One of the last and greatest holdouts from the eighties succumbs.

I'm sure the cynics will say "they should have done this around the time of Automatic for the People," but haters are gonna hate, aren't they?

R.E.M. has announced they are breaking up.

I had no idea who they were in the fall of 1987 when a friend of mine who was still in high school called and asked me if I could get tickets to their show on campus. Tickets were something like 15 bucks and a cd was something like 12, and as I didn't know any of their songs, I decided to get him tickets (2) and myself a CD (it was Fables of the Reconstruction -- not one of the band's favorites, but I think it's one of their best). As it turns out, it was a stupid decision, because they weren't playing college shows after that tour, which was in support of Document.

Not soon after, some local band named -- wait for it -- Driver 8 provided live entertainment at an Amnesty International letter writing event that I attended, which was a welcome break from the steady diet of pop and classic rock (and I have no problem with classic rock per se: I do have a problem with its radio format) that was all you could hear on the local radio stations.

R.E.M was essential listening in those days, and I would argue up through the release of Monster they were really at their peak.

I know I was late to the R.E.M. party, but they'll always bring me back to 1987.

Oh Noes It's The New Woild Order!

So I began this morning looking for something quick to celebrate Bob Dylan's 70th, and no I wasn't checking under the couch for a half-smoked joint. I was up on You Tube looking for a decent video to share with my good friends on facebook. However, having found said video, I became trapped in the You Tube Maelstrom, that whirling vortex of connectivity that drags you in and holds you for an hour or two.

I noted first how many links there were to Bob Dylan covers. OK, great, but not what I was seeking out. Then there were several links to Bob Dylan selling his soul. Interesting stuff from a whacko standpoint, so I made a note to come back to the link, which I did after I found a great video from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.

Bob Dylan selling his soul led me to all sorts of selling one's soul and all sorts of anti-christ musings, which are very interesting given our recent brush with the Rapture on May 21. What impresses me most is the seamless way in which anti-government hysteria is linked with apocalyptic religious readings.

Apparently, in addition to the evil that the UN represents, and especially because the UN has turned out to be more bumbling idiot than despotic overlord, we need a more scary adversary in the area of New World Orders. The UN, admittedly, has failed miserably as a frightening force for world unity. Enter the North American Union!

It's scary.

It's come to take your cars out your garages!

And best of all, since it doesn't exist, it can be all things to all people! It can cause abortions! It can turn your son gay! It acts in secret because it knows it can't get elected!

Seriously. Do a you tube search on North American Union. Apparently any sign of cooperation among the three North American nation states of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico is evidence of this nefarious collaboration. Whether it's formal agreements such as treaties or less formal photo opportunities, it's all a sign of something underhanded.

In fact, discussion "North American borders" is the same thing -- the exact same thing -- as erasing national borders. Did you know that? Well, now you do! In fact, joint military exercises and trainings are nothing more than the creation of a North American military that will overthrow out sovereign nation! Keep that in mind next time you see a smiling Canadian -- that Maple Leaf is red for a reason, Comrade!

All this mayhem would be disturbing enough if it were only national sovereignty at stake, but the real goal of the NAU -- or should I say the real purpose of the NAU -- is to prepare the way for the AntiChrist and then my friends it's not only your passport label at stake: it's your eternal soul.

Don't mind the dire predictions of all this happening under Bush's watch (Bush I as instigator and Bush II as the Realizer) -- it's still valid. Who knows, your neighbor could be a spy for the NAU. Be careful out there.

So as Bob Dylan said so many years ago, "you've got to serve somebody." But not in the clip below:




Happy Birthday, Bob.

When being sick is no fun.

Well, the whole damn family is sick now. Yesterday I was so sick I didn't have the energy to play with my new toy, pictured below:

Seriously, I was wrapped in three layers and lying under a blanket all day, with my hoodie up over my head. This little Zoom G-1X is pretty amazing. A friend of mine had the first generation Zoom back in the late 80's, and I've pretty much wanted one ever since, though my guitar playing has taken a backseat since the birth of the children. But I got one for Christmas, and have had a few chances to play with it.

Basically, it's a bundle of guitar effects wrapped up in one package, and the pedal is a multifunction device depending on the settings: it can control the general volume, the effect mix, etc. Oh my it sounds good.

Going to see Neil Young tonight...

Neil Young is playing Constitution Hall tonight, and I'm going to be there. In all my fourteen years of living in this nation's capital, I've never been in the site that turned away Marion Anderson because the Daughters of the American Revolution didn't like the fact that she was Black. The DC School Board also denied her an auditorium. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR over their racist stance (which of course didn't keep FDR from hemming and hawing and dragging his feet over anti-lynching legislation). Marion Anderson instead performed at the Lincoln Memorial.

These days the DAR is happy to have anyone in their doors, and Neil Young will be there and I will be there and it will be the first time I've seen Mr. Young live and in person. Young of course wrote "Southern Man," in which he attacked the white supremacists who were clinging to their dustbin of history ways, and "Alabama," which takes a more indirect route by implying that Alabama has poverty to worry about rather than upholding white supremacy. Lynyrd Skynyrd didn't take kindly to Neil Young's critiques, calling him out in "Sweet Home Alabama," though they themselves claimed it was for the sweeping condemnation of the South rather than for the anti-racist aspect of Young's song (Skynyrd have some interesting stances, including what might be one of the earliest gun control songs in "Saturday Night Special").

I'm guessing Mr. Young will be promoting his new album, Chrome Dreams II, and pulling out a few oldies from his catalog. I'm hoping for "Like a Hurricane" myself.

The company you keep, yet again.

It's been a while since I've written about the mercenaries the US is using in Iraq in lieu of a proper accountable armed force, but now they're back in the news. Blackwater, the war profiteering mercenary "business," have been caught a little too red-handed this time in their "civilian shoot-em-up" games, and the US government, the current employers of this mercenary force, is feeling the heat to separate themselves from this gang of thugs.

Not since the days of privateers on the open seas has the US been so dependent on these bottom-feeders of the world's tragedies, and days were when the term "mercenary" had a pejorative connotation, as the British employed their German mercenaries, the Hessians, against the U.S. in the Revolutionary War. Under the Bush Administration, anything goes, though, in this vain bid to secure the oil fields, as even Alan Greenspan now admits is the origins of the Iraq War (I would argue that a good bit of Bush's eagerness to invade also came about through his ridiculous family vendetta against one-time ally Saddam Hussein -- gotta teach those dogs that bite their masters a lesson...). Hey, Billy Bragg (did I mention he was playing the Birchmere October 22?) could have told him that about five years ago:

There is nothing new under the sun.

It seems everywhere you look the 1980's are coming back with a vengeance. This phenomenon is not new. Back in the late 1990's, you could go to an "Eighties Dance Party" most nights in either Adams Morgan or downtown at some joint called Polly Esther's (or so I read in the City Paper). That initial bounce was generated by newly-minted drinking age patrons who were too young the first time around to remember how shitty most of that dreck was, so it was mainly a playlist dragged off the pop stations of the 1980's (at least in Adams Morgan, where I could hear "99 Red Ballons" from Heaven and Hell bouncing off the buildings and into our house every Thursday night; yeah, not even the German version, "Neunundneunzig Luftballoons").



This latest return is a bit different and manifests itself not so much in the music at crappy dance clubs, but in the throwback t-shirts of The Smiths and Siouxsie and the Banshees etc. visible on the now up and coming generation of (non-kickball playing) club-goers. Such bands were once a staple of 99.1 HFS, back when it was locally owned in the 1980's and early 1990's and long before it became a Spanish language station.



Which brings me rambling to another point: DC has no underground or offbeat radio station. Prior to the advent of the bastard genre called "alternative," which essentially became meaningless once it was formalized and formula-ized, HFS performed that crucial role in a city with many colleges but no college radio stations actually run by college students playing whatever the hell music said college students felt like playing. WHUR, WAMU, and WGBT are long gone (though they live on in other vestiges: WHUR and WAMU you probably recognize, and Georgetown donated its frequency, 90.1, to the newly formed UDC, which then sold it [!] to C-Span...).



I suppose you could argue that teh internets have brought back the idea of local programming (WGBT for instance has come back as an internet-only station), but until I can pick up webradio on my portable boom-box or my car radio (minus special satellite radio equipment), it isn't the same.



So if you've read this far, I'll let you in on a little slice of the 1980's that you'll not find on the dance floors but you can find at the Birchmere on October 22: Billy Bragg.

Name-checking bands.

Keeping on the music theme, I'm reminded of a time when my fellow English grad types sat around watching a baseball game. It was respectable back then for me to be considered a grad student, since after all I'd just completed coursework and we were all presumably working on our theses or dissertations...All of that circle, of course, had moved on by the millenium with their degrees to their "adult lives," leaving me and my wife floundering in ABD state. At that point, it's no longer pleasant to identify as a grad student.

But we were watching the Braves and whenever Chipper Jones went up to bat, the stadium PA system played Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train," which of course got us thinking what our theme clips would be for when we entered conference rooms to give papers.

I settled on Guided by Voices's "Watch Me Jumpstart."

I think it's a good choice, which is a long-round way to get to talking about Guided by Voices, perhaps the finest band that ever did play in the 1990's (and I say that as a devoted follower of Pavement, at least up to and including Wowee Zowee...). There's something glorious about watching a band of 30 somethings, who had labored in their basements on this hobby, break it big (as Indie standards go), and proceed to combine the stage theatrics and heavy riffs of the 1970's arena rockers with the 1 and a half minute songs and low-fi techniques of the punk rockers.

Really, to watch Pollard perform, microphone dangling from one hand and an open Budweiser in the other, was brilliant. He treated every stage as if it were a stadium, doing Daltrey-esque microphone swings on cramped bar stages, which sometimes got him in trouble. I watched them open up for Superchunk in State College, PA, on a Halloween night in 1994 or 1995. The bar was a converted multi-level Burger King, and the stage was crammed into a back corner and resembled more or less a triangle. Think the old 9:30 Club, but smaller. Pollard was drunk off his ass, but that didn't stop him from trying his high leg kicks and microphone swinging, and on a few occasions he careened straight into the speaker stacks, running into Tobin Sprout a few times as well.

It was not a great musical performance, but it was one of those shows that built the "mystique" of GbV and a few years later, they're headlining the new 9:30 Club and playing for so long that the club finally turned the lights on to quell their act after about the fifth encore. I swear, the band would have kept playing until the Metro re-opened in the morning if the 9:30 Club would have allowed it.

And speaking of Superchunk, it's pretty damn hard to leave the albums On the Mouth and No Pocky for Kitty off a top 50 list of 1990's albums.

Mixing it up.

I'm thinking about place names and songs and back in the day when I used to make mix tapes (you remember that ancient technology, don't you? I sure do...basically you could produce audio signals by manipulating a magnetic tape...pretty cool) they never really had any sort of theme beyond what I was enjoying at that time. And I generally named the tape by the date on which it was recorded. Hence, the "25 September 1993 Mix" for example. Yes, back in the day.


So these days we make playlists on our iPods or at the very least mix CDs, if we make them at all. Really, I need to get another iPod because I was much more in touch with the connections between songs and bands and my own idiosyncrasies when I tried to figure out a particular playlist on the iTunes. For instance I had a great one about loss that included Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" and U2's "One" and The Shins' "Pink Bullets." Etcetera. It was actually thematically organizized.


So a mix of place name songs seems like an interesting idea to me right now. Here's what I've got so far:


Desolation Row - Bob Dylan (I didn't say it had to be a real place...)
Haiti - The Arcade Fire
Big Dipper - Built to Spill (it's a place, right?)
The Guns of Brixton - The Clash
Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedys (or maybe California Uber Alles...)
Marching Bands of Manhattan - Death Cab for Cutie
Telegraph Road - Dire Straits (I have always loved this song, and I think it pairs well with "Desolation Row")
Mt. Pleasant Isn't - The Evens (for the local flavor and it's a damn good song)
Folsom Prison Blues - Johnny Cash
Ohio - Neil Young (aka Crosby Stills Nash and Young)
Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles
Woodstock - CSNY version, not the Joni Mitchell one.
New Madrid - Uncle Tupelo

New Orleans - The Silver Jews
New York - Sex Pistols
A New England - Billy Bragg
New York - U2

Medicine Hat - Son Volt

Zurich is Stained - Pavement. Or should it be "Texas Never Whispers"?

Via Chicago - Wilco

Sweet Home Chicago - Robert Johnson

Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen. Maybe "10th Avenue Freezeout"?

Night Boat to Cairo - Madness

Redondo Beach - Patti Smith

Motorway to Roswell - Pixies
Hotel California - The Eagles (a late addition for MG! )

I'm sure I'll think of about ten more after I post this... (and I already thought of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zep but have decided against including it, although I could be persuaded to include "Kashmir")

Plan your summer evenings accordingly.

The Fort Reno schedule is up. If you've never been to Fort Reno, you need to get there. It's an entirely laid back scene appropriate for all ages, from little babies on up. Dogs, too. Many people choose to make a picnic dinner of it, spread out a blanket, and enjoy the evening.

You can, too.

If my house were to catch fire, there's plenty of fuel.

Happy May Day to all!

I unearthed a whole folder full of horrifically embarrassing song lyrics that I wrote twenty years ago. Before I turned to poetry in my college years, I would write song lyrics obsessively, and I would date everything. Ostensibly, the lyrics were for the band my best friend and I hadn't yet formed, but by the time we'd graduated high school we'd actually recorded a few of them on a little four track recorder. I have no clue where any of that recorded material is, and my musical talents at that time were so primitive that I didn't play any of the instruments or sing on the recording. So my contribution in the studio -- aka my friend's bedroom -- was as lyricist.

Song lyrics are of course meant to be set to music, and they sound far better with a backing beat to take some attention away from the inanity of their content or the obviousness of their rhymes. There are of course exceptions; I think The Decemberists are incredibly inventive in the construction of their lyrics...I am in love with lines like "You come from parents wanton, childhood rough and rotten/I come from wealth and beauty, untouched by work or duty," from Picaresque's "We Both Go Down Together." Still, even their lyrics don't always scan well singled out from the music:

Here on these cliffs of Dover
So high you can't see over
And while your head is spinning
Hold tight, it's just beginning

They aren't bad lyrics -- in fact, they're incredible with the music driving behind them, but standing alone they're kind of naked. The proper music behind something can transform the words from bland quatrains to overwhelming angst (see: Smashing Pumpkins).

Looking over my contributions to the field of song lyrics, I'm getting the feeling that pretty much any teenager who writes a journal/diary/poetry/lyrics can seem in retrospect like a pretty despondent and maladjusted loner. I don't exactly remember it that way, but I do think that teenagers, for better or worse, have a good bit of trouble turning off the immediacy of their emotions. It's everywhere, hence the Nirvana lyric, "Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm old and gray." Or Bart Simpson's offhand remark, "Making a teenager depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel." So from 1-23-1986, I offer the following:

I've had too many chances
at too many dances
but the chances weren't right
I sat around all night

It's a sad thing to put your faith in the ceremony of the high school dance especially when you can't stand 85% of the music the DJ plays (and you can more or less guess the exact playlist for the entire year beforehand). I was the very definition of a wallflower. However, I do remember looking forward to going, if only because it was one of the few things to do in a small town on a weekend night.

I continued to write lyrics up until the early years of graduate school, at which point I ran out of spare time to sit around and play with words, and I often recorded them in a primitive way and having to sing the lyrics myself, a task I do not enjoy since my voice makes Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Tom Waits sound like the Three Tenors (don't get me wrong: I love Bobby, Neil, and Tom). Which is to say that it remained an obsession and an outlet until replaced by other writings: the dissertation and this exercise I'm currently engaged in called blogging.

Remembrance of things past...

So I'm sitting around listening to an old Teenage Fanclub album, A Catholic Education, and wondering whatever happened to this early-nineties favorite of mine...well, I wonder no longer as the wikipedia tells all...

They're still out there and still making records. I have a lot of catching up to do. One thing I love about them is the thick sound that fills up space (but in a different way than say the Smashing Pumpkins had a thick sound that utterly overwhelmed everything else...ah, Siamese Dream was a beautiful album...).

Now a true blast from the deep past, the Police, the first band I ever really loved, are reuniting and touring. They looked tremendous at the Grammies; let's hope they can sustain a tour without Sting trying to ruin it all by selling Jag-u-ars or something.

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Some blogs I have known...(aka stealing other people's ideas post)

That was some snowstorm. I'm surprised teh internets are still working, what with the strain all that snow and ice must be putting on the infrastructure. But I'm not going to write about yet another ridiculous winter scare forecast; having lived in the District for 13.5 years, I'm used to the ridiculous amount of time local newscasts devote to the weather and the endless hype that surrounds any possibility of precipitation.

No, today I am going to write about the brilliance of this. Just a little bit maybe. Momentary Academic has taken a 1980's tearjerker hit, the titletrack to a popular movie, and redone it as a spare guitar/vocal arrangement. There's a hell of a lot more vulnerability in this version than in the Phil Collins original (which has its own merits, but Phil does menace far better than he does vulnerable, in my opinion). Speaking of Phil, it's hands down true that his 80's solo stuff is far better than his 80's Genesis stuff. In fact, the only Genesis I like at all is the Peter Gabriel era stuff, when they were so hopelessly art rock that you had to either be stoned to the bejesus or a poet/instrumental snob to enjoy them.

Which by the way leads me to this. Mr. Lonnie Bruner of Adams Morgan writes that music is no longer central to his life. Looking at my own life, I have to agree. I remember a time when music was pretty much the only thing that mattered in a real way to me (sure I wanted to do well in school, stay out of trouble, fall in love, but that's all on the side), and I'm guessing that time spanned somewhere from high school to a few years following college (although to be fair, after two years of college music had to share the limelight with a few other "deeply felt interests."). To me, there are still crucial bands, but they are crucial more to me on a personal level than they are as saviors of society. There is, after all, the only band that matters.

That's all for now.

getting down and dirty in the Crescent City

Last night I went out to a joint called Vaughn's, where Kermit Ruffins
was playing. This bar was no French Quarter Daiquiri trough either. It
was a cramped little shack with sagging wood floors and an ancient cash
register that served no other purpose than to hold the money. A cigar
box would have served the same function.

Since the Saints are still in the NFL playoffs, the band led off with a
rollicking version of "When the Saints Come Marching In" interpolating
the Saints's de facto theme song, "who dat?" They promised to return to
the "Who Dat?" Song throughout the night, and they did.

One tremendous thing about the bar was how informal it was: band and
audience were barely separate, with the band tucked into a corner of the
dancing area, and between songs it was difficult to see any separation,
with individual members of the band carrying on conversations with the
audience.

We were lucky enough as well to run into another member of the Rebirth Brass
Band (the tuba player, Phil), who'll be playing the Velvet Lounge in March. He handed us a copy
of "Ultimate Rebirth Brass Band," which was nice.

All in all, it was a very late night.