Week 31: The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 1

I am trying something new. It makes me a little nervous, but what the hell, I’ve done way stupider stuff that makes me nervous too. What I’m going to do is to start using this forum to present and hopefully discuss work in progress. After 30 weeks of writing mostly about music, and getting extremely addicted to writing and reading every word posted on this blog. I now need to switch the focus to making music instead of writing about it. Of course I will still do my weekly posts, but mostly they will be about the music I’m working on, with samples of recorded material in progress.

Since having a child, the way music plays a part in my life has changed. For the time being I can't sit in someone’s house playing and making up songs ‘til the sun comes up. For the time being I can’t go spend 3 days locked up in a studio out in the country recording all day and night. For the time being my musical output is mostly confined to recording music on garageband and playing songs at home with my wife, for my baby or to myself.

I am treading through musical waters previously unknown to me. These are the waters where I record songs that have never been played live; the waters where I record songs that are created track by track instead of using a live band to lay down the basics from where to build; these are the waters where I am arranging all the parts of the song. These are the waters of the lone wolf working from home.

But I’m not really much of a lone wolf type of person. So while one part of my natural instinct tells me to work alone (and of course, by alone I mean with Diane) on the material until it’s done, the other part of my instinct tells me that I need to work out this music with some kind of more general public. Also, this blog has been very good at getting me to write. Having that weekly deadline and having the support of the group has been instrumental in me writing a few things I had been meaning to write for a long time. So now I’m going to see if it can similarly work for recording music.

Not that I haven’t been recording. I’ve been working on a record for a few months now. And I have a vision of it that get a bit sharper every day, though it is still fairly open ended. So I’ve started to work out sketches of songs and bits of music and putting them together in various ways. The goal at present is to complete a blueprint that can then be used to create the final recording. But I can't say that I know exactly how that final recording will take shape.

For the blueprint at least, I am using a collage technique which makes it possible to create super fast sketches of ideas on record. I’m not recording songs all the way through. Instead I am recording little bits and pieces and then I am cutting and pasting them at various spots of a song or even in other songs as they might seem to fit. This way the whole record is slowly being built. However I am also trying to work within the basic rules of a traditional song album, structured with cohesive short statments that can stand on their own as individual pieces.

It is possible that some of the material I am recording now will end up as it is in the final recording, but for now I am still seeing everything as a blueprint. And by that I mean in the way that a blueprint is a two dimensional, skeletal projection of a three dimensional construction. The way I hear them in my head, the recordings I am making still seem to be in one dimension less than the final dimension. In my mind the missing dimension is other musicians playing the music all the way through, ideally as a group. But I might be ok if the recording can convey that certain freedom and intra-instrumental communcation that is what makes band music so cool for me.

So for now, I am using only a few very basic instruments to create the whole thing. Some basic live instruments such as my guitar, Diane’s voice, natural sounds, and other various instruments I have around the house (toy instruments, other guitars, percussion instruments, etc). I am also using a few canned instruments that come with garageband, mainly drums, bass, piano, trumpet and organ. Piano, trumpet and organ are being used as placeholders and could be easily substituted by other instruments in the final recording. In some cases I hear in my head a pedal steel, trombone, accordion, flute, etc, but since garageband either doesn’t have these sounds or has crappy versions of them, I’m not using them. Also, since I am recording at home, you will hear the sounds of my baby daughter, since I can’t ask her to be quiet while I do a take. And as cute as it may sound, her input has affected the direction of certain parts of the recording.

What I am hoping is that by me sharing the various sketches of the work as it progresses, that you will offer some criticism in return. Any and all responses would be appreciated, verbal abuse of course is not my preferred way, but if that’s what you feel, I will listen quietly to that too and try not to get defensive. My greater hope, however, is that you will get involved at that very basic level of creative input that band members share, to the point where you want to add instruments or pieces of your own to the record. However, I’ll be very happy if you just offer a critical perspective and maybe some suggestions and/or questions. I can't think of any place where I could find a group with the range of interests and skills available here so I imagine the criticism would be broad in spectrum and concern with many aspects of the music.

Ok, that being said, I’ll give you a couple of very general starting points about the work as a whole, sort of as if you were looking at it in a store.

The working title at present is “The Ballad of Stayed and Gone”.

And if I could have it my way, I would be able to use this beautiful image by artist Toba Khedoori as the cover.

For now this is all. Next time I will start posting some of the actual recorded sketches so you can see what it's beginning to sound like.

* * *

Meanwhile, for the Napcast this week I will submit two songs by the everybodyfields, who are getting ready to release their third record, Nothing is Okay, and since there was no Napcast when Carlos did the post about them many weeks ago. Here’s the original post about the everybodyfields that Carlos did for Week 3 of the NAP. Seems like ages ago, doesn’t it?

Baby Huey

One cool thing about trading turfs is discovering local legends.

Talking about Baby Huey.

Not the St. Louis rapper much less fitted to the name, but the 350 pound six foot one Chris Farley of soul music,

James "Baby Huey" Ramey.

James Ramey was probably the fattest heroine addict ever posthumously credited as a father of Hip Hop. He was an entertainer so powerful that after his death at 26, his band could not go on, even with a young Chaka Khan at the mike.

For the rest, somebody already said it better here.

Check out these tunes, especially Baby Huey's great take of Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come.

Songs
A Change Is Gonna Come
Mighty Mighty
Just Being Careful

The Lungfish and the Palanquin

Part One: The Lungfish

Everybody knows that Jimmy Page dug Aleister Crowley. He bought the guy’s mansion, practiced Crowley rituals, hell, he even conned the rest of the band into adopting magick symbols for the infamous fourth album. Wonderful. I’ve read some Crowley, even attended an actual Crowley mass (don’t ask, but if you must, ask Kyle Phillips what “cookies” are), but I couldn’t give a fraction of a shit about that. What I care about is the fact that Page’s artistry has blown my mind so many times that I will always admire him regardless of how many fish he shoves up some poor groupie’s crotch.

So we open this week’s proceedings with this formal imperative: Your honest creative expression is always more inspiring than a crotch full of lungfish.

Look, in the world of popular American music culture, it’s a fucking hornet’s nest. Ever since the inception of the counterculture in the sixties the party was pretty much over. The very moment young people began to define how they were different they in effect announced to the heavens that they were the same as everyone else and always would be. Relativity is a bitch. Marketers copped redwood boners that rivaled Mt. Rushmore when all this went down. Gone were the days of bypassing the youth as an actual commodity, and ushered in was the genesis of revolution as a marketing strategy. We have never looked back.

It’s a tragedy if one was to look at it from the surface, but a slight scratch below and you start to get to the real meat of the issue. Beneath the obvious is the unadorned, the honest, roads that lead inward, the quest for oneness. Up top the kids are battling for elbowroom, warring over the intangible now-ness that will carve their niche as being rebellious while keeping confined. But youth is all about burning the house down and building again. You can sell now to tomorrow but now is always over and tomorrow never stops coming.

Below the glossy crust the real life is happening. Someone somewhere is silent and methodical. Someone is working it out in a little corner of the world. Someone is rigidly controlling the flow of information on the most personal of scales. And the best part is that these someones are oblivious to the jockeying that sullies the surface. They simply sweat away learning to master the secrets of whatever medium through which they have chosen to express their voice.

That to me is heroic. I couldn’t give less of a shit about the rock star histrionics, or the mythic indulgences upon which my favorite artists have embarked. It’s the strength with which they face the emptiness inside that makes me feel chills. Creative people concoct all sorts of ways to distract themselves from reality. I should know, I wrote a chapter of the book. That stuff is all fine, but it does practically nothing good for creating truly strong and honest work.

Part Two: The Palanquin

Declaration time. I listen to way too much NPR. This is in no small part due to the fact that FM radio is a total wasteland. In other words, if I want to listen to the radio in the morning there are two choices that I can tolerate, KPFT or NPR. I’m just not into KTRU in the mornings, too much of something and not enough of multiple others. So other than NPR I consider my choices to pretty much be the iPod or silence. Lately a little silence has been the most beautiful music what with the augmented family setup.

One thing that NPR does that simply drives me up a fucking wall is their sycophantic band interviews. For some reason whenever they conduct a band interview it seems like they have to treat the band/artist as if these people had somehow suddenly discovered perpetual motion or had finally turned shit into gold like some fetid alchemist. I don’t really get the idea behind this unless NPR is paid by the labels to prop up their stable of “talent” for maximum exposure. All I know is that it sucks, and that it makes for a less than objective interview process.

I have heard this treatment given to Brian Wilson (who is still out of his fucking mind), John Mayer (who deserves almost no credit for anything positive in any way, shape, or form), the miserable Arcade Fire (kill me post haste), and the single worst band in the entire world at this very moment (including Dashboard Confessional), the Decemberists.

When the NPR drone spoke with the head Decemberist, Colin Meloy (even his name is whiny), it was the most lopsided shine job I’ve heard since Katie Couric “interviewed” Tom Cruise under a weeping willow tree, through a soft filter, as if Cruise had just passed Katie on his way across some idyllic park in his bike shorts. Nice. In the Decemberists clip the lady is so totally taken with Meloy that she is gushing through the entire interview with lines like “you guys are so smart,” and “your lyrics are so literary, you most read a lot.” Deep. It’s as if NPR thinks its listeners are stuck forever in middle school, which I suppose may be true.

My favorite part of the interview is when she asks Meloy about his lyrics, and she demonstrates her total loss of control over the use of the word “palanquin.” Apparently in this woman’s world the concept of a dictionary is totally novel. She is simply stunned that anyone could be so clever as to use the word palanquin in a sentence. I’ve got news for this bitch. Any idiot can use big words, shit, just look at Dennis Miller.

So in the spirit of totally unearned accolades, I would like to formally enter myself into the sure-to-get-NPR-chicks-for-my-daunting-vocabulary competition by bandying the following really big term about. See if you can spot it.

(Hint: it isn’t palanquin)

In my many travels the world over, during the great quest for the holy lungfish, I made a short stop in the jungles of the Congo. Held aloft by my servants in a most beautiful palanquin which had been fabricated from the flesh of young cash-laden American teenaged consumers, I noticed that I had in fact developed a horrible case of Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, and might I add, in the immortal words of Gang of Four, that is something you don’t want to catch.

Epilogue:

We’ve had some fun today, stuffing our genitals with seafood, prattling crankily from on top of our aging perch, blowing sunshine up a semi-literate wanker’s ass, and finally wrapping it all up in a nice little saccharine package. But seriously, never forget that Colin Meloy is an unholy troubadour worthy of all of our most fervent loathing. And above all, have a nice day.

Postscript: We euthanized our dog Thursday night and that is a task I wish on no one, including Colin Meloy. Yeah, I may be a prick, but I’m no monster, and I also know that our dog was a sweetheart, and she in no way deserved to suffer. I hope I could at the very least give her a peaceful, painless exit. If you have dogs, pet them for me. Thanks.

Damn.

sometimes sloppy is offensive.

or alternately, hipsters try to ruin one of my favorite pieces of music and then redeem themselves by playing some of their own music. For the good kind of sloppy, please refer to this post.

Acting like a snarky, know-it-all gets one nowhere in life; it stirs up resentment and difference rather than an empathetic exchange. When something is bad, I prefer to ignore it because there is enough good out there that deserves attention. The bad is often just a misunderstanding or on its way to getting better. However, if I’ve been duped into paying to see someone, whether deliberately or accidentally, wreck a masterpiece of modern music, I might feel obliged to comment. Especially if I’ve been talking up the piece to one of my friends and we go out of our way on a Saturday when we could be eating grilled sausages in a park somewhere.

Kranky is a fantastic label and we all love Kranky here. [Insert disclaimer for the rest of NAP here, my views do not necessarily reflect everyone else’s views etc.] The intentions of the organizers were honest, and I applaud them: they wanted a bit of crossover between the composers on their label and the contemporary classical world. Gotcha, all there, down with that. Then threw out an adventurous/audacious idea: how about having the Caleb Burhans String Quartet perform Steve Reich’s Different Trains? I might pause for a minute or two as a promoter or event-organizer here because of the singular thematic significance of this work.*

Different Trains was written for the Kronos Quartet. Pause again, inhale deeply, think clearly. If a quartet is not up to the Kronos standard,** they had better figure out how the fuck to perform a different/better interpretation of whatever piece of music it is. Period. No exceptions, not in New York. Furthermore, even if one advertises “Loscil, Brian McBride, and The Caleb Burhans String Quartet” in big letters and puts “Steve Reich’s Different Trains” in small letters on a flyer, one should figure that most people know who Steve Reich is, will most certainly be familiar with the recording of this work, and a lot of us will have seen it performed live by Kronos.

There is a precision, a rawness, and an immense physicality that reinforces the emotional impact when Kronos performs the piece. Sorry if this seems overly pedantic to you dear readers who are already familiar with Different Trains, but an elucidation of the central themes seems necessary to explain why I am so pissed off about sloppiness. There are three parts: America – Before the War, Europe – During the War, and After the War; and they each have to performed differently to get the meaning across. We are not in a car driving from Seattle to Portland in some sort of melancholy mood. If you reduce the piece to some sort of mannerist interpretation about noise, I’m afraid you don’t fundamentally understand the work and don’t deserve anyone’s attention.

If the audience sees four bows moving with unity and precision, they are reminded of the various rods, bars, and levers of an engine train’s wheels moving together to produce locomotion. If a quartet isn’t moving in unison, this impression is lost; the melding between musicians and machine doesn’t occur. The subsequent phase-shifting requires the initial unison so that we can hear one rhythm or melody accelerating or playing off of one another. If the audience has no sense of continuity because random musicians are playing random bits (and the pace is slightly off from lack of rehearsal) it becomes mush. And for fuck’s sake, turn down the amplification of the recorded bits so that the audience can hear the live musicians. The piece produces tension with the rising pitch of the blowing whistles, phasing of rhythms, the sense of acceleration into an unknown, and also between the the tension of live performer and the recording. The machines aren’t meant to drown out of the living, breathing human- at least not in the first part. America – Before the War is also a remembering of Reich’s own journeys as a child across the American landscape, between parents in New York and L.A. The innocence and hopeful anxiety is crucial. It’s not noisy and overwhelming at this point; it must be played precisely in order to recognize and emphasize the coming shift.

When the whistle of a steam engine is replaced with a siren of war at the beginning of Europe – During the War, a fundamental change of meaning and mood has occurred. If the audience doesn’t feel the shift, I think you’ve blown it as performers. It’s one thing if the performers aren’t technically able to play all of the parts and don’t have them memorized; it becomes another, more offensive thing, if the performers don’t even seem to acknowelge the composer’s intentions. Those trains were going to auschwitz- not to a summer camp. How can you be so blasé?! A measured deceleration, change in rate of the crescendos and diminuendos, an added shrillness to the timbres, an increased sense of desperation, maybe even a little sweat would have gone a long way. This is neither the time not place to maintain one’s composure as a musician. Oh gaaawwd, do I even mention the video? More wtf?????! Perhaps, the Caleb Burhans String Quartet got the melancholy of the After the War part. I can’t recall because I was angry and I’m a bitch and I’m sorry about that if it hurts anyone’s feelings. My feelings were hurt by the trivialization of a piece of music that valiently tries to sort out a bit a human history.

The rest of the Kranky stuff, the other performances by the same string players, and the other videos were brilliant. I will go see more of the Wordless Music Series when it starts up again in the fall. Sorry, if I’m abruptly leaving out the good bits of the evening. I wasn’t really able to calm down until after having a vodka-tonic at Iona while listening to a hipster DJ. Here’s a nice video to help take one’s mind off the memory of bad performances:

*Dear whoever you are who decided to do this- please realize that I have made bigger mistakes in my own life- and, in a way, I admire you for your overly ambitious undertaking.

**Kronos isn't necessarily perfection embodied; they perform some compositions better than others. Tim Berne wrote Dry Ink for them and, in my opinion, Bloodcount would have performed it better.

I have nothing to say and I am saying it and this is blogging.

I wish I could remember what that was a reference to. I certainly didn't mean to equate my tenure on GBI with WWI trench warfare last week, so god knows what I've got myself into this week.

But I'm not really kidding. I feel blank, wiped out. Perhaps it's a function of leaving a controlled environment and being thrown back into the chaos of the real world and travel planning, or exhaustion, or fear that my suddenly pained ankle will hamper my ability to get around or jump up and down at a music festival. (Perhaps my companions are secretly grateful that I will not embarrass them if my ankle continues to hamper me.)

I suppose, though, it was this blank state that gave me the patience on the boat ride home to sit on the bow, watch the waves go by, and listen to the soothing sounds of ... Clipse. I don't really know what kind of mass presence they have in the States, if any, but I'd heard enough positive things about their album that I decided to pick it up without having heard anything off of it.

What I initially thought was, well, Clipse are kind of slow-paced and annoying in their conspicuous consumerism/posturing as drug dealers. (Or perhaps it's not at all a posture, though I would think at some point one might be wise to limit's one publicity about one's illegal trade if so.)

But listening to them on a boat, while an inobvious choice, forced me to listen through my headphones, and thusly more attentively. And now: they seem somewhat like geniuses. Their beats became much more prominent to me, and while this may betray my relative inattentiveness to trends in hip-hop, they seem pretty exciting to me, exciting in their textures. And simultaneously their lyrics became much less annoying - they seemed to a parodic level, and whether or not they should be taken that way, I enjoy them that way.

Similarly, on the boat, I put on Hot Water Music's CAUTION. A friend of mine loves loves loves Hot Water Music, and thus far I had been unconvinced, giving it a listen every month or so without really clicking on to it as something I had to put on. But this time, suddenly, everything clicked: dueling vocals and doubled guitars and speed and hooks without cheese, and I felt like all I wanted to do was listen over and over until these songs were in my bloodstream, and even though I'm listening to nothing right now, "Trusty Chords" is stuck in my head.

I now suspect that boats are the best place to listen to music. I will compare this to planes, and report back next week.

NAPcast XX

Click on the podcast link in the right margin of this blog to hear OLDER episodes of the NONALIGNMENT PACT podcasts. Click HERE to listen to this episode or go HERE to listen to old and new shows with the embedded player. If you need help, just ask.

Please submit guesses for my mystery tune in the comments section of this post. I would say it was easy, but it never seems to end up that way.

Clues may be provided if the song cannot be guessed.

Thanks for submitting music.

You're Gonna Miss Me

I arrived home yesterday in a funk. Actually I'd been in a funk since the morning as R & O had left for a trip for Mexico and due to the short notice, I had to stay behind. So what's the worst thing you can do when you are feeling down? I'll tell ya what, sit down and watch 2005's "You're Gonna Miss Me"- Keven McAlester's unblinking look at Rocky Erickson's troubled life.

In this film, Erickson is simply a detached and hopelessly adrift schizophrenic under the inadequate care of his mother - a woman who doesn't seem particularly stable herself. It's simply a sad portrait of a man whose talent was overwhelmed by his mental condition; a condition that has been exacerbated over the years by the state's malicious punishment and later his mother's well intentioned but ultimately neglectful care. A plot unfolds in the film as Rocky's brother, Sumner, tries to and ultimately succeeds is wresting control of Rocky's well being from his mother. But the resolution is hardly a happy one as Sumner realizes that, while he can make Rocky's life more comfortable and attend to his health better, there is a limit to how much better Rocky can get. As the film closes, Rocky (though healthier, more interactive and lucid) still seems adrift as he sits in his room reading while surrounding himself with a blanket of noise from the TV- hardly a classic Hollywood ending.

The problem I have with the film is that the Rocky Erickson that belongs to us is not Rocky Erickson the person but the Rocky Erickson we know through his music and art and, because of that distinction, I almost feels officious watching the film. What I gained from watching this, I'm not sure. True, it's nice to know that Rocky is doing better but I gained little insight into what made him special and I think that is because the filmmakers either assumed that the audience would already be familiar with the legacy or, given Rocky's inability to connect with people during most of the film, they may have found a subject that was unable or unwilling to discuss on his own life and work. That leaves a big hole in the film so that, in the end, while admirable in intent, if you are looking for a film to celebrate and elucidate Rocky Erickson's legacy, just know that you won't find it here.


Postscript:
It seems Sumner has actually done well by his brother as Rocky just performed in New York's Bowery Ballroom in April of this year and he sounds and looks great. Here is a You Tube Posted clip of "You're Gonna Miss Me."

Sky Blue Sky

Week 30: Violeta Parra

In Latin America there is a long standing tradition of singing decimas. A decima is a ten line verse or stanza with a rhyming pattern of ABBAACCDDC. Decimas can be pre-written, but often they are improvised. They are also used in many contexts and find their way into many genres and styles of music and literature. In Puerto Rico, for example, there are 'controversias' in which two 'trovadores' face-off. They are both given the same one or two line foot with which they must end each decima, and the band starts to play. Then they each take turns improvising decimas that end with the pre-assigned foot. These controversias usually take a confrontational tone that can go from the political (imagine Crossfire with rhymes) to the more personal (MC battles are a good parallel). This is just one of the many ways in which decimas are used. I have, for example, a textbook-size book filled with thousands of decimas that someone collected from every source imaginable, from songs mothers make up for their babies to philosophical reveries to political letters. And then there is Violeta Parra.


Violeta Parra's decimas are some of the most profound, beautiful and gripping that I have heard. Like with the best decima writers, one gets the impression that she thought like that, in decimas. One of her most stunning achievements was writing her autobiography completely in decimas, a beautiful epic poem about the life of an incredible woman. Unfortunately, there is very little about her available in English. Here is the best bio in English that I could find on line, but since it's not that great I will go ahead and give you a few quick bits about her life.

Her father’s family was wealthy, but after being fired from his teaching job by an opposition government, and before dying from his alcoholism, her dad drank and gambled away all the money they had. After his death, her mother supported her nine children by washing clothes and sewing. Violeta left school at the age of nine to work with her siblings singing in trains, bars and circuses. In a particularly moving section of her autobiography she describes how, still a child, she had to helplessly continue to play her song while a woman was raped by several men just outside the door. Two children from her first marriage survive, two children from her second marriage died as infants, one of them less than a month after she had boarded a boat to Europe where she was to represent Chile in various music festivals. She taught herself the guitar, harp, piano, and other Latin American folk instruments, and had a successful music career, traveling the world, recording a number of records and collecting many South American folk songs. And her influence on the popular music of Latin America can not be overstated. She was also an accomplished visual artist, creating beautiful paintings and tapestries, and had a profound cultural and social impact in Chile. After her second divorce she fell in love with a Swiss musician, recorded one of the most incredibly heart wrenching and beautiful collection of songs ever put on vinyl, and a few months later, at the age of 50, she shot herself with a shotgun at the Carpa de la Reina (The Queen's Tent), the circus she had started upon her return to Chile from France.

Translating most poetry, in my view, is sort of wrong. Good poetry lives through the language it was written in and dies a little when translated. However, because we don’t all speak the same language, some poetry has to be translated, if only to give a glimpse of that other language, which in turn is a glimpse into the spirit of the culture that speaks it. So I have translated some of Violeta's verses written in decimas from two of her songs from her last record. I have opted for an open and free style of translation focusing on translating the intention, feeling and flow of the work rather than doing a word for word literal translation which I believe would miss much of the beauty and power of her words.

Curse to the High Heavens*
(In this song, Violeta added an 11th line foot to each decima)

I curse to the high heavens
And its star the way it shines,
I curse the bluish lines
Of creeks, brooks and rivers,
I curse from the deepest layers
The earth and all its surface
I curse the fire in the furnace
Because my soul is in mourning
Thus I curse all the ordering
of time in all its fairness.
How much pain must I endure?

I curse every standing mound
From the Andes to the shore,
I curse the long stretch, my lord
Of this endless tangled ground,
I also curse weak and sound,
The honest and the embellished,
I curse all things that flourish
Cause my desire is dead,
I curse truth in all its breadth
Along with lies and vague rubbish.
How much pain must I endure?

I curse the loving spring
And the gardens filled with flowers,
In autumn I curse the colors,
I curse them with all my sins,
And the clouds having their fling
I curse them with all my pain
Cause they curse me with their rain,
I curse winter from start to end,
And with summer’s lying games
I curse the saint and the profane.
How much pain must I endure?

I curse the moon and its display
With the windows and the bed,
I curse the dead for being dead,
And the living from king to page,
The birds and their bright parade,
I curse them with all my gloom,
Churches and schools too
Cause this pain fits like a glove,
I curse the syllable love
With all its garbage and doom.
How much pain must I endure?

Finally I curse the white,
The black along with the blue,
Bishops and Rabbis too,
Preachers and their wives,
I curse with screams and cries,
The imprisoned and the free,
The pedantic and the sweet,
My curse I put on them all
In English and Español,
Because of a love full of deceit.
How much pain must I endure?


Volver a los Diecisiete (Back to Seventeen)
(In this song Violeta added a chorus which is repeated between the decimas.)

To once again feel seventeen
After what seems like years of waiting
Is like deciphering hidden meanings
Without being wise enough to dream.
To once again suddenly feel
As frail as just one second,
To once again have the impression
That a child has in front of God,
That’s the way we feel our love
At this instant of fertile blossoms.

(chorus)
And it climbs and climbs, like on a wall the vine.
And it grows and grows, like on a rock the moss.

What feelings can do
Wisdom is not able,
Nor the clearest of directions,
Nor the widest thought.
It can all change on the spot
Like some condescending magician,
Sweetly distancing our position
Away from rancor and discontent.
Only love with its sixth sense
Can bring our innocence to fruition.

Wide the windows have flown open
As if by some unseen magic.
Love came in with its soft blanket
Just like a warm Sunday morn.
To the tune of its lively song
All the jasmine turned to bloom,
An angel fluttering through the room
It fills the air with golden rings
And our years into seventeen
Are turned on this April moon.

And here’s the only video I could find of Violeta herself singing. She sings in Spanish and is then interviewed in French with Spanish subtitles.


*I haven't translated all the verses of each of these two songs since some are just impossible translations. But you should be able to hear both songs as she sang them in this weekend's NAPcast.

That's Right Kid, Laugh It Up

Many miles away something crawls from the slime





Age 13, I was convinced that all the adults in my life were dull dummies who wouldn't open their ears to the good stuff and just needed a zit-faced kid to show them where it was. So I blasted Richard Pryor albums and the J. Geils Band from my room in the hopes that they would GET A CLUE. In return I received the seen-it-all expression that I now share with you, Dear Indie Kid.

It's not the music to which I roll my eyes (though at 38 the simple tunes don't hit me like they used to). It's the comedy that really gets my oh brother up.

Before falling completely into curmudgeonity, I should tell you that Zach Galifianakis makes me laugh. The other day I watched his Netflix Special. When he confused the Importance of Being Earnest as just another Ernest P. Worrell flick, I laughed. And when he asked "what is that thing Noam Chomsky said about eating pussy?" again I laughed.

The problem though with this young comic set, and Zach G. is no exception, is that they go for the easy targets. Sarah Silverman is funny but how old is her Jewish material? For his part, Zach G. has more one liners than Henny Youngman.

Replacing "blacked" with "African Americaned" in the line "I got so drunk last night I blacked out" is not funny and I don't mean in a pc way. Neither is using Triscuits, cracker and black in the same joke.

And can you get a safer target than Miss Congeniality 2?

Another thing...

Galifianakis is not good under pressure. In the Netflix Special, he constantly engages the audience which leaves him reaching for jokes. To his detriment he keeps going back to this guy up front just to pick on his easiest identifiable weakness, middle age.

I mean geeez.

...okay maybe I'm a bit sensitive.

Moving on...

When Galifianakis picks on a geeky young computer game developer, feigning ignorance of SIMS proves unbelievable and thankfully he quickly drops it. Later the only improvisational jokes he can muster up about his fat friend is that he is fat.

Zach G. may also have a personal problem with character-based comedy. He keeps saying, sarcastically I believe, that he is going to develop characters based around one liners - the effeminate gay basher, the timid pimp. The funny thing is, his most clever bit is the character he actually does develop, one Seth Galifianakis, his uptight effeminate twin brother. In the Seth scenes, Galifianakis' character immersion is as funny as anything Andy Kaufman did.

Um, let's see...



Oh yeah, I'm going to assume Galifianakis' "I get paid for doing this" joke was a nod to Steve Martin, unacknowledged though it was.

Chapter Too
The indie world has taken certain comics under its umbrella. As Justin pointed out, Will Oldham and David Berman (of Silver Jews) now share their wit to the shy young set. Here in Chicago, the Empty Bottle promotes "indie comedy" nights. Perhaps because he once played in an indie band, Fred Armisen is a sort of pioneer of this scene.

Zach G. is an indie comic. He's got the lumberjack look going. He's uptight about old people up front at his shows. His fan base is geeky SIMS developers. In his unchallenging Hee Haw send up, Horse Apples, he is even bed buddies with Will Oldham.

That's what he's got going against him.

Actually the beard kind of works.* Zach G. is funny looking and at age 23 he is a mere pup and a rising star with good timing if not so quick a wit.

The problem, kids, is...

Music and comedy, common bed buddies, rarely marry without divorce except in the unhealthy coupling of blue collar comedy and main stream country music.

Those two myopic genres are happy together and don't much rightly care if the Dukes of Decency are aginst 'em.

Indie Comedy, the new coupling, had a different kind of wedding, wrote their own vows, but are too young to realize it's still the same friggin' marriage.

For Zach G's sake, I hope he keeps his distance and attempts true indie-pendence.

(yuk yuk)

At the end of the Netflix Special, Galifianakis leaves San Fransisco's Purple Onion comedy club buddy buddy with the geeky developer. There is safety in numbers and it is a cruel world out there for sure, but good comedy eschews safety. Safety is not funny. I don't laugh at Foxworthy/Reba and this indie stuff is a stones throw away.

A good comic doesn't have to thrust his nuts at you like Sarah Silverman. By the same token, stand-up comedy, like AM radio and the blogosphere, already has too much pulpit and not enough wit.

What a good comic needs is to be a lone ranger.

That's why Steve Martin** had to leave his banjo.

^-- (Okay, I don't know what that was. I'm not gonna call it a joke that's for sure.)

I'm just saying, don't stay together for the children. The kids aren't alright. They're zit faced old people in the making who need to GET A CLUE.

Jokes

Euguen Mirman - Shapes for Sale
Jim Gaffigan - Midwest Thang
Demetri Martin - The Jokes with Guitar

P.S. If you don't like this review, well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse meeeeeeeee!
P.P.S. I know how to spell Zach Galifianakis

*Steve Martin had a beard when he was a kid too, but warning: it also puts Galifianakis in dangerous Robin Williams territory.

**Okay Martin is fairly mild as a comic especially these days but he stands on his own two feet. And if he accompanied himself on the piano like Zach G does I imagine he wouldn't have to stick to the black keys.

Oh Where, Oh Where Have You Gone, Billy Boy?

Ramon and I once met one of my heroes. Know that I don’t have too many heroes. Without heroes, nobody is going to let you down too far. I suppose I’d give you John Coltrane, the Buddha, and boom, you’ve pretty much arrived at the bottom of the list. But if pressed, I would have to go ahead and put Bill Hicks on there. Here’s another nugget of wisdom: I have a soft spot for stand-up comedy. It’s a love that has precious little payback. Most stand-up of the last twenty years has been abysmal to be perfectly honest. David Cross may be the best there is, and that’s a shame. I like David Cross, but he is a firm entrant in the comic/actor subset that seems to dominate contemporary stand-up. And he heads the pack of like-minded and marginally funny comics/actors. In this same semi-hipster pack are folks who always seem to leave me cold, folks like Brian Posehn, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswald, Zach Galafianakis, and others. I can’t imagine stand-up paying too well, so I understand the idea that acting is a way to split the difference between doing what you enjoy and sucking Satan’s pecker (classic Hicks line), but still, is this the future of stand-up? I hope not.

So anyway, anyone who grew up in the eighties, and watched as much TV as I did, will remember the spate of truly, truly shitty stand-up shows that were broadcast late on Saturday nights. I endured these shows for years, expressing my streak for masochism in a big fucking way, and the only thing I can honestly say I got from them was Bill Hicks. Sometimes patience is rewarded. He was just another featured performer one night. He did a bit about being the kid who threw a pencil into the eye of another kid in school. It wasn’t his best bit, but compared to the zombies that were sharing the stage that night, he was a revelation. He had the timing, the tone, and a physical presence that was simply absent from stand-up at the time (or since for that matter).

Eventually I got to see Bill Hicks perform live at the recently closed Laff Stop here in Houston. I have never laughed so hard in my life. It was like I finally found the block that filled a gaping hole in my mind. His material was offensive, edgy, intelligent, and totally fucking hilarious. I went back the next night with a friend, and from there was hooked.

One day, a few years later, Ramon called me up to tell me that he had contacted Hicks’ manager and had managed to arrange an interview with Hicks who was on his way through Houston. Being a KTRU DJ at the time, Ramon was able to make us sound like something more than the fanboy yokels we really were. As it turned out, Hicks was glad to be able to spend some time with people who weren’t the “butts in the seats” type of people he usually met on his eternal trip across America. He shared his story of spending the morning with Stevens and Pruett, the morning drive-time DJs that plied their sleazy trade on Houston radio in those days. He swore that day that his appearance on Rock 101 would be his last bullshit promotional stop ever. We didn’t know how true that was.

That we basically had no decent prepared questions seemed to be of no consequence, though Hicks constantly ribbed us with comments like, “so, when does the interview start,” hours into the interview itself.

We had no clue at the time, but Hicks was not only about to make his last drive-time appearance, he was also about to do his last show in his adopted hometown of Houston soon followed by his last shows ever. He had recently been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and he knew that this would be his final hurrah. So the man we sat with that day was a dying man, well aware of his fate. As sick as he had to have been feeling, he never let on. In fact, he was gregarious, polite, and extremely accommodating considering how idiotic we must have been.

It was at this interview that I learned of Hicks’ great love of music. I knew he was a fan; he opened all his shows with music. The first time I saw him, he came out to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. As the infamous riff played, he walked out, all in black, and played a lazy air guitar along with the tape. With one swipe across his neck the music stopped. He did the same thing another night with a Bob Dylan track, and both times the brief introduction was effective. During the interview, when I asked him what music he was into he told me that he was good friends with the guys from Tool and that he really dug their music. I knew them from their video that was getting a ton of MTV airplay at the time, but their vocalist was just too much for me. When he told us about Tool though, I figured I’d give them a chance. That chance didn’t come until years later when I was working at a non-profit. This lunatic friend of mine was a huge fan of Tool, and while I teased him mercilessly about his tastes in music (Tori Amos, Jellyfish, Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley), I also had to respect his passion. For that reason, and for the sake of Bill Hicks, I gave Tool a listen.

I have since gone back and forth about that band. For the most part I find them to be tedious and pompous in a bad way. I won’t lie, I have several of their albums, and I even still occasionally listen to them. The musicianship is generally rather high, and they can rock fairly hard when they aren’t going off on ten-minute wank-offs about daddy touching them in the wrong way and what have you. My biggest problem with them at the end of the day however is the apparent need they seem to feel for interminably boring bonus tracks and unbearably over-serious lyrics. That shit gets old real fast.

Enough of that, let’s get back to Bill Hicks.

Another thing that I learned upon meeting Hicks was that he was making a stab at mixing his own music in with the pre-recorded stand-up on his – at the time – forthcoming release. He had this idea, he told us, to change up the acrid, enraged ranting of his material with the more subdued and intimate sounds of his guitar playing. The problem was, his guitar playing was fairly awful. But again, his passion for his work overrides the fact that I don’t like the music he uses. I admire him for trying it even if it doesn’t work.

So the gist of this, I suppose, is that in the face of true passion, and true love of the things that are important to the people I love, I am often a sucker for getting wrapped up in their happiness. I have learned to love so many things because someone I care about feels so strongly about it.

And a funny thing about this is, that like love itself sometimes, these feelings can fade with time. I have a whole selection of Bjork CDs that I almost never listen to because I almost never talk to the guy who was so into her to begin with. Without his glowing praise, she is relegated back to the place I reserved for her before I met him. She falls back into her role as a talented oddity with a certain knack for inventive production, but ultimately someone who doesn’t do a whole lot for me, most of the time. Some of her stuff is really great; I just don’t think about it that often.

So, Ramon turned forty the other day. Congrats Ramon.

This is really not a milestone that is easy to absorb. And I should get ready because my day of reckoning is right around the corner. Next year the blade falls on my neck. So I find myself reflecting even more than I usually do on the way my life has wound over these four decades.

I was born into a working class family. My parents are college educated Midwesterners. My mother gave up her career in teaching to be a stay at home mom, a job that is very high on my list of most respected. My father worked for a machine tool company out of Cleveland, Ohio. His work brought our family over to Paris so he could work in their European headquarters and be closer to the rest of the world in which he would make a success of his professional life and a shambles of his family.

By the way, before I go any further. I’d like to just say that anyone thinking I was going to stray from what I do best, which is personal posts, ought not go past this point. It won’t get any less personal.

Okay, moving on.

I discovered very early that I was an extremely shy and sensitive kid. I noticed things others did not. I sensed sadness in people I never met simply by the way they carried themselves. This led to problems sometimes because crying for a total stranger is hard to explain. My family moved a lot as I was growing up. Being as shy as I was led to a certain unease about the way things were that I think has in no small way helped define my clear need for a general level of security. Meeting new kids every so often was always a total nightmare, and as I got older and learned the many ways in which people were bad to one another, things got even stickier.

By high school I was a kid who was dying for a way out. I hated being in Texas with every fiber of my being, and desperately wanted to get the fuck out of here. I learned about fighting, fear, rage, shame, and thankfully music.

And music was really the golden ticket. Through my love of music I have managed to weave a little blanket of security around myself that I will never remove. I have always been a dabbler in many things. Books, writing, art, sports, drugs, you name it, I’ve given it a shot at some point in my life. But music is the glue that has held it all together in a sense. There is a depth to appreciating music that I haven’t found in anything else save perhaps for film. But music is something more fundamental than film. It is part of our being. I live through my love of music.

In these almost forty years I have learned how to let go. I’ve had to. Most of what I have loved is gone in one way or another. Whether through attrition, death, dishonesty, or simple boredom, virtually all I have loved is lost, except music.

Dramatic? Sure it is.

As for my current family situation, my children are great to me, but my goal with them is to give them the tools to create their own life without having to need me. I want them to have the confidence that I can’t seem to hang on to for long, and to have the happiness that has eluded me in many ways. If they get the right tools, I have no doubt this will happen. With that, I will have done my job. But I don’t have the traditional all-encompassing myopic view of my children that we are suppose to all act like we have. Yes, they are my children and I will hold them above all other, but they are also individuals who need to function as such. I don’t want to ruin them by making the sort of mistakes clingy parents make in their efforts to shield their kids from harm. That level of protection is an impossible charge, and ultimately a destructive one.

I may not make it to forty. I may make it to eighty. Who knows? The way things are now, the transitional element of having a newborn and a four year old are monumental. There is no life in our home outside of the responsibilities this entails. But I know I will one day look back and miss these days, and the frustration and fears that I wade through today will fade just like the passions of my past, just like the memory of the faces that I swore to never forget, just like the shared love for music that meant so much to those who meant so much to me.

must find time to do laundry

This week is going to have to be brief because next week and the week after will be extra long. As you may already know, Doug, Justin, Conor and I along with my friends Kate & Kate will be headed to that festival we had mentioned in previous posts. I’ve been busy trying to appease my clients by finishing all of their work before leaving and that is why I’ve been relatively absent from the comments section. Something else called the ‘Napsquisite Corpse’ seems to have started up, and it sounds great, but I missed an email in there somewhere, so I’m not quite sure what is going on. Am looking forward to the results, though.

Now, if you would all be so kind as to help me out, I have a few dilemmas coming up which anyone out there in the ether can help me resolve by voting one way or another in the comments section. Since I do not operate like a true democracy, a persuasive argument will sway me more than sheer vote count.

1.) A.) The White Stripes or B.) Fujiya and Miyagi

2.) A.) Girls Against Boys + one of the later bands in either B or C; B.) Modest Mouse/Low/Built to Spill; or C.) Reinhard Voight/Tok Tok/Luke Slater

3.) A.) The Good, The Bad and The Queen or B.) Isis

4.) A.) The Buzzcocks or B.) Nathan Fake

These are all conflicts in the schedule for me, i.e. both A and B will be playing at the same time, so I can’t go see both bands. It’s one or the other. Of course, I’ll probably end up going wherever my friends want to go. Inevitably, we will get separated because someone will go buy beer and then the band will end and everyone will move. Or, someone will decide someone is crap and they want to go check out the other stage and then they won’t make it back. Or, the bathroom line will be 10 light years long. And, text messaging won’t work because the whole system will be clogged. So, I have to be prepared to make some decisions on my own.

Tonight, I’ve been talked into going to see the Jesus and Mary Chain. I started to tell my friend Scott “I’m not even sure I liked the Jesus and May Chain when they were popu….” He interrupted with an emphatic and lawyerly statement “But, it’s the Jesus and Mary Chain and they haven’t been together for twelve years.” Somehow I lost the debate about whether or not I had the option of staying home tonight. We’re also going to see Bebel Gilberto and Ben Watt this week. (Ben is half of Everything But the Girl, also did great Sunday evening club nights called Lazy Dog at the Notting Hill Arts Club in London which were a lot of fun). I need to do my laundry.

goodbye to all that

This is my last post from scenic Great Barrier Island, at least for the foreseeable future.

I suppose this means I should say something profound, but honestly, I'm at a loss for words this week. But perhaps I can say this.

On the eve of our departures, there is increased drinking at people's houses, and with it comes increased dancing, which I have participated in. But as you might expect when you get - well, more than three people in the room, anyway - what music is played to dance to is a heated point of debate. The other night I ran the music for a while, which was supplanted by the guy who wanted to play his favorite Cure songs that nobody else knew, which in turn was superseded by the guy who put on "I Wanna Dance With Somebody". This immediately filled the dance floor, at which I point I ceded any hope of controlling the party music. Water seeks its own level, et cetera.

But later in the evening, an ally of mine in the quest for good music* took back over, and so we had a bit of Pixies, New Order, Clash, and other stuff that I can't remember because I was really drunk but stuff I knew how to dance to. At some point, the iPod was passed to me, and I decided it was a really good time to hear the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen In Love?"

I got 45 seconds in, and someone else took over the iPod to cut my song short in favor of the Pussycat Dolls.

That was my cue to leave. (Which, being 3 AM and having to go to work the next morning, wasn't a completely bad idea anyway.)

Next week, I'll have my return party in Auckland. Hopefully, music I like will be played more frequently there.

NAPcast XIX

Click on the podcast link in the right margin of this blog to hear OLDER episodes of the NONALIGNMENT PACT podcasts. Click HERE to listen to this episode or go HERE to listen to old and new shows with the embedded player. If you need help, just ask.

Please submit guesses for Anaconda's mystery tune in the comments section of this post.

Clues may be provided if the song cannot be guessed.

Sorry for the delay. Please forgive the Huncke misspelling.

Want to kill some time?

The MC5 star in "Contract Law" - the most exciting film of the summer...not

MC5- A True testimonial, I've seen it twice and it is simply a great film. David C. Thomas (Director) and Laurel M. Legler (Producer) clearly had a love for the MC5 when they set out to make this film. It's a warts and all documentary of a great band 's rise and fall, the story of those who knew when to abandon ship and those who couldn't, the story of an era and a city, and a testament to the greatness of a subset of music we like to call Rock and Roll. All of this without the soap opera sentimentality of a "Behind the Music" episode. I really can't recommend this film strongly enough. The footage is spectacular (hell, even the Feds got some great footage), the surviving members are charming, honest, and sympathetic, and the story arc is just gripping.

So why, given it's brilliance, can't you rent it or buy it? Well, I wondered too so I asked on the Terrascura list. Jeff Penczak sent me a link to an exhaustively documented blog called Detroit Tango and here is a Detroit Woman on the Street response from Windy Weber of Windy and Carl and Stormy Records :

The film had a huge debut party here in Detroit, and promos were given out willy nilly, which meant there were lots floating around. Then Wayne Kramer stepped up and said "our agreement was that I would be in charge of the music, and you did not put me in charge, and you did not give me the credits (ie more money) you said I'd get and now I'm suing you". So the movie was halted after hundreds of promos were given out.

So the bootleg copies started floating around, and every store in Detroit sold them for awhile and we even had a screening for it here in the shop where a friend who works for Wayne State University brought 3 hours of riot footage to show. (very scary to see blocks and blocks of Detroit in flames - really helped us understand how the place is so deserted and worn out now).

In the midst of this, grimble grumble came to stay with us, and when we told them we'd played the film to a room full of people, they were shocked. their friends were the people who made the movie, and the movie makers had no idea at that point that thousands of boots had been made and sold already in Detroit, and it was pretty sad to see the results of Wayne Kramer being a buttbrain when in reality these people made the movie because they love the MC5 so much.

So this past few weeks some sort of legal decision was made, and it favored the movie makers and not Wayne Kramer, but a second lawsuit started in the midst of all this about who had rights to the band name and who had rights to use Rob Tyner's image and Rob Tyner's family wanted more money and sued Wayne Kramer and it all got out of control.

A friend of ours even was just given a bootleg copy while he visited AUSTRALIA, so obviously the thing has gone far and wide. A legit release at this point might make a fraction of it's original money potential because so many people already have it.

So there you go - dumb greed. What I don't get is that you'd think all band members would at least be happy to end the band's legacy on the celebratory note that is this film especially given the MC5, one of the great American Rock and Roll bands, went out playing a pathetic show to a relatively small crowd at a venue that once was synonymous with their greatness.

"...and I just looked at everyone's faces in the audience and it was like they all knew...they all knew I was a fraud and that i was a fuck up and that the whole thing had turned to shit. I could see it in their faces." ... Wayne Kramer on the final MC5 performance.

Clearly, nothing was learned from that last MC5 show. But, you know, fuck all this, because the thing is in the end music isn't about money or egos and shit like that. Once that crap gets in the way, it isn't music, it's business: white-collar suit-and-tie bullshit. I mean it bores me to read what I just wrote because in the end these legal battles have nothing to do with the music. So, instead just watch this clip below from youtube - amateur television hosts and a great MC5 performance far far away from any courtroom or boardroom.




BONUS Youtube : Ok this has nothing to do with the rest of the post aside from the fact that it is cool and besides Ms Rosa's birthday was this week.




Credits:
MC5 Stills - A True Testimonial (c) 2004 Future Now Films
YouTube Video -
MC5 from Detroit Tube Works which seems to have run sometime in the late 60s and into the early 70s.
13th Floor Elevators - Anyone know where this is from?

Self-Loathing Metal Review

I can't remember whether I dreamed it or not. A number of years ago I did sound for Will Oldham* at a club in Houston—that much was not a dream. The bit that I'm hazy about is that when it was time for soundcheck, nobody could find Mr. Oldham. After looking around for a while, somebody found him asleep underneath a desk. I remember seeing him emerge from underneath the desk in some fluorescently lighted room. Or do I? That whole “asleep under the desk” scene could be as much a part of my dreams as that night I found myself in cab with Mick Jagger as my driver**. I know that never happened because I've never met Mick Jagger and the odds are slim that he would ever drive a cab. On the other hand, it doesn't seem that unlikely that Will Oldham would disappear under a desk to sleep, so maybe that really happened and wasn't just a dream I had later and then conflated with actual events. At any rate, Oldham does seem to keep popping up like that.

I remember watching John Sayles' Matewan*** on video long after it came out and suddenly seeing somebody who I thought was a young Will Oldham. I stopped the movie, rewound, and replayed the scene. It was indeed a 17 year old Will Oldham, playing a somewhat damaged hillbilly. A hillbilly not unlike the one that he plays on his albums. Or maybe he's not playing a character. It's hard to say. Either he really is a weird hillbilly or he has made a career out of playing a character that was invented by John Sayles. My possible experience with the groggy man emerging from under a desk doesn't really help settle whether Oldham is, in fact, a hillbilly, but there are certainly other things which point in a different direction.

This week, while watching Junebug, Will Oldham popped up again. The appearance is so brief, that it would hardly be worth mentioning had I not also come across an album that came out last year (that I apparently missed) which features Will Oldham. This album is the unlikely pairing of Oldham with Tortoise. I mean, I guess it's unlikely. They are all Chicago hipsters, just ones with very different styles. While Oldham's music stays pretty close to the folky/country stuff, Tortoise's music—as much as it can be said that it tends toward anything—tends toward the funky. This album, The Brave and the Bold, is an album of covers. You've got your Elton John, your Springsteen, and your Milton Nascimento. That's right, Milton Nascimento. As in, Brazilian. As in, Will Oldham sings in Portuguese. And here's the really surprising part: it's good. In fact, the whole album is good.

Even though, it's an album of covers, it's not the sort of gimmicky cover album where the coverer does his best to ape the coveree. Will Oldham sounds nothing like Bruce Springsteen or Elton John or Devo, so it would be difficult for him to pull off an imitation (though I have no doubt that the Tortoise guys could play anything in any style). Instead, the songs are for the most part complete reinterpretations with the same lyrics and some of the same melodies. But it's nothing like a Will Oldham album, which have become blander on each successive album (and there are lots of them, so the blandening happens all the faster), the lowpoint being that misguided album of reinterpretations of his own songs, sung by Oldham but played by Nashville studio hotshots. So is Oldham going to go in another direction and finally retire the character that he's been playing since he was 17?

*I also can't remember what he was being billed as. It could have been Palace Brothers or Palace or Will Oldham, but it almost certainly pre-dated the Bonnie Prince Billy phase of Oldham's career.

**And just thinking about this dream, it sort of runs together with the ghostly cab driver played by David Johansen in the movie Scrooged.

***I've seen quite a few of his movies. Here is a list of the ones I have NOT seen: Sunshine State, Limbo, City of Hope, Eight Men Out, Baby It's You, and Liana. Anybody else seen those and want to make a recommendation?

Week 29: Transitions - Kill 'em All?

To Cliff Burton, RIP.

“Say goodbye to the world you live in, you're always taking, but now you're giving.”
Seek and Destroy, 1983

Metallica during the Cliff Burton years, c. 1983 (Lars Ulrich third from left)







“The ultimate in vanity, exploiting their supremacy, I can't believe the things you say, I can't believe the price you pay, nothing can save you.”
…And Justice for All, 1988

Lars Ulrich c. 1990













“It's not who you are it's who you know, others lives are the basis of your own. Burn your bridges build them back with wealth, judge not lest ye be judged yourself.”
Holier than Thou, 1991

“But my vibe is, this is the reality of where we're at now. And why pretend it's otherwise? For the last 10 years, our thing has been very pure, very clean, very straightforward. But there comes a point where you have to realize that you're taking it up the ass, and I don't like the feeling very much. Kill 'em all or not kill 'em all, this is what it feels like, and we have to see it through.”
Lars Ulrich, interview, 1995

“No, never stop this locomotion, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't bring it down 'cause I'm better than you.”
Better Than You, 1997

“We're paying more money paying our lawyers -- $500 an hour -- than we're losing on the Internet. If people think this is about greed, then they should think again.”
Lars Ulrich on Metallica's battle with Napster, interview, 2000

Lars Ulrich settles legal battle with Napster CEO, 2001








“I feel my world shake like an earthquake. It's hard to see clear. Is it me? Is it fear?”
St. Anger, 2003

Lars Ulrich at society party, 2005








An excerpt from the article that accompanied the above picture:
“Getty galaxy: No baby seals were saved. Nor wetlands restored. But it sure was one heck of a party when Ann and Gordon Getty hosted an elegant black-tie dinner for friends and family at their home to honor "Star Wars'' creator George Lucas, interior designer Ann's new Presidio neighbor. For this gang, who often and repeatedly dig deep into their own pockets to support numerous cultural and educational causes (the Gettys' grand manse is the site of numerous fundraisers), everyone agreed it was sort of nice to, well, have the night off.
But no sweatpants here. It was major midweek glam for Getty guests: gals gorgeous in gowns and gents dapper in tuxes. Lars Ulrich was relieved to meet Peter Getty, Ann and Gordon's firstborn: "I'm glad to see I'm not the only one without a tie," said the Metallica drummer, a rock god who can get away with such sartorial omissions and remain dashing. "I know," said Peter. "Ties are always too tight and constricting." "Wait a minute," teased Katie Lucas, the director's dynamic teen dynamo, who will graduate high school early and plans to attend USC film school in January. "If either of you have never worn heels, don't even talk to me about pain!"

“We are finishing up the last couple weeks of pre-production on the album and... really... seriously...(drumroll)... we're going to start recording on March 12th. We're pretty fuckin' psyched about it and pretty fuckin' psyched to be sharing this experience with Rick [Rubin].” From the Metallica website, March 2007 (Lars Ulrich, spokeperson)

Kill em All?

Over By the Loop

This group promotes the Chicago Loop as a mixed-use area. Each year they host an all-night event called Looptopia. The idea is based on White Night festivals elsewhere.

Here are three Looptopian things.

1. The Ponys - Their hairs are getting long, their pants fit a little tighter and their style is thickening too. The show was on Daley Plaza with the black iron Daley Center and the Chicago Picasso as backdrop. They delivered a solid unhurried set. The third album, Turn the Lights Out, released this year on Matador is their best yet.

songs off Turn the Lights Out:
Double Vision
Turn Out the Lights

2. The Red Moon Theater - Red Moon cooperates with the city to put on some truly amazing public shows. Like the year they performed in Chinatown's Ping Tom park along the sanitary canal and passed over by the CTA Red Line. The play incorporated train props as it passed overhead and a funeral parade on the canal culminating in a fire wall dropped from the 18th street bridge. Their Looptopia work included fire towers, which I didn't get to see, but I dug the Green Classroom outside Marshall Fields. The green props included stacks of books improbably balanced on ladders and shelves, with a guy playing a drone instrument and a jibberish-speaking teacher. Red Moon aesthetics have a dark absurd appeal like a Terry Gilliam film.

3. The highlight was Turkish clarinettist Selim Sesler who played the magnificent Preston Bradley hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. The line was long but the show rewarding enough that I may never be bothered suffering a line again. The domed and mosaic-ed Cultural Center, formerly the main branch of the Chicago Library System and most famous from the building hopping scenes in the Untouchables, was a fitting place for Turkish wedding music. Check out Selim Sesler kill the clarinet in this Turkish coffee house filmed by a weird German crew...

*Redmoon photo from Meryddian's Looptopia Collection on flckr.

The Sunn O))) and the Earth

I first found out about the band Earth while watching the Nick Bloomfield documentary Curt and Courtney about the death of Curt Cobain and the possible role his harpy of a wife played in his demise. Carlson was a friend of Cobain’s, and he also carries the dubious honor of being the guy who provided Curt with the gun Curt used to kill himself. To be fair, the gun was meant for Cobain’s protection, but seeing the interviews with Carlson in the film, I got the impression that this guy wasn’t too upset about the way things turned out. Of course, Carlson also looks like he was so loaded on heroin that anything resembling actual remorse seemed well outside of his capabilities.

After reading some reviews of Carlson’s band, I went out and bought the first Earth album I could find. They were described as a droning, ultra-heavy, guitar based outfit that dropped the conventions of songwriting for a more exploratory and experimental style. The album I got, Pentastar: in the Style of Demons, wasn’t exactly the monstrously heavy epic I was expecting, but it was an intriguingly appealing album nonetheless. Had I wanted to find the quintessential doom metal release, I would have been better off with Earth 2, widely regarded as their masterpiece.

During the initial phase of Earth’s life, little comes of their union with Sub pop records. They piss off almost everyone, go through about ten members, abuse various substances, and basically go into hiding. But eventually a small and slow growing number of people begin to take note of Earth, not the least of which, two guys who will go on to start a band that picks up the aesthetics of Earth 2 and expands them to their most brutal and punishing conclusion: Sunn O))). Greg Anderson (Goatsnake) and Stephen O’Malley (Khanate) share, among other things, a deep love for Earth. They decide to form a band that operates as a sort of tribute and a revival of the epic drones of Earth at their heaviest. They choose the name Sunn O))) after the amplifiers which are so brilliantly huge in tone, and as a reference to Earth (sun and earth, get it?).

My first Sunn O))) album is titled Flight of the Behemoth and goddamn, it is huge. A couple of the tracks are mixed by the Japanese master of noise terror, Merzbow. With no tracks under about six minutes and the average song length at just about ten minutes, you can bet that FOTB is not an easy listen. But if you give this album its due, it rewards in spades. The super distorted droning chords ring out and pulse through your brain until you are in a virtual trance for the duration of the album. Though little of the comfortable signposts of catchy music reside in FOTB, there is enveloping warmth that oozes from every ugly pore of this album. I highly recommend it for the more adventurous and patient listeners.

Sunn O)))’s latest release, titled Altar, a collaboration between them and the equally amazing Japanese doom band Boris, is an entirely different animal. While the immense, dirge-like drones are present, the strength of this album lies in the diversity of the sounds contained within. Joining Sunn O))) and Boris are