Don Caballero :: Don Caballero 3
If you’re at work right now, please do not listen to this. Unless your job has something to do with being totally sweet, and kicking a fuckload of ass, while almost dropping something. Or with deterministic chaos.
Like if you’re job involves swallowing a vacuum cleaner, while you necessarily juggle poodles (to keep the bullets from hitting them), in the throes of apprehending and cuffing some evil doer, then by all means put this jam in the tapedeck. It might even give you a needed adrenaline boost for that car chase.
Or, if your job happens to be drumming for Don Caballero, what better music is there to do your job to?
My knack for evenhandedness and linguistic grace aside, that octopus behind the drum kit sets it all in motion, and it’s just a wonderful, rocking mess; a tightly wound, incalculable push down a hill set forth by all four limbs (you can hear it!).
Well wishes getting to the bottom.
Don Caballero 3 (13.1MB MP3)
Don Caballero (wikipedia)
Dick Marx Orchestra and Choir :: Here Come the Hawks
For reasons not completely clear to me, or God, ice hockey in the 60s and 70s, especially at the pro level, somehow gained an association with brass-heavy, grocery-store/game-show styled pop tunes (not to mention the associative big-collared polyester shirts, and bell-bottomed tweed, plaid pants).
For a fast-paced, highly improvised game born on the ponds of Nova Scotia and nurtured in the ice barns of Eastern Canada, this just doesn’t seem right. Perhaps it was a result of a strong push by the NHL to market the game in the States, and the subsequent hiring of several jingle writers and producers (Dick Marx, father of Richard, for example) to produce hockey related themes? Despite this rather artificial association of brass and ice, this era produced some real musical gems like The Hockey Theme (often referred to as the Hockey Night in Canada Theme), and the old Hartford Whalers tune Brass Bonanza. Although I wouldn’t consider this one a gem, the official Chicago Blackhawks fight song Here Come the Hawks was produced at the same time.
Certainly these tunes in no way whatsoever capture the essence of the game. But I cannot deny them, and their contrived link to a sport I love. Nor can I deny that I’m not wearing a shirt right now.
Here Come the Hawks
Dick Marx (wikipedia)
(song originally written by J. Swayzee)
Mercury Rev :: Something for Joey
Finally again the nights are warm and still. Some nights Cort and I will inevitably ride our bikes half-drunk down Damen, on our way home from some $5 movie, or a friendly back porch, or, perhaps, a show at the Bottle.
Everything that was kicked up by to-and-fro’ers, ourselves, awesome peelouts, ballgames, and street vendors during the day settles; the air instead holds pollens, and that shit they dump in the river to make it smell like cinnamon. Which, by the way, I hope is cinnamon. Which, by the way, I kinda like.
Of course, we’ll cut over to Ravenswood. That street is ours! No traffic. We can go against the one-way or make figure 8s. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and try to count to five. Once I counted to forty-two. But I opened my eyes at, like, two-and-a-half.
Soon we’ll find home, hardly having seen any cars, lock-up our bikes and hit the sack.
Something for Joey
Mercury Rev (wikipedia)
Preston Love :: Chicken Gumbo
The snare is hit once. It is on.
This one’s for overcaffeinated dance-offs. Especially on the river after it freezes over. I’ll slip and jitter to the guitar, pass it over to you, and you shake, tumble, and slide to the sax parts. That ice can be like glass. I can see our reflections moving in it now; calling and responding.
Sometimes when no one’s home I put this song on and run recklessly down the upstairs hallway and then down the stairs at full speed. I have had my face reconstructed nine times because of this song.
My father foolishly performed a circumcision to this song in 1982. No one was harmed, thankfully. What was my father doing performing a circumcision in the first place? Especially after he lost his hands in the war?
I also recommend challenging your food processor to a coleslaw-making contest to this song. You are a modern-day John Henry. That’s right. A cleaver in each hand, you died of exhaustion shredding cabbage. Just the way you wanted to go.
You see that man? He has a sax in one hand, and a huge goddamn brisket in the other. Preston Love’ll handle the sax; you gotta play the brisket!
Chicken Gumbo
Preston Love (Nebraska Life article)
Molasses :: Saint Catherine (Idiot’s Waltz)
It’s the middle of the week in the middle of February, and all of us in Chicago have been enduring single-digit temperatures — a dry, biting, stinging cold. Even through layer upon layer of wool, cotton, and synthetics. Even when there’s no wind. The cold just meanders its way through the spaces in twill, and waffled cotton, and nylon; it finds the skin.
The city, certainly, is still busy… not like Spring, though. A cold like this still evokes a certain sparseness and bleakness for me.
So please, enjoy this Americana from these Canadians. Perhaps, by the time this is posted we will have experienced one of those anomalous, 70-degree February days. But for now I must shake the rats from my hair…
Saint Catherine (Idiot’s Waltz)
Molasses (label website)