Surf Noir

• The Aqua Velvets, “Guitar Noir” (buy here and learn more about the band here)

Or, enough about crap TV, let’s talk about good TV.

There’s a highly entertaining New York Times article about Deadwood creator David Milch, who’s currently working on a new show for HBO called John from Cincinnati. (Hurry there if you’re interested; not sure how long the Times will keep it on the right side of the pay-only wall.)

You don’t need me to tell you that Deadwood is worth seeing, but I will anyway (even though I’ve seen only the first season so far and am still looking forward to the rest). It’s startlingly rich, with a huge cast of vivid characters encompassing all manner of human striving & vanity; it’s built out of dense & energetic language; its story arcs are freewheeling & idiosyncratic. Go read this; Devin puts it better than I could.

Deadwood also has a more compelling antihero than I would have imagined possible – the brothel owner and, um, pillar of the community Al Swearengen, who’s vicious & amoral & dangerous yet also strangely understandable & utterly fascinating. He makes Tony Soprano look pale, emaciated. The Seth Bullock sheriff character ostensibly represents the moral yardstick of Deadwood, but there’s never any doubt that Swearengen is the real centre of the show & the town.

One of the most rightly celebrated scenes (again, in, um, the first season) features Swearengen delivering a kind of soliloquy about his childhood while being, ah, serviced by one of his employees. It shouldn’t work – it should be a showoffy set piece clearly designed to tell you A Genius Wrote This. But it does work, amazingly; when you watch it you believe that every word & every second is actually happening in front of you.

Anyway, John from Cincinnati sounds pretty insane:

The pilot, scheduled for broadcast in the spring, is based on the travails of a mythical first family of surfing.… The story defies television genre-speak, but in literature it would be called surf noir. There is a dysfunctional family viewed through the twin prisms of surfing and heroin addiction, a space alien and a lawyer named Dickstein. It should be mentioned that some characters occasionally levitate.

I for one am intrigued.

I also had to laugh at some of Milch’s highfalutin’ brainstorming; he’s quoted as saying (presumably extemporaneously):

“A dying culture, intuiting that it is dying, postulates an alternative reality: The Indians postulated in the ghost dance that they were impervious to technology, that when a bullet hit them, they went up to heaven. Does any of that sound familiar?”

On the other hand, it’s refreshing & bracing to see someone so infatuated with ideas, so unafraid of being thought pretentious. Milch’s eccentricities have been well documented, probably best in the long New Yorker article that Devin points to, and at this point it feels like there’s a statute on the books that any article about Milch must play up the fact that he writes flat on his back in a room full of people. Still, he is one funny, interesting cat.

Flashback Caruso

I can’t stomach it on a regular basis or anything, but I do sometimes enjoy CSI: Miami just for David Caruso’s completely batshit hamming. And now some enterprising soul has put together this compilation of “endless Caruso one-liners” and put it up on YouTube. Could be a little more sharply edited, but it’s still very fine. The use of the Who theme music as a kind of ba-dum-bum rimshot really makes it for me – every time it goes to the Daltrey “Won’t Get Fooled Again” scream, I just laugh harder & harder.

Sent it to a Caruso-loving (well, Caruso-appreciating) colleague, who says:

My two favourites are, obviously, the last one set in Brazil, which I still can't really believe is real, and the one where he says, “Mr. Coleman, don’t worry because I ... I’ll be your memory.” I like to imagine that the weird pause is a Caruso ad lib and not just the worst writing ever.

I have not seen the full Brazil episode, but I must have seen the one leading up to it, because I do remember the line “Eric, we’re going to Brazil” right before the end credits. And several minutes later, I stopped laughing and got up off the floor.

Bonus beats: also courtesy of YouTube, here’s David Spade having some fun of his own: “That Who song can make any dialogue rock.…. Now Caruso delivers every line, even the lame ones, as if the Who is about to kick in his door.”

And if you have no interest in David Caruso, which is of course proper & sensible, just so all this wasn’t a complete waste for you, here’s everybody’s favourite German art-rock band* with one of the more almost-kinda-rockist moments from their trippy ’73 album The Faust Tapes. Buy it here.

• Faust, “Flashback Caruso”

* (Well, along with Can, Neu!, Amon Düül, and probably a few others....)

Something Is Wrong Here, Something Is Terribly Wrong

I like to say I don’t care about lyrics in pop music, but I tend to exaggerate. This Bishop Allen song, for instance, seems to have a rich, sad short story in it about an obsession with the JFK assassination masking guilt over not being there for a suicidal friend/lover. It sounds so reductive to summarize it thus, I know, so just give it a listen. (But you may notice that great lyrics or no great lyrics, the song would be much less memorable without the dramatic guitar chords and piano flourishes in the chorus.)

• Bishop Allen, “The Bullet & Big D”

And to further mark this Kennedy death-day anniversary, here’s Steinski & Mass Media with “The Motorcade Sped On,” which, in case you don’t know it, is constructed from samples of the news coverage surrounding the assassination and its aftermath. Well, OK, he cheats a bit, working in some JFK speeches, etc., plus of course that guitar whaaaang from “A Hard Day’s Night.” Y’gotta hear it.

It was a long time before I clued in that in structure this song is actually totally conventional: verse chorus verse chorus bridge verse chorus.

• Steinski & Mass Media, “The Motorcade Sped On”

The Bishop Allen song is on their January EP, which can be bought here. No link for “Motorcade” because I really don’t know where or if you can buy it these days.

Money It Can Kill Ya

Was listening to the Cherry Blossoms while walking this morning and I was feeling it, ready to testify. They sure can put a happy hop in your step, man. These two songs especially, which could have been put to tape (in -fi that’s lower than lo-) at some postmodern tent revival shindig. Makes you wish you were there with them when they were playing them, wherever that was. Plus, that one woman has the voice of an angel. A backwoods hermit angel, maybe, but an angel still.

• The Cherry Blossoms, “Rocks and Stones”
• The Cherry Blossoms, “Glow Jesus Glow”

I know quick comparisons are lazy and all, but I can’t resist describing the Cherry Blossoms as a cross between Lambchop (their fellow, um, Nashvillites? Nashvillians?) and the Shaggs. These songs and a bunch of others can also be gotten from the band’s own site.

Cool / Dub

“Cool” and “Dub” were the flipsides of the first single by the Athens, Georgia band Pylon, contemporaries of R.E.M. and the B-52s. (Not that they sound like either of those, although R.E.M. did cover “Crazy.” Maybe a tiny bit like the B-52s, if the B-52s were being covered by Gang of Four. But anyway.)

I could swear I read once that when Pylon played NYC for the first time, they read a review of one of their shows that said, “Pylon eats dub for breakfast,” causing them to scratch their heads as to what this dub thing was, anyway. Hence “Dub,” with the lines “I don’t know what you’re talking about” and “We eat dub for breakfast.”

Can’t seem to find any corraboration of this online, but it sounds true and I would dearly love it to be.

Anyway, “Dub” is a great stubborn fight between scratching guitar, pounding toms, and guttural singing. But I really love those fat, gonging bass notes that anchor the whole thing. “Cool” is excellent, too, with its slow-burning signal fires and that “Everything is....” chorus.

• Pylon, “Dub”
• Pylon, “Cool”

Pylon broke up in the 1980s after three albums or so, but they’ve been playing intermittently in recent years, I think. Their official site is here. The record to get is the CD comp Hits, drawn from their first two albums, Gyrate and Chomp. However, I don’t think it’s in print. Their site says they’re working on a Gyrate reissue, though.

I Heard Those Slinky Sirens Wail (Whoo!)

First, some fun with YouTube. Big thanks to Sandy for sending me this fantastic link to Roxy Music doing “All I Want Is You” on German television in the mid-’70s, complete with Bryan Ferry sporting an SS-style uniform. Yow!

Funny how it’s not hard to imagine the lyrics to “All I Want Is You” attached to some smooth Avalon croon, but at this point (it’s from Country Life, right? fourth album?) Roxy still sounds like a hot-shit rock band, some freaky-pretty meld of flesh & chrome.

They sound a little more like that on the first two Eno-fied records, of course, so here’s the great “Editions of You.” As with “All I Want Is You,” it amazes me how streamlined & sleek the band sounds, despite all those disparate elements that you’d think might easily congeal into some kind of prog bog.

• Roxy Music, “Editions of You”

(Check it out quick while you can, and buy For Your Pleasure here.)

No Words Could Come Between Us

Mitch Easter’s “Every Word Means No” sounds so classic garage that for years I was convinced his Let’s Active version was some cover. It’s not, it’s his very own, and it’s on their first record, the EP Afoot, and despite a very light ’80s-style production sheen, it holds up real real well. (Buy it here.)

• Let’s Active, “Every Word Means No”

Word

“Songs are really just feelings dressed in words. You may not know what the words actually mean until 15 years later.”

Robyn Hitchcock, Mod Club, one night in November

Attention Adults

OK, after a couple, um, aggressive songs about the whole man-woman thing, I was definitely in the mood to put up something sweeter. And then when I saw that sometime in the past couple weeks someone was somehow directed here after doing a Google search for

we are love baby love child kooky love child

– well, that settled that. (I think it’s actually “groovy,” not “kooky,” but close enough.)

This one will float you up to the ceiling smile-first, and it goes out to all the lovers out there tonight.

• Pizzicato Five, “Baby Love Child”

(Buy it here.)

Let Me Be Your Lovin’ Daddy for a While

• Hoyt Axton, “Double Dare”

Holy moly!

I knew Hoyt Axton – dimly – as the well-trained country troubadour who was led out and paraded for display on bad TV shows (WKRP in Cincinnati, Hee Haw). But on this thing from the sixties he’s like all rock & roll brute, snorting-horny & gruesome creepy. The guitar lines & the vocals are unstable, ready to go off like dynamite, carted along fast & rickety by the organ and the backbeat, snarl twisting to falsetto & back again. It could all blow a hundred feet off the ground any second but Jesus hold on & laugh because there aren’t enough thrills like this one in this life.

(Buy a hard-to-find used copy here.)

Got Some Fine Wine in the Freezer

Steve Wynn played the Horseshoe last night, the first night of a new tour leg. Whenever I see him play or check out one of his recent records, I always feel like I should be following his post-Dream Syndicate career more closely than I do. Solid songs pour out of him, riding simple but effective riffs & melodies, generally classic-rock-feeling with a slight Velvets or punk edge. Even though he’s an LA and NYC kind of guy, his stuff seems to me to have a real heartland feel – it’s not impossible to imagine, say, John Mellencamp singing “Bruises” or “There Will Come a Day.” But thankfully he’ll do the odd weirder tune, too, and he likes his pulsing mood pieces.

Last night’s show, featuring Wynn’s for-a-while-now backing band, The Miracle 3, was just solid fun, fun, fun. Four people playing rock & roll, playing hard, and enjoying each other. (Especially grin-happy drummer Linda Pitmon.) As ever, Wynn seemed comfortable enough with his Dream Syndicate legacy, throwing in a few Days of Wine and Roses songs including “When You Smile,” “Halloween,” “That’s What You Always Say,” and the title track.

I was kind of hoping he’d do “John Coltrane Stereo Blues,” from the Dream Syndicate’s second album, but he did not. Recently I came across a solo Wynn version from the mid-1990s that, I must say, kicks the ass of the original. It’s twitchier & more insistent, and longer, too – it collapses into tiny fragments in the middle and then slowly rebuilds itself. And the guitars just sting all the way through.

• Steve Wynn, “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” (from The Suitcase Sessions – buy here)

This song was obviously conceived mainly as a jam, and although the lyrics may seem like throwaways, I think they’re actually kind of brilliant. On the one hand you have these courtship moves that sound like typical Your Carlsberg Years bullshit:

I got some John Coltrane on the stereo, baby, make you feel alright
I got some fine wine in the freezer, mama, I know what you like

But the real message keeps slipping through:

Keep your hands off the shades, baby, no one gonna care....

Don’t tell me any more about the civilized world – it’s just you and me
What do I gotta do to show you the way that it’s gonna be....

I said that a man works hard all day and he can do what he wants to at night....

It’s terrifying, all the more so because these are ostensibly just vague innuendoes. But the menace is still clear, and because they’re ostensibly just vague innuendoes, they actually sound like how a dangerous creep might choose to express himself.

Compare that with a song that came out around the same time, by Hüsker Dü’s Grant Hart. Hart’s “Diane” is narrated by a sex murderer, and this is what he has to say:

We could cruise down Robert Street all night long
But I think I'll just rape you and kill you instead

Come on – this is the equivalent of a comic-book villain saying, “As an evil mastermind, I will have my terrible revenge on that crime-fighter.”

Ah, well. It’s on Metal Circus (buy here), which was before Hüsker Dü got really good anyway.

• Hüsker Dü, “Diane”

Hot / Cool

I was kindly asked to participate in I Heart Music’s poll about the “hottest Canadian bands of 2006” – the results were posted over there this week.

In true self-centred form, I took the deliberately ambiguous “hottest” to simply mean the bands/records I’ve liked the most this year, and rather than submitting a top 10 list, I went with six or so. This is mainly because there are so many current Canadian records I’m either still digesting or still trying to get to in the first place. But I also decided that rather than fill out the list with second-tier stuff that I liked but didn’t like quite as much, I’d stick to the things that really really stood out.

Sadly, my #1 pick – Glissandro 70’s eponymous album – did not make the all-star team. As I wrote in my note to Matthew at I Heart Music, this is certainly my favourite Canadian album of the year and almost certainly my favourite album of the year, period. I’m still trying to fully articulate why that is, but I guess it has to do with....

A bold range of guitar sounds, from Afrobeat buzz to ponds of reverb.

A mood of sadness & defiance & acceptance all at once, though it’s hard to point to exactly where or how that mood makes itself known.

A stew of diverse influences that blend into a cohesive & singular flavour (more on that here).

A vibe that’s calm & stately but just as thrilling as records that are much more uptempo.


And for what it’s worth, “Portugal Rua Rua” is my single favourite song of the year. Here it is, and for God’s sake buy the record.

• Glissandro 70, “Portugal Rua Rua”

(For scale purposes, my favourite song of last year was Antony & the Johnsons’ “Fistful of Love.” I don’t always have a Favourite Song of the Year that I’m aware of, but I guess I have for the past two.)

A True Halloween Story

As a child I was prone to colds, chills, and coughing fits that must have worried my parents. One year, the year I was in Grade 1, I caught a cold right before Halloween. My parents didn’t prevent me from trick-or-treating – that would have been too cruel – but they did take me out unusually early in the day on the 31st, I guess on the thinking that the temperature was dropping and getting more perilous by the hour.

Which meant that I was already back home and changed out of my costume by the time most other kids thronged the streets. While trick-or-treaters rang our doorbell and held their bags open, I was in my pyjamas, taking inventory of my own loot. And at some point in the evening, one of my own classmates turned up at our door. His name was Brian; he and I waved at each other as my mother gave him a miniature chocolate bar, or perhaps a couple of those little red boxes of raisins.

I didn’t think anything of it. But at school the next day, as all the first-graders gathered attentively around our teacher, Mrs. Scott, Brian put up his hand and made an announcement: “Derek didn’t get to go out for Halloween!”

I began to raise my hand to correct this misunderstanding, but Mrs. Scott spoke first. “Oh, that’s terrible,” she said. “Well, maybe everyone in the class can bring in a little something for Derek.”

Well, what can I say? Yes, greed claimed my six-year-old soul in an instant, staying my hand and stilling my tongue.

And my base instincts were well rewarded. Over the next few days, everyone in the class did indeed bring in a little something for Derek. Each morning more kids would hand over chocolate bars or packets of cookies, which I would accept with murmured thanks, my eyes cast downward, my face mottled by shame and sugar-lust.

But there was a flaw in the plan. I’d soon amassed a plastic bag full of ill-gotten treats, but there was no way to get it back home to my lair without exposing the fraud to my parents. My budding criminal mind was quickly stymied – the only solution I could see was to leave the entire stash at school and try to eat it there over time. So for a week or two I was a desperate, sweets-addled gorger, stuffing a couple of snack cakes into my mouth every lunch hour at school. And all of this under intensifying pressure.

Mrs. Scott: “Derek, you should take those things home instead of cluttering up your desk here!”

Me: (stuffing mouth with snack cakes) “Yeshmishshcott!”

The end finally came after a parent-teacher night. I had done nothing as the fateful summit loomed; I’d like to think my inaction was stoic in nature, that I’d accepted exposure and punishment as my due, but it seems more likely that I was simply out of ideas, a dumb deer caught in the headlights of justice. Or maybe I didn’t even know about parent-teacher night, was still anxiously muddling along and gobbling mouthfuls of lunch-hour chocolate in hopes of consuming the evidence.

In any case, that night my parents returned from the school demanding an explanation, my father clutching my half-full plastic bag of candy. I’m happy to say I have no real memory of whatever punishment followed, nor of what must have surely followed that in turn: public exposure in Mrs. Scott’s class, peer outrage, social ostracization.

All of it richly deserved, of course.

• The Strangeloves, “I Want Candy” (buy here)
• Jesus and Mary Chain, “Some Candy Talking” (buy here)
• Pop Will Eat Itself, “Candydiosis” (buy here)