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.
Author: kim
Do I still love the music?
Oh, I do. The daily repetition of these songs threatens my quality of life.
The Hidden Hand – “Purple Neon Dreamâ€Â
Alabama Thunderpussy – “Void of Harmonyâ€Â (note: Due to the awful name and horror regarding anything billed as “Southern Metalâ€Â, I’ve never heard this band. The easy access promo cardboard sleeve and a long drive worked to introduce this catchy blaster. True to the cover art, it sounds a little like Molly Hatchet, but nothing like Bolt Thrower.)
Primal Scream – “Higher Than The Sunâ€Â
Dead C. – “Worldâ€Â
Ponys – “Small Talkâ€Â and “1209 Seminaryâ€Â
Amerie – “1 Thingâ€Â
Metallica – “Motorbreathâ€Â
Wedding Present – “Suckâ€Â
Ween – various numbers from The Pod
Gene Clark – “Because of Youâ€Â
Witchery – “Disturbing The Beastâ€Â
Rein Sanction – “Creelâ€Â
Jackson C. Frank – “My Name Is Carnivalâ€Â
Can – “Fall of Another Yearâ€Â
Salem 66 – “Postcardâ€Â
Bongwater – “The Drumâ€Â
LCD Soundsystem – “Someone Greatâ€Â
Norman Greenbaum – “Alice Bodineâ€Â
Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – “For Youâ€Â
Terry Reid – “Superlung My Supergirlâ€Â
More History Gone
There it goes: another piece of Berlin history is biting the dust.
That’s right, folks: by the time I get back from the States, the Tränenpalast will be no more. Apparently Deutsche Bahn has decided that this memory of the old East-West border has to be demolished immediately, the easier to excise the memory of what the building used to be.
I know for a lot of people, the Tränenpalast was a curiously-named entertainment venue, one which, if the experience my friend Gary Lucas had when he was booked there a few years ago is anything to go by, was horribly managed. In fact, practically from the day it opened in that incarnation, I heard sordid tales about the management, and the new managers didn’t seem to be any better than the first ones.
My first time there, though, wasn’t exactly for entertainment. The building’s name, “Palace of Tears,” came from its use as the processing terminal for Western visitors leaving East Berlin on their way back home. In retrospect, this seems like an odd name: Friedrichstr. station was an international checkpoint (the other being Checkpoint Charlie, further down Friedrichstr.), not a German-German one (which were scattered all over town), so the story that it saw the tearful separation of families who had come over to visit doesn’t hold water unless these families were from countries besides Germany.
When I made my first visit to East Berlin, it was in the company of a guy who apparently had raised some red flags at Checkpoint Charlie, and had suffered a cavity search on his last time over. He decided it might be easier to try Friedrichstr., and indeed it was, so my first view of East Berlin was the Admiralspalast theater. We quickly headed on to the Pergamon Museum, Alexanderplatz, and Frankfurter Allee, where we marvelled at the grandiose Russian-style apartment buildings.
But our ultimate destination was Prenzlauer Berg, where we met up with a guy named Norman. Norman was part of a group of vegetarians who met occasionally in East Berlin with some folks from the West, including some British and American soldiers, who were also vegetarians, for big dinners. Apparently (by which I mean maybe, see below), the day before, Norman had seen one of these guys on the street and waved to him. The morning of the day we met him, he’d been awoken by the Stasi secret police and interrogated for six hours. By the time we met up with him, Norman was a wreck.
Our solution to this was to get him as drunk as possible. This was also the solution to another problem: the 25 Marks one had to exchange one-for-one at the border. Eastmarks were worth nothing, and there was nothing much you could buy with them, but you weren’t allowed to take any back with you, either. To burn them up, we bought Norman dinner and found a bar where we drank ourselves silly. Finally, it was almost midnight, the time by which we had to be out of East Berlin, and we were just about out of money. We slipped Norman our spare change, and headed to the checkpoint in the building which is now called the Tränenpalast. Norman was still traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the Stasi, and was begging us to find him a black Jewish woman to marry. “That way, if the state tries to keep us apart, I can charge them with racism and anti-Semitism!” We tried to explain that black Jews of any gender were thin on the ground, let alone ones who might be inclined to marry him, but he told us we were lying, covering up for our unwillingness to help him.
On the one hand, Norman was being ludicrous, but on the other, I never forgot this rather intimate view into life in East Berlin. The guy I went over with later published a rather icky book called Once Upon a Time in the East, detailing the wacky fun he and his friends had had travelling in the East Bloc before the Wall came down, eating bad — but cheap! — vegetarian food in places like Romania and Czechoslovakia and generally behaving like the boorish British tourists they were. Norman’s story was in there, too, along with an interesting postscript. When the border to Hungary opened up, Norman was one of the first to leave East Berlin, and travelled the long way around, through Czechoslovakia, Austria, West Germany, and then back to West Berlin, a trip of hundreds of miles to achieve a journey from Prenzlauer Berg to Schöneberg. But once he was there, he began acting very strangely, and there are some among that circle who think, today, that Norman was a Stasi agent keeping track of them, and that it’s not impossible that the whole interrogation story he told us that day had been made up.
I have no idea, but I do think of Norman, who was last heard of living with his mother back in Prenzlauer Berg, when I walk past the Tränenpalast.
Or, as with so many other things here, maybe I should put that in the past tense. Once again, an uncomfortable souvenir of Berlin’s past is extirpated. In two years, no doubt, there’ll be a little pocket park there (to compensate for the one on the other side of the station, on which rose yet another untenanted office building), or maybe a Tränenpalast Museum sponsored by Deutsche Bahn, where the story the exhibits tell might not jibe exactly with the memories a bunch of aging people seem to have of the reality. The Palast der Republik is pretty much down by now, the Tränenpalast is going down…What’s next?
On Sunday, one of the tabloids had a headline screaming that Deutsche Post is going to tear down the Fernsehturm. It’ll take a little more than the Berliner Kurier to convince me of this, but after what I’ve seen here, I’m not ruling it out, either.
TIME FOR A MOVIE ROUND-UP
I just don’t have time to put any real thought into writing about “cultural” stuff these days. The no-look-hand-pass mp3 blog thing is incredibly easy – post the song, write some inane text and boom, there you go. Yet here’s an attempt to provide a bit of a peek into some films I watched over the past month. Perhaps there are some titles that you recognize. Perhaps, like me, there are some that you will enjoy. Please allow me to continue:
Here we are.
Dice: Undisputed…the first reality show that I will watch from start to finish. The White Rapper Show looked good on paper, right up my alley (cat), but interest sank. MC Serch was an insufferable moron (1), Prince Paul (2) was confusing and boring as a co-host, and the truly bizarre rappers were clipped early on. Also promising was Shooting Sizemore, yet clarification is needed as to why. I do not advocate or enjoy this style of reality show. The suffocating negativity peddled by addict/derelict/downfall reality series is uncalled for (in my life, at least), but I enjoy Tom Sizemore as a character actor, and his particular spiral appeared (in the previews) to reach insane depths (like homelessness). So, to approach personal hypocrisy, I just wanted to see how things would turn out. Otherwise, as a half-observed rule, exploitation of demolished lives is something that I find unsavory. Regardless, I’ve yet to see an episode.
Dice was never a drug addict. This was a career ruined by various forms of stupidity (3), lack of diversity and progress, the PC movement, and a bulldozing cruelty on the part of the entertainment business. Because of these things, hopefully, the Dice: Undisputed formula is different. I don’t pretend to know how rigged/scripted these shows are. Naturally, we start off with a broken man. Rather, the career is broken. Home life is comfortable, suburban, and primarily friendly. There’s a focus on how much he loves his kids. None of this should come as shocking if you’ve ever watched a reality TV show. Be it fake or genuine, the show has heart. The parade of disappointments, the Ford Taurus rental, the unfashionable dining choices, and especially his dad’s support….I am, so far, hooked like an idiot.
1. And deeply unlikeable as a host.
2. The purpose being what? That 7/8 of his audience is white anyway?
3. In my previous post re: this subject, a Bill Hicks reference was made. Let me clarify. Hicks’ material was, at the time, unquestionably cerebral compared to Dice Clay’s rube-ish, dumbshit posturing. Hicks’ material is also sorely overrated, and has aged like Candlebox. His post-mortem glorification is vexing…I just so very rarely find his bits laugh-out-loud funny. You may not like where Dice Clay took things, but that place, in a pure sense, was previously unconquered. Writer Mark Prindle has a better grasp of what makes the Dice Clay career fascinating/entertaining. Read that.
Mere Words
Dominic Priore
Where you’ll find me tomorrow night, etc.
(Bullet Point) I’m not here to surprise. I’m excited. Hopefully, there will be some mention of the last two Def American albums, the indie albums, and what has been happening since 2000. I find this him fascinating. I’m confortable with the predictability of it all. Edgy? Offensive? Bill Hicks? Please. For better or worse, there was nothing like this man’s comedy. He looks terrible. The skin underneath his eyes looks as though it’s seeking an out-of-court settlement with the rest of his face. Round 8 for that one.
(Bullet Point) I have not seen Zodiac, but…..I’m excited. I’m half-confident that David Fincher has made his first movie that falls outside of the Clever Art for Stupid People category.
(Bullet Point) Is this still interesting to people? Is a mainstream 80’s aesthetic (that has nothing to do with the music, sonically) still entertaining herds of idiots?
(from Pitchfork)
“With his midriff-baring t-shirts and loose-limbed dance moves, !!!’s Nic Offer is a total goofball in the unselfconscious way that only really cool guys can get away with being. If you’ve ever attended a performance by !!! or Offer’s former band, Out Hud, then you’re familiar with his repertoire: the Christ-like wingspan, overhead clapping, shimmying hips, gangly duck-walking, dervish spins, scissor kicks, and humpy pelvic thrusts. It’s like the mutant spawn of step aerobics, Flashdance, and Electric Boogaloo in an arena-ready package: ridiculous, extravagant, and completely awesome. Offer’s stage presence isn’t just deeply entertaining; it’s an ice-breaker that gives us permission, by example, to forget ourselves and celebrate with abandon. You can tell he’s having a hell of a time, and his enthusiasm is infectious.â€Â
(Bullet Point) Ok, back to the excitement. These future reads make me smile:
Zodiac
The criteria one uses for determining whether or not a film is good, or by which one would recommend said film to someone else, is far from scientific (Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs up or thumbs down being on the low end of the scale and Paul Schrader’s canon somewhere out there in the ether); but today Deb and I happened upon a yardstick that seems as reliable as any. It being a fairly nice, hinting-at-spring kind of day, we decided to walk to the theater and back. Three miles to, three miles back. Six miles total. And, having done so, and having just taken the obligatory prophylactic Ibuprofen to assuage my already achy, exercise-deprived legs, I can honestly say that yes, I recommend Zodiac.
Though in my mind director David Fincher’s Se7en is a modern classic, two of his subsequent films, The Game and Panic Room (sorry to say, Fight Club has thus far eluded me), left something to be desired script-wise. No such trouble with James Vanderbilt’s screenplay (based on Robert Graysmith’s book) for Zodiac, a police procedural which, at 158 minutes, never bores. While it could be convincingly argued that this is just an $80 million version of a particularly compelling Law and Order episode, Fincher’s direction and the ensemble acting take it up several notches. Jake Gyllenhaal is fine as the cartoonist-turned-journalist Graysmith, Mark Ruffalo suitably dumpy as Inspector David Toschi, and Robert Downey Jr. splendid as Paul Avery, the doomed-by-his-own demons journalist. Among the several laudatory supporting performances, Elias Koteas, Dermot Mulroney, the always excellent Philip Baker Hall, and, coming out of nowhere, Candy Clark, all stand out. Chloë Sevigny, unfortunately, is wasted in the thankless role of Graysmith’s wife.
While I wouldn’t walk a mile for a Camel, I would walk six miles for Zodiac.
MIKE REP & THE QUOTAS : “MAMA WAS A SCHITZO, DADDY WAS A VEGETABLE MAN”
Here’s a post from last September that I wrote on my old blog about this amazing posthumous single – this time with the song itself for you to download below…..!