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Thursday, July 24, 2008
FIREMAN
Lil Wayne
Tha Carter II
Cash Money : 2005
[Buy It]
FIREMAN
Jawbreaker
Dear You [enhanced reissue]
Blackball : 2004
[Buy It]
FIRE
Arthur Brown
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown
Track/Atlantic : 1968
[Buy It]
FIRESIDE
mwvm
Rotations
Silber : 2007
[Buy It]
Lil Wayne's got it, Hendrix wanted to stand next to it (yours, to be precise), M83 don't want to be saved from it - popular music is no stranger to fire and its bottomless metaphorical potential. But the true music of fire does not speak its name, does not reduce it to metaphor. The true music of fire is like fire itself, an implacably pulsating abstraction, a continual movement of energy. Last weekend, at a fire festival, I sat in a tent late at night, listening to the competing DJ tents scattered across the grounds, whose emissions blended into one gargantuan throb, which seemed from my enclosed vantage to emanate from a single source, as if Terry Riley were conducting a mad symphony just over the hill. The music of fire is diffused and all-encompassing, as if the air itself had a beating heart, reverberations condensed out of vapor and smoke, energy burning off from some ineffable source. In the presence of fire and the music with which we pay tribute to it, latent potential for transformation becomes manifest, even inevitable. In that tent, I thought of fires I have known, fires which, while retaining the universal quality of all fires, seemed to distinguish themselves for me by their overstated and personal transformative properties.
The house that my family lived in when I was seven and my brother was three had a back yard that was abutted by a largish field of broomstraw, which was the property of a neighbor down the street. One of my favorite activities at this age was to go outside with a magnifying glass, using its lens to focus the sunlight into a tight beam, burning patterns and holes into leaves, twigs, bits of paper - and ok, sometimes ants. I'm surprised I was allowed to do this unsupervised - I suppose it was decided that I'd done it enough to amass some expertise, and that I had the good sense to stay on the concrete driveway when I did it. I can't say, on a particular afternoon, what compelled me into the field of broomstraw with my magnifying glass. I can't recall the sequence of events. I know there must have been a moment, when the broomstraw began to burn, spreading quickly, that I knew things had gotten out of hand. The part I remember clearly is standing beside my brother, back in our yard, dumbly watching the field burn. From my childish perspective, it was an inferno, but I've no idea how serious the fire actually was - it must be amplified in my mind, as a neighbor who was washing his car across the street was able to extinguish it with a garden hose. I don't remember how I felt, besides awed, and maybe that was all I felt - seeing all that fire up close, uncontrolled, and knowing I was responsible for it, perhaps my awe blocked out all my fear, my guilt, my anxiety over getting in trouble. I recall the endless walk down the street to knock on the neighbor who owned the land's ornate, imposing double doors; I don't recall whether they were understanding or angry. But here is what I recall most clearly: my father, rushing out onto the patio with a look of utter panic on his face, rushing down to where my brother and I were standing. From his perspective in the house, when he saw the blaze through the window, my brother was standing behind me - my father couldn't see him, and for a moment, between seeing the fire and rushing outside, he believed my brother had been engulfed. I wonder which of us changed more that day - me, in my newfound power, or my father, suddenly possessed of a trace of dark knowledge.
Sometime around my high school graduation, I attended a small party with my group of closest friends. As usual, we were drinking, gathered around a fire in a rusty barrel in my friend's yard. Although I couldn't have expressed it at the time, there was something elegiac in the air, something tangled about the celebration's energy, a sadness veining the muted revelry. The end of high school is a pivotal time for everyone, in ways that are too common, too trite, and too profound to even get into. We'd weathered some calamities together, and perhaps we all had the latent sense that greater, more confusing, less resolvable ones lurked on the horizon, that we were trembling in some ephemeral interstice between one life and another. At a certain point, as we stood in a motley ring around the barrel fire, one of my friends, as if at some secret cue, picked up a bucket of gasoline (why we had an open bucket of gasoline handy perplexes me to this day). Moving slowly but deliberately, as if hypnotized or underwater, he began walking toward the bucket. I felt a heightened sense of reality in this moment, a strange and dreamlike lucidity - everyone else was chatting aimlessly, and I felt as if only I were witnessing the scene at hand, somehow seeing the whole thing play out simultaneously, somehow entranced and unable to speak the warning that I felt welling up in me. In slow motion, my friend cocked back the bucket of gas and hurled the entire thing into the barrel. Time sped up again as a great pillar of flame erupted from the barrel, causing everyone to leap back, seemingly pushed through the air by the flames like heroes in an action movie. Luckily, no one was burned, and the inferno quickly subsided. We gave the friend who'd thrown the bucket some shit and got back to our aimless chatting for some minutes before someone thought to look up, and discovered that the boughs overhead were aflame.
I thought about all these fires at the fire festival, during the lazy days, as my partner and I sat around singing songs with the guitar, swimming in the lake, reading from my dog-eared copy of Borges' Ficciones. (When I read Borges, my heart would like to burst with love, and yet I have never read Borges - only his translators. This relationship too seems evocative of fire - intense yet somehow deflected, a reaction to an energy coming down some cloaked and remote corridor.) A fire festival is an invitation to transform, and I witnessed the costume I wore all weekend - a full-body tiger-striped unitard, a pair of earlike feathered discs, an improvised tail (fur trim cut off of a puffy coat's hood) - manifest different selves for me. On the first night, I was a housecat, inclined to curl into and around things, staying close to the ground. Or a churchmouse, meek and perceptive - someone asked me if I wanted to try out his poi, and I said to him, "Tonight, I am a creature who watches," realizing as I said it that it was true. I had the distinct sensation of peering out at the world around me - the fire dancers and drum circles, the poi spinners and psychedelic lights - through a crack in the floorboards.
But the next night, the night of the burn (the climactic moment in any fire festival, where some sort of immense effigy is ceremonially set aflame for a great, purgative revel): same costume, different tiger. As the fire dancers circled the effigy in center camp, Ashley and I joined a great outer throng around them, dancing, playing percussion, whooping and exhorting. I beat a guiro until it split in two, then played the shards until they were pulverized. Finally the effigy was set aflame, the improbable heat of the inferno momentarily pushing everyone back a few steps - was it fifty feet high? One hundred? Large fires wreak havoc on your sense of scale. Hundreds of bodies pressed into a circular orbit around the fire, which eventually came to rest, the trippers grooving with their eyes closed, others stunned and mute in the heat. That night, I was a tiger as strong and powerful as I'd been meek and timid the previous night, a playful tiger and a fierce one. Ashley and I took up jingly bells and slinked through the crowd, moving like jungle cats, close to the fire, feeling the full power of our lithe bodies and our status as most wondrous creatures in our costumes, purifying people with bells. And I will tell you now that there is no better feeling in this world than moving through a crowd of strangers, in a ridiculous costume, purifying them with bells, and for the purity of this intention to be conveyed wordlessly and perfectly - to move through a crowd of strangers and see on their faces not wariness or scorn or apathy but a reflection of your own burning spirit, to see face after face light up at your approach, for no other reason than that it is your intention to be wonderful and to transmit this wonder, to hear them gasp and say "Thank you!" for doing something that might get you punched in everyday life (imagine walking through the subway jingling bells around people's faces and bodies) - to incarnate your desire as twinkling bells, at the root of a pillar of flame, and to be those bells, or that tiger, or whatever you want.
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
THEME FROM SHAFT
Esquires LTD
c. 1973
Available on: Grand Bahama Goombay
Numero Group : 2007
[Buy It]
THEME FROM SHAFT
The Chosen Few
Hit After Hit
Trojan : 1972
Available on: Darken Than Blue: Soul from Jamdown (1973-1980)
Blood & Fire : 2001
[Buy It]
THEME FROM SHAFT
Bernard Purdie
Shaft
Prestige : 1971
[Buy It]
JOHN SHAFT
Sammy Davis Jr.
c. 1973
Mr. Bojangles
Universal : 1999
[Out of Print]
SHAFT
Kashmere Stage Band
Available on: Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974
Now Again : 2006
[Buy It]
SHAFT
Joe Bataan
Saint Latin's Day Massacre
Fania : 1972
[Buy It]
SON OF SHAFT
 Video
The Bar-Kays
Stax : 1972
Available on: Best of the Bar-Kays
Volt : 1992
[Buy It]
SHAFT IN AFRICA (ADDIS)
Johnny Pate
Shaft in Africa OST
ABC : 1973
[Buy It]
SHAFT MEETS SUPERFLY
John & Ernest
c.1972
Who's a complicated man but no one understands him but his woman?Labels: alex, soul/wtf?
posted by Alex
LINK |
Friday, July 18, 2008
SOME PEOPLE ARE CRAZY
John Martyn
Grace & Danger
Polygram : 1980
[Buy It]
BABY'S CRAZY
Larry Williams
1958
Available on : At His Finest
Ace : 2004
[Buy It]
CRAZY WOMAN
Bill Wyman
Monkey Grip
One Way : 1974
[Buy It]
DON'T BE CRAZY
John Lennon
c. 1975
8 TON CRAZY
Andy Fairweather Low
La Booga Rooga
Universal : 1975
[Buy It]
RETURN OF THE CRAZY ONE
Digital Underground
Body-Hat Syndrome
Warner : 1993
[Buy It]
I called someone crazy this week. She deserved it. Objectively speaking, for a little while at least, she was every kind of loon. I wouldn't say flibbertigibbet, because that's sexist. I wouldn't say murderer, because that's inaccurate. I'd say crazy. When I told her about it, she balked. She should have thanked me. A crazy person has hundreds of songs at her disposal to clarify and celebrate her condition. In fact, you can argue that it's one of the five or six most decorated words in the history of pop music. Sounds crazy, I know.
The most common use of crazy is romantic: Patsy Cline's "Crazy," Billie Holiday's "I've Got a Man, He's Crazy For Me," Chet Baker's "You're Driving Me Crazy (What Did I Do?)," and Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," to name just a few. In others, it's just a way of expressing energy: Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," or for that matter the Clash's. But then there are the songs that investigate a darker, richer seam of meaning, where crazy means what crazy means: a temporary loss of reason due to a combination of emotional and psychological factors.
That's the case in "Some People Are Crazy," one of the signature songs of the British singer/songwriter John Martyn. I missed Martyn the first time he passed through my life, in college, when a slightly older guy I knew insisted that he was like Eric Clapton but with brains. "But that's not like Eric Clapton at all!" I said, and we both had a hearty laugh, and I went on my way. In the last year or two, I have found my way back to Martyn, or he has found his way back to me, thanks largely to his 1980 album Grace and Danger. The record can sound smooth and jazzy if you don't pay close attention, but beneath the surface it's as raw a dissection of a failing relationship as, say, Shoot Out the Lights. "Some People Are Crazy," the opener, isn't among the most bruising songs; it's cryptic, but still dark and disturbing: Some people are crazy about him
Some people can't stand his face
Some people they smile when they know he's coming
Some people chase him out of the place At first blush, it seems like another "crazy for" song, but as it goes on, it becomes clear that there's a broader brief: Some people are crazy
Some people are just plain good
Some people talk wouldness and couldness
Some people don't do as they should, One of the people who didn't do as he should was Larry Williams. Williams started out as a songwriter and performer at Specialty Records in the mid-fifties, and he was designated as the label's star when Little Richard left rock and roll for the ministry in 1957. Williams had the songs, like "Bonie Moronie" and "Dizzy Miss Lizzie." He had the style. He had the platform. In "Baby's Crazy," though, he may be grasping at straws -- his main piece of evidence against the woman in the song, Marie, is that she doesn't love him like she used to do. Maybe she just came to her senses, or moved on. In real life, Williams' problems were more severe than just missing out on the record hop, thanks largely to his involvement with pimping and dealing. His life in the sixties and seventies was marked by drug and gun trouble, and in 1980 he was found dead of a gunshot wound outside of his Laurel Canyon home in a highly suspicious suicide.
Guns also figure in Bill Wyman's solo work, though they seem the stuff of blues legend rather than of reality. Monkey Grip, the bassist's 1974 album, was the first solo product from a Rolling Stone, and it opens with "I Wanna Get Me a Gun," which featured an excellent piano solo by Dr. John. "Crazy Woman" is the second song, and it builds its case slowly: Crazy woman
She caught me with somebody
Crazy woman
She caught me with somebody else
Crazy woman
She flew into a fury
Crazy woman
She said she's gonna get me some
Crazy woman
She said I'm gonna get what's coming
Crazy woman
Gonna get me with a gun Wyman's song highlights the ways in which "crazy" can be used as dismissal, even if it's tinged with admiration. After all, who is more qualified to offer his opinion on a woman's mental fitness than Wyman, who began a relationship with Mandy Smith when he was 47 and she was 13 and who drove her to a nervous breakdown and anorexia?
It has suddenly occurred to me that the woman I called crazy might be coming for me with a gun. Is that sexist? Is it dismissive? Can she even shoot a gun?
I'll end with a plea for sanity from John Lennon -- "Don't Be Crazy," from the Dakota Demos, is Lennon's workup for "(Just Like) Starting Over" -- and a pair of songs that handle craziness from the inside rather than the outside. Andy Fairweather Low is, like John Martyn, a respected and well-connected British guitarist and singer- - he has had professional relationships with Wyman, Clapton, and Roger Waters, among others - - who is more distinctive, if not more well-known, as a solo artist. The loping, beguiling "8 Ton Crazy" may be a love song, but it works more generically as a defense for temporary loss of reason: Hey mama morning, papa night and day
Don't treat me like I've got nothing to say
Please don't tell me that you think it's a shame
When things go wrong and there's no one to blame
'Cause I get 8 ton crazy
I get 8 ton mad
It's the strangest feeling
That I ever had
When you start tap-dancing
It makes me feel bad Finally, of course, there's Digital Underground's "Return of the Crazy One," which makes an strong case that a person's crazy parts are the most attractive, not to mention the most fun to handle. At times, Digital Underground sacrificed its comic genius for standard-issue P-Funk-derived hip-hop, but not as long as Humpty Hump was nearby. Here, Humpty presides over a celebration of alternative and maybe even revolutionary thinking. It seems like a good idea to quote it extensively, because what else can you do with joyful things? Lick lick let me lick
Smell let me smell the flavor
And taste the behavior
The way you
Been kicking it while the Humpster was lamping
Fishing and camping
Out renting boats in the Hamptons
Eating good, working out, and giving charity
Working on my vocal cord clarity
Hell no, I can't front, I been at the crib G-ing
Slapping poontang trying to be the mack pappy
40-dog and pina colada peeing
Making my rounds to keep the Humpty girls happy
If you missed me I was laying in the cut
Wrecking big butts
Scratching my knees
Cause my homegirl's cat got fleas
That's how it goes
The beat flow-flows
Yo peep the new color of my nose
Representing how we been living
That's how it is
I'm not the Biz
But if I was to pick a booger
It'd be a big fat gooey gold plated loogie
But I was born a yankee so I use my hanky
The way I wear my clothes freaks the hos 'cause I'm lanky
Speaking of hankies, I like hanky panky
Especially when the hanky panky's stanky
Of course ain't gonna be too much stanking
Cause then my duty would be to give the booty a spanking
I like biscuits and grits on the sausage
And so you know it's me, I wrote some nonsense
Hova glova nivlan blizman glaze niull And so, by way of apology to the crazy ones -- no, not exactly apology, but more a equal mix of admiration, impatience, fellowship, and challenge, all of which are tuned to a pleasant humming at the base of the brain because, well, there's nothing better than liking a person right on through the craziness -- I say, hova glova nivlan blizman glaze niull. And don't forget it.Labels: ben, hip-hop, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, July 17, 2008
CHICKEN
Pink Anderson
Medicine Show Man vol. 2
Prestige : 1962
[Buy It]
EAT THAT CHICKEN
Charlie Mingus
Oh Yeah
Atlantic : 1961
[Buy It]
SOUTHERN FRIED CHICKEN (PARTS I & II)
Bill Thomas & the Fendells
c. 1965
Available on: Movements 2
Perfect Toy : 2006
[Buy It]
FINGER LICKIN' CHICKEN
The Radars
Yew : c. 1969
[Out of Print]
CHICKEN HEADS
Oscar Brown Jr.
Fresh
Atlantic : 1975
[Buy It]
CHICKEN
Ike & Tina Turner
Available on: Rockin' and Rollin'
HHO : 2006
[Buy It]
CHIPS, CHICKEN, BANANA SPLIT
Jo-Jo & The Fugitives
Cobra : 1968
Available on: Jamaica to Toronto: Soul, Funk, and Reggae 1967-1974
Light in the Attic : 2006
[Buy It]
FRIED CHICKEN
Rufus Thomas
Hi : 1978
Available on: Pulp Fusion : Bustin' Loos
Harmless : 2006
[Buy It]
C-H-I-C-K-E-N SPELLS CHICKEN
McGee Bros
c.1927
Available on: Ghost World OST
Shanachie : 2001
[Buy It]
They eat chicken, don't they?
-Col. Sanders, responding to a question about black folks. (Apocryphal) Well, folks, the review is in: "On Untitled you get to decide whether you prefer Nas thoroughly exploring half-assed concepts or half-assedly exploring thorough concepts." Ouchie. And, man, that 3.8's gotta sting. But, you know, we don't know: Here at Moistworks' Astoria Bureau, we kinda think of "Fried Chicken" as the new summer hotness-
FRIED CHICKEN (FEAT. BUSTA RHYMES)
Nas
Untitled
Def Jam : 2008
[Buy It]
Mrs. Fried Chicken
You was my addiction
Drippin' with hot cholest-
Like Greeks with his falafel
Italians with their tomato
Pasta
What roti is to a Rasta
Trappin' me-
You and your friend Mac'n'Cheese
?
OMG/WTF/LOL/BRB/BBQ/QE2/WMD/WWIII, right? I mean, we're a ways away from "C-H-I-C-K-E-N spells 'Chicken'" now! And, while we're on the subject of eating/racial stereotyping, we might as well address the age-olde belief that black men don't eat pussy....
WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT
The Wailers
Studio One : 1965
Available on: Destiny: Rare Sides from Studio One
Rounder : 1999
[Buy It]
CUNNINGBIRD
Charles Mingus
Debut : 1957
Available on: The Complete Debut Recordings
Debut : 1990
[Buy It]
BEAUTIFUL GIRL
CunninLynguists
A Piece of Strange
LA Underground : 2006
[Buy It]
LICK THE PUSSY
Beatnuts
Street Level
Relativity : 1994
[Buy It]
Ok - so - as it happens, not eating pussy happens to be one of the things that a lot of rappers tend to rap about a lot. And that makes a certain amount of sense: In the more misogynistic & minstrelsy corners of the rap universe - that MTV-friendly, jack-in-the-box cartoonland where punks jump up to get beat down, bitches ain't nothin' but hos and tricks, and "feelings" are something you "catch" - going down on your lady friends might just give the impression that feelings are something you've caught.
AIN'T NO FUN (IF THE HOMEY'S CAN'T GET NONE)
Snoop Doggy Dogg
Doggystyle
Death Row : 1993
[Buy It]
At least, Marvin Gaye seemes to have thought so. "You could feel him struggling for the courage to say it," David Ritz reported, in his courageous MG bio, Divided Soul.Finally the words came: he was going to give her "head," oral sex. He convinved himself he could "handle" her, though in mentioning the act, as if to "sanctify" it, he quickly suggested marriage and even pregnancy, singing that he was going to "knock up this woman." This is one of the moments in which he actually called out her name - "Oh, Janis!" - exploding with an anguished shriek, a cry of limitless pleasure and pain. Like a little boy afraid of jumping off a diving board, Marvin built up his courage - "soon," he repeated, "soon" - trying to convince himself he was man enough to do the job. He viewed oral copulation as a complete commitment of his affection. For Gaye, the act was the highest expression of his love since, as he told me several times, it was something he didn't enjoy. It's no accident that "giving head" was joined to the notion of conception and pregnancy, further validating his feelings of sacred romance and familial sanctity. In fact, in November of 1975, Janis did give birth to her second child, Frankie Christian "Bubby," born a day after his namesake, Marvin's Brother. That, folks, is what we call writing! And, while we're on the subject of writing, let's leave off with Ritz channeling Ray Charles, on the twinned subjects of crazy laws and cunnilingus: "Hell, there are dozens of crazy laws," Ritz writes (in Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story). "I understand in some places it's forbidden to suck your wife's pussy. Well, they can't enforce that one, but if they could, wouldn't it be a bitch?"Labels: alex, chicken, sex
posted by Alex
LINK |
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
NEW WAVE DUST
John Wiese
Soft Punk
Troubleman Unlimited : 2007
[Buy It]
MILITARY ROAD
Prurient
Pleasure Ground
Load Records : 2006
[Buy It]
UNTITLED
Boyzone
Recycled Music
RRRecords : 2008
[Buy It]
Sometimes I feel certain that all music really does is give shape to the nebulous passage of time. Ambient music makes time into a deep, still pool. Techno dissects it into concise, manageable slices, like a really well organized day planner. Rock breaks it up into an orderly pattern of bright, simple shapes, stacking up as neatly as Yaffa Blocks. Classical music condenses it - an entire mythohistorical saga can unfold in an hour. And harsh noise simply obliterates it. The inutitive choosing of music seems mysterious - why do we need to hear this song, in this moment? - and I wonder if it's all about how we need time to feel in that moment: orderly or chaotic, compressed or expansive, becalmed or vanished. As time-management is probably the single biggest issue in my life (lucky, I know), I find myself attracting to ambient music or noise - depending on whether my mood is at the beatific or destructive end of the spectrum - more and more often. I've posted way more ambient music than noise music here, which I'm rectifying now - call it "difficult listening" day. Woe be to those who snag the songs off of mp3 aggregators without reading the text; may they dial up John Wiese on their iPod at max volume.Labels: brian, noise
posted by Brian
LINK |
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
JE N'AIME PAS DORMIR
Danny Norbury
Jean Cocteau
ONO : 2008
LA JOLIE ROUSSE
Black Toothed Grin
Guillaume Apollinaire
ONO : 2008
L'AMOUREUSE
Ikey
Paul Eluard
ONO : 2008
LES AMANTS SEPARES
Andre Hargreaves
Louis Aragon
ONO : 2008
I found out about Manchester's Danny Norbury via the Swedish musician David Wenngren, whose music as Library Tapes I adore. (Norbury played some cello on Library Tapes' superlative Fragment EP.) I quickly sought out Norbury's Dusk EP, a lovely slice of light ambient/chamber music, and have been anxiously awaiting its follow-up ever since. So it was with great delight that I opened my mailbox to discover these four (very) limited edition mini-albums from fledgling label ONO, each of which pairs a different artist with the recordings of a different Surrealist poet, complete with beautiful hand-painted sleeves (see supra). I love stuff like this - little labors of love more concerned with making a precious artifact than with album sales. In fact, these releases reside at the nexus of a number of my interests: Danny Norbury, "out" music in general, Surrealism, poetry, hand-made artifacts, the combination of recorded oration with sound environments. You won't be able to get ahold of these releases unless you can snag one of the 33 copies on sale at Piccadilly Records in Manchester, but the artists and the label have kindly allowed me to post one track from each here. What follows is something a little different I'd like to begin doing at Moistworks from time to time, the mini-interview. We'll call it
NINE-ISH QUESTIONS with DANNY NORBURY
MOISTWORKS: Hi Danny. Can you tell our readers a bit about your musical history, practice, and prior discography?
DANNY NORBURY: I began playing cello when I was nine, and went on to study it at music college, so my background is classical music. I didn't really start writing music until a few years ago. I wrote and recorded some songs at home that were released as Dusk on Static Caravan.
MW: Is this the correct website for ONO Records? Can you tell us about ONO and how you got involved with them?
DN: No! ONO hasn't got a website yet, but the catalogue is here. It's the label of my friend Michael Holland, who originally set it up to put out DJ mixes. Michael has the best record collection of anyone I know. His band is Black Toothed Grin.
MW: How many copies of each release will be made, and will they be formatted the same way the ones I received were formatted: hand-made covers, mini-discs, etc? Where can readers purchase these releases?
DN: They're coming out exactly like the ones you received. There will be 33 copies. They are being sold at Piccadilly Records in Manchester.
MW: Whose idea was it to record sound environments for the works of Surrealist poets? Can you tell us anything about the three other artists who've participated in the project?
DN: The idea came from Michael. He sent us all the sound files to do with whatever we wanted. The only thing he said to me was to not bother spending too much time on it, so I didn't. His band is very exciting - I have no idea what to expect from them. I don't know much about Ikey, except that he's a friend of Michael. Andrew Hargreaves is one half of The Boats. I'm a big fan of their music.
MW: How did you choose which Cocteau poems to use? Do you speak French?
DN: I think Michael sent me nine Cocteau poems in total, and I ended up using eight. I can understand French enough to know what the poems are about on a basic level, but I was more interested in the tone and rhythm of the speaker (the actor, Jean Mercure).
MW: Have you worked with the spoken word in your compositions before, and did doing so here present any particular challenges?
DN: I've never used words in my music before, spoken or sung. I think this is because the addition of words often gives a too precise meaning to what is, by nature, abstract. In any case, the poems suggested in a fairly obvious way the tempo, rhythm, texture and instrumentation of the music. I wrote and recorded the tracks at home over two days, using the instruments I have around me at home.
MW: More than many other 20th century artistic movements, Surrealism seems stubbornly to refuse to become irrelevant. Do you have any thoughts on the ongoing currency of Surrealism, why it never seems to exhaust its interest for us?
DN: I suppose the appeal of dream, and dreamlike states, is universal, and has always existed on either side of Breton's manifesto!
MW: As you began to compose around Cocteau's poems (presuming that this is how the process worked), were there any certain elements or qualities of them that emerged particularly strongly, themes you wanted to musically draw out or complement?
DN: The tone and timbre of the voice was the most important thing. On "Batterie" for instance, the speaker keeps the rhythm and cadence very precise, so I let that rhythmic structure dictate the tempo and length of the piece. So many decisions were taken out of my hands, and that in itself was liberating. On "Muses qui ne songez a plaire..." I felt the poem had the most gravity, so I cut up the phrases of the speaker and extended the silences between the lines. This is the longest of the pieces.
MW: You're working on a proper follow-up to your EP, if I'm not mistaken. Can you tell our readers anything about this new album and when it might be available?
DN: I hope to have it finished at some point this year. It'll be put out on ONO. I also have an ongoing collaboration with Library Tapes called Le Lendemain, and we've almost finished an album, so hopefully that too will see the light of day soon.Labels: brian, interview, surrealism
posted by Brian
LINK |
Friday, July 04, 2008
BO DIDDLEY
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1955
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
HEY BO DIDDLEY!
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1957
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
THE STORY OF BO DIDDLEY
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1959
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY 1969
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1969
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY-ITIS
Bo Diddley
Chess : 1972
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Roy Orbison & The Teen Kings
KSOA TV : 1956
Available on : Orbison
Bear Family : 2001
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Ronnie Hawkins
Roulette : 1963
Available on : The Golden Age of American Rock and Roll: Special Bubbling Under Edition
Ace : 2006
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Buddy Holly
Released : 1963
Available on: The Very Best of Buddy Holly & The Picks
Prism : 2007
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Art Neville
Sansu : 1968
Available on: New Orleans Funk vol. 2
Soul Jazz : 2008
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Drunk Man #2
Stax Reheasal/Audition Tape
196?
[Unreleased]
BO DIDDLEY
Sonny Boy Williamson & The Animals
c. 1964
Available on: The Animals w/Sonny Boy Williamson, Live!
Griffin : 1988
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
U.S. Army Infantry
Run To Cadence w/the U.S Army Infantry
Documentary Recordings : 1996
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY (LIVE)
Janis Joplin
1968
Available on: Box of Pearls
Sony : 1999
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
New York City Band w/Luther Vandross
Sunnyside OST
Unreleased : 1979
Available on: New York City Band
Alan Douglas : 2007
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY'S A HEADHUNTER
Roky Erikson
Live in Dallas 1979 w/the Nervebreakers
[Out of Print]
BO DIDDLEY 1969
68 Comeback
Mr. Downchild
Sympathy for the Record Industry : 1994
[Buy It]
I was the first son-of-a-gun out there. Me and Chuck Berry. And I'm very sick of the lie. You know, we're over that black-and-white crap, and that was all the reason Elvis got the appreciation that he did. I'm the dude that he copied, and I'm not even mentioned.
- Bo Diddley, 2005
If he copied me, more power to him. I'm not starving.
- Bo Diddley, c. 1956
The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doing now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties in and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goose it up. I got it from them.
-Elvis Presley, 1956
I hold no grudges. Elvis didn't steal any music from anyone. He just had his own interpretation of the music he'd grown up on. Same was true for me; the same's true of everyone. I think Elvis had integrity. I've heard blacks ask, "Why couldn't the first big rock star be black, since rock comes from black music?" The commonsense reason is the numbers. Blacks are a small minority. The white majority, whether in movies or music, want their heroes and heroines to look like them. That's understandable. Sure, there are exceptions, but few. We blacks want our own heroes and heroines too. Back then, we had Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. Now we have Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington. Blacks might invent a new style, but chances are, only the white artist's adadptation of that style will result in mass-market success.
-B.B. King, 1996
Nas: You got people running TV and movies who think they know black people better than black people know black people. And that's cool. But it has nothing to do with what's black and what's real. Nobody's giving us a shot, so why sit there and beg for a shot? We're smarter than that. There are so many things we can do. Hollywood is never going to understand a black man's story. They don't want to. So why beg them? Just create it. Write it. Produce it. Direct it yourself. Like Spike Lee did with Malcolm X
Interviewer: Why don't they want to understand a black person's story?
Nas: They're just not interested. It's not white people's fault, it's just that people are arrogant, they have egos - and people in those positions don't think much of other ethnicities. They're in power. And their movies are great. They're not even wrong. They just don't know us.
"Elvis Presley ain't got no soul/Bo Diddley is rock and roll"
-Mos DefLabels: alex, rock and roll
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, June 26, 2008
TRANSFUSION
Nervous Norvus
1956
Available on : Stone Age Woo
Norton : 2004
[Buy It]
NOON BALLOON TO RANGOON
Nervous Norvus
1956
Available on : Stone Age Woo
Norton : 2004
[Buy It]
At the start of the week a friend of mine called to say that she was in a poor mood. She considered a variety of causes--job, relationship, weird spot on her arm, crazy West Coat heat, biorhythms--and decided in the end to blame herself. "Maybe I'm too restless," she said.
"What's too restless?"
"You know," she said. "I think maybe I like novelty too much."
We hung up, and I thought about what she said, because, well, it's interesting. Does she like novelty too much? Life is boring at times--that seems hard to dispute--and while that boredom can be a source of frustration, it can also be a source of motivation. If you're in a job that has ceased to engage you, find a new one or a way to make the old one work. If you're in a relationship that feels drab, rejuvenuate yourself within it or rejuvenuate yourself without it. But the process of making things new is sometimes difficult to manage without feeling like a spoiled and greedy child. When you're seeking out new stimuli, how do you know when the jolt you've found is genuinely contributing to your sense of self and to the progress of your life (and when you're genuinely contributing to the lives of others), and when it's merely a new blip whose intensity will soon fade, leaving you yet again in search of something new? Should you settle for boring things and look for excitement in other areas of your life or should you hold out hope that you will discover something that exactly matches your needs?
These are only random notes on the problem, not even a whole melody. But thinking about novelty led me to thinking about novelty songs. The term, of course, refers to songs that are noteworthy not primarily for the beauty of their music or the skill of their musicians or the passion of their vocals, but rather for their comic strangeness. Sheb Wooley's "Purple People Eater," which was released fifty years ago today (well, this month, but today sounds more exciting), is one of the most famous novelty songs, so familiar that I won't bother posting it. "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!" is another. It's annoying. On the other hand, there's C.W. McCall's "Convoy," which has the power to warm even the coldest hearts, and the dozens of novelty-flavored songs by artists with broader, more legitimate careers (Randy Newman's "Short People," Todd Rundgren's "Bang the Drum All Day," Offspring's "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)"). Novelty songs provide respite from the drudgery of life, like a juggler appearing at work. But which juggler do you prefer? The guy dressed like a jester? The one who adds an apple in with his juggling balls and takes a bite of it when it comes around? This is a highly personal choice. I once dated a girl who loved Cheech and Chong's "Earache My Eye," no matter how many times I'd try to redirect her to Spike Jones. I'm sure some of you even know people who like Ray Stevens' "The Streak." When they get out of jail, you can ask them why.
Even in the land of novelty songs, there are upjuts of genius. Jimmy Drake was working as a truck driver when he created the Nervous Norvus persona in the mid-fifties. Over the course of a year, he recorded a string of truly cracked songs that mixed absurdist jive (much borrowed from the Bay Area musician and DJ Red Blanchard), conversational singing (with occasional leaps into strangulated yowling), and highly rudimentary guitar backing (supplemented by sound effects). Drake's first hit as Nervous Norvus, "Transfusion," sketches a series of car wrecks, focusing on (as the title indicates) the sanguinary needs of the victims. It belongs to the fairly large genre of car crash songs ("Leader of the Pack," "Last Kiss," "Tell Laura I Love Her"), but it's also a novelty song about novelty--all the crashes are caused by speeding, and all require (literally and metaphorically) new blood. There are parts of "Transfusion" that could come from a love song, or at least a lust song: Transfusion transfusion
My red corpuscles are in mass confusion The transfusion requests are the heart of the song: they end each verse with absurd rhymes--"Slip the blood to me, Bud," "Shoot the juice to me, Bruce," "Pass the claret to me, Barrett," and, best, "Pour the crimson in me, Jimson"--that forecast Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," another song about finding new blood. There's a tension, though, because the thrill of recklessness is counterweighted by risk: I'm never never never gonna speed again But he does. He always does.
"Transfusion," which went top ten, was followed by "Ape Call," a consideration of the courting practices of cavemen, and then there was one more Nervous Norvus single, "The Fang," a story about a Martian who comes to earth to chase skirt. But commercial momentum was slowing, in part because Drake didn't like appearing live as Nervous Norvus--he turned down a chance to perform "The Fang" on Ed Sullivan--and soon the act was history. Drake died in 1968. Then, in 2004, Norton records released a compilation that included several outtakes, including "Noon Balloon to Rangoon," which was rediscovered in a thrift store in Oakland and found its way back to the airwaves courtesy of Dr. Demento. "Noon Balloon to Rangoon" isn't just an oddity--it's a masterful oddity that holds up as one of the finest Nervous Norvus offerings. It shares most of the melody of "Transfusion," such as it is, and like its predecessor, it is a meta-novelty song. The lyrics are drawn directly from the Book of One Thousand and One Nights, perhaps literature's greatest lesson in the lifesaving powers of novelty: A boy named Aladdin had a magic lamp
His magic was the hottest in the Baghdad camp
What happened to Aladdin when the lamp got damp?
The noon balloon to Rangoon
Nervous Ali-Baba was a zorch mahalt
He trapped the forty thieves and laughed to hear them shout
What became of Ali-Baba when the thieves got out?
Noon balloon to Rangoon The lyrics go on, through Sinbad, through Scheherezade, but just as in "Transfusion" there's a tension between stimulus and safety: Rangoon is the safest place
When you get in a jam
So don't be a goon
Round about noon
Take that balloon and scram, Sam. The balloon is a vehicle of escape, but look at the escape route--it's to Rangoon, the safest place. Is that the solution, to pursue novelty from a solid foundation? And would Rangoon be deadly dull (rather than "a safe retreat") without the magic of the lamp or the carpet? It's worth further study. I'm not saying that all the answers to the questions of restlessness, energy, intensity, and comfort--how long to hold a job, how long to keep a lover, how long to stay in one place before hopping on a train or a plane or into a balloon--reside in two minutes of a never-released song recorded by a virtually unknown novelty singer. But I'm not saying that they're not.Labels: ben, novelty songs
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Hey, folks - does anyone out there happen to have a copy of the Fiery Furnaces doing "My Dog" @ the BBC? If so, moistworks at gmail dot com? Thanks!
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
GIVE ME EVERY LITTLE THING
The Juan Maclean
Less Than Human
DFA : 2005
[Buy It]
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT
El Perro del Mar
From the Valley to the Stars
Control Group : 2008
[Buy It]
ECONOMIC THEORY
Christian Kiefer
Dogs & Donkeys
Undertow : 2007
[Buy It]
MOISTWORKS STORYTIME CORNER PRESENTS:
"The Devil is a Busy Man"
by David Foster Wallace
from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Back Bay Books : 2000
[Buy It]
Plus when he got something that was new or if he cleaned out the machine shed or the cellar oftentimes Daddy would find he had a item he didn't want anymore and had to get shed of and as it was a long haul to truck it to the dump or the Goodwill in town he'd just call up and put a notice in the Trading Post paper in town to give it away for nothing. Shit like a couch or a freezer or old tiller. The notice would say Free Come And Get It. Yet even so it always took some time after it run before one soul even called up and the item would sit around in Daddy's drive pissing him off until one or two folks in town would finally come out to his place to look at it. And they'd be skittery about it too and their face all closed up lik at cards and they'd walk around the thing and poke it with their toe and go Where'd you all get it at what's the matter with it how come you want shed of it so bad. They'd shake their head and talk to their Mrs. and dither around and about drive Daddy nuts because all he wanted was to give a old tiller away for nothing and get it out of the drive and here it was taking him all this time jickjacking around with these folks to get them to take it. Then so what he up and starts doing one time he wanted to get shed of something is he puts his notice in the Trading Post paper and he puts in some fool price he just makes up there on the phone with the Trading Post fellow. Some fool price next to nothing. Old Harrow With Some Teeth A Little Rusted $5, JCPenny Sleepersofa Green And Yellow $10 and like that. The oftentimes folks called up the first day the Trading Post run the notice and up and come out from town and even would haul in from further out in some little other towns that got the Trading Post and pull up spraying gravel and scarce even look at the item and press on Daddy to take the 5 or $10 right away before any other folks could take it and if it was something heavy like that one couch I'd help them load it up and they'd up and haul it off right then and there. Their faces was different and their wife's faces in the truck, fine and showing teeth and him with an arm around the Mrs. and a wave at Daddy as they back out. Tickled to death to get a old harrow for next to nothing. I asked Daddy about what lesson to draw here and he said he figured it's you don't try and teach a pig to sing and told me to go on and rake the drive's gravel back out of the ditch before it fucked up the drainage.
Labels: brian, fiction
posted by Brian
LINK |
Friday, June 20, 2008
I'M SAD ABOUT IT
Lee Moses
1966
Available on : Time and Place [reissue]
Castle : 2006
[Buy It]
SAD TOMORROWS
Marvin Gaye
1971
Available on : What's Going On [reissue]
Motown : 2001
[Buy It]
SAD SONG
Rachel Sweet
1978
Available on : Fool Around: The Best of Rachel Sweet
Rhino : 1992
[Buy It]
SO SAD ABOUT US
Shaun Cassidy
Wasp
Warner Bros. : 1980
[Buy It]
Cliff Arnall, a psychologist at the University of Cardiff at Wales, is a specialist in human moods and the conditions necessary to produce them. A few years ago, he used science to determine the unhappiest day of the year. Later on, he developed a precise way to measure the pleasures obtained during weekends. His proclamations are always accompanied by equations. For example, here is Arnall's equation for a perfect long weekend:
(C x R x ZZ) / ((Tt + D) x St) + (P x Pr) >400 A key is required. Tt equals travel time, D equals delays, C equals time spent on cultural activities, R equals time spent relaxing, ZZ equals time spent sleeping, St equals time spent in a state of stress, P equals time spent packing, and Pr equals time spent in preparation. Got it?
Of course you don't, unless you are insistently obtuse. No one gets it. There is nothing to get. It is an ugly thing, this equation, and unwieldy, and senseless in many small details (why Tt for travel time rather than just T?). It is also wrong down to its socks; as the doctor, journalist, and idiot-debunker Ben Goldacre pointed out, "if you pack for 10 hours and prepare for 40, then you get a result of 400, meaning you've apparently had a great weekend." Once I was going out of town with a girlfriend. I packed for ten hours and prepared for forty. It was not a great weekend. She got on the wrong side of a bad oyster and deposited her body weight in vomit upon the bed. [Ed. Note: Since the publication of this piece, an eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that Arnall's equation puts preparation and packing in the denominator, not the numerator, so that a high pack/prepare number would actually limit the pleasure of a trip. Well, the same rule holds. Once I packed a ton and prepared two tons and had a great vacation. Once I ran off spontaneously and forgot to bring pants. And not in a fun way.]
Goldacre's column goes on to point out that Arnall's infamous "Worst Day of the Year" equation was not only promoted by the TV channel SkyTravel but actually designed by the channel:
It's not surprising that these equations are so stupid, because they come from the PR companies almost fully-formed and ready to have your name attached to them. I know that because I have received an avalanche of insider stories--Watergate it isn't--including one from an academic in psychology who was offered money by Porter Novelli PR agency to put his name to the very same Sky Travel equation story that Arnall sold his to. In amongst their aggressive pitch they described how the story would go.
"Blue Monday - January Blues Day is Officially Announced: The 26th January is the most depressing day in the calendar for the majority of Brits as measured by a simple mathematical formula developed on behalf of Sky Travel.
"By taking into account various factors such as avg temperature (C), days since last pay (P), days until next bank holiday (B), avg hours of daylight (D) and number of nights in during mth (N), we create a formula such as C(P+B) N+D. This formula allows us to work out the day with the highest 'depression factor' which you can then use as a focus for making things better, booking your holiday etc ..." This is almost exactly as it was when Arnall revealed his important work to the world. This story is old news. Goldacre's piece ran more than a year ago. So why praise him, or bury Cliff Arnall, in June 2008? Well, here's why: because the ghost still walks. Four times today, I have heard from people that today is the happiest day of the year, and I have heard it because there is a story--a new story--making the rounds. Here is an excerpt from a piece that ran in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Apparently it's the combination of brighter evenings, childhood memories, and the prospect of summer holidays that puts the best possible spin on today.
On paper, Arnall's equation looks like this: O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He.
O is time spent outdoors.
N is time spent in nature.
S is more socialization in the summer.
Cpm relates to positive memories of childhood summers.
T factors in temperature.
He is vacation anticipation.
Arnall said his calculation isn't rocket science. Being outside produces energy, while increased socialization--such as barbecues with neighbors--stimulates pleasure zones in the brain. Also arousing feelings of euphoria are pleasant memories of childhood summers and the fact that vacations are just around the corner. This piece is foolish. Everything about it. But it would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact it's dead reverse wrong. Today is, as it turns out, not only not the happiest day of the year, but one of the sadder days. It's in the bottom half, easily. I have run across a handful of people today who are having sad days for no precise reason. Not bad days, but sad days. "I feel down," one friend said. "Not sure why." Another friend of mine had a good reason. His girlfriend recently told him that she wasn't sure how she felt about things, and that she had been thinking about an ex-boyfriend of hers, and in her thoughts he was not wearing pants. I told him he was supposed to be happy, and explained Arnall's equation. "Eff him," he said, and then sighed. He didn't even have the strength to say "fuck." A third friend is traveling, and she told me that she was at a train station, and she saw a young mother treating her infant son cruelly. "She had blank eyes, the mother," my friend said. "Aren't you supposed to love a baby no matter what? The whole thing just made me fear for humanity." And a fourth friend is going through some changes, as they say, and as a result she has been off the radar, and her decision to be off the radar saddens me. So that's five: a handful. My wife started the day thrilled. The weather was nice. Her coffee had just enough cream in it. But as soon as she heard about Arnall's equation, the day took a sharp downturn, in large part because of the equation. "Most days are going to have plenty of everything," she said. "How insulting is it to pick one day as a designated happy day? Now I'm in a terrible mood."
I don't blame these people for selling out Arnall's best-day propaganda. I run it in reverse, and blame his best-day propaganda for selling out these people. In their honor, in Dr. Goldacre's honor, here are some songs about sadness. Two are soul rarities, one from the nearly unknown Lee Moses, one from the universally revered Marvin Gaye. Two are power-pop oddities from former teen idols who have forged successful second careers on the small screen. I hope that this music will, though a combination of its formal skill, beauty, emotional reality, and energy, make you happy. (Fs + B) * (Er + En).Labels: ben
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
TEARS ARE IN YOUR EYES
Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Matador : 2000
[Buy It]
TEARS ARE IN YOUR EYES
Adem
Takes
Domino : 2008
[Buy It]
FRONTWARDS
Pavement
Watery, Domestic
Matador : 1992
[Buy It]
FRONTWARDS
Los Campesinos!
Sticking Fingers into Sockets
Arts & Crafts : 2007
[Buy It]
Hey Moistworks, what's good? You're looking snazzy today. Me? Fine thanks-- been feeling real mellow since I got moved into my new place. Today I find myself feeling especially quiet, with nothing in particular I want to talk about. So I thought maybe we could just listen to a couple sweet, modern indie rock covers of two great songs by some vintage Matador bands (Sub Pop's 20th birthday donnybrook is coming up, and Sub Pop definitely deserves some feting, but between you and me, I always thought Matador had a stronger track record). One of these covers, I actually prefer to the original, although I'm not going to say which one (hint: "Frontwards" is probably my favorite Pavement song of all time, so...). Apologies to readers who got excited about the prospect of this post actually being about the creature known, Wheel of Fortune "Before & After" style, as Olivia Newton-John Travolta. Maybe next time (but probably not).Labels: brian, covers
posted by Brian
LINK |
Friday, June 13, 2008
CELEBRATE THE NEWS
The Beach Boys
1969
Available on : Friends/20/20 [Extra Tracks]
Capitol : 1990
[Buy It]
I went to an event for a friend recently, a party. I don't need to be so vague but I don't need to be so specific either. This friend had finished a project that had taken up quite a bit of time, and the party was a celebration of that project, and I went to show support and to participate in the celebration. While I was there, I felt proud. Not proud of myself for going--that would be stupid--but proud of my friend for doing the thing that occasioned the celebration. I felt happiness, but there was something else, too, something that started as a little circle at the base of the throat and moved up, warmly, before moving back down again. I wanted my friend to be inspired by herself and her achievement, to feel that inspiration as a palpable presence, without needing the approval of others or cash on the barrelhead or anything else tangible or crass or temporary or illusory or false: without needing anything else at all. Are you allowed to be proud of someone? Are you allowed to want that person to experience, for a little while, the same swell of pride, that same sense of having set the world right--and to want that feeling to last at least until reality descends on the achievement like a pack of birds, pecking and picking? Maybe you're allowed, but I wasn't sure. I worried that if I said anything, it would seem presumptuous, or paternalistic, or cloying, or that she'd say "of course I'm proud" and turn and walk away and I'd feel foolish. Instead, I said that it was a fun party, which was both true and untrue. It was fun enough, but only because it was celebrating something that someone I believe in believed in, if that's not too knotty. It's hard to explain, maybe because it's so easy to understand, and whenever that happens I tend to let songs do the talking.
The song that's talking today is the Beach Boys' "Celebrate The News." Dennis Wilson had begun to assert himself on the 20/20 album, which was recorded in the fall of 1968, but when he headed back into the studio at the beginning of 1969, he was unusually fertile. He produced a handful of songs, some of which ended up on the Sunflower album in 1970 ("Got to Know the Woman," "Forever"). "Celebrate the News" didn't make the album--it was released as the B-side to the Brian Wilson-penned "Break Away," which was the last single the band did for Capitol before moving to Warner Bros. Despite the fact that it was somewhat buried, "Celebrate the News" is one of the finest late-sixties Beach Boys compositions, not to mention one of the oddest, which is really saying something. It starts with a friendly, spoken "hello" and then moves into a very abstract self-directed pep talk that's appropriate for a Friday the 13th posting.My luck was so bad
I thought I used up all the luck I had
Every time I thought I'd get it on
Someone put me on
There's been a change
Beautiful and strange
My life's gone through a change
Somehow I know
Bad luck's in the past
All good things here at last It's not that his luck has turned, necessarily, only that his belief about his luck has. You wouldn't think that he could hold on to that belief, but he does. The title only appears briefly in the lyrics, and what passes for the chorus is performed as a kind of round, with two refrains ("I've got news for you" and "bad luck no more") rising out of the swirling harmonies and chasing each other until neither is exhausted. Then the song lifts off into about a minute of layered repetition:Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on) It's hippie philosophy, but it's genuinely felt and performed, which makes it highly affecting, not to mention strangely effective. Whenever I listen to "Celebrate the News," I want to go find some news to celebrate. This time, I celebrated my friend's news, her completed project and what it brought to her. Every silver lining has a cloud nearby, of course: a few years after "Celebrate the News," Dennis Wilson's optimism would wash away and darker tones would dominate, particularly on his ruined, beautiful solo album Pacific Ocean Blue. ("Farewell, My Friend," from that record, is one of the scariest songs you'll ever hear. Wilson described it as "happy." It's not.) By the early eighties, Wilson was floundering in drink and drugs, and then he drowned. "Celebrate The News," buoyant and airy, could have kept him afloat, at least for a little while.Labels: beach boys, ben
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I BEEN DRINKING
DeYarmond Edison
Bickett Gallery Residency
self-released : 2006
My parents are lifelong teetotallers, so maybe it's weird that my first taste of alcohol was administered by them. I must've been in elementary school, and we were visiting my maternal grandparents. My immediate family is not a hard-drinking family, although we come from a hard-drinking line. My maternal great-grandfather smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey all his life and lived into his 80s; near the end he would just sit in his bathtub with a Texas gallon, his fingernails and toenails carbuncular with nicotine. My mother loved her grandfather but also used him as something as a cautionary tale for young Brian, and sometimes played me against him. I remember once, when I was really little, my mom told me to tell my great-grandfather that I wished he wouldn't smoke, and while I recall having no such wish, I dutifully told him what my mother instructed me to tell him. In retrospect I resent this manipulation a little, in the same way one grows to resent being lied to about Santa Claus, whatever good intentions were involved. (If finding out the truth about Santa Claus was traumatic, imagine when I found out about God.)
But so on this one visit to my grandparents' house, I found a little airplane bottle of whiskey in a drawer. I don't remember how I came to be offered a taste of it - probably I expressed curiosity. I do remember how the centimeter or so of goldish-brown, chemically scented whiskey looked at the bottom of a paper Dixie cup, and how foul and alien it tasted, and how I then resolved, much to my mother's satisfaction, that it was "yucky" and that I didn't understand why people drank it. To hear her tell it, beer tasted even worse.
There was obviously never drinking alcohol around my home, but my mother had a bottle of Creme de Menthe on a high shelf that she used to bake these really yummy Creme de Menthe brownies. In the summertime, while my parents were at work, I would get the bottle down and drink small swigs of it, much to my four-years-younger brother's trepidation and intrigue, eventually convincing him to drink it too. We never drank enough to get drunk (although perhaps my little brother got a bit loopy once or twice), or for my mother to notice the diminishing bottle. Only in adulthood have we even told my mother about this, which has joined the roster of her favorite childhood-related stories to tell about us. I realize that my current, fairly moderate alcohol ingestion still makes my mom a little uneasy, in part because her lifelong teetotalling has rendered the effects of alcohol out of all proportion to reality in her mind, partly because, never having developed a taste for it, she doesn't understand why anyone would drink it besides getting wasted and embarassing themselves, and partly (probably mostly) because of the extremely self-destructive substance use of my teenage years.
DRINK AWAY THE PAIN (SITUATIONS)
Mobb Deep
The Infamous
RCA : 1995
[Buy It]
Perhaps appropriately, my memory of the first time I actually got drunk is muddled. It might have involved Zima, although I prefer to believe this is not the case. It might have involved the day when my friend and I raided his parents liquor cabinet, made a vile concoction of pretty much everything in it, and proceeded to jump on his trampoline while we drank it (that we did this without getting sick blows my mind, but the young are made of tough stuff). But the closest thing I have to a true memory of my first time getting drunk is this: one friend of mine's family lived on a farm, and that farm had a log cabin that was remote from the house, which my friend's grandfather had built. Much of my early substance use took place at this cabin, which had a fireplace and decent chairs and a bed where we could spend the night. Up in the rafters, we found a jug of moonshine that my friend's grandfather had made. It was cloudy pink and contained floating flecks of something dark. I'm amazed it didn't blind us. But after consuming some quantity of this moonshine, I remember going to a punk show at the local Exchange Club (one of those shadowy organizations like the Elks Lodge or Rotary Club), laying on the floor with a spinny head while punk kids either pretended to or maybe actually spit on me. (Another booze related memory - coming home at 5 am after having snuck out to a party to find my father unexpectedly awake, and trying to explain A) where I'd been and B) why I was covered in chocolate pudding.) I remember going home to my friend's house and discovering that his mother had cooked up a deer (these were country people), and I remember eating some of this deer despite the fact that it turned my stomach because I was afraid of seeming strange or drunk.
After that, trying to procure and then find places to drink alcohol began to take up a significant portion of my time (although I wasn't as hard a drinker as many of my friends, who would drink hard liquor before school in the mornings - I liked to drink, but I preferred weed.) One event that stands out in my mind with great clarity was called "Plan Z." Some older boys at the high school told my friends and me that they'd had to ditch a case of some vile beer (Milwaukee's Best, I think) in the weeds by a convenience store because of some dust-up with the police, and that the booze was probably still there. In English class we drew up a map - the aforementioned "Plan Z" - that showed where the beer was suspected to be in relation to where we were, and plotted a SWAT-team-like operation to procure it. (It's not as if a map was necessary, we could have just gone and gotten it - but my budding nihilism was still warring with my native precocity, and I'm pretty sure "Plan Z" was my idea.)
We skipped the next period (the various insane ways my friends and I contrived to escape from school, like driving madly out of the student parking lot, down a steep grassy grade, and into the unguarded bus lot of the elementary school next door, are a post unto themselves) and put Plan Z into action, which involved a screeching halt at the suspected location, fake walkie-talkie cries of "Go Go Go!", a commando raid on the weeds by the convenience store in broad daylight, and, miraculously, the procurement of said case of beer, just where the older kids said it would be (I'm still amazed that this wasn't a snipe hunt, and never got clear on why the older kids didn't just go back for the beer themselves). It turns out my mother was right - beer, especially the cheap beer we favored, tasted foul, and I set about learning to like it with near-suicidal resolve. The discovery of the "beer bong," a funnel and tube that allowed you to down a beer in seconds, helped on this score.
And I did, somehow, grow to like bad beer (now I drink decent wine and good beer, and the idea of drinking 12 PBRs seems not just repulsive but impossible). But the freewheeling days of Plan Z began to shade into darker territory rather quickly. The first time I was caught driving drunk by my parents remains a black day in my memory; I remember how sad and terrified they were, and rightly so - I was so young and naive, and I gave myself so many chances to die. The first time I got caught, I'd been drinking 40s of malt liquour at a party and came home reeking - I just didn't care. The next time, I was grounded for months, months which included a new year's eve. But I just snuck out. Me and all of my friends drove drunk, we were invincible! We really were. But shortly after high school, our invincibility ran out. My friend Jeff H. left one party we were all at around 4 in the morning, after drinking keg beer and doing cocaine. For reasons we'll never know, Jeff didn't go home, but instead drove several miles past his house, doing well over 100, before he spun off the road and disintegrated in the trees. Literally disintegrated, car, Jeff, and all. I remember going to the site with my friends the next day, marveling at the skid marks and the strewn detritus, wracked with someth |
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