Final Date

Just a quick post to mark my first & last visit to the concert hangar at the Docks. I was lured there against my better judgment, a result of having consistently missed Belle & Sebastian on their past swings through Toronto & thinking that I really should see them sometime. (Or in some cases having been missed by them – I did have a ticket to that cancelled-on-the-day-of Opera House show back in fall 1998.)

Anyway, it was, er, a fine set. I guess. From what I could tell. Nice funky dance moves & a career-ranging song selection (though more/some covers would have been nice), and musically the performances of both B&S and openers the New Pornographers seemed certainly solid, if not exactly revelatory. From what I could hear.

And now, let us speak of this no more.

Here’s the superfun B&S disco take on the Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day.” And a track from the Giants themselves, one of the best from the icy, haunting, superb, and many other adjectives Colossal Youth. And a lovely Floyd Cramer classic that B&S oughtta cover sometime (except they’d probably have to make up some words or something), & which will serve as a gentle farewell from me to the Docks.

(Elsewhere: Frank at Chromewaves has a very well done proper/thorough review of the show here.)

• Belle & Sebastian, “Final Day”
• Young Marble Giants, “Brand-New-Life”
• Floyd Cramer, “Last Date”
  

And Oh, What Heights We’ll Hit

It’s the first song of the Animal Collective set at the Opera House, & onstage four guys in civvies – no funny costumes or anything – have bubbled up a huge cauldron roar. I see a guy playing bass and a guy banging drums and a guy playing guitar and another guy doing something with machines, but it’s Just One Sound. (I’m tempted to say “wall of sound,” but that’s a whole other connotation.) The only other band I can remember so completely creating Just One Sound live is My Bloody Valentine years ago, & I was wearing earplugs for that one so that probably helped the effect. Anyway, then I realize that in fact the guy playing guitar is also singing, but his voice, and the tune it carries, is only coming through in muffled hints here & there. The bass player starts hopping around, & a few seconds later I realize he’s hopping around because there’s been a chord change. What is this? I know this. What is this song? A ghostly silhouette in the background of a Polaroid.

Anyway, it was remarkable. The show never quite hit that particular height again (at least not for me), but it had its moments for sure. Sometimes it sounded more like this –

• Animal Collective, “Banshee Beat” (live in Orlando, Florida)

– which is pretty cool too.

(“Banshee Beat” is my fave from Feels; I dig it much more than the pop/Beach Boys stuff. And yet, on Sung Tongs it's the pop/Beach Boys stuff that stands out.)

And elsewhere: Stereogum has a kooky Broken Social Scene cover of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” apparently for a kids'-song comp, here. (Be sure to listen for the epilogue, IE the kooky part.) A friend who will remain nameless once told me that hearing “Puff” made him weep well into adulthood.

Workmanship

More from our German friends today – in this case two specimens of mid-1990s indie-rock. Blumfeld sang mostly in their native tongue and never got released in North America, I don’t think; 18th Dye were with Matador for some fine English-friendly records.

This Blumfeld track is the hookiest tuneless song I know. No melody to speak of. An antichorus that represents collapse rather than climax. Vocals that are essentially spoken-word. Lyrics that are of course meaningless, at least to a monolinguist like me.* And yet the guitar & drum sound on the “verses” absolutely glistens, and soon enough you’d swear that those clipped Teutonic tones are glistening, too.

• Blumfeld, “Verstärker”

And then there’s 18th Dye. I remember really digging both their full-length albums** in their entirety when they were fresh & new, but the intervening years have distilled my grasp & appreciation of their work down to a representative couple tracks. (Funny how that happens.) Love the dynamics here, not because they’re mindblowing or anything but in fact the opposite. The song’s soft-loud-medium building blocks become predictable after a few listens … and then become inevitable & seamless rather than just predictable. I get caught up in it every time, the same way you get caught up in the carpentry of a well-made chair or the curve & climb of a lovely building – for their beauty & functionality alike.

• 18th Dye, “Poolhouse Blue”

* I’m pretty sure my friend John, who introduced me to Blumfeld, once told me that “Verstärker” is actually a brand of German amplifier. (Correction: It's just German for “amplifier.” Thanks to commenter.)

** This one is from their second, Tribute to a Bus, and I really must throw it on again sometime soon.

Must Am I Be Singing Vergnűgt?

• The Comedian Harmonists, “Wenn Ich Vergnűgt Bin, Muss Ich Singen”

This is, for me, the clear standout from a double-disc Comedian Harmonists comp, though the rest of their stuff is similar & similarly striking. I can tell you that this is a German vocal band from the 1930s, but otherwise the Harmonists pretty much fend off my descriptive /evocative skills – you need to hear them for yourself. (There was a good German movie about them a few years ago, called The Harmonists, and there are CD compilations aplenty to be found.)

I’ve been putting this song on mixed CDs for friends & family for years, usually to highly mixed response, but I want to be clear here that I don’t consider this a novelty or joke record in any way, even though it’s highly entertaining & amusing and even though their name begins with “Comedian.” Nor is my love of this ironic or aloof – it’s earnest & utterly straightforward. The song never fails to whoosh a druglike euphoria through my veins & around again; I am never not in the mood to hear it.

All this may or may not have something to do with the fact that I sprechen no Deutsch and therefore don’t understand the words.

The Beatles & the Stones

• Happy Cat, “We Fuck You Like Superman”
• The Weather Prophets, “Well Done Sonny”

Today’s theme is song titles borrowed from rock & roll arcana. “We fuck you like Superman” is allegedly a backwards-masked message at the close of “A Day in the Life.” And “Well Done Sonny” is a line spoken by Charlie Watts in the Gimme Shelter movie, breaking up a charged silence that follows a radio call-in rant about Altamont from Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels. It’s Watts fending off the darkness by reasserting his own dry, snug & smug unflappability – least, that’s how it always looked to me.

The Weather Prophets tune gets bonus points for actually being about Altamont (“searching the crowd for the the man in the lime-green suit”); it captures the horror, the horror but delivers it with a mighty rollick & shine, plus a bass hook so sturdy you could hang onto it with both hands if the ground fell away on you. The Happy Cat song seems to be about, um, fucking you like Superman. But it’s mesmerizing, & the washes of vinyl static make for their own callback to the, er, source text.

(“Well Done Sonny” is from a solid old Creation Records sampler, Doing It for the Kids. “We Fuck You Like Superman” is from a great early-1990s comp called Soluble Fish, a tie-in to Chemical Imbalance ’zine put together by this guy, who currently propriets one of my fave mp3 blogs.)

On another note....

Moistworks has been hosting “Writers Week,” in which a number of authors post songs of their choice. My favourite, I think, is Jonathan Lethem’s survey of poultry-themed songs (“Chicken Strut,” “Turkey Walk,” “Eat the Goose,” etc.).

Please Don’t Stop Me

I’ll probably only keep that one Boss thing up for a day or two, “State Trooper” being so canonical & widely available and all. But as a postscript, I was very happy to recently discover a Steve Wynn cover of same, from a Springsteen tribute album. (Wynn’s something of a tribute-album slut, & not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The song tends to attract country-identified artists – Cowboy Junkies, Steve Earle – but Wynn brings some welcome electric thrum. This here version actually doubles the fun, clocking in at eight-plus minutes as compared with the four-or-so on the tribute disc.

I saw Wynn’s Dream Syndicate near the end of their lifespan – one bit of history I’ll always cling to, having missed so many others. The last time I saw him solo (well, with the Miracle Three backing him up, as they do here) was a great in-store at Soundscapes a few years back. I gotta tell you, what with getting older, tiring more quickly, needing more sleep, having to work in the morning or otherwise get things done, etc. etc., sitting crosslegged on a record-store floor on a summer Friday afternoon seems more & more like the ideal way to see a band.

• Steve Wynn, “State Trooper”

Is a Dream a Lie If It Don’t Come True?

So Bruce Springsteen was doing Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” on his 2005 solo tour. (Thanks here to my friend Robert K., who was at the Toronto show last summer, for hipping me to this.) It’s a natural, since Springsteen likes his Suicide and sure does love his dream imagery (dream as in longterm aspiration, that is, not as in sleep narrative).

His version of “Dream Baby Dream” is starker & ostensibly darker than the Suicide original – it’s missing the sleighbell flourishes of Martin Rev’s instrumentation, not to mention that supremely comforting bassline that all but says “There, there, it’ll be OK.” But it’s warmer in other ways: Springsteen’s plaintive singing suggests an effort at connection that Alan Vega’s aloof & ambivalent vocals don’t. Same goes for his added lines – “dry your eyes” and “open up your heart” and “I just wanna see you smile” – clichés that both work with the song’s minimalist lyrics and manage to add some urgency.

Which in turn makes the song darker still, since you get the sense Springsteen has something at stake, some unmet need, whereas you’re never quite sure what Vega wants or needs when he tells you to keep dreaming. (I’m not saying one is better than the other, mind. Just different.)

Springsteen is well known to be a big fan of Suicide, especially their epic “Frankie Teardrop.” In fact, the first time I ever heard of the band, back in the early 1980s, it was because they were mentioned in a Springsteen article. But for some reason, only very recently did I clue in that “State Trooper” – one of the highlights of Nebraska and oft-covered since – is actually an OVERT Suicide homage. The backing is acoustic guitar rather than synth, but otherwise all the elements are there: the chugging rhythm; the spooky, gliding-by vocals punctuated by sudden yelps and barks; the words coming at you in short, discrete lines separated by pauses, as if the singer’s a gambler turning over one card at a time between bets.

One difference, though. Alan Vega’s antiheros, his Frankie Teardrops, feel like pure abstractions, probably even to him. Whereas even though we’re given few details about the nameless narrator of “State Trooper,” I have no doubt that Springsteen could instantly tell us where the guy went to high school, what his father did for a living, and how old he was when he stopped going to church every Sunday.

• Suicide, “Dream Baby Dream”
• Bruce Springsteen, “Dream Baby Dream” (live in Toronto, 2005)
• Bruce Springsteen, “State Trooper”

Three Times That Same Song

In the November ’05 issue of The Wire, Alan Licht writes about his history of interpreting other people’s songs, starting with an EP of Moondog covers that his first band, Love Child, recorded.

Forced Exposure, still a magazine/label back then, had commissioned us to do it. Neither Love Child bassist Rebecca Odes nor myself had heard Moondog, but they sent a tape of Moondog 2, an album of rounds, and we loved it. It was sharp thinking on their part: like Love Child, the Moondog album featured child-like vocals, and balanced musical sophistry and simplicity. Plus, everything clocked in between one and three minutes, much like our songs did back then. But [in the Love Child version] “All Is Loneliness” was stretched to nearly seven minutes as a psych guitar jam inspired largely by Spacemen 3’s live take of The 13th Floor Elevators’ “Rollercoaster” – the canon and the 5/8 metre went out the window and we concentrated on the fuzz guitars, with a cheap Casio winding in and out of the mix.

It’s always a thrill to be reminded of how much forgotten & undiscovered country there is out there – undiscovered by me, anyway. On reading this I realized (a) that I actually had a dub of Love Child’s “All Is Loneliness” on an old mixed cassette, and (b) that I’d come across this “Moondog” name here and there for years without ever bothering to learn who he/she/they is/was. Turns out Moondog was Louis Hardin (1916-1999), an eccentric composer known for performing on a Manhattan street corner dressed as a Viking, and the maker of many records. “All Is Loneliness” is a popular cover choice – Big Brother & the Holding Company did it back in the day, and Antony & the Johnsons have been doing it live recently.

Anyway, here’s Love Child’s version, sounding a little rough for the ride from vinyl to cassette to WAV to mp3, but still eerie & entrancing. (I’d recommend both the full-length Love Child albums – spry Beat Happening-style stomps & moody guitarscapes, with more of the former on the first record and more of the latter on the second.)

Here too is the Moondog source version, plus another take on the song by those crafty Norwegians, Motorpsycho. Theirs is more conventional polished-up neo-psychedelia, but holy moly that track kicks.

• Moondog, “All Is Loneliness”
• Love Child, “All Is Loneliness”
• Motorpsycho, “All Is Loneliness”