Month: March 2007

Yet Another Decent Interval

So tomorrow morning I’m off to SXSW again. Last year I said I’d be reporting from the scene, but got so weirded out by culture shock that I never got around to it, so this time I’m not making any promises. I’ll probably be uploading some food reports to Dishola, and I’ll undoubtedly expand on them here, especially if I find some great new places, but usually the nights of music leave me so exhausted and depressed with the sheer volume of mediocre stuff that I lack any enthusiasm for writing about it afterwards. Or that’s what happened last year.

Actually, one of the more interesting SXSW-related activities is happening before the event, in the form of a blog discussing the impact of technology on the record biz. Even if you don’t follow some of the more intricate details, you’ll be able to pick up on how dire things are even for those heroic little guys who’re supposed to be profiting from the dinosaurs’ malaise. And this year I’m actually on a panel, or, rather, I’m conducting one of the live interviews with an old hero of mine, Joe Boyd, who’s probably produced at least one of your all-time favorite records, even if you haven’t heard it yet.

I’ll also be headed off to Marin County (got a super-cheap ticket) to pay my respects to the about-to-vanish Village Music, but unless I win the lottery in Texas offering my respects is about all I’m going to be able to do. But I’ll be seeing some folks from the Well, as well as some old friends from when I lived there. Then it’ll be back to Texas for a couple of days, and back here at the end of March.

And a couple of days after that, you just know I’ll be pissed off at Berlin again.

CAN YOU DIG DAT HOLE?

Back in the 80s I used to read Gerard Cosloy’s CONFLICT magazine so intently that his bands, the ones I’d never even heard, often became my bands, and since he incessantly and most often deservingly hyped up the ones he dug, I knew their ins & outs pretty well. One I always wanted to hear was DIG DAT HOLE. They were often described in Conflict’s pages as being a wild-ass BIRTHDAY PARTY-inspired antecedent, very much in the same school as some other great bands of the day like the Laughing Hyenas and Pussy Galore. They actually imploded even before they got a 45 out the door, and all that ever existed from them was a single cassette tape (pictured here) and an aborted LP, neither of which I’ve heard in their entirety. The story I got from the interweb says that 2 of the guys moved to NYC and quickly started COP SHOOT COP. They were interesting for about ten minutes in 1990, weren’t they?

So here it is in 2007 and I’ve procured a solitary song of theirs from the cassette and aborted LP called “A Similar End”, and – whoa. Absolutely fucking scorch. This has aged like a bottle of fine barleywine, and blows away a fair majority of the musical landscape between 1987 and 2007, wouldn’t you say? Wow.

Download DIG DAT HOLE – “A Similar End” (from tape and aborted LP)

The Squid and the Whale

A feather of a movie. The matter-of-fact, laid-back, middle-class microcosmic manner in which writer/director Noah Baumbach lays out the drama is so undramatic, and the humor is so anti-jokey and deftly delivered, that a half-decent wind threatens to blow it all away.

Yet it all hangs together, and I can’t come across this movie on cable without once again watching it to the end.

THE WHITEFRONTS – “6 BUSES”

Hey, I know this isn’t a pic of the band or their album – I can’t find THE WHITEFRONTS’ 1985 album “Roast Belief” in my cluttered garage (actually I’m too lazy to look), so you just get a pic of this lovely honking bird instead of a scan of the record. It’s also rare enough that there’s virtually nothing about it online. Who were the WHITEFRONTS? Well, when I started college at UC-Santa Barbara in 1985, they were sorta my hipster cousin & his pals’ favorite local band down there. I never got to see them; I think they graduated or got kicked out or something around ’86 and moved to San Francisco, where they gigged around for a bit and then called it a day a couple of years later. My cousin used to play me some great “cassette tapes” of their stuff, which ranged from Velvet Underground-inspired freakouts (like the track I’m posting here, the fantastic “6 Buses” from the “Roast Belief” album) to Hawaiian slide guitar weirdness to hippie bongo workouts to Meat Puppets-style fake hardcore punk. And lots of genres and styles in between. When you hear this track, perhaps you’ll wish to start the Whitefronts revival with me?

Download THE WHITEFRONTS – “6 Buses”

Daisy Spot

                      

 Daisy Spot has been one of Sacramento's most interesting and exciting bands for the past fifteen years now even though they've released only one CD to date. Fortunately, their self-titled debut album was well worth the 13-year wait. Co-lead singers Mike Farrell and Tatiana Latour manage to maintain a sensuous vibe throughout as they seductively croon in unison on most of the tracks. Despite the consistent tone, the band touches on a variety of styles, including bossa nova, country, rock, and soul. The album won a SAMMIE (Sacramento Area Music Award) in 2006 for "Best Local CD," although I believe it could've been in contention for the best among any released nationally that year had it reached more ears. Tatiana also won for "Best Female Vocalist," and she could've easily earned it just for her breathtakingly-beautiful performance on "All I Wanna Know." Although the CD's an instant classic, it doesn't quite prepare the uninitiated for just how exhilarating their live shows can be. Bassist Brian Latour and drummer Alex Jenkins always provide reliable and steady support, but the adrenaline really kicks in whenever guitarist Farrell launches into one of his incendiary solos while Tatiana dances languidly as though in a trance. I remember being mesmerized by this pair of former lovers the first time I saw them perform in a club, and they continue to work their magic together many years after introducing themselves as a rock 'n' roll couple.

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You can find Daisy Spot for sale here.

Gallery & Studio

Yours truly and the book I’m writing receive a kind mention in the February/March 2007 issue of Gallery & Studio, a magazine devoted to “The World of the Working Artist.”

Managing editor Ed McCormack’s essay, “Andy’s Aura, Patti’s Power, My Sister’s Boxes, My Father’s Press Clippings, Paul Nelson’s Withering, and Other Aspects of Art and Fame, Obscurity and Loss, Death and Resurrection,” an extremely personal meditation (which, at six pages, is almost as long as its title) on life and death, where we come from, where we’re going, and what we encounter along the way, at its heart seeks to find the answer to this conundrum:

Why Patti Smith matters so much to those who take rock & roll more seriously than McCormack does.

And while he wishes he could call upon the late rock critics Lester Bangs (whom, in an otherwise painstakingly researched piece, he misidentifies as “the dean of American rock critics,” a title belonging to Robert Christgau) or Paul Nelson to provide the answer, Nelson probably couldn’t have helped him, as Patti Smith’s attraction was lost on him, too.

About her first album, Horses, pretty much a universally acknowledged classic, Nelson in 1976 wrote that “I never want to hear it again…” In the years that followed, he avoided writing about Smith at all and, the few times he did, struggled to resist the cheap shot.

All of which is neither here nor there, as McCormack, himself also an ex-writer for Rolling Stone (as was Patti), does a fine job addressing, in a heartfelt and often humorous manner, the considerable cult that belongs to Smith.

As far as the bit about me, McCormack deftly demonstrates the importance of remaining open to influence in one’s art. Had I not e-mailed him late last year while researching my book, I wouldn’t be writing this piece today; and McCormack might never have referenced Paul Nelson — and certainly not me — and the article he happened to be writing would have ended up being that much shorter.

33 1/3: The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck (Continuum Books)

Medium Image

I’ve been particularly looking forward to reading this long-promised contribution to the series of little books about great albums. I adore the record—in fact, it was on my own shortlist of potential subjects, usurped when series editor David Barker encouraged me to poke a nose out of the comfortable sixties psych basement and write about Neutral Milk Hotel instead. If you’ve read more than a couple of 33 1/3 books, you know that they’re all very different, with each writer taking their own path to revealing the mysteries of their chosen favorite LP. As a working musician who once had his creative heart broken when a band on the way up suddenly crashed and burned, Velvet Crush drummer Menck has a rare capacity to recognize the emotional state likely effecting the individual Byrds in the years leading up to Notorious, arguably their best album, and also the most volatile. Coop-flown Byrd Gene Clark was hanging around the studio again, David Crosby left the band before it was completed, and increasingly inadequate drummer Michael Clarke was subject to terrible verbal abuse during the sessions (a brutal excerpt is on the CD reissue). The first half of the book is a mini-Byrds bio, so by the time the members are reaching around producer Gary Usher to rip each others’ bangs off, the reader has an intimate understanding of the tensions in the room, and can marvel all the more at the sonic beauties unfurled in so toxic an environment. The second half of the book is a track-by-track accounting of the album (and related outtakes), with all the geeky session notes a geeky fan could want. But with the biographical material and Menck’s interesting perspective, this one would be enjoyable for Byrds fans or neophytes alike. And drummers will especially appreciate Menck’s observations on this oft neglected part of the rock and roll sound.