Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
This was a weird week for the Villains. First our drummer extraordinaire Bob Rock was sick and couldnt make our show in Bridgeport at Two Boots on Wednesday so I, the bass player, had to play drums. A couple things about Two Boots: the pizza isnt great and the roller girls give off a kind of military occupation vibe, i dont know why, thats just the vibe i got . However the decor is cool and they have a nice stage and sound system so it all blends together to equal a place i have no real feelings for. Anyway, we played with an instrumental surf rock band called the Clams and they were pretty good. they had their own go-go dancers which was a little awkward but neat i guess. Then it was our turn, let me preface by saying that i had never played any of the songs we played that night on drums so my main goal was just to try and remember what Bobby did and copy that as best I could. Much to mine and John Paul’s surprise, the show wasnt a disaster. We got forty bucks and didnt embarrass ourselves which for me means i had a pretty good Wednesday.
That brings us to Friday. We got Bob back to play a show at Cafe 9 with the Black Hollies and Les Sans Culottes, a pretty good bill. It snowed I drank a lot of Pabst, i drove home and picked up some McDonalds which i ate furiously and then instantly regretted. The next day i talked to a few friends of mine who were in attendance and they all said that it was the Villains best show. and i said , “what?” They re-iterated their claim that our snowy Friday show at Cafe 9 opening for two great bands was our best show ever. The Villains have been together for almost 3 years i dont think we ever anticipated having a “Best Show Ever.” I think we always shoot for somewhere between pretty good and not a train wreck. Apparently though on Friday we edged into a place i dont think any member of our band is comfortable being. the place where people expect you to play a good show, the place where someone that isnt your buddy might come out to see you play hoping to hear something great. I believe Friday was a turning point for the Villains, for better or worse. Maybe it was the paisley shirt John Paul let me borrow or maybe it was his rather excellent guitar solos. Maybe it was Bob’s steady but perfect drumming or it could be that was just didnt mess up at all and that the room sounded great. Who knows. Whatever it was the Villains are no longer the little band that could. we are now the little band that wants to take over the world one Psychedelic Lounge Rock fan at a time.
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Monday, March 3rd, 2008
Went and saw the Black Crowes last night at the Starland Ballroom in New Jersey and i recommend to anybody that loves getting musically murdered to check them out before one of America’s last great working bands disappears off of the face of the earth. i dont anticipate this happening soon but it will one day and you will regret it forever if you dont see them now. They are playing their new album “Warpaint” in its entirety and it is an amazing collection of music. I didnt think we needed an updated version of Mississippi Queen but as it turns out we did and it is just a towering rock song. Ive been going to Crowes shows now since 2001 and the one thing that is different and better than it was back then is that they have slowed everything down to this dirty southern boogie with a groove like an undertow that you can slip into and get carried, drowning you in an ocean of guitars and grease. Another interesting things is that they no longer seem interested in playing very much of their back catalog which is fine with me. Last night they capped of a second set of Poor Elijah, Jealous Again and Wiser Time with Rich singing just the perfect rendition of Rocking Chair and that got me thinking: There is no one in music now doing what the Black Crowes are doing and if you point to a band that is doing something similar stylistically they arent doing it as well and they certainly arent doing it with the heart, soul and authenticity that the Crowes are doing it with. They truly are a national treasure and i continue to be confused and amazed that people a) havent heard of them or b) just dont like them. This makes no sense to me. what are you listening to? The record comes out tomorrow so ill review it in depth then but just be warned, last nights preview was so good, it may be in the form of a super gushing sappy mushy love note. I make no apologies.
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Monday, February 25th, 2008
I sat through the entire ceremony last night, including the nauseating Enchanted songs, and i feel pretty good about how the whole thing went down. I liked most of the nominated films and performers so i was rooting for everyone unless you were associated with Juno. Good Work everyone!
Moving on…
One of the things i’ll be doing, when there is nothing else i really feel like writing about is commenting on my list of Top 15 Favorite albums of all-time. This is a pretty eclectic list but not frustratingly so. My taste tends to swing in a specific direction so there wont be any gangsta rap or bone head county music on here. I will unveil my list one record at a time and hopefully if you havent heard this particular record you will get yourself a taste. So, entry #1 (in no particular order, unranked, im just going to list them as they were when i originally jotted them down) belongs to:
Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Blood and Chocolate
The last album he did with the Attractions until All This Useless Beauty is also the best Attractions record since Armed Forcesand where that record may not have been made by a group of guys that loved or even liked each other they at least had momentum on their side and obviously cruised through that record like a rock and roll knife cutting melted butter. Not only that but the songs on Armed Forces could have been carry overs from This Years Model making that exact period Elvis’ most successful in marrying his two favorite things, hating people and writing the catchiest melodies since the Beatles were holding your hand and taxing the pennies on your eyes. Those records were easy. When the first song on Blood and Chocolate, the title track, kicks in with its bare E chord you can imagine him struggling somewhat to come-up with a decent guitar line before finally deciding to just bang on one chord for 4 minutes loathing the thoughts running through his head making it impossible to concentrate. the whole record stinks of this kind of anger and frustration. His band, the best backing band in the history of rock, this is arguable im sure but in that argument im taking the Attractions, was freaking breaking up, mainly because he hated his bass player and the cherry on top of the already too cherry laden sundae is he gets divorced. These songs specifically, Home is Anywhere you Hang your Head, I Want You, Battered Old Bird, and Crimes of Paris, sound like they were wrenched out of Elvis against there will, thrown on a recording console and stapled and nailed down with pneumatic air guns. Is there any other reason for Home is Anywhere you Hang Your Head to be so slow and his vocal performance so mannered and so off key on occasion? doesn’t it sound like the songs are fighting their own existence? In Battered Old Bird they use a reverse tape loop to lead into the bridge and kiss my grits if it doesnt sound like the record has finally decided it just cant take it anymore and come hell or high water its going back to the dark pool it had been swimming in inside Elvis’ head. Fortunately, it didnt and we have this amazing record to listen to. This is the first Elvis record I ever bought. at the time those Rhino reissues were a big deal (it has since be reissued again by Hipp-o but unless i finally wear out my copy I will be avoiding spending another couple hundred of dollars replacing records that need not be replaced) and i made sure i bought each one the day it came out. I poured over Elvis’ newly composed liner notes watched him get fat and bearded, weird and then back to normal, ive heard him be great and not so great all within the space of track 1,2, and 3 on the same record, but this record front to back is fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. I think in away, it ruined my life. Anyone that knows me knows that i have a slightly cynical side to myself. Am I totally blaming Elvis? No but did he and this record play a major part, i have to believe that they did. Its the record where you can hear Elvis loose his faith in marriage, his band and himself, and when something like thats going down, even the jauntiest acoustic coffee shop pop tune, like Crimes of Paris, is going to sound like you are singing through a smirk while poking people in the eyes with the head of your guitar. Fantastic!
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Thursday, February 21st, 2008
I made a decision last night that this would be my last post about American Idol unless something really unbelievable occurs. There are probably 100,000,000 people that blog about their every thought regarding American Idol and that is not why i got this blog. So, my final thoughts on this years American Idol are as follows: a girl is going to win. They were pretty good last night, not great, i could do without most of them but a few showed that they had some vocal chops and some personality and thats all im looking for when i watch this show. I counted 4 out of 24 contestants who fit this bill and they are all girls. The rest of them cannot sing and are socially awkward. Those are two things that i dont want in my pop stars.
The name of this blog is “A Combination of Things” and while it fits my blog it is actually the name of a song that I wrote a couple of years ago but finally recorded with the Joiner Inners last year. Its a pretty good song I think. I have always thought that it had a kind of Replacements feel to it. I think its kind of shambley and rough, not rough like tough but rough like not clean, a little sloppy, all good things. I’ve got a red notebook next to me as a write this and its first 3 pages are filled, front and back, with things i want to write about in this blog. Ive broken them down into some simple categories that you can see over to the right there, yeup right over there. If you allow me to ramble some more ill get to my point. I bring up the song because, i never at any point sat down and wrote out a set of new lyrics for the tune, i never felt inspired to do so. I had already given it the name and one night, i think i may have been watching a baseball game, I’m a Mets fan by the way but we’ll get to that at another date, I started sifting through this manila folder I have that is filled with yellow legal sheets and scraps of receipt paper and envelopes and Chinese food take out menus, all of them containing ideas for stories and books and movies and lyrics written in my very distinctive chicken scratch. I have accomplished very little in the time i have already put in on this planet but these manila folders with all of my many years of accumulated notes and thoughts i think shows me that i have the potential do something pretty great, I’m talking about great creatively. I’m not going to be president, although I’m not sure how great being president is, and I’m not going to cure cancer and I’m not going to climb a mountain because I’m afraid of heights and people that climb mountains are crazy not great. The end of this story is this, I was watching a Mets game and i was looking through this folder and pulling out anything that i thought might make a good lyric. i was remembering where i was and what i was doing when i was making these notes. I had my guitar next to me and a fresh legal pad with “A Combination of things” written across the top of it. when i thought i had enough lyric ideas i started writing them down and after a little trimming and a little editing and a little revising and a little more of all of them, i had myself a tune. a pretty good tune. Not a great tune, because i think I’ve only written one great song in my life and i only think that because everyone tells me it is but Combination of Things is a pretty good song and I’m proud of it i guess. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is this, This blog is going to be just like that song. I’m going to take little pieces of myself that i have accumulated throughout my existence and I’m going to write about them and by the end of what I’m writing my views on them may have changed. By the end of reviewing a movie i might find that i didnt like it that much when at the beginning of the review i said it was the greatest movie i have ever seen. Maybe ill review a record after one listen and hate it but maybe ill listen to it while I’m reviewing it and the guitars on the fourth track will do something i didnt notice before and i wont be able stop listening to it for a week. maybe the drums start to shake out a beat that is impossible for one man to play but you dont hear the second man or that second set of hands and the record finds its way into the open slot in my top 15 records of all time. Little things that dont mean anything all of the sudden coming together to mean something. It may not mean anything to you and i absolutely respect that but i think blogs are kind of personal. The fact that people read them is almost secondary. You write for yourself and if you do it well enough and interesting enough maybe someone starts to pay attention but you do it, I do it, first, to put the pieces of myself into some kind of order, to archive them by date and category and if you’re honest with yourself as you go when you’re done you can show it to someone and say this is me. whether you agree with me or not, this is all that Ive got.
(click on the link “Combination of Things” in the Blogroll to hear the tune at my old bands myspace which i have renamed. i dont think i need to tell anyone what the new name is)
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Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Big win by Barack Obama last night. That’s 10 in a row folks. Keep on chooglin’.
Alright. I told anyone who would listen that i wasn’t watching American Idol this year because of the bull crap that they pulled with Josiah (although, after watching last nights proceedings, i am actually sort of glad he didn’t get put through. I forgot that the goal of these early elimination rounds is to pick a song and turn it into adult contemporary trash. Im not sure how well he would have accomplished this and im glad he was spared the embarrassment). Anyway, i DVRed and I watched and half way through some random crumb bum’s rendition of Moon River i was wishing i had stuck to my guns and not compromised my principals due to an absence of acceptable time killing activities while waiting for the polls in Wisconsin to close so that i might bathe gloriously in election night analysis and punditry. Every male performer this year is terrible. TERRIBLE. Even the Australian guy with the record deal, Michael “Two First Names” Johns, was sub par and he sang one of the same songs he sang last week in LA. I can only hope that the girls tonight are better because now, since i have already forfeited my integrity, i have to watch and root for all the men to get kicked off before all the women the same way i rooted for Ace to spontaneously combust mid-George Michael song during season 5.
Also, it’s lunch time here in corporate hell and I just ate a Quizno’s. its close to the office and never crowded. I was nursing a substantial hunger and had forgotten to bring myself a microwavable soup or even a small plastic sack of pretzels. Let me tell you something faithful blog reader, don’t be fooled by advertising or praise from a colleague or friend, eating Quiznos is never a good idea. Ever. I did however just find a piece of Orbit gum, flavor spearmint. Which is always nice
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Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
This is my first official post but I need to back track and comment on a few events before I start dealing with current issues.
- Barack Obama – There is a primary in Wisconsin today and Barack absolutely needs to win it. He can not afford to let Hilary gain even a shred of momentum going into March 4th. I am not politically intelligent as you will see going forward, but if I know anything its that Barack needs to put his foot on the gas here and keep on rolling. I wouldn’t say that im a fervent supporter of Senator Obamas. I haven’t been to any of his rallies and I haven’t donated any real money. I have a bumper sticker on the back of my car and a cardboard sign in the living room window of my house that’s hard to see from the street if the sun hits it just right which it usually does but I am excited about the prospect of this man being our next president. I think issues in Presidential elections are almost secondary. I know that probably sounds crazy but I just feel like once you are in office your reality changes and your issues and beliefs have to adapt accordingly. However I will say that he has been the most realistic candidate this year. He is aware of the divide between Republicans and Democrats and has structured his plans, programs and ideas in a way that will appeal to members of both parties in an effort to do some real work for the good of the country. I haven’t heard him say once, regarding his use of the House and the Senate, that it is, effectively, his way or the highway. I think he believes that when all is said and done we will be able to find OUR way and that’s why Im supporting him for president. If he doesn’t win the nomination I will admit that I will be a little sad about it, but I definitely think that Hilary Clinton will make a fine president. I just think Barack Obama would make a better one.
- The Grammys – Dear God in heaven what a freaking sham this whole event is. If I thought that swearing on my blog would be a good idea I would be swearing all over the place right now. I am just so disgusted with the state of the music industry. I know that no one except the previously mentioned music industry puts very much stock into these things but I personally, as a musician and a card carrying member of the “Not an Idiot Club,” find it just so insulting they someone somewhere actually believes that Amy Winehouse should win any kind of award. I dont feel this way because shes a drug addict, I feel this way because shes terrible. At the end of this post I will list 10 records that came out this year that are better than almost every record that got nominated for any award at this years Grammys. And do I think that Herbie Hancock won Album of the year because the Grammy voters actually thought that it was the best record of the year. No I do not. I think they gave it to him because hes nice and he makes nice music and because he plays the piano nicely and because he has Norah Jones on that record and shes nice. The fools that hand out the Grammys love to reward music that you don’t have to think about, that has a good beat or that you can listen to if youre having trouble falling asleep. Im glad my parents had the foresight to teach me the word Travesty. Try falling asleep to these records(in no particular order):
Against Me – New Wave
Espers – II
Wilco – Sky Blue Bky
PJ Harvey – White Chalk
Dinosaur Jr – Beyond
Miles Davis – The Complete on the Corner Sessions
Grinderman – Grinderman
Neil Young – Chrome Dreams II
Okkervil River – Stage Names
Ted Leo – Living with the Living
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