IT’S A GAS GAS GASTROPOD

I was talking with a friend last night, and it was getting late. She swung her feet off the couch, preparing to say goodnight, but quickly drew them back up. She had stepped on something that was not quite carpet.

We both looked down at the floor, squinting, trying to make sense of what it was. The kids had been in the room earlier, eating Choco Pies and wafers, so we expected it was some remnant of that feast.

No. No, it was not. The large brown teardrop that began to come into focus was a slug. A slug.

I took it as a sign. A near-biblical portent.

Which is all just to explain my general sluggishness today. I will pick up my sat rad survey in 2006.

Have a safe and happy New Year’s celebration.

And take a little time to embrace your inner slug…

RETURNING FROM A JOURNEY

1st Wave. Alternative rock's pioneering artists and sounds.

Gone Daddy Gone-- Violent Femmes
Dig that googly xylophone! A weird only-in-America conflation of sex, god, and adolescence, busked on a cold Milwaukee street corner.

Be Near Me-- ABC
Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC. Be Near Me, ABC...

Another Nail in My Heart-- Squeeze
The perfect Squeeze moment. It’s winsome but not maudlin, sharp but not snarky, with the ticky rhythm of a sewing machine. And I like the way it stands itself on its head by running straight into the bridge after the first verse/chorus.

Cities in Dust-- Siouxsie and the Banshees
And now those kooky Batcave kids are 40, and buying clothes that camouflage their spider-web tattoos…

Perfect Kiss-- New Order
The plain truth is that they could groove to wear a rut in steel, but there was not a guiding intelligence after Ian left. Here they recycle Blue Monday for the fifth time, and throw in some cheap aural puns (croaking frogs=kiss if death-- ha ha). And it works.

Doot Doot-- Freur
If memory serves, these guys morphed into Underworld of Born Slippy fame. Which makes perfect sense, since this is the same whooshy, echoey concoction, minus 50 or so bpm.

Brass in Pocket-- Pretenders
That brass is money. This probably would've hit No. 1 in America if it had been called I'm Special. Kind of like Train in Vain...

Everything Counts-- Depeche Mode
There are very few bands that I expend energy on actively detesting, but here's a rara avis. And then they go and make me laugh with stuff like “The holiday was fun-packed”...

Don't Stop the Dance-- Bryan Ferry
SAT time again. Don't Stop the Dance is to Bryan Ferry as ____________ is to David Bowie.

Modern Love-- David Bowie
See above.

Some obvious choices, though Freur was a nice touch. Could've done with some Books About UFOs or Wolfman Tap or Away or Make a Circuit with Me.

I'll give it a B.

AIN’T THAT AMERICA

I can remember many nights in 1980 talking on the phone for hours with Cindy, she under the covers to evade her mother’s fine ear for any conversations that involved me, and me sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, one knee pressed against an open container of wide-eyed potatoes.

And what did we do on the phone for hours? Mostly we listened to the radio. WPIX.

Nick Lowe, The Vapors, Split Enz, Sniff and the Tears, Flash and the Pan, The Records, The Only Ones, The Specials, The Kings, Devo.

Girding ourselves for a decade of going against the grain…

Oh Sherrie-- Steve Perry
It’s amazing how the memory trips into video mode when you enter this decade. I remember that Steve emoted like a peacock caught in a thresher. And that Sherrie apparently couldn’t afford a bra…

Modern Love-- David Bowie
A slick mainframe simulation of a genuine David Bowie song, programmed in a lab up in Armonk in late ’82, and released to an unsuspecting public in ’83.

Our Lips Are Sealed-- Go Go's
My big “secret” with my best girl friend Robyn back in ’81 was how this melted me like a chocolate chip in a cookie. That is, I got all soft and runny, but I held my basic form.

Private Eyes--Daryl Hall & John Oates
I know it’s not fair to characterize Oates as an accessory, but if the handbag fits…

Pink Houses-- John Cougar Mellencamp
I give the little bastard some credit. He evolved. Yeah, he's still in Springsteen-manque mode here, but that's a fair remove from I Need a Lover...

Eternal Flame-- The Bangles
The devil of commercial success visited this bunch, and led them down the shit-guilded path to treacle such as this. Bad devil, bad.

Cars-- Gary Numan
First gear, second gear, third gear, fourth gear. And no reverse.

Edge Of Seventeen-- Stevie Nicks
Stevie representing for the girls in the 'burbs, on the edge of a chutter-chutter-chutter-chutter guitar line. Cool.

Handle With Care--Traveling Wilburys
Roy Orbison? Check. Bob Dylan? Check. George Harrison? Check. Tom Petty? Um, OK, check. Jeff Lynne? Jeff Lynne?

High On You-- Survivor
So artless and faceless that it's an achievement of sorts.

This small sampling of the Big 80s finds it as melanin-free as pre-Thriller MTV, but I’ll assume I just happened to hit a white patch.

Grade: C.

Tomorrow is Potluck Wednesday—we’ll see what grabs my fancy.

FALLIN' FREE

Totally '70s.

Da Doo Run Run-- Shaun Cassidy
This was what it was, and it is what it is. Never was it cause for handwringing, and never was it an object lesson. Call it teen idol, call it pop idol, call it American idol, call it Billy Idol for all I care. And then just move on.

Instant Karma-- John Lennon
This is sort of the longhair version of what drew me to punk, so I’m all over it.

I’m Not in Love-- 10cc
That “big boys don’t cry” part still gives me the creeps. Fun fact: 10cc was named after the measure of the average human male ejaculation. Less Godley, and more Creme, then…

Use Me-- Bill Withers
Not dry and sapless, this Withers, but rather warm, smooth, and just a little sticky.

Fame-- David Bowie
Harumph.

Never Can Say Goodbye-- Jackson 5
There were five of them? No shit...

Take it Easy-- Eagles
The California sound, all brown(e) outs, dust storms, and cutoff jeans. I once sang it in the back seat of a Corolla at the top of my lungs all the way from the Bronx to Jersey. You know, just to be annoying...

Brick House-- Commodores
For someone who would prove himself to be such an insufferable American Music Award winning prick, Lionel was part of something cool once upon a time. Those are the ones that hurt the most.

Count on Me-- Jefferson Starship
Speaking of which... This finds our wayward travelers nearly complete on their journey from some kind of relevance to total meaninglessness. It's apparent that they're just a puddle hop away from cutting off their Jefferson...

I Feel Love-- Donna Summer
Massive. Hedonistic pillow talk that bounces along on a motorik beat, it's the ultimate '70s fusion of European and American sensibilites. I feel it too...

This was a pretty impressive cross section of '70s radio-- I'll give it an A-.

The Big '80s will have to wait until after Christmas. Peace to you and your families.

DARK SURPRISE

I pulled out of the parking garage, acquired a signal, and entered the '60s.

Dance, Dance, Dance-- The Beach Boys
You can hear the palpable tension between Brian's ardor for artistic growth and Mike Love's desire to continue to get his balding ass laid. Love wins here by a nose.

Come and Get It-- Badfinger
In which Apple's favorite manic depressives take a little slice of Paul nothing and make it into something. I especially like the part where Paul was too lazy to write a connecting lyric, and just sticks in a hum.

Uptight (Everything's Alright)-- Stevie Wonder
16 years old? 16 years old? What were you doing when you were 16? Writing and performing spurts of pure effusive joy that would become the soundtrack to one of the most important social movements of the 20th century? Yeah, me neither. I was getting stoned and pissing outdoors in winter...

Elusive Butterfly-- Bob Lind
The kind of obscure folkimbo that everyone should hear, oh, once every couple of years, which'll give you enough distance to mythologize the sweet production while you gloss over the insipid lyrics.

Sunshine of Your Love-- Cream
This earned my short-term esteem by starting out “It's getting near dark...” at the precise moment that I lowered my car's visor to blunt a setting sun. It crunched along in all its clockwork crunchiness, and in this context I loved it for 4:10...

Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)-- Edison Lighthouse
Props for writing a tongue twister for a chorus. And for naming yourselves after a fucking lighthouse.

(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman-- Aretha Franklin
The least of the things I love about this is the fact that Goffin and King lead with the parens-- that's such a cool move.

Midnight Special-- Johnny Rivers
I honestly didn't know that he did a version of this. It sucks, but it's not Secret Agent Man, and I prefer archaeology to the obvious...

Mama Told Me (Not to Come)-- Three Dog Night
See, this would've been hipper if it had been called (Mama Told Me) Not to Come, but what are you going to do. And anyway, the book on early Randy Newman was that he was so unhip that he was hip. Chuck Negron and the dogs basically channel him here...

This short survey earns '60s Vibrations a B+. Now if I turn it on next week and hear Bob Lind again, I mght have to adjust downward.

Tomorrow: Totally '70s.

SATELLITE OF LOVE

Given my history with the radio, the suits behind satellite would have needed to fuck the concept right off the rails for it not to be my crack pipe...

I grew up following Top 40 radio like a Belmont tout. I marked chart movement from week to week, looking for trends and tendencies. Was this Manilow a mudder? Could Barry White run the stretch?

Near as I can tell after being plugged in for a week, satellite has legs.

It narrowcasts to all my narrow persuasions.

The only real problem so far is that I can't stay put on any given channel. Mad surfing.

In an effort to get a little traction, I'm going to spend some time focusing on a single channel on my upcoming drives home. I'll report the results here.

Tomorrow: 60's Vibrations...

JAI GURU DEVA

The Pogues and Stereolab are stored in completely separate compartments of my memory.

They are not meant to coexist in my world as going entities. If they did, time would surely double back on itself, and the glue of the universe would become unstuck.

Well, about a week and a half after The Pogues concert in March (which I will be attending by the grace of brain coral), Stereolab will be playing the very same venue.

And you can bet that I'll be attending, peril to the fabric of existence be damned.

This one's on me brain coral, if you're interested...

BALLAD OF A THIN MAN

And to be honest, I think that while one of the layers of that "break out of the apron" thing was an expression of a desire for freedom from conformity, another layer was the expression of a desire for the freedom to conform.

I wanted either to get on the stage or to take a seat in the pit. Or perhaps to take a seat in the audience.

I am in the audience now. My seats are good, but I am in the audience...

LET IT OUT AND LET IT IN

So what did Jimmy see in Jude?

Some of it had to be the general obliqueness. He was a big R.E.M. fan, and they were still relatively murky back in 1987 (and the better for it, I might add).

And if you had never read Jude the Obscure, I suppose this was even more, um, obscure…

I liked this little epigram:

“A fool and his philosophy
Will soon part
Faithfully.”

The “break out of the apron” image was a pretty layered expression of desire for freedom from conformity, and it was a nice move to repurpose the portent of the Hardy-via-Corinthians “The letter killeth” as a message of slightly blinkered optimism.

It is more than a little odd sitting here behind my large ell-shaped wood-grain desk nearly 20 years later, on a lunch break from writing staff performance evaluations, to consider all this...

CRACKED BELLS AND WASHED-OUT HORNS

OK, a couple of quick points to start.

(1) Maybe Bob Dylan could safely use the word "organ" in a song, but under no circumstances should anyone anywhere ever use the word "organs" in a song's chorus. This should be like a Talmudic law of songwriting...

(2) And if the above is part of the Mishnah, then surely there is something in the Gemara regarding the use of the word "fiber." I was looking to convey the idea of moral fiber, but I think I came closer to conveying the idea of Metamucil...

JUDE

You and I were never afforded
The one peace which we sought,
Preachers scoff and we move off
Down the road, where we know
A fool and his philosophy
Will soon part
Faithfully.

And I feel it coming Jude,
And I know you feel it too.
And I feel it coming Jude,
And I know you feel it too.
Bell towers will not ring,
Organs will play no hymns,
Bell towers will not ring out...

And I know that we have the fiber
To stand when it is done,
To stand when the matter is won.
And we will break out of the apron,
And not the letter live,
For we know that the letter
Killeth.

(CHORUS)

(FIRST VERSE)

(CHORUS)

I DON'T EVEN BOTHER TO USE MY BRAIN ANYMORE (THERE'S NOTHING LEFT IN IT)

Office party tonight-- see you Monday.

WE ALL SHINE ON

Spanish Wings did not have much exposure in the outside world beyond these brief excursions.

I gave it to Jimmy before he left for Athens, but he was more interested in something wordier I had written called Jude.

He demoed Jude, with just a guitar, a whistle, and a well-full of echo-- I still have the C30 tucked away in a battered orange case...

But Spanish Wings, this brief, elegant, wistful, weightless thing, this song that does not exist in your world, is the most important song in my life.

It has elevated me, and carried me over difficult times. It has given me hope, comfort, and inspiration.

It is my introduction and my valediction, and the eternal life in between.

Come fly away...

IN RESTLESS DREAMS

The somewhat pathetic truth is that this was not the original version that I sent to my friend.

That version went

"From this day onward, the visions could be ours
That the moon sees when it's standing in the towers
Of the night."

This was more pedestrian than epiphanic-- I didn't want to build to something so pat.

The whole point of leaving in the "Oohooh ooh ooh'" at the end of the first two verses was to give "Of the night" in this last verse some oomph, and I felt like this was undermining that effort.

I did what any reasonable soul would do, and called my friend and made him swear to never open the letter, vow to just rip it up on the spot.

So that night "the moon sees" became "seize the moon"-- I was pretty damn happy it was such an easy fix. With the flip of a homophone, I was able to move the action from the moon to the visions, where it belonged.

Crisis averted, I dropped this repaired version in the mail the next day...

DAHLIAS ON A PLATE

In our universe, it is 1987, and I’m staying up until 3 am most nights, reading and writing.

In this universe, to all outward appearances, I am adrift. My friend sends me a postcard from California with a big picture of Earth as seen from space. “Wish you were here” is all he writes on the reverse. He doesn't mean California.

Internally, however, I am being reshaped, reformed. Redeemed.

A good friend comes to me with several demos that had been put together by some acquaintances of his, who have been playing with Suzanne Vega. The demos are musically polished, but the vocals are just an ethereal oohing.

He gives these to me as an exercise, as a way to cast form the loose words that have been spilling out.

The next day I send him Spanish Wings...

ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE

There is this alternate universe…

It is one where I followed my friend Jimmy to Athens, GA in 1987, three or four years after anyone with jangle-pop dreams had any right or reason to make such a journey…

His friend Mike, the one with clear band-management tendencies, came too. He started booking us some frat parties. Our band went through a couple of name changes and bass players, and ultimately stuck with Cobweb Yard and a girl named Teri on bass.

We played around the South for a year, got tighter, and scored a semi-regular gig back home at the 40 Watt Club. We began to think about doing an album.

We booked some studio time and laid down an EP’s worth of what we felt was our top original material. IRS came sniffing around and agreed to release it.

Cobweb Yard enjoyed some airplay on college stations up and down the East Coast. Shot a chintzy video for $350 that aired for two consecutive Sundays on 120 Minutes. There was a quarter-page writeup in Matter magazine out in Chicago…

But things didn’t really gel after that. Nothing major—our drummer was the first to decide to go back to school, while he could still do so on his parents’ dime. A couple of us hung on for another six months or so, but by and large it was a hair-metal world, and we just didn’t fit.

Our “big” song, the one that got the airplay, the one with the video, shows up on the occasional 80s comp. In fact, the last time the whole band got together was right after we gave Rhino the rights to include the song on Vol. 14 of the Just Can’t Get Enough series—we had a little party down at Ruby Tuesday’s.

The song was Spanish Wings.

SPANISH WINGS

I stand in place here, this cold and ancient ground
Has never moved me, the canyons to the towns
Oohooh ooh ooh...

A simple plan, love, that they can call retreat,
We'll call it inward, redeeming and discreet
Oohooh ooh ooh...

We'll fly away
We'll fly away
Come fly away
On Spanish wings, love
On Spanish wings
On Spanish wings, love
On Spanish wings

From this day onward, the visions will be ours
That seize the moon when it's standing in the towers
Of the night...

We'll fly away
We'll fly away
Come fly away
On Spanish wings, love
On Spanish wings
On Spanish wings, love
On Spanish wings

On Spanish wings, love
On Spanish wings
On Spanish wings, love
On Spanish wings
On Spanish wings, love
On Spanish wings...

THE TAO IS LIKE A RIVER

So Shane and The Pogues blew apart sometime after Hell’s Ditch, and I was more than prepared for it. I had heard the hollow men rustling in the breeze long before…

I didn’t pick up either of the post-Shane Pogues’ discs, knowing that the charms of a Tuesday Morning likely masked a Squeeze/Other Voices/Full Circle type fiasco.

I was still curious enough to buy The Snake when it was released.

Not that it was a return to form or anything, but it was diverting, and not censed with the stink of death that Hell’s Ditch wore.

Soon after this, I met up with Stereolab, and didn’t but occasionally look back down the road. Every so often I’d see Shane’s name pop up in print somewhere, check to see if it was his obit, and move on.

Now I note that the reformed Pogues are scheduled to play the 9:30 Club in DC in a few months.

I tell you what Shane—if you make it, I’ll make it.

Hope to see you there…

SAYONARA

Hell’s Ditch.

When it is not simply uninspired, it’s just unremittingly ugly, and to no good end.

Syllables gurgle and drown at the back of Shane’s throat, in a welter of slurs and elision.

Where earlier efforts had seemed a reflected impression of degraded circumstance, the songs here shoot straight through a degraded heart.

I have it in me to excoriate this thing at great length, but I don't have it in me...

THE CRUX OF LIFE’S PHILOSOPHIES

For years I could not track down Red Roses for Me on cassette.

These were the pre-Web days, and I tramped from brick-and-mortar to mortar-and-brick in search of the tightly wound relic, to no avail…

So I was left to wonder what Red Roses was really like, tantalized by the fact that there was a Pogues album out there somewhere that I had never heard.

I finally found a copy on a trip to Boston with my future wife.

Just about all I remember from that trip is finding Red Roses, digging Red Roses, and starting to cede a good portion of my heart to a woman I had been dating for six months…

It was a damn fine trip.

IT'S THE SAME WHEREVER YOU GO

Now seems like a good time to say Peace and Love...

The overall spirit of the album is indicated by the bantamweight pug on the cover, posing bareknuckled and slightly hunched in front of a dirty gym wall, with PEACE and LOVE tattooed across his fingers.

For what it’s worth, I call him Tommy.

There is plenty of fine non-Shane material here. Gridlock rollicks. Misty Morning, Albert Bridge brings the strings. Blue Heaven choogles well enough to have earned some medium rotation at the local alt-rock station back in ’89. Lorelai longs. Gartloney Rats spins until it’s dizzy.

So what did Shane bring to the proceedings? Well, White City showed he still had the pith and vinegar, and trumped Townsend’s concept album with a single line: “And it’s just another bloody rainy day.”

Cotton Fields is autopilot stuff, notable mostly for revisiting the electroshock of Shane’s youth and namedropping producer Steve Lillywhite. Down All the Days is almost... there..., but not quite. USA has some epic percussion rattling all over the place, and some nice imagery doing about the same. Boat Train saddens me.

And London You’re a Lady leaves us with Shane’s last great piece of poetry: “While Chinamen played cards and draughts/And knocked back Mickey Finns”…

GOBBLE GOBBLE HEY

Now seems like a good time to say Peace and Love...

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends. See you on Monday.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT OLD SONG

The rampaging scourge of late 80s/early 90s pop was the "special remix" version, which took a previously recorded song from a group's canon and decked it out in shiny new togs in order to help flog a useless best-of comp.

The nadir of this particular genre was likely plumbed when the briefly reunited Police let Sting spray his smooth-jazz jizz du jour all over Don't Stand So Close To Me. Yuck.

The Pogues, however, actually got it right.

They recognized A Rainy Night in Soho for the diamond in the rough that it was, and they recut it to fix the flaws.

The most obvious of these flaws is the fact the original dulls the impact of this verse:

"Now the song is nearly over
We may never find out what it means
Still there's a light I hold before me
You're the measure of my dreams
The measure of my dreams"

For some odd reason, the original does not peak with this, but rather goes into the bridge following this verse and then comes back around and repeats the verse.

But the remix realizes that the song is building to this moment thematically and narratively, and puts it in its rightful place.

And where the original seemed a bit embarassed by its sentimentality, the remix embraces its inner schmaltz and lets us have a nice cry...

THE WORMS CRAWL IN AND THE WORMS CRAWL OUT

If I Should Fall From Grace With God (or IISFFGWG, as the kids call it) is probably The Pogues strongest album as a band, but through all the tightness it is possible to hear Shane’s battered muse occasionally cry “Uncle.”

Nothing here rises quite to the level of The Body of an American or Sally MacLennane, but, to paraphrase Lou Reed, at this point Shane could shit other people’s diamonds.

So is Bottle of Smoke just willfully profane and chugged up as hell? Well, yeah, but then there’s this observation: “But the money still gleams in my hand like a light.”

And while Fairytale of New York has reached a kind of anti-standard status, if you look closely, the ache is there:

“I could’ve been someone,” he says.
“Well, so could anyone,” she shoots back.

People write entire novels/plays/operas trying to convey what’s in those two lines.

Birmingham Six is righteously pissed, and Lullaby of London is righteous. The Broad Majestic Shannon embraces Irish fiddle-faddle while simultaneously giving it the lie (“For it's stupid to laugh and it's useless to bawl/About a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball”).

The cracks were showing, sure, but in some ways they just lent a little extra character to the whole affair.

I’M A FREE-BORN MAN OF THE USA

Words again.

“The Cadillac stood by the house
And the yanks they were within
And the tinker boys they hissed advice
'Hot-wire her with a pin' “

As much as Shane liked to play that he didn’t care about fuck all, words like this are no accident.

Words like this make it all the sadder that he got ensnared by a mythology as pissant as the whole “bardic Irish drunk" thing.

Because to write a line like “the tinker boys they hissed advice” takes work.

Sober work— not in the dry sense, but in the sense of a serious sit-down approach to a craft.

A line that evocative and metric can only come from someone who gives a fuck.

Go listen to The Body of an American this weekend.

Go read it too…

A HUNGRY SOUND

My father died of cirrhosis at the age of 44. My brother died of the same at 33.

My alcohol intake is limited to an annual St. Patrick’s Day Guinness that I buy and occasionally neglect to drink.

This is just to say that my love of The Pogues was never fueled by a misguided romanticization of auld sod drunk blarney. Mostly it was the words.

I bought Rum, Sodomy and the Lash on cassette when it came out in 1985. The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn started out the album all stately and slow, and then suddenly shifted into this torrent of words, each bound to the next by phlegm and piss and wisdom and genius…

It took weeks for me to believe that Shane MacGowan had actually written the likes of Sally MacLennane. I was convinced that it had to have been drawn from some deep well, where it had steeped for ages, periodically bucketed out and improved by a generation’s poets:

“Well Jimmy played harmonica in the pub where I was born
He played it from the night time to the peaceful early morn
He soothed the souls of psychos and the men who had the horn
And they all looked very happy in the morning

“But Jimmy didn't like his place in this world of ours
Where the elephant man broke strong men's necks
When he'd had too many Powers
So sad to see the grieving of the people that he's leaving
And he took the road for God knows in the morning”

Billy’s Bones was the other MacGowan original that stood out, partly for its humor (I especially like that Billy knew an “Arsenal from Tottenham blue” and to start the Solomon Grundy-esque ending with “Have a Billy holiday” was pretty inspired), and partly for the way it manages to encapsulate The Pogues’ sense of hard-edged pathos:

“Now Billy's out there in the desert sun
And his mother cries when the morning comes
And there's mothers crying all over this world
For their poor dead darling boys and girls”

It helps to know that the last line there is spit out with a smirk.

This then was the stuff of life…

AMERICA’S BOY

I really hoped that Broadcast’s Tender Buttons would pull me into a new obsession.

The Noise Made by People had some moments of admirable melancholia, and weird forward/backward sonics. It dragged a bit in spots, but overall it was several ticks above simply distracting.

I had high expectations for Ha Ha Sound, and they were met. The sonics remained weird, in a different, percussive way, and the songs were more illuminated. This was lushness with hard corners…

So when Tender Buttons rolled around, I was ripe for the plucking. But while I find it to be a logical evolution from Ha Ha Sound, there is a clinical air that is keeping me at bay. And secretly I wonder if the cover— a mirror close-up of singer Trish— is a bit of a cry for help.

I suppose a move from Stereolab to Broadcast would’ve been pretty lateral, in the end. Not like the last shift, from The Pogues to Stereolab.

Ah, The Pogues. Let me tell you a little about The Pogues…

HOLD YR TERROR CLOSE

If you can't extract any joy from The Go! Team's Thunder, Lightning, Strike, I'd say your joy-extracting abilities are well-nigh fucked.

That being said, I don't think there's room in my life for more than one of these, so I'm not necessarily planning a long-term relationship. Go ahead and surprise me Team...

TOO AULD TO RAWK AND ROLL

Back from vacation, I’ll ease in by shooting some fish in a barrel.

There was an amusing story in the Washington Post this morning about today’s teens and their newfound love of Classic Rock.

Some kids from TJ HS started a club called the Classic Rock Appreciation Society, with no apparent indication that the resulting acronym is meant to be ironic…

Ian Anderson got wind of this and flamingo hopped his way over to the school when he was in town playing a supermarket opening. He regaled the children with some of his fluttery flutery, and told a minstrel’s tale. Yea, verily.

There’s a priceless quote in the story by one Charles Cross:

"But maybe the ultimate offense -- the new, best way to offend your parents -- is to listen to the music they were embarrassed to listen to. Like Jethro Tull.”

Crap, does this mean my kids are going to subject me to a steady diet of Stone Temple Pilots ten years from now? Because I assure you, that will really piss me off...

IT'S SELF-LOCKING

If your X IQ does not go beyond the totally appropriate cover of Breathless and/or the totally inappropriate cover of Wild Thing, I implore you to dig deeper.

I'd suggest that you download Under the Big Black Sun for starters. The album of the same name was informed in part by the death of Exene's sister Mary, and this particular song is a dizzying conflation of adultery, death, and Jesus:

"If it isn't men it's death
It's the same old testament
At the cross her station keeping
Stood the mournful mother weeping
Where my man extended hung
Driven with nails to wood"

Then this passage hits me like a sucker punch, I think because it seems so painfully verite:

"The sly brown fox pulled up a glass
Pulled up a chair
And yanked out my hair
When I tried to sit I fell down
When I woke up he was gone"

And then the ending is just so damn existentially pithy:

"The man is gone, Mary's dead
Good morning midnight"

The rest of the album is pretty sweet too, but this song comes from another planet.

I'm vacation-bound, so no posts for a week or so. Enjoy your X...

LETTERS

In honor of day 3 of my conference, and the attendant alphabet soup being ladled out 'til dusk, I give you the best strictly alphanumeric bands ever. No room for after-the-fact acronyms (or Electric Light Orchestra, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer so would've dominated) or interfering articles (The B-52s are grounded). I'm a reasonable man, so I will let a little stray punctuation slip by...

5.
AC/DC

4.
XTC

3.
U2

2.
R.E.M.

1.
X


See, I always preferred Sandy Koufax to Phil Niekro. I'll take five years of white-hot shit over 25 years of floating knucklers to a .537 winning percentage any day...

WHAT'S YOUR NAME?

In the post 9/11 chill, the concept of "disaster recovery" gained serious traction. Providing businesses with a fallover operational model in the face of cataclysm became a growth industry.

All things considered, disaster recovery falls about dead center between corporate forethought and throwing money down a hole.

I was at a conference today, and it appears that the linguistic shift is on, with movement afoot to rename the concept "business continuity plan."

I guess they're hoping for some of the same magic The Bangs rang up when they became The Bangles, or when Southern Death Cult became Death Cult became The Cult...

NOW WITH 50% MORE NOUGATY GOODNESS!

Watching my son puke up a small package of M&Ms, half a mini Milky Way, and a single Milk Dud last night got me thinking about candy songs. So now, without any further filigree: Best. Candy. Songs. Ever.

5. (tie)
Candy Girl, New Edition
The Candy Man, Sammy Davis, Jr.

4. (tie)
Some Candy Talking, Jesus and Mary Chain
Candy's Room, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

3.
Candy-O, The Cars

2.
Candy, Iggy Pop/Kate Pierson

1.
I Want Candy, The Strangeloves and Bow Wow Wow


Number 1 slips by Iggy and Kate on the combined strength of its two primary versions, which perhaps isn't fair... but who ever said candy was fair? The Strangeloves rock an Eric von Zipper wetsuit dream, while Bow Wow Wow richocets Burundi beats all over the beach.

THERE'S A PLACE YOU MIGHT WANT TO GO

My favorite Halloween carol is Halloween by Dream Syndicate. It stumbles around with murky menace, rather than simply going splat, and is all the better for it.

When I was a kid, we used to go on family car vacations, usually up to New England, and I was strangely comforted whenever I saw a street name that matched one of the streets back home.

It was not as if I thought that one of my familiar home roads had somehow snaked its way 300 miles north—it just had an odd way of making the unfamiliar seem local.

That sensation pretty much sums up how I felt about the first Dream Syndicate album…

NATTY DREAD DRINK

I was thumbing through my back pages, and came across this:


The Day Bob Marley Died

I sat on a glacial rock
In Central Park,
Drinking warm beer
Through a red
Bendy straw,
Sun illuminating
The Heineken bottle


I kind of like this.

I think the main reason I like it is because it's true-- this is exactly what I did on May 11, 1981.

I cut out of school that day and went into Manhattan (you'd be forgiven if you pointed out that this appears to be a bit of a trend)-- I was amazed that I could walk into a deli abutting the park and buy a six pack, which was all my friend and I could afford. Back on the Island, I had to lurk outside the local Super-X waiting for someone sympathetic enough to facilitate underage drinking by making a purchase for me.

The beer was warm because we'd heard that you could catch a buzz quicker by drinking it off the shelf. We drank it through straws for the same reason.

But I also like the poem for reasons other than its accurate reportage of my youthful profligacy. I like the simple riddim of it-- the "glacial rock" and "Central Park," the "Sun illuminating/The Heineken bottle."

I like how it begins with an image of strength and permanence (that glacial rock), and ends with illumination.

I like how it uses the word "bendy"...

And although it's a bit of a parlor trick, I like how I weaved in the Rastafarian red (the straw), gold (the sun), and green (the Heineken bottle).

My goal with poetry is (was?) always to pack as much as I can into a small space, and this is one of the rare occasions where I think actually succeeded to some small degree.

A thousand pardons for crawling so very far up my own arse today...

ODESSEY & ORACLE

At last it was retrieve-the-repaired-car day. Content tomorrow...

THE SKELETAL GHOST

"Aluminum Tunes"
This is a wicked good double-disc comp of some of the stuff I mentioned yesterday, plus some equally incandescent stuff that I didn't. Their version of One Note Samba/Surfboard is the apotheosis of a slightly jaded brand of groovy...

And as with the albums, it is around here that things get a bit dodgy. I cut "The First of the Microbe Hunters" some slack, seeing as it was strictly an odds and sods affair. [As enticing as an outtake from Dots and Loops seemed in theory, in practice I Feel the Air (Of Another Planet) didn't do much more than show that it deserved to be taken out.]

"The Free Design" EP was due south of inspired. Escape Pod (From the World of Medical Observations) at least had an interesting title, but was as gripping as listening to someone count.

Long Life Love
This is abidingly odd, like a bunch of tiny ill-formed revelations in search of a unifying epiphany. I think I would have liked it better in French...

The Super-It
Who does stuff like this? I mean, who releases their best and brightest as a vinyl-only tour single? It still hasn't been officially digitized to this day, but it's sure to sparkle on the next Switched On...

ABC Music and Oscillons from the Anti-Sun are both very useful buckets of ashes, sweeping up BBC sessions and most of the EPs. But it is telling how much looking back this forward-looking bunch has been doing of late.

While my obsession has closed its loop, I'm sure I will continue to buy anything new the group puts out, prepared, as I have been of late, to be nonplussed (Instant 0) or pleasantly surprised (Kybernetica and Interlock from the new singles)...

ONE SMALL STEP

Super-Electric
Early evidence that the marginalia would not be marginal, that the effluence would not be effluvia. Released initially as a limited edition of 10 copies scraped onto the underside of a portobello mushroom, playable only by pulling the legs off a cricket.

John Cage Bubblegum
Avant pop bubblegum pop soda pop lollipop.

Revox
A trip through a page in a French rhyming dictionary, a trip through an amplifier tube...

Lo Boob Oscillator
The best Stereolab manages the trick of pulling you back into the past and nudging you into the future simultaneously, which this does in spades and dark shades. It percolates along like moon cabaret, and then turns into Neu! out of nowhere. Book your flight today.

"Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center"
This rivals Dots and Loops as the most cohesive sustained recording the group ever produced. 25 minutes without a slip.

"Fluorescences"
Another virtually flawless EP, although Soop Groove #1 does grow a bit of a skin on top.

Brigitte
A sweet tribute to a kindred spirit. Makes the word "Brigitte" sound like both a seduction and the entire plot of a children's book...

Check and Double Check
Verges on inspirational, verges on invisible, verges on impeccable. This is the true sound of a beating heart of glass...

Iron Man
Give the drummer some. Somebody should mash this with the Sabbath song of the same name.

Spinal Column
One of the flat-out prettiest things the group ever dropped hides its light under a bushel as the last track on the Miss Modular EP.

Damn, they wore me out, and I'm only up to about 1997. More tomorrow-- sorry haters!

THE SUN THROUGH FILTERS

What keeps the Stereolab story interesting—what makes it more than “boy meets band, boy loves band, boy wanders from band’s clutches”—is the staggering amount of non-LP material the group has produced over the years.

I haven’t even touched on the other regular-issue discs predating MAQ, specifically Peng! (aborning) and Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (coalescing), but I can’t think of a modern band that has released more high-quality music outside the confines of the traditional LP format. (If you’re listening to Push Barman to Open Old Wounds right now, I could bear an argument.)

Next week I’ll touch on some of the one-offs, flip-sides, comps, side projects, tour singles, and other assorted gewgaws and baubles that helped deepen my obsession…

THE MOST INOPPORTUNE

Field trip today-- I'll be back behind the glass tomorrow.

GOODBYE MARY

Stereolab’s music had become something that I experienced more through the prism of memory than I did in the moment. I heard them now in unbent white light.

Margerine Eclipse, with its Margerine Rock and Margerine Melodie and Dear Marge was clearly a heartfelt tribute to Mary Hansen, who had been killed in an accident after the release of Sound-Dust.

Mary brought warmth to the group, and served as a counterbalance to Laetitia's husky world weariness. While Laetitia occasionally treed herself with aloof theory, Mary exuded openness and simple humanity. Much of Margerine Eclipse is an effort at reconciling the “Let live what must live, die what must die” philosophy of Sound-Dust with the reality of a friend's death.

And while objectively I knew this was at least a partial return to top Decision Rock form, I could never muster much enthusiasm for it.

Because I tend to travel in cycles of obsession...

BON BONS

Sound-Dust is not ephemeral, which connotes something brief, fleeting, and wonderful. It is not even transient…

It is, rather, ephemera: something of little lasting value. And as is the wont of dust, it can even be a bit of an irritant.

However, the cover art is fascinating.

There is a dark green castle set against a bubblegum pink sky. The castle is being buffeted by curly white waves, and at the heart of the castle is a pink death’s head.

For once, Stereolab’s album art transcends the music within, instead of complementing it. And just to be clear, that’s not a good thing.

It’s too bad they couldn’t muster anything more trenchant than the half-steeped relativism of “Let live what must live, die what must die.”

It’s too bad they couldn’t make the music that really goes with that cover…

PAUSE

Happy 5th Anniversary brain coral!

The least of what you've done is inspire me off my ass to tend to my graying gray matter, so that my own creative impulse doesn't atrophy.

I mean, to supply the depth and breadth of content that you have over these last five years (and these last two years with notes), well it's pretty damn impressive. I'm on post 59 now, and sometimes I look back on the halcyon days of post 27, when it all came so easily...

So thank you for the peek inside your brain, for the mix tapes, for the links, for the photos (and for the record, my favorites are the ones where you focus on an everyday industrial object to the point of abstraction, but also include some words printed or embossed on the object so that it swings back to the everyday again), and for the inspiration.

THE FRAGILE DEFENSE OF WORDS

When I saw that the title of the next Stereolab disc was going to be Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, well, first I laughed a little. Then I grew concerned…

This seemed a symptom of some of the less-attractive Decision Rock impulses run amok. Dots and Loops had been clean, like its title, and green, like its cover. But this title bespoke an apparent lack of focus. The cover, a muddy brown plate interrupted by several swiping wisps of orange electronic smoke, did nothing to dissuade me from this notion.

This marked the first point in my cycle of obsession where I began to question my faith, as it were. I overcorrected initially, and couldn’t warm to Cobra and Phases at all.

As time passed, its merits became clearer, as did its faults.

Chief among its faults is that the thing is too damn long. Just because a CD makes 78 minutes available to you doesn’t mean you have to threaten to use them all. A couple of months after it was released, I burned a new version that shaved off about 20 minutes by dropping two songs.

Blue Milk is the kind of song that would have been better served as a tour single or some other breed of limited release; Caleidoscopic Gaze would be a bore at any length, but is an insufferable bore at 8:09.

So, the ground rules had changed. Stereolab was making me work for my pleasure, and with Cobra and Phases it was worth the effort in the end. But where would we go from here?

VIVE LES HARMONIES

Dots and Loops is Stereolab’s Decision Rock masterwork. It is a unified field of well-considered sounds.

Those sounds are the greens of wet flora and the patina of copper rust.

I cannot locate an album in my memory that was a more precise mirror of the sights and sounds in my head at a given time.

And I carry its whorled fingerprints on me to this day...

ANONYMOUS COLLECTIVE

By the time Emperor Tomato Ketchup rolled around, I was aware of Stereolab's canny design sense. Each album/CD/7" cover is a well-considered depiction of the sounds inside.

The repeated use of the Cliff image in the group's early iconography was an apt reflection of the pop-art cartoon-revolution noise they were making at the time. The fact that he graced a number of covers in different day-glo color schemes was a cool conveyance for the fact that there were but subtle tonal differences from release to release.

They stretched their legs and left Cliff behind, and the covers grew more evocative along with the music.

ETK is a sunrise/sunset moment, with geometric, muted oranges and yellows. A record needle sits on the point of convergence of a white sun and the horizon, and then spirals dizzily out of the range of vision. It is a fractionated Warholian version of the Japanese flag with a flourish of rhythmic gymnastics.

And the genius is that you can take that description of the cover and apply it just as fittingly to the music on ETK...

TURN ON

I tend to travel in cycles of obsession.

I discovered while I trawled through Stereolab’s back catalog slowly but determinedly that Mars Audiac Quintet is a line of demarcation. It is the point at which they become clear proponents of Decision Rock.

Now maybe one day I’ll take the time to draw up a more complete exegesis of that term, but this’ll do for now: It is the sound of decisions being made.

Given my general tilt away from music that emphasizes craft over passion, I suppose it’s a little surprising that I took to it as avidly as I did…

IT'S NOT ETERNAL

I tend to travel in cycles of obsession.

I discovered Stereolab one late summer day in 1995. I was lounging on a borrowed recliner in an airy rented house. The walls were white, the windows were numerous, the sun was earnest, and this all combined to have a sweet narcotic effect. I had the TV tuned to MuchMusic from Canada, and the video for Ping Pong came on. Interesting.

I bought Mars Audiac Quintet a couple of days later, and found myself in the same chair, evening now, absolutely hypnotized by the drone of the first three tracks. Obsessed.

“What is this?” my wife asked, not in wonder, but rather with a slight air of resignation that she would probably be spending the next several years in its midst…

TOMORROW IS ALREADY HERE

Downloaded the new Stereolab singles a couple of weeks ago, and I’m loving Kyberneticka Babicka. Mostly because it feels like the soundtrack to an early 60s Czech cartoon about robot grandmothers and the girls who love them, but then realize they love their flesh and blood grandmothers better.

I also love it because it pulls off the sweet trick of no doubt sounding repetitious and pointless to the haters, while sounding nuanced and triumphal to the faithful...

ON THE VERGE OF BEING OBSCENE

Some recent discussions with a friend about whether I curse too much when I write lead me to this stream-of-consciousness swim through a stream of epithets...

Of course, every other word out of Little Richard’s mouth was obscene, but this was obscured by his scat scatology (“A wop bop a lu bop, a wop bam boom!” indeed).

Louie Louie

“Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” is nice and pithy. It’s a shame the MC5 didn’t have the songs to go with it.

The Stones didn’t get really down and dirty on official releases until Exile, near as I can tell. But then each of the first two songs had a bomb in it (“Plug in, flush out and fire the fuckin' feed” and “Well they're gonna hold some shit for me”), although both occurrences are pretty slurry. The “Got to scrape the shit right off your shoes” stuff in Sweet Virginia, however, is articulated and repeated.

Pink Floyd’s Money and its “Don't give me that do goody good bullshit” used to be a litmus test for just how progressive your local FM station was. If they were, you know man, cool, they played the “bullshit” version—if they were tools of The Man, they played the “bullBLEEP” one…

The Steve Miller Band’s Jet Airliner was another benchmark for this. If you heard the Casey Kasem approved “Funky kicks going down in the city” instead of the “Funky shit going down in the city” well Lance, it was time to spin the dial.

For some reason I always contrasted Aerosmith’s “And all the things you do, motherfucker, come back to you” in the live version of Dream On with Zep’s Bilbo-baiting “Does anybody remember laughter?” tomfoppery from the live Stairway. Aerosmith always looked better in the light of that contrast.

It’s really hard to top the “Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat” explosion in Bodies.

Um, Prince, was that “funk” or “fuck” that you sang 136 times in Erotic City?

And then the next thing I knew, Tipper Gore was masturbating in a hotel lobby with a magazine, and the whole obscenity thing got freighted with the PRMC and stickering, and cursing was well on its way to being codified...

CUCKOO

Listening to the Magnetic Fields' Reno Dakota today, and amid the dizzying "You know you enthrall me/And yet you don't call me/It's making me blue/Pantone 292" and among the cleavingly clever "Reno Dakota/I'm no Nino Rota/I don't know the score" sits the shitty little line "You have just disappeared/It makes me drink beer."

Only it's not so shitty in the context of all the best-damn-showtune-ever! lyrics swirling around it. The bastard starts to shine, and struts along elegantly in its $50 coat.

He might be too this, he might be too that, he might be too "too too" but damn that Stephin Merritt is good...

IS IT ANY WONDER

Scientists working at Oak Ridge and RIKEN recently announced their findings that the only song of the rock era that is actually too short is You Are the Sunshine Of My Life.

"Fuck, I would've thought there was at least one punk song that made the cut, but it turns out the best of them are just right," said Dr. Ryuichi Kawamoto.

I AM TIRED, I AM WEARY

I'm suspicious of the language of coercion that we tend to use to describe our emotional reactions to art. It made me laugh, it made me cry...

And yet there I was yesterday, idling at an intersection in front of the local Giant on my way home from work, feeling my jaw tighten in a gentle surge of rage.

If you've been reading for the last few days, you'll notice that I've been dipping into the Velvets. I confess that it's been quite a while since I've done so, and it can be refreshing to come back to the good stuff with new ears.

But as Heroin skronked to a climax, I was more and more gripped by the feeling that the whole thing was irresponsible. Kind of reprehensibly so...

While you could hardly call the song a glamorization of the drug, I don't think you can deny the darkly seductive tableau of self-annihilation that's laid out. There are a couple of particularly disconcerting moments where Lou kind of chuckles the lyrics...

If you're reading this, chances are you'd be quick to acknowledge that art can be a positive force in a local and global sense, but we also have to acknowledge the corollary. That is, like any worthwhile religion, there is good and there is evil. And no, both of those words aren't dead...

So, just as I know that Heroin never made anyone stick a spike into their vein, I realize that it did not make me have the reaction I did-- the whole nexus is pretty damn intricate. But I can't completely let it off the hook in either case...

Well, today I found a cure in Loaded. By this point the Velvets had embraced their inner CCR, and taken the long road from ermine to flannel. I'll be damned if Sweet Jane, Rock and Roll, and Head Held High are not some of the most exhilarating, life-affirming songs ever recorded. They made me feel better about all this.

I ended the day by scooping the cases for the four Velvets albums off my front seat, and filing them back on my shelf. We'll get together again in a couple of years and see how we're both doing...

HE'S TAKING A SICK DAY

Semi-obscure Fountains of Wayne reference or simple statement of fact? You make the call.

THE RALLY MAN'S PATTER RAN ON THROUGH THE DAWN

The Velvet's literary pretensions were right there on the surface. The Gift was a blowsy little short story redeemed by its sonics. The Murder Mystery was a muddle, with the occasional arresting image jumping out of one speaker or another.

But The Black Angel's Death Song was awesome, like the non-diagetic soundtrack music to Bob Dylan's 115th dream...

SPUTTER MUTTER

This is my personal favorite “waiting for the man” story.

One bright morning a friend of mine and I decided that going into Manhattan to buy weed trumped another boring day in 9th grade, so we slid out a side door and made our way to the LIRR.

We pulled into Penn, detrained, and wended our way back out into the sun, navigating purposefully to what we had been told was a prime spot for making our intended purchase.

It didn’t take long for us to hook up with a dealer, who clearly knew a couple of easy marks when he saw them. He sized up the situation, and quickly realized that the best way to negotiate the transaction was going to be by flattering my vanity and talking to me as if I had been doing such commerce from the cradle.

He suggested that he and I duck into an alley, so he could give me a sample of his wares. He pulled out a joint of “premium Panama red” and lit it up, offering me a toke, and advising me to cup it, as there was a police precinct right across the street. “It’s cool, I’m cool,” I whispered, smoke leaking from my constricted lips.

Now, chances are that this “joint” was a repurposed Camel, but I quickly agreed with his assessment that it was strong shit. After some further discussion, I palmed him $30. He handed me a tightly packed one-ounce bag, and advised me to secrete it down my pants. I emerged from the alley, gave a quick nod to my friend, and we were back on the way to Penn.

We reached the station and headed for the nearest bathroom, where we took up residence in adjoining stalls. I reached into my pants and pulled out the baggie. I unrolled it, unzipped it, and found…

Paper. Tiny, wadded up pieces of thickish brown paper. I conveyed this discovery to my friend in the stall next door, and almost immediately I heard a loud, rhythmic pounding on the divider. This was accompanied by a loud, rhythmic series of “Fuck!” exclamations…

He was hell bent on returning to the scene of the crime, but I finally persuaded him that this was probably not a good idea. I knew that I had been suckered, and I even felt a certain warped sense of admiration for the psychology that underpinned the ruse.

In an effort to take my friend’s mind off thoughts of glorious revenge, I spent the last of my money on tickets for Jerry Lewis’ Hardly Working. Which experience made the absence of drugs that much more palpable and regrettable…

With no money in our pockets, we hopped back on the LIRR as rush hour approached, and made it all the way to Garden City before we were kicked off the train...

DENIGRATE OBTUSE AND ACTIVE VERBS PRONOUNS

At one point this weekend I shot past the sublime and straight into I’m Waiting for the Man, and I have to cop to spending 10 minutes or so obsessing over the fact that the title is at slight variance with the chorus (“I’m waiting for my man”).

Makes you wonder how the discrepancy was born. Anyway, it knocks me slightly off my axis, and I appreciate that…

HAVE A SUBLIME WEEKEND!

Candy Says—The Velvet Underground
Broken Heart—Spiritualized
Velvet Water—Stereolab
Waterloo Sunset—The Kinks
Valerie—Broadcast
This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)—Talking Heads
You Made Me Forget My Dreams—Belle and Sebastian
In the Morning of the Magicians—The Flaming Lips
Sunday Morning—The Velvet Underground
I Am Waiting—The Rolling Stones
Here’s Where the Story Ends—The Sundays
God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters—Moby

COMBIEN DU TEMPS?

My apologies, but I’m afraid this “national treasure” thing ends with a whimper, and not a bang.

The way I see it, there are a few groups remaining.

There are the stone-cold locks, who I could not muster either the passion, courage, or time to cover in much detail:

Elvis
Note lack of last name.

Chuck Berry
I am he as you are he as you are me…

James Brown
Get on up.

Beach Boys
I liked them most when Brian was either lying through his teeth or being nakedly honest. One of my top five is I Get Around, in which I suppose he’s doing both.

Then there’s the “sorry, not quite, but thanks for playing” bunch:

Michael Jackson
Damn, there was a time when this was a no brainer. But his second round of massive success helped to make everything attending him massive, including the consuming self-hatred.

Prince
A genius, for sure, and the same temperament that fed the genius probably drew up the blueprints for that Purple Castle of Weird he ended up building.

R.E.M.
Time and distance might one day elevate them off this segment of the list. I hate to play the “If they went away after…” game, but if the whole thing wrapped with Automatic for the People…

The Replacements
My friend brain coral spoke very eloquently the other day about their flameout. But for a brief shining moment they ripped off three or four beauties, and kinda sorta stood for something or another.


And finally, there’s the collection for which I suppose someone could make a case, but not me:

The Grateful Dead
As if the intemperate, interminable, impenetrable noodling was not enough, they encouraged that whole caravan of passive/aggressive stoners to follow them around. Bad trip, mannnn…

Jimi Hendrix
Sorry, technical mastery was never my bag. I know that’s not the alpha and omega of Hendrix, but it’s what sticks...

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
My stance on Springsteen has softened over the years, and I do appreciate his integrity and boundless energy. But from his New Dylanisms to his New Depressionisms to his New Working Classicism to his New Whateverism, we just never connected.

Run-D.M.C.
They brought the most important genre of the late 20th Century to the mainstream by cutting it with rock. That I can’t make a case is probably my fault.

Public Enemy
Kind of like The Replacements, but sunk more by self-righteousness than booze. Or, to jump continents, exactly like The Clash.

Aerosmith
They did the burnout/redemption thing well, and were actually kind of amusing at both ends of that spectrum. But treasure needs substance—Aerosmith is a big wooden chest full of paste.

eins-zwei-drei-vier

The Ramones taught both of my kids how to count to four.

They could each out-Dee Dee Dee Dee by the time they were two, barking “1-2-3-4!” with possessed self-possession. It gave them great confidence.

Because, after all, once you’ve got the linear locomotion of counting down, going beyond four is really just rote academics—it’s simply a matter of learning more numbers.

Now there’s nothing wrong with learning more numbers. But being proud of it and showing off that you can count to 130, well that’s for proggers. Fuck that.

This aesthetic of concision was married to an aesthetic of inclusion, best exemplified in the Freaks-biting Pinhead: “We accept you, one of us, one of us.”

This is the essential chemistry that makes The Ramones a national treasure.

They stuck around long enough to turn the burnout/etc cycle into a rondelet, as their haiku became bloated and distended.

Then within the span of four years Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny were gone, inserting a touch of classical tragedy.

But thanks to The Ramones, losers, loners, glue-sniffers, medicine-cabinet rouletters, and basement dwellers will always have someone there to accept them, someone to teach them how to count to four…

DINOSAUR VICTROLA

Uh-oh, it’s turning into National Treasure Week on the Tongue— here’s another: CCR.

The old-school SAT analogy would be “Sly and the Family Stone is to James Brown as CCR is to Bob Dylan.”

Both groups built on certain key elements of their analogues, and created something that in theory should have been marginal, but in practice was epochal.

CCR translated the mythic portents of Dylan into plainspeak. Yeah, a hard rain was gonna fall— Have you seen it? Who’ll stop it?

Plus, they turned Dylan’s elliptical protests into Fortunate Son, perhaps the most stirring and clearheaded thing of its kind.

And then there’s Proud Mary, one of the best American songs of the 20th Century…

I could prattle on through the catalog, but you get the point. Chances are you got the point before you got here.

John Fogerty also followed a rough outline of the “burnout/dissipation of visionary talent/lost wandering in the wilderness” paradigm—his drug of choice appeared to be bitterness, which is highly addictive and tough as hell to kick.

Fogerty, however, had his redemptive moment in the mid 1980s, when he reappeared looking and sounding so much like he did in his prime that everyone was willing to overlook the fact the he didn’t really signify anymore.

The tailend of his wilderness period played out in public in the form of lawsuits and stubborn refusals to play his old CCR songs, but he softened in the light and gave the people the grace notes they desired...

BE MICE ELF AGIN

Sly and the Family Stone are a national treasure, and we shouldn't let this be obscured by the fact that Prince, Outkast, et al have quite ably jizzed them into our DNA.

And yeah, part of the "national" in that "national treasure" is the burnout, the dissipation of visionary talent, and the lost wandering in the wilderness.

What's missing is the redemption, and I can wait as long as it takes Mr. Stewart. In the end you'll still be you...

WHAT’S THE POINT IN SAYING “DESTROY”?

While I certainly responded to the pointed political anger of punk, and to the general ether of anger floating through punk (I swear that nothing could put me to sleep in a more efficient and complete manner when I was 16 than listening to the Pistols at volume levels courting pure distortion), what ultimately won the day for me was the confrontational positivity of punk.

The first time I heard the first Clash album, I was sitting in the same local park that I had retreated to upon news of my father’s death four years prior. It was late fall, it was cold, and I was characteristically underdressed. The air from conversation among friends was visible, and quickly mingled into one breath.

Clash City Rockers started with its stuttering guitars and thudding drums, and then came Joe Strummer with his sputtering vocals, and I was lifted off the ground. From my new elevation I heard “You won’t succeed unless you try!” The air was nearly visible again.

I felt immediately as if I had found another friend, the crucial kind who understands you, to whom you don’t need to explain an obscure reference or an obscure mood. The kind who is going to share your frustration that “things” are fucked up, but is not going to let you wallow in it. You got a problem? Well, whatcha gonna do?

And that’s what punk rock means to me…

A REASONABLE ECONOMY

Lazy man like theme. Theme good.

So Bollocks turned out to be as patchwork as the album art's ransom-note motif. It ranged from the glorious (Holidays, God Save the Queen, Anarchy), to the gleefully nihilistic (Bodies, No Feelings, Problems, Seventeen), to a simulacrum of the glorious and gleefully nihilistic (Pretty Vacant), to the punkily pedestrian (Liar, New York, E.M.I), to the please-make-it-stop-right-now (Submission).

And the stuff worth mentioning outside of Bollocks?

Substitute
Early Who is as punk as anything, so this fit like a glove.

Steppin' Stone
"Hey hey, we're the Punkees..."

Belsen Was a Gas
This is no doubt the kind of by-the-numbers punk rock shock horror they would have churned out if there was an album number 2. Europe would've recoiled; America would've rested comfortably waiting for someone to explain what a Belsen was.

Silly Thing
This is flanged, phased, overdubbed, and more processed than a package of Kraft singles. Goes down like comfort food, though...

Something Else/C'mon Everybody
It would take actual effort to not make these songs pulse, and lord knows the boys couldn't be bothered. So it all works out for the best.

No One is Innocent/The Great Rock 'N Roll Swindle
McClaren, McLuhan. McLuhan, McLaren.

NO DOGS, BUDDY

The only album I ever threw from a moving car in a spasm of anger, informed by something as quaint as betrayal? PiL's This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get.

In the underpass where Washington Avenue ducked below the Long Island Expressway, the underpass where my brother's best friend Paul died in a car accident, I huffed the cassette out the window and caught a faint echo of it smashing against the lightly graffitied wall as I drove on...

FODDERSTOMPF

The Sex Pistols were a lot of things. Dickheads, dopers, defibrillators, feckless fucks, and poncy feckers. They were also archly funny, and occasionally downright hilarious, never moreso than on Seventeen:

We don't care about long hairs
I don't wear flares!

Sometimes I think this is a more accurate statement of purpose than Anarchy. And the way Johnny gargles with the word "flares" reiterates that he was the punk Sinatra...

IT KEEPS ME STABLE FOR DAYS

Prison labor in my fine state is apparently so cheap that they're practically giving away vanity license plates. Plus, they make the cons do ampersands, which is hard labor, because we all know how tricky ampersands are...

So, tonight I'm going to take the plunge and order my first set of personalized plates. And the screws will be happy to know I'm going to make those prisoners earn their keep:

BEL & SEB

Is that the damnedest little manifestation of a midlife crisis you've ever heard or what?

BELLE & SEBASTIAN PARKER

On a languorous late-summer Friday, these were the best lines to pass my ears:

Stars of Track and Field, Belle & Sebastian

"You liberated
A boy I never rated
And now he's throwing discus
For Liverpool and Widnes"

Why I prefer B&S to The Smiths, reason #36.

Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying, Belle & Sebastian

"Think of it this way
You could either be successful or be us"

Reason #109.

Discovering Japan, Graham Parker and the Rumour

"As the tears dropped sideways down her face..."

Narrative songwriting needs more of this kind of thing. Tell me two things in one compact image. The tears didn't just drop down her face, they dropped sideways. So she was crying and laying down. It seems so simple, but you'd be surprised how rare it is...

Protection, Graham Parker and the Rumour

"So all of you be damned
We can't have heaven crammed
So Winston Churchill said
I could have smacked his head"

Um, I think it was actually Swift, but when someone sounds this self-righteously pissed and, uh, Swiftian, you don't niggle the details...

SCORPIONS LOVE YOU!

Took the kids to the Richmond County Fair a couple of weeks ago, and had the good fortune to run into Rudolf Schenker, founder and rhythm guitarist of The Scorpions. I borrowed my wife’s notepad, and sat down for a quick chat.

ST: Welcome back to America. You’ve had a pretty good history of success here, huh?
RS: Yes, the Americans love our power. They know that we will give them rock, and the girls like the slow kissing songs. America: power and kissing!

ST: So you think that dichotomy has helped you through the years?
RS: Yes, yes, yes. When Klaus had his throat problems back in 1981, everyone said “Is Scorpions finished? Will Don Dokken sing for Scorpions?” And then Klaus had the dichotomy and his voice came back, and I don’t need to say the next thing, do I? No, I don’t.

ST: OK, I’ll say it then. The next thing was Blackout, with the breakout FM hit “No One Like You.”
RS: I still remember when Klaus and I wrote that. He had just gotten out of the Stuttgart clinic, and he was feeling strong. I said “Klaus, maybe we should do a slow one, where the vocal performing is like a whisper.” And that’s what we did. But it’s not like a little kiddie whisper: it has the sexiness and power in it. When he does that “Girl…” whisper part in concert, every time the bras bloom like tulips.

ST: That brings up a point. You guys were often accused of being sexist, due to some of your lyrics, videos, album covers…
RS: This makes me so angry. The fans know we are not doing sexism. We are doing sexy, with the Y. They see our videos and they say “Hey, Mr. Critic, Scorpions are in cage. Not pretty ladies. Scorpions are animals.”

ST: Some of those album covers, though…
RS: We get criticism for Virgin Killer, but it is joke. The naked 12-year old girl just means that Scorpions are virgin killers, and if you are one of them, we are going to get you and kill you with our love. So maybe you won’t be the virgin anymore, yes? Lovedrive has the picture with the bubble gum on the guy's hand sticking on the tittie. But the critics don’t get the humor. I think that’s not the only thing the critics don’t get, yes? Animal Magnetism, the man with the tight trousers and the woman and dog kneeling before him? You know the word for a woman dog is, right? So, again we make a joke, but you have to be paying attention to appreciate. It has the subtleness. And power.

ST: Well, Rudolf, I thank you for your time. Do you have any words for your American fans?
RS: Look out for our newest album called Unbreakable. Klaus has written some of his best song lyrics here. Listen, listen: “Roller coaster flies off the track/Hits you in the face, stabs you in the back.” I mean, you can just see that roller coaster going woooo, and then hitting the guy in the face and stabbing him in the back, yes? And the new ballad Maybe I, Maybe You that Klaus wrote with Anoushirvan Rohani is something for the ladies. So, keep rocking America! Scorpions love you!

LITTLE BIT OF DIRT MIXED WITH TEARS

My time with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road yesterday reminded me that the thing is just a major sumbitch of an album. It's loaded with those moments that make me feel like a hit of extra-oxygenated blood has been injected into the base of my skull, and is tingling its way up to the crown of my head. Seriously, it's a physical reaction.

A few specific lines that do the trick:

"Could tell a lie but my heart would know"
"Are you heavy enough to make me stay/I feel like I might blow away"
"All I ask/Don't tell anybody the secrets/Don't tell anybody the secrets I told you"

Of course that stuff benefits from its context and delivery, but there are also moments of unadorned poetry:

"We used to drive
Thru Lafayette and Baton Rouge
In a yellow El Camino
Listening to Howling Wolf"

Plus it kicks off with an unashamed and adult encomium to female masturbation.

Go. Listen. Now.

GHOSTS FROM THE PAST

My good friend brain coral made the point the other day (on notes, a fine adjunct to his primary site) that was on my mind all morning today. Namely, how a great tragedy can radically recontextualize a pop song.

He references Joy by Lucinda Williams, but I think he's really after Lake Charles from the same album (Car Wheels...). It's an ode to Louisiana in the form of a lament, and beyond all the requisite place names that currently clog the cable alphabet news nets, there is the chorus, which now seems painfully prescient:

"Did an angel whisper in your ear
And hold you close and take away your fear
In those long last moments"

We have spent the last week being collectively overwhelmed by long last moments...

But of course, this is not a song about the aftermath of Katrina. And that is part of the magic of the best pop.

Although it is such a circular medium (think verse/chorus/verse/chorus; think cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs, reel to reels, cassettes, CDs, the wheel on your iPod), pop curiously lacks a center. It can have a POV, an agenda, maybe even a subtext, but the best of it is out there waiting to be willfully and willingly misinterpreted. And in the act of misinterpretation and being misinterpreted, it can take on an almost unbearable increase in gravity. I have heard Lake Charles at least 100 times, and for all its lyrical, transportive grace, I was never moved by it so much as I was when I listened to it this morning. And misinterpreted...

The last time I experienced this transformative moment with such power was in the days and weeks directly following 9/11. During that period, I listened to Abernant 1984/85 by The Mekons at least a few times every day. Sometimes it was the sole accompaniment to my 20 minute ride home from work. Listen. Repeat. Listen. Repeat.

I was intellectually aware that it is a song about the miners' strikes that roiled the UK in the mid 80s. I was not compelled to listen to it because it was helping me to form some thesis about how the callousness of the Thatcherite/Reaganite years had led us to 9/11. Rather, I was reacting quite viscerally to this:

"Vengeance is not ours it belongs to those
Who seek to destroy us
How much more is there left to lose?"

That is such a slippery couplet, but it affected me so profoundly, and in ways that I don't quite fully comprehend to this day. But the act of willfully misinterpreting once again got me through...

A DOSE OF THRUSH

Now, you don't normally associate Belle and Sebastian with the garage. And if you do it rhymes with carriage, and they're 12 years old, and they're in the corner behind the pram, and they're looking at a picture of Lulu that they cut carefully from last week's Melody Maker, and they're feeling conflicted about it. Because yes, their high frequency sensitivity does sometimes put the twee in tweeter...

But then in Lazy Line Painter Jane, those girl-group handclaps come in before the bridge, and the whole thing devolves into a glorious Al Kooperesque noise at the end that you really need to turn up loud, and as it skids to a close you marvel at this inflation of the everyday into the epic. In the garage...

GARAGELAND

The job's got me pegged like a pair of jeans this week, so I'm going to stay in the garage for the next couple of days...

Forever Changes is awesome, but this is my favorite Love moment, from 7 and 7 Is:

"Trapped inside a night but I'm a day and I go
Boom bip bip boom bip bip yeah!"

I swear I could listen to that on an endless loop some days...

Plus, I love titles that seem to dare you to complete them. I don't know, 14? Whiskey and lemon-lime soda?

I MEAN THEY'RE FRUSTRATED

Dirty Water by The Standells gets my vote for the most deliriously snotty piece of garage band noise ever. The way Joey Standell is not only going to tell us a story about his town, he's going to tell us a "big bad story" about it, about the "lovers, fuggers, and thieves." And all the while Johnny Standell works out the riff he learned in his first guitar lesson the week before they put this to tape. It's protopunk on a stick, fuggers.

I suppose you could make a case for The Seeds' Pushin' Too Hard, but that's delirious and snotty, and there's a difference...

DINOSAUR BONES

I love this.

I was reading through the April 1982 issue of Trouser Press (and no, this story does not get any less geektacular as it goes along, so strap yourself in), and I came across the following letter to the editor:

Trouser Press puts "let it rock" on its cover,
but never has and never will "let it rock"
because it refuses to recognize where real
rock is coming from. TP is not new, hardly
ever features new bands and, to put it
bluntly, sucks.

Lou Barlow
Westfield, MA

The existence of this letter authored by 15-year-old Lou is probably common knowledge among the Dinosaur Jr/Sebadoh cognescenti, but I feel like Howard Carter when I unearth nuggets like this...

THE BOTTOM OF MY COWBOY SHOES

There were two further significant Doors' releases that predate the grave-robbing "Is Jim really dead?" crap that reared its distasteful head in the late 70s: Absolutely Live and Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine. (13 was a greatest hits package released prior to L.A. Woman that stuck to the short, digestible stuff, but proferred nothing "new.")

Absolutely Live contains a couple of covers that did not make it onto any of the studio albums, none of which are revelatory, although Who Do You Love? is definitely in their comfort zone. Then there are some original oddities...

Love Hides
"Love hides in molecular structures"-- it was funny then, and it's funny today...

Build Me a Woman
Cry me a river. Buy me a vowel. Give me a break.

Universal Mind
This could have improved The Soft Parade, and it certainly would not have sunk Morrison Hotel. I guess it's actually sort of an acid-fried cousin to The Spy...

Dead Cats, Dead Rats
It is with great generosity of spirit that I assume this riff on Break on Through was improvised, and not a proper "song." Because, really, you should hear the shit that comes out of my mouth sometimes...

Celebration of the Lizard
One of my good friends in high school was prone to freak a little easily when he got stoned, and I was always there to push him over the edge with an in-your-face recitation of this. I remember writhing around on a lunch table, mewling through the whole Go Insane part, while the lunch ladies scratched their heads. I hear you lunch ladies, I hear you...

Weird Scenes is an interesting, slightly discursive collection. It eschews chronological sequencing, and is the better for it.

Who Scared You?
Fun fact: This is the only Doors song title that contains a question mark. This was the B side to Wishful Sinful, and is another song that would have improved The Soft Parade.

(You Need Meat) Don't Go No Further
If I had wanted to listen to Ray butcher (sorry) old blues tunes, I would've bought Other Voices and Full Circle.

The version of Roadhouse Blues that pops up in the middle of An American Prayer ain't half bad, with a gunka chunka be bop section that goes on and on and on.

Now let us leave these fag ends of The Doors and move on...

MIDNIGHT ALLEYS ROAM

The Changeling
Pretty bold move to start with this, knowing they had the next song in all its charming obviousness at their disposal. You look at the album cover and see the once-leonine face that was thrust to the fore on the cover of the debut, now puffy and hirsute, keeping a physically lower profile than its bandmates, only four years on. And you understand the attraction to the concept of change. Probably worthwhile to keep in mind the three definitions of "changeling" in Webster's:
1. Turncoat.
2. A child secretly changed for another in infancy.
3. Imbecile.
Somewhere deep in his heart, Jim probably thought he was a little bit of all three...

Love Her Madly
Charmingly obvious, or didn't you hear?

Been Down So Long
They work up a good blues froth here, straightforward and gruff.

Cars Hiss By My Window
Slow as molasses, and relevant mostly because it provides a thematic lead in to the epic and propulsive...

L.A. Woman
One of their best. Even the leaden anagramming that it builds to kind of tickles-- it's self-mythologizing that doesn't take itself too seriously. The whole thing moves like L.A., with all the sights/sounds/smells of L.A.

L'America
Bites My Generation's "fade away" with its "find yourself" but it's still kind of amusing. I like how it flips between menacing and merry-go-round...

Hyacinth House
The "I need a brand new friend" stuff is touching and convincing, and I genuinely buy that this is not a pantomime of real emotion. But "I see the bathroom is clear"? Yeah, I could've done without that...

Crawlin' King Snake
FF

The W.A.S.P.
I liked this even less when Bono called it Bullet the Blue Sky. To be fair, this doesn't leave quite the scorched earth on L.A. Woman that Bono's rap does on The Joshua Tree-- the music is intricate enough to hold your attention, and some of the lyrics are well turned, if a bit well marinated.

Riders on the Storm
Haunting, in retrospect, kind of like All Apologies. Not just because both end their respective groups' final albums, but because they seem to carry markers of their leaders' deaths. They also carry clear markers of their leaders' weariness, which plays out here in some pathetic lyrics (the "dog without a bone" and "his brain is squirmin' like a toad" patches in particular). And so to bed, perchance to dream...

I'll wrap this all up on Monday.

LINEAMENTS OF GRATIFIED DESIRE

Forgive the pregnant pause. My wife and kids were visiting friends in NY, and on the way home the other day, she got into a car accident. Everyone is OK, and they're home now, but let's just say the car is still in NY. I hope to return tomorrow...

WEIRD SCENES

A strange thing happened on the way to closure. All these old connections that I figured were too lossy and frayed to be conductive started firing, and I found electricity where I expected simple clinical objectivity. The betrayal of talent that was The Soft Parade made me angry; Morrison Hotel sounded like a recovery; but we already know how the story ends. I suppose I'm familiar enough with self-destruction and death to take that ending a little personally. It's hard to sit and watch the filament blow, and I know what comes next: darkness.

Tomorrow: L.A. Woman...

A BRAND NEW PAIR OF SHOES

Roadhouse Blues
You'd be forgiven if you'd assumed this car had pitted and left the race, but then out of nowhere: "Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel." Good advice. And then the verite "Well, I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer." We might just have something here...

Waiting for the Sun
Gotta love the old we'll-come-up-with-a-song-to-match-the-album-title-in-a-couple-of-albums gambit. Fellow traveler Julian Cope pulled the same trick years later with World Shut Your Mouth. I suppose in retrospect it's a minor miracle that the Bunnymen didn't do it too. The kicker is that it's better than anything on the album of the same name.

You Make Me Real
See what you can do when you ditch the boho mystic crap and have some fun? Plus it has the weight of fun that's been singed by fire.

Peace Frog/Blue Sunday
A mash up. PF seems like sort of a clearinghouse for some poems that had been sitting and gathering moss, and BS is a slight, innocuous ballad. Both benefit from the general reinvigoration that's on display here.

Ship of Fools
I always liked the way this and Land Ho! sounded back to back, but I used to need to wait for the leader tape to run out on side one before the auto reverse kicked in on my cassette player and started up side two. So here CDs, which have dulled the dramatic impact of many a side closer, aid in the thematic flow.

Land Ho!
An odd little bedtime story/nursery rhyme, with verve if nothing else.

The Spy
All Music Guide is telling me this is 4:17. Feels longer. Not all bad, to be fair-- "I know ev'rything. Ev'rything you do. Ev'rywhere you go. Ev'ryone you know" has some warmth to it-- but pretty turgid overall.

Queen of the Highway
I can never quite figure out if this is underrated or if I have an irrational attachment to it. "Formless/Hope it can continue a little while longer" had great resonance to me during a summer I knew I was pissing away, which I knew would have to end, which I hoped would never end...

Indian Summer
And this put a nice atmospheric capper on it.

Maggie McGill
Where earlier blues efforts were callow, and sounded unearned, this is starting to sound "real" if you will. It's the sound of a man who's come through a crash course in self-hatred and self-abuse, and emerged with a lasting mark, one that speaks of a well-earned humility, but also a growing sense of self-worth...

MILKY BABIES

Tell All the People
It's not often you find the sound of a band hitting the bottom right at the top, but here you go. Robby writes one with a "message" that is like a punishment for Jim to sing, and a passel of horns do their best to drown all the nonsense out. Staggeringly bad, quite possibly their worst.

Touch Me
Robby's back, and he brought the horns again. This seems truer to his muse, if you will, and is the better for it. The Comet cleanser ending can't wash away the stain of that opener, though.

Shaman's Blues
Three songs in and here comes Jim. It's a decent blues number, and the odd line seems interesting (I'm thinking of "Out in the train yard/Nursin' penitentiary" and "Cold grinding grizzly bear jaws"), but that might be a product of drastically lowered expectations...

Do It
Bored and uninspired is one thing, but this is something more pernicious. "Please, please listen to me children"? Listen to what? "You are the ones who will rule the world." Oh, okay. And? "You gotta please me." Ah, now I see. Well, fuck off, you lazy, cynical bastards. Fuck right off.

Easy Ride
More by-the-numbers guff, until Jim wakes up a bit at the coda with that "Coda queen-- be my bride" bit...

Wild Child
You remember when we were in Africa? Hee.

Runnin' Blue
OK Robby, this is more like it. Nicely executed, straightforward tribute to Otis. Can't complain about that.

Wishful Sinful
Damn, this is like Robby Krieger and the Doors. I give him credit for keeping the band in songs while the visionary lead singer was wetting himself in the corner of the studio. A nice, nonoffensive ballad.

The Soft Parade
Kind of by default, the most intriguing thing on the album. What is it "about"? Dunno. Starts off with that wacky jeremiad, then seems to slip into a draft evasion primer (the "four ways to get unraveled"). Eventually, a monk buys lunch and some horses get their eyes whipped (ouch!). It's probably best to call the stuff in between an imagistic carnivale, and be done with it...

Plans tomorrow night, so I'l be back on Monday to roll through the last two studio albums. Turn out the lights...

LAZY DIAMOND STUDDED FLUNKIES

Hello, I Love You
Sure, it's a rinky-dink Kinks rip, but it's cute. This is another case where it's worth it to track down the original demo, though, which is just absurd.

Love Street
The second of the four "Love" songs on this album finds Jimbo in crooner mode. The spoken word section is not quite Are You Lonsesome Tonight? level hokum-- actually, maybe it is, in its little hippie way. When I was 15, I thought that they needed less of this la la la la la la la'ing-- now I realize they could have used more la la la la la la la'ing.

Not to Touch the Earth
The only remaining fragment of the aborted Celebration of the Lizard, which was supposed to make up one side of this album, and whose ultimate absence left them scrambling for songs. As fragments go, it's pretty strong, although it is again a set of random "dark" images that don't really cohere into anything meaningful.

Summer's Almost Gone
About that scramble for songs... Jim sounds lethally bored-- the only redeeming feature (and this is a stretch) is the way it winds up with "The winter's comin' on" leading into...

Wintertime Love
..."Love" song number three. Half the la's of Love Street, and less filling...

The Unknown Soldier
You mean war, and perhaps in particular the Vietnam War, is bad? You bold erotic politicians, you! The D-Day celebration noises on the fade out are a pretty cool move, the obviousness of the politics notwithstanding.

Spanish Caravan
In which the boys set off on a bold attempt to get through an entire album side with nary a song at their disposal. They don't do a half bad job of it. The guitar work here is quite pretty, and the way Jim draws out "Andalusia" shows that not all of his phrasing skills are in the bottle at this point.

My Wild Love
My experience is that the last of the "Love" songs works best as a stoned campfire singalong among a group of people who are vaguely familiar with the lyrics.

We Could Be So Good Together
This is Waiting for the Sun's version of Strange Days' My Eyes Have Seen You, which is a perfect illustration of the difference in quality between the two albums.

Yes, the River Knows
This is very affecting, and the return of the drowning motif links it back to Strange Days in a positive way. "I'm going but I need a little time" in this context certainly sounds like the words of a man who knew full well what he was doing to himself...

Five to One
It sounds menacing, but when you measure it against something like the following year's Gimme Shelter, you begin to realize that there's not much there there. "America's Rolling Stones" could make but vague and cryptic references to revolution, while all their leader really wanted to do was go "out in this car with these people and get fucked up." Which leads to The Soft Parade...

WET FORESTS

Strange Days
Yeah, success'll turn your head like that. The cock is still in cocksure, but the sure's a little shaky, and it sounds good.

You're Lost Little Girl
The forgettable stuff here is more memorable than the forgettable stuff on the first album. I guess Sinatra never did get around to covering this one...

Love Me Two Times
Chugs along nicely, and that guitar's got some sproing in it. The sound of the singer trying just hard enough...

Unhappy Girl
Another girl song, huh? As tired as that may be, it is nice the way the water theme is introduced (Don't miss your chance/To swim in mystery), and how that carries through the next two pieces.

Horse Latitudes
Normally I wouldn't countenance this kind of thing, but some of the imagery is actually pretty interesting ("In mute nostril agony/carefully refined/and sealed over" is an evocative portrait of a drowning horse). Plus-- and I can't stress this enough ye future writers/performers of song poems--it's short. If you find yourself in a situation like this, say your piece in 1:30 and please move on...

Moonlight Drive
Definitely a top fiver in the oeuvre, this one is pretty much unassailable. And just like Horse Latitudes, it ends with a drowning. Seek out the demo to hear how much it benefited from maturation of vision/sympathetic production.

People are Strange
And now we resurface for a return to the strange. There is something to be said for consistency of vision, especially when it's as sharp as this.

My Eyes Have Seen You
An underappreciated gem. I love the way the first five words become one: Myeyeshaveseenyou. And how the song speaks to the power of simple repetition: Endless roll, endless roll, endless roll, endless roll...

I Can't See Your Face in My Mind
Filler. But again, unlike some of the filler on the first one, this is at least of a piece with the rest of the album.

When the Music's Over
But alas, as with the first album, we close with an "epic" that would have been much better served by some judicious editing. Could've been a five-minute song about music being your only friend, goth kids could've latched onto it as a manifesto 15 years later, and black would be the new blue. Instead, it's bogged down by what appear to be snippets from three or four unrelated poems, an exhortation to "revolution," and some Jesus stuff. Huh?