Monthly Archives: November 2016

VIA NATIONAL POST | “I just like the feel of a book in my hands!”

Despite living an otherwise digital world, this sentiment is almost impossible to avoid anytime the topic of eBooks comes up. While Silicon Valley might think those who try to stave off the inevitability of technological advances are behind the times, maybe they’re actually on to something.

According to David Sax, author of Save the Deli (2009), The Tastemakers (2014) and now, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, analog is having a comeback. And he took me on a tour of some retailers on Toronto’s Queen Street West – a record and audio store, a bookstore, a watch store – to prove it. “This book began when I was writing Save the Deli back in 2007, right when smartphones were taking off,” he explains.

“Friends of mine were getting Blackberries, and I was seeing the difference in how they interacted with the world, and how I was interacting with technology through things like downloads and iTunes.” What Sax also noticed was how what should have been the triumph of digital technology seemed to coincide with the rebirth of its predecessor.

“There was kind of a parallel with Save the Deli, which was about the re-emergence of artisan deli food.” To extend the metaphor: “Everything else is only going to get more digitally connected, and that’s only going to make us hungrier for this analog stuff.”

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Jesus Christ, life is an awful thing. And as if it weren’t awful enough, Donald Trump is officially slated to become Fuhrer of that Fourth Reich known as the United States of America, and I for one can’t think of any music, besides that of Richard Wagner of course, that so celebrates the grandiosity and pomposity of our new fascist state than that of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The works of the troika of Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, and Carl Palmer were oversized explorations into the gigantism that characterized Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, from the mammoth scale of his Nuremberg Rallies to the monolithic architectural projects the Fuhrer spent so much time planning with Albert Speer.

And what I’m wondering is, will Donald Trump replace “Hail to the Chief” with the fanfare that opens “Toccata” from 1973’s Brain Salad Surgery, or the pomp and circumstance that signals the beginning of the insufferable “Jerusalem,” which does a great disservice to the mystical English poet William Blake and which I once had to sit through live, and what’s more not completely stoned into a blissful state of virtual obnubilation, an experience that so unnerved me that I refused to leave my apartment for a month?

I can’t tell you what our new President will do, because he’s crazier than a shit-house rat, but I can tell you this: ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery isn’t even the worst of their albums (that honor goes to 1971’s Pictures at an Exhibition), and that is a horrifying thought indeed. Don’t get me wrong; Brain Salad Surgery is an abomination and a crime against all sentient beings. Hell, it’s a crime against dumb stones even. But despite its myriad shortcomings, it at least boasts two short and actually listenable tracks in “Still… You Turn Me On” and the amusing “Benny the Bouncer,” to say nothing of a cool album cover by H.R. Giger, which you could stare at while on acid while losing yourself in the shadowy intricacies of the three monstrous movements of “Karn Evil 9,” which go on for thirty minutes or so but seem to natter on forever.

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Well, here I am at last, in a deserted warehouse on Desolation Row, about to realize my lifelong dream of interviewing the legendary Bob Dylan. It’s a rather odd place to meet, I know, but I got absolutely nowhere with Dylan’s PR people, so I decided to exercise my First Amendment rights by abducting him, duct-taping him to a rickety wooden chair, and shining a very bright light in his eyes. It’s an unorthodox arrangement, to be sure, but then Dylan is a famously uncooperative interviewee.

“Okay, Schmylan,” I say, opening the interview on a light note. “You’re going to spill or I’m going to shave Vincent Price’s mustache right off your face.”

“You don’t like it?” says Bob in that unintelligible frog-with-emphysema croak that makes his present-day concerts such wonderful exercises in collective audience incomprehension.

“Not really. I think it’s creepy. And if it’s creepy I want, I can always listen to Saved.”

“Vince bequeathed it to me in his will,” says Dylan, unfazed by my criticism. “And I happen to like it. It’s so Dr. Goldfoot and The Bikini Machine. I kept it in the freezer for years, on top of a box of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks. Hey, would watch the parking meter?”

“Quoting your old chestnuts will get you nowhere,” I say. And to prove it, I slip a cigarette between his lips and smack it out again.

“No, I mean literally. I only fed it enough quarters for two hours. And the last thing I need is another ticket.”

“You’ve got bigger worries than a parking ticket, Zimmerman. Like your legacy. You’re the guy who put out Bob Dylan at Budokan. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that album blows.”

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“I’ve been looking at all the First Dates and what I love is how many of these musicians have been drawn to music through their parents’ record collections. It’s not just a collection of records, it’s a record of their lives collected together. When I was a kid, cassette tapes were norm and CDs were coming up too. We were once given one of those that were the size of an LP—I don’t think my dad knew what to do with it so it got put on the wall as art/weird mirror.”

“The ceremony attached to the playing of vinyl was never lost on me, there was such a buzz watching the needle pick up and play. At home the collection was very varied as my dad is a real searcher for good music. It started for me with Elvis though, Little Richard, The Beatles, and the Disney soundtrack (I kid you not, “We are Siamese” and Luis Prima singing Jungle Book? Incredible). We also had a 1950s jukebox which had been slightly updated with the odd single from the 1970s, so I know all kinds of wonderful tunes that your gran probably rocked out to (such as “The Stripper”—David Rose & His Orchestra—my grandma loved that) as well as “Tiger Feet” by Mud.

But it was the whole sensory experience, the artwork, the opening up of the cover and the feel of the cardboard, sometimes they had writing on them and you had a sense of them being held onto, through all the different times in my parents’ lives, so in a way they made me feel closer to my parents too. It was a real initiation being taught how to hold vinyl, take it out of the sleeve, all that.

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Two releases illuminate Tim Buckley as being far from the typical 1960s folkie. Light in the Attic’s Lady, Give Me Your Key uncovers two ’67 demos and is easily the more consistent of the two, its contents complementing a significant portion of Omnivore’s Wings: The Complete Singles 1966-1974. That set leaps over a highly fertile period in chronologically documenting the 45s of an artist primarily known for his albums, but still manages to detail the lessening of quality in Buckley’s work. The former comes with vinyl, compact disc, and digital options, and the latter is CD only.

Tim Buckley’s output can be divided into three segments: the early formative period that includes his self-titled ’66 debut and the following year’s Goodbye and Hello, a fertile middle section beginning with ’69’s Happy Sad and Blue Afternoon and continuing with ’70’s Lorca and Starsailor, and a highly disappointing shift into strained soulfulness and off-putting conventionality that includes ’72’s Greetings from L.A., ’73’s Sefronia and ’74’s Look at the Fool.

Since his premature death in 1975, Buckley’s discography has roughly doubled, mostly through performance material, a circumstance helping Lady, Give Me Your Key to stand out a bit; composed of a pair of demos made for producer Jerry Yester in aid of choosing the contents of Goodbye and Hello, there are enough new song discoveries to enhance the familiar numbers, and if belonging to Buckley’s earliest period the album deepens the man’s work rather than just offering minutiae for diehards.

If predominantly straightforward in approach, it’s important to qualify that on his first LP Buckley was already more than a clichéd strummer. Working largely in baroque mode with a full band including drummer Billy Mundi, his longtime guitarist Lee Underwood, and on piano, celesta, and harpsichord Van Dyke Parks, a third of the album sets Wings: The Complete Singles 1966-1974 into motion, the A-side to the first 45 lending the collection its title.

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If this 1970 LP by folk-jazz-rock ensemble The Insect Trust is considered an almost mystical object by the souls who are hip to it, it’s due as much to the people who are said to be on the LP as for the album itself. In hushed tones, it is said one of its horn players was Robert Palmer, later to become a renowned music critic and historian; that several of its tracks featured the great Elvin Jones, the long-time drummer for John Coltrane; and finally, and most intriguing to the people who are drawn to it, that America’s most reclusive and arguably most brilliant novelist, Thomas Pynchon, was somehow involved in the LP’s making.

Well, first the good news. Robert Palmer did indeed play alto saxophone, clarinet, and recorder (alongside Trevor Koehler, who played more horns than I can name here, and a couple of guys who played trumpet) for the band, and Elvin Jones does indeed play on two of Hoboken Saturday Night’s tracks, along with the great funk drummer Bernard Purdie, who also contributed.

Now for the bad news, at least for you Pynchon fans. I always imagined Pynchon showing up at the studio’s back door in the dead of night, in a stained bathrobe and camouflage boonie hat, to play some primitive guitar riffs and smoke lots of very high quality Mexican dope. Unfortunately, Pynchon’s only input to the LP consists of the lyrics to “The Eyes of a New York Woman,” and they weren’t even original lyrics but simply words lifted from his novel V. I know, bummer. How the band got the rights to use Pynchon’s words would probably make for an interesting story; did they actually know literature’s most mysterious figure, who makes J.D. Salinger look like a publicity hog, or did they deal solely with a third party?

And now for the rest of the good news. Hoboken Saturday Night is one very eclectic and enjoyable album. The Insect Trust, whose name came from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and which came to be in Our Year of the Lord 1967, are all over the place. Horns blow ersatz ragtime or simply wax lovely and wild (see “Our Sister the Sun”), vocalist Nancy Jeffries has a delightfully folksy voice (see “Our Sister the Sun, “Reincarnations”), and the rockers actually rock, despite the fact that the band was short on rock musicians and heavy on jazz musicians, folkies (multi-instrumentalist Luke Faust, formerly of the Holy Modal Rounders), and blues guys (guitarist Bill Barth). That the Insect Trust made such excellent music from such a hash of musical styles is nothing short of miraculous.

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The Vinyl District’s Play Something Good is a weekly radio show broadcast from Washington, DC.

Featuring a mix of songs from today to the 00s/90s/80s/70s/60s and giving you liberal doses of indie, psych, dub, post punk, americana, shoegaze, and a few genres we haven’t even thought up clever names for just yet. The only rule is that the music has to be good. Pretty simple.

Hosted by John Foster, world-renowned designer and author (and occasional record label A+R man), don’t be surprised to hear quick excursions and interviews on album packaging, food, books, and general nonsense about the music industry, as he gets you from Jamie xx to Liquid Liquid and from Courtney Barnett to The Replacements. The only thing you can be sure of is that he will never ever play Mac DeMarco. Never. Ever.

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Those who came of age in the 1980s surely remember The Bangles; with songs on the radio and videos on MTV, they provided the era’s musical environs with a crisp ’60s influenced guitar-pop breeze, but too few have gotten hip to the band’s early work. Ladies and Gentlemen…The Bangles! collects their initial recordings, a sum embodying the melodic end of the garage spectrum with gestures in accord with Cali’s neo-psych movement. Released a couple of years ago as a download and earlier in 2016 by Omnivore on compact disc, on November 25 the collection hits vinyl for the first time.

A lot of bands who originate in the garage gradually shed layers of appeal as they make their way toward prominence, but even after they attained full-fledged stardom that wasn’t necessarily the case with The Bangles. Hitting pop consciousness in the latter half of the decade, Susanna Hoffs (guitar, vocals), Vicki Peterson (guitar, bass, vocals), and her sister Debbi Peterson (drums, bass, vocals) began in Los Angeles in 1981 as The Bangs, and it didn’t take long for the trio to wax a 45.

However, many early fans residing outside of L.A. were likely introduced through “Bitchen Summer / Speedway” on the 1982 Posh Boy compilation Rodney on the Roq Vol. III, making the tune a sensible place for this compilation to start, doubly so as it illuminates a connection to the region’s post-punk ’60s infatuation that came to be tagged as The Paisley Underground.

Featuring warm fuzz, bright surf vibes, and late in the track, a taste of their soon to be well-known vocal harmonies, it’s a nifty slice of the sort of classic-minded stuff that sprang up in void left by ’70s punk’s waning fortunes, and the relationship to the Paisley upswing is solidified through a co-writer’s credit alongside Hoffs for Dave Roback, then of the Dream Syndicate and later half of Mazzy Star.

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