Mom, if you’re reading, I’m only repeating the name of the band. Things were different in the 70s, mom. You remember. So here’s Side A of a 45 that everyone needs to hear and then hear again. Best as I know it – and you can find a lot more detail in an issue of Ugly Things from a few years ago (sense a pattern this week?) – the FUCKIN’ FLYIN’ A-HEADS were an out-of-time, out-of-their-element, outcast bunch of freaks on the island of Oahu, making an unholy din & some wild-ass psychedelic punk rock in the late 1970s. At least a couple members were Japanese. I found a copy of this 45 in the late 1980s at a San Francisco metal store called “Record Vault”, after seeing Byron Coley namecheck it in passing (yet with glee) in an old Forced Exposure. Good enough for me. I sold it on eBay a few years back for far less than anticipated. I think it’s still awaiting full discovery by the populace at large, and I’m posting it here to do my part. Wow. Clear the room, you’re gonna need the space.
My feeling is that SXSW was very good to Earles and Jensen Present: Just Farr A Laugh Vol. 1 & 2. It was also fun (I wasn’t expecting it to be THAT fun), there were good times with some previously internet-only writerly colleagues/friends, plus friends/associates in general, and a band or two hit the spot (Clockcleaner, for one).
Here’s an Austin Chronicle writer that failed to get the point of the panel. As my friend and panel moderator Bob Mehr assumed, “She was clearly insulted by my suggestion that a certain segment of indie rock fans had a less than stellar sense of humor. Then she goes out and proves my point by completely missing the fact that Zach was BEING FUNNY, and not really bored or fidgety. She apparently came expecting David to do a 90-minute stand-up set. Oh well.â€Â
There were at least 150 people in attendance. I’m happy with that, especially considering the time (12:30 Friday….after everyone had been out drinking the night before) and the other panels/interviews that were simultaneously underway. I got some cracks in, and David Cross gave JFAL a major prop (â€ÂI’ve been burning and giving out Just Farr A Laugh to friends over the past four yearsâ€Â or something like that), as well as Tony Kiewel stating that JFAL was the favorite comedy album at the Sub Pop offices.
…not sure how any of you will see it, but I will soon have a DVD of the panel discussion.
Saturday was St. Patty’s Day, turning the streets of Austin into a combination of stripper-obsessed date rapists in giant, green foam hats and what looked like an airlift and dump of Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue.
In contrast,ÂÂ Sunday afternoon looked like a post-attack scene from The Day After. ÂÂ ÂÂ
Upon registering Thursday evening, I got the SXSW “Big Bag.â€Â The contents are as follows:
Issues of Singer & Musician, Performing Songwriter, Blender, AP, Paste, The Filter Good Music Guide, Fresh Breath of Mint, !*@# Exclaim!, Utne Reader, Relix, The Austin Chronicle, and TimeOut Austin.
(So, on the drive home through festering concrete boils like Temple, TX and Forest City, AR, I got to read some rags that I’ll never read again….and two that I’ve written for.)
Lots of flyers, handbills, promotional notepads, party invites, a plastic container claiming to contain a “hangover survival kit,â€Â and two condoms.
CD’s: SXSW CD Sampler that came with a fake voodoo doll attached, Kemado Records sampler, Canon Records sampler, SXSW “UK Invasionâ€Â sampler, Japan Nite sampler, 10 Spot sampler, and the new CD’s by Ani DiFranco and Public Enemy. The latter of which had a $6.99 Best Buy sticker still attached.
In the end, we are who we are. The best we can hope for after we’re gone is that someone will think enough of us to to render a kind and fair account of our memory.
The thing is, in death as in life, you tend to do unto others the way they did unto you, and, well, long story short, singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, who died from mesothelioma in 2003 at the age of 56, wasn’t always a very nice person.
Zevon, like his songs, was often acerbically funny and witty and generous; in music and in life he possessed the ability to locate poetry in the commonplace. But he also epitomized Toulouse-Lautrec’s dictum that “One should never confuse the artist with the art.” Zevon the man had difficulty seeing beyond his own often petty desires and, as a result, left scores of hurt friends and family in his wake. Which, when it comes to the more than 130 songs he wrote and recorded in his 34-year recording career, is neither here nor there.
In a genre that begets imitation and champions crass commercialism, Zevon was an original. Reviewing Zevon’s eponymous album back in 1976, Paul Nelson called forth a disparate roster of stellar artists to herald Zevon’s arrival: “he is a talent who can be mentioned in the same sentence with Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and a mere handful of others — no apologies necessary.”
All of which brings us, over 30 years later, to the new book I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. Written by Zevon’s ex-wife Crystal Zevon, the book provides a compelling oral history of a man who was as troubled as he was talented. Detailing the years before, during, and after Zevon’s battle with alcoholism, the result is an artfully rendered casebook study of an addictive personality and, because Zevon portrays herself as honestly as she does her ex-husband, a codependent relationship.
Less than halfway through the book, photographer and art director Jimmy Wachtel, commenting on Zevon’s newfound sobriety, gets right to the heart of the matter: “To be honest, he was the same asshole, drunk or sober, so there wasn’t that much difference except he didn’t repeat himself as much.”
For those of us who didn’t know Warren Zevon personally, it remains the work that matters, for which he’ll be remembered. For those who did know him, who have to sift through the memories and hang onto the ones that made Zevon special and kept him in their lives and their hearts, it’s a bit more difficult.
*
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon is due out from HarperCollins on May 1st. In the meantime, Crystal Zevon is posting updates about personal appearances and other related events — as well as material about Warren Zevon that doesn’t appear in the book — over at her website.
One of the more wacked records I’ve been turned onto in recent years is this raspy, tuneless 1965 single from a Rochester, NY act called THE CHURCH MICE. I first heard of the record when it was pictured and briefly discussed in Johan Kugelberg’s Ugly Things feature on “primitive shit rockâ€Â (which I in turn wrote about here). A little research on the web brings me IT’S GREAT SHAKES which will tell you far more about the record – and why it’s important that you hear it – than I ever could. Finally, even crazy old Julian Cope got into the act and wrote up a piece on the ‘Mice and about the even more bent offerings from Armand Schaubroeck that followed this release. Schaubroeck is a real cult figure that I haven’t quite cottoned to just yet, but this 45 certainly leads me merrily in that direction. Easily one of the 1960s’ strangest pre-punk records.
So today’s thinking exercise was going to a SXSW panel called Covering Music In New Media, moderated by my pal Jason Gross. The participants were Michael Azerrad from eMusic, Erik Flannigan of AOL, Amy Phillips of Pitchfork Media, mighty Mark Pucci (one of my favorite publicists) and someone I think was Nick Baily of Shorefire Media, another great publicist. The panel description ended with this sentence:
“Without a reliable and financially sustainable model for online media, what is a rock critic to do?”
Well, yeah.
Naturally, all the folks with dogs in the online media fight — Azerrad, Flannigan, and Phillips — sought to assure everyone that their online publications were as viable as the print ones, as opposed to the many unreliable bloggers and fan-sites. The talked about coping with the flood of product, the fight to maintain some sort of credibility in the face of illegal uploads and rumor-mongering. They said that discussing which online sites will eventually work and which won’t is like asking if Rolling Stone would survive in 1973 — a good point.
What they did not discuss is what every single writer I’ve talked to here has been talking about: there is no paying work. Anywhere. Rumors of magazines going broke abounded, and the most-spoken sentence was “Man, I can’t remember when it was ever this bad.” When I’d respond that I couldn’t, either, I got a shocked look, since I was writing about music something like 20 years before any of these other folks came on the scene. Nobody is making a living any more. Nice to have spent your life learning a trade you can no longer practice and can’t make a living at, eh?
“Great audience at this,” commented the irrepressable Jim Fouratt, who’s been in this business even longer than I have (well, by a year or two). “Half of ’em are dinosaurs and half of ’em are 18-year-olds.” And what we old folks had in common with our spiritual grandchildren was that neither of us can figure out how to make a living doing what we want to do. What we did not have in common with them was that once, we actually did, even if it was never a good one.
In a way, I’m lucky. Writing about art and culture for the Wall Street Journal for all that while liberated me from rock criticism, and I’m less and less interested in writing about (and listening to) music these days. Rock criticism has always paid less than any other cultural commentary, and that hasn’t changed: one major indie-rock mag pays its writers a dime a word. That’s what I got in the early ’70s, and those dimes were worth a whole lot more back then. If I can make the right connection (and getting out of Berlin would help me subject-wise), I’ve got a lot more to write about than ever before. A lot of the poor souls trudging around here are a lot more committed to one subject than I am, or they really don’t want to write about anything else. Or can’t. I’m itching to write about a whole lot of stuff, and I’ve already proven I can.
But where? As general-interest magazines die like there was a plague going around (and actually, I guess there is), the options get more limited, and there are more people competing for less space than ever before.
I sure don’t have any answers, but then, after an hour and a quarter, neither did anyone on Jason’s panel. You either wrote for a website with good writing that doesn’t pay, or you squeezed yourself into someone’s idea that 700 words is just about all anyone needs to write about anything and got paid commensurately. Blender, the reigning paper rock mag, doesn’t allow record reviews of over 80 words, for the most part.
I’ve currently got two book proposals out, neither for a music-related book. I hope one of them will give me the lifeline to make the changes I need in my life so that I can keep on doing the only thing I know how to do well enough to get paid for it. Neither has an agent who’s committed to it yet, though, so I’m living in suspended animation.
Sin City comes onscreen as initially striking and innovative, but soon turns redundant and anti-human and, worst of all, boring. How many impalings, decapitations, severed limbs, and newfound, blood-spurting orifices are we supposed to suffer before we notice that, amidst all the incredulous plot lines, bared breasts, and sometimes admittedly amazing cinematic flourishes, stunning mediocrity has taken over? Unfortunately, like the movie’s many victims, despite being shot again and again and again, the movie just keeps on going.
Directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, and “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino, proven talents one and all, have effectively transferred Miller’s Sin City comic book to the screen — but why? In having done so, the filmmakers have accomplished the cinematic equivalent of “recreating” the Eiffel Tower and planting it in Las Vegas.
The next time you’re in a, as someone (I remember not) put it, “lifestyleâ€Â store (the Ikea/Urban Outfitters lifestyle, not the Dollar General lifestyle), be sure to pick up a free copy of Discos Matador: Intended Play 2007. This superstar Matador sampler features fantastic tracks by, amongst others, The Ponys, Chavez, Love of Diagrams, Dead Meadow, Shearwater, and……….and……..and………and……..
EARLES AND JENSEN!!!!
That’s right!! Earles and Jensen representin’ with “Attitudes: A Bar With a Bunch of Dumbasses Hanging Outâ€Â and “Introducing Bleachy: Poised to Sweep the Nation.â€Â
I’m grabbing a moment before I have to head in to the Austin Convention Center to interview Joe Boyd to jot down some of the stuff that’s happened so far on this trip.
***
Paris was okay, although the restaurant I ate at wasn’t worth noting (although it was inexpensive and not bad). The hotel was convenient to the Gare Montparnasse, which is where the buses to the airport leave from, and it occurred to me that Montparnasse is worth a walk when I have time. There was a nearby bar called Le Chien Qui Fume, whose neon smoking dog I’d have liked to get a picture of, although whether or not I have the skills to do this is quite another question.
I saw a number of election posters for Segolene Royale, the Socialist candidate (and, potentially, France’s first woman president, although her chances don’t look too good a the moment) with the slogan “A fairer France is a stronger France,” and I mused that this is a slogan both stirring and, uh, empty. Think about it: what on earth does it meant?
The bus to the airport has a video loop it plays, presumably to distract you from the not-so-inspiring scenery after you leave the city limits, and, as on the other trips I’ve taken on it recently, there was a longish public service announcement about pedophilic sex tourism. A good cause, of course, but a strange thing to see over and over, the litany of how many years in foreign jails various men have gotten. Do a significant number of Air France’s passengers to Charles de Gaulle Airport have sexual predation in mind at their destinations? That seemed to be the message.
Spotted on the way out of town, another Parisian eatery we won’t be patronizing: Cheaper Food Sandwiches.
***
I haven’t seen much music yet here, mostly because I’ve wanted to re-read Joe Boyd’s book White Bicycles to prepare for this afternoon’s interview. Jon Hardy (who was turned down yet again for a showcase here this year) recommended I see some of his friends from St. Louis who’d moved to New York, a band called the White Rabbits, and it was a good tip. They feature a very intense piano-playing guy, a more serene guitarist, and three other guys who move back and forth among bass, keyboards, percussion, and three drum sets. I didn’t catch enough lyrics to see if the songwriting’s there, and there’s a bit of sameness to the material which ought to even out when they write more songs. I’d be very interested to see them in a year.
Last night, of course, there was no choice: I had to at least try to get into the Stax show at Antone’s. Although the line went around the block, by some miracle I got in, and at long last got to see Booker T and the MGs, who are probably the greatest band-as-band America has produced. I mean this in kind of a jazz sense: the way the four original members, Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Steve Cropper, and Al Jackson, Jr. (who was murdered years ago: his place was taken by one of his cousins)(and yes, I know Lewis Steinberg was the original bassist), interacted almost telepathically and could raise material as bathetic as “More” and “Summertime” to astonishing heights. Forty years later, Cropper’s let the guitar-hero thing go a little bit to his head (Steve! It was all about the minimalism of your playing!), Booker seems less invested in the results, and Dunn is still the greatest bass player around, but hey, what do you want after all this time? An hour of Booker T music was something worth waiting for.
William Bell has still got it, too, and his snazzy pinstripe suit, dark sunglasses, and soul-man show was way too brief. Hunger got me out of the building during Eddie Floyd’s set. I know he’s not as young as he once was, but this “clap your hands” schtick gets old fast. And I’d seen what I’d come for, and was glad.
* * *
And I was hungry. I’ve gotten some good food here, and will probably do a full post on it later, but so far the big discovery was just a couple blocks from my hotel. My friend Scoop, whom I hadn’t seen in eons, has moved here, and he came in from his Rancho Deluxe in Bastrop County to have lunch with me. We headed for the Tâm Deli, the superb Vietnamese place Jean Caffeine turned me on to last year, only to find it closed Tuesdays, so we decided just to cruise until we found a taqueria. Buried in a strip-mini-mall, bundled with a convenience store, an auto insurance agency, and a pool hall, was Jefe’s, which I picked because they also run a taco truck, which was parked out front. We had tacos al pastor, which is marinated pork, and the order came with two squeeze bottles of salsa, one kind of brick colored, the other a pale green. Both were astonishing, the red having citrus undertones and hellfire overtones, the green subtly fiery with a wonderful herb combination. Four tacos, $4.99. I’m going back.
Mom, if you’re reading, I’m only repeating the name of the band. Things were different in the 70s, mom. You remember. So here’s Side A of a 45 that everyone needs to hear and then hear again. Best as I know it – and you can find a lot more detail in an issue of Ugly Things from a few years ago (sense a pattern this week?) – the FUCKIN’ FLYIN’ A-HEADS were an out-of-time, out-of-their-element, outcast bunch of freaks on the island of Oahu, making an unholy din & some wild-ass psychedelic punk rock in the late 1970s. At least a couple members were Japanese. I found a copy of this 45 in the late 1980s at a San Francisco metal store called “Record Vault”, after seeing Byron Coley namecheck it in passing (yet with glee) in an old Forced Exposure. Good enough for me. I sold it on eBay a few years back for far less than anticipated. I think it’s still awaiting full discovery by the populace at large, and I’m posting it here to do my part. Wow. Clear the room, you’re gonna need the space.
