« August 2006 | Main | October 2006 »
Heard about this website today, RuinedMusic.com. It's essentially a collection of anecdotes written by people who have had their favorite songs, well, ruined by personal experience. The one about the guy who can't listen to "The One Thing" by INXS anymore because it played a significant role on a videotape he accidentally found of his parents having...well, I don't want to ruin it for you.
Check it out.
Can you believe were almost done with September? What the hell happened? Where did it all go? In any event, it's almost time to bust out the Cosby sweaters and start carvin' the damn pumpkins, so I'd better go ahead and get this month's edition of Currently in Rotation up and out. So here goes....
MUSIC: With the exception of Bowie's Pin-Ups, Another Time, Another Place by Bryan Ferry, Kicking Against the Pricks by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Garage Days Re-Revisited by Metallica and maybe Undisputed Attitude by Slayer, tribute/cover records are rarely a good idea. Nine out of ten of them fall flat (Duran Duran's arguably bloated Thank You -- as one particuarly tragic example -- was recently voted the "worst album of all time" by a British music magazine, although I actually don't think it's all that bad). However well-intentioned, albums comprised solely of cover versions of other artists' songs tend to smack of hubris, barrell-scraping, contractual obligation and ineptitude. Def Leppard were recently savaged in the press for Yeah!, their collection of glam and classic rock staples. Even my beloved Firewater released a covers album, 2004's Songs We Should Have Written that, while boasting a few great moments, was far from their finest hour.
So imagine my surprise to learn the Grant Lee Phillips, former lead singer of criminally unsung 90's "alternative Americana" trio, Grant Lee Buffalo, was releasing an all-covers album. To my pronounced relief, however, Grant didn't try to tackle the predictable crap like Gram Parsons, Hank Williams or Leonoard Cohen, but rather concentrated his homage on largely familiar alternative hits from the 80's (hence the title, nineteeneighties). While their career had its low-profile ups and downs, I am firmly of the mindset that Grant Lee Buffalo crafted at least two shimmeringly perfect singles in their day, namely the eerily evocative "Mockingbirds" and the flawless love song that was "Truly, Truly" (from their otherwise dead-on-arrival final album, Jubilee). Phillips' distinctive vocals can both swoon a sweet falsetto and exhort in a throaty baritone (ala a less self-conscious Eddie Vedder). I've never been an especially ardent fan of so-called "alt.country" let alone, folk-rock, but Grant Lee Buffalo brought a new sound to that particular table that managed to capture my attention. The band died a quietly ignominious death after the failure of their last two albums to match the critical acclaim of their first two, and Phillips went onto launch a solo career, often touring with the likes of equally compelling artists like Robyn Hitchcock and M.Doughty (ex-Soul Coughing). So, again, to hear that he was releasing a covers album did not bode well. Had his muse finally abandoned him?
I wasn't going to pick it up at first, but when I heard that he took on "City of Refuge" by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (one of my favorites), I couldn't resist. The album is basically a collection of rootsier, virtually campfire-friendly renditions of songs you wouldn't normally imagine working in a folkily acoustic context. Some tracks work better than others. His rendition of New Order's "Age of Consent," for example, excises the original's twitchy urgency, replacing it with a drowsily contemplative vibe. More often than not, Phillips' arrangements are perfectly pleasant, but just make you pine for the originals. His trek through the Psychedelic Furs' signature "Love My Way" jettisons the memorable marimba hook, and his pass at "Under the Milky Way" by the Church just makes you miss the original's twelve-string atmospherics. There are a couple of duds. His take on the Cure's "Boys Don't Cry" just falls completely flat (no one should cover this song, honestly) and his handling of R.E.M.'s "So.Central Rain" sorely misses Pete Buck's Rickenbacker chime. The bottom line is that while this album would sound great being played live one cool, starry night on the front porch of a cozy cabin off the shores of some remote island in a far flung Maine archipeligo, all it manages to make me do is shuffle my iPod to hear the original tracks that inspired it. And while I applaud Phillips for covering "City of Refuge," his version lacks all the palpable menace that makes Cave's original so thrilling in the first place.
But still...it doesn't suck.
WEBSITE: Brandspankin!, a "site dedicated to the high art of advertising parody, and giving brands the spankin' they deserve." The gent behind this site left a comment on an earlier post of mine, prompting me to seek out his weblog. Some very funny, endearingly inflamatory stuff to be found here.
TEXT: I'm sad to say that I've had precious little time to devote to any serious book readin' of late. My weekends are chock full of toddler-maintenance, and by the time the Missus and I are ready to call it a night, we're both too exhausted to crack the bindings of any bedside tomes. I still haven't finished the Bourdain book I cited last month. That all said, my wife recently handed me a copy of Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik on the strength of an entry called "Barney in Paris." Two paragraphs in, and I was convinced that the man was a sheer, unfettered genius. I haven't had time to read the rest, but if this entry is anything to go by, it's a possible new fave.
QUOTE: A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. - H. L. Mencken
SHIT THAT'S PISSING ME OFF THIS MONTH: In an ill-fated attempt to clear my head one recent weekend afternoon, I decided to stroll on up to my local Virgin Megastore on Union Square just to punish myself (with two little kids at home, it's not like I have a great opportunity to blast any new music, much less watch any DVDs with any semblance of regularity). In any event, while I was incredulously stomping around looking for the "import" section (which had been evidently dismantled to accommodate a larger Hip Hop section -- yeah, like Hip Hop doesn't already have enough an unremitting stranglehold on popular freakin' culture that it should need to dislocate my favorite stuff!), my fruitless search led me downstairs where I found myself in the DVD section. And what should I see staring me square in the face but this beautiful little bundle of cruelty.
Rewind the clock to 1979. I was a feckless 8th grader otherwise obsessed with Kiss, "Ghost Rider," "Star Wars," "The X-Men" and the Ramones. My father -- in an exceptionally rare instance of coolness -- decided that it would make for a swell bonding experience to take his son to go see Francis Ford Coppola's newly opened Vietnam War epic, "Apocalypse Now." I had no idea what the film was about, nor could I even correctly pronounce the first word in the title (much less find Vietnam on a map), but I'd seen the poster and it looked way fuckin' cool. I vividly remember seeing it at some crappy movie theater on 3rd Avenue and brieftly thinking that maybe my dad wasn't such a raging jackass after all (I was wrong, of course). In any event, I was mesmerized. I soaked up every hugely confusing nanosecond of "Apocalypse Now." To this day, it remains one of my favorite films of all time, and it all started that afternoon.
One of my best friends at the time was a lanky, bespectacled class-mate named Charlie. A fellow comics devotee and Kiss fan, Charlie was also an ersatz gun-nut and potential future-survivalist obsessed with all-things war. It was Charlie who first introduced me the needlessly violent D.C. comic, "Sgt. Rock" and first played me Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine by the Doors (who we both momentarily latched onto strictly because of the placement of "The End" during the opening scene of "Apocalypse Now.") It was Charlie who fist got ahold of the soundtrack LP to the film, which featured about eighty percent of the film's dialogue (which we, of course, dutifully memorized for the purposes of unsolicited recitation at inopportune times). I think we even picked up copies of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (the book upon which "Apocalypse Now" is loosely based, although the original narrative takes place in the African Congo and involves elephant tusk trading), in an ultimately futile attempt to more fully understand the film.
The trouble reallly started, however, one day when Charlie and I started to discuss the film in inordinate detail. For some inexplicable reason (perhaps I simply saw an earlier cut of the film than Charlie), I vividly remember the film concluding not only with Brando's haunted soliloquoy ("the horror...the horror"), but with a very artsily shot montage of the air-strike (presumably called in by Chef before his neck was forcibly parted from his head) as the credits rolled. Plumes of orange flame silhoeting the Cambodian statuery and haggard palms of the Kurtz compound, set to ominouosly struck piano chords. At my first mention of this, Charlie was incredulous. "You're such a fuckin' liar, Alex" he scoffed. Evidently, as far as Charlie was concerned, the film ended with the final utterance of "...horror" and the titles rolled over a black screen. It was this pivotal discrepancy of events that almost tore our friendship apart (and remember, this is years before both the advent of readily available VCRs, let alone the film's release on VHS). We argued with vein-popping intensity about it. Too late to catch the film again in a theatre and without the resources to prove each other wrong, we decided to agree to disagree on the point, but we never really saw eye to eye on a subject ever again.
Over a decade later, the film was finally released on DVD. Charlie and I, having both graduated from grade school (let alone our respective high schools and colleges) had long since fallen completely out of touch. I remember popping the DVD of "Apocalypse Now" into my player and watching it end to end (as I always had), rapt by every last detail. Sure enough, following Kurtz's dying utterance, a lone white point appeared out of the black that suddenly blossomed into a blinding ball of napalm. I WAS RIGHT.
Cut to 2001. Francis Ford Coppola releases "Apocalypse Redux," a supposedly complete "director's cut" that includes all footage from the film restored into one sprawling piece. I dutifully went to see it one rainy Tuesday morning at the movie theatre under the building that I now work in. I was gripped by every extra, equally confusing nanosecond of footage. BUT GUESS WHAT? No fuckin' final air strike. Sorry, you lose.
I later found the answer:
Was There an Ending With an Air Strike on Kurtz' Compound?
When I saw Apocalypse Now in a theater years ago, the end credits were shown over footage of massive explosions in Kurtz' compound. But on the DVD, the end credits are simply white letters over a black background. So, were there multiple endings or what?
Material on the DVD covers this issue. At one time the filmmakers released a theatrical version of Apocalypse Now that had end credits shown over behind-the-scenes footage of sets being blown up. The problem was that to many viewers, including me, this footage looked like a continuation of the movie's narrative in which an air strike was in progress on Kurtz' compound.
When it was realized that Coppola's intended ending was being muddled by this version of the end credits, the sequence now on the DVD was substituted. With this change, the film's ending is unambiguous: Willard switches off the radio without ever calling for an air strike, and therefore we can assume there won't be one.
To make a long, rambling rant short, I'm strenuously lamenting this supposedly definitive collection. They did it with "Monty Python & the Holy Grail," they did it with "Star Wars," they're doing it with "Blade Runner" and now with "Apocalypse Now." Stop syphoning monies out of the fanbase, goddammit!
ADDENDUM: In the entirely unlikely event that Charlie is reading this, you can see the sequence for yourself right here. Enjoy,!
OLD TIMEY VIDEO CLIP OF THE MONTH: If you've spent any amount of time reading this weblog, you'll know that I harbor an almost fetishistic fascination for the NYC of the 1980s. As such, I bring you "Run and Run" by the Psychedelic Furs. It's not that I think this song is the bee's knees or anything (the band made fistfulls of better tracks than this), but the clip finds Richard Butler and the boys swanning about Battery Park, the Gramercy Park Hotel, long-defunkt Venus Records on W.8th Street, lower 6th Avenue and snippets of the East and West Village all circa 1982. As a video, it's no great shakes, but as a period piece, I find it quite compelling.
For no readily apparent reason, I selected a clutch of `choons by ye olde Police for my walk to work this morning. Playing a quick paced game of beat the clock, I decided to eschew the subway option (as I'm often keen to do, being that I pretty much loathe the entire subway commute experience) in favor of a purposeful stride up Broadway, scored by some of the more energetic blasts by one of the world's former biggest bands.
Strikes me that the Police never got much respect. Villified in the Punk Rock community they initially aspired to be part of, lambasted for their appropriation and arguable bleaching of reggae (there's some quote by Elvis Costello about how Gordon "Sting" Sumner strenuously needed to drop the faux-Jamaican accent) and roundly derided for the haughty antics of their de facto leader, the afore-mentioned Sting (despite the fact that the band was initially ex-Curved Air drummer, Stewart Copeland's brainchild), the Police seemed to attract as many enemies as fans.
I remember first hearing them when my sister brought home a copy of Zenyatta Mondatta after a trip to England. Despite the fact that they looked like a bunch of pretty boy pin-ups, there was certainly no arguing with the propulsive punch of "Driven to Tears" (the opening buckshot drums of said track still get my blood pumping) and they sounded like they had the chops to back up the all the preening. I gradually became a fan, immersing myself wholly in the follow-up album, 1981's undersung Ghost In the Machine (by which point my sister had seemingly undergone a rigorous taste-ectomy -- abandoning the Police in favor of indefensible crap like DeBarge, Michael Jackson, Evelyn "Champagne" King and the like). I remember buying Ghost... the same day I bought Concrete by 999 and Give the People What They Want by the Kinks in the record department at long-vanished Gimbels on East 86th & Lexington Avenue. Much like many of the bands that would become my favorites, the Police were born of Punk but never truly fit in with the safety-pinned horde (much like, say, the Stranglers, Devo and Killing Joke). There was simply more to them than high voltage, three-chord ramalama (although I love their Punk-aspiring tracks like "Nothing Achieving," "Fallout" and the truly awesome "Dead End Job," wherein Sting bleats out an empassioned "CUNTS!"). They were consummate musicians, like or not, and ultimately not ashamed to display same.
It wouldn't last, of course. Sometime around Synchronicity -- when Sting was gruesomely eaten alive by his own ego -- the Police lost that tightly-wound, friction-fueled dynamic that made their early recordings so exciting. Sting went-on to be an ersatz male Sade, largely leaving Andy Summers and Stew Copeland to pursue significantly lower-profile careers. To hear them now, it's hard to believe they were once inescapably huge.
Striding up the avenues this morning, though -- I found myself furiously air-drumming along to manic tracks like "No Time This Time," "Can't Stand Losing," "Regatta de Blanc," the afore-mentioned "Driven to Tears," "Too Much Information" and even "Synchronicity I." Who cares if they weren't the coolest band in the world? They rocked. Case closed.
Hey again. In the Night Life section of the "Goings On About Town" section of this week's issue, I'm responsible for the judiciously edited blurbity-blurbs regarding Fishbone, Jet, Secret Machines and the entirely ass-whuppin' NoMeansNo who rock way harder than my editors allowed me to assert, I'm sorry to say. Should you be curious to read'em -- and would it kill you to? -- please click thyselves right here to see for your damn self. Incidentally, you could certainly do worse than read The New Yorker instead of that mirthless tripe you normally read, you slackjawed cretins! GET SOME CULTURE!
Kidding.
I'd love to be typing "hey, I survived the solo-parent weekend!" and all that right now, but truth be told, it's 7:30 pm on Sunday night and the rigors are still virgorously at play. I honestly have no concept how single parents do it. I'm bruised, battered, beaten, bleary-eyed and my back is killing me. I haven't showered in two days, my t-shirts are stained, my fingers stink of baby formula and I've changed more pairs of unspeakably-polluted diapers than I'd wish on Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri. The little one was finally coaxed down (after consuming practically double his already hefty weight in formula), and the two-year is continuing to rise and whimper after repeated soothing-visits. I just went in for the fourth time with a bottle of milk to hopefully finally buy her silence. When will the madness end?
I shouldn't be too surprised, really. After a long weekend and a car trip, little kids usually go through a weird, inconsolable decompression period. All told, the weekend was a success. Some whiney bouts notwithstanding, Charlotte was a perfect little girl, and charmed the beJesus out of all and sundry on Saturday night. Likewise, Oliver was tirelessly cute, but postitively demands constant attention. There were high points (John, my step-father beaming at the sight of Charlotte in her little party dress, Oliver's easily coaxed smiles) and low points (the maddeningly shrill "Dora's Fiesta" talking book my cheekily sadistic mother gave to Charlotte -- seemingly to punnish me with, Oliver's easily coaxed, t-shirt ruining spit-ups). I'd love to extend a hearty thank you to my mother and my sister for helping me out. Both really went well above and beyond the call of familial duty. Suffice to say, I have newfound respect for the efforts my wife puts in with these two little diaper-filling terrors our children on a daily basis. That said, I cannot wait until she walks through the door (and after a weekend in my ham-fisted custody, neither can my kids!)
Hey All....
So far, so....umm...good. One child is napping and the other is having lunch, so I'm taking a fleeting moment to update. There hasn't been a great deal of sleep going on, and my back is killing me, but we're halfway there.
In any case, maybe it's my exhaustion, but I stumbled upon this post on my comrade, Hot Johnny's site, and practically wet myself laughing. Hopefully, you'll find it equally amusing. Be warned, it's exceptionally juvenile.
I fully expected today to suck from a giant tube of rancid bean paste, but fate had other plans in mind and many of my fears were mercifully unrealized, which was a damn relief, as I'm feeling significantly stressed out of late. By way of an update, while it seems we've successfully weaned our little boy, Oliver, off the breast and onto the bottle, we're still having a hugely difficult time getting him to sleep through the night (thus we too are having a hard time sleeping). He's still loudly waking up at 2, 3, 4 and 5 a.m. Eager to acclimate him to the ways of the rest of the world, we've begrudgingly started the campaign to ferberize him. I've discussed it here before, but let me reinforce the sentiment. Ferberizing Sucks! Adding insult to injury, it seems the dreaded Dr. Ferber himself is starting to question his own theory, only validating my inherent suspicions with the method. It was hugely unpleasant when we put Charlotte (and ourselves) through it, but it seems a thousand times more difficult with Oliver. The past few nights have been sheer Hell.
But new challenges await. The Missus if flying out of town tomorrow for a weekend breather with her family, leaving me to look after the kids solo. As fate would have it, it's also my beloved step-father's 80th birthday this weekend, so I'm packing up Charlotte and Oliver and heading out to Long Island to be a part of the festitivies. To suggest that I'm looking forward to next three days of arduous parenting would be a flabby, fatuous lie, but at least I'll have my mother, my sister, my nephews and the rest of my extended family to help out. I don't expect a lot of sleep -- let alone a lot of time sitting still -- but it's an event I simply cannot miss. And it will be nice to have my children be a part of it. I'm hoping so, anyway.
Check back on Monday to see if we all survived!
9:05 a.m. It's the time of the morning when the sun strafes down 45th streeet, streaming through the windows of the 29th floor of my office in perfect alignment with my desk, seering my aching retinas like the flashlight of a vengeful god. It's unrestfully reminiscent of the scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when Indiana Jones, with the help of the staff of Ra, divines the location of the Well of Souls. It's quite like that, in fact.
Only with fewer Nazis.
First, Rod composed it. And then Mrs.Tanya picked it up. Then I ripped it off of her. And then Eric ripped it off of me. So I figured it's high time for a sequel!
Last Five Albums you bought/burned:
A Matter of Life and Death by Iron Maiden
Nineteeneighties by Grant Lee Philips
The Greatest Gift by Scratch Acid
Beg to Differ by Prong
The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu
....although the last three were to replace vinyl/cassette incarnations.
Five great albums that are not available on compact disc:
Let Them Eat Jellybeans by various artists (Alternative Tentacles compilation)
Headkick Facsimile by Cop Shoot Cop
Belfegore by Belfegore
Teen Babes from Monsanto by Redd Kross
Drunk on the Pope's Blood by the Birthday Party/Lydia Lunch
The Echo & the Bunnymen e.p. by Echo & the Bunnymen, a blue-sleeved 12" which featured an ass-whuppin' live rendition of "Do It Clean" that -- to my knowledge -- cannot be found elsewhere.
Albums you wish they'd re-master/re-release (w/ deluxe bonus tracks, expanded artwork -- the whole nine):
Well, I'm still waiting for them to re-release the next five Killing Joke albums, but beyond that…
Headkick Facsimile by Cop Shoot Cop
The Lion & the Cobra by Sinead O'Connor
Chronic Town by R.E.M.
The Sprit of Eden by Talk Talk (though it's already perfect)
Album you're looking for but have yet to find:
The internet has made the world a smaller place, thus things aren't nearly as hard to find as they once were (which is sort've a shame, really -- half the fun was in the search). That said, I've never been able to find any albums by the Matt Stagger Band (British Punk band from the mid-70's that briefly featured Big Paul Ferguson and Jaz Coleman, later of Killing Joke). And there's a record by a calypso singer named Blind Blake that my grandparents used to play to death that was actually pretty amusing -- I'd love to find a copy of that on disc (note: there's a blues singer also named Blind Blake -- this ain't the same guy).
"Seminal, cannonical" album that you've never owned/heard:
I regret to confess that I've never heard Tago Mago by Can, which I'm told is the greatest thing since the invention of Nutella. I do have Monster Movie, though, and that's pretty great.
Album you love, but wouldn't want randomly lying around when your in-laws come over:
Scatology by COIL
Five songs you never want/need to hear again:
"The Day the Music Died" by Don McLean
"Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison
"déjà vu" by Beyonce
"Lovin' You" by Minnie Ripperton
"Alright Now" by Free
The dealbreaker album: if you spot this album in the person you're dating's collection, it's OVER!
Well, technically, I'm already married, so it's too late. That said, my wife did (and still does) own several albums by Van Morrison, who I fuckin' hate. That said, she also owned the 7" of "Love Like Blood" by Killing Joke, which significantly redeemed her. But if I'm ever unsolicitedly thumbing through someone's record collection and come across, say, any albums by Toby Keith or Shania Twain, I'm pretty much immediately convinced that they're an idiot. Of course, I have an awful lot of dubious crap in my collection as well, so what the hell do I know?
Do you own any albums autographed by the artist
Yeah, tons. Most prized would be a copy of Too Tough to Die by the Ramones signed by Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and…er…Ritchie. I also have a copy of Murder Ballads by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds upon which Nick scrawled "To Alex -- LOVE, NICK!" Nick Cave loves me!
Unlistenable album you'd never part with:
Ignore the White Culture by Missing Foundation
Favorite song in a genre you otherwise hate:
I cannot lie: "Cry Me A River" by Justin Timberlake is a great goddamn song.
Songs Played at Your Senior Prom:
I vividly remember "You Spin Me Round" by Dead Or Alive" and "The Rappin' Duke" by Shawn Brown
First concert:
Devo at Radio City Music Hall on Halloween of 1981 (on the New Traditionalists tour).
First album you ever bought:
Dressed to Kill by Kiss, purchased at a long-defunct store named Sam's on main street in Westhampton, N.Y.
Favorite Elton John song:
"Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding"
Favorite David Bowie song:
"Moonage Daydream" (and countless others)
Favorite Bob Dylan song:
Don't have one. Never been a member of that faith.
Favorite Bruce Springsteen song:
"For You"
Favorite Michael Jackson song:
Really don't have one. Hated him then, hate him now.
Album you'd leave on continuous play to torture your neighbors over the course of a long weekend with:
Hysterie by Lydia Lunch
Worst Cover song ever:
The Goo Goo Dolls' butchering of the Plimsouls' otherwise flawless "Million Miles Away," swapping the timeless Rickenbacker chime for ham-fisted power-chords. They should be brutally hurt for this.
3 Albums owned by both your parents and yourself:
Arrival by Abba, Teaser & the Firecat by Cat Stevens, Take Five by Dave Brubeck
3 Albums you'd wager are in the collection of everyone who might fill this out:
Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, Back in Black by AC/DC and The Joshua Tree by U2
3 Albums that SHOULD be in the collection of everyone who might fill this out:
Funhouse by the Stooges, The Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk, Singles Going Steady by the Buzzcocks
Recent Comments