no pie!

A few years back, Rhino released a compilation (which seems to be a compilation of some other compilations...I'm confused) called Mother Goose Rocks! which are settings of popular lyrics for children (nursery rhymes and the like) set to parodies of popular songs. Okay, sounds like Weird Al Jr. or something - but at his best Weird Al's pretty damned good. I've heard only one of the Mother Goose Rocks tracks, but it's just wonderful: this remake/remodel of Ben Folds Five's "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces," adapting the lyrics to "Three Little Kittens." (The song's billed to "Ben Folds Laundry" - har.)

What's really impressive is (a) this is not Ben Folds (I have no idea who played on these tracks - and I don't think they're listed in the credits), but (b) a pretty fine impersonation not only of his singing, but also of his piano-playing and his band's drumming and bass playing (they even throw in some of that distorto-bass used to roughen up the edges now and again). The song itself is a clever rearrangement of "One Angry Dwarf..." - turning chord progressions inside out or varying them - and I might be nearly blasphemous or something in saying that it just might outrock the original as well.

looks like you blew a seal...

Most ice-cream trucks around here play one of two tunes: "Turkey in the Straw," or "The Entertainer." (Why those two?) But recently, I've been hearing a truck that plays the theme from "Popeye the Sailor Man" (I don't know what that tune's actually called), and so I'm wondering: what, does that truck sell spinach-flavored ice cream?

(Incidentally, the phrase "ice-cream truck" never fails to bring this song to mind for me:
The Leaving Trains "Ice Cream Truck")

back to road signs

My new favorite road sign:

Lobster Typing Zone!

we once knew the story

All that talk about construction, sweaty manual labor, the manly art of graphic design, and rock-eroding urine might mislead folks as to the demographic sought by this globbo. I also am moved by gossamer lyricism, the velvety pluck of the acoustic guitar, the moist vulnerability of a tenor tremolo nearly overcome by romantic longing. (No I'm not selling my original copy of Belle & Sebastian's Tiger Milk.) And so, today, prettiness.

A year or so ago, I picked up the Simon & Garfunkel box set containing (nearly) all their studio releases. That parenthetical "nearly" means that the set omits their later collaboration "My Little Town" and the three live versions of songs that appear on their first greatest hits collection. (Was that the first time a greatest hits comp featured previously unreleased tracks? I can't track down if those recordings of those songs - "Homeward Bound," "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," and today's featured attraction, "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her" - had been released elsewhere.) That last omission was disappointing - because the live version of "Emily" squashes the studio take like a moldy little grape. I will attribute that fact to the lovely, autumnal volume of reverb in the recording, the passionately syncopated guitar playing, and Art Garfunkel's unearthly, effortless, and dramatic vocal. It would be easy - too easy - to mock this song's rather overripe poetics - but doing so would assume that songs depend upon their lyrics rather than the lyric depending upon (in the sense of hanging downward from, to be plucked) the song. You can buy perfect grapes at the supermarket - but even if it's a little bit off, that grape you plucked yourself from the tree on that wonderful day - you know, the one where between "held her hand" and "awoke" there was that guitar solo? - are you going to analyze the flavor with a spectrograph, or love it for all it comes along with? I thought so.

When I was listening to that song, my mind for some reason thought of Yes' "Turn of the Century" (from Going for the One) - and the more I thought of it, the more I kinda think the band thought of it too. The reverb has a similar feel, as do some of the acoustic guitar rhythms - and while Yes, being Yes, constructs a much more complicated and perhaps needlessly allusive story, there's a certain similarity in romantic arc as well. Musically, the band gets an awful lot of mileage out of its core melodic cell: that three-note ascending scale thingy, which gets permutated the heck out of (it even doubles up as a rhythmic motif in the middle section).

So, yeah, things get a bit florid around here sometimes. You may want to finish up with a bit of Motorhead or something if you suddenly feel like you must needs wear a fluffy white shirt with enormous sleeves.

Simon & Garfunkel "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her"
Yes "Turn of the Century"

can you read the signs yet? can you read the signs?

Since we're traveling, more roadsigns are presenting themselves for my contemplation than usual. Most are fairly clear...but there's one in particular that's just completely inept. Presenting, Person With Odd Object On a Stick:

Okay, I realize this is actually supposed to represent someone shoveling, and that that act stands in for construction work generally...but the key items of info that need to be graphically conveyed in that case are: (a) there may be a person on or near the roadway; and (b) the person is there to do construction work. But why the anonymous artist felt the need to depict our worker's load at all (when it's just a distraction from the essential act of shoveling), why the load appears to be the upper portion of the pointy spire of hair sported by the boss in Dilbert, and why the shoveling implement apparently comes equipped with some sort of heavy-looking, triangular basin-like arrangement...that's a mystery. Either that, or the sign shows a person who has just speared a hitherto-unknown suit of cards (a mutant crossbreed of clubs and diamonds, with diamonds' redness apparently being recessive) with a poker of sorts.

Fortunately for construction workers everywhere, such musings have not distracted me to the extent that I go careening into them as they work.

scariness!

I'm on vacation - that's why there've been fewer posts, and none with music. Anyway.

Addendum to the post on metal from two weeks ago: while I understand why metal bands choose names that are scary and death-oriented, that desire can sometimes seem pretty desperate...as with the most ridiculous name in the genre I've come across. And that is the band Obituary.

Okay, it's death-related...but how scary is the thought of 4-point type detailing Aunt Myrtle's love of flowers, her beloved grandchildren Timmy, Sara Jo, and Kimberly, and her request that well-wishers offer donations to the Poodle Fanciers of America? I mean, c'mon guys...you're just not trying hard enough.

sheer fucking brilliance

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1371/5551029.html

(Thanks Paula!)

my favorite headline this year

...is here. As interesting as the article actually is, I was rather hoping it would refer to a place where you might find Douglas Adams hanging out...

(I wonder how much the Mars candy company paid for the last bit of that URL...)

point that thing somewhere else

I've always thought Grace Slick had one of the more compelling voices in rock. I've also thought it a bit odd that she's usually underplayed when the (generally tedious) discussion of strong women in rock comes up - perhaps the absolutely horrific music she was involved with during the '80s and '90s made the idea seem a bit rude, like belching loudly during a golf tournament.

Anyway. The thing about Slick that I've always liked is that she has no patience with the notion that she's supposed to be nice. She's sharp, witty, aggressive, off-kilter, more than a bit strange at times, particularly in her sense of humor. And even though when I mentioned Slick's voice above, I was referring to her literal voice, its actual sound, it's also true that those qualities show up in her songwriting voice as well (a bit less apparent in her musicianly voice: she does play piano, organ, and the occasional recorder, but the credits on the CDs I have are sketchy about who plays what where, and other piano players are listed). An example of that odd, slightly off-putting sense of humor is "Lather" (from 1968's Crown of Creation). Of course there's a bit of a political edge to the song's lyrics, but Slick's alternately bemused and queasy portrait of an overgrown baby is miles away from the usual we-are-children-in-the-garden hippie blah-blah.

Last week I put up two tracks that set one of Thomas Pynchon's ditties to music; here's more litrachur for yuz, in the form of the cut-n-paste Ulysses that is Jefferson Airplane's "Rejoyce" (from After Bathing at Baxter's, the band's 1967 shambolic* masterpiece). Like the novel (I suppose) the song is polymorphous, structurally and stylistically; if nothing else, the song avoids the slavish "aren't we sophisticated" vibe of too many literary adaptations.

Finally, moving along from relatively straightforward if odd storytelling, to fractured modernist narratives, to completely what-the-fuck-land: "Eskimo Blue Day," from Volunteers, 1969 - the first Airplane album I picked up...at a grade-school benefit fair in a whitebread upper-middle-class suburb in the mid-seventies. Also found: The Fugs' Tenderness Junction, Fifty Foot Hose's Cauldron, and Timothy Leary's Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. I thought it was like finding The Ray Conniff Singers' Greatest Hits in a metalhead's collection. As far as I can tell, this song's about another hippie fixation, in this case nature. But the usual hippie nature song is all about we-are-children-in-the-garden (that phrase sounds familiar. Damned short-term memory loss), whereas this is about nature's monumental indifference, at least if the recurring line "doesn't mean shit to a tree" has anything to do with it.

Jefferson Airplane "Lather"
Jefferson Airplane "Rejoyce"
Jefferson Airplane "Eskimo Blue Day"

* I've used the word. Can I be a British rock critic now?

business, numbers, money, people

You know those voicebox machines people sometimes have to use when their vocal cords are damaged or removed? Shouldn't there be a karaoke bar for them too, featuring tracks like Kraftwerk's "Computer World"? I can hear it: "crime, travel, communication, entertainment"... This would be quite cool.

Ye Olde Conceptual Arte

A small walk-in freezer, about eight feet wide by six feet deep.

Create block-letter-shaped ice-cube molds, about eight inches high.

Mount the letters created by these about two feet from the rear wall with fishing line strung through the letters so they're suspended in mid-air.

Immediately behind the letters is a series of heat-producing lights, the only lights in the room, which are activated whenever the door to the freezer is opened.

The letters spell

N O T I C E

The catch, of course, is that you can only notice the letters when you're in the process of destroying them...which, of course, brings out the other half of the pun.

I expect my grant money immediately.

variations on a theme

Just be thankful I didn't post "The Pina Colada Song."

Kate Bush "Babooshka"
The Negro Problem "Bermuda Love Triangle"

mystery!

For some reason, a recent revamping of their logo demonstrates that the restaurant is now named "Quiznos Sub." First there's your missing apostrophe (I know that it used to be "Quizno's"), but what I really want to know is, is there now only one enormous sub, cut into thousands of segments which you can buy? Paging the Yale Goddam Philosophy Department...

In Which Byron the Bulb Immanentizes In His Capacity as Muse to Two Different Groups of Musicians

I think it was in college that I first read Thomas Pynchon. As near as I can remember, one of my friends (either Geir Kvaran or Phil Proefrock) introduced his stuff to me. I may have run into references to him earlier, but I'm pretty sure that's when I actually read him for the first time. Somewhere along there, I read that some band from the late sixties called the Insect Trust had set music to one of Pynchon's doggerel poems, in this case, the bit from V. on page 141 (in - as this helpful website points out - all editions except the Bantam paperback...naturally, the edition I have). At that time, the album (called Hoboken Saturday Night) was hopelessly out of print, but some years later, I re-met my ex-girlfriend, and her husband at the time actually had a copy, which I taped. (I include this biographical info because its tangledness is somehow vaguely Pynchonesque...) Anyway: their version, called "The Eyes of a New York Woman," seems to take its musical cue from a description a few pages later in the novel, wherein a character notes that the words were from "a song of the Great Depression."

Twenty-six years later, another band with a New Jersey connection, the Favorite Color, recorded their own version of the same Pynchon lyric, this time calling the track "V. in Love." I prefer this version, which seems to take the mood of the lyrics more or less straight, thereby reducing the listener's need to have read Pynchon to "get" what's going on. What I really like is the tremolo guitar and the resonant discordant suspensions on the first two chords in the verse, and that crunchy guitar sound at what sounds like a bridge but is actually a coda.

The Insect Trust's Hoboken Saturday Night was reissued last year, so I suppose a copy's fairly easy to come by. The Favorite Color's Color Out of Space is, as main songwriter Tris McCall says, an "unjustly ignored" record, by which he means (and I agree) that it's a very good unjustly ignored record. (Currently, the last two weeks' worth of mp3s at this site are tracks from this album.) I don't know if there are any more copies available...but I imagine if there are, and you harass Tris and claim you'll send him cookies or something, he might send you one. No promises there though.

The Insect Trust "The Eyes of a New York Woman"
The Favorite Color "V. in Love"

flush of steel

Okay, so here's part of an ad for this year's Ozzfest (I couldn't scan the whole thing: too huge), and I've just gotta say: huh?



As far as I can make out, a demon, smoking a fat cigar and enjoying a glass of...uh, wine or blood, has been interrupted in his hellish call of nature. And again, I say unto you: huh?

At one level, this is funny - but at the same time, it's funny primarily to twelve-year-olds, and you don't immediately notice the spiky Toilet of Hell (and no, I don't know why toilets have become a running theme here). I suppose it might be a parody on prevailing metal imagery.

But. You will notice the list of bands appearing at this year's shindig: in addition to the big-deal Black Sabbath reunion (okay, I do have a soft spot for the first half-dozen Sabbath records), we have Iron Maiden, Killswitch Engage, Rob Zombie, Shadows Fall, Black Dahlia Murder, The Haunted, Bury Your Dead, As I Lay Dying, "and much more!" The sharper among you will have detected the common thematic thread among these band names. I mean, it's one thing to be all death and torture and pain and gloom and darkness when, say, everyone else is a buncha flower-sniffing hippies rolling around naked in the rain - but twenty-five years later, isn't there just the slightest possibility that the whole D-O-O-M!! thing might be getting just the least bit worn out and cliched? No?

But most of these bands, particularly the more recent ones, don't seem terribly aware of the silliness of their names (the exceptions would be Rob Zombie, and possibly Iron Maiden, at least among acts I know something about). And so the parody is either a bit mean-spirited, aimed directly at the bands and their fans - or the apparent self-seriousness of the bands is itself a big ol' joke, which their fans may or may not be in on. But the problem there is: say a joke once, it might be funny. Repeat a few times, it's less funny. Repeat it 8,725 times for thirty years? Someone stomped the hell out of the funny a long, long time ago.

So, I just don't get it. It's sorta like the way all male country musicians are required by law to wear a cowboy hat - even though they might be from the renowned cattle-rearing districts of New Jersey. (Oh hell: now Tris is going to point out some statistics demonstrating that, in fact, cattle farming constitutes a thriving sector of the New Jersey economy...)

Anyway: smoking, drinking demon on the toilet.

she said it...

La Editrice has a recent entry whose title sums up my feelings quite adequately. It's been another week with highs in the 90s, and after a few days of relief, it's supposed to get back up there again later. And I just don't get the appeal. Since we've had central air, and cars with a/c, I'm actually okay most of the day - but after a while I'm just tired of having to treat the entire outdoors as a species of enemy, an enemy that will make me feel as if it's covered my body first with a layer of hot glue and then with a sealing layer of thin, vaseline-smeared plastic wrap. I like wearing pants, for instance (as opposed to shorts), and dammit I actually enjoy being able to put on a nice casual jacket, or layer my look a little bit, instead of wearing as few clothes as public decency allows. Rog may parade around in public in nothing but a Speedo (or so he says: please don't post photos) but going around striking terror into the hearts of little children is not my idea of entertainment.

And about that air-conditioning: I'm not sure why so many places think it's effective only if it's dialed down to like 68 degrees. (In the house, I rarely have it set lower than 79 - and since it removes humidity, that's just fine.) It's not so bad for me - I apparently am well-suited to Wisconsin winters, and don't get too cold too easily - but Rose gets cold far more readily than I do, and as a consequence of over-cooled air in public places, ends up having to cart around sweaters to keep herself warm when the outside temperature's 90 degrees. This is absurd, of course. The worst offenders are restaurants, who apparently set the temperature that's comfortable for their running-around waitstaff, while their clientele sit shivering in sweaters at their table frightened to use the silverware lest their tongues freeze to the metal. Worse yet is when you ask someone to moderate the a/c, and they claim they can't do anything about it (I'm talkin' to you, Cempazuchi Guy). Uh-huh...I suppose if the temperature outside suddenly dropped 40 degrees (which can happen here) it'd still be going on? Plus, Rose being an architect, she has some knowledge of how HVAC systems work...and unless the system was designed by a drunken chimpanzee, it should be controllable by the occupants. Anyway.

Fall is lovely - I can't wait.

more drama

As Steve guessed, yesterday's songs have in common the fact that each of the bands featured future members of Yes. Bodast's guitarist was Steve Howe*, Winston's Fumbs' organ player was Tony Kaye, and the Syn featured both Chris Squire and Peter Banks, Yes's original guitar player.

The occasion for my posting these tracks is the current tour featuring Steve Howe, Chris Squire, and Alan White in various permutations, including (oddly) a reunion of the Drama-era Yes (was there a huge demand for that?). What's really odd about this is that Chris Squire's component of the tour is being billed as a reunion of the Syn, since that band's singer Peter Nardelli is on board as well. I suppose two original members (at least: no idea who's drumming, but Peter Banks isn't playing guitar) is enough to constitute a legitimate reunion, and that raises the interesting question: can anyone think of another reuniting act with more time between incarnations? The Syn broke up in about 1968 as Squire and Banks went on to Mabel Greer's Toy Shop (which more or less turned into Yes). But here it is thirty-seven years later, and not only are they touring**, they're working on new recordings. Curious...

* Although not featured on this recording, another member of that band was Bruce Thomas - yes, Bruce Thomas of Elvis Costello's Attractions. Surprisingly, it turns out that Thomas played with at least three future members of Yes: according to this site, he was also in the band Bitter Sweet with Tony Kaye, and he did session work with Rick Wakeman on Al Stewart's Past, Present and Future. So, my idea to re-do "Roundabout" in the style of "Pump Me Up" is nowhere near as farfetched as I'd originally thought...

** Oops...as I was writing this and looking for info, I found out that the tour's been cancelled due to immigration paranoia. Apparently, sources at the FBI discovered that the lyrics of "Siberian Khatru" are a complex cipher which, when decoded, reads KILL AMERICAN PIGS. BOMB IOWA. Who'd've guessed? Jon Anderson is under arrest in London, having been caught developing an amplification system that would allow his voice to melt steel.

a (not very difficult) quiz

What fact (other than being recorded in the 1960s) do the following tracks have in common? (Answers next time.)

Winston's Fumbs "Real Crazy Apartment"
The Syn "14 Hour Technicolour Dream"
Bodast "Nether Street"

I'll bite your legs off!

I've set up a Flickr account for myself. And I wrote up a photo-essay of sorts. Enjoy.