The Philter

After observing the federally mandated waiting period, I am finally ready to name my album of the year for 2009.

There’s not a lot if suspense here, at least in my mind. All along I thought the Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love would be pretty hard to top, but I had to hear a few other things (Devendra Banhart’s latest, e.g.) before I could be sure. Now, with February safely in the rear view and springtime in the offing, it’s time to make it official.
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David and Marc, older, richer, and more coked-up

This month’s book club selection is Bowie: A Biography by Marc Spitz. (Is he any relation to Bob Spitz, author of the gigantic Beatles book it took me the better part of a year to get through? I am mildly curious, but not enough to actually do any research.) My favorite factoid so far: In the years while David was still David Jones, his friend Marc Feld, later known as Bolan, briefly toyed with the name “Bowland.” It would have been Bowland and Bowie, and then maybe Iggy Stooge would have changed his name to “Bowery” and they would have formed a trio.

I also loved this anecdote about the first time they met:

It’s now hard to believe but the meeting of these two rock icons was as humble as it could have possibly been. Les Conn, managing both Bolan and Jones, had promised both future icons some much-needed spending money to whitewash his office.

“Both Marc and I were out of work,” Bowie would later recall, “and we met when we poured into the manager’s office to whitewash the walls. So there’s me and this mod whitewashing the office and he goes, ‘Where’s you get those shoes, man?’ And I asked, ‘Where’d you get your shirt?’ We immediately started talking about clothes and sewing machines. ‘Oh, I’m gonna be a singer and I’m gonna be so big you’re not gonna believe it, man.’ ‘Oh right. Well I’ll probably write a musical for you one day then ’cause I’m gonna be the greatest writer ever.’ ‘No no, man, you gotta hear my stuff ’cause I write great things and I knew a wizard in Paris!’ It was all this. Just whitewashing walls in our manager’s office.”

This is the kind of image that amuses me no end, two young, skinny, overdressed aspiring rock stars doing manual labor and talking shit. To quote another famous Bowie associate, “Those were different times.”

The Metal Machine Music 8-track, which Lester Bangs used to play in his car.

I’ve been rereading Lester Bangs’ classic Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and as a result thinking a lot about Lou Reed, Lester’s idol and nemesis. Odd that all these years later Lester’s long gone while Lou improbably remains alive, or at least not certifiably dead, and still an enigma wrapped in a paradox: the misanthrope’s misanthrope, also author of such transcendently beautiful and human songs as “Candy Says,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

He is also the creator of the infamous Metal Machine Music, which is the subject of not one but two pieces in Psychotic Reactions. The first, “How to Succeed in Torture without Really Trying,” describes MMM this way:¹

What we have here is a one-hour two-record set of nothing, absolutely nothing but screaming feedback noise recorded at various frequencies, played back against various other noise layers, split down the middle into two totally separate channels of utterly inhuman shrieks and hisses, and sold to an audience that was, to put it as mildly as possible, unprepared for it. Because sentient humans simply find it impossible not to vacate any room where it is playing. With certain isolated exceptions: mutants, mental patients, shriek freaks, masochists, sadists, amphetamine addicts, hate buffs, drug-numbed weirdos too walled off by chemicals to feel anything, other people whose nervous systems are already so bent out of shape that it sounds perfectly acceptable, the last category possibly including the author of this article.

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Rock is basically an adolescent music, reflecting the rhythms, concerns and aspirations of a very specialized age group. It can’t grow up — when it does, it turns into something else which may be just as valid but is still very different from the original. Personally I believe that real rock’n'roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

–Lester Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun,” 1970

And what can I add to that? Absolutely spot on.

There seems to be a bit of kerfluffle going about the fact that music may have been used as an instrument of torture at Guantanamo Bay and other American detention camps. According to the Washington Post,

A high-profile coalition of artists — including the members of Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Roots — demanded last week that the government release the names of all the songs that, since 2002, were blasted at prisoners for hours, even days, on end, to try to coerce cooperation or as a method of punishment.

Certainly one can understand why an artist would not want their work either classified as torture or used for that purpose, although James Hetfield of Metallica seems to take it as a perverse sort of compliment: “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?”

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Highlight of the week, the month, possibly the year: a whirlwind trip to LA to catch a rare appearance by the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy. This was the third time I’ve seen the Butcher, who is mostly calling himself Pat Fish these days, but the first time I’ve seen him together with the great Max Eider, who it turns out is a quite indispensable part of the equation. An extra special bonus was the presence of Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus/Love and Rockets fame on drums.

Everyone is aging rather gracefully. Mr. Fish himself resembles an graying movie star, somewhat faded but effortlessly charming. Max was mysterious and somewhat oddly mannered behind his shades, but still with golden fingers and a highly underrated voice. Kevin did a real job of work on the skins, pounding out the beat to classics like “Roadrunner” and “Caroline Wheeler’s Birthday Present.”

It would have been hard to ask for much more, except maybe that everyone would have shut up when the band played “Drink,” my all-time favorite. I’ll never understand why people insist on talking over music they’ve paid money to hear. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a gun in my hand, or I’d be blogging from prison right now, and I wouldn’t have gotten to hear “Southern Mark Smith,” “Zombie Love,” or “Who Loves You Now.” And that would have been too bad.

Big ups to Cecil Vortex, without whose participation this escapade wouldn’t have been possible. He is a prince among men.

Amy Winehouse, before all the trouble started.

Today is the 26th birthday of the aptly named Amy Winehouse. This seems worth mentioning because there’s no guarantee she’s going to have a 27th, hell-bent as she is on self-destructing at an early age like her foremother Janis Joplin. This would secure her eternal street cred but would be a tremendous waste of talent. Amy not only possesses a freakish singing voice that had her sounding like the second coming of Dinah Washington at age 20 (despite the handicap of her Britishness), she can write songs, too. She is listed as the sole composer of stellar tunes like “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good.”

I recently bought Amy’s debut album, Frank, and was amazed to discover that she was actually pretty cute before she got heavily into drugs, tattoos, and excessive eye makeup. Truly, it’s a shame on many levels. Maybe it’s not too late. She could still pull out of it and end up living to a ripe old age, right? Right?

I was at the Red Cross today, feeling a little lightheaded as the blood ran out of my right arm, when I read the following passage in Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June:

HAROLD: America’s days of greatness are over. It has drunk the blue soup.

PENELOPE: Blue soup?

HAROLD: An Indian narcotic we were forced to drink. It put us in a haze — a honey-colored haze which was lavender around the edge. We laughed, we sang, we snoozed. When a bird called, we answered back. Every living thing was our brother or sister, we thought. Looseleaf stepped on a cockroach six inches long, and we cried. We had a funeral that went on for five days — for the cockroach. I sang “Oh Promise Me.” Can you imagine? Where the hell did I ever learn the words to “Oh Promise Me”? Looseleaf delivered a lecture on maintenance procedures for the hydraulic system of a B-36. All the time we were drinking more blue soup, more blue soup! Never stopped drinking blue soup. Blue soup all the time. We’d go out after food in that honey-colored haze, and everything that was edible had a penumbra of lavender.

PENELOPE: Sounds quite beautiful.

HAROLD: [Angered] Beautiful, you say? It wasn’t life, it wasn’t death, it wasn’t anything! Beautiful? Seven years gone — like that, like that! Seven years of silliness and random dreams! Seven years of nothingness, when there could have been so much!

And because one corner of my brain is devoted to the Beatles 24-7 these days, I thought immediately of Mr. Lennon:

Everybody seems to think I’m lazy
I don’t mind, I think they’re crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find, there’s no need

Please don’t spoil my day
I’m miles away
And after all
I’m only sleeping

Yes, yes, the eternal question…drink the blue soup or face reality head-on. Lennon was a blue soup guy; Vonnegut’s character Harold Ryan is not, though it must be noted that he is more or less the villain of the piece. It’s a question most of us face every day, save those courageous few who have sworn off the stuff for good. The blue soup, mind you, isn’t necessarily a substance; it could be a comforting delusion or an unquestioned ideology. To see with clarity and deal with the consequences, this is no easy thing. In the future, I’d like to do more of it; at the moment, however, dreamland beckons.

Today’s treat is a music mix I’m calling “Mind Bender,” which is what you’ll hear John Lennon say in the sample from the Beatles Anthology at the beginning. The playlist is after the jump, but here’s a hint: every other song is by the Beatles.

PLAY

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Posting stuff off YouTube is the lazy blogger’s way out, I know. But lazy is my natural state, and anyway, it’s Labor Day—it would be against the spirit of the day to try too hard.

In the course of my research I came across this mashup-tastic version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which combines the Beatles’ original with William Shatner’s cover, which is of course the definitive version. The results can only be described as essential. Thank you, “indastrol,” whoever you are.

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