“Box of Rain” – The Grateful Dead (download) (buy)
from American Beauty (1970)
The Lorimer/Metropolitan station connects the L train to the G train, or Williamsburg to Park Slope. It is, needless to say, a Brooklynite hub. After discovering Grateful Dead graffiti there last year, I had another late night Dead encounter, this time with a drunk hipster.
At around 2 in the morning, over Thanksgiving weekend, he wandered onto the Brooklyn-bound side, carrying a mostly empty bottle of wine, and singing at the top of his lungs. His bellows slapped off the tile, making the lyrics that much more indistinguishable as he sang along with his iPod. I slipped off my headphones, curious to hear what he was singing: “Box of Rain.” Needless to say, I started singing along.
Dude had owned American Beauty in high school but was recently inspired to dust it off thanks to the concluding episode of Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, in which Lindsay Weir discovers the Dead and skips out on a summertime academic summit to head off on Dead tour.
The reclamation continues.
Following my debacle with the HIP website, I soon ran afoul of their legions of contradictory phone-bank loons, two of which approved a simple physical with a Manhattan doctor, and one of which added a few hundred dollars of additional charges to my account even though I’d already shelled out the agreed co-pay.
Thankfully, I have a secret force on my side, who revealed his identity in a manner most clever amid a thick tangle of bureaucracy that (I think) means I won:
v. The decision to overturn for the processing of the claim was rendered by Senior Clams Examiner, who is experienced in claims related issues.
The Senior Clams Examiner! Calloo! Callay! I’d like to think he is working away at his desk right now, high in some post-modern box overlooking a deserted midtown avenue, his office gloriously clean and new and tasteful. He empties a bucket of clams on the clean glass before him, the residue of previous loads miraculously wiped away by the futuristic self-cleaning furniture.
The Senior Clams Examiner praises Jah for the dumbass HIP executive who didn’t know the difference between oysters and clams and hired him to look for pearls anyway. He will be home in time to put his son to bed. He smiles, and grants his benevolence on a hapless sucker who didn’t realize that just because a hospital is affiliated with HIP doesn’t mean that all of its doctors are, too.
Putting the appeal in a pneumatic tube, the Senior Clams Examiner returns his attention to the batch of mollusks before him. When he finishes, he slides a few into his briefcase for a midnight treat with his wife, and leaves the rest for the robots to clean up.
Friends! Landlubbers! Brooklynites!
I sincerely hope you are all weathering the season with minimum
weather-induced mope and maximum nog.
Here are 111 songs — old faves, new friends, Dylan covers, shuffle-zen,
etc.. — I have thought ginchy since the last time I did one of these (and
in a more compatible file format, too):
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F0AXAKIF
Sorry about all the ads & clutter on MegaUpload, here’s how to navigate it:
1. Click above link.
2. Ignore flashing lights, find code next to MegaUpload logo, enter code into special box, click “download.”
3. Wait 45 seconds (sing rousing chorus of “Contact” while watching onscreen
counter, waving arms), click “Free download.”
4. Save! Go!
…when on harddrive, click on file happyholidaysxojj.zip
Helper monkeybots are on call in the comments section to answer any technical
questions!
Other’n that, see y’all next year.
xo,
jj.
The Yo La Tengo Hanukkah mixes: part 1 and part 2.
Part 1: Georgia, Ira, James, Todd-O-Phonic Todd Abramson
Part 2: Yoshitomi Nara, Matmos, Eye, David Cross
If you enjoy the mixes, please consider donating to the charities for which they were intended. (See original setlists for more info.)
Happy holidays y’all. Check back in soon for my own holiday megamix.
Episode 34: Christmas in Bourgwick…
Listen here.
(Thanks to Boomy for many Holiday Sounds from the Way Out.)
1. “Silent Night” – Ween (from Merry Little Christmas compilation)
2. “A Very Special Christmas, part 2” – Wayne Butane
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Christmas at Ground Zero” – Weird Al Yankovic (from Polka Party)
5. “In the Hot Sun of A Christmas Day” – Caetano Veloso (from Caetano Veloso (1971))
6. “Santa Claus Is Ska-Ing To Town” – Granville Williams Orchestra (from Trojan Christmas box set)
7. “Sugar Rum Cherry” – Duke Ellington (from Three Suites)
8. “It’s Christmas Time” – The Qualities (from Sun Ra: The Singles compilation)
9. “Reindeer Boogie” – Hank Snow
10. “Run Rudolph Run” – Keith Richards (from Run Rudolph Run single)
11. “Rock n Roll Santa” – Yo La Tengo (from Merry Christmas from… EP)
12. “12 Days of Christmas” – Twin Peaks cast (from KROQ Acoustic Christmas compilation)
13. “Christmas With William S.” – The Olivia Tremor Control (from Singles and Beyond compilation)
14. “The Priest, They Called Him” – William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain (from The Priest, They Called Him EP)
15. “Turkey Song” – Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers (from Heroin)
16. “Blue Christmas” – Ernest Tubb
The Frow Show will return tomorrow with a special Christmas in Bourgwick episode. For now, Steve Martin’s “The Bohemians,” from Cruel Shoes (1979). Kinda makes ya nostalgic for a simpler age, eh?
Were they rebels? Were they artists? Were they outcasts from society? They were all of these. They were The Bohemians.
These bohemians, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Williams, and their seven children, Biff, Tina, Sparky, Louise, Tuffy, Mickey, and Biff Number Two, lived in a notorious artists’ colony and planned community.
Naturally, the bohemians’ existence thrived on creativity. Early in the morning, Mrs. Williams would rise and create breakfast. Then, Mr. Williams, inspired by his wife’s limitless energy, would rush off to a special room and create tiny hairs in a sink. The children would create things, too. But being temperamental artists, they would often flush them away without a second thought.
But the bohemians’ creativity didn’t stop there. Mr. Williams would then rush downtown and create reams and reams of papers with numbers on them and send them out to other bohemians who would create special checks to him with figures like $7.27 written on them.
At home, the children would be creating unusual music, using only their voices to combine in avant-garde, atonal melodies.
Yes, these were the bohemians. A seething hot-bed of rebellion — the artists, the creators of all things that lie between good and bad.
Ornette Coleman, quoted in Howard Mandel’s Miles, Ornette, and Cecil:
When you ask a question or make a statement it’s either that you know the subject that you’re talking about or you’re trying to express something without the persons you’re talking to changing their views of it. You try to make their view of it more clear to them so they can stay more natural, rather than to think that you’re just trying to get them to repeat something to make you feel more secure or something.
Coleman gets at the artificial casualness of the typical interview, where the interviewer has to figure out how to best ask a question without leading the witness, so to speak. Often, this involves some sort of carefully managed reduction of the questioner’s knowledge of his subject. Despite wanting an interview to flow like a natural conversation, the very relationship between interviewer and subject makes it virtually impossible.
“Mr. Tambourine Man” – Bob Dylan (download)
recorded 30 July 1999, Jones Beach Amphitheater, Wantagh, NY (download whole show)
(file expires December 24th)
(And… reentry complete.) A friend of mine once negatively characterized Bob Dylan’s live vocals as “UPdownUPdownUPdown.” And not inaccurately. But, Dylan’s too ornery to alternate so blandly (except when he is). It’s like Mike Gordon said — speaking of criticisms that the Grateful Dead just ran up and down scales together — you have to know when to go down and when to go up. Given Dylan’s gnarled voice — part affected, part acquired — even the up/downs sometimes get blurred, which is why I’m so frabjously psyched about this summer ’99 soundboard, in which Dylan cuts through completely.
In Chronicles, Dylan spins a probably bullshit yarn to describe his improvised vocal melodies, taught to him by Lonnie Johnson, involving “an odd- instead of an even-numbered system” and “a highly controlled system of playing [that] relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes.” Which is where the UPdownUPdown comes from. And the fastSLOWfastSLOW, and all the layered combinations.
At its best, though, it all congeals into melody, as it did during shows I saw in 1999 and 2000, when Dylan’s Larry Campbell-dominated band blew both Paul Simon and Phil Lesh’s genial revues off the summer shed stages. This “Mr. Tambourine Man” resists singalongs and stumbles, almost surprised at itself, around a new melody, with all the revelation that entails. Dylan never quite sings it directly — which is sort of the point, like an improvisation unresolved — but still delivers appropriate drama. This is what I love about live Dylan. It can be elusive, and I’m glad I finally have a solid example I can point to. If you don’t like it, well, there it is.
So, who’s got the awesome Never Ending Tour soundboards? Sendspace that shit up. (Thx to Ace Cowboy for digging this one up.)
“I Wanna Be Your Partner” – Bob Dylan (download)
from Dimestore Medicine bootleg, c. 1966
“Fourth Time Around” – Yo La Tengo (download) (buy)
from I’m Not There OST
(files expire December 21st)
(Re-entry continues…) Yo La Tengo’s two Bob Dylan covers on the soundtrack to Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There — “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “Fourth Time Around” — constitute a tiny sub-category in Dylan’s work: response songs to the Beatles. The former lifts its chorus from Lennon/McCartney so-cast-off-they-let-Ringo-sing “I Wanna Be Your Man” (supplanting Dylan’s earlier draft, the proto-PC “I Wanna Be Your Partner”). “Fourth Time Around,” meanwhile, is Dylan’s rewrite of “Norwegian Wood,” with a similar plot (cheekily oblique conversation about an affair) set to a similar melody in a similar mood. Dylan’s version is way more sly, of course, with its wry put-downs (“your words are not clear, you better spit out your gum”) and the snotty/Britty crutch/crotch double entendre at its end (“I didn’t ask for your crutch, now don’t ask for mine”). Intentional choice on YLT’s part to mirror Haynes’ meta-textual orgy? Only the nose knows for sure. The nose being Ringo.
“I’ll Keep It With Mine” – Yo La Tengo (download)
recorded 30 December 2005, Maxwell’s, Hoboken, NJ
(file expires December 20th)
Sleep. Soon. In the meantime, to aid in the ever-so-gradual reentry, the Georgia-sung “I’ll Keep It With Mine” from the stunning sleeper show the night before New Year’s, 2005. Purdy Nico arrangement (superior to Dylan’s clunkier demo, oddly), aided by Rolling Thunder/sessionman stringdude David Mansfield. Sleep. Now. But first, maybe headphones. (Thx to Neil & Brandon for the tunes.)
