Spoken Word Interlude:Tommy Lasorda on Dick Williams and Kurt Bevacqua

You know, I tell people that I have a music blog. A couple people even acknowledge it. But it's not true. What I have is a blog about my iPod. The two things are similar, admittedly . . . .

Yet now it occurs to me that I have been somewhat remiss in my efforts to convey the complete La Historia de la Musica Rock experience to my readers. While, to be sure, Jr. gets Autofilled often with the same frothy mixture of feedback, backbeats and tra-la-las as is featured regularly on this page, I've also loaded into my iTunes mothership a variety pack of spoken word stuff. Just to, you know, mix things up a bit.

It started with movie dialogue, Quint's USS Indianapolis speech from Jaws, or Carl Spackler's "Cinderella boy" monologue from Caddyshack, and the like, scraps of Willard from Apocalypse Now and little Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Then I added pieces and bits of old John Peel shows, whatever Henry Rollins I could stand, and, because I'm something of a baseball fan, a representative sampling of baseball's oral history. . . .

Like the audio document presented for you now.

Tommy Lasorda is of course best known as the legendary ex-manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers, but given his florid reputation, and of course the extremely persuasive evidence I deliver unto you here, he might also very well be The Most Profane Man Who's Ever Lived.

What's great about the clip is how Lasorda begins so mildly, how he at first seems to be resisting his natural urge to express himself obscenely, allowing simply that his accusers have done "a very bad thing." But before long Tommy has succumbed to his Inner Blasphemer and is letting the F-bombs fly with relish and gusto.

Just to set the thing up, on June 30, 1982, in the ninth inning of a game against the San Diego Padres, a pitcher for Lasorda's Dodgers, one Tom Niedenfuer, hit Padre outfielder Joe Lefebvre with a pitched ball. Coming as it did immediately after the Pads' leadoff man homered off Niedenfuer, San Diego's manager Dick Williams was of the opinion, when asked about it after the game, that the hit-by-pitch was "chickenshit" "retaliation."

And later, after Niedenfuer was fined 500 bucks for doing the deed, Padre utility player Kurt Bevacqua said, "They ought to fine that fat little Italian, too. He ordered it."

Shortly after that, a reporter made the mistake of asking Lasorda what he thought of Bevacqua's comments, and you get what we have here.

I sure as fuck hope you enjoy it as much as I fucking have.


Lasorda on Dick Williams and Kurt Bevacqua.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (or more)

File under: Spoken Fuckin' Word

Three Versions of the Jagger/Richards Tune "Rocks Off"

I never was much for the Dead, never much for the jam bands in their wake, and I've certainly never been much for Phish. I remember that to celebrate Y2K with their followers they came down and did this three-day Woodstock-type thing a little west of where I live, out in the middle of the fucking Everglades. And I remember hearing sometime around the middle of the Bush administration that they'd broken up.

I remember hearing, and I wasn't like 'good riddance' or anything, although if I'd have heard then that Rolling Stone had called Phish "the most important band of the Nineties," I might have hated them more in their death, just on general principle, and in the clenched-fist support of visionary bands like Pavement or Nirvana or Alice in Chains or Kyuss or Earth or any other that might actually have deserved such a highfalutin' acolade.

But anyway, Phish were gone right around the time John Ashcroft was, and without making any hippie jokes, both of these things were A-OK with me.

Then a couple weeks ago, Melanie came home, and told me how a customer had come in and bought all these cartons of clove cigarettes. "Trying to stock up against the Obama ban?" I asked her, and she told me, no, the customer was gonna take 'em to the Phish Festival and sell them there. Maybe the proceeds would defray the costs of getting out to California. . . .

Well, I thought, how about those industrious hippies? And that was how I found out that Phish had reformed.



And now I'm finding out that on evening two of their festival at Indeo, California, on Halloween night, the band covered Exile on Main Street in its entirety.

My second reaction is that covering the Stones' greatest and strangest record all the way through is pretty cool. But that's after I get over my first reaction, which is that Pussy Galore did it first, and probably did it better, plus they did it, like, 25 years ago.

Before getting carried away with words like "menacing" and "chaotic" Allmusic accurately says that "Rocks Off,"--Exile's opening track--"perfectly sets the mood for what's to follow," and I'm down with that, so why not let's take a listen to three versions of it, and see whether Phish can make the grade with either the original or the original copy?

"Rocks Off" Attribute	Presence in version by
	The Stones	Pussy Galore	Phish
Psychotic Spoken Intro	4	10	0
Mariachi Horns	10	0	8
Sound Quality	5	2	7
Consistency of Mix	4	3	8
All-Important Scuzz Factor	7	10	5
Incoherence of Background Vocals	3	3	6
Bludgeon You The Fuck to Death Rhythm Guitar	8	10	4

Let me be upfront: I wanted to dislike the Phish version. But you know what? It's alright. The vocals are a little ragged, but at least Phish can cop to the excuse that Mick and Keith and Jon and Neal cannot: their take on "Rocks Off" was recorded live in concert.

Beyond the fact that of the three versions of the song we're looking at, the Phish cover is probably the only one where all the players are absolutely certain of where they're supposed to come in, and of what they're supposed to play when they do, it probably has the smokinest lead guitar work, and those guitars are also probably the most intune.

Of course, none of those things are all that important, and some of them might even be detrimental.

Tucked away somewhere on one of my computer's many hard drives is yet another version of "Rocks Off." This one is also by The Stones and is culled, if I can believe the ID3 information attached, from "Unreleased Decca Live Album 19." Jagger's singing, as it does on most of the lesser Stones live albums, booms forth sloppily, and the title to the song under consideration ends up sounding like it's "Roax Oaf."

Still, this Decca Live Album 19 version of the song might have been pretty great, because the rhythm guitars are even more muscular than on the Exile original, and the horns are motherfuckin' tight. But the problem with this version is that it has no center, and no climax.

The Wikipedia article on "Rocks Off" tells us that

The song is possibly best remembered for its sudden divergence near the two minute fifteen second mark into what has been called a psychedelic jam of sorts, with Jagger's vocals electronically distorted and the guitar chords stretched

As they do with the rest of the song, Phish plays the "divergence" pretty straight: it comes at more or less 2:20; you get a little flange poured over a sinewy little guitar figure, and a couple mutterings about hypnotized and mesmerized.

The break occurs at about 2:35 in the Pussy Galore edition, and swirls many times more madly than the Stones' original before cohesing again into furious rhythmic downstrokes. The tune is absolutely ripping when they shift the song back to as it was before the "divergence," and "The sunshine bores the daylights out of me!"

That line in all its paradoxical glory is the absolute center of gravity for the song, the emotional and oddly exuberant climax from which it must naturally recede. Somehow, after 20 seconds in the heroin wilderness, all is alright again with the dark. It's not a solution that is as they like to say these days, sustainable, but it works just fine for a song that's right around 4-1/2 minutes long.

And that's what was missing from the Decca live version. Jagger, as he was slurring his way through another concert performance, just sort of mumbled the sunshine bit, de-emphasized it, and there was nothing around which the rest of the song could revolve.

So let's give Phish some credit: they get the sunshine, and they get the daylight, absolutely right. But so do the Stones in their original, and so do Pussy Galore.

So we go to the tiebreakers, and though I'm tempted to simply make that "the all-important scuzz factor" and have done, the divergence just prior to the sunshine, and the way that Pussy's rhythm guitars just shred the fuck out of it in ways even The Stones for all their genius never did, gives me much more solid evidence as to why the verdict is Phish in a one-way tie for last.

A for effort, goddamn, 'cause it sure beats covering "Dark Star" again, but let's call Phish's cover a C+ for execution.

Now then, before I'm done writing this, I can't help but note that the rawness and the noisiness of both the Stones' Exile on Main Street and its lead track can be and have been overstated. Both are subtler than generally stated. The genius in some parts is in the windows opened rather than the vistas displayed. Still, both the Stones song and the Stones album are gonna get an A from this grader, even if some of it sounds less like the Replacements than like rural country to me.

In some sense, it is good that we have Pussy Galore, who keep some of the promises made on behalf of the Stones record. The PG cover is actually as noisy and as debauched as those going overboard have claimed the Stones record to be. "Rocks Off" is a Jagger/Richards tune, just like it says in the blogpost title, and creation is always the hardest part, but the song's greatest, loudest, noisiest, most fucked-up expression to these ears came when the band was named Galore, and the Twins' names were Haggerty and Spencer.


The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street 01 - Rocks Off.mp3

File Under: Heroin Rock

Pussy Galore - Exile on Main Street - 01 - Rocks Off.mp3



File under: Covers Where They Forget the Words

Phish - Rocks Off at Festival 8 10.31.09.mp3

File under: The Great Jam Band/Heroin Rock Mashup

These files were removed April 9, 2010 after I received a DMCA takedown letter. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

Electric Wizard - "Funeralopolis" from the CD Dopethrone

As our flightless friend next door so insistently reminds us, it can be a difficult thing to try and control the connections that our brains make as we digest the various media that come our way. Our crania at the mid- and lower levels are always trying to fashion these connections, whether we notice it or not; it's sort of a survival mechanism, I guess. But I don't believe the brain features an apparatus for testing the validity of these connections: it just keeps constructing them, and the strong survive while the weak will die. And in the meantime, at the upper levels of your consciousness, well, you're just gonna have to deal with the half-naked exploding porpoises, or that annoying Fishheads song, as they cavort gleefully and annoyingly through your head. Or even with the dilution of Electric Wizard--whom you would have thought presented enough of a sensory onslaught to drill a singular hollow of their own into the brain's flexible rubber sheet, without having to borrow power from any other media-memory-- and the way their subsonic doom metal becomes intertwined tightly and quite against my will with a science fiction story certainly as mind-blowing, and just as frightening, as their own uncompromising work, but otherwise not really related at all. "Funeralopolis" is just the sort of extreme music I'm drawn to. It (and the rest of Electric Wizard's work, apparently) is sort of an experiment to see what happens when you focus on one component of the music (in this case sheer, soulcrushing heaviness) to the exclusion of all else. Interesting, and admirable, by its ownself. This song works best at a level of volume most accurately described by its sound pressure. So why is it impossible for me to consider the song except in light of this science fiction story I first read three years ago? It's weird. The story is Alastair Reynolds' "Beyond the Aquila Rift," and though the strong connections my brain has instinctively made between it and "Funeralopolis" have as their foundation only a coincidence of similar setting, they have been reinforced through a much more primal reponse. The accident of common setting--what my mind had originally seized on before reinforcing the connections on a deeper level--lies in that both the Electric Wizard tune and the Reynolds' novelette are set on an asteroid. OK, so it goees on to talk about corporate maggots and nuclear warheads ready to strike, stuff that the Reynolds story has nothing to do with, but the first line of "Funeralopolis" goes like this:

Funeral planet, dead black asteroid

where Reynolds tells us (at least at first) that his story is set on a station that is

just a warren of tunnels and centrifuges dug into a pitch-black D-type asteroid, about half a light-year from the nearest star.

Pitch black, goddamn right. Just like the tarrish nature of Electric Wizard's music, just like the burrows Reynolds later reveals, and the shapeless forms which crawl through them. The truest connection between these two pieces that in some ways couldn't be more dissimilar is based on fear, man. Both the A-list Doom Metal of "Funeralopolis" and Reynolds' story (which made Dozois' Year's Best compilation) are fucking designed to scare. I'm not sure whether the science backs me up on this or not, but I think that the slow and the downtuned as required by the Doom Metal freaks is inherently frightening. Even if Ozzy had been singing about seven swans a-swimming on "Into The Void," it would have still been scary. It's physiological, the way that infrasonics and subsonics act on the body and the brain, raising the blood pressure, increasing unease. Then add in the morbid lyrics, and the way Jus Oborn's howled vocals are distorted into something just this side of inhuman. Yeah, "Funeralopolis" is scary. And "Beyond the Aquila Rift" may be the scariest science fiction story I've ever read. Talk about someone meeting their Doom: Reynold's universe is a little too rational to do that Doom metal staple, the Judeo-Christian moralist judgement thing, at least not overtly. But his narrator has committed the sin of deceit, and then he commits a sin of a much more serious nature right in front of us. Can the enforced solitude he ends up facing--a solitude which makes the one faced by Michael Collins look like a Saturday afternoon at Michigan Stadium--really be considered in any light other than that cast by an almost-Biblical sense of punishment through exile? And what's scarier than a punishment deserved? So, then. Asteroid? Check. Blackness of texture, check. Scary? Check. It's not a lot, not really. But apparently the correspondences are just enough to tie these two works together in my brain, and probably permanently, too, now that I've written this. Both Reynolds--perhaps the greatest writer at short lengths in modern scifi--and Electric Wizard--perhaps the heaviest band who've ever existed--do the Weird Tales thing quite well, thank you. But the weirdest thing of all is the unit perched inside our skulls, processing it all. Electric Wizard - Dopethrone - 2 - Funeralopolis.mp3 192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (or more) (Right click and save as target) Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift.html File both under: A sense of dread

Hüsker Dü - " Data Control" From the Album Land Speed Record

Truly a song for the mp3 era 25 years before it arrived, "Data Control" is the kind of track pointed to with satisfaction by those who haven't really minded the Death of the Album: a fantastic song on an otherwise mediocre LP.

Land Speed Record was actually the first Hüsker Dü album I ever bought, and I had actually done so through mail-order. I'm maybe 20, 21, and still had no car and no checking account. So I rode my bike down to the 7-11, bought a money order for 7 bucks or whatever it was, made it out to New Alliance, and dropped it in the mail: a pretty big deal for me at the time.

And then three weeks later it shows up, and man, the first 16 songs did *not* go well. I'd heard the Dü were all about the melody, but I sure as fuck couldn't find any on Land Speed Record. Everything was short choppy and fast: nothing wrong there, but there was no tunage. The sound sucked, and it was all formless. Not only was there nothing grabbing you, but you couldn't even tell when one "song" ended and the next began.

I was kind of hoping "Gilligan's Island" might be a cover of the TV theme song--reaching for something, anything, to grab onto--but no such luck.

So, fuck. Taken for 7 bucks. But wait: what's this last song? Whoa, it's slower, and you can actually make out the lyrics. Still crappy sound, but here, the ominous bass comes off as portentous, like the rumbling of turbines and generators, and the percussion that seemingly consists only of cymbals crashing is the sound of glass windows smashing on the thirtieth floor.

Though it has nothing whatsoever to do with the places Hüsker Dü would later visit, "Data Control" is the one time on Land Speed Record where the Minneapolis trio were able to harness the rage. Everywhere else, the band's anger makes a sloppy inchoate mess; on "Data Control," if you (and Mould and Hart and Norton) can stand the analogy, at least the columns line up.

Hüsker Dü - Land Speed Record - 17 - Data Control.mp3

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

File Under: Great songs on crappy albums

Queens of the Stone Age - "I'm Designer" from the CD Era Vulgaris

Like that redneck-chic T-shirt from the '70's said, the Queens of the Stone Age may not be perfect, but parts of their work are excellent.

Each of their albums rock solidly, yet each undeniably has a clunker or two. And even their most kickass tunes--like for Christ's sake the sick, sick raveup presented here--tend to have a chorus or a bridge or a refrain where the intensity is dimmed somewhat.

Excellent, but not perfect. On "I'm Designer," you can see that at 1:12 Josh Homme figured it was time to try and go ethereal with the chorus, but what you can't see is why.

What's with the choral dip in intensity? Homme created QOTSA with the express intent of not being Kyuss Part Two, of getting away from the Stoner Rock ghetto, but I am one to submit that regardless, part of Homme's job description is to rock for fuck's sake.

Note to Josh: For better or for worse, your band is just about the last one in the world that can be described simply as "hard rock." Homme writes in "I'm Designer" that "my generation's for sale," but another thing about his generation is that its bands have all headed for genrification. Everybody's got an emo band or their postrock revival thing or their sadcore project or their newgaze collective, but no-one fucking plays hard rock anymore.

Except QOTSA.

So stick with it, and focus on what makes you unique. I understand being diverse, Aerosmith when they championed '70's hard rock were diverse, Monster Magnet if you want a band more recent were diverse, but they never forgot what they were playing. Please skip the dreampop chorales, the cocktail blues, and the falsetto confessionals.

Stick to what's heavy, and your music will be that much the stronger for it.

Queens Of The Stone Age - Era Vulgaris - 03 - I'm Designer.mp3

207 kbps VBR mp3, up for six weeks (or more) (Right click and save as target)

File Under: Hard Rock

Procol Harum - "The Devil Came From Kansas" from the Album A Salty Dog

Three more women were hanged as witches at Union Square last night.

Both the county government and the legislature at Sacramento have issued proclamations that declare such acts of vigilantism "counter to the progressive ideals of the Republic" and have made it known to the general populace that the San Francisco Police Department does not and cannot recognise any reclusive or furtive actions by one's neighbour as witchcraft; and that further hangings during the current hysteria will be prosecuted with considerably more vigour than even your conventional murder would ordinarily warrant.

Their appeals to civilization go well-applauded in these quarters, but these are difficult times. The Devil has exited Hell and walks the earth, or so most people believe.

They say the infernal portal from which Satan has emerged was located in northeast Kansas somewhere. And they point to a dustbowl that stretches westward from that supposed gate out to Pueblo County, Colorado 1000 miles away, and they point to the perpetually dark and swirling cloud that has covered this vast area. The Eye of Satan, this enormous meterological freak is called, not only on the Plains, but out here on the coast, as well.

It is a poor time to ask restraint of the masses, to be sure.

Half a million of them have come west, and they all talk of the devil; they all talk of witches. They hoard the bits of shiny silver paper that they believe wards off the familiars and the spirits and the other agents of the diabolical, and when they find one they believe to be a witch or a warlock, they begin to slit throats in their ritual of mob panic.

I received a note from Snowden yesterday in the post. He tells me that Chamberlain has appointed Deputy Leader Simon to the newly re-created position of Witchfinder General. I daresay Chamberlain has found a man with the proper temperament for the job, but that a sensible fellow like Chamberlain should have found it necessary to create the post at all is quite simply flabbergasting.

Soon the Crown will be hanging witches, too.

Snowden's inquiries concerning business that came along with this grave news were probably best not made, however. Our ship is docked at China Basin and its refrigerated holds are still nearly full of our fine double Gloucester and Stilton. San Francisco is a city full of chefs and cheesemongers, but none of them, it seems, are in any kind of mood given our dark times to spend funds on a new product, no matter how qualitative, no matter how delicious.

Money is therefore running low for me, and so is my laudanum. I've been filling the dropper only three-quarters of late, and the lack has not only made my days with its frustrating calls upon our customers difficult, it has confounded my sleep in this dreary hotel room as well. I dream often of the pond I know deep within the New Forest, but in these dreams, I am not with the lovers I have taken. I am instead alone, and I strip naked, and dive downward into the cold and slimy waters, and after a while my feet touch the muddy bottom, and I open my mouth, and breathe deeply . . . .

I wake shaking and trembling, horrified, drained by the apocalyptic vision, and struck by how apt my low-grade fever dream seems for these troubled times. And struck, also, by how sometimes it seems as if our world is nothing more than the nightmare lyrics to a shanty written by an opium-eater in his throes, all the strangeness and the evil seemingly ingrained in this world merely the twisted verse of some talented songsmith deranged by his whimsical indulgence into narcotics. . . . .

Procol Harum - A Salty Dog - 4 - The Devil Came From Kansas.mp3

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

File under: Proto-Trower