La Historia De La Musica Rock

Steve Winwood - "Night Train" from the Album Arc of a Diver

2011-09-16T22:06:00.012-04:00

"Night Train" from Arc of A Diver played on the way home, and it got me thinking of the time I saw Steve Winwood in Europe.

A little internet research just now and I can tell the tale: That my grandfather had decided he would take me to Europe after my high school graduation on or around the 15th of June 1983.

While Europe is pretty amazing even if you limit yourself to the parts your grandparents might dig, for the most part the excursion was exactly the whitebread sightseeing kind of trip you'd expect when you're with your grandparents. But on a couple nights they handed me some dough and let me run around the town we were in on my very own. And I of course did the things an 18-year old kid would: those having to do with drugs and rock 'n' roll. When we were in Amsterdam, for example, I hit the world famous Milky Way and bought and then consumed some Afghani black hash, the cottonmouth then averted with a bunch of skunky Dutch beer. And in Luxembourg, on the 20th, I went to see Winwood at the Théâtre Municipale.

It's a long time ago now, but I still do remember a long and excellent version of the same song I heard this evening while driving home. It's funny: Because I remembered "Night Train" so clearly, I'd long thought that this tour Winwood had done, and this show I had seen, was in support of Arc of a Diver, but I'm realizing only now that in fact the tour was behind Talking Back to the Night.

I really don't remember much of the concert, but I've found it interesting to find that this guy here says that the show was in his "top ten gigs of all time." Not going there, but I definitely remember, and always have remembered, the experience as being one of an ace rock 'n' roll show.

Found the image next door on eBay, and looking at the back of the T-shirt now, I see that the gig I attended in Luxembourg is not even listed. Winwood had been in Brussels on the 19th and was in Saarbrucken on the 21st; I guess they decided to turn the day off into a payday sometime after the tour was booked and the merch was manufactured. I seem to recall coming across a small handbill for the event--rather than a grandiose poster--during the day while I was touring with my grandparents, which would reinforce this idea I'm getting that the show was scheduled and promoted last-minute.

Another, and probably the most vivid, thing I remember about this concert is that, arriving early, I hooked up and started chatting with a pair of Luxembourgians who were sitting next to me. I babbled something about Yes no doubt, and they recommended in return Barclay James Harvest. I mentioned Kansas, and they had no clue at all. Then the house lights went down and the three of us enjoyed the show as you do. The band was energetic, and the crowd was enthusiastic, and an encore got played, and Winwood said good night, and the house lights went up and the drummer threw something into the audience landed a few rows behind us, I figured it was a rag or whatever and I bid my newly met friends good night, told them well met and they said: hold on.

They said yeah, let's sit here and talk a bit more while the crowd files out, and I said sure, why not, time's not precious I'm on vacation. And we talked some more rock and roll, can't remember what but I'm sure it was pleasant enough, until the theatre was basically empty, one of the guys climbed backward over his seat and then crawled over a couple more until he found what he was looking for.

Climbing back towards us, he explained in a lowered voice that in European countries with harsh drug laws, and Luxembourg was that, it was fairly common for musicians passing through to toss their fans a bone so to speak in the form of little drug packets tossed into the audience.

I'd never heard of such a thing before, and I've never heard of such a thing since. but Luxembourger prog-rock brother sure enough had some dope in his hand when he arrived back in our row.

So I hung with my buddies a little longer. With no small aura of paranoia, we left the theatre and found a thousand-year old bridge or something nearby that gave us some cover from the long arm of the Duchy's law while we smoked the pot and let the buzz spreads it wanton fingers through us.

Then the moment was gone, and my Central European buddies and I parted for good, and I wandered stoned and more than just a little paranoid through the dark stone streets of Luxembourg for a short time, trying to and eventually succeeding in finding my hotel.

Good memories brought on by a good song.

Steve Winwood - Night Train.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (or more) (right click and save as target)

File under: Multi-instrumentalist Rock

My Lack of Favorite Things

2011-09-09T19:19:00.012-04:00

Don't worry, Hipster Kitty, and Hipster Kitty fans, I haven't decided to change featured memes for this blog, although I will admit to having briefly considered it. But no, Music Nerd Octopus is just a guest today, on loan from his real home at http://fuckyeahmusicnerdoctopus.tumblr.com.

(And OK, before we move on, let's give that hyperlink address just prior a second look:

fuckyeahmusicnerdoctopus.tumblr.com

It may just be the greatest url ever).

Anyway, Mr. MNO is here to help me tell a story . A story about how last week Melanie and I were invited to go down to the Grand Central Club in downtown Miami to hear her Whole Foods co-worker play a set with her synth 'n' laptop band. The music was . . . not for me. The word that came to mind as I sought to explain was "techno," although they describe themselves as "rave/house,". which probably only serves to highlight how disconnected I am from music of this sort.


	A horribly blurred picture I took at the Grand Central Club. Can't tell the musicians, but aren't the colors pretty?

But good for Khadija and Mike, you know? And then after the show, we ran into them in the parking lot, and Melanie said nice things and in doing so pointed at me and muttered something about the weird music I listen to. And suddenly I was being asked by Melanie or Khadija about my favorite band or bands, and I literally had no clue as to how to respond. I muttered something like, "I don't really have any favorites," which sounds like I'm just not that much into music, and which is of course totally inaccurate if you're trying to figure out just what it is I am also.

So fuck. It's complicated. Melanie says something about "Sonic Youth" for me, and Khadija nods her head, saying "yeah we like Sonic Youth, too" and I nod my head also, but inside I'm like, No! I have real issues with Sonic Youth. They're not my favorites, they're just a band that was really good for a good while!, though fortunately I kept my mouth shut.

So what's the point here, beyond the fact that I am just as socially inept at age 46 as I was at age 16? Well, I think it's that in my old age I've moved past this concept we've all had of "favorite band." I remain enthused about music. With the resources available these days, I continue to discover new music all the time. I love music as much as I did as a teenager. Music may in fact be the only thing holding me together, with the household going bankrupt and the Astros in the shit-tank.

But I don't have a favorite band, and haven't had as I think about it, for quite some time. I don't know how to answer the question. I know of bands who used to be my favorites, Iron Maiden and Yes and Sonic Youth, but now they're each just one of many whom I like, each one of many with highlights and lowlights and stories and albums and songs, and I really can't say I prefer one to any other any more.

I think I have said something like "Boris are the best band on the planet" in the recent past, and on reflection now as I write I do even believe that to be true. But still, I wouldn't say Boris are my favorite band. Maybe it's splitting hairs, but I think not.

Perhaps it's that I now realize everything will turn to shit at some point, every band will break up, or release their sell-out album, or get in a lifechanging car accident, or just reach a point where they now no longer agree with me on the things I listen to them for.

Or maybe it was the fallow period that I had, four or five years in the mid nineties when I paid less attention to music than at any other time in my life, a time when I was led to concentrate on other things, a time which passed without anguish and relatively painlessly while my formerly favorite outfits worked on without my attention.

But mostly, I think it's this: of course I've had fun with my blogspot and now with my tumblr, but I believe I have a greater respect for the music now, as I now have a greater respect for growing older. I do take it more seriously than I did back when I was riding my bike to the record store. This isn't making silly lists in history class anymore. It's the way I live my life, powerful music to accompany me and to grab hold of as I struggle through. What it is, I figure, is that I've dropped some of my adolescent enthusiasms while still maintaining my enthusiasm.

Death - "Trapped in a Corner" from the CD Individual Thought Patterns

2011-08-14T17:58:00.018-04:00

Chuck Schuldiner's dead. Been dead. I had no idea.

I'm not so sure whether the honorific that's tossed Schuldiner's way--"The Father of Death Metal"--is entirely accurate. I'm no expert but a quick look at Wikipedia confirms that both Carcass and Possessed released albums considered firmly in the death metal camp before Schuldiner's band put out their first LP in 1987.

But father or no, he was in there early. Think about it: his band was named Death. How early do you have to get into the death metal racket to ensure that the name "Death" hasn't already taken?

So father, maybe not, but pioneer: yes, absolutely. Back in my most thrashtastic days in the late '80's, I remember being aware of Death. I guess I'd seen Scream Bloody Gore or more likely Leprosy in the metal bins at the record stores. Anyway, I'd seen the logo and it's hard to forget it once you have. Even if you've not listened to the music.

A deep skepticism of the growling vocals * that my metalhead buddy Alan and I had developed kept me from listening to Schuldiner's band as it began. And my own estrangement from music for most of the '90's kept me from discovering them as they matured into tech death greatness.

It was probably in 2007 when I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry for Atheist's Piece of Time and thence to the article on technical death metal. Having been into prog and fusion for basically my entire adult life, the terms in which Atheist specifically and tech death in general were being described, its complex rhythms and time signatures, its experimentation, appealed to me. Surely to get at this music I could put up with some growls?

I could. Piece of Time once I bought it, in its relentless epicyclicity became a brutal, headbanging favorite, and thereafter I went looking for more tech death. One of the better albums I came up with was Individual Thought Patterns by Death.

And thoough I never really dug further into the Death canon, never delved enough, really, to find out even that their frontman had died, stupidly, tragically, the songs from that album have been in regular iTunes/iPod rotation for me ever since.

But I had no idea dude was dead, none whatsoever.

* * * * * * * * *
You may have noticed on Friday that an Atlanta appellate court had ruled key parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (some people, mostly those who complain about it, call it "Obamacare") to be unconstitutional, upholding a challenge to the law brought by Chuck Schuldiner's one-time home state, and mine own.

CNN tells me that Stephanie Cutter, an assistant to the president on the matter, disagreed with the rulling. "By bringing everyone into the health insurance system, we can not only lower costs for everyone but also finally ban discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions," she said.

* * * * * * * * *
While in the studio in early 1999, Schuldiner had felt some neck pain, and went to a doctor for what he figured would be a pinched nerve. After an MRI, it was found that instead, horribly, he had brain cancer; it was a large tumor growing on the pons part of his brainstem that was pressing on the nerve.

He immediately began radiation treatment, but was told the tumor was inoperable. After some time, he was told that the tumor had necrotized, not diasappeared but begun to die, and also that there WAS a surgery option; however, it was *really* expensive . . . .

Obviously I don't have Chuck Schuldiner's tax statements, but it's pretty clear that playing this brutal esoteric death metal could not have been that lucrative for him. And none of the record labels he had recorded for had ever provided health insurance. In any case, when it turned out that the possible surgery could only be performed at NYU, the hopital at first demanded 20,000 dollars before any operation could be performed. When the Schuldiner family said that was impossible and refused to sign away future royalties as was suggested, and MTV News started calling the hospital in following the story, the hospital agreed to accept 5,000, and the Schuldiners were able to come up with that amount.

He got the surgery in January of 2000, and it was reported to the media that it was successful, though later it would be revealed that only half the tumor was removed.
Schuldiner returned to work on a new album with a new group, but in May 2001, he was told that the cancer had returned, and that once again he would need surgery.

Schuldiner had bought insurance in the aftermath of the first episode, but the insurer he chose refused to pay for any of the newly-needed procedures, saying that the condition Schuldiner had was pre-existing. Schuldiner and his family were deeply in debt after the first go-round, so had very little to do but go begging in the face of this rejection.

"There is something terribly wrong when a country as great as America will let their citizens die for lack of insurance or money," Schuldiner's family said in a statement at the time. "[We are] aware every time [he needs treatment] that if we do not get the money, he will die."

The metal community during the Summer of 2001 mobilized itself as well as it could in order to help the Death frontman. Benefit gigs were played and benefit auctions were held. Some of this money, that which wasn't lost to crookedness or ineptitude, even got to the Schuldiners. They were able to get Chuck on a regimen of a chemotherapy drug called vincristine, but there never was a second surgery, as Chuck, weakened by the chemo, died in December of 2001.
* * * * * * * * *
I have worked for the same small industrial supply company for what is approaching twenty years. And while they have paid me a salary that has allowed me to take on a grossly inflated mortgage, they have never offered me health insurance. At certain times this has been irrelevant, as I cruised through the months healthy and unbothered. At other times, though--and now is one of those times--I have had to reach into my pocket to pay for the doctors I've needed to see. And let's also say that after six years of salary stagnation, and nearly 15 points of inflation, my ability to reach down is severely limited.

I can understand when it comes down to it why a small business would be unable to offer health insurance. The nature of groups is like the economies of scale that all businessmen understand. So if you've got a five-person company like the one I work at, it's difficult to get a good rate on health insurance. I understand that.

So why do these cocksuckers--cocksuckers like my boss, like this so-called Tea Party, like the magnates that run the corporations we work for and buy from--fight a plan that would create the largest (and therefore cheapest) group of all?

Obamacare is the law of the fucking land, yet the Right, which only gets more neolithic and only gets more savage in its ongoing war upon the middle class, and they won't be happy until 99% of the country's resources are in 1% of its pockets. Nothing you see around you--not the ridiculous argument over a debt ceiling that had been raised seven fucking times under George W Bush, not this absurd Norquist pledge, not the activist ruling penned by Dubina Friday--should convince you of anything but.

They didn't give a rat's ass if Chuck Schuldiner died, and (unless you've got a boatload of money) they don't care if you do, either.

Death - Individual Thought Patterns - 04 - Trapped In A Corner

320 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Death Metal

*We made an exception for Sepultura, not sure what our reasoning was, now that I think on it (Return)

La Historia: The Tumblr

2011-07-30T08:52:00.004-04:00

So I started a Tumblr blog Friday. I wanted to send a link to my Sonic Youth piece to a dude who I follow on Tumblr, and their system told me I had to register with them if I wished to send a message.

So what the fuck, right? Pictures and snippets will go there, longer pieces will continue to be placed here. So during any future post-lapses, you can always head over there and see if I've posted anything that-away.

Take a look now if you'd like.

I also created a little sidebar section here to hold a link to the Tumblr and Astroland and a few other blogs I visit. It's really long overdue that I link back to TAD and Mr. Crabb. The "Site-Specific" title is a nod to the Earth "song," natch.

That is all.

Sonic Youth - "Confusion is Next" From the CD Confusion is Sex

2011-07-25T15:16:00.027-04:00

Or, Thurston Moore is a Big Fuckin' Dick

I guess I ought to start visiting Pitchfork again, or start blog-hopping at elbo.ws. It seems a little repetitive to always be writing about what Spin has written for the month.

Also: I remember when I was reading Shakey, Jimmy McDonough's excellent biography of Neil Young. And I disappeared inside the thing, became engrossed. I was reading about when Young came to LA, and had formed the Buffalo Springfield with Stills and Furay and all the rest of them. And evidently there was a perceived rivalry--at least from the Springfield's point-of-view--between the Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds. I became so wrapped up in this that I started telling Cerveza whenever I had been given half a chance about how much better Buffalo Springfield had been than The Byrds.

And Cerveza was like, why are you telling me this? Why should I care, why does it matter, when this little city of the angels folk-rock turf war you detail took place almost 40 years ago?

That's why I've always tried to keep things positive around here, because while the good stuff is always relevant, nothing seems more pointless than bitching about things which ended up getting resolved decades ago.

But, maybe, some things haven't gotten resolved, and remain a viable target.

Spin's latest issue is a 20th anniversary shindig for Nevermind, and while I've already told my Nevermind story, these are worth reading, too, an oral history sort of thing, a few more ambitious analyses, and a couple infographics.

It's one of the infographics that got me going, hope you dug my scan as you were passing it by. If not, go back, and note what's circled in the graphic with the aqua. I bet you're not surprised that I can wait here while you do.

You see them over and over again, these references to Sonic Youth's assumed integrity, and you get tired of it, this fault--not a feature--in the critical landscape that we see when we look around us.

So it is understood let me say it plainly: Sonic Youth were a great band for nearly ten years, and have been at the least relevant for three times as long. They were my favorite band for five years, and not just for five years, bur for the coolest five years of my life. I listen to them plenty even now. This is not a "Sonic Youth sucks" post, or even a "Sonic Youth is overrated" one. I love 85% of this band's music, including the 29-year old, but still truly mind-wrenching tune I have selected for download today.

But it seems to me that if you are as a guitarist or as a bassist or as a person intent on taking the path to paragon of integrity, a good place to start is by not being a fucking asshole.

Quite frankly, no-one is as cool as Thurston Moore thinks he is. For 25 years, Moore--and his wife, too, really--have run around living their lives and making artistic decisions for their band based on the proposition that the coolness of anything they touched would accrue unto them.

When I saw that they'd covered "Beat on the Brat" for Master-Dik, I thought it was pretty cool, and neither "I Wanna Be Your Dog" from Confusion nor "Bubblegum" from the "Starpower" single set off the red flag.

But whether it was their cover of "Personality Crisis" or of "Ça Plane Pour Moi" or of "Moist Vagina" or even of "Victoria" that in the end tipped me off, at some point it struck me like a 165 gram frisbee upside the noodle that SY were trying one by one to get the entire fucking canon in.

As if when they covered the New York Dolls, they got to keep any of the Dolls' leftover coolness that the surviving members weren't using, as if there were a kewlness account somewhere they could squirrel it all away to and withdraw from when their ego needed.

Enough to make you feel a certain fondness for Dinosaur Jr, for their cover of "Show Me The Way," it never bothered J Mascis at all; he never thought covering Peter Frampton might make his band less cool.

And good for him in his security. As for SY: Why does a band whose own work is so respected feel so insecure?

OK, two more stories, let me hammer this thing home.

A couple years back, I spent some time talking about "I'm Not A Young Man Anymore", this long-lost Velvet Underground song that surfaced in early 2008. I made a very big deal about it, because it was a very big deal, a never-previously heard live track of outstanding quality from a seminal band.

Looking now in Wikipedia, I see that in 2008, Rage Against the Machine and My Bloody Valentine played shows for the first time since their respective heydays, and I see that Paul McCartney played Israel for the first time since 1965. Bo Diddley and Rick Wright died, while M83, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend and Deerhunter released breakthrough albums. But I'd still say that the recovery of "I'm Not a Young Man. . . ." was the musical story of the year.

And I guess that Thurston got jealous of all the attention that Lou and John and Sterling and Mo were getting, 'cause when Moore made his appearance at South By Southwest in March of '08, he announced that he would play the song. There's no other way to look at it: Moore was trying to divert some of the attention that had been directed to the song onto himself. I hate him for this. The only people who had any right to play that fucking song at SXSW were the ones who played it at the fucking Gymnasium, and Thurston trying to steal the limelight for himself is most definitely not the action of a "paragon of integrity."

And then there was the time I read that Moore and Gordon had 1) named their dog "Merzbow" after the obscure Japanese noise project 2) made recordings of their dog barking 3) sent those recordings to the actual Japanese noise artist.

Christ. Naming your fucking dog "Merzbow" is, now that I think about it, very much the same as covering an obscure academic curiosity like Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music" (which, guess what? SY have also done). Such a pointless act can only come from a conviction that coolness can be swept into some kind of continually-growing ashpile, and he who has the biggest pile wins, and also that obscurity a priori = cool.

Arrgh. It makes me want to kill yr idols. I'm gonna skip the way SY mercilessly dissed the Jesus and Mary Chain on an EP only some few years after worshipfully name-dropping them in the liner notes to EVOL, and I'll skip the whole ironic we-love-Madonna thing, which I can look back at, and hate.

But hopefully you get my point despite my incompleteness. Though they may be supernally innovative artists, with a catalog of revolutionary works, Sonic Youth are not paragons of integrity as is so popularly (and so tiresomely) supposed. They're more like total dicks who have their priorities all bass-ackwards.

I've never felt the need to admire the artists who make the music I like, but still, it sure is confusing.

Sonic Youth - Confusion Is Sex - 07 - Confusion Is Next

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Pigfuck, Postpunk

Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids - "Misery Machine" from the Live As Hell Demo Tape

2011-07-18T19:49:00.015-04:00

Read something interesting if not necessarily immediately arresting to me last week at Boing Boing. Said that the current laws regarding sampling are so screwed up, it would cost The Beastie Boys 22-1/2 million dollars to clear the rights for Paul's Boutique, should they try to record and release their odd psychedelic classic in the here and now.

And you know, okay, point made, but let's face it: no-one--least of all The Beastie Boys--is trying to make Paul's Boutique these days. If someone was, I might be listening to that somebody's rap, but there isn't, and I'm not.

So my immediate response to the little anti-copyright treatise on the big anti-copyright website is, call me when it affects an artist I give a shit about . . . .

But guess what: even though my hip don't hop, and even though I haven't been a Marilyn Manson fan in twenty years, I was reminded today that, even for cool rock dudes with their heads in the sand, it's not too terribly hard to come up with an example of a song that had been pretty much disemboweled by copyright restrictions.

Once it bumps you on the iPod, I mean.

* * * * * * * * *

I've always said that Glenn Danzig was cooler back when his songs referenced pulp novels and comic books, and I can speak from experience when I say the same thing about Marilyn Manson.

Like Danzig, the erstwhile Brian Warner had a fascination with junk-culture ephemera that receded once he decided that some more gullible fans might buy into the Antichrist bit.

Though I wasn't at the show Tim told me about, where Warner, I mean Manson, took a stagedive into a crowd that made a collective and concerted effort NOT to catch him, I did attend at least two and maybe more Manson shows in South Florida, back before he jettisoned his Kids, back before he signed on the dotted line for Trent Reznor.

They were good shows as I remember, Marilyn and his Kids circa 1990 the hardest working band on the South Florida dive bar circuit, no Antichrist schtick developed yet, but plenty of dummies and mannequins on stage, Manson rocking his Perry Farrell look but the Spooky Kids usually in drag, always high energy, always a kaleidoscopic light show projected onto the venue's walls, full of Rocky Horror-style high camp, images of Lost in Space lunchboxes, of the Cat in the Hat, and of Scooby Doo.

Bringing us back to "Misery Machine," which in the version I present for you here, features not only a four-second clip of Those Meddling Kids to introduce things, but also a splice of James Brown his ownself, telling us in a bit stolen from "King Heroin" how riding in the Machine would ride you to hell . . . .

It seems a little hard to believe now that Trent's people couldn't clear the James Brown stuff, considering rappers had been ripping the Godfather off for a good fifteen years when this stuff was first looked at. But they couldn't get it cleared, and they couldn't clear the Mystery, Inc. stuff with Hanna-Barbera, either, though that's probably less of a surprise.

So the version that ended up getting released on the Manson debut album was missing its best parts. I guess the "blood is pavement" line still works, and so does the "I am fueled by fuel and fury," they're mighty powerful in fact, in either version, especially at loud volume. But all of the cool subtext is fucking gone in the version of the song that most people know. And that's all kinds of fucked up.

Manson/Warner could have used a bassplayer who belongs to Polydor, and Polydor would have gotten it done on their courtesy. But he couldn't use a five-second sample that live DJ's have been using since time immemorial.

Which I guess is what they were talking about in the Boing Boing article; I just had to find the right way of looking at it to appreciate it. Marilyn Manson in my opinion kind of took an unfortunate path with his career after he broke out of South Florida. He got rid of the cool stuff and kept the stupid. That's his fault.

But the fact that his latter-day fans haven't heard the ace version of his best song, that, my sampling and MCing and DJing friends, that appears to be the fault of some silly and obsolete industry dogma.

Marilyn Manson And The Spooky Kids - Misery Machine.mp3

160 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (right click and save as target)

File under: Spooky Snacks

The Washington Squares - "Fourth Day of July" From the CD Fair and Square

2011-07-04T10:21:00.008-04:00

How about we do it Tumblr-style (sorta) today?

Washington Squares - Fair and Square - 01 Fourth Day of July.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Neo-beatnik Neo-folk

The Psychedelic Furs - "Dumb Waiters" from the CD Talk Talk Talk

2011-07-01T11:10:00.002-04:00

So the U2 360° tour passed through town Wednesday. I was not at Sun Life Stadium for the event, nor had I wished to be.

I have instead put my measly weekly discretionary income aside for The Psychedelic Furs, who are playing The Culture Room tonight.

If I were looking for the authentic concert experience, and why wouldn't I be, then it probably should have been the U2 show I steered myself toward. After all, U2 released a new album of original material as recently as two years ago, and they are touring of course with a lineup composed entirely of original members.

Taking a quick look at the Psych Furs' Wikipedia page and at the band's own site, I see that the last time the Furs released a new album of original material, it was 1991, and that only two out of six in the current touring lineup were onhand 31 years ago for the debut elpee.

Consider that tickets to the U2 show could have been had for as little as thirty bucks, and that The Culture Room is asking 25 tonight, and I appear to have allocated my time and my money somewhat rashly.

The question, then, almost assaults you in its eagerness to be formed: Why would I wanna go see some nostalgia band when for almost the same dough I could have gone to see something that is continuing to evolve?

Well, the smartass answer to that question is simply that I don't like what U2 is evolving into.

Seriously, I liked the Irish blokes in the '80's, when Bono 'n' The Edge 'n' Adam Clayton 'n' Larry Mullen basically copyrighted the angular postpunk pop anthem. But their music in the nineties and in the aughts moved away from that sound, into some kind of nethergroove I don't get, and I chose--rightly I think--not to follow.

And if The Psychedelic Furs have stopped evolving because they've stopped producing original music, maybe the most important upshot of that is that they stopped growing at a place where I still liked them.

The Furs' site says that their current set of dates is the "Talk Talk Talk 30th Anniversary Tour," and though I don't know if any Furs album is the complete masterpiece that would truly deserve such honorifics, I still think the fact that they'll be playing their second album in order tonight, in its entirety, is pretty cool.

Even if John Ashton and Vince Ely and Duncan Kilburn won't be some of the ones playing it.

* * * * * * * *

I see, as they are fond of saying on the internet, what I did there. After spending two days writing condescendingly about the nostalgia process and the way it replaces critical listening, I lay down some bullshit that suggests nostalgia's OK when I choose to invoke it.

Guilty, I suppose.

This won't be the first time I've seen The Psychedelic Furs, as it happens. I think it was 1987 and the band was touring off Midnight to Midnight. If that album wasn't the band's artistic height, it was certainly the height of their success, and its promo tour came to the fancy-ass James L Knight Center at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Miami.

I remember that the newest AOR station in town at the time, WGTR, was sponsoring the thing, their personnel as they raised the banners and introduced the show blithely ignoring the sad fact that the station featured none of The Furs' music in their daily playlists. The station had brought along their two-and-a-half storey inflatable guitar-playing monkey, and had tried to raise it outside the hall, but it, fittingly and pathetically both, was in a sad state, non compos erectus, I guess you could say.

Maybe it was because of the ringtail radio station or that monkey or the sad truth that once I got inside, I was completely sober. But despite the fact that the show was well-played, and well-engineered, with no glaring mistakes of performance or of sound, I left the show a little bit annoyed.

I think it was mostly the lighting. The band had a huge glitzy sign that swung forward at louder moments, practically illuminating the entire hall in faceted diamond light, and the whole thing looked and felt so Hollywood and so mechanical to me. It sure as fuck didn't feel like the Psychedelic Furs, who had always seemed much darker, much smokier, much more noir than all that gaudy rockstar bullshit.

I think Richard Butler will tell you now that Midnight to Midnight was the closest his band came to a sellout album, and would agree if you told him the album was his band's most blatant attempt to enter the mainstream. And I guess I just found some measure of offense in the way that the lighting and the stage show were so blatantly mainstream, as well. I was, like, I'm not sure who told these guys they were stars, but . . . .

Anyway, the Culture Room, while having made some improvements over the past few years, is still a hot and sweaty dive and a major fire trap, to boot. Maybe a better name for the band I'll be seeing tonight would be "The Butler Brothers Plus a Few Guys Who Played On Midnight to Midnight." But let's not quibble. If I can be pardoned for reaching back into my past, three quarters of the reason I'm taking the plunge this eve is that I'm hoping maybe tonight I'll see the Psychedelic Furs as they should be seen.

The Psychedelic Furs - Talk Talk Talk - Dumb Waiters. mp3

246 kbps VBR mp3, up for six weeks

File Under: Concerts That Rastro Went To

Brain Damage Part 2

2011-06-28T12:02:00.007-04:00

Thinking a little further about yesterday's post (and thank you Mr. Crabb for commenting on it). . . .

Alright, so I'm bitching about corporate radio stations and the litany of same old same old. Fair enough.

But why DO the corporate stations structure things in the way that they do? Or, to penetrate one of the sheerest veils, what is it about the same old same old that makes these companies money?

Melanie is something of a foodie, and she is fond of using the term "comfort food." The meaning is a little nebulous (or maybe it's just that my understanding of the term is nebulous), but examples are things like macaroni and cheese or mashed potatoes.

These are high-carbohydrate foods, yes, but more to the point, they are also things your mom might have made you when you were a kid. Most of us like the carbs, but what's most important to these foods and to this concept is that they remind us as adults of the simpler times we had when were children.

So what I'm guessing is that the Classic Rock format functions as comfort music. Now, the magic period being evoked moves up a few years, from childhood to adolescence, but if you're in that 30 - 50 demographic that these stations seem to target, and your contracting business is in the shitter and you've got three more years of child support to pay, and they just raised the rent on your duplex another 75 bucks, I can definitely understand if you'd rather listen to something that reminds you of yourself when you were a bit more piss and vinegar.

It's why music like Dust or Sir Lord Baltimore or Nick Drake or Matching Mole or Can or anything else semi-obscure like that, though all of it is properly of and belongs to the quote-unquote classic rock era, won't get played on Classic Rock radio.

They didn't play this stuff back then, so there's a void where the memory-trigger is supposed to be now. The Clear Channel programmers understand that nobody is going to be comforted by an obscure 7-minute track from some band they've never heard of. People for the most part want what's easy, and if you don't make their music easy, you've given them no reason to return to your small slice of the radio spectrum over and over again. And return visits are what radio advertising is all about.

It's all well and good if people like me and Mr. R Smith and Tad and all the other likeminded music geeks on the freaking internet wanna go out (actually, in my case that should read 'wanna force themselves to go out') and challenge themselves with something new or something buzzsaw or something progressive or something obscure.

But I'm guessing most people (and most people who listen to Classic Rock stations) don't need any additional challenges. They've got enough already, courtesy of their government or their boss or their ex-spouse.

Pink Floyd - "Brain Damage" from the Album Dark Side of the Moon

2011-06-27T19:03:00.010-04:00

One of my favorite things in the whole world is when I go on over to RS Crabb's Top Ten site and he's written another rant about how terrible Classic Rock radio is.

"Fucking radio kills me," he says.

Such purity of emotion, you know? Some Clear Channel automaton plays "Margaritaville," and Crabby's near suicide. Then if an enlightened DJ plays Eddie and the Hot Rods, his faith in humanity is restored.

You need to be wary of such wild mood swings, Crabby, my friend. Not that I don't think that mass market rock radio sucks, I'm sure it does. Every now and then I'm even reminded.

But because of the iPods I've owned and put into usage, very little of the time I spend listening to music is spent listening to the radio. The concept of Classic Rock radio's suckitude is not actually transmitted to me all that often.

I mean, Christ, if III's shuffle plays the same Dust song over successive sessions, I get annoyed. If it serves up a couple of Maiden covers back to back I'm wondering how come the Shuffle ain't Shuffling. So I truly can't imagine what it must be like to listen to commercial radio on a regular basis. I do imagine tortuous alternate universes, like the one in which my boss brings a radio into the office to increase some vaguely defined concept of "workplace spirit," and I thereafter have to listen to "Rhiannon" four times a day, every day.

No thanks. Fortunately the boss in real life is so unhip that he's hip, know what I mean? I'd rather slit my wrists than listen to the kind of music you can play in an office. No thanks, well-wishers, I'll just go back and forth up and down Blogspot in the blessed silence broken only by the ringing phone like I'm oh so happy doing.

So, what I'm trying to say is I do understand that it must be fucking horrible, listening to that stuff the way they hurl it at you, over and over and over and over, til you're sick of what you might have once liked. But I so rarely feel it as viscerally as Mr. Smith does.

Got a taste today of how he must be feeling, though.

A quick but savage lightning bolt overwhelmed my backup as it so often gets overwhelmed on Sunday. And for some reason programs on a certain drive don't come back after a restart, so to make a long story short, III was all confused as I undocked this morning; he never came on, I flip the switch, see the green, but no music for the hour long commute in.

And no music for the hourlong commute home, either. Even should I in desperation turn to it for music, FM radio would not be an option in the morning, 'cause all anybody ever does is talk. So I dunno, I just go into this zenlike state and focus on the various roadways' thermoplastic dividing lines.

But coming home, I figured, well, what the hell, it's better than silence, let's just bite the bullet and throw Big 106 on.

And it started off OK. "Don't Bring Me Down" is a little too popular, a little too poppy, for inclusion on my iPod. But I DO listen to ELO, "10538 Overture"'s a fave, and so is "Fire On High." Plus when I was a kid we knew this guy Bruce, and I think it was Steven Singer who always sang, "Dont Bring me Down, Bruuuuuce," it was hilarious, and good to remember that, actually.

Then they did the 5:30 funnies and it was some black dude talking about Viagara, I didn't get it, but no harm done either. And then--at 5:40 in the afternoon, mind you--they played "Brain Damage" by Pink Floyd.

I'm pretty sure they've overplayed "Stairway to Heaven" more severely. But you know, "Stairway to Heaven" heard during a traffic jam actually kind of works. "Stairway to Heaven" has a majesty that they've tried to kill but that dies hard.

Whereas "Brain Damage," heard anytime with the sun shining is just kind of stupid.

Heard anytime sober it's kind of stupid as well, I'm guessing. "Brain Damage" might have been alright once, but its bell-like peals can't take a punch the way "Stairway" can.

But mostly, I'm just feeling a numbness where my opinion of "Brain Damage" used to be.

I remember back in the day, when I was delivering The Herald, there used to be this guy who called into one of the morning shows every day, requesting "Careful With That Axe Eugene."

I don't know if I should be that guy, I don't know if I could be that guy, but someone sure as hell should.

At this late date, I can't remember what it was like when "Brain Damage" was new to me, when it hadn't been bludgeoned to death. I kind of suspect it's not that special a tune in actuality, that it is probably comfortably nestled into its little nook, dwarfed by the monumental constructions that are tunes by the Floyd like "Sheep" or "Echoes."

But I don't know that for a fact, and this numbness where an emotional reaction to a song used to be inside kind of pisses me off, now that I'm thinking about it, this evening, now that I'm *really* feeling what Crabby's been feeling.

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - "Brain Damage"

I really don't see any reason to post this, because if you really want to hear it, they're probably playing it right now on some nearby Classic Rock station. Or perhaps Roger Waters has commenced yet another Dark Side of the Moon anniversary tour at a venue near you, tickets won't be cheap but they should be available.

File Under: Overplayed, Underdone

The White Stripes - "The Union Forever" from the CD White Blood Cells

2011-05-23T16:41:00.016-04:00

My experience is, it's more likely that a new song about an old movie will be worthwhile than a new movie about an old song.

Not that "The Union Forever" is new, mind you, but please understand there is in general a time lapse involved when considering my picking up on things known to most others. . . .

You might say I had no idea what this song was about until I saw what it was about.

I still remember when I met Donna, she was incredulous that I hadn't seen The Godfather. I was like, Jeez Louise (I was like, Jeez Louise, with her a lot), it's not such a big deal, I watch what I like and this is how it's turned out, my canon or whatever. Apocalypse Now and A Clockwork Orange and Chinatown and Meatballs and Where the Buffalo Roam, what the fuck's wrong with that?

Nonetheless, I made sure as soon as we were settled in to mosey on down to the Blockbuster and rent the trilogy, which we took in order over some long mid-nineties weekend.

From then on, I tried to make sure I'd seen the movies I should be seeing, a Vertigo here and a 12 Angry Men there, and by the time I met Melanie, whose film knowledge borders on the encyclopedic, I'd seen most of the movies you need to see, seen most of the ones Melanie would have expected me to see, most of the American ones anyway.

But somehow I'd missed Casablanca, so a few weeks back Melanie got her Netflix account to send us the Bogart-Hepburn thing, and it was, I have to say, a pretty great film.

Well, I then thought, what other 70-year old movie hadn't I seen?

Citizen Kane sat around the house for a couple weeks before we finally watched it Saturday. That's because it--the idea of it--is intimidating. The weight of its supposed greatness, the heaviness of that Rosebud jazz, the last words and the innocence-symbol, all the film snobs who go on and on about it, all this stuff preceeds it, and makes it hard not to infer that the film might be juuust a tad dry.

And while now that I've seen it I can say that Citizen Kane isn't dry, and is for the most part a pretty enjoyable film, it's no laugh riot. And it's not stainless, either. "Rosebud" as a plot device, the last words dripping with import, and the reporter's intrepid search for their meaning, isn't quite pulled off, and the film feels torpid in spots where it fails. And it, to be honest, isn't carried inexorably forward by snapping great dialogue, the way Casablanca is.

There is a great script underneath it all, but it consists mostly of monologue, characters talking at each other rather than with each other. Some of that is merely a reflection of the way that Charles Foster Kane conducts his business, but some of it speaks to the film's didacticism, its penchant for lecturing us about Charles Foster Kane at the drop of a hat.

Now, you might argue that the film invites conflicting opinions of Mr. Kane, as did its promotional materials, and you would be correct. But it doesn't change the fact that the viewer sure does get lectured multiple times. . . .

But anyway: back to said great script. You have to pick through, but parts of the movie sound so very good, and Jack White has noted this fact well for us with his song.

Not that I knew he had until after I'd seen the movie, though.

Towards the beginning of the movie, the young Charles Kane is cavorting onscreen in the snow, when I hear him shout "The Union Forever!" And instantly I think of The White Stripes, because, you know, you don't hear that phrase very often elsewhere. It even seems out of place in the film.

I chalk it up to coincidence, however--until I hear Kane upon his 25th birthday tell Thatcher that he's sorry, he's not interested in gold mines, oil wells, shipping or real estate.

And I realized--loudly as it happened, so that Melanie would know too (this might have been rude)--that Jack White had written his spooky song I already quite favored about Citizen Kane.

In tracking this down on the net after the movie was over, I came across quite a few who said that their appreciation for The White Stripes had increased now that they knew the band had written a song about Citizen Kane.

Well, I'm here to tell ya: my appreciation for Citizen Kane has increased, now that I know the White Stripes have written about it!

Given the, um, certain varying stated and actual relationships that Meg and Jack have had, it's tempting to try and parse the snippets from the movie that White has used in his lyrics for meaning.

It's very tempting. Leland says that all Kane "wanted out of life was love...he just didn't have any to give." And Kane in flashback toasts "to love on my terms." But the movie doesn't employ much of its space on the word love, and I don't believe that the movie when it comes down to it is all that much about love or the lack of it.

Personally, I think the movie's about how one man can gain the power and the freedom to do fuck all whatever he wants, and how the natural consequence of so doing is that he will be forced to endure a thousand different unpowerful and unfree little people as they weigh in with a thousand different unfree opinions about just what it was he was trying to do. That, in the old parlance, opinions about a man's life are like assholes; everybody's got one.

But let's never mind what I believe, because it is more intriguing to think that Jack White--whose most famous relationship had been broken and then clumsily repaired before anyone even knew who the fuck he was--might see the film in terms that nullify the possibility of true love.

The White Stripes - White Blood Cells - 07 The Union Forever.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right-click and save as target)

File under: Celluloid Heroes

On This Date

2011-05-15T14:01:00.006-04:00

Happy birthday to Brian Eno, and Happy Brian Eno's birthday to everyone else.

Did you know that ABBA is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but that Eno is not?

This despite Eno's role in the establishment of the seminal art rock band Roxy Music. This despite the revoltionary quartet of art pop albums Eno released under his own name between 1973 and 1977. This despite the tape loop processes he pioneered in his work with Robert Fripp. This despite the production and the songs and the ideas that he brought to work he did with no less than five artists already in that Hall since then.

This despite ABBA's recorded output.

I don't like to inappropriately use the word "travesty."

Both Henry Kissinger, who oversaw the war in Vietnam and masterminded its incendiary expansion into Cambodia, and Barack Obama, who continued both wars he was handed, and then started a third for good measure, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

THOSE are what I call travesties.

So I won't be hyperbolic here and use the word "travesty," especially since the man himself is either unaware or couldn't care less. And people, you know, do not, and justly do not, take the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame all that seriously.

But if ABBA is in and Eno is out at that silly museum in Cleveland, then I have no choice but to steal the word from Hipster Kittty and call it a SHAMOCKERY.

Brian Eno - Nerve Net - 05 - My Squelchy Life.mp3

320 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: The Vision Thing

La Historia Word Cloud

2011-05-15T00:58:00.005-04:00

Given my love of stupid widgets, I'm sure you're surprised I hadn't posted one of these ages ago . . . .

I copied the text from my atom feed, which goes back 25 posts, and then used notepad to edit out the boring words, prepositions articles pronouns, relative and otherwise, and forms of the verb to be.

File under: More Bullshit

Nine Inappropriate Classic Rock Album Covers

2011-05-10T12:04:00.011-04:00

I remember writing some time ago about an album cover that was particularly apt. These are the flipside. Not horrible, necessarily, not laughable, nor even bad, just wrong in some way for the music contained within.
-------------
Molly Hatchet S/T

The artwork by Frank Frazetta is a sword and sorcery classic, but somebody forgot to tell Danny Joe Brown and the rest of them about the equivalencies between fantasy art and metal.

This would have been great as a Cirith Ungol cover, or for some other band with a name jacked from Tolkien, like Gorgoroth, or Amon Amarth. But for a Southern rock band whose best song is called "Gator Country?"

Not so much.

Boston - Don't Look Back

If the metal <==> sword and sorcery equivalency is damn near hard and fast, the prog <==> sci fi one is a little more fluid.

Yes kickstarted the sci-fi thing with the Fragile backstory, but they also went fantasy with Relayer. For every 2112, there's an In the Land of Pink and Grey.

Neither of which sound anything like Boston. Simply put, the Rock 'n' Roll Cities In Flight thing here doesn't work. Not for this album, not for this band. I'm not really judging the music. There's no need for me to slander Boston, at least at the present time.

But listen to it, or at least remember back to when you did: this is beach music, for sunny days, blue skies, hot chicks in pink bikinis. Frisbees. Nowhere in sight is there anything remotely resembling a fucking guitar starship. . . .

Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed

Because the one thing we all think of when we come across smokin' slide guitar blues rock, or for that matter achieve the sweet absolution when she spills her honeyed blood or splatters her musky nectar and makes a mess all over us, is . . . . birthday cake!

Sir Lord Baltimore S/T

Proto-metal cult classic musically, but--and I guess it's because in 1971 they didn't have the metal iconography down pat yet--a bad misfire on the cover logo.

It's like you see some old concert poster from the early '70's and they've got Black Sabbath's name in some airy-fairy, wavy gravy hippie font. Metal is for angular Germanic fonts, goddamnit. Otherwise, how are we to know it's metal?

Jon Anderson - Song of Seven

Son of a bitch made the album look like Olias when it don't sound like Olias

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Zuma

There's been some kind of mixup, apparently: this artwork had actually belonged on the cover of a Daniel Johnston album, right?

Roxy Music S/T

Actually a little torn on this. On the one hand, it's not surprising that a band featuring two well-known horndogs like Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno should have an album cover that so obviously attempts to titillate.

But on the other hand, this is art rock. Growing up in the '80's, I was despite my best efforts inundated with T'n'A album covers from hair- or sleaze-metal bands like The Scorpions or Warrant, and this sure as hell ain't them.

Blue Öyster Cult - On Your Feet Or On Your Knees

I'm of the opinion that the cover art for live albums should--unless they are making a visual joke a la Kansas' Two for the Show or Aerosmith's Live! Bootleg--use some pictures that were taken of the band while, you know, playing live.

Think Double Live Gonzo or Live at Budokan or Rainbow's On Stage.

I don't know, maybe it's just me. But a picture of some limousine, even if it is festooned with the BÖ logo, doesn't convey the concert experience. At least Some Enchanted Evening had the Grim Reaper. . . .

Dust - Hard Attack

Another Frazetta, and basically, what I'd said about the Hatchet. Maybe if Dust had been some pagan black metal outfit from Norway rather than some hard rock dudes from New York, I'd be feeling the cover more.

ZZ Top - "Heard It On the X" From the Album Fandango

2011-05-02T15:56:00.022-04:00

There was only one single taken from ZZ's fourth record, and this marvelously syncopated blues beauty wasn't it. Though it should have been.

Now, as one of the world's foremost Caucasian admirers of women who put the the 'max' in gluteus maximus, I'm certainly not gonna have too many issues with any song called "Tush," which was the track that London Records did in fact select as the solitary single from Fandango.

Certainly, Zeta-4 and WSHE, the rock stations I listened to at various times in my high school days, each played the hell out of it, and I bet it was the same with rock stations across the country. Before the massive, MTV-fueled success of Eliminator, "Tush" was probably ZZ's signature tune. And if I were listening today, I'm sure I'd still be hearing it twice daily on the lame-ass classic rock station in town.

Still and all, "Heard It On The X" is a better tune than "Tush", with better drumming, a better guitar solo, and a better backstory.

A waaay better backstory. In fact, some folks in the know on the whole thing say it's the best story of the century just past.

Do you remember
Back in 1966?
Country Jesus, hillbilly blues,
That's where I learned my licks.
Oh, from coast to coast and line to line
In every county there,
I'm talkin' 'bout that outlaw X
That was cuttin' through the air.

CHORUS
Anywhere, y'all,
Everywhere, y'all,
I heard it, I heard it,
I heard it on the X.
We can all thank Doctor B
Who stepped across the line.
With lots of watts he took control,
The first one of its kind.
So listen to your radio
Most each and every night
'Cause if you don't I'm sure you won't
Get to feeling right.

CHORUS, etc

I. Lots of Watts

Now, most people, Gibbons 'n' Hill 'n' Beard included, suggest that it all begins with Doctor B, with quackery and snake oil and shady preacher men.

And we'll get to all that, but--especially since this blog is called La Historia de la Musica Rock--it's probably worth noting first that power is very rock-and-roll, wattage and volume and dangerous amounts of electricity.

So before we get all Tex-Mex with it, before we bring in the charlatans and the con-men, we should talk about Powel Crosley, 'cause it was he who brought WLW online, and it was he who therefore invented the kind of super-high power North American radio station that young Billy Gibbons would one day cotton to.

During the second quarter of the 20th century, Powel Crosley just about owned the city of Cincinnati. He mostly sold a boatload of affordable radios and affordable refrigerators, but he also sold affordable cars and affordable phonographs, and he owned the Cincinnati Reds and their ballpark, to boot.

Shortly after Crosley got into the radio business, it struck him that he might should also get into the broadcasting end of things. He started WLW with a 50 watt transmitter in 1922, and by 1928, had increased the power of his transmitter to 50,000 watts, figuring that the stronger his transmitter, the weaker (and cheaper) his mass-produced radios could be.

That worked so well that Crosley sought out and got permission from the Feds to jack things up to half a million watts. Armed with his new "experimental" license, Crosley went to RCA and General Electric both, and had them produce the transmitter to spec. By the time it was done, the thing was 15 feet high, 57 feet wide, and right around 30 feet deep. All tube as befit the time of course, and each of its two modulation transformers alone weighed 37,000 pounds.

Yikes. Add in the 750-foot radio tower and Crosley's station wasn't just ruling the nighttime skies above the Great Plains up into Canada, and down into Mexico. The station had a potential worldwide reach, and in one case its shows took a very special request from Buckingham Palace, England.

With its newfound audience, and a roster of artists that included Fats Waller and The Mills Brothers, WLW's advertising revenue went through the roof. New applications for the "experimental" 500K transmitting power from jealous competition poured into the Federal Radio Commission's office, but the Feds, suddenly gun-shy after hearing the horror stories of the little 10 and 20 kW guys 500 and a 1000 miles away who'd been steamrolled by the immensity of WLW's signal, denied them all, and in fact revoked WLW's license at that power for 1939.

It was called the Wheeler Resolution. The Act limited radio stations on American soil to an absolute limit of 50,000 watts, and it remains in effect to this day. WLW's power during the 1930's has not since been matched in America.

Which is of course not to say that it hasn't been matched or even surpassed in Mexico.

II. Doctor B Who Crossed The Line

As has been hinted at, John Romulus Brinkley was a quack and a charlatan. He sold his bottles of colored water, for sure, but became notorious for an idea that may be unique in the history of medical fraud: that transplanting goat testicles into men could cure a man of "sexual weakness," or prostate problems.

Brinkley, like Crosley, seized upon radio quickly as the way to most effectively sell his wares and services. In 1923, operating out of a town called Milford in Kansas, Brinkley started KFKB ("Kansas Folks Know Best"), which played some roots country (including that of the Lonesome Cowboy Roy Faulkner), some gospel and some string band, but mostly ran the crooked and long-winded advertising pitches of Brinkley's.

Aware no doubt of WLW's increase two years earlier to 50,000 watts, Brinkley applied for an increase of his own in 1930. But he'd made some enemies at the Kansas City Star, who had a going concern of their own on the AM waves, and who had also begun some investigations into Brinkley's blatant malpractice, finding for example that Brinkley had signed the death certificates of 52 former patients. Upshot was, not only was Brinkley's request denied, but he was also stripped of his license to practice medicine in the State of Kansas.

Brinkley's first impulse after hearing these two pieces of news was to run for governor of Kansas (and he almost won).

The second was to buy a radio station in Mexico.

Which he did. Just as Brinkley did not invent high wattage commercial radio in America, so too did he not invent the border blaster. Border Blasters--comparatively high powered stations just on the other side of the US-Mexico line, with content designed for America, rather than for the Mexican state they supposedly served--had been around for a few years when Brinkley bought his station.

Brinkley was, however, the first to get ridiculous with the concept, and I'm sure Crosley back in Ohio approved. XER, located in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, right across the border from Del Rio, Texas, had a mere 50,000 watts when it signed on in August 1932, but it's just as well, considering that the Mexican authorities (under pressure from the same people who'd run Brinkley out of Kansas) shut it down shortly thereafter.

When Brinkley (one assumes) had paid the proper bribes and opened his second station in September of 1935, he re-used the XER facilities but brought a new 500 kW transmitter with him. Designed by some of the same engineers who had worked for Crosley (though it wasn't branded an RCA), the insane new transmitter used eight water-cooled vacuum tubes that were each eight foot tall. The station's signal reached all the way to Canada, locals often picked up the station with their dental fillings and barbed-wire fencing, fowl who aviated themselves too near the antenna when things were humming found themselves french-fried, the antenna created its own green-cast aurora for Christ's sake, and the call letters that the Mexican authorities issued for the cause of all this mayhem were X-E-R and -A.

The station was run pretty much as Brinkley had run the stations before it: populist entertainment leavened with radio preachermen and long infomercials for Brinkley's clinic in downtown Del Rio. Prominent country music and hillbilly artists who broadcast for XERA included The Pickard Family, Cowboy Slim Rinehart, and The Prairie Sweethearts. In 1938 they even signed The Carter Family. Though Brinkley--always on the Federales' hit list--would get shut down for good in 1939, and die, broken and disgraced three years later, he had altered and in a strange way almost even legitimatized the border radio game forever after.

III. Country Jesus, Hillbilly Blues

Dusty Hill, to Spin magazine in 1985:

They'll sell segments to anybody. There are a lot of preachers on there. I heard them one time selling autographed prayer cloths. They were to put on your radio when you're listening to these programs. But this one was autographed by Jesus himself. Then you'd hear a 15-minute country/western show. Then there'd be a blues show. You could just buy your slot and do whatever. They didn't have a whole lot of restrictions . . . .

It would be ten years before the facilities used by XERA would be used again, and twenty before they had another supercharged transmitter, but when the Golden Age came again in 1959, it was powered not by country and hillbilly, but by R & B and the blues.

XERA had been reborn in '49 as XERF and in '59 the new station was re-organized, and brought a new 250 kilowatt transmitter online. For a couple years, the station continued doing what it had been doing since '49, which was to alternate the quack medicine ads with the preachermen, with musical content fairly limited and the musical glory days of The Carter Family pretty much forgotten. You could have driven your tailfinned beauty from Los Angeles to New York again while never losing the signal, but who would have wanted to?

But then a fellow calling himself Wolfman Jack showed up, and changed the border radio game more than anybody had since Brinkley.

The Wolfman--whose real name was Bob Smith, but why would anyone want to call him that?--would later become associated with what were called "oldies," Bill Haley and The Beach Boys and "Please Please Me"-era Beatles, but at this early date, and with the freedom he found south of the border, he was mostly spinning black artists, John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf and James Brown and Johnny Otis and you get the picture, just playing what was good, sure, but also desegregating his playlists in a way that he couldn't have done North of the Rio Grande.

And he was broadcasting in that Trashmen voice of his to what Jean Shepherd had called "the night people." Smith in his role as station manager ceded the early evening to the preachers on a cash-upfront basis, then stepped in at midnight to play the stuff that got everyone excited. And, you know, whoop and holler, and sell some of those things that would put some zing in your ling nuts.

IV. That Outlaw X

The preachermen would show up with sacks of cash around the clock, and the Wolfman had taken to carrying large amounts of the green and crispy at all times, so it was probably not surprising that some of Mexico's lawlesss elements took an interest in the station, as well. There were at least two shootouts at the station, and our lycanthropic DJ hired soon thereafter a personal security force, and began wearing a bandolero.

This was "The X" that ZZ Top are talking about in their song, and it's the sum total: Loads of cash money and doin' the nasty and that smokin' blues backbeat, and Jesus Christ Himself, all stuffed into an armed compound within a stone's throw of the world's tenth-longest international border. If by 1966 the Wolfman had split for safer pastures in Southern California, and begun the decline into pop schlock that would one day see him guest star on The Odd Couple, the template he'd created held on for at least a couple more years before the Federales signed a treaty with Uncle Sam and shut the whole fucking thing down.

Just as Mexican border radio is not the only reason people have ever heard of The Carter Family, it's also not the reason Muddy Waters got his songs covered by rock artists of the '60's and 70's. But stations like XERF and DJ's like Wolfman Jack (at least in his earliest days) were absolutely and positively part of the reason.

Wolfman Jack - 250,000 watts of power.mp3

The Wolfman Givin' out the Call Letters and the reason at XERF

File Under: Spoken Word

ZZ Top - Fandango - 08 Heard It On the X.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File Under: Tejas

Twenty-One Good Instrumentals . . . .

2011-04-24T13:51:00.011-04:00

Inspired no doubt by the new Explosions in the Sky album, the folks at Spin in their May issue produced a good little featurette about the history of instrumental rock. Though I enjoyed the thing quite a bit (and can you believe I've still never heard Link Wray's "Rumble"?), there's definitely some stuff I think they missed. No "Eruption" = No Credibility is what I say.

And of course there's the small matter of The Soft Machine.

I wouldn't say these are the 21 best rock instrumentals ever, or even the 21 best that aren't mentioned in the Spin article. But they might just be the 21 best rock instrumentals that weren't in the Spin article and haven't been featured here before.

21.  Russian Circles - "Youngblood"
20.  Rick Wakeman - "Catherine of Aragon"
19.  Yes - "The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)"
18.  Mono - "The Battle To Heaven"
17.  Gravity Keeps the Hours - "Gravity Keeps the Hours"
16.  Camel - "Earthrise"
15.  David Bowie - "V2 Schneider"
14.  King Crimson- "The Sheltering Sky"
13.  Oxes - "I'm From Hell, Open A Windle"
12.  Gong - "The Isle of Everywhere"
11.  Pelican - "Nightendday"
10.  Black Flag - "Southern Rise"
  9.  The Tornadoes - "Telstar"
  8.  China White - "Anthem"
  7.  Sonic Youth - "Fire Engine Dream"
  6.  Rush - "La Villa Strangiato"
  5.  The Velvet Underground - "Guess I'm Falling in Love                 (Another View Version)"
  4.  Metallica - "The Call of Ktulu"
  3.  Van Halen - "Eruption"
  2.  Steve Miller Band - "Song For Our Ancestors"
  1.  The Soft Machine -"Facelift"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs, except for the Gravity Keeps the Hours. That one's here

A New Member of the La Historia Team

2011-04-21T18:46:00.017-04:00

Please join me and give a warm La Historia de la Musica Rock welcome to the newest member of our blogteam, Hipster Kitty.

Although she's of course famous all over the internets for the work she does at Memebase and at I Can Has Cheezburger, it turns out that Hipster Kitty doesn't actually write. I guess it's her lack of opposable thumbs.

The whole zero-productivity thing on her part might be a problem for some of those other blogs, but the opportunity to have an internet celebrity like Hipster Kitty on staff was much too tempting for me. I was more than happy to create a new, non-creative post for her, one that will require only the one special thing she has already graciously given unto the internet, which is that certain self-righteous and superior attitude that doubts your indie cred and viciously seeks to invalidate whatever it is about yourself you might think is cool.

In thinking about it, it seemed to me that Hipster Kitty might be a perfect complement for me: I've always been obsessed with coolness, yet have so often been clueless about what, in fact, you might have to do to actually achieve it.

In her new role here at La Historia, I'm sure that Hipster Kitty will do exactly what she means to do, which I can only presume will be to increase my insecurity and produce additional self-doubt as I traipse about South Florida in my Pelican T-shirt with the Lark's-era King Crimson issuing forth from the Sony earbuds.

So, yeah, it's all about the learning here at La Historia de la Musica Rock, and if Hipster Kitty is the new teacher in class, well, let the bell ring.

She brings plenty of attitude to a blog that might have sometimes been lacking it, that's for sure.

With Hipster Kitty's haughty dismissal of their importance, I'd like to share with you some excerpts from the interview I conducted with her when I first found out she might be willing to work for LHdlMR.

We met for lunch at a brew-pub she recommended. I had a burger and a Sam Adams; she had an avocado reuben and a PBR.

RASTRO: Nice place we're at, pretty cool menu and decor . . .

HK:             Well, I did pick it.

RASTRO: Yeah. So, I guess this would be the first time you've ever worked for a blog . . . .

HK:            Actually, I've worked for more than a few blogs . . .

RASTRO: More than a few? Really?

HK:             Yeah, but you've probably never heard of them.

RASTRO: Kinda stepped into that one, didn't I?

HK:            Yeah you did. Anyway, don't worry about it. A noncorporeal meme such as myself has all kinds of extra time she can use for familiarizing herself with internet timesinks. The fact that you've not had the time to hear about these places, well, I wouldn't worry about it. Too much.

RASTRO: Right. So, music. I wanted to say that this role of cultural arbiter you play, I think it fits right in with what I'm trying to do with La Historia. I've always been trying to tell people what music's best for them . . . .

HK:             I'm kinda more into keeping it a secret.

RASTRO: Yeah, I guess so. But, still, I've sometimes felt I needed someone to point me in the right direction, musicwise.

HK:             I'm there, dude.

RASTRO: Figured you might be. Straightforward question: How would you describe your taste in music?

HK:         Well, I often like to say that I like the music you might find on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack, only I liked it before it was on the soundtrack.

RASTRO: That's a good way to put it, I think. You know, I was listening to "Jeepster" the other day, from that movie of his . . .

HK:         Death Proof.

RASTRO: Yeah, that was it . . . and I was thinking about how those of your persuasion . . .

HK:         My persuasion? What do you mean by my persuasion, imaginary cats?

RASTRO: No, no, no. HIPSTERS.

HK:         Oh OK. Well, you can say the word. Hipster and proud, that's me.

RASTRO: Yeah, so anyway, I was thinking how if you graphed T Rex's pouplarity, it'd be like a fucking sine wave, up then down even in Bolan's lifetime, then fluctuating since depending on the popular attitude toward glam at the time.

HK:         Hmmm, true that, I think.

RASTRO: Except that IT'S BULLSHIT. T Rex are either good music or they're not, and why the fuck should I have to keep up with whatever trend it is that makes either a straightforward appreciation or an ironic re-appraisal the preferred reaction du jour? If I like something, I stay with it, and then I can forget about having to keep up with the social networking part of it.

HK:         Please don't use that phrase "social networking." But anyway, what you're saying won't work. Just look at The Arcade Fire. I--of course--was onto them early, but now that they've won a Grammy, not only am I off the boat, I HAVE to be off the boat.

RASTRO: Well, I'm not a fan anyway, but they're not getting any better from here, are they?

HK:         Thought you'd see what I was saying.

RASTRO: Maybe. I wanna get back to the ironic re-appraisal thing. Did you see that movie with Ellen Page that Drew Barrymore directed, the name's escaping me . . .

HK:         Whip It.

RASTRO: Yeah! That was it . . .

HK:         I know.

RASTRO: So you'll remember how like, the central object in the film, was Ellen Page's Stryper shirt.

HK:         Yeah, yeah it was.

RASTRO: And I'm here to ask what the fuck is that about. Stryper were a CHRISTIAN GLAM METAL band. It's impossible to embody more varieties of suck, and now in retrospect Drew Barrymore or whoever is going to tell us that well, you might have missed it the first time, but they were actually pretty good?

HK:         Actually, a gal by the name of Shauna Cross wrote that film.

RASTRO: Whatevs. So Shauna Cross is gonna tell me that this band who dressed like a bunch of honeybees were of any use at all?

HK:         No, no, you misunderstand. They sucked but we can still like them. Sometimes we're even obligated to.

RASTRO: That's utter, complete, perfectly-formed bullshit.

<RASTRO fumes>

RASTRO: Alright, do you have any questions for me, anything you might be unclear on, anything maybe that's been bothering you?

HK:             Well I'd have to ask what's with all the Neil Young.

RASTRO: What, what do you mean Neil Young

HK:             Nothing, just why do you listen to a geriatric old fart?

RASTRO: LISTEN, man, Neil Young is a fucking musical genius, don't go there.

HK:             Alright. In the interest of harmony, I'll skip the lecture you'd otherwise get.

RASTRO: Thanks.

HK: No problem. But I've got another thing we can work on. This '70's prog stuff, you know it's gotta go . . . .

RASTRO: Fuck you.

OK, so actually that interview didn't end all that well. Maybe my fault.

But after I split and stuck her with the check and then another week went by, I still couldn't stop thinking about Hipster Kitty's internet celebrity, and how it might help the anemic hit-count around here.

So I called her back and here she is. She probably won't like most of the music I'm scrobbling or even am writing about, but her opinions should at the very least keep me honest.

Hipster Kitty's opinion on the music I scrobble will be found from here on out below the "Last Child" widget at the right-hand column

Pink Floyd's "A Pillow of Winds" and My iPod's Abject Inability to Pronounce Its Title Correctly

2011-04-15T12:07:00.011-04:00

From the "Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy" file . . . .

Ever since I got III (or Jr. Jr., as I sometimes call him) with his fancy voice over software, I've gotten an intermittent kick from his fairly frequent misprononunced bandnames and titles.

I've got lots of Les Baxter loaded up into the library, so it's pretty commonplace for me to hear it give Mr. Baxter's first name the French pronunciation, Les as in Les Halles or Les Miserables.

The instrumental postrock band from Athens who had both the good humor and the audacity to name one of their songs "Synchronicity III" isn't Maserati to my poor benighted iPod, it's mah-SAIR-a-TEE, the stress accents exactly backwards from what they should be, and the S as in Sam and not as in . . . well, Maserati.

It's something I'm used to by now, and I find the software's flaws more amusing than annoying, but this morning while driving into work, though it absolutely aced "Hibou, Anemone and Bear," there issued forth from his digital lips a mispronunciation of a somewhat more mundane if still somewhat poetic title that got me thinking.

The song playing was "A Pillow of Winds," which I love for David Gilmour's preternaturally trippy voice and the way it descends dizzily when singing "Green fields, a cold rain/ Is falling in a golden dawn."

But the name of the tune if not the band and the album escaped me for some reason, so I hit the voice over button, there, as I drove down NW 37th Avenue in the battle-scarred Toyota, and III told me that the song was "A Pillow of Winds," as in winds-your-watch.

This bugs me more than usual, and I'll tell you why.

It's the word before the mispronounced one that gets me going, because the word "of" is NOT mispronounced. So, clearly, some programmer went in there and put in a line of code which says that the two letters O and F next to each other but off by themselves will be pronounced "uhhv."

Good so far. But "of," in addition to always being pronounced with an "uhh" and with a "v," will also ALWAYS be used as a preposition--and therefore will always take an object after itself.

And the word that Roger Waters spells as W-I-N-D-S is only an object if it's pronounced with the short i.

Does it seem too much to expect this voice over software--this CHEAP voiceover software, mind you--to keep track of parts of speech in addition to the sounds of letters?

No, I don't think it does.

Maybe in Spanish, everything's phonetic, but in English, sound and meaning ebb and flow in concert with each other. Meaning determines sound and vice-versa.

So, if you're trying to actually reflect the language that both Pink Floyd et moi customarily work in, and you're already putting in a subroutine that tells Jr. Jr. how to pronounce his fucking prepositions, I figure you can damn well include a library of nouns to use as their objects, at the very least.

</rant> the book falls to the floor

Pink Floyd - Meddle - 02 - A Pillow Of Winds.mp3

320 kbps mp3, up fo six weeks

File under: Songs Named After Mah Jong Hands

The Descendents - "Hope" from the Album Milo Goes to College

2011-04-11T20:18:00.000-04:00

This is another one that gets tied up in my head with a science fiction story. In this case the story is "Push No More," by Robert Silverberg, a novelette which first came to my attention when it was collected in the author's excellent late '80's collection, Beyond The Safe Zone.

The sci-fi element, or the fantastic element, actually, of Silverberg's story is the conceit that the sexual frustrations of virginal adolescents can trigger a telekinetic ability within them.

Our awkwardly teenaged hero, Harry Blaufield, isn't sure exactly whether he is a poltergeist, or is just a host for one, but he prefers the theory wherein he's not been "possessed by a marauding demon." He prefers to think that his "hot core of fury and frustration," sexual on both counts of course, is what drives the whole moves-things-with-his-mind thing.

Why can't you see
You torture me
You're already thinking about someone else
When he comes home you'll be in his arms

And I'll be gone
But I know
My day will come
I know someday I'll be the only one

So now you wait for his spark
You know it'll turn you on
He's gonna make you feel
The way you want to feel

When he starts to lie
When he makes you cry
You know I'll be there
My day will come

I know someday I'll be the only one
Call me selfish
Call me what you like
I think it's right
To want someone for all your own

And not to share her love
But I'll have my way
You won't have a say anyway
Cuz I've got you

You don't stand a chance
So now you wait for his cock
You know it'll turn you on
He's gonna make you feel

The way you want to feel
When he starts to lie
When he makes you cry
You know I'll be there

My day will come
I know someday I'll be the only one
My day will come
I know someday I'll be the only one

So now you want perfection
I see your self destruction
You don't know what you want
It's gonna take you years to find out

I'm not giving up
And when you've had enough
You'll take your bruised little head
And you'll come running back to me

You know that I'm gonna be the only one

Neither I nor The Descendents talk much about psychokinesis, and aside from the ending pathos--bet you can guess--the power in Silverberg's story comes not from the supernatural window-dressing but from the stuff the sexually mature always condescendingly say is "only" natural.

But in digging through my memory and through Milo Aukerman's cognitively dissonant lyrics, the hot core of fury and frustration part of it is certainly reflected.

I remember reading the story when I was still a virgin and thinking to myself that here was tangible evidence of Silverberg's great writing ability: he wrote so convincingly of the bitterness and the jealousy of the high school virgin, yet you just know the talented and suave motherfucker was getting laid left and right when he was in school.

A petty thought that was, don't you think, and one which almost perfectly encapsulates the bitter jealousy of the virgin-too-long, and one that perhaps pulls a few triggers with me even now, even as I sit here and type in my underwear midway through my 46th year. Of course, the first thing you gotta wonder given that advanced age of mine is how relevant anything by the Descendents is going to be these days. They were always riffing on their "Parents" and about their teachers and about burger joints and, yes, about girls who wouldn't give them the time of day, or heh-heh anything else.

Subject matter that you'd think is not too illuminating for me at my age, and in my station, where it's the boss and the bank, and not the teacher or the parents, who have control over me, and my nights in bed with Melanie are more likely to be possessed of the tension caused by snoring than by tension of the sexual sort.

Well, Milo--able to get away from his research biochemist gig--sang with the band as recently as last December, and he's gotta sing the stuff.

And he has two kids beside the biochemsitry job. And somehow he pulls it off. Or I guess he does, anyway.

Regardless. Make of it what you may: in hearing the chainsaw pop of "Hope" the other afternoon during lunch, it still felt like the song in its love 'em/hate 'em duality was pushing some buttons with me. My frustrated sexuality for so long may have been moved into the "resolved" column, but I guess some of this junk is <sigh> always with us.

Harry Blaufield and Milo Aukerman polished their insensate libido until it was the most powerful thing they had, resolving it into a mean and petulant song like "Hope" and into the ability to somehow push a Schlitz can into orbit through thought alone. Christ.

Extraordinary schmucks and klutzes, but schmucks and klutzes still. Just like me, just like I'd been. Mind you, nothing I ever formed from my untended libido ever resolved into anything more than a messy puddle, but these guys, fictional and not so much, were and are in resonance with the kernel of inept adolescence that still to this very fucking day no doubt lies deep within.

I remember early one morning Mike and I were putting out the Sunday paper at the Town and Country mall and we came across a young, prettily made-up Latino girl who had been ditched by her date after the movie. She'd gone to pieces, was wracked by tears, the whole bit. And I don't remember everything about the incident, but what I do remember is that Mike agreed in the face of her desperation to give her a lift back to her nearby house or her nearby friend's house or whatever.

And I remember that I had serious issues with Mike's decision to lend a kind and helping hand there. With The Herald, there was no eight-hour shift: you went home when you were done, so any detours from the route were gonna cost me some Sunday morning personal time, and I suppose that only makes sense for whatever fifteen minutes were worth. But I also took the whole thing personally. I remember telling Mike in some great dudgeon that if the roles were reversed, this pretty young thing wouldn't have even glanced in our general direction. I forget how Mike replied, I suppose it was something like yeah, whatever. Anyway, he dropped the girl off at her house, and then we went back and resumed the paper route.

Trying to remember back, I recall more episodes of sadness over the whole don't-have-a-girlfriend thing than anger, but the thing with Mike that morning seems to indicate that I was walking around with a chip on my shoulder when it came to girls, just as a matter of course.

A frustration that shaded into anger might be the best description of my sometime emotional state back then and it's that, again, cognitively dissonant state in the characters behind "Hope" and "Push No More" that resonates with me.

I spent much of my teenage years and at least the first half of my twenties pining after first one, then another, girl of bounteous, overflowing boobs and prodigious butt--which is, you know, the sort of thing I like--and I felt victimized when the platonic relationships with these girls I found attractive failed to become sexual.

But looking back, I can see now that both girls had at one point given me the favor of a sexual opportunity, which I of course each time then flubbed in my terror and in my complete lack of confidence. Though it's obvious now, I couldn't see this then, because it would have detracted from the victimization construct I had, from the assembly of fury and frustration that fit me so well.

First you gotta help yourself, and I suppose that's the lesson I eventually took sometime around my 29th birthday and the one that we can take most from Harry and Milo.

After which things get more pleasant, and less dissonant, and at least a little more settled.

The Descendents - Milo Goes To College - Hope.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Chainsaw Pop

Rastro's 8 Quickest Ways to Clear A Juke Joint

2011-03-22T20:32:00.008-04:00

8.The Beatles - "The Inner Light"
7. Nirvana - "Endless Nameless"
6. The Stooges - "LA Blues"
5. Butthole Surfers - "Graveyard 1"
4. Neu! - "Super 78"
3. John Coltrane - "Jupiter Variations"
2. Happy Flowers - "Left Behind"
1. Napoleon XIV - "!Aaah-aH ,yawA EM EkaT OT GnimoC"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy some of the songs, if you're really sure that you want to. Given a selection as abrasive as this, I guess it's unsurprising that iTunes has elected not to feature some of em, so I'm here to step in 'n' save the day:

Napoleon XIV - The Second Coming - 01 !Aaah-aH ,yawA EM EkaT OT GnimoC.mp3
Nirvana - Nevermind - Endless Nameless.mp3
Happy Flowers - My Skin Covers My Body - 2 - Left Behind.mp3

Tasting notes:

The Beatles - "The Inner Light" -- Cerveza used to claim that he knew a bar that had the old Beatles Rarities CD ensconced within its mechanical innards, and that he had not been shy about playing the horridly raga-babbulous thing to the horror of other patrons. I never actually witnessed this, but have always remembered the story.

Nirvana - "Endless Nameless" -- This was the hidden track off Nevermind of course, and the one where Cobain was already clearly trying to undermine the Cheap Trick sound he was elsewhere on the disc creating. As such, I suppose you could look at it as a free bonus preview of In Utero. Anyway, a lot of bars had a lot of jukeboxes with that Nevermind CD, so the many opportunities across this great land to inflict a lot of screeching feedback upon a lot people who had no earthly clue merits its inclusion here, even if it is relatively mild on the noise scale compared with the rest of the stuff here.

The Stooges - "LA Blues" -- Iggy ratchets things up a little bit on this one. I've read some reviews of Fun House by punks who actually complain about the "new thing saxes," but this song is like a lot of the very best stuff I've ever heard: I hated it the first time I heard it, but soon fell in love with its polarizing qualities, and knew instinctively which side of the fence I needed to be on. Still, there's little doubt it would horrify a happy hour crowd, or even one that's kinda sorta heard of the Iggster.

The Butthole Surfers - "Graveyard 1" -- I love this.
I love it very much.
I love driving around with my windows down, with this wonderful demented song playing very very loudly, hoping there are some uptight people around to take offense, maybe I could even see them run for cover. This is the one where it's slowed down of course, where it sounds like a 45 played at 33. "YOOOOUUUUU WRIIIIITTTTTHHHE IIIINNNNN TTTHHHHE GRAYYYYYVVVVEYYAAAAARRRRDDDDDD."
Back when we were in college and therefore a LOT more likely to ingest odd substances and toss back highly flammable liquids than we are now, Cerveza and I contemplated the filming of a movie we would have called "Cranium." Gosh, it would have been great ^*. The audio portion would have consisted of Butthole Surfers music exclusively, and the video portion would have consisted of us and our friends captured on grainy film taking a drive and smoking and drinking and tripping and probably pouring beer on ourselves and each other. All the while mouthing repeatedly the single poignant phrase, "I'm losing my cranium." Very. Slowly. Exactly the way Gibby is heard singing on "Graveyard 1."

Neu! - "Super 78" -- This is like the opposite of the Surfers above. Neu! basically ran out of money after they'd recorded the first half of their second album, and when they asked their label for more dough, it refused. So to take up the space on side two, Neu! played and recorded their first single at different turntable speeds. The 78 version is somehow more annoying than the 16, funny how that works. Wikipedia says that this was an early example of remixing, but they are being generous. Very very generous.

John Coltrane - "Jupiter Variations"-- Really, I could have pointed to anything on Interstellar Space, as it all sounds roughly the same. But this is the one I heard today as I drove home and that inspired tonight's post. Funny, I thought about halfway through, how I've actually gotten to the point where I can listen to this skwonkulous noise and actually digest it. My manager, who plays sax and is something of a jazzhead, is convinced that Coltrane was back on the drugs when he recorded this stuff, even though there is no historical evidence at all to support such a belief. Other than the warped music itself, I mean.

Happy Flowers - "Left Behind"-- I've never heard a DJ so totally lose it on air as when some poor unsuspecting schmuck doing a Christmas theme show for the University of Miami's station made the mistake of selecting for airplay the Flowers' "All I Got Was Clothes for Christmas." About halfway through he very quickly faded the thing out, and literally screamed into the open mike "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?!?!?"
I'm also seeing where they've used "Mom I Gave The Cat Some Acid" during prisoner interrogations in Iraq. Lightweights, of course, as "Mom" is probably Happy Flowers' easiest-listening song. "Left Behind" is considerably more jarring.

Napoleon XIV - "!Aaah-aH ,yawA EM EkaT OT GnimoC" -- The winner and still champeen, as well as the clear inspiration for this post's title: as Dave Marsh most famously said, it "cleared out a diner of forty patrons in three minutes flat." Plenty of us stoners were playing Led Zeppelin records backwards back in the day, but this is as far as I know the only record that ever played backwards forwards. I can't imagine anyone at all maintaining that it's listenable.

^* Not really. (Return)

Music-Related Posts Elsewhere: R S Crabb Music Review & Top Ten Site

2011-03-17T18:00:00.012-04:00

Over at his site, RS Crabb was talking about how vocalist Ronnie Hammond from the Atlanta Rhythm Section had a fatal heart attack on Monday. That got me thinking again about being a stupid fucking teenager:

Whoa, ARS, been a long time since I've heard that name . . . . I'd always find their singles in the bags of 45's my old man brought home. I had "Imaginary Lover" and "So Into You" and "Champagne Jam" and "Spooky," probably some others too.

In 1980, when they were promoting The Boys from Doraville, they backed up Kansas on the Audio-Visions tour, and I was 15 years old and it was my fourth concert, and because it was the thing to do, I got myself freaking wasted, probably quaaludes and pot and Budweiser.

At some point during the headliners I looked up in a grossly intoxicated kind of way and Dave Hope had suddenly gained 100 pounds and had gotten butt ass ugly. I was sure I was hallucinating, but then I realized that what was happening was that Paul Goddard from ARS was sitting in on the song.

Then the song ended and Steve Walsh thanked Goddard, and I felt pretty smart for somebody who was stoned stupid.

Probably never forget it, and while I'm not proud of it, I don't necessarily regret it, either.

Click anywhere on the blockquote to be taken to Mr. Crabb's post.

Thinking now that it was probably Robbie Steinhardt who thanked Mr. Goddard. While Walsh was almost always the one who screamed "Welcome to Kansas!" at the start of the show, Steinhardt usually handled the audience interaction after that. Also seeing that the show I attended--which almost as a matter of course had been held at the infamous, and the lamented, Hollywood Sportatorium--took place on December 6, 1980. So I would have been 15 years 93 days of age. Old enough to get fucked up, anyway, at least at the Sport.

Observing as well as I look around that Goddard had played on Kerry Livgren's solo album from that same wonderful year, Seeds of Change. And if that's so, I think I've figured out which song it was that Mr. Goddard had guested on.

It was probably the single from Livgren's album, which was called "The Mask of the Great Deceiver." I never did pull the trigger and buy Seeds of Change (just like I never bought Schemer-Dreamer, the first Steve Walsh solo album), but I did find a copy of the single in one of my dad's grocery bags. Wish I still had it: while not a picture sleeve, the label gave a special vocals credit to Ronnie James Dio, who sang on the thing. It made no mention of Goddard, however, or of Barriemore Barlow, who played the drums.

Anyway, I don't have a setlist from the concert, but I do see that the band played "Deceiver" at points along the Audio-Visions tour, like in Houston and in New York. My thinking here is that if Goddard played bass on the album track (he did), and played at all with the band live, wouldn't it make the most sense that the live tune he played would be the one he already knew?

And not that Dave Hope couldn't have learned the song, but if Goddard was playing the thing, he wouldn't have had to.

So: there you have it. A little bit of the 30-year old memory that had not been eradicated by the drugs. A little bit of present-day internet detective work. And what do you get?

Well, you get proof conclusive of Paul Goddard playing his Fender Precision on "The Mask of the Great Deceiver," before a stoned-out Hollywood audience, December 6, 1980.

The only thing left unknown (besides where that fucking "Mask of the Great Deceiver" 45 has gone off to in the years since) is whether or not I puked out all the Budweiser and all the pills after the show was done.

But the answer is, probably.

Mojo Nixon - "Don Henley Must Die" from the CD Otis

2011-03-10T16:32:00.014-05:00

He's a tortured artist
Used to be in The Eagles
Now he whines like a wounded beagle

Poet of despair
Puffed up with hot air
He's serious, pretentious and I just don't care

Don Henley must die
Don't let him get back together
With Glenn Frey, Don Henley must die

Cut on the TV
And what did I see
This bloated hairy thing winnin' a grammy

Best rock vocalist
Compared to what
Bunch of pseudo-serious Kraft angst-a-matic
Satanic plot

Don Henley must die
Put a sharp stick in his eye,
Don Henley must die

******
So. I was reading Suicide Watch the other day and was struck well by the following short screed.

i hate the shit out of Steely Dan and The Eagles and most of the 70s cocaine yuppie yacht rock . . .

And I was like, colorfully put, but maybe you wanna give yourself some wiggle room over there? Don't get me wrong: I consider it a blessing that it's been years and years since I've had to hear anything off Hotel California, but there ARE on close inspection a few Eagles tunes loaded into my iTunes. Truly twisted songs like "The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks" and "The Disco Strangler" come to mind, and I do indeed dig most of The Long Run, anyway.

And while Steely Dan ain't first choice or anything, if I'm in a dentist's office, let's say, I truly believe you could do worse than "Josie."

What I think I'm trying to say is that you can be surprised by an artist, you can. It'll happen, bank on it; but if you shut the door, then you're stuck.

So anyway, to at least try and get things moving, it was Suicide Watch that put me in mind of both Don Henley and of the sense of space you just might wanna give yourself when making bold artistic pronouncements.

And then what should my iPod play for me as I'm driving home Tuesday?

You guessed it, the song we have here, "Don Henley Must Die."

I'll be honest. It's not a great song. Mojo's always good for a laugh, but the tune is just a little bit standard-issue, I don't think I'm out of line at all if I say that. But like "Gimme Shelter," like "Carry That Weight," like the Pistols doing their version of "No Fun," "Don Henley Must Die" has had its musical heft increased by circumstance.

The story goes that sometime in 1992, Mojo was doing a show at an Austin bar called The Hole in the Wall, when a drunken Henley appeared out of nowhere and climbed onstage. Mojo--as fit to be sheep-dipped as everyone else in the building, probably moreso--wasn't sure whether Henley wanted to fight or "debate," but what it turned out that Henley wanted was to sing backup vocals to "Don Henley Must Die."

Mojo was good with that, and Don proceeded to go through with it.

I'm not sure, exactly, what else in musical history, real or imagined, might work as an apt comparison to this truly crazy-ass happening. At first I was thinking that it might have been close to something like if Biggie Smalls had guested on one of Tupac's records. But, you know, if Mojo and Henley had been rappers, Mojo would have shot and killed Henley long before it got to the point where both men were in the same freaking building. . . .

What I guess it might be most like is if George W Bush had done a cameo in one of Michael Moore's films. Except that, like the hypothetical Tupac-Biggie get-together, that shit just never happened. No-one is disputing that Don Henley sang background on a song that mean-spiritedly jokes about his own death--and fucking asked to do so.

I've spent some time here suggesting that it is to an artist's own good if they can show a sense of humor about themselves, but even so, I'm frankly amazed at the determination not to take himself seriously shown by Henley in this whole thing. How can you NOT admire the guy, cocaine yuppie yacht rock or no?

It's probably Mojo himself who said it best about Henley: "The guy's got balls as big as church bells."

Mojo Nixon - Otis - 09 - Don Henley Must Die.mp3

242 kbps VBR mp3, up for six weeks

Time The Way I Roll

2011-03-08T18:41:00.005-05:00

When I got home and took a look at my ITunes library, I saw a bunch more, such that I thought I'd just go ahead and go fullbore on the thing, skipping of course the five I'd mentioned in the previous post. . . . .

10.Blue Cheer - "Summertime Blues"
  9. The Pixies - "Distance Equals Rate Times Time"
  8. Emerson Lake & Palmer - "A Time And A Place"
  7. INXS - "Good + Bad Times"
  6. Led Zeppelin - "In My Time Of Dying"
  5. The Dismemberment Plan - "Time Bomb"
  4. Atheist - "Piece of Time"
  3. Neil Young - "Time Fades Away "
  2. Sonic Youth - "I Love Her All The Time"
  1. The Yardbirds - "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs, except for "Time Fades Away," not being sold by Apple Corp, probably due to some cussed perversity of Young's. So that one's here

Time: The Mixtape, In Another Stop On Its Journey Across The Web

2011-03-08T09:24:00.005-05:00

From Negative Pleasure via my new favorite Tumblr blog, Only the Young Die Young:

the time mixtape:

- gimme some good times - lou reed
- hoochie koo time - big stick
- waste of time - turncoats
- action time vision - alternative tv
- now’s the time - shadow of fear
- pizza time - ducktails
- time for a witness - the feelies
- killing time - black market baby
- out of time - the soft moon
- give me some time - the nerves
- funny how time slips away - willie nelson
- stopped myself in time - pigbros. featuring the membranes
- time for change - omega tribe
- dark times - the passage
- time expired - slant 6
- maybe it’s the wrong time - ze malibu kids
- lifetime problems - the dicks
- making time - lords of the new church
- one more time - them
- flash in time - gray matter
- i can’t make it on time - the ramones
- no time to be 21 - the adverts
- some other time - x
- time passage - scientist
- right time - the crowd
- zero time - chrome
- time - david bowie
- yet still time - the new creation
- first time - dmz
- various times - the fall
- good times - sam cooke
- dub in time - the upsetters
- first time - the boys
- last time - soft powers
- modern time - the gents
- time - the speedies
- the best time - dillinger

Except they missed a couple, or more than a couple. I can see skipping "Time" by Pink Floyd, but how about "Sign O' The Times" by Prince, and "Time Has Come Today" by The Chambers Brothers? Or (the simply phenomenal) "Time of the Season," by The Zombies, or "Got the Time," by Anthrax? I get the feeling that "Time Passages" by Al Stewart might not be up their alley, but I'm pretty sure it'd be on my tape, I like a wide dynamic range, don't you know.

Music-Related Comments Elsewhere: Jon Anderson's 'Stash

2011-03-04T19:20:00.003-05:00

This is what I love about my Last FM software: I could be fiddling with my baseball cards with the iTunes open, and "Solid Space" from Olias of Sunhillow could randomly come on and all of a sudden I'll have this window opened for me with this seriously badass photo that I'd never before in my life even imagined the existence of, our favorite cosmic-minded domineering prog-rock man as a young dude experimenting with the mustachioed look, as a way to win friends and influence spacy-headed prog-people.

It's the kind of thing that would inspire me to write something like

The 'stash is a good look for Mr. Anderson, shoulda stayed with it, makes him look like he coulda been in Bad Company or something . . . . .

And I bet you all agree.

All Your Internet Are Made of Us

2011-02-24T22:21:00.003-05:00

10. Hefner - "Hello Kitten"
9. Sonic Youth - "Loop Cat"
8. 65daysofstatic - "This Cat is a Landmine"
7. Matching Mole - "Instant Kitten"
6. Squirrel Bait - "Kick the Cat"
5. The Cure - "The Lovecats"
4. Ted Nugent - "Cat Scratch Fever"
3. The Stray Cats - "Stray Cat Strut"
2. Adrian Belew - "Big Electric Cat"
1. Beck Bogert & Appice - "Black Cat Moan"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs except for the Matching Mole, which is here.

Sick: The List

2011-02-22T04:49:00.008-05:00

Ten songs selected in honor of the 504-hour virus which continues to plague me.

10. Disturbed - "Down with the Sickness"
  9. UFO - "Doctor Doctor"
  8. Unsane - "Sick"
  7. die kreuzen - "Pain/Sick People"
  6. Alice in Chains - "Sickman"
  5. Run-DMC - "You Be Illin'"
  4. Queens of the Stone Age - "Sick Sick Sick"
  3. Aerosmith - "Sick as a Dog"
  2. The Replacements - "Take Me Down To the Hospital"
  1. Led Zeppelin - "Sick Again"

Itunes appears not to include "Sick Again" in its store library, so maybe I'll skip the whole iMix thing and just go back to bed.

May God have mercy on my soul.

Music-Related Comments Elsewhere

2011-02-10T01:45:00.009-05:00

I remain sick as a rheumy dog--not dead yet but still, yellow matter custard all over the fucking place--and it's kept me from posting here since Punxsutawney Phil did his thing.

Still, I was able to squeeze out an interesting comment this afternoon at Tad's Backup Plan. I've long considered copying the comments I leave behind as I traipse about the internet--or at least the comments I leave behind on music--over to here, and tonight, at least and if only to take up some space where some was needed, I believe I'll initiate such a process.

Whether I stick with it strictly, or at all, who knows? But for now, Tad was talking about pop in the early '80's and new wave and a certain album from The Headboys. So I chimed in with a 'hasn't anybody heard of closing the goddamned door' . . .

I had that Headboys 45! "The Shape of Things to Come." Brilliant fucking record. They played it once or twice on the briefly new-wave radio station here, and then I seized upon it one day when going through one of my old man's grocery bags. Wasn't a great copy, let's say it crackled as it spun. But I loved that chorus, Oh-oh-oh-Oh-oh, The-Shape-of-Things-to-Come.

My favorite Cars song was always "Since You're Gone," with that outrageous, amorphous, infinite delay guitar solo, and I always remember how . . . spastic . . . Elliott Easton looked playing it on the couch in that video with the disappearing eggs.

But my second favorite Cars track isn't a Cars song at all. "Wearing Down Like A Wheel," from Easton's solo album Change No Change may have the best solo from a man who seemed to painstakingly craft them.

Hated that fucking 'Til Tuesday song, really, REALLY hated it.

Fuckin' hated it.

Loved me some Clash first album, though, and think my favorite London punk might be its twisted reggae: White Man in Hammersmith Palais and Sub-Mission best EVAR.

Still remember the choice I made one day at the Spec's or the Peaches or whatever mass market retailer it was: INXS Shabooh Shabbah or Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks.

Guess which one I picked?

Click anywhere in the blockquote to be taken to Tad's post.

Primus - "Groundhog's Day" from the CD Suck on This

2011-02-01T22:08:00.009-05:00

We all like ourselves some apple pie, but seems like most of us are gonna have to get used to settling for Corn Chex.

Whether it's the same day-different shit movie or Primus' genre-bending musing on being cheated that you cotton to in regards February 2nd, it makes perfect total excruciating sense that the day on which Phil makes his fateful decision ain't no goddamned work holiday.

Pay to play indeed: it is in fact a tease which never does subside.

Primus - Suck on This - 02 Groundhog's Day.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Funk Metal Fusion?

Spoken Word Interlude: John Peel

2011-01-30T15:46:00.009-05:00

Beyond the tirades of profane baseball men and the clever movie dialogue, there is at least one more great class of spoken word often loaded onto Junior Jr., and that is those endlessly entertaining excerpts from the BBC One radio shows of the late great John Peel.

I used to run around saying that Brian Eno was my hero, but that was until I tried reading . . . the Vertical Color of Sound, and realized that saying so was unseemly when my intellect was so vastly inferior to Eno's.

Easier, then, I figured, to marvel at the life put together by Peel, who, while sharp enough, was no unassailable genius to us plebes, and became a beacon for the rest of us only through his enthusiasm for, and love of, music.

It's amazing how balkanized music can become, and how freely even the most passionate of music lovers will help the process along. The folkies wouldn't listen to psych, and the hippies wouldn't listen to folk. The punks hated the hippies, too, and would grow into their disdain for heavy metal. These days, music is either "urban" or not, and the twain don't often fuckin' meet.

And we all know that guy who listens *only* to skacore, or to drone metal, or to reggae . . . .

Peel transcended all that bullshit. He was a champion of T Rex, and of Napalm Death, of Roy Harper and of Billy Bragg, of Robert Wyatt and Cat Power and Orbital and New Order and PJ Harvey and UB40 and The Fall, like mixing your peas with your mashed potatoes, Peel didn't mind 'cause it all went to the same place.

Peel loved music the way it should be loved, without prejudice, and though it's a struggle, ever since I became aware of the man, I have endeavored to follow his lead in that regard.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The other, funnier, thing about Peel after the shining example he set is that he was frequently a klutz on air, banging the desk, knocking over the mike, popping the wrong cart in at the wrong time, forgetting the name of that band's album. But it all emanated from his guileless enthusiasm, and was so therefore wonderful . . . and wonderfully hilarious.

Here are a few of my favorite Peel moments caught on air. They serve me well in traffic and at the grocery store, but I do not have an exceptional collection. You could probably spend your life finding more.

John Peel Bangs The Desk.mp3

John Peel Gets To Meet Genesis

John Peel Iced Towels.mp3

John Peel BLUUUARGH.mp3

Various bitrates don't matter for the okenspay ordway I don't think

File under: Spoken Word, Hero Worship

Children of the . . .

2011-01-26T19:32:00.007-05:00

10.  Korn - Korn
  9.  Moon - The Alan Parsons Project
  8.  Hydra's Teeth - ... And You Will Know Us
             By the Trail of Dead
  7.  Underworld - Entombed
  6.  Sun - Billy Thorpe
  5.  Revolution - T. Rex
  4.  Future - Steve Miller Band
  3.  Damned - Iron Maiden
  2.  Sea - Black Sabbath
  1.  Grave - Black Sabbath

As usual, Black Sabbath, FTW.

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs, except for el numero uno, "Children of the Grave," which strangely, mystifyingly, almost inconceivably, sees no original studio version of itself at the iStore. What in the fuck is up with that?

So here that one is: 192 kbps mp3

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality - 04 Children Of The Grave.mp3

All hail Lord Sabbath

Jon Anderson - "Naon" from the Album Olias of Sunhillow

2011-01-23T10:46:00.009-05:00

Previously unpublished excerpts from Olias' Wiseguy Brother: Another View of the Doom and Salvation of Sunhillow:

So he built a space ark, and saved the tribes of Sunhillow from certain doom: BIG FAT HAIRY DEAL.

Olias was a freakin' klutz, so discombobulated, it was a wonder he found the tree-pod egress each morning. "Pay attention to what you're doing, for Arya's sake" I'd tell him. "You're drinking your soul into the ocean so goddamned much, you're walking around like a fucking zombie. And you're bug-eyed from the Garden's fountain lights. One day we're gonna dredge you from a Tallowplanic swamp after you stumble in 'cause you weren't looking where you're going. You think the fish of the plain are your play pals, wait 'til they start munching on your bloated corpse."

But he'd just mumble, "Brother, the Moorglade occupies me constantly."

Moorglade, Schmorglade. I told Olias what he really needed to be doing instead of building some stupid music-powered star-galleon was bringing some extra income into the treehouse so our begotten father could stop breaking his back and enjoy a little comfort creation for a change.

"If you're set on this ridiculous Moorglade thing, if you're so sure of the coming apocalypse, you ought to at least charge fucking admission," I said. "Jack up the price for those fat cat Nordranious, and Pops could retire on the take from them alone."

But Olias just shook his head in that pious, holier-than-thou way he had. "The silver chord of life is precious, brother, and there is room enough for all."

Olias got the "room enough for all" bullshit from that pansy-ass buddy of his, Qoquaq. They say Q. sang his transic song of welcome over Tallowcross and united the four tribes, and you can say that if you want, but for me, Qoquaq was day-cruise entertainment, if you know what I'm saying.

OK, I had a little egg on my face when Sunhillow, you know, actually exploded. "Into millions of silent teardrops," the bards wrote.

Whatever. It was probably a Nagrunium conspiracy all along. That's what Moon Ra the discord said, anyway, and I believed 'im.

* * * * * * * * * *
But seriously, folks. . . .

Olias of Sunhillow is not as visceral or as muscular as a Yes album, and that is for the very good reason that Jon Anderson, for all his multitracked multi-tasking on Olias, simply can't play his instruments as well as Steve Howe or Rick Wakeman can. For all its ambition--and it may be the most ambitious single album ever made--Olias is still scaled to Anderson's instrumental talents and rather simple musically.

Yet it's not something you notice, because of all the textures. I once read a review, can't find it now, unfortunately, that called Olias "samey," and boy, did I think that was wrong-headed. "Naon" is a great counter-example to that accusation of sameness. It is one of the most organic and therefore distinctive prog songs you'll ever hear.

I love a good synthesizer as much as the next prog fan, but they are as a matter of course synthetic. "Naon" foregoes that route, while sacrifing none of Olias' core progressiveness. Back when I was a kid and getting stoned every Friday night, I would listen to "Naon" through headphones afterward, and without fail I would be transported into the dark, cramped passenger hold of a great spacefaring wooden ship. I could almost smell the sour sweat and the incense and hear the creaking of the timbers beneath the sitar and the harp.

And that's a testament not just to the drugs, but to the meticulous worldbuilding of Jon Anderson, music and text and art all combined into (heh-heh) an intoxicating melange, very likely prog-rock's most fully realized world.

Jon Anderson - Olias of Sunhillow - 07 Naon.mp3

230 kbps VBR mp3, up for six weeks (right click and save as target)

File under:Progressive Rock, Apocalypse Rock

The Last Historia de la Historia de la Musica Rock

2011-01-20T19:26:00.016-05:00

Unless I can track down a copy of Soundhog's Mashup album, that is.

Anyway, this list and the artwork next door was something I put together about five years ago as part of a mix CD I'd made for a friend.

You can see that I took the idea of putting together 100 records worth of rock history seriously--to a certain extent. Dig the Yes-antecedents disc, or the Metallica-influence one. Check out the No New York platter. Scholarly if I do say so myself.

Other shit, however, is just for laughs. Mudhoney, Mudvayne, ha! That cracks me up every time. And of course, the cover/theme.

Ah, but enough blowing of my own horn. Check it out, you should find it as thought-provoking--and as funny--as those other guys' lists.

1.		The Rolling Stones
2.		Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash
3.		The Big Bopper, Vangelis
4.		Johnny Kidd & The Pirates
5.		Bee Gees, Gorguts
6.		Helmet, Can
7.		Buddy Holly, Napalm Death
8.		Dave Clark Five, The Hollies
9.		The Kinks (2 discos)
10.		Tornadoes, PJ Proby
11.		? and the Mysterians
12.		The Monkees, White Zombie
13.		The Byrds, The Doors
14.		La Reina De La "Quiet Storm"
15.		Love, Jefferson Airplane
16.		Neil Young (2 discos)
17.		Jimi Hendrix
18.		GG Allin
19.		Cream, Family, Happy Flowers
20.		Blind Faith, Renaissance
21.		Led Zeppelin (2 discos)
22.		America, Boss Hogg
23.		Jefferson Airplane, SNFU
24.		The Velvet Underground
25.		Steve Miller Band 1968 - 73

51.		Jeff Beck (2 discos)
52.		Television, Refrigerator, Table
53.		Mission of Burma
54.		Brian Eno (2 discos)
55.		Black Flag, White Flag
56.		Tympani & Sousaphone
57.		Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Mars, DNA
58.		Killing Joke, Spandau Ballet
59.		The Damned
60.		90 Day Men
61.		Falco, Gary Numan, The Nice
62.		Joe Jackson, Captain Sensible
63.		The Cars, System of a Down
64.		Ultravox, Bloodhag, U2
65.		Dead Boys, Rocket From the Crypt, Christine Aguilera
66.		X, Husker Du, The Replacements
67.		Iron Maiden
68.		Holocaust, Budgie
69.		Diamond Head, King Diamond
70.		Sonic Youth (2 discos)
71.		The Fall, The Rapture
72.		The Police, MDC
73.		Michael Jackson, Gang Green
74.		The Beatles, Herman's Hermits
75.		Metallica

26.		The Grateful Dead
27.		Buffalo Springfield
28.		The Faces, Crucifucks
29.		Humble Pie, Mott The Hoople
30.		Procol Harum, Life of Agony
31.		The Syn, Bodast, Tomorrow
32.		Yes (2 discos)
33.		King Crimson
34.		Emerson Lake & Palmer
35.		Stormtroopers of Death
36.		Nick Drake, The Dwarves
37.		Black Sabbath
38.		Joni Mitchell, Nico
39.		Fairport Convention
40.		Rumah Sakit
41.		Hot Tuna, Mr. Airplane Man
42.		ABBA, MOD, UK, XTC
43.		Rage Against the Machine, Load
44.		The Clash (2 discos)
45.		The Sex Pistols, Hanson
46.		Peter & The Test Tube Babies
47.		Ramones, Kepone
48.		Voivod, Voidoids
49.		Lonnie Donnegan, The Slits
50.		The Beach Boys (3 discos)

76.		Big Black, Shellac (2 discos)
77.		Slayer, Possessed, Genesis
78.		The Who
79.		Men at Work
80.		Scratch Acid, The Jesus Lizard
81.		INXS, Slipknot, Enya
82.		Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Drums and Tuba
83.		Naked City, Painkiller
84.		Jane's Addiction, 7 Mary 3
85.		Nirvana (2 discos)
86.		Mudhoney, Mudvayne
87.		Korn, Drowning Pool (3 discos)
88.		Neutrino, Tortoise, The Hosemobile
89.		Nuclear Assault, Shocking Blue
90.		Minor Threat, Uniform Choice, The Seizures, Codeine
91.		Stone Temple Pilots, Lunachicks
92.		Cro Mags, Chronic Disorder
93.		Morphine, Cake, The Ex
94.		The Soft Machine, Oxes
95.		The Mercury Program, The Cure
96.		Rush, Mahogany Rush
97.		Wall of Voodoo, Chavez
98.		Soundgarden, Linkin Park
99.		Kiss, Beck, Wire, Juno, Ween
007.		Pussy Galore

Fairport Convention - "Tam Lin" from the Album Liege and Lief

2011-01-17T20:40:00.006-05:00

"There are other worlds. This one is done with me."
--Merlin (Nicol Williamson) in John Boorman's Excalibur

The world gets older, and the magic goes away. That has always been the nature of things.

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

I forbid you maidens all
that wear gold in your hair
To travel to Carterhaugh
for young Tam Lin is there

None that go by Carterhaugh
but they leave him a pledge
Either their mantles of green
or else their maidenheads

Janet tied her kirtle green
a bit above her knee
And she's gone to Carterhaugh
as fast as go can she

She'd not pulled a double rose,
a rose but only two
When up then came young Tam Lin
says "Lady pull no more"

"And why come you to Carterhaugh
without command from me?"
"I'll come and go" young Janet said
"And ask no leave of thee"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *Sandy Denny was 21 years old when she joined Fairport Convention. Her voice of this time if you've never heard it is one to give you shivers, warm and full and rounded, and of unfailing and absolute perfect pitch.

The tale is that first the band auditioned her; then, though they had an album out on Polydor already, she auditioned the band. . . .

I've never heard that debut Fairport album with original singer Judy Dyble, but I will nevertheless say that, no matter how good Dyble may have been, a voice like Denny's couldn't help but expand the possibilities open to Fairport.

As would her conversance with English (and Scottish) traditional music. Before Sandy Denny joined, Fairport were a bunch of Brits who wanted to be The Byrds; after she joined, Fairport were the band that others, Steeleye Span and the rest, wanted to be.

It is impossible these days to introduce the term "British folk-rock" into the conversation without mentioning Fairport; they were its first and foremost practitioners, and without slighting the talent that is Richard Thompson's, they were that primarily because of Sandy Denny.

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

Janet tied her kirtle green
a bit above her knee
And she's gone to her father
as fast as go can she

Well up then spoke her father clear
and he spoke meek and mild
"Oh and alas Janet" he said
"I think you go with child"

"Well if that be so" Janet said
"Myself shall bear the blame
There's not a knight in all your hall
shall get the baby's name

For if my love were an earthly knight
as he is an elfin grey
I'd not change my own true love
for any knight you have"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *The first written reference to the Scottish ballad commonly known as "Tam Lin" dates from 1549, but there is every reason to suppose that the ballad is in fact much older. "Thomas the Rhymer," a ballad with which "Tam Lin" is often associated, and which shares some thematic similarities with "Tam Lin," originated at least 100 years earlier, and it's also possible that "Tam Lin" is the older of the two.

However old the ballad might be, whoever its original composers and contributors and singers might have been, there's no doubt that that they were practicing Christians. William when he came to do his Conquering came to a thoroughly Christianized land; the last pagan king in Britain had been slain some 350 years before his invasion.

But we all know Christian is isn't always as Christian does. Much of the pagan myth and ritual of the British Isles was not discarded, but was rather subsumed into folklore.

Into folklore like the ballad "Tam Lin," that is. What's interesting to me here is not just that "Tam Lin" is a fairy story with direct links to Celtic belief, but also that the story serves as an allegory as to how that Celtic belief, that Celtic magic if you will, came to be diminished with the spread of Christianity. Unlike many of the folk ballads, "Tam Lin" is understood to have something of a happy ending, but of course it's a happy ending for Tam Lin, and not so much of one for the fairies and their queen.

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

So Janet tied her kirtle green
a bit above her knee
And she's gone to Carterhaugh
as fast as go can she.

"Oh tell to me Tam Lin" she said
"Why came you here to dwell?"
"The Queen of Fairies caught me
when from my horse I fell

And at the end of seven years
she pays a tithe to hell
I so fair and full of flesh
and fear'ed be myself

But tonight is Halloween
and the fairy folk ride,
Those that would their true love win
at mile's cross they must hide

First let pass the horses black
and then let pass the brown
Quickly run to the white steed
and pull the rider down,

For I'll ride on the white steed,
the nearest to the town
For I was an earthly knight,
they give me that renown

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Fairport Convention released three albums with Sandy Denny in 1969. What We Did on Our Holidays was followed by Unhalfbricking was followed by the singular masterpiece of British folk-rock that is Liege & Lief.

It was like good morning, good afternoon, and goodnight: for after they--she--had revolutionized electric folk, when they were done with these records, Denny made the first of the several poor career decisions that she would make during her lifetime: she quit Fairport.

In hindsight, we can say that neither party would ever be so important or influential again. This may not have been apparent in the immediate aftermath of the split, however: Denny won Melody Maker's poll as Best Female Vocalist in both 1970 (as a member of her one- or two-off band Fotheringay) and 1971 (when she was promoting her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens).

It became readily apparent, however, as time passed, as Denny's heavy drinking took a toll on her personally, and as her heavy smoking took its tithe on her voice. By 1975, when she had rejoined Fairport for a brief reunion, it was apparent that the bell-like clarity of her voice was likely gone, not to return.

Then, after a final, ill-conceived "contemporary rock" album, one day in 1978 she tumbled down some stairs, perhaps drunkenly, and four days later her voice in whatever form it might have taken was silent.

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

Oh they will turn me in your arms
to a newt or a snake
But hold me tight and fear not,
I am your baby's father

And they will turn me in your arms
into a lion bold
But hold me tight and fear not
and you will love your child,

And they will turn me in your arms
into a naked knight
But cloak me in your mantle
and keep me out of sight"

In the middle of the night
she heard the bridle ring
She heeded what he did say
and young Tam Lin did win

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Although it's not mentioned in the Fairport rendition, most versions of "Tam Lin" explain that Janet was the heir to Carterhaugh Woods. When the fairies--or Tam Lin as their emissary--forbid her to enter the woods that in fact belong to her, they're not necessarily fighting words, but only because mortals had traditionally not dared to defy the powerful fey in the matter. As someone who knows a lot more than me on the subject has written: "The battle over Tam Lin is also a battle over the magic in the woods, and whose claim was greater."

The fairies' defeat in the matter of Tam Lin, then, seems to mirror the eclipse of Celtic paganism and its sequestering under Christian envangelism. "Tam Lin," so often noted in this day and age for its strong feminine hero, is pretty plainly to me an allegory for the rise of Christianity, and of course its contrapositive, the death of magic.

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

Then up spoke the Fairy Queen,
an angry Queen was she
"Woe betide her ill-farred face,
an ill death may she die

Had I known Tam Lin" she said
"This night I did see
I'd have looked him in the eyes
and turned him to a tree"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Sandy Denny's voice at her height, on "Tam Lin," young and powerful, five, six, seven years before things would dissipate messily, is like furniture of fine burnished wood. You can almost smell the lemon oil, watch the rag infused with its essence as it slides frictionless across that polished table top.

Her voice is like Armagnac, caramel, honey, syrup, and the rich rich burn as it envelopes you. It's like violins, layers upon layers of warmth, so deep and so sad you're not sure just how far down it all goes, the vibrato there stately weeping for all the magic yet to be lost.

Fairport Convention - Liege & Lief - 07 Tam Lin.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File Under: British Folk Rock, Scottish Balladry, Songs with versions by Robert Burns

Historia de la Musica Rock: The Hundred (and One) Albums in the Pussy Galore Universe

2011-01-12T10:01:00.015-05:00

Like I promised the time before.

These albums don't exist of course, but are simply referenced on the back of the booklet that came with Pussy Galore's tribute to/deconstruction of the Historia series from 1990.

In its own way, this list is as funny as the one they provided with the originals. Hard to surpass the humor in reality, if you know what I'm saying, but this list--the entire CD package--is so faithful to the budget bin aesthetic of the Spanish archetypes that you've just got to giggle.

Somebody spent a lot of time with this, it's clear, so I know the mistakes are intentional. My favorite is "Mango Jerry," though "Otis Spawn" is also good. Also love how John Travolta and Ike & Tina both get appearances on two albums, in the same way Roger Daltrey did in the original Spanish series. And they included Aphrodite's Child! No word for that but awesome. Just plain awesome.

Now we can say, had you doubted, that Jordi Sierra i Fabra and Pussy Galore both agree: The Rolling Stones and Aphrodite's Chid are essential.

And was it inevitable that Pussy Galore--named after a Bond girl, of course--would include in their list a band that named itself after the Bond villain Hugo Largo? I really have no choice, given the evidence; I have to suppose it was.

Beyond the humor drawn from the intentional mistakes and the James Bond injokes, the humor is where it was in the originals: in the juxtapositions. I hadn't realized until I compiled the list last week that the Spanish records hadn't actually combined artists on a single platter; but I've long known that Pussy Galore's parody finds most of its humor in the way it slaps radically different artists onto the same (yes, yes, hypothetical) disc. "Nuclear Assault, Shocking Blue" might just be my favorite fusion, though fictional record # 42 is pretty great, too: "Iron Butterfly, The Crests, The Crewcuts, The Undead."

Beyond that which is funny, much of this list is amazingly obscure. After the doo-wop and the paleo-rhythm and blues, much of it is comprised of arcane New York bands from the dawn of punk, crust punk bands, and Youth Crew bands, and scum punk bands and no-wave bands, many of whom I've never heard of in any other context.

Such deep, deep obscurity begs the question as to whether some of these bands might be so unknown that they, technically, as we say in the blogger biz, didn't even fucking exist. Pussy Galore wouldn't lie to us, would they?

Would they?!?!?!?!?

Well, it seems not. I did a little internet verification on some of the ones I hadn't heard of this morning, and almost everyone mentioned appears to have, you know, been real. "Red Buckets" and "L.C.U.," I couldn't find anything on them, but 20 or so of the others that I looked at have some kind of quickly-found mention on the beercan-riddled shoulders of the information superhighway.

If you wanna get an idea of some of the stuff I found while looking, check out this review of a rare early NY-scene compilation that namechecks five of the bands PG go to in their list.

Other than that, dive in:

1.		The Rolling Stones
2.		Red Buckets, Chubby Checker
3.		Bob Marley, Squirm, Crippled Youth
4.		The Fleetwoods, Savage Clrcle, The Chiffons, The Ad Libs
5.		Even Worse
6.		Billy Preston, Solomon Burke, Rites of the Accused
7.		The Headlickers, Sam & Dave, The Association
8.		The Waldos
9.		The Platters, Ultravlolence
10.		lke & Tina Turner, Warzone, Esther Philllps, Blues Image, Jimmy McGriff & Junior Parker, Ludichrist
11.		The Bloods, Duane Eddy, The Fireballs, Jack Scott,
12.		The Beach Boys, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Rude Buddha, Disco Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes
13.		Curia Thomas, The Shlrelles, Lonnle Mack, Brook Benton, Seizure,
14.		Mango Jerry, Johnny & The Hurricanes, Danny and The JunIors, Agnostlc Front, BiII Deal & The Rhondels
15.		Token Entry
16.		Nuclear Assault, Shocking Blue, The El Dorados
17.		Cro-Mags, L. C. U.
18.		Bloodsister
19.		The Platters, Killer Instinct, King Curtis, Lee Dorsey
20.		The Diamonds, The Five Americans, Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs, Porno Dracula, The Manhattans
21.		The Misguided
22.		Rufus Thomas, Martha Reeves, The Nashville Teens, Ism
23.		Sick of It All
24.		Harlots of 42nd Street
25.		Gary Lewis & The Playboys, The Eternals, Ritual Tension

51.		The Impressions, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, NY Niggers, Otis Spawn
52.		Jan & Dean, Shades of Blue, Jay & The Techniques, Patti Labelle & The Blue Belles, The Solitalres
53.		Aphrodite's Child
54.		Brook Benton, White Zombie
55.		The Shlrelles, The Olympics, The Mercers, Jerry Butler
56.		Roger Manning
57.		76% Uncertain, The Dovells, Jlmmie Rodger, T Roe
58.		Circus Mort
59.		Harry Crews, The Lunachicks, STP, Maria Excommunicata
60.		Mike Rlmbaud
61.		Jimmy Mcgriff & Junior Parker, Shirley & Lee
62.		Mike Blooomfield, Otis Spann
63.		The Skyliners, Gene Chandler Joe South
64.		Kraut
65.		Robert & Johnny, The Spaniels
66.		Peach of Immortality
67.		The Kingston Trio
68.		Icon
69.		Letch Patrol, The Flamingos
70.		Billy Bland, The Jive Five, Johnny Crawford
71.		Erasers, Cllfton Chronic, Isaac Douglas
72.		Jimmy Reed, Rat At Rat R
73.		The String-a-Longs, Sonny Till & The Orioles, Bobby Helms
74.		Jackie Wilson, J. Frank Wilson, Damage
75.		Amen Corner, Egoslavia

26.		Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Verbal Abuse
27.		Stisism
28.		The Drifters, Chronic Disorder, The Bobettes
29.		John Travolta, Fontella Bass, Marv Johnson, The Box Tops, Lloyd Price
30.		Drunk Driving
31.		Murphy's Law
32.		The Orioles, The Dust Devils, The Moonglows, Fabian
33.		M.O.A., D.Y.S., F.O.D.
34.		S.O.D.
35.		M.O.D., Freddie & The Dreamers
36.		The Speedies
37.		Hugo Largo
38.		Virus, Black Snakes
39.		False Prophets
40.		The Jimmy Castor Bunch, The Casuals, Chris Banner
41.		Blodwyn Pig, Joe Simon, Otis Spawn
42.		Iron Butterfly, The Crests, The Crewcuts, The Undead
43.		Butch Lust & Tne Hypocrites
44.		The Capris, Heart Attack, George Freeman
45.		A. P. P. L. E.
46.		Uniform Choice
47.		John Travolta
48.		Ike & Tina Turner, Jimmy Reed, Serendipity Singers, Johnny Rivers
49.		Johnny and The Hurricanes, The Klngsmen, The Excellents
50.		Betty Everett, The Earls

76.		The Olympics, Nausea, The Mystics
77.		B. J. Thomas, The Tokens, Mel Carter, Token Entry, Bobby Freeman
78.		Sanford Clark, The Clovers, Ludichrist
79.		The Fiestas, The Fireballs, The Coachmen
80.		Numb Sex
81.		P. M.S., Wilbert Harrison, The Leaves
82.		Telly Beans, Peter Best
83.		The Cribcrashers, Doctor Clayton
84.		Youth of Today, Reagan Youth, Wasted Youth
85.		Irma Thomas, The Cowsills, The Crow, The Dells
86.		Johnny Ray, The Rotters
87.		The Passlons, Jlmmie Rodgers, Crumbsuckers, The Shangri-Las
88.		The Mellow Kings The Qin-tones, Swingin' Blue Jeans
89.		The Skulls, The Turtles, Frankie Valli
90.		The Paragons, Joe Thomas
91.		The Capitols, Frankle Ford, The Mob
92.		Brook Benton, Gogi Grant, The Happenlngs, King Harvest
93.		The Charlots, Ronnle Dove, Jerry Wallace, Sister Rosetta Tharpe
94.		Bloodsuckers From Outer Space
95.		Robert and Johnny, The Shaved Pigs, The Chimes
96.		Artless
97.		The Capris, The Earls, Don Gardner & Dee Dee Ford
98.		Seizure, Jimmy Reed, Crippled Youth
99.		The Solitaires, Billy Bland, Dee Clark
100.		Sonny Till & The Orioles, The Spaniels, The Undead
007.		Pussy Galore

"A new page in the history of Rock has been written. ¡Bravo!"

Stealers Wheel - "Stuck in the Middle" from the Reservoir Dogs OMPST &

2011-01-08T22:36:00.019-05:00

April March - "Laisse Tomber Les Filles" from the Death Proof OMPST

Interesting it is, I think, that in the wake of Gerry Rafferty's death January 4th, I've spent more time thinking about a guy getting his ear sliced off in a famously ultraviolent indie film than I have thinking about the deceased artist in question.

Maybe it's just mine own reaction, and if so, let's just forget the whole thing, and I'll see you on Tuesday or so. But it doesn't seem fair to me, on consideration, doesn't seem fitting.

Gerry Rafferty was no Captain Beefheart, no revolutionary, no great influence to anyone, really. The relevant stage of his career as an inoffensive soft-rocker lasted a decade, or actually a little less, and he seems to have spent the last 15 years of his life drinking himself to death.

Despite all this, however, Rafferty did manage to write 3 or 4 or 5 pretty great songs, and upon his passing, it seems a little sad to me that we spend more of our time thinking about some fictional rookie cop getting his fucking fictional ear sliced off by some fictional psychopath than about the real, true-to-life music that Rafferty actually made.

Not sure what the upshot of this is, though. I'm not suggesting that Rafferty and his partner Egan shouldn't have sold the song (its title expanded to include "With You" on as many releases as not, BTW) to Quentin, and I'm not suggesting that Tarantino shouldn't have bought it. I'm just lamenting how it all turned out.

It's the tyranny of the cinema, I guess.

I've been bitching and moaning for years about Scorsese, and what I feel to be his horribly inappropriate choices for soundtrack music. Like the mafia capos he depicts in his movies give a shit about The Rolling Stones, or that the simple accident that Marty happens to enjoy the music of John Lee Hooker makes that music at all appropriate for his films about Italian-Americans.

Not that I'm saying "Stuck in the Middle" is necessarily inappropriate for Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino's clever, he's like The Butthole Surfers: in his detached, ironic, postmodern, postpunk way, he manages to evade the question of appropriateness in the first place. It doesn't matter whether the song fits the film or not, see, 'cause it's all intended to be ironic, anyway.

So, y'know, in this oh-so-artistic way that he has, Tarantino is not as annoying as his ultraviolent grandfather Scorsese, but, to be sure, the end result is the same. I wind up thinking of guys in pinstripe suits hanging on meathooks inside of refrigerated trucks when I hear "Layla," and I think of Mr. Blonde when I hear a certain Scottish folk rock band performing their biggest hit.

It ain't right, I tell ya, but there's no getting around it. As big as rock and roll is, it ain't so big that it isn't dwarfed by Hollywood.

Anyway, there's no denying Tarantino's omnivorous taste in music. Stealers Wheel is just the beginning of a long list of wizened (and yes, many times ironical) inclusions QT has made onto his soundtracks. Check Dick Dale, T Rex, Neu!, Dusty Springfield, Kool and The Gang, and the 5.6.7.8's.

And April March. I've long wanted to share her outrageously fun Serge Gainsbourg cover, and I doubt I'll ever have a better chance.

Stealers Wheel - Stuck In The Middle With You (Reservoir Dogs).mp3

224 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

April March 'Laisse Tomber Les Filles' (Grindhouse-Death Proof OST).mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File Both Under: Quentin Tarantino's Greatest Hits

La Historia de la Historia de la Musica Rock

2011-01-05T11:08:00.024-05:00

OK, so the deal with this, that Pussy Galore had so much fun with, and I still do, is that between 1981 and 1983, two Spaniards by the name of Juan Manuel Prado and Jordi Sierra i Fabra began writing and publishing a Spanish language rock and roll magazine with a biographical/discographical slant.

In addition to other rock and roll books, including biographies of The Who, Pink Floyd and Rick Wakeman (!), Sierra i Fabra had some ten years earlier also written a reference work called La Historia de la Musica Pop, so we can assume a name for the new project came fairly easily for them.

Each magazine was made up of 20 ad-free glossy pages, and featured text by Sierra i Fabra, full-color photos, and an illustrated discography by someopne named Alex Mosley. The magazines were published weekly by Orbis, a British printing house who kept an office in Barcelona. Once the series was complete in its 100 issues, it was reissued in 6 hardbound volumes of about 200 pages each, and nothing of its like on rock 'n' roll had ever been seen in the Spanish language before.

Of course, Lillian Roxon's English language Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock had outlived its original editor and gone into its second or third edition by this time, so Prado's large encyclopedia might have remained of limited interest to an Anglo like myself . . .

Had it not been for the records. See, each of the magazines had been issued in conjunction with an LP, usually a Greatest Hits compilation^* manufactured by Polydor Italy, and while the books and the magazines de la Historia Rock never really made it stateside, the albums most assuredly did.

Anyone who spent any time at all in the cutout bins and in the import sections of record stores in the 80's is sure to have come across these records, and, really, they're not all that uncommon even now.

'Course, none of this really shares the joke, none of it really gets at the ironical reason Pussy Galore named their album what they did. In my telling thus far it all seems admirable. . . .

And it is. But dig the 100-entry series discography, and see if you don't crack a smile.

1.	The Rolling Stones
2.	Jimi Hendrix
3.	Jerry Lee Lewis
4.	David Bowie
5.	John Mayall
6.	The Beatles
7.	Genesis
8.	The Dave Clark Five
9.	The Small Faces
10.	Eric Clapton
11.	Joe Cocker
12.	Rod Stewart
13.	T Rex
14.	The Animals
15.	Procol Harum
16.	Manfred Mann
17.	Taste
18.	The Allman Brothers Band
19.	Bill Haley and The Comets
20.	Chuck Berry
21.	Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity
22.	The Pretty Things
23.	Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich
24.	Fats Domino
25.	The Nice

26.	Elvis Presley
27.	Lou Reed
28.	Chicago
29.	James Brown
30.	Santana
31.	Bob Dylan
32.	Blood, Sweat & Tears
33.	Janis Joplin
34.	Leonard Cohen
35.	Brian Poole & the Tremeloes / The Tornados
36.	John McLaughlin
37.	The Who
38.	The Velvet Underground
39.	Lulu / Tommy Steele
40.	Cat Stevens
41.	The Righteous Brothers
42.	The Hollies
43.	Roger Daltrey
44.	Elton John
45.	Them
46.	The Moody Blues
47.	The Kinks
48.	Roy Orbison
49.	Savoy Brown
50.	Ten Years After

51.	Ted Nugent & the Amboy Dukes
52.	Status Quo
53.	Slade
54.	Chick Corea
55.	Rainbow
56.	Fairport Convention
57.	Cream
58.	Bachman-Turner Overdrive
59.	Graham Parker
60.	The Walker Brothers
61.	Kansas
62.	Boston
63.	Jeff Beck
64.	Little Richard
65.	Melanie
66.	Jethro Tull
67.	Donovan
68.	Mahavishnu Orchestra
69.	The Three Degrees
70.	Labelle
71.	The O'Jays
72.	Poco
73.	Dave Mason
74.	The Byrds
75.	Billy Paul

76.	Argent
77.	Pacific Gas & Electric
78.	REO Speedwagon
79.	Aerosmith
80.	Johnny Winter
81.	Janis Ian
82.	Journey
83.	The Jacksons
84.	Bob James
85.	Fleetwood Mac
86.	Al Stewart
87.	Chicory Tip
88.	Gilbert O'Sullivan
89.	Johnny Nash
90.	The Clash
91.	Robin Trower
92.	The Everly Brothers
93.	The Beach Boys
94.	Los Teen Tops
95.	Bruce Springsteen
96.	Dan Fogelberg
97.	Rick Derringer
98.	Aphrodite's Child
99.	10cc
100.	Miguel Ríos

And I don't even think that Poco is part of the joke. We might have been guessing that the country rock thing wasn't going to age well by 1983 or so, but keep in mind Poco was once actually called a supergroup.

No, it's more the inclusions of Johnny Nash and Gilbert O'Sullivan that get me. Yeah, they got Dylan and The Beatles and The Kinks and The Stones, but looks like they left out Neil Young so they could find room for The Righteous Brothers. They skipped Yes to make sure Aphrodite's Child could fit.

And for some reason they gave Roger Daltrey a record after having already given one to The Who? What was it, the McVicar soundtrack?

Anyway, it's the juxtaposition, and who's put in at the expense of who else that's funny. Pussy Galore played that up big time on the back of their album, and I had some fun with it on one of my homemade CDs a few years back, as well. I'll publish both those 100-item lists soon.

^*But not always. The David Bowie album is a reissue of Another Face; the Amboy Dukes record is a repackaged Survival of the Fittest - Live. I think the REO Speedwagon LP is actually Hi Infidelity. (Return)

Thanks to these two pages:
Goldmine Magazine
Rate Your Music

Reelin' in the Years

2011-01-02T14:54:00.005-05:00

Having spent the last day and a half or so celebrating the arrival of a year for which I suspect they'll write no songs, I thought it might be a good time to compile a list of years that were in fact found worthy of such an honor, ironical or no (and I'm looking at you Dayglo Abortions).

"1959" - Patti Smith
"1963" - Jonathan Richman
"1967" - Dayglo Abortions
"1969" - The Stooges
"1970" - The Stooges
"1974" - Ryan Adams
"1976" - Redd Kross
"1977" - The Clash
"1979" - Smashing Pumpkins
"1983" - The Soft Machine
"1984" - David Bowie
"Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five" - Paul McCartney & Wings
"1989" - Less Than Jake
"1992" - Blur
"1999" - Prince

Honorable mention (although not inclusion) should go to Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y." (which was 1957).

As well, I kind of wish The Afghan Whigs had included a song called "1965" in their album of the same name. It would also have been nice if Van Halen's "1984" from that decidedly non-dystopic album of theirs had been a better song. Fortunately, the Thin White Duke's got us covered.

Good news I suppose is it's only 101 more years 'til 2112.

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs

The Dismemberment Plan - "The Ice of Boston" from the CD The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified

2010-12-31T21:20:00.017-05:00

That this bittersweet celebration song from the same guys who brought us the powerful and poignant "Time Bomb" is, along with The Standells' "Dirty Water," one of the best songs about the city of Boston is certainly true, but also something you might guess at from its title.

But what you might NOT guess from the title is that it's also one of the greatest New Year's Eve songs ever.

It's that, too. Perhaps THE greatest. Can't think of too much competition, actually, once you get past Guy Lombardo.

"The Ice of Boston" is not a perfect song. When our hero tells us that he doesn't want to admit these pathetic ridiculous and absolutely true things about himself, affairs DO get fairly maudlin. Maybe he followed her, maybe he didn't, I don't really care.

But no matter: when he pops that third bottle of cheap champagne open, pours its chill froth all over his naked self, lets it drip through his scalp and through his chest hair, then stares down through his kitchen picture window onto the scads of drunken Bostonians gathered below, well, it's an all-time classic image.

And no song, ever, has captured the unexpected and unwelcome Call From Mother so very well. And I'm here to say no song ever will, either.

So, as the clock ticks towards 2011, as our public places become more and more clogged with intoxicated celebrants, as the skies in Boston or elsewhere become thick with fireworks smoke, and tinted orange with celebration, as someone, somewhere, slips on the muddy ice, let me say to my readers, to The Dismemberment Plan, and to everyone else: Here's to another goddamned New Year.

The Dismemberment Plan - The Ice Of Boston.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up until the Groundhog checks out his shadow
File under: New Years Eve songs

Best* o' the Decade

2010-12-28T18:56:00.013-05:00

The 30 best songs^* of the decade that ends Friday, ordered only by year, one song per band. Actually I should say the best songs THAT I'VE HEARD, it's why I put the asterisk, because the way I get around to stuff, I'll be hearing the real best of 2010 sometime in 2015. But, anyway, these are good . . . .

2001: Gorillaz - "Clint Eastwood"
2001: System of a Down - "Toxicity"
2002: The Reverend Horton Heat - "Galaxy 500"
2002: Songs: Ohia - "Blue Factory Flame"
2002: 90 Day Men - "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life"
2003: British Sea Power - "Apologies To Insect Life"
2003: Cat Power - "He War"
2003: Killing Joke - "Asteroid"
2003: M83 - "0078h"
2003: Metallica - "Frantic"
2003: The White Stripes - "Black Math"
2004: Arctic Monkeys - "Cigarette Smoke"
2004: TV On the Radio - "Bomb Yourself"
2005: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - "Heavy Metal"
2005: The Dead Hookers' Bridge Club - "Hung Like Whales"
2005: Kylesa - "Eyes Closed from Birth"
2005: Panic! At The Disco - "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"
2006: Boris - "Woman on the Screen"
2006: Disappearer - "Crownfire"
2006: Neil Young - "The Restless Consumer"
2007: Queens Of The Stone Age - "Battery Acid"
2007: The Raveonettes - "Hallucinations"
2007: Spoon - "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case"
2007: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - "Bomb.Repeat.Bomb"
2008: Russian Circles - "Youngblood"
2009: Assjack - "Smoke The Fire"
2009: Pelican - "Ephemeral"
2010: High on Fire - "Fire, Flood & Plague"
2010: MGMT - "Brian Eno"
2010: Violent Soho - "Jesus Stole My Girlfriend"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy 28 of the 30 songs

The other two:

Dead Hookers' Bridge Club were probably the best South Florida band I heard during the aughts. They've long since broken up, and of course iTunes knows nothing about them. They were great though. I went up to one of the band members after a show this one time, and asked him if they'd heard of Pussy Galore. He said yes. "Hung Like Whales" is audacious, the way the best punk rock should be.

DHBC-Hung_Like_Whales.mp3

160 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under:Rock and roll

"Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" is 90 Day Men's best song of their latter day Whiskey Bar phase, and for some reason is not available on iTunes. It's probably not as good as "Methodist," but regardless of when it was recorded, "Methodist" seems to belong more to the 1990's 90 Day Men than to the 2000's version, don't you think?

90 Day Men - To Everybody - 08 Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Stuff that's Inexplicably Titled

Vince Guaraldi - "Skating" from the album A Charlie Brown Christmas

2010-12-25T13:29:00.013-05:00

We've all heard the old canard that the sense of smell is the most immediate one, the sense that is most directly and most vividly tied to memory.

And perhaps it's true. But I think it's still illuminating to note that when you talk to couples in love, they never describe something as "their smell." Yet most romantic couples with any kind of history at all together do have something they call "their song."

Sure, barbeque smells great, but music, to my mind, does indeed trump all in the way it can encapsulate memory and emotion.

Lovers share a life, and, to be sure, they share all the hassles and hardships which go with it. Having a song that you each can call ours, instant shorthand during stressful times for all the reasons you love each other, well, it's cement, a building material if you will for the lives together you've built.

One of the greatest joys of being in love is having a song you share. Conversely, and sadly, one of the greatest tragedies about falling out of love is how a song that was once a shorthand for joy becomes a shorthand for broken promises. You used to have the song, but it becomes lost to you.

Which is of course all the more reason to treasure what you have.

On the eve of Christmas eve this year, Melanie and I watched for probably the fifteenth time "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Melanie always gets a kick out of how the cartoon artists are credited in the titles not for art but for "graphic blandishment." And the stars in the nightskies above Linus and Lucy and Charlie and at the end of the long unfettered horizons past which they walk ARE beautiful.

Yet I think that the cartoon special is so universally loved because of Vince Guaraldi's music. They kept making Charlie Brown specials after Guaraldi's untimely death, but they're just not the same without his whimsical compositions and without his accomplished, syncopated playing. His music is as vital to the production as the characters themselves, probably moreso.

I was familiar with "Skating" long before it became cement for me and Melanie. It's funny actually: the very first time I heard the song, or at least the very first time I realized how great the tune was, it wasn't even "A Charlie Brown Christmas" that I was watching. It was another of the specials, not sure which one. It was probably one of the ones they made after Guaraldi passed. If I remember correctly, Charlie Brown won a spelling bee at his school and was rewarded with a trip to New York City for the championships.

He brought Snoopy along, and at some point the dog in his willful way decides to go iceskating at Rockefeller Center. It's late at night, and the rink is empty, Snoopy begins circling the rink, performing his pirouettes, and "Skating" begins to play. Though I like as well the scene at the beginning of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" where Linus and Charlie leave their wall and find the whole gang skating on the frozen pond, it is Snoopy at Rockefeller Center I see in my mind's eye when I hear the track unaccompanied by video^*.

It's a fluid and glistening and wonderful clip, and "Skating" is a fluid and glistening and wonderful piece of music. But I think the most wonderful thing about the song is that Melanie and I call it ours.

To Melanie and to everyone else reading: Merry Christmas.

Vince Guaraldi Trio - Skating.mp3

160 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Jingle Bell Jazz

^*I still wonder what the name of that special was. It's probably the second greatest Holiday Cartoon mystery of my life. If you know the name of the Charlie Brown special or, especially, the name of the cartoon that had Jack Frost done all in angular pastels dancing on the icy rooftops, I beg you: please please leave a comment (Return)

A Unique Pair

2010-12-22T17:52:00.009-05:00

The only pair of songs as far as I know in rock and roll history:
song "a" by b, and song "b" by a.

2. Tom Waits - "The Fall of Troy"
1. The Fall of Troy - "Tom Waits"

Maybe you know of some others?

The short but distinctive list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy both songs

Tom Lehrer - "Wernher von Braun" from the album That Was The Year That Was

2010-12-19T11:45:00.012-05:00

I guess anyone reading this would be aware that Captain Beefheart died Friday.

Interesting, actually, that I wrote the sentence above the way I did. I didn't write "Don van Vliet," I wrote "Captain Beefheart," though the man hadn't used the Beefheart moniker in almost 30 years. If you think about it, the man who died Friday was famous as a painter. "Captain Beefheart" stopped making music in 1982, and in a very real sense, ceased to exist around that time.

Although I can't claim to be a fan of Captain Beefheart's music, though I can't discuss his notoriously difficult work with any sense of familiarity at all, that decision he made in or around 1982--to stop making music and go do something else--has always fascinated me.

Plenty of artists stop making music because the marketplace stops caring. A significant-enough group of others stop making music because they got themselves killed. But how many stop simply because they decided to?

Not many, that's for sure. Beefheart comes to mind, and--even more intriguingly--so does Tom Lehrer.

It may seem a little incongruous to speak of Lehrer--who very famously mocked folk music and was bitterly disdainful of rock and roll--on a blog called La Historia de la Musica Rock. Yet, I've been a fan of Lehrer's music for as long as I've been a fan of anyone's music. The memories I have of hanging out late-night with my old man in his den, when he would play me tracks from Lehrer's records, and explain the references when necessary are foundations for me--most of what I am and most of who I am has been set on top of them.

And hell, if we can forgive Elvis Costello his racist remarks, or forgive for that matter Captain Beefheart treating his talented sidemen like dogs, then I can surely forgive Lehrer for the mistake he made of characterizing rock music as "children's records." So let's treat with the dude for a little before coming back to his Captain Beefheart moment.

Lehrer can be a little tough to decipher these days, and I don't mean because he rhymed "Helen Gahagan" and "Ronald Reagan," in such a way that made it clear he and his audience understood Reagan to be the lesser-known of the two. It's not his references that have dated. We have Wikipedia for those who want to know more about George Murphy or Hubert Humphrey. What actually makes it tough is his musical context: pre-rock and roll, yes, but also absolutely unconnected to jazz or the blues.

It's a lot easier to savvy Robert Johnson from the '30's, or Charlie Parker from the '40's, than to dig Lehrer from the '50's, because the idioms Johnson and Parker worked in came to dominate popular music even as Lehrer's beloved show tunes withered away in the popular consciousness.

About a month and a half ago, a writer at NJ.com wrote an excellent piece on Lehrer. It's much better than anything I could have written (or am writing now); straightforward, well-researched and direct in the point it wishes to make about Lehrer.

Nevertheless, this otherwise well-written piece makes two mistakes about Lehrer that I found somewhat humorous. First one was the writer's expressed belief that of all the barbs that Lehrer had in his pocket, the longest and sharpest one was for the form he worked in, that he was purposely trying to deflate pop convention.

And he wasn't. Lehrer loved his show tunes. He has made them the secondary study of his long life. These days, we've all come to assume that through its unique charms, rock 'n' roll long ago cornered the market on urgency and venom. Which may even be true, but Lehrer tells us it's a mistake to believe that no other form might have been capable of saying the same things. And if Lehrer might have been something of an Angry Young Man, keep in mind that he was a young man from Harvard: to Lehrer, the sophistication that someone like Irving Berlin brought to a pop song was an essential quality. Lehrer didn't want to disembowel the Tin Pan Alley showtune; he just wanted to use it in his act.

OK, I'll admit it: the second mistake the article made is funnier. Because Lehrer, always always clever, used hanging rhyme and internal rhyme and slant rhyme, the writer compares him to modern-day MCs, and actually says Lehrer was "an arrogant nerd rapper with a taste for shock tactics."

Now that IS funny. Clearly it is difficult these days to understand Lehrer's context, because it has all gone away. The joke of course at which I laugh is that you do not need to invoke music which would have assuredly filled Lehrer with horror to reference his tools.

The show tunes and popular songs that Lehrer loved, the lyrics to them written by Lorenz Hart, or Cole Porter, or Oscar Hammerstein, were, as a matter of course, full of the same creative rhymeplay that Lehrer used. It was to them, quite simply, that Lehrer looked. He was no proto-rapper, and he felt none of the contempt he had for rock 'n' roll when he looked at the music that had been popular before it.

Not that I'm saying I'm some kind of savant on the subject, while the talented writer over at NJ.com is some kind of schmuck. I have no great expertise in Tin Pan Alley. I'm sure I miss plenty of Lehrer's callbacks to the form that he loved.

All I'm saying is that as funny as Lehrer remains, he's tough for any of us below the age of sixty to truly comprehend.

There's an urban legend that my father used to repeat to me about Lehrer, and why he quit playing music sometime after the release of That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer, it was said, gave up political satire after Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace prize in 1973.

Even as a ten-year old, even as I heard it from my father's lips, the tale made no sense. Here Lehrer wrote songs like "So Long Mom I'm Off to Drop the Bomb," riffing about "the agonizing holocaust," but Henry Kissinger was the last straw?

Not likely, I don't think.

The fact is--and here we're getting back to the Captain--Lehrer's decision to stop writing and playing the songs he was preternaturally gifted at creating remains mystifying to me.

Beefheart always said he was able to make more money painting, and even given that, his choice remains strange to me. But Lehrer's choice is unfathomable. Sure, he's a mathematics professor, and teaches the musical theatre he loves, to boot. He hasn't gone starving.

But how can you turn your back on something you're so good at, if critical and popular appreciation were not the issues? There may not be another musician of sizable audience anytime, anywhere, who has made such a cryptic decision, to staunch their muse.

Actually, the best comparisons might not be in the field of music, at all, but in sport. Lehrer not playing music is like Koufax not pitching.

Which brings up a question of its own: Might it have been some kind of pain which led Lehrer to walk away?

Tom Lehrer - That Was The Year That Was - 13 - Wernher Von Braun.mp3

256 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Good Old American Know-how

A Cappella Top Seven

2010-12-16T18:20:00.007-05:00

7. Van Halen - "Happy Trails"
6. Yes - "Leave It (A Capella version)"
5. Todd Rundgren - "Lockjaw"
4. Suzanne Vega - "Tom's Diner"
3. Cream - "Mother's Lament"
2. TV on the Radio - "Ambulance"
1. Nomeansno - "Forward to Death"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs

Elliott Smith - "Needle in the Hay" from the Album Elliott Smith

2010-12-11T21:44:00.011-05:00

Just another workaday peon, that's me, another schmuck living a life constructed around sensible decisions, going to bed by 11:00 PM, so he can wake up by 7:00 and sit in rush hour traffic for 70 minutes, doing it over and over and over again, exchanging his life for a paycheck to exchange for a mortgage for what.

So as a person who has spent the majority of his adult life habitually fleeing from risk, and forever requiring of myself a moderation in indulgence, in behavior, in emotion, I have no idea at all how someone can become the vessel that a song like "Needle in the Hay" is poured from.

How is it that a man can be so stark and so desolate, how can he give himself so much over to the cold emptiness in constructing and conveying something so paradoxically beautiful?

When I hear Elliott Smith's music, when I hear the music of those like him, like Nick Drake, and Skip Spence and Syd Barrett, I don't think so much of fragility as I do of elasticity.

When I hear "Needle in the Hay" and think of Elliott Smith's life, I consider how we're all rubber bands, designed to expand and contract within reason, within the limits of our coefficients of expansion and retraction, never getting too crazy, never getting too melancholy, except for our artists and our insane, who stretch past the sensible limits habitually, in their ecstatic paroxysms and in their torturous depressions, and their band gets degraded, then they just snap.

Elliott Smith - Elliott Smith - 1 - Needle In The Hay.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Live Fast Die Young

Snarky Advice for Aspiring Critics

2010-12-10T20:55:00.009-05:00

I was over at Something Awful, checking out these designs they'd done for imaginary Criterion Collection DVD covers (you can see the rather amusing one they mocked up for that awful Cannibal Holocaust thing right here), and my eye was caught by a little featurette called "Everett True's Advice for Aspiring Critics"

Now, I'd never before heard of Everett True, but if he's famous enough to be asked by Something Awful to write something, you can be sure he's read by more people than yours truly. So, leaving aside questions of whether or not I myself am a critic, or even intend to be one, I followed the link to see if I might learn something useful.

Uh, nope.

I found Mr. True's 38-point list to be representative of that part of the Internet Which Sucks, snarky, superior, and most of all, of the very troublesome opinion that a cultivated apathy is the best attitude to take when approaching the arts.

Not to sound like Wavy Gravy or anything, but Back In My Day, people actually CARED about the music they listened to, and if they were driven to write about it, well, you could be sure they really, really, fucking cared.

Now, I guess not. And you kids get offa my lawn!

Anyway, I thought I might write a little rebuttal. I wasn't gonna go over all 38 of his points, and I only got through four before feeling the need to order a pizza, but these'll get you started, and I'll probably write some more tomorrow.

(To keep things compact, I've set it up where you click the point to see True's elaboration, and my rebuttal. Click it again to contract back.)

1) Don't ever attempt to apologise for holding an opinion.

2) 400 words good. 800 words fucking horrible.

3) Most musicians are cunts.

4) The music industry is not your friend. Unless you choose to make it so.

I May Not Be Perfect, but Parts of Me Are Pretty Awesome

2010-12-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

7. Cirith Ungol - "Finger of Scorn"
6. Pavement - "Best Friend's Arm"
5. Scratch Acid - "Eyeball"
4. The Raconteurs - "Hands"
3. Dinosaur, Jr. - "The Lung"
2. ZZ Top - "Legs"
1. Kyuss - "Thumb"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs

Talk Box Top Six

2010-12-07T20:10:00.011-05:00

6. Peter Frampton - "Do You Feel Like We Do"
5. Joe Walsh - "Rocky Mountain Way"
4. Alice in Chains - "Man in the Box"
3. Jeff Beck - "She's A Woman"
2. Paul McCartney & Wings - "Goodnight Tonight"
1. Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan - "Tell Me Something Good"

The list as an iMix at Itunes, you can quickly preview and/or buy all songs

Killing Joke - "Good Samaritan" from the CD Revelations

2010-12-05T16:51:00.025-05:00

Ah, Jaz Coleman! Ah, humanity!

What vital place in the soul does the mystic hold?

With the mighty Killing Joke having in the last fortnight released their 14th album, Absolute Dissent, and it being as apocalyptic, perhaps, as any KJ album since Revelations, I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at the centererpiece (to my ears at least--YRMV) of that third album, the masterpiece of bitter irony and hermetic paranoia that is "Good Samaritan."

It's no (heh-heh) Great Secret that KJ leader Jaz Coleman has been and remains postpunk's preeminent mystic. He claims to have organized his life and his band around Rosicrucian principles, to have in fact created Killing Joke, to have recruited guitarist Geordie and bassist Youth into the band as founding members, through the influence of Rosicrucian ritual magic. He claims to be a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn.

And of course Revelations is adorned with the symbols and the purported symbols of Freemasonry. The T-square and the compass--perhaps the Masons' most recognizable sigil--are displayed on the back cover. Too, featured prominently on each side of the LP's record sleeve are reproductions of the great seals affixed to the dollar bill and to the pound note, the Eye of Providence and the caduceus having long since been imagined by conspiracy-theorists and mystics to have been placed in these seals by the Freemasons who founded each country's bank.

The title that Coleman chose for the album refers of course to The Book of Revelations, which is itself known by a variant title The Apocalypse. And it is the Apocalypse with which Coleman is consistently concerned. In 2010, with the Cold War consigned safely to history, the apocalypse referred to in songs on Absolute Dissent is couched in terms of alarmist Malthusian principles (as on "The Great Cull") or in terms of a Kurzweilian singularity (as on "Here Comes the Singularity," natch).

But in 1982, with the United States run by a born-again trigger-happy cowboy by the name of Reagan, and with the Soviet Union on the edge of instability as Brezhnev lay on his deathbed, Coleman can almost be forgiven if he saw the future's dark horizon in nuclear terms. Read the lyrics and it almost makes sense to split for Iceland and wait for Ragnarok there:

Bright clothes and smiles and we'll talk sunshine
Although the light bulb's dim
And my beach ball is getting dusty
And the fun wears thin - thin.
It's much the same everywhere
Diversions right and we're ready to dance

Complacency seemed to kill the cat
Curiosity led me on
On what foundation is your pedestal built
The great architect to a tower block
And Uncle Sam says it's not long now
And we can play our way
My Marvel comic says a hawkheaded man
Led to a brighter day
It's much the same everywhere
We're getting ready and we're ready to dance

Happy, so happy, I just accept the way things are
I'll stick to songs - that's real
So happy

La la la

Dark indeed, and not just for the bitter, bitter sarcasm that puts such future exercises in cynical irony as The Minutemen's "Number One Hit Song" to shame. Coleman is not trying to write his lyrics plainly. To do so would be to violate the cryptic traditions he holds so dear. Note, though, that Freemasonry's GAOTU is reduced to designing high rises. The End Times are no Golden Age, that's for sure. And--most saliently--mark well how our good uncle can envision a playtime unencumbered by any longer having to deal with his enemies right around the corner.

I've never been a comic book kind of guy, and the internet codices of the Marvel universe seem at least to this surfer even more indecipherable than those of the hermetic. However, it seems to me that the hawkheaded man might be Horus, the same Egyptian deity whose Eye is reimagined as the Eye of Providence on the back of that one dollar bill on the sleeve. But be careful of that brighter day, though: it might be the one for which Timbuk 3 suggests you wear shades.

The slow sad bitter rumination that is "Good Samaritan" notwithstanding, much of Killing Joke has always been at its core dance music, and their idea of doing the Danse Macabre has been of much influence to other bands playing industrial or gothic music. But Coleman, unlike some of these other bands who have copied KJ for expedience' sake, really seems to buy into this, telling Quietus as recently as earlier this year that

I'd like to party at the end of the earth. But we will either way – if we don't die, great, and if we die we go out rocking

Coming from someone like Trent Reznor, Coleman's comment might seem like calculated nonsense, but when it's 2000 years of commentary on Hermes Trismegistus that are being referenced, rather than some Ministry tune from 1987, the nonsense Coleman spouts forth is at least a little bit enchanting.

Killing Joke - Revelations - 9 - Good Samaritan.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Proto-postpunk, Going to Iceland and Waiting for the End of the World Rock

Soft Cell - "Memorabilia" from the CD Non Stop Erotic Cabaret

2010-11-18T09:32:00.010-05:00

Soft Cell's larger FM radio hit notwithstanding, "Memorabilia" is in my estimation the high-water point for 80's synthpop.

Or at least, it's the point where the genre's aims best mesh with my own tastes, which admittedly run towards the somewhat dark.

And "Memorabilia" is no doubt that. Beyond its proto-electronica digital clicks, and beeps, and whirrs, the song gives us an evocative and disturbing first-person view of a collector-by-disposition who veers wildly into dysfunction when the physical relationship he'd longed for fails to materialize.

Interesting, how our narrator (and Soft Cell themselves) manage to imbue the most trivial of objects with an air of gravity that they don't in fact possess, how keychains and ashtrays and other trinkets of mass production transform through tenuous association into emotional markers, the real enough hoarded residue of a fantasy liaison.

His delusion yearns for reinforcement, whether it be through furtively snapped photographs, through cheap melmac souvenirs, or through malleable memory that must be altered on its demanding behalf.

If you polish your delusion strongly enough, I have never had you will gradually become molded into . . . I've been there

Places are collected in this way too, towns that he's passed through and their pretty postcards for sale, the snowstorms trudged through in winter recursively mimicked in Taiwanese plastic, resorts visited clandestinely on the Costa del Sol, and the girl with him there in her mantilla, or, really, markers for the monothematically deluded tourist placed anywhere else the fetishistic meets the obsessive-compulsive.

Soft Cell - Non Stop Erotic Cabaret - Memorabilia.mp3

160 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Synthpop

Scrobbles

2010-11-17T16:00:00.007-05:00

Please give a warm LHdlMR welcome to the newest version of my Blogger Last Child widget, now featuring fifteen songs, copiable text, fine-tuned colors that change from day to day, and a handy link to a well-formed XML file.

All so that y'all can have access to the songs I'm listening to on my iTunes.

Last.FM had thoughtfully provided a customizable widget for me to use, but I was never happy with that 'coz 1) it was an image, not a text file, and 2) the titles that were long enough to run past the edge of the image were simply chopped off rather than returned to be completed on a new line. So you most recently had entries like "They Might Be Giants - Sapphire Bull"

Not that there's anything wrong with Sapphire Bull, mind you.

Anyway, I decided to tgry and write something that would get it right, a PHP script that would parse the XML file my scrobbler generates, and once I had worked around the difficulties it had with Blöödhag, and had something I was happy with, I then--and only then--realized that Blogger won't allow you to post PHP scripts!

Ack, all that time wasted . . . but no, at the last I realized I could host the PHP file on my site, and run it here in an iframe.

Yippee!

Here's some code if anyone's interested:

<?php

$date = date("j");
if ($date %7 == 0) {$todayscolor = "#A47FCC";}
if ($date %7 == 1) {$todayscolor = "#0D3F04";}
if ($date %7 == 2) {$todayscolor = "#F7646A";}
if ($date %7 == 3) {$todayscolor = "#26388A";}
if ($date %7 == 4) {$todayscolor = "#EABF15";}
if ($date %7 == 5) {$todayscolor = "#000000";}
if ($date %7 == 6) {$todayscolor = "#408080";}

$i = 1 ;
$spacer="";
$backgroundcolor=$todayscolor;
$fontcolor="#FFFFFF";
$dashflag=1;

echo "<body style=\"margin:0px;padding:0px\">";
echo"<table cellpadding=3 style=\"font-size:12px;width:218\">";
echo "<caption style=\"border:3px double black;color:#666666;font-size:18px;font-weight:700\">Last 15 Tracks Scrobbled at
Last.FM</caption>";
ini_set('allow_url_fopen', 1);

$file = 'http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=user.getrecenttracks&user=rastronomicals&limit=14&api_key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';

$NAMEflag=0;
$ARTISTflag=0;

echo "\r\n<tr

style=\"color:".$fontcolor.";background-color:".$backgroundcolor."\">";

function contents($parser, $data){
global $spacer;
global $todayscolor;
global $fontcolor;
global $backgroundcolor;
global $i;
global $NAMEflag;
global $ARTISTflag;
global $dashflag;

if ($i % 2==0) {$backgroundcolor=$todayscolor;
$fontcolor="#FFFFFF";} else
{$backgroundcolor="#FFFFFF";
$fontcolor=$todayscolor;}

if ($ARTISTflag==1) {
$NAMEflag=0;

echo $data;
}

if ($NAMEflag==1) {

$ARTISTflag=0;

if ($dashflag==1) {echo " - ";}
echo $data;
$dashflag=0;

}

}

function startTag($parser, $data){

global $i;
global $spacer;
global $NAMEflag;
global $ARTISTflag;

if ($data=="NAME") {$NAMEflag=1;
$ARTISTflag=0;
} else
{$NAMEflag=0;}

if ($data=="ARTIST") {
$ARTISTflag=1;
$NAMEflag=0;
}
else {$ARTISTflag=0;}

if ($NAMEflag==1) {
echo ""; }

if ($ARTISTflag==1 ) {
if ($i > 9) {$spacer="";} else {$spacer=" ";}

echo "<td style=\"vertical-align:top\"><b>".$spacer.$i.". </b><td><b>"; }

}

function endTag($parser, $data){

global $NAMEflag;
global $ARTISTflag;
global $fontcolor;
global $backgroundcolor;
global $i;
global $dashflag;

if ($data=="NAME" ) {
$NAMEflag=1;
$ARTISTflag=0;
}
else {
$NAMEflag=0;
}

if ($data=="ARTIST" ) {
$ARTISTflag=1;
$NAMEflag=0;
}
else {
$ARTISTflag=0;
}

if ($NAMEflag==1) {

echo "</td>\r\n<tr
style=\"color:".$fontcolor.";background-color:".$backgroundcolor."\">";
$i++;
$dashflag=1;
}

if ($ARTISTflag==1) {

echo "</b>"; }

$ARTISTflag=0;
$NAMEflag=0;

}

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();

$y = xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startTag", "endTag");

if ($y == "NAME") {
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "contents"); }

// make sure the remote file is successfully opened before doing anything else
if ($fp = fopen($file, 'r')) {
$data = '';
// keep reading until there's nothing left
while ($line = fread($fp, 1024)) {
$data .= $line;
}

} else {

echo "uh-oh";
var_dump($http_response_headers);

// an error occured when trying to open the specified url
}

if(!(xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp)))){
die("Error on line " . xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser));
}

echo "</table>";
echo "<br><center><a style=\"color:#666666\" target=\"_blank\"

href=\"".$file."\">XML File Here</a></center>";

xml_parser_free($xml_parser);

fclose($fp);

?>

"Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" (Two Different Ones)

2010-11-11T19:10:00.009-05:00

I wonder whether anybody ever asked John McLaughlin what type of gun, exactly, it was that shot those sapphire bullets. Maybe it was the same one that shot that diamond bullet right through Kurtz' forehead?

Or maybe not. Maybe you need a different model gun for each precious or semi-precious stone. Or maybe it's that you need a different gun for each mental capacity, one for pure love, one for Kurtz' crystalline realization, maybe a third for bullets of acceptance, if you've heard of those.

Indeed, I'm kind of surprised we never saw a sequel song from the preternaturally talented Mahavishnu John, "Platinum Rifles of Inchoate Ecstasy" or some such . . . .

Alright, alright, alright, enough from me. "Sapphire Bullets" is a trifle of a song, actually, one that doesn't even display the Mahavishnu Orchestra's greatest calling card, which was their extreme instrumental virtuosity. It sort of blends UFO sounds with those of a guitar being tuned up, while featuring none of that fabulous pentatonic riffing from McLaughlin or Jan Hammer or Jerry Goodman or anyone.

It seems to exist, strangely enough, solely for the purpose of its silly little title, which on further reflection, seems to be a tad less little than the 21-second song itself.

I think the whole thing's pretty absurd, and I'm sure that McLaughlin himself--who's long since dropped the Sri Chinmoy nonsense--would agree.

But of course you don't need me to skewer the song, because They Might Be Giants already have!

Pistol shots
Gun shots
Pistol shots
Gun shots

Bullets from a revolver
Bullets from a gun
Bullets through the atmosphere
Here they come

John, I've been bad
And they're coming after me
Done someone wrong
And I fear that it was me

Sapphire bullets
Bullets of pure love
Sapphire bullets
Bullets of pure love

Anyway, the whole thing is kind of interesting to me, the way TMBG wrote a new song lampooning an older song and then had the chutzpah to name their tune after the song they lampooned.

Can't think of any other case quite like it, the Two Johns clearly had a blast with it, and now you can too.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra - Birds of Fire - 04 - Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Ridiculous little snippets

They Might Be Giants - Flood - 17 - Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (right click and save as target)

File under: Nerd Rock

Megadeth - "Set The World Afire" from the CD So Far, So Good . . . So What!

2010-10-20T12:08:00.007-04:00

Red flash clouds
Choking out the morning sky
They said it'd never come,
We knew it was a lie
All forms of life die now,
The humans all succumb
Time to kiss your ass goodbye,
The end has just begun

Distorted figures walk the street,
It's 1999
Weeds once underneath the feet
Have grown to vines
Bodies melted like a candle,
A land without a face
No time to change your fate,
No time left, it's too late

The aresenal of Megadeth can't be rid of they said
And if it comes, the living will envy the dead
Racing for power and all come in last
No winning, first stone cast

This falsehood wordly peace
Its treaties soon will cease
No one will be left to prove
That humans existed
Maybe soon the children
Will be born open fisted
We all live on one planet
And it will all go up in smoke

Too bad they couldn't see this lethal energy
And now the final scene, a global darkening

Dig deep the piles of rubble and ruin
Towering overhead both far and wide
There's unknown tools for World War III
Einstein said, 'We'll use rocks on the other side'
No survivors, set the world afire!

The best song from Megadeth's somewhat disappointing third one makes me wonder whether Dave Mustaine might not be kind of nostalgic for the bad old days when nuclear bombs meant flotillas of Soviet ICBMs coming in over the Pole and the impending global Doomsday, rather than just some deluded lonewolf assclown in a keffiyeh dumping a dirty bomb down a toilet at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Not that I or even Mustaine would make light of the grave damage even a schmuck like Jose Padilla might be able to inflict, but let's face it: if you ply the heavy metal horror biz like Megadeth does, the old tyme Mutually Assured Destruction postapocalyptic thang was so much better as a go-to lyrical device on those days when you just weren't sure which version of armageddon you wanted to conjure in your newest metallic opus.

Heavy metal tunes invoking the horrors of the Aftermath are almost as old as metal itself--think "War Pigs"--but, like politically-charged punk rock, they appear to have gone out with the Reagan presidency and the Berlin Wall. And from a geopolitical standpoint, you can understand why.

Not that metal will ever be hurting for lyrical themes. The Judeo-Christian Hell with its tortured denizens ain't thematically tapped yet, and won't be anytime soon. But--even if you're a clever sonofabitch like Mustaine--archaic quotations from Milton and Dante are a little less easy to recast than ones from Einstein.

Megadeth - So Far So Good So What - 10 - Set The World Afire (Paul Lani Remix).mp3

240 kbps VBR mp3 (Right click and save as target)

File under: Speedmetal

John Lennon - "Meat City" from the LP Mind Games

2010-10-14T19:28:00.001-04:00

So you might have noticed that the other day would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday.

Maybe you missed the news, if you didn't use a search engine on the 9th or you had smashed your clock radio with a sledgehammer by accident that morning, and then kicked in your WEGA for good measure. Oh, and if you live in New York, Hollywood, Reykjavik, or Liverpool, you would have had to have locked yourself in a soundproof closet for the duration of the day.

So, yeah, you probably heard, one way or the other.

Me myself I found myself savvy through my libero-techno-scifi-artsy-craftsy-civlib blog of choice, Boing Boing. Sort of a stripped down post, it was, that I'd stumbled across. Pescovitz had posted a drawing of Lennon linked to a place where you could buy a print of said drawing for a hundred and fifty bucks next to two words of text: "Imagine Peace."

Pretty poignant, is what I'm saying.

OK, no I'm not. I'm not saying that at all. But at least when I scanned the post I instantly knew the cheap sentiment that had been targeted.

So then, because I was under the weather, on the weekend no less, and feeling therefore a little grouchy, and also because I happen to believe it's true, I submitted my comment to the discussion of the man that had sprung up thereunder, which was in its entirety: "Overrated."

It was a sort of perverse thing to do, I know, posting such a cynical contribution to a thread that had been all Peaceburger and Genius before I arrived. Like I said, I was feeling sort of grumpy and--alright, guilty as charged--maybe wanted to spread it. I figured I'd be shouted down quickly, but since I had no intention of defending what I'd written--being headed for bed instead--no biggie.

So I verified my comment had posted and went to my sickbed.

I think it was Monday before I went back to Boing Boing again, and of course I couldn't help myself, I decided I should check out the post and see what the reaction to my provocative comment had been.

And a mod had deleted it. I saw the thing post, and there I was, same bat-time, same bat-channel, two days later, and it was as if I'd never even answered that Captcha challenge.

Now I was pissed. I hadn't been rude, I hadn't been antagonistic, yet here my comment had been deleted as if it were racist screed, as if it were obscenity.

Of course, it had been neither of these things. What my comment had been, now that I think of it, was sacrilegious. The Weekly World News convinced us long ago that Elvis had the whacko cultsters, but now I find it's been Lennon all the time.

"Imagine" was a trifle, people, a barely pleasant ditty cloaked in vapid platitudes. "Give Peace a Chance" is at the least fun --you certainly feel as if you are in that Toronto hotel room with John and Yoko and Tom and Dick and everybody else, buzzed and smelling of incense--but it's not much more, a child's singalong, is this all that Lennon, on inspection, had?

No, of course not. He'd been in The Beatles of course, and I can't discount that too much, though that the Beatles were, are, have been, and must forever after be overrated is an unassailable truism. They were pretty fucking good, but no-one is that good, and if you disagree, consider for a moment the atrocity that is "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."

Or if a McCartney song seems incongrous, consider "Revolution # 9."

Anyway, my point, beyond the obvious one that the most popular band in the history of the planet can't help but be overrated, is that you can't judge the members by the band. It was all chemistry. It's impossible to say what influence Lennon had on "Yesterday," and impossible to say what influence McCartney had on "Across the Universe."

So if you believe as I do that you can't judge Lennon by The Beatles, what do you have left?

Well, you have Plastic Ono Band, a stark masterpiece in which you hear the layers of Lennon's personality being peeled away until you've reached his raw inner core.

And that's certainly something. Don't take me wrong: in the masterpiece department, the score stands

Lennon In His Own Write 1
rastronomicals 0.

But some of the scores from those faves listened to here at La Historia are a bit higher. King Crimson has two, possibly three, masterpieces to their credit, and Pink Floyd certainly have that many. Eno made three, then realized he didn't even like making them. Neil Young's probably tossed off five.

And I don't see Neil Young's self-drawn mug on Google, or Bob Fripp's.

Plastic Ono Band is awesome, but make no mistake: Lennon never followed it up with anything remotely as good. In this respect, Lennon is as a solo artist more like Joseph Heller than William Faulkner, more like Night Ranger than Black Sabbath. He did good work, but not enough of it, and you don't get the feeling that his murder, as tragic and reasonless as it was, really deprived us of anything vital he needed to express, not if you're straight up about what Double Fantasy truly was.

And yet somehow it is Lennon alone who has been selected for sanctification. Lennon was at core a rock star like any other, perhaps most like Lou Reed in that he played guitar in a great band that broke up and his best song is about heroin.

Or perhaps he's more like Ozzy, in that he found a kind of contentment in being marketed by his dominant wife.

A rock star like any other is what he was, prey to the same pecadilloes and fetishes and hedonisms as all the ones you read about in the tabloids. If you doubt that, you might read up on his lost weekend one day. Yet we find he's been canonized to the point where muttering "overrated" under your breath at a major website will get you censored.

Yikes. I guess if you've gotta get murdered, you might as well be made into a saint.

Anyway, another characteristic of Lennon's original solo work is its frequent failure to rock, witness "Imagine" and Double Fantasy again, if you'd like. Presented for you here--and to show I bear no ill will--is perhaps John's rockinest solo tune, the tape loops don't bother me at all.

John Lennon - Mind Games - 12 - Meat City.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (right click and save as target)

File Under: (Just gotta give me some) Rock and roll

Steve Miller Band - "Mercury Blues" from the LP Fly Like an Eagle

2010-10-03T17:16:00.014-04:00

Went out to the ballpark last night and saw Stevie Guitar Miller.

It's not too odd these days for major league teams looking for a boost to their attendance to host concerts by those on the nostalgia circuit after Friday or Saturday night games. And the Marlins I guess are a little more active on this front than some of their competition, other than considering the makeup of the area, half the shows they sponsor are salsa acts.

But last night was for the Anglos, and longtime readers who know I'm a Steve Miller fan should only be slightly surprised that I took Schfrank and Cerveza up on the opportunity presented when they invited me to the game.

In one sense, of course, a Steve Miller concert might be among the events I'd be least expected to attend. While a time machine or some other method of delivery to the late '60's would be greeted enthusiastically, as it would allow me to witness the band's set at Monterey Pop, the last thing I'm about when it comes to music is the warm and fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. I'd rather be challenged with something new or at the least old and obscure than hear the number one hit yet again. So what if they played "All the Young Dudes" at my high school's prom?

I wasn't even fucking there.

And yet, to me, Miller's formidable body of work prior to his mid-seventies' career peak makes him something of a titan--no-one from San Francisco was better, and no-one anywhere played a slow blues the way Miller could. And Miller might be a nostalgia act at this point, but he DOES have a new album out, and it IS good. It's called Bingo!, and it nods more in the directions of his late '60's work than his mid '70's stuff, being a collection of R & B and blues covers.

And while recognizing it unlikely that someone playing after a ballgame in Miami would stretch out and play their old and obscure psychedelic blues or their new and obscure R & B stuff in lieu of their massive radio hits remembered as tokens of their youth by the upper-middle class suburbanites who attend a ballgame in Miami in the first place, what clinched it for me is that I actually LIKE a lot of the radio hits.

Why, just the other week, I added "Take the Money and Run" to my iTunes after hearing it on the classic rock station during the three or four days when Jr. was dead but III had not yet arrived. Still love the way he rhymes "Texas" and "facts is" and "taxes." I was even telling Carlos the warehouse kid about how great those lines are . . . . though Schfrank would express a contrary opinion during the show.

So, fuck yeah, reservations be damned, let's go, Steve Miller, the Space Cowboy, the Gangster of Love, even though in all likelihood, he wouldn't actually be playing the songs which gave him those nicknames.

I got there early, and saw all the ballgame, and let me tell you this: Do not go to a ballgame in late September in which both teams have been eliminated, unless they've got some kind of a concert afterwards. The Marlins (long since eliminated from the playoffs) faced the Pirates (the worst team in baseball, v. 2010), and if it's possible to play a game in a more lethargic and less energetic manner, I don't wanna know about it. Marlins won 2 - 0 in perhaps the most boring game I have ever personally witnessed.

But hey! No worries! After a short fireworks show, it's Stevie Guitar Miller!

Let me say before proceeding that Miller looked good for a 67-year old man. Grey to be sure, but spry and still flexible in the fingers where it matters. His voice was more hit-and-miss, though, but what are you gonna do?

First song was "Jet Airliner"--no surprises there. But the second was "Mercury Blues" and that was a little surprising, especially in that Miller played it more in the country style of Alan Jackson's # 1 hit version than of the primo blues version he himself had released on Fly Like an Eagle. It also seemed to me that Miller was singing "Crazy about a Mercury Ford."

Weird, right? Turns out that right around when Jackson recorded the song and allowed Ford to use it to sell their pickup trucks in the early '90's Ford Motor Company actually bought the rights to the tune from the estate of KC Douglas or whomever. Now, no company anywhere no matter what rights they own can dictate the lyrics to a song performed live in concert, but--given that Miller conducted his own business transaction with Ford when he allowed the guitar intro to "Swingtown" to be played over commercials hawking the Ford Mustang in exchange for some Ford-built tractors--I have to wonder whether Miller has maybe cut another deal with Ford to sing the song that way in his appearances.

That's another one of the things about the nostalgia circuit, I guess: you can't ever pretend it's not about the money.

Miller would also go on to play a rather boring version of "Swingtown," though if Miller considered rewriting the lyrics to mention FoMoCo, he ultimately passed on the opportunity.

"Swingtown" was probably the least inspired tune Miller did, but later in the show came a song that he historically has failed to render properly. Back in the '80's, after "Abracadabra" had hit, Miller put out the Steve Miller Band Live! LP, and I remember being turned off to its eventual purchase by the video for "Living in the USA," which--recorded in Vegas or wherever in 1983--totally and absolutely failed to capture the groove it had on Miller's classic Sailor LP from 1968.

Twenty-five years later, with Sailor bandmates Boz Scaggs and Lonnie Turner and Tim Davis just as absent as they'd been in '83, it is kind of reassuring to me that Miller still can't get his old song right. And I won't hold it against him that he dedicated a song about the inauthenticity of a plastic land to our soldiers in Afghanistan, not given his audience for the evening, but I'm pretty sure he can't have meant that.

It might seem like this review is going in a certain direction, but let me nip that in the bud. If the "Mercury Blues" thing made "Swingtown" sound a little funny, or if the message on "Living in the USA" was a little garbled, that was it. Miller was never cheesy, always played and sang entusiastically, and rather smoked on the guitar. For me, the highlights of the show were when Miller took his solos. For example, I never much cared for "Abracadabra," but the version played Saturday night jammed. Miller's solo work was muscular throughout, and side deals or no, you can tell he loves playing the instrument.

And he played two songs from Bingo!, too, and got decent if not overwhelming responses, as well. I was glad to see that.

The show was hardly perfect, but regardless of the flaws, I had a damned good time. In saying goodnight, Miller asked to be invited back when the Marlins open their new stadium in 2012. I'll say this: if the team does invite him back, they can count on at least one fanny in their seats, even if it's a late season game without any playoff implications at all.

Steve Miller Band - Fly Like an Eagle - 6 - Mercury Blues.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Blues Rock, Concerts rastro went to

La Historia De La Musica Rock III

2010-10-03T12:55:00.005-04:00

Took me about six weeks to switch my baseball card site out to one powered by an SQL database, and then write the badass search engine for it all. But it's done now and I'm happy, sorry if things have been slightly more fallow around here than is usual.

I managed to write the Florida Metal piece and the Vanilla Fudge appreciation and the 90 Day Men critique, but there's been some big news that I wasn't able to treat with properly 'cause I was so busy with the PHP and the MySQL, and it's that Jr.'s dead.

Been dead, these five or six weeks. He stopped holding a charge for much longer than my drive in to work, and I need better than that, so I dropped him in a glass of water, and I killt him.

My iPod is dead, long live my iPod. La Historia de la Musica Rock III arrived some short time after I euthanized Jr. and I think it sort of makes sense that III is a Gen 3, even if his generation was quickly superceded. You can check out the picture next door: he's got four gigs and he's shiny chrome, and best of all, he talks.

Actually, I think he's a she 'cause of the way the Voice Over sounds. But that's fine with me, and even the way she hilariously mispronounces some of the bandnames and some of the songs is rather endearing. I think I'll keep him.

I mean her.

90 Day Men - "Dialed In" from the CD [it [is] it] critical band

2010-09-18T22:50:00.010-04:00

"Dialed In," as with much of the album it's culled from, is like a transformative event, a post-rock baptismal in Big Muddy, the baptism an apt metaphor for the newness of the music, and the Big River an apt location for that transcendence, considering the band is originally from St. Louis.

Check THIS out, the Mississipi River, Brian Case and thou waist up in it, and Cormac McCarthy of all people watching from the sloping banks. And how about this: Let's romanticize bordertowns before we split for Chicago and add a keyboard player.

Like some of the other great albums out there, [it [is] it] critical band catches its makers on the way to somewhere else. 90 Day Men in common with all their Slintian brethren had always been angular and disjointed and purposefully complex, but the addition of keyboardist Andy Lansangan to the band's lineup for critical created a sound like none other anywhere, including--regretfully enough to this mind--the band's own later work.

Lansangan's contributions to [it [is] it] critical band remind me of Larry Young's to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew; the Fender Rhodes omnipresent, even, contradictorily enough, when it's not even there, comps and loops and tone clusters, spongefuls of sound that do more to define and direct the aura of the music than the supposed lead instruments.

The result of it all as the electric piano globules marry themselves to the stark knife edge guitars and Case's mumbled talk-to-his-shoes delivery is truly unique; if everyone and his brother ended up copying what Larry Young brought to Miles, no-one had the ability or the temerity to copy what Lansangan brought to 90 Day Men. It sounds distinctive to this day, and will, I suspect, continue to do so.

But the way it turned out, I don't think the electric piano was really Lansangan's first instrument. On follow up albums To Everybody and Panda Park, his acoustic piano melodies would come to direct the band, bringing to mind Kurt Weill and '70's glam and perhaps a poor man's version of Enoesque prog. And while some of the band's later stuff is tremendous (dig "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life"), some of the experimentation, particularly on Panda Park, is truly misguided. "Silver and Snow," with its flat vocal modulations in the key of Leonard Cohen, may be the worst song I know of by a band that I otherwise like. You're seriously unsure that anything this bad could have been meant seriously. But, you know, even when they were at their greatest and at their most innovative, 90 Day Men were hardly known for their sense of humor.

So, unfortunately, I suspect that "Silver and Snow" was intended without irony.

Not all of Panda Park sucks so hard. But I'm forced to say that most of it causes you to miss the album they made where they sounded like no-one else this side of the Mississippi, or that, the band talking straight to you, how we could see what would happen, and how--if you could just remember their name--it was supposed to change your life.

90 Day Men - It Is It Critical Band - 01 - Dialed In

128 kbps mp3, up for 6 weeks

File under: a range of frequency ratios which sweep across the audible spectrum in a band, within which two notes will sound like they are fusing into one rough sound

Vanilla Fudge - "You Keep Me Hanging On" From the Album Vanilla Fudge

2010-08-28T09:20:00.004-04:00

It has occurred to me recently, as through the vagaries of Shuffle- and Autofill-induced chance, I have now heard this bejewelled relic of the psychedelic age three times over the last 72 hours, that Vanilla Fudge must be the '60's closest analog to doom metal.

Maybe not drop-tuned, but plodding and monolithic nonetheless, just like the glacial tempos enjoyed these days by the doomsters and that crowd.

I'm old but I'm not that old, so I can't say for certain. But as well as the first Vanilla Fudge album did, I get the feeling that "You Keep Me Hanging On" and the rest of it was for the hardcore freaks of the time. George Harrison is famously said to have latched onto the album during the summer of 1967 and to have blasted it nearly continuously from the windows of his palatial bungalow or whatever, and both the album and its single here charted--but still.

Regardless, this music rather screams underground, Weather and otherwise, flagburners and yippies and the burn baby burn types. Let's just say that we haven't heard muzak versions of these songs, in the same way yas I am sure we won't for (more or less) current fringe faves like "Doom-antia" or "Dopesmoker."

And check out the brontosaurus bass. If guitarist Vinnie Martell spends half his time trying to get his axe to sound like a sitar, Tim Bogert's playing, way out front, distorted and thunderous, is definitely of the flavor that Geezer Butler and his children and grandchildren would purvey.

What I am trying to say, ladies and gentlemen, freaks and freakettes, is that this is heavy music. Proto-metal like contemporaries Blue Cheer, for sure, but also proto-doom. There, I said it. Proto . . . doom.

I was reading on Wikipedia where someone wrote that the Bolton Iron Maiden might have prefigured doom . . . poppycock. But I believe The Vanilla Fudge bear such a leaden genealogical mantle a bit more easily.

Vanilla Fudge - Vanilla Fudge - You Keep Me Hanging On.mp3

128 kbps mp3, ups for six weeks

File under: There I said it

"There are other worlds. This one is done with me."
	--Merlin (Nicol Williamson) in John Boorman's Excalibur