Ouch. That’s Hot.

You ask me how I can like this band of phonies.  And I ask you:  How can I not?

I grew up on Graceland.  I was a boy in a bubble and that bubble was mercifully, occasionally, popped by missives shot off from the head-tops of East Coast sons of privilege and promise.  From Salinger to the Beats to Woody to Wolfe to Wharton to the VU to Tim Gunn.  Sure, I’m painting with a broad brush here, but from a Pittsburgh-birthed point of view, everyone from the Upper East Side to the Village had it better than me.  Not having much else in common with Warhol except for the whole hometown thing, I had to sit back and watch.  Just a doe-eyed extra in a Whit Stillman film, hoping to someday make it past a velvet rope.

And anyway, the Strokes made the critical cut, right?

As for the music, I like Contra just fine.  The rock-band to what-have-you ratio seems askew, but sophomore efforts often come off a little over-produced.  I’m not sure it’ll plant a seed in the sandy soils of my heart like their first disc did, but that’s more about time/place than anything else.

That first Vampire Weekend landed a little ray of light on my life during some dim days.  I’m not in that same head-space at the moment, but it’s good to know that they’re picking up where Buffett left off, keeping the ice in the blender for a better-read bunch of preppy parrotheads.

Well, actually it’s the impostor Tommy Thayer who’s all gussied up in the Spaceman’s galactic get up on a recent issue of Guitar Player.  But that’s beside the point.

KISS really used to scare me.  There I was, a sweet little guy, about 9-years old, watching a perfectly innocent episode of 3-2-1- Contact on PBS.  The show did a little fieldtrip to explore the science of stage lighting and pyrotechnics and showman-type stuff.  Fun right?  It was until the concert began and out strutted the freaky foursome of KISS.

I was old enough to know about KISS:  To know that they were EVIL and that KISS stood for “Kids In Satan’s Service” and that they ate bloodied bats with long tongues and were blatantly anti-Christian and probably un-American too.  And I knew that I would never join them.  I would never turn into one of those long-haired teenagers that hung out at that house up on the corner and played metal music out of the open hatchbacks of their Trans-Ams.  They probably smoked cigarettes and snuck beers from their dad’s keg-o-rators, too.  No sir, that would never be me and that would never be my music.

The culture wars had just begun, but I knew that I would stand my ground.  Hand-in-hand with the Beaver, we’d fight the good fight to stop the People Against Goodness And Normalcy.  And Heavy Metal too.  It seems that we’d lost PBS to the dark side of libidinous liberalism, but that was just one battle, not the war.

(Warp ahead a couple of years or so.)

It was late one night during my past life of rock ‘n roll slummery.  I was still hovering around the 10th step of my ongoing post-hippie rehabilitation, when my buddy Chad “The Bad” popped by practice with an object of much interest.  Down on one knee, he reverently unlatched the black and curvy case before him.  A deal was struck and a check was written.  Glam unleashed, the time had come to spread some glitter.

Ace, I owe you an apology.

But what to do with it all?  I once saw an interview with the author whence he noted the improbability that those who reviewed his book had read it.  “Do the math,” he said, “there’s too many pages to read it all in that amount of time.”  So true.  It 0nly took me a decade of false starts and a few months of dedication.  Nothing that would happen by an end-of-the-day-Friday sort of deadline.

With other books, I’ve made it a point to look Google-up the words and references I don’t know as I go, tightening my mind’s grasp on our language, to more firmly bear-hug and french-kiss this great English tongue of ours, in American.  Well, that wasn’t really in the cards for this one.  If there was ever a time to let oblique references and literary obfuscation wash over me like a dip under the Niagara, it was now.

So yeah, it’s big.  And full of good stuff.  Diamonds a-plenty.  In plenty of rough.  The shear quantity of rough parts I found troubling, though I suppose his editor did not.

On the up side, I really enjoyed the whole Salinger/Glass family thing.  I happily latched on to Hal as an updated Holden Caulfield beset by East Coast prep-school privilege and brimming with potential, yet unsure of how to proceed with no real dreams and/or direction to point his way save the expectations of his uniquely gifted family.  But I had nothing but head-scratching for the whole Quebecois Separatist subplot,  though it was funny and the accent was outrageous.  That being said, after a thousand pages, I was getting pretty curious as to how the whole ridiculous attack of the wheelchair-bound assassins was going to play out, to see what sort of mini-eschaton was about unfold on the courts of the Academy.  To see how DFW was going to tie it all together.  But then?  Well…  nothing.

Argh.

I’m not big on plot.  My knee-jerk reaction to the best-novel-ever question is On The Road.  But there were some pot-boiler, page-turner twists in there that ought to be going unambiguously Somewhere.  Sure, you can cut up the book and re-string some scenes together in a more chronologically consistent order.  You can make some educated guesses as to what lies behind the many veils of ambiguity.  You can fill in the narrative gaps about the short-term fate of our wonderboy, Inc.  But why-oh-why-oh-why does Mr. Wallace feel justified in cranking out dozen-page-long drug-mumbled rambles plucked right from the brains of addle-minded minor characters without giving us just a little proper satisfaction as to how the thing turns out?  Yeah?  Not saying I need to be spoon-fed Readi-Whip and Cheez-Whiz to be kept happy, but a wee bit of payoff would have been polite.  Is it too much to ask?  Dan Brown wouldn’t do this to me.

Despite this (point-missing, I know) grumble, INFJ is certainly a thing of beauty with much to ponder.  Ponderous Exhibit #1 being addiction.  Nary a character escaped the grip of some compulsion or another, chemical or otherwise.  But mostly chemical.

Addiction, in INFJ, is the unspoken tie that binds every last man, woman and child in the near North American future.  Your fix could be as simple as TV, or over-training for tennis, or as terrifying as multi-day blackouts at the mercy of an alphabet soup of grade-A pharmaceuticals.  At the root, it’s not so different.

DFW delves deep into 12-step insight, including the concept of learning to separate Identifying and Comparing.  The idea is that when listening to a fellow addict’s tale of woe, regardless of how horrible it may be — and DFW has a flair for the surreal and gratuitous grotesque, disturbingly — the important thing to remember is the common shared humanity between you and the speaker, to look at this fellow suffering human being as being like you, with the same feelings and fears, the same shames and weaknesses, and the same longings for escape.  Don’t compare, don’t judge, don’t rank, just understand how they felt, how you’ve felt, how much we’ve all got in common.

Despite the hyperbole, there’s a lot of  stop-and-look-in-the-mirror stuff in there.  In other words, there’s plenty for any honest person to Identify with, as long as you can remember not to Compare.

So, now that I’ve read it?  I’d like to read it all over again.  I missed too much linguistic trickery the first time, and the words were too luxurious,  too sweetly decadent, not to be enjoyed a second time.  Eventually.

For instance, most of the story takes place in the fictitious just-outside-of-Boston town of Enfield, Massachusetts.  However, there really was an Enfield, Massachusettes.  It’s now at the bottom of a lake, washed-over and drowned-out in the name of progress, just like the book’s experialist territories formerly of USA.  There’s a lot more where that came from.  A lot more.

I must admit that I had pinned my hopes on a more transcendent experience through this journey of a thousand pages, to catch a view of some new Xanadu now that I’ve climbed to the top of this mighty pulp mountain.  INFJ is too realistic for that.  Like the character of Don Gately, on occasion we find moments of enlightenment, but most days we must struggle to do the redemptive work before us.  As the adage says: “One day at a time.”

I find this record comforting.  It takes the edge off of life like Bob Marley used to, back a few years ago when I didn’t have any real responsibilities to wig-out about.  Unfortunately, “Don’t worry about a thing ’cause everything’s gonna be alright,” just doesn’t cut the cheese anymore.

Those sorts of sentiments did wonders back when the semester would screech to a halt regardless of the marks on my final exams.  Or back when a job was something you found in the newspaper, applied for, and started the same day after answering “YES” to the question: “Do you have a valid driver’s license and reliable transportation.”  Yeah, everything used be alright when any day you could walk away.

I’ll still take a stroll with those Three Little Birds, but life is no longer such a beach.  Responsibilities and consequences are now part of what it means to get out of bed in the morning.  The boys in Art Brut are catching on to this.  Late 20’s and holding on for dear life, Art Brut is smart enough to know that modern life is cracked, but haven’t figured out the fix.  It’s nice to pop on the headphones and know that I’m not alone.

I guess it really comes down to rolling back the clock just a few years.  When I’m 44, I’m sure there will be plenty of 30-something sentiments that tug nostalgically at my heart strings.  I don’t know what they might be (Joan Baez and Carole King are frighteningly coming to mind) but I’ll find out when I get there.

But the tunes of Art Brut — the simple yet spot-on guitars, the lyrics of lament, the self-haranguing humor, the Cure cover — whip me back to a romanticized past.  It’s a little cathartic break until duty calls.  Personal demons purged, I’ll take Art Brut FTW.

This book has been on my shelf for about 10 years.  Since the late nineties, it’s been skulking there in the corner.  Bright-oranged and baby-blued, unmissable in girth and shelf-sagging heft.  (Can’t find it?  Look for the low spot on Shelf “W”.)  This year marked my third attempt at getting through, though I must confess that my motives had not been pure.

My first swing at INFJ was driven by thoughts of Ought.  As a recent graduate in the fantastic field of English Literature, I knew that it was my duty to continue my education.  (Call me old-fashioned, but I still buy into the idea that the goal of a Liberal Arts Education is to learn how to educate one’s self, ’til death or senility do we part.)  I had heard tale of this this new scribbler, this inscrutable hotshot Dave Wallace, and felt I ought to size him up as only I, college graduate, could.  So I read The Girl With Curious Hair and started in on INFJ.  Didn’t get far.  At all.  I had cash-in-hand waitering jobs to attend to.  (English Major career opportunities and all that.)

A few years later, the urge hit me again.  This time, I needed to get a few new intellectual bragging rights to wave around.  Rock ‘n Roll was good kicks, but my new venue for social performance was lousy with grad students.  I figured that tackling the Gen X version of Ulysses would do the trick the next time someone asked, “Read anything good lately?”  Unfortunately, the answer “I’ve read INFJ” is just as satisfying at a cocktail party as “I’m reading INFJ.”  And since nobody else had finished it either, there weren’t many questions relating to the captivating climax and the delicious denouement.  There was no need to complete the quest, as long as it loitered on the back of the john with a bookmark stuck firmly in place.

But this year he came up a lot.  New people that I’d met in new circles found him worth reading, indeed, worth finishing.  He seemed to have something to say.  So I licked a finger and held it to the wind, catching more and more interviews, essays, addresses, and other bandanna-brained dives into the icky depths of modern  life.  In death, his once-shelved specter loomed large.  I started to love the guy, the man, DFW.

Motivational rudder righted, compass reset, and course corrected, I set sail once again.

This post has been clogging up the blog for the last week.  I just can’t seem to get it right, and now I know why.

I like to write about things that I like.  I try to stay positive, to be a thumbs-up, glass-is-half-full fella.  But even when trying my best to stick to the bright side of life, I find it’s all too easy to slip into cynicism and find fault.  Just a few snarky remarks can undercut the upbeat and chase the joy away from a sunshiny day.  And as the adage goes, it only takes one bad apple to poison the punch.

So here’s the problem:  I just don’t like this record!  I love Matisyahu, but something was off.  So yesterday, to double-check my lens, cleanse the palate, and tighten up the eardrums, I listened back to my (and, I’m guessing, your) introduction to the man:  Live At Stubb’s.  What a disc!  I was lucky enough to catch the Stubb’s-era band shortly thereafter.  They took the stage and put on the kind of show that gets you high even if you’re keeping your feet on the ground, chemically speaking.

The band was still a little green, which you can hear on Stubb’s.  For every hot lick and tight break, there’s a meandering noodle-to-nowhere moment.  Babylon By Bus this was not.  But the troubles were forgivable as the guys were still fresh enough to get really, Really, OMG! excited about playing to a few thousand people in a college town a thousand miles from home.  They weren’t deer-in-the-headlights self-star struck, but there was this sense of collective joy that the dream was coming true and we were all in this together.

And the frontman had a burning fire in the belly.  Far past rolling in the shtick, his earnest recounting of his people’s past and his Let’s-Go-Build-Us-A-Temple! enthusiasm for the future made you forget that there was anything strange about the scene.  But, alas, that was then.

The critical response to this new album has been strangely kind.   Not that it’s been fawning; it’s been split 50/50.   What surprises me is that the critiques of the actual music have been fair to positive, pointing out the Sly & Robbie collaborations and other bits of finely-tuned production.  The scathing remarks have been directed much more at the man, this oddity named Matisyahu.  Sometimes it’s cheap shots at all purveyors of  kidnapped reggae, a broadside condemnation of  the music’s colonization by the fairer-skinned peoples, with curses cast in passing at the likes of Sublime and 311.  (The Clash will always get a true-punk pass on these things.)  Often the ire is focused on the historical inaccuracy of the spectacle.

Although Matisyahu stretches your eclecticism tolerance to new heights, what could be more natural?  A hippie kid rediscovering his Jewish roots would find it hard to miss some sort of cosmic connection to the chant-down-Babylon music of the Jamaican champions of the Ethiopian Zion.  If you’ve got a beef with authenticity, pick a fight with the original Rastafarians for misappropriating 3000 years of glorious tradition (from Moses to Sandy Koufax), not some Phish-following kid who decided to borrow it back.

Not that this is a reggae album, which is the real problem.  “Light” is a mash-up of Hip-Hop hype and Jack Johnson tripe that loses itself in a thousand-layered studio sheen.  But I’m a loyal fan, and I’ll be here for the next one.  Looking up expectantly, channeling my inner Norman Vincent Peale, believing that Matisyahu will rediscover his inner Stubb’s, and that good things are a-gonna come.

Sometimes I’m a little slow to catch on.

Despite having been told by numerous good-eared friends that I should buy this, and despite the fact the I’ve seen them live and know first-hand that they’ve got the stuff to really rip it up, it still took me a year or so to grab my own copy of The End Is Not The End, the latest album by the Columbus-based, and God-fearing, House Of Heroes.

Maybe my reluctance had to do with those last two qualities.  It’s hard to have any critical distance from music released by those within your milieu.   And I’ve always been biased to quick-skip tunes writ for the safely cordoned-off, closed market of the CCM crowd.  Preaching to the choir creates mediocre music like Trekkies breed Tribbles.

Please forgive me, Listening Public, for I have sinned.  I should have tried this disc a long time ago.  It is, as one buddy of mine sez, “all killer and no filler.”  Each Sing-A-Long (indeed, Radio-Ready) chorus is sandwiched in angular, proggy guitar hooks that launch the 3-chords-and-a-hunch Power-Pop template into sonic bliss.

And they’re funny!  My favorite track (at this point)  is “Baby’s A Red” about crushing hard on a lil’ commie cutey.  It splits the difference between The Beach Boy’s Surfer Girl and The Dead Milkmen classic, Punk Rock Girl.  Listen to it for the “Hammer & Sickle” backing vocals alone.  “I’m not ashamed to be your comrade.”  Indeed!

Not that it’s all fun-n-games.   You can’t pretend to be Muse on every bridge and breakdown without taking your craft pretty seriously.  And you can’t sample preacher extraordinaire Rich Nathan pontificating on capital-”g” Grace (as they do on “Voices”) without a dose of divine conviction.

So why now?  House of Heroes is playing Sioux Falls this weekend.  I thought I’d check it out for kicks, but after spinning this record all week, I’m really looking forward to the show.  Though I was once a skeptic, I am now going as a fan.

This summer, I finally made it to a show.

The first time Perry came to my town was with the original Lollapalooza line-up at the idyllic Blossom Music Center.  I was invited by a gal I was kinda dating.  Hindsight being 20/20, I think I wish I had been dating her a little more.  She was cool. Cooler than me.  (Speaking of nothing shocking…)  But my intimidated 16-year-old self stuck his head in the sand and his fingers in his ears when the invitation came.  Jane’s represented a secret world of clove-smoking art students, clad in weird black xl t-shirts emblazoned with letters like PIL and KMFDM and XTC.  I had yet to crack the code, let alone be initiated into the scene.

But I think I’m glad I waited.

That first trip was marred by reports of blasphemy and nudity and a sloppy set cranked out by a band about to blow.  Seems Perry’s a better man these days.  A little Torah never hurt anyone, eh?  He was certainly in high spirits in the ‘burgh this June, bouncing around the stage in his lamé and lycra-infused fashions, peeling off a layer a tune as he proved that 50 ain’t too old to rock and roll.  Did I mention that he’s 50?  Goodness.  Stamina.

I’d witnessed Perry do what Perry does once before with Porno For Pyros a long time back.  But I’d never sat at the feet of my all-time-guitar-hero Dave Navarro (sorry, Edge,) nor had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the elusive Eric Avery ’til now. I’ve often watched the Three Days documentary DVD which commemorates one of the last big tours featuring Flea on the four-string.  This was a different experience.

Of course, Flea played the parts flawlessly, sliding effortlessly from supple to spank.  Eric didn’t care about that.  He wrote the damn parts in the first place and he was gonna play ‘em any way he wanted.  This meant pounding it out while stomping out a tribal tantric circle dance like an Iroquois warrior preparing for the fight, clad in direct-from-1991 combat boots and cutoffs.  No poofery for this fella.  While bass players are often unjustly remaindered to the periphery of the 8×10 glossy, hiding behind the ego(s) up front, this band never would have happened without Eric giving Perry a platform on which to wail.  He’s the most essential Jane; here’s to détente if not reconciliation.

It was good to finally make it to a show.  It was great to see the band in fine form after all these years.  And it was pleasing to look around at the beer-sipping crowd of 30/40-Somethings politely comparing notes while respecting each other’s space to enjoy a civilized conert.

We all got older, but Jane’s stayed the same.

A few weeks ago, Bob Dylan got himself rounded up by the New Jersey police as a suspected up-to-no good, itinerant, vagrant-type individual.  Described by concerned residents as looking “scruffy” and “eccentric,”  the officers had no choice but to respond to the call that a man was wandering around the neighborhood, alone.

Once apprehended, Dylan was found to be entirely without ID, proving to be a problem as the 20-something gendarmes drew a blank when the culprit claimed to be a Mr. Bob Dylan.  Now under scrutiny as a hypothetical celebrity, the fuzz drove the bemused Bob back to the stadium where the marquee claimed that there was indeed a Mr. Dylan playing in town with the also unknown duo Willie Nelson & John “Ze Coug” Mellencamp.

Everything worked out in the end as there were in fact several staff and crew members available who could vouch for both the existence of such a musician/public figure, and his resemblance to the man in the back of the black ‘n white cruiser.

What can we learn from this escapade?  What lessons can we take from this frightful foray to the dark side of the law?  Namely that Simon & Garfunkel were on to something 40 years ago:

Interesting live bootleg, eh?  Lots more words ‘n references than the album version, enough to give both REM and Billy Joel a run for their money.

I know it’s been way too long since I’ve hit the right balance of inspired and untired to do a little writing, but the last issue of Spin has convinced me it’s nigh time to pop the cork on another bottle of blog.

So it’s back to my roots; back to the guys that most recently lit my muse.  Columbus, OH may not be an Athens or an Austin or a Seattle, but this college town has got more than its share of real deal rock ‘n roll, as evidenced by the August ‘09 issue of Spin which declared that it’s pages contained “100 of the Greatest Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard.”

The headline was right on the money.  Yes, 96% of these guys I’ve never heard.  But the other 4% were some of the greatest.

I know because 4 of the top 100  hailed from what  was once known as Cowtown, the now magnificent megalopolis of Columbus.  That’s 4% of Spin’s Top 100 Worldwide.  That’s saying something for a snatch of real estate which sure as hail ain’t New York or LA or Chicago or even Hotlanta.

Granted, all of these guys peaked before I earned the right to plug in my Fender Twin, but it’s this scene that gave me the dream to keep it going on and on and on.  (Not Stopping Believing, as it were.)

So, for the record, they are:

Gaunt

Great Plains

Royal Crescent Mob

Scrawl

I’m a little bummed that I can’t find a decent picture online of any of these guys rocking out in obviously Central Ohio sort of way.  Sure, there’s a million pictures of bands bashing away at Bernie’s, but they all post-date the digital revolution (iPhones n’at.)  I’m sure that somebody out there has got a stash and a scanner.  Get to work!  Because of this, I’m using the above picture of some guy wearing a Gaunt t-shirt.  It’s the best that I can do.

Just to round out the Buckeye Beat, I must also mention that the hard workin’ Michael Stanley Band made Spin’s list of “Essential Heartland Rock” at slot number six with his EMI-released and spot-on titled, “Heartland”.  Trust me, he was a big deal if you grew up on bunny-ear-only Cleveland TV.  Kind of a local King Of All Media.  The kind of guy who only had to play one show at year, at the biggest shed in town, and it always sold out.

Still not convinced?  To let the proving begin, here he is with a song I know you know, the glorious romp “He Can’t Love You.”  Enjoy: