Monster Magnet w/ Pilgrim Fathers and Nebula

Sapnu Fabrika, Riga, 13 November 2008

From the outside, it was hard to gauge the size of the Sapņu Fabrika (Dream Factory). I had a moment of trepidation before stepping through the doors (Please let there be more than fifteen people at this show) but once inside I felt better. There were two bars, a decent stage with crowd control corridor, and standing room for several hundred. Just how many were in attendance, I can’t say, but it was certainly a good crowd.

[Aside: Coat check was free. Which in a coldish country like Latvia is very fair. I wish there were opportunities to make an extra buck left unexploited in the U.K. – it’s just so tiring sometimes.]

The first band on were Pilgrim Fathers from Nottingham. They were clearly influenced by the kind of effects-heavy Hawkwind-y space rock that early Monster Magnet channelled before releasing their debut L.P. (see half hour jam on Tab E.P.), but something was amiss. Marisa didn’t like them from the get go: loud and indecipherable were her main complaints. She has since adopted “Pilgrim Fathers” as a short hand for “irredeemably bad”. My reaction wasn’t quite so negative, perhaps because I knew a bit more about where they were coming from, but still: the lead singer spent so much time hunch over his effects module that it the thought of throwing a shoe at him did cross my mind.

After the sacrificial lambs, we were treated to the best supporting set I’ve seen in a long while by Nebula. I actually own To The Center and may have a few other tracks from these Californians on some of my “stoner rock” compilation CDs back home, so the band were not exactly an unknown entity. But then if you asked me for another album title, I’d be struggling.

The band are actually doubling back after doing their own headline tour of Europe earlier in the year, and managed to lure the building crowd into a bopping mood. As with Pilgrim Fathers, however, their kind of music – in this case: tight, riff-driven, sludgy rock’n’roll – sounds dated now. The lyrics lack any sort of punch, and the band are a couple notches down on the charisma stakes to suggest they will ever find their way out of their Eastern European Tour purgatory and into the American alternative mainstream.

Still, there’s plenty worse things than being a great supporting act (I’m sure for a few audience members they outshone the headliners…).

But I was only in Riga for one band.

Before, during and after Monster Magnet’s performance, I thought a lot about one thing. And no, it was not Dave Wyndorf’s weight (I forgot about that halfway through the first song… though not permanently).

It was the set list.

I own all of Monster Magnet’s albums, but wouldn’t call myself a diehard fan anymore. When I heard that the band were playing ‘Best Of’ shows this time around and ignoring their newer material, my first reaction was: cool. I would get to see the songs that made me a diehard fan.

But just what would a best of set list be like? Monster Magnet have released two greatest hits collections: both were misnomers (only ‘Space Lord’ could be called a hit); both were money-making ventures by record labels and opposed by the band in some way; neither really captured the best of Monster Magnet.

Then there was the difference between what the band would consider a best of and an Eastern European audience would expect.

All I knew was that there were certain songs, if I cast my mind back five or six years to when Monster Magnet loomed large on my musical tastes, that I would go ga-ga to see live. Such a list began with ‘Spine of God’ and ‘Cage Around The Sun’, followed by a trio of album starters from the mid-late 90s: ‘Dopes To Infinity’ (from the album of the same name), ‘Crop Circle’ (from Powertrip) and ‘Melt’ (from God Says No).

I was earworming ‘Dopes’ for three days as I walked around Riga (and Sigulda, which was lovely, by-the-by) before catching the concert on our last night in the Baltics. I even said to Marisa before the show: they’re gonna play ‘Dopes To Infinity’ tonight and they’ll play it first.

And so they did.

In fact, the set of fourteen songs (ten plus a four song encore that stretched for 25+ minutes), included every one of the five songs I listed above in my best of / must see live list.

I was so fixated with what songs MM would play / were playing, I tried to take a snippet of video of each song as an aide memoir for when I got back to the hostel to ensure I got the set list straight for this review.

[It turns out this wasn’t necessary as I got one of the set lists used by the band after the show, which Jim Baglino (Bass) kindly signed... and most of my video snippets are pretty much indecipherable.]

The only time I felt the set list left something to be desired was when they followed up the epic ‘Third Alternative’ with ‘Zodiac Lung’. Dave sat on a speaker and almost crooned the lyrics, while Ed Mundell stood in the background providing the only instrumentation. It was clearly an attempt to provide light and shade, this being a quieter, more introspective interlude, but it wasn’t necessary: ‘Third Alternative’ had already light-and-shaded our socks off, and later on ‘Cage Around The Sun’ and ‘Spine of God’ did the same thing. In comparison, ‘Zodiac’ was a one trick pony. It was also the only time I wondered (worried) about what the locals thought of this song choice.

If mellowness and introspection were in order, why not ‘Ozium’, a song from the same record as ‘Zodiac Lung’ but with that space rock vibe that the Pilgrim Fathers tried (and failed) to hook into. For a best of show, that would have been the icing on my cake.

The other thing to note, and this isn’t really a complaint, is that there was nothing from 2007’s 4-Way Diablo. Which, in one respect, you can understand if the band is out to play a We May Never Tour Again So Here’s The Best In Our Bag of Tricks type of show, but then again, what’s up with the t-shirts on sale with the cover art of 4-Way Diablo on the front and on the back: “4-Way Diablo Winter 2008 European Tour”?

‘Little Bag of Gloom’ could have ably filled the role of ‘Zodiac Lung’, and surely one of ‘Slap In The Face’, ‘Solid Gold’ or ‘4-Way Diablo’ would stand up just as well as lesser known songs like ‘Twin Earth’ or ‘Radiation Day’?

See, I told you I’d thought a lot about the set list.

Still, I can conclusively say that this was the concert where I have sung along the most (yes, even more than the Tragically Hip). I was enjoying it so much I never got the chance to properly look around and see how many other people were singing along (though I got the impression that Powertrip-era songs were the ones that went down the best).

The band were tight and looked into it. The absolute highlight was the way Caivano, Baglino and Mundell hung back during the quiet parts of ‘Third Alternative’ and then came to the front of the stage in a wave and blew the speakers for the chorus (sounds gimmicky put into words, but it wasn’t).

Up until seeing MM live, I was never really sure about Ed Mundell, the lead guitarist. He always seemed a bit aloof in videos and photos, somehow at odds with the band’s image, though I could never fault his solos. But seeing him out watching the warm up acts (he actually ran off to find the sound engineer when Pilgrim Fathers were on stage waiting to start) and his demeanour on stage, it’s clear that Ed is a great guy who just isn’t that outgoing. His personality is refreshing to find in a band of this sort, and provides an indispensable foil to the excesses of Dave Wyndorf (hold that thought). And following my brief conversations with Jim Baglino and Phil Caivano after the show (basically: “Great show. I’m from New Zealand. Please like me”) I feel safe in saying they are genuinely nice people.

As for Dave, he didn’t emerge from backstage before or after the show, and I couldn’t help imagine him in some Jabba The Hutt repose. He still played the role of showman and Prophet of Teenage Fears and Desire well during the show, but he also spent a lot of non-singing time with his back to the audience, recovering.

Because the guy is out of shape.

And his dress sense (unzipped back hoodie, baggy cargoes) doesn’t help appearances… or the sweat situation.

And when he stands with his back to the crowd, you can see his bald spot.

And I have nothing but admiration for the show he put on.

Regardless of the fact he’s 52 years old and only two years removed from a near fatal drug overdose. Compare him to the noodler from Pilgrim Fathers, and you begin to understand why some people are made to be fallen stars and others can only dream of it.

---

Rating: 9 guitars out of 10.

Starred Reviews or Saggy Books?

Rating a film or album out of five stars is ham-fisted, but the practice still pervades the industry. Books, on the other hand, have largely avoided a rating system being incorporated into their reviews. Is this due to snobbery on the part of reviewers/books editors or perhaps even readers? Or is there something that sets books apart from other rateable commodities?

Perhaps the first place to use star ratings was the military. Senior ranking officers such as brigadiers and commodores received one star, and as they progressed further up the ranks they gained more stars until they were top dog (Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal, etc).

In 1926, The Michelin Guide introduced a star rating for exceptional food in the restaurants it reviewed, expanding its rating system to three stars in the 1930s.

Around the same time, accommodation started to be rated. Nowadays, many organisations, such as the AA (or in the US, the AAA) review both restaurants and accommodation using a star system (although often they aren't stars but diamonds or rosettes...).

Film and music reviewers have also taken liberties with the 'star' system, from Siskel and Ebert's Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down to Robert Christgau's report card grading (A+ = Marquee Moon, A = Born To Run, etc). Gimmicks aside, it seems the urge to quantify and compare certain types of media as one would a restaurant or a hotel is strong.

Is it really the case that a good movie is as easy to distinguish from a bad movie as it is to tell a dive from a deluxe suite?

Of course not. Reviewers disagree all the time. In fact, it makes great TV when they do. While living in Australia, one of the few TV shows I watched with any frequency was the ABC's At the Movies with David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz. Despite the fact I was seeing less and less movies at the cinema, the show was at it's most engaging when one host was bowled over by a film and the other was left untouched. When they both loved or loathed a film, there was always a sense of disappointment, of dead air being filled with uh-huhs and oh yesses.

Review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes seek to remove the subjectivity and twist reviewing back to quantitative blacks and whites. 69% of reviews were favourable for I Am Legend, so it must be okay. Really?

Book reviews (at least the reviews I read in print and online) don't bother with stars or rosettes or coronets. But why is a book less like a hotel room than a movie, especially if that movie is based on a book?

I think it has something to do with the complexity of books. I'm talking here about both novels and short story collections. The way you gather together threads throughout the reading process may differ from book to book, but the fact still remains that after you finish the final page, your work as reader -- as audience -- is not over.

The amount of work required after finishing a book is often a good measure of its worth. Having now finished Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and Moonraker, I can say they aren't very good pieces of literature, comfortable in the knowledge I'm not being undeservingly snobbish. The only thoughts I was left to work through at the conclusion of these books was how they tied in with the films and the overall Fleming/Bond legacy.

Several other books I've read in the past few months have, on the surface, and even while reading them, seemed good enough. It was only when I finished them and moved onto the next book in that particular pile (home, travel or lunchtime) that I realised how little I was thinking about the book outside of reading it. And how little it came back to me after having finished it.

Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes was shortlisted for the Booker this year, and made me realise how little I knew about Pakistan's role in the Soviet-Afghan conflict of the 1980s. But the story itself (narrator is arrested on suspicion of involvement in assassination plot...) went in one ear and out the other (excuse the cliché: it was an audiobook).

Another audiobook, The Brooklyn Follies, was more engaging whilst I listened to it, but, strangely for something that ends on the morning of September 11, it seemed to ask no questions of me as a reader after the final line. Stranger still since I am an Auster fan, and expected something to chew on. Perhaps it was because I knew 9/11 would be the terminus at which the book got off, so as I listened, it seemed 'The Times They Are A'Changing' was playing in the background?

Other books I have not enjoyed reading but for some reason they stuck in my throat. After raving about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I approached The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark with high expectations. And after two pages my expectations were being met. Sadly, the rest of the book (it was only 106 pages, I think) were an exercise in disappointment. I was reminded of the first book of Spark's I read (The Public Image) and why it took me so long to get around to reading another of her books.

The graph of my reading experience for The Driver's Seat would looks something like this:

However, my negative reaction stuck around in my head for the next week, forcing me to ponder what Muriel Spark was doing. In the introduction John Lancaster suggested The Driver's Seat was not one of Spark's most popular books because of it's unrelenting darkness. Indeed, it only shows one side of everything. In many ways, it felt less substantial than a short story, let alone a novella, let alone a novel as it purports to be in some places. And while I dispute Lancaster's claim, that it's a masterpiece, I can't help feeling now that it builds, rather than diminishes, my estimation of Muriel Spark.

So, to add in the chewing over period, the graph now looks something like this:

For comparison, this is what the graph of my reading experience for Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut would look like:

This is pretty typical for my relationship with Vonnegut. The voice usually kicks in straight away and gets my respect as a wannabe writer, but it's not until maybe twenty pages in that the story gets true momentum and I'm hooked. From time to time, the voice, or perhaps the things it has to say, strangle the plot (and my enjoyment), resulting in the judder bar effect. But, ultimately, it's the messages (both proclaimed from the mouthpiece narrator and limned by the plot) that linger long after finishing the novel, continually lifting my regard.

I know some films have continued to affect me long after viewing them. Fight Club (as a well-adjusted, angry teen). Easy Rider (that LSD trip in the cemetery...) Um... There might be a few more.

But for the most part, movies end for me when the credits roll. Okay, I may have a wee discussion about how (*spoiler alert*) Verbal was Kaiser Soze, or why those virgins killed themselves, but it's different to a book. Even a good attempt at turning a book into a movie, like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, leaves me feeling like I have been gliding on the surface of something, whereas the book had penetrated the meniscus.

Albums certainly grow (or shrink) in import with time. I wasn't so sure about Fully Completely the first 10-12 times I listened to it (over the space of 2 years), and then one day it clicked (I've been earworming 'At the Hundredth Meridian' for the last three weeks). But that's the nature of albums: they are constructed to be engaged with repeatedly. Bad albums (and almost every double album ever made) ignore this fact.

Half decent films, especially in this age of dedicated movie channels and DVD/Blu-Ray, also invite repeated viewings.

And, while we're at it: hotels are there to be stayed in whenever you need, and restaurants shoot for repeat custom.

All these rateable commodities seem to share this possibility of return. The reviewer has only seen the film once or twice, or listened to the album for a week. They visit the hotel every six months, but haven't seen in every room, nor have they tried every dish on a restaurant's menu. But they still feel confident they can recognise a 4-star experience when the have one.

But books. They seem to be a different creature.

I know some people do re-read their favourite books with regularity, but not me. There's too many possible favourite books out there to discover. Something about the architecture of a book, its length and the level of engagement required, means that a once-through is as much as can reasonably be expected. (I know many novelists and academics would disagree...). But because of what has gone into the experience (all those words, scenes, characters, experienced in different sized chunks in different places at irregular intervals), it takes more to unpack the book and evaluate its lasting impact.

All this is to say two things:

One: I wouldn't want to labour book reviewers with a star rating system, because they may not have "finished" the book by the time they submit their review. That is, they would have read the final page, but who's to say they don't need another week (or month, or year) to discover what they really feel about it. I think this is where criticism and review part ways.

Two: I do think keeping a personal rating system for books would be interesting, and perhaps useful. If I continued to do my little graphs of the reading experience for a given book, and how it performs once the covers are closed for good, patterns would no doubt emerge. Is there, in fact, an ideal worm? I believe a novel has to build, but it also has to start big to grab the reader. But you can't aspire to write a saggy, U-shaped, book. Same goes for short story collections. The first and last stories usually have a bit of tangy zizzle about them, but you can't hide poor stories in the middle or get away with too many of the same story.

I probably won't graph every book I read (I get enough graphage on Sundays), but it would be interesting if the 5-star system was overthrown and instead people talked about a saggy movie or a judder bar meal. It might help remind us that every reader/viewer/diner/guest's view is different yet valid.

As for Generals and Colonels, I think they can keep their stars.

Last night while trawling the internet I discovered...

Dave Wyndorf got fat.

The last time I saw a picture of him, he looked something like this:


I assumed he still looked like this, subsequent to his 2006 overdose, seeing as how his band, Monster Magnet, released a new album in late 2007. I figured I probably seen recent pics on their myspace or something. But no.

In June 2008, he looked like this:

[Not the best shot I know... Not many photos about... More here if you're interested]

[Edit: here's another one:

Positive spin: a lot of people put on weight after kicking drugs. Kicking drugs means no more overdosing. That's a good thing. And heck, the guy turns 52 at the end of the month!

According to a message Wyndorf left on the Monster Magnet message board on 30 June 2008, the "chub" was the result of "3 years of reading and eating chocolate", and he declares he "[b]ack on track now, though! "

The significance of the above before and after shots, beyond the usual women's mag voyeurism, may be lost on non-Monster Magnet fans. But it's thrown me. Wyndorf has always been a leather clad panther. Even with the overdose and the layoff, I didn't expect to see him wearing hoodies and what look like a cross between a mumu and pirate shirt and generally frumping it up, surrounded by a band that, apart from a few more lines around the mouth and one or two tidier haircuts, looks as generic rock'n'roll as it did throughout the nineties and the first half of this decade (and numerous personnel changes).

I did detect a possible change in the tenor of his songwriting on last year's 4-Way Diablo, but I wasn't expecting this. There was too much of that old Monster Magnet swagger. I just can't picture the chubby Wyndorf delivering the line, "I got a cock made out of platinum"
(from 'Wall of Fire').

[But two lines later Wyndorf does exclaim: "I got the world's last piece of chocolate"...]
This is not a personal attack against Wyndorf - this isn't about him personally at all, it's about Wyndorf the image. From the half-gibing declaration on the inlay of MM's first full length album (It's a satanic drug thing, you wouldn't understand), the band has wedded musical substance with chemical, aural entertainment with visual. Without the image of the band, and Wyndorf especially, as rock extremists (well beyond cliche: where sex, drugs and Hawkwind covers are all), the music loses something. Those ah-huhs and aw yeahs are no longer beyond cliche, but sit squarely within its realms. Dave Wyndorf can't be a sad, chubby, and ultimately human character and continue to front the same sort of band.

He's vowed to lose the weight, and he may have already made strides. All I know for sure is this has added another element of intrigue to the shows I will be attending in Eastern Europe next month.

It's also added another slew of possible cliched rock'n'roll deaths for Wyndorf (think Elvis, think Mama Cass). One thing's for certain: when it's all over, it'll be a hell of a biography. I'm officially starting the queue for those who want to write it. (Hopefully the final chapter isn't for another few decades).

White Music

The question I set out to answer nearly a month ago was, essentially, “Why would listening to 'Hazard' by Richard Marx now be a pleasurable experience?” After two posts I hadn’t quite reached the answer, so I began drafting up my next installment, but things went a bit haywire.

You might be able to guess why when reading my unfinished playlist and my parenthetical comments:

Six “Old” Songs I Remember Hearing When I Didn’t Like Old Music

* ‘Good Vibrations’ – Beach Boys (my dad and his brother made a dubbed cassette of the Beach Boys… at one point I could hear them arguing between tracks).

* ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ – The Beatles (my dad’s most prized album, as I remember it, was a copy of The White Album he acquired whilst working for E.M.I. on his O.E. in London¹; it was a very special occasion when he placed one of these hallowed LPs on the turntable—all the more shocking when Paul McCartney starts singing about copulating on a highway)

* ‘White Room’ – Cream (I remember a lot of rock trivia my father told me, most of them seemed to involve Eric Clapton. Nickname: Slowhand. Stole George Harrison’s wife. Was in a band with Jimmy Page… Dad: Jimi Hendrix was the best left handed guitar player ever. Me: who was the best right handed? Dad: Eric Clapton. My dad had an Eric Carmen jacket; for a long time I thought the printer had just misspelled Eric Clapton)

* ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ – Procol Harum (I still get the Moody Blues and Procul Harem mixed up, I think because of 'Knights in White Satin'. When I was 15 and 16 I used to spend an hour most weekend flicking through the bargain CD shelves of my local Warehouse; one of my last memories of my father is him asking me if I saw a Best Of collection for Procol Harem that I should get it for him; a copy of Procol Harem’s Greatest Hits surfaced at the Warehouse two months too late)

* ‘…

Clearly, my dad had a big role in my musical tastes, though these tastes didn’t show through until he was no longer there to influence me.

But someone does not need to be physically present to be a presence in your life. In fact, it feels as if things are only free to influence you when they’ve been put to bed. When the film is over, the book returned to the shelf (inevitably the shelf of a library in my case), the teacher left with younger students…

Which means that things aren’t really influencing you, but your memory of things.

I wonder, sometimes, if I would share as much of my father’s musical taste if he was still around…

Something like this happened the last time I tried to write this post. It seems unwilling or unable to remain in the concrete world. Who cares if it’s the memory or the actual thing that’s influencing you? What does it matter?

I would like to tie this back to writing, to how the idea of books, both before and after reading them, is what comes through most in your own writing. I think this would make an interesting post, one which people might leave comments on, perhaps even link to. But I don’t have it in me.

I don’t really want anyone to read this post. I’m coming down with a cold.

My friend, Abby, told me about this site. Go there. Leave me to my lemon and honey drink, I have a novel to write.

¹ Puts my boring bank job to shame… but then I don’t think he wrote 6,000,000 words (and counting) in a year.

Great (?) Moments in iPod Shuffle #5

Isle of Q – Bag of Tricks
Isle of Q – Little Scene

I only have two songs by Isle of Q on my iPod. Out of a possible 6,300 songs, these 2 appeared back to back.

The thing about iPods is they accelerate the pace at which you become like your parents. That is: your taste is frozen in a particular era. Isle of Q’s two singles came out in 2000, and most people will have heard one or the other, but few would ever think of the band when asked, ‘Name a band beginning with I’.

(When I just asked myself to name a band beginning with ‘I’, my answer was Icehouse… who also have 2 songs on my iPod, though ‘Great Southern Land’ and ‘Electric Blue’ leave Isle of Q for dead. I think this also supports my tastes frozen in the past theory).

iPods are distorting the Darwinian nature of the music industry. A song like ‘Bag of Tricks’ should be forgotten by now. If not forgotten, at least not listened to 11 times in the last 3 years (it must be a favourite of my iPod as this is how many times it has been thrown up on shuffle).

The fact is, shuffle isn’t perfect. It has its favourites. If only you could give your iPod to someone with better taste than you and get them to weight the chance a song will be played on shuffle based on how often you need to hear this song. Then again, who has better taste in music than me?

Don’t answer that.

Which reminds me, I really should buy my tickets to Monster Magnet in Estonia in November. I want tickets to the show in Riga too, but I can’t buy them online the now (that’s not a typo, just my idiomatic Scottish coming through).

Rock'n'Roll Rebellion

Yesterday I listed six songs that were big amongst my circle(s) of friends back when I was eleven and twelve. The list is, however, slightly misrepresentative. I wasn’t just into rap. I was, like almost everyone else at Ross Intermediate, impressed by TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’, Mariah Carey’s ‘One Sweet Day’ and Montell Jordan’s ‘This Is How We Do It’.

There is still a gulf between these artists and the ones I listen to now (according to my LastFM profile, the top five from the last six months are The Kinks, Warren Zevon, The Tragically Hip, The National, and Shearwater; that is, melodic, thoughtful, rock music).

The first reason for the differing taste is quite obvious. The National and Shearwater weren't around last century. Of the three artist above that were, I had only heard the Kinks when I was twelve, and that wasn’t on 2XS, the station that me and my peers listened to, but 2ZA (“the hits of the sixties, seventies, eighties and today”). The Kinks were for people of my parent’s generation, or older! Eleven and twelve is an impressionable age, and you can only like what you’ve heard. If I was hearing Dr Dre and Bone Thugs and The Puppies, and that’s what my peers were hearing and talking about, it’s no wonder it seemed important.

But even then, when I didn’t really know why I liked what I liked, I was being exposed to the music I would shortly adopt as my own. And it is these minor flashes of rock’n’roll amid my r’n’b years that stand out now when I look back with a nostalgic agenda:

* watching Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York during lunchtime in room 12, aged 11. I don’t remember why or even how this came to be, just watching Kurt Cobain looking miserable and hurt and the opposite of bling (though we didn’t know that word back then)

* my dad turning off the radio halfway through The Smashing Pumpkin’s ‘Disarm’ because he couldn’t stand Billy Corgan’s voice (aged 12)

* buying Pearl Jam’s Ten on cassette for one dollar from friend who won it on a radio competition (aged 12)

I would not listen to Pearl Jam or Nirvana or, to a lesser extent, The Smashing Pumpkins in earnest until I began high school, but the seeds were there before this change in scenery.

Of course, the change in scenery should not be understated. I moved from a medium-to-low decile co-ed intermediate school that had hoodies as part of the school uniform to a much stricter single sex high school where classes were streamed according to academic performance. As a result, my social circle took a jump up the socio-economic ladder, for better or worse. Suddenly, my friends were into Jean Claude Van Damme movies and The Stone Temple Pilots.

I can’t say for sure, but if you took schools and friends out of the equation, I think I would still have gravitated to grunge and post-grunge music at the age of thirteen. I was after that vein of rebellion that has run through rock since the fifties, and I got it in grunge. The rebellion was not political, but generational. Rap and R’n’B at the time was a more aspirational (I want a lot of cash and bitches) or looking down from the top (I got a lot of cash and bitches) or rebellious in that kind of racial / political way that I couldn’t relate to. But a song like Lithium, or Unglued, or Creep (by Radiohead or STP but not TLC) sounded like I felt, or how I thought I should have felt. It said: the world is shit but I have no answers. Most of these songs didn’t even acknowledge a world outside your bedroom door.

My entrée into rock coincided with my first CD player (a gift for my thirteenth birthday) and therefore my first CD purchases. This coincidence has a lot to do with why my iPod has virtually no hip hop music, and why I can feel more nostalgic about Richard Marx and Savage Garden (i.e. the most watered down decedants of Van Halen or The Beatles) than Snoop Dogg and Warren G.

Six Songs From My Early Days of Rock Appreciation

* Interstate Love Song – Stone Temple Pilots (my first CD was STP’s Tiny Music… My second was the Space Jam soundtrack. When I got around to buying Purple, I knew my loyalties were here rather than with R. Kelly or Busta Rhymes)

* This Is A Call – Foo Fighters (a noisy, nonsensical gem)

* Fell on Black Days – Soundgarden (probably still in my top ten songs of all time, even though the lyrical content no longer speaks to me as it did when I was a shoe-gazing fourteen year old)

* Grind – Alice in Chains (dirty, dirty music that can’t resist a Staley/Cantrell harmony in the chorus – the genius of AiC)

* Black – The song that, when I came around to playing my one dollar Pearl Jam cassette, stuck me as both sad and angry, but still beautiful)

* Talkshow Host – Radiohead (“I want to be someone else or I’ll explode”, nuff said)

A lot of the YouTube videos I’ve linked to above are for acoustic versions of the songs rather than the original. Partly because these are quite well known songs and I wanted to mix things up, but also because I really like these versions. This speaks to the next development in my musical tastes: the move away from loud, angry, (commercially successful) alternative music to something more nuanced...

Which sounds like a dissection (and playlist) for another day…

My Hip Hop Heritage

I’m not sure how it came up* but last night Marisa sung these lines:

We used to walk down by the river
She used to watch the sun go down

Then said, “What song is that?”

I said, “It sounds like Richard Marx.”

She gave me a blank look. Names and music don’t go together for a large proportion of the population.

Anyway, I summoned up Richard Marx’s ‘Hazard’ on my computer thanks to the wonder of YouTube:

I've never thought Richard Marx was cool. He’s always been slightly above Michael Bolton on the ladder of M.O.R. adult contemporary acts. (The top of this ladder begins at ground level and descends into a deep crevasse.) ‘Hazard’ is admittedly his least cloying hit ballad (refer to ‘Right Here Waiting’, ‘Now and Forever’…) and listening to it again after howeverlong it’s been was the kind of nostalgic delight I am experiencing often in my serious twenties for my silly pre-teens.

But when the song ended, I thought about it a little more. When Richard Marx was big (1989-1994) I wasn’t into M.O.R. adult contemporary, of course, but neither was I into rock, or folk, or indie, or anything which resembles my mature music tastes. I was into hip hop.

Six Of The Best From My Hip Hop Period

* ‘Regulate’ – Warren G and Nate Dogg

* ‘Gin and Juice’ – Snoop Dogg

* ‘Gansta Lean’ – D.R.S.

* 'Tha Crossroads' – Bone Thugs-n-Harmony

* ‘California love’ – 2Pac and Dr Dre

* ‘Fantastic Voyage’ – Coolio (the only song in this list I regularly earworm these days; maybe because the original song by Lakeside was so catchy)

These were the songs that loomed large in my life as an eleven and twelve year old.

These are the songs that are attached to actual memories (going round to the house of someone I wasn’t really friends with just to listen to his copy of Doggystyle; ringing up 2XS every night for a week to try and win E 1999 Eternal).

These are the songs from the Richard Marx era I should be nostalgic about.

But for some reason, I don’t own any of the above artists albums and only have one of those songs (‘California Love’) on my iPod.

Why is this?

I’ll look at that tomorrow.

* I lied.** I actually asked, “Have you ever thought about what songs you’d like played at your funeral?” which eventually lead to Richard Marx rendition.

** For the purposes of expedience rather than deception. I’m happy to admit that I ask questions like, “Have you ever thought about what songs you’d like played at your funeral?” from time to time. So what? And yes, I’ve thought about it myself. Perennially at the top of the list: ‘Desperadoes Under The Eaves’, just so that I could look down on the congregation (if that’s what you call a collection of mixed- and non-denominational mourners a congregation) singing:

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum
It went mm mm mm
Mm mm mm mm
[etc.]

Five Things I Like Right Now

I feel like all I've been doing lately is talk about things I haven't liked. So here's five things I'm liking right now:

1. Boxer by The National

I downloaded a couple of Best of 2007 mixes in December which is how I came across 'Mistaken For Strangers'. I liked the song whenever it popped up on iTunes, but when it began popping in my head of its own accord it starting to take notice. Still, I didn't get around to owning the entire album until about a month ago (after seeing yet another National song on SwissToni's list of earworms). I listened through the album once. Then straight through again. In the first week I listened to it seven times. Now the playcount is pushing twenty. The strength of Boxer is its restraint. Musically and vocally, the tracks are subdued; no track is longer than 4:29 (the terrific closer, ‘Gospel’). Matt Berninger’s lyrics are like the highlights of a conversation or a dream - - every time you listen there's a new gem to notice: (Ada don’t stay in the lake too long / it lives alone and it barely knows you…). Forgive me if you went through this a year ago, but if you still haven't listened to this album, I highly recommend it.

2. Kurt Vonnegut

I currently have three more KV novels out of the library (Hocus Pocus, Mother Night, and Galapagos). These will take the tally to six read this year. There will come a time when there are no new Vonnegut books for me to read, and I will be sad. He's probably the reason I am putting off re-re-re-starting Novel A... I just can't get close to that voice.

3. 'The Dinner Party' by Joshua Ferris

The term 'New Yorker Short Story' has almost become synonymous with boring, but Ferris' effort manages to entertain (while still staying within conservative boundaries). Has bumped 'And Then We Came To The End' back to the top of my To Be Read pile. After Mother Night and Galapagos of course.

4. BBC's Olympic Coverage

There will be at least three (normally four) freeview channels showing the games at any one time. The coverage has a British focus, which is only fair - - but even if there weren't any Brits in the rowing, I'm sure I'd be able to catch the kiwis step up in the finals (fingers crossed). In a related moan, I can't watch video highlights on TVNZ's website because I'm not in NZ - - something to do with broadcast rights. We all know there's a whole New Zealand's worth of Kiwis living abroad, and the internet is probably their only hope of seeing Tall Ferns highlights or whatever. Surely something to sort out before London 2012.

Oh, I forgot about being positive. I guess I'm a curmudgeon at heart.

5. Candle Hat by Billy Collins

Just now I thought: ‘What about a poem?’, and this was the one that sprung to mind. Questions About Angels is in my recent batch of borrowings from the Scottish Poetry Library... I might have chosen something by Dennis Brutus if more of his poems had titles!

Infitity Hours From Tulsa

While I was walking to the post office today I found myself humming 'Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa'.

It's probably not cool to know the words to this song (and even less cool to harbour desires of one day getting the chance to show off my Gene Pitney impersonation), but I find myself strangely compelled by it.

History: The song was written by Burt Bacharach (music) and Hal David (lyrics), and while many have covered it since (perhaps most famously: Dusty Springfield) Gene Pitney's version was the first to be released in 1963.

The sound of the song is not too far from Jimmy Webb's compositions from later in the sixties (see: Glen Campbell's 'Wichita Lineman': a thing of beauty; Richard Harris' 'MacArthur Park': too zany not to love). It's the rich, layered ornamentation, I think. Those almost-Mexican horns (Tulsa is only 725 miles from Mexico).

But the lyrics are a long drive from the figurative melt of ‘MacArthur Park’ (or even ‘Up, Up and Away’). Hal David's lyrics read so flat on the page, it's almost childish:

Dearest darlin' I had to write to say that I won't be home anymore
'cause something happened to me while I was drivin' home
And I'm not the same anymore

That’s not rhyming. That’s just saying the same words (home, anymore) twice. The fact is Bacharach’s melody, the instrumentation and Gene Pitney’s voice push the song through till the chorus hits:

Oh, I was only twenty four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only one day away from your arms

That’s the hook that got me humming today on Leith Walk.

For a long time, all I really retained from this song was there was this guy, 24 hours from his girlfriend in Tulsa. Perhaps the ordinariness of the verses explains how the fact he hooked up with a waitress and was no longer returning to Tulsa slipped under the radar for so long.

But the story is redeeming feature of Hal David’s lyrics. This isn’t another sappy separated-love song… it’s actually the cruellest break up song in the history of popular music. Those first three lines I quoted above say he won’t be coming home, but don’t say why. He could be detained with work or had a terrible road accident… It’s not until the waitress appears at the end of the second verse that his hitherto girlfriend (the “you” of the song) realises the obstacle is romantic. *knife-in-heart moment*

And he doesn’t just say, “I found someone else,” - - she gets a blow by blow of the hook up:

as we were dancin'
Closely, all of a sudden I lost control as I held her charms
And I caressed her, kissed her, told her I'd die
Before I would let her out of my arms

*twisting-knife-in-heart moment*

Reading over these lyrics again today, I noticed the similarities between the Bacharach/David song and Jimmy Webb’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ (1967). Like ‘Wichita Lineman’, Glen Campbell made the song famous, but you should click here to listen to Jimmy Webb sing it himself (YouTube won’t allow me to embed this particular video).

In Jimmy Webb’s South Western U.S. town-quoting, break-up song, the distance between dumper and dumpee is increasing:

By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising…
By the time I make Albuquerque she'll be working…
By the time I make Oklahoma she'll be sleepin'…

Apart from the improbable speeds required to make the journey fit the story, the physical distance increasing makes sense in a break up song, physical distance standing in for emotional distance yadda yadda yadda. But ‘Twenty Four Hours…’ goes the other way. Gene Pitney (et. al.) has driven for at least a full day (the trouble starts when he needs to stop to rest for the night) and is only one sleep away from returning. It still sounds like he loves the “you” he address, calling her darlin’, imagining being in her arms. But no, he’s not the same anymore.

Bastard.

It’s as if everything about the song is engineered to generate maximum pain for the girl he’s breaking up with.

Does this make it a genius song, or just a troubling one?

I’ll stick with my first adjective: compelling.

Footnote:

In searching for YouTube links for the songs mentioned above, I found Karl Pilkington’s explanation of this song, which says similar things. I’m not sure thinking like Karl Pilkington is a good thing -- though he is a published author!

A Kink in the Armour

On Friday Marisa and I watched The Darjeeling Limited on DVD. It was okay.

I think I belong to the uncool crowd, in that I think The Life Aquatic was Wes Anderson’s best film (rather than Rushmore). Despite a high quirk-quotient in Darjeeling, the film felt like Anderson was rounding back to themes already covered in The Royal Tenenbaums and even Bottle Rocket.

But the one thing you can count on in a Wes Anderson film is a great soundtrack. Unlike Anderson’s first four films, Darjeeling wasn’t scored by Mark Mothersbaugh (who some might know of as the dude from Devo), but from the opening scene (Adrian Brody running to board the eponymous train) the music is a perfect fit.

The song is ‘This Time Tomorrow’ by the Kinks, who I liked to think were one of my favourite bands… but I had never heard this song before. Two more songs, ‘Strangers’ and ‘Powerman’ from the same album, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970), feature in the film.

As the final credits of Darjeeling rolled, I was thinking about The Kinks more than the film or Wes Anderson. How I only owned three discs worth of “Greatest Hits” material, and The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968). I did borrow their first three albums from my local library for a week a few years ago… but this is a band that released 23 albums. A back of the envelope calculation reveals, as of Friday, I had not heard approximately 300 songs by “one of my favourite bands.”

I am in the process of rectifying the situation. I’ve started with Lola Versus Powerman… and Arthur (1969). [I suspect I’ll have to download some of the later albums as they’re rarely on the shelves at the local CD store.]

So, as with Warren Zevon and the Tragically Hip, prepare for a lot of Kinks references over the next few months.

But on Lola Versus Powerman… : it’s a great listen! The three tracks featured in Darjeeling are great (‘This Time Tomorrow’ has shot to five stars on iTunes after 3 listens), but you can add ‘A Long Way From Home’ and ‘Get Back In Line’ to the list of ‘greats’. The big song on the album, ‘Lola’, is actually a sore thumb, not really jiving with the rest of the album, which can be broadly called “media industry satire.” Sometimes the satire usurps the song, like in ‘Moneygoround’, but that’s something I already knew about Ray Davies as a songwriter.

I suspect when I get familiar with this album and the lyrics start to sink in, the bitterness that is in 90% of Davies’ songs will rise to an uncomfortable level. Just like in his semi-autobiography, X-Ray.

But ultimately, this is a band that produced flawless rock songs like ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’; flawless songs full-stop like ‘Days’; and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and great satire like ‘Shangri-La’ and ‘Plastic Man’.

If the unheard gems on Lola Versus Powerman… are anything to go by, I should find another fifty favourite Kinks songs as I do the discography.

"...and Grace too" : How Grown Up Songs Make Me Behave Like A Teenager

Today is the final matchup of the Hip64 tournament for 2008.

‘Emperor Penguin’ versus ‘Grace Too’.

What exactly is the Hip64 tournament? I hear you ask.

64 songs started out two months ago and rounds of head-to-head voting have whittled them down until there is only two. Tomorrow there will only be one.

Last year (the first year the Hip64 was run) the winner/survivor was ‘Nautical Disaster’, which I blogged about in February.

Sure, it’s geeky, artificial, solipsistic, and probably pointless in the greater scheme of things (though if it makes the Hip play Emperor Penguin live more often, it will have made the world better place)… but it has been fun.

I voted for Grace Too, by the way. It might not be my favourite Hip song at the moment, but it was the first song I heard on the first Hip album I listened to, and I knew after sixty seconds that this would be the beginning of a beautiful thing.

Being marooned in NZ, then Australia, as I discovered the Hip (who themselves are marooned – the only place they are “big” is their native Canada) meant I developed attachments to songs based purely on the songs. I didn’t know which tracks were released as singles, which ones were played to death on Can Rock stations, which ones were mainstays of their live show -- I didn’t even know which of the faces from the album covers actually played which instruments.

Looking back, I could have found all of this out on the internet (as I have subsequently), but back in my first 24 months as a Hip fan, there were still albums to buy off eBay, still new songs to discover and absorb – this other information wasn’t necessary.

And one could argue that it isn’t necessary to ever know anything about who makes the music you like, or what other people think about it. Just as you don’t need to know what an author looks like, or what a politician does behind closed doors.

Those who take the pursuit of secondary information about an artist to the extreme – let’s call them superfans – always seem immature. Adolescent. Even when it’s with obsessing about Chopin or Proust.

But to ignore all the other factors at play and just listen to the music – that too seems like adolescent behaviour. A failure to grasp the whole. It speaks to a more innocent time when all you knew about the Beach Boys was the tape your parents played whenever you went on a long drive.

Somehow I have gone from innocence to superfandom with the Tragically Hip. My response has been, and will remain, adolescent, even when I go ahead and analyse a song with a serious expression on my face...

[I’d actually never seen the video until today. It’s not very interesting, but at least it doesn’t bombard you with unnecessary secondary information, eh?]

As I type this it looks like it will win the Hip64 2008, but to look at the lyrics, the song seems thin and insubstantial. Aside from the epigrammatical “The rules of engagement are hard to endorse / When the appearance of conflict meets the appearance of force,” the song looks like a dialogue between two people.

He said I’m fabulously rich
C’mon just let’s go
She kind of bit her lip
Geez, I don’t know

But when I began my relationship with this song, I was not reading the lyrics, I was listening to the song. The 45 second intro is a great album opener (and live opener) but foremost it leads the listener into the sort of world where someone could say, “I’m fabulously rich. C’mon just let’s go.”

The dialogue is highly stylised (who would ever profess to being armed “with skill and its frustration” in real life), but embedded in this song, in this aural template, it works.

The one area where reading the lyrics mirrors the experience of listening to the song is the confusion of who says what. Just as there are no speech marks on the liner notes, there’s only one voice (Gordon Downie’s) on the track. Downie doesn’t make a point of differentiating the speakers because a) this is mid-nineties rock not Queen at it’s campest and b) it isn’t supposed to be clear cut.

The opaqueness of the lyrics means that it takes several listens for the scene in the song to congeal, but also that you could listen to this song forever and not be entirely sure of your footing.

Here is my reading of the scene. There is a man, probably a pimp or a wannabe pimp, who is trying to coerce a girl into doing something (a life of prostitution or a one off? with the fabulous rich man or one of his clients?).

But, if you attribute everything from, “Geez, I don’t know,” onwards to the girl, the scene is more like: rich guy propositions prostitute, she plays coy for a moment, then talks shop.

Either way, this seedy, cinematic tale is the perfect opener to an album (Day For Night, 1994) which is full of film references (including the album’s title) and dripping with that other cinematic term: noir.

It was Hunter S. Thompson, I believe, who coined the term Song Noir, and this is as apt a term as any for ‘Grace Too’ and it’s Day For Night brethren.*

Thompson was actually referring to the songs of Warren Zevon when he came up with song noir, and there is one particular Zevon song with which Grace Too shares some striking similarities.

In ‘French Inhaler’ the woman is a wannabe actress, and the persona Zevon adopts for the song suggests the actress will have to put herself “up for sale” to “make her way in the world.”

Basically: another case of a man trying to cash in on the sexuality of a woman. Or perhaps: a man seeing the cash value of a woman’s sexuality.

In terms of lyrics, ‘French Inhaler’ is a longer, more complete song than ‘Grace Too’. Whereas the Hip’s song is essentially two repeated sections of eleven lines each (the last seven lines of each section being virtually identical), Zevon’s song sets its scene, builds to a climax (“When the lights came up at two / I caught a glimpse of you…”), and even has a kind of dénouement (“She said, ‘So long, Norman’…”).

I am not going to take a (maple) leaf out of the Hip64 tournament’s playbook and vote for which is the better song: ‘Grace Too’ or ‘French Inhaler’. What I’m interested in is this concept of song noir. And that two of my favourite songs feature men trying to turn women into whores - - What does that say about me?

Well, um, back to the song noir thing: the appeal of darker, more twisted songs is in no small way related to the alternative on offer in the mainstream. When Zevon wrote ‘French Inhaler’ the kids were lapping up Abba and Chicago. When the Hip released Day for Night the grunge flare up had already made its way to the mainstream (flannel shirts in JC Penny’s etc) and the two biggest selling singles of the year were from movie soundtracks. As I type about these songs, the video playing on The Hits (UK Freeview Musioc Channel) is September ‘Cry For You’ (I’m not sure if I got the artist and song title the right way around and will be damned if I’m going to look this up).

Sexuality has never been more pronounced in popular music, but it also has never been more adolescent. Music videos are the same kind of ‘You can look but not touch’ as being a geeky kid at high school and ogling the pretty girls. Quote-unquote love songs in popular music rarely strive for more than a memorable hook (2008’s biggest selling example: ‘Bleeding Love’ by Leona Lewis).

It is with all this noise in the background that one stumbles across a ‘Grace Too’ or a ‘French Inhaler’: songs which deal with love, sexuality, or mortality in adult ways. ‘Adult’ here doesn’t mean right, or even clear-cut, just as being an adult doesn’t give you all the answers. Adult just means something you probably weren’t interested in when you had bad acne. I can’t speak from everyone, but when I was fourteen, putting myself in Zevon’s shoes was beyond my ken.

I touched on this distinction between adolescent and adult themes with reference to Monster Magnet, a band whose songs oscillate between the two worlds. As I drill ever deeper into my musical tastes, and their evolution, I always seem to strike this adolescent/adult vein…

Which brings me back to the Hip64. There may be intellectual reasons why I the Tragically Hips’ songs, but the reason I love them, and constantly return to them, goes beyond the intellect - - or more correctly, kicks in before the intellect even gets a chance. The themes of ‘Grace Too’ may resonate because they speak about something that is elsewhere unspoken, but they ultimately lead me back to the form of adolescence that is fandom.

*Appendix: An incomplete list of noir-ish elements in Day For Night

@ The pessimistic coda of Daredevil: “And the real wonder of the world is that we don’t jump too.”

@ “Greasy jungle, metropolis noir,” and the ensuing song about a grieving friend in ‘Greasy Jungle’

@ Again, the whole of ‘Yawning or Snarling’, which features the line “Night time when the shadows cough”

@ “Just then a stripper stopped in a coughing fit / She said sorry I can’t go on with this” (‘So Hard Done By’)

@ “Everyone's got their breaking point / With me it's spiders and with you it's me” – the first lines of ‘Thugs’ which are taken straight from a film called "The People That Time Forgot"

@ The nautical disaster in, uh, ‘Nautical Disaster’, and it’s echo in ‘Scared’: “Defanged destroyer limps into the bay / Down at the beach it's attracting quite a crowd / As kids wade through blood out to it to play.”

@ ‘Emergency’ and its scungy diner scene: “We're sitting in the Baby Bar bereft / at a shadowy table out past the sentence’s end.”

…