May 23, 2007
Horse or Ballet?
Alright, moving on…
Listening to some old mix tapes in the car lately, I’ve been reminded of the existence of a band called Sammy. (Not to be confused, as Amazon did, with Sammy Hagar or Sammy Davis Jr.) The band Sammy were a couple of smartass eggheads who back in 1996 made an album called Tales of Great Neck Glory. A fantastic album that never found an audience, and thus today can be had for a penny plus shipping.
Much like, say, Elastica, Sammy never invented anything; instead they distilled a long list of influences with such skill and aplomb that they transcended mere imitation. The odd tunings, deadpan vocals, and hyperclever lyrics point to a strong affinity for Pavement, but at other times Sammy calls to mind Sonic Youth, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Brian Eno, the Cars, Wire…in truth, just about every touchstone in the history of cerebral rock music. And they sound damn tidy doing so.
Without further ado, here’s Sammy asking the musical question “Horse or Ballet?”
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April 16, 2007
Fire Fire Fire
I have written previously about both Captain Beefheart and That Petrol Emotion. But have I written about the intersection thereof? I think not.
To remedy that situation, I offer you a song called “Hot Head,” lifted — like the Sonic Youth song I posted a while back — from the out-of-print Beefheart tribute album Fast’n’Bulbous. This is a cover of a song originally found on Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s 1980 album Doc at the Radar Station (also home to the song with the best title, maybe, ever: “Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on My Knee”).
Few bands have the wherewithal to successfully re-create the Captain’s strategically warped rhythms; the Petrols not only pull it off, they also interpolate part of the Ohio Players’ “Fire” just for the hell of it. If this song doesn’t have you pounding both fists on the table and shouting “Fire fire fire!” like Beavis on Pixie Stix, it’s time to check your meds.
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March 22, 2007
Fiction Tales, pt. 1
So why am I posting a song you’ve never heard, called “Second Still,” by a band you’ve never heard of called Modern Eon?
Good question, and the answer is sort of roundabout, so bear with me if you will. The Easy Star All-Stars recently released a full-length reggae version of Radiohead’s OK Computer as the follow-up to their fantastic Dub Side of the Moon. I found this interesting because I’ve long considered OK Computer the Dark Side of the Moon of the 90s. This led me to wonder, what was the Dark Side of the 80s? I couldn’t think of anything that was commercially successful in the 80s that had that kind of ambition. The best answer I could come up with was Fiction Tales (1981) by the aforementioned Modern Eon, from which this song is taken.
In stark contrast to the actual Dark Side, which spent about 97 years on the Billboard charts, Fiction Tales really could not be more obscure. I’ve seen exactly one copy of it in my life, and that belonged to my freshman year hallmate G. Babb (where have you gone, G. Babb?). But musically, the comparison is apt, I think. Like Dark Side or OK Computer, Fiction Tales is a vaguely structured concept album with a dark, majestic sweep to it. “Second Still,” which is the opening track, boasts a trippy Floydian intro, wicked reverb guitar, top-notch drumming, and provocatively cryptic lyrics. If you dig that sort of thing, you may enjoy it.
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March 16, 2007
A squalid affair with a thing
It’s been tougher finding time to write lately, and I can’t help but feel that the cosmic balance of things is being thrown off somehow. Meanwhile, I have this stockpile of obscure/out-of-print/unavailable music I’ve been wanting to post, so I guess this is the time.
We’ll start with a short one: “Thing,” by the Jazz Butcher and his Conspiracy, clocking in at an economical 1:02. I’m transcribing the lyrics here as well, not because they’re hard to understand, but just because I like them so much.
Thing (c. Pat Fish, 1986)
I have an affair, a love affair with a thing
I have an affair, a squalid affair with a thing
Well the preacher tell me, son
To love an object is a sin
See now I call that thing J. Edgar, though it don’t run no FBI
And I call that thing J. Edgar, though it don’t run no FBI
That’s the end of this song
And I don’t know why
Goodbye
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October 24, 2005
High voltage man kisses night
It’s the exception rather than the rule for a cover to be better than the original, especially when the original is a Captain Beefheart song. But take a listen to this:
The song is called “Electricity,” and the problem with the Captain’s version is not so much the performance as the sound quality, which was poor even for its day. So the song was just laying there for twenty years or so waiting for Sonic Youth to come along and run a million volts through it, which they did on the now out-of-print Beefheart tribute album Fast’n’Bulbous. The result is transplendant, or superious, or some other Don King-style adjective.
Oh, by the way, play it loud.
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August 17, 2005
Electricity Wants to Go Home
I can’t say too much about Dr. Thompson’s work over the last 15 years, because I stopped buying his books after shelling out $21.95 for Songs of the Doomed — which was awfully pricy for a book back in 1990, especially when you’re fresh out of college. I was not too happy to get home and discover that it consisted mostly of retreads from Hell’s Angels and The Great Shark Hunt, Examiner columns that hadn’t made it into Generation of Swine, and unpublished fiction that would have been better left unpublished. It seemed likely that the Doctor was going through one of his drunker phases, and his editors had thrown the book together from whatever they had at hand.
But even there, the real thing, the genius, would pop up once in a while. As in the short piece called “Electricity,” which you can hear here in the Doctor’s own voice:
Although given how much the Doctor mumbles, you’re probably going to want a transcript.
Electricity
By Hunter S. Thompson
They laughed at Thomas Edison.
It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods…lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about electricity.
Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is rampant and even children are losing their will to live.
The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end looking like they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals trapped in bags.
People get very conscious of electricity when it goes sideways and starts to act erratic…eerie blackouts, hissing, and strange shocks from the toilet bowl, terrifying power surges that make light bulbs explode and fry computer circuits that are not even plugged in…The air crackles around your head and you take a jolt every time you touch yourself. Your lawyer burns all the hair off his body when he picks up the cordless phone to dial 911.
Nobody can handle electricity run amok. It is too powerful…Ben Franklin was never able to lock a door again after the day lightning came down his kite string and fused that key to his thumb. They called it a great discovery and they called him a great scientist; but, in fact, he bawled like a baby for the rest of his life every time he smelled rain in the air.
I find myself jerking instinctively into the classic self-defense stance of a professional wire wizard every time I hear rain on the roof. That is an atavistic tic that I picked up many years ago in my all-night advanced intelligence electronics class at Scott AFB, on the outskirts of east St. Louis — where I also learned about pawnshops, oscillators, and full-bore lying as a natural way of life.
The stance was the first thing we learned, and we learned it again every day for a long, crazy year. It is as basic to working with serious electricity as holding your breath is to working underwater….
Lock one hand behind your back before you touch anything full of dissatisfied voltage — even a failed light bulb — because you will almost certainly die soon if you don’t.
Electricity is neutral. It doesn’t want to kill you, but it will if you give it a chance. Electricity wants to go home, and to find a quick way to get there — and it will.
Electricity is always homesick. It is lonely. But it is also lazy. It is like a hillbilly with a shotgun and a jug of whiskey gone mad for revenge on some enemy — a fatal attraction, for sure - but he won’t go much out of his way to chase the bugger down if ambush looks a lot easier.
Why prowl around and make a spectacle of yourself when you can lay in wait under some darkened bridge and swill whiskey like a troll full of hate until your victim appears — drunk and careless and right on schedule — so close that you almost feel embarrassed about pulling the trigger.
That is how electricity likes to work. It has no feelings except loneliness, laziness, and a hatred of anything that acts like resistance…like a wharf rat with its back to the wall — it won’t fight unless it has to, but then it will fight to the death.
Electricity is the same way: it will kill anything that gets in its way once it thinks it sees a way to get home quick….
Zaaappp!
Right straight up your finger and through your heart and your chest cavity and down the other side.
Anything that gives it an escape route. Anything — iron, wire, water, flesh, ganglia — that will take it where it must go, with the efficiency of gravity or the imperative of salmon swimming upriver…. And it wants the shortest route — which is not around a corner and through a muscle mass in the middle of your back, but it will go that way if it has to.
Some people had to have their loose hand strapped behind them in a hammerlock with rubber cords, just to keep their hearts from exploding and their neck nerves from being fried like long blond hairs in a meat fire when the voltage went through. But sooner or later they learned. We all did, one way or another.
One night — perhaps out of boredom or some restless angst about the fate of Caryl Chessman or maybe Christine Keeler — I connected a 50,000-volt RF transformer to one end of the thin aluminum strap on the Formica workbench that ran around three sides of the big classroom; and then I grounded the strap to a deep-set screw in a wall socket.
Severe shocks resulted when the generator jumped its limiter and began cranking out massive jolts and surges of RF voltage. A 50,000-volt shock ran through my stomach, just below my navel, burning a long, thin hole that I can still pull a string of dental floss through on wet nights.
It was horrible, and still is, but it was also a massive breakthrough; and I will never forget the warped joy I felt when the first surge of electricity went through them. They squawked at each other and flapped their arms like chickens….
My own pain was nothing compared to the elation of knowing that I had just made an unspeakably powerful new friend — an invisble weapon that could turn warriors and wizards into newts, and cause them to weep.
Washington, DC, 1989
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August 6, 2005
The Rev. Hell Gets Confused
Amazingly enough, it took me this long to get one of those dealies that lets you record analog media on your computer. The turntable isn't working, so I am starting with the cassettes.
The first thing I digitized is a spoken-word bit by Richard Hell called "The Rev. Hell Gets Confused." This was on one of those Giorno Poetry Systems records and I used to play it on my radio show at KZSC in Santa Cruz, way back in...well, er, you know...back then.
The record belonged to the radio station and I've never seen another copy anywhere, nor has it ever appeared in digital form before so far as I'm aware. More to the point, it is freaking hilarious, so go ahead and click on the word "Play" below to hear it.
PARENTAL ADVISORY: Contains many naughty words.
PLAY.
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July 1, 2005
Damn you, Hippie Johnny!
Finally located a copy of the Modern Lovers' debut album. Call me cynical, call me churlish, call me cold-blooded, but I've always preferred the younger Jonathan Richman, when he was still kind of angry, to his later good-natured-retard phase.
Case in point: Here's a song that's not actually on the album but was recorded at the same time and is a bonus track on some imports. It's called "I'm Straight," referring not to Jonathan's sexual orientation but to his state of mind. He is trying to convince the object of his affections to choose him because he's not high all the time like his rival, Hippie Johnny.
It's a great song, but you can be pretty sure that Hippie Johnny gets the girl.
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June 28, 2005
They were a tragically underrated band
Their name was That Petrol Emotion and they recorded five albums between 1986 and 1994. They played two-guitar rock music, vaguely political, always of the highest quality, precise and passionate at the same time. For some reason they never really caught on. Today you can get their albums for next to nothing; Amazon lists used copies of End of the Millennium Psychosis Blues starting at $1.79, Chemicrazy at $1.98, and Fireproof at one cent. These are their later albums, not as critically beloved as their first two, but still really excellent stuff.
For your listening pleasure, here's a song from the B-side of one of their singles that you can't get on CD (big ups to Bob at Cheese of the World for the digitizing facilities). It's a lovely slow number called "Chrome."
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June 6, 2005
Palmer and the Dream of Wires
Like most people who came of age in the 80s, I always thought of Robert Palmer as a) the lead singer of Power Station and b) the guy who fronted that band of robotic models in the "Addicted to Love" video.
Turns out Palmer had a whole other career before that, a pretty interesting one. On his 1974 debut, Sneakin' Sally through the Alley, he worked with members of Little Feat and the Meters to produce a slick, coked-up version of New Orleans funk. The results are, em, simply irresistable--especially the title track, an Allen Toussaint song originally recorded by Lee Dorsey.
I recently managed to score a copy of Palmer's out-of-print 1980 album Clues. It's a weird mix of styles, new wavey but with a bit of a Caribbean lilt. Especially odd is Palmer's version of Gary Numan's "I Dream of Wires," with backing provided by Numan himself and Tubeway Army bassist Paul Gardiner. It answers the musical question, "What if Gary Numan had been a soul singer?"
So if you ever wondered, click here.
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June 3, 2005
Lions Are Growing
When Brother Cecil sent this out as the Richard Brautigan Poem of the Day recently, I was reminded of a recorded version that I'd heard back in my wasted youth. Thanks to the magic Internets, I was able to track it down almost instantly. It is from an out-of-print "demonstration" disc called The Digital Domain and is credited to one Charles Shere. It is now presented here for your edification:
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