Why Can't You Play Something Nice for Once?

Album: Hüsker Dü, The Living End, 1994

Best Track: "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker"

Lasting Memory: Hüsker Dü's The Living End is the last prerecorded audio cassette I ever purchased. This bit of autobiographic minutia coincidences nicely with the biographic fact that The Living End is Hüsker Dü's final album. It was released seven years after the band disbanded, and it documents the final month of their final tour. That's a lot of lasts.

I bought The Living End because it seemed to me that I had a huge hole in my music collection. Ask just about any alternative band who released an album between 1982 and today to list their influences, and Hüsker Dü is likely to be mentioned sooner rather than later. I figured I had to hear for myself what was so special about these three guys from Minneapolis.

To be honest, I don't hear the specialness. Songs like "Friend, You've Got to Fall" definitely rock. And others like "Celebrated Summer" even roll. There's humor enough to be found in a "Books About UFOs," and I suppose I can wrap my mind around how some folks could interpret "New Day Rising" as being anthemic, but I would never go so far as to describe listening to Hüsker Dü as inspiring, transformational, or even consistently enjoyable. The melodies are too discordant for my tastes, and I know that if I were a musician, I wouldn't want to sound like Hüsker Dü.

I'm sure I'm missing something, and I readily admit that my personal taste doesn't dictate whether a band is great or not. And, certainly, if 99 out of 100 actual musicians say Hüsker Dü is seminal, they're seminal.

I will offer in defense of my position only this: The best song on The Living End is Hüsker Dü's show-closing encore cover of the Ramones' "Sheena I a Punk Rocker." The reason the Ramones were so great is that they were playing pop songs. Those songs came out fast and sloppy because the Ramones were not especially talented or imaginative musicians. The reason Hüsker Dü is an acquired taste is because they were very self-consciously not playing pop songs. They set out to play music best characterized as "loud fast rules." The phrase was coined by somebody to describe most of the Minneapolis college rock scene in the early and mid-1980s -- a scene that gave also gave rise to The Replacements (who didn't really play all that fast) and to Soul Asylum. What happens when a band sets out to record a punk song is that they consider exercising the craft of "playing something nice" to be counterproductive.

It may well be that, as diehard Hüsker Dü fans claim, lead guitarist and singer Bob Mould was playing the most amazing arpeggios and filigrees under all that distortion and that vocalist/drummer Grant Hart was laying down the most impressive fills this side of Gene Krupa. But what can that matter if the listener can't actually hear any of that?*

After Hüsker Dü broke up, Bob Mould went on to have a stellar decade as a solo artist and as the driving force behind the band Sugar. The key to his success was that he turned down the fuzztones and let his songcraft be audible.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Up Next: Indigo Girls, Indigo Girls, 1989

* Hüsker Dü's bassist was Greg Norton. He may have been great, too.

From the Annals of Oblivious Obviousness

The post on Hüsker Dü's swansong live album, The Living End, will have to wait for another day while I come to terms with a shocking new research finding.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have found that "when people thought their earnings were below a certain standard, they were more prone to take [financial] risks." In particular, poor people are more likely to purchase lottery tickets than are affluent people, according to some simulations. This is truly shocking to me, but absolutely not in the way the researchers undoubtedly intended and not least because the researchers defined "poor" as having an annual income of less than $100,000.

I did not make this up. The worst part of this is that I don't even know where to begin mocking Professor George Loewenstein and his colleagues.

I'll spin the wheel and start by asking, "In what version of America is 'anything less than a hundred grand a year' considered poor?" Most college professors don't make that kind of money, and damn sure hell none of the graduate students who actually collected the data and ran the equations for the lotto study do. Using $100,000 as the boundary between affluence and abjectness indicates how out of touch with reality the researchers are.

Another screaming beacon of the researchers' obliviousness is that they would consider it noteworthy that people who are not rich buy lottery tickets. How could they not already know that people who are not well off wish to become well off?

I'm reminded of a special seminar I attended when I was a first-year graduate student. I had just spent the previous year working a succession of temporary, minimum-wage, hard-labor jobs on construction site and in warehouses and factories. The woman giving the seminar had just published a book about her interviews with minimum wage workers. She opened with a "joke" about how happy it made one group of workers to get a pizza party after exceeding a monthly production goal. "Isn't it horrible how they could be so motivated by something so insignificant," the woman asked rhetorically.

"Christ! You're an idiot," I replied as I kicked over my chair and stomped out of the room.

To state the reality of reality very simply, and with the expenditure of no research dollars or the killing of any trees, when folks ain't got, they want. If someone who usually goes without lunch gets a free one, you bet your ass he'll be happy about it. In the same vein, someone who has two bucks left over after buying the week's groceries and paying off the most urgent bills can easily be excused for betting those two dollars against the chance of winning wealth she can't even really imagine.

Which brings me to truly idiotic piece of Loewenstein's et al.'s pointless research. According to Reuters, the group determined that people who earned less than $100,000 per year "bought 1.27 lottery tickets compared to 0.67 by people who earned more." Leaving the news service's atrocious grammar aside, note that rich people do play the lotto. Aren't they the people who are being, as Loewenstein accuses the non-wealthy of being, "somewhat perverse since every time you buy a lottery ticket, it's the equivalent of burning money." I mean if a person is already financially secure, he would be much better served by saving, investing, or spending on luxuries any money left over after he met his obligations.

A poor person who purchases exactly one more lottery ticket than a rich person (double .67 is actually a little more than 1.27, but close enough), at least has the excuse of betting on hope. The rich person, if he or she spends any money on lottery tickets, is being frivolous at best and greedy at worst.

As for myself, I'm like that guy in the Too Much Joy song. "I'm neither hungry, or poor/ But I'm rarely satisfied." At the same time, and by the same band, "I've never met the poor/ But all my friends are broke."

I buy Mega Millions tickets when the jackpot goes over $100 million. I have the income to dispose, and I won $11 on my last three rounds of buying a total of $25 worth of numbers. I'll call $14 a fair trade for the time I spent daydreaming about how I'd spend the jackpot. Maybe next time, Academy of Hope.

You Say Pot-ta-toe, I Say STFU

Album: House of Pain, House of Pain (Fine Malt Lyrics), 1992

Best Track: "Jump Around"

Lasting Memory: Before yesterday, the last time I listened to House of Pain's debut album was in the winter of 1994. I very vividly recall having this in the in-dash cassette player of my 1984 Suburu hatchback while driving home from my swing shift (3 pm to midnight) at the paper factory in Radford. Interstate 81 -- fairly mountainous in the stretch between Radford and Blacksburg -- was starting to ice over because even though the air temperature was something like minus-4 Fahrenheit, it was raining. Instead of thinking, "How am I going to get off this highway alive?" all I could think was "Why did I steal this tape from brother?! This suuuuucks!!!"

Fourteen years of perspective later, and from a safe and temperate perch in my home office, I can confirm that House of Pain (Fine Malt Lyrics) is a truly terrible album. I can also disclose that I took the tape from James without asking because I really, really liked the song "Jump Around." I still like it, and I make no apologies.

How I did manage to get home without incident that one night, I'll never know.

Even back when the band was new, it should have been easy to tell that House of Pain would be less than good because their whole act was a lame gimmick from the words "Erin go bragh." Any hope that the gimmick of an Irish American rap group would pay off died with the release of the second single from House of Pain, "Top O' The Morning To Ya'"

She won't come, just when you want it
Ya see, I'm Irish, but I'm not a leprechaun
You wanna fight, then step up and we'll get it on
You gotta right to the grill, I'm white and I ill
A descendant of Dublin with titanic skill
I ducked and I swing, next thing your jaw's broken
Punk I ain't jokin', you can bet you'll be chokin'
On a fist full a nothin', meanwhile I'll be puffin'
On a fat blunt, run punk, you don't know the half
Tryin' to talk shit, man, please don't make me laugh
These Irish eyes are smilin', I'm buckwildin'
The House Of Pain is pumpin', start jumpin'
Freak it, funk it, back seat junk it
If you can't get with it, you'll wind up sweatin' it
Then you'll get a beatin' just like an egg
It's so hard to run when you've got a broken leg
But we can have a run off, the House Of Pain'll come off
We got the cake that you're tryin' to get a crumb off
The Irish stylee, the Celtic jazz
No one has it, just us that's it
If you try to take it, I got a big shillelagh
I don't have dreads cause I shave my head daily
You call me a skin head, I call you a pin head
Yo, where you been man, just like the tin man
You got no heart, here comes the good part
I pick 'em, buck 'em, cut 'em up, and buck them down
No fuckin' around
Home boy ya get clown like Krusty, trust me
You shouldn't play, and by the way
Top o' the mornin' to ya

[Chorus]
(What's the hassle man?) Top o' the mornin' to ya [2x]
(Hey, are you givin' us a hassle man?)

And then it gets stupid.

If you're going to do shtick in addition to playing and singing, you either have have to be damned good at it, or so committed that the irony could be missed while the product is enjoyed. House of Pain was neither, although lead MC Everlast managed to rehabilitate himself somewhat by changing genres.

I suppose that what I'm getting at is that just about everybody enjoys a good novelty song every now and then, but the act gets stale very quickly.

Up Next: Hüsker Dü, The Living End, 1994

Southern Discomfort Sounds Pretty Good

Album: House of Freaks, Tantilla, 1989

Best Track: "Big Houses"

Lasting Memory: I taped Tantilla from a friend of a friend named Steve. I got to know Steve pretty well even though he never became an actual friend of mine. You see, Steve and I and my very good friend Dave all shared a bed at a Panama City, Florida, Day's Inn for a week in late March 1991.

It was Spring Break. A total of six people were official residents of the room. I believe the highest occupancy of sleeping/passed-out college kids was 10.

It was a fun trip because of its extracurricular nature, but Panama City -- the "Redneck Riviera" immortalized in song by the inimitable Tom T. Hall -- is the very opposite of a place you'd want to spend a week even if you have your own bed.

I've always gotten the impression that House of Freaks felt this way about their hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Certainly on Tantilla, guitarist Bryan Harvey and drummer Johnny Hott give repeated voice to the mixed blessing of being the latest bearers of and contributors to the heritage of the Old Dominion.

As you can hear here, Harvey and Hott sway in the breeze like the "Family Tree" while being unable to decide whether they or you-know-Who actually deserves to lay claim to the title of the "King of Kings." They question the exact value of "White Folks' Blood" and warn about "When the Hammer Comes Down," which will mean "The Righteous Will Fall." And even as "The World of Tomorrow" looms, threatening to destroy everything they have come to know, they scream into the gathering clouds, "I Want Answers" -- mostly about the past and why they know everything they currently know.

All of these threads come together in the campfire Confederacy sing-along "Big Houses":

Through the tears and smoke I remember
The fields of green where I'm bound
How peaceful and blessed was this great white home
'Til the bluecoats burned it to the ground

Master, mistress, sons and daughters
Field hands and foremen gather 'round
Together, we sang of love and peace
While the walls of our world came tumbling down

[Chorus]
Living in the shadow of big houses
From the cradle to the grave, I'll bravely stand
All across this land
Every woman, every man
Like pillars of stone, brother stand

....

Look away, look away
To the place of our big houses
Their burning walls of fire
Look away, look away
To the place of our big houses
Look away, look away

....

A band I pull from my finger
For the cause of fools never dies
The face of glory lies down in the mud
And the casket train's a'rolling by

All us Virginians are at the House of Freaks' campfire whether we want to be or not.

The duo's Wikipedia entry places House of Freaks in the Southern Gothic tradition of artists like Flannery O'Connor. I wholeheartedly endorse this categorization, and I will add that a lot of the songs on Tantilla sound like long-lost first British Invasion gems played by Guadalcanal Diary.

While definitely underappreciated in their day, House of Freaks played a seminal role in the alt-country movement that hit its full stride in the mid-1990s. Drive by Truckers were both friends and fans, and they recorded 'Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife" as a tribute to Harvey and his family, who were murdered on new Year's Day 2006. Legacies are what the South is all about.

Up Next: House of Pain, House of Pain (Fine Malt Lyrics), 1992

Absolutely the Next Something

Album: Hothouse Flowers, People, 1988

Best Track: "Hallelujah Jordan"

Lasting Memory: I received this album from my sister Clair for either my birthday or Christmas in 1988. It was a well-informed choice, as I was definitely very much into the Celtic-tinged rock n' roll the Hothouse Flowers had to offer. It was also a very cool choice because, as my memory served to tell me, HHF had been tagged with the label of Greatest Unsigned Band in the World.

Two minutes of research preparatory to this post proved my memory wrong, which I suppose makes my memory a poor servant. That bastard.

The truth of the history is that HHF were signed to PolyGram in 1988, and the band had all the support it could ever want from fellow Irishman Bono. Still, I definitely appreciated getting People as a gift. The buzz around it was huge. I was cool just for holding it in my hot little hands.

With that kind of expectation, of course, how could People help but disappoint? There is nothing particularly wrong with the album, but it does manage to fail on the whole by overachieving in its parts. That is, each note played, sung, and arranged is well played, well sung, and well arranged. But when each of the notes are listened to at the same time, they create more noise than art.

I suppose it would accurate to write that People's problem is that it is overproduced. That is certainly true, but the statement fails as a global critique because it does not fully capture how the album stands as a monument to lack of imagination. Or, more specifically, how it stands as a monument to taking one good idea of how to craft a pop song -- start quiet and slow, build volume and speed through the verses, and end at the acme of a crescendo -- and beating it into the ground. To get a sense of how too much of this good thing becomes an unwelcome thing after a couple of songs, click through some of these People song samples.

The formula absolutely does work a couple of times. Apparently, HHF had a pretty big hit in Europe with "Don't Go," and the song "Hallelujah Jordan" is a great, slow-burning rafter-shaker. I just would have liked to hear some countersinking of screws, or even some tongue-and-grooving, instead of only the hammering HHF does on People.

I learned today that HHF is still a touring band. In the interest of learning whether the band had lived up to the "next big thing" label I thought they held at one time, I sampled a few of the songs from the albums that followed People. I gave HHF the benefit of the doubt. Since I'm not omniscient -- yet -- it could have happened that the band did become the next big thing without me noticing. Sadly, no.

That raises an age-old question about rock bands that peak with their first album: Was the debut the best they had to offer, or did the weight of expectations and the distractions of early success lead to repetition rather than growth? No one has ever adequately answered that question in the abstract or the particular. I'll put my mind to it once I am endowed with that omniscience. I don't know when that ill be, though. I'm not psychic, either.

Up Next: House of Freaks, Tantilla, 1989

Taps for an American Icon

I'm late to the wake on this item, but exactly how much does it suck that Anheuser-Busch is being bought out by InBev?

Or to restate the question in more than appropriate terms, how much Budweiser will I have to drink until I no longer care that the King of Beers is now a chap named Albert II?

I suspect the answer is infinity-plus-one. Not that I'll be drinking any more Bud for a while. I feel too betrayed.

"Betrayal" may be too strong a word and an emotion. After all, it's just business. And $52 billion would be tough to turn down.

Logic has no place in this discussion, though. Just ask the St. Louisan quoted at the beginning of the linked article who remarked, "“We were betrayed. The good Lord was sold out for 30 pieces of silver. We were sold out for $70 a share.”

A-B was the quintessence of an American success story, from its origins as a corner tavern peddling a recipe and label stolen from some Czechs to it's frog-themed television ads.

In between those cultural touchstones, the Busch family did everything a family business was supposed to do to become successful. They hired the world's best brewers -- veritable magicians who were able to produce an identical-tasting product whether they were working in Williamsburg, Virginia, of Jakarta, Indonesia. They perfected systems of refrigerated distribution for a product that hadn't travelled well for millennia. They made a product that became such an icon that when people around the world think about what kind of alcohol Americans drink, those people think about Budweiser. Just like someone would think about Guinness and the Irish, of Scotch and the Scots, or kumis and the Turkmen and Kazhaks.

It's worth noting for the sake of this post, of course, that Guinness is now wholly owned by the British company Diageo. Pernod owns The Glenlivet. Nobody owns any kumis distilleries because ... well because kumis is fermented horse milk.

Knowing that the sale of A-B and its signature brand were probably inevitable provides no comfort. Misery hates company (and presumably kumis).

What rankles more than just about anything with the A-B sale is that the company's board was dead set against an InBev takeover when the offer was $46 billion. Everyone has a price, but is there that much of a difference between 46 and 52? It's like the difference between just leaving the money on the nightstand and actually walking down to the front desk to call the lady a cab. A nice gesture, but the transaction remains what it was.

What rankles most about the A-B sale is that it leaves avid beer consumers with few everyday options for expressing our displeasure by keeping our money out of the pockets of the executives of the conglomerate soon to be known as Anheuser-Busch Inbev (just rolls off the tongue, don't it?). The list of brands brewed and/or distributed by the merging companies runs to more than 150. Here are a just few: Bacardi malt beverages, Bohemia, the Bud family, the Busch family, Grolsch, King Cobra, Michelob, Bass, Beck's, Boddington's, Hoegarten, Jupiler, Kirin, Lowenbrau, Red Hook, Quilmes, Rolling Rock, Stella Artois, Tiger, and Widmer.

Switch to Miller or Coors? Not a chance. See, those companies just merged their own selves, taking South African megabrewer SAB in tow.

It's enough to make a man build his own still in his back yard. He'd have to figure it would only be a matter of months before SABMillerCoors Anheuser-Busch InBev Diageo Pernod came around talking buyout. Neil Young got it a long time ago. Clapton, not so much.

P.S. I know this rant is all over the place. It is a rant. Still, I got to this point, and I was going to go back and bring some coherence to the proceedings. Before I could start wiping the flecks of spittle from my laptop screen, though, this song started playing on my Internet radio station. I started laughing and didn't have the blackened heart necessary to screed it up any longer. Maybe tomorrow, I'll just chuck it all and go down to the YWCA and inquire after a position as a back-scrubber.

Every Misstep Tells a Story, Don't It?

Album: Hoodoo Gurus, Magnum Cum Louder, 1989

Best Track: "Baby Can Dance (Pts. II-IV)"

Lasting Memory: Disappointment upon the first play in 1989 or 1990. Disappointment that the wheels had come off for a good to potentially great band.

But then I listened to this cassette a couple of times this past Thursday. and then I listened to it again a couple of times this morning.

I realized my disappointment had been misplaced and that my nearly 20-years-ago decision to consign Magnum Cum Louder to hardly ever played category of my tapes collection was unfair to both the Hoodoo Gurus and to myself.

I've spent most of my past two posts complaining about the weakness of the Hoodoo Gurus' filler material and about the very fact that any bands felt compelled to put filler material on their albums. I'll probably reair those laments multiple time over the course of this blog, even though I know it's pointless to do so.

What giving Magnum a fair hearing taught me is that for a good band, what plays as filler on one album can prove to have been a learning experience on a later album. All but two of the songs on Magnum sound just like or just like much better versions of songs on earlier Hoodoo Gurus' albums.

I won't belabor the point, but I'll link to the examples of "Another World," "Hallucination," and "Death in the Afternoon," which are all vast improvements on earlier attempts at such material.

The first moral I need to draw from this is that talented musicians know more about their own music than I do and that I should trust them a little more to be going somewhere worthwhile with an experiment or departure from form that I don't immediately appreciate.

I will continue to ignore that moral, but at least I know that I should know it. That'll buy me three minutes off my sentence in Purgutory listening to the Wilco discography. (I know I should appreciate their work, but I just can't stand Wilco.)

The second moral I need to take to heart is that experimentation can sometimes pay off in huge ways. The two songs on Magnum that sound like nothing the band had previously recorded are also far and away the best songs on Magnum. "Where's That Hit?" really should have been one instead of just a jokey complaint.

And "Baby Can Dance (Pts. II-IV)" is just great. (How's that for insightful critique. Maybe it's enough to write that Wilco would never record such a song.)

Up Next: Hothouse Flowers, People, 1988

Too Long by Half

Album: Hoodoo Gurus, Blow Your Cool, 1987

Best Track: "What's My Scene"

Lasting Memory: I fought liking the Hoodoo Gurus for months after first hearing them in 1987 because every time I heard this album, it was the end of wrestling practice, and me and my teammates were either running endless laps around the mat or doing running-in-place jumping jacks.

Our coach was a fan of the band, and he had Blow Your Cool cued up at the end of pretty much every practice. The end of every practice sucked, so, therefore, the Hoodoo Gurus must have sucked.

Except they didn't. The Hoodoo Gurus actually kicked a lot of musical ass -- for a total of 13 songs, at least.

The first side of Blow Your Cool features five great rock songs. "Out That Door" segues into "What's My Scene," which is followed -- after a one-song interlude of just-okayness -- by "I Was the One," "Hell for Leather," and "Where Nowhere Is."

The less said about the songs on the second side of the album, the better. I wrote in my last post about how the Hoodoo Gurus recorded and released eight good songs on the 10-track Mars Needs Guitars. On Blow Your Cool, the band produced an EP's worth of great songs and a second EP's worth of filler.

I'm probably being too harsh in my criticism, but a song like "My Caravan" really never should have performed by anyone. That it is a song by a band obviously capable of much better work is disappointing. But an album needs to be album length, right?

The All Music Guide has this to say about Blow Your Cool:

For the Hoodoo Gurus' third album, the group's American record label was hoping the band could come up with something a bit easier to market than the witty,
'60s-obsessed pop/rock of Stoneage Romeos and Mars Needs
Guitars. ... As a result, Blow Your Cool is the least idiosyncratic album in the Hoodoo Gurus' catalog and doesn't reflect the sneaky wit or goofy charm that won them many of their early fans. ... Blow Your Cool is in some respects a compromised Hoodoo Gurus album, but it's strong enough to prove that these guys could make a worthwhile album even while playing by someone else's rules.

I couldn't write it any better, hence the quote.

Up Next: Hoodoo Gurus, Magnum Cum Louder, 1989

Catching Lightning in a Foster's Can

Album: Hoodoo Gurus, Mars Needs Guitars!, 1985
Best Track: "Hayride to Hell"

Lasting Memory: Until I discovered Uncle Tupelo and began working my way backward and forwards and sideways through traditional American bluegrass and folk music -- which explorations are only sporadically reflected in my music collection, oddly enough -- I had two favorite country tunes of all time.

The first was, and probably still is, Marty Robbins' "El Paso." Really. I love that song. Shut up.

My second all-time favorite country song was the Hoodoo Gurus' "Hayride to Hell." The two songs have quite a bit in common, it turns out, starting with an illicit romance, plenty of justifiable emotional and physical violence, and bad endings for pretty much everyone involved. The melodies are also pretty similar. (H/T Crankypants blog)

The Hoodoo Gurus were not a country band, of course, but they could have recorded a disco track or a polka number in 1984-1985, and it would have turned into a whole bunch of people's favorite song. In that two-year period, the lads steadily improved their songwriting and musicianship throughout all of Stoneage Romeos and 80 percent of Mars Needs Guitars! while continuing to mine the deep vein of unrequited and broken love on songs like "Bittersweet," "Poison Pen," and "The Other Side of Paradise."

Truly, the band could do no wrong. Until it did. The final two songs on Mars are every bit as weak as their album mates are strong. The most jarring thing about the drop-off in quality is how precipitous it is as "Poison Pen" gives way to the regrettable title track. It also always struck me as strange that the two worst songs on the album are also the two at the end. Thinking about this now, I have to figure that the band was basically telling its label, "You want a ninth and a tenth song? Fine, here're are a ninth and a tenth!"

Admittedly, the album era was unkind to a majority of artists. Nearly every disk produced by every artist between the years of 1980 and 2000 -- the years when singles stopped selling and before digital downloads were an option -- contained more filler songs than hits. Also, no band can be at the absolute top of its game all of the time. The problem with catching lightning in a bottle, as the Hoodoo Gurus had, is that you end up with burnt fingers.

But the Hoodoo Gurus were doing so much good work, I have to wonder why they didn't just put out Mars with eight winners. The question will loom larger in my next post.

Up Next: Hoodoo Gurus. Blow Your Cool, 1987

Pop, Rocks!

Album: Hoodoo Gurus, Stoneage Romeos, 1984

Best Track: "I Want You Back"

Lasting Memory: This one time -- oh, my God. This one time, when I was heading back up to Tech from Virginia Beach with my roommate Barry, Barry was driving, and he took 64 through downtown Richmond 'stead of the Beltway 'cause he needed gas and stuff. But it was Sunday morning, right, and this one gas station that he, like, knew was closed. So we drove 'round looking for a place that was open, and we got lost. I mean, we wound up in this reallllly bad part of town, and Barry finally pulled over to ask this chick for directions. But -- I swear to God -- the chick was a prostitute, and her pimp got mad at us us for wasting her time. We we were so freakin' scared!

Stoneage Romeos was playing on the car's cassette deck the whole time.

The story is true. I tell it in breathless Southern American suburban white teenspeak in homage to its soundtrack, which perfectly blends pop lyrics about love sought and lost with not-quite-punk power chords. Being as that is what the album is, it is perfectly titled as Stoneage Romeos.

From the very first note note of the album's first track, "I Want You Back," to the final line of the album's last track, "My Girl" -- which runs "My girl don't love me at all/ Anymore./ Not at all. -- you know you're in for a rocking, pimple-pussed and angst-filled good time.

What American listeners such as myself probably weren't expecting when they first heard Stoneage Romeos are all the metaphorical uses of World War II Japan. While it is undeniably true that "Tojo" never did make it Darwin and that some unfortunates were briefly able to claim in all honesty "I Was A Kamikaze Pilot," who would ever expect those verities to be employed as descriptions of failed relationships?

The only explanation I can assert is that the Hoodoo Gurus are from Australia, which was very nearly invaded by Imperial Japan. That would be like how us Americans are still trying to calm ourselves after being threatened by Grenada and Nicaragua in the 1980s. October 25, 1983, is a date that shall live in infamy.

"Infamy" means "not famous," doesn't it?

Up Next: Hoodoo Gurus, Mars Needs Guitars!, 1985

Old Friends and Throw-Away Lines

Album: Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, Mavericks, 1991

Best Track: "Anymore"

Lasting Memory: Back in the day, when I was serious about acquiring new music and when Mavericks was released, I did most of my actual listening to music in my car. This is probably true for most people because it is difficult -- not to say dangerous -- to read while driving, who ever has a passenger to speak with, and audiobooks are for nerds.

Mavericks is not a driving album. As a result, I criminally underplayed it 17 years ago and only grew to appreciate its considerable charms within the past few years, as I've become less apt to drive, more apt to be playing tunes while reading or working, and increasingly mellow.

"Charming," by the way, is the perfect description of Mavericks. The songs are warm and heartfelt, familiar on first listen yet endlessly engaging and revealing. Plus, all of them contain at least one eternal truth, nice joke, or combination of the two.

"Anymore" concludes with the observation that "Everything original's been said much better years ago by someone else, anyway . . . anyway".

The very next song, "I Want to Break Your Heart" features the verse

You don't ask a lot
Girl that's what I got
Before your dreams come true
I will belong to you

And the very next next song, "She Was the One," explains how "She was the last to know/ That I was socking in the long haul."

In short, Mavericks sounds exactly like what it is, two old friends who just happen to be supremely talented songwriters reuniting a few years after their dB's heyday and seeing what it would sound like if they tried to be Chad & Jeremy or Peter and Gordon.

The whole Holsapple and Stamey album, plus bonus tracks, is available for sampling and downloading here. I'll wait.

(Huh? Cool. The Nationals look like they're gonna take another one from the Marlins.)

(I really gotta get around to answering that e-mail.)

(Should what comes out of anybody's ear really look like this?)

Oh, you're back. Did you hear I was writing about? Maybe you could see it by clicking on "Angels". Sure, the video is kind of glitchy, but who are you to resist?

I can't, and I shouldn't. Especially since this album came up perfectly in the rotation of my life. Twice in the past month, I've had occasions to head up to the D.C. area to hang out with all the friends I made between 1997 and 2006. Slipping into the comforts of close friendship, sharing old jokes, and learning of new joys is the very essence of Mavericks.

Well-played Messrs. Holsapple and Stamey. Well played.

Up Next: Hoodoo Gurus, Stoneage Romeos, 1984