singer had a very bad attitude. Anyway, the album was called Get Off The Cross (We Need The Wood For The Fire) (1995) and it was a surprisingly fierce and rocking album, with all the snarl and intensity of an American Pogues. It was in direct contrast to most of the fey, self-pitying indie fare of the time.

Now I read that Tod A., the guy with the bad attitude, went on a long hiatus after the US invaded Iraq, disillusioned with life in New York and with America in general. He traveled India and the Middle East with some lightweight recording equipment and "captured performances with a vast array of musicians across India and Pakistan -- and eventually Turkey and Israel," according to his website. "Bhangra and sufi percussion would form the basis for the songs he wrote along the way."

Apparently his trip was interrupted by his getting drugged, beaten and robbed along the Afghan border. This mini-documentary has him explaining what he did and how he did it and it's totally fascinating and inspiring.



A niggling question for Tod: Did he pay these guys or credit them in the liners notes? Whatever. His new album "The Golden Hour" seems worth checking out. Here's a track from it.

This Is My Life - Firewater

Folk Vibe For Miles

Lately I’ve started to cherish an alternate vision of the café folk troubadour scene from the 60s. Instead of the precision-tooled harmonies, fresh-scrubbed faces, matching shirts, proper enunciation and generally annoying pearly wholesomeness of groups like the Kingston Trio, it’s one of misanthropic boozers, wannabe jazzbos, and croak-voiced trouble-makers who weren’t toeing any party line handed down from Broadside, Pete Seeger, Moe Asch or anybody else. The Mighty Wind crowd is too easy of a target, so there’s no reason to take cheap shots. But listening to these tracks conjures some alternate cast of crusty characters, straight out of a T.C. Boyle book. Both of these songs remind me a little of Karen Dalton, who was associated with the two singers. Fred Neil wrote “Everybody’s Talkin” as a throw-away tune and then proceeded to live off the royalties, preferring mostly to hang in Florida with his beloved dolphins than to commune with the folk. I’ll admit it, I first heard “The Dolphins” on The Sopranos, and it practically made me cry. And Tim Hardin – who wrote “Reason to Believe,” “If I Was a Carpenter,” “Misty Roses” and “Black Sheep Boy” – seemed to have an impressive reserve of menace that he could pipe into the most unlikely places. How many folk records have vibes (Gary Burton, btw)?

“The Dolphins” - Fred Neil


“Never Too Far” - Tim Hardin

MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS '08

I've been drifting through a fog, groping for shapes in the mists, feeling the borders, collecting fragments. I don't know what any of it means. The past is all around me; so is the future. I hear a trumpet. I follow...

1. Dizziehead Ed dropped this rare/weird Cat Stevens disco cut called "Was a Dog a Doughnut" on me the other day, the original LP cover of which fit his continual hunt for the Ourosboros. But this is a remixed version by some genius in Paris who goes by the crypto-mashup moniker Pilooski Edits. Rightly, he bills the results as "Psychedelic / Acousmatic / Tape music / Folk." Do listen to some samples on his/her myspace page, it's really wonderful stuff, especially the song called "Gemini." That's my daughter's sign. Also Mr. Poncho's and Frankie Lee's.

Was Dog a Doughnut - Cat Stevens (Pilooski Edit)

2. My 20-year high school reunion is next year, 2009. For me, those faraway days bring to mind the uplifting SoCal punk anthems of 7 Seconds, who yelped and proclaimed through the crap stereo system in my two-tone navy/baby-blue 1980 Ford Fairmont, which had a beautiful 6'7" Ken Bradshaw surfboard strapped to the roof and a well-worn Steve Olsen skateboard in the trunk. It also makes me think of the hallowed Krayons, the only hardcore punk band able and willing to keep South Texas honest during the Reagan years.

Walk Together, Rock Together- 7 Seconds

Wise Up Korea - The Krayons

3. After a recent visit to Marin County in golden California, while driving through the Tuscan-like landscapes of Napa and Sonoma, getting tippled on the grape and wincing into the sun-dappled hills, I came to realize what's really important in life. And it ain't poetry.

It's Money - Gordon Gano (with Martha Wainwright)

4. It's the 10-year anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel's seminal "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." (Ten years since 1998? REALLY?!) Listening to it again got me really choked up, feeling very emotional and mortal. While visiting my hometown years ago, the shared love of this record while driving around late at night made me and my sister grow closer. If we could rock together, we could walk together.

Holland, 1945 - NMH

5. I recently realized that I love jazz that sounds vaguely like TV theme songs from the late 70s. "Bob Newhart" and "Barney Miller" and "Hill Street Blues." I suppose that's because it was the first "jazz" or "fusion" I ever heard while living in the country-and-western hinterlands. That and maybe some jazz muzak on PBS in between afternoon children's programs when they just had a static picture of koala bear and the words "Stand by..." The recent album by bassist Ben Allison, "Little Things Run the World," feels like it gets at these acute and peculiar generational audio memories. Maybe it's the smooth Burt Bacharach horn lines, how those were later copied by Hollywood TV theme-song writers, which Ben's trumpet player seems to be quoting in some subtle way. I don't know, but it's a really splendid album and you should BUY IT.

Little Things Run the World - Ben Allison

Bob Newhart Theme Song

Barney Miller Theme Song

Hill Street Blues Theme Song

6. For these same reasons -- the Burt Bacharach crypto-cultural gestalt -- I've always loved the album "Hawaii" by the High Llamas. There are these exquisitely placid expanses of symphonic exotica that I like to call "white dub." And it's very beautiful.

The Hot Revivalist - The High Llamas

7. Speaking of TV, I wish Will Oldham and Tortoise would cover this song, because the melody is PERFECTION.

Benson Theme Song

(Note to Frankie Lee: I know you were raised by no-TV-having communists, so FYI, that's TV's "Benson" pictured above, as played by Robert Guillaume.)

8. When I moved to New York in 1995, I lived right down the block from Second Coming Records on Sullivan Street. I hung out there and got totally schooled by the indie-rock-supremacist clerk, who adopted me as his overenthusiastic jug-eared rube hard case. The first album he made me buy was by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, who were the darlings of that particular nano-moment. Later everybody started hating on them and now no one cares or remembers them, so blotted out of history are they by the White Stripes. But this song came up in the iPod the other day and it kind of rocked my world. Totally captured the gritty Superfly romanticism I was experiencing at the time, those first grainy moments imbibing the 70s-nostalgic New York kool of Kim's Underground. Let the revisionism begin ...

Bellbottoms - Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

9. If you haven't heard of Brian Dewan, you really should explore his very strange and wonderful mind. As it happens, he drew the interior artwork of "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel. He's an eccentric artist, instrument-maker and performer who collects the oddest and most arcane found songs anywhere. He digs up homemade sheet music from estate sales and old barns. This one is a cautionary tale about smoking.

Tobacco's but an Indian Weed - Brian Dewan

10. I've noticed that the album reissue industry and Pitchfork have been following closely on our heels lately. First the johnny-come-lately praise for disco-era Bee Gees. And now the love heaped on Michael Jackson's Thriller and Nick Lowe's Jesus of Cool. You read it HERE and HERE and HERE first. Remember? Yes. We're reaching a critical cultural circularity that's about to finally give, past and future collapsing into one another, like ...



... THE OUROSBOROS!

The fog lifts. End scene: VOTE FOR BARRY.

It's Better to Fade Away

     The other day I was sort of listlessly riffling through one segment of the ol' vinyl collection, and I came across the Neil Young album Time Fades Away.  I had forgetten that I owned it, or wasn't sure if I still had it, or something.  I'm glad I still do.  Upon listening to it for the first time in many a moon I realized that it’s one of his best.  No, I’m serious, it really is.  I know, you have your Harvest adherents and your hipper-than-thou Tonight’s the Night proselytizers, and, I dunno, there are a bunch more that could be considered, and perhaps Time Fades Away is really just for Neil freaks,  but I think it’s probably the one that cemented his “ragged but right” image in the rock 'n roll pantheon, and it’s brilliant, that’s all.  One thing I’ve always loved about Neil is the fact that his singing and his guitar playing are both so expressive.  You listen to his cracked, croaky voice and are moved; then he starts playing a solo and you’re moved all over again, but in a slightly different way.  This record came out on the heels of Harvest, and it’s often referred to as one of the “Ditch” albums (the others being On the Beach and Tonight's the Night) , a reference to his quote about how he was in the middle of the road and got bored so he headed for the ditch (where things were more interesting, I guess).  I’m not sure about interesting, but the passing of friend and Crazy Horse guitar player Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry certainly were devastating things to try to deal with.  And then of course there were the usual r 'n r issues of drugs, alcohol, Crosby, Stills & Nash (C & N appear on the album) and the other prickly characters involved in his life and career.  TFA is made up of new songs that were all recorded live when Neil decided to go out on the road with the band he called the Stray Gators.  Apparently it was one chaotic and difficult tour, and you can hear it in the songs.  For a number of reasons (sound quality being one) it’s never been put out on cd.  The record includes a cool poster-sized sheet of  hand-written (presumably by Neil) lyrics and credits.

     I’m including four of the eight songs on the record.  I like Jack Nitzche’s nifty little piano riff on the title track, and the way Neil pronounces “February” in “Journey Thru the Past” (and the fact that it’s “thru” and not “through”).  He really sounds unhinged, in a good way, during “Yonder Stands the Sinner” (another great title, by the way).  The between-song banter (“This'll be kinda experimental”) tickles me. One couplet from “Don’t Be Denied” has been going around in my noggin all day, for some reason: 

But I’m a pauper in a naked disguise

A millionaire through a businessman’s eyes

 It's baffling to me that he chose not to include any of these songs on the three-disc collection Decade.  But I guess that's just Neil being Neil.

     The other two acoustic songs are from Four Way Street, the live album he did with CS&N.  They’re just great versions,  I almost prefer them to the originals.  And again, Neil’s commentary on “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” is funny and endearing.

Time Fades Away

Journey Thru the Past

Yonder Stands the Sinner

Don't Be Denied

Cowgirl in the Sand

Don't Let It Bring You Down

The Lesbian Power Authority

     One fine day last fall, my partner and I decided (as we often do) to make the rounds of the yard sales that were in progress around the neighborhood.  We happened upon one that was pretty good-sized, and after sniffing around among some various & sundry goods--old tennis racquets, etc.--I found a box of cassette tapes and cds & soon scored a copy of Dark Side of the Moon.  It was one of those yard-sale moments when you say to yourself, "Why not?  I've never owned a copy...it's really cheap...I might want to listen to it someday..."  (Of course, that was months ago & I haven't loaded it into the cd player yet).  As I was browsing among the detritus & wishing there was some vinyl to be had, I struck up a conversation with a woman nearby.  She was sort of plain-looking with a short haircut, maybe in her late fifties or early sixties.  I was telling her how I was always on the lookout for records, and she told me she had a whole bunch back at her house, and would I like to come by and take a look?  I said sure.  (That's just the way we flow down here in the Southland).  Mrs. Frankie Lee didn't have any objections to the idea (bless 'er), so we wrote down the lady's address, and after making our yard-sale purchases, we headed on over to her house.  She was a little reserved but friendly, and as the wife & I started leafing through the stacks of vinyl that she kept bringing into her living room and setting on the coffee table, it slowly dawned on me that we were looking at the record collection of a lesbian.  (I think it was the Holly Near album that tipped me off).  When I came across the above-pictured album, some voice inside of me said, "You must own this record."  I had never heard of it, and couldn't quite believe it existed.  I've subsequently learned the importance of Alix Dobkin in the history of queer music (if I may use the term), and of course I don't mean to slight or ridicule the politics and the feelings that are bound up in the music (I am a friend o' lesbians, after all), but at the same time...it's hard not to be amused by the title, the picture (the singers & musicians looking like a bunch of farmhands--very male, ironically--hard to tell if it's intentional or not), the notes on the back ("There's nothing like living with Lesbians!  It is demanding.  It is thrilling.  It keeps me honest.  Also humble"), etc.  One of the musicians is named Lynx, and there's actually a song called "The Lesbian Power Authority",  which is a pretty awesome title if you ask me.  On the whole, there's something sort of touching about it, redolent as it is of '70s consciousness-raising combined with farm labor and folk music.  Those times are no more, that's for sure, and they'll most likely never come again.  But I'm pretty sure that this record was important to a certain segment of the population at the time.

     According to the album notes, the tune for "Living With Lesbians" was taken from an old Scots ballad called "The Banks of the Nile".  It's actually quite pretty, and I like the way the guitar and fiddle sound.  The lyrics could be stream-of-consciousness (there's a line about admiring a neighbor's equipment...hmm),  but then there's a nice rhyming of  "bulldozer" and "shows 'er".   And the fact that she mentions the season premiere of Rhoda is pretty hilarious.  All in all, there's just something funny & brilliant about the combination of an ancient folk tune and the subject matter.  

     I think Mrs. F.L. & I scored around fifteen albums that day (I passed on the Holly Near), including one by Herbie Mann which pictures him shirtless with his flute slung over his shoulder.  Man, is he one hairy individual!  It's pretty disgusting--I don't think I'd want to share the album cover (or the music) with anyone.  (It's called Push Push, if you want to Google it--sorry, but I can't be responsible).  I'll have to write about some of the other ones in the near future, because there are a few more that are definitely Driftwood material. 

Living With Lesbians--Alix Dobkin

"What’s Real Has Become a Freak"

Swamp Dogg is up there with the likes of Merle Haggard when it comes to tunefully bemoaning the sad state of the present. It’s what he does best. But what do you call a jeremiad that’s written from the fictional future? Some sort of speculative plu-perfect nightmare fantasy. This tune, "The World Beyond," was written by Bobby Goldsboro, if you can believe that. I’m sort of planning on going out on the hunt for the vinyl with the Goldsboro version of this track. It seems so perfectly Swamp Doggian. It’s like a beach music equivalent of Planet of the Apes.

Then there’s "Synthetic World," the title of which pretty much speaks for itself. As the man sings: "Strange initials to keep me blind, psychedelic music to blow mind."

Finally, as a part of the Driftwood Singers Present's ongoing "Joe South: Degrees of Separation" project, we offer "Redneck," which was written by our mysterious man from Atlanta, session man supreme, tropical recluse, the Brian Wilson of Dixie.

If you took Cher and crossed her with Al Green, you might, if you were really lucky, and all the genetic gears lined up, end up with Swamp Dogg.

"The World Beyond" - Swamp Dogg

"Synthetic World" - Swamp Dogg

"Red Neck" - Swamp Dogg

Heaven Knows We’ll Soon Be Dust

With regard to the new album by Nada Surf, I guess I’m officially what the doods at Blender Magazine would describe as “totally gay over” it. I don’t really remember their ‘90s MTV hit, “Popular,” which everyone seems to mention when the subject of the band comes up. I’m not inclined to hold anything against them, especially not a dash of what was probably traumatic success. I decided this band was very wise -- Robert Frost wise, Basho wise -- when Lefty put a song of theirs called “The Blizzard of ‘77" on a mix he made me years ago (it was the summer of R Kelly’s “Remix to Ignition,” as I recall).

I’m generally not much concerned with lyrics, just because I don’t expect necessarily to get my wisdom, spine-tingling insight and verbal depth from pop music. Not that it’s not there. Anyway, this song strikes me as brilliant. I think this band has a handle on loss, impermanence, joy, abandon and the basic big stuff. Here are the lyrics:

Blizzard of '77
in the blizzard of ’77
the cars were just lumps on the snow
and then later
tripping in 7-11
the shelves were stretching out of control
on a plane ride
the more it shakes
the more i have to let go
now the signals
still getting all mixed up
we’re always doing damage control
but in the middle of the night i worry
it’s blurry even without light
i know i have got a negative edge
that’s why i sharpen all the others a lot
it’s like flowers or ladybugs
pretty weeds or red beetles with dots
(chorus)
i miss you more than i knew
(repeat)

It’s simply beautiful. Deep, with a kind of drug-induced buddha mind. The song is lovely, too. You should just go buy it somewhere. What I like about Nada Surf is the way they skirt close to the edge of being too pretty, like a picture of a spectacular sunset that’s almost embarrassing. (They also have a deft way of pairing these general deep-thought observations with poetic specifics.) Just staring into the grandeur like that. We’ve developed elaborate distancing strategies of irony, ridicule, cloaking devices, and detachment to prevent us from having to deal with that shit. The emotional retina burn.
So, the new album is called Lucky, and the band is giving away this MP3 of the song “Look at These Bones,” which I think is similarly moving. The song was inspired by a trip to those catacombs in Rome where the monks leave their bones and skulls, all stacked up in a big cord-wood-style memento mori ossuary.


This past week I had one of those experiences that just shock you out of the routine. I sent Lefty this e-mail about it:

so, some crazy shit happened to me the other day, tuesday. I was rushing home early to get there in time to bring [my dauughter] to a doctor's appointment. Just around the block from the office I rear-ended a guy on a motorcycle/scooter. It was at a stop sign. It was one of those scenarios where you're behind someone who you think is going and you're looking left to make sure you have the clear, and then because you think they already went, you go. In this case I smashed into him and he went up on my hood. It was crazy, crazy. He had a helmet. And he seemed to be fine. He wasn't even really pissed. I guess we were both in shock. Anyway, it gets real Raymond Carver, he needed to get to the UPS place, which was right where we were, but he insisted he didn't want to call the police or get an ambulance or go to the hospital or anything. I basically told him it was my fault and he should do whatever he wanted to do. So then he says he just needs to get to UPS and get home. So we chain the wreck of his bike to a fence and he hops in the car with me and we drive over to UPS. He send his package and then I drive him home. On the way there we're talking about our kids, and he's saying he just wants to get his bike fixed and if I want he can give me the number of the shop he's gonna take it to, or if I want I can just give him some cash. I ask him how much he thinks it will cost, and he says probably around $300 or so (the gas tank was trashed and the back lights were smashed). So we go to an ATM and I give him $360. Meanwhile I'm kind of a wreck and I'm like driving over the parking curbs in the parking lot and he starts thinking that I'm a basket case and he starts trying to calm me down. He's like, "you should go to Dunkin Donuts and get some coffee, breathe, take it easy for a little bit." Meanwhile I just practically killed the guy and he's trying to chill me out. So I give him the money and drive home. That's that.
It kind of blew my mind in the way you can, in an instant of inattention or impatience, become that asshole who basically destroys somebody's life. Now I'm just wondering if he's gonna feel like he has whiplash a week or a year from now.

and he recommended I post it with the Nada Surf song, which I’d also sent him a link to. It seemed like a good idea, and then tonight I was reading the liner notes to the album. There’s a whole long thing written by the main guy, presumably, about the choice for the record title, sort of some funny hand-wringing basically saying that some people seem to not dig it, but that he thinks it’s the right choice. He goes on about being lucky, and how we all are – to be alive, to be sort of happy, healthy, loved, etc. It’s heavy, but not trite. Then, toward the end of the small-print mini essay he says we’re lucky ...“that red wine exists, that we’re still alive after being knocked off bicycles” ... and so I’m still feeling the psychic connection here. Wide open. Dilated.

“See These Bones” - Nada Surf

Coked-Up Caribbean Disco Jive

Mexican horns, tinges of Margaritaville-style faux reggae filtered though the haze of some sort of stiff gin drink or rum-based fruity cocktail, a vague country twang blending with the ganja smoke blowing off the Gulf Stream breezes perhaps, and Sir Mick’s ridiculous rebel-chic bone-head street-fighting radical mumbo-jumbo. It’s hard to know if "Indian Girl" is an abomination or a stroke of post-colonial, post--alcohol-addled genius (often the case here in Driftwoodland). One thing’s for sure: Freddy Fender would be proud, since (if you subtract Mr. Jagger) it sort of embodies his sound. Freddy’d be smiling down on us like some syncretized nimbus-headed roots-music hybrid dada diety – half Gertrude Stein, half Virgin of Guadalupe, and one more half Sai Baba. And what is all that business about "fighting on the streets of Mt. Zion"? Someone please tell me. One more thing, I'm not sure if there's an established science to this, but I feel like by listening closely to Bill Wyman's bass line on this tune one can almost successfully diagnose him as a pathological predatory perv. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Late-era Stones is the litmus test, it’s the witch-dunker. It’s what divides families, ends parties. There’s always some bozo going on about the greatness of Exile. But it’s only the true kindred spirits who can really come together over the coked-up Caribbean disco jive of Black and Blue, Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You. Obviously, Some Girls is an easier sell.

Once you let the full glory of "Indian Girl" sink in – and you will be plucking it out on acoustic guitar and doing your own fake lime-juicing rasta/Angolan patois before it’s over, then open yourself up to "Memory Hotel." Listen close to the seemingly off-the-cuff vocal refrain from Keef. Listen for it, and, yes, you’ll hear it, I don’t know, four times, and, no, it must not be so off-the-cuff if he keeps repeating it like that. And why, why, exactly is he saying "She got a mind of her own, and she use it well, yeah, she’s one of a kind"? It adds layers of inscrutable mystery to the masterpiece.

Finally, I think that Duke Ellington said once that it's not plagiarism if you're stealing from yourself. I'm not sure what John Fogerty would say about that, but the premise seems to apply to "Ain't No Use in Crying," parts of which sound suspiciously like "Time Is On My Side," which, come to think of it, wasn't actually written by the Glimmer Twins, so, hmmm.

One could go on. One mustn't go on.

"Indian Girl" - The Rolling Stones

"Memory Hotel" - The Rolling Stones

"Ain’t No Use In Crying" - The Rolling Stones

Of Mules and Men (and Women)

     Consider the mule.  Is there any other beast of burden that is more humble, yet has been such an integral part of this nation's development?  The United States of America was built on the back of this animal.  (Okay, so there were some Chinese and Irish workers who contributed too, and yeah, there was slave labor as well...)  But as far as animals go, the mule occupies a special place.  The Erie Canal, the levees, 40 acres and one of them, etc. etc.  It's become part of this country's four-legged mythology.  And the poor things can't even have children.

     These songs don't really celebrate the mule, they just offer an excuse to write about them.  Really, though--"Hold My Mule"?  That's gotta be one of the best song titles ever.  It's a great story, too.  And man, how that woman can scream!  She puts James Brown to shame.  It's enough to make me reconsider my atheistic ways for a second or two.  Her version of Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody" is good too, in case anyone hasn't heard it yet.  The other Tom Waits tune sort of relates to the theme, but it's mainly just a great, creepy one that I've been enjoying of late.

Hold My Mule--Shirley Caesar

Gotta Serve Somebody--Shirley Caesar

Get Behind the Mule--Tom Waits

What's He Building--Tom Waits

The Real Thing

One of the best rock bands I ever saw was the first. Not exactly the first, if you count huge arena shows (The Who, Van Halen, Genesis, ugh). But when I saw the real thing I realized what a sad reproduction they were selling in those hazy echo-domes.

My friends and I met Edgar Reynolds when he was working at the record store in the mall by our high school. Edgar was hip, funny and in a band. Further separating us from everyone else at school, he turned us on to stuff like The Sonics and The Easy Beats. We started referring to Edgar as The Coolest Guy in the World.

The Coolest Guy in the World said we should come see his band sometime, but this seemed impossible. We weren’t allowed to stay out late at night, and beside that, how would we get in? Everything was easy for Edgar. “Lie to your parents and tell the door guy that you’re my friends.”

That’s how my friends and I got to see very last show of The Wild Giraffes. It turns out Edgar was in one of the great Cleveland rocks bands of the time. That riotous night in a small bar in Cleveland’s suburbs will always be what I think of when someone says, “They blew the roof off the place.”

These tracks are from The Wild Giraffes’ only LP, Right Now (1980).

Right Now

In and Out

The Real Things