Truth in Advertising

Album: Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience, 1992

Best Track: "Lost Horizons"

Lasting Memory: I spent a day in September 1992 building a bookcase in the backyard of the townhouse I was renting with four other guys. The weather was perfect, and the bookcase came out okay. I think a friend of mine still has that set of shelves. I must've heard "Hey Jealousy" played 13 times that day. And the song never wore out its welcome.

Looking back, I have to think it's a little incongruous to associate one of my few successful attempts at carpentry with a song from New Miserable Experience. Each of the 12 tracks on the Gin Blossoms' major-label debut is about drinking until your life is ruined or making an irreparable mistake in a romantic relationship. Most of the songs touch upon both themes.

New Miserable Experience, in short, is not a winners' album. It is not, by extension, an album for guys who build nice bookshelves.

But what else should listeners have expected? The band is named for a medical condition caused by chronic alcohol abuse. The album's title promises nothing promising, and any suspicion or hope that the phrase "new miserable experience" should be read with an implied wink and a nod is disabused by the first two verses and chorus of the first song on the first side of the album, "Lost Horizons":

The lost horizons I can see
Are filled with bars and factories
And in them all
We fight to stay awake

[Chorus]
Drink enough of anything
To make this world look new again
Drunk drunk drunk
In the gardens and the graves

She had nothing left to say
So she said she loved me
I stood there
Grateful for the lie

Throughout New Miserable Experience, the music is mostly upbeat. I would almost describe the auditory as "rollicking," but I'd never type a word like that. And you never read it here.

In contrast to the melodies, the lyrics are somber to the point of hopelessness.

Many bands employ this contrapuntal approach, of course. The Smiths come most immediately to mind in this regard. What sets the Gin Blossoms apart here is that there really is no humor, or even acceptance leading to accommodation, to be found. We can all laugh along with Morrissey when he delivers lyrics like "Spending warm summer days indoors/ Writing frightening verse/ To a buck-toothed girl/ from Luxembourg" or "I was looking for a job/ Then I found a job/ Heaven knows/ I'm misearable know," exactly what is one to do when confronted with the following chorus from the Gin Blossoms' "29"?

Some rides don't have much of a finish
That's the ride I took
Through good and bad
And straight through indifference
Without a second look

The short answer is, "Take the lyrics at face value."

The guy wrote wrote most of the songs for New Miserable Experience, Doug Hopkins, had been kicked out of the band for being a dysfunctional alcholic by the time the album got its national release. While Hopkins did not write "29,"--Gin Blossoms' guitarist Jess Venezuela did--the song captures Hopkins' mindset well. Hopkins committed suicide in December 1993. His humorlessness was no affectation, and he certainly laid out his problems for the world to hear over the course of a really remarkable album.

New Miserable Experience, then, is all art and no artiface. Shame that it took a young man's life, but it does deliver on what it advertises. The work of all bands and singers should do the same.

Fortunately, none of the other Gin Blossoms have had the misguided courage of Hopkins depressive convictions and are all alive and presumably well. Unfortunately, the band has become a county fair act. I wonder how songs like "Alison Road," being so essentially dark play as they are, play to nodding-off grandparents and 3-year-olds wired on cotton candy?

"So she fills up her sails with my whiskeyed breath." Indeed.

Up Next: The Godfathers, Birth, School, Work, Death, 1988

Who Could Possibly Object to This?

Posted without further comment (or permission from AP, but I'll take my chances), except to say that even Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptists trolls would probably not mind seeing this particular coupling:




In this May 15, 2008, file photo, Sharon Papo, left, and her partner Amber Weiss fill out paperwork as they apply for an appointment for a marriage license at the county clerks office at City Hall in San Francisco. In court papers submitted Thursday, May 22, 2008, a conservative legal group asked the California Supreme Court to stay its decision legalizing same-sex marriage until November, when voters are likely to encounter a ballot measure would amend the state's constitution to ban gay marriage.

(AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File)

Never Knew What You'd Get

Album: Galaxie 500, Today, 1991

Best Track: "Parking Lot"

Lasting Memory: Growing up, my friend Chris Gersh's dad owned a Galaxy 500. I have wanted that car ever since I first saw it in, oh, 1976. The men of Reverend Horton Heat, who tell an ex-wife that she can have everything but the car, seem to share my passion.

But my unrequited auto love was not the reason I picked up Galaxie 500's Today. Rather, I bought this album thinking that it would contain one of the great overlooked alterna-pop nuggets of the late 1980s.

Turns out, though, that "Love Crushing" was performed by Fetchin' Bones, a band that could not have been more different from Galaxie 500.

I don't consider myself burned, though. Today is plenty entertaining in its own right. Galaxie 500 never rocks here, but they do create and commit to a solid vibe that is equal parts melancholy and hopeful. "Tugboat" illustrates this seeming contradiction nicely, with its central lyrical message of, to paraphrase, "I don't want you to think of me as friend, I need you to think of me as someone you need."

Okay. I guess the vibe is more "ineffectual stalker," but it's still harmless and active rather than mopey. I'll take that over Joy Division or Elliott Smith any day.

Galaxie 500 didn't make the kind of music I was listening to and buying in the early 1990s, or at any other time, really. That's makes my kind of embarrassing mixup of them with Fetchin' Bones a happy mistake. If I'd been smarter or better informed, I never would have heard "Parking Lot." And that would've been a shame.

One of the things that I worry about with the remorseless rise of the Internet and the lingering-but-assured death of the full-length album and the mall record store is that people will have fewer and fewer opportunities to make happy mistakes. There is so much information just a mouse click away, that it has become almost impossible not to find what you're looking for. Also, since everyone will only buy singles anymore, there will be no reason for bands and singers to put together collections of related songs.

Last, the irony of the Internet is that it tends to narrow users' intellectual and aesthetic worlds rather than expand them. Hell, I just autoprogrammed my own "Uncle Tupelo" radion station on a Web site called Pandora. I could make a convincing case that no one loves Uncle Tupelo more than I do, but does anyone need to get "Punch Drunk" every day? Should one? Probably bad for the liver,. And, absolutely, such minimicro genre splicing concusses the artistic sensibilities.

Up Next: Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience, 1992

wORKING Musicians Work

Album: fIREHOSE, fROMOHIO, 1989

Best Track: "In My Mind"

Lasting Memory: I went to a fIREHOSE show in blacksburg in the spring of 1990. The venue was horrible, only about 20 people were in the audience, and the band played for almost three hours, giving it everything they had, like they were The Who at Leeds. I don't see enough live music anymore.

That's beside the point of this post, which is that love a band or hate a band, you should always be willing to respect honest effort. The fact that I liked fIREHOSE going into the gig at what was just an empty storefront with no stage in a strip mall that belonged to Virginia Tech helped me enjoy the show that particular evening, but I would have given hats off even if I had disliked the lads from just north of San Diego.

I'm posting short today because I'm back to putting in honest efforts of my own. I had my first complete weekend off from professional responsibilities in more than five months this past Saturday and Sunday and spent time hanging with family and very determinedly not turning on my computer. Felt good, but all play and no work make Ed a slack boy.

Very apt to the tangential threads poorly connected so far, and even fitting in with the Memorial Day vibe of this week, I sign off with "Riddle of the Eighties":

Yonder
Onward
Way beyond Navy housing--
The U.S.S. Townsend
Haunting me ...

Up Next: Galaxie 500, Today, 1991

Pig-Biting Mad

Last year's folding of the not-at-all-venerable Weekly World News left a huge hole in the anti-intellectual firmamet by silencing the voice of Ed Anger.

Mr. Anger was the editorial columnist for WWN, and he was often self-described as "pig-biting mad." His insight into what exactly was wrong with America and what needed to be done to fix said problem was nicely summed up in the title of his book Let's Pave the Stupid Rainforests & Give School Teachers Stun Guns: And Other Ways to Save America.

(Glen Beck and Michael Savage owe royalties, at the very least, for stealing Ed Anger's schtick.)

Well, today, and against all the better angels of my nature, I myself am pig-biting mad. What has put me in this frothingly porcine prandial frenzy is a two-part series of radio ads for Mcdonald's chicken breakfast biscuits that is in extremely heavy rotation in the southeastern Virginia market. I know this is a stupid thing to get apoplectic about, but read me out and see if you don't share at least a little bit of my ire.

See, the ads are premised on a dichotomy so false and a semiotics so insidious that the two logical linguistic fallacies combine with such force as to practically blow the top of head off.

In one version, a black man says, "I'm a city boy, but I love the South." In the other version, a black woman says, "I'm from the South, but I love the city." To scratch their respective itches, they go to McDonald's and eat chicken biscuits.

ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!

"The city" and "the South" are not comparable things; therefore, they cannot be set in opposition to each other. Miami, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Atlanta, and Charlotte are cities in the South.

Plus, since when does "South" mean "soul food," which is what this chicken biscuit obstensibly is? That's the damnablest part of the ad campaign. McDonald's and its advertising agency assume that radio listeners will hear the word "South" and think "poor, rural, and black." Why would anyone assume that? Why would anyone actually make that mental connection?

It would be different if McDonald's were introducing Frito Pie desserts or the Possum McRib sandwich (with the Armadillo McRib sandwich in the American Southwest). How about the Watermelon Milkshake? The Chitlin McNuggets? A Squab Breakfast Biscuit? But Jehosaphat! the company isn't even being that ingenuous.

Instead, McDonald's is actively creating, and concommitantly marketing to, a new stereotype: the black urban professional who wants to pretend to eat like a rural fieldworker.

I can't stop them, but I sure can get all Ed Angry on their ass.

Remember Talking 'Bout Remembering

Album: fIREHOSE, "if'n", 1987

Best Track: "Sometimes" (This was a tough call.)

Lasting Memory: I can still picture perfectly in my mind's eye the first time I heard the first song on the second side of this album. I was laying in bed and playing "if'n" on my combination alarm clock-tape player and thinking "For the Singer of REM" was just about the funniest and most musically blasphemous thing I had ever heard. Which I also thought at the time was truly saying something, coming as it was from a devoted fan of Dr. Demento.

I no longer think "For the Singer of REM" is all that transgressive, but 21 years ago, it was tough for me to wrap my mind around the concept of anyone criticizing R.E.M. in any way even if I could understand why this verse made sense:

Now you object to objects meaning more
Than some pathetic, lame aesthetic
Stolling Rone is famous for
Grab a firehose
Point it at the door
Get it all wet
Remember
Forget what rock 'n' roll is for

According to the members of fIREHOSE, rock 'n' roll was for rocking and, mostly, having fun. This makes eminent sense when it is kept in mind that the bassist and drummer for fIREHOSE were originally members of The Minutemen.

This legacy shines through most clearly on the song "Me & You Remembering":

Remember?
Me, at first, couldn't remember
Me & you talking, remember?
'Bout dick hell, remember?

Remember?
Remember me & you talking 'bout the time I couldn't remember
remembering?
Remember talking 'bout remembering 'bout dick hell, remember?
You remember,
I want to ... I do!

But now it's just you an me
Singing songs,
Singing 'bout ...
Madonna!?

We've all had conversation like that.

We've also all had the daydream-slash-waking-reality captured in the bittersweet--and available for download from CMT.com!--"Sometimes," whose first two verses and chorus run

Like a locomotive wheel
Feelings feel the real
Hearts are just bound to break

I'm off and on my way,
Rolling night and day--
highway been calling my name!

[Chorus]
Although sometines
(Almost always)
You know sometimes:
I reamain

A surprisingly complete downloadable fIREHOSE discographys can be found on Rhapsody, so I spare you all the rest of the direct links, but other standout songs on "if'n" include "Honey, Please," "Anger," and "In Memory of Elizabeth Cotton." Check 'em out. You won't be disppointed.

Up Next: fIREHOSE, "fROMOHIO", 1989

If You're Gonna Steal From Someone

Album: Flat Duo Jets, In Stereo, 1992 reissue

Best Track: "Riot in Cell Block No. 9"

Lasting Memory: When I played this cassette Friday, I was shocked to discover that it wasn't an all-instrumental affair. I would've have sworn up until that point that it was, but only because when I saw Flat Duo Jets open for Reverend Horton Heat at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club in, I guess, 2003, FDJ didn't sing a word during their 30-minute set. Odd, and also proof that I haven't listened to In Stereo very often since I pulled it from a 3-for-$5 bin somewhere.

I realize what I I've just described is a lasting misimpression rather than a lasting memory, but that is apt in the case of In Stereo because the ablum, while perfectly servicable as a collection of traditional rockabilly, is pretty forgettable as an artistic product. In fact, the only reason I'm tagging "Riot" as the best song from the ablum (a six-song maxi-EP, really) is because it is the only song I can remember anything about while typing up this blog post 32 hours after giving In Stereo a play.

The only reason "Riot" proves memorable, though, is because it is a rockabilly standard. A partial list of people who have performed it to greater and lesser acclaim over the past half century includes Wee Willie Harris (1958) Johnny Cash (1962), Dr. Feelgood (1979), and The Blues Brothers (1983). I don't know who Dr. Feelgood is/was, either, but here's a video of that early British punk band for the curious.

This seems to be the FDJ take on "Riot." I'm getting a new computer delivered sometime this week, but for the purposes of this post, I still don't have sound on my computer.

If you clicked on the FDJ link, you'll probably hear what I'm writing about when I mention that the band is fine but unimpressive -- in the sense that they largely fail to make an impression. The playing is profecient, the singing has genuine emotion, and the band would have been right at home in the Sun Records stable of the late 1950s.

That last bit of genuine praise also points directly to FDJ's Achilles' heel. FDJ, performing and recording the mid-1980s, sounded so much like so many bands from the 1950s that there is really no point or particular reward in listening to the latter-day product. Which is kind of shame because, again, FDJ was good at mimicking. They just weren't good at contemporizing.

Think of Stray Cats. Brian Setzer, Slim Jim Phantom, and Lee Rocker stole every note and beat and lyric they ever played and sang, but they also used what were then cutting-edge studio tricks and new media like MTV to make Built for Speed a deservedly huge hit that added to, rather than simply reproduced, a long-extent subgenre of popular music.

Think also of Reverend Horton Heat. Everyone should always be thinking about the Rev at some level.

Unlike those contemporaries, FDJ opted for revenance over revision or revolution. Too bad, really. But at least FDJ made themselves into the very image of their influences. Call it "homage" because "aping" is an ugly word, and because FDJ lead guitarist Dex (full name from liner notes: John Michael Dexter Romweber) wrote on the album sleeve (cassette jacket?) "We'd have parties where I'd drink a whole bottle of red wine while we listened to Gene Vincent, Ritchie Valens, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, The Cramps, Ronnie Dove, and The Coasters" (emphasis in original).

In conclusion, then, I'll give FDJ points for skill and honesty, subtract one point for pretentious liner notes content and formatting, and then I'll file In Stereo away again for possible future rediscovery and reassessment.

Up Next: fIREHOUSE, "if'n", 1987

Early Indications of Uncoolness

Album: The Feelies, Only Life, 1988

Best Track: "The Undertow"

Lasting Memory: Yesterday, I spent a majority of my post bemoaning my 1999 realization that I wasn't exactly the musical maverick I imagined myself to be. Truth to tell, that particular moment of clarity should have occurred in the spring of 1991.

That earlier period is when I had the following converstion with one of the cooks at Buddy's Restaraunt, where I was waiting tables and doing regular stand up gigs.

Mise-en-scène: A Tuesday or Wednesday night around 9 pm. The place is almost completely empty, except for a hippie duo on stage who are absolutely murdering "What's Goes On."

Me: Man, if The Feelies could hear what those two are doing to their song, they'd just about die.

The Cook: Like how The Grateful Dead must fell when they hear The Feelies' cover.

Me:

The Cook: You gotta learn this stuff, man.

Me: Yeah, but these guys on stage still suck.

And the worst part about this converstion is that the song was originally written by Lou Reed and recorded by The Velvet Underground. The exchange between me and the cook surpassed simple musical ignorance to become something truly pure and beautiful in its lack of reliable information. A White House press secretary couldn't have done any better.

I wish I could say I was smarter now or that I wasn't able to think up probably a hundred other times when I was caught talking out of the side of my neck, but I won't commit either of those particular lies to virtual print.

What I can say with absolute certainly is that Only Life is one of the best albums of the 1980s. It rocks, and it rolls, and it even holds up your lighter for you during the slower moments so you have both hands free to operate the bong or crack a fresh beer. (Well, I had to lie about something. Didn't I?)

Why a song like "Away" wasn't a smash hit is one of those damnable mysteries. Why another song like "Deep Fascination" didn't, um, fascinate nearly everyone is more than a shame.

There is no filler on Only Life, but for no reason I could really say, my favorite track on the album is "Undertow." Feel free to sing along in your best Lou Reed meets the Grateful Dead impression; at least the confusion of me and the cook was understandable. I call that the first step toward forgivable.

Bring back the innocent lords
It may be later than you think
There's new places to explore
But the old ones return tomorrow
Lines are forming all around
Hear them cry out above our heads
Divide the years apart
The passive grumble like a shell

I'm the intended, hear the call
Try to be careful and I don't know why
One hundred years, maybe more
I'm the intended and I don't mind it

Waiting patiently
Walk over to the window
Then you look away
Can't see no accidents
Waiting endlessly
It will be easier and
We will be together
Just another test
Like any other test

I'm the intended, hear the call
Try to be careful and I don't know why
One hundred years, maybe more
I'm the intended and I don't mind at all

And it all comes down
As you wait for the dream
You've known all along
But you're waiting alone
For the moment to come
And you hear them call
And you hear them call
And you're waiting alone

Up Next: Flat Duo Jets, In Stereo, 1992

This Day in the History of Learning You're Not All That Cool After All

Album: The Feelies, The Good Earth, 1986

Best Track: "Two Rooms"

Lasting Memory: Sometime during the late spring or early summer of 1999, I heard this album being played very loudly in my very own house. But I wasn't the person playing it.

My housemate Rob (I think that was/is his name; I try to block out most of that group house experience) was the spinner of this cassette on that day--the day my music cred died.

See, Rob (again, if that was his name) was not the kind of person who owned or listened to no-fi post punk albums by bands like The Feelies and Firehose and Guided By Voices. And, yet, even though he was a Chicago Bears-loving, Illinois-born second-generation Serbian mortgage broker who looked a lot like a heavyset Peter Lorre, he was also a Feelies fan. Go figure.

In a way, the shredding of my musical ego was liberating. I was at that very moment freed from what had always been a very poor-fitting hipster straightjacket and let to run wild plugging dollar after dollar into dive bar jukeboxes to hear Boz Scaggs' "Lido Shuffle" and Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman." (You know you want to click. Don't fight it. I'll wait.)

So that was all to the good.

The downside of learning that I was nowhere as cool or unique in my musical tastes as I would have liked to have been was that I no longer had much reason to work at stretching my musical horizons. I've acquired very little new music since 1999-2000, and I suspect that in a very small, very subconcious way, learning that (for-the-sake-of-this-post-at-least) Rob was as cool musically as I was is part of the reason for that.

Of late, I been listening to a lot more new music, thanks mostly to the digital musical channels on my cable TV package. Streams that I highly recommend are Music Choice Americana, Music Choice Bluegrass, Urge Radio Americana, Urge Radio Cover to Cover, Urge Radio Wide Open Country, and Urge Radio Acoustic Chill. The online Urge channel are subscription-only, dang it.

Yes. Rock is mostly too loud for me these days, and I am getting too old. 'Course this "La Grange" playing on my radio as I type is still okay by me.

The Feelies are also still all right by me. The band sounds cool, which I can appreciate even if I'm not a person in that category.

Like I typed above, though, The Good Earth is a strictly no-fi affair. All the songs have titles on the cassette isert, and they all also presumably have lyrics. Forced to reproduce those song titles and lyrics based only on my listening experience, I'd have to go with multiple variations and combinations of "aaaahnnAHNaaaa," "laaAAAAnnnn," and "ghghghghgh." Henry Higgins would have had a field with these guys.

He may have. Tomorrow's featured album treats listeners to a much more elocutious Feelies. The kids play their instruments better, too.

Up Next: The Feelies, Only Life, 1988

To Expect Is to Be Disappointed

Album: Mark Erelli, Untitled EP, ca. 1993

Best Track: "So Lonely" (I figure that's the name, anyway)

Lasting Memory: As I wrote about 10 days ago, my then-roommate Toby dubbed this EP for me because he was a friend and former classmate of Mark Erelli's at Bates College. I may have also mentioned that Toby taught Erelli how to play actual songs on a guitar. I'm too lazy to check, but this my bit of the multiverse, and I'll repeat myself if I want to.

Truly, the pupil surpasses the teacher, but since Toby is on the tenure track in science education at UC-Davis and Erelli is paying the bills as a working folkie, I'll score their lives a draw for now. Certianly, their respective career paths prove that Toby is a good teacher and Erelli is a good student.

But that's not the lasting memory in any event. What I most always have in mind when I think of this homemade cassette is how I didn't think about it for probably 7 years until I moved from DC back to Virginia Beach.

I was given it, I played it, I filed it, and completely forgot I even had it until I was sorting through things for the big re-lo --to throw in some obnoxiuos realtor slang that shows up in a lot of crossword puzzles.

Having rediscovered the cassette, which also holds Greg Brown's Dream Cafe and a CD-single of R.E.M.'s "Near Wild Heaven," I slipped it into my boom box not really knowing what to expect, and I was very pleased with the sounds produced.

Revisiting this piece of magnetized plastic over the weekend, I was less pleased, but only because what I thought was, and remembered as being, the great lost Mark Erelli EP was only one and three-quarters worth of songs. Dagnabit.

But that's what I get for expecting more. Nothing is ever the way you think it's going to be. When I expected nothing, I was happy with what I received. When I expected something: DISAPPOINTED!

The upshot is that I have little to report on Erelli because I don't have enough of his music in my collection to go on.

So while I practice my Zen desirelessness and wait only a few days before posting another entry, you all enjoy this randomly selected sample of Erelli's music.

I wanted to be desireless so frickin' bad ....

Up Next: The Feelies, The Good Earth, 1986