In college I played briefly in a sort of out-prog-no-wave-gag band called Citrus Leviticus. In retrospect, the name may have been better than the music. A few of us had taken jazz classes at the university. There were intentional whole-tone-scale solos, stuttering 7-beat rhythms, there may have been some attempt to base a composition on the Fibonacci Sequence , and I remember one song had the chorus "I've got too much meat on my toes," which was sort of a garbled in-joke about a diagnosis that one of us had received from a local macrobiotic specialist (hairy toes, as [...]
A few years ago I was a real sourpuss about retro rock and the whole museum-quality renaissance fair-ism happening in garage rock, as exemplified by the Strokes and the Hives, et al. It's not that they were awful, I used to say, but just not the real thing. Calorie-free. Empty suits. And while it's now clear in the rear-view that the Strokes were an unsustainable confection, I've come around to the beauty of precision simulacrum. It may be that, like weather in England, I just needed to wait 5 minutes for the simulacrum storm to catch up [...]
Where we live, in western Mass., this seems to be the weekend when everyone gets charged with seasonal electricity. JP went to Whole Foods to shop for the Boggle party we're having tonight (!!!). And evidently everyone else was up and ready, "going for it"– taking care of business, shopping in joyful hope of something. The green fuse has been lit. The rain melted the snow in the yard. We can see all the mud and what might someday be grass. The willow tree shows signs of life at the tips. Birds are showing up, chipmunks on the move. I [...]
True story. A while ago my wife asked me if I had ever heard of the folksinger Jim Post, and I said why no, I haven't, who might he be? She told me that he was singer/songwriter her parents used to like back in the day (the '70s, to be a bit more specific), and she remembered hearing them play this one record of his, but she couldn't recall what the name of it was. The next day-- the very next day , mind you--she and I went to one of our favorite Salvation Army stores here in [...]
As those three wise men, sometimes known simply as America, once said: "The ocean is a desert with its life underground." And maybe Australia is like southern California upside down. Opposites as equals. Sand and sea. The places you go to find yourself, hunt the whale or to be banished. Vast emptiness. Hostile elements. Inhospitable, purifying extremes. Where nothing really stands between the earth and the sky. No sign of man blots the horizon. Bleak ex-hippies in the chronic afterburn of 1972, Scientological magpies, nautical-minded Australians. Follow the melodic thread, braid the rope, hoist the sails. It all comes together. [...]
1. As I'd resolved in my New Year's resolutions , I saw the extraordinary Petra Haden in concert. Last night at the Knitting Factory with SNL comedian Fred Armisan opening with some standup. Guess what? They're dating! After Fred did some hilarious "drummer impressions" (he did a precise Phil Collins), he recalled hearing Petra Haden's a cappella version of "The Who Sells Out" on the radio while driving in LA and was paralyzed with joy and knew right away "she was the girl for me." Petra and The Sellouts (8 gals) were breathtaking [...]
One of the loudest and most savage rock-and-roll shows I saw in the 1990s was Firewater , which laid sinister rock riffs over various Old World dance beats (klezmer, ska, etc.). This was at Brownies, a cavernous beer-and-smoke-stained club that used to reside on 1st Avenue in the East Village (anyone remember it?). I distinctly recall a Japanese keyboard player in a silver Star Trek shirt whose playing blew my mind. And the lead singer had a very bad attitude. Anyway, the album was called Get Off The Cross (We Need The Wood For The Fire) [...]
Lately I've started to cherish an alternate vision of the café folk troubadour scene from the 60s. Instead of the precision-tooled harmonies, fresh-scrubbed faces, matching shirts, proper enunciation and generally annoying pearly wholesomeness of groups like the Kingston Trio, it's one of misanthropic boozers, wannabe jazzbos, and croak-voiced trouble-makers who weren't toeing any party line handed down from Broadside, Pete Seeger, Moe Asch or anybody else. The Mighty Wind crowd is too easy of a target, so there's no reason to take cheap shots. But listening to these tracks conjures some alternate cast of crusty characters, straight out of a [...]
I've been drifting through a fog, groping for shapes in the mists, feeling the borders, collecting fragments. I don't know what any of it means. The past is all around me; so is the future. I hear a trumpet. I follow... 1. Dizziehead Ed dropped this rare/weird Cat Stevens disco cut called "Was a Dog a Doughnut" on me the other day, the original LP cover of which fit his continual hunt for the Ourosboros . But this is a remixed version by some genius in Paris who goes by the crypto-mashup moniker [...]
Recently I remembered that I own a copy of the Neil Young album Time Fades Away , and upon listening to it for the first time in many a moon I realized that it's one of his best. No, I'm serious, it really is. I know, you have your Harvest adherents and your hipper-than-thou [...]
One fine day last fall, my partner and I decided (as we often do) to make the rounds of the yard sales that were in progress around the neighborhood. We happened upon one that was pretty good-sized, and after sniffing around among some various & sundry goods--old tennis racquets, etc.--I found a box of cassette tapes and cds & soon scored a copy of Dark Side of the Moon. It was one of those yard-sale moments when you say to yourself, "Why not? I've never owned a copy...it's really cheap...I might want to listen to it [...]
Swamp Dogg is up there with the likes of Merle Haggard when it comes to tunefully bemoaning the sad state of the present. It's what he does best. But what do you call a jeremiad that's written from the fictional future? Some sort of speculative plu-perfect nightmare fantasy. This tune, "The World Beyond," was written by Bobby Goldsboro, if you can believe that. I'm sort of planning on going out on the hunt for the vinyl with the Goldsboro version of this track. It seems so perfectly Swamp Doggian. It's like a beach music equivalent of Planet of the [...]
With regard to the new album by Nada Surf, I guess I'm officially what the doods at Blender Magazine would describe as "totally gay over" it. I don't really remember their '90s MTV hit, "Popular," which everyone seems to mention when the subject of the band comes up. I'm not inclined to hold anything against them, especially not a dash of what was probably traumatic success. I decided this band was very wise -- Robert Frost wise, Basho wise -- when Lefty put a song of theirs called "The Blizzard of '77" on a mix he made me years ago [...]
Mexican horns, tinges of Margaritaville-style faux reggae filtered though the haze of some sort of stiff gin drink or rum-based fruity cocktail, a vague country twang blending with the ganja smoke blowing off the Gulf Stream breezes perhaps, and Sir Mick's ridiculous rebel-chic bone-head street-fighting radical mumbo-jumbo. It's hard to know if "Indian Girl" is an abomination or a stroke of post-colonial, post--alcohol-addled genius (often the case here in Driftwoodland). One thing's for sure: Freddy Fender would be proud, since (if you subtract Mr. Jagger) it sort of embodies his sound. Freddy'd be smiling down on us like some syncretized [...]
Consider the mule. Is there any other beast of burden that is more humble, yet has been such an integral part of this nation's development? The United States of America was built on the back of this animal. (Okay, so there were some Chinese and Irish workers who contributed too, and yeah, there was slave labor as well...) But as far as animals go, the mule occupies a special place. The Erie Canal, the levees, 40 acres and one of them, etc. etc. It's become part of this country's four-legged mythology. And the poor things can't even have [...]
One of the best rock bands I ever saw was the first. Not exactly the first, if you count huge arena shows (The Who, Van Halen, Genesis, ugh). But when I saw the real thing I realized what a sad reproduction they were selling in those hazy echo-domes. My friends and I met Edgar Reynolds when he was working at the record store in the mall by our high school. Edgar was hip, funny and in a band. Further separating us from everyone else at school, he turned us [...]
Two times Bruce Springsteen divided by Bob Dylan, times Rod Stewart over the square root of Joe Cocker, multiplied by ZZ Top divided by Texas minus the Edgar Winter Group, plus King Crimson over eight, multiplied by two times the square root of Van Morrison, all over Led Zeppelin = Thin Lizzy. Factor in Chicago = Urge Overkill Add Minnesota, is greater than or equal to The Hold Steady. "Honesty Is No Excuse" - Thin Lizzy [...]
I suppose it's become a truism here on The Driftwood Singers Present that Alabama is the real semi-secret ground zero of American music (Lefty's recent post on Shelby Lynne reminded me of this, and Mr. Poncho has written on the subject). I mean, jeez--there's Hank Williams, Sun Ra, the Commodores, Tammy Wynette, the Louvins, Taylor Hicks (kidding!)-- the list goes on and on. You can add Candi Staton to said list. She hails from the town of Hanceville (pop. 800), and had the archetypal Southern upbringing--picking cotton, singing in the church choir, growing up poor but happy, as [...]
Ever since the Driftwood Singers annual board meeting in Hobbit country, when his case was brought before the appeals committee, the enigma of Joe South has remained. As Lefty pointed out, this super-charged "electric-finger music" raised as many questions as it answered. South, we learned, was a session player in Muscle Shoals and Nashville (he played bass on Blonde on Blonde) and a songwriter (he wrote "Hush" AND "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden," for God's sake) in addition to being a successful performer. I scored this record, Walkin' Shoes, a few weeks before I [...]
Well, dear child, let me show you ... Courtesy of Agent Eliot in our Cleveland bureau, this video is like a lost DVD extra from the major motion picture that is Paradise. Just added to our To Do list: Find out everything we can about Hermeto Pascoal . This must be seen to be believed. (And while you're at it, you better go ahead and watch this, too , because it's INSANE.) Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, [...]
The Driftwood Singers Present
Azealia Banks - '1991' [Listen]
Metric Debuts Album via Synthetica Hide+Seek, Tickets On Sale Now For Fall Tour
