Archive for the ‘Record reviews’ Category

You know my name (look up the number)

Posted: August 25, 2013 in music, Record reviews
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When I took up the challenge of reviewing every band with a number in its name, I thought it would be something mindless I could do while doing some other, more serious, thing. Well, it was often mindless (to cite one example, One Direction), but overall this project has proven to be more interesting than it had any right to be.

Why are there so few band names with numbers?
You loyal readers came up with 110 suggestions. I thought that was a lot – but how many bands have had major-label releases in the past 60 years? Surely there have been thousands, and that’s just in the English-speaking countries. Why are so few numbered?

Don’t expect an answer to that one, but I can tell you that approximately half the names on our list are variations on two, three, four, and five. That makes sense, since most bands have two, three, four, or five members. 101 Strings actually has more than 101 musicians plucking strings. I don’t know why they’re so modest when they’ve done so much to destroy our way of life.

Threat level: Not exactly off the scale
The rest of this lot falls into no discernible pattern, though you could make a small category of names that seem to threaten: World War III, World War Four, Five for Fighting, Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor), 10cc, 50 Foot Wave, The B-52s, MX80, 101 Strings (I always thought that one was a threat), 1000 Homo DJs (we’re here, we’re queer, we refuse to play “YMCA”), and 10,000 Maniacs. Frankly, none of these bands seem particularly threatening, unless you fear Reznor’s brand of relentless self-pity.

Get right out of town!
I decided to disqualify any act that wasn’t listed at Allmusic.com, or, failing that, in Wikipedia. Also, the act had to have at least one album from a major label – something you could find for sale at eBay or Half.com. This led to surprisingly few disqualifications of your suggestions.

  • Less Than Zero: It’s an Elvis Costello song, it’s a Bret Easton Ellis novel, it’s an early Robert Downey Jr. movie, it’s the name of several albums, but it’s not a band.
  • 2 Tribes: This is a song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and some electro outfits. It’s not a band.
  • Devo 2.0: Mark Mothersbaugh cooperated with Disney to make disneyfied versions of his original songs. O the humanity!
  • The Five Jones Boys: George Jones played with four other boys, but they didn’t use a number. Also, they’re country. That reminds me: No country.

Much as I love jazz, I disqualified the entire genre. If I hadn’t, I would’ve been overrun by trios, quartets, and quintets.

Welcome to By the Numbers Week. Tomorrow night: One is the the loneliest number!

Write-a-thon, Day 38: Go back, Jack, and do it again

Posted: July 30, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. (Colette)

When I was a pre-bar mitzvah sprout in Hebrew school, I was at the mercy of a teacher who came from the Old World with some old skool Old World characteristics, including teeth and fingernails yellow from chain-smoking and a tendency in any academic situation to fall back on his main teaching tool: violence.

I’m not going to tell you this man’s name, or the nickname we children gave him, or the songs we sang about him, because I don’t want his descendants to track me down and torture me the way he did. And anyway, maybe he behaved so badly because he had survived the Holocaust and journeyed to America and in his declining years ended up marooned in our declining, uninteresting city, teaching Hebrew to a bunch of youthful dumbshits. Whatever his motivations, when he called one of us up to the front of the class to recite and we couldn’t deliver, he always screamed, “Go back to your seat and study!!!”

This evening at the end of my Write-a-thon hour I wanted to send myself back to my seat to study. What I wrote was definitely not worth reciting at the front of a classroom or anywhere else. There’s a character I have yet to understand, and my subconscious writer brain refuses to let him walk through these pages as valiant, virtuous, and virtually flawless. Unlike my former Hebrew school teacher, who is long gone, I can figure out what makes this guy tick and why anyone should care.

Maybe that was my old teacher’s real problem. He cared too much.

The 10-year-old inside me just ducked and covered.

Random Pick of the Day
Three Dog Night, Cyan (1973)
Loyal Reader Accused of Lurking has pointed out my math error. Before I so blithely skipped to the Dave Clark Five, I should’ve stopped at Three Dog Night! I also skipped 4 Non Blondes. I’m rectifying the first error tonight.

I find Three Dog Night interesting because almost everything they sang was written by someone else. The original was practically unrecognizable after 3DN finished rearranging it. Look at their first record, Three Dog Night (1969). The composers on this disc include Tim Hardin, Stevie Winwood, Harry Nilsson, Lennon & McCartney, Randy Newman, Neil Young, and Johnnie “Guitar” Watson. Their second album, Suitable for Framing (also 1969), adds Laura Nyro, Dave Mason, Sam Cooke, and Elton John. I wish 3DN had lasted as far as 1980 because I would’ve loved to have heard what they did with songs by, for example, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Joan Armatrading, and Michael Jackson.

Other than the fact that I flee from any room where “Black & White” or “Joy to the World” is playing (the latter being the “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” song, which Hoyt Axton wrote to showcase the melody – the lyrics were a nonsensical placeholder), I’m OK with this band. They fit well on a road trip in-between the harder stuff. My favorite 3DN songs are “One” (Nilsson), “Eli’s Coming” (Nyro), “Easy to Be Hard” (the team that wrote Hair), and “Liar” (Russ Ballard). Except for “Easy to Be Hard,” these treatments are tougher than usual for them. They’re all from the first two albums.

Cyan (which includes the hit “Shambala”) is not 3DN’s best album (that would be their debut), but it’s their closest to the blue-eyed soul of Rare Earth. There’s also a gospel flavor to some of these tracks. (“Celebrate,” from Suitable for Framing, could easily have appeared on a Rare Earth album exactly as it is.)

For a few years back there in our rearview mirror, Three Dog Night was more powerful than the Van Allen radiation belt. According to Google, they ran up a string of 21 hit singles from 1969 through 1975. I’d rather revisit their music than that of their contemporaries Grand Funk Railroad, a band that rocks very hard for very little reason.

Write-a-thon, Day 35: They don’t pay me to sit here and look pretty

Posted: July 27, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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I’m starting a new job on Monday. It’s a contract job, and it might only last until Thanksgiving, but I’m hoping for something longer. It’s a good job and I’m excited about it. Satisfying assignments! Interesting co-workers! Payday!

It’s been an unsettled time, filled with networking, interviews, freelancing, conferences, more networking, and too much time on LinkedIn. Do I wish I had written more during these months? Of course I do. But I wrote what I wrote and page by page I’m going to get where I want to go.

We celebrated my new status by eating too much pizza. We’re going to walk it off tomorrow while hiking around Mt. Hood. Mountain ridges, views of distant peaks, alpine meadows, mountain flowers. And in two weeks, payday!

One more day in the Write-a-thon is in the books. Literally.

Random Pick of the Day 1.0
David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel (1981)
Most of David Byrne’s solo work leaves me cold, but what I like I like a lot, and that includes about half the 23 songs on this disc. The lyrics are subpar by Byrne standards, but the music often rises above – way above. I was an idiot for not appreciating this album 30 years ago.

Random Pick of the Day 2.0
Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law (1966)
Bobby Fuller (who died at 23) was a talented man who loved the music of Buddy Holly (who died at 22). This record is a vision of what Holly might’ve sounded like if he’d lived, except I have the feeling that if Holly had lived past 1959, he would’ve changed a heckuva lot by 1966.

Fuller’s work is particularly interesting in that it was recorded against the tidal wave of the British Invasion and on the cusp of psychedelia. Fuller is known today solely for his version of “I Fought the Law,” but frankly I think everyone else does it better. I prefer his originals, especially “King of the Beach,” “Baby My Heart,” and “Nervous Breakdown.” They were released on other albums or as singles, but later releases of the BF4 are usually called I Fought the Law and sometimes include them. Bobby Fuller’s catalog has been messed up by decades of nostalgia but is worth exploring.

 

Write-a-thon, Day 34: I got blisters on me fingers!

Posted: July 26, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Snoopy letter What is it with you

“Let’s face it, some boys and girls become writers because the only workplace they’re willing to visit is the one inside their heads. And even then it’s a tough commute.” (Arthur Krystal)

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” (Thomas Mann)

I don’t find writing difficult. I write all the time. Stories, blog posts, music reviews, love letters, flame mail, and whatever they throw at me at work. When I have work.

The difficulty for me is concentrating on something as large and as made-up as a novel. Heather Sellers, in her excellent how-to book Chapter After Chapter, reminds us that, in general, we humans lack experience in long-range projects. At our core we’re hunter/gatherers who are still concerned with today and how we’re going to get through it. Which is also how we often live our harried modern lives.

Ms. Sellers writes:

Writing a book is going to annoy the hell out of your brain. What you are asking it to do – to always move toward the unknown – goes against thousands of years of successful survival. But that’s how we evolve. We move toward the unknown.

Today in the Write-a-thon I spent 90 minutes moving toward the unknown in the window of my favorite coffee shop. Flannery O’Connor  said, “I write to discover what I know,” and I discovered a little more tonight. I’d rather discover a lot rather than a little but I guess my brain is too annoyed to cooperate.

I’ll let former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have the final word on the known and the unknown:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Random Pick of the Day
Various Artists, You Heard It Here First! (2008)
What makes a hit record a hit? Talent, timing, personality? You Heard It Here First!, a collection of “26 classics from the 50s and 60s, heard here in their original, pre-hit versions,” leans toward talent, but it’s a close and interesting race.

For example, Elvis Presley had a hit with “Suspicious Minds,” but the musical arrangement is almost exactly the same as Mark James’ original. The only difference is Elvis Presley. Soft Cell had a hit with “Tainted Love,” but the original, by Gloria Jones, has all the menace Soft Cell was too soft to deliver. And The Troggs had a hit with “Wild Thing,” besting the original by The Wild Ones. If you’re going to call yourselves wild and make a song about being wild, you should at least try to sound like you’re wild.

Johnny Darrell’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” almost had me in tears. Kenny Rogers & The First Edition raked in the cash after applying their Purell hand sanitizer to it. And The Leaves, with the first “Hey Joe,” turn in a surprisingly strong and genuinely wild performance, even though it’s obvious after the first minute that the only thing they know how to do is play wicked fast.

Some songs I thought were ties – “Louie, Louie” is “Louie, Louie” no matter who plays it – and then there are the hit songs that I will always hate no matter who sings them: “My Boy Lollipop” and “Something Stupid” head that list.

The main things I learned from this disc are 1) The Raindrops (“Hanky Panky”) may have been the worst singers in the history of singing; and 2) Bill Haley took a nothing of a song called “Rock Around the Clock” (“Put some glad rags on and join me hon/we’re gonna have some fun when the clock strikes one” is the only halfway decent line), added some catchy musicianship and a delivery that made sex seem goofy, and got the first rock song to break the Top 40. And if you think an 87-word sentence like the one I just wrote is lengthy, the record, held by Victor Hugo, is 400+. Gonna write, gonna write, gonna write around the clock tonight.

Random Pan of the Day
3 Doors Down, The Better Life (2000)
They had a hit with “Kryptonite,” which is still a nice song, but they’re basically interchangeable with Candlebox, Nickelback, Creed, and most other hard rock/fake grunge acts of the 1990s. None of them are as good as Cream or even Stone Temple Pilots. The boys in 3DD try harder than most, but their limitations are cruelly exposed when they attempt a ballad and immediately enter Kansas and Styx country.

Write-a-thon, Day 33: Someone left a train out in the rain

Posted: July 25, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of an island and was inspired to write Treasure Island. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about a Hobbit and from there drew a map of Middle-Earth. Many writers start writing after being captivated by a drawing or a photo. Others cut pictures out of magazines to help them visualize their characters or some aspect of their stories. Writing is surprisingly visual.

For my book, I bought 10 irregular sheets of poster board at an art supply store. The biggest is about 2’x3’. I took all the book covers, magazine photos, and old postcards I’d collected with a mountainous, railroady theme and spray-mounted them on these boards. I glued a balsa-wood frame to the back of each to keep them from warping, then hung them on the walls around my corner desk. This way I write while looking at the physical setting my characters are moving through.

I also drew a map of the where the action is, but my illustration skills are stuck in the sixth grade, when I struggled to draw a creditable starship Enterprise. (Still working on that one.) I keep redrawing the map for practice but I’m not getting better at it. I know the look I want and at some point I’m going to hire an actual artist to do it.

Meanwhile, it occurred to be that I could one-up Tolkien and RLS. (Boy, I never thought I’d get to say that.) I love building models. My book is full of trains. Why not build a model of something I’m writing about?

Micro 1

Nature is always trying to come indoors and take over. If you leave your car parked too long, nature will grow under it and eventually over it. Same with trains. Open-top cars left on a siding will eventually support enough wind-blown dirt and weeds to initiate agriculture. I’ve hiked past abandoned bridges that were turning into gardens way up in the middle of the air. Look at what happened to the High Line in New York:

High Line

I thought I was going to have one such bridge in my book, with an abandoned gondola astride it. So I made one. (This was also a way to sneak a garden railroad into my wife’s garden.) The wood came from an old dish drainer. The plants are a type of sedum that’s pretty much indestructible. It all lives outside; I’ll bring it in when winter comes.

Micro 2

I tried to sell these photos to Classic Toy Trains, but for some reason they weren’t enthused about showing their readers how to destroy their classic toy trains. They were very nice about it, though.

Micro 3

After further thought I decided to put this bridge in my second book. At least I’m thinking ahead. For my next construction project, I considered a half-size caboose replica, but I had some doubts I could secure trackage rights for the backyard. Maybe I’ll build that miniature Cape Cod lighthouse after all. It could double as a doghouse.

Today I went to the gym for the first time since the Write-a-thon started, so I’m feeling particularly virtuous this evening. My new mantra is short and intense workouts rather than lengthy and laid-back. Blood, not just contusions.

Random Pick of the Day
Ministry, Filth Pig (1995)
Sometime in the early 1980s I saw The B-52s at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. The opening act was a Seattle band called The Blackouts. It was an unlikely pairing, as The Blackouts were dark and noisy and The B-52s are light and zany. But it’s a rock-concert tradition to pair like with unlike. A tavern here in Portland just had Wicked Sin opening for The Punctuals. I didn’t go. I knew it was wrong.

The Blackouts eventually met a heavy-metal industrialist named Al Jourgensen and under his leadership formed Ministry and became even darker and noiser. Filth Pig is a good example. On this disc, Ministry did everything it could to clear the dance floor. The album name was thought up by a 16-year-old boy with bad skin and no hope of getting laid. The cover art is grotesque. The track listing is unreadable. Most of the songs are as listenable as a space shuttle in need of a new muffler. The singing is not so much singing as it is screaming at Orcs.

But! This album has their cover of “Lay, Lady, Lay” (track 9, since you’ll never decipher the info on the CD). The first time I heard it, I thought it was a joke. I listened a second time because I was looking forward to the laugh, but I didn’t laugh. I just listened. Now I’ve heard it many times and I think it’s beautiful. (Dylan does it again.) “Lay, Lady, Lay,” and tracks 1, 2, and 10 redeem Filth Pig for me.

Random Pan of the Day
Fun Boy Three, Waiting (1982)
The musical equivalent of the plastic garbage floating around in the Pacific Ocean. David Byrne produced this thing, after producing another inept record earlier in the year, The B-52s’ Mesopotamia. But 1982 also saw Talking Heads’ first live album,  the excellent The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. Strange year for David Byrne…The only FB3 song worth its weight in vinyl is one of their two collaborations with Bananarama, “Really Saying Something,” and in that one they let the girls sing the leads.

I know I said I wasn’t going to do anymore music reviewing while the Write-a-thon was on, but I can’t seem to rein myself in. So many bands to insult, so little time.

 

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