Finally gave Cingular the old heave-ho today and signed up with T-Mobile. After ten years (!) with one cell company, it seemed like it was the time to change. June and I got matching RAZRs and Grandma got a new flip phone. The kids are fighting over who gets the old superannuated phones to play with. I’m wondering what the right age is for a kid to have a phone?
Other good geeky thing, I fixed the Audi’s braking system myself (almost) and saved 750 bucks. The ABS light was on, and after getting a $1000 quote, I looked at the audiworld forum and found a mention of Module Masters, a company that will rebuild the electronic control module of most ABS systems for $250 (including a five year guarantee). Only hitch–you’ve got to remove the module and send it to them. They fix the thing in about a day and a half and return it overnight, so it’s gone for a little over a week, and in the meantime you have just regular non-ABS brakes. The weird part is that to remove the module, you have to remove a wheel, the wheel liner, the windshield wiper fluid tank and a bunch of Torx screws. But other than that it’s not too bad, although I seem to have knocked something loose on the wiper fluid tank and all the fluid ran out.
But the good news is that the brakes work again and I feel very manly.
Which is a good thing, because the RAZR is kind of a girly phone. And the signal strength kind of sucks. Are there any better phones anyone can recommend?
I’m not sure how so many years got by without my having seen this. I was alerted to it by a fine piece, “Why We Keep on Rolling With Dylan” (basically an onstage dialogue between critic Greil Marcus and novelist Don DeLillo), that appeared last month in The Daily Telegraph in the UK.
“In 1991, Bob Dylan was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy show,” Marcus explains. “They now hand these out very promiscuously, but this was unusual at the time — it was a big deal. So Dylan comes on with a very noisy, loud, small band, all dressed in dark suits with fedoras pulled down over their heads. And they go into the most furious, unrelenting, speeded-up piece of music.
“And Dylan is slurring his words, you cannot understand what he’s saying, but you don’t need to. The sound that’s being made is so thrilling. And about halfway through, at least for me — other people might have caught on more quickly, maybe later — I realised he was singing ‘Masters of War.’ His most unforgiving, bitter, unlimited denunciation that he’s ever recorded. It’s a song about arms merchants. It ends with ‘And I hope that you die, I’ll stand over your grave, I’ll follow your coffin.’
“Not too many songs really wish for the death of the subject, the person who’s being addressed. Then he gave a little speech after his award, where he managed not to thank anybody.”
Essential viewing for anyone interested in Dylanography.
SCAFFOLD “Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall 1968” CD (el/ Cherry Red)… It was a swinging time for music in England in the ’60s. It was also a pretty cool era for comedy. Scaffold was a comedy trio that mixed a smattering of music with a whole bunch of funny bits. Paul McCartney’s brother Mike was in the group and that’s probably why Scaffold received a bit more notice than a lot of other comedy acts of their day. The liner notes mention the group being forever remembered for a novelty singalong called “Lily the Pink.” Unfortunately, that piece wasn’t part of the set they performed here. There is a jolly touch of whimsy in one of the rare musical accompaniment numbers, “Ten Whiskey Bottles,” in which the singer gets progressively smashed while guzzling hootch and progressively screws up the lyrics. While some of this is very funny, it requires an awful lot of undivided attention to get through the heavily accented banter. Fans of Monty Python, with the requisite patience to sit still for an hour in an otherwise quiet room and just listen, will be rewarded with some classic irreverent British humor.
CRASH COFFIN Self titled CD (Radioactive)… Crash Coffin is a fellow from Ohio who put together a band and recorded ten of his songs on a local label back in 1970. Crash had a good grasp on singing, storytelling and songwriting as well as a working knowledge of various musical genres. This CD contains “Masochist Blues” and “the Looney Polka” as well as eight others that are not as readily pegged as belonging to a particular musical style. One song, “Freedom Cake,” could have given the Lovin’ Spoonful some serious competition in the jug band pop field. Crash had a strong and smooth voice with plenty of Elvis that crept in around the edges. This is actually a pretty good record that I’ve gone back to more than once. I especially like the closing track, a rambling folk pop ditty about Jesus stealing his “Blue Kazoo.” Mr. Coffin did individual artwork for the covers of the few copies of the LP that actually made it into the hands of the public because he couldn’t afford to have the covers printed. It’s a shame because this could have been a popular record with a little support from a label.
FIFTH FLIGHT “Into Smoke Tree Village” CD (Radioactive)… Radioactive Records digs deep to find lost records of the past and make them available to a fanatical bunch of ’60s and ’70s enthusiasts. Fifth Flight was probably a popular high school hop band. They were a bit luckier than a lot of other groups doing covers of radio hits in the late ’60s because they actually got to record a whole album. Their set opens with a middle of the road original called “Can’t You See?” The rest of the record is made up of pedestrian versions of songs like “Midnight Hour” and “I’d Like to Make it with You.” It’s too bad they didn’t have a prolific tunesmith onboard to give them something to work with because they were decent musicians. This will enlighten anyone wondering what a competent group of musicians working the top 40 circuit in 1969 was like.
THE FLOOR “1st Floor” CD (Radioactive)… The band was known as the Hitmakers until 1967 when the changing times brought about a radical reincarnation in the Danish beat group. They brought in a fifth member, changed their name and set about Sgt. Pepperizing everything. There is a great photo on the back cover of the band, in their psychedelic finery, along with their various managers, composers, studio musicians, conductors, technicians… and coffee-lady. This is some of the finest introspective pop with orchestral backing of its era. Things get a tad too LSD silly with songs like “Hey, Mr. Flowerman” and “A Rainbow Around Us,” but others have more of a Zombies sensibility. In a fair world, music historians would be mentioning this album in the same breath as Herman’s Hermits’ “Blaze,” but the Continent never got as much attention as England or America. Maybe this re-release will set things straight.
THE SIDETRACK “Baby” CD (Radioactive)… Radioactive Records can be counted on to dig up some very obscure music from the ’60s and ’70s, but this one is more enigmatic than the average overlooked also ran. The label couldn’t dig up a photo of the group and the band never came up with artwork for this eleven-track demo. The best guess of the person who reviewed these songs for the label is that the band is from the late ’60s/ early ’70s. That sounds about right. This could almost pass for the British band Fields. It’s chock full of piano, organ and harpsichord and incorporates elements of classical music in its post-psychedelic rock explorations. While trying to zero in on its own unique sound, the band dabbled in a sort of blues/ Gregorian chant fusion and extended funky jazzy noodling among other odd combinations of eras and genres. The production is good, but the songs could be a lot
more memorable.
What the hell. Tuesday’s musings about Under the Pink got me thinking about all things Tori. Even though I haven’t physically put on one of her CDs in years, it’s comforting knowing that they’re up there, boxed away in the attic, awaiting that day when I cannot go another minute without hearing a musical version of an Alice Walker book or a song about having tea with the devil. Which brings us to Boys for Pele, about which I wrote in 1996:
Because she rides her harpsichord as if it were an unbroken stallion. Because she continues to cultivate her gift for conjuring up musical mood and narrative that hang together and mean something while logically making little or no sense whatsoever. And because the photo in the CD booklet of her suckling a piglet transcends mere questions about bad taste and raises loftier ones about who knows what.
Her third album proves F. Scott Fitzgerald right when he observed: “To most women art is a form of scandal.â€Â
Further cultivating her public image as freak extraordinaire, she employs lyrics as disturbing as “Sometimes you’re nothing but meatâ€Â and “I shaved every place where you been.” She seems incapable of not putting her credibility — first as an artist, then as a woman — on the line. She again scores admirably on both counts.
(Seek out the “Hey Jupiter” CD single for the “Dakota Version” of the song. Industrializing — as much as a piano number can be industrialized — and improving on the Boys for Pele take by adding some nifty background noise that might be a sump pump or a Jarvik-7 artificial heart, it now sounds like something out of a David Lynch film. Included among the four live cuts is a delicate rendition of the tune Amos was born to sing and which presaged her very existence, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.â€Â)
Peter Geiberger, once one of our most promising young troublemakers, artists and social misfits, a creature of great natural intelligence, charm and wit, a musician, visual artist, writer and prankster, died on Wednesday.
I regret that was not able, when I had more influence over him than most, to convince him that dabbling in heroin was stupid. Of course the drug became huge in his life, stole many of his friendships, his time and imagination, and eventually killed him. He dies owing me $50 and a lobster dinner, and the life he ought to have lived instead of the one he did.
I will remember the brilliant 17-year-old with the pre-Raphaelite features who dazzled the tired old Cacophony Society when he began attending events nearly a decade ago, his fearless ability to grab a guitar or some hideous prop and make himself the center of attention, how sympathetic a listener he was when needed despite his snarky ways, how happy he was when drawing, and his essential sweetness.
I will also remember the memorial service I helped organize after Peter’s death was faked on Hallowe’en 2000, as part of the conclusion of the grand Cacophony Society prank. It is all quite surreal, but at least Peter had that rare opportunity to attend (or at least hear about) his own funeral, and receive many posthumous accolaydes from people who loved him.
Goodbye, dear Peter, always in so much pain, now free of that at least.
~
Postscript: I have put Peter’s two delightful features for Scram online: his advice for How to be a Badass (which explains his entire personality) and his history of the black velvet painting tourist market. Around this time (1999) he published his own little zine, Scrum, as well.
Listening to a recent interview with Tori Amos on NPR’s Studio 360, I was reminded of (a) what a good interview she makes, (b) this 1994 album, and (c) how many of her songs pose musical questions:
Why do we crucify ourselves?
Don’t you want more than my sex?
God, sometimes You just don’t come through Do You need a woman to look after You?
For Amos, who was 31 years old when Under the Pink was released, the creative process represented as much an act of confession as it did an act of discovery. “Without the songs I wouldn’t know that I feel what I feel,” she told me in a telephone interview. “Let me tell you,” she confided in a wispy voice, “sometimes I can go, ‘I hate that motherfucker,’ and I’ll rip up his picture. Right? Then I’ll start writing this song, this most beautiful—” Catching herself, she laughed and said to herself, “Oh god, you’re just a sap.”
And a successful one, at that. Her 1992 debut solo album for Atlantic Records, Little Earthquakes, revealed a bent for idiosyncratic lyrics, loopy melodies, and neoclassical keyboard work. It went gold in the US and sold more than a million copies worldwide. The follow-up album, Under the Pink, made its maiden landing at number twelve on the Billboard charts.
Born Myra Ellen Amos in North Carolina, her life from that point onward was atypical at best. A child prodigy who won a piano scholarship to Baltimore’s prestigious Peabody Conservatory when she was five, she grew up listening to the music of Nat King Cole, Fats Waller,Jimi Hendrix, and John Lennon. She was expelled when she was eleven. Her father, a strict Methodist preacher who believed you either support or lose your child, didn’t stand in her way when, at the age of thirteen, she hit the piano bar circuit. At the Marriott, they made her play “Send in the Clowns” seven times a night. At Mr. Henry’s, a popular gay bar in Washington, DC, the waiters used a cucumber to teach her how to give head.
All these daffily disparate ingredients — combined with the sad truth that somewhere along the way she was raped and lived to sing about it on her own fruitcaky terms without reducing herself to martyrdom (“Yes, I wore a slinky red thing/Does that mean I should spread/for you, your friends, your father, Mr. Ed?”) — converge to create songs that are not about blame, but about taking responsibility.
Amos refused to take responsibility, however, for Womanhood or the feminist movement at large, an agenda that many critics (music and social) famously tried to foist upon her.
“I guess I’m kind of boring because I just go about my biz trying to work on myself. When I’m working and listening to my real feelings about things, and trusting them, then I just have to allow that to be enough. Whether I say something that offends somebody or gives somebody a giggle—” She paused. “You have to let go of the responsibility of people’s responses. Sometimes I’ll say things that I might not have said if I would have had more sleep. But, at the same time, that’s real, too.”
Between her first two solo albums, she released a hushed and breathtaking cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” When I asked if she felt any sort of psychic connection with Kurt Cobain (who had just committed suicide a few months earlier), she replied, “Totally.” In the silence that followed, she whispered the word twice more.
“I think it could’ve gone either way for a while,â€Â she commented on another singer/songwriter’s theory that, if left alone to deal with his demons away from the limelight, Cobain might still be alive. “If he would’ve been on medication for the depression. Put all the emotional stuff aside — it’s hard enough waking up every morning — it’s just that you’re a depressive and you have a chemical imbalance.â€Â
Aware of life’s little imbalances, Amos found it difficult to take her fame too seriously. She knew from experience that there were worse alternatives. “Like, we have no idea what it’s like to live in Belfast with those people killing each other,â€Â she said. When she had toured there recently, she’d done so with the reality of bomb scares and a guard at her dressing room door. Because of her name, in the demented minds of some of the more radical Irish there existed a connection between her and the Tories and their principles. “And my whole religious position,” she said wearily, “blah, blah, blah. In Ireland, I always get a bit of a stink because I tell them that the Virgin Mary swallowed, and they don’t like that shit.”
She stopped reading reviews of her work. “It didn’t make me feel good. You read the great ones, you’ve got to read the shitty ones. If you’re going to walk into the ‘opinion world,’ then you have to listen to them from all sides. And I’m just not in the mood. I know when I suck and I know when I’m great. Grade me that all the elements came together, and it didn’t overcook and it didn’t undercook. You know, I got the baby out of the oven just in time.”
Speaking of bad reviews, I mentioned the heavy-metal band that Amos fronted when she came to Hollywood in the late Eighties, called Y Kant Tori Read? While she could no longer worm her way into the plastic snakeskin pants that, along with thigh-high boots and big hair, that had contributed to her mode of dress at the time — and contrary to most of what had been written about this period in her career (most likely because it wasn’t something her more ardent feminist fans wanted to hear) — she giggled and admitted, “Hey, I enjoyed some of it. I had great hair spray. Looking back, I was coming out of my skin as a person.” Before the band, “I was so miserable. My jaw was in a constant clinch mode.”
It was also a learning experience. “I have no illusions about this business. Not one. That’s why I think I’m doing so well. When I say ‘doing well,’ I mean I don’t cancel shows, I’m not jumping out of windows. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t sometimes wear on me and I want to crawl into the corner with a friend.”
Though she had no trouble getting down to brass tacks when it came to the business side of her music, the act of songwriting remained something of a magical mystery to her. Despite her professionalism, it wasn’t something she could force to happen. “If the songs don’t show up knocking on my door, bringing a bottle of chardonnay or a box of shoes, I can’t even think about it. It’s like they already exist, and I get a whiff of their perfume and I get inside of their essence and what they’re trying to tell me. They show up, showing me who they are, and then I’m trying to translate their feelings. Sometimes I don’t do a very good job, and they come back and harass me until I do.”
Bold, hand-clappy Francophone electropop trio fronted by Isabelle LeDoussal, whose snotty, sing-song tones lend a human face to the band’s mechanized synth-punk jingles. Think Bis meets Plastic Betrand, with a little splash of robotic sixties pop chanteuserie.
T- is for tempo, which the multi-instrumentalist kept
T- is for tape, which when rolling can capture gems
R- is for "Really Wanted You," which is pretty near perfect
H- is for Hawthorne, his hometown
O- is for "Only Lovers Decide," little heard but loverly
D- is for daisy, daisy fresh to be precise
E- is for easy, because he makes it look that way
S- is for sixties and seventies, when he recorded mainly
Put em all together and they spell EMITT RHODES, a good friend of the Scram gang, and subject of one of our more jaw-droppingly frank interviews. In honor of Emitt, we’ve created a gallery of rare photos from his personal archives up on flickr, which you may peruse at leisure. Many of these only appeared in Scram #18, and others have never been publically seen at all–including a few from a roll of unprinted slide film circa 1968. Thanks, Emitt, for all the great pix! And if you like deliriously catchy melodic pop, you owe it to your ears to pick up his disks, in thrift stores or import CDs.
Mark Phillips, aka Sono Oto, made it easy on lazy rock crits when he packed his EP of six songs about apples with so many related qualities. I could just riff on the crisp melodies, juicy hooks and all-American charms of this set, but tunes this strong deserve more thoughtful feedback. From the bittersweet pop shimmers of "Granny Smith" (where the titular fruit is sweet but irradiated, with swift decay a worrying possibility) to the childlike nostalgia of "Malus Domestica," which recalls Epic Soundtracks’ solo piano turns, to the sprightly, paranoiac "Northern Spy," Sono Oto’s applesongs reflect a smart and seductive pop craftsmanship that’d be a hit in the veggie aisle or anywhere.
