My Galaxie 500 Story

For me, Galaxie 500 will always be music for vacuuming your car.

When you're newly single again, your schedules can get a little fucked up. If no-one needs you at home at 10:30 PM on a Sunday night, there's no reason, for example, not to go to the gas station and vacuum your car out, if you've been putting it off for weeks and feel a little lonely and ineffectual as another boring weekend closes itself out.

In the early oughts, I was living on an island in the middle of Biscayne Bay, buncha condos, buncha restaurants and the one Shell Station. So I drive the 3/4 of a mile over there, and all the restaurants are closed, there's no-one around and very few cars are even driving by.

Cerveza had just given me a tape he'd made with a bunch of Galaxie 500 on it, so I popped that in, and cranked it up. Gotta hear it over the vacuum motor, right?

This was my introduction to the band, so not sure which of the three albums, or whether it was a mix, or whether "Tugboat," their masterpiece, was included on the tape, or what, but I've got it loud and it sounds pretty good to me, all the dreampop surf guitar and the melancholy keening vocals.

And then as I'm leaning down into the passenger side seat with the vacuum hose, I get the shit scared out of me. I hadn't heard him over the various roars, but some dude must have been walking by, I swear I have no recollection of what he even looked like, but he called to me from five feet away and asks, "Hey! who's that band?"

I don't know what to say, but I twist around in the driver's seat towards him and yell, "they're called Galaxie 500!" and I have no follow up at all. Again, I've barely heard of them, and this is the first time I've heard. You always want to say something like, "they're my favorite band," or "my sister knows the bass player," or "they're gonna be in town next week," or even like I should have said, "too bad they broke up," but I had nothing. No knowledge, no stories, just the somewhat inappropriate volume, and sounds issuing forth from the Pontiac's 6 x 9's, of this pretty, sad little atmospheric dreampop band. So I just stare at him silent for a ten seconds or so, reverbed guitar blowing past us under the filling station lights, at a complete loss for anything at all to say, and then he nods his head, turns around and walks away, hoodie flapping in the nighttime bay breeze.

And then I finished vacuuming my car and drove back to my apartment and went to sleep.

File under: Music for a lonely Sunday Night on an island and without a girlfriend

https://rastronomicals.tumblr.com/post/651912856359616512/nocommonwealth-written-by-kaya-oakes-for-kitchen

Iron Maiden - "Phantom of the Opera" from the album Iron Maiden

Having emerged from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which very famously took a lot of their inspiration and their energy from British punk, Iron Maiden, at least initially, probably had to be a little careful about acknowledging the progressive features in their music. Later on, of course, when they could do whatever the fuck they wanted, they'd cover Jethro Tull and Nektar, play guitar synths, and write songs about "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".

But if the band in its youth wasn't talking about prog elements, really, all you had to do to find them was listen to "Phantom Of the Opera." The band wasn't going to divide the song into subtitled movements with Roman numerals attached, but they totally could have.

0:00   I. Introduction and Phantom Theme -- The theme is stated at 3/4 speed four times, then we're off and running.

2:06   II. Opera Ghost -- Breakdown, including the Chorus. The breakdown is the toughest and dirtiest and most punk section of the song, but those backing vocals ("Don't you stray") totally remind me of Yes

2:48  III. Christine -- Dave Murray's lyrical solo anticipates the harmonies to come.

3:20 IV. Stairway to the Cellars -- Harris' bass run a descending stairway, as Stratton and Murray enter in harmony, high above, in the eaves of the opera house, I guess, looking below upon the Phantom as he takes the steps down to his torture chamber. I suppose Stratton--a huge Wishbone Ash fan--wanted more harmony parts like this, and that's why he was fired.

4:34  V. The Phantom's March -- The riff is inexorable. Nothing can stand before it. Bedrock over which first Murray, then Stratton solo. And don't you think Stratton's is the better one?

File under: Works adapted from the original by Gaston Leroux

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d's Pee AT STATE'S END!

So, I finally received the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor CD on Wednesday and have been listening to it during drive time since. When I first got wind of the record, I'd heard that they were using short wave radios as an instrument, and that really piqued my interest because my favorite ambient album of all time (by Holger Czukay) does that and it's really really weird and all-around spooky.

So I was excited about the record because of that--but they really don't do that much with the idea, using the recorded radio broadcasts basically as introductory prescript and then dropping them after that. A wasted opportunity in my mind.

BUT-- at the end of the third track, there is a beautiful passage of about five minutes, perhaps named "Ashes to Sea or Nearer to Thee," that is absolutely *stunning*.

The album is solid throughout, and features the electric guitar moreso as their recent albums have done, but that one section makes the album worth getting, worth listening to, and worth knowing.

File under: Canadian Post-rock Ensembles, Numbers Stations

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - re-act-or and what I wrote at Allmusic

So, almost a week ago, Neil Young released another live album in what has become a most remarkable Archive Series. This one was called Way Down in the Rust Bucket, and I haven't bought them all, or even heard them all, but it's safe to say I was all over this one. I had my copy on the morning of the 27th.

The set was recorded in Santa Cruz, California, late in 1990, chronicling a gig which served as a warm up for the legendary Arc/Weld-Gulf War arena tour the following year. But as interesting as even *that* is, what really piqued my interest in acquiring the double CD (if not the deluxe set with the DVD) was the inclusion of two songs from re-act-or, which I have long felt is Young's most underappreciated work.

And there's a great version of "Farmer John" and a very good one of "Bite the Bullet" from American Stars and Bars, but if I was looking for versions of "Surfer Joe" and "T-Bone" that reflected the way they were played on re-act-or, well, it wasn't happening. What a strange version of "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze" we get! Neil nicks a few notes from "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and plays a grand interpretative overture, as if Surfer Joe was some Mexican emperor, or Moe the Sleeze a great lost love. And then they play the song at half speed . . . .

And "T-Bone," it doesn't have horns, but it's definitely the Bluenotes arrangement.

Listen, it's all grist for the mill. Almost everything Neil does is at the least interesting, and these two songs from re-act-or are definitely that.

But I have to admit I've been thinking of the power and the speed of that album since I gave Rust Bucket its three requisite drivetime spins.

So much so that I found myself on Allmusic today, reading user reviews for re-act-or. The thing was, even the people who liked it were damning it with faint praise! "Lightweight" said a guy who gave it 4-1/2 stars. Well, first off, it's five stars, so then I left this review:

Garfong reference aside, if On the Beach was honey sliders, and Tonight's the Night was tequila, then re-ac-tor is pure uncut crank. It's easily Young's fastest album, his most furious, probably his heaviest, and it recasts Crazy Horse as three guys gobbling speed just trying to keep up with their maniac boss.

I've read where Neil was supposedly mentally absent for these songs, being preoccupied with his son, but have the people who wrote that stuff actually listened? If you choose not to see the lyrics to "T-Bone" as the zen koan for the chronically shortchanged that it is, and if you want to say "Rapid Transit" is aping the Talking Heads of all people, well, good for you, hope it gets you through the night. But Young is *not* absent:, he's as in-your-face as he's ever been.

Young clearly hadn't gotten all the Johnny Rotten out of his system with Rust Never Sleeps (after all, the punk rock there was only on the second side). It's fair to say that re-act-or emptied the cistern. When Young returned with the Horse again, there'd be a swinging laid back character to the roar that they've retained to this day.

Ol' Neil's interesting even when gets it wrong, keep in mind, but when they played "T-Bone" and "Surfer Joe" at the Catalyst in 1990, the songs practically bore no relation: the speed and the fury that re-act-or had was gone. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it helps you realize: re-act-or is a unique document of a band in a place it went to precisely one and a half times.

https://www.allmusic.com/album/re-ac-tor-mw0000717742/user-reviews

Review of Genesis' Duke at Pitchfork

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/genesis-duke/

Interesting review, written by an author who I'll say up front knows a lot more about Genesis than me.

For somebody who as a kid jumped from Elton John and Wings to Yes, I am surprised to this day that I never got into Genesis. Danny Agramonte and I were fellow progheads in 11th grade honors history, and every Monday we'd lay our new purchases on the other. One Monday, he came in, agog at The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. "It makes Olias of Sunhillow look like Foreigner 4," he gushed.

But I didn't get it. Danny later sent me off in the direction of "Charlotte the Harlot," so he knew what rocked, but that was the thing about Genesis--or at least Peter Gabriel Genesis. They didn't rock.

They also didn't get played on South Florida radio. Or at least they didn't before Duke.

The local rock station, Zeta4, or maybe by this time it was WSHE, began playing "Misunderstanding," which was shit, but they also played "Turn it on Again" and that was an interesting track.

It made sense as concise prog and it also made sense as something you heard on rock radio. I didn't become huge fans of Genesis (I didn't even buy Duke), but Genesis had started doing something I hadn't previously thought they knew how to do. They started doing in fact something that not many bands in the entire world knew how to do, which was to here and there get their progressive music serious airplay.

From around that same time, only The Police, with some of the deeper tracks from Ghosts or Synchronicity were able to pull off the same feat.

Abacab accelerated the process. There was dross mixed in, sure, but the title track is a masterful piece of jammy progressive rock, and "Keep it Dark" is even better, stutters and bursts of electronic instruments that take their cues from a driving 6/4 beat.

So the thing about '80's Genesis is, it's not that they started writing sappy shit (though they did). The remarkable thing is that they simultaneously and for the first time got good at the things they'd used to do.

The Hollywood Sportatorium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Sportatorium

Check it out, click that link, if you haven't before: SoFla's concertgoing Stoner Nation forged a legend out of a leaky, acoustically atrocious, aircraft hangar in the middle of nowhere. I was 14 years old when I first attended a show at the Snortatorium, and the feeling as I entered the seating area with its dopesmoke cloudcover was that of crossing into a dark fantasyland, orcs and wizards and longhaired freaks crawling through the plastic chairs on the floor and over the permanent seating in the rafters.

And I felt that way even *before* I smoked reefer for the very first time that night. The first kid I spoke to collapsed into a quaalude-induced puddle right in front of me, and, later, my old man, who was waiting outside in his car, told me they were doing drug deals on the long hood of his Chevy Nova.

I never bought PCP at the Sport, never got a blowjob in one of its bathrooms, never got arrested, but that wasn't 'cause I couldn't've.

I saw Kansas there (twice), Foreigner (with Blackfoot, who blew the English band off the stage), Black Sabbath, Robert Plant, Rush, Van Halen (who were basically a distorted muddle), Iron Maiden (twice), and Judas Priest (with Megadeth)--that time, my father came inside with me(!).

Beyond the always surreal experience of just being in the cavernous space with six to ten thousand of South Florida's rowdiest motherfuckers, highlights were probably the laser show I saw at that first Kansas show, and the riot that broke out when Neil Peart was tardy for that Rush concert. The show started 90 minutes late, but it was worth it, as I can always say I've been teargassed--the Iron Cross of sorts for veterans of the old Sportatorium.