Monthly Archives: November 2013

Night Music: Tiki Brothers, “Ocean—Thank You Lou Reed”

by

My buddies the Tiki Brothers play a lot of water and beach themed tunes. They started out playing covers, lots of novelty tunes (Pipeline anyone?) a few years ago and at one of their early shows at the Steinhof Cafe, a bar up the road from my house, they played a gorgeous non-novelty song about the sea that stately-sloshed it’s way up the bank and back down the beach again, with a long inevitable build of tension and melody and determination. These are the not coincidentally the characteristics that, for me, dominate Lou Reed’s song writing. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he wrote this late Velvet Underground song that I didn’t know, called “Ocean,” which I’d surely heard because it was on the Velvet’s big commercial move, Loaded. (The link here is to the demo version, which features John Cale on organ and wasn’t on the released elpee.)

Walker, the Tiki’s bassist, sent me a recording today. It’s Ocean, the Lou Reed song, only with a kind of righteous poem dedicated to Lou Reed laid on top by the Tiki’s vocalis/mandolin player, Buck, extemporaneously I’m told. And like the original it starts quiet and builds into something of a roiling swamp of tone poem and tribute and something a little lovely and oddly familiar with Lou. It’s recorded live in the rehearsal studio so the balance and mix isn’t always perfect, but that’s okay. It builds to something I thought worth sharing.

Ocean–Thank You Lou Reed, by the Tiki Brothers.

louandlaurie-southfork Ps. I went looking for a picture of Lou Reed at the beach, maybe doing tai chi or working on his tan, but this was the closest I could find.

Night Music: My Bloody Valentine, “Sometime”

by

I was asking Gene to turn up the levels on his vocals, but yesterday’s foray into his song the End and the Beatles overlaid a hundred times, put me in mind of My Bloody Valentine. This is one of the most loved albums of the 90s, and he wisely buries the vocals underneath the overlaid and overdubbed guitar and whatever other noises he uses. (NOTE: After writing this I was reading some interviews with Kevin Shields, the Valentine’s lead guitarist and main writer and he says the sound is a result of open tuning and a wang bar that he pulls on while he plays. Sounds lewd, but he also says there are very few overdubs, that the band values simplicity. Of course, here’s Shields’ idea of simplicity, as applied to the recording of the song “Only Shallow:” “That’s just two amps facing each other, with tremolo. And the tremolo on each amp is set to a different rate. There’s a mike between the two amps. I did a couple of overdubs of that, then I reversed it and played it backwards into a sampler. I put them on top of each other so they kind of merged in.” Quote from a story by Alan DiPerna originally published in Guitar World.)

I was torn about whether to use the Lost in Translation version, with those visuals, or the album cover only version. The music makes its own images, but if Scarlett Johanssen gets in the way, close your eyes. This is beautiful too.

Night Music: Gene McCaffrey, “This is the End”

by

My buddy Gene wrote this song, and with each iteration he raises the level of the vocals and the cleanness of the mix. Which is good. But the reason to love this song are the propulsive guitars and the rock solid drums. This thing kicks from the stall to the cleaning stall and probably even to the sleeping stall (I’m borrowing my daughter’s horse vocab here).

A metaphor lives forever.

http://www.reverbnation.com/bluegene/song/19254234-this-is-the-end

Night Music: Reform School Girls, and Don’t Touch Me There

by

If you have ever been in a band–and I hope my buds Steve and Gene affirm this–you are doomed to play covers.

Speaking for myself, and the Biletones, between my own catalog of originals, and that of  bandmate/singer/rhythm guitarist Tom Nelson, we could easily play a two hour set of tunes we penned.

However, especially if your group does not have, shall we say, “a name,” then for the most part you have to get used to playing Little Queenie, Dead Flowers, Moondance, and a zillion other tunes that I have played way more often than I wish.

Still, it goes with the territory, as people want to hear and dance to stuff they know. We do play Tom’s Rich Girlfriend as a regular tune, and have done my own Geography Matters, as well as a couple of more Tom wrote (Bad Dreams, DUI Bars) but for the most part we have to squeeze the desire to play originals into playing more obscure covers.

That means we play a chunk of Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, and Wilco, all of which are fine by me, to go along with Queenie and the more mainstream cover ilk.

Sometimes those odd covers work (Gravity’s Gone, by Drive by Truckers) and sometimes not (Having a Party by Sam Cooke, and Borrow your Cape by Bobby Bare, Jr.).

Well, about a month ago, the song Reform School Girls, by Nick Curran and the Lowlifes appeared on the weekly practice list.

The song is a great paean to the Phil Spector sound, as well as an homage to the Bitch Groups like the Shangri-Las, and well, once we started playing it, I found myself humming it for days at a time.

Written by the very talented Curran, who sadly passed away from oral cancer in  October of last year at the age of 35, Reform School Girls is as beautiful a send up to the genre as is the Tubes Don’t Touch Me There.

Enjoy!

We Buy White Albums by Rutherford Chang

by

Dust_and_Grooves_3332Last March the NY Times ran a story about a guy named Rutherford Chang, whose art installation called “We Buy White Albums” was open in Soho of New York City. Chang had collected more than 600 first edition copies of the Beatles album The Beatles, with the embossed lettering, more commonly known as The White Album.

The White Album, Chang found, was something of a tabula rosa, a canvas for stains, drawings, accidents and art, and from the Times story is appears that was part of the plan of the cover’s designer, Richard Hamilton.

Chang created a record store stocked with his White Albums, and spent his time at the store playing each one. They are ordered by the serial numbers that came on the albums pressed before 1975.

Another plan was to play all of them at the same time. Now the record store has opened up in a museum in Hamburg Germany, and Chang has released his overlaid performance of 100 copies of Side 1. It seems record pressings are not all the same, and while this starts out sounding like a somewhat boomy version of side one, by the end of Back in the USSR there is a real loopy dreamscape at work. I learned about this from a story in Slate.

Have a listen here.

Night Music: Humble Pie and Ray Charles, “I Don’t Need No Doctor”

by

When I was out in Arizona seeing AFL baseball games a reporter from the NY Times called, and I did an interview while standing on the mezzanine behind first base at Talking Stick in Scottsdale. The subject was primary care physicians, and we had a nice chat. The story has a little less scope than I imagined, but just as in Larry Schechter’s new book, Winning Fantasy Baseball: Secret Strategies of a NINE-TIME National Champion, out the first week of January, the first two words in this story are “Peter Kreutzer…”.

The Humble Pie version of this song is the one I grew up with. Heck, I probably thought they wrote it, or I didn’t care. This analog YouTube video has typical analog sound, but don’t be afraid to turn it up. THe distortion makes it all the more like a 1971 8-track.

I think I must have heard this Ray Charles version at some point, but tonight it surprised me. It’s the original recording of the song, which I learned from the “video” was written by Nick Ashford, Valerie Simpson and Jo Armstead. Sweet!

Night Music: The Spirit of Radio

by

I have never really been a big Rush fan.

Not that I was ever against them, but sort of like Masters of the Universe, I was born  too late for them.

By the time Rush hit what Wikipedia refers to as the band’s “Mainstream Success” years (1977-81) I had run from the Arena rock of ELO and Queen to the Punk bands from England and New Wavers out of New York.

Furthermore, Rush was a Prog Rock band, and I had already grown weary of Yes, not that I did not respect the musical chops of Steve Howe and his mates. Yes’ music just seemed a bit on the forced/overwritten side to me compared to the visceral guitars of the Pistols and Eddie and the Hot Rods and the Records, et al.

Actually, the real bottom line was that the Prog Band of my adolescence was The Moody Blues, and then Pink Floyd, both of whom were cutting edge in the late 60’s, before Yes and Rush and even Fripp and Eno (there was Roxy Music out there too, though they were more Pop/Art Rock than Prog in my opinion).

I was given a copy of Rush’s single, New World Man when it came out in the mid-80’s, and it was OK, but I more remember a photograph of a Dalmatian on the cover (our family had one as I was growing up) than the actual song.

Over the years, I have heard songs by Rush on the radio waves, and with their distinct style and Geddy Lee’s falsetto vocals, they are pretty easily recognizable. And, they are not bad in any way. I never turn them off or change the channel: I just never crave more.

Except for the tune The Spirit of Radio which I have heard from time-to-time on said radio, and which I thought was a really great cut, but which I had never really listened to, if that makes a lick of sense. And, I certainly did not know the title of the tune.

However, I did catch the Band’s live performance  as part of their introduction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and lo and behold the band played a red hot version of said song.

Again, I noted I liked it a lot, but I still did not know the title till the other night when I was returning from band practice, and the local hard rock station (the Bone at 107.7) played the original album track from the 1981 album Permanent Waves.

Of course with its unmistakable Alex Lifeson riff that runs through the tune, it is pretty hard to miss, but the truth is, since I heard it that last time, I cannot stop hearing in my head.

For now, that is a good thing.

 

 

Night Music: Mayer Hawthorne, “The Stars Are Ours”

by

I’m not sure what to do with this. I was just out parking the car and I heard this song on the radio. Well, first there was a cover of the Rolling Stones’ I’m Free by a band called the Soup Dragons, which was weird but cool. And then this song came on.

I felt immediately that I’d heard it a thousand times, and yet I was pretty sure I hadn’t. I’ve now played it three times and I’m struck by how it seems to jam the ur-Stevie Wonder song into the ur-Steely Dan song, with pretty smart lyrics about being young and feeling special. I’m dumbstruck and awestruck at the same time. I should hate it the way I hate Bruno Mars appropriating the Police, but I don’t. Not yet, anyway.

Groupies on Reddit

by

There is a long Reddit thread about groupies here. You could probably spend days reading it, but it’s fun to wade in.

Here’s a non-rock (hockey) sample:

[–]YoureKindOfADick 953 points 1 day ago

My ex girlfriend fucked half of the Buffalo Sabres circa 2006.
permalink

[–]Camellia_sinensis 2614 points 1 day ago*x2

Is your ex-girlfriend the Ottawa Senators?
permalinkparent