The Driftwood Singers Present

Just Let Go of Your Mind

2009-12-01T22:42:00.001-05:00

The first step is admitting you have a problem. There's also a step involving the realization that you don't have control. I just reached the step where I find some scrap of music on my iPod and I don't know where it came from (I have this feeling that Lefty may have dropped it on me, or maybe even posted it here already) or who it is, and I have to accept that it's the abiding mystery -- and the vaporous otherworldly shapes that form between my ears when I put this music on: the assertive tambourine, the lush-and-lumpy horns, the billowing backwards shit, the funky drummer business put to the service of soulful sap-rising psychedelic soft pop -- that keeps blowing sparks off the dusty coals.

This is music made by a Canadian teenager in the late '60s. The record was re-issued in 2001.

"Fly" - J.K. & Co.

"Christine" - J.K. & Co.

This Is Not Only A Test

2009-11-13T12:24:00.009-05:00

Today I am reminded of the famous Herman Melville quote: "To produce a mighty blog, you must choose a mighty theme." Done and done. I didn't get on the bus until it was down the road a ways, but I'm enjoying the ride. Thanks, boys.

Part One

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, let's get down to brass

tacks. Every so often I like to perform a test on myself (no, not that kind, silly!). It's quite simple: I listen to the Billy Joel song "Uptown Girl", and try to register my reactions in a brutally honest fashion. I did this a year or so ago--well, I should say that I attempted to, but I just couldn't bear it for more than, I dunno, 45 seconds or so. Last night I tried again, and lo and behold, I was able to listen to it all the way through. Granted, I periodically burst out laughing every few bars, but the fact remains that I listened to the whole song. You may be wondering (and well you should): Why would someone do such a thing? And what does it all mean? Well, I've been wondering that myself. I admit that I've crossed many a line in the last few years: the Huey Lewis line, the REO Speedwagon line, the Foreigner line. (You get the picture). And when you realize that you no longer have any shame (or at least possess very little), naturally your thoughts turn to Billy Joel. "But wait!" I can hear you saying. "This is madness! Is there no limit? Is there not a line that shall never be crossed?!?" Okay, whoa--calm down... I believe there is, or at least I hope so. I do this in the spirit of fearless research into the deepest recesses of human consciousness. Future generations will benefit, I assure you. [An aside: I just reread Lefty's post on BJ (still can't get over that ankle watch), and recommend his take on the issue]. Okay, I admit that I also listened to "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)", without many feelings of revulsion. It made me realize something: The only Billy Joel album that ever crossed the threshold of the family home (if memory serves) was one that one of my older sisters borrowed from a friend, and I'm pretty sure I heard that song being played a few times when I was a wee lad. (I've been blessed--and I use that term unironically--with four older siblings who all had positive influences on the formation of my musical tastes). So I'm thinking there must by some sort of subconscious--oops, not anymore!--deep-rooted Billy Joel aversion dating back years, simply because none of my siblings ever bought one of his albums. Quite the revelation, I know. So where does this leave me, or any of us? It's hard to say. I still don't really understand why I now enjoy listening to certain songs that I used to sneer at when I was a high schooler. Maybe it's just the fact that the shame/cool factor has slowly whithered away. Some might say I'm the better for it. I'm not sure. Anyway, go ahead and do the "Uptown Girl" test--it's fun, and the results are always interesting! (And hey, "Movin' Out" isn't so bad, really...) (Uh-oh...)... (I almost forgot--check this clip out--it still cracks me up every time...)

Uptown Girl--Billy Joel

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)--Billy Joel

Part Two

We decided to take a different route, and ended up driving through a small town called Graniteville. We passed some old factories that looked like they had been dormant for a while, and rows of small, tidy houses that were probably built for the no-longer-working factory workers. We crossed a canal and some railroad tracks, and saw a few nice old houses. We found out later that there had been a terrible accident there a few years ago, something involving railroad cars and chlorine. That didn't stop us from driving back through a few days later, though. After a few miles we happened upon an old junk store. It was really a classic, straight out of central casting. Old black guy sitting in a chair on the side, staring. A ton of mostly useless stuff. I asked the lady who ran the place if there were any records, and she pointed me in the right direction. Like a junkie desperate for another fix, I started pawing though the musty, dusty stacks of vinyl, and soon that old familiar feeling started to set in. It's sort of like nausea, or maybe nausea is just one component of the over-all feeling. You could say it's existential, I suppose. (But who would want to?) It's partly due to the physical sensations--the dimness, the dust. But there's also that feeling of pointlessness, and the thought "Am I really that much of a loser?" never fails to creep into the brain. Sometimes, there's really nothing, not even a funny album cover, and that's pretty depressing. But then sometimes, like this time, you find a record like the Raspberries' first one, and all those thoughts of loserdom vanish. I had known about the Raspberries for a while, Eric Carmen, etc., but I never listened to them before. More importantly, I never knew that this album had a scratch 'n sniff sticker on the front. You heard me right. How cool is that? Yes, I scratched, and I sniffed, and there it was--I could still smell the scent of raspberries (or at least, manufactured raspberry aroma). Sometimes the album jacket is more interesting than the music inside. It reminds me of the Hargus "Pig" Robbins album I found one time--it's got Braille on it. Him being a blind pianist and all.

Go All The Way--The Raspberries

I also found this Ambrosia album, which I hadn't even realized I wanted. I love the lame high-school-art-class-psychedelia cover.

It was 1975, but they didn't care! Perhaps psychedelic art never goes out of style, for some people. Apparently these guys all played on an Alan Parsons record. So there you go. The one hit is "Holdin' On To Yesterday", which I believe is the perfect tune for this here blog. For isn't that what we're all doing? Holding on to the music of yesterday, in a vain attempt to [fill in the blank]?

(Come to think of it, I can't believe that no-one's ever written about the Raspberries or Ambrosia on this blog. Strange). Besides those two albums, I also found a Hall & Oates record--the one with "Kiss On My List" and "You Make My Dreams" (a must-have, in other words); The Best of Freddy Fender (which features a picture of him with a huge fake cactus between his legs); and something called Les Baxter's Jungle Jazz. The beat goes on.

Holdin' On To Yesterday--Ambrosia

Recover the Life that was Once Your Own

2009-11-01T08:04:00.003-05:00

Solitude and isolation have their place. But -- in honor of four years of digital musico-kaffee/(bean/bourbon/weed)-klatching -- here's to solidarity, computer-aided communistics, brother/sisterhood, shared strife, shared joy. Altogether now.

This first one comes from the ultra-rare 1968 debut single by singer Kathy McCord. It's the first track on the fine compilation Women Blue: 16 Lost US Femvox Classic, released in August on the Past and Present label. McCord sings with overflowing emotional quaver, shivering vibrato and bluesy phrasing. The tune is "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and "You Are Always on My Mind" locked in an estrogen death match. There are murky sonic sub-basements of slightly out-of-tune backing, weird spectral guitar lines, rusty scaffolding seen through a distant crepuscular heat haze. There's a flickering soul-spook at the foundation. "My eyes see so much clearer when my head is upside down." (McCords 1969 full-length solo on CTI is pictured here.)

Off the same anthology is the enigmatic Emily, singing "Song of Decision." She's a little like the female version of Arthur, one of the first Emily is Emily Bindiger, who got her start in the Greenwich Village folk scene and then went on to play and record in France, backed by a band called Dynastic Crisis. She later sang with Leonard Cohen and Neil Sedaka. As the tune says, "Someone has written a song of decision, its contents are still left unknown. You can recover, uncover, discover, the life that once was your own."

"I Will Never Be Along Again" - Kathy McCord

"Song of Decision" - Emily

TIME OUT OF MIND

2009-10-31T14:28:00.010-04:00

Here's a Driftwood statistic worth noting: this site's authors have made five children since we began four years ago on Nov. 1, 2005, at 8:45 p.m.

A lot has happened, but perennial themes tell a story: controlled spoilage, the curdling of tastes, aesthetic relativity, the world-weary shrug one eventually adopts in the face of overwhelming evidence that things probably aren't going to get much better than they are right now. You'd think we would have quit by now.

But always, eventually, somewhere in the hidden folds of the crow's feet of a leathery gaze into the sunburst desertscape of our spiritual condition, we find reasons for joy and hope. In records, albums, songs, melodies, beats, lyrics, riffs, barbaric yawps, fay whispers, harmonic convergences, thunderous licks, melted time signatures, all manner of stoned philosophy, rough mixes, ripples of phaser and dollops of wah-wah, sonic wizardry of pretty much every stripe and stipple. If there's a sparkle in the groove, we'll fish it out. We're as moved by an epic failed attempt as by the soulful note perfectly struck.

As people, we grow ever more barnacled and bloated, what with jobs and kids and mortgages (gulp), untethered from a long-lost center that didn't hold and was never destined to hold. We need stronger liquor now, it's true. A revelation: people our age, Gen-X, have realized we're finally just a subset of the Baby Boomers, our cultural circuit-board built to believe we were extending the 20th Century narrative on some inevitable arc to somewhere (over the rainbow?), never suspecting we'd just end up digitizing the whole human drama and folding it all into an archival box for a flattened, airless age. End of History and all that. We're still a bit stunned that it turned out this way, aren't we? I think that's what The Driftwood Singers has always been about: for us, old LPs and quasi-salvageable bygone pop isn't just the flotsam and jetsam of a faded generation, it's a flotation device to keep us from going under the waves. We collect them like scrap metal for some kind of floating junkyard paradise where we can hang out and talk shit, drink bourbon and eat beans around a fire when the rest has turned to Waterworld. Inside a grain of sand, a universe: here's ours. A little reefer in a hand-rolled cigarette, settle in for the gauzy journey to the stereo, the blue-green glow, the first shocking notes, the quivering vocal, the tremolo guitar trembling between the speakers like a shimmering sun, the enveloping rapture of a musical moment.

It'll do in a pinch. Here's to four more years ...

Divine Daze of Deathless Delight - Donovan

Yellow Sun - Donovan

Modern Love

2009-10-28T22:37:00.008-04:00

1.) It's hard to believe, but the rate of retro exploitation has sped up so fast that it's now acceptable to cop Pavement records, as if new listeners were too young to actually pick up on it. This either signifies that I am officially ancient or history is folding in on itself so fast that 2012 will indeed herald the end of the world. Never had I imagined a day when my own generation's music would become source material for boutique replicators. Then I heard this band Cymbals Eat Guitars, which sounds so much like Pavement I'm almost convinced Stephen Malkmus invented these guys in his basement in some kind of a cloning experiment gone haywire. I sound like I'm complaining, but it's actually pretty amazing!

Tunguska - Cymbals Eat Guitars

2.) Lefty is presently loving two albums: the new Flaming Lips, Embryonic, which is so heavy with deep-dish psychedelia it's basically an ode to the impending legalization of pot in California; and the new Clientele album, Bonfires on the Heath. These records are great for entirely different reasons, the first for undermining all expectations, the Clientele for continuing to sound exactly like they always have, like the Byrds, the Zombies and the Left Banke were poured in a vat of green cough syrup, which you drank before falling asleep in a park in suburban England. It's perfect.

Silver Trembling Hands - Flaming Lips

Wonder Who We Are - The Clientele

3.) Mr. Poncho pointed me to the music of Ernie Graham, which seems to merge Bobby "Santa Claus" Dylan with Bobby "I live in a trailer on the Bayou" Charles. More acurately, it sounds like Ernie rolled up the year 1971 in a Zig Zag and smoked it.

So Lonely - Ernie Graham

4.) I'm not sure if I'll be the first to observe this, but Julian Casablanca may be the first of Gen-Y's retro-refurbishers to mine Eddie Money. Watch his much ballyhooed appearance on the Tonight Show and then compare:

(Can't really touch Eddie though, right? Casablanca needs a touch more Rodney Dangerfield to pull it off; JC's drummer is working some outer borough retard magic though.)

5.) Somebody dropped this track on me a few months ago and it keeps coming up in my shuffle. It's getting under my skin, slowly.

Modern Love - The Last Town Chorus

Ain't No Velvet Glove

2009-10-23T21:50:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned, my brother dropped by the other week. He had his external hard drive. There was a lot of data dumpage going on. I retrieved some tidbits from the memory banks. I'm still excavating and unpacking. This was one of those tracks that I remembered from a mixed tape. It got played over and over. Etched in. Intaglio of the air. Wax print on the brain folds. Sonic seepage. There was so much transpiring in so little real time. Southern-fried tabla. Synth squiggles, muskrat sounds, circuit-board didgeridoo. Cornmeal drone. And the lyrics: "milquetoasted love." I could never sign on fully for the heavy-lidded beach music vibe of Little Feat, and Lowell George's Zappa connection always seemed like as much of an indictment as a point of pride. Bonnie Raitt's rec means more to me. This is one of those songs that point to all kinds of frightful possibilities.

"Kiss It Off" - Little Feat

Take Your Pick

2009-10-20T23:53:00.002-04:00

You Better Run--Pat Benatar

You Better Run--Dorothy Love Coates & the Original Gospel Harmonettes

You Better Run--Iggy & the Stooges

All Bets Are Off

2009-10-16T21:01:00.000-04:00

I Give Up, Why Can't They?

2009-10-10T14:42:00.002-04:00

I had one of those mystical communions with this song, years ago. In a piny subdivision, watching a video documentary about the band. Maybe having smoked some weed. Probably. The tuneful summing up. The strange uplifting hopelessness.
DJ Bonebreak was one of the great drummers. Muscular and crisp and driving, without ever being showy or too spastic.
Shocking how much John Doe and Exene sound like Grace Slick and Marty Balin. Billy Zoom was like a robot god inhabiting a punk greaser.
Shocking, too, how much this sounds like a lost track from the cast recording of Hair.
The title always seemed like the best, most sound punk rock advice you could ever get. The So-Cal name-checking is so "positive scene."
X was exploring the punk/hippie symbiosis/continuum long before it was sanctioned. They were like some deformed Platonic ideal of a band.
Did you know Exene was married to Viggo Mortensen?
Weird.

My brother stopped in last night. Down from Quebec. He got out the external hard drive and did a major excavation/plundering from my music files. I did the same. Found this, and many other nostalgic nuggets.

"I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" - X

Dap This

2009-10-02T08:37:00.003-04:00

Last night my dear wife and I went to see Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. I happened to stumble upon this cd a while back, and we both liked it a lot. Then she was on Austin City Limits, and pretty much tore it up live. So it was a must-see situation. (Plus it was free! And it was on our anniversary!) Charles Walker and the Dynamites opened (I guess it was an and the kind of evening). Mr. Walker is a veteran soul artist who's been recording since the '60s, and he's having a late-career resurgence backed by a bunch of young Nashville musicians. He's pretty amazing. Sharon Jones was great too--she's probably only, what, five feet two, but she has this incredible energy, and her band is tight and funky as hell. At one point in her show she has to take her shoes off so she can really, truly get down--I mean, she just goes off in this paroxysm of stomping, shaking soul dancing. It's a sight to behold. The (mostly white) crowd was way into it. (One could probably write a dissertation about old-school funk & soul bands and the makeup of their audiences, but I won't go into that here). I'll just say it was a great night of music here in Music City. Sharon Jones is a force of nature, my friends. You should see her live if you ever get the chance.

100 Days, 100 Nights--Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Answer Me--Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Visions of Bacharach

2009-09-21T23:44:00.024-04:00

The thing about loneliness is that everybody is lonely differently, in their own way. Which is either, a) why it's called loneliness to begin with, or b) doubly lonely, when you think about it, or c) both. It's like when a song comes on the radio and you're suddenly filled with the sweetest reverie for a bygone moment and the person you're with says, "I hate this song."

By now I've accepted that I'm alone in certain things. And one of those is my continuing fascination with the instrumental albums of Burt Bacharach. I just found a copy of Make It Easy on Yourself from 1969. Upon first listen, a lot of people, Dewey Dell included, immediately reject what they're hearing. The 1960s "period" sound strikes people first and usually blots out any further consideration. That's fair. It sounds like muzak or something your parents once heard in a hotel lobby in Vegas.

But bear with me.

What begins to happen when I listen for a while, with imagination, even meditation, is that I can start to feel like I'm walking in a museum of pop gestures, a melodic Pop Art exhibit with huge canvases of glockenspiel and trumpet and tremolo surf guitar. That probably sounds like an "ironic" experience, Warhol lite. And occasionally it is. But sometimes a revelation can happen when a mellow horn line or a leisurely piano melody suddenly bonds with a personal association, like an image seen in a musical Rorschach: a green vacuum cleaner being run over an orange carpet by a brunette in curlers in a cool, sunless room, white curtains, a Hawaii Five-O re-run in the background; the brightly-lit popcorn maker at Sears; a sea-green counter at a Woolworth's diner on a winter afternoon; the silhouette of a man in a long burgundy Buick driving at dusk across a flat landscape in warm 35 millimeter. I'm reminded of the photographs of Stephen Shore, the Warhol acolyte, who drove around America in the 1960s and 70s taking pictures of hotel rooms and empty parking lots (see above, Room 110, Holiday Inn, Brainerd, MI, July 11, 1973).

When you let this music sit like a still life, without received judgment, the inspired images can have an oddly emotional tincture, the distillation of some faded American loneliness, like a recovered memory belonging to someone else, but no less sad for that. And maybe sadder. The real irony of this music is not in its cliches, but in the embedded human sympathy that's somehow revealed in these faceless orchestral vistas. I start to imagine Burt Bacharach as the loneliest man who ever lived while making these songs. Because nothing in the music is about him, personally. He's utterly solitary with a full studio orchestra, painting these lush and gleaming landscapes. And we can see ourselves in them, lost in time.

She's Gone Away - Burt Bacharach

The Guy's In Love With You - Burt Bacharach (Listen for Bacharach humming along to the melody)

Pacific Coast Highway - Burt Bacharach

Scottish Georgics

2009-09-20T21:18:00.003-04:00

These days, my life, my anxieties, my hopes, my whole scene, could be summed up, or put in place, or undermined by its own essence, with any number of vaguely agricultural get-up-and-go aphorisms. The early bird gets the worm. You reap what you sow. The sun also rises. Make hay while the sun shines. Ecclesiastes. Etc. It's either birds, worms, seeds, sun or hay. Throw in a little "Muck is the mother of the mealbag" and you've got it covered. Shit be elemental.

But talk of shit and talk of sun and talk of hay always makes me think back to the characters I spent time with on farms. Ernst Larson, Buck, Kenny. Dudes who whose proximity to the life force seemed to place them farther from actual civilization. Hoisting grease guns, getting augers and hoppers and silos all lined up. Birthing calves. Weening. Putting up fence. Standing in fucking frigid and fetid water with rats scurrying around, trying to hack into a frozen pile of silage. More than anything, bailing hay. It was hellish. Infernal. All itchy and rashy on your arms, shirt soaked with sweat. Blowing beats of sweat off your nose. Bailing twine tearing through your fingers. These guys seemed powered by some kind of mute masochistic energy. They'd work until their hands, lungs, muscles, backs, brains and skin were just shot. Then they'd get up and do it again. They wanted to see you pass out from heat stroke so they could laugh at your college-boy ass.

I remember Kenny sneering and offering what to him was the harshest put-town he could make of the wealthy wanna-be farm-boy son of the wealthy businessman owner of the farm. "The sun's not his blood," he said.

There's a lot to be learned from putting up hay, aside from the lessons of the punishing labor required. You really do have to act when conditions are right. It's a shit load of work at a time when everyone else is vacationing, but you're stacking away loads of stored-up energy. You've got to cut it, you got to let it dry, rake it, bail it. It's like the feeling of stacking cord wood while the weather is still hot in September. You're so in touch with the seasons and the cycles that you practically want to just stop speaking altogether. The sun is your blood.

We've been big fans of Gerry Rafferty here. I'm not sure if the sun was his blood. But there was definitely something other than blood in there. That might be why he wound up at a London hospital being treated for liver problems last year. And then the story of his escape to Tuscany showed that the Scottish singer had a lot of sense. Maybe he'd stored up some energy years before and was getting the last laugh, living off his labors from earlier days.

This tune, "Jose," is off of Stealers Wheel's greatest hits. I love the fact that these guys were produced by Lieber and Stoller, doesn't make any sense, but I love it. This tune is in fact written by Joe Egan, the other half of the band. I'm officially on the lookout for Egan's 1979 solo debut, Back on the Road, if anyone spies any moldy vinyl by that name.

"Jose" is great for a number of reasons. It starts out with about three red herring instrumental blues-zombie parts, none of which actually make sense as lead-ins to the actual tune. And the song is really about how it's time to turn the hay. There's some hard-learned Scottish focus in there. Your life is a mess, but you got to get up and get to it.

"Jose" - Stealers Wheel

Say Uncle, Part Two: Here's Johnny!

2009-09-19T18:33:00.003-04:00

A while back I wrote this post about Uncle Bill, an old family friend (my parents just visited him and his wife in Germany, and they had a great time). On a recent visit to NYC and VT, I found this record (I still have some in my old apartment in the city, where my brother and his wife reside) and it made me think of another uncle--Uncle Johnny, my mom's younger brother. He was an erstwhile folk-singer back in the '60s and '70s--the kind that scoffed at Neil Young's success with "Heart of Gold". More of an amateur ethno-musicologist, I guess. He'd come up to visit us in his orange VW bus (which eventually caught fire somehow and burned up) and at some point he would haul out his hammered dulcimer--the big guns. He played guitar too, and wrote some pretty clever songs--there was one which gently lampooned the back-to-the-land types:

Marvin tills the soil, he's livin' naked out on the land

He only eats what he can grow, they call him Organo-Man

The strangest thing about Marvin is, I'll never understand

I saw him out just the other day with an ice-cream in his hand

There was a time when Uncle Johnny was breeding Siamese cats, and he brought a couple with him. One of them got so freaked out that it ran up in the rafters of our still-unfinished house and refused to come down. So, we ended up with a pet Siamese cat by default. In short, a real character: Tall, with long black curly hair, glasses and eyes that always seemed to be bugging out of his head. But a really good-hearted person. He would always send us records at Christmas, and they were invariably by people we had never heard of--obscure folkies, primarily. That's how we got the Joe Hickerson disc. I'm not sure how it ended up at my brother's apartment. (He gave us a couple of records by a guy named Ed Lipton, who did children's songs--"Fly, Hippopotamus, Fly" and "Jump, Elephant, Jump" are two song titles that spring to mind. I don't think he ever experienced Raffi-type success).

My brother and I were always inclined to make fun of the music on the records Uncle Johnny sent us (then again, we were inclined to make fun of just about anything), but I eventually grew to like some of Joe Hickerson's stuff. It probably requires growing up and becoming interested in music of the old, weird America. Hickerson's delivery is a bit stilted--he really sounds like the folk scholar that he is--but there's something sort of charming about that. Anyway, the songs don't suffer too much from it. I like Rolling of the Stones in particular. It has a really haunting melody and lyrics that leave you scratching your head (I'm pretty sure it's a Child ballad). Shingling the Rum-Seller's Roof is funny--it's both an anti-alcohol tune and a good drinking song, and it's a metaphor I want to start using more often. The record came out in 1976, on the Folkways label (appropriately enough).

Drive Dull Care Away--Joe Hickerson

Shingling the Rum-Seller's Roof--Joe Hickerson

Rolling of the Stones--Joe Hickerson

American Apparel

2009-09-08T23:44:00.007-04:00

California Fleece Track Jacket - Price: $45

Barry Sunglass, Vintage Eyeware - Price: $55

Dixieland Delight - Alabama: Priceless.

(Mark Herndon, drums, 1983)

The Dream Lives On

2009-08-29T11:43:00.003-04:00

I heard this track on WFMU the other day and was so bowled over I emailed the DJ, Todd-o-phonic Todd, who directed me to the source, the 1974 Hollies album Another Night (above). Just when you think you can't be surprised and delighted by another third-tier, off-track moldy-oldy, along comes the disco-era Graham Nash-less Hollies covering Bruce Springsteen. Prepare to be wowed, it's a major winner.

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) - The Hollies

The Whole World

2009-08-25T11:41:00.002-04:00

In 9^th grade I went on a major Kurt Vonnegut binge. It coincided with a lot of new interests, many of which involved drastic efforts to get my mind outside of the public school where I had to physically spend my days. I remember being so leveled by the genius of the plot for The Sirens of Titan – the idea that all of human history was being manipulated by aliens light years away in an attempt to send coded messages to a space traveling comrade stranded on a moon in our galaxy. When viewed over the course of geological time, the goings on on earth seemed to spell out something for the Tralfamadorians that basically translated to “the spare part’s on the way.” I loved the way the story just pulled back from mankind and history and sort of trivialized the whole shebang, but also somehow transformed everything into one giant becoming, a kind of blossoming, or blooming, ultimately meaningless maybe, but beautiful. You can imagine the Tralfamadorians watching eons unfold over the course of a breath – growth, shift, drift. We were all stranded somewhere, and I was hoping there was some long-form message being delivered. I’ve been listening to this Thin Lizzy song, “Little Girl in Bloom,” which I love for about 14 different reasons. It’s got its own slow-blooming pace. The riff, if you can call it that, is basically two eighth notes, ringing slowly like bells, and set over alternating 7- and 8-beat phrases. Count it. Listen to the harmonized feedback at the beginning. Any time you have Irish dudes singing about “Bloom,” you start thinking there’s some Ulysses business at work, but thankfully Phil and the boys probably didn’t need to worry about that. And how many songs mention cricket? Not counting that Men at Work song. Plus there are a lot lovely people in bloom right now.

I read a Phil Spector bio a few years back and it really captured the despicable nature of the little man. The book chronicled just about every unlikely interpersonal disaster or recording stroke of genius in the studio. I was surprised to learn that he produced a mid-70s Dion record (Born To Be With You). I went on the lookout. Finally found it. It’s not all good, but Dion’s soft rock stylings of the era and Spector’s maximalism do produce some moments of lachrymal greatness. There’s a definite whiff of James Taylor here. I’d like Geoffrey O’Brien to scrape off the layers of accreted dusty nostalgia, the coats of dead-dream residue. You might think that “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” would be a throw-away, but there’s a lot to contend with here – the slap-back on the drums, the disembodied gospel choir, the weird dark diminished-sounding harmonies of the strings, the tambourine working overtime but somehow in weird clipped fits. And the message seems to point back to the Tralfamadorians.

“Little Girl in Bloom” – Thin Lizzy

“New York City Song” – Dion

“(He’s Got) The Whole World” - Dion

Hell Yeah, Part 2 (Massive Afro Edition)

2009-08-24T19:26:00.000-04:00

[Hat tip: T-Ro]

Hell Yeah

2009-08-23T14:15:00.001-04:00

[Hat tip: M-Ro.]

Mind Games

2009-08-12T22:46:00.020-04:00

1. The other night I was telling Dewey about a new band called Lake who had a new song I really loved, called "Madagascar." In the course of this same conversation, the so-called Monsters of Folk also came up, that supergroup featuring Jim James, Bright Eyes and M. Ward. Next thing you know, Dewey plays a song clip from the iTunes store and I couldn't believe what I was hearing: the Monsters of Folk had evidently taken a wildly artistic left turn into "Wasted on the Way"-era CSNY, complete with sleek disco-era production, pristine and feather-light six-part harmonies and Styx-like prog instrumentals. I thought, Brilliant move, fellas. Wow. Who's the genius in the group? Jim James?

Well, of course, it wasn't Monsters of Folk at all. It was Lake -- but NOT the new band called Lake, who are on K Records. Dewey had tripped upon a 30-year-old German prog-pop group called Lake, who some apparently consider "one of the great unknown bands of the 70s." As it happens, two days later I was flipping through some vinyl in Manhattan and happened upon their second album, which I bought immediately, if only to make Dewey laugh. It's entitled Lake 2 (1978). Without saying too much, let me ask that you simply listen to this from beginning to end. Yeah, I know, unbelievable. Paging Ween! But then imagine for a moment that it's a brand new Monsters of Folk single -- and then see how you feel about it. For a moment, if you can suspend disbelief, it almost reveals something corrupt about postmodern taste-making and the way the mind forgives when it forgets.

Scoobie Doobies - Lake

2. A long time ago -- in fact, my very first post in 2005 -- I surmised that my musical tastes might have been formed listening to AM radio in the back of my parents' VW microbus on family vacations in the late 70s and early 80s. But there was another sacred location: laying on a sheep skin rug in front of my dad's Kenwood in the living room at night while gazing at LP covers and listening through those massive 1970s headphones. Some of the first inklings of what adult love and lust must be came to me while staring at the pictures of Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt inside the gatefold of the Endless Love soundtrack. I was 10. When I hear it now, wow, it envelops me totally, revealing an unexpected pocket of warmth beneath the cold surfaces of present life, one so deep and pure that calling it nostalgia doesn't even begin to touch it. It seems to bend time like light through curved glass and suggests for a brief moment the impossibility of mortality. So close, yet so far away. This, my friends, is why I love pop music.

Dreamin' - Cliff Richard

THE MONEY PIT

2009-08-04T20:33:00.008-04:00

For the first time ever I plunked down a large sum of money for a record. As a rule, I pay no more than $15, usually between $1 and $10. I'm what is known as a "bottom feeder" by the record store geniuses who sell vinyl LPs. What happened was I was walking down a hot August street thinking of other things when blammo, here's this record store. A RECORD STORE! A rare discovery in Manhattan, where rents have killed off most of them. So next thing I know I'm flipping through the stacks and listening to this clerk, a pink-Izod-wearing 50-something effete stereophile snob in Lenscrafters faux-architect glasses, groan to a customer about people who think they're getting a "bargain" off the Internet only to find the rare Blue Note album they ordered has a huge gash in it when it arrives. "Idiots!" he declared. "They get what they deserve! Yeah, I'm sure an album graded 'excellent' sounded super on a $99 record player in Texarkana."

OK, on-site perusing has its virtues, sure, but this is a guy who charges $65 for a Glenn Danzig album on vinyl. If I could sell my own collection for the prices he's charging I could retire right now. Thing is, so rare are these bonfires of 20th-century vanity in the digital age, these record stores, it takes very little time for you yourself to become warped into thinking this is a reasonable reality. The kids are really into vinyl nowadays, this guy argues to a customer, so the prices are going up, up, up, up, UP!

All of which is to say I bought Money Jungle, a 1962 United Artist import of Duke Ellington with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, for $60.

SIXTY! DOLLARS!

I don't know why. I was about to stick with a $10 copy of a lesser Jerry Butler album, but then I saw this sitting up there on the wall, beckoning. I'm sure Mr. Poncho bought this album 10 years ago for about $7, if that. And it's not like I wanted to impress the Pink Architect. I pretty much despised him from the minute I walked into the place. But I despised him for a very specific reason: out of a visceral fear that we shared some essential DNA. Or rather, a rare and alarming disease that leads to the belief that collecting vinyl LPs is a worthy way to pass the time -- a life's pursuit in which there are winners and losers, and not just a bunch of suckers all the way around.

A bright spot: the Ellington record is totally and utterly awesome! And Mr. Poncho says we might fund our kids' college degrees when the vinyl bubble comes and an early Bee Gees record is suddenly worth $50 (thanks for that, Mr. Poncho, but here's my projection for that scenario: the year 3033). In any case, the very least I can do is bring pleasure to my friends now. Herewith, the sound of three giants of jazz in a bare bones trio, egos a-blazing, bass, piano, drums, sparring, ribbing, jabbing, winking, rocking, tearing it up, then going placid and blue and profound, Mingus and Roach making room for master Ellington, Ellington trying to prove he's still got chops beyond the conductor's baton. Mingus levels entire modes of Western thought with his fiercely monosyllabic bass solos against Duke's basso-profundo left-hand jabs and Roach's shimmering minarets of cymbol-work. The name of the record feels right, too, timely, fatalistic and ultimately clear-eyed, an agreement on plight, a killer jam session the only route to existential detente. And maybe that's what I'm seeking from it: a vision of clarity and piercing recognition of what matters in the age of meltdown and reappraisal and thrift. Money is what ails us, but music is what matters, what cures, what calls. Right? I hope so. I just spent $60 for it. Anway, listen.

DOWNLOAD SIDE A

Money Jungle
Le Fleurs Africaines (African Flower)
Very Special
Warm Valley

DOWNLOAD SIDE B

Wig Wise
Caravan
Solitude

Recorded: New York City, Sept. 17, 1962

Tropical Hot Dog Day Day

2009-07-31T20:59:00.002-04:00

Everything’s all moldy. We got ourselves an airborne toxic event up here in New England, wet wise. A white-nose fungal situation. Trench foot, on a spiritual level. But with the high spore count comes a kind of equatorial mush-mind, a humid/tumid world-view. Tropical hot-dog night. We mostly like to keep our eyes cast behind us, against all the best ancient advice. But the dust blows forward and the dust blows back. And, though it is not now as it hath been of yore, same is true of how it will be. I’ve had a few ear-glimpses that make me less forlorn. The apiary, the aviary, the binary barber shop. People turning the melt on, full-force; people working their face-painted shaman thrum; people letting/getting the brittle post-punk get cross-contaminated with/by the polyrhythmic call-and-response aural-quilt patternings.

“Apology to Pollinateurs” – Karl Blau

“Sunlight” – tUnE-yArDs

“Digital Haircut” – dd/mm/yyyy

More Midlifery

2009-07-20T20:56:00.009-04:00

The crush of middle age is upon me, folks. Full bore! And I've got blogger's block something fierce too. Bad combo. But I'm giving it a go here, attempting to snatch victory from the jaws of spiritual defeat. Look at me: buying some real estate and adding another social security number to the rolls during an economic depression. Dicey! [Breaking News: Actually TWO new SS #'s!!].

Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've become a "content provider" scraping for a shred of dignity in the digital age. How poetic! Then one day you wake up and find yourself on your knees on the sidewalk flipping through boxes of crappy $1 vinyl like some vagrant off his meds: Hey, maybe this Strawbs album will be good. Pathetic. (Btw, it's horrible.) Can't remember who said it, but life is

just one

I Don't Believe in Miracles - Colin Blunstone

distraction

Goin' Down to Laurel - Steve Forbert

after

Oh Yes My Lord - Voices of Conquest

another.

Calico Silver - Write Me Down (Don't Forget My Name) - Kenny Rogers & the New Edition

Well, it'll do in a pinch.

Two-Fold Spooge

2009-07-14T22:15:00.001-04:00

Back when I traveled around playing music, we were once staying in Huntsville. Alabama (northern Alabama in general, and The Tip Top Café in particular, is where I had some of my most anarchic, rowdy and most “rock-and-roll” rock-and-roll experiences.) We had friends there who would put us up. The husband was a scientist – a cryonics expert – at NASA. And one night he took us to the lab to fuck around with some liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing bananas and turning them into brittle things that would shatter on the floor – shit like that. Back at their house I remember reading an essay – maybe in a Robert Anton Wilson book or something – about an optics experiment in which subjects are shown a series of letters displayed on a wall just at the outer limits of what they can decipher. So the subjects basically can only see a hazy blur of unreadable text. But researchers found that once the subjects were told what the letters spelled out, they could then somehow “read” the letters. The point being that what was once beyond their ability to process and read would somehow become readable, even though all that had changed was that they were told what the letters were. The experiment demonstrated something that was maybe obvious to a lot of people: basically that your brain does a big part of the work of making sense of the data that your sense organs take in. So if you know what you’re looking at, you can then understand it. I think the same is sometimes true of music and desire; if you know what you’re wanting to hear, your mind will spooge in the mortar between the bricks. In this case, the spooging was two-fold. My mind wanted to like this Chris Darrow record in part because of his having been on sessions with people like Leonard Cohen, Gram Parsons and others. I also learned coincidentally a few months back that Darrow was an early guitar teacher (maybe the first?) for Stan Ridgway, of Wall of Voodoo. The cover art on this re-issue of Darrow’s early solo stuff is awesome – the country-hippie existentialist “I advance masked” element. (I’m still not sure if it’s “good”.) There was also a mondegreen situation at work. My copy of this disc didn’t have any song titles on the CD sleeve, and I kept hearing the chorus of the first track as something like “there’s a crooked rainbow shining in my eyes,” which just seemed like a pleasantly absurd image in a kind of country-fried soft-rock scenario. There’s lots of endearingly questionable production on this record – pillowy toms are rolled on in sleepy tribal elaborations, cymbals seem to have been in short supply at times (thankfully), at one point a Moog-ish synth provides out-of-place futuristic robot-swamp bass lines to a booze-boogie jam. There are strange dueling fiddles. Nasally bag-pipe-type things drone in places. “Take Good Care of Yourself” sounds like “The Harder They Come” transmuted on an ethanol-powered Nitty Gritty Dirt Band quantum molecule swap.

“Albuquerque Rainbow” – Chris Darrow

“Take Good Care of Yourself”- Chris Darrow

“There’s Nothing Within … That’s Still My Empire”

2009-07-05T14:38:00.001-04:00

In that Musicophilia book Oliver Sacks wrote about some people who have “ear worms” or bits of what I think were basically auditory hallucinations that were more or less unshakable. He made a point of distinguishing this from just getting a song stuck in your head. These people actually thought they heard a marching band tune, or a hymn, and sometimes they’d go look out the window to check. Well, much as I fancy myself a candidate at times, I’m not quite Oliver Sacks material – yet – but I’ve been having a major-league auditory fixation with Scott Walker lately. It started shortly after Frankie Lee posted about the recent documentary – 30 Century Man, a copy of which came into my hands shortly afterwards. I was ready to call bullshit on the whole cult of Walker, especially with the punching-slabs-of-meat percussion sequence, but I was fascinated. The whole way that Walker resonated with the Brits and somehow remained unknown over here is a curious example of the taste divergence. But footage of Walker’s shortlived BBC show, and bits of tracks from his Scott 3 and Scott 4 records roped me in. And though I wasn’t immediately sold on the more avant, high-art leanings of his later stuff, I found some of his lyrics to be pretty, like, poetic. And some of the orchestrations that went with the crooner pop material just blew my mind – like Lee Hazlewood teaming up with Wagner. Anyway, I’ve had these two songs off of Scott 4 basically in a perma-loop for the past three weeks or so. I wake up and I need to hear them, or else I sing them all day. In the film Brian Eno says, basically, that we have to reckon with Walker not just as one of our great composers, but as one of our great poets as well. I know, I know, that’s ridiculous, but as far lyricists go, he’s a contender.

“Duchess” – Scott Walker

“Rhymes of Goodbye” – Scott Walker

The Ballad of Benji Hughes

2009-07-01T10:40:00.003-04:00

There are a plethora of conflicts of interest and quasi-ethical issues in telling our dear readers they should check out a story in THE BELIEVER magazine this month. One of us may have written it, another was probably the source for it and possibly the drummer in a rock band mentioned therein. But what the hell, we've never billed ourselves as objective. So: It's a profile of Charlotte, NC-based singer-songwriter Benji Hughes, who is, besides being a gorgeous chunk of hirsute humanity, a pop savant of the criminally unsung variety. If Randy Newman and Prince were put into a particle accelerator built on a NASCAR speedway you'd probably end up with Benji. There are music samples in the story, but here's a download of "So Much Better," the song that tipped me into a full-on rabid fan.

"So Much Better" - BENJI HUGHES