Hey everybody!
Sorry the Frow Show has been absent for the bulk of the summer, but it’s all groovy, since we were just waiting to be able to announce the happiest of happiests in radioland: the Frow Show is moving to WFMU! (Let me just add two more exclamation points to demonstrate how honored and psyched I am: !!)
It’s gonna be fairly irregular for starters, probably fill-ins at odd hours. But that’s totally rad, too, ’cause FMU are real good about getting their shows to people who don’t occupy the same physical or linear space as their studio in Jersey City. All future Frow Shows will thus be available at: http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/jj (and, once I get comfortable, I’ll hopefully get podcasts going as an option again, too)
I begin with an episode this Saturday, 8/23, as part of The Listener Hour, from 9 am – 10 am.
Frow Show announcements will be made here, and via this handy Google mailing list. Do sign up!
Thanks so, so much to Andy & Ropeadope for all the hospitality & encouragement over the past three years.
Episode 48: Hello, Goodbye!
Listen here.
The Frow Show is moving to WFMU! See here.
1. “Hello, Goodbye” – The Beatles (from Magical Mystery Tour)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “What Am I Doing HanginRound?” – The Monkees (from Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.)
4. “Sunshine Superman” – Donovan (from Sunshine Superman)
5. “This Is It” – Lothar and the Hand People (from Presenting…)
6. “Groovy Girls Make Love at the Beach” – Gary Wilson (from You Think You Really Know Me)
7. “Bessie Smith” – The Crust Brothers (from The Crust Brothers)
8. “U.S. Millie” – Theoretical Girls (from Theoretical Girls)
9. “Rory Rides Me Raw” – The Vaselines (from The Way of the Vaselines)
10. “Rapacite Nocturne” – Camille Sauvage (from Fantasmagories)
11. “Strung Out Deeper Than The Night” – Les Rallizes Denudes (from Heavier Than A Death in the Family)
12. “Hello, Goodbye reprise” – The Beatles (from Magical Mystery Tour)
“Jungle Drum” – Emiliana Torrini (sorry, nastygrammed by Rough Trade–first time ever!–despite the fact that this is the album’s single! WTF? See below. Good promotion, dudes.)
from Me and Armini (Rough Trade) (out 9/8)
(file expires August 25th)
I have a silly crush on this song. It’s not particularly complicated, but at least one–if not both–of the chorus’s twin hooks were stuck in my head for better parts of a glorious New York weekend. There are all kinds of little appeals: Emiliana Torrini’s ESL cuteness, the kitschy escapism of drums in the jungle, the perky electro groove, the soaring title refrain, and–of course–the onomatopoeic thump of Torrini excitedly sounding a cartoon heart-pulse. The modulation for the final chorus is rather pleasant, too. It feels kind of like a reduced version of Björk or MIA’s foreign otherness: a whiff of the weird to propel it, but–unlike those two–hardly challenging pop’s international, institutional grammar. Who cares, really? It’s just a silly crush.
Some of my stuff has made it into books lately:
o A previously unpublished short story, “The Night Before I Got Home,” will be featured in the Real Magicalism comics/fiction anthology, edited by James Burns.
o A 2003 interview with Hunter S. Thompson, originally in Relix, was reprinted in Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson, published by the University Press of Mississippi.
o A 2001 interview with Bob Weir, a 2003 interview with Mike Doughty, and a 2004 interview with Lou Reed (the latter two in different forms than originally printed) are featured in Song: The World’s Best Songwriters on Creating the Music that Moves Us, published by Writers Digest Books.
o New biographical essays on Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and David Bowie are featured in the Greenwood Icons edition, Icons of Rock, published by Greenwood Press.
o New biographical essays on Prince and Stevie Wonder are featured in the Greenwood Icons edition, Icons of R&B and Soul, published by Greenwood Press.
o Educational book, Presidents: The Race for the White House, illustrated by Scott Peck, published by innovativeKids, edited by Russell Kahn (not necessarily recommended for anybody above, oh, the third grade — though it does come with a nifty jigsaw puzzle)
“Rory Rides Me Raw” – The Vaselines (download) (buy)
from Son of a Gun EP (1987)
(file expires August 12th)
It’s rare that indie rock is straight dirty. Romantic, sure. Coy, frequently. Sexy, almost never. And, no two ways about it, the Vaselines’ “Rory Rides Me Raw” ain’t about horses, despite the lyrics about galloping through the morning dew. Oddly, I think it’s the just-off double-tracked guitars that add to this impression as much as the lyrics, as if the singer knowing that “I’m gonna do it soon” is making it a bit hard to focus.
Spent some time traveling over the past few days. Through the TSA lines (and especially after they confiscated a nifty swag water bottle I’d gotten), elitist airline terminals (at Delta at JFK, once site of Pan Am’s utopian glass Worldport, coach customers wait in makeshift screening areas, and funnel through a series of endless hallways before only to be spat out at the backdoor of the first class entrance), and down Utah highways, past gas stations (where prices make road-trips for fun or friendship both morally and economically unfeasible), I thought pretty much non-stop of Hunter S. Thompson’s vision of 9/11.
It was the death of fun, unreeling right in front of us, unraveling, withering, collapsing, draining away in the darkness like a handful of stolen mercury. Yep, the silver stuff goes suddenly, leaving only a glaze of poison on the skin. (Kingdom of Fear, 160.)
What a bummer.
I taped an appearance with host Brett Pasternak for tonight’s episode of Woodstock Jams, speaking about “How Jerry Got Hip (Again).”
10 pm-midnight EST
on Radio Woodstock, 100.1 WDST
also streaming live at WDST.com.
After that, the show will be archived for a week on their site. (Click ‘Woodstock Jams.’)
“Turn On Your Lovelight” – Akron/Family (download)
recorded 11/07, UK
My feature, “How Jerry Got Hip (Again),” appears in the current issue of Relix.
Download an accompanying mp3 mix here.
Dead-influenced tunes:
“Ed Is A Portal” – Akron/Family (from Love is Simple)
“Blessing Force” – Akron/Family (from Meek Warrior)
“Lazy Suicide” – Megafaun (from Bury the Square)
“Centermost” – Greg Davis (from Somnia)
“Peacebone” – Animal Collective (from Peacebone)
“Jugband 2000” – Jackie O Motherfucker (from Wow/The Magick Fire Music)
“For Every Field There’s A Mole” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy (from Lie Down in the Light)
“The Party’s Crashing Me” – Of Montreal (from The Sunlandic Twins)
“Preteen Weaponry, part 1” – Oneida (from Preteen Weaponry)
“The Diamond Sea” – Sonic Youth (from Washing Machine)
Dead covers:
“Stella Blue” (live) – Ween
“Brokedown Palace” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy (from Pebbles and Ripples)
“Cream Puff War” – Oneida (from Heads Ain’t Ready 7-inch)
“Turn On Your Lovelight” (live) – Akron/Family (11/2007 UK)
“We Bid You Goodnight” (live) – Animal Collective
“Shakedown Street” (live) – Kevin Barnes (15 March 2008 South by Southwest)
“Ripple” (live) – Yo La Tengo (19 October 2007 Landmark Theater)
“Attics of My Life” – Megafaun (29 April 2008 Union Pool)
“Franklin’s Tower” – Meat Puppets (from Meat Puppets I bonus)
Dead references:
“I Saw A Hippie Girl on 8th Ave” – Jeffrey Lewis (from It’s The Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through)
“Drug Test” – Yo La Tengo (from President Yo La Tengo EP)
“So Long Jerry” – Ween (from 12 Golden Country Greats sessions)
Greg Davis mix:
One hour DJ-style mix. See PDF.
Like a slacker, I totally spaced on mentioning that I was going to be a guest on Gary Lambert and David Gans’ Tales from the Golden Road show on Sirius radio on Sunday afternoon, along with my pal Barry Smolin and journalist Denise Sullivan.
So, uh, sorry.
If you happen to read this before 9 am EST on Monday, and want to hear more musings related to my Relix story, “How Jerry Got Hip (Again),” and some random call-ins that didn’t have much to do with it, that’s when the show will re-run.
o Flavor tripping parties! Miracle fruit, huh?
o An NYC taco blog.
o Michael Agger on How We Read Online.
o Michael Donahue on the ghostly South China Mall, the biggest mall on the planet.
o Nicholas Carr on whether Google is making us stupid.
o The James Brown Collection from Christie’s. Clicks on anything (like, say, the handwritten letters) for close-ups.
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