Posted in Tripping | 22 June 2010 | by Duncan
In Russia, for some damn reason, they call a restaurant a “pectopah” and a bar a “bap.” But you could certainly argue that the drinking establishment in this St. Petersburg hotel deserves a special name of its own. And maybe it’s “movie,” because that’s what the whole experience feels like.
It’s an epic movie, to be sure, as we hang most nights past 4 a.m. But putting in the hours means we get to see the whole story arc. How the hookers, who don’t look like hookers at all – in the US they’d be the most elegant ladies in the room – periodically shift tables and take turns discreetly trolling the crowd. How the smooth-as-silk manager signals to them with a silent nod that he needs their table and they temporarily move to a seating area in the hall. How every hooker has a rose-colored drink, non-alcoholic, on her table with a straw in it. Some kind of high-class red light maybe, but mostly, I think, to signal the staff.
But enough of my ogling the working girls. What I wanted to tell you about was the gangster part of the movie from last night.
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Posted in Tripping | 10 June 2010 | by Duncan
Fluorescents reflecting on the inside of the train windows make it impossible to see out as we pull into the New Delhi station around 10 pm, back from a day-trip to the Taj Mahal. So we have no clue. We file slowly out of the air-conditioned first-class car into the sticky, 100-degree heat and onto a dusty concrete platform that is nothing less than carpeted in humanity: sleeping, sitting, eating, talking, standing, lounging, smoking, cradling, shuffling, cuddling, walking and, frequently, maneuvering a large bundle of belongings, in sandals and saris and ballooning shorts, open shirts and khakis, over every square centimeter. We edge, mostly sideways, through this density toward the pedestrian overpass that will deposit us on the opposite platform that leads outside the station. We hold hands, like we never do anymore, tightly, but functionally. We’ve read about stampedes in those undifferentiated foreign places that seem exotic to gringos. We don’t talk about it. But we’re all pretty sure that one spark and people would die. And maybe some of those people would be us.
The stairs are impassable. But somehow as you lift your foot to the first step you find a toehold that you didn’t see a moment before or that wasn’t there. Like some gelatin river, the crowd haltingly, imperceptibly flows around you, even when the crowd is not moving, and you flow around the crowd. You make it to the overpass and glance back down the stairs to see who you’ve lost, maybe forever. Where’s your friend from Australia? Where’s the Indian account executive who’s been assigned as your guide? No time to do anything about it. You have to hold that hand and keep flowing.
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Posted in Noise | 29 September 2009 | by Duncan
I’ll show you mine in a minute. But, first, show me yours.
And you’re not allowed to say Clay Aiken, Miley Cyrus or something silly like that. Even Vanilla Ice. Those guys don’t count. They’re awful. But they’re not really music. They’re just hula hoops. Some unholy combo of popcult ephemera and music-biz corruption. No, a worst band ever has to be something someone else thinks is meaningful. They have to be part of the actual musico-historical conversation. Gotta have, well, gravitas, even if they suck.
My son, a music scribe in his own right (and inspirer of this idea), nominates the Red Hot Chili Peppers, just to start the fire (speaking of good candidates for worst – Billy Joel). Even if I don’t entirely agree, the Peppers seem like an exemplary choice: a band that many revere, that are credited with innovation and with chops and cool and that seem to have ascended to the rock ’n’ roll canon, if not yet the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (a goldmine, I would submit, of worstness – especially in 2010) (and, late-breaking news, now including the Chili Peppers!).
But that doesn’t mean your pick has to be an old band – though you’re going to have a hard time making a case for an artist with less than ten years of output, because some of these guys wind up redeeming youthful excrescence with breakthrough work in their maturity (Justin Timberlake, anyone?). And it’s not enough to name the name, you also have to make the case. Give us a sentence or two. Help us fully grok their true awfulness.
So, nominate your all-time worst band, email your pick to worstband@duncanchannon.com before November 1, 2009. We’ll publish the top ten disses and send each winning correspondent a FREE, USED CD of Celine Dion’s My Love – Ultimate Essential Collection!!! Now for mine – except it’s too damn hard to pick just one:
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Posted in Tripping | 9 July 2009 | by Duncan
You know those folks who take long vacations and feel the need to explain that it’s their first vacation in five years/ten years/since I can’t remember when/since I started working here/since I got married/since I had kids/since I moved to California/since I moved back to New York. (Or, as the Hold Steady put it in “Chill Out Tent”: “…it was his first day off in forever, man.”)
Well, I won’t put you through that. I was away from the office for two weeks. And fuck it.
I also won’t try to explain that the vacation actually started out as work. Because you’d never believe that attending Hard Rock’s concert series in Hyde Park is work. Certainly not if you were there, what with the amazing VIP tent and free food, booze and service all day, not to mention guys named Springsteen, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and the Killers onstage. Not to mention the after-parties.
Yeah, I won’t even try. It was work. It was fun. And it rapidly devolved into pure, stout-soaked sloth.
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Posted in Noise | 9 July 2009 | by Duncan
6/28/09, Hyde Park, London, backstage at Hard Rock Calling
– What’re you doing here?
– I’m working for Hard Rock… What are you doing here?
– Uh-huh…
– That was great, you goin’ up onstage with those guys [Gaslight Anthem]?
– Yeah…
– Really cool. Really fun.
– Yeah… [Hug.] Good to see ya, Bobby.
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Posted in Noise | 1 June 2009 | by Duncan
This all hit me in Buenos Aires a year or so ago when I turned the corner in a museum and saw a famous painting, described in the nameplate as:
“Self-portrait with Monkey and Parrot. Frida Kahlo, 1907–1954.”
I know it seems the height of philistinism, but I always read nameplates first. And, in this case, maybe because I’d seen the image on a million totebags, it was the nameplate, rather than the painting, that affected me most. And mostly because it told me I was alive at the same time as a nigh-mythical figure from impossibly remote history.
Now I’m sure it’s not a good and honorable way to respond to art (can you say “narcissistic personality disorder”?). But it did get me to wondering, who else? What other surprising historical figures from what seems like way, way back were alive – and maybe alive nearby – same time as me?
Doing the exercise, it turns out a lot of them were musicians, which is how I justify putting them here:
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Posted in Noise | 11 May 2009 | by Duncan
It is dark and it is cold in January in Detroit. Darker and colder than you’re imagining now. And you are broke. You’ve been amicably tossed, but tossed nonetheless, from your railroad flat in NYC because your childhood buddy, Mark the Shark (he of later Studio 54 celebrity), who more or less owns the place, wants his girlfriend to move in. Actually, she’s in already – they just want a little privacy. Besides, you are a few months behind on the rent, as dirt cheap as it might be, because you are really broke.
And here you are. Detroit in the dead of January.
You know John Morthland from Sausalito, where you lived for ten months, on a lark, after abandoning New York the first time and whom you had met through Ed Ward, the ex-Rolling Stone writer (now “rock historian” on Fresh Air), who gave you your start with an assignment to review Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade. John Morthland’s a really good writer and editor and an amazingly prescient musicologist who was first to discover a lot of things pop-cultural that eluded most rock critics, or at least white ones. Things like rap music (before it was hip hop), Sacred Steel and Moe Bandy. He’s in Detroit to be interim editor – interim, because John is strictly freelance or die. And you know him, it should be clarified, only pretty well, though that may be as well as most anyone knows silent, staring, inscrutably smirking John.
You don’t know Lester.
You know of him, but barely, and as much on the strength of that seemingly concocted name – Lester Bangs – as his writing.
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Posted in Noise | 14 April 2009 | by Duncan
On this Easter Sunday of Passover weekend, we should all be grateful for the latest resurrection of Terry Adams – he of the perennially passed-over NRBQ, America’s greatest cult band.
His new album’s called Holy Tweet. And while it’s not out till the end of the week, it got a sweet review from Ben Ratliff in today’s Times, and you should definitely plan on appending it to your music collection. And even if you don’t grok it at first, even if it seems too silly or too poppy, too accessible or even too willfully obscure, you’ll eventually discover that you’ve not only had a good time, but learned something. And then you’ll see the genius of Terry, the Hohner Clavinet-slapping heart of the Q.
I’m not the first to tout NRBQ – Elvis Costello left out the “cult” part when he called them “the best band in America” and Penn Jillette said they were the “best band in the world” – but I could’ve been. My life has crisscrossed theirs at odd intervals for 40 years.
NRBQ (which stands for New Rhythm & Blues Quintet/Quartet) were a Next Big Thing when their first self-titled album came out on Columbia in 1969. On the other hand, I was just another NBT-aspirant, nose to the glass of New York’s 48th Street music row, when I first encountered the band, parading in self-consciously single file down the opposite sidewalk. Even the way they walked seemed unique and, I would soon discover, uniquely Q.
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