Author: kim

Correction

Ok, so maybe David Cross said “I’ve played it for all of my friends over the past several yearsâ€Â and Henry Owings definitely said “I’ve burned it for all of the bands that have stayed at my house.â€Â Maybe I got that mixed up. Pardon. One thing’s for certain: I must stop all of this petty name-dropping!! Some petty name-dropping rubbed off on me somewhere. Whaddupwiddat?!?!? 

This is from May 1982, after Richard and Linda Tho…

This is from May 1982, after Richard and Linda Thompson had divorced. With the unexpected success of Shoot Out The Lights in the U.S., they toured America to try to salvage a career in the wake of their divorce. This was not an easy tour on either of them or their bandmates.

Look how Linda is holding on to the mic stand as if her life depends on it. Richard is his usual insanely talented self, but Linda tears the shit out of this. Well, ok, Richard is above-and-beyond on the solo. Have you ever loved a song so much that you want to tear your heart out?

I didn’t realize I would have to add this, but HOLY CRAP! How does the guitar not break?

THE EAR-BLEEDING MAJESTY OF THE FUCKIN’ FLYIN’ A-HEADS

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.

Download THE FUCKIN’ FLYIN’ A-HEADS – “Swiss Cheese Back” (A-side of 45)

SXSW recap (part one of ????) and some self-promotion….

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).

This is the bio that I almost forgot I submitted.

Here’s a nice shout-out from one of the Onion A.V. Club boys.

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€ÂI’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, Sunday afternoon looked like a post-attack scene from The Day After.   

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.

No Rest for the Wicked

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.

Things that happened in the last week:My sister …

Things that happened in the last week:

  • My sister had a birthday. Happy birthday, Jenn!;
  • She called from Brazil, where she is visiting her husband’s family;
  • SXSW rolled through Austin, bringing many out-of-town friends;
  • I ate bbq twice with some of these out-of-town friends, including the ultra-cool Maud Newton and the mysterious man known only as Mr. Maud;
  • My parents visited and we played Cities and Knights of Catan not once, but twice;
  • My in-laws visited and gave/sold us a brand-new Prius;
  • We spent time with in-town friends who we don’t see nearly as often as we should;
  • We watched Borat;
  • I worked on the book.

I think that’s it. All of these deserve more words, but my words are all committed to other projects at the moment.

THAT ELUSIVE CHURCH MICE 45

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.

Download CHURCH MICE – “Babe, We’re Not Part of Societyâ€Â (A-side of 45)
Download CHURCH MICE – “College Psychology on Loveâ€Â (B-side of 45)

The Magic Question

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.

And posting on my blog.

Which doesn’t pay.

Sin City

What a waste of talent and technology.

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.

“Wow” soon gives way to “So?”