Miscellany
On the right track now
Advertisement for international travel, 1984
Every month The Mixtape Club, a project started by Micah Panama and Brian Thomas, publishes ten tapes contributed by guests from around the music world. The results are difficult to predict (this time they range from Alejandro Jodorowsky to the Beatnuts): but then everyone seems to have their own rules for the construction of these somehow ceremonial mixes. On their info page, they quote Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity: “A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, …” Many of my old pals insisted there could only be one song per artist, or that the ideal length was a 45-minute, or a 30-minute side, or that there ought to be some sort of comprehensible message. In the film version of High Fidelity, the protagonist characterizes this as “using someone else’s poetry to express yourself.” I dunno; that sentiment is something I’ve always found to be pretty specious, and probably undesirable. The songs keep their own poetry: that’s why you want to listen to them.
For the July episode of the Mixtape Club, I sent Micah the second half of a tape I made about a year ago, Always Crashing In The Same Car. The night time complement to a brighter, more trebly first half, it chugs from the early Tears for Fears through a forest of 70s and 80s synthesizers before arriving at the present with the Chromatics’ cover of “Running Up That Hill,” originally by Kate Bush. Ever since I started dubbing things onto Maxell XLIIs in fourth grade, I’ve tended to engineer these things for roadtrips or late-night car rides. Originally they were heterogenous to a fault, leaning heavily on Graceland and dipping into contemporary alt-radio hits from the time, but sometimes would bafflingly digress into a crackly Vladimir Horowitz performance or some other passing fancy. That formula took a turn when I started driving (and discovered girls). This one draws its lineage from that later era, when the midnight drive home called for something that stayed a course, but still took you from one place to another.
Everybody wants something
Degrassi High. Season 1, Episode 5. “Everybody Wants Something.”
Lucy finally agrees to shoot The Zits’ video – if they can all agree on a script, persuade Clutch to lend them his car and coax Lucy into shooting it with Clutch around… Life is almost perfect for Joey – he’ll deal with the small problem of Caitlin just as soon as the video’s done. The hate campaign against Erica escalates, and Erica is determined to find out who is putting pamphlets and slogans on her locker. [TV.com]
windsofchange345 (8 months ago) This is a true story of 3 young canadians at thier finest.
Catfux (3 weeks ago) This song is pure musical genius, “Everybody wants something, and never give up.”
SuperSaiyanAl (6 months ago) …Who WROTE this?!
rileymakeupgirl (6 months ago) joey and wheels are hot
Xervosh23 (5 months ago) Its like a commercial for AIDS.
Yardbird suite
A nifty installation art piece by Céleste Boursier Mougenot—commissioned by the Barbican Centre in London—consisting of a garden, guitars, amps and birds, and which Alex Naidus aptly describes as “Zebra finches making a bid for The Wire year-end list.”
Our secular saints
Photograph of Charles Young, (detail). Philadelphia: G. S. Ferguson, 1902.
James Moody will celebrate his 82nd birthday with a performance at B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill on March 26th, 2007. All proceeds from the event will go to the James Moody Scholarship Endowment Fund.
Roy Haynes will celebrate his 85th Birthday with special guest Chick Corea Friday, March 19, 2010 at The Blue Note. (New York Times)
Jazz musicians, like hippies, represent a sensibility continually replenished but whose founding—one is tempted to say “actual”—membership is well into its winter years. The new ones are not quite the same—they practice the same craft, but are tempered and diverse, seemingly dilute. The old guard in jazz have attained the social status of generals in popular wars—some keep their posts, gray-haired and decorated, and continue to lead smokeless drills in Greenwich Village; others have retired, and spend their time sitting on symposia and contributing to public works. Their pronouncements are hollow, wearied, conservative. Occasionally they are drawn in by organizers of bloodless reenactments, but their lives are quiet and distinguished. They remain in the public imagination hung with their medals and remembered by their involvements—in the company of Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie.
They are publicly remembered for having participated at whichever turning point, and no one but the most brazen grognard bickers about which was the most effective, and there are few gossipers interested in unearthing whatever inconvenient historical facts could possibly tarnish their statued leaders. All were on the same side, most have survived admirably. They are rosy and comforting figures, largely unrewarded but still appreciated—with a generalized, dim gratitude. They are shaded with quiet, mostly unpolitical nobility. Far from being thought of as entertainers, as the impulsive and polarizing face of a fashion, they are an unrecognized, anonymous, anointed corps. A slowly disbanding army of secular saints.
No replacement
Alex Chilton, the leader of the seminal band Big Star, died Wednesday of a heart attack at age 59. Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney, spoke for many fans when she wrote on NPR’s Monitor Mix blog that Chilton’s music has come to feel irreplaceable:
I first heard of Alex Chilton in the Replacements song that bears his name. “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes around… They say, ‘I’m in love with that song.’ ” Later, Paul Westerberg sings, “I never travel far without a little Big Star.” When I used to tour with my band, I would think of that Replacements tune as we traveled from one town to another. Touring is fragmentary and disjointed by nature, and you have to find home in what little there is of it — in your favorite song, in your favorite band — and then I’d think of Westerberg’s own anchor, Alex Chilton. I knew then that I was part of a continuum; one of longing, of listening, of hoping and of always reaching, both forward to the unknown and back to what I hoped would always be there. And I felt like I’d found my home.
Tally ho
Beech-Nut Lifesavers, television advertisment (still). 1960s.
Chris Balla pointed me in the direction of this encomium by Graeme Downes (The Verlaines) of his fellow Dundein rockers The Clean. Downes is now a senior lecturer of music at the University of Otago, no doubt for stuff like this:
As a musical depiction of violence and mental derangement, the bridge or middle 8 of “Billy [Two]” is one of the Clean’s more inspired moments it seems to me. It takes place on only one chord, E minor, but like Billy himself one is led to think, is profoundly unstable. The backwards guitar enters on the second bar of the section creating its own ambiguity in the process (Where does the section properly start, at the beginning of the E minor chords, or the advent of this melodic event one bar later?). It implies a time signature contrary to the 4/4 backing of the rhythm section, namely 3/2 (count a half time 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 against the six notes) … This is all somewhat disorientating such that it becomes very difficult to know where you are in the phrase, to predict when (or even if) the section will end. Rock music tends to move in predictable four-bar units, but in the end the Clean’s bridge is only seven-bars long, such that, in combination with the earlier disruptions and disorientation, the return of the verse section is precipitous and violent, impervious to prediction.
I’ve also heard rumors that The Clean will tour the States sometime this spring or summer — fingers crossed.
Readings
Gilette, magazine advertisement (detail). 1983.
I am very pleased to confirm that we will resume at Luxembourg this coming Friday (5 June), absorbed and collected. I have been reconstructed by a Wiltshire hospital and I am as close to good health as I’m likely to get. I apologize to everyone caught up in the to-ing and fro-ing, but the disappointment of postponement is less than the disappointment of hearing me sing on one engine. I should stress that nothing has been canceled. The four London concerts are repositioned in July, and both Birmingham and the Royal Albert Hall are October fixtures. I’ve endured a titanic struggle against an intolerable virus lately, and although Hull, Hartlepool and Manchester were nights that comprised a whole life, the physical limits were reached. False notes crush the soul. Besides Luxembourg and beyond, I am excited about the October release of Swords, which is an 18-track compilation of b-side of singles from the last three albums. This will be a Polydor release. Thanks to everyone who bought ‘Years of Refusal’. We were the number one seller in the UK for the week of release, but, as with ‘You Are The Quarry’ and ‘Your Arsenal’, we were booted off the number one spot on the last hour of the final day. We cried.
I would like to point out that some passable creature is using my name and sending sharply chiseled replies to people via Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. This person is not me. Not enough happens in my life that I would wish to share it with others. I do not scan these sites—or whatever they are—so I can only hope that whoever is posing as me is at least worth talking to. Beware of false imitations. Thanks for reading these unvarnished facts, and thanks for giving us some greatly enjoyable nights on the Refusal tour.
Absolutely Yours, Morrissey.
We bleed love
Still from an Allied Chemical TV ad, 1960s.
This morning, Pitchfork tapped Chris Knox for their 5-10-15-20 series, in which musicians reveal what they were listening to from age five onward. Knox, the New Zealand impresario behind the brilliant pop experimentalists the Tall Dwarfs, suffered a stroke last year. Until this moment I had heard varying accounts of his condition, but the interview makes it painfully clear that he is not recovered. The selections here follow a familiar Rolling Stone-esque path before settling into a friends-and-family pattern, and about which Knox provides monosyllabic responses to leading questions.
Knox was one of the most significant figures in underground pop music in the late eighties and nineties, and his work continued to be exploratory and compelling through a lengthy solo career. Accompanying the Pitchfork piece is “Sign The Dotted Line,” a tune from the 1990 Dwarfs record Weeville, as covered by Jeff Mangnum (Netural Milk Hotel). It appears to promote Stroke, a Merge Records fundraising tribute to Knox featuring Stephin Merritt, Yo La Tengo, Lou Barlow, Mountain Goats, The Chills, the late Jay Reatard, and many others.
Tall Dwarfs
“The Slide”
“Nothing’s Going To Happen”
Chris Knox
“Half-Man, Half-Mole”
“My Dumb Luck”
Song for Sunday
From Malcolm Lowry, Under The Volcano (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947) p. 21:
Oh we all WALK ze wibberlee wobberlee WALK
And we all TALK ze wibberlee wobberlee TALK
And we all WEAR ze wibberlee wobberlee TIES
And-look-at-all-ze-pretty-girls-with-wibberlee-wobberlee eyes / Oh
We all SING ze wibberlee wobberlee SONG
Until ze day is dawn-ing,
And-and-we-all-have-zat-wibberlee-wobberlee-wobberlee
Wibberlee-wibberlee-wobberlee feeling
In ze morning