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.
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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Part I: Friday night, Grammys minus two: Return to forever.
Last time we went to Michael’s in Santa Monica they had a dress code. That’s how long ago it was. Back then, circa 1980, Roni Hofman (my missus) was having an art show at a gallery in Hollywood, and we were out from New York for the opening. Which was pretty glam, except we were also pretty broke. So our pal Sandy Pearlman — he of Blue Öyster Cult, “more cowbell” fame (hi, Sandy) — offered to take us out to the hottest new restaurant in town.
We arrive at Michael’s, and it turns out they have this dress code. Now Sandy, an uberhip music producer, has never been much for jackets, let alone ties — unless they’re Swedish paratrooper jackets. And we’ve made the trip all the way out to Santa Monica from the rockin’ Sunset Marquis, and the maitre d’ is saying to Pearlman: Sir, you’ll need a jacket and tie.
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Posted in Noise | 28 January 2009 | by Duncan
I totally blew it with this year’s top 10 (see preceding post). I’m not sure how it happened. Too much angel dust at the Tipmas party? The faceplant in the Porta-Potty on New Year’s Eve? Who knows? But I wanted to sincerely apologize to all of you who count on me to deliver 100% accurate, factual, dependable musical information and who I have so sorely disappointed.
Herewith, corrections to my 2008 top 10:
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Posted in Noise | 26 December 2008 | by Duncan
Ecto Bathsheba, Groynbusters (Frilly Underthings). Take one part Arvo Part, one part Weird Al and one part Goblin Cock, mix with strong psychedelics, re-mix with grain alcohol and, voila, the greatest record ever made.
Fraidycat Freeway, Far Tortuga (Testpattern). Noise sisters from S.E. Portland go unexpectedly Americana. Echoes of the Band, Jayhawks — plus, just a lot of echo (hey, enough with the slapback, Constance!). Caveat: it’s a radical departure from Narc. But, thankfully, pretty harmonies can’t entirely mask the rage beneath: “Forest fires burn inside/Raped your swan on West Burnside.”
Blueish, Tim Hatter (Elk). Even if the last time you cried was when you were a little kid and your father took your puppy to the pound to have it put to sleep because it shit on his bed because you hadn’t housebroken it properly, Hatter has a rare gift for getting under that burnished leather emotional scar tissue of yours.
Chromium Picolinate, Barcalounge Express Dream (F-stop). It goes against every fiber of my being to enjoy these neo-Kraut Rock electron dribblers. But damned if every decade or so — just when I’ve forgotten they exist — B.E.D. doesn’t re-emerge from the Bavarian forests of Bertel Hopkins’ imagination with a blippy concoction that is to pop what Link Wray was to Connie Francis. If Connie Francis had been named Brumhilde!
Fort Wayne, The Jims (Erstwhile). Like a Rolling Stones for the ’00s, but without bass or drums. Or money. Or, well.
Schedule in the Laboratory, Esther (Archback UK). Esther is chart-topping, paparazzi-bait humongous in Limeyland, but has yet to get a break in the colonies. Too bad for us. Because her unholy marriage of Adele, Estelle, Shakira, Duffy, Robyn, Beyonce, Enya and Lulu, with a little Cher and Madonna thrown in, is guaranteed to get your Yank booty shaking — even if your Yank booty’s middle-aged, hairy and made of cottage cheese.
Tell, Not (Elemental Physics Barn). Not exactly your typical E.P.B. band. Maybe because it’s really a band, instead of a technological construct (yeah, I know, wtf?!?). The aptly-named Not is the veteran rockabilly singer Narvel Felts’ side-project supergroup with Buck Dharma of Blue Oyster Cult, Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy Mangrum and Paul Westerberg(!). Nuff said?
Last Will and Testament, Edgewater (New York Prime). Blasting out of Brooklyn’s latest hipster hotbed, lower-west Boerum Hill, Edgewater singlehandedly returns classic rock to the outskirts of metal — in a thoroughly modern cap and gown. Best line: “I’m shivering/But you’re the one who’s cold.” Indeed.
Wayyy Out 2 Lunch, The Money (Bulbous Toe). Post-hip-hop pioneers star in a post-ecological concept album about the first manned — and, of course, womanned — mission to Venus. Full of witty metaphors (Venus is both a planet — and a ho) and artfully stoned rambles, the Money men completely redeem themselves from the execrable Arrrgggh and, if even possible, improve on the incendiary mixtape version of this released in July. A landmark achievement, up there with BrouHaHa’s PaXXX AmeriKKKana.
Bub, Kennedy Bledsoe (Texas A&M). Drew Bledsoe’s bastard son is a bitch of a country guitarslinger. His first indie release since being unceremoniously dropped — after one album! — by Capitol Nashville finds him (finally) getting back to his roots as an unintelligible drunken yowler whose lyrics are impossible to understand — but who nonetheless manages to communicate universes of deep, raw feeling. Will change the way you look at football (I think it’s football; might be foosball; might even be food or Kung Fu).
Honorable mentions: Abbatoir Bouquet, Blast Furnace (Gelding). Onomatopoiea, Arnold Dilney & the King’s Cross Poetasters (Zed). Alphabets of Undergarments, Fetch the Donkey (Itch). Telemachus Cherry, Afterparty (Too Late to Stop Now). Invitation to the Flogging, Infidelicatessen (Brackish). Dromedary Torquemada, Ian Poons (Constructive Criticism). Number II, The Fart Ark (Lawrence Harvey’s Lack of Affect).
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