Malcolm Maclaren fronting hip-hop culture

While most of the obituaries for Malcolm McLaren will rightfully center on his time as manager of The Sex Pistols, this was just the first of his successes in revolutionary pop music.  Upon its release in 1983, Duck Rock‘s distillation of Soweto, South Bronx and proto-electronica sounded like nothing on earth and everything on it at the same time.  Nowadays it sounds almost ridiculously dated.  The primitive turntablism sounds like something your 4-year old could do when you hand him your iPhone to distract him for a while.  The raps are impossibly old skool, practically “moon” and “june” rhyming.  Even the selection of African sources seems downright quaint as the recent crate-digging revolution led by Soundway and others continues to dig up impossibly modern-sounding treasures from the 70s.

To truly appreciate how insanely alien Duck Rock felt at the time, you need to place your ears in its historical context.

The idea of creating cut-up music and rhythms from records and charismatically, charmingly rhyme-chanting over them was still very new.  Rap and hip-hop were still barely more than rumors to most of the country.  Even as a teenager in relatively open & urban Berkeley, the hip-hop hits that bled out into our mainstream were more like novelty acts.  Grandmaster Flash was on auto-repeat in the school cafeteria, while Tom Tom Club and Blondie had fluke hits that played on hip-hop styles without actually committing to them.  But that was about it.  The great Def Jam/Run-DMC/Beastie Boys explosion of 1984 was still yet to come.

I would never go so far as to say Malcolm McLaren discovered African music, but for the 80s generation Duck Rock represented its introduction into their consciousness.  South Africa and apartheid were only just entering mainstream conversation in America.  None of the great boycotts had started.  Nelson Mandela was still in jail – and wasn’t he some kind of terrorist or something?  All we knew about him we learned about from The Special AKA.  Stevie Ray Vaughn and friends had not yet declaimed “I ain’t gonna play Sun City!”  Most critically to the success of Duck Rock, African music simply hadn’t made it over yet.  After the political convulsions of the late 1970s, Africa’s music industry was essentially gone.  Graceland wasn’t even a gleam in Paul Simon’s eye.  The Indestructible Beat Of Soweto was not on anyone’s radar, except perhaps Robert Christgau’s.

Finally, Duck Rock believe it or not is a critical early entry into the creation of the synth-y pop sound that dominated pop in the 80s and is a focus of today’s 80s revivalism.  Producer Trevor Horn was fresh off the successes of a couple of the best sounding and most influential post-punk synth-pop productions, ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love and Into Battle With The Art Of Noise, and yet to move on to the monolithic and silly manifesto-ism of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome.  It’s difficult to give the sense now of how new and modern Horn’s production style felt in the early 80s, especially coming out of a long period starting with punk where amateurism was so key to the aesthetic.  Crucially, the Horn style sounded great on Walkman headphones in the early days of personal stereos when little else did.  And whether on purpose or not, Duck Rock brought together several burgeoning genres – African, electronica, sampling and hip-hop – that sounded great on cheap portable headphones, even better when moving in virtual isolation through an urban environment – still a novelty in those days.

I think it also bears noting that there was – and should be – considerable controversy over the provenance of the songs. Connecting the dots between township jive and US inner city radio seemed pretty clever at the time and still gives a nice message that we’re all connected, baby.  But there’s also real reason to be uncomfortable with that message, especially in light of the songwriting credits that give all the rights to “Horn/McLaren.”  One listen and you’ll see strong reason to doubt that they really had much to do with songwriting.  While it’s true in the early days of sampling that credits were a bit less… stringent, the co-opting of others’ artistry – in particular from distressed urban areas around the world – reeks of the worst of cultural imperialism.   This is another crucial way that Duck Rock is a product of its time even as it stretched out ears into the future.

(Come to think of it, Malcolm had done something similar with another music project six years earlier.)

The performers and set spill into every corner of the theater and virtually – no, in actuality – beg for audience engagement and participation throughout.  There is even a moment in the first act in which Fela invites the crowd to storm the stage.  This moment passes quickly and is done so subtly that I think most people, including the theater-savvy group with whom I attended the show, can easily miss it.  It’s clearly a charged moment for the performers, though, as they need to wait a moment to see if the audience will respond – but also be able to play through seamlessly to keep potential awkwardness to a minimum.  The musicians keeps riffing and if nobody moves the show goes on.

At the intermission, I asked one of the ushers if the weekend night crowds respond differently.  Oh yeah, some of the audiences are there to paaarty.  My Sunday afternoon brethren were a quieter bunch for sure.  What a performing challenge for the actors & dancers in a tightly choreographed show to have such an unpredictable element built into the show!

Another way that Fela! tries to break through the traditional Broadway audience dynamic is through an insert in the program inviting audience members to drink throughout the show.  The bar in the rear stays open and you are explicitly told its OK to have beverages at your seat.  In the spirit of the show – and, well, because I can’t imagine going to a rock concert without a tasty adult beverage – I made my way to the back bar towards the end of Act I.  Not only was I the only one in the theater to do so but the bartender seemed totally baffled by my presence, ignoring me even though I was her sole customer.

I don’t blame the audience for being confused.  The marketing on the web and around town still follows the formula of most Broadway musicals; it won this many Tonys, blah blah blah.  It makes me wonder how the show has decided to target its potential customers.  Would it be better getting the startled tourists and traditional theatergoers who have been taught to sit there and passively enjoy the show; or make outreach to younger audiences – or even traditionally more participatory groups like those found in gospel churches.  (Perhaps I’m so far away from this target that I can’t see the campaign?) As John Lennon legendarily said when he performed for royalty, “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”

So two lessons to take away.  First, no matter how much a show gives permission, it takes a lot to get an audience out of generations of ingrained viewing habits.  It’s hard to imagine a show with more energy, intelligence and pure uplift than Fela! – and still the crowd stayed seated until the curtain call.  (Me and my friend hooted for an encore, which only seemed to confuse our section-mates.  Isn’t that what you do after the set ends?)  Second, if you’re going to see Fela!, try for a weekend night!

• Discount tickets for Fela!
• “By the end of this transporting production, you feel you have been dancing with the stars.  And I mean astral bodies, not dime-a-dozen celebrities.” – New York Times

Rocky Becker has been a barber for nearly 50 years. He attributes his success and longevity to keeping it simple. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

The words every man dreads hearing: “You’re getting a little thin up there.”  And with that – no fanfare, no drama, no time for a neurotic outbreak – my barber Daniel snipped off the strands of my faux combover.  ”It’s 2010,” he went on.  ”Time for a fresh start.”

It was true.   One always wonders about the guy who has that one strand of hair carefully arranged over an obviously bald head.  How does he do that?  How does he face his loved ones when he gets wet?  Isn’t he worried it might be windy today?  For the last year, I was well down the road to becoming one of those guys.

What I learned over the last few years is that nobody plans for a combover.  They’re insidious.  They are the product of years of attrition, denial, compensation and the simple refusal to adapt to new ways of brushing your hair.

There’s something comforting about the No BS treatment at traditional men’s barber shops, a fading breed, run for the most part by old guys who have been doing nothing but giving no-BS quick & dirty haircuts for eons.  San Francisco has a couple of fancy locations – Mister and The Barber Lounge – which say they are barber shops but are in reality more like ultra-masculine salons.  More memorable, though, is Original Palace Barber Shop at 2nd and Mission.  Basically a bunch of chairs pushed together in a mound of the eccentric absentee owner’s garbage (must be seen to be believed), Original Palace is staffed by a crew of several 50+ men, all foreign with indeterminate nationalities, and one terribly unlucky woman. Never a wait and never out of there in more than 20 minutes.

My local barber shop is the simply-named Montclair Barber Shop.  Its proprietor, Rocky Becker, a near-silent character I see all the time on Mountain Boulevard smoking and sucking down coffee, was recently profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle.   To be in Rocky’s chair is to be transported somewhere into the early 1970s.  He’s got his Raiders calendar, a few shots of his Harley – and that’s all you get to see because after 5 minutes you are done, $20 and a pile of hair lighter. Not the greatest haircut, but that’s not what you were there for – nothing some pomade and an encore in four weeks can’t fix.

The Chronicle was principally interested in the shop because of its longtime relationship with Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, who’s been getting his hair cut by Rocky for 49 years.  The Raiders of the 70s were known for their hard partying, rebellious personae and straight-up intimidation of their opponents.  ”Just win, baby” was their mantra. And of course they were one of the most successful franchises, a regular visitor to the playoffs and winner of three Super Bowls.  Al Davis is one of the founders of the modern NFL, one of the world’s great business growth stories, and a member of its Hall Of Fame.

Davis may not be loved, but the media and Raider Nation remains entranced by the Davis mystique.  They are fascinated by Davis for never changing, a throwback – and for almost 40 years one of the cleverest, most influential men in football.  They also lay his lack of success in the last decade – the Raiders now officially own the worst 7-year run in NFL history – for never changing.  ”He still likes to maintain his look,” Becker told the Chronicle. “You’ve got to maintain what you have. Al’s a big believer in that.”

Change is hard work.   Sometimes it needs to be tough love, other times it’s letting someone or something just go to town on you.  You gotta cut off those old strands flying in the wind and move on.

Hurrah for traditional barber shops!  Thank you for letting me stay the same as long as I could and then making me change when it was the right thing to do.  Long may you wave.

My bet – or, as last as things move these days, this month’s bet – is that we’ll start to see a merging of the forms.

As Malcolm Gladwell writes in this week’s New Yorker, the biggest handicap that underdogs give themselves is engaging in competition on the terms of the stronger party.  An underdog’s chance of victory nearly triples if it finds a way to not play the game.  Right now newspapers – whether they admit it or not – find themselves the underdog for information distribution but still (so far) the best at obtaining information.  So why do they insist on sharing the same distribution models as their potential destroyers?

The New York Times' new reader uses AIR capabilities to flow text and show video. (Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

The New York Times is one of the best at this.  To my knowledge, it was the first with a dedicated iPhone application, it looks great on a Kindle, and its new Adobe AIR format is simply spectacular.  Still, as everyone knows, the Times is hurting and in talks with everyone from Google to Geffen to find a suitor.

So instead of wringing our hands about public trusts and eroding institutions, perhaps we should be asking of our Third Estate “What can you do to adapt?” Something basic to your business model that doesn’t play to the other guys’strength?  Here are a few I’ve thought about:

• Does it really need to be daily? If people are already receiving a stream of real-time news everywhere they go and at their desks, do newspapers need to be real-time, too?  Local ‘alternatives’ with a more magazine-like format and deeper stories like the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly are well positioned to take over many of the essential local functions of a newspaper – and with lower circulation, their ad rates are less prohibitive, meaning they get the bar, restaurant and nightlife ads that are essentially blocked from big dailies.  Reliance on major retailers to be your biggest advertisers is a recipe for death in an era where retail doors will close continuously, like, forever.  (But what about the recent SF/LA closure of The Onion?  I’ll address that in a minute.)
• Does the news need to lead? Every news site has a ‘Most Frequently Viewed’ or ‘Most Frequently E-Mailed’feature.� It’s very rare that the top stories, even on the most serious sites, are today’s news. (Or as SFist notes about the Huffington Post today:  Boobies.  Boobies. Boobies. Boobies. Boob.)  I would hate to see our locals ignore the news, but why couldn’t it be treated like a magazine cover  with offers of advice, news coverage, quizzes… Things that reel the reader in.Here are today’s SF Chronicle leads:
  * A stricter, drier Bay to Breakers
  * Craigslist cuts ‘erotic services’ section
  * If state cuts too deep, it loses stimulus funds
  * Senate testimony sheds light on alleged torture
  * Young boost diversity as population agesSeriously, not a single one of these lines would sell a magazine at the checkstand.  No editorial viewpoint expressed, no help offered – simply no answer to Why Buy?  Why not feature elements from throughout the paper?  ”Take your medicine, it’s good for you” doesn’t work for marketers in any other industry, including medicine.  Why is it the norm here?
• Does it need to be shaped like a newspaper? Why not a glossy cover?  Billions of magazines have done just fine that way.  In particular, I;m a fan of The Atlantic and The New Yorker’s newsstand strategy: a single compelling image with a flap violator that entices the reader to pick up the magazine and look inside.
• Can it be targeted better than “It’s local, it’s yours”? In printing ‘All The News That Fits’, newspapers lose the single biggest weapon a marketer has: the freedom to select an audience.  It’s wonderful that the Chronicle tries to express the region’s diversity and interests, but I think it’s fair to say that the news interests of, for example, a 70-year old woman in the Sunset and a 25-year old man in The Mission are very different.  So how come the same information in the same format is being sold to both?  Using copy splits, could different front pages go to different neighborhoods – and not just regional sections to outlying areas?
  It’s also worth noting that this could open up new revenue streams.  In my opinion, one of the seeds of the demise of The Onion in SF/LA is that it didn’t take the thinly-veiled prostitution ads that are easy money for the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly.  With CraigsList now discontinuing those same ads, that’s a lot of advertising cash set free.  Where will it go?Well, if you had a well-targeted newspaper that didn’t need to worry about offending its audience with certain content/ads, you just might be able to scoop it up.  So, yes, I’m imagining a world where Candy TS Outcalls replaces Macy’s.)
• Further, why is it serving so much of the area? In an era when advertisers pay more for the specificity of an audience, why is the San Francisco Chronicle the leading paper of Contra Costa County?  And Oakland?  And most of remote Northern California?  Surely some of these readers are more profitable than others.  And those that aren’t can get their news somewhere else.
• Does every copy need to have the same content? When I received the Sunday paper, the first thing I did every week was throw away 50% or more of it.  Why not allow a la carte sections?
• Is it automatic for its customers – and especially its best ones? Mark Cuban – who got me thinking about this originally and reels off another thousand or so ideas in his blog post on the subject – points out that his local paper was blowing one of the very basic elements of keeping him engaged: pricing policies.  Aside from receiving no volume discount, Cuban says that the billing policies discourage people from staying involved.  Why aren’t subscriptions annual = or far more?  In the core areas, closest to the printer and the most attractive identified customers, especially those that own their home and are less likely to move, why not offer 5 years, 10 years, even a lifetime subscription?
• Finally, what unique advantages can newspapers bring to ‘real-time’ media? Yes, there’s still an opportunity for symmetric warfare for newspapers.  My old colleague Sebastian Provencher at Praized Media recently blogged on just this with regard to the Yellow Pages, but it applies equally well to local papers.  His 2300-word post on real-time information flow between local merchants and customers should be required reading for local media outlets that seeks to make its revenue from being an intermediary in these relationships.  You should have a look, but I can boil it down to one tantalizing word: souq.

I’m curious for your thoughts on this since I know my few readers are newspaper lovers, too.  Don’t forget to comment!

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you’re it!

When I sat down to write this, I thought in terms of the albums that helped me learn how to listen, to form a critical opinion, or opened new worlds avenues & possibilities and so forth. By its nature, then, these 15 albums may not necessarily represent desert island discs, favorite artists, or even the best of a particular artist. In a couple of cases, I don’t even particularly enjoy the album any more though I can still catch the whiff of thrill I felt when I first heard it.

I started with about 50 albums and ruthlessly edited until only 15 remained. Most of the late scratches were albums where I felt that the one that made the final list already epitomized something in common between those albums; examples include Power Lies and Corruption edging out Seventeen Seconds and Remain In Light. (I didn’t say it made sense, I just said it was.)

And so, in rough chronological order:

THE ROLLING STONES, Their Satanic Majesties Request – It’s absurd and in points unlistenable, but to a 4-year old with a close-n-play it’s mysterious and full of whimsy, from the playful idolatrous cover art to the nonsense psychedelia of the songs. I would listen closely, scrutinizing every note cough mumble; it seemed so important to decode it. Though just a curiosity today, it has some of the Stones’ loveliest pop songs before they went on to become the raw, bluesy world-beating band they were over the next 10 years.
PS The remaster sounds amazing.

THE WHO, Tommy – It’s full of filler and the story is absurd, grotesque and more than a little offensive. For me, though, it unlocked the idea that rock could tell a story and that the different instruments could be expressive of character and ideas. On that basis, it beat the hell out of the “Young People’s Guide To The Orchestra” or “Peter & The Wolf.” And the playing still knocks me out. I’ll put Underture up against anything as one of the great instrumental performances.

THE BEATLES, The White Album (for this is what it should be called) –  This list would not be complete without any Beatles, a band that I devoured well into my teens. I don’t think is their best nor is it my favorite – it contains the very worst efforts by all four of them – but its very density makes it the one that I still find the most fascinating – a real songwriters’ battle royale. Oddly, I think my two favorite Beatles albums today may actually be solo albums: Ram and All Things Must Pass. (Bing! Snooty rock critic alert!)

PUBLIC IMAGE, LTD, Metal Box / Second Edition – How did we get there from here? Coming in a bit late for punk, this was my one of my first pick-ups of the genre. But really it couldn’t be further from punk; the trebly in-your-face pop-based guitars replaced by a dominant dubby danceable beats. It was scary and invigorating to hear something so released from pop form but still essentially fun to listen to. I’m sure this set me up for both techno and reggae as I discovered them later.

BRIAN ENO, Ambient 1: Music For Airports – I bought this off the in-store turntable at Leopold’s. (What strange self-absorbed 12-year old does that? [raises hand] That would be me.) But this album was freeing in so many ways. Free from composition & structure. Free from noise. Free from pop and conventional song structure. Yet it was peaceful and engaging. Plus it came with instructions for setting up your speakers properly.

GANG OF FOUR, Entertainment! – Even though the songs, polemics and unique performances are this album’s most obvious attributes, the affirmation I got from Gang Of Four came from what people – especially Greil Marcus – wrote and felt about them. I started reading Marcus in my parents’ copies of New West magazine while he was plowing through many of the same touchstones I was running into working at Universal Records in Berkeley. From this experience – and kudos to my mother the Art History major, too – I learned about art criticism and how it could add value to my experience to be a critical listener, question the narrator’s motivation and look for themes in the music that go beyond the obvious strands of plot. Who needed English class?

KRAFTWERK, Computer World – It seems so tame now in the face of the booming techno genre, but when this came out in 1981, absolutely nothing sounded like this. All synthetic and machinist, yet hinting at underlying humanity. It bespoke a world of machines whispering too each other constantly night day, sharing our secrets. I remember a day in 1993 temping for a bank when I realized that all the machines were secretly connected. The buzz of the wires suddenly seemed alive to me. Kraftwerk foresaw all that and more on this album. Plus, funky as all get out.

NEW ORDER, Power, Corruption & Lies – A transition out of the dark post-punk noise and stifled emotion back into passion and pop. Not to mention my cassette had Blue Monday tacked on as a bonus, the pinnacle sonic achievement of the whole early 80s era without doubt.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS, Get Happy! (Part 2 here) – 20 perfect pop songs sung & played furiously by a drug-fueled genius with sparks flying out of his head every which way. Most importantly, though, Get Happy led me to explore the album’s true roots, the sounds of classic soul. I dove deeply and found a rich vein of Americana that still remains one of my easiest sources of joy.

MARVIN GAYE, Anthology – Which leads me here. Even singing silly love songs, was there ever a more compelling voice? I thought I could sing – I still think I can sing a bit – but this just humbles me. It humbles everyone! There was a night in freshman dorm when a friend and I got stoned and put on “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”  We were totally halted in what we were doing, compelled as the voice crashed in, forcing us to Stop and…just listen. I don’t think any other singer ever did that to me so convincingly.

PREFAB SPROUT, Two Wheels Good / Steve McQueen – I was 19 and scared of life, it’s about being 19 and scared of life. (A recent Pop Matters essay guesses that it’s secretly a failed concept album about masculinity.) And as pop songwriting goes, it’s perfection, on par with any you can think of. Light and deep at the same time, as all great pop trifles should be

MILES DAVIS, Kind Of Blue – It’s nothing but a cliche to say that this, the most popular jazz album of all time, opened me to the genre (see, for example, the stoner brother chapter of ‘Sometimes A Great Notion’). It’s embarrassing, like saying “I love reggae, yeah, I’ve got Bob Marley;s Legend and UB40. What, Bob Marley had other records? Sly & who?”  But you know what? Kind Of Blue is that good.
PS In A Silent Way was a late scratch for this list, but I thought Brian Eno and Miles Davis together did enough to fill the same intellectual spot on the list.

PUBLIC ENEMY, Fear Of A Black Planet – Taking the formula of tight James Brown beats and infringing chaos as far as it could go, this album brought down the curtain on the first great age of sampling and hip-hop. It’s a mess, but for sheer sonic inventiveness it’s a pinnacle of the form. Not to mention that in a time of great urban strife, Fear Of A Black Planet sounded like a sonic representation of the horrible crack epidemic striking at the cities I lived in and a bellwether for the shocking racial incidents to come in the next few years.

GUIDED BY VOICES, Bee Thousand – The album that launched me to a thousand shows, or so it seemed like. But really for me it was a return to rock after years & years away. Buried under the fuzz and half-baked ideas, a great classic rock band struggled to break free – which indeed was what happened when they performed live. In a renaissance period for American indie rock, this was the album that led me back to it.

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, Vrioon – There’s a weird moment during power cuts when the silence blooms and you realize how much static & white noise you are forced to live within, both from the environment and from within. This album expresses both the silence and the buzz – and does both with beauty and surprising emotiveness.

As anyone who follows media knows by now, magazines have been hit with a triple-witching the last few years: collapsing CPMs for even the most difficult-to-target audiences (in light of the targeting capabilities of the Internet) and plus collapsing advertising page sales; slackening demand; and rising distribution costs.

The big bellwether is now upon us.� Conde Nast, really the last of the big-spending believers in magazine, first quietly packed off Domino and a few other titles and, more dramatically, this week closed Portfolio, for which the company had reportedly spent over $100mm to launch.� (Portfolio was a poorly-timed entry – a well-written glamor magazine about business caught up in, well, now.� But it was also schizophrenic.� Despite being targeted at business elite, it was also weirdly basic; a column in the first issue, for example, explained how interest rates work[?!?!].)

While most attention has been paid to falling ad pages, it�s really the CPM problem that most fundamentally egs the question of whether the magazine industry will get anywhere close to its old business model ever again.� Publishers formerly charged $30-100 to reach a hard-to-reach passionate target � say, ukulele players � while now that CPM on AdWords is not just catastrophically lower but also available by auction.� In other words, not just the price is better; it�s the buying process, too, with better information creating a more efficient market.

So what for magazines to do?� The most obvious choice is simply to start charging readers, which is what many of the newsweeklies are now trying to do.� Any subscriber to Wired can see that they are getting their magazines at a steep unprofitable discount.� ($12 for 12 issues written, designed, printed and mailed?� Probably more like $30.� Printing and postage alone is probably well more than $1.25 per copy.� I�ve long said that Conde Nast magazines are one of the great bargains of American life, like home plumbing and the US mail.)

But the reality is that it�s going to be a very hard road to convince readers to pay after being trained into receiving content for free (the Internet) or near-free (magazines) for their entire lives, no matter how great the reporting or photography.� In the face of low demand, we�ll see massive changes in how these magazines work in the next few years � maybe months.

Another possible answer could come from the manufacturing side.� The biggest challenge with magazine business models as they stand stems from their battleship-turning nature.� It takes a long time to build circulation to get to a saleable advertising proposition; it takes an equally long time to deflate that unprofitable circulation when the ads dry up.� (This is why you’ll see big circ magazines like George suddenly disappear.)

HP recently debuted a service called MagCloud that could potentially democratize the industry by allowing easy creation of micro-targeted magazines � for example, not just for the ukulele player but for left-handed ukulele players living in the Midwest. A more nimble manufacturing process could allow more short-term plays; imagine for example �100 Days� magazine to follow the excitement around the new President, killing it just as readers start to tire of it.� Magazines may survive in fact by forgetting about brand-building and going after hot content.� In short, a return to the tabloid times of our Founding Fathers.�� More on this in a coming post.

Joba Chamberlain opens the second game ever at the new Yankee Stadium. Empty seats outnumber specators in the exclusive areas behind home plate and the dugouts. (Flickr / Fansherpa)

With all the fuss over the empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium, I was mildly surprised to find something similar happening in my own backyard.  At Sunday’s A’s-Rays game at the Oakland Coliseum, all the ingredients for a great day at the ballyard were in place: sunny April weather, last year’s AL champions in town and a Sunday afternoon.  What we found instead was a micro-market in disarray.  As the credit markets teetered last October, the market for sports tickets has apparently fallen apart as well.

The first indication there was a problem was the total lack of online ticketing activity.  There were practically no offers on CraigsList, even from brokers, and none at all on eBay.  At the walk-up ticket booth, we found that we could buy any section in the house, including the Diamond Level.  This should simply never be the case. The Diamond Level is a very limited “VIP” area, maybe 60 seats tops, right behind the plate on the playing field level.  Seats go for $225 and include free food and drink service for the whole game.

Weirdest of all was the scene inside the stadium.  The A’s bifurcate each of the two seating levels – a minimum of two pricing levels in each deck.  In both decks, there was a cluster of people behind the plate, emptiness for several sections as the seating moved along the infield, another cluster in the sections where the new pricing tier begins, again fading to nothing.

The mystery is why shouldn’t the people forced out to the outfield be able to sit in these empty “mezzo-sections.”  The answer could come from a nimble dynamic pricing system at game time.  As airlines like Virgin and JetBlue have discovered with exit rows sold at check-in, why not ask fans as they arrive if they would like to purchase a better seat for an extra few dollars?  It would be an easy thing to equip ushers with Palm-style barcode and credit card machines like those carried by the clerks at The Apple Store.  Everybody gets the opportunity to move closer (or elect not to), getting rid of the weird empty spaces and (I’m assuming) presenting a better, more invigorating environment for the home team.  (I know they’re supposed to ignore the crowd, but ask any actor or musician if they’d rather play to a full orchestra than have the front rows empty and the crowd loosely dispersed.)

Meanwhile across the bay, the Giants are trying out a number of dynamic pricing policies.  First, the team partnered up with a firm to build elastic pricing around its unsold inventory for the least attractive games. Last week, though, came the real reckoning – and a big indication that the team is running scared about its attendance.  Ticket prices were dropped 40% for the Giants series this week against the Dodgers, traditionally the most attractive opponent.  Granted the team is trying to stir up interest for later in the year – it appears they’ll be competitive in a moderately challenging division – but to have to do this so early and against the team’s best natural rivarly is surprising.  One wonders how scared the Giants are about advance sales for the rest of the year.

In the Oakland A’s case, the lack of a fluid ticket market is framed by the fact that the Oakland Coliseum is a horrible dump, getting dumpier every day.  The tarps in the third deck look weathered and depressing, while the bathrooms, parking lot and facilities remain some of the worst for a major league sport.  Nevertheless the empty seat patterns – along with all the unsold display ad inventory throughout the stadium – are clear indications that baseball is not recession-proof.  There are easy ways to make profit from making markets more efficient.  Let’s see if the A’s and their brethren take up the challenge.

Fresh skunk does not smell anything like the mildly unpleasant musk you occasionally pick up driving down the street. It is insanely intense. Imagine eating a large moist purple onion while standing next to a pile of burning tires and you’re about halfway there.

The tire smell is especially tricky; it seems more like an artificial chemical solvent than anything borne of nature. Because of the solvent reek, in our tizzy we made a bad mental leap: “it’s not skunk, she’s been maced by someone trying to break into the house!” Which led us to our a series of mistakes…

1. Do not bring the dog in the house
2. Do not pour water over the dog
3. Do not call the vet in a panic — they’ll tell you to come in because you sound panicked
4. Do not put the nearest set of clothes to go to the vet; these will now be trash
5. Do not put the dog in the car

The vet shooed us away as fast as they could and gave us the magic combination to get the stink off the dog (hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, Dawn). But by then the damage was done and the dog was the only thing left on the property that didn’t reek.

When we picked up the elements of the dog-cleaning kit from Safeway, the checkout clerk took one look at our haul and asked us if we had a dog that got hit by a skunk. How’d she know that? Attacks are so common in Oakland this time of year that the recipe was posted in the break room. They left that bit out of the disclosures when we moved over here.

This is not a matter of simple alma mater loyalty; this is something I’ve done my whole life. Everything I learned about humility I learned from Cal football.

It wasn’t just me; it was the whole fan base. The oft-proferred line about Cal — at least when things were going poorly — was that its alumni would rather be proud (and beat Stanford) than become a so-called major program.

But this year looks different. Very different. Not only is Cal ranked in the Top Ten to start the season and opening its season at a bona fide "football school" (Tennessee), but ESPN analyst Lee Corso predicted Cal to win the national championship! This, dear readers, is crazy stuff. Cal hasn’t even got to the Rose Bowl since 1959, many years before my parents were thinking that sex was something they could do.

A national championship simply does not compute. It does not map to my self-image, to root for a team that can and will win. It used to be that I went to Memorial Stadium each week wondering how we’d find a way to lose. Now I have the neurosis of the winner — "Which game is the one where we slip and fall?" Instead of worrying about whether we’ll beat Stanford, my attention turns instead to "How much do we need to beat Portland State by to keep the East Coast writers from doubting the Bears? If we don’t win by 35 points, will it hurt our standing in the computer rankings?" I’m not certain that this is an improvement, fandom-wise.

There are cultural issues to think of, too. I’ve been very happy with the ramshackle stadium and the relatively low-key games. (Note the picture above; that’s the highly successful 1975 team upsetting USC at home. The stands in the background are pretty much empty.) I don’t want to be Texas with the world’s largest HDTV or the Florida teams with their absurd fan rivalries. Or, god forbid, USC with its traveling squad of weirdly mindless fans led by 5,000 band members playing one song over and over. (Cal fans have found ways to get back at idiot Trojans over the years.)

But unfortunately this is what it takes to be a top program in today’s major collegiate athletics. Today we stare into the abyss, sing our fight songs and hope we don’t lose our selfhood along the way.

UPDATE: So much for that.  Jake Curtis at SFGate still thinks Cal has room for hope.  One friend said that we had to break our "culture of losing" and then in the same breath said that we didn’t really want the national championship, just the Rose Bowl.  Sounds like a contradiction to me, but I guess that’s we’ll have to do to break up this culture one step at a time.

In the early 1950s, the California Division of Highways was loving its job. Combined with President Eisenhower’s push for the Federal Interstate system — partly for commerce and partly for Cold War homeland security — the nation’s freeway planners were give virtual free reign to plan whatever they wanted. Treating the nation’s communities as if they were networks of Fisher-Price toys scattered on their bedroom floor, the planners looked at every possible throughway and connection point as a place to run a freeway.

By 1959, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, Mayor Alioto and several neighborhood groups had turned back many of the most megalomaniacal plans, including turning Van Ness into an elevated freeway, running expressways along either side of Golden Gate Park, and wrapping a road through Fishermen’s Wharf to connect the Bay Bridge & Golden Gate Bridge. Nevertheless, it was too late to stop the Embarcadero Freeway, but the 1989 earthquake took care of that road at least.

SF vets like myself will attest that the City was indeed easier to get around with the Embarcadero Freeway and the on-ramp at Golden Gate & Gough, but I’m sure we’d all say also agree that what’s been gained by their removal — the return of the Embarcadero Promenade and Hayes Valley, respectively — is a trade we’d make any day. Almost as if The Wizard Of Oz himself ordained it, those areas went from depressing and grey to lively and technicolor within months of the removal of the oppressive elevated throughways.

Perhaps California’s new emissions law will all turn out to be ineffectual in the end. As the Chronicle points out today, if California is able to achieve the targets in this week’s legislation, the world’s carbon emissions will be reduced by only .5%. (California, the world’s 12th largest economy, makes 2% of Earth’s emissions; the state seeks to reduce by 25%.) The Law of Unintended Consequences always lurks; the dismantling of CDH’s original SF freeway plan may have done more to encourage urban sprawl in the Bay Area than to end it, thereby driving up California’s fuel usage and air pollution levels.

But try to imagine San Francisco today with all those freeways. It would not be worth living in or visiting. It would not be a great city.

So today I’m damn proud of my state for taking on a leadership role in the fight against Global Warming. And (dare I say it) I’m thrilled for the bravery of my term-limited Legislature and Governor to push through Green laws that could help make the world a better, healthier place, even though it could hurt the State’s economic growth in the short-term.

San Francisco CITYSCAPE – Freeway Revolt Map
BikeSummer – The Freeway Revolt

Thinking about the long-term and "victory," in a world more and more besieged by "Inconvenient Truths," does it really make sense to have the values inculcated by our presence to be so overtly comsumption-based? What local children are going to see all of our cool gadgets and huge cars and not want at least a chance to own those items? If we’re worried about the pressure on our oil economy that China poses now, just wait until the rest of the equitorlal world realizes that it can afford air conditioning in every building.

It’s not just democratic values our military ventures should bring to the developing world. It’s sustainable values, too.

Ars Technica – iPods at war
Also: Miltary.com: David Sears: American Stuff

Transgression: Somebody plays Brian Eno’s hour-long ambient piece “Thursday Afternoon” on the jukebox at their local drinking hole. Anger and discomfort ensue. Remember this next time you want to conduct an anthropological experiment (or a prank).
NYT: True Life Tales – Unhappy Hour

In the face of the 1950s post-war malaise and Cold War dread, psychology and psychiatry arrived in the American cultural mainstream. The science of the brain was seen as a cure-all for its time, treating everything from depression to truancy, and many looking for quick fixes for everyday depression and headaches fell into the care of quacks.

Take Walter Freeman, for example, the doctor who gave Dully his lobotomy and a pied piper of this primitive psychosurgery: “Freeman was a showman and liked to shock his audience of doctors and nurses by performing two-handed lobotomies: hammering ice picks into both eyes at once. In 1952, he performed 228 lobotomies in a two-week period in West Virginia alone. (He lobotomized 25 women in a single day.)”

Add to this milieu a 12-year old who wouldn’t go to bed when asked (imagine that!), an evil stepmother, a fall-guy father and you have the makings of a Greek tragedy.

NPR : ‘My Lobotomy’: Howard Dully’s Journey

Up on the playa, someone asked me to tell her something about me that might surprise her. After thinking for a moment, I came up with the most shocking thing I could think of in that place at that time: I am a diehard, dyed-green Oakland A’s fan. (The shock is the baseball fan bit, not the team affiliation, thanks.) It’s something that I spend enough time and psychic energy on that I find it a bit embarrassing. But I have to admit that there is something uniquely satisfying and orderly about a well-pitched game, a situation you’ve never seen before (and there always seems to be one), the fun of second-guessing where the infield should play, whether the starter should be left in, how will they fill the left-handed set-up man role… so many things that make my brain go Ahhhhhhh. It’s been this way as long as I can remember and it’s always been just this side of obsessive, though I try to mostly keep it to myself and share it with only my family and closest friends.

Normally I try to stay a bit dispassionate about baseball, mainly because it will break your heart if you let it. (Don’t get me started, but let’s just say that the A’s have a checkered playoff record this decade.) Today, though, some news hit that killed. Bill King, the A’s lead play-by-play man since 1981, suffered an embolism on the operating table and passed from this world.

There’s a big part of me that knows that baseball is stupid; it’s an opiate of the masses; it’s just a game; it’s a bunch of big dumb jocks running around a field (and more often just standing around); it’s full of meaningless statistics that ooze over your brain matter and slowly take over, pushing out more meaningful memories. But my “user satisfaction level” tells me otherwise and there are other little signals along the way that make me question my doubt (if that isn’t too abstract).

Bill King plays a huge role in my acceptance of my lot as a baseball fan. This was a guy who was incredibly articulate, had much to say about the cultural world outside of baseball (though he rarely did) and brought an air of erudition and excitement to every game he broadcast. He tacitly made it OK to be an egghead and love baseball.

In the last few years when I listened to him, I often found myself wondering as he made his way through the eighth inning of a crummy game in the middle of the country, knowing that he was stuck in a hotel room with a really unpleasant travel schedule: What does he see? How can he be so passionate about this? I knew – even though he never talked of such things — that he’d had tragedy in his personal life (the passing of his wife during the 2004 season) and that his health was shaky (he’d ceased to join the team on road trips off the West Coast). But still he came to the games and he told stories, incisively dissected strategy, threw out countless off-the-cuff witticisms, spoke truths about the team, its competitors, and its rules-makers (sometimes kind, sometimes not), and always inspired you to feel like a better smarter person even though you were doing something as stupid as listening to a dumb ol’ sporting event on an antique transistor radio.

How could he care so much? Somehow he did, and we cared too, and it was OK.

Another great thing about Bill King was his unique ability to question authority, no small thing to a person with such deep roots in the politically isolated Bay Area. Unlike any other sports broadcaster I’ve ever heard (Daniel Schorr being the closest parallel in ‘real broadcasting’), Bill King had no fear of challenging authority, be it an umpire’s call, interleague play or some bad decision by team management. My first memories of him are his absolutely livid play-calls he would make for the Warriors in the ’70s, where he held absolutely nothing back on the officials (to the apparent delight and approval of my Dad, who always seemed pleasantly astonished by what he was hearing; what a change that must have been from the stodgy New York sportscasters of his youth!). And of course that made him the perfect complement for the many memorable teams he covered: among them, the Rick Barry-era Warriors, the Ken Stabler Raiders, the Billy Ball A’s and the Moneyball A’s. Each of these teams were rebels in their own way, they each made me proud (and quietly relieved) to be their fans, and the voice of Bill King was a huge part of each of those team’s characters.

It’s ironic that here in the age of unbridled self-expression and self-absorption – y’know, people writing blogs and stuff – that I can’t produce an MP3 for you of any of Bill King’s great calls or style. Major League Baseball appears to have done what none of the record companies have been capable of doing: keeping its product from being shared all over the Internet. No, all I have left of Bill King is my Oakland A’s bottle opener, which blares King’s call of the Hatteberg homer that brought the 2003 A’s winning streak to a record 20 games. It’s nice, but it’s not even one of his best calls, though it does have the mandatory “Holy Toledo!”

A bottle opener seems like a really sad, tiny souvenir from someone who made such a mark on my life, whose voice took up so many pleasurable hours, but I guess that’s a life lesson, right? So now I’m going to go to the kitchen and use it to pop open a beer.

Thank you, Bill.

UPDATE: Hey, everybody! Vote for Bill King for the Baseball Hall of Fame!

[Soundtrack]

Hopefully some A’s clips will show up in the next couple of days – if I dare put myself in front of the wrath of Major League Baseball! — but here is a classic from Bill King’s days with the Raiders:

Bill King calls the Holy Roller — Oakland Raiders vs. San Diego Chargers, September 10, 1978
(courtesy of the Bay Area Radio Museum)

Bill King: The Bay Area Radio Digest Interview, 1990

Everyone,
I just returned from my first trip to Louisiana this weekend since Katrina. I spent the entire trip back trying to decide if I wanted to tell you all about what is happening down there, because honestly if I had the choice, I would choose not to know. But in the end, I figured e-mail you all was better than talking to each of you on the phone and over e-mail.

It is beyond what you can imagine… it’s hell on earth. I flew into Baton Rouge, which sits about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, and the city is destroyed, but not by the storm. There are over 750,000 refuges from New Orleans in Baton Rouge. People are camping on the side of the roads, in their cars if they have them, and all over the LSU campus. The first thing you notice is how outraged everyone is. The people of Baton Rouge don’t want us here. There seems to be no plan for the New Orleaneans once they are dropped off in Baton Rouge, and everyone is confused, horrified, or worse. They know this is potentially a permanent situation, or at least the way it will be for the next several months, and it is safe to say they are as scared as the homeless and exhausted refuges that litter their streets.

My sister and I rented four houses in Houma, Louisiana, which is about 50 miles south of Baton Rouge or about 30 miles west of New Orleans. We spent the weekend moving our family there, then our friends, and then in the end, people we met that had no other options. When I left, we had perhaps forty people with another twenty on the way. It is an amazing thing to see: your best friends, your family, and everyone in between huddled on floorboards, makeshift beds, and sleeping bags. It is truly like a nuclear bomb hit our city, and we are doing everything we can just to keep everyone housed, fed, and with water.

Saturday morning, I decided to go into New Orleans. There were far too many people from our home unaccounted for, but beyond that, New Orleans is part of everything that I am; it’s more than a city to those of us who call it home. It’s part of your family, and with the stories of looting, flooding, and complete inability of the government to make the matter better, it was as if a family member was being slowly killed. I was told by everyone it was impossible to get in and I would be arrested for trying, but I’m sure you call imagine how little that did to deter me.

There is no way to get into the city. The roads that are open are being used to bring people out, and no traffic is headed into the city. I had a rental car, and I started to drive the 30 miles on backroads that I guessed wouldn’t be flooded. I made it about half way before there was no way to get into the city by car. I loaded up a backpack with as much water as I could carry, two packs of breakfast bars, three canisters of bug spray, and an extra pair of shoes. Then I started walking.

From there, it was hell on earth.

First, there is the climate. It is almost 90 degrees, and the humidity plus the still water everywhere has made the swamp come alive with bugs. Trying to describe the mosquitos is almost impossible. Do you know the sound of the wind in the north when a blizzard is happening? The “whirring” sound? That is the sound this many bugs make. You have to wear long sleeve shirts and pants, and you are drenched with sweat because of the heat.

The first group of people I met were very friendly. I traded my ipod for a kid’s dirt bike so I could make better time, and they gave me some extra water. They did their best to warn me it wasn’t safe to head into the city, but they didn’t argue when I said there were people we couldn’t find. They warned me about what neighborhoods to avoid, and they said beyond everything else, it was critical to stay away from the police. They would force you to leave by putting you on a bus destined for who knows where, and if you resisted, they’d shoot you. It was the first I saw of a constant epidemic: the police and the government are considered absolute enemies by Katrina survivors. At first, I tried not to judge and simply considered that shortsighted, but over the next two days, I started to understand where it came from.

I got into the outskirts of the city by about 2pm… an upscale neighborhood called “Metaire,” where most of the money of New Orleans lives. To even get that far had already involved about half a mile of swimming. There is no way I can get you to understand just how destroyed everything is. It’s not just underwater – it’s more that the swamps have risen over New Orleans. There are snakes and alligators everywhere, and the more you see, the more you realize the city isn’t going to be livable for who knows how long.

And then there are the bodies. I first started seeing them as I crossed from Metaire into what is called “mid city.” Have you ever been to Jazz Fest? The neighborhood you drive through to get there and the fairgrounds are called “mid city.” It was the first place where I saw them. Before this weekend, I had only seen a few dead bodies in my entire life: traffic accidents, I once witnessed a shooting, and then funerals. I don’t know how many dead people I saw this weekend. Some have been pushed against dry spots by what I am assuming are rescue workers. Others are just floating in the water. Then there are all the houses with red marks on them, meaning there is someone dead inside. The most horrifying part of all of it is what happens when a body is floating in the water for two or three days. It’s barely recognizable as a person. When you see one, it is riddled with mosquitos and who knows what else.

The other thing you have to understand is people are still everywhere. Any idea the media may have given you about a city wide evacuation is insane. I found hundreds if not thousands of people in all the different neighborhoods, and they have no intention of leaving. First and foremost, they have nowhere to go. And having come from Baton Rouge, the people that did get evacuated are simply unloaded from the busses, told loose plans of food that is coming, and told to hold tight and someone will come up with a plan. It’s chaos. Second, they don’t want to leave. They don’t trust they will ever be let back in, and they certainly are not going to allow their homes to be pillaged by the people crafty enough not to get kicked out. Finally, they just don’t believe the argument that the city will be unsafe and riddled with disease. The people still in New Orleans are our uneducated and angry masses. You know the people of the world that “don’t beleive” in AIDS, who thinks the government is out to get them, and don’t understand why they should ever get jobs when unemployment pays just fine? Try convincing them typhoid fever is real. But beyond that, they are armed and angry, they have already survived five straight days of no food and no water, and they don’t believe those who haven’t gotten them food or water are going to find a place for them to live. I know it sounds ignorant on their part, but can you imagine it? I was there on Saturday, five days after the storm, and still no one had been told where to go for food or water. People are surviving by breaking into each other’s homes. It’s chaos, and it’s dangerous, and there doesn’t seem to be a plan to fix anything any time soon.

My main goal was to go to the homes of family and friends and make sure everyone was safely out of the city. I grew up in the 9th Ward – it’s one of the lowest income areas in the city, and it is also the sight of the first levi break. For me to get to my childhood home, I would have needed to dive down underwater just to get to the roof. I went to the second house we lived in after that. It’s roof had been torn off, and there was a body floating not fifty feet away from the front porch. I wish I could say the journey to friends’ houses fared better, but I can’t. Most of the homes were either completely submerged, sitting in ten to fifteen feet of water, or just not standing anymore. I found three people I knew in all, and they set off for Houma that afternoon.

Then I started to explore the city. Like I said, it is hell on earth. The people are furious. They feel as if they have been abandoned. You have to understand, there is no power anywhere. The rescue crews are going through New Orleans proper, not all the neighborhoods where people live. Most of the city doesn’t even think there is a rescue effort underway at all. It became clear to me the one thing people need is communication, and in the absence of communication, fear takes people over. I never realized how powerful the raw ability of communicating is. There is nothing more important to restoring order than giving the leaders an ability to get messages to everyone.

I know you have all heard about people firing on helicopters. I’m certainly not saying it is right, but after being there, I understand. For five days, helicopters were flying overhead, but none of them are even so much as dropping water or food down for people. They fly by using load speakers saying that anyone found looting or stealing will be arrested, and those are the helicopters that are followed by gunshots, from what I saw. I don’t know who is controlling the message being given to everyone, but they need to be replaced. The only government group anyone has seen are the police with sawed off shotguns threatening to arrest everyone who is walking around on the streets. Everyone is scared about their future, about their friends and family, and about their city, and fear leads people to do amazing things. Like I said, I’m not saying firing guns at the helicopters is the right thing to do by any means, but after being down there, I understand.

When I left, I thought I was going to see the 3rd world, but it isn’t the third world. It’s a state of war. People don’t even know who they are fighting, but they know they are at war. Twice, I had to bike at full speed away from gangs that came at me, and before I left the city, I had my cash, my backpack with my food and change of clothes, and my camera stolen from me. It’s like a family member of mine has been possessed by a confused, frightened, angry force that can’t be stopped. Every interaction with someone who is supposed to be helping, like the helicopters flying overhead or the police barking threats only makes it worse.

When I left for New Orleans, I thought I wanted to help the people I couldn’t find. But once there, I realized I was just trying to feed my selfish vanity of wanting to see the city in turmoil. If it was flooded and there was chaos, I wanted to see it and be a part of it. It was as if I was one of those idealistic kids who wanted to head off to war to seek glory. I’ll never forget this weekend my entire life, and I’ll spend years wishing I could. You just can’t describe what it is like to see your hometown that you love, that is a part of everything you are, with dead bodies floating in the street and the people you consider “your people” firing guns at strangers and hating everyone and everything. It was one of the worst things I have ever felt or seen. It’s a war being fought against no one.

But not all is ruined. I was thrilled to see the French Quarter, the Garden District, and the central business district were all ok. The shipping yards along Tchapitoulas were also undamaged. It is enough to make you believe the city can be salvaged.

I got back to Houma Sunday morning, and that is where the real work began. We’ve been trying to construct mosquito nets around the houses. Jjust using screen doors and screen windows isn’t enough, because of how many people we have living there. Opening the door for ten seconds every hour can make the house unlivable. We managed to get a generator going, and we are using it to boil water, keep food cold, and charge up non-working cell phones (we can make calls out of state, but we can’t receive any phone calls with in-state phone numbers).

So many of you have asked what you can do, and I am sorry to sound pessimistic, but I just don’t know. I wish I could say “donate money to the Red Cross,” but I didn’t see the Red Cross doing anything. The entire time I was there, I only saw Jesse Jackson and his buses, a huge congregation of busses from Baltimore (for some reason) bringing food and water, and private companies like Dysani, Evian, and K-Mart bringing supplies. The more you look around, the more you realize it is the private sector that is the only group that is doing anything. I genuinely believe private companies are going to do more for us than our own government, but I’m ignorant to the entire picture, I only know what I saw, so I don’t want to judge anyone.

If you want to help, all I can say is there are different levels of help. There are 1,000,000 people that need homes and some semblance of a future. My sister, mother, aunt, and I are going to do our best to make a home for people in Houma. We don’t need money, but we do need bodies. There is just too much to do.

I’m going back on Thursday, and I hope to figure out an address for people to ship things to us. Right now, what we need more than anything else are:
- light sleeping bags (not designed for the cold)
- battery chargeable power tools
- mosquito netting by the square yard
- CELL PHONES with out of Louisiana phone numbers are CRITICAL

We have enough breakfast bars and bottled water for now, and there is no power for preparing food as it is. There are stores to the north that can sell food once we have the power to make it, so that isn’t needed, even though you would think it is.

I know this sounds crazy, but if there could be anyway to make an outdoor movie theatre powered off a generator, it would do more good than you can imagine. New Orleaneans are social, and one of the biggest problems we have is not being able to be with each other… share the stress and find a way to deal with it together. It’s being isolated from each other that is really destroying people’s will.

If you can, please consider opening up your home to people that need one. But as these people are strangers, I don’t pretend it is something everyone will find comfortable. If you can, there is an amazing site setup to help you register as a host (http://www.shareyourhome.org/).

Thank you to you all for everything you will do in the next coming months,
Nick

I get back from my annual Burning Man-forced news blackout and frickin’ Armageddon hit a huge swath of the country. I knew going up that things were going to be bad; my last news as my radio signal faded in the desert was that the levees had broken and the water was spilling in. I imagined that the city was gone, but I was still surprised by the level of depravity and desperation achieved. We should all be asking ourselves questions about how this might happen in our own communities and what we can do to prevent it, but that is a topic for a later post.

I never had the privilege of visiting Nawlins, but it always loomed large for me as a place of cultural richness and weird behavior, seemingly catering to the very worst touristic instincts — gluttony, drunkenness, sloth — but without the cold calculation of the minds that run Las Vegas. Not to mention centuries of political machinations, running the gamut from virtual dynastic royalty to populist uprisings to Lee Harvey Oswald hawking socialist newspapers down on the corner.

For the next several posts, I’ll be whipping out some of the great artists that made Nola one of the most influential musical cities in the universe. With the great diaspora under way and most of the area’s housing stock destroyed, we may never see a city like this again where history and demographics conspired to blend such disparate influences and peoples to create unique, exciting music.

Today’s artist, Lee Dorsey, is a personal favorite. With several huge national hits in the mid-60s (including “Ya Ya,” “Working In A Coal Mine” and “Everything I’m Gonna Do Is Gonna Be Funky”), Dorsey was massively influential on the birth of funk in the late 60s. Although he didn’t have the flash of megastar performers like James Brown, you can hear Dorsey’s intonation and groove in many of the great funk bands of the 70s, like Parliament and Cameo. Perhaps he’d be better known today if he hadn’t retired in 1970 to open an auto repair business. Yes, really.

[Soundtrack]
Lee Dorsey – Yes We Can Can.mp3
Lee Dorsey – Give It Up.mp3
Lee Dorsey at AllMusic
Robert Christgau covers Dorsey opening for The Clash in 1980

The news that Teenage Fanclub would release its first record in five years came as a welcome surprise. I had assumed that Scotland’s finest working pop band had thrown in the towel, and when the news rolled out that Tortoise’s John McEntire would be producing, this became easily one of my most anticipated releases of the year.

The new release Man-Made finds the Fanclub in a pensive mood. While both Songs From Northern Britain and Howdy! saw the band mix pop euphoria with a decidedly melancholic streak, Man-Made tends more toward subtlety than the release of some of their earlier records. Each of the songs have deceptively dense structures & productions that don’t initially bring the songcraft to the fore. Repeated listenings, though, bring out delicate touches – a harmony that zags when it should zig, hidden layers of strings and reverb, and indeed the same great songs and pop sense that the band has effortlessly brought to its music throughout its career. This is surely an album that I will return to many times in the next few years.

* * * * *

This weekend found me spending three straight days at my 20th high school reunion — a “pub crawl” on Friday, a dance party on Saturday and a family picnic on Sunday. It was pretty amazing – a word I don’t use lightly – to be among all those folks again, still so much themselves, but more self-assuredly so. At first it was almost embarrassing to make eye contact with people; how did they get so old? Surely that’s not true of me, too? Or was it that I was younger then than we thought we were? All those tired eyes, shifting hairlines,… offspring and lifemates! After the initial shock, everybody got along and had fun. So far nobody has confessed to melancholy, but then that’s not something you would send out in a mail to 120+ people, most of whom are strangers. No, that’s something you reserve for your blog.

Here’s a note about the picnic from my old friend Chris, who I’ve known since first grade but hadn’t spoken to in 20 years:

It was hilarious to see kids at the picnic and know instantly who their BHS mom or dad was. DNA is an amazing thing. Also fun to hear the kids trying to figure out together if their parents were friends.

Chris introduced himself Saturday by apologizing for whatever he’d done to me. Funny thing is, I remember doing more to him than he did to me. Refractionary tricks of the mind. Probably neither of had ever “done anything” to each other.

* * * * *

It’s a myth that your body’s cells are completely replaced every seven years; some cells can live up to 120 years. So that means that I haven’t been three different people since high school, which might have been fun to imagine and feels like its close to the truth. But, alas, as I learned over the weekend, we are all ourselves just so much more so.

* * * * *

Teenage Fanclub has a new song out about the inevitability of aging. “[It's] written about coming to terms with your place in the world, about dealing with ageing,” Norman Blake says. “When you’re almost 40 years old and you’re still in a pop band, you can sometimes have doubts.”

[Soundtrack]
Teenage Fanclub – Cells.mp3

In the dark days before MP3 blogs and the internets, it was a lot harder to come by music news out of the mainstream. Now put yourself back in 1981 and 14 years old. Even for a kid working in a record store, there were very few outlets to find out what the latest on the art punk heroes from far away. The mainstream music press, which then was Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone and Rolling Stone, took an almost complete pass on the punk revolution and its aftermath. I had three main sources, each of them lovable and flawed in their own ways.

First there was Trouser Press. Today it’s considered one of the ne plus ultra music reviewers of its time, but that’s mostly on the strength of the Trouser Press Record Guide, which is still in print and can now be accessed in full for free. TP was the only national magazine covering the New Wave in any kind of detail with cover stories for the likes of The Clash and Devo.

Nevertheless, during my readership it was still handing covers to Bill Wyman and Genesis. It’s a great reminder of how confusing a time it was for listeners and for the music press. Petty was being marketed as a new waver power poppers like The Police and Squeeze were advertised as cutting edge. Even Billy Joel got in on the act; “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me,” incredibly, was seen at the time as his punk hit. (Click here to see TP’s bizarre cover choices.) If you wanted the latest on the new wave sounds that managed to fight to the top of the charts, though, Trouser Press was the only choice.

More fun was Damage Magazine, a tabloid-sized punk zine from San Francisco in the manner of Search & Destroy or Slash, which had both already come & gone. Unfortunately I can find nothing anywhere about Damage, not on eBay, not anywhere. It’s just plain gone. If anybody has an archive, let me know!

The most influential for me, though, was Greil Marcus’ column in New West. The magazine was like New York Magazine, West Coast-style. For some reason, the editors gave Marcus completely free rein, and instead of writing about the burgeoning West Coast punk scene – or even the West Coast sound dominating the charts at the time (Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, etc.) – he tackled the fringes of UK post-punk with feature length articles about the likes of Gang Of Four, Delta 5 and the Au Pairs. Then he’d mix all that in with pieces about his love for Jackson Browne’s back-up vocalists. It must have been terribly confusing for readers his age, but for me it made perfect sense. The post-punkers were my bedroom listening, but all that California pop was what my parents were playing when they got stoned while I sat in the backseat of the Volvo. They were deeply separate worlds, but I was living in both.

[Soundtrack]
Public Image – The Cowboy Song.mp3
Trouser Press had a (regular?) column about misheard lyrics. (Creedence: “Don’t go out with Ike / He’s bound to take your wife / There’s a bathroom on the right” Ha ha ha) One time they wrote that they wanted to include the complete lyrics to PiL’s “Cowboy Song,” the B-side to “Public Image,” but space prevented them from doing so. Naturally I was intrigued, so I ran out and found a copy. Well, your guess is as good as mine. Were they kidding? Was this an in joke? I still can’t tell.

Crime – Piss On Your Dog.mp3
Representing Damage Magazine, here’s an example of how it looked and read, but in sonic form: messy, smart and pretty darn funny.

Greil Marcus’s New West columns are collected in In The Fascist Bathroom, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers. This book is still a fixture in my fascist bathroom.

Gang, we have to have a little talk. It’s about our beloved Kraftwerk. Yes, we all agree that they are the unchallenged leaders in the growth and acceptance of electronic music. I would take that further: that Kraftwerk were visionary about how we would come to use and accept technology as an essential, completely integrated part of our everyday lives. It’s hard to remember now, but when “Home Computer” was released in 1981, computers were still way out of anybody’s reasonable price range and required cassette tapes for data storage.

But I’m sick of the backhanded compliments for the live show. No, you object, you said you loved it. You gave strong reviews to the new live tour document, Minimum-Maximum. But you’re always slipping in something about “four guys standing around with laptops” or “what’s the point of a live performance by a band that’s just triggering their loops.”

Let’s start with what we mean by “Live.” I propose the following definition, as useful for a classical pianist as a drum circle as a guy with a laptop: A live musical performance is one in which the musician is 1) Performing music from a score or via improvisation; 2) Making conscious decisions about how the music is played as it is performed, and; 3) Injecting meaning through his/her actions, words demeanor and stagecraft.

With Kraftwerk, I don’t think anybody has any doubts about 1) or 3). It’s 2) that you might have a problem with.

My observation is that Kraftwerk does indeed make lots of decisions as the music is performed. I saw them last May at The Warfield, and even to say that they “are just standing there” is dishonest and wrongly dismissive. I stood at the very front towards Stage Right, just in front of Florian Schneider with a clear side view of the other three band members’ set-ups. Ralf Hutter has a MIDI controller that he uses frequently, playing the vast majority of the melodic parts. He also sings and is a might good dancer. The two fellows in the middle, newer members Henning Schmitz and Fritz Hilpert triggered bass lines and percussion. The one who does the bass lines had several foot pedals that emphasized and deemphasized different elements of the bottom tracks. And Florian … well, actually I’m not sure what Florian was doing. Everquest? Checking local maps for a bike ride tomorrow? He did cut some awkward dance moves during “Music Non Stop,” but otherwise your guess is as good as mine.

The cut from Minimum-Maximum I’m putting up today, “Neon Lights,” is a great demonstration of Kraftwerk’s musical ‘chops.’ Hutter sounds practically emotional, awestruck by the spectacle of a city lit up for the night. Above all, it sounds like he’s having fun, which is not something you can glean from any of Kraftwerk’s studio recordings post-Autobahn. There’s lots of interplay between the loops and lines; it’s closer to a group jamming than a simple triggering of a program. Most telling, it sounds like Hutter makes a mistake playing out the melody at the very end. Maybe the non-exactness is part of the art, programmed in to add humanity to the proceedings, but having seen how he operates on stage, I’m not buying it. It’s human error, right there in the middle of a Kraftwerk song. Given 30 years of dehumanization as an art form (in a good way!), that slip-up and its preservation by the artist who made it is worth noticing.

The song titles, which feature the city of the performance used on the album, are also a dead giveaway that there is something more going on here than pantomime with MIDI controller. If the guys in the band feel like the performances are different from city to city, we should take that seriously. We owe that to them as musicians. On the other hand, maybe it’s just another in a series of wry jokes going back through 30-plus years of recording and playing live.

[Soundtrack]
Kraftwerk – Neon Lights (London).mp3

Here is a great shot from above that gives a glimpse of each member’s on-stage set-up.

PS How come no enterprising computer company has gone and got the Kraftwerk product endorsement yet? What would Dell give to have had their name on their on-stage laptops? Thank goodness it hasn’t happened yet, really; every effort should be made to keep Kraftwerk from looking like a NASCAR team. Or maybe that’s next year’s joke. I was a little surprised to see that they were on PCs and not Macs, though.

PPS I concede that when the robots are on stage that that is not a live musical performance. Nice stagecraft, though.

The Library of Congress announced the latest additions to The National Recording Registry. These are the sound recordings deemed valuable enough to American history that Congress funds their preservation into perpetuity. 500 years from now — assuming humans are still around — these are the sounds that people will know from our time.

So what did they select this year? Neil Armstrong on the moon, Dwight MacArthur, Woodrow Wilson, Fred Astaire, Al Jolson, Vladimir Horowitz, John Coltrane… Indeed many of the most influential sounds and voices of our time

…and Nirvana! and Public Enemy!

Really this isn’t that surprising; one of the first items named back in 2000 was Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message.” But it’s still incredible to try to imagine earthlings in another millenium trying to make head or tail of “911′s A Joke,” “Burn Hollywood Burn” or “Lithium.”

Why Fear Of A Black Planet? My hunch is that this album represented the commercial and legal pinnacle of sampling as an art form before it all was forced underground. (We’ll have to count on illegal-art.org to take care of the rest.) Also, Public Enemy’s ‘Black Nationalist’ message will probably seem more consequential to future historians than Paul’s Boutique‘s or 3 Feet High & Rising‘s content.

But is it worth it if people can’t hear the originals? Will future listeners even understand that these songs were built off of other recordings if those other recordings aren’t preserved, too? Today’s MP3 is highly dependent on Isaac Hayes samples. Does this make Public Enemy more historically important than Issac Hayes?

If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. — Isaac Newton

What do you think? Drop me a comment!

2004 National Recording Registry
The full registry to date

[Soundtrack]
Public Enemy – By The Time I Get To Arizona.mp3
(Yes, I know this is the wrong album, but the peculiarly 1991 political content — Chuck D’s anger at then-Arizona Governor Even Mecham’s refusal to ratify Marting Luther King Day — should prove plenty confusing to listeners in the year 2525.)

This is a shorter entry, and I hope to follow it up with a much longer sequel over the weekend.

I’ve only ever bought three records off the turntable at record stores, and none in the last 25 years. The three records were U2′s Boy (which was then available only on import), Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports and The Specials’ debut album.

Elvis Costello produced the latter, saying that he wanted to get them recorded before someone came along and ruined them. As it turned out, he was right, but the supposed enemy came from within. This will be the subject of that promised sequel.

I knew nothing of them, but news reports started to come through after I bought this album about their incredible live shows and the racial politics they championed. In retrospect, what really stands out for me is the misogyny. You can see all three of these elements at work in this incredible picture of one their early live shows. Note that despite their commitment to a racial equality message, this picture appears to be entirely white men. I guess the woman-bashing songs like “Little Bitch,” “Stupid Marriage” and “Too Much Too Young” ultimately made more of an impression on their fan base.

I heard this record first at Rasputins when it was its way-old location between Channing & Durant, the one that burned down in 1980 (I think). To get a great sense of what Rasputins was like in those days, have a look at these pages from Cometbus 30. (Scans are PDFs, right-click to download.)

[Soundtrack]
The Specials – Stupid Marriage.mp3

Contemporaneous press coverage of The Specials live experience

Universal Records had its share of odd moments. A few of my favorites include:

* Gandalf, the crazy coupon man, saw Jonathan Richman walking by with his guitar and conned him into playing a few songs.

* Marc declaring ELO Week, so we blasted Out Of The Blue for a week straight, which confused our art-punk clientele pretty good. The look on their faces when they came looking for the new Cure single…and then “Blue Skies” roars out of the stereo.

* Gang Of Four did an in-store to publicize the Universal Records-sponsored gig they were doing (at Market Street Cinema!) with Romeo Void and Wall Of Voodoo. It was the first in-store they’d ever done, and they were really shy at first. They didn’t bring any management, just showed up, hung out, drank beer and chatted with whomever for several hours, until one of them said (I think it was Jon), “Is it OK to leave now?”

* Going to a Jars gig in Provo Park. Marc drummed his ass off and looked totally exhausted at the end, so I asked him “Can I get you anything?” “Yeah, you got an extra shirt?” Uh, no.

But now I will tell you the greatest Universal Records story of them all: how Marc Time invented electro. This is 1981, long before Afrika Bambaataa, Mantronix and all that, and I swear this is a true story.

There was this African-American guy named Robin who always hung out in front of the Berkeley Public Library on Shattuck. Somewhere along the line, Robin got it in his head that what he really wanted to do was dance like a robot. For some reason, Robin chose to come to our punky store (why us, of all stores?) to ask the fateful question, “You got anything I can dance like a robot to?” We of course knew just the record for Robin: Kraftwerk’s new record, Computer World.

When we put it on the PA, Robin’s striking blue eyes lit up even more than usual. Before long, you could see Robin any afternoon in front of the UA7 movie theatre, doing his robot dance. I like to think that he was the start of it all, and before we knew it young African-American men across the country were popping & clicking & acting like robots. I like to imagine that Robin went on to tour the country, spreading the gospel of Kraftwerk and robot-dancing, and then it busted all mainstream, paving the way for Baambataa, Whodini and all that noise. All because of the gang at Universal Records.

[Soundtrack]
Kraftwerk – Pocket Calculator.mp3
Balanescu Quartet – Pocket Calculator.mp3 Robot dancing, 18th century-style

Does anybody out there have any Jars records?

I’m not really sure how it happened, but somehow I wormed my way from “hanging out” to “working” at Universal Records, which was the name that The Music Faucet took on when it moved up between Bancroft and Telegraph. This was prime real estate — close to campus, next to Rasputin’s Records and across from Blondie’s Pizza. From here I was to learn a lot about music and life.

I was just one of a really odd cast of characters. Marc Time and Gary Nervo were the guys who ran the place, and I was completely devoted to trying to look cool in their eyes. For some reason, they let me be there, probably because I was doing a huge amount of the used record filing. Marc and Gary were in The Jars, one of the first bands on Berkeley’s Subterranean Records. They were pretty good and opened some interesting shows, including for Flipper. They had two singles released and fit in nicely in the whole early 1980s new wave pop thing. Just to give you an idea of the sense of humor around these guys, on the covers of their first two singles, they planted clues that their guitarist/singer, Mik Dow, was dead. That’s sort of funny, but what was REALLY funny is that they didn’t tell Mik. And then they told all their friends. (at least, this is how I remember it)

Ron was the owner. I couldn’t really read him, but he was always smiling a Cheshire Cat grin. (There may have been good reason for this, but I was oblivious.) He seemed really apart from the life of the store, and yet it was his. Then there was a whole periphery of other folks: Richard, the manic English 100-pounds with the huge nose, convinced that Rocktography would be the Next Big Thing; Gandalf, a spaced-out hippie who passed out “dollar off” coupons for us and once corraled Jonathan Richman into coming in and playing some songs; and Rob, a disaffected punk teen, lead singer of Intensified Chaos, who later gave it all up to become the F Scott Fitzgerald-like “Robert Cameron The Third.”

But I am an MP3 blogger, so let me stick to the music for a moment.

It’s 1980 and I’m buying my first non-commercial, non-parentally influenced records. Can you guess what they were? Obviously London Calling was a biggie. I liked that fine, but it didn’t seem especially punk or strange to me, and I have actually always been a little baffled why The Clash are considered punk heroes. I like them fine, mind you, but it seems like a pretty short street from Bruce Springsteen to Joe & Mick. Joe & Mick just happened to have more diverse taste than Bruce. But that’s another discussion.

The first record of this period that really captured my imagination was Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition. I knew little or nothing of the Sex Pistols’ music, so PiL’s deep dubby grooves didn’t seem as shocking to me as it probably did to my fellow 1980 folk. For me, hearing dance music be treated as avant-garde experiments was competely novel. I realized that it was mostly improvised, but the tracks still held enough interest that I would turn up the headphones and listen closely BETWEEN the bass lines (if you know what I mean). This was completely mesmerizing stuff, full of pain and rhythm and strangeness and drama, and I was hooked.

Ooooh and then I found the Metal Box version! As perfect as the distorted art, silvered ink and scribbled lyrics were on the Second Edition cover, Metal Box was the most unbelievable record package I’d ever seen, and may still be. It’s one of the only records I’ve retained over the years. If you don’t own one, you should. The discs had no song titles and you had to shake the can to get the records out. And on 45, the bass lines sounded incredible.

Asked why the Metal Box, John Lydon answered — Because it made the records hard to get out. The simplicity of that use and the complexity of the package still make me laugh. I also liked the idea from the surrealist standpoint, that to play them was to destroy them, like Andre Breton’s sandpaper covered book that was intended to destroy all the books next to it on the shelf.

The obvious thing to illustrate my feeling about this album is to put up “Graveyard” or “Death Disco,” but since I’m at the end of my bandwidth month, here instead is the 7-minute “Poptones.” Lydon said back then that this was a song about a rape of a man by another man, but you can’t really tell if that’s true or if Lydon (typically) is just trying to tick off his audience. But to me that doubt about the true subject matter of this song makes it even scarier, as it was to an impressionable 13-year old with headphones on and the lights out.

[Soundtrack]
Public Image Ltd – Poptones.mp3

this is what you want, this is what you get
Find a Metal Box

Running a college basketball pool definitely sets back your ability to write interesting posts, and tonight I’ve got setting up my fancy new iBook to preoccupy me! The So-Called Post-Punk Life will resume shortly.

While writing the MSCPPL series last week, I had the good fortune to run across Marc Time, a former colleague from my 13-year old life in the Berkeley punk rock record store. He shared some great stories and ghostly pictures from my past life. He also runs a darn fine radio show which you can check out at his blog, The Sunday Morning Hangover. You’ll see some really interesting things come out of this re-found relationship in the next week or two.

On a related note, I’ve awakened every day for the past week with this song in my head. It seems appropriate to post it here and now — a great song for someone who aspires to posting every day and just can’t do it. Ha. When I was 13, it felt like a great song to blast when Mom forced me to clean my room. Oh, what an ironist I was.

[Soundtrack]
Gang Of Four – Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time.mp3

Get your tickets now to see the Gang Of Four reunion tour!

Tuxedomoon was a local art-punk band that I found by way of The Residents. Ralph had signed them and then of course I just had to have their whole back catalogue.

Their first couple of EPs, Tuxedomoon and Scream With A View were particularly great because they seemed so enigmatic. Self-released, hardly any liner notes, bizarre cover images, and the band seemed to change identities completely from song to song. Check today’s offerings below from Tuxedomoon’s scarce debut EP, which has them swinging from Kraftwerk-y electro-pop to prog to Wire-style freakouts. (Compounding this, the other tracks on the EP were avant-garde classical and a Cole Porter cover.) Plus they were the only ‘punk’ band around sporting a line-up of melodramatic actor lead singer, alto saxophone, bass and viola.

Once they were on Ralph, the production started to de-muddy and I gradually lost interest in them, especially after 1981′s Desire. Tuxedomoon’s sometimes lead singer, Winston Tong, could also be just… a… bit… TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO MUCH. That last sentence is a pretty good demonstration of Tong he might have sung that line.

The reason I bring them up is because the band is making its first appearance in San Francisco in a very long time this weekend. I’m committed to a birthday party, but I’m thinking I’m going to go out and see these guys, as I was too young to pay my respects at the time. Tuxedomoon picked up and left the Bay Area for Rotterdam shortly after Ralph’s implosion in 1981, so this is really a rare thing. Always more popular in Europe, this should prove to be a classic “triumphant homecoming.”

As far as I know, Tuxedomoon has no material available in the US right now, though there is a re-release program under way in France. With all the other Class of 1980 folk coming around, surely some enterprising label should have an interest in cleaning up the original tapes and re-issuing them.

[Soundtrack - tracks from the debut EP]
Tuxedomoon – New Machine.mp3
Tuxedomoon – No Tears.mp3

Confessional: Tuxedomoon’s Half-Mute is the only item I ever shoplifted. From Rasputins Records. So now my secret is out. Ken Sarachan, if you want your $7 back, drop me a line.

I think the folks at The Music Faucet were trying to get rid of me, their personal 13-year old hanger-on groupie. Or maybe this was a “Punk Rock Record Store Guy” test of sorts. One day Gary Nervo issued a challenge to me. He reached into his own stash behind the counter — a rare honor! — and pulled out a copy of The Residents’ Please Do Not Steal It, a collectors item DJ-only promo of The Residents “greatest hits.”

(God knows why Ralph Records issued this. Did they really think they were going to get airplay? It was later released UK-only as Nibbles.)

This was before The Residents started parading around in eyeballs and tuxedos. At this point, they had no public image at all. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I brought it home and put on the first track, “You Yesyesyes.” Immediately, the most ghastly guitar solo started pumping through the speaker. It made me feel scared and ill. I skipped on to the next track, somebody muttering something about a Santa Dog. And on to a bizarre cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” And so forth until the end.

Instead of giving up, though, I started listening again and soldiered through. After all, the great Nervo had given this to me. I couldn’t let him down!

What I had in the end was a band that completely rattled my parents, something my classmates couldn’t understand at all, something that met my own standards for psychedelic pop (which I’ll talk about sometime later this year), and a whole lot of private jokes. Because if nothing else, the best Residents stuff is great satire.

As it turned out, this period turned out to be the peak years for The Residents. Eskimo was out shortly afterwards and The Commercial Album a year after that. Ralph Records, The Residents’ homebrew label, was also very active during this time, releasing albums by Bay Area art-punk luminaries like Tuxedomoon (more on them in my next post) and MX-80 Sound (who were regular visitors to The Music Faucet and its next incarnation Universal Records). I wound up so obssessed with Ralph Records that I bought a copy of every single thing that came out on the label and in some cases multiple versions if there were small changes to the artwork on a reprinted edition.

Since Ralph was right over in San Francisco at 444 Grove Street (a revered address in my mind), I decided that I had to go in there and see The Residents. Remember that The Residents shielded their identity and never performed live. For all I knew, they weren’t even human. I was pretty sure they weren’t. But I had to know.

I bravely got on BART by myself (which I don’t think I’d done before and for which my parents would certainly have grounded me), found my way to Grove Street, nervously paced around their door for awhile and finally knocked. The door was answered by a perfectly normal fellow. I presented myself, requested that he sell me some records and after some wariness was let in! (“Can’t you find these at a record store?” Thinking quickly, I blufeed, “Uh, which one should I go to?”) Wow, I was in The Residents studio! Are they here? No, they’re not in today. The place had murals everywhere and everything was covered with plastic sheets to create walkways and rooms. I paid whoever it was — who of course had to be a Resident! — and went back home, triumphant.

Except that the records were warped!

So now I had to go back, make the exchange… Anyway, pretty much the same thing happened. I explained that records weren’t right. The man went off into the back to check them on the “The Ralphinator” as he called it. Sure enough, they were warped and he gave me new copies.

After The Commercial Album, The Residents started off on the Mole Trilogy and that put me off them. But for about two years, they were total obsession for me. The picture above was a poster on my bedroom wall and my backpack was festooned with Residents-related badges.

Here today is one of The Residents’ best and rarest works, The Beatles Play The Residents and The Residents Play The Beatles, an early version of what would now be known as a mash-up and a great example of the sense of humor that The Residents brought to everything they did. One of the most appealing aspects of following The Residents was their demolition of pop history, a recurring theme in their work. (See also The American Composer Series, The Third Reich n Roll, The King & Eye, etc.)

It’s incredible that the copyright police let this one go through. Back in the day, eh? It was released originally as VERY limited edition 7″, but can still be found on some European compilations.

[Soundtrack - The Beatles Play The Residents & The Residents Play The Beatles]
Beyond The Valley Of A Day In the Life.mp3
Flying.mp3

The siren song of Telegraph Avenue led me to hanging out at The Music Faucet, a quintessentially divey record store at the unhip end of the street away from Sproul Plaza and all its attendant early-80s student madness. Luckily the guys who ran the place took a shine to me and started feeding me records to check out. I think they were trying to scare me off with some of their choices (more on that in my next post), but they were also pretty obliging when they felt like it.

One of my great early finds from Music Faucet was Blondie, a band I fell immediately in love with. Sure, the singer was hot, but I think what really got to me was the imaginative blending of punky threat with good old-fashioned girl group Brill Building-style pop. Plus, they had a synthesizer player that made weird sounds! And a kick-ass out-of-control drummer, just this side of Keith Moon! This had a lot of appeal to a 12-year old who was only hearing Jackson Browne and The Eagles around the house.

Parallel Lines was out, but hadn’t quite hit yet; “Hangin’ On The Telephone” was the bomb first single and I don’t think megahit “Heart Of Glass” was released for a good six months after the album dropped. No, I didn’t dig the new one anyway. The albums that sent me were the two first ones, Blondie and Plastic Letters. They were sexy and threatening, but also had great pop sense. You could sing along without embarassment because Debbie was no girly-girl.

For a kid who was set to see his first pornographic magazine, this was a complete thrill — and because the band wasn’t popular yet it was like having a secret older woman girlfriend in a really innocent kind of way.

I was actually sort of embarassed by Debbie’s hotness quotient. I just wanted to check out the music, but all the bootlegs had to have pictures of her nude or somehow exploited. I felt bad for Debbie. How could everybody look at her like that? She’s so cool! In retrospect, this probably made me one of their best fans since the band was always complaining that “Blondie is a band! Quit checking out the lead singer!” (Author’s note: No, I am not gay.)

(It doesn’t look like things have changed much either. As I got ready to do this post, I discovered that there are some really creepy Debbie Harry sites out there.)

Things peaked when I got into bootlegs. I had a live bootleg with some demos on that I loved, which gave me a taste for more. The next one I set my eye on happened to be a picture disc with a nude Debbie ingrained in the vinyl. I asked permission from my parents to buy it, they said OK, but I never got up the courage.

The band stayed one of my favorites through Autoamerican, which despite its huge hit single with “Rapture,” even I recognized as incredibly pretentious twaddle at age 14. A very very disappointing shark-jumping release.

It’s hard to believe now that Blondie was considered Punk and semi-avant garde in its heyday. Leaving aside the band’s appearance and home base (late 70s NYC), the first album would fit neatly next to most of the things you hear on a Solid Gold Oldies AM station. Maybe it was because Debbie dared to look bored and angry. Oooo daring.

[Soundtrack - 'album cuts' from Blondie's 1977 debut]
Blondie – In The Sun.mp3
Blondie – Rifle Range.mp3

After posting on Flipper, it seems like an opportune time to take a stroll through the post-punk life of a kid growing up in Berkeley in the 70s and 80s.

My first brush with punk came from my godmother, of all people. She’s not exactly straight-laced, but what baby boomer was in San Francisco in 1978? This person is the wife of a law firm partner and I always picture her in my mind in a turtleneck. But indeed, Terry was the start of my journey into punk.

It’s 1978, I’m 11, and all I know about punk is something about the Sex Pistols coming to town last year. I hear The Tubes are pretty punky, too. My parents go see them every New Years Eve. “White Punks On Dope” is wild stuff to a kid that thinks The Beatles are the alpha and the omega, with occasional Who & Stones interludes.

We were over at Marc & Terry’s house and Devo’s Are We Not Men is presented to me as a birthday gift. I’m baffled. What, no Paul McCartney record? No, Terry has heard that this is what all the kids at USF are listening to and it’s supposed to be hilarious. OK, sure, I’ll check it out. I have firm roots in psychedelia, I’m game for anthing. I run it to the “upstairs stereo” and drop the needle.

Bright yellow cover with a strange doll-like man on the front. He’s standing in front of a golf ball? The inner sleeve shows a very high energy band in weird jumpsuits that look vaguely like something to do with…science. They look like Super Friends.

I dropped the needle…

Yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah Yeah yeah yeah
YEAH!!!!!

On paper, it looks pretty tame. But that man screaming those words terrified me to my core. What was the Uncontrollable Urge? What was it doing to him???

The music totally baffled me. What was with those crazy rhythms? Why did the songs stop & start at random? Why were they singing about Space Junk? Why do they talk about monkeys so much? What did they do to that Stones song? That’s horrible!

I relay my review to the assembled, probably stoned-off-their-ass adults. “I don’t get this.” They seem disappointed, but then go back to whatever. I went back upstairs to play it again, to parse the mystery of the man screaming about his Urge.

But I held on to my copy for many years and it quickly became one of my favorites. Devo became so accepted around Berkeley that Freedom Of Choice was a mainstay of 8th grade parties.

Mark Mothersbaugh now makes soundtracks for Nickelodeon cartoons and Gerry Casale (according to my friend, Dan) makes imitation songs for commercials. (“You need a song that sounds like Get Ur Freak On for a truck ad? I can do that!”) There’s a certain symmetry there — from “Space Junk” to Spongebob, sure why not — but it still seemed pretty radical at the time. The mainstream rises up to hold the center yet again.

[Soundtrack]
Devo – Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Getting).mp3

[Soundtrack]
Decemberists – Leslie Anne Levine.mp3

We were over at Mark’s last night in a Mah Jongg marathon and I mentioned how much I’d been enjoying The Decemberists, a band that I had inexplicably been missing out on. He informed me that one of my favorite songs of theirs, Leslie Anne Levine, is told from the perspective of a dead infant, which surprised me since I’m not given to listening to the words. This made for a pretty embarassing case of lyrics ignorance. Indeed I looked them up this morning and Leslie turns out to be an infant dead in 1842, 15 years on, singing about her lot in life.

Soooo I woke up this morning to the “Fuck You” guy. We have a halfway house across the street and every so often somebody imbalanced comes through there. From time to time, the FY Guy comes strolling down the street in the early mornings yelling FUCK YOUUUUUU!! FUUUUCCCCK YOOOUUUU!!! He sounds angry at somebody, but I suspect he’s just yelling, like Raaer from Berkeley in the 80s.

In turn all this talk of 19th century SIDS and crazy yelling folk got me thinking about Wisconsin Death Trip, a book that I read in Business School that had huge impact on my reading of historical photography. (My B-School classmates used to think I was nuts, reading books from the library during my education!)

Wisconsin Death Trip throws open a private photo archive from Black River Falls, WI, a 19th century middle-of-nowhere town cut off from pretty much everything and suffering through the fierce Wisconsin winters. At that time, almost all photographs were posed and only for the very most special occasions, and weirdly a hefty percentage of the photos seems to show people going nuts. The author, Michael Lesy, contrasts these with contemporaneous newspaper police clippings that show that, yes, pretty much everybody was losing it. Bestiality, arson, murder, you name it, it was happening up in Black River Falls. And a whole lot of people working on “perpetual motion machines.”

Especially poignant are page after page of photographs of dead infants and children. Often the only photograph — the only remnant of a child’s existence — might be a picture of it in its coffin.

It’s been in and out of print a few times, but you can still get Wisconsin Death Trip here (of course). The movie, which is not nearly as impactful as the book, but is still a really interesting piece of faux-documentary filmmaking.

Taken together, though, the book and film of Wisconsin Death Trip provide a fascinating window into the personal costs of expanding the nation westward in a big hurry, far ahead of any supportive social or economic infrastructure.

Today is a significant day. Not only are my beloved Cal Bears playing for (maybe) a spot in the Rose Bowl, but it’s the 6th anniversary of my mother’s passing.

Silly stuff first. I’ve been going to Cal games since I was 5. They haven’t been to the Rose Bowl — or even close — since 1959, which is so long ago and obscure a game that I can’t find a link about it (we lost to Iowa, 38-12). Say what you will about the Red Sox, at least they got to sniff a championship a few times. Cal ain’t even got close.

It will be a long strange road to get there, however, thanks to the BCS. Needless to say, I will be planted in front of the TV from 430pm onwards today, rocking back & forth and keeping very quiet like an autistic kid who’s just been scolded, furtively keeping an eye on the Auburn and Oklahoma games on the other channels. The Orange Bowl could still happen!

It’s probably not a coincidence that this is all coming down on the anniversary of the day my Mom left the building. Mom was secretly a pretty big Bears fan; even though she brought books to the games as some kind of weird protest against, I don’t know, watching football(?), she wound up being a hardcore fan and listening to all the games on the radio.

I went through the family picture box the other night for the first time in many years and found to my delight that she had already organized everything by year, thus the fabulous shot above from 1968 of hip Mom with 1-year old Shawn. From my 37-year old perspective, it’s pretty amazing to look back at those pictures and see how young my parents were; Mom was just 19 when I turned up. Those were different days. I can’t even imagine — migrating to sight-unseen Cali from Long Island, 19 years old, shotgun-married (basically), in the middle of the 60s. Amazing stuff.

In any case, to celebrate today’s goings on, I offer…

[Soundtrack]
The Angels – My Boyfriend’s Back.mp3 – A sneakily clever song with a hook you can’t get out of your head. What exactly happened while Johnny was away? At any rate, I’ve always considered to be my Mom’s all-time favorite song because anytime it came on the radio she’d start singing along joyfully, even doing some of the fab 1962 girl groups moves with the music.

Fight For California.mp3 – ’nuff said.

Bjork – Mother Heroic.mp3

After a pre-party at our house, we lurch downhill to the Fillmore. It seemed unusually crowded, and unlike some of the other Saturday night crowds we’ve seen there, everybody seems primed for the show, more pushing to the front than hanging back. When GBV hit the stage, more than one of us remarked on Bob’s grey hair. Eh, at least he gets to keep his.

Somebody passed up a bottle to the stage. How did they get that in here? Bob drinks. Then he drinks tequila. He is a brave man.

Somehow after 11 years of listening and trying to keep up with all his various projects, Bob still has records and songs I’ve never heard of! They plow through a great set of new & old favorites. A couple of times I catch myself thinking, “I’ll never hear that song played that well again.” Can’t they drop by my house and play I Am A Tree a couple times a year?

In general, the band seems like they are playing to our need to say goodbye. I don’t think it’s really hit them yet, except probably for Bob. The really emotional gigs seem yet to come on this tour. That’s OK, I’d really rather they just concentrate on rockin’ out anyway.

After two-and-half hours and 50-odd songs, the usual detritus of a GBV gig covers the floor and we stray to the exits. The club is done.

[Soundtrack]
Transcender – Motorpranks.mp3 A tribute to GBV by a coming California band. It’s good, I swear, and neatly expresses why it’s great to be their fan. It mattered, it mattered, it mattered a lot to me!
Robert Pollard – Conspiracy of Owls.mp3 From Bob’s new solo album, released pretty much simultaneously with the latest GBV. Is this the future of the GBV sound?

GBV continues to put albums out on Matador, but somehow I find them all vaguely disappointing. They still have terrific singles (linked below), the albums still leap to life live, but the filler material and Bob’s recent lurch towards prog leaves me a bit colder than in the past.

Nevertheless, I’m always there at the shows, still coming every six months, still with the formula of playing mostly the new record the first time through and more of a hits set the second time through. I’m still introducing people to the band and acting as a ticketing ringleader for each gig. I nearly have the UK-based worldwide CEO and CFO out for a night at Bimbo’s, but an unhappy budget meeting sees them begging off at the last minute.

Somehow I sense that they’re not having as much fun as usual. Only Bob is drinking, not the rest of the band, and not really that much. Has he put a no-drinking on stage rule into effect? No, that seems unlikely.

Not a couple of weeks after this gig, bass player Tim Tobias — who always seemed the happiest guy on stage, the band’s biggest fan — leaves the group. I’m not surprised; he sort of seemed to mope through the show and he’s lost a lot of weight. Maybe health problems? A solo release by Bob and Todd is mysteriously downgraded to a limited edition of 500.

A gig at Slim’s in October 2003 seems to set some kind of milestone. They’ve just been to SF a couple of months before and the club is only half-full. They are completely tanked. Bob starts off with the announcement that “We’re here to support our new album. And we’ll probably here again next year to support our new album. We’ll probably be here every year for the rest of our lives to support our new album.” This doesn’t sound like a happy announcement. Sure enough, halfway through the show Bob goes into a semi-intelligible 20-minute monologue about the history of the band, how all the critics complain his albums sound the same (they don’t), and a host of other things on his mind. Then they all do shots. Then they take a piss break. Most of the crowd, including all of my friends, decide they’d rather party somewhere else. It’s a depressing night.

So when GBV announces in Spring that they plan to discontinue the band after playing one more tour, it’s not really that big a surprise.

[Soundtrack]
Guided By Voices – My Kind Of Soldier.mp3
Guided By Voices – Everywhere With Helicopter.mp3
Guided By Voices – The Best Of Jill Hives.mp3

At one point in 2001-02, we see GBV four times in six months. Easily the most memorable time was on our trip to New York for New Year’s 2001. They’re back on Matador, back producing themselves and they are clearly having a good time. On this occasion, I’ve managed to score tickets to see them play at the legendary Apollo Theatre in Harlem. They are sharing the bill with MC David Cross and The Strokes, who are 2001′s flavor of the moment.

First of all, just being in Harlem at night — much less at the Apollo — is kind of a trip. It’s already been an odd day; that morning I’d gone down to check out the scene at Ground Zero, which was still very much Ground Zero just three months after that thing happened. The Apollo, it turns out, is kind of run down and not nearly as glamorous as all the televised talent shows would have you think. But it’s still terrific to be there. The halls and stairwells are decorated with glossy photos of past performers, every one making you ooh and aah.

The staff is not ready for a rock n’ roll show, especially not this one. We’re in the first balcony and all the ushers are holding their ears. The Strokes come on to open the show… and Julian falls down! This will be an interesting evening.

Actually, it turns out to be a horrible whooping. The bands switch off sets, but it’s no contest. The Strokes have about a half-hour of solid material. GBV on the other hand has, what, 500 songs? The Strokes surrender early, drunk off their asses, but unfortunately so do the NYC fans who are there mostly to see the hometown side. By the time GBV is done, the place is half-empty. The Apollo, unfortunately, has grossly underestimated the beer-drinking abilities of an indie-rock crowd. They desperately refill the drink stations for a while but by 10pm they’ve just plain given up on keeping the crowd fed.

I read an interview with Bob the next day in the Times. Turns out he’s advised Julian that whenever he’s in doubt onstate, he should fall down because “the kids love it.” I guess Julian is in doubt a lot on stage, especially in the presence of the great GBV!

The next time we see them is three months later at the Warfield with the New Pornographers opening. Another dream show, right? Maybe not. They’ve just plain been to SF too many times and the soft economy takes a toll on attendance. In a half-empty, too-big hall, I’m having a hard time getting into it. For the first time ever, I take stock of the situation and decide to cut out after an hour. They’ll be back, right?

There are other signs of trouble, too. Seemingly many of the best new songs aren’t on GBV’s albums, but are found instead on Robert Pollard’s various other projects. (These are the sources for today’s Soundtrack below.) But I can’t imagine that I won’t have this band around forever. They seem to love their jobs so much.

[Soundtrack]
Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard – Tight Globes.mp3
Robert Pollard & His Soft Rock Renegades – I Drove a Tank.mp3
Airport 5 – Stifled Man Casino.mp3

For some reason, GBV won’t come to San Francisco on a weekend, always a weeknight. This is a royal pain in the ass when it comes to, you know, functioning.

It’s the end of the century and the band has signed to TVT Records to finally go for it. They are going to become arena-rock stadium gods. TVT sets them up with Ric Ocasek as their producer. (I should have taken this as a danger sign. I hate The Cars.) GBV makes its most commercial record ever, “Do The Collapse,” in an obvious bid for radio play. Rumor has it that Ocasek won’t let them drink in the studio. How on earth will they find that magical drunken rocking place now? The record has some great tunes, but in retrospect it’s obviously GBV’s worst. Bob publicly disowns the inspiring but sorta insipid ballad, “Hold On Hope,” as something he regrets writing. Heck, it’s still better than 96% of what’s on the radio.

But live the band still kills. The stability of the line-up has made them an absolute rock and roll machine, better than just about any band you’ll ever see. They give it their all for 2-3 hours, over & over. They get in the habit of coming to SF twice for every album; first pre-release with a set loaded with new material, the second time playing more of a hits set and more clearly enjoying themselves. These second shows are always messier and more fun.

Two gigs stand out from this period. At the Fillmore for a “Collapse” show, Amy jumps onstage to dance with the band. It’s the only time at the Fillmore where I haven’t seen someone immediately bum-rushed by security for doing this. It’s her 30th birthday and they keep her up there for a couple of songs. It’s a really charming moment.

The other is at Bimbo’s on the “Isolation Drills” tour. After closing with an unitelligible “Baba O’Reilly,” all the energy spills out on to Columbus Avenue. Chris R. convinces two guys that they should fight. Meanwhile, Susie has convinced Angela to find them a way backstage. They get there and Susie freezes up. The band has just played its heart out and they are exhausted. Susie is starstruck and drunk, a really lethal social combination. “Hey, you guys want to get a drink?” They get blank stares while Angela rushes her out of the room.

I think it was this same night that I glided unusually close to the stage. By now, I know the GBV repertoire like nobody’s business. Yeah, it’s 50 songs a night, all different, every time, but I’ve got the Bob Pollard dramatic sense down cold. It’s near the end of the set and I’m pretty well gone. They conclude some song and I sense — I just know — the next song. I count off “1-2-Big-SCHOOL!” Bob looks down at me for a second, hesitates… and then endorsing my call, counts off “1-2-Big-SCHOOL!” People around me look at me aghast. How did he know that? Yep, this is the band for me alright!

[Soundtrack]
Guided By Voices – Things I Will Keep.mp3
Guided By Voices – Skills Like This.mp3
Guided By Voices – Glad Girls.mp3

It’s 1997 and I’ve settled into my return to San Francisco life. GBV have settled in, too. They are on a one-new-album, two-tours annually groove. They clearly love coming to San Francisco and play some great gigs here.

Weird stories are coming out of the GBV camp, principally that Bob has fired the entire band and grafted another band, Pittsburgh’s Cobra Verde, into its place. It turns out that Cobra Verde has already been fired and GBV is touring for the first time with the line-up that will stay pretty constant for the next 6-7 years (though in true Spinal Tap fashion, there seems to be a rotating set of drummers). Meanwhile, Bob has opened the floodgates and is now putting out about five albums a year on his private label.

My personal favorite gig comes on the “Mag Earwhig!” tour, or maybe it’s the next year. We’re at Maritime Hall, an outmoded union hall next to a freeway entrance that’s being used mostly for stoner shows. It’s like being in a high school gymnasium, but the promoters have made a few touches to spruce the place up — fried chicken in the back and a ‘psychedelic’ light show to the side of the stage, which obviously delights Bob to no end.

The manager runs drink after drink on to the stage. Angela manages to get in front of Nate and do the unthinkable: steal the Jack Daniels bottle. Nate nearly jumps into the audience for it, dropping to his knees and begging in mid-song. Angela ransoms it for beer from the onstage cooler.

Hysteria seems to build with every song. And there’s a lot of them! GBV has become the marathon band! Two and a half hours and a song every two minutes. What’s that? 75 songs??? And of course we have to drink when Bob drinks.

Bob closes with the announcement,”OK, kids. There’s no more beer in the cooler. And you know what that means: there’s no more reason to be here.” Sure enough, they run through one more song and are gone for another six months.

[Soundtrack]
Guided By Voices – Your Name Is Wild.mp3
Guided By Voices – Little Lines.mp3
Guided By Voices – Don’t Stop Now.mp3

I was living in Seattle when I was first put on to GBV. Mark of course — with his stacks & stacks of CDs — many wonderful, many head-scratchers — was the start of it all. We had both moved up there in various states of loneliness and weird life inflection points to find Seattle dark, depressing but really open to finding new bits of alt.culture. This was at the tail end of grunge, but the city’s hipoisie had already moved on. The celebrities of grunge were still there, though. They’d never really “gone big” and most of the the Sub Pop level folks were still accessible and visible.

So Mark calls me up and says there’s this band I have to hear that sounds like Gang Of Four but poppy. My suspicion that he’s trying to put one over on me is confirmed by the record he brings over, “Bee Thousand.” It sounds like it’s been recorded in the basement, but every song has different imperfections — like it was recorded in a 100 different basements. The songs are catchy, but difficult to hear. The titles are surreal — “Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” “Kicker Of Elves,” etc — but the singer seems entirely committed to… whatever he’s saying. There are 20+ songs, but the album is only 33 minutes long. Rumor has it they are all 4th grade teachers, all over 40. This is weird.

We head down to Crocodile Cafe to check them out. It’s a typically cold, dark, rainy Seattle night, just frozen enough to chill you, but not enough that you break out the deep winter clothing. This was my secret life in business school; none of my hopelessly square classmates are the least interested in Seattle’s underbelly. GBV takes the stage. And they are drunk. Really drunk. In fact, come to think of it, I saw them hunkered over a table in the dining room before, downing Bud after Bud. Geez, I thought those were some fans.

They are magnificent. Every song sounds like it’s been awakened from the CD. The singer comes on, does a letter-perfect scissor kick, turns bottle after bottle of beer upside down his throat and so clearly LOVES what he is doing. This is Bob; I’m going to see a lot of Bob over the years. The band completely rocks. It’s like The Who disguised as a bunch of record store clerks from Ohio. They play like 50 songs in 2 hours and all of them sound like instant classics, the kinds of songs so good that they sound like they always existed and somebody unearthed them.

I am sold. My cassette of “Bee Thousand” stays in or near my car stereo for about six months.

The next time we see them, Mark, Eric and I meet at Eric’s for a barbecue. This is late spring and Seattle looks great. It’s sunny and we’re getting a good beer buzz on. We argue about what songs to play from the new record “Alien Lanes,” which has a mere 28 tracks in its 38 minutes. This time they’ve brought the cooler right on stage with them, and they pass beers back and forth all night. That night, the rhythm guitarist was called away for the birth of his daughter, so the roadie steps in to play instead. He’s never gigged with the band before, but he clearly fits right in. Like Lou Gehrig, Nate hasn’t relinquished his spot since that night.

A love affair is born. I’m going to see these guys probably 15 times in the next 10 years.

[Soundtrack]
Guided By Voices – Tractor Rape Chain.mp3
Guided By Voices – Game Of Pricks.mp3
Guided By Voices – Motor Away.mp3

Yesterday was a day of complete torpor. We got out of the house just long enough for Mexican food and ran back home as fast as the traffic-besmirched Bay Bridge would allow us. I then made the mistake of starting to watch the Red Sox-Yankees game, which has to win some kind of award for the longest boringest game ever that was actually suspenseful enough to watch. It becomes a matter of principle to finish it, like a TV series gone horribly wrong. All in all, it was a day spent more horizontal than vertical.

So much for being an early adopter. ABC News is reporting that music blogs are the coming thing in music promotion. "Labels want to harness the influence of the music bloggers." Ha! I ain’t wearing no dang harness!

Labelfriends and labelcountrymen, if you’re really listening, here’s my suggestion for today. Swedish guys. Especially more Swedish guys imitating Curtis Mayfield. I’m telling you, this is the coming thing!

“Oh my god, we had such a good time. Lower Haight is going to be talking about the devil bride and her angel consorts for a long time. The house is a total mess. Those girls are really messy. It looks like a blackbird flew through the house.”

“What?”

“Oh, L. was wearing my black boa and feathers got everywhere.”

“I see. Any other damage?”

“The stripper broke one of the plant stands. He said he would pay for it, but I was too drunk to tell him it was worth more than five dollars.”

“Uh, well, that sounds like a good time.”

I continued to babble on and ask questions in the dangerous way that drivers on cel phones do. Susie cut me off.

“This is a courtesy call. I need to go back to bed. Don’t call me today. I can’t talk to anybody right now.”