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?