Flesh Garbage

Quote of the Day

2009-08-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

There are few sights more affecting, more indicative of God's disdain for man, than a retard on skates.

- Winston Churchill

A teaspoon of salt and a pinch of sugar

2008-07-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

2008-07-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

2008-07-21T22:50:00.000-07:00

post

2008-07-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

post

2008-07-21T22:44:00.000-07:00

Auf wiedersehen liebchin

2008-05-26T13:53:00.000-07:00

Night Marchers @ Bar Pink Elephant, February 8, 2008

2008-02-13T01:52:00.000-08:00

Speedo (aka Swami, aka Raz'tus Reis), masta' of hypuh'bole and James Brown showmanship, sounded uncharacteristically apprehensive as he jimmey'd down de fust show uh his new band De Night Marchers at Bar Pink Elephant. Ova' Tommy Kitsos' drobbin' bass he addressed da damn capacity crowd. "Alright, dis be goin' t'seem much longa' dan it really be since ya' duzn't know any uh de songs. You's duzn't gots'ta dance, ya' kin even turn yo' backs on us if ya' wants'..." It wuz his fust show in ova' a year and puh'haps de room's palpable sense uh 'spectashun weighed on his mind. Wid some 20 years uh cribtown baaaadgots'ta in de bank he needn't gots' wo'ried; when de fust cho'ds uh "Bad Bloods" rang fum his Telecasta' de crowd jimmey'd deir arms and he wuz crib again. 'S coo', bro.

Afta' years uh appearin' in seemin'ly every oda' band fo'med in San Diego, Reis gots'ta recently scaled back his beatal ventures. Hot Snakes and Rocket fum de Crypt played deir last shows in 2005 and De Sultans followed suit in January uh 2007, leavin' de fo'merly ubiquitous rocka' widout some sin'le band t'his dojigger. Many wondered if Reis had abandoned da damn makin' uh beat in favo' uh his activities as label 'haid (Swami Reco'ds), DJ (Swami Sound System on FM 94.9), bar co-owna' (Bar Pink Elephant) and studio proprieto' (City uh Refuge). Dat wuz neva' de case. What it is, Mama! As he told Billbo'd.com, "I likes collabo'atin' and ah' likes bein' part uh a band. Even afta' Rocket fum de Crypt and Hot Snakes ran deir course, ah' knowed ah' dun didn't wanna stop playin' beat. ah' likes collabo'atin', and ah' wants'ed t'be part uh a band. ah' wuzn't interested in becomin' some bedroom artist. Also, ah' love playin' in front uh sucka's."

De Night Marchers are some celebrashun uh everydin' sexy, savage and defiantly knuckle draggin' about rock and roll, an emodiment uh beat as liberatin' elixir and social unifier. Ah be baaad... As such it's plum de latest in some long line uh Reis led bands dat 'esplo'e similar terrain, but it's also some culminashun uh everydin' he's learned fum some lifetime uh surveyin' every nook and cranny uh dat terrain. 'S coo', bro. Joinin' Reis (guitar and lead vocals) are guitarist Gar Wood (Hot Snakes, Beehive and da damn Barracudas and da damn under-recognized Tanner), bassist Tommy Kitsos (CPC Gangbangs) and drumma' Jason Kourkounis (Hot Snakes, Delta 72). Dough de band's linedown consists uh 3/4 uh Hot Snakes de moody post-punk blur uh dat band - o' de earlier, freaked-out Drive Like Jehu - be mostly absent, replaced by some garage rock vibe dat gots'ta mo'e in common wid de party andems uh Rocket fum de Crypt and da damn stripped-waaay down Sultans. However, unlikes dose bands De Night Marchers kin also git waaay downright funky, 'esplo'in' de shimmerin' sounds uh Stax Reco'ds and da damn 60s garage punks who loved dem. 'S coo', bro.

"Who's Lady R U?", wid its scratchy guitars, wo'dless backin' vocals and hip-swin'in' whup' featured Reis and Wood lockin' into some great interlockin' guitar groove, while "You's've Got Nerve" wuz some hauntin', slinky soul ballad wid sweet harmonies. "Scene Repo't" brought some amped-down rockabilly t'de party. Slap mah fro! "I Wanna Deadwhup' You's" had da damn shouted cho'uses and careenin' guitars uh many some great Rocket tune. What it is, Mama! On songs likes "Jump in de Fire", "Total Bloodbad" and "Open Ya' Legs", de band played fierce punkish blasts dat highlighted Reis and Wood's inventive guitar wo'k and placed Reis' distinctive bark at da damn fo'efront. Dey closed wid "Fistin' de Fanbase" some heavier, densa' song dat jimmey'd down de sound enough t'allow fo' some intense jammin'.

De new songs kin be intricate but da damn band proved t'be surprisin'ly tight and assho' nuffd considerin' dat Kourkounis lives in Philadelphia while da damn rest reside in San Diego. Dey've clearly made da damn most uh deir infrequent practice oppo'tunities. Deir debut album, See You's In Magic, wuz reco'ded in foe days, wid minimal rehearsal, and gots'ta be released April 22nd on de Swami label. While dey've followed deir fust show wid some handful uh Soudern Califo'nia dates and some Sprin' tour gots'ta been menshuned, given de geographic constraints and Reis' many oda' obligashuns ah' gots'ta wonda' how much we'll be seein' dem. 'S coo', bro. We'd betta' cherish dem while dey're here. What it is, Mama!

www.myspace.com/thenightmarchers

Stravinsky, Liebermann, Haydn, Radiator Calhoun

2008-02-10T21:30:00.000-08:00

In her classic 1972 memoir The Happy Hooker, New York madame Xaviera Hollander relays a touching anecdote. It seems that a certain gentleman had requested her assistance in arranging a paid rendezvous with a suitably strapping black man who would be willing and able to perform anal penetrative service upon said gentleman. Finding a black man proved surprisingly easy; a willing one not much more difficult; but at the last moment this particular black man vexingly insisted upon wearing a condom for, as he explained, he didn't want to get shit on his dick. To which Xaviera wittily retorted (I paraphrase), "Hell, your cock's already black! What's the difference if it's got some shit on it?"

Conductor Jahja Ling wisely sidestepped a similar contretemps by refraining from fucking the audience's collective ass during the San Diego Symphony's Jacobs' Masterworks Series on February 10th. Instead we were treated to sensitive performances of two very different symphonic 'masterworks' and an arresting West Coast premiere from a contemporary composer.

It's pronounced Eye-gor

I had come for what would be the last performance of the day; Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, that mystic reverie of quivering strings and dancing rhythms which established the young Igor as a Big Fucking Deal. Originally composed for Diaghilev's Russian Ballet in 1909, it exists in numerous versions, of which Ling and Co. chose the widely played 1919 version that omits some of the more stage-bound music and adds two of the most memorable elements of the piece: the gentle Berceuse and the glorious Finale, a stately procession of singing horns that seems to spawn infinitely into the air before collapsing under its own weight. The Firebird builds surely to that grand end and boasts a rich, lustrous atmosphere that permeates every note, but it's rarely lackadaisical; the great clanging rhythms presage the violence of The Rite of Spring and its inventive percussion and crying horns are rapturously dramatic.

The Firebird Suite was preceded by the West Coast premiere of a new work by a young composer named Lowell Liebermann (born 1961). Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 95, was a brilliant and far-flung composition which began by embracing intense chromatic piano work - with deep bass runs that would make Cecil Taylor smile (or shit) - with inventive contrapuntal writing for the orchestra. It evolved into a haunting slow movement that at times sounded like a distant toy piano echoing through a thick fog. The pianist, the brilliant Jeffrey Biegel, describes this section as consisting of an "F-sharp Major harmony with gentle starlights" and furthermore deems it reminiscent of Brahms in its piano voicing. It certainly sounded lovely so I'll take his word for it.

The third movement of Liebermann's concerto was an insane Ives-ian carnival of pop distortions, the orchestra cycling through dramatic shifts into swing jazz, ragtime and showtunes like a feverish Woody Herman leading his Herd through a desperate audition for the WPA. It was marvelously exciting and a complete surprise given what had come before it but, as with the rest of the concerto, it managed to be both dauntingly rigorous and joyously footloose. It also received something of a mixed reception, the majority of the audience giving a long standing ovation while some of the older patrons wore an expression similar to that of a child watching his teddy bear being raped by the family dog. Doll rapist or no, Liebermann is an original and thrilling voice and I'm looking forward to catching up on his work.

The program began with Haydn's Symphony No. 94 in G major, also known as "The Surprise" for the ***SPOILER ALERT*** single loud chord that comes crashing unexpectedly into the otherwise quiescent second movement. Haydn, whom I mostly know as the inventor of the string quartet, was evidently something of a musical prankster who inserted Zappa-like meta-commentary into his pieces. According to the pre-concert lecture by Nuvi Mehta (Zubin's supercilious young cousin) one of his more extreme pranks was a composition which called for the players to leave the stage before resolving the performance. In this particular symphony the humor - with the exception of that single unsettling chord - is more subtle and mostly involves little rhythmic sleights of hand that subvert the listener's expectations. Mostly though, the Symphony was your typically graceful and effortless Classical confection; much like the prettiest girl in school its very perfection became a sort of narcotic blandness capable of lulling the hardiest of men into a dumb stupor.

Blue Cheer & Earthless - Live @ The Casbah, Feb 1, 2008 - Plus: A Righteous Indictment of the All Music Guide

2008-02-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

I can recall a day, many years ago, when I woke to a ripe summer's morn, its dewy thighs parted wide in invitation and possibility. The sun shone into my bleary studio apartment like a police cruiser lighting up a crackhouse. I had a case of Mexican beer in the fridge and nowhere to go, so I popped a bottle, shoved a wedge of lime down its trap, and headed to the garden where I listened to AC/DC at cock-shaking volume. A half-joyful feeling of fuck-it-all; there was nothing to do but drink the glorious day away. There's a special kind of music for that feeling: Deadbeat Rock.

Would it surprise you to know that Blue Cheer have changed very little from their late 60s heyday? They still make the same pill-poppin' blooze-metal racket; Dickie Peterson still looks like a Keebler Elf from the wrong side of the tree and still sings like a coyote with his throat cut; they're still deliberately stoopid, still uncompromisingly unsubtle, still 'louder than God' and still amazing.

Though the Cheer have been playing with scores of different players off and on for almost forty years, their reputation rests on the original lineup of bassist/vocalist Dickie Peterson, drummer Paul Whaley and guitarist Leigh Stephens, all of whom played on the first two albums Vincebus Eruptum and Outside/Inside. Stephens has long since gone to pasture but he's been ably replaced by 'new guy' (over 20 years in the band) Duck Marshall, a much more fluid guitarist than Stephens ever was. In his honor, most of their songs now feature long solo guitar passages which Peterson and Whaley support with airtight thundering vamps.

It was pretty much everything you could want in a classic rock show. Peterson sported a pseudo Jim Morrison getup of sunglasses, tight leather pants, shirt opened to a bare chest festooned with what looked like Indian medallions; his hair was pretty much the same billowing plume from the old album covers, only now it was gray. This is a look that doesn't flatter most 60 year old men, but he pulled it off with panache. He indulged in lots of endearingly cheesy stage banter:

"You love Blue Cheer? Well, we're glad cuz we love you too!"

"This is the second time we've played The Casbah, so this song is kind of appropriate. Here's a little number called Second Time Around!"

"This next song's kind of ironic, cuz we never do anything Just A Little Bit!"

"You feel like getting high?"

"People always think this song is about drugs. Well, it is..."

The crowd, mostly hesher kids mixed with a few greybeards, adored them and were adored right back. The band seemed happy to be there and pleased to shake hands or exchange hugs with all comers, including the requisite over-enthusiastic woman who jumped on stage and embraced them all in turn. Of course, they mostly stuck to the oldies and even these were restricted to the first two albums. Parchment Farm and Doctor Please were huge psychedelic jams; Babylon grooved; Summertime Blues stomped. The brief Randy Holden era was ignored, along with everything that followed it. There were three new songs (at least one being about pot) which were surprisingly good and showed a more contemporary metal influence. There was even a drum solo. What more do you want from them?

The setlist, as I recall it: Babylon/Second Time Around/unidentified new song/Rollin' Dem Bones/Out of Focus/Just a Little Bit/Maladjusted Child/Parchment Farm/Summertime Blues/Doctor Please/Rock Me Baby

While I have you here, let me direct your attention to this astonishingly poor piece of writing by one Mr. Joe Viglione, purporting to review Vincebus Eruptum for the All Music Guide. Say what you will about Blue Cheer - you're welcome to love or hate them - but shouldn't your review at least make sense? For some reason this sentence, though far from the worst of the lot, particularly bugs me:

Definitely more risqué than Grand Funk Railroad's "T.N.U.C.," Abe "Voco" Kesh's production is almost nonexistent.

Now, first of all he's talking about Blue Cheer's version of Parchment Farm, which has nothing to do with Grand Funk Railroad. Secondly, the production of Abe "Voco" Kesh has nothing to do with the risque content of Blue Cheer's song. The subordinate clause does not support the, uh, ordinate cause, or whatever the fuck you call it; Mr. Viglione is cramming two very different, and useless, sentiments into one sentence. The rest of the review is nothing but scattershot references to Grand Funk, the Velvets and Mountain. He compares Blue Cheer's Doctor Please to a song Leslie West would record four years later called The Doctor:

Also interesting that "Doctor Please" on Vincebus Eruptum doesn't have the crunch West/Bruce and Laing would insert into their own "The Doctor" four years later on Why Dontcha.

Interesting? Really? What's the link between the two numbers? The fact that both titles share the word Doctor? I think what he's saying is that Blue Cheer influenced a lot of bands, but he's too busy showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of shit-rock to properly make the point. It's a miserable excuse for a review. Now, I may be just as inept as Mr. Viglione but at least I'm not getting paid to imitate the scratchings of a stoned sophomore stuck in detention. I am a stoned sophomore in detention and I do it for free. I also really like italics.

Please - I beg of you - read his review and tell me if I'm wrong. I want to learn.

But I digress...

San Diego's very own instrumental acid-rock trio Earthless, who have got to be one of the best live bands in the country, opened the show with a typically epic new song, their dirgiest, most riffed-out to date; crashing waves of Sabbathian brain-fry and some furious double-bass assault from drummer Mario Rubalcaba healed the wounds of all the lost souls in the room. That's all ye know and all ye need to know.

Miles in Japan

2008-01-31T13:59:00.001-08:00

There's a hack journalist in my head - his cubicle shiny with pizza grease and donut residue - always on the lookout for correspondence and coincidence. This is where he earns his stipend; two Miles Davis albums, both recorded in Japan, ten years apart, as different as nigiri and maki. (My man pulls double duty in the Strained Metaphor Department as well.) This, in the parlance of our times, is a 'hook'. Now I've got an excuse to write about the baddest motherfucker to ever pick up a trumpet, drive a Lamborghini and call Steve Miller a "sorry-ass cat".

Personnel: Miles Davis (trumpet), Sam Rivers (tenor sax), Herpes Handjob (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums)

Miles In Tokyo documents a July 14 gig during our man's first trip to Japan in 1964. The trip started inauspiciously; Miles vomited up his in-flight entertainment of sleeping pills, booze and cocaine upon his hosts at the Tokyo airport. He was musically unsettled as well. Having recently lost tenorist George Coleman, Miles heeded the recommendation of drummer Tony Williams and brought in a left-field choice, the Boston avant-gardist Sam Rivers - one of the truly great saxophonists of the modern era - to fill in for the duration of the tour. By this point the core of the Davis band had been playing together for over a year but were still struggling to find their own sound. Sam Rivers was a very different player - volcanic, mercurial yet analytical - than the straight ahead Coleman and the enigmatic saxophonist who would succeed them both and inaugurate Miles' 'Second Great Quintet': Wayne Shorter. Miles - at 38 a veteran of several musical revolutions - and his young band - Williams, the youngest, was 18 - were looking for a new sound and Rivers' brief stay served to clear out some of the cobwebs in the quintet's music. As Williams said, Rivers "changed the sound of the band before Wayne joined".

Here, as for much of the 60s, Miles live setlist neglects the band's current compositions in favor of a strict diet of standards and old favorites, so the band is in comfortable territory. Tempos are mostly fast, though not the Napalm Death-like rush they would reach in the Shorter years, and the emphasis is on the solos. If I Were a Bell shows Miles to be in great, aggressive form and while Rivers sounds a little constrained by the format his playing is tough, inventive and clearly challenging to the rest of the band, prompting a more flexible approach to the rhythm and freer, less confining harmonies from Hancock. So What, a laid back staple from Kind of Blue, gets a particularly furious treatment, the band impatiently boiling behind Miles' long lines before Williams erupts in clangorous percussive fits that nearly envelop Rivers' scouring tenor. Walkin' begins with a similarly intense treatment then heads into more impressionistic territory during Hancock's solo.

My Funny Valentine, long a calling card for the trumpeter and a showcase for his pure, haunted cool, exposes some of the divisions at work in the Rivers lineup. With the rhythm section's mostly muted support Miles plays an exceptionally strong solo from the source melody; Rivers plays around it - a dessicated ghost of the tune - and the band skirts abstraction. All of You finds the band working with an elastic pulse, reacting particularly closely to Rivers' loose limbed, digressive phrasing. It's worth noting that Miles and Rivers never actually play in unison at any point on the album, the trumpeter stating the theme alone before heading off into the solos. Rivers was clearly just a guest in the band but his presence inspired a lot of thinking about the dynamics of the music. The result is the sound of a band in transition, groping its way toward a less hierarchical group dynamic that would coalesce in the dark spiraling mysteries of the Wayne Shorter years.

Personnel: Miles Davis (trumpet, organ), Sonny Fortune (soprano sax, alto sax, flute), Pete Cosey (guitar, synthi, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Mtume (conga, percussion, water drum, rhythm box), Al Foster (drums)

When a 2-CD set opens with a pair of tracks entitled Prelude Parts 1 & 2, and those two tracks total well over half an hour, you know you're in for something more than just another set of jazz standards. There are five tracks in all (Maiysha, Interlude and Theme from Jack Johnson are the others) but in effect Agharta is just one big jam; a mutating slab of dense, freaked out poly-rhythmic alien jazz-funk that pushes Miles Davis' electric period as far from his bebop origins as can be imagined; as far as even Miles cared to go, for this and its companion piece, Pangaea (recorded later the same day) would be his final records before a drugged-out six year sabbatical from which he finally emerged a much different player; a pop jazz superstar. It's deeply ironic that jazz critics in the late 60s and 70s considered his contemporary music a sellout to the hippie crowd; while Miles did want to transcend the traditionally insular jazz audience, albums like Agharta and Pangaea were probably too jazzy for the rockers, too rocking for the jazzers, insufficiently mocking for the mockers and too weird for almost everybody.

Taped live in Tokyo, Japan on February 1, 1975, a little over ten years after his first visit to the country, Miles was a changed man; he suffered from bleeding ulcers, a bad hip and was addicted to cocaine, pills and alcohol. He was no longer measuring his music in terms of bars and rests; instead it married Stockhausen's theories of music as process - a continuing, eternally unfolding river of sound - to a Black Power ethos of deep funk grooves, African rhythms and collective improvisation. This is music to be listened to from the bottom up; solos are subordinate to the organic interaction of the band.

Prelude is almost nothing but rhythm, each player a living, breathing drum in some dark ceremonial rite. Stravinsky's 'neo-primitive' Le Sacre du Printemps was famously inspired by the composer's vision of a young girl dancing herself to death; Prelude, with its relentlessly driving wah-wah guitars and the leader's horror-show organ, could score a frenzied dance to summon the spirits. It's one big boiling cauldron of voodoo. It's also the perfect soundtrack for driving down darkened streets, stoned, on the way to a Blue Cheer concert. Or so I'm told.

Miles acts as a mad conductor, performing rhythmic amputations, directing the group to drop out in full stops that leave soloists momentarily clawing in the air before the band jumps in to cushion their fall. It's a breathtaking strategy that works well when Fortune is soloing, but only serves to accent the vacuity of the guitar solos; they're great rhythm players but their sub-Hendrix shredding is more notable for its fevered wah-wahing than its substance. But, again; to focus on them is to somewhat miss the point.

Prelude sets the template and the rest of the album follows suit, albeit less intensely, with disc two meandering along spacily - lazily, even - with some nice flute work by Fortune and more dubbed-out trumpet swimming in echo and wah. You could call it go-nowhere music for a go-nowhere world, but it's also not that far removed conceptually from the universally beloved Kind of Blue; there's some of the same sense of stasis that one finds in All Blues; an open plain with no roads and no map. Miles claimed that Kind of Blue was a failed attempt to evoke the interplay of African thumb-piano and drum, the spontaneity of African music; maybe he never captured the sound he heard in his head back then, but in 1975 he still wasn't ready to stop trying. Perhaps the attempt was everything; maybe - for Miles - anything that can be easily captured isn't worth holding onto.

The above photo says more than I ever could about where Miles Davis was at in the early to mid 70s. Once a friend of mine who was tripping on mushrooms pointed to this picture, pasted on the wall, and said, "Right now I feel the way Miles looks". I'm sure a lot of people do. And Steve Miller really is a sorry-ass cat. "Abracadabra" my balls.

Ian Svenonius interviews Ian Mackaye: In Soft Focus

2008-01-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

Soft Focus, Ian Svenonius' fascinating online chat show on Vice TV, finds the leftist provocateur inhabiting the role of rock's Charlie Rose. Earnest and po-faced, with a slight lisp and an aura of refined abstraction, he poses questions so specific and self-reflexive as to nearly answer themselves; alternately, he offers up learned koans so broad as to flummox all but the quickest of subjects. It's a bit of a high-wire act and, like Rose, his self absorption can lead to the occasional bout of tone deafness, as per his exchange with Will Oldham regarding the latter's trips to Cuba:

Svenonius: I'm a big fan of Fidel Castro, as you might know.

Oldham: You know they call him that (Oldham mimes the stroking of an imaginary long beard). In private discussion, in houses, if they want to talk about him it's a habit to go like (strokes chin).

Svenonius: Oh, that's great.

Oldham: In case they're being bugged.

Svenonius: Oh, that's great.

While his ideology and erudition shouldn't be doubted his pretensions are a little more complicated. The title of the show is explained, with half a wink, as "The world looks better in Soft Focus." Svenonius has a long history as a musician in bands such as Nation of Ulysses and Weird War, where he's cultivated a simultaneously tweedy (even in his punkiest days he was immaculately tailored), subversive and deliberately self-parodic aesthetic. In Soft Focus he seems to be sending up his persona as an effete, be-suited intellectual poseur as a means to enter areas of discussion less pompous interviewers would fear to broach. Consequently there's little show biz badinage, logrolling or name dropping; the focus instead is on musicians, their motives and methods, and especially their thoughts on art and its position in a hyper-capitalist American culture.

It's easy for his guests to become trapped in Svenonius' more elaborate constructs, so the best interviews are the ones where the guest feels challenged to break from the question-answer format and engage in a real discussion with a sympathetic mind. His greatest strength as an interviewer is his ability to provoke these exchanges. His session with Ian Mackaye begins with Mackaye's friendly assertion, "You are incredibly full of shit" and takes it from there, with Mackaye periodically skewering and turning the tables on his interlocutor.

I've never been a rabid devotee of Mackaye's bands Fugazi and Minor Threat (though I do like them well enough) but in his position as co-owner of Dischord - one of the original, and still thriving, independent labels - he has shown tremendous integrity and intelligence in his relationship with the corporate culture of the music biz. Here, in part two of his interview, he dissects the failings of the major label system, the rise of digital culture and makes some predictions about the much lamented (at least in certain imposing steel and glass skyscrapers) End Of The Record Business As We Know It.

Even if you're not interested in Ian Mackaye it's well worth watching all four parts of the interview if you're at all dismayed by the state of music and popular culture.

Finally, if my analogy holds up wouldn't that make Henry Rollins the James Lipton to Ian Svenonius' Charlie Rose? Discuss amongst yourselves, but don't mention it to Henry; he has veins that are larger than me.

Thrones

2008-01-30T01:20:00.000-08:00

Joe Preston has cited Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as his favorite book and there's something of the desolate west to the music he creates as Thrones; but whereas McCarthy's band of dispossessed killers roamed a blood red landscape littered with the corpses of Indians and outlaws Preston rides alone, past clotted ravines where bears scavenger amidst discarded Commodore 64s and busted calliopes while Stanley Kubrick holds a neon-lit vigil . It's a land where the prelapsarian American maverick collides with the post industrial age and its wreckage, and over it all preside the angels known as Thrones, or 'ophanim'; wheels of God's chariot and serene administrators of divine judgment. Here brutality, as in McCarthy's world, is just another manifestation of mystic will.

Preston has drifted through the underground music scene for years working (mostly on bass) as a hired gun for bands such as The Melvins, Earth, SunnO, High On Fire and Harvey Milk; a Johnny Appleseed, or perhaps Wayfaring Stranger, of heavily amplified experimental fuckery. In these contexts he is but a voice in the choir, subsumed in the group dynamic, but in Thrones he works alone, handling vocals, bass, guitar, synthesizer and drum machine, recording mostly on cheap digital portastudios. He performs live as well, using prerecorded backing tracks, a bass and an array of effects. I saw him perform in Portland last year and it was an unexpectedly moving and inspiring experience; watching this solitary man on stage channeling these strange & forceful yet fragile whirls of sound gave me hope.

The first stirrings of the Thrones aesthetic emerged on the 1992 Joe Preston EP, his solo debut recorded as part of a typically perverse Melvins project: three simultaneous solo albums, one by each member of the band, in homage to the infamous Kiss solo albums of the late 70s. The sound here is closer to his work with The Melvins and Earth, the centerpiece being the long Hands First Flower, a crushing titan of guitar drone commencing with a sample from Apocalypse Now. 1992's Alraune was the Thrones debut proper and boasted more complex songs, more diverse instrumentation and hints of the cinematic sound that would come to define the band.

Sperm Whale/White Rabbit (2000) is Thrones' homecoming and one of the most beautiful, baffling and fucked up records of its time. On many of the tracks Preston electronically processes his gruff, wounded vocals into a choir of bruised electric angels hovering over a sonic battlefield of broken drum machine rhythms, distorted bass, sci-fi soundtracks and synth washes. Prog, heavy metal and soundtrack music sit side by side, sometimes on top of one another in a glorious heap where beauty and disgust are indistinguishable. Overlaying it all is a sort of gothic western symbolism; images of rabbits, whales and whaling vessels abound; songs are named for bears (Oso Malo, The Anguish Of Bears); Django, a spaghetti western theme, is covered; some thirty minutes of backwoods ambiance - a forest nocturne of frogs and crickets - closes the record. Herman Melville might approve.

Obolus is perhaps the best Thrones track and showcases Preston's under-appreciated gift for beautiful minor key melody and twisted chorales. Listen to the glorious contrast of rhythm and melody and the way he builds tension during the vocal crescendos by withholding the downbeat. Beautiful.

This version comes from Day Late, Dollar Short (2005), an excellent compilation of singles and outtakes and as of this writing the only other Thrones full length.

Obolus

www.southernlord.com

Mats Gustafsson - Solos for Contrabass Saxophone

2008-01-24T00:58:00.001-08:00

An urgent instant message from my Auntie Irene:

This is it: the single best album of improvised avant-garde contrabass saxophone solos you've never heard. I know, I know: heresy! But hear me out. That Dirk Bogard & The Nihilistic Prairie Iguanas' triple-CD set? Toss it out. Meditations In An Olive Garden by David Crosby? Give him a kick in the cunt cuz he ain't worth the ass-grease his mom sucked down before shitting him out. Those contrabass saxophone solos you've been loading into your Mac down in the basement? Give up; Heather Mills has got more legs.

What, you don't play? Shit, Millie, get on the good foot! Contrabass saxophone is where it's at and me, I'm always where it's at, waiting for you to get on the bus and get down here! Jumpin' jerkoffs, on my block every home's got one. The whole family sits around on the porch just a-tootin' and a-grinnin! Like so:

But see, Mats here, he's from Sweden and he's got very different ideas about how to play improvised avant-garde contrabass saxophone solos! It's not your usual run of the mill improvised avant-garde contrabass saxophone solo cliched shit. For one, he plays it in a church. Besides that he warms up by getting all these great breathy noises out of the thing, sounding at times like a gently babbling brook that happens to be playing a seven foot saxophone. Add in some slow dark blues, barge horn blasts, lycanthropian howls and Brobdingnagian gas attacks and you got yourself a soundtrack for your next cookout!

Can't find it? Oh, that's right; it was only issued as a limited edition silkscreened transparent one-sided 12" record so it might be a bit hard to come by. Well, blow a record geek or hie yourself up to Sweden cuz it's probably worth the fuss; it's spelunkingly eerie, atmospheric and mildly terrifying. Your girlfriend will probably hate it but if you made it to the end of this review you don't have one anyway.

www.tableoftheelements.com

Eric Dolphy - Complete Memorial Album Sessions

2008-01-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

Collective personnel: Woody Shaw (trumpet), Clifford Jordan (soprano sax), Sonny Simmons (alto sax), Eric Dolphy (alto sax, bass clarinet, flute), Prince Lasha (flute), Bobby Hutcherson (vibraphone), Richard Davis, Eddie Kahn (bass), J.C. Moses (drums)

Recorded in the summer of 1963 for producer Alan Douglas (look under the bongwater stains and you'll find his his name all over those sleazy old posthumous Hendrix releases) these sessions were only released after Eric Dolphy's death the following year and for decades were found scattered among various albums such as Iron Man, The Eric Dolphy Memorial Album, Conversations and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is par for the course in Dolphy's piecemeal discography; perhaps because of his endless session work and touring he never developed a close relationship with a protective producer and label the way Coltrane did with Bob Thiele at Impulse. In any case, and despite the brilliance displayed in his own work and numerous supporting roles, Dolphy didn't find his true voice as a leader - one that would mark him as an 'auteur' equal to Coltrane or Miles - until the last year or so of his short life. Fate's a motherfucker, as Miles might say.

Burning Spear, for nonet, leads the album and illustrates what an original thinker Dolphy really was. With twin basses and a frontline dominated by high pitched instruments (trumpet, soprano, alto, flute, vibes plus bass clarinet) Dolphy scores floating harmonies that sound inspired by Ravel or Stravinsky rather than Basie or Ellington but uses them to create a free counterpoint to the wild solos; a fresh way out of the tired head-solos-head format of post-bop while skirting the radicalisms of free jazz and the moribund politeness of the Third-Stream. Other than his role as arranger for Coltrane's Africa/Brass I know of no other instance where a larger band was put at his disposal and it's a shame it wasn't to happen more often. Music Matador, a calypso by Prince Lasha and Sonny Simmons, is something of a shock after Burning Spear, the sextet romping through a kitschy theme with Dolphy's wild bass clarinet hurumphing like an elephant and screaming like a cockatoo.

The three quintet numbers, though exciting in their own right, sound like dry runs for the Out to Lunch album. The instrumentation is the same but the ensemble work very different; the bassist and drummer's roles here are those of a traditional rhythm section and the band never develops the intense five-way conversation that makes Out to Lunch a milestone. The scorching, headlong Ironman is a highlight and the lilting take on Fats Waller's Jitterbug Waltz displays Dolphy's reverence for the past and alliegance to the present. It's something of a cliche to describe the musical relationship between Dolphy and bassist Richard Davis as 'telepathic' but their three duets could hardly be described more accurately, each player perfectly attuned to the other's every inflection on a gorgeous Come Sunday. A characteristic Dolphy alto solo on Alone Together closes out the album and, as everywhere else on these sessions, his playing is astounding. Everyone plays well but it's Dolphy's lines that demand to be heard.

The Complete Memorial Album Sessions isn't a cohesive statement - the contrast between the band half of the record and the duet half is a bit jarring - but it is Dolphy just entering his prime. Who knows what would have come next? Though no one would mistake them, Dolphy resembles Ornette Coleman in musical temper; confident, wild, inventive and above all joyous, with little of the bristling anger or tortured mysticism of so many progressive players of the time. Coleman inspired the fire breathers to come but always followed his own tune. It's left for us to wonder how Dolphy's spirit would have fared in the combative, often bleak years to come.

Kit Ream - All That I Am

2008-01-16T01:05:00.001-08:00

I've not said I'm better and I've not said I'm worse but I have an idea concerning the universe

- Kit Ream

There are times when I believe words have outlived their usefulness, that the disconnect between essence and word has grown to the extent that the latter only subverts the integrity of the former. Language has become an obstruction, an instrument of suppression and containment. Upon it we apply the thick coating of gold leaf; it beguiles us with its illusion of riches but we dare not strip the surface bare for fear of the coarse construct found beneath. Instead we elevate and seek the empty comforts of mere eloquence; thus the efficient charms of the silver tongued seductress, the flamed utterance of the demagogue, the sly fawning patter of the salesman, whatever it is that people find so engaging about Christopher Hitchens. Out there beyond the syllable is sound, but a true sound we cannot yet form. Somewhere around the 1"52 mark of Don't Be So Holy Poly Over My Souly I believe Kit Ream comes as close as any man (with the possible exception of Iggy Pop on Funhouse) has to this next evolutionary advance...

And it sounds something like this:

UHHH ah jah ai uh ooo uh chi chai chuh chu chi is!!!

The story of All That I Am was chronicled in appropriately unsubstantiated fashion by Jello Biafra in the book Incredibly Strange Music Vol. II:

The most deranged 'rich person do-it-yourself' album is All That I Am by KIT REAM, heir to the Nabisco cookie fortune. According to someone who knew him, he dropped tons of acid in the '60's and wound up in a mental hospital where he spent six months staring at his own reflection in a mirror. Eventually the acid wore off, he was deemed "cured" and let loose in society, whereupon he decided to become a guru and make a record.

Scuttlebutt on the internet suggests that Kit later forswore his meds, killed a man on his father's yacht and eventually retired to the suburbs of San Diego. It's a shame that a man may have died for Kit's art, but what an art it is. Seventies lounge-funk collides with mystical poetry, putrid come-ons, boogaloo blues, free jazz, hallucinatory incantation and the sound of your dad, drunk on Pina Coladas, dancing shirtless at your uncle's backyard luau. None of this is quite 'pulled off' in the traditional sense, making Kit Ream the essence of Outsider Art; the joy is all in the awkward collisions, the tension between the aspirations of the artist and his inability to express them 'eloquently' using the accepted language of the art form.

And he's nuts.

Some highlights:

The bubbling cauldron of Don't Be So Holy Poly Over My Souly with its pastel electric piano, insistent flute, roiling congas and loopy drumming gives Kit a platform for some insane glossolalia and sexual preaching. The band is actually really smoking on this and the stereo-panning effects on the drums are great. I also confess a sick weakness for soft electric pianos, perhaps a result of growing up near an AM radio in the seventies.

Wines is a free-form drunken stumble with retarded drumming like Animal from the Muppets gone jazzbo. The lyrics tell a loose tale of a devotee of Bacchus named Jason Slash while the horns get freaky and a couple of Kit's groupies coo and purr from the sidelines.

Cool Water, on which Kit lays out entirely, is sung by one of the aforementioned ladies and is unabashedly lovely in its simplicity. Devendra Barnhart, Joanna Newsom or some other denizen of the 'freak folk' communes should cover this.

Funk heads into War territory with some great horn lines and a loosely double-tracked Kit sounding like a leisure suited swinger possessed by the Holy Spirit, spitting out leering poetry about girls on the sand, trouts and stout, sea urchin's crowns and burps.

Everything else is just completely fucked, and it's not a gentle tender fuck; more like a soul baring "let's revisit our childhood traumas via bizarre fetishes" fuck. But you like it.

It's easy to make fun of this record but it's absolutely great in its idiosyncratically personal way and I don't think your Springsteen or Tom Petty records, for all their accomplishments, can quite reach the same outer limits.

It's also a ridiculously rare record that sells for kazillions of dollars. I found mine by chance in the 99cent rack of a local store and have cherished it ever since. However, if you're lucky it's still available for download here.

Or you can just check out this mp3 of Don't Be So Holy Poly Over My Souly.

The full Kit Ream story needs to be told. Kit, if you're out there drop me a line.

Shostakovich, The Clash & 'The Big Sell-Out'

2008-01-14T18:03:00.000-08:00

I've been a whore, I am and always will be a whore

-Dmitri Shostakovich, after accepting membership in the Communist Party, 1960

In February of 1948 accused "formalist" Dmitri Shostakovich stood before the Soviet General Assembly and read his response to Stalin's Historic Decree banning several of his own recent symphonies as well as those of his contemporaries Prokoviev and Popov. As a formalist he stood accused of modernist tendencies, a decadent refutation of joyous simplicity and thus incompatible with the goal of all art: the exultation of the spirit of the Soviet People and their great leader Comrade Stalin.

This was not Shostakovich's first infraction; in 1929 the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians administered a slap on the wrist after the premiere of his satirical opera The Nose. Suitably chastened the composer subsequently devoted himself to film work and ballets illustrating revolutionary Soviet themes. In 1936 Stalin himself attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an opera ostensibly in service of the Soviet struggle, only to walk out in disgust at its moral ambiguity, satirical tone and daring harmonic constructions. Shostakovich was soon denounced in the pages of Pravda under the headline "Muddle Instead of Music", his work derided as "morally obscene", the composer warned that his career "may end very badly". Stalin's terror was underway and those who displeased the dictator were executed or sent to the gulags. While his friends and colleagues suffered, Shostakovich lived in perpetual shamed, agonized suspense as Stalin's pet, alternately coddled and tormented as the needs of The People and the whims of their leader dictated.

By the late 1940s Shostakovich had perfected his role, something akin to that of a brilliant but naughty schoolboy, a fawning smile and a spitball in his pocket; his symphonies spoke in a formally conservative voice in which some heard a strain of mocking satire and subversion; occasional film scores and workers songs were produced to glorify the Motherland and its leader; criticisms were met with obsequities. His 7th Symphony commemorating the siege of Leningrad earned Stalin's praise and the gifts of a new five room apartment in Moscow and a country dacha; though he still kept two suitcases packed for the arrival of a Black Maria he delicately used this unofficial status as the premier Soviet composer to aid the cause of his less fortunate peers. All the while he sought the shadows of piano and chamber music - their lack of pomp and grandeur rendering them useless as propaganda and thus nearly invisible to the state's eyes - for an unshackled expression of his tragic, mordant voice.

By 1948, his behavior was conditioned; answering the charge of formalism, he spoke to the Soviet General Assembly in Stalinese so fluent it could be read as abject contrition or the driest of satire:

The absence, in my works, of the interpretation of folk art, that great spirit by which our people lives, has been with utmost clarity and definiteness pointed out by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). I am deeply grateful for it and for all the criticism contained in the Resolution. All the directives of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), and in particular those that concern me personally, I accept as a stern but paternal solicitude for us, Soviet artists. Work - creative, joyous work on new compositions which will find their path to the heart of the Soviet people, which will be understandable to the people, loved by them, and which will be organically connected with the people's art, developed and enriched by the great traditions of Russian classicism - this will be a fitting response to the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).

His plea succeeded, but there was no joy for Shostakovich; his life was a struggle between his muse and his master, and his master always kept the upper hand. He resisted where he could, but in the collective paradise of the Soviet state there was room for no individual but one, and Shostakovich, his wife and his children lived only at His discretion; the composer was merely an instrument of Stalin's rule.

By 1960 Shostakovich's subjugation and humiliation was complete; he accepted a position at the head of the Soviet Composers Union and a membership in the Communist Party. Fifteen years had passed since Stalin's death, the Terror with it, and artists were once again allowed some measure of freedom, but by now Shostakovich knew only one way to make himself heard; in a fever of self-loathing he composed his autobiographical Eighth String Quartet: a sorrowful requiem for the "victims of fascism and war" and his own conscience, its dark largos the mourning of a man with no illusions about the world or himself.

You think it's funny

Turning rebellion into money

-The Clash, White Man In Hammersmith Palais, 1978

Born with guns blazing less than two years after Dmitri Shostakovich's death, The Clash defined themselves in strict opposition to the political and cultural orthodoxy of doleful Olde England of drear. Their very name served as a manifesto in brief and their first single elaborated upon it; White Riot was a blunt call to arms while its flip, 1977, with its chorus of "no Elvis, Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1977!", consigned rock's past to nostalgia and its present to The Clash.

After the brush clearing of their first album The Clash would continue to build on the foundations of punk rock, rejecting its musical conservatism and becoming first rate songwriters who incorporated pop, rockabilly, R&B, and especially reggae into their sound. This was part of a greater philosophy which posited the band as the unifying voice of the punk diaspora, a one band pirate radio station uniting all the world's underdogs in common cause. Conflating the personal and the political, they sang eloquently of the power of the individual against the forces of conformity, commerce and nihilism; they released two and three record sets (London Calling & Sandinista! respectively), forcing their record company to sell them at the reduced price of a single disc; fans were treated as fellow members of a movement. The press dubbed them "The Only Band That Matters" and the laurel still clings to their reputation today.

So how does one reconcile this principled idealism and revolutionary fervor with the use of The Clash song London Calling in a 2002 television commercial for Jaguar luxury sedans? The spine-tingling tune, one of their best and the title track of their defining album (Rolling Stone called it the best of the 80s), envisions London's apocalyptic end:

London Calling
To the far away towns
Now war is declared
and battle come down (...)

London Calling
Now we ain't got no swing
Except for the ring
of that truncheon thing

In 1991 Levi's had used Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, one of the band's few poppy love songs, in a commercial to little backlash, but this time Clash fans were aghast; some questioned Jaguar's wisdom in co-opting such a furious, righteous anthem for the benefit of a haute-bourgeois lifestyle accessory, and most everybody wanted to know how The Clash had come to authorize its use. Many simply assumed that the band had lost control of the rights. Joe Strummer, the band's de-facto leader set them straight:

Yeah, I agreed to that. We get hundreds of requests for that and turn 'em all down. But I just thought Jaguar…yeah. If you're in a group and you make it together, then everyone deserves something. Especially twenty-odd years after the fact. It just seems churlish for a writer to refuse to have their music used on an advert and so I figured out, only advertise the things you think are cool. That's why we dissed Coors and Miller. We've turned down loads of money. Millions over the years. But sometimes you have to earn a bit, so everybody gets some.

The Clash set out to erase the distinctions between music and message and they succeeded; the two are inextricably linked, more so than almost any other band I could name, and by selling their music, particularly a song as resonant as London Calling, to a corporation they are effectively gutting a movement and hanging its corpse out as Jaguar's shingle. Strummer's lazy, disingenuous response belies the affection and respect he continued to hold for his band long after their breakup in 1986; he never repudiated his ideals and continued to pursue his commitment to a socially aware global music in his post-Clash band the Mescaleros. As the writer of Lost In The Supermarket and Koka-Kola, trenchant critiques of the "advertising world", he more than anyone must have known what this decision meant.

Jaguar too knew what they were doing; there is an unmistakable whiff of revolutionary chic to The Clash and they're smart enough to stand downwind of it. In the rush to canonize Joe Strummer (R.I.P) & Co. this is something the rock community has consistently neglected. For all their idealism and occasional brilliance this is also a band of middle-class lads self-mythologized as outlaws; who sometimes pandered in their efforts to adopt subcultures, musical and otherwise; who "loved a bit of posing" as Strummer once said.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, they are your local liberal grad-student's favorite band. Chances are he knows of a dingy bar where the jukebox glows like a marquee in the London gloom, its belly full of Clash records nestled conspiratorially alongside those of another self-proclaimed Man of the People, Johnny Cash; where The Clash signify something both illicit and unprofaned. It's a prime demographic and everyone wants to pick its pocket. Stalin may have ruled Shostakovich's Mother Russia but out here cash is King.

Your Mind And We Belong Together: Live And In Color

2008-01-14T16:01:00.000-08:00

High in the Hollywood Hills, the Sunset Strip at his feet, one of rock's great loners makes his last stand. Convinced of his own impending death Arthur Lee has just given the world his epitaph in Love's Forever Changes and is now confronted by the prospect of a very mortal afterlife. The opening to the band's 1968 single Your Mind And We Belong Together gets right to the point:

I would like to understand just why
I feel like I have been through hell
Can you tell me?
I haven't even started yet

A multi-part suite jammed onto four and a half minutes of vinyl, Your Mind throws all of Love's tricks into service of Lee's spiritual autobiography. It begins as a taut rock song anchored by staccato guitars then the melody curves and ascends like the vertiginous road to The Castle, the band's hillside manor, only to crash into a minor key finger-picked lament with Lee's stressed croon:

So many people
They just seem to clutter up my mind

A lone pulsing guitar returns, the band churns, and Lee draws some conclusions:

I'm locking my heart in the closet
I don't need anyone oh no
You'll find me behind the door

A brief chorus of lilting wordless "ahs", a glimpse of clear blue sky amidst black clouds, and the storm resumes with a long coruscating fuzz guitar solo by the great Johnny Echols taking us out.

The few people who bothered to flip the record over found the initially confounding Laughing Stock, a schizophrenic continuation of Your Mind's themes. Lee intones cryptically over Bryan Maclean's flamenco-inspired guitar before the band kicks into a frantic Bo Diddley-ish rave up and we meet a disconcertingly direct chorus:

I keep on playing my drums
I keep on singing my songs (...)
I keep on doing all the things
That I shouldn't have to do

After the single flopped the rest of the band drifted away or were fired and Lee was left alone. Love would continue in name but really it was all over except the long, sad decline of drugs, jail, death and the song Doggone.

Now that I've cheered you up here's the great video for the song, with Arthur Lee ambling around the Hollywood Hills, cooing over his pigeons and fondling a groovy white chick. Bryan Maclean drinks a beer.

Your Mind And We Belong Together

Hard to believe they made a video for such an uncommercial song in 1968 but there's an appropriate sense of futility in the effort.

San Diego artist Dan Dickey (1908-1956)

2008-01-13T00:17:00.001-08:00

Dan Dickey in San Diego Magazine, March 1950

My biography of San Diego artist Dan Dickey appears in the most recent issue of The Journal of San Diego History (Vol 53, No. 4, Fall 2007) under the pleasingly literal title Dan Dickey: Mid-Century San Diego Artist. If you don't buy it Britney Spears will have another breakdown. Or you can get it for free on their website. You would be supporting a worthy institution by paying for it, but do as thou wilt, I'm not your Mother anymore...

An intellectual painter, Dickey had few equals in San Diego at the time and was endlessly fascinating. Writer, painter, teacher, raconteur, Romeo, the man got around. I was given access to newly discovered material including the artist's personal correspondence and was thus able to produce the most comprehensive published account of his life to date. Unfortunately they were unable to reproduce some of the works in color; since I don't have their photos I thought it might be extra swell to at least post these snapshots of the works from my own collection. I'd love to hear from anybody with material related to this artist.

Untitled, 1951, by Dan Dickey. Oil on board 16 x 20 ", Collection of William Perrine. This is one of Dickey's few totally abstract paintings. Click the image for a closer look at the textured surface.

Untitled, 1938, by Dan Dickey. Mixed media on paper, 14.5 x 11.5". Collection of William Perrine

Spring 1940, by Dan Dickey, ink on paper, 13 x 8". Collection of William Perrine.

I am sitting in a room, or some thoughts on the merciless march of history as embodied by the Vanilla Fudge

2008-01-12T23:47:00.000-08:00

Preamble

I am sitting in a room. I am alone. The room is approximately 10 x 12 feet and nearly empty save a small bookcase with a phonograph precariously perched at its edge, two old guitars and a rug. A mirrored closet allows me to observe my reflection as I sit on the floor; I am 35 years old, I have bags under my eyes, a bit of a paunch and I am listening to the Vanilla Fudge's second album, 1968's The Beat Goes On for the first time in fifteen years. I see this clearly and clearly something is wrong.

This is the slow degradation of memory. This is the inexorable refinement of taste. This is the merciless march of time and history.

The Beat Goes On: This is what happens when you take a bunch of young mooks from Jersey and the Bronx, give them a recording contract, a copy of Sergeant Pepper and then neglect to get them high.

Why this should have been a retarded masterpiece

This is a concept record based on Sonny Bono's philosophy of history ("La dee da dee dee, la dee da dee die!" just about sums it up) as articulated in his title composition, begetting a suite incorporating hundreds of years of musical and world history as refracted through the minds of four young men who refer to themselves collectively, in all seriousness, as the Vanilla Fudge.

There are four "phases" to the record, totaling eleven songs, but many of the songs feature a half-dozen or so (bowel) movements.

The cover is written in English as well as various Eastern-looking scribbly languages (Sanskrit? Chinese? Farsi? Esperanto?) because this record is Important and Universal.

The gatefold for this dark masterpiece features mini biographies of each member of the Vanilla Fudge, all pictured looking suitably hep and psychedelic, detailing their storied past, their promising future, their middling present and concluding with pertinent Teen Beat style factoids such as:

"His pastimes include golf and bowling...he likes good food and jazz...his pet peeve is narrow-minded people" (Mark)

"...he likes Chinese food and dislikes hypocritical 'day' people. He is 6', weighs 150 lbs., has hazel eyes and dark blonde hair" (Tim)

"He fills his spare time with girls, cars (to race and to build), wild interior decorating, rebuilding stereo sets and buying clothes" (Carmine)

There is a guy named Vinnie in the band.

It bears repeating: This is a concept album based on a Sonny Bono song. Sonny Bono. The man died skiing face first into a tree. He also married Cher, a death unto itself.

And yet no one thought to get them high. This should have been brilliantly awful. Yet it is unbearably boring. It's inconceivable that this was recorded under the influence of the appropriate substances. Ah, the foolishness of youth.

An Abstract

Side One. After a brief and boring overture aptly entitled Sketch an oracular echoing voice intones "Phase One" and we're off to see the wizard. It's all downhill from here. The first of six (six!) versions of the title track, this time a boring instrumental, then the ten-part musical history lesson of movement three as the Fudge faithfully and boringly belt out garage band nuggets such as Variations on a Theme by Mozart, Divertimento No. 13, Don't Fence Me In, In The Mood, Hound Dog and lazy sub-Herman's Hermits manglings of four Beatles tunes. The title track, again. Beethoven's Fur Elise and Moonlight Sonata are bludgeoned, boringly, and finally another boring instrumental version of the boring title track. Side One (Phases One and Two!) features some of the most boring music I've endured in my life. And I've listened to Wilco.

Side Two. In case you've forgotten what they're getting at here, we're treated to another version of The Beat Goes On. There are, of course, various subtleties and nuances in the different renditions but they are far too boring for me to remember and impart boringly to you. Phase Three, Voices of Time, is a boring eight minute sound-collage of various 20th century blowhards such as Winston Churchill, FDR and JFK intoning ponderously about war and such while the Fudgers are off getting their goatees trimmed and their kaftans ironed. This track tends toward the dull. Boring, even. Another fucking version of you-know-what follows, and then the real dark heart of this album, the nine minute Merchant/The Game is Over, with a final summation in verse ("The beat goes on / the mind goes on") and a distillation of the pure Fudge Filosofy as rendered in Platonic dialog:

Q: What do you see in the future for the Vanilla Fudge?
A: Another album. (Long dramatic pause). I just hope the trip gets lighter.

Q: What about trips?
A: For fifteen cents you can take one on the subway. Now I think it's up to twenty.

Q: What about sex?
A: Sex is a very beautiful thing.

Q: What do you think about black power?
A: Black power is a very wasted use of good imagination and drive.

Q: How about poetry?
A: It says everything that can be.

Q: Ice cream?
A: I like ice cream!

Throw in a reading from scripture ("So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab..."), some noodling sitars and a final pummeling of the title song complete with lyrics ("Teenybopper's the newborn King uh-huh") and this souffle is done, daddy-o. The void is now before me, naked in its empty black glory.

Summation

I had fond memories of this record, recalling it as a hilariously overwrought piece of pie-in-the-sky 60s conceptual kitsch. But God is this record dull. Dull, dull, dull. Boooooooooring. I have been betrayed. My mind is a cobwebbed attic and it's time to clean house. I grow old, memories mold; a young man's kitsch is an older man's endurance test. I'm going to drink tonight.

About the author

-Bill likes Mexican food and Klingon-industrial-cocktail-jazz. His hobbies include goat wrestling, lint classification and mastering Fate. His pet peeve is the concept of the 'pet peeve'. He's 6', weighs 145 lbs., has coal- black eyes that hint at unspeakable horrors, and dirty-blond hair.

Ten Superior Instances of Guitar Wankery - Part One

2008-01-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

Isaiah from Earthless

The other day I was recommending the band Earthless to one of my many fine, enlightened and well-coiffed acquaintances when I found myself blushing at my own description of the band. Letting my gaze wander briefly from my own navel I quickly noticed an ever so slight twitch of his eye confirming what I knew to be true; somehow the words 'hour long guitar solo', though harmless when approached solo in the field, become absolutely terrifying when they band together as a pack. It needn't be so.

Thus, a pointless list to get my newly inaugurated and soon to be abandoned blog going. Herein find ten instances of superior guitar wankery with a pronounced emphasis on the 'wankery'. As much as I love a good rhythm player - Steve Cropper, Curtis Mayfield et. al. please take a bow - there is much pleasure to be had from arthritis inducing finger slaloms up and down the fretboard. Thanks to the excesses of prog and stadium rock - and the reactionary conservatism of certain strands of punk rock - guitar heroics still get a bad rap in some quarters.

As for my choices, for the most part I've avoided the hopelessly obscure and the nose-tweakingly obvious. If my Mom has potentially heard of 'em they're off the list. As for the various less mainstream guitar gods beloved by pimply mouth breathing shut ins such as myself, well, they're represented here by a selection which veers ever so slightly off the beaten path. My tastes, however, run toward the ecstatic rather than the workmanlike, so your mileage may vary.

God, this really is a pointless list.

The Velvet Underground - I Heard Her Call My Name. Poor Lou Reed. Just because he's now a lumpy old prick with a headless guitar and all the charm of a German head-cold he doesn't really get his due as a guitarist. This tune is from the rather bracing White Light/White Heat album and illustrates quite nicely the difference between Lou and fellow bandmate and guitarist Sterling Morrison; where Sterling strings along beautifully composed lines that weave in and out of the song like a lover delicately pitching woo to his beloved Lou just turns the volume up and beats that whore into submission. This is about as close to the manic screaming free jazz of the late sixties as a guitar player got at the time. Hell, at that point Sonny Sharrock was still comping groovily behind Herbie Mann's flute and lubed torso.

Lou's amp sounds like it was dropped down a flight of stairs before the session and every note trembles with rising feedback periodically erupting into brittle howls. The piercing shrieks of feedback that follow "and then my mind split open" are especially soothing. The story goes that naughty little Louie sneaked into the mixing room when the rest of the band wasn't looking and turned his guitar waaaaaaay up in the mix, so high that the band sometimes sounds like it's playing in the next room over. They were all a tad peeved -understandably, methinks- and later resolved the issue with a group hug over tea and biscuits at Moe Tucker's pied-a-terre. But Lou was right - the effect is unnerving and beautiful. Just like his balls on a moonlit summer night.

Earthless- Godspeed. The aforementioned hour-long guitar solo band. That's really not a fair description of these guys and proves what a douchebag I really am. But still, when these guys play live they can go for an hour fucking straight - just drums, bass and a wailing guitar. No vocals, no mercy. There are actual hooks and riffs of course but these are the mere bones over which Isaiah Mitchell drapes the acid guitar man-flesh. Why does this work? For one, Mitchell is a stunning guitarist with a staggering command of what Anthony Braxton might call the language of the post-Hendrix continuum, or as I would have it: long unspooling lines that bob and weave in and out of lyricism and chaos, acid fried wah-wah abuse and black holes of delay. Just as importantly though, bassist Mike Eginton and drummer Mario Rubalcaba aren't the kind of hacks that, say, Steve Vai would hire to fluff his musical pillows while he whacks off on the comforter. Instead, it's a three-way tryst, kind of like one of the instrumental breaks from the first Hendrix album, but stretched out to the length of my cock. Actually, Godspeed is only twenty minutes or so as it appears on Rhythms From A Cosmic Sky, so it's perfect for your short attention span. Go read a book.
Earthless – Godspeed (Amplified / Passing / Trajectory / Perception / Cascade)

Love - A House Is Not A Motel. A most concise bit of wankery, as the whole song is just a tad over three minutes with the guitar histrionics in question confined only to the last minute or so. But this illustrates so well the particular genius of Forever Changes, perhaps my favorite record of all time. As with the rest of the album, A House Is Not A Motel is essentially an acoustic number, though a more traditionally structured one with a more purposeful itinerary and no scenic detours. It just grooves along smoothly with a nimble little bassline and some pretty acoustic arpeggios while Arthur Lee croons creepily about his love shack, its lack of shackles and how you can call his name. Then the first instrumental break introduces a lone electric guitar - part Byrds jangle, part drone - ratcheting up the tension before suddenly dropping out in deference to the driving acoustics. Now Arthur sings of "schools of wars" and bathtubs filled with blood. And yes, you can call his name but perhaps, one thinks, he really couldn't help you if you did. Then a brief drum breakdown, the band pushes into overdrive and twin guitar leads break out of the gate, first in tandem then breaking apart, tangling, spitting and clawing as they round the bend toward home, the one in the right channel choking into harmonics as the song fades. Thus the beauty of Forever Changes; the simultaneous lure of darkness and elegance, rapture and horror, harmony and dissonance.

Same time next year: the rest of the list. Or not.