Schleck and Contador by Monet

Today’s writing is dedicated to George Clinton, the Benjamin Franklin of funk, who turns 70 today. For those of you keeping score at home, that means he was born exactly 15 days after Ringo Starr in July 1940. Ringo and George (Clinton) share one essential quality, which is that it’s hard to think of them without feeling just a little bit happier. “With a Little Help from My Friends,” The Mothership Connection, “It Don’t Come Easy,” Maggot Brain…we’re glad these things exist, aren’t we? And its nice to know their creators are still walking the Earth. Love on ya, boys.

And what does this have to do with the Tour de France? Well, you’re reading about them in the same place, aren’t you? So they must have something to do with each other.

Stage 17 was the big showdown on the Col du Tourmalet, and it was a cold, rainy, foggy day. The images on the TV were dreamlike and impressionistic, with the raindrops on the camera lens giving everything a sort of Monet quality. And then, out of the fog, there are two figures, one in white and one in yellow: Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador, having left everyone else behind and shooting to the top of the mountain.

Schleck rode valiantly the whole way, but he couldn’t shed Contador, who has the legs of steel. They embraced at the finish line, and everything seemed warm and fuzzy, but my stomach was full of anger. It was all pretty anticlimactic. Nice to see Schleck take the stage win, but Contador remains 8 seconds ahead overall, and unless Schleck pulls off a miraculous attack on the flats in Stage 18 or an equally miraculous performance in the Stage 19 time trial, that’s all she wrote. Of course you never know…I guess Contador could have a major mechanical issue in the TT that costs him a minute or two; that would be poetic justice.

In the meantime, it’s late it’s late it’s late, and I’m not sure that anyone’s actually reading these things. So ta-ta for now, whoever you are.

Well, no time for an in-depth consideration of the Buttholes today; when I finally build my museum they will have their own wing, though you will have to sign a waiver before entering. Instead, this video for “The Shame of Life.” I absolutely love this song, though it is clearly an attempt to follow up on their fluke trip-hop hit “Pepper.” Like their fellow-travelers Ween, the Buttholes always win the tug of war with whatever genre they dabble in, always emerge unscathed from whatever depth to which they sink; as the Trouser Press Record Guide put it, “they just like it down there.”

Dev2.0: The house band in my own personal hell.

I was recently alerted by my friends at Dangerous Minds that Devo is preparing to release a new album, Something for Everyone. This worries me.

For several years in the early 80s, Devo was not just my favorite band, but pretty much the only thing I listened to. For a smart, strange, and somewhat alienated kid, theirs was the right message at the right time: they and I and those like us were not weirdos but superior mutants, and the future belonged to us.

In some respects this has turned out to be true; certainly Devo’s vision of an increasingly technology-centric, fragmented, and surreal world was spot-on accurate, though knowing it was coming didn’t necessarily help us prepare for it, and may even have been something of a burden.

Unfortunately their other central trope, the idea that human evolution had reached its apex and was now tumbling down the other side of the hill, was absolutely correct as well. This has not helped anyone, least of all Devo themselves, who for the last 25 years seem to have gone out of their way to embarrass all of us who liked them by making increasingly bad music and not just selling out in every way known to man, but actually inventing some new ones. To give a few examples:

• Playing corporate parties where they are treated as just another 80s novelty, a bunch of fat old guys in yellow jumpsuits and energy domes. For the record, I have nothing against fat old guys making a buck; but this is Devo, and they used to mean something, and it depresses me.
• Not just selling “Whip It” to Proctor & Gamble for a “Swiffer” commercial, but actually recording a new version of the song specifically for the ad.
• Licensing their music and image to Disney, who created Dev2.0, a band of kids who perform dumbed-down versions of Devo songs marketed to the iCarly set.

That last one is bizarre enough to almost make you wonder. I’ve always wanted to believe that all this is actually a grand experiment in subversion through infiltration, not just a sad money grab by a group of aging rockers with mortgages to pay. But over the years it’s gotten harder and harder to think so. The clincher came last year, when Devo did a concert tour where they played two shows in every city, one a performance of the Q: Are We Not Men album, the other a performance of Freedom of Choice. This sounded appealing until I realized that Are We Not Men clocks in at 34:24, and Freedom at 32:14, meaning that there was absolutely no reason to do two separate shows other than to extract more cash money from the punters.

For the new album, Devo are using focus groups and other modern marketing techniques to tailor their music to the desires of their audience. Again, this almost seems like a nifty idea, but I have grave doubts about the results. An honest-to-”Bob” comeback by the visionaries we used to call the Spud Boys would be most welcome, but I am not holding my breath.

For what it’s worth, Devo will be revealing the 12 songs chosen for the album by Interweb voting on Club Devo today, May 18, at noon Pacific. Click through at your own risk.

So anyway, without further ado:

This new addition makes today as appropriate a time as any for me to update my Bands I’ve Seen List. The way Cecil does this, with the names of the bands along the left side of his blog and thus easily updatable, is probably smarter. This way I’m going to have to post a new list every year or two for the rest of my damn life. Well, I guess things could be worse.

I’ve been debating whether or not to include last night’s opening act, who started strong but went on too long and finally vanished in a cloud of mediocrity. Generally I include opening acts when they’re someone I want to claim and leave them off otherwise. Some years back, for instance, there was a Morphine show that was led off by a band called the Dirty Three, who my friends and I agreed was one of the worst acts we’d ever seen. They went on to have a fairly distinguished career, and every time I read some critical plaudit, I got confused. Had we been that wrong? Had the D3 improved that much? Well, never mind; they still don’t make the list.

AC/DShe (x2)
Ade, King Sunny
Air
Amadou & Mariam
Ash, Daniel
Bauhaus
Beck (x3)
Belly
Beta Band
Beulah (x2)
Blackalicious (x2)
Black, Frank (x-many)
Blind Boys of Alabama
Bowie, David (x3)
Breeders
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Built to Spill
Burnett, T-Bone
Butthole Surfers (x3?)
Buzzcocks
Camper Van Beethoven (x?)
Cave, Nick
Chao, Manu & the Radio Bemba Sound System
Chilton, Alex
Clinton, George & the P-Funk All Stars
Costello, Elvis
Cracker (x3)
Cramps
Cure
Darondo
David, Anthony
Del the Funkyhomosapien
Depeche Mode
Devo (x2)
Dimmer
Doe, John (x2)
Dr. John (x3)
Eskimo
Fall
Flaming Lips
fIREHOSE
Foetus
Funky Meters (x?)
Gabriel, Peter
Galactic
Grateful Dead
Guy, Buddy
Harvey, PJ
Hold Steady
Hooker, John Lee
Hooters
Jane’s Addiction
Jazz Butcher (x2)
Jesus & Mary Chain (x3)
King, B.B.
Kool Keith (x2)
Kraftwerk
Latryx
Levy, Barrington
Lords of the New Church
Los Lobos (x3)
Love and Rockets (x4)
Loved Ones
Low Pop Suicide
Lyrics Born
Malkmus, Stephen
Meat Puppets
Monks of Doom
Morphine
Murphy, Peter
Musselwhite, Charlie
Naked, Buck & the Bare Bottom Boys
Negativland
Oranger
Overwhelming Colorfast
Ozomatli
Pavement (x4)
Pere Ubu (x2)
Perry, Lee
Pixies (x5)
Presidents of the USA
Rev. Horton Heat
Richman, Jonathan
Roots
Semisonic
Shriekback (x2)
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars (2008)
Sippy Cups (x3)
Sisters of Mercy
Sly & Robbie/Taxi Gang
Soft Boys
Sonic Youth
Spencer, Jon Blues Explosion (x2?)
Spiritualized
Starlight Mints
Sugar
Television
They Might Be Giants
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
Thin White Rope
Throwing Muses (x2)
Tin Machine
Tortoise
Uncalled Four
Voice Farm (x?)
Waits, Tom
Wire
Wolfgang Press
Wu-Tang Clan
Young Fresh Fellows
Ze, Tom

I love the fact that there are still these huge untapped veins of great music out there. For instance, until relatively recently I never listened to the strange and wonderful German band Can. They are a truly unique group, arty/experimental/difficult on the one hand, but with a strong rhythmic underpinning and a fondness for reggae, dub, and even funk. (Yes, Germans can be funky—see also “Kraftwerk.” People forget that funk requires precision: Everything must be exactly on the beat, or it is not funky. There were no accidents, for instance, in James Brown’s music; James understood exactly where every note belonged, and if someone made a mistake, he knew it.)

Can’s music is truly experimental, i.e. not especially well edited, so you have to wade through the failed experiments to get to the good stuff. An additional complicating factor is the vocals. Can’s first “singer” was Malcolm Mooney, about as atonal a vocalist as you’re likely to find fronting a major rock band. Mooney sometimes sounds like an inebriated street person intoning chants the meaning of which are known only to himself; and yet for all that, his singing is not without a strange charm, and he delivers an utterly flabbergasting performance on the psycho-loungy “She Brings the Rain.” According to Can scholar (and former Cramps/Bad Seeds drummer) Jim Sclavunos,

[Mooney's] unhinged performances may have been part of the attraction for concertgoers, but they were definitely not an affectation: Mooney really was on the brink. The crisis point came during a Can show when Mr. Mooney began repeating the phrase “Upstairs, downstairs” obsessively and non-stop for about three hours before finally collapsing. Not long thereafter, Mooney’s psychiatrist convinced him to return to the United States.

Mooney was replaced by Kenji “Damo” Suzuki, who was only slightly more musical and had a similar penchant for enigmatic, repetitious lyrics. Although he was only in the band for a few years before leaving to marry a Jehovah’s Witness, Suzuki remains a legend to this day, and has served as an inspiration to a whole generation of less-than-classically-gifted vocalists (such as the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, who wrote a song called “I Am Damo Suzuki”). One is hard-pressed to explain Suzuki’s appeal exactly, or Can’s for that matter; this may be a case where writing about music really is like dancing about architecture. So why not have a listen to this Can sampler?

1. Spoon (1972) (vocals: Damo Suzuki)
2. I’m So Green (1972) (vocals: Damo Suzuki)
3. Aspectacle (1979) (vocals: Michael Karoli)
4. Moonshake (1973) (vocals: Damo Suzuki)
5. Babylonian Pearl (1976) (vocals: Irmin Schmidt)
6. Laugh Till You Cry, Live Till You Die (1976) (vocals: Michael Karoli)
7. She Brings the Rain (1970) (vocals: Malcolm Mooney)
8. Last Night Sleep (1993) (vocals: Malcolm Mooney)
9. Sodom (1979) (instrumental)
10. Sing Swan Song (1972) (vocals: Damo Suzuki)

As you’ll notice, after Suzuki’s departure the vocals were handled by remaining band members, and these are less idiosyncratic, though never exactly conventional. Mooney returned to make Rite Time in 1989 and also appears on “Last Night Sleep,” recorded for the Until the End of the World soundtrack in the early 90s. Damo Suzuki, meanwhile, has returned to music as the leader of Damo Suzuki’s Network, a loose association of musicians who convene on an ad hoc basis at a time and place of Damo’s choosing. If I am interpreting his web site correctly, shows are planned throughout Europe and Japan for the rest of this year; if you find yourself in any of those places, please check it out and report back to me.

Interesting random Can fact: They inspired the names of at least four rock bands that I know of (The Mooney Suzuki, Spoon, Hunters and Collectors, and Moonshake). Interestingly enough, none of them really sounds that much like Can, with Hunters and Collectors probably being the closest.

Interesting random Can fact #2: “Sing Swan Song” was used by Kanye West as the template for his song “Drunk and Hot Girls.” Listen here.

A couple of rock birthdays today: Iggy Pop turns 63 (!) and Robert Smith of the Cure, 51.

The continued existence of the man born James Osterberg as a living, breathing organism on planet Earth—along with those of his contemporaries Lou Reed and Keith Richards—must be considered something of a miracle. Consider this passage from Marc Spitz’s Bowie describing Iggy’s state in 1976:

Iggy Pop resurfaced again once the White Light tour rolled back into Los Angeles. Since being dropped from MainMan, Iggy had sunk even further. He was arrested for shoplifting, sleeping in a garage, and trying to write songs with James Williamson but mostly in a drug haze.

“Iggy was in such bad odor with the rest of L.A. that most of the dealers refused to let him into their apartments,” Nick Kent writes in his classic anthology The Dark Stuff. “He’d made such a mess of his life during the two years he’d been based in L.A. that everyone had him written off as nothing more than a washed up loser….”

When he began to vomit fluid of unrecognizable origin and indescribable color, and with the police threatening to prosecute him for vagrancy, he finally committed himself to the Neuropsyciatric Institute in L.A.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of self-destructive Iggy stories, and yet not only did he survive the 70s, in 2008 he inspired the following passage from Dan Kennedy’s Rock On:

The unplugged so-called alternative metal songs have stopped being played, and the opening band has retreated, maybe even a little earlier than planned, making me think they’re probably decent men on some level. After about twenty minutes, the house lights go down, the stage goes dark, some static and clamor as a guitar is plugged in by a shadowy figure, static for a second, a little feedback, and then the first huge chords ring out and…

JEEEEZUS!

The stage lights are up full blast and Iggy Pop hits the stage like he’s not going to stop running until he’s at the back of the auditorium, grabs the mic, and splits off across the stage to the side. A shirtless blur, a tornado of living, screaming, chiseled muscle-and-sinew proof that all of what they told you about growing up or aging is bullshit.

Mike Watt, from the Minutemen and fIREHOSE, is playing bass and looks as amazed as anyone in the crowd. His eyes are absolutely glued to Iggy, and Iggy is everywhere at once. he flies like a computer-animated god-beast deity in an unhinged and hijacked Lucas film. You suddenly realize every punk band you thought was blowing your mind back when you were sixteen was simply a cute little messenger delivering a wadded note to you from this man, wherever he might have been that night.

It goes on like that for awhile, and is worth checking out in its entirety; I just wanted to be sure to work in the Mike Watt reference. Anyway, Iggy, Jimmy, whatever you want to call him, is clearly made of some different material than the rest of us. He may outlive us all. When the aliens drop that special bomb keyed to human DNA patterns to wipe us out so they can take over the planet unopposed, they may find Iggy may standing in the wreckage wondering what the hell happened to everybody.

Bob Smith, meanwhile, is a comparatively young 51, which seems hard to believe since the Cure have been around forever. He had barely turned 20 when the Cure’s debut, Three Imaginary Boys, was released in 1979. The deluxe reissue of TIB released in 2004 contains a song of the same vintage called “I Want to Be Old,’ which goes as follows:

I want to be old
And creek by the fire
I want to smell of rotting wood
It’s all I desire
I want my joints to seize up
I want my legs to ache
I want my eyesight to fail
I want my skin to flake
To be old
I want to be old
I want false teeth
And not be able to chew
I want to be senile
A centigenarian fool
I want lots of wrinkles
Want my hearing to go
I want to be ignored
And I want to be slow
To be old
I want to be old

One wonders how he feels about that, now that he’s getting up there. One song that does not appear on this reissue in “Killing an Arab,” the 1978 single that inspired the title of the Cure’s first greatest hits album, “Standing on a Beach.” Due to some controversy over its title, “Killing an Arab” has been Trotskyishly erased from the Cure’s catalog, and no longer appears on any in-print Cure album; this despite the fact that it is a fairly unmistakable homage to Albert Camus’ existential classic The Stranger, and does not endorse the killing of anyone. I happen to be in possession of the original issue of the Boys Don’t Cry CD, and I invite you to listen here and judge for yourself.

Spooky.

Knox of Pixels at an Exhibition fame (an excellent site devoted to iPhone photography—check it out sometime) recently pointed me to the blog Dangerous Minds, which in turn pointed me to a couple of recent news items involving the Beatles.

One concerned Ringo’s response to the Vatican’s recent decision that the Beatles were OK after all:

The Vatican offered its latest peace offering to The Beatles in its recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper, on Monday.

“It’s true they took drugs, lived life to excess because of their success, even said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” the newspaper said.

But, “what would pop music have been like without The Beatles?” it reasoned, describing the band’s music as “beautiful.”

I guess this is what the Old Man meant when he said “At least the Catholic Church tries to come to terms with the modern world.” But if you ask me it’s too little, too late, and seems pretty half-hearted at that (is the Catholic Church the Mark McGwire of major world religions?). If the Beatles “put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” what in the Jesus, Mary & Joseph is the Vatican doing kissing up to them? Ringo agrees with me:

“Didn’t the Vatican say we were satanic?” Starr said during an interview with CNN. “And they still forgive us?”

“I think [the Vatican] has more to talk about than The Beatles,” he added, alluding to the child sex abuse scandal that continues to plague the church.

Which brings us right back to where we were three days ago. You have to go back a little further to find the post where I wrote about John Lennon’s personal supply of Owsley acid, which was smuggled into England inside film canisters. The other shoe has now dropped on that story, according to the Sun, via the Daily Telegraph, via Dangerous Minds, via Knox:

John Lennon experts are taking a, er, trip down memory lane with their latest finding.

Hardcore fans of the Beatles legend reckon they have uncovered where in the grounds of his Surrey home he hid his stash of LSD more than 40 years ago.

Builders digging up the lawn of his old house, Kenwood, came across the remains of a leather holdall containing several large broken glass bottles. Legend has it that John buried a large quantity of the drug in his garden in 1967 when The Beatles declared they had given up drugs in favour of transcendental meditation.

But when the band returned from India, John decided he’d been a bit hasty and tried to dig it up – but never found it.

Now fans are convinced these bottles contained the missing treasure – though they will never know for sure as the one bottle found intact had a cracked cork, so it was empty.

Too bad about that, I’m sure John would have loved to have turned us on one last time from beyond the grave.