Posts Tagged ‘Screaming Trees’

Ask Run-DMSteve: Dawn of Justice

Posted: August 21, 2017 in music, Record reviews
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The solar eclipse invaded the mainland United States through Oregon, where cracks and fissures appeared in the earth and the simple folks panicked, setting fire to civilization….Excuse me, this is approximately what happened in Isaac Asimov’s short story “Nightfall,” in which a planet with six suns experiences darkness for the first time in a thousand years.

Ralph Waldo Emerson gets an assist for dreaming up this idea. The 21-year-old Asimov lacked the skills to write it but his editor, John W. Campbell, made him write it anyway. I’m sure this was a worthwhile learning experience for Asimov, but his story sucks. How did this 1941 doorstop get voted the greatest science fiction story of all time in 1964? Civilization is a puzzling thing. No wonder the Klan and the Nazis are always trying to burn it.

The solar eclipse was a welcome break from our current national pastimes of refighting the Civil War and World War II. I can’t even discuss this with my 90-year-old father. Dad and his two brothers (and my late father-in-law) spent the best years of their lives pulverizing Hitler. Now Hitler’s fan club is back and we’ve got them. I wish we could return to an earlier time when all of our arguments were about chess.

Dateline Normandy, 6 June 1944: Anti-fascists storm ashore to confront white supremacists! Both sides to blame for violence on Omaha Beach? Alt-left U.S. Army “very, very violent”!

But we’re not here today to talk about Nazis or the Confederates who didn’t surrender at Appomattox but didn’t tell anybody. We’re here to answer a letter from Accused of Lurking, my brother…my captain…my king.

Dear Run-DMSteve,

We all have artists we return to, over and over, in our listening lives. For me, these would include Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles, The Who, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Melissa Etheridge. (Obviously, I am a man of a certain age.)

But there are also albums we return to, usually by lesser artists, that somehow have a particular resonance. These albums can intensify, alleviate, or complement our mood of the moment. It’s like that trash movie you watch again and again over the years because it hits your sweet spot.

For some reason, for me, these five albums return to my playlist on a pretty regular basis:

Patti Scialfa, Rumble Doll
Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience
Indigo Girls, Rites of Passage
Mary Chapin Carpenter, Come On Come On
Del Amitri, Change Everything

Given your extensive listening experience, my question to you is simply this: Have you ever listened to any of these albums? (My expectation of your answer is “No.”)

With warmest personal regards,

–Accused of Lurking

Dear Accused of Lurking,

You are indeed a man of a certain age, who enjoyed an intense teenage rebellion in the 1970s. However, judging by the five albums on your list, you had a rebirth in 1992. I believe this was about the time you met your trophy wife, [redacted].

To answer the question you asked: Yes. I’ve listened to four of the five, though I listened to them so long ago that my imperfect memory can’t reproduce much. I shall immediately catch up.

To answer the question you didn’t ask: What are the albums I go to when I want to intensify, alleviate, or complement my mood of the moment? Or when I want to create one? You’ve made me realize that in those cases, I don’t usually turn to albums, I turn to songs. And I do this most at work.

For example, I’m a guy who likes to feel sorry for myself. There’s no better way to do that than to start another day at the office with a dark, endless, ponderous meditation on existence worthy of German opera wunderkind Honus Wagner. What better song for that task than The Doors’ “The End”? It’s 11 minutes and 43 seconds of 1960s nihilism.

Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.

“The End” is perfect in every way. If I’m tired of “The End,” one of my fallbacks is Mother Love Bone’s “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns.” The lyrics don’t make the grade as coherent English:

Like a crown of thorns
It’s all who you know, yeah
So don’t burn your bridges, woman
’cause someday – yeah.

Heroin will do that to you. But the lyrics are not what I’m here for.

What if I want to start the day with a short, sharp shock? For something that resembles these slabs of gloom but moves like somebody means it, there’s Stevie Ray Vaughan’s cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.”

Run-DMSteve Fun Fact: I once held a stressful job whose chief characteristics were creativity and interruptions. I used the 6 minute 47 second “Little Wing” as a test. Could I get through the entire thing without an interruption? The answer was usually no. I learned to write fast.

If I need a quick punch because I have a meeting in 10 minutes, the William Tell Overture makes me stand on my back legs and roar. If it’s the middle of the afternoon and I have a deadline looming in three hours, the words I’m typing don’t make sense, and all I want to do is enter REM sleep without having to listen to R.E.M., I have many choices. Here are three:

  • 1000 Homo DJs, “Supernaut.” This Black Sabbath cover makes Black Sabbath sound like English country dancing in a Jane Austen movie.
  • Rob Zombie, “More Human Than Human.” Not only will this song electrocute the sleepiest copy writer, the video is one of the funniest ever made.
  • Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion (the entire album).

I could continue – I could way continue – but after all, you didn’t even ask. You always inspire me, Lurk. Rock on!

–Run-DMSteve

Back off, man, I’m a scientist

Posted: May 22, 2013 in music, Record reviews
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“Ghostbusters”
Ray Parker, Jr.
1984

R&B hitmaker Ray Parker, Jr. once said that his biggest challenge in writing the theme song for this movie was the lack of words that rhyme with “ghostbusters.” PolitiFact rates this assertion as True. The only two rhymes I can think of are “feather dusters” and “workplace clusters,” neither of which work in the context of fighting off an invasion from the afterlife.

“Ghostbusters” is a rip-off of Huey Lewis & The Snooze’s “I Want a New Drug.” I don’t care which one came first. Both of them go on way too long (3:59 and 4:45, respectively) and anyway they’re both distant descendants of the “George of the Jungle” theme. In 1987, Michael Jackson reused this riff for “Bad” (at 4:06 it fits right in). The result of all this cross-pollination is that whenever I play Weird Al’s “I Want a New Duck” I hear this whole crowd singing.

Ghostbusters was a silly movie, but it gave us two lines that we’re still quoting here at the Bureau: “Zool, you nut” and “Here’s  your mucous, Egon.” Parker’s song gave us two more: “Who ya gonna call?” and “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.”

It was Loyal Reader Tilda who demonstrated the versatility of that second phrase. Shortly after the movie was released, when the Orioles were scheduled to play the Mariners, she announced, “I ain’t afraid of no birds!” I’ve been customizing this line ever since, particularly whenever I find myself trapped in another workplace cluster.

In honor of Tilda and her sidekick Rickalope’s 23rd anniversary, everyone go listen to Ray Parker’s “You Can’t Change That.”

Random Pick of the Week
Mark Lanegan Band, Blues Funeral (2012)
Tilda strikes again – thanks for the tip, kid. Mark Lanegan was the singer in Screaming Trees and a man who, judging from that work and his solo albums, never fails to find the gray cloud around every silver lining. Blues Funeral is not what I’d call perky, but I love two tracks, the rocking “Riot in My House” and the almost-danceable, techno-influenced, unapologetically romantic “Ode to Sad Disco.” I’d have to love that one just for putting the word “disco” on a Mark Lanegan album.

Random Pan of the Week
Can, Monster Movie (1969)
Rhapsody says of Can’s first record, “The band fails to play a single note that is not ahead of its time.” Big talk for an app with more bugs than a Cape Cod cranberry bog during an August sunset. These German avant-gardesters make me want to holler, and not about anything good.

RIP, Ray Manzarek (1939-2013). This. Is. The. End.

The album experience

Posted: September 18, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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Hot Trip to Heaven
Love and Rockets
1994

Tubular Bells
Mike Oldfield
1973

Key Lime Pie
Camper Van Beethoven
1989

Today I will spare you a rant about the vanishing concept of the “album,” a group of songs that are thematically linked or that fix an artist in time. That concept didn’t even exist until The Beatles came along, and if the album is no longer needed in an era of music on demand, well, The Beatles aren’t around anymore either. Things change and I like change.

But I do want to recall for a moment one aspect of the album experience, and that is having to buy an entire album just to get one song.

You might remember Love and Rockets from their 1989 hit, “So Alive,” which sounds very 1970s to me, like a lazy lounge version of T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong.” They also did a good job with their cover of The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.” Love and Rockets was a sort of goth/psychedelic act with an enthusiastic though small following. I wasn’t enthusiastic about them until I heard “Body and Soul” from Hot Trip to Heaven.

Like most people, I love a 3-minute record with a beat. But I also like a lengthy, mesmerizing song. I write better in a trancelike state (I also write better after I’ve had my shoes shined) and I find that playing lengthy, mesmerizing songs at work keeps people from bugging me. “Body and Soul” (which has nothing to do with Billie Holiday) is a 14-minute chunk of musical hypnosis, even at the 6:45 mark where the song abruptly picks up speed.

(The lyrics are another issue. The main theme in the first half of the song is “Body and soul,” which isn’t explained. In the second half it’s “Spin the wheel,” and I can’t shed any light on that one, either. Love and Rockets graduated from the same school of lyrical obfuscation as did Screaming Trees.)

The rest of the album I never listen to, though a couple of songs (“Trip and Glide” and “Be the Revolution”) are almost sort of catchy. But in 1994, if you wanted to own “Body and Soul” by Love and Rockets, you had no choice but to buy the entire album. That was about a $12 song. The cover art looks cool if you leave the CD sitting on your desk, but people listening to iTunes tend to snicker when they see any CD sitting on my desk so this is not the benefit it once was.

Another example from my experience is Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, a snippet of which became the theme from The Exorcist. The actual title is “Tubular Bells, Pt. 1,” and it weighs in at a hefty 25:49. Don’t let that figure deter you – you don’t have to listen to the entire epic. Thanks to your computer, you can start precisely at 17:04 and immediately get to the meaty, mesmerizing part. It even has an announcer to introduce the dozens of instruments Oldfield played, as he played them. When I bought this album in the ’70s, I had to memorize where on the vinyl I wanted to go and hope I dropped the needle in the right place. (Side two, the cleverly named “Tubular Bells, Pt. 2,” is a mere 23:20. I probably played that side once. It’s way too short.)

Sometimes buying an album to get just one song resulted in a happy surprise. I wanted Key Lime Pie because of Camper Van Beethoven’s cover of the 1960s’ psychedelium masterpiece, “Pictures of Matchstick Men.” Camper Van was an early indie band with a violin and a sly sense of humor, as you can see in their legacy to contemporary music, “Take the Skinheads Bowling”:

Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes
Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same
There’s not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything

For years I took out this CD and skipped to track 13, “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” played that song a couple of times, then popped the disc out of the machine. Even though David Lowery of Camper Van went on to form Cracker, a band I like, it never occurred to me to listen to anything else on Key Lime Pie. But then one day at work I slipped the CD into my computer just as a co-worker came over to speak to me. Before I could punch in track 13 the music started and I found myself listening to the entire album. I loved about half of it! That’s a whole lotta love in my snobby world.

My experience with Key Lime Pie proves that you should always make time to talk to your co-workers. You should always be prepared for change, too. I don’t know what’s going to happen to albums, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

The Power-Thru

Posted: June 12, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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Sweet Oblivion
Screaming Trees
1991

Unemployment has so many advantages that I hardly have time to list them all in. For example, I never got dressed today. I’ve been wearing my pajamas since last Monday. Or maybe the Monday before. For another example, I get to listen to as much music during the day as I want.

Yesterday I listened to Rhapsody’s Baroque channel for about four hours. The Baroque period ends with Bach’s death in 1750. I guess you can take it with you. The music of the Baroque era features clarinets, flutes, viols, lutes, and theorbos, and don’t tell me you don’t know what a theorbo is. Pete Townsend smashed one into his amplifier onstage at Leeds in 1966. I’ll bet Bach never did that.

When I decided I was about full up on theorbos, I switched over to what Rhapsody calls Essential Classical. The first artist was Beethoven. After four hours of Baroque serenity, Beethoven sounded like I was running for my life in a bowling alley. I still had writing to do and it was getting late. It was time for the Power-Thru.

Write like the big boys
The term “Power-Thru” was coined by Odd Todd, who literally wrote the book on unemployment: Hard Times, Soft Couch. Todd was referring to the common problem of how to finish a bag of chocolate fudge-striped cookies when you’re already full. I use Power-Thru to describe the process I undergo to kick-start whatever I’m writing.

In 1995 I went to work for a company that made computer games. Software deadlines were far more onerous than what I’d known in newspapers. I often had to lock myself away in my monk’s cell at midnight to get anything done, and when I did I came to rely on certain albums played very loud to ignite my creativity (which, in stubborn moments, felt as if I were thawing a glacier). One sure-fire fire-starter was Sweet Oblivion.

Describing Screaming Trees won’t make you want to listen to them. They popped up in Seattle during the grunge era. Critics said, “Screaming Trees are not grunge,” but if they’re not I sure can’t tell you what they are. Like most grunge outfits, their lyrics make no sense. I mean sometimes you get a song by Soundgarden or Alice in Chains and you can sort of tell what they’re on about, but you can dip into almost any Screaming Trees song and fall right through the looking glass, even on their one hit, “Nearly Lost You”:

I nearly lost you there
And it’s taken us somewhere
I nearly lost you there
Let’s try to sleep now

There’s a reason why Screaming Trees’ best-of collection is called Ocean of Confusion.

It won’t help to say that I can’t remember if I ever saw Screaming Trees on a stage. I remember a show I went to about 1990 where all four men in the band were wearing unbuttoned flannel shirts, but that could’ve been anybody. Two guys were rather large and one was kinda skinny; I couldn’t tell about the drummer. That fits their profile. The show was in Seattle. I want to say it was at the Gorilla Room, but that place had closed years before. So it could’ve been at Gorilla Gardens, except I’m pretty sure I never went there. This is starting to sound like one of their songs.

These caveats aside, let me state unequivocally how much I love this band and this record. The individual songs never attain greatness, but the overall effect of listening to Sweet Oblivion is like listening to Baroque all day and then getting hit in the face with Beethoven, except I know exactly what’s coming. Bowls me over every time. Gary Lee Connor’s guitar playing is not too little and not too much but just right. Mark Lanegan wields a baritone voice that, like Perry Como’s, never seems to work too hard but always makes itself known. (Lanegan has released several dark, spare solo albums. They remind me of Tom Waits without the laughs.)

Whenever I’m stuck on a project, I can go to half a dozen albums guaranteed to set me free. Sweet Oblivion leads the pack.

Cover of the week: The Slits, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
The three women in The Slits made up the weirdest rock act of 1979, and that’s saying something. For competition they had Gary Numan of Tubeway Army. Gary Numan pretended to be an android. He made David Bowie look like an investment banker.

Their first album, Cut, has two excellent tracks; one is their cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” A ton of artists have covered this one; Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Gladys Knight & The Pips, and Creedence Clearwater Revival had early hits with it, and of course there’s Marvin Gaye’s version, which is a landmark of Western music. The Slits’ interpretation is not just a whole lotta fun, it’s…how can I put this…singular. Of all the covers I know of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” nothing sounds like this one.

I would’ve remembered these women if I’d seen them in person.

More me in The Nervous Breakdown
In my push to totally dominate this online zine, I’ve posted my second humor column. This time I take on Thor and other superheroes, tools, and general musings on life. When I posted yesterday, my neighbor on the front page was a woman writing about bondage and discipline. I suspect she got more readers than I did with my stupid puns about Thor.*

The Nervous Breakdown now has a contributor who is 16. The competition out there is fierce. I hope you’ll stop by and run up my hit count!

* I couldn’t work this one into my column: For Halloween this year I’m going as Thorsten Howell III.

Roll over, Kurt Cobain

Posted: November 28, 2010 in music, Record reviews
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Grunge Lite
Sara DeBell
1993
I was living in Seattle when our fair city unleashed a pair of unstoppable cultural forces: coffee and grunge. Everyone knows what coffee is: overpriced. What is grunge?

Figure 1. Let’s go grunge-spotting!
Here are some general characteristics to help you seek and spot grunge anywhere in the world:

  • Men who can’t sing.
  • Big fuzzy guitars – a moderately pleasing sound that conveniently camouflages a lack of technical skill.
  • Overflowing testosterone. Particularly ironic in that the best album from the grunge era is easily Hole’s Live Through This. Only Courtney Love’s husband came close when his band released Nevermind.
  • Bad male fashion – plaid shirts worn unbuttoned or tied at the waist, or two nondescript shirts worn one on top of the other. A man at my gym left one of his nondescript shirts on a hook in the locker room for two months before he realized it was his shirt and not an irregular pattern on the wall.

Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam played Matt Dillon’s band, Citizen Dick, in the movie Singles (1992). This movie might not have been the high point for grunge, but it was certainly the high point for Pearl Jam.

Targets don’t get much fatter than this
Sara DeBell’s Grunge Lite, which appeared while grunge was still happening, was billed as a “whole buttload of easy-listening favorites,” recorded entirely in her dining room. She took 11 grunge masterworks and muzaked them, including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow,” Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick,” and Soundgarden’s “Hunger Strike.” (DeBell was particularly taken, or appalled, by Soundgarden, who appear three times in her carnival of carnage.) I only wish she had taken down my faves, Screaming Trees (“Nearly Lost You”). They could’ve used the publicity.

Grunge had it coming, but this is the kind of album you’ll play only when your house is full of people and they are full of your beer. Sure, the muzak versions of  these songs are clever…if you like muzak. Few people will be able to sit through the entire thing without losing intestinal containment. OK, I’ve done it. In the mid-’90s, though, when I played DeBell’s version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at parties at our house, everyone over 40 would gather adoringly around the stereo. I probably couldn’t get that reaction today, now that the real “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a standard in the Classic Rock repertoire and everyone I know is at least 100.

After releasing Grunge Lite, DeBell became the copy editor at The Stranger, one of Seattle’s weekly alternative papers. At that time I was finishing my sojourn as the copy editor at Seattle Weekly. If this was her idea of how to gain respectability, I could’ve told her it wasn’t going to work.

I don’t know where Sara DeBell is today, musically, but the one time I spoke with her, in 1996, she was really into The Everly Brothers!