I don’t know Mike Edison, but I like him. He’s part of a generation of NYC rummagers who came before me, stirring the trough around here when there was plenty of room at the edges to stink it up. Born in the suburbs of New Jersey, Edison parlayed a teenage marijuana habit into a resume that, in his own words, “reads like a crime scene”:
* driver of the crash car for the Rock Against Reagan tour in ’84, and crowd instigator for Reagan Youth’s sets
* columnist, then editor, of Wrestling’s Main Event, back when such business mattered
* drummer for GG Allin and the Holy Men, Sharky’s Machine, the Raunch Hands, and the Pleasure Fuckers
* author of dozens of anonymous stroke books sold in ye old Times Square
* writer for various Drake Publications offerings (High Society, Celebrity Skin, Hawk, Live Young Girls!)
* freelancer for Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine (and later there in management)
* journalist for Soft Drinks & Beverages Magazine
* publisher of High Times, who led the magazine into its most profitable stretch to date
* frontman and guitarist of Edison Rocket Train
I Have Fun Everywhere I Go (Faber & Faber/Interstellar Roadhouse, 2008) is the story of his life, as told by the man himself. I grabbed a copy at his book release party at Black & White, a bar I used to remember as a hipster dive, Italian restaurant worth a slight damn (depending on how messed up you were), and pre-game spot for SPA Wednesdays back in the dot-com days, before 9/11, when this town’s nightlife was still dealing in young decadence. Edison’s not the type of guy I would have associated with that sort of place, but it didn’t matter: he’s as much a part of what kept NYC as dangerously great as it was for years on end, and his writing is clear, solid evidence of that. Capturing first the awe and confusion, and eventual degenerate mastery of a metropolis on the verge of cultural bankruptcy, his prose dances through tales of peddling smut and heroic benders dance like Nero fiddling his way through the back alleys of a burning Rome. Edison also plies himself as the voice of reason, the one guy in the room who actually gets off on pride in his work, and in this regard he finds himself at odds with the remnants of the culture he loves so dearly (his struggles with the lifetime burnouts of the High Times empire are as entertaining to read as they were frustrating for him to deal with). Still the man trudges, onward and upward, into local legend status.
Sadly the same thing cannot be said for his CD. Sharing the title of the book, Edison recites his text with plenty of gusto, landing him between the Big Bopper and Wolfman Jack. He’s also got respectable backing musicians in Raunch Hands singer Mike Chandler, and producer-guitarist-theremin savant Jon Spencer (yeah, that Jon Spencer, of Blues Explosion fame). Sadly, this comes at a cost; namely, overlong rave-ups where seediness goes to seed, hoedaddy ramblings of the old guy at the corner of the bar to anyone who’ll listen. Great writing doesn’t need to be deflated by such rote music charts or hammy performance, and the lounge-bop-groove tracks have about as much legitimacy as flames on a silk shirt. But hey, in this day and age, who gets to bat .500 and be the last man standing? Edison’s lived it; he gets the pass.
Book Rating: 8.4
Don’t have time to search out this week’s essential new music? That’s why we’re here.
Fleet Foxes “White Winter Hymnal”
If only every band with beards could pass through Detroit on its pilgrimage to Laurel Canyon, swallow a big gulp of baroque pop with its nightly intake of Beach Boys, and genuinely embrace the weirdness then maybe–just maybe–they would all sound as wonderful as this Seattle five-piece does on this little taster from its spectacular full-length debut.
MP3: White Winter Hymnal
The Futureheads “Broke Up The Time”
Their no-holds-barred cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” will remain The Futureheads’ crowning moment, but with this choppy post-punk throwback they’re getting pretty close to having another.
MP3: Broke Up The Time
Ed Harcourt “Revolution of the Heart”
Ed Harcourt hasn’t given up his lifelong pursuit of making every single one of his songs as epic as The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life.” This one packs on the pianos, handclaps and swooping vocals in several layers, sounding quite massive in its own right.
(via Dovecote Records)
Wolf Parade “Language City”
Wolf Parade is trying hard to escape the “prog-rock” tag. We can’t speak for the rest of the group’s second album, but this bouncy piano-driven rock track can only help. It turns out they’re actually just a new-wave band in search of the perfect John Hughes movie in which to make a cameo.
MP3: Language City
Bo Diddley “Who Do You Love?”
This rock and roll classic has been covered by everyone from Eric Clapton and The Band to The Doors and Jesus and Mary Chan, but never better than by the man who originally wrote it and released it in 1956.
MP3: Who Do You Love?
Last Friday night, in a VFW hall in South Philadelphia–a joint frequented by that most defining South Philly phenomenon, Mummers (no to time here to explain, for those uninitiated)–where beers are still a dollar and you can call your liquor for two bucks, Rick Froberg (ex- of Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes) presented his new band, Obits. In an opening slot for his old Jehu/Snakes band mates, the Night Marchers, Froberg, along with former members of Edsel, Short Stack and Noblesse Oblige, ripped through a set of what legions of Froberg supplicants have been all a-twitter in anticipation of since Hot Snakes disbanded in 2005.
According to Froberg, Obits formed in the immediate wake of Hot Snakes and have been rehearsing ever since. They played their first show in their hometown of New York in January and have since played one-offs in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and, of course, Philadelphia.
Froberg says the band will record a full-length in the fall (which would put its projected release at spring 2009); they will try get a get a couple of seven-inches out to hold people over until then. Touring will happen on a rip-and-run basis, with ten-day stints here and there, but they should be able to cover the States in due time and will be touring Europe as well.
Obits certainly present a different side of Froberg’s musical sensibility, but are not the result of his efforts and influence alone. Sohrab Habibion, singer/guitarist from Edsel, adds a proclivity for stoner rock to the Obits’ recipe. Blended with Froberg’s frantic, unaffected, naked vocal approach, it all comes out bearing the stamp of the most compelling and efficacious elements of ’60s and ’70s garage pop and Brit blues. It’s something akin to the Chambers Brothers and the Kinks forming a band that’s trying to sound like Blue Cheer, but with the guy from Pitchfork singing.
There are a couple tracks taken from their few live shows posted on their MySpace page and a YouTube clip from a recent gig. Listening to and watching Obits, one can imagine the perplexed little cocked heads of confounded fans, like dogs just shown a card trick, when they have their first listen at this promising change of direction for the indie icon.
(photo credit: Davey Wilson)
Sublime Frequencies
Seattle label Sublime Frequencies began in 2003, putting out musical recordings and DVD videos of artists from around the world that they had collected during extensive self-funded travels. The label is the avocation of brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, of the band Sun City Girls, along with video documentarian Hisham Mayet. Following their tremendous output of global musical vitality last year, the label was back at it last week with two new offerings from afar.
The CD Bollywood Steel Guitar exhibits 21 tracks of instrumental virtuosity and innovation performed by film studio session players recorded to score films produced in India between 1962 and 1986. There is a lot of heavy-handed drumming and intricate melodic interplay between harmoniums and pedal and lap steel guitars. For anyone charged up and blown away by the footage intercut with the opening title sequence of the 2001 movie Ghost World of the sassy-assed Shankar Jaikishan performing the song “Jan Pechechan Ho,” Bollywood Steel Guitar will bound you over the same instrumental terrain.
Also recently released, on vinyl only, was Shadow Music of Thailand–surfy instrumental guitar and farfisa organ rave-ups. It’s the sort music you expect to be blaring from speakers atop the Tiki bar at a Quentin Tarantino pool party.
The list of titles and the requisite descriptions of all of their releases to date is far too long to indulge in here, however, among my favorites are:
Thai Pop Spectacular (CD 2007)
A marvelously deft and dazzling array of power pop cuts from 19 different Thai artists, compiled by Bay Area archivist and audio innovator Mark Gergis.
Choubi Choubi: Folk and Pop Songs from Iraq (CD 2005)
A mix of modern urban rhythmic tracks and traditional melodies, layered with vocals that pass freely from old world, Middle Eastern moaning to Brooklyn-esque, girl hip hop–with some cuts culled wholesale from Detroit radio broadcasts (a technique common to other Sublime releases)
Guitars of Agadez, by Group Inerane (LP 2007)
A band tagged as part of the “Tuareg Guitar Revolution,” Inerane, from Niger, play electric-guitar desert blues. It is the infusion of their own tradition with distilled elements of the Delta blues that make them so haunting and deep. Inerane, however, eschews all the trappings of the stodgy blues song structure and instead cycle around the beat, causing your pop-radio-indoctrinated and inundated ass to have to continually re-orient yourself to the “1” in the count, which has usually relocated itself to a different spot in the progression. The tunes are topped off with beautiful trills from a backing chorus of female voices.
As with the fabulous Ethiopiques CD series, I sometimes wonder if it is as much the American funk, soul and jazz influence on the elements of music of a distant origin that makes it so appealing. But, as is also the case with Sublime’s releases, it is not merely people from other cultures and traditions playing their traditional music and tossing in American musical clichés for pragmatic measure. These artists are taking American musical forms and inverting them, looking at them through different goggles, refining the meatier components and discarding the fat. Then they spit them back at us saying, “here’s what you could be doing with your own legacy.” Although I’m sure the above statement, however unintentionally, oversimplifies the phenomenon.
I asked the well-traveled Sublime Frequencies co-proprietor Alan Bishop, via email, if his duty to finding new music to record became burdensome to the travel process or impinged upon his enjoyment of being somewhere far from home.
“Of course I don’t always carry the [recording/video] gear around…I always have my detectors on,” Bishop writes, “I find ways to make what I do meditative and relaxing.”
Bishop says Sublime Frequencies tries not to force the issue with their artists. They strive to capture, as unobtrusively as possible, performances of their artists in their most familiar and comfortable circumstances.
Says Bishop, “I think some people believe there is some method to this and that we have a formula. That’s never the case. Each situation is completely different from all the others…we never take groups to a studio or try to pull them from their normal operating procedures. That is not conducive to getting great recordings. Many others seem to think slick sound production is best, so they wheel a group into a studio and ‘produce’ them. I prefer to record them wherever they play, in their own space, where they always perform.”
Personally, I listen to Sublime Frequencies releases with an unfortunate anxiety, fighting off my dread that they will one day run out of new music to find or the energy to go out and get it.
Other recommended Sublime Frequencies titles (all CDs) that are more or less self-introductory:
-Radio Algeria
-Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar
-Radio Palestine: Sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean
-PROIBIDÃO C.V: Forbidden Gang Funk From Rio de Janeiro
And some tasty DVDs:
Musical Brotherhood from the Trans-Saharan Highway
Sumatran Folk Cinema
Nat Pwe: Burma’s Carnival of Spirit Soul
A couple videos:
To see a band change is quite a thing. To witness the evolution of Zen Guerrilla from a tolerable gathering of friends, eager to make music together but not quite yet onto anything particularly compelling, into one of the more formidable forces of sound and presence of their time is a beautiful experience.
Likewise, after seeing some early Jon Spencer Blues Explosion gigs I walked away underwhelmed. Then six months later I was in front of a stage watching them as though I were smack in the middle of the railroad tracks peacefully anticipating the impending crush of a locomotive. But the Blues Explosion were hardly “unsung,” and so I digress. No, Zen Guerrilla is the band I first saw at Silk City in Philadelphia in about 1994. They were friends of a friend and introductions were made as someone snapped pictures of them in the lobby wearing their matching rose-pink tuxedos.
Nice enough guys I thought, and their stage show ended up being mostly unremarkable, with vague traces–in the vodka-addled slide show of my memories–of fairly standard psychedelic rock with a protracted nod to Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and the like, and even a Beatles cover or two. What I mostly remember being bothered by–besides their ungainly name–was that the front man could really sing and yet he ran his vocals through a series of processors, amps, compressors and what-not, like a tube-powered version of a Gibby Haynes vocal cop-out. This dude was like six-foot-seven and spent the entire set bent over double, his back to the audience, trying to hide behind parts of the drum kit.
I ran into the fellows from the band from time to time but otherwise didn’t see them around all that much. Then I heard that these four guys who had met each other as students at the University of Delaware in the late Eighties, had moved the band to San Francisco.
Now, I don’t know when the transformation took place exactly, but the next time I remember seeing them play was about 4 years later, in Seattle. Same dudes, brand new band. They were now a sonic tsunami. They were physical. They were focused. And the front man, Marcus Durant, owned the audience. He was going at the crowd, drawing them in from under a crazy bush of hair, reaching his arms out as to offer his hand in guidance through an unnerving rock-n-roll journey.
The only problem with this new outfit was that my own band had to take the stage after them.
We did all right because I had a couple of pretty good players with me, but we were in no ways up to Zen level, and the conversation in our van on the drive to Portland the next day, where we had to follow them again the next night, was a serious one. It centered on pep talking each other as to how we weren’t going to allow these out-of-control give-a-fucks to shame us again. It was, alas, to little avail, because Zen Guerrilla mopped the floor with us again.
But it never made me feel that bad. I mean what were we gonna do against that? They were on fire and they loved it like few bands I’ve seen. They lapped up the giddiness and ludicrousness of every rock performance cliché and delivered them with none of the hammy, self-conscious irony that hampers lesser men. You could suck cognac from a brick baked in the desert sun easier than you could wring a drop of pretension or condescension toward the art of rock from any of the four of them. And they never for a forgivable instant took any of it seriously. They all understood that glory is fleeting, if not impossibly illusive.
Anyone I ever hipped to Zen came away changed, and henceforth a devoted disciple. That is why it was so vexing and confounding that even after they were on Sub Pop (who, granted, were not in their glory years at this point, but still…). Zen were, near as I could tell, all but ignored by the American music press and record-buying public.
At SXSW in 2000 I walked into Emo’s with some friends who had been theretofore uninitiated to their greatness–or even their name–as Zen broke into their perception-altering cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream.” We stood there dumbfounded at these four motherfuckers who were insightful enough to have noticed the jolting power in what Bowie could only get across as a jangly, tripster ditty. It brought to mind Stevie Wonder’s funked up demolition of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.”
In 2002 I had the good fortune of doing a week-long UK tour with Zen. I was solo and fortunately I was the opener this time. Rich Millman (guitar), Carl Horne (bass), Andy Duvall (drums) and Durant shredded the room every night and they ridiculed and cajoled me all the day and whatever part of the night they weren’t pummeling the musical conscience of England.
One of my favorite Zen memories is from a gig in a cavernous little club in Newport, Wales with the thinnest turnout of the tour. There was some idiotically constructed 2 1/2″ lead piping running about ten inches off the stage floor that bordered the entire edge of the stage perimeter like the top rail of a midget chain-link fence. It was exposed to the audience on three sides, and Durant was leaned over it eliciting deep guttural howls into an SM58 and shoving his face down into the face of a stupefied fan. This kid was smallish and not physically distinctive in any visible way, and as Durant was bellowing away and the band was flailing around behind him, this kid took the nearly full 1.5 liter plastic bottle he was holding and squeezed it, shooting a geyser of icy water all over Marcus’ face, the mic, and the front of his body.
Durant is huge and I prayed for the kid’s soul. Durant stood there for moment, band still wailing. If he felt any physical or psychological shock–or even mild surprise at this flood of cold water, his face betrayed none of it. He just stared at the kid. Then, with both feet balanced on the stage-girding pipe, his forearm steadying him against the low ceiling, he sprung, circus canon-like through the air, and came down on top of this hapless water-squirting lad. When Durant rose again and stretched upward, fully erect, he had the kid’s neck cradled in the craw of his elbow and pulled snug, right up against his own throat. The kid’s feet dangled below Durant’s knees, a full foot off the floor. Then Durant pulled the kids face somehow tighter still against his own, shoved the mic into his own mouth and unleashed unearthly screams that seemed to disconnect the erstwhile spectator’s consciousness from his body. He had been shouted into apoplectic shock, as though by an aboriginal witch doctor. Then Durant let the kid drop and he flopped on the floor like he’d been slapped on the forehead by a faith healer.
I believe that tour was the last time I saw Zen play. I heard they might have done another tour in Europe, maybe even the States. An old Philly friend, who lives in London now, told me he saw Zen play at a festival in Spain to tens of thousands of people sometime in 2003. My friend said they came off the stage, the immense outdoor crowd going nuts behind them, and Millman laid his guitar down and said “I’m done.” “What?” my friend said. Millman looked him square in the eye and said, “That’s it.”
And as far as I know, it was.
Images ©1999-2001 Rob Erickson
www.roberickson.com
That old difficult rock is back, being made by a handful of the same people who made it so indigestible and rare in the first place: Singer combines the estimable talents of former U.S. Maple guitarist Todd Rittman and drummer Adam Vita, along with Town & Country/Bird Show man Ben Vida, and Rob Lowe, currently of Lichens and late of 90 Day Men and TV on the Radio. These four gents hail from Chicago, a city with a lot to answer for regarding the sizeable portion of our nation’s avant-garde music they’ve laid upon us.
But when you really start to dissect Singer’s sound, it leads back to the blues, and to U.S. Maple’s deconstruction of it. Dissonant, constantly collapsing, and wheezing towards some grand notion and grander execution of the blues, that band attempted to dismantle the very mechanics of where rock and roll came from–messily separating it into piles all over the floor, still twitching with discovery and nervousness of being discovered. On some compressed timeline, U.S. Maple might have sounded like ZZ Top, but we got all of it, the miscues and the control of the uncontrollable, confounding many and intriguing the few, those determined to solve one of the only challenging puzzles in music during their late ‘90s and early ‘00s existence. Singer, by rule, doesn’t make it too easy; though the pieces are now bigger and easier to classify, they have many more sides now, and some are far too similar to one another. Looks like a job for Mensa.
Or perhaps not. Unhistories’ seven tracks unfold in a logical, almost suite-like manner, forcing the listener to stare into its flats and evening out the jostles with something traditional (here, multi-part male vocal harmonies and stretches of playing chords in time). It gets more exciting as the story rolls on, too, past the thudding, clicking percussive punctuations to the guitar’s lingering single-word sentences of opener “Slow Ghosts” and its somewhat dull follow-up, “Divining.” Think of these as a warm-up period for “Please, Tell the Justices We’re Fine,” where Singer starts to find its legs, racing in and out of a propulsive Krautrock beat and bass combo that eventually concedes to some 5 o’clock whistle jamming, never letting up on its urgency even in its slack, but never fully showing its hand either.
And from here on out, we’re golden: fast or slow, crowded or spare, no moments seem wasted or unnecessary. Artistic choices of where to insert a jagged couplet of guitar chords into the contiguous, speed-crafted surfaces of “Mauvais Sang” are wholly acceptable, because we’ve found a band that knows how to drag the perception of difficulty into that of wonder and kid-gloved amazement, one that is easily put upon the audience, first as a burden, but then as a conversation. It’s a complex machine, this Unhistories, but its makers play off of one another with surprising balance and offhanded, agile performance, salvaging what others might wreck with asymmetry.
After four albums, you’d think two-man-band The Black Keys would run out of ways to keep their drums-and-guitar formula from going stale. Perhaps this gritty Midwestern blues duo felt on the verge of a musical identity crisis–or maybe it was serendipity–but on their uncharacteristically eclectic fifth album Attack and Release, this low-fi duo enlisted production help from Brian “Dangermouse” Burton, of Gnarls Barkley and Beatles vs. Jay-Z mash-up Grey Album fame. This unlikely trio–who hooked up while working on Ike Turner’s comeback disc before his death in late 2007–has rejuvenated The Black Keys’ signature primal stomp with love-worn dirges like the banjo-laden porch ditty “Psychotic Girl”, which uncovers the evil ways of the female sex, and the morosely nostalgic “Things Ain’t Like They Used to Be” a song that mourns the end of a tumultuous romantic tryst. The Black Keys conjure their garage roots on the savage “I’ve Got Mine” and “Remember When (Side B)” with ferocious guitars and bombastic percussion that recall some of the best moments from Thickfreakness. A newly revamped sonic aesthetic and help from a superstar jam master, Attack and Release shows that for The Black Keys a little change may be a good thing.