Bringin Down the Grouse

The year of our Lord 2008 has certainly been a collection of 366 days, hasn't it?

I've not done at all badly for myself, and I hope you can say the same in your own regard.

Either way, may we all always be able to sing along with this classic and mean every word in a good way.




Happy New Year!

A Diamond in the Goth

Album: Peter Murphy, Deep, 1989

Best Track: "Cuts You Up"

Lasting Memory: I salvaged this cassette from the detritus of a former D.C. housemate. I'm pretty sure the guy's name is Paul, but I can't swear to that because I've tried to forget as much about him as possible.

The guy was a walking disaster -- psych discharge from the Air Force, failed Scientologist and Mormon, and debtor to several very insistent college loan issuers -- who I voted against allowing to move into the group house in the first place. I remember as much as I do about the guy because I had to gloss over it so he could get a Russian work visa and stay well the hell away Washington and my house once and for all.

Did I mention that the guy actually moved to Russia before he secured his work visa? He was that kind of guy. He was also the kind of guy who left behind his music collection, all but a handful of his books, and a microwave as "payment" for the nearly $1,000 phone bill he managed to roll up during his month and a half in the house.

I eventually tracked him down through the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and got him to pay his phone bill in return for not at least entering extradition processing. I also kept this copy of Peter Murphy's Deep and a wallchart of the young-Earth creationist's time line of world history from Adam and Eve until about 1980 AD.

The wallchart is more interesting than the tape, but you'll probably recognize the hit single "Cuts You Up" from Deep since it was exactly everything a fin-de-80s alternative track should have been and it still gets played on the better sorts of radio stations.

What you won't know, and what I never realized until I gave Deep a listen yesterday, is that whatever appeal Peter Murphy holds, he holds in large measure because he sounds exactly like Neil Diamond. In fact, the similarities between the former leader of goth godfathers Bauhaus and the leather-lunged troubadour are nothing short of eerie.

Compare the vocals on Murphy's "Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem" to Diamond's "Heartlight" and then tell me if you have ever seen both men in the same place at the same time.
You hear what I'm saying, right? I'm not just way off base here, am I?

Beyond the voices, both men are partial to wearing pseudo pompadour hairstyles, engaging in-concert theatrics, and sucking blood.* What other proof do you need?

Up Next: Ned's Atomic Dustbin, God Fodder, 1991

*Editor's note: While Mr. Diamond's taste for "red, red wine" is well-documented, it has never been confirmed that Mr. Murphy actually dines on the sweet nectar of humans.

Turning to Partly Sunny Later in the Day

Album: Bob Mould, Black Sheets of Rain, 1990

Best Track: "It's Too Late"

Lasting Memory: Exactly one day after receiving Bob Mould's Black Sheets of Rain as a 21st birthday present in 1990, I was involved in what should have been a very serious automobile accident on Interstate 64, just south of Williamsburg, Va.

The whole thing was fittingly poetic, but not in the way that the album's title would suggest.

The day was perfectly sunny, and the pavement was bone dry. The album is a mostly light-hearted recap of the leadup to and aftermath of the breakup of a long-term relation. There is only a smattering of doom and gloom on the album, and there was certainly no impending disaster on the horizon for me at that moment.

The stretch of highway I was on is flat, straight, and separated by a completely treeless and guardrail-less expanse of median. It is also maddeningly prone to total traffic stoppages for no reason at all, during which every driver has to decelerate from 75 mph to 0 mph in less than a minute.

While grooving to Black Sheets of Rain, I ran up on one of these parking-lot occurrences and stomped on my brakes. Not owning my own car at the time, I was driving a rented Dodge 4-door something. All fiberglass and relatively low to the ground.

Not knowing the car well enough to know if I would be able to stop in time before running into the car in front of me, I jerked the Dodge onto the shoulder of the center median and coasted to a stop. No harm so far, and it turned out I could have stopped within the lane after all.

So glancing into my rearview mirror to see if I have space to pull back into traffic, I saw an SUV of indeterminate but very large make squarely in my hindsights and growing bigger and bigger at an alarming rate.

Having nothing else to do, I took my foot off the brake and pulled hard to the left, into the median. This evasive action did little to minimize the impact, as the SUV must have been going about 30 mph when it smacked into my rented Dodge and pushed me into the center of the median.

And whaddaya know? I wasn't injured. The Dodge wasn't dented, and the SUV suffered just a cracked cover of one its headlights.

The only losses were a couple of oranges, which got knocked lose from an overstuffed grocery bagful of Thanksgiving leftovers and which rolled out of my driver's side door when I got out to yell at the SUV driver.

I still miss those oranges.

And I still don't know what that friggin' SUV driver was doing driving on the lefthand shoulder when he had more than enough room in the lane since I was no longer occupying it.

What I do know is that Black Sheets of Rain is everything I earlier complained that another album Bob Mould recorded with his band Hüsker Dü, The Living End, isn't. The production on Black Sheets is clear, and the songs are catchy while also being insightful. I might even go so far as to describe "Disappointed" as playful, life-affirming, and '60s pop-like:

Well I'm sorry you're disappointed
But times they change and so did I
Standing still and getting nowhere quicker
Well it seems I didn't have to try
But now I've found a reason to move on
And you won't miss me much now that I'm gone
You don't seem disappointed

The three years I went to college
Didn't make much of a difference to me
Made me feel so safe I didn't have to think
About the things I really wanna be

So don't get caught up in that trap
They'll make you feel like you've been trapped
Into owing them your gratitude
And all the other platitudes
That make you feel important when you go
But now I've found a reason to move on
And you won't miss me much now that I'm gone
You don't seem disappointed

'Cause when you're gone, somebody else will come along and take your place
It doesn't make me feel any less a member of the human race
This ain't no race

Well I'm sorry you're disappointed
But I don't feel that way today
I am free from all the crazy games you played
I am free from all the things you say
And I don't mean to make a mockery of the things
you thought I'd say when I left, but I'm not disappointed

And if I felt the urge to say you're wrong
Well, I just hold the words inside and laugh
And you'd be disappointed
So disappointed
So disappointed

Nothing on Black Sheets of Rain is exactly a day at Chuck E. Cheese's, but it's all nice enough. Even the ominous-sounding title track ends with this affirmation that the sun shines even when we can't see it:

A little rain is all we need
(Someone stopped the sun from shining)
Where will you be in my darkest hour of need?
(I never see the sun stop shining)
Where will you be in my darkest hour of need?
(Someone stopped the sun)
Here it comes again

The heart of the album are the songs that proceed most directly to its dual theme of the recognition of and resignation to loss, "It's Too Late" and "The Last Night." But, just as the album's title baits and switches, "Last Night" describes the beginning of the end, while "Too Late" is the tale of moving on.

All of Black Sheets is pleasingly ironic, which, to finally get to my point, is what made it a fittingly poetic soundtrack for a car crash that destroyed nothing but oranges.

Up Next: Peter Murphy, Deep, 1989

So Happy Christmas ...

Leave it to The Pogues to capture the best and the worst of the Christmas experience all in one song.




It really is a hopeful song. The hope of the damned, but that sort of thing has its times and places. Like theNew York City drunk tank on Chistmas Eve.

Here's hoping you only experience good things this holiday, and all next year, too.

Album: Mötley Crüe, Shout at the Devil, 1983

Best Track: "Looks That Kill"

Lasting Memory: I was a loser when I was 13. Full stop. No gainsaying. I was a loser.

For no other proof, you need to know that I really, really liked Shout at the Devil when I was 13.

I may still be a loser, but I no longer enjoy Shout at the Devil. The album is exactly lame as it predecessor Too Fast for Love is not lame (see below).

Vince Neil may be a pretty, pretty man, but that can't make up for the fact that he is less appealing than any of the chicks in the video for "Looks That Kill." And all of the songs on Shout fail to rock precisely because they try to rock. "Red Hot" comes closest to being closest to being unbad, but it is also the most beige of all American hard rock songs.

If anyone wanted to rock out, they could definitely do better than "Bastard," but they could absolutely do as well.

I hate to harsh on a band that I just praised highly, but I have to think that Mötley Crüe both rushed out its sophomore album and aimed for the lowest common denominator with Shout. Certainly, the band did much better with its follow-up albums, such as Girls, Girls, Girls. Or at least that's what I think every time I'm at the Hustler Club in Baltimore.


Up Next: Bob Mould, Black Sheets of Rain, 1990

Judge This Tape by Its Cover, or Else

Album: Mötley Crüe, Too Fast for Love, 1982

(Parental Advisory: This album cover may be laughably homoerotic.)

Best Track: "Merry-Go-Round"

Lasting Memory: This is one of only maybe three cassettes I ever replaced with a cassette after I finally broke down in 1991 and purchased a CD player. The analog Too Fast for Love tape that got dropped and stomped on during one of my infinity-plus-one moves in the late 1980s and early 1990s had too much sentimental value to me to be supplanted with a digital disk.

I couldn't today tell you what that sentimental value was, but I know I held the tape dear and that only a cassette would fill the void created by its destruction.

Playing the replacement tape through a couple of times this morning, I am convinced I made the right choices in both re-adding Too Fast for Love to my music collection and in going analog. The Crüe's major-label debut benefits from the murky sound and a slight echo that are the hallmarks of magnetic tape and which are inevitably scoured away on digital recordings.

"Starry Eyes," for instance, would just suck if it was, you know, good. But since it sounds so amateurish, the song endears and rocks much more than it has any right to.

The whole of Too Fast for Love is like that. The album is a guilty pleasure of a hard rock album that no one should need to feel guilty about enjoying.

Certainly compared to almost all of their Sunset Strip hair band brethren -- your L.A. Gunses, your Hanoi Rockses, your Poisons -- Mötley Crüe proved itself to be the most talented. And while it can be fair to counter that even Beckley, W. Va., has its best little ballerina,* being the best of/from will always merit its own deserved respect.

Then there's this: The songs "Merry-Go-Round" and "Live Wire" kicked ass when I was 12, and they kick ass when I'm 39.

So 27 years on, I throw my horns and am happy to let Mötley Crüe go "On With the Show."


Up Next: Mötley Crüe, Shout at the Devil, 1983

* Good night, Craig McC, wherever you are.

Let Me Send You Glad Tidings

Album: Van Morrison, Moondance, n.d. (cassette reissue)

Worst Tack: "Come Running"

Lasting Memory: While I was sitting in a Blacksburg hippie coffee shop/ice cream parlor named Gillie's with a couple of friends on some cold, drizzly February night in 1990, a guy I kind of knew named James (I'm pretty sure, wouldn't swear) appeared out of nowhere and started singing along with a three-piece jazz combo that was playing "Moondance" near the front door of the establishment. You could have heard a pin drop, as everyone in the place -- struck by how perfectly the song, James' voice, the weather, and the general mood of being young and worldly wise/sheltered all came together -- fell silent and lost themselves in the vibe.

Everyone needs to experience more moments like that.

Fortunately, all anyone needs to do to set the scene for such reverie is to play Van Morrison's Moondance. Ranked 65th on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, Moondance is the album you need when you just want to feel great about being alive while not completely forgetting that the world isn't always the greatest place to be living. (RS pollsters actually ranked Morrison's Astral Weeks higher on the GOAT list at No. 19, but since I don't own that album and can't unequivocally affirm that I have ever heard any songs off of Astral Weeks, I'll stick with my assertion that Moondance is Morrison's masterwork and add that Astral Weeks can go suck it.)

Every song on Moondance would be a career-maker for most other singer-songwriter -- even "Come Running," which I tagged as the album's worst track only because I couldn't see the point of listing every other song as the album's best. "Come Running" is a good song. In fact, it was the American single when Warner Bros. released Moondance in 1970. But set alongside with such timeless classics as "Caravan," "Everyone," "Into the Mystic," and "Glad Tidings," "Come Running" comes up a little short. Maybe it should give up smoking and drinking and really get itself in shape for the next listening.

For all of the greatness of its individual songs, though the best ting about Moondance is that it is a completely coherent album. In writing, recording, and sequencing the songs, Morrison and his band and production team took great care in constructing a collection of songs that have similar lyrical themes, similar musical sounds, and similar effects on listeners. As I blog through my music collection, I'm finding that most of the albums I praise highly are the ones that are albums qua albums. I'll try to remember to write more about this when I get to my Tragically Hip CDs sometime in, oh, 2011 at the current pace, because the Hip more than any other band I could name tends to pick unique moods and riffs to build entire album's worths of songs around.

For now, I'll just sign off and look forward to transitioning from the sublime to the ridiculous when I get around to making my next post on:

Up Next: Mötley Crüe, Too Fast for Love, 1982

Anarchists Who Attend Meetings Miss the Point

Album: Mojo Nixon, Otis, 1990

Best Track: "Don Henley Must Die"

Lasting Memory: Whenever I catch an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, I think about this album because the inside of the cassette cover features a list of famous Otises -- Otis the Drunk, Otis the Elevator, Otis Sistrunk, etc.

Played by prolific and deceased voice actor Hal Smith, Otis Campbell is right up there with Frank Pembleton at the top my of list of all-time favorite television characters. As written, the character of Otis was the most responsible alcoholic who ever lived. He had and kept a good job. He was reasonably happily married. He had his own keys to Mayberry's police station and holding cells so he could lock himself up when he needed to sleep off a bender. Otis was fictionally a man who knew how to balance his vice with virtue.

I suspect that Mojo likes Otis Campbell for the exact same reasons I do. Because while Mojo espouses anarchy -- consequence-free irresponsibility, actually -- in songs like "I Ain't Gonna Piss in No Jar" on Bo-Day-Shus!!! and "Took Out the Trash and Never Came Back," he clearly understands that in real life that with great libertarianism comes great responsibility. Here's what Mojo had to say about his political and social philosophies during a 1999 interview with The Onion A.V. Club:

Onion: Can you outline your political platform?

Mojo Nixon: Basically, I'm just saying one basic thing: Take responsibility for your own actions. You make decisions, and you live by 'em. If you were dealt a bad hand, you've still gotta play cards. Or you can fold and get another hand. But you can't sue somebody and get a new hand! People always want to blame somebody or something. It's always somebody else's fault. But it's your own damn fault. The government, the church, the state, the lawyers, the doctors. ... It's not their fault, it's not your parents' fault, it's your fault. People always want to blame someone else -- right-wing talk-show hosts, or rap musicians, rock 'n' roll, or whatever. All this whining and crying and pissing and moaning and suing everyone has gotta stop. You make decisions and you live by 'em. And then you die. Then other people get to make decisions and live by them. It's pretty fuckin' simple! Now, it's who can hire the most lawyers and wear the other person down so they give up and you win. Whoever has the most money can hire the most lawyers and eventually win. Same thing with the election process. The idea is that there's supposed to be a marketplace of ideas and you vote for who you think is best. But that's not true at all. It's whoever can raise the most money, can hire the smartest people, and make the best button-pushing ad to get elected. We have diluted justice and democracy by putting money into it so deep. I've been working on this thing, The Mojo Manifesto. I'm gonna solve all these problems. I'm just having a little trouble figuring it out.

O: Do you vote?

MN: No, I don't vote. I think the last time I voted, I voted for Carter. I don't think it makes a difference. I think the Republicans and the Democrats are just selling us the same bag of shit with different colors on it. They're both battling in the same middle 10 percent of the total spectrum of political ideas. People were so excited -- and I, too, was excited -- when Clinton was elected, but all Bubba can really do is put a smiley face on things. The giant bureaucratic machine, the Defense Department, the Department of Transportation, the IRS. ... All these things just ride along. They don't even know Bubba's there. And look at Bubba--he can't stop these things. Look how worn-out and beat-up he is. Because of the way the whole system is based, you get the most money, which comes from the most evil people, whether it's cigarette money or HMOs or whoever, and they're going to keep things the way they are. They're going to bamboozle us into making us think we're getting reform when what they're really doing is protecting their asses. In the big picture, the Republicans and the Democrats don't have a clue. They don't have any intention of solving any of our problems. Their only plan is to get re-elected; their only plan is save-ass: "If you give me money and vote for me, I'll try to save any stupid thing you want." It's sound and fury signifying nothing, and I'm calling for a new constitutional convention. If that doesn't work, I'm calling for armed insurrection! I mean, we're totally drifting around in a sea of stupidity and indecision. We agreed 200 years ago to have a constitution and to fight the king. We need to agree on something now besides football and pizza.

O: Are you thinking of joining a militia?

MN: No, I'm not going to blow up people; I'm going to blow up the infrastructure. I'm gonna shoot satellites out of the sky. And I also think that the ideas of doctors and nurses and HMOs are lousy and inefficient. It's all just a big money-grab, hiding behind the veil of, "We want to help you." They don't care about helping people. If you want to make money, there are plenty of ways. Become a lawyer. Become a widget salesman or something. Medicine should be about finding cures and healing people, not about making more money. If people are sick, we should try to make them well, not try to get as much money out of them as possible and keep 'em just alive to milk 'em 'til the end. It's wrong.

O: What's your solution?

MN: We need to reform the whole thing. We need instant voter registration when you turn 18. They're still using paper to register people to vote! You should be able to walk in anywhere with your social-security number, and they can check the computer and see if you've voted already. We need to get rid of the Electoral College; we need to open things up a little bit. That's why I'm calling for a new constitutional convention to unveil Mojo's new 10-point plan. I'm also calling for a billion dollars in research for the male G-spot. If you're gonna waste money, let's waste it for a good reason.

I agree with everything he said here except for abolishing the Electoral College. All people have the inalienable right to be occasionally reckless so long as they are more often responsible. Mojo for president, indeed.

Double indeed.

Up Next: Van Morrison, Moondance, n.d. (cassette reissue)

Comedy = Others' Pain + Your Distance

I have a long post on libertarianism vs. the social contract to put up tomorrow. You'll be surprised by my choice for the winner.



While I get my thoughts sorted, enjoy this bit of irreverent comedy from The Office creator Ricky Gervais, which may just be the most wrong -- and most spot-on -- four minutes of social commentary ever filmed.






And don't miss out on Gervais calling out Nazis for sloppiness and Anne Frank for laziness ("no sequel").

Ain't Gonna Pay for Tapes Any More

Album: Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper, Root Hog or Die, 1991

Out of Order Posting Excuse: I no longer have this cassette in my music collection because someone at WUVT, the Virginia Tech student-run radio station, stole it after I brought it in to play a track during my short-lived show but forgot to take it with me when I left.

Damn alterna-kids.

So since I can't do a proper post on Root Hog or Die, and I'm too strapped for time today to do a legitimate post on the earlier album I do still have, I'll just share these two Mojo-esque videos of songs from Root Hog or Die.

The first is no "Stuffin' Martha's Martha's Muffin," but it's fun to think about Mojo and Debbie spending any time together at all, let alone spending time in flagrante delecto.






This second offering ain't a great song, but Mojo's wall-eyed commitment to being a public kook is admirable if nothing else.




Up Next: Mojo Nixon, Otis, 1990

Ode to an Easy Job

Mojo Nixon, "Shane's Dentist," Otis

(H/T Blues Brews and BBQ)

Montage lifted from J-Walk.

Let record show, unbelievably, that Shane McGowan will be 51 years old this coming Christmas Day.

We Gotta Have More Soul!

Album: Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper, Bo-Day-Shus!!!, 1987

Best Track: "Wide Open"

Lasting Memory: Listen to "We Gotta Have More Soul" or "Wash No Dishes No More" and understand how rarefiedly ridiculous it may seem for me to write the following words: I experienced a true epiphany on July 23, 1991, while listening to the Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper album Bo-Day-Sush!!!.

Sitting in my car, at around two in the afternoon, parked in front of a company-owned townhouse in Germantown, Md., where I was camping out while serving a co-op stint with a government management consulting company at the U.S. Department of Energy satellite headquarters, listening to "Wide Open," I understood, all in a flash, what was so great about rock n' roll and America.

"Wide Open," like a majority of the songs on Bo-Day-Sush!!!, preaches the desirability of -- and sometime the absolute requirement for -- freedom in dancin', drinkin', and hair stylin'. But the real root of Mojo and Skid's message is conveyed in the bridge to "Wide Open," during which Mojo drops into sotto voce to tell listeners

I'm out in Pittsylvania County
On Highway 7-1-8
Middle of a cornfield
Know I'm not too late
There's about thirteen
Thirteen '67 Chevy Malibus
In a circle
In the cornfield with their headlights on
And I can feel it

I can feel it!

And everybody's dancin' in the headlights
Dancin' in the headlights
And off
In the distance
You can hear 'em sing . . .

"I'm feling wide open"

That. Is. It. That is the power of music and the blessing of having been born in the United States. If you need further explanation, I can't help you.

But if you do need some further proof of American Exceptionalism, give "B.B.Q. U.S.A." a click and a spin.


Up Next: Mojo Nixon, Otis, 1990