Friday, January 30, 2009

the payoff...

good god almighty...mr tollett @ Goldenvoice never ceases to amaze. have to digest and think about this & start to see the overlaps...number of things i've seen before, but enough new & cool to justify...
also, late additions have been know to happen, but for now: Let the fun begin!

Monday, January 26, 2009

the waiting...


nothing too deep or profound today...just an ode to my yearly pastime, the annual wait for the announcement of the lineup for Coachella.


Goldenvoice, the promoters, have raised this to a hideously beautiful art form, and for sheer entertainment value, their online message board of patient folks continually raising the bar on the art of discourse...

Meanwhile, major & not so major news organizations ramble through the boards and cobble together actual stories based on the rabid droolings therein...which of course are then regurgitated back on the boards as FACT since, after all, it has the weight & heft of the fourth estate behind it now...

Ah, that most wonderful time of the year!!!

(above photo: reunion of Team Coachella '07)

Saturday, January 24, 2009

what's in a name...

To answer the many raised eyebrows & semi.polite queries, no, the title of this blog is not getting heavy on the Fahrenheit 451 tip, but rather a nod to the Talking Heads lp from 1979, Fear Of Music-specifically, the track "Life During Wartime", precisely what the title implies...

At the end of the song, following the lyrics, (back in the days when music had lyrics provided, and life provided us w/time to read them...), Byrne skips two lines to get to the payoff: 'Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks, they won't help me survive', and deep in the fade of the song, 'my chest is aching, burns like a furnace, the burning keeps me alive'...then skips the last two lines...
Never could figure out why, an oblique strategy perhaps?

Two years ago, when the catalog was remastered, an alternate version was tacked on to the cd...finally, at last, the mystery revealed. sort of...

Of the last six lines, Byrne again jumps to the third & fourth, then goes back and catches one, two, five, and six...
It gave me a small sense of peace to know that those poor orphan lines i worried about so actually did have a home...

English tv's 'Old Grey Whistle Test' provides a great live take from 1979 where he follows the original template by pulling out the two lines and ending cleanly with them...



In hindsight, one can make a case for this record capturing the uneasiness of the coming 80's amidst the disco frivolty, but perhaps a greater case can be made for its edginess embodying the first example of geek cool? Let the historians decide...

Friday, January 16, 2009

roots, part one

A passing reference in an article on southern soul yielded the name Joe Tex…surely in those AM radio days I’d run across his singles, ‘Skinny Legs & All’ jumped to mind…but this was different, something deep down gnawing at me.

I closed my eyes and it came to me…stabbing horns piercing the gray matter and that inimitable gutbucket growl building to a shriek: ‘I Gotcha’…the first 45 I can remember acquiring of my own volition (dumb luck)…after all these years, it was still buried there in my brain, as a quick trip to the web quickly confirmed.
try this...



The circumstances are fuzzy, some flea market/jamboree or somesuch at the county fair grounds resulted in digging through a box and claiming my prize…I remember playing the hell out of it initially, but I don’t remember it from later…not terribly appropriate for an eight or nine year old, & was probably seized on those grounds, or spun into orbit for it’s sheer annoyingness…either answer is fair enough…
But now I understand a little more clearly my affinity for that particular school of soul.

Grazzi, Mr. Tex, wherever you are…

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

more homemade goodness...

Replicating the previous post in intent, this is another trawling of user created treasure from YouTube. Previously we saw Timebomb 72's interpretation of Elliot Smith's 'Rose Parade', done with old found home movies...Compulsively viewable, i really want to crawl inside and know more of the stories, and more than anything, what Mr. Smith's reaction to this would have been...
Today, we'll tackle Katamai's vision of Sun Kil Moon's 'Moorestown'...Sun Kil Moon is the continuing adventures of singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek, who favors acoustic guitar and epic interior laments. Over the years he has incorporated a very specific visual aesthetic into his work, and the beauty of this user-professed 'quickly thrown together video of a drive' is how neatly it dovetails with the mood of Kozelek's song...



'April' is Sun Kil Moon's latest, perhaps a high water mark in a career spent pursuing a singularly idiosyncratic vision, coming to terms with ghosts of the past, yet setting the table to look forward. Over repeated listenings, the simple song structures unfold...
Major thanks to these users for sharing their visions...