Janet Weiss is a killer drummer. She’s probably better known for her work in Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag, but I first saw her as a member of Quasi. Quasi is a two-piece band out of Portland Oregon, with an unusual organ/drum alignment. Kind of like White Stripes with organ instead of guitar, and a drummer who can kick ass, royally. The organ player, Sam Coombs, used to be married to Ms Weiss, and he’s an action figure on stage, often using his body and the principles of levers and balance to make things happen. I first saw them live opening for Elliott Smith and they were a delightful surprise, partly because of the novelty of the performance, partly because the songs are pretty good, and partly because the rhythms were excellent. The sound on this clip is mediocre, but you get lots of video of Janet Weiss playing.
To hear the song for real you’ll want to find the elpee mix.
The Breeders, as a concept, was a band Kim Deal and her twin sister imagined when they were kids, and they learned how to play so they could make it a reality when they got older. But Kim Deal’s adult life has been divided between her work with the Breeders (whose great album Last Splash is 20 years old this year, and they’ve been touring and playing it in its entirety) and the Pixies (as well as a detour with her solo band, the Amps, whose one album was played a lot on my cassette player when it came out). So Breeders albums have come out with lengthy intervals in between each release. The most recent, from 2008, is called Mountain Battles. Winding down our week of authentic sounds, please note that it was engineered by Steve Albini.
But it is perhaps useful to point out that Kim Deal started her own recording purity movement, called All Wave, which abjures any use of computers or digital equipment, up to and including mastering. Presumably not including CD production. Mountain Battles sounds just fine streaming digitally out of my computer into my headphones (Grado analog), but I bet the vinyl version sounds better.
My mind’s eye is always on the lookout for a SotW idea. I might hear something new on a blog I follow or read an interesting article in a magazine or hear a long forgotten gem on the radio. But a couple of weeks ago my friend David K posted a video on his Facebook page of Crack the Sky doing “She’s a Dancer.” Eureka! I hadn’t thought about that band or song for a very looong time.
If you’ve never heard of Crack the Sky, you’re not alone. Most people haven’t, unless you’re from their adopted hometown of Baltimore (they were originally from Pittsburgh) where they were a big hit in the mid seventies.
The band was led by John Palumbo and played a very smart, pop biased form of progressive rock – at least in the strictest sense. Their songs are played by virtuoso musicians, often use complex arrangements, tricky time signatures and have pretentious lyrics, and on occasion run very long. But most of the songs still fit into more conventional pop structures.
Take the song David reminded me about, “She’s a Dancer”, for instance.
“She’s a Dancer” is from CTS’s self titled debut (1975). The album received some critical praise – Rolling Stone declaring it “Debut Album of the Year” – but it did little in sales or airplay. The song contains many of the characteristics described above but also comes in under 4 minutes and contains some latter day Beatles’ influence. Plus it ends with a pretty cool, horn driven, instrumental section played by the Brecker Brothers and David Sanborn. Not too shabby!
The lyric covers some of the same territory as The Kinks “Lola.”
Check out the rest of the set and their fine second album, Animal Notes, on Spotify.
Another Steve Albini engineered song from the Pixies’ first, Surfer Rosa. Gigantic features bassist Kim Deal on vocals and the kind of sly hard rock songwriting that actually has pop appeal, like she wrote for the Breeders. Not that it was any sort of hit when it came out.
A friend posted a link today to Bill Plummer’s recording of “The Look of Love,” which features a sitar, psychedelic cover art and a prominent bass line. When I saw the link I thought: The baseball player? Or the bass player? Or have I got the names screwed up? I didn’t have the names screwed up.
If you Google Bill Plummer, the baseball player comes up. He played from 1968 to 1978 for the Cubs, Reds and Mariners. He was primarily a backup catcher, put together 1007 PA with a .188 BA and 14 homers during that time. As so often happens with catchers, he ended up a manager for the Mariners in 1992, when they had a .395 winning percentage.
The only reason I knew Bill Plummer, bassist, is because if you read the inner sleeves of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street elpee, Bill Plummer shows up as an acoustic bass player on some of the songs. I have to admit, I don’t remember the name of everybody who plays on every album, but not only did I play Exile a lot and read the notes closely, but I also discovered that my “hi-fi” set at the time—a belt driven AR turntable and a fairly cheap but wood boxed desk radio with stereo RCA inputs—was capable of letting me get deep into the Stones’ mix. I couldn’t believe I could hear Bill Plummer in all that grimey noise. The mix is brilliant.
Plus, it couldn’t have escaped my attention at the time that a catcher on the Reds and a bass player for the Stones had the same name, and from such linkages memories are made.
The songs Plummer played on are “Rip This Joint,” “Turd on the Run,” “I Just Wanna See His Face,” and “All Down the Line.” I know all this because I found a website devoted to the Stones that is plug ugly, but goes on and on and on with interesting facts, documents and conversation, called iorr.org. It’s a good place to go if you want to get caught in the sway of the Stones.
I also learned at iorr (which is the acronym for It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll) that Bill Wyman later claimed that he played bass on at least some of the tracks credited to Plummer. And the posters at iorr.org credit that info totimeisonourside.com, another website of dubious aesthetics that seems to get the job done Stones-wise. Just as the Stones and Bill Plummer, among others, get the job done with this one. . .
When my daughter was a kid she (and we) fell in love with Bill Callahan, who a while back (before she was listening to music) recorded as Smog, and is a fantastic singer-songwriter, with all the baggage that comes with that.
This was a fairly early (1995) and shaggy Smog tune, engineered by Steve Albini. The thing to look at here is the vividness of the guitar and the vocals. Totally out front.
What a stance. You mean ALL your songs are better than EVERY OTHER SONG EVER? I gotta see you live. There ain’t enough time to play every great song, why pass up any chance? Just don’t play any bad ones – another impossible task maybe, but why try?
So The Sinatras lucked out for a while. Not only did we get a bass player but we got a great bass player, and he could sing too. Glen Cahill had just quit a band that was making quite the noise at the time, The Slander Band. They ruled CBGB late 1977-78, but they had just broken up. New York Dolls manager Marty Thau offered them his customary $20k deal, on his Red Star label, but they turned him down. Glen quit over that, that and the usual interpersonal band bullshit. Their singer Jesse Blue was a stone belter and could have been a punk Janis Joplin and I ain’t lying. I can’t find any recorded evidence of her posted anywhere which is a crying shame. They did record, somebody must have it.
One of the things that pisses me off about the Sinatras album is that on those same lousy tapes, but not on the record, is us doing “Around and Around” with Jesse Blue singing. Why they didn’t put that on the record is beyond me, it was by far the best thing that night.
After the show we jammed with Jesse and others in the dressing room until 5 in the morning. I remember the Stones’ “Tell Me” was really good.
They found Jesse’s body five days later, smack overdose. Good thing it was winter I guess. R.I.P. Jesse, but what a waste. Not to preach, everybody needs something, but let me tell you something about junkies: every single one that I ever knew WANTED to be a junkie. It takes dedication to become a junkie, at least a month of doing it every day to get even a mild habit. They loved the idea of being a junkie, in most cases before they actually were. They would segregate themselves at parties and talk about nothing but junk. They were just the baddest asses in town because they laid around and dreamed. The funny thing is that a lot of them were real bad asses, until junk turned them into sneaky street rats.
But that all came later. I started out so UPBEAT! I had moved out of the city, quit my day job, and lived in North Pelham with Kenny Lamb, in a sweet if dank basement apartment. I met my wife there. On nights when we weren’t playing or practicing, Kenny and I had a constant party going. There was so much fantastic new music around then, we listened hard and loud, getting high and playing Risk and then going out.
Kenny wanted to do a 45, so we went back to A-1 and cut Teddy Crashes Blonde Dies b/w Some Others Boys, both written by Nicky and me (mostly Nicky’s words and my tunes). The recording went well; the engineer knew what we wanted and he got it. I have to say the songs sounded better on cassettes made in the studio than on 45, because the mastering wasn’t too good. We knew nothing of that arcane process. Teddy Crashes was re-released on two compilations, Hyped to Death and later on No One Left To Blame. Here it is off the 45, play loud please:
It was on the jukebox at Max’s and Meg Griffin played it on WPIX FM. Look Ma, top of the world.
We played our first gigs at The Rat in Boston. We got the gig from a Pelham friend, David Alcott aka David Champagne, who was in the hard pop Shane/Champagne Band. Later he was in Treat Her Right with Mark Sandman. David is one of those mensches. He helps people. I was good friends with his brothers Tom and Toby, but David was three years older and I didn’t get to know him until one night the summer before when he and Gary (Shane) Lavenson jammed with a bunch of us in Mark Lyons’ basement. We played mostly Stones and Rascals songs. It was the first time I ever got off playing with other people. My first musical orgasm. David and Gary told me I should get in a band, so when I told David that I had one, he got us two nights at The Rat.
It went well for a first gig, nervous and rushed at first but we settled in and rocked. The place was not packed but close and the crowd was into it. They booked us with The Real Kids, another stroke of luck since they had a following and musically they were at least in the ballpark. Unlike many New York gigs in both respects…
We came back, the record was out, we had CB’s and Max’s lined up, then the Hot Club in Philly, some big barn in Jersey, the Electric Circus which had just reopened, and back to Boston and Atlantis uptown, then Max’s again. We’re writing new songs, Glen has really solidified us and added creative touches, there was a little blurb about us in the Daily News (“Sinatras will dooby doo at Max’s”).
No shit: the National Enquirer had a story “Frank Sees Red Over NY Punk Band.” We had nothing, but the future looked bright. Of course right around the corner, the blackjack of fate was poised to strike.
