the Gizmos :: Progressive Rock
In Candide, a seminal work of social satire, Voltaire takes us to an opulent Venetian villa. Here, the estate’s owner, Pococurante, apathetically enjoys only the most luxurious delights: well-manicured gardens, priceless paintings, exquisite sculptures, rich foods, and, of course, small animals. As one of Voltaire’s model cynical figures, Pococurante also possessed an intimate knowledge of opera, which was all the rage among his bourgeois elite peers. With regard to opera’s feverishly fashionable allure and stylistic excesses, Pococurante issued to the credulous Candide a vitriolic rejection of Enlightenment Europe’s avant garde musical idiom:
“This noise,” said the noble Venetian, “may amuse one for a little time, but if it were to last above half an hour, it would grow tiresome to everybody, though perhaps no one would care to own it. Music has become the art of executing what is difficult; now, whatever is difficult cannot be long pleasing… the scenes are contrived for no other purpose than to lug in, as it were by the ears, three or four ridiculous songs, to give a favorite actress an opportunity of exhibiting her pipe. Let who will die away in raptures at the trills of a eunuch quavering the majestic part of Caesar or Cato, and strutting in a foolish manner upon the stage, but for my part, I have long ago renounced these paltry entertainments, which constitute the glory of modern Italy, and are so dearly purchased by crowned heads.”
In the spirit of such cutting criticism, I present to you the Gizmos. I confess to not discovering these quick and caustic chaps on my own; it was the discerning ear of a friend long-gone — one of the brightest men I know — that thrust the said boy-band into my life. Hailing from Bloomington, the Gizmos represented the Midwest’s cleverest and most waggish contribution to nerd punk. Not to be hyperbolic, but I prefer to call these lads “the Voltaires of their time.” As such, Progressive Rock took dead aim at what the Gizmos considered a fussy and convoluted musical style:
“Well you can learn a lot if you listen to Yes, topics taken from literature’s best. Journeys and spaceships and wives and lords, In a Gadda da Vita with classical chords. It’s called progressive rock. Really sucks don’t it? Don’t it really suck? You’re lucky living in modern days like this. Now you can boogie with taste and intelligence. You’ll be so progressive you’ll stand out in any crowd. You’ll be so cultured that you’ll never shout out loud.”
What is that you say? This song sucks and, furthermore, progressive rock practitioners are exceedingly adept at playing their respective instruments? Hold on, I’m not endorsing personally this Gizmoian polemic and I don’t mean to offend any readers who are die-hard fans of the music. I just marvel at how Pococurante’s 18th century literary lambasting of opera’s decadence and trendiness is curiously analogous to the Gizmos’ 20th century sonic censure of prog. Like Poco, the Gizmos did not find hyper-complexity and showiness too appealing, let alone meaningful beyond a pronouncement of musical virtuosity. What’s also remarkable here is that the Gizmos voiced a sophisticated critical opinion that very much belied their superficial goofiness.
Moreover, the Gizmos are not the first to lay down the prog-smack. Before the music industry deradicalized and trivialized the early passion of punk, the movement was determined to spurn what it considered a gimmick-based and pleasure-centered popular culture. In this vein, so-called punk founding father Joey Ramone, like the Gizmos, denounced prog as mere establishment-approved rubbish, regardless of how much skill its performance required. In lieu of what those old-school punkers felt about prog, it bears mentioning that almost all of the Yes catalog has gone gold. So, in the end, it appears that more than a few folks enjoy a good wank from time to time.
Progressive Rock
the Gizmos (fan site)
(note — To hear Joey Ramone’s comments, check out the film End Of The Century: The Story Of The Ramones.)
Red House Painters :: Have You Forgotten (extended)
I’m a sad cat. It’s no bigs; that’s just how I turned out. I was a quiet melancholic kid and I’ve grown into a decent man who leans closer to somber than pep. On the bright end of the birth canal I was dealt a full run in hope, aces in mourning, a couple queens of joy, and a lonely ten of exuberance. And yeah, there have been many chances to pass or throw off, but it seems I’m always ending up strong suited in heartsick, winning tricks with sentiment.
This is important: there is a difference between sad and cynical and depressed. I am not bleak nor mean. I am not sour and my bouts of pettiness seem to pass quick. Sad has no self-pity or cruelty in it. Sad is the oak in late March that is a month away from forgetting that the Spring ever comes. But sometime in April the ground thaws and the oak remembers.
When I was about eight years old, my grandparents and parents gave me a boombox. It had four equalizer buttons. This was before radio makers decided all listeners are idiots and started naming EQ buttons things like “jamming” and “bass bomb”. This EQ had a high pass filter and a low pass filter and a mid boost and a flat setting. You could select different combinations and then the ‘flat’ would reset them all. I spent days messing with these buttons and consider this boombox hugely responsible for my later interest in the technical aspects of recorded music.
Anyway, the first tape I got was called the Mellow Sixties. I still have it. It has that sick Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys’ song Different Drum on it; it has that great (and perhaps only?) drug smuggling anthem Coming into Los Angeles and it has the Byrds’ Turn Turn Turn. I have an impossibly vivid memory of listening to Turn Turn Turn on that boombox in my bedroom, rewinding it over and over and listening again and again while quietly sobbing. I don’t now, and didn’t know then, why. Something in the song rang true in a deep sad place in me and I guess, two dozen hands later, I still seem to hold that sad place close to my chest.
Lovely, sentimental, maudlin perhaps, maybe even corny. I should be embarrassed. But the apartment is empty and the sky is slate dusk-lit and everything I’ve seen and all that I’ve loved will first pass from this world and then pass from its memory. So by the third minute of the Red House Painter’s Have You Forgotten, I think I will forever be that same small boy in his bedroom, unwittingly heartbroke by song.
Have You Forgotten (extended)
Red House Painters (Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters, Mark Kozelek site)
(notes — A different version of this song originally appeared on Songs for a Blue Guitar in 1996. Whenever I imagine gambling through this life, I play pinochle. At about 7:40 (wait for it!) the guitar starts doing these double-time and triplet runs that are so lovely that I wish they soundtracked all of my dreams.)
Oblivians :: Ride That Train
The album Oblivians play 9 songs with Mr. Quintron, in its wild salute to the energy and spirit of gospel music, did my record shelf a favor. This final studio album of Memphis’ garage punk heroes shows that the fellas can sing songs about feeling good being bad AND feeling good being good. It starts with a fever that only twice gives pause for introspection, allowing the listener (and perhaps the band) to catch their breath. As the story goes, Greg, Jack, and Eric Oblivian dragged Mr. Quintron from the Fifth Ward to record the album in one eight hour session, a superhuman feat given the soul-summoning, ass-shaking piece of work they created. It must have been an exhausting eight hours.
9 songs has got traditional favorites (Live the Life, What’s the matter now?), a cover (Mary Lou by Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks), and six of Greg Oblivian’s own, including Ride that Train. And if songs are moods, this is one of the best ones. A masterwork of rhythm and repetition as Greg trumpets an invitation that goes beyond toe-tapping and ultimately makes me run around my room with the kind of abandon Billy Idol mused about in Dancing with Myself. Who needs bass?
Greg Cartwright sure can write a song. And he’s got a brain full of 50’s and 60’s blues, soul, gospel, and rock-n-roll; the fabulous and obscure. It’s the kind of brain you want to borrow and download to your hard drive. Borrowing this record from my roommate way back in Ohio marked the birth of my love for soul, blues, and garage. Greg knows what’s got it. And ever since my first listen, I’ve wanted it, too.
Ride That Train
Oblivians (Trouser Press site)
What’s the matter now? videos here and here
(note — Also, check out their other projects: Reigning Sound, Greg Oblivian & the Tip Tops, and Compulsive Gamblers.)
Olu Dara :: Harlem Country Girl
Brooklyn is 103 degrees. You can feel the pavement’s heat through the thin soles of your shoes, and when you cross the street the asphalt displaces in small ways under your feet. Your body is mostly water, but today asphalt is more fluid than you.
The thought would blow your mind, but you are thinking about your arms. You’d meant to fill just the one canvas bag at the grocery, but the produce looked so much better than you see in your neighborhood. The plastic bags are heavy enough so your arm muscles burn a bit. The sun has your skin burning a bit, too. Heat inside, heat outside—the effect is kind of nice.
A drop of sweat slides down your side. You know there’s nothing you can do about it, and that’s kind of nice, too. Heat and resignation are good for the soul.
You come up on the small park at Fulton and Greene. Even before you see it, you hear the festival there—samples and drums, freestyling and laughter. The park is full of afros and hair wraps, West African fabrics and Negritude t-shirts. Older gentlemen wear tweedy hats. Little ones with snow cones run wild in beaded braids. You wish you didn’t have grocery bags on you. But you do, and you’re too broke to let good groceries rot in the sun.
Still, you cut through the park to bask in the party—the heat, the noise, the love. Because it’s Brooklyn in the summertime, the party has no middle. It’s all the middle. The kids run circles around you. The grandfathers nod. You pass the bandstand and you catch someone’s eyes.
And damn but they don’t catch you back.
You don’t stop. You’re not going to stop. But for a second, the light turns to honey. You are both moving slow. Your heads keep turning to hold the gaze. There is nothing else, just cool honey and that gaze.
You keep on moving. You could swear there’s a trumpet. Cool trumpet and honey, slow. And already you’ve gone past.
The honey thins back to summer light. The trumpet fades. The heat returns, and more this time. Another bead of sweat lets go. But you know there’s nothing you can do.
Harlem Country Girl
Olu Dara (homepage)
Daniel Johnston :: Like a Monkey in a Zoo
Daniel Johnston is one of those notorious figures that you’re either completely sick of, or completely oblivious to. If you do know who he is, you either love him or hate him. Basically, he’s manic and recovering. He had a brief encounter with fame in the early 90s followed by a documentary that recast him as an “outsider” figure, forever cute and novel.
This particular song embodies something that I feel has been completely sucked out of modern music. In this case it’s a synthesis, but what Daniel generally offers is mistake. Or rather, to those who have come to see perfection as polish and grace, this song may sound a bit flawed. He sings off key, you can hear the cassette tape he recorded on warble and distort, his piano is out of tune… the list goes on. But, when I hear this song, and when any one who likes Daniel Johnston hears this song, its flaws are precisely what make it great. Its flaws are its perfection. And, in a society where everything we do is gauged by the swiftness and order in which we do it, it kind of makes sense why music like this would appeal to at least a few of us.
Personally, I hate our flawlessness, our perfection; I can’t do a single thing without double and triple checking my results. It’s inhuman. It is inhuman to strive to be so perfect and to feel flawed from failure of achieving an impossible goal; what Monkey in a Zoo represents is an alternative. Daniel presents failed flawlessness as human perfection. Or rather, his failed perfection is all too human to be denied for lack of beautiful. He’s proud of it. Daniel Johnston taps our inner essence by never polishing, the first take is just how the song goes, and that’s just how he sings it. He hits record and lets it fly, censorship be dammed. He’s raw emotion. And all this would be enough, as it usually is, to make a classic Daniel Johnston original, but this song offers more. This Monkey in a Zoo is self-aware. The lyrics are precisely about this idea of societal flawlessness. We’re all monkeys in a zoo, chained to the wall that is other people and a projected sense of perfection. And it’s not like he’s just riffing on some little emotionally felt ditty either; the structure of this song is pure pop, straight out of a Beatles songbook. Listen to the bridge. I can’t quite put my finger on which Lennon song it sounds like, but I just know it is one.
So in an effort to be brief, I dutifully submit for the approval of the midnight society this humble approach to the greatest song ever, Monkey in a Zoo.
Like a Monkey in a Zoo
Daniel Johnston (homepage)
Sly and the Family Stone :: Fun
Fun is. Any song that starts with a kick-snare, boom-smack is bound to make your next two and a half minutes shake like Jell-o in a centrifuge. That snare keeps on the 2-3-4’s throughout most of the song: a drunkard trying, and failing, to stand up straight. It only veers off to fly through time and space into the bottom of the percussive register. Then it snaps right back into the groove as if it were that drunken guy at the party who falls off the porch only to jump right back up as if nothing happened (you know who you are).
The Beatles-esque choir can’t stop itself from climbing up the banisters to pull the chandelier all the way back down. That’s just the beginning of the end, but the party keeps going. The dry mouth laughter in the background can’t be the horn section; they’re too busy getting stuck in your head. I know… it’s OK… just whistle along. Too much Fun is never, ever enough.
Fun
Sly and the Family Stone (homepage)
the Pogues :: Thousands are Sailing
The thing about the Irish, other than the drinking, the singing, and the gorgeous redheads, is the way they reveal the nasty machinations of class in America. You don’t just become successful: someone else must fall. The Irish became white, the Irish became President, and the Irish became the green-plastic-hatted drunk racists of Chicago’s South Side Irish parade. The Pogues understood this mixture of pride and loathing; they formed in England, angry and raw from derision, merging the punk dream of class war with the blood soaked history of Irish music.
Not every Pogue’s song had the fortune of being written by Shane MacGowan; Pogues guitarist Phil Chevron wrote Thousands are Sailing, and sang it when I saw them live in 2007. Chevron’s lyrics and voice lack the dark irony of the Pogue’s famously Fucked Genius. Chevron also permits a dreadful rock-and-roll beat to enter midway through the opening refrain and never makes it leave. The rest, however, is heaven: tin whistle, mandolin, crystalline guitar, bodhran, dulcimer, and, I swear to you, red-headed angels weeping.
“Wherever we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees.” This line alone makes Thousands are Sailing the true Immigrant Song. The tempo and the lyrics move from sentimental ballad to indictment: “We dance to the music and we dance,” he snarls, telling us we’re fools. It’s through MacGowan’s voice that you feel the exhilaration of self-pity, the sentiment of venerating a homeland that hated you, the Irish quality of celebrating failure until success feels like a betrayal.
Thousands are Sailing
the Pogues (homepage)
World of Pooh :: Scissors
I’ve had a crush on Barbara Manning since I was sixteen. I think I can admit that here.
Sixteen was the age that I first heard Manning sing as a part of the band World of Pooh. World of Pooh’s album Land of Thirst (with Jay Paget on drums and Brandan Kearney on guitar) was recorded by Greg Freeman and released in 1989. I’ve always found that the song I go back to most is Scissors. The imagery in the song is a bit violent and disarming like the best folk songs, pointing toward a life of lost connections and self doubt, all within the domestic metaphor of clashing shears and threadless needles. This version of the song is about one part indie rock jangle (less REM and more The Bats) and one part noise rock, like much of World of Pooh’s recorded output. Manning went on to rerecord the song, as well as Somewhere Soon, for her solo album Lately I Keep Scissors in a more straight forward fashion, complete with scissors-as-percussion, flattening out the jagged edges. Without the crazed drumming of Jay Paget, it falls a little flat for me (it’s still wonderful and beautiful, though, as is the whole album, so go buy the damn thing).
For those wondering and or keeping score, the other members of World of Pooh, Jay Paget and Brandan Kearney, were both stalwarts of the San Francisco scene in the 80s and 90s as well. Drummer Paget went on to become a part of the amazing and much-loved-in-our-household Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. Kearney was a part of the band Caroliner, a whacked-out art combo who usually had handmade covers and elaborate costumes (when I saw them in a small club, they had papier-mâché masks and the album I bought was wrapped in a Depends undergarment bag). He also played on some of Manning’s solo albums.
Barbara Manning is still making wonderful music, now with the Go Luckys.
Unfortunately, the album is long out of print and probably won’t be rereleased anytime soon. If you look around hard enough on the internet, you can find a copy, though. It’s completely worth your time.
Scissors
World of Pooh (Barbara Manning’s site)
(Note — Lately I Keep Scissors was rereleased in 2007 as part of the box set Super Scissors, which also includes One Perfect Green Blanket on which Manning rerecorded another one of her great World of Pooh songs called Someone Wants You Dead and some excellent demos.)
the Half Beats :: Should I
The adolescents of 1966, grown emotion-blown and sentimental on the sounds and words of 50s rock and roll knew the oft-repeated lyrics by heart. Rock songwriters of the 50s and early 60s knew that they had to reach in and grab a specific piece of gut from inside us and twist it around, and they knew what words to use. Over and over we’ve absorbed familiar lines:
“…love / under the stars above…[I] [I’ll] [I’d] die for you…I’ll wait for you…cry for you,” etc.
The Half Beats, raised on these crooned platitudes feel rightly let down when they don’t hold up under the acerbic strain of a teenage break up. The worn lyrics, now sung in an insolent whine, are hurt — and hurtful:
“No more will I die for you…why should I wait for you…you’re out there makin’ love / makin’ love under the stars above.”
Enjoy this break up song, and rejoice that teenage pain doesn’t last forever.
Should I
the Half Beats (nothing on the web that I could find!)
Dead Milkmen :: Plum Dumb
If I have ever really fallen in love, it was in early fall, amongst sticky fruit flavored lip gloss. The blue raspberry preteen lipstick of a girl who had the same poster in her room that I did. She had tried sewing; I had tried chew. Years went by. I got into acid; she got into makin’ babies for other guys. We were just like celebrities.
Or maybe, we lived the lives celebrities wished they could live. She got away w/ more leopard print. We’d peel out under the street lights just as they turn on. Drive to Taco Bell, drive to Dairy Queen, drive to the quarry, swim, eat, smoke Swisher Sweets. Blast Elvis on the car stereo of the Pontiac with the doors open as the sun disappeared behind the purple rocky mountains. Etc.
Plum Dumb
Dead Milkmen (homepage)