Author: kim

Do I still love the musicians? Not so much.

Music writers are like restaurant employees. Don’t be a dick during your interview. Think about it when we have book deals and you’re in the cut-out bin. Rob Crow recently pulled some attitude out of his expansive cargo, uh, cargo, SHORTS?!?!…..what the hell are those things? That’s ok. It’s thrifty not to discard what you wore to a Quicksand show in 1992.

The following is courtesy of my writerly colleague David Dunlap Jr.

(from the Memphis Flyer)

Beware of Geek
Living well hasn’t mellowed indie rocker Rob Crow.
BY DAVID DUNLAP | MARCH 8, 2007

At first glance, Rob Crow seems to be a likable enough guy. He’s got a great voice and a disarmingly schlubby appearance. On the artwork of his most recent solo release, Living Well, Crow is pictured with his new bride and even newer baby in a tableau of indie-rock domestic bliss. The press release for his latest even states that “the intensely personal lyrics document Crow’s courtship with his wife, their marriage, and the subsequent birth of their first child.â€Â He’s a geek of the highest order; his popular band, Pinback, is named after a character from John Carpenter’s sci-fi comedy Dark Star, and on the song “Jedi Outcast,â€Â he sings, “Remember Yoda!/And what he said/’There is no try/ There is only do.’â€Â

Well, despite all of these endearing qualities, it seems that someone out there doesn’t think that Crow is such a mensch. On Living Well, there are not one but two versions of a song entitled “I Hate Rob Crowâ€Â — an album and a single version, naturally. The song is pleasant enough, and the blandly cryptic lyrics (a Crow staple) — “Wanted to be/Some kind of mess/The pain of it all/And not too impressedâ€Â — don’t offer any clues to what could have inspired such vitriol. No help comes from the song’s goofy video, which features Crow stumbling into an operating room and singing into a microphone attached to an intestine. Reportedly, the title came from a “particularly unpleasant roommate Crow had earlier in his life,â€Â though Crow himself declines to comment on the

song’s origin. Perhaps it could have something do with his off-putting personality and anemic sense of humor. You’d think that Crow, the newly minted family man, would have found inner peace and that the guy who called a previous band Goblin Cock would be a laugh riot. Well, you’d be wrong on both counts.

Despite his new family, Crow remains the tortured artist. When asked if it was harder finding inspiration after settling down, he tersely replies, “I’m never satisfied.â€Â Crow is a staunch vegan and an avid comic-book collector, and he exemplifies the more unsavory personality traits that both of those stereotypes confer. He is known to be sanctimonious and more demanding on contract riders than an artist with 10 times the star power. Though an indie-rock vet, he was more than happy to lend his sweet voice to a Clorox commercial, and Pinback contributed a lackadaisical cover of Black Flag’s “Wastedâ€Â to the cred-sapping compilation Music from the OC: Mix 6: Covering Our Tracks.

Surely, though, the guy who titled a Goblin Cock release Bagged and Boarded (a comic-book term) must have a hell of a funny bone. Again, no. The humor with Goblin Cock, his heavy-metal outlet, ended with the name and the song titles. Some of the more refined fans might claim that the humor never even began. In a fit of literal-mindedness, the not-ready-for-big-box-store-display artwork for Bagged and Boarded depicted the ridiculously large member of some underworld demon. Though Goblin Cock did, indeed, set off false metal alarms for the genre’s purists, Crow claims, “It’s not jokey. I’m just doing the band I want to see.â€Â

On Living Well, Crow is still flying his geek flag, though not in a silly way. He titles one song “Liefeld,â€Â after an oft-derided comic-book artist named Rob Liefeld, whose popularity peaked in the ’90s. Crow joins the chorus of Liefeld detractors, and the lyrics seem to be a critique of Liefeld’s drawing style and his trademark anatomical inconsistencies — “I know it’s strange, their eyes don’t match.â€Â

Crow’s sparkling personality aside, the short, melodic songs on Living Well are enough to sate fans of Pinback until the duo releases its next record. Crow handles everything on the record — from playing to recording to producing. He compensates for his lack of rhythmic prowess by crafting complicated XTC-esque melodies with his guitar (â€ÂOver Your Heartâ€Â). Overall, Living Well is a tuneful, pretty bore. The trick, then, is how to translate the low-key home-recorded solipsism of the songs on the album into ones played by a full band in a live setting. So far, Crow seems happy with the results.

“The tour is going really well,â€Â Crow says. “To the point where I wish I could record some of it over again with this band.â€Â

While the band may be gelling on tour, the pressures of what Bob Seger chronicled in “Turn the Pageâ€Â may be getting to Crow. When asked about balancing family life with life on the road, he replies, “Well, right now I’m just trying to finish this interview so I can spend some time with my family who came to visit me in New York for a couple of days between shows. It can be stressful.â€Â

Perhaps the doughy malcontent isn’t living as well as it might seem.

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”

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.