The Clash:  Live In Akron at the Civic Theater

Yes, this is a bootleg.  I mention it for three reasons:  First of all, it’s The Clash, so it’s great. Secondly, it illustrates where a lot of my listening has happened over the last year.  Everyone knows that you can beg/borrow/steal most anything you want from the internet.  While your opinions may vary on the commercial/legal/moral aspects of this topic, on the happy-hippie side of things it’s also birthed an explosion of pro-bono, fan-fueled, bootleg distribution unearthing all manner of gems. Crate-diggers would have died for this stuff a decade ago.  Now it’s easy listening.

Thirdly, when it comes to music, it’s the personal connection that trumps all. When this show was taped, I was probably consulting with the docs on my tonsillectomy just down the street at Children’s Hospital. How Mom & Dad could have missed the show is beyond me, but I do thank them for prioritizing my health.

We All Have Hooks For Hands:  Girls

When I first arrived in Sioux Falls, I set out a-looking for the local scene.  Internet searches came up dry, and alt-weeklies were not to be found.  I was bummed, but I kept my eyes open and eventually started to see things in a new light.  Sure, this town might not be big enough to support a hipster enclave or a proper strip of dive bars and record shops, but who needs that anyway?  There’s more than enough talented people here waiting tables and roasting coffee while staying up all night GarageBand’ing their dreams and making something beautiful.

Exhibit one:  We All Have Hooks For Hands latest EP, Girls.  This is a fine example of what I’ll call team-sport indie rock, a twee-punk shout-along sound somewhere between Wavves and that Battles tune.  (Hopefully, some better examples will come along before I publish this.)  Anyway, you can download it for free.  Give this video a try and tell me that it can’t hang with anything the kids in your town are putting out.  I double-dog dare ya.

The Black Swans: Don’t Blame The Stars

To paraphrase Cinderella, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till you’re gone.  I had to move a thousand miles away before I gave The Black Swans a fair shake.  To push the road metaphor a little too far, they met me exactly halfway in Rockford, IL with a Daytrotter Session, tossing off a hasty taste of forgotten sounds and leaving me missing what I had once skipped past.

So I looked up their latest on Amazon and had it shipped over.  It arrived full of surprises and contradictions.  Teardrop tunes, surreal spoken-word setups, rooster calls.  Funny stuff riding shotgun with a fiddler’s ghost.  Don’t Blame The Stars is a torch song to lost loves, murky old Americana, and some Desire-era Dylan.  Yes, sometimes it’ll make you laugh, but there’s all sorts of blood on those tracks.

Fleet Foxes:  Helplessness Blues

‘Bout time to include something on my list that might be on yours?  Around the age of 21, I’d imbibed so much Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, and CSN that my body revolted and I couldn’t stomach another drop.  I was off the stuff for years, but when Helplessness Blues hit the middlebrow circuit I fell right off the wagon.  It’s simply gorgeous stuff, fearfully and wonderfully made.  But it’s the lyrics that set the hook when they sang out some of my own post-adolescent, 20-something thoughts.  The kind of growing up and making something of it thoughts that echo through your 30′s (and from what I’ve been told, your 40′s and 50′s too.)  Who knows, maybe next I’ll order up a shot of Sam Beam with an Iron & Wine chaser.

TV Girl:  Benny And The Jetts

Back to the internet-fueled topic at the top, I do a fair amount of blog-spotting, scanning hipster posts from tertiary towns that gotta dig up their own good times.  The enthusiasm runs higher when you’ve got skin in the game.  I mean really, Brooklynites and Silver Lakers – don’t you just choke on the choices?   My head would swim, my distracted heart lying lonely and loveless, left cold every morning after last night’s next big thing.

So who’s TV Girl?  I don’t know, but this little EP was floating around for free on some blog somewhere.  It’s a second-rate recording, a bedroom labor of love.  But I’m thankful for it.  It’s good for driving around town.  It makes me smile every time.  So go for it, all y’all:  Make a record.  Put it on BandCamp.  Give it away or charge me 5 bucks.  You might not make it big, but somebody out there will dig it.  Somebody like me.

As a younger man, I flirted with the thought that I might make it as a rock ‘n roll reviewer.  A few school paper write-ups to the contrary, I chased that dream about as realistically as a 5-year hoping to be an astronaut.  While I still kick myself for not pursuing the pen with purpose during those middle years when time was abundant, sleep arbitrary, and the brain constantly buzzed with the shiny newness of all things, I now know that Professional Pop Critic would never have been my beat.

See, I just can’t keep up.  I always think I’ve got a pretty good handle on things until sometime around December 2nd when I first catch a Best Of The Year podcast or three.  And then it dawns on me that I never did get around to hearing all of the recommendations shot my way.  Good stuff too.  Stuff I should like, and probably will in a year or two.   But right now I’m still stuck in the past, living life like it’s 2010.

I know that the Black Keys’ El Camino should be on the top of my list, but to be honest I didn’t really delve into Brothers until a few months back.  I love my lady Feist, but I’ve yet to hear anything but a single or two off the new one.  (Her live set Look At What The Light Did Now has been keeping me content.)

David Bazan’s Strange Negotiations is way up on the must-listen list, but after the gut-punch of his last one, I’m taking my time until I have a few hours to recover from the expected trauma to my little soul. And I’m sure I’ll love all of the new Wild Flag, Deer Tick, Yuck, M83, Girls, and even Ezra Furman.  Just ask me next year, m’kay?

This not to say that I didn’t find some great stuff this year.  So mañana I’ll post a few things that came along, that I might treat to more thoughts more fully when the moment strikes.  Stay tuned!

Why do I read the books I read?  Got my reasons.  Three of ‘em:

There’s the stuff I read because I should (another turn through The Great Gatsby before that new film comes out), the stuff I pick up to keep up (Freak-o-nomics, Gladwell, et al.), and the stuff that makes its way to the back of the john due to some sort of personal connection.

I’ll never champion one category over another.  Gems can be found glittering in all, and it’s a mystic thing how the right book can find the right reader at the right time.  Oft heaven sent, me thinks.

Kick Butt touched down in category three.  I had the good luck to spend a little time with the author while my special lady was “on the market”, that bizarre combination of auction block and poker tournament that awaits as a final right of passage for grad students done good.  More than a few people I ran into mentioned that he’d recently published a novel, and a pretty good one at that.

I’d have to agree.  And I don’t even understand football.  At all.

Kick Butt, which follows a helluva season with the fictional Morgan University Knights, is sheared from Tom Wolfe’s starched-white cloth.  Think a less ambitious Man In Full with a little splash of Charlotte Simmons, tossed into the deep end of southern-style collegiate sports.

Yes, it’s kind of a big deal down there, where the culture-clash still simmers between antebellum royalty and carpet-bagging Yankees, between black and white, rich and poor.  ‘Tis football that blessedly binds them all.

And’s got me too?  There’s a great quote before Chapter 15 that points to the fact that the sports metaphor is now not only the indispensable crutch of daily conversation, it has metastasized into the central conceit of our American existence.  It is our shared cultural touchstone: what Homer was to the Ancients, the Church to the Middle Ages.  Sports are the shorthand for our noble quests, our battles between good and evil, between the self and a sacrifice to a higher call.  Go team!

Perhaps that’s why I found the whole thing so relatable, despite the opaque scoring mechanisms and inscrutable tactics employed on the field.   Did I mention I don’t have a scrap of smarts about football?

I only wish that it ran another hundred pages long.  There are plenty of  interesting second-string characters begging to get back on the field, and a lot of loose ends which I’d enjoy seeing tied up, or maybe just strung out a little more.

Perhaps there’s a sequel in the works?  A Kick Butter?

Jose Feliciano. His mellifluous name always brings two things to mind:  Steve Buscemi in Fargo and David Sedaris taking guitar lessons.

Good stuff, both.  But this next gem is better.

Every December, the family gets together to record something for the Grandpas and the Grandmas that they might enjoy revisiting when the ghost of Christmas Next calls up the ghost of Christmas Past.  There’s always a few tracks that come together nicely.  Someday, I’ll Bandcamp the hits à la Sufjan and see what comes of it.

In the meantime, even though it’s the new year, here’s a little Christmas cheer:

mia sings feliz navidad

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My favorite drug got the full-length treatment in Daniel Levitin’s science-lite best seller. I’d heard the guy interviewed a long time back, methinks on a podcast of Sound Opinions, but it was a pine-scented Christmas morning surprise to find his book in my hands.

A prog-rocker turned record-producer turned academic-researcher, Dr. Levitin isn’t one of small ambitions.  Not surprisingly his book takes on quite a bit too, with three topics spinning in heavy rotation:  music theory, scientific memoir, and ruminations on music and evolution.

The first cut would fascinate anyone who loves them tunes. For that alone, I’d short-list this book for everybody who picks up a mic, straps on a guitar, or sits behind a mixer. He spends a lot time at the intersection of music theory and perception, harmonizing what you remember from high school band with what you’ve absorbed from years of radio-listening experience.  If you ever wondered why a “G” on a telecaster sounds different from a “G” on a strat, this book’s for you.

The needle skips a bit on the biographical stuff, but if you worked with Watson & Crick you’d probably want to talk about it too.

Finally, he attempts to explain why music evolved as it has, and why it is so universal and so universally loved.  In doing so, he offers a rational, scientific explanation for oddities such as the lovely Liv Tyler:

Dr. Levitin asserts that the ability to master the complex mental and physical feats of coordination necessary to perform music may indicate a high level of reproductive fitness to a potential mate. And, as he puts it, “for the top rock stars, such as Mick Jagger, physical appearance doesn’t seem to be much of an issue.”

So there’s a little handy motivation for the next time your kid complains about practicing — making this an enjoyable and ultimately useful book.

So hear me now or hear me later.  I keep my lips zipped too much these days — and such silence is not spun of gold.

However, for Exhibit One, I’ll throw out a nicely-countered counter-example.  Lou Reed & Metallica’s exposition of what not to do when the mic’s been passed to you:

The music doesn’t really bug me. Great art is hard to come by, and just because you throw some world-class talents (if you ask the fans) together doesn’t mean that the Godz will descend and mightily bless the frets. But it was worth a shot.

The budget’s what gets me.  Months before this came out, there were websites built and photos printed and talk-shows booked.  Did someone think they had a hit?  Strange to think about how much went into putting this on the shelf, to carefully craft the image, to have it all undone by some clerk with a well-witted sharpie and a little free time.

Oh well, I’ll jam with ya Lou. Give me a ring. It’ll be golden.

But today is all different.  A wet 60-something, with a chill blowing from the north.  A September day for this December boy.

One really shouldn’t rush into things like this anyway.

The other day I read that Booker’s got a brand new bag.  So with a good-to-see-you-again grin, I picked up the pieces and revisited his last album, the Neil Young’d and DBT’d joint Potato Hole.  Ah, good stuff.

After a spin, I thought it would make a fine jam-a-long soundtrack, only fitting as “Green Onions” was one of the first tunes I tried to figure out when my second-hand, knock-off Strat and Cry-Baby were shiny new teenage treasures.

Picking out a few of the licks, I wondered what a cover would sound like.

Copping the tone seemed easy enough.  Neil’s never been a fleet-fingered picker.  (But on this one, who’s who?  The Drive By Truckers have always had some Southern Man grit about them, and the skinny is that Booker plays a mean-n-loose guitar too, though he usually saddles up to the B3 before the red light blinks.)  After a few dozen experiments, I realized that the only thing Neil and I have in common is that we can’t help but sound like ourselves. (A quality I still prize in a musician, despite its application to Kenny G.)

With the new Hot Sauce Committee on the brain, I sliced up some beats from the Monkee’s and added some fuzzy leads, landing sonically in the mid 90′s back when Primal Scream tried to sound American and the Soup Dragons wrestled Kula Shaker for the alt-rock bronze.

Not such a bad place to hang on a summer’s day.

my take on native new yorker

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Some alternate titles to this post would include:

“It Takes A Village to Kill a Pop Song”
“Death By 50 Tracks”
Or to quote Tim Gunn, “A Tortured Mess.”

(But maybe I made it work?)

Like a new friend who feels like an old pal, Free Energy had me at one listen.  The tunes and technique sat in that nice comfy zone between just right and endearingly flawed.  They were fun and new, but familiar too.  Then Rocs put her slender finger of perception on the crux of it:  “They sound like you guys.”

By “you guys”, she was referring to my old pop-rock combo and our quixotic quest to meld 30 years of rock ‘n roll into 3 minutes of aural bliss.  She was on to something, especially when one cocks an ear to the solid but not exactly, eh, earth-quaking guitar figures.

Anyhoo, from a recording point of view, I thought this would be a darn easy assignment.  So I looked up a few tabs and learned a few of the licks and dove right into laying down some takes.  But something wasn’t right.

I should have know better.  You can’t build garage-rock with a computer.  You’ve got to let it grow like a seizable crop.  It’s got to be an all-organic affair nurtured in a damp basement or a drafty attic.  Some out-of-the-way place where you can wood-shed your way to air-wave victory.

To rock this way, some bunch of “you guys” have to get together and let a little alchemy overtake the sum of your parts.  It might take a few years or it might gel in just one night, but a lone wolf in a one-man digital den won’t make the cut.  The results will be the opposite of my intentions, but there’s some nice moments in there, so what the heck…

my take on bang pop

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It started as the fallback safety-soundtrack:  Always at the ready for dinner parties of mixed company, late nights chasing deadlines, filling cracks in conversations, drowning out things that go bump in the night.  But after a hundred spins or so, sketches of stories started night-swimming out of the echoes.  Then they beached themselves in my brain.

Such is the case with “VCR”.  There’s not much to it. It’s just another night with you and me, speculating superstars couched by the TV.

And that’s alright.  And everything’s going to be OK.

Because you… you just know.

You just do.

my take on vcr

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