SACCHARINE TRUST – “HEARTS AND BARBARIANSâ€Â

Truth be told, I think SACCHARINE TRUST were sort of also-rans in the early 80s Los Angeles rock scene, which produced so many incredible bands that it made Sac Trust, a fine combo, maybe the 47th most important band of the “sceneâ€Â. But they certainly had their moments. Early on, on comp tracks like this one and on their debut “Pagan Iconsâ€Â EP, the band played a great angry, off-tempo artpunk with really frothing, weird-guy-rants-n-raves vocals from Jack Brewer. You can totally see how it attracted the attention of Greg Ginn and the SST crew, and Saccharine Trust were one of the very first bands to be signed to that label. I can remember back to when the only non-Black Flag records in SST’s catalog were Minutemen, Stains and Saccharine Trust records, along with 45s from Overkill and Wurm. Later, Saccharine Trust went sideways with a sort of mutant, art-damaged punk jazz, with some improv flourishes. Only their second album. “Surviving You, Alwaysâ€Â really did it for me during this era, and only then on a few tracks like the excellent “Cat Crackerâ€Â. After that LP they went off into the freakzone, like so many of the SST peers, and I stopped paying any sort of attention, as did everyone else not named Dave Lang (with all due respect!).

One classic scorcher of theirs was “Hearts and Barbariansâ€Â, released on the “CRACKS IN THE SIDEWALKâ€Â 45rpm EP comp put out by Mike Watt’s New Alliance records in 1980. I love the hardcore punk tempo but the restrained vocals, the snaky guitar line, and the general sense of evil and/or loss in this one. They had a couple others this smoking, but not many. See what you think by playing or downloading it below.

Play or Download SACCHARINE TRUST – “Hearts and Barbariansâ€Â (from “Cracks In The Sidewalkâ€Â compilation EP)

Kicking myself? Not so much.

David Dunlap Jr. thinks that I’m upset at the cleverness of this. Maybe.

My readers….have you seen this?

“Ratâ€ÂÂ Pete Postlethwaite, Imelda Staunton [2000] A woman becomes furious when her husband arrives home from a bar and metamorphoses into a rodent. [1:45]. [PG/TV-PG] ** 

Lastly, is this enough to finally dismiss The Hold Steady?

 

K.V. – R.I.P.

Already off of CNN’s homepage? It was there at three in the morning, when I was up….and shouldn’t have been.

Truth be told, it’s been some time since I’ve cracked a Vonnegut book. I still own some, so that means something.

Boy, Hollywood could destroy a Vonnegut book. Easily a 100% shit rate. Chime in. Any of you get hoodwinked into renting Breakfast of Champions? On paper, Slaughterhouse Five looks ok (meaning, it was made in the 70’s, and I’ll watch anything from the 70’s), but of course, another misstep.

 

My Mistake

There are times when things are so bad that I think the worst mistake I ever made was moving to Germany in 1993. But then I reflect that, for a while, at least, I had a very exciting life as a writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe who got to travel all over the place and write about art and culture. I also had a radio show which I really enjoyed, as did my many listeners, some of whom still remember it seven years later.

There are other times when I think the worst mistake I ever made was loaning a great deal of money to a friend who has still not paid me back, and who may never do so. But neither of us could have forseen that the sure thing would be cancelled when some people flew planes into the World Trade Center. I mean, what civilian could have predicted that?

But two years ago I made a mistake which has finally caught up with me, and which has cancelled any remaining affection I may have had for living in Germany. It’s a mistake anyone living here might make, so let me explain.

When I was whizzing around Europe for the Journal, I nearly always took the train. My territory was central Europe and Scandinavia, so it made sense: one day going there, one day reporting the story, one day back — and the story would inevitably get written subconsciously on that return journey. So it made sense for me to obtain a Bahn Card, the discount card you can buy from Deutsche Bahn. Back then, there was only one kind of Bahn Card: it gave you 50% off of every ticket, and it had a Rail Plus supplement, which gave you half off of tickets on rail lines in a number of other countries. It wasn’t cheap, but, as I once realized, one round-trip ticket to Copenhagen paid for it.

I bought one in 2004, but that was around when the work started to fall off spectacularly. My editor at the Journal had been replaced, and suddenly I wasn’t getting any work at all from them. Or, for that matter, from anyone else, at least not the kind of work that required me to travel. I missed travelling — I still do. But when 2005 came around, I realized I had better uses for what little money I had than a Bahn Card.

Nonetheless, although I hadn’t ordered one or renewed it on the website as I’d usually done, one came in the mail. Then Deutsche Bahn tried taking the money out of my bank account, but failed, because there wasn’t enough. They sent me a notice. I replied that I didn’t want the card and wasn’t going to pay for it or use it. And that, I thought, was the end of it.

I didn’t pay for it, and I didn’t use it. At the end of April, 2006, I got a stern warning from them ordering me to pay them. I wrote back and repeated that I had not requested the card, and had not used it. And that, I thought, was the end of it yet again.

It wasn’t. Shortly thereafter I started getting bills from lawyers. The €64 Bahn Card debt was now encumbered with legal fees, fees for, as far as I could tell, writing me a letter. And they were big fees, too. Now, I’d gotten letters like this before from mysterious phone companies who thought I owed them money. I ignored them, and they went away. That’s what I decided to do with these letters.

Big mistake. In October, they told me I owed €116.42. In November, it was suddenly €169.70. In December, it was €185.67. On December 7, I was found guilty of indebtedness by a court in Baden-Baden and a judgement was mailed to me in a jaundice-colored yellow envelope.

Now, in America, this would be a black spot on your credit record. My credit here is already terrible. For one thing, I am considered very unstable because I don’t have a regularly occurring income. I live in a country where nobody is self-employed, where if you don’t draw a regular salary, there’s only one bank (the one I use, of course) which will allow you an account. (I once knew a guy who was hired on a freelance basis to come to Germany to teach corporate communications to a major bank. After he was ordered to close his account with them because he wasn’t making regular deposits, he asked his clients what kind of message they thought they were sending. They shrugged and told him to go to another bank. He had plenty of clients in the States, so he just up and left instead.)

So I didn’t think anything more of this until last week. That was when I got a letter from an Obergerichtsvollzieher, one of those words whose individual components you have to look up in the dictionary, but which eventually revealed itself to be “high court bailiff.” I mentioned this to someone and was told “You are in terrible trouble. You’re going to have to hide your computer and all your CDs. You’re going to have to empty out your apartment. They have the right to seize everything you own in payment of the debt — and they will. They can take your bed. They can take your silverware. They have unlimited license.” I thought this was paranoia.

It’s not.

They really can do all of these things. No matter if the value of the goods seized is many times the value of the debt. They will do it because they can. Can they deprive you of your means of making a living? In the United States, the law is very clear about this: you can’t impound a violinist’s violin, or a mechanic’s tools. But in Germany, you can.

A couple of friends rushed over to help. They perused the letters, made notes, hemmed and hawed. “You know,” one of them mused, “when it comes to stuff like this, Kafka was a documentarian.” No kidding.

Making it worse was the fact that it was Easter weekend. One of my friends wrote a letter for me to send to the bailiff explaining things. I had a copy of the letter to Deutsche Bahn. I faxed both to the bailiff, and got ready to call him during office hours. Or should I say hour: he is available for one hour, two days a week. And my last chance for any mercy was to reach him on Tuesday.

It took thirty minutes, but I got him on the phone. Miraculously, he spoke a little English, enough to tell me that there was nothing he could do to mitigate my guilty sentence and that all I could do was pay him before April 19. Oh, and the price, which now included his fee, which was nowhere in any of the paperwork in my hands, was now €225.

A couple of weeks ago, when I got back from Texas, I found yet another note that the postal customs people had seized yet another package of the CDs people send me for review. I’ve taken to letting them send them back, because in most cases it’ll be yet another singer-songwriter I’ll wind up tossing after a couple of tracks, and the Postzollamt is way the hell down in Wilmersdorf. But this was from a label that puts out stuff I like, so I schlepped down there to rescue it. I was confronted with a sign stating that, due to a lack of personnel, waiting times had increased significantly, and that after registering, I was to wait in the new, utterly undecorated, waiting room next door. Which I did, for over an hour, a fourfold increase in their previous record. When I finally had my name called, the woman with the package asked me to open it. I told her (and pointed out on the customs label, which never does any good) that these were promotional items, that I was a journalist, and so on. She grabbed one of the CDs and pointed to the bar-code. “This has to be blacked out so that this item can’t be sold!” she yelled. I told her I wasn’t the one who’d sent it. “You tell them that they have to do this!” She seemed genuinely angry. Or maybe it was just the stress of working somewhere where you knew everyone you met hated you.

What these incidents drove home for me was that there are two Germanies. One is occupied by the people who are my friends and my friends’ friends and husbands and wives, the ones I met when I had the (German) girlfriend who led to my moving here, the ones I hung out with when I did move, the ones I’ve worked with and for. Then there are the ones who run the place, obsessed with a perverted, rigid, narrow need for “Ordnung,” which translates directly as “order,” but is much, much more. Ordnung is conformity; Ordnung is submission; Ordnung is the petty regulations that don’t let you recycle glass on Sunday, that make all onions the same size; Ordnung is why I’ve stopped listening to music, because I have to use headphones after 10pm no matter what, or my neighbors next door will call the police. Not because they’re disturbed by it. No: because they can.

Thinking about Ordnung leads to a lot of other places I’m not going to go right now, mostly because it’s a nice day and I’m trying very hard not to slip down the slope of depression that is almost inevitable when I think of what I could be doing with that €225 I’m going to be parting with soon. I’ve already been for a long walk (my CD player stopped working, so I went to Alexanderplatz to price a new one: looks like about €60 goes out the window on that one) and although my landlord’s mother (one of the Ordnung Germans if there ever was one, as the bitter gurn that suffices for her face makes clear) is here, so far I’ve avoided contact with her. If the checks come in on time, I’ll have the money in time for the bailiff, and — in one of those too-good-to-be-true coincidences — there’s even a possibility that Jim’s Mistake will pay for My Mistake in part.

But I’m very, very tired of Ordnung, and very, very tired of living here. I gave a lot to this city, and I never got a whole hell of a lot back. It’s time to move on, to somewhere with just a little bit less Ordnung and a lot more capacity for fun.

PSYCHEDELICO ULTIMA

I make all these custom CD-R comps at home for myself, now that I’m commuting again and need new music in the car, and blank CDs are rapidly approaching a price point that enables them to be easily disposed of. In other words, at roughly 10 cents a pop, I can start making a CD, lose interest, botch the whole thing, take the CD out and snap it in two, all without too much of an impact to my bottom line. Remember way back in 2000 when a CD-R, which almost always came in its own case, was like $1.50 or more? I sure do. Anyway, one CD I’m working on is a “monstrous compilation of fuzzed-out world-destroying 60s psychedelic nuggets to fry yr brainâ€Â, or something like that. I don’t yet have the 20-25 absolute face-melting, mind-expanding, acid-damaged screamers that I need, though. It’s gonna be called Psychedelico Ultima, ‘cause that sounds kind of Spanish and rad. I know what the three lead tracks are going to be, though.

First’ll be THE TWILIGHTERS’ “Nothing Can Bring Me Downâ€Â for sure. This Texas howler from 1968 is just an incredible tune, later covered as you may know by PUSSY GALORE on their live album. Right on. Next’ll be “Cuttin Grassâ€Â by the CARETAKERS OF DECEPTION. Thank you Grady Runyan! 1968 on this one – read more about it here. Finally, the wah-wah crazy “On The Road Southâ€Â by THE STEREO SHOESTRING will take you into the howling, sucking void & leave you there for good. Sound fun? It is. These are the three best psychedelic rock and roll songs America ever produced. I hope you agree.

Download THE TWILIGHTERS – “Nothing Can Bring Me Downâ€Â
Download CARETAKERS OF DECEPTION – “Cuttin’ Grassâ€Â
Download THE STEREO SHOESTRING – “On The Road Southâ€Â

Everyone Loves Re-Runs

An open apology to WFMU re: my laziness. I once made some entries on WFMU’s “Beware of the Blog.â€Â Not sure why I stopped, nor do I know if they’d ever let me start back up. I max out at 2 – 3 blogs (in terms of regularity).

Previously and currently available here.

July 05, 2005

The Cable Report 07/05/05 (TV That Scared the Crap Out of Me)

In tribute to TV Land’s “Greatest Made-For-TV Movies Of All Timeâ€Â campaign (this week, and next, I believe), I’m firing up a Cable Report.

The Day After
The preceding parental advisories were more than warranted. I’ve begun to mentally compile a list of grocery store freak out scenes, and The Day After has a spendid one. Watching this again, I was knocked back by the unrelenting bleakness, the degree of bickering insanity amongst the characters, and the special FX are not too shabby – look for the signature explosion scenes in which victims are x-rayed as if part of a cartoon. Additionally, who can argue with ANY Jason Robards appearance.

V.
This mini-series did nothing if it didn’t convince me that my parents were face-peeling aliens. The scare lasted weeks, and was eventually replaced by the belief that my Mom was trying to abandon me in the middle of Sears.

Salem’s Lot
I’d venture a guess that some of you didn’t even know! It sucks so bad now, because it was a TV movie then. Not to discredit TV movies as a whole, but you wanted scary and gory, and this is neither. To note: Salem’s Lot did prominently feature Geoffrey Lewis, father of Juliette, and the ultimate on-screen sidekick. Speaking of character actors, and as such, getting completely off track here, who knows the name Michael G. Hagerty? Let’s end with a nod to Michael G. Hagerty:

For years, I was hell bent on the misconception that Michael G. Hagerty was John Candy’s brother. The pop-culturally semi-literate will know him as the Mike Duffy in the “AAMCOâ€Â episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. His bio on IMDB.com reads as follows:

“Graduated from the University of Illinois. He worked at Chicago’s Second City. He now lives in Los Angeles.

Often plays vendors or merchants.â€Â

June 13, 2005

The Toughest Movies Ever Made

Prime Cut (1972)

Simple. Gene Hackman runs hookers out of a meatpacking plant and Lee Marvin (in a suit) chases him through a field with a machine gun. Not only is this the toughest movie ever made, that was the toughest sentence ever written.

 

 

Death Hunt (1981)

Again, this is very simple. Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Carl Weathers, and Ed Lauter run around in the middle of a Canadian nowhere and a lot of blood flows. A lot of blood…in a Peckinpah way. A man gets his arm caught in a bear trap, and in lieu of getting morphine or any sort of treatment, he gets PUNCHED OUT. Lee Marvin repeatedly kicks the dead body of a comrade, yelling, “You dumb son of a bitch!!!â€Â


The French Connection (1971)
 

 

There’s really only one scene in The French Connection: When Popeye Doyle (a 41-year-old Gene Hackman) leaves a bar at dawn, trashed, and manages to pick up a beautiful girl riding her bike around his crappy neighborhood. This scene is tough…tough to believe.
 

Love Liza (2002)  

 

Tough. Tough to sit through.
 

Cannonball  (1976)  

 

Paul Bartel’s unfunny account of the elicit coast-to-coast race was the first movie that disturbed me with violence. A good example of how PG-rated violence in the 70’s would be R-rated violence today. Cars crush people, and they bleed from the mouth. Drivers are head-shot by snipers, and it contains a Carradine.

June 03, 2005

Capsular Reviews of Anything 1.1

Out of the Blue  (1980)

Dennis Hopper runs up and down the hallway, waving his hands and screaming. Dennis Hopper sits at the breakfast table, drunk, waving his arms and screaming. Linda Manz, later of Gummo “fameâ€Â (Solomon’s mom), runs away to carouse around with a “punk rockâ€Â band. Not much fits in-between the (these) lines, here. An entertaining wreck (no pun intended).

The Ice Pirates (1984)

This is the eleventh or twelve movie that I remember seeing in the theater. Condorman was the fourth, and The Black Hole was the first. The all-knowing North Pole glowing crystal that creates the universal star rating system is pulling one over on me. This movie got two stars. The climax is loaded with pre-MTV scatter-brained editing tricks. Oddly “nameâ€Â cast with Robert Urich, Anjelica Huston, Ron Pearlman (ok, ok), and a Carradine.

The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber (2004…it’s a book)

Best true crime I’ve read in months, and I read the living shit out of true crime. This past Christmas, I went on a cruise with my mother. When I wasn’t drunk (afternoons at pool and prior to daily nap), I read the 2003 and 2004 editions of The Best American Crime Writing in the space of a week. Totally engaging, easy, and addictive. Scary Monsters and Super Freaks is in the same territory, but more entertainment biz related. Perfect vacation fare. In order to fit in better on the pool deck, I purchased Robin Cook’s Seizure from the duty-free shop, but I couldn’t dance with that thing. The Nashvillian real estate agent sunning next to me was engrossed in Robert B. Parker’s Stone Cold, but we’re veering into fiction here, with my only point being that THIS BOOK, the story of Attila Ambrus, is a must and erases all other true crime…for now.

Do’s & Don’ts: 10 Years of Vice Magazine’s Street Fashion Critiques

Do your research. There is a picture of a corpse-painted Black Metaller. The caption refers to him as “Speed Metalâ€Â and goes on to make a tired joke about metalheads huffing glue or suffering from incest down the line or something. Practitioners of speed metal do not wear corpse paint. I felt like I was reading Andy Rooney on Metal, if, of course, that existed.

Every Thin Lizzy album before and including Chinatown

…is worth owning. Why, at this late stage in the game, do I have to keep telling people this?

Jim’s Mistake

In 1970, I lived in Sausalito, which is the town that’s at the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite what the town is now, back then there were still little enclaves of funk, and my apartment, needless to say, was one of them. It was set on a steep hill, so that although it was technically a basement, there was still a nice view of Richardson Bay, the fishing fleet (yes, there was still a fishing fleet), and Mt. Tamalpais.

One person I’d always inevitably get to know would be my mailman, because back then I was inundated with free records, and, less frequently, books. The records would come sometimes in outrageous boxes with promo trinkets in them, the books were always heavy, and so there was always a lot of mail at my house. At one point, my mailman was a jolly young guy with wire-framed glasses, who seemed too smart to be in this for a career — you saw a lot of folks like that working in the Post Office in those days. This one’s name was Jim, and sometimes he’d stop to chat for a moment. Nice guy.

But one day he showed up and announced that he was quitting. “Yup. I’ve saved up enough money and me and my girlfriend are going to do something we’ve always wanted to do: go to Africa.” Now, this was a surprise, especially since Jim was white (and I presumed his girlfriend was, too). There was something of a vogue for middle-class black Americans to visit Africa back then, but you didn’t get many white tourists from the States. It was also a surprise because I’d gotten a book in the mail called Bright Continent, by Susan Blumenthal, an American woman who’d done the same thing and published a guidebook to sub-Saharan Africa. Remember, this was in the days before Lonely Planet and so on — it was 1974 or so, and books like this just didn’t exist. I’d taken a look in it and gotten hooked; it was not only useful as a guide, but it was fun to read.

So I mentioned this to Jim, and he said sure, he’d love to look at it. “Take it with you,” I suggested. “Bring it back when you get back.”

And he did. It remains one of my treasures: beat up, bookmarked with odd bus tickets and harissa-can labels, annotated with corrections and amplifications. I’ve never been to sub-Saharan (or super-Saharan, for that matter) Africa, but I’ve got a book that has.

I’m not sure what happened next, but I lost track of Jim and eventually moved to Texas.

Fast forward.

Last year, I heard from Jim again. He’d found this blog, and was bemoaning the fact that he’d been in Berlin some months earlier, and hadn’t known I was here. He was in Portland, Oregon now, selling real estate and hoping to find something else to do, but loving Oregon and hoping I could visit. Well, that was sort of out of the question, but it sure was good to hear from him, and yes, it was too bad that he hadn’t known I was here. But, I said in my e-mail back to him, I had a friend in Eugene, Oregon, who constantly fantasized about moving to Portland but didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. Not only that, I figured Jim would like this guy and maybe he could kick his butt gently enough so that he’d move and realize his dream while putting a couple of bucks in Jim’s pocket.

And that’s just what happened: Brett and his wife Carole had dinner with Jim one evening when they were in town for some musical event and Jim wound up showing them a place that they wound up buying. Everybody’s happy: Brett’s doing a lot more good work and is much happier being out of the decaying hippie/university surroundings he was in, Carole’s doing fine with her artwork and other innumerable projects, and Jim’s got a couple of people he likes to hang out with.

I like happy endings, myself, but there’s more. To thank me for sending him customers, Jim sent me a gift. It’s a €200 gift certificate redeemable at the restaurant Quarré or the “gourmet restaurant” Lorenz Adlon at the Hotel Adlon. It expires on April 19 and cannot be renewed.

And when I saw it, my heart sank. I knew he meant well, and yet the Adlon pretty much represents a huge hunk of what I don’t like about this city. It’s got a horrible reputation as a place to stay: I once helped an editor for Conde Nast Traveller research a story on Berlin, and he was staying there, went for a walk, and was refused re-entry because he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He finally convinced the doorman to accompany him to the front desk, where they conceded that he was, indeed, a guest. Then there was the young African woman who was fired for wearing her hair in an “unconventional” style, albeit one traditional to her people — and hardly outrageous. The stories go on and on; the high-end travellers I know avoid the place.

The idea that I could get into one of their restaurants without a jacket and tie, too, is ludicrous. That’s not the way I dresss, nor is it the way you have to dress in most restaurants here. One nice thing about Berlin is that, outside of government circles, anyway, it’s very informal. I don’t want to eat where the Bonners eat anyway, so they can have their jackets and ties.

Jim was, understandably, distressed that I was upset by this gift. Why, he said, he’d been to the Adlon and it didn’t seem like that kind of place. And couldn’t I borrow a jacket and tie? (Answer: no. From whom? Nobody I know has one either!)

I’ve tried not thinking about this for a while, but it occurred to me recently that the clock was ticking on this gift, so I took it down the other day and saw the date. I honestly don’t know what to do. I don’t think they check ID when you cash it in, so maybe I should sell it. But I don’t know anyone who’d want to buy it, either. Should I hit Craigslist? Just let it expire quietly in its folder here by my desk? It’s only eight days away.

Some day, I hope, I’ll visit Portland. I also hope I’ll have enough money to take Jim out to dinner and explain the cultural nuance behind all of this. Meanwhile, I’ve got a white elephant with a Quadriga on it making me feel guilty.

Warning: The following post is mostly content-free…

Warning: The following post is mostly content-free and full of boring minutiae! Buy a case and share with your friends!

I shaved off my moustache this morning, and now I have a clean-shaven upper lip for the first time in 13-14 years. I first grew a moustache two years earlier to that, and the last time I was ‘stasheless lasted one week. It was odd to see my face in the mirror, all moony and sometimes reflecting back at me what appeared to be a bad photocopy of my teenage face. I’m thinking muttonchops are next.

In other news, my eMusic downloads of the month are:

  • Andrew Bird – Armchair Apocrypha (+ eMusic bonus track)
  • Danielson – Brother Is To Son
  • The For Carnation – s/t
  • Isaac Hayes – To Be Continued
  • Opeth – Blackwater Park
  • Panda Bear – Person Pitch
  • Red House Painters – Down Colorful Hill
  • Sonny Rollins – Freedom Suite
  • Marnie Stern – In Advance of the Broken Arm
  • Tortoise – TNT
  • David S. Ware – The Freedom Suite
  • Young People – Five Sunsets in Four Days

BILL DIREEN & THE BILDERS : “ALIENâ€Â 45

I once knew a woman in the early 90s named Sharon McKenzie who had just come off a college stint as a “disc jockeyâ€Â, as had I (she at KDVS in Davis, CA; me at KCSB in Santa Barbara, CA and KFJC in Los Altos Hills, CA). She went to every show I did – and at that time we were averaging 2-3 per week – and when she told me she was starting a record label, I thought that was pretty cool. She stumped me with her first artist, though, telling me it was something by BILL DIREEN & THE BILDERS, and then getting a little annoyed when I didn’t know who that was. She was all, “You don’t know who that is?â€Â, and I was all, “Noâ€Â. So she goes, “He’s a New Zealand outsider pop legendâ€Â, and then I go, “Oh, well I haven’t heard of himâ€Â. So she’s all, “laterâ€Â. Of course I bought Direen’s “Alien/Skullsâ€Â 45 that came out a few months later on Sharon’s HECUBA RECORDS, and became a BILL DIREEN convert shortly thereafter.

His story is arguably the most unsung of the great New Zealand 1980s outsiders (I say arguably because there’s also THE KIWI ANIMAL and SHOES THIS HIGH, not to mention THE GORDONS), and you’d be well advised to pick up the FLYING NUN series of CDs that came out in the mid-90s that collected his early works. Direen still records music to this day and is a published poet of much renown; Hecuba folded up shop very quickly after this single; and I haven’t seen Sharon in a coon’s age (you can still say “coon’s ageâ€Â, can’t ya?). I’m posting “Alienâ€Â because it’s my favorite of Direen’s many eerie, organ-heavy loner pop records, which always seem to be uplifting in their way but are full of strange stumbles down dark musical alleys. This particular version is a later (1990?) run-through one of his earliest songs, originally from 1981. It’s a good one, and you will like it.

Play or Download BILL DIREEN & THE BILDERS – “Alienâ€Â (from 1991 45)

Final Frank Words

 

What Ever Happened To The Mothers Of Invention?

by Frank Zappa

(Hit Parader no. 48, April 1970, pages 23-24)

The Mothers of Invention, the infamous and repulsive rocking teen combo, is not doing concerts any more. Jimmy Carl Black (the Indian of the group) has formed another ensemble which he calls Geronimo Black (named after his youngest child). Don (Dom De Wild) Preston is collaborating with avant garde dancer Meredith Monk in performances of electronic music. Ian Robertson Underwood is preparing material for a solo album. Roy Estrada, Bunk Gardner, Buzz Gardner and Art Tripp are doing studio work in Hollywood. Motorhead (James Euclid) Sherwood is working on his bike and preparing for a featured role in a film with Captain Beefheart. Frank Zappa is producing various artists for his record companies, Bizarre and Straight (which he co-owns with Herb Cohen), working on film and television projects and is currently writing arrangements for a new album by French jazz violinist Jean Luc Ponty. This Ponty album, to be released on World Pacific, will mark the first attempt by any other artist to record a whole album's worth of Zappa's writing, exclusive of The Mothers of Invention interpretations.

It is possible that, at a later date, when audiences have properly assimilated the recorded work of the group, a reformation might take place. The following is a brief summary of The Mothers' first five years of musical experimentation and development.

In 1965 a group was formed called The Mothers. In 1966 they made a record which began a musical revolution. The Mothers invented Underground Music. They also invented the double fold rock album and the concept of making a rock album a total piece of music. The Mothers showed the way to dozens of other groups (including The Beatles and Stones) with their researches and experimentation in a wide range of musical styles and mediums.

The Mothers set new standards for performance. In terms of pure musicianship, theatrical presentation, formal concept and sheer absurdity, this one ugly band demonstrated to the music industry that it was indeed possible to make the performance of electric music a valid artistic expression.

In 1967 (April through August), The Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street in New York was devastated by cherry bombs, mouldering vegetables, whipped cream, stuffed giraffes and depraved plastic frogs… the whole range of expressive Americana… all of it neatly organized into what people today would probably call a "Love Rock Long-Hair Tribal Musical." The Mothers called it “Pigs And Repugnant: Absolutely Free" (an off-Broadway musical)… it was in its third month when "Hair" first opened.

The Mothers was the first big electric band. They pioneered the use of amplified and/or electronically modified woodwind instruments… everything from piccolo to bassoon. They were the first to use the wah wah pedal on guitar as well as horns and electric keyboard instruments. They laid some of the theoretical groundwork which influenced the design of many commercially manufactured electro-musical devices.

The Mothers managed to perform in alien time signatures and bizarre harmonic climates with a subtle ease that led many to believe it was all happening in 4/4 with a teen-age back beat. Through their use of procedures normally associated with contemporary "serious music" (unusual percussion techniques, electronic music, the use of sound in blocks, strands, sheets and vapors), The Mothers were able to direct the attention of a large number of young people to the work of many contemporary composers.

In 1968, Ruben Sano lifted his immense white-gloved hand, made his fingers go "snat!" and instantly Neo-Greaser Rock was born. A single was released from Ruben's boss album (remember Cruising with Ruben & the Jets ?) called "Deseri." It was played on many AM stations (actually rising to #39 on the Top Forty at KIOA in Des Moines, Iowa) until programmers discovered Ruben & the Jets was really The Mothers under a disguise.

Meanwhile, the so called Underground FM stations could boast (because they were so cool and far out) that they actually went so far as to play The Mothers of Invention albums on their stations. Yes. Boldly they'd whip a few cuts from Freak Out on their listeners between the steady stream of important blues numbers.

And then of course, there was Uncle Meat, recorded back to back with Ruben & the Jets (a somewhat unusual production procedure). In spite of the musical merit of the album, the only thing that drew any attention was the fact that several words, in common usage, were included in candid dialogue sections.

Awaiting release is a collection of 12 complete albums of Mothers' music, a retrospective exhibition of the group's most interesting work, covering a span from two years prior to the actual formation of the ensemble, through August 1969. Included in the collection is documentary material from first rehearsals, tracing the development of the group through to its most recent live performances in the U.S. and Europe, some of which have become almost legendary. To those people who cared at all about The Mothers' musical explorations (and also those who didn't care & who wish to be merely entertained), this collection will prove of great interest.