Defenestration - "Watch The Hearts Break" from the album Dali Does Windows

Despite the fact that it came out in 1987, and on the semi-major label Relativity, Dali Does Windows may be the most obscure album I've ever liked.

It's sort of fun to try to pick out the reasons why nobody has heard of Defenestration. There's the fact that their first album on a more-or-less major label was their last album on a more-or-less major label.

Or that it was their last album period.

There's that remarkably nondescript cover, and the band name that's more or less meaningless to most people, unless they've studied Bohemian history.

Did I mention that they were from that hotbed of indie rock, Norman, Oklahoma?

Dali Does Wndows failed to hit, and it failed to hit miserably. I'm sure I've missed some of the reasons why, but one of them was not that the music sucked. It's not great all the way through, but "Watch the Hearts Break" and "Bedlam Revisted/She Has No Soul" are outstanding, pretty much as good as anything else the late '80's produced.

It's sort of embarassing to admit, but I was a college disk jockey. What made it embarassing was that the station didn't actually have a transmitter. The signal was supposedly carried through the campus wiring. Which might have worked--if even the Rathskellar had bothered playing the station. But they didn't--so the job was basically talking to yourself. I will say they had good equipment, and music sounded good in that room. I made a bunch of mix tapes, and discovered a bunch of music, mostly from lists CMJ sent on.

Defenestration was one of the bands I discovered through my access to the carts and lists made available to the station, and so was Timbuk 3. If the rest of the world has forgotten both bands, I have not.

Anyway, for what it's worth, Defenestration were:

Tyson Meade - Vocals, and Guitar on the two best songs
Todd Walker - Guitar
Chris Ward - Drums
Joe Kollman - Bass

File under: Eighties Alternative

33-1/3: Tago Mago

So ten days or so ago, I read Treble's review of the new archival Can live album--Live in Paris 1973--and it sounded good and noisy, so I ordered it.

Received it over the last weekend, and spent the first half of the week listening to it as I commuted to and from work, and I fucking loved it, especially the 36-minute first track. Karoli goes repeatedly off and then goes off some more.

Listened to Miles on Thursday, but on Friday I was back to Can. Pulled out Tago Mago and I knew I had a difficult relationship with "Augmn" but this time, man, I *communed* with "Mushroom" (Jaki Liebezeits DRUMMING!) and found the perfect descriptor for "Oh Yeah" in 'hippity-hoppety.'

So jumping off from there, my goal for this weekend was to read the 33-1/3 on the album I've had lying around. My guilty secret is that I've got about 20 in the series filed neatly on my bookshelves, next to my dictionary and the albums I've kept--but I've only actually read two or three.*

Actually did break into it today, yay me, and I'm not done yet, intend to finish tonight, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Don't know this Alan Warner cat--evidently he's a Scottish novelist, not the guy who wrote Trainspotting, but I guess similar except he's got no experience with heroin--and his approach is basically to take us back with him to when he was a pimply teenager discovering the music, taking the train into Glasgow where there's a decent record store, etc, as he tells us all the misapprehensions and wildy exaggerated imaginings he had about the band and their albums--most of them simply based on the album art and most of them way way off.

It's pretty great. He's become an expert on the band, so he slaps his naive younger self around quite a bit and thereby imparts some crucial info as well.

Good stuff, and let me get back to it.

_________________

* Master of Reality and Reign in Blood and . . . oh wait that's it.

File under: Permission to dream

Dream

Dream

So I ran into my buddy Jeff Bagwell. We were both in our 30s or something.

I caught up with him as he was walking to his ride. I asked him, "Jeff, are you a metalhead?"

Suddenly, in the way of dreams, he's lying on the floor, leaning back on his elbows next to a heavy workbench, looking up at me.

"When I have to be," he says.

We're walking again and I'm trying to tell him about that time when the boss let me leave work early so I could go to the Metallica concert off Justice and then I came back to work after the concert was over, but Jeff is going on about left-handed pitching and I can't get a word in edgewise.

Finally he calls ahead to the driver of a ramshackle Chevy van and someone on the inside (there's four or five guys in black t-shirts sitting on the carpeted floor, I'll see) slides the side door open.

"Frantic," from St Anger is playing rather loudly within. We both start headbanging.

Jeff hops in, I don't. The van starts moving ahead slowly, side door still open, and I'm walking alongside, still whipping my head back and forth.

Bagwell is still talking to me, now it's about Kevin Brown's anger management issues. I wish I was going with them. But I'm not, and I'm going to have to tell Jeff about that Metallica concert some other time. The van door slides shut and it pulls away in a cloud of exhaust.

I turn around, dejected. Think I'll get a hot pretzel....

John Coltrane - "Greensleeves" from the album Africa/Brass

Listening to Coltrane's cover of "Greensleeves" for the first time. Nine or ten times over the last two days.

It's got a lot of the same lyricism that "My Favorite Things" does, the same modal, kind of raga feel, the same jawdropping glissando sound to his solos as he shifts the soprano sax up into hyperdrive--no, *through* hyperdrive, quickly tasting n-space and then bringing it back down into standard topology again.

Conjecture: If he had lived long enough Coltrane probably would have covered "Pure Imagination" too.

Where I Stand

Stupid and Silly

But I couldn't help myself