Category: Blogs A-J

5. rockcritics.com

On 31 January 2002, almost a dozen years since I’d last seen anything published by Paul Nelson, I posted a public query to the Elliott Murphy mailing list:

Does anybody know what ever happened to rock critic Paul Nelson? 

Within the hour, some kind soul directed me to rockcritics.com. Almost two years earlier, in March of 2000, the website had published an extensive interview with the elusive critic. Written by Steven Ward, a staff writer for The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the article was appropriately titled “What Ever Happened to Rock Critic Paul Nelson?”

“I never heard of Paul Nelson until 1990,” Ward remembered last year. “I was 22 and a friend had given me a Christmas present — a prized possession then and now. The present was Kurt Loder’s Bat Chain Puller, a book collection of my favorite music writer’s articles from Rolling Stone.” In the acknowledgments, among the many individuals Loder thanked, was “the legendary Paul Nelson.” “So I immediately hit my college library, attacked the microfilm machine, and started looking through old issues of Rolling Stone. I started reading everything Nelson had written. It was unbelievable stuff — especially his long cover feature on Warren Zevon from the early Eighties that zeroed in on the songwriter’s demons with alcohol.”

Ward made a promise to himself to track down Paul Nelson — something that wouldn’t happen until late 1999.

The resultant interview marked the first of what has become, thanks to the Canadian music writer Scott Woods, rockcritics.com, a treasure trove of articles and interviews devoted to critics (not all of them rock & roll). And Steven Ward’s piece stands as the definitive Paul Nelson interview.

Everything Is an Afterthought draws from subsequent, previously unpublished interview material with Paul to explore the many whats and whys raised by Ward’s excellent article.

Copyright 2007 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

5. rockcritics.com

On 31 January 2002, almost a dozen years since I’d last seen anything published by Paul Nelson, I posted a public query to the Elliott Murphy mailing list:

Does anybody know what ever happened to rock critic Paul Nelson? 

Within the hour, some kind soul directed me to rockcritics.com. Almost two years earlier, in March of 2000, the website had published an extensive interview with the elusive critic. Written by Steven Ward, a staff writer for The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the article was appropriately titled “What Ever Happened to Rock Critic Paul Nelson?”

“I never heard of Paul Nelson until 1990,” Ward remembered last year. “I was 22 and a friend had given me a Christmas present — a prized possession then and now. The present was Kurt Loder’s Bat Chain Puller, a book collection of my favorite music writer’s articles from Rolling Stone.” In the acknowledgments, among the many individuals Loder thanked, was “the legendary Paul Nelson.” “So I immediately hit my college library, attacked the microfilm machine, and started looking through old issues of Rolling Stone. I started reading everything Nelson had written. It was unbelievable stuff — especially his long cover feature on Warren Zevon from the early Eighties that zeroed in on the songwriter’s demons with alcohol.”

Ward made a promise to himself to track down Paul Nelson — something that wouldn’t happen until late 1999.

The resultant interview marked the first of what has become, thanks to the Canadian music writer Scott Woods, rockcritics.com, a treasure trove of articles and interviews devoted to critics (not all of them rock & roll). And Steven Ward’s piece stands as the definitive Paul Nelson interview.

Everything Is an Afterthought draws from subsequent, previously unpublished interview material with Paul to explore the many whats and whys raised by Ward’s excellent article.

Copyright 2007 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

Almost all that’s on my mind lately is the book. …

Almost all that’s on my mind lately is the book. With that in mind, here’s the first random 10 songs from my iPod when I hit shuffle.

  1. The Mountain Goats – “Pale Green Things” (The Sunset Tree)
    This is the kiss-off final track from The Sunset Tree, a downer of a song cycle (so says the author of the forthcoming 33 1/3 book Shoot Out The Lights) about, presumably, John Darnielle’s abusive step-father. The elegaic feel of this song, both a curse and promise, is unbelievably poignant, a way of making a semi-fond farewell to someone hated more than loved. The lyrics talk of a trip to the racetrack, and end with these lines: “My sister called at 3 a.m./Just last december/She told me how you’d died at last, at last/And that morning at the race track was one thing I remembered/I turned it over in my mind/like a living chinese finger trap/seaweed and Indiana sawgrass.” My poetry professor used to say that most song lyrics are doggerel made more meaningful by the way they are sung, and I think he was mostly correct about this. This is the exception.
  2. The Embarrassment – “Song For Val” (Blister Pop)
    Just over a minute of a poorly recorded little punk anthem. “I don’t care for old people,” goes the lyric.
  3. Dinosaur Jr – “Start Choppin'” (Where You Been)
    Man, this is a surprising collection of songs! This is a post-Lou power-pop song layered with a couple of dozen J. Mascis guitars. I’m not a huge fan of later Dinosaur Jr, but this is one of the keepers.
  4. The Mountain Goats – “Woke Up New” (From a free eMusic Pitchfork Festival sampler)
    This song also appears on Get Lonely, which I also have, so hey, it’s a duplicate and I can delete it to make room for new music. Yay! I must have my random factor set to be more likely to repeat artists, because I can’t believe I’d have enough Mountain Goats out of the 4,178 songs currently stored on my iPod to bring them up twice in the first five songs otherwise. Get Lonely is an ok album, but the lyrics never rise to the poetic heights of the previous few albums and the artiface of the songs actually seems to distance me from Darnielle’s characters, rather than drawing me towards them, also unlike the 2-3 immediately preceeding albums.
  5. Isis – “Backlit” (Panopticon)
    I think Darnielle, a metal fiend currently working on a 33 1/3 book on Master of Reality, would dig this transition. Isis plays trippy, expansive metal. I understand many of their longtime fans dislike this album, but I like it a lot, almost as much as the classic Oceanic. See, I love long post-rock tracks (meaning that the music relies on jazz-like textures and moves through suites rather than verse-chorus-verse structure), and this sounds like the metal version of that. As much as I like Isis, I wish they’d join Mastodon in dropping the cookie monster vocals, although I think that may be the primary way that metal fans identify Isis as a metal band these days. Did I mention that this song is nearly 8 minutes long and features as great stripped-back bridge part? Like it.
  6. Tom Ze – “Dulcineia Popular Brasileira” (Tom Ze)
    From the master of mindbending tropicalia, this is a somewhat unsuccessful early fusion of 60s-era radio pop with Ze’s distinctly odd sensibilities. There’s better examples of what Ze can do when he’s cooking with grease.
  7. Devendra Banhart – “Anchor” (Cripple Crow)
    A short burst of sweetness that may also be called “Canela”. I put this on a bedtime mix I made for my 2-yr-old.
  8. Bill Evans Trio – “Peace Piece” (Everybody Digs Bill Evans)
    I’m taking this as proof that my iPod would rather be laying in a shady hammock in a cool breeze. This track, a slow sort of ur-New Age ivory tinkling, but with, y’know, tons of heart (unlike George Winston, f’rinstance), always sounds like it should score the inevitable final compromise between the protagonists and antagonists in a Miyazaki flick.
  9. The Mekons – “Cocaine Lil” (Mekons Rock ‘N Roll)
    A spacey, sing-song tale of a coke addict. The lyrics read like a Victorian morality tale.
  10. Prince – “New Position” (Parade)
    Wow, I had no idea I had any songs from Parade in my iTunes at all. I’m completely unfamiliar with this song. It ain’t Prince at his maximum brilliance, though.

Missteps. I love missteps.

It’s bedtime. I’m in no condition to be writing IN MY WAAAAH IN MY WAAAAH IN MY BLOG. Here are some creative mistakes that bring a great big smile to my incredibly handsome face:

1. Illbient -  When you have a genre spearheaded by a man that subheads his already perfect-storm-of-stupid moniker with “That Subliminal Kidâ€Â, well, you have a pretentious (yet mercifully brief) movement that is deservedly slotted to wash through the cracks of music history, hopefully never to return. Say it to yourself: “ILLBIENTâ€Â “ILLBIENTâ€Â “ILLBIENTâ€Â

2. The Black Dahlia – It takes real talent to fuck up a story/book quite this bad. DePalma deserves to be locked in a room with the Yoko Ono boxed set!!! Un-f*cking-believable!!! I gave the seven foot tall “daddy-oâ€Â of noir James Ellroy a ride to the airport once. What a walking cartoon.

3. Paris, Texas – Wim Wenders is officially my OVERRATED DIRECTOR OF THE WEEK. Paris, Texas? Uh, I have shit to do this afternoon…can’t make it. â€ÂOh wow, watch how he utilizes space and silence!!â€Â Yeah, watch nothing happen for the sake of a flimsy story. Check Puh-leeeeeze!!! No more movies for people that f*ck to NPR!!!!

 

 

THE APOTHEOSIS OF PSR

That’d be “primitive sh** rockâ€Â, as discussed in this forum here and documented in amazing, glorious detail here. Well, my favorite PSR song of all time needs a fair hearing, too. This nasty, downer of a 60s garage track from THE MODDS came out on “American National Recordsâ€Â, but I’m a little unclear as to what date it came out – I’m guessing ’66. All you can hear is the scarily fuzzed-out guitar; slurred, I’ve-just-been-dosed vocals, and what appear to be maracas shakin’ in the background, but legend has it there’s actually an entire band lost in the murk there somewhere. What a friggin’ masterpiece. Deservedly resurrected by the CHEATER SLICKS on their “Whiskeyâ€Â LP in 1991.

Play or Download THE MODDS – “Leave My Houseâ€Â

Take it up a notch, please!!

What I pasted below can also be read in its edited/less-embarrassing form if you loiter in a bookstore, flipping through the latest issue of D.I.W. Magazine.  

START!!

Check it out, Skank Williams Jr., I’m back with another installment of Pussy Eraser, DIW’s I’m-Not-A-Metalhead-But-I-Play-One-In-This-Column extreme music examination!! I recently started a sluggish day with the 2 CD live Sentenced set, Buried Alive (Century Media). The day remained sluggish. Bless their sort-of black hearts, they spent 14 years (and a lot of albums) trying to be In Flames, but Sentenced started out DECENT (not GREAT), and went BAD (not catchy BAD). Ever wish that Anal Cunt were smarter, less self-destructive, and more musical? Of course you did. That’s why I’m telling you to run into the loving arms of Chicago’s 7000 Dying Rats. Their expansive Season In Hell (He Who Corrupts Inc) assaults with coherent blasts of grind mixed with genuinely hilarious novelty hip-hop and a track that makes fun of free jazz. I love it!! If you’re the gambling sort, go ahead and bet that Jesu’s Conqueror (Hydrahead) will make every top ten list forced upon bedraggled freelancers come December 2007. Unsurprisingly, but good for us fans, it combines the pop of Silver and the pummel of the debut with at least four songs that annihilate anything on those two discs. Continuing the obligatory Hydra Head string (we are, after all, an indie magazine and not Metal Maniacs), let’s recall when Cave In, uh, caved in (HAHAHAHA!!!) to bad radio metal, then tried to get all loud and shit to save face. That’s applicable here because our favorite label has issued not one, but TWO Cave In side projects. Clouds is the effort of Adam McGrath, and it resurrects the LET’S ROCK….WHAT A FUN IDEA!!! movement of the mid-90’s – you know, when hardcore crusties discovered ZZ Top? Too bad he cut class when they were hitting the How To Write A Good Song portion of the course. Zozobra is Cave In’s bassist, Caleb Scofield – a far more experimental in a Melvins-meets-Wax Trax adventure. If you haven’t figured it out by this sentence, that means it sounds like mid-period Godflesh with a touch of Harvey Milk. Midwestern, cargo pants-rocking, meth-blowing fathers of three at age 20 are problematic on many levels, and I wonder if they’d use contraception if someone invented condoms that felt and appeared like the members of Slipknot. Collect all nine and avoid having nine kids!! Are their babies born wearing visors? Voliminal: Inside The Nine (Roadrunner) turned up in the PO Box – it’s a live DVD set – as far as I can tell, cuz I will not be venturing “inside the nine.â€Â The Handshake Murders (Usurper, on Goodfellow Records) just spent an entire song telling me that they’ll “rip my throat out,â€Â which they are attempting with rearranged Prong riffage and your standard issue metalcore throat shred. To conclude with uber-worthy reissue alerts: Snatch up both of the Trouble reissues (Psalm 9 and The Skull…on Escapi Music) and educate yourself on how lonely it must have been to be a an amazing, prescient, and Christian doom band in the early-80’s. Follow that up with Armored Saint’s CLASSIC March of the Saint on Rock Candy….wow, there was never a more perfect combo of thrash and L.A. pop-metal….fans of ANY metal variation will not deny the brilliance of this record. Check please!!!

–Andrew Earles

4. Elliott Murphy Remembers

I was remiss in my last journal entry for not linking to Elliott Murphy‘s heartfelt eulogy of the man he called mentor, the man he called friend. Written on 7 July 2006, just a few days after Paul’s body was found in his Manhattan apartment, Murphy’s memories — as tough as they are fond and funny — spill forth in a nonstop fashion like so many years gone by. Thirty-four, to be exact.

Copyright 2007 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

4. Elliott Murphy Remembers

I was remiss in my last journal entry for not linking to Elliott Murphy‘s heartfelt eulogy of the man he called mentor, the man he called friend. Written on 7 July 2006, just a few days after Paul’s body was found in his Manhattan apartment, Murphy’s memories — as tough as they are fond and funny — spill forth in a nonstop fashion like so many years gone by. Thirty-four, to be exact.

Copyright 2007 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.