'Buked & Scorned

Talking 'Bout That Number Which No Man Can Number

2009-01-30T08:55:00.000-08:00

ROKY ERICKSON "I Look at the Moon"

PRECIOUS BRYANT "When the Saints Go Marching In"

DeZURIK SISTERS "Go To Sleep My Darling"

...No, how you doing? Yes, I know it's been a while. Wanted to wait until no one was looking, or linking, I guess? No, really, I just got busy. I know, I know, yeah, we're all busy. OK, I got sick of blogging. But I am less sick of it now, today! And I will cease with this ridiculous fake conversation, toot sweet.

Someday soon this blog will be transferred over to a new/ improved/ actual YETI website. But for now, I'll get started again with three little very pretty songs. Today we're unplugged. God, I hate that term, but anyway.

The Roky song's from the long out of print album The Holiday Inn Tapes. It's my second-favorite post-Elevators number (very favorite being, of course, "You Don't Love Me Yet").

The Precious Bryant track is from this wonderful George Mitchell book which comes with two CDs. George Mitchell might be one of my heroes. I really need to talk to both Bryant and Mitchell, if possible, when I return to the South. (Note to self!)

The DeZurik Sisters tune is from some comp. called like Early Country Ladies Who Sing or something. You may know them as the Cackle Sisters.

It's a very pretty late January day here in Portland (translation: it is not currently raining). I'm obsessed for some reason with trying to find out more about P.M. Wentworth today -- he or she was a very interesting self-taught artist, hardly any known works around -- maybe 40 survive. But who knows? That one lucky family found a stack of unknown Ramirez drawings a few years back -- that show in New York was fabulous, and I highly recommend the catalog. Maybe there's a stack of this person's stuff in a trunk somewhere. But Wentworth -- fuck, there's hardly even any images on the Internet. I'd love a monograph of this work, all in one place, no matter how small. Anyone know if there is one? My guess is no, just need to make sure.

HALLELUWAH Fest lineup finally finalized.

2007-08-24T02:33:00.000-07:00

HALLELUWAH TWO: A FESTIVAL OF ENTHUSED ARTS
Presented by Blackbird, Yeti & PSU’s Popular Music Board
Three days at Holocene, Portland, OR: Aug. 31-Sep. 2 (1001 SE Morrison, Portland OR 97214)

The music-film-arts event that ‘Portland Mercury’ called “the greatest festival of all time” --without a hint of hyperbole, of course-- returns to Portland, OR next weekend.

This year we’ve got a slew of Portland’s finest musicians paired with such internationally renowned musicians as Califone, Climax Golden Twins, the Blow, They Shoot Horses Don't They? and Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (which is sweet since he inadvertently named the festival some 35 or so years ago). (Very) loosely put, Friday is the more dance-oriented night, while Saturday is more folk and rock-based, and Sunday’s performers lean more towards improvisational freak-outs and drones. We didn’t want to divvy it up by genre too much, so there are plenty examples to the contrary.

There’s a rad literary program put together this time by Yeti magazine, and brilliant films shown each night from Seattle’s DIY ethnography crew Sublime Frequencies. We’ve enlisted artist/ Albina Press curator Gretchen Vaudt and photographer Norm Sajovie to mount a full installation of new work solely for the festival.

{ Friday 8.31.07 }
* The Blow, Panther, They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, The Beauty, White Rainbow, Alexis Gideon, Valet, Metal, The Joggers & Modernstate. Hosted by DJ Spencer Doran, DJ BJ & DJ Hanukkah Miracle.
* Sublime Frequencies presents: ‘Niger: Magic and Ecstasy in the Sahel,’ a film by Hisham Mayet. 70 minutes: A celebration of life in the Sahel region of Africa, this film showcases many of Niger's venerable music styles: Tuareg electric guitar trance rock, Bori cult dance ceremonies, Fulani folk, and roadhouse gospel rave-ups.
* Doors at 6PM; film starts 6:30 PM promptly.

{ Saturday 9.1.07 }
* Califone, Dark Meat, Bowerbirds, Plants, Eternal Tapestry, Builders & Butchers, Whip, Strangers Die Everyday & a special appearance by Rob Walmart (performing from inside a van outside the venue). Hosted by DJ Yeti.
* Sublime Frequencies Presents: ‘Palace of the Winds,’ a film by Hisham Mayet (filmmaker in attendance!) 45 minutes: An entrancing look at the culture and music of the Saharawis from the Western Sahara and Mauritania. Journey from the northern fringes of the Western Sahara to the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.
* Action-packed and NOT-BORING literary event curated by YETI magazine with Jana Martin (author of ‘Russian Lover,’ a Yeti publication), Curtis Knapp, Tom Blood, Vanessa Veselka & Mike McGonigal.
* Doors at 4PM; literary program starts 4:30 PM promptly (even if it’s nice outside).

{ Sunday 9.2.07 }
* Damo Suzuki (performing with the Portland All-Stars: Honey Adams, Yellow Swans, Adam Forkner, Emil amos & Dan Wilson), Tara Jane O’Neil, Ilyas Ahmed, Master Musicians of Bukkake, Evolutionary Jass Band, Climax Golden Twins, Cexfucx, the Sea Donkeys & Katharina Tunicata. Hosted by DJ Old Fronteir.
* Sublime Frequencies Presents: ‘My Friend Rain,’ a film by Robert Millis (filmmaker in attendance!) 45 minutes: A collage of musical segments, tropical backdrops, and mysterious celebratory events captured live and in the moment by Robert Millis and Alan Bishop on location in Thailand, Burma, Indonesia and Laos.
* Doors at 6PM; film starts 6:30 PM promptly.

Portland State University students get discounted admission. Three-day passes are available for $30.00 via Brown Paper Tickets here.

'Russian Lover & Other Stories'

2007-05-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

Didn't realize it was such a pain in the ass to DL tracks off eSnips; I just signed up for another service to host the mp3 files. I'll have more tracks up soon.

Biggest news around these parts is that the very first YETI imprint title, Russian Lover by Jana Martin, is in hand. We also have advance reader copies of the Luc Sante book, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005. Both books came out really really nice, I think. We're just getting those mailed out now so interestedd reviewers should contact us ASAP for either title.

Jana's book is available pretty cheap here, and I will now quote from the jacket copy OK:

Jana Martin’s sentences have beauty and bite and a rhythm all their own. These are tough, funny stories from a writer wise enough to know that wisdom doesn’t always come with experience. Russian Lover won’t teach you much about Russia, but it will give you some exhilaratingly painful portraits of people trying to love.--Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

There’s an elegant, flaring strength to Russian Lover, a precision of language that is daring and unique in the way it touches memory. Martin’s stories are cocoons spun tightly around an elusive, idiopathic emotional core—always intriguing, they give life to the tired mind. --Lydia Millet, author of My Happy Life

Go back to Germany

2007-05-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

CAN "Doko Daie"
CAN "Introduction"
CAN "Mushroom (Alt. version)"
CAN "Halleluwah"
CAN "Bring Me Coffee or Tea"
CAN "Mushroom"

At last night's Miniluwah (with Valet, Au, Smoke & Mirrors, and Amen, Again Amen doing a live score to Kenneth Anger's sometimes gorgeous Pleasure Dome flick) I was having a lot of fun playing with the song "Halleluwah." It was the first time I had allowed myself to be so literal as to play the actual song our little festival stole its name from. I never practice DJ, and lately my office with the stereo in it is in such disarray that I do not get to listen to my LPs as much as I'd like. So when I get fancy and play stuff at the same time ("Mind Train" by Yoko worked well with "The Creator Has A Master Plan" by Pharoah Sanders) or chop a song up into different parts or whatever, and it sounds good, then I'm extra psyched.

These tracks posted today are from a CD bootleg that came into the used book and CD shop I worked at in Oak Ridge, TN, of all places, in the mid '90s. This is where I learned about the "alternative" Christian" genre, discovered that paperback romance novels can be bought and read at an alarming rate by some people, and met one of my favorite people ever, this guy Martin Beeler who did a bang-up job on his Akron/ Family piece for the next Yeti.

That CD, Free Concert, has since been eclipsed by the Can Box in many ways -- you can view the entire concert on that VHS/ DVD, for instance -- and I know at least a few of these tracks are on the CD component of that set, and that they sound better on there. I do not think the entirety of the 28-minute track "Doko Daie" was ever officially released, however. I am not sure I'm even spelling it right. Anyway, "Doko E." appears on Unlimited Edition. I think it's safe to assume here that "E" is for Extract or Excerpt. My years as a private detective come in handy some time...

The first track is a lower res mp3 -- had to make it smaller so I could upload it via eSnips. The other tracks are lossless mp4s. Hope that's cool, that people do not have a problem listening to/ playing those files. Please lemme know if so, OK.

2007-05-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

PUMICE "Eyebath"

Here's the first track off of Pebbles by Pumice. Pumice is the AKA of one Auckland, NZ chap named Stefan Geoffrey Neville, which is such a great name I want to bestow it upon a pet of some kind. Maybe tomorrow I'll run out and get a pet. I was woefully ignorant of the supreme excellence of Mr. Stefan Geoffrey Neville's music until this week, when I was lucky enough to receive this not-yet-released disk in the mail.

I have been in one of the most embarrasingly extreme don't listen to any new stuff at all phases in my life here lately. That does make some sense, in that I'm working on a book centering largely on music made in the '20s and '30s. But between this and the new-ish R. Kelly and Diddy singles -- both of which rule, of course -- I'm slowly being brought back to the music of today's youth, to the now sounds that are currently happening. Yay, Pumice!!!

They muuuuurdeeerrrrrrrrrrred himmmmmm

2007-05-05T00:07:00.000-07:00

NANCY DUPREE & HER ROCHESTER SCHOOLCHILDREN “Docta King”

TONY SCHWARTZ “Religion (Street Preacher, Jewish Prayer)”

NANCY DUPREE & HER ROCHESTER SCHOOLCHILDREN “James Brown”

TONY SCHWARTZ “Imagination & Music”

OK, so things seem a bit less harried and crazy and nuts and busy around here today so I aim to post with regularity -- we'll see!

The EMP Pop Conference remains the best thing happening in music criticism (as Christgau has claimed I believe? -- don't want to misquote him, especially now that I finally really like the guy and his work).

I was honored to be included, and the presentations I saw by Scott Seward, Michaelangelo Matos, Erik Davis, Ned Sublette, Simon Reynolds, RJ Smith, and this guy whose name I forget who had super interesting things to say about the ways Hawaiian culture interpreted / appropriated minstrelsy, he was awesome too. I missed as much great stuff as I saw, too. My brain's still processing stuff from then, and it was two weeks ago now (also just getting over a cold I picked up on the trip, yay).

One of my outlets, eMusic, has recently uploaded hundreds of Folkways titles. Hundreds!

There's music from the rarely recorded Tuareg people of the Sahara and cool looking weirdo classical people I've never heard of and a great Fugs record and some weird guru chanting recordings and Tim Leary telling you how to get high and a recording of the way a Manhattan street sounded in the early '50s. I know it's been said dozens of times, but if Folkways is not the most judiciously interesting label that's ever been launched, what is? They should have just sent the entire Folkways catalog up in the Voyager -- or sent an extra one along with it, crammed with a nice hi-fi and a robot eager to cue up every Folkways disc.

Even more obscure titles from the Folkways catalog remain un-digitized, though presumably it’s only a matter of time before everything is released—hopefully including archival recordings that never got put on LPs or CDs in the first place, going back to acetate 78s and early wire recordings! I personally can’t wait for the release of Elder Charles Beck’s awesome and super rare recording Urban Holiness Service, though it looks like it's digitzed elsewhere. The Blind Willie Johnson LP that Sam Charters did in the '50s which has his second wife taking credit for stuff his first wife did; I have it on vinyl but it would be nice to easily have it in bits, too.

The two things that have me really freaking out are the near-complete recordings of the genial, New York City-based musique concrete/ collage artist/ contemporary sound ethnographer dude Tony Schwartz, which just got added (you may know him for his Moondog recordings.)

Also just added is Nancy Dupree’s brilliant 1969 album Ghetto Reality, essentially an inner city version of the Langley Project with the kids writing their own songs. Holy fuck, it's so good!!! Hope you like these samples. I urge you to check out more at your earliest convenience.

He'll be with me 'til the end

2007-03-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

BISHOP PERRY TILLIS "I Found a Solid Rock in Jesus"

Woah, how did I ever miss this song by Bishop Perry Tillis on the compilation Traditional Music from Alabama's Wiregrass, a gift from esteemed scholar/ gentleman Kevin Nutt? Here I thought I'd never heard Tillis until I got sent the swell Perry Tillis disc that Birdman released last November. My brain's a sieve, apparently. Anyway, that disc is rad, the Alabama wiregrass one, and I guarantee you'll be the first on your block to own a copy. Plus it's only ten bucks, and the $$ goes right to the folklore society people themselves.

I wrote about Tillis a bit here a few months ago, if you care to know more. Nice to hear him in this 1995 service excerpt backed by drums and a congregation! This here song is about as raucous as I've heard him Tillis get, FYI. Part of his appeal is actually how subtle and "soft" his style is. Tillis actually played with Blind Willie Johnson. According to Bengt Olsson (awesome Swedish music fan who discovered / recorded Tillis some thirty-five years ago) Johnson himself hunted the dude down to play with him in the '40s! Wow. I wonder if BWJ was performing "Dark was the Night" live at the time (or really, ever)?

I once was lost in sin

2007-03-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

ERNST PHIPPS & HIS HOLINESS SINGERS "A Little Talk with Jesus"

You know, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Super Rarities & Unissued Gems (subtitle: The Dead Sea Scrolls of Record Collecting!) really should have topped my little list of favorite albums from last year. I didn't dig into it until January of this year, however. I guess I'd heard that the presumed-lost Son House find of a few years back, "Clarksdale Moan,"* was on a compilation somewhere, but... you know, you get busy, you move around a few times and aren't on anyone's promo lists anymore. And that's mostly fine by you since publicist emails and phone calls are maybe not worth the "free" discs after twenty-plus years of such stuff. Plus hardly anyone sends finished product anymore, it's all CD-Rs in the mail or lo-bit advances streamed on choppy proprietary players -- it's not like the old days of fancy lunches based on the boxes of discs loaded into your shiny Amazon cubicle weekly, daily. Just saying I'm a little out of the loop, and do not always hear everything months before it comes out. I wrote about this collection a touch here, months after it came out.

If Phipps' name sounds familiar, well he's on The Anthology, in Social Music of course, ruling on a ragged send-up of "Must Jesus Bear the Cross Aone" which they called "Shine on Me." And here, "A Little Walk" has become "A Little Talk." Not sure if this was because of royalties or just the natural desire to put one's own stamp on something? Phipps and his crew were part of Ralph Peer's mindfuckingly important Bristol sessions. If you like this, check out their few other numbers, especially "I Want to Go Where Jesus Is."

* That song is awesome, by the way -- worth the wait, even!

2007-03-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

PON DAO, JUEN "Sad Love/ Gungteng & Voice"

Everyone and their househeld pet is going gaga over Sublime Frequencies’ Omar Souleyman release, and with good reason. This past week, while prepping the full text of an interview with the Sun City Girls I did a few years ago for a Seattle weekly cover story, I spent a lot of time revisiting the SF records, and #27, which has the Nonesuch Explorer-ish title of Ethnic Minority Music of Northeast Cambodia, has been kicking my ass: it's meditative and lovely.

On their own website, the SF folks have this to say: For the first time, here is a recording that documents the ceremonial animist music from the mysterious tribal villages of Northeast Cambodia. The Tampoans, Krungs, kavets, Braos, and Jaraîs of Ratanakiri Province and the Phnongs in Mondolkiri Province have been living amidst each other in this region for centuries preserving and expanding their unique cultural heritage, sometimes at peace and other times in conflict with one another or with foreign invaders. The music includes hypnotic gong ensembles, guitar ballads, bamboo flute, and unique local instrumentation such as the “Gungteng” and the “Mum”. The superb singing styles and vocals present throughout are absolutely mesmerizing. These tracks sound like nothing you’ve heard before, all magnificently documented transporting the listener into the heart of each performance. Recorded on location by Laurent Jeanneau over a 2-year period from 2003-2005 with his revealing liner notes and a detailed tracklist included within.

Of ouds and fuzzes

2007-03-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

JOHN BERBERIAN AND THE MIDDLE-EASTERN ROCK ENSEMBLE "The Oud & the Fuzz"

How about an Armenian-American psychedelic jamlet to help you get through hump day? It's no Mogollar, but it's definitely worth hearing. F.E. has a bootleg reissue for pretty cheap, via the label with the best name ever, Acid Symposium (World's Leading Terr0r1st State). They have this to say about it:

An inspired fusion of Middle Eastern rhythms and the fuzz guitar blasts so dear to fans of psychedelia resulted in this the most accessible album by accomplished oud player John Berberian and his troop of skilled musicians. First released on Verve/Forecast in 1969 this exotic album features music based on traditional themes from Turkey, Armenia, Greece, Arabia and North Africa blended with the terrific improvised energy of psychedelia. So what you end up with here is bustling bazaars and scorched sands passed through the prism of the lysergic sensibilities of the late 60's.

They know where they are

2007-03-20T00:44:00.000-07:00

ALEX CHILTON "The Walking Dead"

I am a little, tiny bit disappointed upon hearing this for the first time in about sixteen years. It's just not how I remember it, somehow. Either the song sounded rawer, crazier and a tad more "jointed" to my younger ears (which of course had yet to listen to the Rev. Overstreet for days on end) or it's the magnification process in the space in-between owning the song on vinyl then finally finding it on disc? Most likely it's a bit of both -- or perhaps the version I used to have was different?

Anyway, these are MY ISSUES, and I hope you enjoy this song. It's surely one of the five best paeans to zombies ever written (the other four being, I don't know, most likely Misfits songs). Dude clearly sounds out of his skull here, and once I relax and just accept the thing for what it is rather than what I thought it maybe was going to be, it's not half bad at all, especially delivery of the line "it gets stuffy in the lab." Hope you like, and many thanks to Douglas and Jason for saying 'welcome back' to me in the comments section! PDX represent, and stuff.

My soul got happy so I stayed there all day.

2007-03-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

Straight Street Group (featuring Rev. Milton Phelps) "Angels Keep Watching Over Me"

Gospel Keynotes "Jesus Will See You Through"

The first song is a latter day sanctified blues tune done just the way I like. It was sent my way by the esteemed Kevin Nutt, the man behind the Case Quarter label and the Sinner's Crossroads radio show. He had this to say about the number: "Thought about you when I heard this. Vanity label South Georgia Pentecostal throw down. c.1975 maybe."

Thanks Kevin! And holy frijole this thing is awesome: rollicking distorted guitar-heavy stuff in the manner of Rev. A. Johnson and Rev. Charlie Jackson. Can't find anything out about this Phelps guy but I know I need to hear the flip-side of this one. I'm going to presume he's of no relation to the famouser Rev. Phelps, the not very nice one, OK.

I feel a great desire to hear every single song that sounds like this. I don't need to own the stuff, and I know I'll never hear it all of course -- I just want to try, you know? All the cool cats are down in Austin this time of year immersing themselves in the crowded venues all day and night. And even a few years ago I'd have been there or wanted to be there bathing in the excitement of next big things and enjoying the awesome BBQ (eat the brisket, kids -- you'll never have it as good anywhere else!) and all else that SXSW has to offer (I love the running into old friends aspect, and the Yard Dog shows, the best). Instead, I'm up here in Portland combing through the Dixon and Godrich book, trying to find sanctified blues numbers I've never heard before, salivating over the idea of unheard Paramounts and unissued test pressings. I'd love to be in Austin (even though it is in TX) but I'm not at all sad to not be there, is what I'm saying.

Song number two is from about the same time as the first single, though most likely a few years earlier: a delightfully smooooooove number in the style of the Delfonics/ Floaters, by the Gospel Keynotes, who I do not think I've ever listened to before. This one was sent in by Ted Sonnenschein, whose ears are burning since I talked about Ted quite a bit at last weekend's moving, sweet memorial service for Charles Gocher of the Sun City Girls up in Seattle, at the SCG/ Sublime Frequencies compound.

The gospel soul era (very roughly, '69-'82 or so--whenever it is everyone and their mother had to start sounding all super mass choir) isn't my area of expertise, nor too often is it even an area of that much interest. But damn, I'm digging this song, today. It's what I imagine riding around in the back of a huge old American car that smells good heading to church with your man or woman dressed up looking so good you can't wait to get back home later but also you want people to see you with them just might be like. This song. I hope it is not too terribly lame for me to have shared this minor fantasy of mine with you. Ted writes: "Every time I listen to gospel I think of my pooka bear. If you ever need a hand, I have this song for you. God Bless, Teodorus Sonnenrighteous."

It's good to have friends. Anyone else care to send me some mp3s of gospel music, or maybe some drone I've never heard, that would be swell. But pretty pretty please, no more mp3s from indie bands trying to break into the don't-call-it-the-blog-o-sphere -- that email address is all clogged up already! (PS: there are of course five thousand, three hundred and twenty-three other blogs which people actually look at, unlike this one, which are all ready and aching to hear your stellar and exciting sounds and to help you get signed to, say, "Megakid"'s label before she gets shit-canned. Ummm, best of luck to you!)

Thirty three and a third reading

2007-02-07T18:42:00.000-08:00

'Sup? I'm deep in a review-writing crunch and getting back taxes sorted so this is more news-based than, well, interesting, sorry!

I'm reading at the new Sonic Boom General Store in the Fremont section of Seattle, WA Thursday evening, at 7:30 PM. It's free, and maybe fun. Be sure to heckle me if you show up? I am nervous enough as it is during these things; maybe I'll do a Scanner-head?! That would be cool.

The esteemed KEXP Blog said nice things so I'll just quote them:

Thursday February 8: 33 1/3 book reading with Sean Nelson & Mike McGonigal {Sonic Boom Records General Store}
It doesn’t seem so long ago that we were buying our copies of OK Computer from Sonic Boom’s wee-sized Fremont location. Now they’ve grown to multiple locations all over to fill the backpacks of Seattle’s music lovers. Their latest addition to the SB family is the Sonic Boom General Store, which will specialize in vinyl, magazines, books, designer toys, gifts, and snacks. We’ll find any one of those things exciting. We mean, “designer toys?” Snacks? FUN!

But we digress. This Thursday is a night of smarty pants good times that involves a trifecta of things, each as fun as a mouth full of pop rocks: Sean Nelson, Mike McGonigal, and 33 1/3 book series. Sean Nelson, Seattle Man about Town, will be reading from his new 33 1/3 book on Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and Mike McGonigal, curator of the finest arts and culture publication-Yeti, will focus on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. With both men being stunning examples of charm, eloquence, and wit, we’re breathless with anticipation for Thursday’s reading.

Russian Lovahhh

2007-01-25T23:50:00.000-08:00

As the first two titles from YETI Publications near completion, the first one's now up on Amazon and ready for pre-order: Russian Lover by Jana Martin. It's a collection of short stories from the upstate-New York-based writer.

Also, Greil Marcus is writing the introduction to our second title, out late Spring/ early summer: Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante. And Patrick Barber is designing the cover just now, which has a sweet painting on it by Francesco Clemente.

The other two YETI titles which will be out at the end of the year, Mike Doughty's Eritrean photo book and Tara Jane O'Neil's art book will both be 6" by 6" full color hardcover titles with CDs inside them. Rachel Carns has signed on to design those.

Pre-order Jana's book at a sweet discount here.

To here knows when

2007-01-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

Pictures are pretty

2007-01-23T12:39:00.000-08:00

Just playing around with images today, and can you tell I was thinking about this olden time awesome silliness today? In order these are by: Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner, Unica Zurn, Oyvind Fahlstrom (left my umlauts at home sorry), Jordan Belson, Paul Thek, Bruce Conner, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Paul Thek, and Jordan Belson.

The cake it is here

2007-01-22T23:31:00.000-08:00

Well the Music Appreciation Society people are AWESOME and the event was sort of a d.i.y. sweet, Canadian mini-pop conference. I am also psyched about the Seattle Art Museum's sculpture park -- it's free and a pretty nifty use of public space. Lily concluded a month's long search for jeans that fit at the Seattle Rack, we both saw some friends and I only had one cup of Vivace, but I guess I just feel like I get coffee at least as good as that here in Portland every day so I do not need to go all the way out of the way simply to drink down a cup of ristretto in five seconds.

The image up there is by Jason T. Miles and Tony Remple, a two color job done at Zak Sally's awesome La Mano Press. You can buy it off of Jason's blog for ONLY SIX BUCKS, if I read correctly.

PS: I have no way to post or host files right now so no music for a bit -- and eventually this blog will go over to the YETI site sometime this year but will of course post messages saying that here when that happens, OK.

Ack, links not working today for some reason so go here for Jason T. Miles' site yes: http://drinkmeink.blogspot.com/

All things are possible...

2007-01-16T23:49:00.000-08:00

SWAN SILVERTONES "Only Believe" live (Youtube link)

Hope you had a groovy MLK day. Me, I guess I have a sinus cold? Man this thing is weird because I only have a few symptoms. Makes it hard to get work done, but then so did the actual snow which fell and stuck on the ground this morning -- several inches worth, very rare for Portland! I'ts still a winter wonderland outside, now -- the stuff stayed stuck!

My girl and I ventured out this afternoon as her school was cancelled (though she didn't know until she got there this AM, and it took her many hours to figure out none of the buses were working properly as despite the fact it began snowing at 3 or 4 this morning not a one had chains on their tires so she took the light rail home instead which leaves off a mile and a half away). It's weird how I was able to not feel sick for that hour and a half we went outside: angels were made, snowballs flung, feet slipped and slid, hooray.

So, of course since I'm illing I start flipping around on YouTube looking at the Yardbirds and the Move and Fred McDowell and Rev. Louis Overstreet and Rev. Charlie Jackson. I only give YT a few more months before all this great content disappears; it's too good to last, you know? Anyway, I love this clip of the Swan Silvertone Singers. Seeing Claude Jeter and Louis Johnson pass the mic back and forth like that is amazing. I really really would love to see more. I've watched this a dozen times already, holy frijole.

"Music Appreciation Society"

2007-01-16T04:42:00.000-08:00

I'm headed to Seattle this weekend to participate in this thing happening Saturday, January 20th, at 2 PM in the Henry Auditorium. Unfortunately it's $8 for Henry Members / $10 General: A Listening Event and Panel Discussion with Rodney Graham and Special Guests. “Join artist/musician Rodney Graham, The Music Appreciation Society’s Kathy Slade and Brady Cranfield, and special guests Rich Jensen, Mike McGonigal, and Meghan Seling as they trade opinions on choice picks from popular music and art.”

So, near as I can tell, I'll play a song and talk about it for fifteen minutes or so and then these other folks (all famous Vancouver artistes in town for their Fri. night show at the Henry, plus Rich from the most excellent Clear Cut Press, and surely you know Meghan from theStranger) will do the same thing. And after that we'll talk/ argue/panel-ize about music and art or something? I hope it will be fun and not at all friggin' Sarah Vowell/ McSweeney's-y despite the thing being called what it is, which to me sounds pretty Sarah Vowell/ McSweeney's-y, but maybe it's that I've had a sinus headache for two days, and am perhaps a tad grumpy as a result.

My song will be the BEST of course. It was recorded almost exactly eighty years ago and consists of voice, guitar and finger cymbals. If you live in Seattle and want to stop by and pelt me with popcorn, please do so. If you live in Seattle but do not want to spend ten bucks to go to this thing, I do not fault you, one bit. I mean, if it were me, I'd be still asleep at 2PM on Saturday... Or watching a matinee of Children of Men to try to catch more of the details in the newspapers-on-the-wall scene.

Thanks to everyone who replied to the post about the sanctified blues book! Hooray.

Help with my book on sanctified blues/ guitar evangelists/ gritty gospel music?

2007-01-07T01:31:00.000-08:00

Sorry to not be here anymore; I will blog again!, and soon, on the Yeti site, after we overhaul it in the next month or so.

I'm writing 'cause now that the Loveless book is finally out, I'm starting on the next one, on sanctifiedd blues.

Aside from a few chapters here and there in histories of blues or gospel (most notably/ excellently in Paul Oliver's Songsters & Saints) I've had trouble finding much info. about this type of stuff. There's not a single book that addresses sanctified blues. So, I'm starting to write one about it, myself. I do not pretend to be an expert on this material, FYI; I just have to know more about it and do not see any other way, really.

In the case of a dozen or so artists, there is quite a bit known, of course: Washington Phillips thanks to Michael Corcoran, and in the cases of Rev. Louis Overstreet and Bishop Perry Tillis I myself was able to find people to talk to about them/ their work. But with, say, Luther Magby, whose sole 78 is mind-bending, I can't find more than a few sentences here and there.

I'm thinking of calling the thing 'BUKED & SCORNED: The YETI Field Guide to Sanctified Blues & Gritty Gospel, 1922-Present (yeah, unwieldy/ unoriginal title, I know). The format will be that of a classic field guide: color innards, rounded pages, plastic cover, everything (there will be other 'Field Guides,' including a photo-heavy guide to 'American ruins' - old and abandoned factories, hospitals etc., with info. on how to break into them and spelunk about). The plan is to have an awesome introductory 80 minute disc with the book, the gospel blues one I mean.

I'm really psyched about it. At first I felt like maybe I'd bitten off more than I could chew. But now I'm just breaking it down into little entries and starting on them, with help from the little bits of info. found on places like the liners on the back of the Origin's fabulous In the Spirit LP collections or inside the essential book Blues & Gospel Records 1890-1943.

Not sure if there is much interest/ audience in this, but it seems like Fahey's excellent (if poorly titled) American Primitive Vol. 1 sold pretty well. So maybe there is some sort of audience? We'll see.

Following's the raw list of artists that I'm starting with. I know it's long. I know this post is already long. I know it will take me longer to get this thing done than I think it will. But if anyone has suggestions about other artists to consider, or has xeroxes of articles about any of these peeps from old issues of Livin' Blues or anything, I'll totally love you for that info. and pay for xeroxes, whatever... I will love you and pay you! (What's that called again?)

Just groping about in the dark to find stuff out. Here's my working artist list: sanctified blues musicians/ players of raw bluesy gospel/ guitar evangelists/ bluesy streetcorner gospel shouters/ predominantly blues musicians who also recorded & performed significant songs of a spiritual bent.

Elder Charles Beck
Barbecue Bob
Emmett Brand
Richard "Rabbit" Brown
Rev. Pearly Brown
Elder Richard Bryant
Sam Butler AKA "Bo Weavil Jackson"
Rev. E.D. Campbell
the Campbell Brothers
Wynona Carr
Clarence Clay & William Scott
Rev. Edward Clayborn "the Guitar Evangelist"
Austin Coleman
Jaybird Coleman
Dennis Crumpton & Robert Summers
Elder Curry
Rev. Gary Davis
Blind Willie Davis
Thomas A. Dorsey
Arizona Dranes
Duckett & Norwood
Brother Willie Eason
Brother Claude Ely
Sister Callie Fancy
Rev. Lonnie Farris
Blind Mamie Forehand
Jesse Fuller
Rev. J.M. Gates
Aubrey Ghent (how much of the 'Sacred Steel' artists, if any, to include?)
Blind Roosevelt Graves
Blind Arvella Gray
Henry Green
Suddie Griffins
Holy Ghost Sanctified Singers
William "Blind Willie" Harris
Goldia Haynes
Eddie Head & His Family
Jessie Mae Hemphill
Jessie May Hill
Mississippi John Hurt
Rev. Charlie Jackson
Otis Jackson
Skip James
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Rev. A. Johnson
Bessie Johnson
Blind Willie Johnson
Prof. Johnson & His Gospel Singers
Elder Otis Jones
Alfred G. Kanes
Louisville Sanctified Singers
Thee MacGee
Luther Magby
Rev. Moses Mason
Sister Matthews
Mother McCullum
Mississippi Fred McDowell
Rev. F.W. McGee
Lonnie McIntorsh
Memphis Sanctified Singers
Sister Mary M. Nelson
Blind Gussie Nesbit
Nugrape Twins
Rev. Louis Overstreet
Isaiah Owens
Frank Palmes
Charley Patton AKA Elder J.J. Hadley
Sister Lottie Peavy
Elizabeth Phillips
Washington Phillips
Ernest Phipps & His Holiness Singers (? – not sure how much to enter into preacher and congregation type artists – whether to just use a few who are really bluesy or just to forego them entirely?)
Leon Pinson
Rev. D.C. Rice
Staple Singers
Homer Quincy Smith
Rev. Utah Smith
William & Versey Smith
Horace Sprott
Bozie Sturdivant
Blind Joe Taggart
Sister Ola Mae Terrell
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Two Gospel Keys
Henry Thomas
Bishop Perry Tillis
Joe Townsend
Rev. I.B. Ware (with Wife and Son)
Rev. Charles White AKA James Butler
Bukka White AKA Washington White

One way conversation

2006-07-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

TEENAGE FILMSTARS "Dressing up for the Cameras"

Best piss-take on the Jam, ever? Perhaps. Great song, regardless. Love the Jowe Head-style bass. Really digging the O Level/Teenage Filmstars compilation on RevOla, A Day in the Life of Gilbert and George this morning.

YETI 4 is done, in production; cover will look like this, only better (with gooooooooold). Pre-order capability to show up on YETI site shortly.

HALLELUWAH festival site is up (uhh, hence the link to the left) --very bare bones now but info. about other aspects of the fest as well as info. about the fest-only LP (Deerhoof, Alela Diane, Valet, Michael Hurley, Nudity, Rick Bishop, and more...), as well as how to get tickets, all that jazz, will be up on there shortly. This bit about it was nice.

Sitting here in the slowly swelling heat anticipating the 102-105 projected temp. today, trying my absolute best not to lose my shit over a good chunk of change owed me by an insanely rich computer type company I did some work for back in March. Their system is so insane, labyrinthine, and mind-numbingly not at all oriented towards anyone doing creative work (not any of the templates they offer for invoicing make any sense to me -- not a one, out of three) so I feel a wee little bit like our pal THX 1138 today. Just a wee bit.

I feel that I've been very patient until now, especially as this is my first time working for these people, and it does often take longer to get paid when you're a freelancer. But Jesus fuck I don't know if it's the heat or what but I just feel like my head's going to explode from this stuff. Feeling this way could have something to do with the fact that my brother dumped the entire task of finding his baby mommy a place in Portland, in the next week, same time I myself have to pack and move... I haven't got my hernia fixed yet so I'm a bit worried about literally spilling my guts in that procedure. (TMI? Too bad!)

So, if anyone knows of a 2BR/ 1BA near OHSU close to bus lines that allows cats and is under $800, let me know, OK? Thanks a gazillion.

We want to live...

2006-07-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

3Ds "Evocation of WC Fields"

For no reason other than I just imported tracks off the CD last week, here's a fun ditty by New Zealand's 3Ds, from their 1990 disc Fish Tails/ Swarthy Songs for Swabs, which combines their first EP and LP, plus an extra track or two. People who say they sound like the goddamn Pixies are so wrong it makes we want to umm, to tell them how wrong they are. Loudly.

Got the final manuscript for the Luc Sante collection Yeti Books is publishing next Spring; of course, it's awesome. Also in the final throes of getting YETI 4 together--we send off pages to the printer on Monday. The disc is being mastered right now. And the first book we're publishing, Jana Martin's short story collection Russian Lover, is coming together as well. Damn.

We'll finally have a site up for the Halleluwah Fest in the next week or so. Looks like I'm spending the next week crazily assembling a cool LP with unreleased tracks from some of the festival performers, which will be available at the show only, for not too much dough ($10 maybe?). That is, if it can actually get manufactured by the end of next month. Thus far, though, Rick Bishop, Truman's Water, Nice Nice and Deerhoof all seem into the LP thing (as well as the fest itself of course). I hope it happens as I think it'll be a rad/ fun souvenir type thing.

Posting has been re-enabled after a long absence, FYI. I finally figured out if you just use one of those crazy scrambled word filter things you can keep the blogspam out, or most of it anyway.

When I was alone you promised the stone from your heart

2006-07-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

SYD BARRETT "Dark Globe"

You probably know this already but it looks like Syd Barrett passed away, age sixty.

In the palace of the Lord

2006-07-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

VAN MORRISON with Bob Dylan "Foreign Window"

I think this is from a live show in the late '80s, Dylan presumably on harmonica. I like the way the pseudo mystical sheen of the studio version is gone; it just sounds like two dudes on a boardwalk somewhere. It's kind of puffed-up and full of itself but what song that namedrops Rimbaud and Lord Byron wouldn't be?

Today I give thanks for iced coffee, Oregon blueberries and Tuli Kupferberg's Listen to the Mockingbird book. For no reason other than when I wasn't working or furniture hunting at "the bins" (score! for $30.50: two ottomans, two nice mis-matched dining room chairs, one big bulky old stereo console furniture thing--which was actually free by the side of the road, a paperback about Chinese medicine, and a very oddly shaped modernist mini-bookshelf) these things provided major relief.

And the rest of the scene still exists

2006-07-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

BIG BOYS "Which Way To Go"

Not a rare song, nor a particularly unheralded band this time. The summer makes a lazy man extra lazy. Well, maybe they were a bit unheralded outside of Austin and L.A. at the time, but surely that's been redressed by now. Wikipedia credits them for spreading hardcore across our fair land, which seems pretty wrong to me both on the historical side of things and the musical side, but I don't feel like ever dipping into "correcting" a Wikipedia entry. I mean, I'm a geek and all but I'm not that kind of geek. You know, the kind who cares about accuracy too much.

I do know that this tune is from the Texas band's posthumous 1984 release on Enigma, No Matter How Long the Line Is at the Cafeteria, There's Always a Seat. It's always been one of my three favorite Big Boys songs, and needless to say I was delighted when Seam did a slow-kiddie-core cover of it a few years later.

Didn't get turned on to this band until after they'd broken up, thanks to onetime dorm-mate Al Brown, who lent me this album like in '87, along with the just-released Paid in Full. If you click on that link, check out Alex's Alice Coltrane painting from last year. Holy hell. I always knew Alex was smarter and more talented than anyone else at school, but I didn't realize the dude is brilliant until a few years ago.

Fundamental Tom

2006-07-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

TARA JANE O'NEIL "Fundamental Tom"

Nice instrumental piece from the new TJO jam In Circles, which is flat-out fabulous. You better get yourself a copy of her two import CDs issued on vinyl by the brilliant Mississippi Records, and soon.

If I may lazily slip into self-promotional mode, one of the dozen book projects we have on the back burner is a small, square hardbound, thick full color book of Tara's visual work, with a CD of all new material included. We're gonna do the same with E*Rock, but his will have a DVD inside. OK, enough goofing around.

Now to cogently segue into the confessional mode, I have to say I'm a bit stressed to be meeting my girl's folks for the first time tonight. Also, am I the only one totally confused about is it a Monday or is it a Wednesday or what? Something tells me no.

I lost my sense of

2006-07-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT UNWASHED "Sense of Balance"

This live ca. '81 song is from the Oddities Two cassette, which I believe has yet to receive a release beyond its initial cassette pressing in the '80s on Flying Nun. Used to own a copy; my brother Kevin came up with a CD burn of it that sounds rather nice for my birthday or Christmas or something the other year.

This was/ is an awesome present as I'd not heard these particular Clean and Great Unwashed songs in years, and I cling to my belief that a lame little throwaway song by the brothers Kilgour bests most acts' best tunes. I am a very difficult person to get gifts for. I either have it or I used to have it or have a Very Big Opinion about it (how could you get me that? are you saying I'm friggin lame?) that precludes me from digging it. Or if I don't have it already or haven't heard it or read it how can it be any good? Hah. Just kidding. Sort of. My sister Katie gets me fancy soap, which is a very smart gift, and if she's saying I'm smelly or soemthing at least she's saying that nicely. My other sister simply gives me some cash; all these gifts are perfect. If you want to give me a gift sometime, and I know you do!, make it cash or fancy soap or an obscure recording of some sort that you know for a fact I do not have. OK, glad to have that cleared up.

Last night while putting the final finishing touches on the YETI 4 CD, I thought that what I should do with the YETI discs now that we're going to start coming out with them more often (really) is to turn a small chunk of each (and space inthe accompanying issue) over to a series of bands I've always loved and yet who maybe people don't know so well, focusing on rare/ unreleased material by each (not super obscure but like... the Grifters, the Clean, 39 Clocks, Charlie Pickett and the Eggs, June Brides maybe). 'Cause it sure would rule to, for instance, have a handful of rare Clean/ related tracks on one disc?! We'll see.

I also really want to have "guest curators" each time now, as both Eric from Mississippi Records and Adam Forkner both got me some amazing stuff on the new one... YETI 4 has four amazing Ethiopian, Eritrean and Kenyan tracks from the '20s and from this year that you've never heard before. And they rule. And they make me not so bummed that there is hardly any gospel on this disc.

Cheer up my brother

2006-07-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

SWAN SILVERTONES "Father Alone"

A neat trick many gospel artists did was to slightly recast traditional songs as their own (a practice not in any way endemic solely to gospel). I'd assume this was in order to get the publishing money (or at least to give that money d'reckly to their record label presidents), right? Anyway, this here smoove, jubilee style reworking of "Farther Along" is not the Swans' greatest moment by any means. But it does show how even when they were coasting, it was like at ninety miles an hour.

Hope you all had a great time celebrating the nation's independence from a repressive, regressive government that cared not a single whit for the well-being of its people...

Ohhhh, wait. Fuck.

It is grand

2006-07-01T17:24:00.000-07:00

REV. EDWARD W. CLAYBORN 'THE GUITAR EVANGELIST' "A Letter From Father"

Some people believe the great sanctified blues singer E.W. Clayborn, whose first recordings for Vocalion simply bore the credit THE GUITAR EVANGELIST, played slide guitar lap style. I'm becoming obsessed by his music, and there's so little known. We just have one photo from a Vocalion sleeve. Paul Oliver surmises the dude came from Alabama in his great study Songsters and Saints, based on the fact that he shared a session with Charles Davenport who was from there.

Dude's vocals are stern and restrained, his lyrics often pretty uptight recriminations that say stuff like "That's the Wrong Way to Celebrate Christmas Day" or "Everybody Ought to Treat Your Mother Right," and at least three songs warn that you basically can't trust anyone (Oliver does a slight bit of armchair shrinking which does seem warranted). As often stated, the dude basically played the same way in each song: almost the exact rhythmic pattern, slide lines that answer the vocals, and nearly the same chords every time as well. So, unlike the often similar Blind Willie Johnson, this is not a dude you would ever invite to a party.

There remains something I love about him, though. Some things, I mean. That clean and delicious guitar style? The jaunty little two-step rhythm he has going on by plucking the bass strings like that? The fact you kind of know what you're going to get with him? Because I still love the three R's so much (of course they are... repetition, repetition, repetition)? This song is one of his happiest and most uplifting, btw.

Speaking of uplifting, dude, I try not to complain... (Ummm, really I do!) But some of these complications from diabetes really blow, especially the fact that the vision in my left eye has gotten quite a bit worse since my "out of control diabetes" diagnosis last December. I just got new lenses and I'm having to learn to see/ focus differently, I guess? There are permanently popped blood vessels in that eye now (sweet! I always look stoned!?) so I'm afraid the best I can do in that eye now even with a much stronger prescription is not-that-fuzzy, where the right eye is different, it can see a lot more clearly. This has been the case for many months but in glasses that were way out of whack so everything was fuzzy. I dunno, it is possible that this prescription is wrong but I've known my eyesight in that eye got worse. I just thought somehow that corrective lensescould, you know, correct it? The good news is the damage coulda been a lot worse, but isn't. People go blind from this shit, you know? Anyway, sorry for venting here; today, it's that or putting my fist into the drywall.

How bad-ass was that? Wooooah, fists in the wall, man. Clearly, I am the most bad-ass lover of sanctified blues on my entire block, I bet. Or this part of the block, anyway.

The other one somewhat free

2006-06-28T21:32:00.000-07:00

DESTROYER "Why Banacek Doesn't Love"

Here's a rad rarity appearing courtesy of the lovely and talented Dan Bejar. It's an outtake of sorts from the YETI 4 CD (in that instead of this awesome, long song we chose two shorter ones for the disc instead). Mr. Bejar writes: "Recorded the summer of '95 / spring of '96, on a 4-track which has since stopped working... Originally released on a cassette entitled Ideas For Songs (edition of 50, maybe a little more), in 1997 I think... To be rereleased soon, in some for or another..." Hope you like.

Today was awesome, mostly.

Got a full night's sleep, since it was not in the upper '90s any longer (Portland's made to handle a lot of things but intense heat is not one of them, especially when you currently live in an attic space).

Almost most awesomely, it would appear that we reached our goal for ad revenue in the next YETI, which goes to press in about two weeks. The CD is probably the best one yet and the book itself has amazing stuff, especially the archival Australian police and crime scene photos captioned and submitted by the brilliant and multi-talented Peter Doyle.

Money's been tight for me personally due to simultaneous snafus with several of my outlets, but shit's been a lot worse before. That's something I reflected upon a bit last Thursday, the lucky thirteenth anniversary of me getting stabbed in the chest during a mugging in front of my old place in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I wanted to have a "blood" and "heart" themed party where only red food/ drinks were consumed, but whenever I mentioned it to people they looked at me like I was a nutty crazy ghoul so... I wimped out, I guess.

Went to the farmer's market on Interstate, where I acquired some very tasty local berries (the rasp- and the blue- kinds), fresh basil (as I have a black thumb and dare not grow my own), fancy micro-asparugus (as I am a fancy lad), and a pretty and inexpensive bouquet of flowers for the people I live with (as they just put a bid in on another house, unfortunately one in Hood River). Lily got an exceptionally rich cupcake, the few mini-bites of which seemed more than enough (as I remain a diabetic despite me saying to myself that maybe I am not one and it was all a mistake almost daily).

So yeah, the big news is that I'm moving in with my super awesome girlfriend! I'm not even rich and I get to date a girl this gorgeous and rad? I hope she doesn't ever wake up and realize that she's like twenty times out of my league.

Moving is dreadful, we all know that, especially when you are a records/ books/ art nerd. It is my hope that the process of moving/ boxing/ etc. will help me to jettison more possessions over the course of the next month, to become fully organized while packing, and while the chances of those things are slim-ish at least I know I am going to save money, as I'll move from a cheap place to a really cheap place. Most most awesomely, I get to hang out with my girl more, and I'll now be within walking distance of a lot of friends and the YETI office, and biking distance to downtown Portland (as I shall be living in what is called "close in SE").

We'll be postponing our mid-to-late-July California trip, but that should probably happen in like early September anyway; maybe we can do little in-store events to help sell the new YETI (as it will just be out then) or also the Loveless book (as that should also be out by then) or whatever. Apparently The People like when you do in-store events, as much as I tend to shake and stutter and crumble when I am exposed to even the least bit of the attention I otherwise am craving. That sentence was poorly constructed. But fuck it, this is blogospherical writing, man. And I answer to no one. NO ONE!

Umm, sorry. I think there was something in my coffee.

I just realized I'm actually gonna be living half a mile or so from the new-ish Disjecta space, which is now for certain where Chantelle of Blackbird Booking and I are going to hold the HALLELUWAH festival. But more on that in a week or so, after we get more definite confirmations and the website up, all that jazz. If you hate the name, keep it to yourself okay? Fucking haters.

Ohh man, I can't believe I just wrote "all that jazz" three sentences ago. Would someone please come and shout at me that I've become my father, only the fatter than him version of him, and hit me really hard in my ear? Thanks so much.

Had a great brisk little walk throughout North Portland today -- am definitely going to miss this idyllic and (at least partially) racially / economically mixed neighborhood. I like living in a place where you can say 'hey' to people you encounter and they're not too hipster or scared to say 'hey' back to you.

(Long as I'm jumping headlong into the most banal of all "livejournal" type information -- which the goddamn pencil-pushing thugs can do whatever the hell they want to with -- I'll state that I) ate Trader Joe's sushi for breakfast. Reheated vegan stir fry with fresh spinach in it for lunch. Snacked on Spanish olives and local hazelnuts, both from Sheridan's fruit market. Dunno what for dinner yet.

Picked up three one-gallon cans of recycled/ reconstituted (and supposedly excellent/ thick) paint for the two rooms we're gonna be sharing -- three gallons of paint, $23.00(!), thanks to the local gov't's Metro Paint, who also give far deeper discounts to non-profits on their stuff. Man, not only do I get to live in one of the only towns in the country where the mayor tells the FBI to fuck off, but I get cheap paint that helps me feel like a good citizen, too? Well, and save $$? Huzzah.

PS: People, please be a tad less dorky about whether or not Jeff Mangum is gonna make music or not. Don't you see that a lot of the reason he bailed on the whole thing is he was totally getting stalked by crazy people? Sheesh. Besides, it's apparently a fake post. (I can't believe such a thing would happen on God's green Internets, but some people are sick...)

PPS: For anyone who shares my deep distaste for Chuck Klosterman's uhhhhhh, "work," here's a great break-down of a feature about his very zeitgeisty self here from Gawker a little bit ago, in case you missed it. Does that make me a hater? Drat.

He keeps the noise out

2006-05-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

ALELA DIANE "My Tired Feet"

Today I lunched at Valentine's with Alela Diane, a twenty-three-year-old singer/ songwriter from Nevada City, CA who's been in Portland for about seven months now. Alela's going to be featured on the next YETI CD. I've only heard her disc once through thus far, and not seen her live yet. But clearly she's a talented vocalist, perhaps in the vein of Foster or Spektor or the Casady's or Holland, and maybe even Dalton...

Got turned on to her music thanks to writer/ man about town Matt Wright, who'll soon be doing PR for the release of her disc The Pirate's Gospel on the new and naturally rather electronic-oriented Holocene label (I say naturally, as that's more or less what the club itself caters to). Their interest in Alela (pronounced Uh-lee-luh -- am guessing her parents were hippies or something?) is testament to Scott from Holocene's great taste. I am psyched the label's not going to get too tangled up with one sound (and please, can no one else ever say "importland" or "pornland" again? thanks).

If you ask Alela nicely, maybe she will sell you one of the lovely, very hand-made editions of her second album before everything gets mass-produced and she's on the soundtrack to the new Wes Anderson flick and graces the cover of Arthur and the Wire simultaneously (that is, unless those pubs've already forsaken "folk")??? It's worth a try.

Don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde

2006-05-25T18:09:00.000-07:00

DESMOND DEKKER "Israelites" (Tv show lip sync): YouTube
...And here he is lip sync-ing to the Stiff Records re-recording some years later: YouTube
...And here he's playing it live on Jolls Holland's show more recently: YouTube

I was just listening to this song earlier today, working on a piece about the influence of the Bible in general and gospel more specifically on Jamaican music, when I was forwarded a note saying that Dekker had passed away. He was only 64, and a great fucking singer.

More on gospel and Jamaican music later; if anyone knows where this has been explored elsewhere, please let me know. Ohhh and speaking of Jamaican religious tunes I think I'll break out this one when I DJ the Delta Cafe on Saturday, as well as a few Dekker tunes of course... and maybe "Wings of a Dove" by Prince Buster? We'll see.

Everyone started placing bets

2006-05-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

EGOPLEX "Simplexity"

Ummm, if whomever sent me this demo CD of tunes by "Egoplex" would please contact me, that would rule. I'm seriously considering this track for the YETI 4 CD (which is looking to be THE! BEST! ONE! THUS! FAR!) but I can't figure out how it got to me and Internet searches for a site or something by this artist have been fruitless thus far. Organized, rational type people must have such easy lives...

Read my first Daniel Woodrell book the other day; he's definitely fun. Super excited to finally read the new David Mitchell this coming week. After that I start to work in earnest on my next book, the YETI Guide to Gospel Blues thing. Expect to see little bits of it here first. Aiming to do it in 4-5 months, and am going to attempt to channel Julian Cope's superb (especially for the time) Krautrocksampler in an oblique/ formatty way. (Jeez, look at the insane prices that thing is going for today! Someone needs to reprint that thing...)

Really glad I have the season closer from Lost saved on my Comcast tivo thingie; that'll come in handy some upcoming Wednesday to assuage my withdrawal a little bit. "I don't know what is more disquieting; the fact that the rest of the statue is missing, or that it has four toes."

Self-promo: I am DJ'ing the bar area of the Delta this Saturday. Expect eclectic, fun jamz to make the fried catfish go down even more easily. No bones.

You couldn't believe me if I tried

2006-05-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

NOTE: The following are all YouTube links, just to shake things up a tad.

HUSKER DU, "I Apologize," "If I Told You," "Folklore" (live in London ca. '85)
LES ROCKETS, "On the Road Again" (live on TV)
SHOP ASSISTANTS, "I Don't Want to Be Friends with You" video
JOHN & JAMES WHITNEY, "Lapis" film
ROSETTA THARPE, "Down by the Riverside" (live on TV)
NORMAN McLAREN, "Dots" film
X-CLAN, "Funkin' Lesson" video
JUNE BRIDES, "In the Rain" video
BRUCE CONNER, "Valse Triste" film
LES RALLIZES DENUDES, short TV documentary clip
JACK SMITH, "Scotch Tape" film
REPLACEMENTS "Careless" (live in Mpls., '81)
TELEX, "Moskow Diskow" video
POP GROUP, "She's Beyond" video
NAM JUNE PAIK, "Videotape Study #3" film
ODB (live at the Grammys)
EDIE SEDGWICK, lost footage from "Ciao Manhattan" with commentary
FRED McDOWELL, "Down to the River" (live on TV)
FUGS, "Crystal Liaison" (live on TV)
BROADCAST, "Papercuts" video
WS BURROUGHS, "Towers Open Fire" film
VILLAGE PEOPLE "Sex Over the Phone" video
ED EMSHILLER, "Sunstone" film
WANDA JACKSON, "Rock Your Baby" (live on TV)
SWELL MAPS, "Midget Submarines" video
HAWKWIND, "Silver Machine" (live)
WERNER HERZOG, "Measures Against Fanatics" film
Some East German COMMERCIALS from the '60s
NEGATIVLAND, "Gimme the Mermaid"
NERVOUS GENDER (live in LA in '83)
RAM JAM, "Black Betty" video
FEELIES, "Crazy Rhythm" live footage
STANDELLS, on the 'Munsters'
POPOL VUH (live on TV)
NAM JUNE PAIK, "Electronic Moon #2" film
SON HOUSE, "Death Letter Blues" (live on TV)
DEAD C, "Sky" (live on TV)
WU TANG CLAN, live interview on TV
PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS, "I Can't Stop It" video
CHICAGO, "If You Leave Me Now" (live on TV)
Why Richard Hell didn't last too long in TELEVISION
KEVIN AYERS & JOHN CALE, "Howlin Man" (live on TV)
FLIPPER, "Way of the World" (live footage)
THIS HEAT, playing live and stuff
ELO "Turn to Stone" video

Word hit the blog-o-street this week that Kevin Shields and Sofia Coppola have teamed back up, for the soundtrack to her new (romantic) movie. I'm the last person in the world to begrudge a man his hack-work (being a total hack myself). And as work goes, I'd much rather Mr. Shields do remixes or record other bands than play sound effects guitar in a sometimes great but often shoddy retro-rock band. In an ideal world, Shields would be able to live entirely free of commercial pressures and restraints, but I doubt I'll blow your mind when I say this might not be an ideal world.

I definitely wonder how the fuck people could seriously be that psyched to hear the dude's two remixes of Bow Wow Wow? Yes, he is an utter genius, somtimes, but it's really come to this? Let's face it, Sofia Coppola is a pretty dreadful filmmaker. Like most folks my age (and younger), I enjoyed Lost In Translation while I watched it. But afterwards, it kept coming back up, like bad cafeteria food. And then the xenophobia and the fake-artfilm moodiness of it all just bummed me out, a lot. These criticisms have of course been mademuch more succinctly elsewhere, and Lord help me before I fashion myself a movie critic. Though, those folks actually get sent on junkets you might want to go on (not to mention getting loads of promo-schwag people might actually want to buy later)... Hmmm.

While procrastinating last night, I googled myself (wait, is this like confessing to jerking off? well I never...) and found that not only did people like my EMP ELO paper, they really liked it! I guess I should publish it somewhere... Hmmm. Who has a magazine that prints pretty much anything, regardless of "release dates" and which publicists might be working it? Damn, can't think of a single place. I saw also that some people were discussing the Loveless book on the main MBV fan site's forum thingie, and I found it interesting that one person wonders how many times I use the word "shoegazer" in the text. You ready for the answer? Once. Really. I threw quotes around it to show my "disdain," too. Hah.

I used to rather dislike that term, shoegazer, though it is fairly evocative and descriptive. And it's one of many myspace genres you can slot your band's music into... Back in the late '80s/ early '90s, the two little rock writer genre words that used to really twist my goat were "indie rock" and "lo-fi": the first one because it surmised that a means for distributing music could somehow be flat-out descriptive of all of it, and the latter for even more reductively assuming the same for the way that certain kinds of music might appear to be recorded. These terms seemed almost totally arbitrary, and to paraphrase Dubuffet, about as useful as saying there was a kind of music made by dyspeptics, or people with knee problems.

Man who lived and suffered

2006-05-22T00:20:00.000-07:00

SWAN SILVERTONES "Love Lifted Me (live)"

Build me a time machine and send me back to see these guys at their peak. Pretty please. Cherry on top!

I want to marry your daughter

2006-05-18T18:25:00.000-07:00

JOSEPH SPENCE "Good Morning, Mister Walker"
PSYCHIC ILLS "January Rain"

As mentioned before, there's a chance I'll get an unreleased Spence track via Elijah Wald into Yeti #4, the release date for which has slipped to August 15, by the way, since releasing anything in June or July is really dumb (so much for being "quarterly," this year at least.) Once you stop laughing at/ with this Bahamian, there's so much else to captivate the listener, I think -- he plays music like he invented the stuff himself, and there's a lot going on that's really on here, I promise -- pay attention to what he's doing rhythmically, for instance. Ooops, did I just sound like a friggin school teacher? Lo siento. Next up we have a song off the album Dins, on the oft-great label Social Registry, by Psychic Ills. I don't know anything about them.

No real theme connecting these things today. Am in a bad mood right now, for no reason aside from a protracted and mangled exeperience with a corporation who want me to do much more than send an invoice to them before getting paid. Not a fan. I think I need to "make a meeting," and toot sweet, if I may speak in the parlance of my secret society for a second. Later.

Angels In Heaven Done Wrote My Name

2006-05-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

SENSATIONAL SIX OF BIRMINGHAM "I Saw the Light"
FLIPPER "The Lights, The Sound, The Rhythm, The Noise"
BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON "Let Your Light Shine on Me"
BOXCAR WILLIE "I Saw the Light"

Not to be confused with the Sensational Six of Arkansas, of course, the Sensational Six from Alabama let loose a slightly mocking take on this song more affiliated with Southern gospel. It's taken from Let Us Talk About Jesus, a super fascinating compilation assembled by Kevin Nutt (a premium from WFMU's 2005 pledge drive) that explores the influence of country on black gospel. The Flipper tune is from Blow'N'Chunks, one of the four or five best live albums of ever. Then we have yet another B.W. Johnson tune and finally we end with an authentically caucasoid take on the song we started out with. I was going to post a lot of other "light" and "electric" songs but this is all the server space I have right now.

Record high temperatures were reached here in Portland today and yesterday. Across North America, last month was the warmest April since records were first kept some ninety years ago. So, being one of the freckled and fair, I am to the best of my ability avoiding the sunlight altogether, though I do enjoy the stuff and of course it is a rare commodity here in the Pacific Northwest. Too many people I know have melonomas, I guess, and I just prefer to take my little exercise walks in the early evening rather than high noon.

But, that's not the reason that today's loose theme is (electric, well, angelic, mostly) light. When in Seattle for the EMP (where, yes, the subject was Electric Light Orchestra, but this coincidence is purely nominal and surface-like), I swathed myself in that consumer-happy glow you get while you're on vacation. Among other things I picked up the new issue of Cabinet. Now, I always buy that thing -- it is probably my favorite magazine and not at all expensive for what it is. I guess I shouldn't just spend every cent I have as soon as I get it, whether I'm on vacation or not. By the time I'm forty I need to learn if not how to save then how to spend, no? (Forty is sooooooon, by the way.)

The (excellent) piece by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in Cabinet (new issue's themed electricity: very excellent) looks like it might be an excerpt from Schivelbusch's new book, Three New Deals : Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, which I am offically stoked about. I first got into this cultural historian 'cause his 1992 book Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants seemed such an obvious companion piece to Piero Camporesi's own social food history woorks like The Bread of Dreams, the tome I've mentioned on here at least once before that posits thanks to a magical combination of hunger, poor diet when food could be had, and hallucinogenic herbs or spoiled grains like ergot, every person in the Middle Ages was essentially tripping their balls off, especially the poor. Schivelbusch's Paradise book shows (among other things) the history of spices and intoxicants that first came into use after the discovery of the New World. I just instantly dug the way he writes, since it's so clear and smart and free of the kind of Jungian leaps Camporesi's prone to (though the two of them are totally apples and oranges).

Since I never even finished undergraduate studies, I appreciate smartypantses who you don't have to have read twenty other books or get teached at for years in order to "get," and yet who also aren't watering their ideas down too much either. I guess it helps that Wolfgang is (or was) a freelance writer rather than a professor somewhere? Schivelbusch's 1988 book Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, which I got into next, is among my summer re-reading plans. I post these songs in honor of that great little book. In case you care, I also aim to re-read Emmet Grogan's self-mythologizing autobio. Ringolevio, a sporadically brilliant large book written by the founder of the SF Diggers. I also aim to actually read the far larger still Man Without Qualities, instead of just getting a few pages through it and giving up. Do wish me luck. Or laugh at my folly. Or both. And stay away from the sun!

Memory wastes

2006-05-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

GO-BETWEENS "Cattle & Cane"

Bought this 1983 single on a whim around when it was released. Back then, so many purchases were made along the lines of "I think I've heard of this, and it's on a label that's cool, plus it's only a single," and that remains one of the most perfect singles I've ever gotten, really. As you very likely know by now, Australian singer-songwriter Grant W McLennan from the Go-Betweens passed away on Saturday in his sleep. You can see the video for this and some other Go-Betweens tunes on this YouTube index page here.

With her face to the living room floor

2006-05-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

WE/OR/ME "Aimless Day"

Had a week filled with predominantly and wonderfully aimless days, which I very much needed after weeks of working as close to non-stop as I could, capped by watching Elaine May's 1976 film Mikey & Nicky tonight. You ever see that flick? It's just come out on DVD -- Cassavetes, Falk, Beatty. A really nice little gangster paranoir, sweetly Fr. New Wave-ish, wow.

This song by the Chicago-based We/Or/Me is not gonna be on the next YETI CD, but space-willing, something by them/ him will be. It's sweet, isn't it?

PS: Looks like in general the next YETI will be more weighted toward freakouts, drones and archival material than this sort of folk-dude sing-song. I love the good folksy stuff I just don't want to be pigeonholed, you know? Plus there's tons of awesome kinds of music that hasn't been featured on the YETI discs yet -- like gospel, for instance...

PPS: Looks like I'm gonna be helping to put together a really fun three-day festival of music/ film/ art/ etc. at the awesome Hollywood Theatre in Portland, OR over Labor Day weekend -- that Friday, Saturday and Sunday -- with Blackbird Booking. Working name is HALLELUWAH: A Festival of Enthused Arts (OK, Mostly Music). There will be three theatres with stuff happening in them pretty much all the time; the headliner looks to be Vashti Bunyan, who'll be in the area to perform at Bumbershoot in Seattle that weekend.

It could all fall apart of course, but I don't think so. I have a pretty great feeling about this thing, actually -- especially because Chantelle from Blackbird is so experienced and we both seem to have very similar ideas for the thing. At least partially it's gonna be a benefit, we think. More on it later.

I'm afraid the shining sun might burn and scorch his beauty

2006-05-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

STEELEYE SPAN "The Blacksmith"

Of the two versions that Steeleye Span recorded of this traditional British Isles tune, this sparse and weird take is my favorite by far. It's probably most easily found on that Early Years CD, though the entire original LP it's on, Please to See the King, is a delight throughout. It's very unfunky, but that doesn't mean it's not great.

No, I didn't forget about this place, this blog, and thanks a ton to those who wrote inquiring what the fuck. I just had to leave it be for awhile, as I worked on the new YETI (looking great by the way), and yeah, it pretty much took me as long to finish my book on Loveless as it did for the band to record it. And no, I didn't get nearly as much money as they did for the actual thing!

As you've undoubtedly heard, the EMP Pop Conference was most excellent this year despite the lack of too many academic and/ or international peeps; my presentation on ELO went over far better than I thought it would. "Papers" by Drew Daniel, Peter Doyle, Douglas Wolk and RJ Smith were among the highlights, though I missed half of the conference for various reasons (mostly, last-minute writing my paper)...

Seattle's loss is L.A.'s gain, but I do hope that Eric and Ann can keep the conference going, and if possible at the EMP (assuming it doesn't next get turned into a food court after the "sci fi museum" fails to lift lagging attendance). Xgau is totally right in saying it's the best thing to have happened to music criticism in years (together with this here Internet, I'd add, if I may be a Master of the Obvious--which I may.)

I am thinking of starting a monthly review 'zine along the lines of the lamented Sound Collector Audio Review: newsprint, cheap (like, $2-$3, or free?), mostly music-based but also books and other stuff, long form essay-friendly, with an aim to pay people pretty well though to start out that may not be possible. Kind of YETI meets Bookforum, I guess. Several people I brought it up to last weekend seemed interested, which is encouraging.

At the conference, the writer Elijah Wald, whose Dave Van Ronk book is kind of awesome --and who just MIGHT be able to hook me up with an unreleased Jospeh Spence track for the next YETI CD!!!-- had really good points about the next book I'm writing, a YETI guidebook for what I've always just called "gospel blues," which will also encompass what's traditionally been called "sanctified blues." He cautioned that in the gospel community that term, "blues," is def. frowned upon, and countered with the idea of calling it something like "outsider gospel" and broadening it to include shout trombone bands, sacred steel music and the like. Now, Luther Magby fits in better perhaps with a term aside from "blues," as it's not that bluesy, and yeah I love trombone gospel bands and the sacred steel stuff as well as its roots in Wille Eason and the like. But I personally have issues with the way the term "outsider art" has travelled so far from when the great critic Roger Cardinal first coined it in the late '60s/ early '70s, as an English language approximation for Dubuffet's "art brut." And I spent a lot of time in the late '80s/ early '90s arguing with Randall Morris (in my very brief tenure as US editor for Raw Vision) as to whether a thing such as "outsider music" exists -- this being of course before Irwin Chusid decided that yes indeed, it does.

Sooooo, my point here is: what to call this amazing stuff? Raw, bluesy, gospel; gospel songs recorded by blues musicians; Blind Willie Johnson; Sister Ola Ma Terrel; Rev. Charlie Jackson; Fahey's American Primitive V. 1 comp; Wash Phillipps--what is it, if not gospel blues? Should I not worry about possibly offending the gospel community? Is there an audience for this stuff outside of folks who are not at all offended by the word "blues" anyway, who're more likely to shie away from "gospel" -- are those the people it would be trying to reach??? Would love feedback on this, even/ esp. if you have no fucking clue what you're talking about (it's never stopped me before).

And I Will Come And Sit Beside You...

2006-03-08T03:28:00.000-08:00

ALI FARKA TOURE "Machengoidi"
IVOR CUTLER "Go & Sit Upon the Grass"
REVEREND CHARLIE JACKSON "God's Got It"

We all know that life's short, and clearly I've not been spending any of it blogging on here in the last five weeks. Still, more than a few of my favorite people have all passed away just recently: Ivor Cutler, Octavia Butler, Ali Farka Touré, Rev. Charlie Jackson, Barbara Guest, Walerian Borowczyk, and maybe more but those are the ones I'm thinking of this morning.

Ivor Cutler was of course a wonderful old coot, even though he sometimes played up his cranky coot-ness a bit much, and I'm still not so sure his whole Noise Abatement Society thing wasn't another joke, though those in the know swear this isn't the case. I like his books a lot, but the album Velvet Donkey is his masterpiece, if you ask me. This MP3's from that 1975 Virgin release.

Octavia Butler's short story collection Bloodchild is among the five best science fiction/ fantasy/ whatever books I've read. I had the pleasure of interviewing her in 1998 for the finally-defunct Index; I called and wanted to interview her after reading two of her books. She sternly suggested I do "more research," and phone later. I was scared like hell when I rang up a few months after that, but she was really sweet with her time once we did talk. That piece was only about half of the interview -- I should track the rest of it down. Hmmmm. Old boxes of cassette tapes flung in the attic somewhere, reveal your contents to me so that I may find this thing!

I didn't realize Farka Toure was in his late-mid 60s, 'cause he always looked so youthful in pictures. Never saw him perform. I forgot I reviewed the collection Radio Mali (which this MP3 is taken from) for Amazon, and that I said this about it (in one of those cliche-laden reviews where all of a sudden you're an instant expert just 'cause you read the liner notes and looked up what they had to say on AMG about it):

Previously available as a 1996 import on the World Circuit label, this nearly 72-minute collection of recordings were originally made for radio broadcast between 1970 and 1978. As a single collection, this is the finest yet of Toure's slow-burning music, characterized by nimble, expressive guitar playing and strong, expressive singing. Lyrically, the songs are mostly devotionals, praising a loved one, Allah, and various government initiatives (including Radio Mali itself). Half the tunes feature Toure alone on guitar and vocals; elsewhere he is backed by the ngoni's beautiful rattle-buzz, a full choir, a smattering of percussion, and a violin player whose sliding, high-pitched notes echo the fiddle playing of Appalachia. Throughout, Toure's singing has a wider range than you'd expect (considering that he's known as the "African John Lee Hooker") and his bluesy guitar playing is always melodic, modal, and meditative. Toure repeats musical phrases over and over again, subtly changing them. But he never gets fancy for its own sake--his style (which adapts Sonrai, Peul, and Tamascheq techniques) sounds as natural as a babbling brook. Strands of sing-songy, seemingly simplistic melodies wrap around each other, coming together and unwinding like strands of RNA. This is some mind-blowing stuff.

The Rev. Jackson was one of the last great practitioners of the gospel blues and his music is amazing and I am actively missing him and thinking of him daily (especially as I ready working on a feature on Rev. Louis Overstreet, who has serious Portland roots and more on that soon I promise). "God's Got It" was probably the best single song released in 2004. It's posted here for the few lucky enought to not have heard it yet, who don't yet know its insanely rockin' charms, the way it sounds like the wrong speed at first but it totally doesn't matter.

Barbara Guest was a poet I like quite a bit but alas, do not know that much about, so I don't know what else to say.

To finally put an end to this morbid list, I just learned about the amazing animator Borowczyk (from my girlfriend and Will of Ye Ovverkille Riverre, who stayed here a few days last month, when they were both talking of him as the primary influence on Jan Svankmajer, himself the primary influence on the Brothers Quay). Umm, so I do not have much else to say about him either...

Someone told me mercury is in retrograde or something? Fuck. Whatever.

Since last I wrote, let's see: I've gotten some good assignments and stuff (though my editor at SPIN got shit-canned the day after handing in my assignment). The group art show I curated was a great success and I always forget how much work those things are -- thank God I had friends who know what they're doing handy and eager to help. DJ'ed Josh and Emily from Barsuk's wedding in Bellingham, and it was a lot of fun as well as the best service I've ever seen (short - sweet - wow). If you don't know him, Josh Rosenfeld is one of the three most honest and sweet people in the "music business." My girlfriend got to meet a bunch of my Seattle friends at the wedding and en route to it. And she has now moved into a groovy old house with the best shower ever inside it, located in "close-in" Southeast Portland. This shower has two heads -- truly decadent and remarkable, if environmentally uncool. A good shower with excellent water pressure is very important. YETI #3 is almost gone now, while #4 is shaping up nicely. Fred Cisterna's lengthy interview with Fred Tomaselli is awesome; I can't wait to hear the six minute Bright song for the CD, too.

Also in the same span of time: I was diagnosed with another diabetes-related ailment (gastroparesis -- stomach is now pretty fucked-up due to nerve damage). Felt tired and weird a lot from this diabetes stuff; it's better but still kinda messed up. Was way late on a piece written for an old friend, someone I professionally admire a lot and had never worked for before. My laptop hard drive totally died and I'd not backed it up in over two months meaning MORE DELAY for the MBV book (not much more, but still!). Simultaneously, my home computer finally succumbed to an evil virus that had been inside it for a long time. My truck got towed. Sold prized possessions for rent. Umm, but it could always be worse! You know -- not complaining, just saying.

Here's to hoping that NOTHING happens this next month, aside from getting a ton of work done, on time -- or my own personal approximation of that anyway...

...Or one of these days you'll be made to cry

2006-01-27T13:33:00.000-08:00

REV. A. JOHNSON "Let That Liar Pass On By"

Here is my favorite version of this great tune, posted here in reference to the media's obsession with James Frey. Frey is certainly old news by now, but I did start this post a week ago and then I got side-tracked with stuff: a nasty cold, packing up YETIs after the power of Pitchfork compelled hundreds of kids to order it instantly just based on a little news blurb on their site the other day, trying to make some $$, and curating/ hanging that art show which opens later on tonight and has now swollen to have 24 artists and well over a hundred pieces -- it's kind of crazy. I'll post pictures if I can figure out how to.

The fake Frey controversy does remind me of a common affliction in "the rooms" that we might term "bottom envy." I've had friends over the years state repeatedly that they were "only addicted to---(insert the name of drug less 'hard' than heroin)" or how they "never lost all their possessions and wound up homeless," but they still hit bottom... And I've always felt there should be no need for such qualifications, ever. No one's going to twelve-step meetings for the coffee; if you're there, you're there. It just doesn't matter how macho the war stories you swap over coffee afterwards are. If you had to quit 'cause you thought you might lose your job you are fundamentally no different, when it comes to recovery, from your friend who quit because they were a male crack whore who lost both their legs and had their kids taken away and did four years upstate. This is a beautiful thing, and it teaches you a lot about empathy, among other things.

And one of the myriad rad things about recovery is that we're all there just for one reason only, that we desire to stop using/ drinking/ eating/ whatever-ing. It's a deeply level field, profoundly level, 'cause all it ever takes is one slip to be back in the same place you were before you first walked into that weird, unmarked room in the corner of a church. I understand that Frey, in his multimillion-selling non-non-fiction novel, states that he is not down with twelve-step programs, feeling that they're just another addiction, or words to that effect. And fair enough for him -- even if that were true, I'd gladly take meetings over dope, if only 'cause they're free and the girls a lot better looking.

Seems to me that Frey likely heard some good stories at meetings or in group therapy and simply copped them, maybe 'cause he felt as if his own experiences were not "real" enough. Which is a shame, 'cause I feel that there's a great myth that in order to get clean and sober you have to end up as I did --crazy, homeless, penniless, etc.-- before you finally are willing to try anything to stop using. I'd love to read a great addiction memoir that tells the story in less an after-school special way. Besides, Cain's Book has already been written! No one is ever going to trump that one when it comes to the utter dispassion (is that a word?) and savage boredom of the junkie life.

The Frey thing makes me sad, and it's just another distraction from very important things going on today -- like how lame the Pazz & Jop poll results are!

I didn't end up submitting quotes, because I found myself writing only to try to impress other critics, but I realized after thinking about it that I mostly just don't care about other critics anymore. There are maybe five superlative music writers working today and we all know who they are. That's it. Only maybe five. (I am certainly not one of them, nor do I care to be: I'm way too scatter-brained, not obsessive enough about only-music, or writing about it anyway, so I'll never fully excel at it. I'm not that good a writer, and am too lazy to be a good reporter. I am late with copy more often than I'd like. Basically, I'm sometimes a hack, and at other times a fanboy. I can't write a "think piece" for shit. I'm pretty damn good at interviews, though I tend to talk over whomever I interview. I'm pretty good at describing how stuff sounds or what it feels like to be ridiculously psyched about something. And I'm a better editor than I am a writer.) OK, glad we're all clear about where I stand, or rather don't stand!

Has anyone ever read Macunaíma? I think it might be pretty great, though I've just started it...

Twin prizes waiting for the sun

2006-01-26T11:19:00.000-08:00

39 CLOCKS, "Stupid Art"

Ugh. Much to moan about today. Car trouble, sickie sickness. Missed the going away party for my pal Beth in Seattle, and then there's this near-constant rain here in PDX. I can't even order mochas anymore either! And I'm behind with everything. Whatever, enough emo BS. This song is already helping me feel better. It goes very nicely with the rain, and my headache.

If you live in Portland and are out and about next Thursday (you know, "first Thursday," when all the art openings happen downtown) please do drop by this shindig:

YUMMY FUR: A YETI Magazine Group Show
Opening February 2nd, Groundhogs Day, at Valentines, all night long (within reason)

Kevin Arrow (Miami, FL)
Julianna Bright (Portland, OR)
Claudia Brown (Portland, OR)
Mark Dwinell (Brooklyn, NY)
E-Rock (Portland, OR)
Alan Greenberg (Portland, OR)
Liz Haley (Portland, OR)
Chris Johanson (Portland, OR)
Josh Kermite (Portland, OR)
Robert McCormack (Madison, NJ)
Jason Miles (Seattle, WA)
Tara Jane O'Neill (Portland, OR)
Lucy Raven (Brooklyn, NY)
Alisyn Smith (Portland, OR)
Marian St. Laurent (Brooklyn, NY)
Gretchen Vaudt (Portland, OR)

Rad tunes all night provided by DJ Yeti, aka Mike McGonigal, who curated the show.

The premise of YUMMY FUR is really simple; it's just art by people that are or will be (or anyway should be) featured in YETI magazine. YETI is an internationally-distributed, book-bound arts 'zine based in Portland, Oregon. The magazine has been praised by the New York Times, Village VOICE, Seattle Weekly, and the Stranger, plus the record shops Rough Trade, Other Music, Insound and Aquarius. "Strangely esoteric but also eminently readable," Aquarius said about it. That was nice of them.

There will be lots of drawings and photography, plus paintings and collage and a smattering of sculpture, too. The show will be hung salon style, with images piled totally on top of each other. It might look like a mess to some people but it's going to be a glorious mess. Really. A small selection of art from the curator's personal collection will be hung in a corner of the space. The show will run from February 2 - 26.

Holding me down

2006-01-25T10:55:00.000-08:00

FLY ASHTRAY "Rapscallion"

Proving the old adage that inside every middle aged man there's a teenage girl (and I don't mean that literally) I have to admit to being something of a MySpace addict at times, which is insanely dorky I know. But I have reconnected with some old friends on that thing, as well as been exposed to some really good music in addition to the expected emo-pap. (PS: Add me!!!!!)

Today I got a myspace friendster request from Fly Ashtray, a band who, in my first failed attempt at having a record label, I put out a CD (via Shimmy Disc) of theirs plus a 7" (via the band so it wasn't really like it was "my" release but the logo, that Redon eyeball/ balloon drawing, looked awesome on the label of the single). Damn, horrible sentence construction there.

Listening to their new-ish songs on their myspace page, I was surprised at how great their new material is -- not very different from their old stuff, but you don't always expect bands to be good after being around for twenty-three years. Sometimes toiling in obscurity can do wonders for your output. Speaking of which, Fly Ashtray's a band that would seriously benefit from a deft compilation disc, since the one thing they allways seemed to lack is an editorial impulse; some of the tunes they put out on their packed to thegills records were so awful you couldn't believe it. Sort of endearingly awful, but awful nonetheless.

This song here, "Rapscallion," it has so many hallmarks of F.A., maybe that's why I like it so. Successive layerings of guitar, guitar and bass, all following the same rhythm and melody, a bit staggered from each other on purpose; Kavoussi's pleasant voice buried almost entirely in the mix; drums that sound like cardboard; demented surf elements; and a lot of weird little almost-hidden obsessive stuff that starts to pop out after a few listens. Eptness and ineptitude co-exist so wonderfully with this band. They did the too-short-and-very-Beatley-but-fucked-up song thing well before anyone had heard GBV outside of Dayton. And they continue to do it today, rather well. Rejoice, and stuff.

Gonna eat at the welcome table some of these days

2006-01-24T08:56:00.000-08:00

THE CARTER FAMILY "River of Jordan"

You've probably already heard that Janette Carter, the last surviving child of Sara and A.P. of the Carter Family, passed away at 82 on Sunday, in her Kingsport, Tennessee home.

"Until recently she gave concerts each Saturday. She played autoharp."

In the city of Bethlehem

2006-01-23T13:51:00.000-08:00

THE SUNSET FOUR "Oh Lord, What A Morning (take one)"

Not to be confused with the Bessemer Sunset Four, the Sunset Four recorded a bakers' dozen tunes in the 1920s. They can be found on the Document disc Black Vocal Groups Vol. 1, 1924-1930. They do get crazy a bit on that collection, especially the song where they mimic a calliope. This tune is slow, sweet and very olde schoole.

I was sick and I couldn't get well

2006-01-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON "I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole"

For some reason, this song has come up in conversation with a frequency that's startlingly high even amongst record-obsessed dorks the last few weeks, not to mention that it keeps popping up on my "random" iTunes setting, and otherwise creeping into my life in almost-creepy ways.

I may have even posted this before, but here it is. Let's just go ahead and make it a chain letter type of thing. So, pass it along to ten friends before you get hit by a truck!

Later this week, we'll upload something very special for fans of the great Rev. Louis Overstreet, fyi.

Reading rainbow

2006-01-21T06:16:00.000-08:00

A book I cannot wait for.
A book I hope to never read.
A book I wish I had never read.
A book someone should give to me.
Another book someone should give to me.
A book I'm going to review for Bookforum, hooray.
A book that is taking me forever to read but it's pretty amazing.
A book that desperately needs to be reissued 'cause it fucking totally rules OK.
A book I am really, really excited about even though it's likely going to be "difficult."

Ring like bells, ring like bells

2006-01-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

THE LOFT "Why Does the Rain"

As a doughy teen who'd smashed his sister's car up within two weeks of getting my license in 1984, I was left to getting around everywhere on my bike, a silver Schwinn ten-speed that I was given when I turned twelve and which was a large part in why I didn't get laid until I was nineteen. What kid who rides his bike to school in the suburbs gets laid? Not me, anyway.

Thankfully, this car smash business happened in suburban Miami, in a part of Coral Gables that was then still sort of middle class but twenty years later consists mostly of these heinous gated communities. (Developers do not fuck around down there -- where my Moms lives now was naught but marsh land twenty years ago.) A series of paved bike paths snaked through my neighborhood, and though the eternally coked-up and speed-addled drivers of South Florida could care less to even look for bicyclists, there were enough back roads to go down so I only got hit by a car once.

Sometimes I used a walkman but I'd duck-taped a slimline boombox to the groin injury bar thingie of the bike, and that provided the all-important soundtrack. Several times a week, I'd ride about five miles each way to Yesterday & Today Records to see what new stuff had come in, to read through the NME and Melody Maker to find out about new music and keep up on very British acts I was infatuated with like Yeah Yeah Noh, the Pastels, June Brides, Shop Assistants, We've Got a Fuzzbox & We're Gonna Use It, Pop Will Eat Itself, the TV Personalities, and the Loft. I was an avid Creation records fan and bought all the singles they released, in order, even the fairly shitty ones by the Jasmine Minks, the Legend! and McGee's own Biff Bang Pow!

With the exception of the first Jesus & Mary Chain singles, which hit me and my friends with such a powerful force (total coolness in the fact that they covered a bootleg Syd Barrett song and that combination of buzzsaw noise with confectioner's grade pop music -- we all asked ourselves how come that had never been done before?! as one generally does when confronted with an act of, yes I'll say it --as a partial ode to the British papers-- total fuckin' genius) nothing else coming out of England at the time impressed me so much as Pete Astor's first band the Loft, who are the subjects of a second, decent-though-anemic compilation album as of a few months ago. eMusic has it, if you want to download the thing for super cheap. They also now have the SST catalog, everything by the Monochrome Set, and more Document stuff all the time (insert disclaimer here). His second band the Weather Prophets (clearly dude was obsessed with precipitation -- they had a song called "She Comes from the Rain") had a few killer songs ("Almost Prayed" chief among 'em). But it is the Loft that I love.

Love, yes I said it, love. So much of what I love is in fact right here in this one sad sack little song! It's mopey and minor keyed and the lyrics are all "woe is me," but beautifully so, perfectly so. I think it's because there's hope in these three and a half minutes, that absolutely cliched Beckett-y, can't go on must go on kind of hope. The song is about feeling helpless, I think that's why I connected to it so much as a 16 year old. The outside world may completely ignore you or worse, the trains keep running on time when you feel so bad 'cause you're so utterly into that girl who'll never talk to you or whatever, when everything should just totally explode, all at once. This is helplessness in a grand sense, a very cinematic helpless and hopelessness, the kind that starts a movie with some startlingly beautiful and sad creature staring out a window on a darkened street.

The song continues to talk to me, beyond the safe and respectably shambling jingle jangle goodness of its sound or the fact that this is my favorite kind of guitar solo -- the kind that's crisp and sing-song-y solo that is almost a new song in and of itself, the kind that in varying degrees you find in Television and the Minutemen and Galaxie 500 and the Velvets and the Urinals and the Swell Maps, the kind that sounds basically the same on record as live but not in a bad way. It's not even that here we find that special combination of groovy melodies and misanthropic lyrics which never ceases to have its way with me. I guess it's that I fear that I've only rarely advanced beyond the emotional and psychological levels of a sixteen year old. Surely my ex-wife would provide a good reference for this.

Back then, when this simple little tune was new, I played it every day over and over again, riding my bicycle along idyllic tree-covered paved paths en route to school or to my part-time record shop job, scowling at the world, which had done me such wrongs as to place me in the depths of paradise. These days I'm more likely to listen to it while I shower, gearing myself up for the day. Is it strange I find such goddamn twee woe-is-me-isms warmly compelling, nourishing even?

Nahhh, I think it's probably the least strange thing about me.

All the way to Washington

2006-01-16T09:49:00.000-08:00

CAPITOL CITY QUARTETTE "No Jim Crow In Heaven"
STAPLE SINGERS "Long Walk To D.C."

Happy MLK Day -- a national holiday actually worth celebrating! I'm sure you're aware that it was Mahalia up there on the podium who urged the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. towards his infamously extemporaneous "dream" speech when she cried out "Tell them about the dream Martin; tell them about the dream!"

In our revisionist history we may impose the sounds of soul hits recorded years later onto images of dogs, firehoses and worse turned onto peaceful marchers, but gospel was of course the soundtrack to the civil rights struggle, going back to the slave era when spirituals such as "Wade in the Water" were sung at specific times to communicate plans for breaking free.

Radical student in satin boots

2006-01-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

Over at the uber-rad group blog Moistworks, I've posted five songs by Thirty Nine Clocks, a vaguely anomalous German band from the '80s I'm fairly obsessed with. Hope you enjoy.

Grab a reason and I'm dragging you down

2006-01-13T08:49:00.000-08:00

MY BLOODY VALENTINE "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)" (Peel Session 1988)

Today has started out well. I may have no money in the bank but I feel pretty okay about things. Last Gasp asked for another hundred YETIs, and here I am listening to the Swell Maps rather loudly in my Grado SR 80s (official headphone of the Amazon.com OG music editorial crew -- insert sound of bubble bursting here) after an early morning walk with my girl, followed by a strange breakfast of Trader Joe sushi, edamame, and half a pear that's possibly the best pear I have ever eaten, consumed with a few slices of sheep cheese which the little card at Whole Foods said went really well with pears. Say what you will about Whole Foods, they did not lie to us about their cheese. Sorry to get all Bret Easton Ellis there with the naming of my brands there. I didn't even get paid for those endorsements! I paid FOR them.

This is the best sounding version I've found of My Bloody Valentine's Peel Session from '88, when they did four tunes under circumstances they supposedly didn't enjoy, as they were rather hurried through the songs. One imagines Kevin Shields had far less control than he's used to. The band did not return to do another session, though Shields did play on one with the Pastels about seven years later.

MBV have one of the lamest names around, there's no question about it. The moniker was notoriously taken from a campy horror flick by the first singer, that Dave guy, but I like the way the word "blood" is in there. Blood has been on my mind a lot of late. I'm told eventually I'll be put on insulin maintenance, in all likelihood. I did not like hearing that.

Speaking of blood: over the years, I've noticed a big difference in the way you're treated by doctors and especially nurses when you tell them you want to be tested for STDs versus when you get any other bloodwork done. I guess I should just go to Planned Parenthood for testing and avoid this business? I just feel like if you've been sexually active at all you should get tested pretty often, and assume that everyone else does this too so it's not a big deal, that even if you're "safe" and "hetero" you fucking get tested often, right? Then I've got a past history of drug use, so I feel the need to get tested for Hep C every few years 'cause even though I never shared needles thanks to NYC's awesome and thankfully extant policy of harm reduction (which very likely saved my life). But I have had friends have Hepatitis sneak up on 'em years later, you know? I just hate the weird nervous vibe there is when you get tested for this stuff in doctor's offices.

I remember getting a routine HIV test in a small doctor's office in East Tennessee, and the poor nurse was totally shaking while trying to draw my blood, like I was instantly gonna spray her with my vampire juice and dissolve her flesh right there if she didn't do this perfectly, or perhaps she thought I was a robot from the future and it actually was battery acid in my veins and not blood? I think she had three pairs of gloves on and couldn't feel her fingers anymore so naturally she had to jab me and move the needle around a dozen times before she hit the goddamn thing.

It's weird to be in the position of the patient in these situations, and not feel judged a little bit, you know? It's also really uncomfortable as an ex needle freak to sit there getting needled by these big gauged syphons, strapped to a chair. I swear I almost got sick the other day while this was happening, all the little tubes getting filled up with my "juice of life." Ummm, this is both boring and disgusting so I'll shut up now.

How do you tell if a squirrel is on crack?

2006-01-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

FEVEN "Welanureiney"

The only way I'm going to get YETI out more often is to include more people in the editing/ selection process, not to mention in production. And I'm confident I've got this happening now, in a way that will not make it any less "quality." My business partner is real good with layout and I'm very very psyched to be free of trying to design the thing as I am self-taught and not very ept in that field. For the disc, I'm asking a handful of people to come up with roughly a dozen minutes of music. One of those will be a spectacular twelve minute track, other selections will be one minutes apiece. Thus far Phil from Misra, Adam Forkner, Mike Doughty and E*Rock have all agreed to help collect CD submissions, and I'll put about twenty minutes of the thing together myself. Naturally, I'll have veto power. I was gonna ask either my friends at Sublime Frequencies or at CaseQuarter or maybe at Dust to Digital to assist as well. We'll see.

This song here was recorded by Mike Doughty during his recent trip to Ethiopia; the idea is to have a few tunes from his trip on the next YETI CD plus a song of his own. This tune may or may not appear on the next YETI disc. It's by a woman named Feven and I don't know anything yet about her other than I really want to hear more. Will get more info. on her ASAP. Doughty is an awesome cat and I am bummed he is not moving to Portland anytime soon, as he was thinking of doing...

Speaking of travel and friends and stuff (that segue works for me), PDX-based photographer Mike Rubenstein (who took those awesome pics of the Sun City Girls for when I did that Seattle Weekly cover story a year and a half ago) went to Bangladesh recently to take photos of the effects of arsenic poisoning from UN-dug wells there on the local population. All the water there is apparently poisoned; as I understand it, folks can either drink canal water polluted with sewage and die in a few weeks, or drink from the wells and die in fifteen to twenty years.

Slept way too much yesterday, it was really weird but I guess it takes some time to adjust to new medication; today I look up the possible side effects to one of the meds I'm on to get the blood sugar under control and it's right there, "excessive sleepiness" or something like that. I should start looking that kinda shit up before I gobble the pills right? Funny the way doctors and medical indutsry people put stuff, like when I got called by the clinic I got a blood test at a month ago while cutting into some steel with my torch for the first time in months, when they said to get my ass into the ER right away or else I might experience a "cardiac event." Cardiac event! Sounds like a Mille Plateaux act from 1996, esp. if you translate it to German. I didn't feel like having any cardiac events, of course. I'm under forty! Krikey. Weird how the Times is devoting so much space to diabetes this week, and totally helpful to me as there's still so much I don't understand about it yet.

Feeling pretty great today though. Peppy. Maybe I just needed to rest a lot? But, so much to do though, fuck fuck fuck. I need to clone myself a dozen times. Got a decent morning chuckle thanks to this. And the one song I've heard from the next Vetiver album is so great it has me smiling all over, happy like a squirrel on crack who's dug up a really sweet, big-ass stash. Andy says he'll get me a Vetiver song to post here soon, FYI.

Ohh, and Dennis Cooper finally weighs in on the JT LeRoy thing here.

I saw the ocean's daughter

2006-01-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA "Can't Get It Out Of My Head"

(Attention, stalkers:) I'm typing right now from the downtown Stumptown, and I can't friggin wait for Valentines to open as they are playing an early R.E.O. Speedwagon album very loud here (whichever one they actually cover Chuck Berry on, that is the one that it is). There's a sub-bubblegum element to the R.E.O. thing that's almost enjoyable, and believe me I love a TON of bad music. But on the most objective of levels, this shit entirely blows. So, the singer can sing like a castrated speed freak? That doesn't mean he should, you know? Anyway, pardon me for blowing your mind by attacking R.E.O. -- but that's what I do, blow minds.

One of my maxims is that irony should not be mixed with music and with haircuts, but then I remember how much I love Steve Miller and ELO and Def Leppard and Lindsay Lohan in this weird kind of excitement that encompasses both irony and sheer delight. These would seem to be total opposites of course but I guess I encompass multitudes? That must be it.

Which brings me to the topic of this year's Pop Music Studies Conference at the EMP in Seattle. It's "guilty pleasures," a topic I have serious problems with but we probably all do. I missed last year's 'cause I was so crazily low energy and depressed with the undiagnosed and outta control diabetes, but the other years were pretty awesome, much better than you might think even.

Here's my proposal, which might be too fanboy-ish for them but there's a reason I never graduated from school; I'm not much of an academic, at all. I can't do math, either, but I'm not, like, mathist or anything. I have several friends who are good at math!

For this year's Pop Conference, I'd like to present a paper about Electric Light Orchestra's 1977 double album Out of the Blue. Today, if ELO is renown for anything, it's for writing all the disco songs the Beatles never got around to writing, then slapping sappy string arrangements on top -- and fair enough. Electric Light Orchestra's maxim seemed to be to try and cram as much sound and scope as possible into the conventional pop song. But at their best --and this album is their best-- this ambitious ensemble achieves a certain lumbering, retrofuturist grace.

On OOTB, Lynne dissassembles high-, low-, and middle-brow genres then recombines them in unexpected ways in a manner that kind of foreshadows pop music's modern direction. That bit was a stretch and I know it, but I've got proof, the songs themselves! Lynne's less a "great artist" and more a classic fetishist, so trapped in his lust that he can't see beyond it. Within those confines --addictions to pulp narrative, an obscene Lennon/ McCartney worship, and the misbegotten belief that you can never have too large a string section in your rock band-- he crafted some of pop's grandest and most wonderfully overbaked songs. Here is a classic guilty pleasure of pop, as satisfying as it is pretentious. Plus, it kicks the shit out of the Moody Blues.

PS: Though Out of the Blue happens to be the first album I ever bought with my own money, I will try to refrain from overly nostalgic ruminations.

This ELO tune is of course NOT from OOTB, but it's been one of my favorite songs since I can remember, an obvious and essential little meta-ditty about the power of pop music.

At first I thought this guy Brian Joseph Davis' "top ten banned albums" project was kinda cheesey, and easy, in a way that Christian Marclay is perhaps more capable of getting away with (though of course Marclay's not trying to make any grand political gestures that I'm aware of, and some of his stuff is just really ho-hum though I never see him get anything but accolades.) And jesus christ, let's have a year without any top ten lists of any kind, OK?

The more I stared at them the more I dug the objects, though the real kicker is the sound sample stuff, these edited together sounds of the warped and torched LPs skipping rhythmically and stuff. Not quite Pierre Bastien but I know for certain that the Dead Kennedys have never sounded this good before. As someone who's taken a torch to CDs, melting a stack of 'em at once, I can vouch that this sort of melting music activity is very fun to do (kinda hard on the lungs even with a good mask though). This link arrives via WFMU so you've probably already seen it, but anyway...

YETI 3 seems to be selling very well, as we've already gotten restock orders from two of our biggest distros and when I went by Powells last night to find a new Charles Portis book to read and the new Octavia Butler book (!yes!) I couldn't find any in sight so I assume those have sold as well. Also, the nice reviews from Aquarius, Other Music and Insound have kept me from worrying too much about if people might still give a shit about the project. I have this weird condition whereby I both totally care about what people say/ think, while not caring at all, or pretending not to anyway.

PS: Why have I never seen this movie?

PPS: Our friend Luc, who actually knows French and stuff, weighs in that "a feuilleton, where I come from, just means a serial."

Happening every day

2006-01-09T02:16:00.000-08:00

REV. A JOHNSON "The Lord Will Make A Way Somehow"
HENRY GREEN "Strange Things"

Loving the fact that so much Document material is available on eMusic; these songs are both from the awesome disc 1950s Gospel Classics. Can't find anything about these performers though; when is the posting of liner notes along with mp3s going to be just the way things are done? (Full disclosure in case you don't know: I write a monthly column for eMusic.) This Henry Green tune is another one to add to the growing list of blues-gospel hybrid tunes from well past the heyday of sanctified blues; it's nice isn't it? Just listened to it nine times in a row.

Spoke with Bilinda Butcher for quite some time yesterday, and she is just the sweetest person; I was half an hour late for brunch with my girlfriend and Austin from the great band Fauna Polly 'cause she just kept talking when I thought it was going to be this awkward twenty minute chat. Spent a lot of time on things that won't be in such detail in the book -- about her kids, and the deal with why there were a dozen chinchillas in My Bloody Valentine's recording studio/ house during the lost years, etc. She sounded remarkably happy and cool, though, and in the last ten years or so she's just been raising her kids and hanging with her boyfriend and doing Spanish dancing.

That's right, Spanish dancing. More juicy details like that in the book. Can't give it all away. You gotta buy the book.

Bilinda is still pals with Kevin, and has hopes to make music with him again someday. I didn't ask if that was really her last name or not as that seemed kind of ridiculous, somehow. It was awesome to get her perspective on what it was like to be in a band where the music was predominantly recorded by one person, then played by the full band, as it sounds like the band were totally cool with that. Of course, Bilinda's style of singing was/is totally original and un-ripoffable and so much of what's great about the band. Plus she could almost do the whammy tremolo guitar playing as well as Kevin onstage.

It's nice to do some things as more of an "adult," like talk to certain people now. When I'd met the band and hung with them a bit during the Loveless tour, I was struck with a total fanboy loss of nerve to say anything more than "hey" to her and Debbie, 'cause they made this insanely sexy music and were cute as hell and they were in my favorite band, you know?

Anyway, I don't know how to segue to this so I won't even try -- the whole JT LeRoy revelation makes me kinda sick to my stomach, especially since I rather liked the books. Especially the first one as it was so Apple Dumpling Gang meets Dennis Cooper. Time to bury your raccoon bones, friends! And thank God you never bought "his" awful-looking Da Capo Guide to the Best Music Writing of 2005 book...

Someone is posting a bunch of rare Nurse With Wound related material, some of it never issued on CD, and that is a very lovely thing deserving of your immediate attention, methinks.

Is the use of the word feuilleton a common thing these days? I guess it should be since mainstream media seems to be getting more and more about short inconsequential fluffy filler type pieces and lists (soon there will be entire movies that are just lists, mark my words). But of course there's a connotation to me of feuilleton with, you know, whimsy, and the last fin de siecle, and groovy stuff like that!: Felix Feneon, Robert Walser, Alphonse Allais... Point is, I actually found some year-end type lists I almost like in the LA Weekly and they called it by that fancy name.

But I probably almost-like it just 'cause of the fancy name. I'm one of those people who buys fancy mineral water at Trader Joe's, after all.

You made a way

2006-01-06T08:19:00.000-08:00

PILGRIM TRAVELERS "Jesus, I'm Thankful"

Lou Rawls, RIP. This is a track from the 1950s, when Rawls was in this subdued and smooth band of sweet moaners.

Losing reality, day by day, slightly

2006-01-06T05:31:00.000-08:00

Thinking a lot about hypnagogia, since it's notoriously something Kevin Shields was big into around the time of Loveless, as a concept and as a lifestyle. I've spent a good deal of my own life in a sleep-deprived state due to my penchant for being up all night whether I have stuff to do the next day or not, and more recently due to a sleep disorder that a little machine I have rather neatly keeps at bay. Of course, the sounds on that record are so woozy in the most intoxicating way, so it's more than tempting it's inevitable to make a connection between the state of mind and those sounds...

There's this rare and rad book on the subject I used to have but stupidly sold ages ago -- now I can only find it from some shady site for $65, and Powells doesn't even have it, neither does ABE. I don't neeeeed it for my book but I'd like it.

You want a taste? Here is a taste (unedited transcript from my talk with Kevin last week): "The Isn’t Anything phase was big time all about sleep deprivation. I was young enough and strong enough, and not into drugs enough. You know, if you smoke a load of pot you can’t stay awake. So, then it would be like I was totally, I would get off on having two or three hours sleep a night , and just working constantly and I'd be making a record and making it; it was very enjoyable. But then the Loveless thing was a lot more about – I’d become more immersed in a general state of slight dislocatedness."

"By and large most of the lyrics come from, not so much the hypnagogic half-awake half-asleep, more the slightly trancey state that you’re in when you’re writing songs. And that does involve being quite tired. Most tunes I write mostly really late at night, or something. Or if it’s in the studio it’s in the state where after a few weeks of being in the studio not really getting good sleep."

"And for me, being in a roomful of electronic equipment I find quite mind altering as well, somehow. I don’t know why, but I feel very affected by a lot of electricity. And that’s why for me the record making process involves a lot of getting away from the studio. Because I find, being in there for a long time is kind of like, I’m going off; I’m losing reality, day by day, slightly. Do you know what I mean? That’s the other weird thing I never really got to understand. Maybe someday they’ll find out some people are more sensitive to electricity than others, or something, I don’t know. I think electricity will be seen in the future as an environmental hazard that some people are sensitive to in the same way as pollution."

This shall be one of the things I talk to Bilinda about this Sunday, since dating someone who has this penchant may not be the simplest thing in the world.

Dropped by the opening reception for Julianna Bright's show at Valentines tonight -- I was rather late and missed the musical portion unfortunately, but got to hang with several handfuls of awesome people (no, it wasn't an orgy, unfortunately -- these were some good looking people!) . Been so tired from ill health plus working too much so it was extra awesome to get out, be amongst pals and stuff. The art community in PDX may be small, but I'm constantly surprised at how many decent artists there really are here. And, like, how good the art at various cafes is. That's weird to me. Good weird, of course. But if a similar thing ever existed in Seattle, I never found it -- and I was looking... Today I adore Portland in all its rainy, chilly, gloomy glamor.

Dennis Cooper just posted his fifty favorite novels of all time -- someone tell that dude to READ MORE HAPPY BOOKS!!! Hah. Of course it's a great list, though Mann, Robbe-Grillet, Foster Wallace and Ellis never did much for me. More people should read Robert Walser and Dodie Bellamy of course; the world would be a better place. Me, I never date a girl who doesn't seriously (but not too seriously) dig Story of the Eye. But then, I only am interested in happy, smart perverts. Like Dennis! Although, I am not interested in him that way, which I'm sure he is thankful for. His blog amazes me 'cause the dude is insanely busy but has the time to seriously interact with all these people. Sure, it's partly flirting. But only part.

Ohhh, you came here looking for a song? Here is one by the awesome Portland free-wheeling band World. And just you wait until PDX's Plants release their debut in a month or so -- you will like it! Because I say so. And if you haven't, listen to Serena Maneesh (non-suck rock type music).

What can I do or say to let you know the state I'm in?

2006-01-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

BIG BOYS "Which Way to Go"
BOBBY BIRDMAN "I Will Come Again"
LILYS "The Hermit Crab"
HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS "Give the Fiddler a Dram"

This Big Boys song sounds as absolutely perfect today as it did twenty years ago when I first heard it thanks to the brilliant painter Alex Brown (who also turned me on to Eric B and Rakim on the same day). But ooohh, man. I can't believe I forgot to dedicate YETI 3 to Randy "Biscuit" Turner; bums me out I didn't do that.

The Bobby Birdman track is a remix by the uber-talented YACHT, from a 12" on the brand-new PDX-based Fryk Beat label. Is there a finer lap-pop crooner out there? Didn't think so.

Yesterday I posted some stuff on ILX about music writer Robert Christgau that I feel like an asshole for saying. I love it when I get all indignant and railing against someone only to realize a few seconds later I not only sound like a fuckwad but I basically was talking to myself, writing out of jealousy and of course fear. I just feel like what's the good in saying asshole-ish things whether they're true or not? Also whenever I'm really self-righteous I fail to make a point very clearly and resort to generalizations more than ever. Sorry to sound all Dr. Phil there. At least I think that was what Dr. Phil would sound like, only meaner and louder and all about somebody else, right? That guy is a douche and I shan't regret saying that. Can you believe the outrageous comments on my blog? I am going out on a limb there, oh good gosh and golly.

My girlfriend is staying with me until she gets her own place; as a total and complete slob with way too much stuff I don't fully realize the extent of my slovenliness until a fairly sane person comes into contact with it. This had me thinking of the "Hermit Crab" song 'cause I think hermit crabs totally have the right idea -- just take your house with you, and don't own more than you can carry. Plus, the Lilys came up in a three hour conversation I had the privelege of finally having with Kevin Shields last week and now I have to rework half my MBV book but it's totally worth it to have the thing be accurate and to have that record's creator's input is awesome. Of all the bands to rip off MBV, I'll take the Swirlies and Lilys over any of their British contemporaries. So many people I respect seem to dig Swervedriver though, that I guess I owe them another listen? Also, I posted the tune 'cause my girl's name is Lily. Also again, the Lilys have a new album due out in a month or so. Can't wait to hear it; wonder which direction they've gone off on now? Hope that Kurt is doing alright ghostwriting these days. That guy's wonderful.

The Holy Modal Rounders tune is here to encourage all good people to tip as well as they can, even when they can't. Tip thirty percent today. Always give a buck for coffee no matter what the coffee cost. If you can't aford that, make coffee at home, you know? Anyway. Apparently I'm more Andy Rooney than Dr. Phil when you get down to it. This's one of the best trad. tunes the Rounders ever tackled, in my book. So few people can really cover that stuff and get the flat fucked-up nasally vocal style down, you know? Though not appreciated by folkie purists in their day, with hindsight the classic pre-trips version of the group sounds like the most "authentic" folk act of the entire revival! I love that.

PS: Does anyone have one of these babies yet? I want.

PPS: NYT's second-most-emailed article of yesterday concerns a place I am rather happy opened up in my 'hood very recently. Just wish the prices were a tad better, or that their cheese selection could come close to Whole Foods'... Yes, I have vaguely yuppie appetites when it comes to food.

One two three four

2005-12-29T04:50:00.000-08:00

CLOGS ""Ostinato"/ "Five:Four" (Medley)

Our pal Alec at Brassland sent us this (*EXCLUSIVE!*) medley of two tunes off the Clogs' Feb. '06 release Lantern, and I'm supposed to mention that the group is sort of a side project of the National and that they're touring the United Kingdom in January and February.

Four years after his passing, and I'm missing W.G. Sebald's presence in this world. (Talked about him all night while dining at my single favorite joint in Portland, the sandwich shop and oh so much more Valentines.) I love when things seem to be totally random or just some rambling journey but then you realize later that they're totally crafted. And Sebald, who's of course best known for inserting images into his texts, has this in spades. And the way he deals with the Holocaust is so honest and intense and never maudlin, kind of like Primo Levi in that regard. I think I need to re-read him, after I finish re-reading Death to the Pigs (who else misses the days Atlas Press was putting out new books every year?)

I'm writing comments for the first time in like a dozen year for the VOICE's year-end poll today while I take a short break from more pressing work, though I might not even send the comments in. I kind of wish the Pazz & Jop poll would have a haterz section, where you could vote the one act you despised the most. Were the options a buffet line, would I vote for the Miracle Whip of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the decaf no-foam no-fat double cappucino of U2 or the stale bologna sandwich with pickles of the Hold Steady? I'd probably go with Clap Your Hands, just 'cause I feel so strongly about the necrophagy vs. necromancy debate. Also, they suck. Bland dispassionate unoriginal suckity suck. Much worse, they make me feel old! Since I cannot discuss them w/o sounding like a hateful old man. Which I will now stop being. I swear. And be grateful there is no "worst" category, 'cause that's mean and stuff anyway.

Twenty years after he died, we all miss dennes dale boon, of course. Just in case you have not seen David Rees' passionate tribute to this unfortunate anniversary, it's here.

Want to know what Alan McGee said when I finally tracked him down for the LOVELESS book? And I quote: "Sorry that record fucking bores me.Long live The Libertines,Dirty Pretty Things and Babyshambles." Hah. Dude. I almost love that that's all he said.

Thousand years may come and go

2005-12-24T21:47:00.000-08:00

RADIO FOUR "How Much I Owe"
STEPHAN MATHIEU & EKKEHARD EHLERS "New Year's Eve"
TURNER JUNIOR JOHNSON "When I Lay My Burden Down"
ISOLEE "Schrapnell"
HAZEL & ALICE "A Distant Land to Roam"

Happy happiness and stuff to you and your’n! First off, thanks to the handful of folks who emailed me asking what the hell I was up to and why haven’t I updated this blog in ages and am I OK or what? Well, the last few months I’ve been super busy (YETI 3 is out – our website will soon be up but if you want to order one right now, it’s currently available from Forced Exposure, Aquarius Records, Midheaven/Revolver, Reading Frenzy, Last Gasp, Insound, and Powells!) and on top of that, honestly, I've been feeling even more low-energy and screwed-up than ever.

But finally, after three trips just this last week to the Providence ER (on top of emergency root canal done superbly at the OHSU dental school), I’m stable and on the road to getting healthy.

At least partially what’s going on is Metabolic Syndrome – a fat guy trifecta that's diabetes (which I thought maybe I had but had never been diagnosed with before) plus a host of other factors (some congenital) which lifestyle changes (like actually exercising and eating properly) will help out lots. I’ve had vision changes and there might be damage to some of my organs, but I don’t think it’s anything too bad. Plus, I get medical insurance in about a week so I’m psyched about that, jack, and will be able to know these things for sure which will be nice.

I’ll totally be fine; I just am one of those people who needs shit to go seriously wrong before making the right changes, you dig? Speaking of which, I have eleven years clean and sober in a week, assuming I don’t go out and smoke a shit-ton of crack cocaine tomorrow night. Ohhhhh man, am I not funny at all? I didn’t think so. But I am totally psyched about double digit recovery, and can't wait to celebrate with my home group, yay.

The next YETI, number four, which is already 100% assigned and slated for an April release, is super exciting: among the things we hope to include there’s a cover drawn by the great Carson Ellis with an interview with her in there too; a re-evaluation of Sister Ray and the Original Sins; an account of Japanese internment camps in WW2 written by the grandson of detainees which unfortunately seems hella current events; some fascinating shit from Werner Herzog; Tara Jane O’Neill talking to Michael Hurley; Keith Fullerton Whitman aka Hrvatski hanging out with Tod Dockstader; YACHT Jana emailing with Genevieve Castree; Ian Nagoski on Blaster Al Ackerman; Adam Forkner chatting with Dave Longstreth AKA Mr. Dirty Projectors; me talking to the coolest man alive who is not Bruce Conner – the former garage band drummer, Surrealist poet, doo wop DJ and current gospel expert Opal Louis Nations; plus interviews with Fred Tomaselli; Hakim Bey/ Peter Lamborn Wilson; Judee Sill; a whole lot of artwork, and more. If we can squeeze it all together... we'll see.

I'm throwing up a slew of songs this time, well that's more like a mini-slew. Or a slewette? Yes, a slewette. The Radio Four just continue to kick my ass. Of course I do not refer to the impossibly lame British band of the same name, but the family quartet who began life as a jug band and in the ‘50s recorded some burning sides for the great Nashboro label.

Turner Junior Johnson is singing “When I Lay My Burden Down,” a capella with harp, and it’s taken from the Document collection Negro Religious Field Recordings (1934-1942) Vol. 1. A good deal of Document titles are available at eMusic these days, FYI – I even wrote about it, hooray.

“New Year’s Eve” is from the way-classic album Heroin by Stephan Mathieu & Ekkehard Ehlers. Four and a half years on and this thing has yet to be remotely stale, to me anyway.

“Schrapnell” is from one of my favorite records of the year, the percolating and lovely Wearemonster by Isolee, which made my Pazz & Jop poll this year, in the top five. I ranked my albums in order of how often I listened to them since that seemed to me the most honest method, you dig? This MP3 was actually downloaded off Fluxblog in April, who I have to thank for turning me on to this thing, though I think I’d read about it on ILX earlier. MP3 blogs can be good for something!

And the Hazel & Alice tune is from that Smithsonian comp. Pioneering Women of Bluegrass, which is kind of great and makes me want to listen to Freakwater again. I haven't heard them in ages, dude.

So I'll keep you in my hat

2005-11-04T03:44:00.000-08:00

FAUNA POLLY "Corvallis"
TIMESBOLD "This Could Be The One"
BOKAJ RETSIEM "Pills"
BAEIN "Ya Binaya Goumi (Oh Girl, Stand Up)"
UNKNOWN FORMER MATADOR EMPLOYEE "Something Something"

Sorry to not have updated for shit lately. Been real busy. YETI 3 will ship from the printer in a few weeks, which means it will be in most stores the week after Thanksgiving, and I think I have to postpone my trip to NYC starting Dec. 3 in order to make sure all the copies go out and stuff. Boom air. We'll have a website up soon hyping YETI 3 as well as other projects in the works. I'vealready got half the contents for YETI 4 together, both in the book and on the disc, but am very open to submissions of any sort. The idea is that instead of a couple years, there will now be three to four months between YETIs. Ummm OK, I wouldn't believe me on that one, either.

We begin this week's selection with my favorite song today, "Corvallis," named for a town in Oregon that the band Fauna Polly was from. Just got a disc of this defunct group's "greatest hits" and am very charmed by it. This song is perfect for people who want to hear more music in the vein of the o.g. Go Team and early Pell Mell, sort of.

The Timesbold tune is a work in progress, from sessions for their next album; Portland peeps are strongly encouraged to check out Whip from Timesbold play with Douglas Shepherd from Douglas Shepherd this Sunday evening at the Towne Lounge for only three dollars.

The Bokaj Retsiem track is from the classic German psych-kitsch LP Psychedelic Underground.

The Baein song is from the excellent new Sublime Frequencies collection Choubi Choubi! (Folk And Pop Songs From Iraq), one of the best comp.s of the year.

Track five is embarrassing to me; it's from a tape I was handed about fourteen, fifteen years ago and then lost, but not after copying a few songs off it first. I totally forget the girl's name though. I think it was Julie something? She was cute and smart and had dark hair then and is likely all those things to this day. My friend Mike Two from Sounds (there were three Mikes who worled at Sounds back then and he was Mike Two) and I talked briefly with her about starting a band though thankfully we never did, since I am tone-deaf and incompetent. Ummm, I do know that she used to work at Matador as a receptionist. Anyway, this little thing is kind of annoying and homemade but I really like it a lot.

I was getting all this weird spam sent to the comments section on here lately, an ungodly amount of the stuff, so I disabled comments 'cause I have no idea what else to do. If you want to get in touch with me for any reason aside from trying to sell me hair tonic or Viagra ('cause I get those things at Costco already, you know?), please just use the email in my profile: yetimike at hotmail dot com, OK. The only other option is to ask people to "register," which I do not believe in.

Look I know lists are dreadful but... here's MINE!

2005-10-18T17:20:00.000-07:00

Lists! You love to hate 'em and hate to love 'em. Most mainstream music mags (even the two good ones) seem to fall over themselves to create new list-based issues alla time. I'm waiting to see one magazine's list of the best magazine lists ever, assuming that's not happened already. Not that I'd ever watch it but VH1 basically consists of the same twelve wait who the fuck are these people sub-celebs reading off teleprompters and pretending it's their own zany material on these special countdown to the greatest shows. So much of VH1 is like a long extended version of what Hollywoood Squares was in the '70s... only not nearly as good 'cause who can measure up to Charles Nelson Reilly (sp?). Anyway, my point is that I was asked by my pals at Amazon to vote in their best records of the year list, and thought it might be of interest to at least three people, so I am herewith inflicting it on you.

Speaking of lists, this is the first one I've made since really falling off of a lot of promo/ publicity lists (many of them voluntarily), so it's a pretty out of it and kinda MOR list in lots of ways. My list's lameness has even more to do with the fact that I've predominantly listened to My Bloody Valentine and gospel-blues from the '20s and '30s this year, and none of those things can make it to my list. I just really don't care to listen to the Hold Steady and the Arcade Fire or even halfway decent acts like the Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. I guess I really am old, now. I love Kanye and Amerie and am psyched that Mike Jones is on the radio like all the time when I switch it on. But I'm so embarassingly out of it with that stuff, it's like I'm happy to DJ it when I DJ a party-party, and songs by those folks will def make it to my VOICE list of the best singles of the year... But I'm not a music editor anymore and I only get paid to write about weirdo, indie, drone and gospel these days so that's that. I sound so apologetic but really, it's nice to not feel like I have to "keep up" anymore, you know? I just care so much more about Luther Magby's two known songs than the entire careers of most bands which might make me cranky as well as old (get off my lawn you damn kids.)

For Amazon you can't vote for reissues unless it's material that's never really been released before. I cheated a tad with the Swan Silvertones, though most of those 78s have not been on CD, and the Sublime Frequencies Golden Trianglething, well, that was only ever released on cassettes in Myanmar (Burma) so I think it's fair to say that it's getting its first release here. I also couldn't vote for a lot of great PDX music from labels like Marriage and States Rights since they don't go the Amazon way...

1 Various Artists Guitars of the Golden Triangle
2 Antony & the Johnsons I Am a Bird Now
3 Six Organs of Admittance School of the Flower
4 Swan Silvertones 1946-1951
5 Mahmoud Ahmed Ethiopiques 19
6 William Parker Sound Unity
7 The Robot Ate Me On Vacation
8 Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane
9 Jamie Lidell Multiply
10 The Clientele Strange Geometry
11 Superpitcher Today
12 CocoRosie Noah’s Ark
13 Sufjan Stevens Illinois
14 Danger Doom The Mouse & The Mask
15 Boards of Canada Campfire Headphase
16 A Frames Black Forest
17 Edan Beauty & the Beat
18 Okkervil River Black Sheep Boy
19 Amadou & Mariam Dimanche à Bamako
20 M.I.A. Arular
21 White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan
22 Animal Collective Feels
23 Bats At the National Grid
24 The Books Lost & Safe
25 Josephine Foster Hazel Eyes

Sorry to not have posted anything this past week -- I'm busy, working thirteen hour days then when my girl visits from Eugene I hang with her pretty much all that time. I did start finally going to see a naturopath specializing in Chinese herbal medicine and it's really amazing, how different I feel already and it's less than a week. I still need two surgical procedures but feel like I'm getting at some of the root causes for my health stuff.

Mostly I'm just psyched to actually be doing stuff instead of just complaining/ not doing. In the same vein, I finally took my truck in to get serviced. The "check engine" light had been on for about 15 thousand miles (no joke) but the repair bill at the amazing joint down the street was less than $108.00, for a full and total tune-up (plugs, oil filter, oil, checking out a buncha stuff, replacing a few lights, etc.) I better go before you explode form excitement or I start telling you how much I saved on groceries by going to Costco. Sheeeesh!

You were right

2005-10-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

NOVEMBER 16TH "I'd Like to Think"

Here's a taste of the YETI 3 CD, presented lo-fi but still sounding great I think, of Ben and Mat's short-lived band November 16th (you try putting that on a flyer!) that existed 'twixt the breakup of Carissa's Wierd (whose last two albums I released on my own very short-lived label, Sad Robot) and their new group, Horses (whose awesome debut album will be released in the Spring by the not short-lived label Sub Pop).

When I take my vacation in heaven

2005-10-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Too busy to post anything new here today, but I did just post six great gospel tunes up on the Moistworks site. Nope, that's not the image I chose. (I gave up irony a long time ago! Hah.)

Looks like my first bit of published food writing will happen soon; I'll let you know when it goes live.

I'm revamping YETI 3 by taking out redundant/ excessively old/ who gives a fuck content from the CD and the book. It's really fun. I just totally resequenced the CD, it still sounds like something that would abeen interesting a few years ago and today just sounds like the OC, but that's life in ye olde indie rocke, no?

Looks like nothing's going to happen, that I must confess

2005-10-06T05:45:00.000-07:00

THE WHO "Little Billy"
THE SCIENTISTS "Frantic Romantic"
THE SHOP ASSISTANTS "It's Up To You"
GRIFTERS "Divine/ She Blows Blasts of Static"

About a year ago, I burned today's songs from vinyl and transferred them at low res for posting here, but don't think I ever did. Anyone will tell you I'm slow but eventually get things done. The Who tune is from the great Live at the Fillmore East 1967 bootleg on Trademark of Quality, one of my favorite records. The Scientists tune is from a reissue of their first 7" and I don't know if Kim Salmon's voice changed or they used to have a different singer back then but isn't it nice, regardless? The Shop Assistants tune is from their perfect debut EP, I mean unless you count the Buba and the Shop Assistants single as their first but I don't, while "Divine/ She Blows" is the flip-side to the brilliant "Soda Pop" single. Notice the continued use of the false start, one of many potentially cheesey big rock moves the Memphis band breathed a new life into. BITD, man.

After last night's episode of LOST, where the camera almost-lingers on a copy of Flann O'Brien's brilliant and hilarious and fucked-up novel The Third Policeman (this copy of it, too), I'm almost-convinced that what's happening on "the island" is all some weird kind of purgatory because that's what's going on in Flann's book. That would be too much like what the guy who made Signs would do if he were writing the show, so I doubt it's true. But it's interesting (likely only to me) that they made such a product placement of that particular bit of literature.

Also in the "only interesting to me" category, I'm a little bit freaked that there's some kinda kooky gallery/ performance space that looks like they actually have really rad things going on in the apartment below the one I used to live in when that was a rather desolate part of Brooklyn, back in '88. The space is also the same place my Portland friend Jesse Durost, a great artist, used to live in, before we met out here. I guess the future of the Keep Refrigerated/ Room Temperature type spaces has to be headed towards Bushwick and East New York now, right? Keep Refrigerated was an art installation-besotted party that would regularly happen in Williamsburg in the '80s in an otherwise unoccupied former meat storage warehouse space. It was owned by this crazy Brazillian diplomat's kid and co-curated by the great Fabio Roberti, I think. I didn't care much who owned or ran things back then, because I used to be a hell of a lot more interesting. Oh, and Room Temp. was the successor to Refrigerated, so named because it was just in a warehouse space and not one that used to house meat... Get it?

And cry behind the door

2005-10-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

KENDRA SMITH "Alle Morgens Parties" ("All Tomorrow's Parties" sung in German)

From my collection of flexi-discs, most of which I hung onto even through junkiedom 12 years ago 'cause even the rare ones are pretty worthless. My understanding is that all the parts were played by Kendra Smith, and it was produced by Steve Wynn and recorded at Down There Studios, in June 1981. The flexi was originally included in an issue of the dreadful fanzine The Bob in 1987. Not the very best song I've ever posted but also probably not the worst.

Eighteen things at once -- you spread yourself so thin!

2005-10-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

VOLCANO SUNS "Jak"
VOLCANO SUNS "Cover"
VOLCANO SUNS "Silvertones"

The Volcano Suns were formed by Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott in 1983, or so the Internet tells me, and these songs are from their debut LP on Homestead, 1985's Bright Orange Years. The thing is out of print despite being the band's best album by a rather wide margin (no offense to latter-day bassist Dave Kleiler who I was indie-rock hall buddies with back at NYU and whose best high school pal fronted the initial dough to start Matador -- nice dudes). Prescott does that anthemic shout-thing a few times too many on here, but pound for pound, it's the finest post-MoB offering, and yes I do like that Consonant debut and Roger Miller's Oh. Orange is fuzzy and pleasantly fucked midtempo indie-punk, and it's a great record to listen to when you momentarily tire of your Husker Du, Membranes, Squirrel Bait and Big Boys records.

Don't believe me? Check out what your hero Will Oldham told INDEX magazine nine years ago: BRUCE: What are some of the things you've recommended for Drag City's reissue label, Dexter's Cigar? WILL: The first record by Volcano Sons[sic], The Bright Orange Years. They went on to make a few more records that I didn't like as much, but that record - it came out in '85 or '84, between '84 and '86 - I still listen to it now. It's actually a beautiful looking record, beautiful sounding record, just a really good record. It's been out of print for a while.

The first time I ever saw an "unplugged" set by Yo La Tengo was at a record shop somewhere in the West Village in the Spring of '87. They did a terrific version of "Cover." Years later I phoned in a pledge to WFMU when Yo La Tengo was doing one of their annual live request broadcasts, and I couldn't remember the name of the Suns song I'd seen them do a dozen years earlier, so I just requested "that Volcano Suns song they do." And then of course, they did another song entirely (since they know almost as many songs as Peter Stampfel), the great "Balancing Act" song, the one that goes "It matters to meeee." That phrase was borrowed for the masthead logo on one of the final issues of the awesome, Burma-worshipping, New Jersey-based '80s 'zine Matter. Anyone remember Matter?

My usual webpage to store stuff on is acting funky now, so this one's a dreaded "you send it file," sorry.

Higher than the heavens

2005-09-30T06:18:00.000-07:00

BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON "Sweeter as the Years Go By"

Freelance monies I expected to arrive did not, but this week has been pretty groovy regardless: productive and fun, and stuff. Too many rad bands on tour all at once, it seems. Hard to choose which shows to go to to on single nights, and which evenings to sacrifice to fun and which to work. Last night I caught some of Acid Mothers Temple's set though unfortunately missed Portland's awesome and very good-looking Plants, especially since they played as a seven-piece big band with members of Nice Nice and the Evolutionary Jass Band. Tomorrow night Calvin Johnson DJs at my favorite sandwich shop on the Earth, while Saturday it's all about Four Tet and Jamie Lidell(!), then Monday I hop between Doughty and Dungen. Best show I've seen in awhile was Whip at the aforementioned sandwich joint last weekend, which I didn't want to mention since I DJ'ed and I'm not into making this a self-promo type thing you know? I mean, I get emo and self-centered here enough already. (That said, I was mostly AWESOME and RULING that night, and in case you ever wondered, the last tune on side A of Don Cherry's Eternal Now mixes perfectly with MBV's Isn't Anything while Stockhausen's Kontakte goes beautifully with a little Bongo Joe. People who play one song at a time are mostly pussies, don't you think? Or professionals...)

I just wrote a column for eMusic that oughta run in about six weeks about Blind Willie Johnson. They have the two excellent Yazoo comp.s that turned me on to his music and contain all thirty known recorded sides by this itinerant singer on their site -- believe me, you need them if you don't have them already. The more deeply I fall in love with sanctified blues/ bluesy and raw streetcorner type gospel in general, and Blind Willie Johnson in particular, the more I forget that it was a bit of a struggle at first to get into this stuff. I mean, I'll concede the dude sounds like a frog here on this song, for instance. But then I guess a lot of the music I like the most was "difficult" at first. I remember in seventh grade how dreadful the first Velvets album sounded but I kept listening to it, regardless...

Most folks peg the gospel blues as an historical anomaly, but for me it’s a genre in and of itself that remains to this day (which I believe I've already said in this blog at least once thus far) so many thanks to CaseQuarter for helping us see some of the ways this fabulous sound does remain. A lot of my favorite gospel blues artists –Sister Mamie Forehead, Reverend E.W. Clayborn, Arizona Dranes, etc.— are admittedly pretty one-dimensional, but that doesn't bother me much. B.W. Johnson, however, has a diverse little set of songs, so that helps him to be more appealing to the neophyters and the neo-lovers-not-a-phyters alike (grooooaaaan).

If you read just one article about Blind Willie, make it Michael Corcoran's piece from two years ago. It's pretty awesome. I love the casual ways Corcoran corrects the historical record when he undertakes this type of dirt-digging reportage. God bless that motherfucker.

Rude boys don't cry -- don't cry!

2005-09-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

PRINCE BUSTER "Judge Dread"
TIGER TRAP "Supreme Nothing"
MOBY GRAPE "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"

Because I know none of us can wait to spend the rest of our lives gazing into his handsome little neocon, civil rights-hating face as we learn, say, of how turning the states of Alabama, New Mexico and Pennsylvia into moated internment camps was indeed not unconstitutional given the eternal state of pre-war that we're in. Or whatever. Sorry for getting all "science fiction" on you. Did you notice how cute he is?

Strike another match

2005-09-28T03:38:00.000-07:00

THE CHOCOLATE WATCHBAND "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"

I rather liked the Dylan folkrockumentary that aired the last two nights on PBS. I imagine the 'sphere is bloguflectin' on the thing left and right, but I don't know for sure -- I only read maybe five blogs these days, and four of them are 'political,' you dig?

The hours of interview footage Dylan gave his manager were pretty amazing even if they didn’t reveal much aside from Dylan essentially throwing his hands in the air to say “I’m not anythingggg! -- I’m just inscrutable and shit!” Scorcese knows how to make a good music movie, despite how irresponsibly and impossibly dreadful his bloated old dudes look at this blues music TV series for PBS was.

I found the stock imagery of !THE! !SIXTIES! used throughout rather grating, but maybe it's necessary for anyone who's been in a coma for fifty years and just turned on their television set, or for the glazed-over fifteen year olds forced to watch this thing in class by their hippie English teacher trying to "connect" with them. Ginsberg was in his over-effusive mode but with such conviction and eloquence it was pretty amazing. Hard to believe fucking Pete Seeger, God rest his soul, still seemed mad that Dylan plugged in his goddamn guitar; being so short-sighted at the time is one thing but he looked like his neck was gonna pop retelling it thirty-plus years later, poor guy! It just is weird how so few people ever 'got' Dylan, always projecting onto him what they wanted him to be or, to be fair, what he had been just a few months prior.

And while it was rad how many people were tracked down for the thing, they all pretty much toed the line for what you'd expect they'd say. I found it interesting that Ramblin' Jack and Richard Farina never existed, that Fred Neil got so glossed over he seems to barely have existed (yeah he was an asshole but still…), and speaking of assholes it was a relief Robbie Robertson was nowhere to be seen, but why not talk to, say, Garth? And speaking of bearded genius types, the importance of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music was not even alluded to that I noticed, except as one of the records we can presume Dylan stole from his Minneapolis pal? Granted, even in three and a half hours that span about six years, there are gonna be omissions. And when a documentary like this is coming out of a particular artist's camp, who one assumes have a great deal of control of the film, you have to expect such stuff -- so it was really rad when you consider that...

The weirdest omission to me, though, was of the made-for-TV film Eat the Document, even though footage from and shot for that movie are one of the great archival highlights of the thing. That footage, shot throughout a tour of England in '66 with the brilliant Hawks backing Dylan (you know the mythology, and about the "Judas!" followed by the "I don't believe you" followed by "You're a liar!" followed by "Like a Rolling Stone" which Charlie Rose said is the greatest rock song ever, and if you do not know about this, I believe that Greil Marcus has written three books about those twenty seconds) by D.A. Pennebaker a year after Don't Look Back had been filmed, is one of the main things holding the film together, the way it’s used repeatedly throughout. How come they never acknowledged what project all that material was originally from? Dylan helped edit it for ABC... Ahhh, I fear I've slipped into amateur trainspotter Dylanology! Lord help me.

It was never shown on TV 'cause it was "too experimental," but it's a really amazing document, excuse the unintended pun. Apparently there is an excellent DVD bootleg floating around. (If you find one, please burn me a copy, would you?) Eat the Document is sort of Dylan's Cocksucker Blues; in fact I once had a little TV party about 18 years ago in the kitchen of my row house in Queens where I showed both of them back to back, with the Bud Dwyer tape and Minor Threat's last concert ever thrown in for good measure (hey, it was the '80s, plus, I guess we all had 5 hours to spare).

Speaking of those two movies together, I wonder if part of the reason it's only screened offically approx. three times since it was made almost forty years ago is that Dylan is clearly out of his goddamn skull on some heavy medication? He's soooooo skinny and out of it at points, even in the PBS movie. There're heavy-lidded moments (when he's singing Hank with Cash, for instance) and what look to me to be fiending moments (when he's saying how much he needs to go home and does not want to go to Italy). That one oft-booted "extra scene" from Eat the Document where Dylan is "tired," and gets in the limo after puking and he's in the back there with John Lennon and they're trying to talk to each other for at least twenty minutes? It's so obvious (to me) that Dylan is high on heroin there and Lennon is tripping his ass off. And we all know what the "motorcycle accident" was; hell, I had a half-dozen of those myself before I finally got clean.

Of course, I am totally speaking out my ass here, and quite possibly doing that "projecting" stuff I just judged Dylan's boomer fans for. As this is not a classic rock gossip site but a ye olde mp3 blogge, I shall shut my yap, now. Ohh, and I trust you are having an enjoyable WOCLAP -- War on (Consensual, Legal, Adult) Pornography day?

If that bums you out, or any of the other small-ish ways that the first ammendment and most amendments (except the second one) don't really exist anymore, there's always YACHT ROCK #4 -- I can't believe these things keep getting better. Wow. Just, wow.

Baby good? Junk is nooooooo.

2005-09-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

THE KONKS "Honey"
HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS "Sugar in the Gourd"
MOFUNGO "Don't Shoot That Junk Into Your Arm Again, Please"
REV. EDWARD W. CLAYBORN (THE GUITAR EVANGELIST) Jesus Is Sweeter Than Honey In The Comb"

Note: the following "denial rant" was written by me in early 1992 or so, and first published in the Portlable Lower East Side in their special Chemical City issue in 1993, then again in the Grove Press book Low Rent: Best of the Portable Lower East Side in 1995.

JUNK

“Junk is no good baby.”
—Brion Gysin

I cannot conceive of a life without junk food, without the rush of getting high, of getting off, of feeling light, of feeling lighter, of the chocolate melting in my mouth and not in my hands, of a weekend that doesn’t end with a good nod, of a day where my blood sugar level does not soar through the roof. I do horrible things to my body under the pretense of pleasure. My teeth are plaque-damaged from years of sugar abuse, my stomach a massive monument to Milky Way bars. I’m trying to figure out a lot of shit, like: what is junk, and why do I like it so much?

The junk gets in you and it never leaves. Picturing the insides of my body, along with the usual red meat and gristle and nerve bundles, I imagine an invisible system: a capillary-like complex of plasticky tubing that pulses nonstop, sending a foamy, cream-colored insulation-like liquid to every cell. (Since I was a kid and saw biological textbooks with their cross-sections of human anatomy, this is how I’ve conceived of my soul.) I’ve daydreamed that, if I were to kill myself, I’d slice very deeply into my wrist, but no blood would come out. Instead, white foam would issue forth from the bursted soul tubing, very much like a can of Reddi-Whip being turned upside down and emptied. As I slip away into the warm bathtub water, I bend over and put my tongue to the creaminess. Its taste is the same as the cernter of a Twinkie.

I was birthed through the mouth of instant gratification. I grew up, sort of, with Sesame Street and Oscar M-a-y-e-r and if I need it I need it now and it better have lots of red dye number two. What is the taste of postmodernity? A glass of Tang, or a bottle of Coke? Does Coke really take the paint off a car hood? Did the astronauts really drink this gross fucking orange-flavored sugary shit up on the moon? Well, I didn’t mean for this to be a pop-culture quiz. The point is that if desire is not brightly packaged I am not interested in it. I crave processed sugar molded into strange little shapes, covered in brightly-colored bite-sized artificial flavorings, wrapped up in plastic and aluminum foil. I have great trust in prepackaged, individually wrapped junk food; I guess it was one of the first things that really made me feel good.

Sugar has flavor, but it has no taste. It has calories, but no vitamins or minerals.

When you overdose, your blood pulses so fast you seem to trigger a second heart. When the sugar heart is pumping inside you, the blood squirts underneath your skin miles per hour faster than ever, and you’re rocking back and forth in your sneakers, looking up at the cumulus clouds. There’s a smile on your lips, the double-scoop chocolate ice cream cone is slowly melting its way out of the base of the cone onto your arm. You try to enjoy it as slowly as possible without having it leak all over you, but even an expert can fail at this task. Your lips, chin, mouth and hands are stained a shit-brown color. You run to the street and you think that the world really does spin around.

Should the body be a reservoir for junk? You have to abhor the idea of the body to be a serious devotee of junk food. Though it is through this weird meat contraption that I find quick solace, the heart-heavy pulses of relief and release, I am repulsed by the reality of flesh, of fat, of my ugliness. This conception of the body strikes me as very Catholic and regressive and in the end only good for medieval saints who can fly up to God after years of brutally pummeling themselves. But there’s a little of the saint in every junkfoodie; we’re all persecuted in this fatist society and we all secretly want to leave this body behind.

“My mom threw me out ‘til I get some pants that fit/
She just can’t approve of my strange kinda width.”
—David Thomas, Pere Ubu

At some point in the last few years, I stopped being chubby. I became fat. And I can’t say it’s like I didn’t notice or something ‘cause I notice every new stretch mark, every extension of the little fat roll on the back of my neck. But I don’t stop eating processed sugars. If I’m addicted to anything, it’s instant gratification itself; hence, I never seem to, never want to put two and two together and make myself aware of what the end results of my actions are. I just wanna get off now.

“Sugar is culture.”
—Sen. Jesse Helms

Civilizations that thrive on excess—like, say, ours—are inherently self-destructive. That sentence probably didn’t blow your mind. But what differentiates the time we live in from any other is the type of awareness we have regarding our demise. True, there’s been some fucker standing in the corner shouting, “The end is nigh!” since man learned the missionary position and thus became sentient (see Quest for Fire if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) I’m not discussing any biblical end-of-the-world shit here, because that presupposes somebody or thing will do the offing for us. I’m talking about how it’s the end of the world as we know it and I’m doing it and I feel fine. We all know the excitement of participating in the destruction of something infinitely huger than ourselves. We are David to our own Goliath. This is more than a projection of our own mortality on the rest of the world, it is a built-in desire that only the greatest men and women are able to sublimate: the desire to rip yourself apart and shred up everything that’s around you.

The only way to self-destruct is slowly. The culturally acceptable pathways to self-immolation are always the slowest ones. The chemical things, legal and illegal, natural and unnatural, that get packaged up and sold to us as pleasure-inducing, these things are all poisons. It’s not my intention to get moralistic about this because I have known the myriad pleasures of slow self-destruction all my life. It is a great part of the thrill of getting off on chemicals.

I think too much about offing myself. Almost every morning I lie in bed and imagine my body being annihilated all at once. I hear the skin rip, see the red blood and the white fat and the brown guts as I elaborately draw and quarter myself. But then I get up and take a long hot shower, and I’m okay again. Where does all this self-hatred come from? It’s the flipside of total immersion in instant gratification…

It’s important to remember that junk food has nothing to do with food itself. It frequently bears no resemblance to the original, nourishing variety. You eat junk food to get off. Junk food is many kids’ first dope experience, first religious experience, perhaps even first orgasmic experience.

“Sugar, aw honey honey/
You are my candy girl/
And you got me wanting you.”
—The Archies

I suppose I should mention my great, uh, interest in porn from an early age. Porn is to sex what junk food is to food: a hyper-inflated, prepackaged simulation of the original. It gives it to ya ALL (the orgasm, the rush) AT ONCE. It often forgoes the nourishment, but again, that’s part of its appeal. The crucial difference is that porn is potentially far more damaging to the soul, if not the body, than junk food. Porn and junk food both breed similar, voyeur-in-your-own-body feelings with regard to corporeal existence.

Where we can tie the junkfoodies together with the junkies is through their relationship to their bodies. There’s a shared view that the body exists just to get you off right now, which is combined with the knowledge of the horrendous consequences of the action as well as the actual drug/ sugar rush—and the eventual crash which often leads to the search for more.

I lived with this guy who was totally unhappy. He was in his mid-twenties and living off his parents and doing dope all the time, snorting it. I watched incredulously as he metamorphosed into this scary zombie creature from outer space. He never worked, the heroin made his balls itch all the time, and his junkie ghost girlfriend and he would just hurt each other, constantly. Break windows, sleep with each other’s friends, quarrel over who hogged more of the bag. I stopped snorting heroin pretty much altogether while this guy lived with me, but after he moved out, I started doing it again. Duh. I don’t need to drive around with the carcass of the victim of an auto accident in the passenger seat to stop myself from going too fast on a slick road, but apparently I did find it necessary to see the carcass of a living heroin victim to keep myself from heroin.

The junk gets inside you and it never leaves. A study written up in some Tuesday’s Science Times found that “untreated” (no formaldehyde) corpses of Westerners decompose markedly more slowly than those from India, where Hostess products are a tad less common. When Americans kick, we’re already pickled from all those preservatives we’ve consumed.

So how do you wash the junk out of your head? How do you cut it out without cutting out the desire part altogether? My head is this little green pond full of wriggling need-monsters. I want to fucking soar like Silver Surfer right over the orange buses and kids on their bikes on my way to school; I want to brutally murder everybody on the subway; I want some clothes that fit; I want to fuck that girl in the bodega down the street, up her ass if possible; I want my ninth grade Spanish teacher to seduce me that time she drove me home in her car; I want my dick to grow four more inches; I want everybody to like me; I want Winona Ryder to beg for it’ I want a Guggenheim grant to fall out of the sky, hit me on the head, and make me dizzy.

Maybe I’ll stop doing junk food this week. But these new Milky Way Darks have been really satisfying me lately and if I can just scrape together another four bucks I’ll have enough cash for a wicked speedball, which will carry me blissfully till tomorrow.

Where the roses never fade

2005-09-23T01:17:00.000-07:00

INDIAN BOTTOM ASSOCIATION OF OLD REGULAR BAPTISTS "I'm Going to a City"

Lined-out hymnody really floats my boat when I'm in the mood for it. It's so spooky and slow and rad, like a group of old stoners sitting down to start up some sacred harp singing but they get lost and never divvy up into different parts, you know?

A Folkways blurb relating to the awesome second volume of lined-out hymnody from Southern Kentucky informs us that "the oldest English-language religious music in oral tradition in North America, the lined-out, congregational hymnody of the Old Regular Baptists is heard in the heart of the coal-mining country of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. In this rare, beautiful, and heartfelt music lie the roots of the high, lonesome mountain sound of elaborate melodic turns and graces."

This track is from the budget-priced Smithsonian disc Classic Southern Gospel, one of those rare entry-level samplers with enough slight obscurities (the Poplin Family's version of "River of Jordan" is aces! -- gotta hear more by them) to satisfy the snob and the newcomer. Remember, the newcomer is the most important person in any record store... (OHH I'm so glad I crack myself up with my AA humor! Get me some more coffee wil you?)

...And things I ain't seen yet

2005-09-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

BOBBY CHARLES "Save Me Jesus"

Been listening to the Bobby Charles LP he made with the Band for Bearsville in 1971 a lot lately, the one I've posted about before. The one that Andy Cabic told me about like a year ago for which I am very grateful. This song in particular has been a favorite lately; such timely lyrics! I want to write an article somehwere about Charles focusing on this album but where? YETI I guess. I can actually say with real authority that the infamous and ancient YETI 3 will see the light of day very shortly, an issue to trail it in March '06.

I'd not believe me about that either, but it's true. Work continues on Rugburn and the MBV book will be finished in three weeks! Then I'm going to nap for a week.

The best news is that LUC SANTE's manuscript arrived yesterday, the collection we're doing of his selected magazine/newspaper writings, late Spring '06 release on YETI books. Luc's MS is so fucking good, of course!!! Twenty-two chapters. Luc is one of the best living essayists (not that that is all he does, of course) and a super swell dude, to boot. (What is the origin of the phrase "to boot," by the way? Someone point me to an awesome etymology site, please.)

In two weeks I'll even be sharing some swank, small and cheap office space with my new business partner, so it's all really exciting. I now have two rooms plus storage and my own half-bath in the house I rent. Then there's my use whenever I want it of a huge metal sculpture studio. And soon, the office share which is also 24/7. I pay very little (like $615/ mo.) for all of that -- this being of course AFTER rents in Portland have increased quite a bit in the last decade. That's half to two-thirds what similar space would cost in Seattle, and at least a quarter what it would in NYC. Have I ever mentioned that I totally love Portland?

And hell is deeper than the sea...

2005-09-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

TEXAS GLADDEN "The Devil's Questions"

You can read about the great Virginia-based ballad singer Texas Gladden here. This song is from one of the Alan Lomax Portrait series discs. I know that Lomax's reputation is not of the highest sort these days and while I wish he'd done more to help black scholars and to remunerate the folks he worked with, it's always real easy to judge folks from one era with the cultural values of your own.

If you read my last chicken little post you might think I was losing my mind, but that is of course a rather moot point. Now, it's easy easy for me to see where I think that other people are acting selfishly and in some harmful way or another, I guess in the way that one thief can easily recognize another or that a junkie can always find another junkie no matter which dead stinking rock in the universe you may deposit him or her.

And this is going to sound ridonkulously facile, naive, hippie dippie and worse, Jack Handey-ish -- but for me I've found that the main thing is that if I do not act out of love, out of as pure and total a form of love as I can muster, as much as is fucking possible for me to, then I'm no good to the world. This doesn't wipe away my concerns that the apocalypse is upon us because the polar ice is going away and a zillion other things you can read about anywhere (on the Internet anyway). And simply being less flakey and better in touch with all my peeps would go a long ways to making things better, too. But when I'm in touch with that simple idea and believe in this love stuff, and act from it even a little bit, things just go so totally well it's crazy.

Of course, I fight against it alla time, and get wrapped up in self-loathing and watching too many Elliott Gould movies instead of doing work or I get lost in fear and eating too much Nutella instead of taking a walk out and about when it's nice like it was earlier today or I get weirdly stuck inside of helping somebody else with their problems (because other people's problems are always so easy to figure out and stuff -- but why don't they just listen to me what makes them so goddamn stubborn!) and etc.

Adam Forkner aka White Rainbow's fully tripped-out installation was the highlight of this year's Time Based Arts Festival, a swell 10-day dance/ theatre/ music/ whatever festival that I was sick for much of last week so I missed Antony and Mirah's last performance for a year and rad butoh dudes and some other stuff.

Thankfully I visited Adam's space twice. I keep thinking about it since then. I think I want a Forkner zome installed in my basement soon as I get mildly rich: full instant access to trips w/o chemicals. You can get a decent sense of it from Steve States Rights' rad Quicktime movie here, and allow me to quote myself from the W. Week: He's transformed a former office space in the Corberry Press into a mind-blowing, lo-high-tech meditation zone. Inside the all-white, soft, loungey space, Forkner crouches in the corner performing blissed-out, four-channel electro-acoustic drones, while the video projections (especially those by E*Rock) are overpowering and mostly brilliant. This is modern psychedelic art that approaches the same level as Yayoi Kusama's reflection pool piece at last year's Whitney Biennial or the spirited and spiritual kitsch of the Assume Vivid Astro Focus collective.

I am not sure if I love the new Constantines record though I definitely dig it a lot; everything people seem to like about the egregiously awful Hold Steady I find happening here instead, with this also-Canadian band. In a pinch, if forced to choose between working class heroes I'd always take Lynott over Springsteen; could that have something to do with it?Anyway.

I can't wait to hear American Primitive Vol. 2, holy fuck. Its imminent release is great news (I have fallen off of many promo lists in the last year or two so I'm a bit behind in some kinds of news.)

Speaking of slightly old stuff, we all know that UBUWEB IS BACK AND NEW AND IMPROVED ANDS SHIT RIGHT?! Hallelujah. Also, has everyone read Alec's big-ass thought piece on the "new" visionary folksters yet?

If they ever change the weather, it would be a shame

2005-09-19T04:56:00.000-07:00

CARDINAL "Singing to the Sunshine"
SUN RA & HIS SOLAR MYTH ARKESTRA "Mu"

OK, so I guess it's too late baby, now, it's too late (thanks to Daily Kos for the link)? Not next decade, not next generation, but it appears that we've "screwed the pooch," already? Time to buy Nova Scotian real estate, I guess -- the parts that won't be under water, anyway? Get ready for even more floods and famine and weird diseases? Wait, that sounds almost... Biblical. Hmmm.

Cardinal was a band that made one fabulous smart little self-titled album of decadent pop music eleven years ago. It is amongst the best work by either of its participants, Eric Matthews and Richard Davies, and would be the finest by either of them were i tnot for the early recordings of the Moles. The thing was reissued this year, but my version's from the original on Flydaddy (which I only mention 'cause it was remastered, okay).

Sun Ra remains the one musician I'm lucky to have seen more than any other, as I believe I've already written here. I saw Sun Ra with the Arkestra twice in high school, but what happened is later, as a little NYU boy, I lived near the Bottom Line nightclub. And in the '80s the group did a series of residencies there, and my awesome uncle David took me to most of 'em (what a guy!) and the ones he didn't, I took myself to.

I post the song "Mu" off the excellent 1967 LP Atlantis because I was searching for another song or two to fit a "theme of global warming." Seriously. I hate to admit that since it's so cheesey but so are mp3 blogs that attempt to address "issues" with "stolen songs," if we are to be remotely realistic about life (or, my life, anyway).

I started to listen to this beautiful little vamp over and over again ("Mu") and then I was meditating on civilaztions that come and go whether they're real or not. And to think about if indeed mankind is a virus that the Earth is doing its best to get rid of, or if there's just something innately self-destructive/ implosive to humans in general -- not that the two half-baked and well-trodden ideas are in any way exclusive, of course.

Sometimes I wish I could write like those smart people, you know like Josh from Hermenaut, because what smart people do is to take crazy mixed-up shit and help you make sense of it, help you feel like you understand what the real problems are, whereas it seems my literary faculties are only good for rendering some of the confusion and craziness I feel, passing it on like a late summer head cold. And lately mixed-up confusion and rage's all I feel when I'm not distracting myself with being in love or watching some great movie or writing about Kevin Shields and his very mighty guitar that reverberates through your consciousness like some incredibly ineffective metaphor!!!

Like, OK, I sit here and I read that the British finally out Uber Papa Bush as the great bad Nazi collaborator we all know he was, and the LA Weekly tells us to not expect the curtain to fall open again anytime soon when it comes to the media actually having a human response to our occupying government's inability to give a single fuck for its non-corporate or apocalypse-culture friends. And the polar ice sheet has already melted too much, buy sunscreen at Costco. And Dubya lets loose with even more crazy barely-coded rapture alert code orange bullshit every time he talks about the storm, or anything.

You know, it's almost as if his cronies have engineered everything in the past five years to actually bring about this apocalypse they're all so enraptured with -- hah, get it, enraptured?! But of course this is not possible. We saw Damian the Omen Part Two and the bad guy died at the end of that movie, right? The German press, and others, think this current mess is the end of the Bush regime. I admire their ability to see the end of this current empire, or this version of it anyway, and to be so optimistic. I could really use some fucking optimism, and not tomorrow.

I apologize for my very ham-fisted commentary here. Perhaps the only thing worse than when music writers try to be political hacks is when they start rock bands. So, I'll go do that instead.

PS: I'm sure you've heard this here Katrina response song already but I definitely felt these lyrics tonight: "It's enough to make you holler out/Like where the fuck is Sir Bono and his famous friends now?/Don't get it twisted, man, I dig U2/But if you ain't about the ghetto, than fuck you too/Who cares about rock and roll when babies can't eat food?"

You left me for one hundred dollars...

2005-09-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

CLARENCE 'GATEMOUTH' BROWN "Ninety Nine"

Just got word that Clarence Brown passed away yesterday; apparently he was in ill health already, but it sounds like the shock of having to evacuate Baton Rouge and move to Texas because of the hurricane was too much.

I like the way the AP obit ends, so matter of factly: Brown recorded with Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt and others, but he took a dim view of most musicians -- and blues guitarists in particular. He called B.B. King one-dimensional. He dismissed his famous Texas blues contemporaries Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland as clones of T-Bone Walker, whom many consider the father of modern Texas blues. ''All those guys always tried to sound like T-Bone,'' Brown said. Survivors include three daughters and a son.

All that I ask is that for peace you fight today you fight today

2005-09-10T20:25:00.000-07:00

THE MISUNDERSTOOD "I Unseen"

You probably already know that this song is an adaptation of a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. Pete Seeger and the Byrds did their own versions of it; the Misunderstood's is, naturally, the best, seeing as how brutally great a band they were. The song's been on my mind since the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima was all in the news recently, sort of. Truthfully, it's one of the strongest anti-war anthems I can think of, especially the way it navigates graphic and gruesome lyrics to end with "all that I ask is that for peace you fight today you fight today" -- a site more profound and enthusiasm-enducing than "Sunday Bloody Sunday." To me, anyway. How does one fight for peace, exactly? I've been thinking that a lot these last four years, and I wish I could say I was closer to an answer. Fuck!

A chicken plucker plucks chickens...

2005-09-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

PELL MELL "Estacada"
THE BATS "Up To The Sky"
DION MCGREGOR "Thought for the Day"

Ahhh, "Estacada"! Such a rad floating down the blacktop late at night windows down kinda tune. One of everyone's favorite Pell Mell tracks, I know, but it's out of print so this one's for the kids. It's taken from the righteous 1988 SST album The Bumper Crop, a collection of early '80s material from their more guitar-heavy phase. When I first heard Slint, and I was lucky to encounter some Louisville folks who taped me Tweez before it came out, I thought Slint sounded like Pell Mell meets "the Albini aesthetic." Today of course, Slint just sounds like a hundred bands from 1992, while Pell Mell still sounds really fresh and eerily similar to the background music on various MTV, HBO and NPR shows.

I know we're living in the precopalypse and this government is hateful and bent on installing the corpocracy as soon as they're done wiping their asses with the Bill of Rights and Constitution and all of that, but shit goddamn, isn't it an almost-wonderful world in spite of that when someone drops a new record by the Bats (!) off in your mailbox and then says yeah, go ahead and post an MP3 of it on your site before the album comes out two weeks from now? Thanks, Magic Marker; I sincerely hope anyone cares about lovely swirly, melancholically blissed-out indie-pop from New Zealand like this any more, 'cause I have heard somewhere that the rock and roll music is dead and stuff. Or is it simply that it's entered the status of vernacular music? Either way. Pretty amazing this band's had one line-up in twenty-two years and is still together. Only other NZ groups you can say that about are the Clean and Tall Dwarfs, right?

Dion McGregor was an infamous personality in the 1960s; the cat narrated his own dreams, you see. Really. The original LPs and books of this material are well worth seeking out and feature wonderful Edward Gorey covers, like this one. More about him at a later date.

Strolling the beach at midnight

2005-09-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

OLD SOUTH QUARTETTE "Oysters And Wine At 2 AM"

Listening to the excellent Document CD Earliest Negro Vocal Quartets 1894-1928, I realized I'd never paid much attention to this group of singers from Richmond, VA, aside from their restrained and strange, banjo-driven take on "What He's Done For Me." Not sure if I like this song (taken from a disc recorded in Long Island City in 1928) or hate it. I've certainly never heard anything quite like it before.

Turns out the group was originally led by a white druggist named Polk Milller(1840-1913), original source of the banjo element in the group. Mark Twain loved 'em; here's an article from the Victrola and 78 Journal about 'em. More about 'em here. He did not perform in blackface and appeared to show real affection for his bandmates, but some of this shit is definitely dodgy.

Anywhere you go

2005-09-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

SWANEE QUINTET "Take the Lord With You"

Pete from UP! Records turned me on to this group a few years ago. This song is from a budget-priced compilation of Nashboro sides from the '50s and '60s. It's on MCA so naturally there is no information at all, but it's cheap as hell and well worth owning.

That place of note and fame

2005-09-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

SHIRLEY COLLINS "The Bonny Irish Boy"

Still reeling from events in the Gulf but I feel that everything is being said much more eloquently elsewhere. With news of the murderous incompetence that greeted the storm's aftermath unfolding by the minute, I almost feel bad that things seem to be going well for me right now. My health seems better today; I'm in a productive phase as to work which is a very welcome change; this publishing venture feels very good indeed and things appear to be really coming together; and my heart remains light and happy thanks to this girl I'm hanging with every weekend (she lives two hours away, in Eugene, OR which is sort of a National Preserve of Hippies in the worst and occasionally best possible ways).

This song--one of a thousand tunes from the Anglo-Celt tradition that tell tales of rakish dudes who break hearts, what's with those dudes?--is from Shirley Collins' first album, Sweet England. Co-produced by her "then-partner" Alan Lomax with Peter Kennedy in 1959, the album was critically thrashed when it was released according to AMG. And it's not that hard to see why. Her maudlin approach on these recordings is bound to make the listener uncomfortable. The vocals are in some weird netherworld between naive and learned, 'twixt "real" folk and folk-revival folk. Same goes for her banjo accompaniment, which is a touch rudimentary. I kind of love this album a lot but can never listen to much at one time.

PS: Congrats to Antony!!!

Close that door

2005-09-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

R.L. BURNSIDE "Poor Black Mattie"
R.L. BURNSIDE "I Believe"

I'm hearing that R.L. Burnside passed away this morning in a hotel room in Memphis. The Fat Possum website confirms it. Shitpissfuck. These songs are R.L.'s earliest known recordings; his style's not in absolute full effect but I love the intimacy and stripped-down quality going on with these "field" recordings. The record they're from is called Mississippi Hill Country Blues; it's highly recommended.

It's getting to be where I don't want to look at the news anymore, but I can't stop. Thinking good thoughts for everyone in the Gulf, donating dough to Red Cross (soooooooo easy via Amazon, who already have your credit card, my friend!) but of course things seem to be worse every day and it's freaking me the fuck out. Check out Interdictor if you've not already: dude blogging from downtown New Orleans -- I especially appreciated this post.

Coming back home to you

2005-08-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

CLIFTON CHENIER "On My Way (Back Home to You)"

All our thoughts are of course with those in Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere that got messed up by this damn storm. Of the many, many cultural charms that area's given the world, Chenier's one of the best known, I know. But this song is the only one I have here on my computer with easy access right now. It's a single recorded in 1955 for Specialty, an especially R&B-ish track by the accordionist. Hope you like.

And I hope that your old lady got a hundred and fifty toes

2005-08-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

CLARENCE 'GATEMOUTH' BROWN "May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose"

This song, written by Neal Merritt and popularized by Little Jimmy Dickens, sums up what I want to say to anyone who crosses my path today.

My mom's little house in Kendall, FL got thrashed by this sneaky hurricane Katrina yesterday. I spoke with her last night as rain poured in through every room, trashing her rugs, computer, and damn I wish I'd been there to help. Looks like a trip to Miami is in short order. Showed up broke to my pal's show last night and was not on the list; didn't feel like pulling Baboon Dooley moves to get in either. Did some work for free for a friend and he's upset with how I did it.

Meanwhile, no freelance checks showed up today, I'm in lots of physical pain (more than usual by far) and I'm frustrated at my own work pace--seems like I'm working all the friggin' time but not getting anything done. Argggh. This tune is from the Charly collection of Brown's 1965 recordings, San Antonio Ballbuster, which may not be essential but it sure is making me feel better right now. Huzzahhhhhh.

He will surely bring you out.

2005-08-25T02:37:00.000-07:00

BLIND ROOSEVELT GRAVES "Take Your Burdens To The Lord"

A nice, downright jaunty version of this tune by one of the stars of all raw pre-war gospel blues collections. For me, Wash Phillips cut the definitive version (a close second to Blind Willie Johnson), but this one sure is nice. Like I said, it's jaunty!

PS: Who else would love to see the discourse on gospel rise above fucking Sesame Street level writing? Why didn't they have Opal Louis Nations write this piece? He's so totally the best writer on gospel it's not funny -- dude can write for a mass audience, too. And everyone acts like Anthony Heilbut is totally the shit when he's not that great a writer, he's just like the only gospel critic to/ for most people. Arggggggghhh. I'm not dissing Mr. Heilbut, really. I just wish this were a music that had more writing about it that was either not so jive-ass and hokey and always at the very same introductory level or else so damn scholarly it'll make you piss yourself.

All money will be useless

2005-08-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

MARKOS VAMVAKARIS "Those Who Have Plenty of Money"

I'm really feeling the Greek music from the '30s lately, specifically Rembetica/ Rebetika/ howeverthfuckyouspellit stuff, the "greek underworld music" not so wrongly referred to as "Greek blues" rather often. This song is from the excellent 1998 Rounder collection Bouzouki Pioneer: 1932-1940, a record I got on a whim with trade-in money seven years ago in Tennessee and barely listened to until recently. (When you have too much stuff you don't really need to go shopping, you just look more closely at your own things...)

Vamvakaris was a self-described "hooked on hashish" dude who lived in the poorest section of the island of Syros. He hated working in the slaughter houses and by his own admission just plain didn't want to work at all. (We've all worked and we've all read Bob Black, so we can relate to that right?) When Markos heard someone play the bouzouki, he was transfixed, vowed to himself he'd "cut off his hand with a cleaver if he didn't play one within six months." In another six months he was a self-taught prodigy on the instrument, though he says he could not tune it himself for years. He instantly began writing his own songs, most within the Rebetika tradition, mournful tales of women and drinking and drugging and all that good stuff.

This song was cut in Athens in 1936. The lyrics go: Those who have a lot of money/ I wish they knew what to do with it/ Do they think that when they die/ It can be taken with them?/ In my pocket I never have/ Two coins to rub together/ And all my troubles go away/ Only when I'm really stoned/ Since there in that other world/ All money will be useless/ Why do they worship it so/ And why do they not spend it?/ Why do they worship it so/ and not have it just to blow it?

Buoyed by a good-will cloud

2005-08-23T17:54:00.000-07:00

MISSISSIPPI FRED McDOWELL "I Wished I Were In Heaven Sitting Down"

From a session produced and recorded by Alan Bates in Como, Mississippi on December 1st, 1965 comes this nice version of this traditional song. All instrumental, just electric bottleneck slide and stomping foot. Taken from the album Mississippi Blues on Black Lion, a swell album notable for vocals by Fred's wife Annie on two tunes; a laudanum-paced "Train I Ride"; and a cracking, lengthy, down and dirty version of Big Bill Broozy's "Louise" that's easily one of this master's finest moments.

She said she was coming home

2005-08-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

ELMORE JAMES "Sunnyland"

What to make of artists who basically create the same work over and over again, slight variations here and there? I live with this rad couple who have a three year-old and a newborn, and the three year-old loves repetition. My nephew's almost seven now and I'd almost forgotten the genius of Teletubbies, how they'll stop and rewind a full six minutes and show everything all over again. From a production standpoint it's a winner, of course, but I think the show's attention to the three R's was a large part of its appeal (eal rabbits cavorting across a fake set was genius, and that baby inside the sun was pretty damn cool too.)

This song was originally a single on the Fire label in 1961; no one's gonna pretend it's Elmore James' most riveting and original performance by any means but that is precisely why I like it so. When you've already got your recipe just right, why fuck around with it?

Swims in autumn

2005-08-22T02:54:00.000-07:00

BIRDBRAIN "Sea Cow"

This is my favorite song today. Birdbrain should be on the cover of Wire, like, yesterday.

How's it going and stuff? I'm loving life despite the eerie and relentless heat-producing activity of the Portland summer sun; how did I ever live in Miami again? speaking of light, I can see the one at the end of the tunnel with the MBV book, YETI 3 (I know, I know...), and am really psyched about the new publishing imprint I'm starting with Verse Chorus Press, especially since the first title will be a collection of LUC SANTE's cultural criticism. Yeah, no shit! We're also doing books with Jana Martin, Michael Macioce, and Alan Greenberg. And me (best-of book/ CD of my old 'zine, all proceeds going to a rad local treatment center that specializes in treating "untreatables": repeat relapsing street-level addicts and alcoholics). I'm curating art shows again, am seeing a girl I really like a lot (naw, scratch that, I love and adore this girl I'm just trying to not sound too crazy or nothing), and I just found out that two of the YETI covers were included in this book, which is awesome. I often find out about things pretty late...

I hope to find every single thing that Tuli Kupferberg ever released on Birth Press, and do facsimile editions of them all (with Tuli's permission of course). Tuli was pumping out these amazing broadsides (weird thematical books that drew from a vast array of sources in some proto-Internet hoodoo-anarchist tip) on mimeograph machines with Ray Johnson and others doing art. The guy was always a bit of a clown, but I fear he's never gotten his due. (Remind me to watch WR: Mysteries of the Organism again soon to catch his genius appearance int hat OK?) I'd also love to do a lavish and perfectly-printed Unica Zurn book. Man, that would rule! Her work is so creepy, spiritual, visceral, sexual, compulsive and somehow undeniably beautiful--everything I like, all in one place! Yesss.

And from her branches carelessly...

2005-08-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

ANNE BRIGGS "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme"

This song is from the Decca Edinburgh Folk Festival Vol. 2 album. It can also be found on the Anne Briggs Collection CD on Topic, which I recommend strongly. There's a thoughtful review that comes from a very strange viewpoint (to me) of that comp. here (how can they think she's not a great singer?).

Briggs was an allegedly "wild" singer in the early '60s who primarily worked a capella and took some liberties with traditional songs. She didn't sing the way she was supposed to, didn't act the way she was supposed to, and she stopped singing at the age of 27 after only have recorded three LPs. She simply disliked the way she sounded on records, and in the early '70s she apparently fell prey to Bartleby Syndrome and moved to Scotland to raise her kid.

As a result, she wound up just being a huge influence on pretty much every single female British folksinger in the '60s (certainly any of them who went 'electric') but remains fairly unknown today... I started to say she's analogous to Karen Dalton in her own way, until I realized that's just wrong. Anyway, this review of her 1971 album The Time Has Come is pretty cool.

I am you and you are me

2005-08-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

BIG BOYS "Sound on Sound"

Perhaps my favorite song by this Austin-based '80s band, offered up here in tribute to Randy 'Biscuit' Turner, who was found dead in his home yesterday, the week that there's a big cover story on him (centered mostly on his visual work) in the Chronicle . Damn.

I like this quote by Randy (from the above article) a lot: "I'm very saddened by the pain in the world and overjoyed at the mundane." The MP3 is linked to from our friends at Moistworks, where I'm a sometime contributor. I'm really sad about this. Don't know what else to say.

Of all the tributes to Biscuit, I'm most drawn right now to Ed Ward's, here. I like how Ed calls Biscuit a queer icon in punk rock at a time when that scene really needed one...

The viola thing is actually a strange descendednt of a Portugese guitar

2005-08-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

JOSE DE LA LUZ "Samba (Moda de Viola)"
SEBASTIAO ALVES FEITOSA & JOSE ALVES DA SILVA "Tamanquero Eu Quero Um Pa"

Whatever happened to the Endangered Music Project, the collaborative release project between Mickey Hart, Alan Jabbour, the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, and Rykodisc? Is it totally dead or what? (And on a related note, how come there are no more new Secret Museum of Mankind releases?! -- And will someone please make podcasts of their WFMU shows? That would rule.)

This song is taken from a CD called The Discoteca Collection: Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas. It collects Brazilian 78s made in 1938 in Brazil by a WPA-style folk/ ethnographic initiative there. Some of the digital transfers are a bit overzealous in the way they "clean up" the sound (while erasing some of the actual music) but that's something one has to deal with when listening to collections like this from the early to mid 1990s. When a technology is first introduced in the arts it often gets overused (i.e. Beatles-style stereo separation versus what people do now). Um, but you knew that already.

I am absolutely in love with these two short songs.

Music for sleeping and bathing

2005-08-19T03:32:00.000-07:00

WHITE RAINBOW "Acoustic"

Last night I DJ'ed at the club Holocene, in-between, before and after sets by Samara Lubeski, Portland Vampires, Tara Jane O'Neill, and World. I love DJ'ing at a club where the sound system is really good; it makes such a huge difference when you can totally hear every little tweak of the EQ; it also means you can't be too sloppy, and I don't think I was. World is music people really need to hear: stellar floating freeform lovely space-out mostly-improvised "freedom music" made by Adam Forkner and Honey Owens -- who quickly became two of my favorite people in Portland after moving here last year. We'd not seen each other in a few weeks so it was rad to catch up, and Adam had finished copies of the new album by his solo project White Rainbow, the Zome CD on States Rights, on hand.

Adam, who used to be in Yume Bitsu and had his band (((VVRRSSNN))) or whatever the hell it was called for awhile and who currently is in Jackie-O some of the time and who has toured with Devendra Banhart and Landing and Surface of Eceon before will soon have a six disc box set on the Marriage label, one of the discs a DVD with a half hour video created by E*Rock based a little bit on stills Adam took of stuff by folks like Jordan Belson. I can't wait to see it. Next month Adam is gonna do an installation as part of PICA's Time Based Arts Festival where he Vito Acconcis your LaMonteYoung (translation: dreamy drone spiritual type music performed by dude who doesn't leave the space for the entire time).

Today's tune (from an out of print CD-R) is actually a stolen link so go gentle on Adam's server, please. The Zome disc, upon a cursory listen, appears to have lovely ambient pop tunes and slow drone jams and at least one of the songs is dedicated to Eugene Levy. It was made a few years ago but is definitely tasty lullabye music with a sense of humor and self-awareness (the Kluster/Neu!-ish jam is called "Germany.") Huzzah.

In more Portland-is-on-fucking-fire-and-please-don't-write-about-it-unless-it's-to-make-fun-of-it- in-VICE-'cause-we-really-don't-need-too-many-people-to-know-about-it-'cause-things-like
-this-tend-to-happen-much-more-interestingly-in-some-level-of-isolation-you-dig-? news, E*Rock and Eric Johnson's new vinyl-only label via Wieden & Kennedy, Fryk Beat, has launched and the first two releases are by Panther and Bobby Birdman, two of the suavest dudes to ever be suave. Charlie AKA Panther/ singer for Planet The makes radtacular music; the MP3 on their site of his song is like Prince stuck in a really bad K hole. And that "cardboard" video for the song? Sublime, motherfucker.

It's a game called Keep Away

2005-08-17T23:35:00.000-07:00

GO TEAM "Archer Come Sparrow"
GO TEAM "Loneliness March"
GO TEAM "Wonderbirds"

This band was mentioned the other day in a mailing list I post to twice a year, and I obviously referenced 'em myself yesterday, then realized peeps have never heard them (which makes sense as they've never been reissued for some crazy reason) so here's a taste. A crummy sounding taste, but a taste nonetheless. Listening to these songs now, they make me think of a junior high garage band trying to sound like early Pell Mell, their vaguely creepy but lovable shop teacher occasionally singing on top of it all. Awesome!!!

Man I wish I still had these singles -- the packaging alone was gorgeous -- one-sided 7"s with a different month silscreened on the blank side of each, then packaged in a plastic bag like some fancy treat. There was supposed to be one a month, but you know how these things go... (I think I have some of the earlier cassette tapes somewhere too, gotta find those!) FYI, Mike Appelstein's great article remains the first and last word on the band.

PS: Someone explain to me why George Kuchar's beyond-classic Hold Me While I'm Naked is not on DVD. I know it's a short, but sheesh!

This song has no lyrics or nothing

2005-08-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

MAD SCENE "Instrumental Song #1"

About two years ago, I got this rad disc of unreleased and in-progress songs from Hamish Kilgour by the band he and his wife Lisa Siegel have had for some time now, the Mad Scene. When my then-label-partner was not at all interested, I knew for certain we had to part ways. Yes, you could call it a moment of clarity...

So this song is a perfect hot sidewalk, running to the store for a Strawberry Shortcake popsicle kind of a song. It reminds me a bit of the Go Team, the original Olympia supergroup and the only band edging out the Alpaca Brothers and World of Pooh for desperate-need-of-reissue-hood. Hamish, his brother David, and Robert Scott comprise The Clean, but you already knew that seeing as they're the best band ever. That's right -- I said ever.

Snatch my spirits back

2005-08-15T16:37:00.000-07:00

GHOST "Guru in the Echo"

In 1990, my friends and I (Fabio Roberti and William Berger in particular, one of whom --I forget which-- was the first to turn me on to the thing when it was first released in Japan on PSF) couldn't believe a band in Japan had so wonderfully distilled the "free folk" and druggy German psych-rock we were digging a lot then. Not that we thought we were the only ones listening to this stuff or anything -- any look at a Bananafish or Forced Exposure from that era showed that this stuff was already pretty big (amongst a certain scene anyway) before Other Music opened up or the first Stereolab 10"s came out.

These records weren't yet insanely expensive, that's for sure -- I was in Germany in 1990 and never paid more than $8 for anything on Brain -- including four different versions of the first Neu! album, brought back for friends... Apologies for slipping into record geekageness. My point is that it was a total shock to hear someone make their own, awesome sound based more than a little bit on the propulsive freakouts of Amon Duul One.

The first Ghost album was/ is just so fucking good, and so unlike anything else being made at the time (that we knew of anyway). Drag City once again showed total acumen in releasing it over here... I like Dungen and Comets on Fire as much as anyone -- in fact I kind of love those bands -- but I've never felt that they totally shook out the past and reconnected it to the present in as weird, and weirdly spiritual, a way as Ghost did. That was lazily written but I have to get back to my real work and stop procrastinating, so it shall have to remain in such a half-assed form as that. The word "procrastinate" reminds me -- I have a copy of the Ghost DVD that I've never watched. I know what I'm doing later on!

NOTE: I've decided to post only decent quality MP3s from here on out. As I only have 20 megs of free online storage these days, that means at most about three songs will be available at a time.

Everybody gathers 'round and they eat it by the pound

2005-08-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

MARIKA PAPAGIKA "I'll Smash the Glasses"
MISSISSIPPI FRED McDOWELL "Going Away, Won't Be Gone Long"
MICHAEL HURLEY WITH THE HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS "Slurf Song"

Ohh, that's right -- I have an MP3 blog don't I? And people expect me to update it sometimes? Well, OK. Really digging this Rounder comp. from five years ago called Women of Rembetica -- Greek women singing these amazing songs that were part of the "Greek underworld tradition." Apparently, these women were allowed far greater freedom within the world of the Greek mafia than outside of it; a "Rembetisse" was a free spirit. This song was recorded in New York in 1928. The first line is "I'll get drunk and smash the glasses for what you said to me." It's almost like a Greek Geechie Wiley tune or something! (Sample song titles from this collection: "Widow I'm Wild About You," "The Herb that Heals the Heart," "Good Time Girl," Don't Play the Heavy with Me," "The Dervish's Broad.")

There are not many musicians that I want to own everything by anymore -- that I need to own everything by, I should say. Fred McDowell is one of them, though. This song was recorded "one evening in March of 1968 at Chris Strachwitz's house with John Francis on drums." Got nothing but love for Chris Strachwitz and his Arhoolie label. This tune appears on the CD version of This Ain't No Rock N Roll, which you'd best not confuse with I Do Not Play No Rock N Roll.

"Slurf" reminds me of something Peter Orlovsky (probably the best writer from the first wave of Beats -- and if you don't agree with me let's meet at the schoolyard Monday in the parking lot at 3PM okay?) might write. It's fucking awesome. This era of the Rounders -- mid '70s -- is pretty amazing to me; 1976's Have Moicy! is a flawed but fascinating album, the kind of record you can never listen to just once. Yo La Tengo's lovely cover of the record's 'hit' "Griselda" on 1990's Fakebook might have hipped a few kids to this here record -- not sure how that stuff really works, though. I left the excellent new Jarmusch film thinking it must turn thousands of folks into instant Mulatu/ Ethiopiques fans. (Um, right!) One hopes if this does happen that at least they will not be as annoying as the Instant Folk Experts engendered by Oh Brother!-ism /the Anthology reissue...

Stench of burnt sulfur

2005-07-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

THE EMBARRASSMENT "Careen"
When the weather gets too hot to do much of anything, I turn to the Embarrassment. Not sure why -- I guess "Don Juan," "Art Party," "Drive Me To The Park," and "Sex Drive" are just perfect little songs that remind me of suburban air conditioned living? This song is from a collection called Heyday that I know you already have but I'm lazy today.

Thanks to everyone who replied the other month about my health stuff, and I am going to explore homeo/ etc. type approaches to things ASAP. Right now, I need two surgeries sooooon: a hernia operation ASAP, and this thing to combat the effects of the Barrett's -- am still trying to get some kind of health coverage but no luck yet.

I am caught between making too much $$ to get on the ever-weakening Oregon Health Plan and being denied by regular independent carriers for my prior conditions. I'm really fucking dismayed and flummoxed. And if I do get fancy individual insurance it will likely never cover me for anything aside form the hernia which is not in any doctor's logs yet but it's really hurting like a bitch today and yesterday and I'm tired of holding my intestines in my stomach with my fucking hands whenever I cough or use the facilities (sorry I know that's gross).

Today I spent a long time deciding whether or not to do this plan -- somehow it looks like a scam to me, though. I mean, how can you save that much $$ and pay so little? I already gave them my SS# via their interface (OK I'm a dumbass) but there's nothing anyone can really do with my SS# aside from get turned down for any loan (or whatever you try to do with it) I hate to say! I guess I really need to start just playing the lottery. Yeah, that's it. Back to work!

You're gonna watch me

2005-07-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

PRESSLER-MORGAN "You're Gonna Watch Me"
SANDRA BELL "Waitawhile"

What better song to celebrate the official loss of the last vestiges of civil liberties we Americans might still have pretended we had left --with the signing into law of the Patriot Act on Friday-- than the fine little avant-pop dittie "You're Gonna Watch Me" by Pressler-Morgan, off their one fabulous 7" from 1978 for David Thomas' Hearthan/ Hearpen label. The Sandra Bell song is from her first tape made for XPressway around 1993. It is sort of sad, like me, today.

Dragging me down

2005-07-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

POP ART TOASTERS "Circles"
FOUR INTERNES "I'm Troubled"
THE SOUTHERN SONS "This Heart of Mine, Pt. 1"

I am obsessed with songs about dizziness and disorientation, and the ways in which the structure of those tunes so often mirrors the subject matter. I'm thinking about this a lot as I work on the MBV book, as every MBV song pretty much hints at a loss of equilibrium, you dig? Anyway. "Instant Party (Circles)" is one of my favorite ever Who songs, and I know of three diffferent covers of it. The best is of course by the British '60s band Fleurs des Lys, but props must be gaved to Pop Art Toasters, a band that a New Zealand music website calls "a short-lived super-group of sorts featuring martin phillips, david kilgour, noel ward, alan starrett and mike dooley." OK.

I don't know too much about the Internes or the Southern Sons. Both crossed from jubilee style singing to "hard" gospel in the late '40s. These are among the respective groups' best known tunes -- and it's easy to see why. When I hear these songs I just want to write scenes for a movie that they can play in the foreground to, uninterrupted.