Blog: The Driftwood Singers Present

I had one of those mystical communions with this song, years ago. In a piny subdivision, watching a video documentary about the band. Maybe having smoked some weed. Probably. The tuneful summing up. The strange uplifting hopelessness. DJ Bonebreak was one of the great drummers. Muscular and crisp and driving, without ever being showy or too spastic. Shocking how much John Doe and Exene sound like Grace Slick and Marty Balin. Billy Zoom was like a robot god inhabiting a punk greaser. Shocking, too, how much this sounds like a lost track from the cast recording of Hair. The title [...]

Last night my dear wife and I went to see Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. I happened to stumble upon this cd a while back, and we both liked it a lot. Then she was on Austin City Limits, and pretty much tore it up live. So it was a must-see situation. (Plus it was free! And it was on our anniversary!) Charles Walker and the Dynamites opened (I guess it was an and the kind of evening). Mr. Walker is a veteran soul artist who's been recording since the '60s, and he's having a late-career [...]

The thing about loneliness is that everybody is lonely differently, in their own manner. Which is either, a) why it's called loneliness to begin with, or b) doubly lonely, when you think about it, or c) both. It's like when a song comes on the radio and you're suddenly filled with the sweetest reverie for a bygone moment and the person you're with says, "I hate this song." By now I've accepted that I'm alone in certain things. And one of those is my continuing fascination with the instrumental albums of Burt Bacharach . [...]

These days, my life, my anxieties, my hopes, my whole scene, could be summed up, or put in place, or undermined by its own essence, with any number of vaguely agricultural get-up-and-go aphorisms. The early bird gets the worm. You reap what you sow. The sun also rises. Make hay while the sun shines. Ecclesiastes. Etc. It's either birds, worms, seeds, sun or hay. Throw in a little "Muck is the mother of the mealbag" and you've got it covered. Shit be elemental. But talk of shit and talk of sun and talk of hay always makes [...]

A while back I wrote this post about Uncle Bill, an old family friend (my parents just visited him and his wife in Germany, and they had a great time). On a recent visit to NYC and VT, I found this record (I still have some in my old apartment in the city, where my brother and his wife reside) and it made me think of another uncle--Uncle Johnny, my mom's younger brother. He was an erstwhile folk-singer back in the '60s and '70s--the kind that scoffed at Neil Young's success with "Heart of Gold". More [...]

California Fleece Track Jacket - Price: $45 Barry Sunglass, Vintage Eyeware - Price: $55 Dixieland Delight - Alabama : Priceless. (Mark Herndon, drums, 1983) Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, folk, prog, indie, so much more. Love.

I heard this track on WFMU the other day and was so bowled over I emailed the DJ, Todd-o-phonic Todd , who directed me to the source, the 1974 Hollies album Another Night (above). Just when you think you can't be surprised and delighted by another third-tier, off-track moldy-oldy, along comes the disco-era Graham Nash-less Hollies covering Bruce Springsteen. Prepare to be wowed, it's a major winner. 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) - The Hollies Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. [...]

In 9 th grade I went on a major Kurt Vonnegut binge. It coincided with a lot of new interests, many of which involved drastic efforts to get my mind outside of the public school where I had to physically spend my days. I remember being so leveled by the genius of the plot for The Sirens of Titan – the idea that all of human history was being manipulated by aliens light years away in an attempt to send coded messages to a space traveling comrade stranded on a moon in our galaxy. When viewed over the course [...]

[Hat tip: T-Ro] Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, folk, prog, indie, so much more. Love.

[Hat tip: M-Ro.] Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, folk, prog, indie, so much more. Love.

1. The other night I was telling Dewey about a SubPop band called Lake who had a new song I really loved, called "Madagascar." In the course of this same conversation, the so-called Monsters of Folk also came up, that supergroup featuring Jim James, Bright Eyes and M. Ward. Next thing you know, Dewey plays a song clip from the iTunes store and I couldn't believe what I was hearing: the Monsters of Folk had evidently taken a wildly artistic left turn into "Wasted on the Way"-era CSNY, complete with sleek disco-era production, pristine [...]

For the first time ever I plunked down a large sum of money for a record. As a rule, I pay no more than $15, usually between $1 and $10. I'm what is known as a "bottom feeder" by the record store geniuses who sell vinyl LPs. What happened was I was walking down a hot August street thinking of other things when blammo , here's this record store. A RECORD STORE! A rare discovery in Manhattan, where rents have killed off most of them. So next thing I know I'm flipping [...]

Everything's all moldy. We got ourselves an airborne toxic event up here in New England, wet wise. A white-nose fungal situation. Trench foot, on a spiritual level. But with the high spore count comes a kind of equatorial mush-mind, a humid/tumid world-view. Tropical hot-dog night. We mostly like to keep our eyes cast behind us, against all the best ancient advice. But the dust blows forward and the dust blows back. And, though it is not now as it hath been of yore, same is true of how it will be. I've had a few ear-glimpses that make me [...]

• DD/MM/YYYY - Digital Haircut
• Karl Blau - Apology To Pollinateurs
• tUnE-yArDs - SUNLIGHT

The crush of middle age is upon me, folks. Full bore! And I've got blogger's block something fierce too. Bad combo. But I'm giving it a go here, attempting to snatch victory from the jaws of spiritual defeat. Look at me: buying some real estate and adding another social security number to the rolls during an economic depression. Dicey! Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've [...]

Back when I traveled around playing music, we were once staying in Huntsville. Alabama (northern Alabama in general, and The Tip Top Café in particular, is where I had some of my most anarchic, rowdy and most "rock-and-roll" rock-and-roll experiences.) We had friends there who would put us up. The husband was a scientist – a cryonics expert – at NASA. And one night he took us to the lab to fuck around with some liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing bananas and turning them into brittle things that would shatter on the floor – shit like that. Back at their house I [...]

In that Musicophilia book Oliver Sacks wrote about some people who have "ear worms" or bits of what I think were basically auditory hallucinations that were more or less unshakable. He made a point of distinguishing this from just getting a song stuck in your head. These people actually thought they heard a marching band tune, or a hymn, and sometimes they'd go look out the window to check. Well, much as I fancy myself a candidate at times, I'm not quite Oliver Sacks material – yet – but I've been having a major-league auditory fixation with Scott Walker lately. [...]

There are a plethora of conflicts of interest and quasi-ethical issues in telling our dear readers they should check out a story in THE BELIEVER magazine this month. One of us may have written it, another was probably the source for it and possibly the drummer in a rock band mentioned therein. But what the hell, we've never billed ourselves as objective. So: It's a profile of Charlotte, NC-based singer-songwriter Benji Hughes , who is, besides being a gorgeous chunk of hirsute humanity, a pop savant of the criminally unsung variety. If Randy Newman [...]

It's hot. Blisteringly, mind-numbingly, hallucinatingly hot. This morning my wife said, "The high today is supposed to be 91." "Oh, good", I responded, "it's cooling off." That's how hot it is--I can't even think of a good joke to make about it. I'm reading Jeff in Venice, Death in [...]

Welp, just watched the Anvil documentary last night. Devastating. I know everyone keeps talking about how Spinal Tap it is, but you can't even begin to grasp it until you start soaking it in. There's riffage, there's tour retardation, there's lots of wasted time, energy and talent. But there's also some redemption -- just enough -- and some real emotional spots: family coming through; reckoning with parents; trying to maintain dignity when there's little to allow it. It made me think of this Manowar documentary that a friend had worked on years ago. He gave me a VHS [...]

When I saw him do the moonwalk for the first time on TV in 1983, sitting in my living room with my parents in Ohio, I gasped. We all did. Everybody tried it at school the next day, EVERYBODY. Now it's over and one of the big iconic American storylines of our lifetimes is officially written. So much like the Elvis story it's almost a Joseph Campbell archetype at this point. Uncanny talent. Innocence lost. The self-made prison. Money, high walls, the weirdness, then the curdling darkness. Multiple personas, story lines, periods, myths, rumors, faces, all [...]