Listen here.
1. “Walking at Night on Key West” – Allen Ginsberg (from “Holy Soul Jelly Roll” box set)
2. “Go” – Apples in Stereo (from “Discovery of a World Inside the Moone”)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Radio India #1” – Sublime Frequencies (from “Radio India: The Eternal Dream of Sound”
5. “Alabama” – Mark de Gli Antoni (from “Horse Tricks”)
6. “Non Dirle Che Non E’ Cosi’ (If You See Her, Say Hello)” – Francesco De Gregori (from “Masked and Anonymous” soundtrack)
7. “Sweet Young Thing” – The Monkees (from “The Monkees”)
8. “The Enemy” – Matt Van Winkle
9. “94 The Hard Way” – Jim O’Rourke (from “Bad Timing”)
10. “Phonoballoon Song” – Takako Minekawa (from “Candy Cloud Calculator”)
11. “My Boy Lollipop” – Millie (from “This is Reggae Music” box set)
12. “White Lexus” – Mike Doughty (from “Haughty Melodic”)
13. “It Must’ve Been the Roses” – the Grateful Dead (from “One From the Vault”)
14. “Hazy SF” – Six Organs of Admittance (from “Golden Apples of the Sun” compilation)
15. “Pink Bullets” – The Shins (from “Chutes Too Narrow’)
16. “You Belong To Me” (altered version) – Bob Dylan (from “Natural Born Killers” soundtrack)
17. “No Ke Ano Ahiahi” – Medeski, Martin, and Wood (from “Combustication”)
Listen here.
1. “We Shall Overcome” – Charlie Haden (from “Liberation Music Orchestra”)
2. “The Infanta” – The Decemberists (from “Picaresque”)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Yellow Brick Road” – Capt. Beefheart (from “Safe As Milk”)
5. “Allah Wakbarr” – Ofo & the Black Company (from “Love’s A Real Thing: the Funky, Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa”)
6. “Micro Disneycal World Tour” – Cornelius (from “Fantasma”)
7. “Grass Canons” – the Olivia Tremor Control (from “Black Foliage: Animation Music, vol. 1”)
8. “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” – Neutral Milk Hotel (from “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”)
9. “Happy Today” – The Wowz (from “Long Grain Rights”)
10. “In the Wake” – John Biz (from “The Elephant in the Room”)
11. “The Bug Speaks” – The Song Corporation (from “Raisin Bran in the Sun” EP)
12. “Totaled” (alternate “I’ll Come Running”) – Brian Eno & the Winkies (from random BBC session)
13. “Burro” (mariachi “Jack-ass”) – Beck (from “Sissyneck” single)
14. “Too Much of Nothing (take II)” – Bob Dylan (from the complete Basement Tapes)
15. “Cars Can’t Escape” – Wilco (from “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” demos)
16. “Round-Up Time In Texas” – Girls of the Golden West (from “Flowers in the Wildwood: Women in Early Country Music” compilation)
17. “Dreaming” (Sun Ra cover) – Yo La Tengo (from “Prisoners of Love”)
18. “Ragtime Nightingale” – David Boeddinghaus and Craig Ventresco (from “Crumb” soundtrack)
19. “Surf’s Up” – The Beach Boys (unreleased bootleg version)
An early October trip to Coney Island.
1. We caught the bus by Keyspan Park, took it down Surf Avenue, got off at 33rd Street, made a right on 34th, and the first left onto Mermaid Avenue. We looked for #3520, formerly occupied by Woody Guthrie and family. We found the apartment complex that replaced it long before we were born.
(1a. Incidentally, if you enter “3520 Mermaid Ave., Brooklyn, NY” into Google Maps, and look at the satellite view, Coney Island is a lush blur, like a SimCity screenshot printed on sunbleached Kodachrome.)
2. We walked down the Boardwalk. The sounds of the Polyphonic Spree ricocheted between the projects. We walked through Astroland at dusk.
3. The Parachute Drop as the light disappears. The cell phone camera overcompensates with its usual granular aplomb.
“Down Home (rehearsal)” – Jerry Garcia (File expires on November 24th.)
outtake from Cats Under the Stars (1978)
available from Rhino (buy)
If you’ve ever dreamed of hearing Jerry Garcia’s (1) voice layered over itself in wordless harmony — ala the Beach Boys on “Our Prayer,” the invocation to Brian Wilson’s SMiLE — then the rehearsal take of “Down Home” is for you. And if you haven’t dreamed of that, well, too bad. Though the arrangement is basically the same, the official version released on Cats Under the Stars, sung primarily by then-Dead vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux — is something quite different. John Kahn’s bass guides sparsely but, here, it’s all Garcia, basically a capella, all northern California sweetness and heartache.
(1) Should you be a hater, at this point, I would like to both quote from and direct you towards a fine article by my friend Bill, published on the uber-heady BoomSalon:
“…a decade [after Garcia’s death], we Deadheads – yes, I now wear that label proudly, so bite me – still all too often keep ourselves closeted, having internalized the embarrassment we’re still told we should feel, its patent absurdity notwithstanding.
“Well, fuck that. Here’s how it is: The Grateful Dead are the hippest goddamn rock band there ever was, and if you don’t get it, YOU’RE the one who’s not cool. That is no longer my – our – problem. I am embarking on a campaign, starting now, to see to it that those brilliant bastards finally get the respect they deserve, and I shall beat it out of you, o reader, with every rhetorical bludgeon I possess should you attempt to resist me.”
Thanks to Craig’ers & Dave, the Frank & Earthy Blog is back. I’ve got a whole backload of entries from around the time the site shit the bed, so I’ll be putting those up in the next few days.
I’ve also stocked the new blog with all the entries from my initial It’s Got A Good Beat blog (circa 2003-2004), which are mostly (maybe uninteresting) exercises in listening carefully to and writing very specifically about Billboard hits, as well as the past 10 months worth of entries from wunderkammern27.com. They’re all properly dated, 1984-style, so as to give the illusion that they were always there. Just as Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, this has always been exactly what my blog has looked like.
I’m using new software, so it’ll prolly take a few days to work out the kinks. Anyway, glad to be back and shinier than ever.
1. In which the sun explodes over Bourgwick…
2. …and later sets behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sucking the foreground into pure, black silhouette.
3. And, of course: the (accidental, digital) agony of Paul McCartney.
I’m a big fan of Polaroids, I have a few cameras, some of them even working, and my shelves are littered with boxes of pictures. With the ubiquity of digital cameras, all consumer-level photography is pretty much instant these days. Everything is a Polaroid. I’ve long thought, though, that lo-fi cell phone cams probably come closest to embodying what was special about the obsolete technology.
On one hand, cell pictures are silly and “cheap” (more on that in a moment), but — on the other hand — they present a series of technical limitations that can result in some great pictures. Polaroids are/were very good at capturing certain subjects and colors — rich blue skies, for example. I imagine that cell cams will prove to have their own specialties.
Like Polaroids, cell pictures are meant to be ephemeral. Where Polaroids generally cost $1 a shot and took a long moment to develop, one likewise doesn’t really know what cell phone shots look like until he sends them back to his computer (and, just as he had to be judgmental at a dollar a pop, barring the purchase of a USB cable, he usually has a limit of pictures he can upload each month).
All of which is to say: I got a new phone this week and have started to take some pictures. So far, I’m most enjoying the varying ways the low resolution distorts different light sources (a TV, a digital radio tuner, a candle). Check it.
More to come, hopefully! I think I need a USB cable…
“Funky Lil’ Song” – Beck
(buy)
(This file will expire August 30th.)
Been on a minor Beck kick lately (more on that soon, hopefully), wishing Guero made me happier than it does. But “Funky Lil’ Song,” Beck’s contribution to Dimension Mix (Eenie Menie, Aug. 22nd) — a tribute to Bruce Haack, Esther Nelson, and their utterly psychedelic children’s imprint, Dimension 5 Records — makes me quite happy, indeed. It’s a cover, but it shouldn’t be, reviving as it does a fine strain of Beck’s older music that he didn’t bring back for Guero: the novelty number. With spoken asides (“the bad vibrations are all around / when your house is upside down”), falsetto overdrive, and some kind of exaggerated soul singer voice I’ve never heard him use before, Beck definitely plays it for somelaughs. It’s a children’s song, after all.
But, while playful, it also retains that somber (ahem) “maturity” that crept into his music beginning with Sea Change that’s frequently toosomber. Beck sounds plenty world-weary on “Funky Lil’ Song,” but when you’re swaying and singing “ding dong, funky little song, everything is up and nothing is down” it’s tough to sound like a miserable sod. More than the comedy factor, though, what makes this feel like the Beck of yore is the sheer surprise of its discovery: a freshly minted obscurity. It’s nice to have that back, if only for five minutes and 15 seconds.
The Mountain Goats: Turning the Kleig Lights Around; feature inteview with John Darnielle, published in Paste#16
Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman, published in Paste #17
Illinois – Sufjan Stevens, published in Paste#17
One Step Closer – String Cheese Incident
David Byrne at Central Park, 29 June 2005
Yo La Tengo and Stephen Malkmus at Battery Park, 4 July 2005
The Olivia Tremor Control at the Bowery Ballroom, 2 August 2005
BRAIN TUBA: Sea Change?
In the current Relix (Jerry Garcia cover), only in print: Mike Doughty and the Unsingable Name feature, album reviews of Lake Trout, Erin McKeown, and the Grateful Dead; DVD review of Brian Wilson presents SMiLE; book review of Anthony DeCurtis’s In Other Words
Thanks to the good utopians at Archive.org, I’ve recently uploaded a bunch of Stopwatch Recordings. Now available for free download:
sw02: Postcards: Atlantic City EP (Funny Cry Happy)
Casinos are tuned to the key of C. Slot machine bleeps, video poker blurps, the pings that come before public announcements — all in C. The sum total is a surprisingly warm hum, designed to keep gamblers hypnotized. Like the lack of natural light, the absence of clocks, and the recycled air, it is one of the many surreal environmental features of our nation’s gambling halls.
Postcards: Atlantic City melds field recordings made in the seedy New Jersey resort town with slight modifications made at home — new drones, toy pianos run through delay pedals, chirping birds recorded in Chelsea — that interact, occasionally accidentally, with the source.
sw03: On A Clear Night, You Can Smell For Miles (Funny Cry Happy)
The second Funny Cry Happy full-length. Songs ‘n’ shit.
sw04: Running at the Sunshine (Matthew Van Brink/Jesse Jarnow)
Running at the Sunshine was conceived as an imagined community behind the doors (and up the stairs) of the incongruously named Sunshine Hotel, one of the last remaining men’s flophouses on Manhattan’s Bowery — a point on a late-night ramble from Chinatown to a greasy taco stand in the Village. These fantasies were later bolstered by an NPR documentary, and a wonderful book of photographs (“Flophouse” by David Isay, Stacy Abramson, and Harvey Wang), which uncovered links to a New York of a bygone era.
With the story and text in place, choreographer-director Judith Chaffee and composer (and my old friend) Matthew Van Brink worked closely together to realize the story in space and sound. Employing a deep percussion arsenal, Van Brink evokes a still clattering, post-industrial New York filled with squealing breaks, rusty dumpsters, and the undergridding rhythmic bustle of a city filled with permanent transients.
NOTE: Handmade meatspace versions of these recordings are also available. Drop me a line, if interested.
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