Wire - "Pink Flag" from the Album Pink Flag and die kreuzen - "Pink Flag" (T&G62A)

Wire provides us with an original art punk gem from 1977 and die Kreuzen provide us with a drone punk rendering from 1990.

Wire were of course genius, but you might make the argument that die Kreuzen's spaced out guitar sound suits Wire's impressionistic lyrics even better than the original arrangement did.

While Wire was always crisp and angular, die Kreuzen stretch the sound of the song, the sound of the guitars, that is, pull it like chromium taffy into this near-infinite delay, and then smash the whole lumpy ribbon of sound they'd just made, so that what had been distinct, choppy, arresting is now distorted, broken, and warped.

The difference between Wire's original and die Kreuzen's cover is the difference between a zig zag pattern etched into zinc plate, buffed clean, and the pattern made by a sponge dipped in paints, silver/chrome and crimson and yes, pastel pink, all smeared together, as it is dragged freehand sidewise along a long, bumpy wall.

Wire - Pink Flag - 10 - Pink Flag.mp3

This file was removed February 9, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Art punk

die Kreuzen - Pink Flag (T&G 62A).mp3

This file was removed February 9, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Covers where they change the words

Emerson Lake & Palmer - "Nutrocker" From the CD Pictures At An Exhibition

On this Christmas Eve, down from Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, to Kim Fowley through B Bumble (whoever *he* is), to Keith Emerson, from me to you, a progressive rock retelling of a boogie-woogie/rock 'n' roll remake of a classical march taken from the score to a ballet performed each Christmas the world over.

Hot damn.

Keyboardist Keith Emerson is, as usual for him, as subtle as a jackhammer in his muscular performance upon the clavinet, but there's no denying the thing's a blast to listen to.

Well, OK-- maybe there's been some denying. The reviews of Pictures at Ground and Sky, while pretty much scorching the album overall, take quite a bit of issue in particular with the capstone to the record that is "Nutrocker," calling it "goofy," and an "insult" that is "cheesy" and inessential.

Well. Though I love me some Emerson Lake and Palmer, that love is mostly for Tarkus and Trilogy and the first one, so I really can't get into a defense of the album overall.

But the disrespect of "Nutrocker"--and from supposed prog fans no less!--kind of gets into some areas where I think ELP are unfairly maligned, so I'd like to (ahem) go into them for a moment.

I'm a child of the seventies, but one that came of age after the Ramones and the Sex Pistols had done their work. Which is to say, after they had made progressive rock (in its first flowering) more or less obsolete, at least in the eyes of the tastemakers.

Jon Marlowe from the old Miami News wrote the review that got me to go out and buy Rust Never Sleeps, while presciently championing all kinds of awesome scuzz rock that gets worshipped now in retrospect--but he hated prog, once calling Kansas "the band that are not a band." Creem had as much to do with my buying White Light White Heat as any earthly condition--but chief scribe Lester Bangs' hate of ELP was, and is, legendary.

But as I said then, and will say now, what the fuck? An oft- and ill-used canard about prog was that progressive rock bands were pretentious, that they took themselves too seriously. Like the Velvet Underground didn't? but more germane here, ELP DID NOT take themselves too seriously. If ridiculous jokes like "Jeremy Bender" or "Benny the Bouncer" didn't get the concept through, then "Nutrocker" here should be the last, umm, exhibit required to convince.

If you told me that Keith Emerson liked to show off, I'd say, "yeah and so what?" And if you told me that ELP didn't understand that a tongue in cheek helps when listening to prog, I'd say you were dead wrong.

Anyway, with that in mind, I'd like to list before I wish the world a Merry Christmas my three funniest things about Keith Emerson and ELP:

"Country Pie/Brandenburg Concerto No. 6" -- a track from The Nice's Elegy; Bob Dylan and JS Bach, together at last. The deep humor here HAD to be intentional. Right?

Welcome Back My Friends to The Show That Never Ends . . . Ladies And Gentlemen, Emerson Lake and Palmer. Yes carried off their Triple Live so much better. . . ..

The exclusive limited edition Knucklebonz sculpture. Not that the Dimebag Darrell isn't funny, also.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Pictures at an Exhibition - 12 - Nutrocker.mp3

This file was removed February 6, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Merry Christmas!

Pelican - "The Woods" from the EP Pelican

As much as I like the concept of a modern metal band without vocals--meaning there's one less thing you have to overlook in order to like them--I like the title (and the thrust) of this song even more.

Working within a genre that so often looks to an overworked Christian mythology for its symbols of heaviness and "evil," Pelican here point to something much more primoridal for their dark symbology, reminding us that if you take the racial memory back far enough, there was once nothing more terrifying and evil than whatever it was that lay past the treeline.

Think, if you can, of a Little Red Riding Hood removed of the ironic Looney Tunes veneer we veterans of the Industrial Revolution have brushed over it. Think past the Brothers Grimm, who were sometimes waylaid by their dreams of German unity. Think, instead, of the source folk tale, of the menace of the wolf, the very deadly dangerous and cunning carnivore of the deepest darkest reaches of the Woods, bloodthirsty and absolutely unpredictable, long powerful jaws dripping with drool, likely to attack at any moment, to leap from the shadows even in corners of the forest you had been naive enough to think might have been safe.

Or think of the cannibalistic witch of Hansel and Gretel, whose sinister phantasm trap of a gingerbread house also lay deep within the forest that is considered by the stepmother to be nothing less than a death sentence for the two children. Or of the similarly anthropophagic Baba Yaga, whose home within the Woods rested on magically animated chicken feet, and whose palisade without was made of human bones, with a ring of skulls perched atop.

These are the myths we created once upon a time in order to explicate our fear of the dark and of the unknown that lived within the Woods. And though we've forgotten about them now, or turned them into Saturday morning cartoons, the way that they rationalized our most primal fears was once essential.


These ultimately pagan myths of the ogres, monsters, wolves and witches rumored by fabulists to dwell within harken back to the neolithic Hercynian Forest: a vast, dense, dangerous place where the sun could not reach and where man for the most part was nothing more than additional prey. It was a place where he simply did not belong, and the consequences of being caught there were dire indeed.

This is all grave, powerful, heavy stuff that taps deep into the medulla, and as the Pelican tune awakes, and stirs, as it throbs with menace, as the minor key dissonance explodes into a thunderous roar, as the final chase through the dark copses plays out, all you can think of as the listener is how perceptive Pelican were to tap into this, and remind us of the older, primordial fears.

'Coz Slayer are a great band and all, but in the end, Pelican are here to remind us that, when it comes to horror and dread, Satan's nothing more than a goddamned newcomer.

Pelican - Pelican - 04 - The Woods.mp3

This file was removed February 5, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Post-metal

Fear - "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones" from the Album The Record

As singer/actor/auteur Lee Ving is very much aware, what's going on in this song is the demarcation of a cultural divide. East Coast/West Coast, Apple/ Angels, "Saxophones" draws the lines (at least from the West Coast perspective) in the battle between Los Angeles and New York, and that battle is over much more just the two metropolis's brands of punk rock.

Yeah, it's about Ramones vs. Black Flag, Voidoids vs. Fear, but it's also about tons of other things: subway vs. freeway, the Village vs. the Strip, the Pacific Ocean vs. Long Island Sound, the MOMA vs. Universal Studios, smog vs. garbage, and probably as much as anything, Woody Allen vs. the whole goddamned collective.

You can surely ask how much Ving is into the films of Woody Allen, but for me, if the pro-LA, anti New York point of view is just about summed up by "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones," then the pro-New York, anti-Los Angeles side of things would be stated by Allen, or at least his later, less funny, films.

I mean, I know that the neurotic jew schtick has by now gotten old, and that Allen's idea of modern music is something like Paul Whiteman, but stay with me, it's worth it: Allen's films starting at about Annie Hall are not only love songs to New York City, they are pretty direct in their hatred of LA, and are therefore definitely salvo in the East/West culture wars.

So yeah, that's it: this song is Part Two of the Steel Cage Death Match between Woody Allen and Lee Ving, initiated and continued over the cities they each hate. The Woodman had laid down the gauntlet in Annie Hall, calling LA "Munchkin Land" and five years later, Lee Ving comes back and speaks on behalf of the City of the Angels, telling us in no uncertain times that New York's best if you've got a terminal illness.

My love of Sonic Youth notwithstanding, I'm pretty sure I'm with Ving on this one, but, of course, you're free to judge for yourself



Fear - The Record - 5 - New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones.mp3

This file was removed January 30, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File Under: Youze all suck, who don't tink so?

Medeski Martin & Wood - "Whatever Happened to Gus" From the Album Combustication

A postbop dreamstate, a figment of rotgut bourbon and scotch, a scrapple in the Apple on a bright sunny morning that exists only in some jazz poet's crazy-ass mind.

Zoot suits and porkpie hats, and cigarette butts, way back when, about Bird and Roach, figure 8 jam-sessions locked tight, chasing that shit hard, only you couldn't figure what the hell Bird was doing with his arms around Wynton Marsalis' shoulders. Saxophone cases resting against the brownstone walls, left empty in the bebop hallucination, everyone's split. All culminating in the perfect beatific vision, scads and scads of these fantastic jazz musicians, one after the other, descending into the City, rows upon rows of them, all dressed in coat and tie and dark sunglasses, hustling and running across the Brooklyn Bridge.

And say, man, you got the key?

After you tip your hat to narrator Steve Cannon (and without offense toward Chris Wood's very athletic bass-playing), you find that the key to this very fine, very historically-oriented, and very very freaky tune is John Medeski's mellotron. And just like Cannon says, that's when I did my research.

For those of you who have long since forgotten or even never knew Days of Future Passed or In the Court of the Crimson King, the mellotron was one of the earliest polyphonic keyboard synthesizers, being introduced in the mid '60's, and seeing some of its most prominent usage on the two proto-prog gems just mentioned.

The M400 mellotron we're talking about, the one that became popular within the nascent progressive rock movement, and the type that Medeski owns today, was electro-mechanical, which basically refers to how undeneath each of the 35 keys is a miniature tape head and roller. Each time you depress a key, 8 seconds of music plays. Then the tape rewinds, ready for the next time you depress the key above it again.

The factory preloaded its mellotrons with a choice of three sounds: strings, cello, or an 8-voice choir. But the thing about the M400 that endeared itself to musicians, and continues to, is that its tapes came in a removeable frame, meaning that artists could, with a certain amount of labor, switch away from the preloaded to sounds to those they themselves created.

Listening to the tune, and reading about the mellotron just now, Medeski is undoubtedly using tapes of his own creation on "Whatever Happened to Gus." But there's another thing going on with the wobbly, freaky, eerie background behind the slaphappy double bass. Evidently, the M400 had a flywheel that powered each of the keyboard's 35 tape reels. And evidently, Medeski has removed the lid from his mellotron so that he can reach into the machine while playing and retard or even stop the motion of the flywheel to get the fluttery distorted sound of his most current whim.

There's a picture of Medeski's mellotron here, if you're interested.

Now, nowhere did I read that Medeski used his mellotron on "Whatever Happened to Gus." But having listened, and having read, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the keening, wobbling, wailing chorus you hear as support through much of the track is exactly that: John Medeski slowing down and speeding up the tapes on his mellotron to better craft the band's soundtrack to Steve Cannon's strange jazzbo poem about the men who used to play back in the day--even the ones whose names you don't remember.

Medeski Martin & Wood - Combustication - 6 - Whatever Happened to Gus.mp3

This file was removed January 27, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File Under: Jazz for Druggies

Bailterspace - "Retro" From the Album Wammo

I found the science fiction theme to the Bellini tune and entry so enjoyable to play with that I think I wanna play with it for another half week.

'Cause that title is Retro as in "retro-rockets," and not retro, "of or designating the style of an earlier time."

Bailterspace's Wikipedia page notes in the band "[a] fascination with the interplay of technology and humanity (often played out in metaphors of space travel)," and it's right up front in "Retro."

The first lines are

The rockets have landed
The spacemen are stranded
Not where they wanna be

Where's that taking you?

You know, maybe the 'style of an earlier time' thing does come into it a little bit. Because the flavor of the sci-fi in "Retro" is markedly different from that in "The Best Song On a Starship." While Bellini's song alludes to (and reminded me of) a science fiction that had literary aspirations, Bailterspace's tune is rooted firmly in time before science fiction thought it could aspire to anything.

I visualize the brightly colored covers of the pulp magazines of the '30's and '40's when I hear "Retro." I see the visions of a future that never actually got here, or now never will.

Perhaps you noticed about fifteen years ago, the Walt Disney World people finally admitted that their Tomorrowland attraction had pretty much gotten everything wrong. They removed the "Mission to Mars" and "Star Jets" attractions, and they redid and rebuilt and repainted everything to match the perspective of an imagineer who lived during the '30's and '40's. When, not incidentally, the pulp magazines were at their height.

I just found out that they've actually given a name to the aesthetic that the Disney folks and all the others who have taken their inspiration from the classic pulp sci-fi mags have been striving for. They call it "Retro-futurism."

Hmmm.

Despite it's bright pulphouse colors, Bailterspace's tune is still somewhat downbeat. The spacemen are stranded, after all, and twice we must submit to Alister Parker's anarchic, slashing, violent guitar solos (and who knows what they must be symbolic of). But this is still a brighter future than the one we're currently enduring.

I'd take it in a second if given the chance, but I'm not gonna get it. I'm stuck in this world of jihadists and AIDS and recession and the fucking Iraq War, when what Poul Anderson and Vincent Di Fate and Gerard K O'Neill had promised me was jet packs and space stations and flights to the Moon twice daily.

Good thing I've got this wonderful piece of atmospheric noise pop to keep me distracted.


Bailterspace - Wammo - 6 - Retro.mp3

This file was removed January 23, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Rocket roll

Bellini - "The Best Song On A Starship" - From the Album Snowing Sun

Love it where the worlds of science fiction and rock 'n' roll collide, if only for the things I get to then think about, even if I mix things up, even if I can't keep them straight, even if it does become this confusing synesthesia . . . .

One of the subtexts in the back of my brain to the concept of supralight, interstellar travel, like they so often talk about in sci-fi, but so very rarely sing about in rock 'n' roll, is that it would to the travelers who use it be in some sense psychedelic.

Or perhaps psychedelic is the wrong word; what I mean is that faster than light travelers would have the impossible made manifest to them. The other side of the light speed limit is a place without causality, a time without logic.

"The Best Song On A Starship" reminds me of a sci-fi story I once read by James Blish called "Common Time." Our hero Garrard, on an antiseptic starship bound for Alpha Centauri, wakes up shortly into his journey to find that his subjective time has been stretched 7200 times; two hours pass for him in the time it takes his wallclock to show the passage of a second.

Then, by the time he's rigorously explicated this state of affairs, the clock has sped up 'til it's the other way around: two hours is like a second to him. His senses fade, until there is nothing but a dim red, and then comes the pseudo death . . . .

From which he is awoken by the rodalent beademungen, "a living being, organized horizontally" who think and speak radically differently--though in English, or at least so it seems to our addled hero. They hold vast conversations, Garrard and the clinesteron beademung, which our hero understands perfectly. "I pitch you-them to fullest love,' he tells the beademungen. "I shall adore the radioceles of Alpha and Proxima Centauri, 'on Earth as it is in Heaven.' Now the overdrive my-other must woo and win me, and make me adore a featureling much like silence."

Garrard was created in 1953, well in advance of not just cosmopolitan math rock bands, but also ahead of all the glorious and insipid proclamations of love that would compose 1960's psychedelia. Regardless of this chronological accident, no lysergic astronaut of that later time could have postulated a credo of love and wonderfully distorted thought processes any better.

And then Garrard heads home and the story ends attending to its own priorities, but the starship that Blish showed me as this place of deep time- and logicfuck has always stayed with me.

"Best Song on A Starship" inhabits the same distorted place, with Sicilian vocalist Giovanna Cacciola's disconnected ramblings, words coming to her atop the angular rhythms randomly, without logic, residing like the bedemungen in a space independent of the need for it.

The song's a progression of the intersection between the impossible states in space-time and the mundane. 20 degress she's getting dressed; 40 degrees she's on a starship, cool and clean and disinfected, smelling like rubbing alcohol, but time's all wrong.. 50 degrees she's shot into a place past logic, where the impossible is self-evident, and she sees their enormous heads and she disappears, surfing into the clear white galactic light.


Bellini - Snowing Sun - 11 - The Best Song On A Starship.mp3
This file was removed January 20, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under (what else?): Songs on a Starship

Slint - "Carol" - From the Album Tweez

It's a horror song.

Movies belonging to the Friday the 13th franchise notwithstanding, most horror lies in the things that are not told, the events that lie past the edge of the picture frame.

The camera in a horror film transmits the sense of terror not by focussing on the events, but rather at the reaction to them. The zombies come knocking, and the first thing you see is not the undead, but the anguished, horrified face of the poor lady who answered the door. It is the reaction to the unspeakable that transmits terror to us.

Not that I think there's anything supernatural about Slint's song. The horror is entirely man-made, I'm pretty sure. But true to what I'm saying, it is also entirely transmitted by the reactions our singer/narrator is having, how he's falling to pieces just trying to tell us.

First it's "past where they paint the houses," a statement of location. But rather quickly it's "PAST WHERE THEY PAINT THE HOUSES!!!" the same words, but now imbued with dread at some nameless horror.

What the fuck is going on?

What did you find there, past where they paint the houses? What did you see, out in the middle of nowhere, past where the silos stand?

We're never told, but we can guess, right? Or you can guess, and I can guess, and the horror will lie in the details that exist at the edges of our individual imaginations.

The whispered part in the middle of the song only gives us a whisp of a clue:

Take away, something that you know.
The reason, that you're always there.
Use it, 'til you're through.
But remember, when the time comes,
You got to let go.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Tweez was released in 1989, and was Slint's debut effort. Seven of the eight songs on the record were named after one of the band member's parents, which is where you get "Carol," who happened to be guitarist Brian McMahan's mother.

The followup they released in 1991, Spiderland, sounds an awful lot like "Carol," with its dark snakelike bass, scratchy guitars, lyrics mostly spoken rather than sung, and gloomy subject matter. They broke up without releasing anything else in 1993, though recently they've done some reunion shows.

Slint - Tweez - 3 - Carol.mp3

This file was removed January 17, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.


File under: Nosferatu Men

Deep Purple - "Highway Star" - from the Album Made In Japan

Once I'd decided I was going to finally get this blog rolling, I spent HOURS agonizing over whether I should feature a song from Deep Purple as my first post.

I'm really not that much into Deep Purple, and I certainly don't know how much residual cool, if any, remains for them. Even when I was in high school (in the early '80's), I thought, considering they were supposed to be a hard rock band, that they were just a little too slick to carry it off. "Hush" had very little to do with rock & roll for me, and "Smoke on the Water" was just kind of stupid, now wasn't it?

But here I go, 25 years later, and I'm starting this blog thing, and with all the weird shit I listen to, I've selected Deep Purple's "Highway Star," the live version anyway, to be my first post.

What's up with that?

I'm into one of my infrequent exercise kicks now, and last night as I was on the exercycle listening to Junior, there it was, right between "Hey Ya" and "Hit the Plane Down."

The little keyboard fanfare is instantly recognizable and then you hear the polite Japanese audience do their polite thing, and then get a little more excited as Ian Gillan announces the song.


Ritchie Blackmore works his opening downstroke into a ball of shiny electric sustain, and by the time Jon Lord does his organ solo with the gallopping rhythm guitar underneath, I'm remembering that well, if you were going to listen to Deep Purple at all, Made In Japan was the one to listen to.

Because of the boring drum solo during "The Mule" and maybe some half-baked prog overtures during "Space Truckin'," even Made In Japan is not a perfect album, but it almost certainly is Deep Purple's rawest, heaviest, least polished-up work, and it absolutely positively features the band's best lineup of Blackmore Gillan Lord Glover and Paice.


In the book version of Fast Times At Ridgement High, Eddie Mann the ticket scalper who never made it into the movie has made a personal holiday of Ritchie Blackmore's Birthday; he stays home and listens to all of Blackmore's albums, one by one in chronological order, and Cameron Crowe writes

Mr. and Mrs. Mann would come home from work at six in the evening, and Eddie would be getting into the great stuff : "Woman From Tokyo" and the Made in Japan live album with all those excellent five-minute screams from when Ian Gillan was still in the group.

Fuckin' ay, bubba.

Gillan shredded his vocal cords into beef jerky with all the high-pitched screaming he did for Purple in this period. Although his screams on "Highway Star" are awesome enough, there's a moment somewhere else on the album where Gillan engages in a screaming match with the crowd, he goes "hey!" and the crowd shouts back "HEYY!" so he screams back "HEEEEYYYY!!!" and by the end it sounds like you're listening to a crazy man. It's something else.

The version of "Highway Star" on the studio Machine Head is already pretty fast, probably the fastest thing I ever heard the band do, and rather energetic itself. But placed in an environment where Gillan is channeling the crowd's energy into these superhuman yells, the song becomes pretty much immaculate. Having just heard the song for the first time in twenty years yesterday, but about four times since, I'm in LOVE with the construction of Jon Lord's organ solo, with the way the first third of Ritchie Blackmore's solo is in a different key from the rest of the whole fucking song, and how the last third devolves into wonderful feedback noise. I told you how I love the rhythm guitar underneath Lord's solo. I'm in love with the way Gillan sings, "body control and everything."

And I love it how I'm never quite sure whether they're talking about a car or a girl.

You know, this is just totally a great fucking song, and it *totally* works as an intial post.

So what if it's 35 years old? Even at the age of 43, It appears I'm still crippled by the same ridiculous pretensions to coolness that ruined my behavior back when I was a teenager. Back then I was supposed to like Deep Purple, and now I figure I'm supposed to mock them. Either way, though, its pressure I invent to believe something because it's popular--at least among the people I imagine I want to impress--rather than because it's true.

But while not smart enough to be free of such desperate inclinations, I am at this late age at least smart enough to ignore them--at least upon reflection.

Everybody wants to be liked, and everyone wants what they write to be liked. And everyone wants their blog to be visited. But let's cut to the quick, and the hell with the pipe I was laying in an attempt to insulate myself from criticism.

Deep Purple weren't a great band for very long, and two generations have come of age since the time when they were. And they aren't any more my favorites than they were six hours ago for me. But the more and more I think about it, "Highway Star" works just fine as introductory blog post.

That I had thought anything else when I began writing this post--and this blog--
says as much about the overcorrections I continue to make even as a supposed adult to my own insecurities, as it does about a band that might be over the hill, that might be lacking in "residual cool," but still at its best was much more ferocious than your run-of-the-mill Kaiser Monkey or Vampire Fire Chief.

Deep Purple - Made In Japan - 1 - Highway Star.mp3

This file was removed January 14, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Osaka Rock