That California Jangle

David Crosby's tone-deaf comments upon the death of Eddie Van Halen reminded me of my long-standing annoyance with the solipsism of 60s/70s California hippie culture. I remember in particular the front porch hangs I used to have with Elijah Pritchett, and how our mutual animosities to that hippie culture came to be animated primarily by one band: The Byrds.

I also have to admit that my first interest in rock music was The Byrds, from a band biography and four song seven inch sampler I got from Scholastic Books when I was in grade school; obviously the book was deeply sanitized to the point of not at all being useful as a story of the band, but most of the band's music goes down pretty easy, so there wasn't much need for sanitizing that, save holding off on some of the band's more obviously druggy songs (though it really seems "Eight Miles High" was on there . . . but of course, that was a song about flying in an airplane lol). I don't remember exactly what was on the record, but one song did stand out: "Lover of the Bayou". That one was dirty.

Anyway, it got me to wondering if I was just done with The Byrds, so I did what it is I do: put together a giant Spotify playlist, based on fan's favorites from the band, and immerse myself in it until I figure it out. This was, in fact, probably the first band I did that with, many years ago, when I joined Spotify not too long after its birth. The playlist was just over three hours to start (three hours is kind of the magic playlist number for me, because that was my average DJ shift on WQAX back in the day). Unlike the Bob Dylan playlist that I have been working on this year, which started out at just over six hours then was lightly trimmed back to about five and a half, the Byrds playlist was cut down to under an hour and a half after I lived with it for a while. A lot of The Byrds's output leaves me cold and bored; some I consider downright repulsive (Crosby's "Triad" immediately comes to mind). The sheer length of the playlist was overwhelming to me as well: I could never handle that much Byrds. On the other hand, once I got it to the point that it would fit onto a 90 minute tape, it became a useful playlist, and one I listen to a fair amount. I emailed Elijah to let him know of my work, but he remained unconvinced.

To be fair, I did have to follow it up with a Minutemen playlist when I listened to it last Tuesday.

Anyway, here it be:

And yes, "Jesus is Just Alright" is on there. And yes, I'm still down with "Lover of the Bayou". And yes, if this band disappeared into the mists of time, I would barely miss them. But here it is.

The Byrds Power Rankings: Most Overrated/Underrated

1. Graham Parsons/Gene Clark
2. David Crosby/Clarence White
3. Sweetheart of the Rodeo/Younger Than Yesterday

The 4 x 4 Mixtapes

 So, yeah . . . string quartets.

Turns out that string quartets are among my favorite classical music forms, along with large ensemble symphonic pieces and solo piano (or exclusively piano recordings, be they solo or multiple - Ives's pieces for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart are stunning). I tend to approach composers I am interested first through either large ensemble symphonic-style pieces or through string quartets. I think in general the reason I like string quartets is that they put compositional ideas in stark relief, without having them buried in potentially obfuscating orchestrations. For my own creative education, they are also important for studying how string instruments relate to each other, which is important if you ever find yourself in a room full of guitar players & you don't want to sound like a jam band.

Several of these pieces are benchmarks for me. I discovered the Debussy a couple years back when I was on a Debussy binge. Interestingly, this is one of the pieces that I have a clear favorite version I listen to: the Kodaly Quartet plays this faster and jauntier than most, and it's definitely how I like it. The next to cuts are performed by the Kronos Quartet, a gateway drug for classical music in general and string quartets in particular. Their Black Angels album made a huge impression on me. The pieces they play are notable as well: Gorecki before he went all tonal, and perhaps the best known female composer in the west, Sofia Gubaidulina. Shostokovich was another binge for me, and I think his string quartets are his real signature, not the more famous symphonies. Beethoven follows up some twelve tone & modernist guys, and is in turn followed by the out-of-time Bartok. Rochberg & Carter round out the first mixtape, from late mid-century when tonality was gauche (Rochberg) and modernism was hip (Carter).

The second mixtape starts with Mr. Twelve Tone himself, Arnold Schoenberg, and travels through Schnittke to Steve Reich's minimalism. Morton Feldman's pointillist abstraction is up next, then side one rounds out with some lovely Brahms. Side two devolves into that time Karlheinz Stockhausen sent up the members of Arditti Quartet each in their own helicopter to play a string quartet, the loopy bastard. Apparently Karl was a bit less concerned about his carbon footprint than his reputation as an avant-garde enfant terrible. Side two is rounded out by two of my favorites, Ives and Ligeti, who are perhaps less known for their string quartets.

Indeed, you can, if you wish, dub these on to 90 minute cassettes and play them in your 81 Tercel. But why bother? Hit the Spotify button and enjoy.

String Quartet Power Rankings:

1. Beethoven (late)
2. Bartok
3. Gubaidulina
4. Shostakovich
5. Debussy
6. Carter

Rory Gallagher Redux

 Seriously not stonewalling here, but I got another pop/rock/blues playlist for y'all. I'm a huge fan of Rory Gallagher's first two solo records. I first became aware of them from a Polydor compilation of the highlights of the first two released in America under the name Sinner . . . and Saint. I'd had records of his pass through my possession before, but this is the one that stuck, until I realized it was actually a comp & just picked up the first two on CD. I have to say that they were dead on with the track selections. I love the songwriting on this: after these albums, he mostly stuck to white boy blues and boogie, loosing the variety of songwriting that he demonstrated here.

For my money, he should have been the white blues boy who got all the accolades that fell into Eric Clapton's lap . . . part of that is I just never understood what made Clapton such a god-like guitarist to so many people, and part of it is about Clapton being a lazy, generally bad songwriter. On the last count Gallagher too ended up being a slacker, but this is some quality stuff right here. In the end, like all guitar heroes, he wasn't really called to account for his songs, as long as he played that guitar.

And indeed, while I consider the songwriting a couple steps above decent, the main reason I'm here is for the guitar. Despite all the dissimilarities, there is something about Gallagher's best solos that remind me of Coltrane . . . though for the life of me, I can't put my finger on exactly why. Perhaps it's the fact that the solos are simultaneously explosive and economical: that for all the notes, there doesn't seem to be a lot of excess.

Anyway, here's a playlist, essentially Sinner . . . and Saint re-imagined as a double LP. If you are interested, I have written about Rory at greater length elsewhere.

Liner Notes to *The Materialist*

On October 2nd, I will be releasing a spoken word recording on Bandcamp: almost 60 minutes of poetry from my last 20 years if writing. As a bit of a preview/teaser, here are the liner notes. Won't make much sense out of context, but that's ok. Previews never do. I will, of course, update on this site when the album drops.

The Materialist: Selected Poetry 2000-2020

NOTES

 

You’ve heard the phrase “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”? Well, I’m neither. I’m the Materialist. I write immanence. Some will have you believe poetry is spiritual, but I write the dirt of existence. I have no interest in castles in the sky.

·        Slipping Perhaps the oldest poem of the batch, it originally ran three pages. Those three pages said nothing more than these five lines.

·        Eileen Myles She’s a swell poet. For real; if you don’t know, check out Not Me. First published in Industrial Lunch no. 1

·        RONA Fragment The bourgeois denouement, the soft apocalypse. 

·        Wallpaper Fires are lit & graves are filled by the kaleidoscopic moods of old white men staring into mirrors.

·        Strangers Talk Only About the Weather (poems 5-25) You may hear that in Tom Waits’s voice, I will always hear it in Marianne Faithfull’s voice. Or sometimes I hear it in Lotte Lenya's voice, though to my knowledge she's never sung it. Not much to be said that wasn’t said in the spoken intro. All poems are untitled & identified by their first lines.

·        from The Bridge God, this one makes me sound old. Charley Anderson staring down into the swirling gingerbread river in The 42nd Parallel, only older and more alienated than lost.

·        John Cage One of the few surviving Desert Poems from the early aughts.

·        Recasting an Elliot Prelude That night not long after the operation where I accidentally doubled up on Percocet.

·        Variation I: Ezra Pound Driven Batshit Crazy For Want of Sound Money Seriously, dude goes on and on and on. The Lyndon LaRouche of modernism.

·        Variation II: Ol’ Ez Thinks Them Could Be Useful, After All Essentially a mildly altered version of a chunk of Canto XXXII. Don’t try to pin this shit on me.

·        Man Who Loves Scenery A true story. First appeared in Industrial Lunch no. 4

·        Darkness & the Percocet In-Between A cut up: sources Hardt & Negri’s Empire; Raymond Rousell’s Locus Solus; and Harry Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically. Probably see this one overhauled at some point . . . still feels a little like raw material to me.

·        Moving Into Lent Ash Wednesday is the last Catholic Mass I attended of my own volition. I have a handful of Lent/Ash Wednesday poems.

·        Busted Loop Really wish I had a recording instead of a poem.

·        from The Ethics Another long poem that will likely remain unfinished, starring Spinoza as Zarathustra. Root source is a cut up of Spinoza’s Ethics, though this section is virtually unrecognizable as such.

·        A New Kind of Television I was on a poetry-writing binge during the early RONA days, as I recovered from my first knee replacement. I had a few lines of this in the notebook . . . and then the murder of George Floyd, the news of Breonna Taylor’s murder, the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s assassination . . . I could no longer write. I had to speak, I had to face these atrocities, but I could not bury them under artifice: so you get it straight. I did my best with the names; I looked up pronunciations on all I could find. I sincerely apologize for any that I did not get right – the last thing I would want to do is profane your memory.

·        A Small Thing From Industrial Lunch no.1 . . . there is always a spring.

Texting Frantz Fannon

the cafes are forgotten, the arguments about elections,
the spitefulness of some cop or other
ears that hear wind through the trees
eyes that see the broken shacks
time has been wasted on the colonial regime,
liberation only to be seen in terms of violence
in terms of neighborhood struggle
in terms of armed struggle
 
militants running from the police
learn the hard lessons of the people
peasants bowed too long
generous, and ready to sacrifice
driven by stony pride
rebels by instinct,
swelling into the villages
to test the strength of their own muscles
to push the leaders into action
 
the militants in turn tutor the people
in ways political and military
 
the second-in-commands,
the rank and file proletariat
foot soldiers for intellectuals & consolationists
no longer, no longer willing to absorb rebellion

*** please see the author's note in the comments ***

We've Got the Seventies Covered

  So, what we have here is songs of the seventies, covered. I mean, in case you couldn't figure that out from the clever title just above. 

  The big joke in the 80s and 90s was to take an incongruous songs and do "punk" covers of them: virtually every punk/alt rock/roots rockabilly/experimental/indie rock band had a cover or two in their pocket. The covers ran the gamut from jokey to sincere, to mark sharp contrasts or deep affinities. Sometimes bands would ditch incongruities and shout out similarities, or even do tributes to favorites: my own 80s/90s band, The Belgian Waffles!, covered God and State, Pere Ubu, Flipper, Crass, Joy Division, the Ramones, and the Flesheaters, among others. These were all meant as tributes, and they were songs that were important to us. I would say the "jokiest" cover we did was of Nancy Sinatra's "Lightning's Girl", though we were all fans of that song as well.

  The Dickies pretty much made a career out of the goofball side of the coin, with covers of "Nights In White Satin", the theme to the Banana Splits ("The Tra La La Song"), and "Paranoid" being much more memorable than their original material. On this playlist, they are represented by their Sabbath cover. Killdozer as well had a reputation for destructo covers (of which they did many, including an entire album called For Ladies Only), though fans of the band are generally at least as interested in their original material. Here they are represented by their ridiculous version of the 75 Jessi Colter country crossover hit, "I'm Not Lisa" . . . and while the absurdity of Michael Gerald's growled vocals are the first thing you notice, it's the sweet guitar work that really closes the deal. On the flip side, covers like Big Black's "Heartbeat" (Wire), the Minutemen's "The Red and the Black" (Blue Oyster Cult), Nirvana's "Man Who Sold the World" (David Bowie), and Galaxy 500's "Isn't It a Pity" (George Harrison) not only shout out their subjects, but show affinities between the bands covered and the bands doing the covers. Metallica in particular is known for their "Garage Days" covers, and that remains my favorite Metallica work, by and large.

  Then there are the more or less contemporary covers, which for reasons not clear to me, tend to get called "versions" instead of "covers". There are three popular versions of Bob Dylan's "If Not For You": Bob's original, George Harrison's version on All Things Must Pass, and Olivia Newton John's 71 version, which had the most chart action. Harrison's cover is included here. Also of note: Gloria Gaynor's 74 disco hit version of the Jackson 5 hit "Never Can Say Goodbye", and Viola Wills's disco (?!) version of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind".

  There are some brilliant re-interpretations here: Corrine Bailey Rae does a deep, soulful piano & bass cover of Led Zeppelin's "Since I've Been Loving You" (Jimmy Page's slow blues were always a guilty pleasure for me, and I can't tell you how nice it is hearing one of them without having to put up with Robert Plant). The Contortion's ripping no wave funk version of Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" is legendary. "Damned for All Time", Judas's song from Jesus Christ, Superstar, is a perfect vehicle for David Yow and Scratch Acid's blitz (and honestly not too different from the original). Shockabilly's explosion of T Rex's "Life's a Gas" is similarly faithful and revelatory. Jon  Langford and his Waco Brothers manage to overhaul and improve one of Neil Young's best songs, "Revolution Blues". And there is probably no version of a song more destroyed and at the same time more appropriate than the Butthole Surfer's "American Woman".

  I could go on, but y'all are getting the point by now. My favorite cover here: the Jesus Lizard's Chrome medley. The cover that gets to the very soul of a song, essentially beating the original at its own game: American Music Club's "Goodbye to Love" (Carpenters) and Thou's "Supernaut" (Black Sabbath). The most epic cover: Television's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" (Dylan). The most brutal and disrespectful: The Resident's nightmare fat Elvis rendition of "Burning Love". The worst cover here: The Bongos take a totally "meh" cover of T Rex's "Mambo Sun" and make it intolerable by mispronouncing the word "mambo" all the way through the song. If you follow this playlist, don't be surprised to see that one disappear at some point.

  And finally, what are all y'all's favorite 70s covers? I'm taking suggestions. No more versions by bands already represented - yes, "Sweat Loaf" is brilliant, but "American Woman" is even better, so that's the Butthole Surfers song included - unless you can convince me that they do another cover that is even better, in which case it will replace my choice. Make sure to put it in the comments, and I may well add it to the playlist. Let me know what I have missed!

70s Covers Power Rankings, Original Artist

1. David Bowie
2. Bob Dylan
3. Michael Jackson/Jackson 5
4. Elton John
5. T Rex
6. Black Sabbath
7. Neil Young

Ezra Pound Driven Batshit Crazy For Want of Sound Money: Variation I

“the temple is holy  because it is not for sale”

 

                              The crucified Jesus

                              of the prosperity bible

                              bleeds green through red

                              interruption of pale skin.

 

droplets water the ground like the blood of tyrants

water the tree of liberty

Sound Money

 

green viral nutrients seed & animate the capsid of the

 

               pathogen capital

 

(don’t worry, you won’t catch it – it’s under

 control – it reduplicates but accumulates

 rather than spreading)

 

“the temple is not for sale because all the flows have been shut down”

 

tl;dr: it’s a cash flow problem