The Nitro Story

I mention making music a lot, I suppose, but then I never put any up, do I?  I need to remedy that.  Make little videos for youtube to extravagantly document nearly thirty years of non-success!  Anyway.  Back in 2000, our friend Dave Doughman was managing a studio/recording school place and needed bodies to come in and record stuff so that all his slacker children-of-divorce students could have something to mix.  He said "Come in Friday and we'll do something." So I did, and made a little song called "What Happened to the Dirty 1?" which was a reference to the old YFOG bass player Wayne DeCarlo, who had a license plate in the 80's that said that.  It was ace!  Some random kid played drums, the song was about 80 seconds long, crazy Beatles harmony part, then Cory showed up to play weird leads on it, and we didn't even let him hear the track he was to play on, just said "GO!" and hit record.  Then we, er, imbibed, and mixed and mixed.  So it ended up being a 10 hour adeventure.  Dave was tired and fried, but when we got in my lovely '86 Buick Century Limited, I was still "Oh, dude, check this out!" and cranked the AC Delco stereo to maximum, much to Dave's exhausted terror:

That is The Nitro Story.

The teen perspective

A stripling, last Friday

Picked the brain of young Luke on show night, he's in high school and records his own songs then is on the cover of his CD holding a balloon, etc.  Told him when I was in school it was all Whitesnake and Top Gun soundtrack, that the cool kids sought out cool shit and twas ever thus.  He said, naw, there aren't many kids who even give a rat's about music at all, that it's just the girls actually LIKE One Direction and it's impossible for him to get a band together, even with Facebook and with the idea of access other local schools.  Dang!

"Like, in homeroom, guys are all just talking about their death-to-kill ratios..." [I assume this has to do with some video game twaddle]

So, yeah, mine truly was the golden age!

Hot, Hot, Hot

I mentioned the Cure last October 31st, as I'm sure you remember.

Not my favorite band ever, but still crucial to one's 80's high school experience, when slinking about in a long "Echo and the Bunnymen" coat and reading fucking The Fountainhead.

When I heard it was going to 450 degrees this week, I immediately went to the external hard drive to liberate Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, which, though the Cure is a very rainy-day band, is a record that always puts me in mind of high summer.  "Torture" makes me think of cutting the grass at 783 Willowdale.  "Hot, Hot, Hot!!!" [three exclamation points] reminds me of hanging out in air conditioning-free, pot-befogged houses on Chambers and Alberta streets, hoping no one noticed I didn't know how to skateboard.  "All I Want" was the soundtrack to my teenage broken heart (along with Descendents' All, of all things).

Anyway, last week was on Standing on the Beach.  Let's all pray that this unbecoming "Cure phase" is brief!

The Eli Janney Story

Back in the 90's, there were Breeders and GBV and Brainiac.  My crappy little band Mink was on the rung below "real."  Twas ever thus!  I think it was because my parents never divorced.

Anyway, Brainiac had some records produced by Eli Janney, who played in Girls Against Boys.  Girls Against Boys were New Yorkers and sorta "Cute Band Alert"-y, although they didn't ever take off to a huge extent.  I think they had two bass players, maybe, but am too lazy to look it up.

Tim from Brainiac got killed in a car crash, and it was terrible for all involved (especially Tim). 

About a year and half later, we were playing at Mercury Lounge in New York and I saw old Eli Janney standing at the bar and gamboled over and said I was an old friend of Tim Taylor's, that we had just played and here was a copy of our new CD that he might like, that the first song was sort of about Tim dying and how his death rather permeated the whole thing, to much indifferent nodding (though we had met before - I'm sure if I was an actual "Cool Person" and a Guinness-drunk 1998 me was bothering me I would not have been as polite as Eli was, probably).

I think Eli maybe has something to do with Akashic books or some other New York Bowery-ish press, one that cares about Bukowski or something.  Anyway, yesterday I said "I'll be goddamned" as I perused the paper:

I guess even Cool People end up drinking Starbucks at the PTA!

Various XTC matters

1. Just read a thingy online where someone said there should be a D_____-based XTC cover band called Drums and Briars. Haw!

2. Had never seen the video for "King for a Day" (1989) until last week, and, gee - the hats, the UK teeth, not-playing-live - how weren't these guys bigger than Whitesnake?

Bears repeating:

The day I bought the lone Egg Hunt 7" as Renaissance Music Media, I also bought a 12" of "Ask" by the Smiths and the then-new Licensed to Ill.

I may have mentioned this before, like once a week.

Only mentioning because you could do stuff like that back then.

Sorry, Bon Iver fans!

Drink and drown

If you are under twenty-five and are reading this, I pity you. Find something better to do. If you are still here, you are likely atop a purple podium, waving your hands in the air to new-fangled "rave" sounds as last night's cocaine flakes fall from the walls like snow. Ah, youth!

I was thinking about my own distant, distant past, which twinkles at my memory like light from a long-dead star. What I cannot get my mind around is the concept of "drink and drown," which would take place at a local dive called the First Stop, where I also played many of my early rock shows (Beastie Boys' "She's On It" cover, "Working Man" into "Another Bites the Dust" medley, that sort of thing)...

Drink and Drown (the entity) took place on Thursday night and anyone who paid the cover ($3? $4? Possibly five bucks, but that seems a lot in 1986 money) could drink as much draft beer as they wanted. Especially stellar is that one could get in with ANY i.d. And I mean any. A typed piece of yellow card with a name and phony birthdate would work.

Now, I was a total wuss and did not go out on school nights but my then-girlfriend and her cronies would...what baffled me then and does moreso now is that things were so lax (drinking age for beer was 19, though that would change the following year) that the cops (who were perhaps paid to ignore it) would not swoop in and close the place down! And that no one I knew dies specifically from D&D related car-through-pole accidents.

Now, by the following pre-college summer, I was fully on my way to full-on drunk dumbass lifestyle, and so would drink anywhere and with anyone. I remember, when my first little fledgling band was still extant, getting a late night call from Dick B____, the owner/manager of the place, asking if we wanted to be "house band" for the rest of the summer Drink and Drown nights and, he made it clear, we did not necessarily paid in money (sniff, sniff). THAT would have worked out well.

The whole point is my high school years were more Less Than Zero than I thought at the time.

I guess that's the point?

Cutting: merely the new erasing?

Okay, so teens cutting themselves goes all the way back to the Nine Inch Nails ep with "Head Like a Hole" on it, probably, and possibly longer than that, but I just remembered this morning how stoner kids in junior high (or "burnouts," as they were sometimes called) used to erase their skin and leave sort of blank burn spots in their arms and such.

1. How/why had I forgotten this?

2. How can I put the information on this connection to some use?

"Joe the Lion"

It's weird, the weather is getting to be more like June than August...weird, but great!

Today reminds me of being in about eighth/ninth grade and getting tapes and records from the library with my friend Ray. For you youngsters, a library was a...oh, never mind! Anyway, lots of RCA Bowie cassettes were consumed.

I have made and remade my current summer CD for the truck (a CD was...oh, never mind!), and the consistent closer had been "Joe the Lion" off Heroes. This song is a fucking career. Still amazing thirty-three (!) years later.

The Queen is Dead

25 years!

I was supposed to be living on the moon by now.

Progress/process

I hear people say all the time now (well, once in a while): "[blah blah] work in process."

Didn't we all used to say "in progress?"

Tandy-riffic

Whoa, we stopped for some sort of female to female adaptor or some such and I saw this at Radio Shack...FOR SALE! Not as museum piece.

Who would need this? Olds? Blind people, still wanting to listen to that old Noble House book-on-tape they never got to?

Surely there is not enough retro appeal that they would continue the manufacture of these "beauties" for the first-bearders, who would find a way to put some godforksaken poo on cassette to play ironically? "Dude - no shit, Veckatimest sounds tits through it..."

It made me all wistful; if only I could be back subbing paper routes, one of these stuffed in my bag, with such 1981 Certron-centric faves as The Wall, Moving Pictures, and Quadrophenia [soundtrack version].

Instead I have to pretend to work all day and write blog posts. Hey! That's actually BETTER!

Off to listen to more Clientele!

Where are "Stuart Murdoch's Top Ten Felt Songs"?

I used to read Rolling Stone all the time, I mean for about fifteen years, from 1984 - 2001 or so. Like anyone with a brain, David Fricke made me sick, and the Respect Paid to old friends of Jann's (Boz Scaggs!) was grating, but still: it was Rolling Stone and chances are there would be something worth looking at in any given issue. That one from 1990 with B52s on the cover, and the articles on both Twin Peaks and some crazy guy in his 30's from El Paso who conned his way into Duke by posing as a Rothschild still stands as a pinnacle of human endeavo(u)r.

As reviews got smaller and more soundbite-y and the then the magazine itself shrunk to standard magazine size, I lost more interest. Wait, before that. I don't think I have bought an issue of Rolling Stone since 2002, probably.

So I was at the Rekkid Store on Saturday and I chanced to pick up an issue that was just sitting there, this one:

At first I misunderstood, thinking that it would be just Rock 'n Pop Stars Old 'n' New saying what was on their current playlist. THAT I could live with! "Wow! Rihanna likes XTC! Who knew?" That sort of thing. But no, no, no. Look again at that cover.

I can write most of these myself:

Bono on Bowie?: I bet old Paul just fucking loves "Heroes."

Yoko on John Lennon: "'A working class hero is something to be. And John was.'"

Tom Petty praising the Dave Clarke Five: "Only thing missing that could have made these better was Roger McGuinn."

Oh, fuck - Arcade Fire asshole on fucking Springsteen? Make it stop!

I confess, I did look at ?uestlove's top Prince songs to see what I had to, er, seek out. But what really got me, what really made me slam the thing down in disgust was flipping to "Mick Jagger's Top Ten Blues Songs" or "tracks" or whatever the hell it said. Because, you know, Mick, at what, nearly sixty-fucking-eight, what he really, really likes to do is dislodge himself from one of Georgia's old schoolmates and press play with his bony finger to hear, what, some "Ham-hock Blues" by Sonny Boy McBloozersonsonton (1953), before going out to London's hippest nite spotz for a glass of Grey Goose'n'Ensure.

I can truly say that when Gawker or whomever lets fly with the news that the Stone has stopped Rolling, I shan't shed a tear.

Better than the actual band names, really

GroupMe, Kik and Fast Society are three of the many group messaging
services looking to break out at SXSW. - CNNMoney

I can still remember when it was about bands! Poi Dog, Papas Fritas...

GREEN BEER DAY!

It's Green Beer Day in the li'l hamlet where I pretended to go to college, and the local paper has its annual cavalcade o' shots o' kids doing it up. Alarmed that the kids are mostly all fat and not as hot as they were in my era - surprising, because even then I already looked like an upright container of dogshit. Also they dress for shit. Bummer! I would have thought another generation of conspicuous consumption, credit card/drug disarray and eating disorders would have lead to a sleeker breed. Look it up, if you like.

I guess I'm even happier than I knew!