Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Nerf Herder NO Big Drag

I love Nerf Herder. It's not really punk rock. It's bubble gum pop.
You know what... Scratch this...
I'd rather tell you about Big Drag.

If you listened to punk.. there were two places you couldn't have missed in San Antonio.
One was the Bone Club and the other was TacoLand.
TacoLand... that's a whole other entry. If you're from San Antonio-- you MAY know about TacoLand and it's deceased owner, Ram Ayala. TacoLand was quite possibly THE greatest place to drink, listen to music and get stupid in San Antonio. I loved the place. I had quite a few great times there.
When Ram was shot and killed a few years ago, the club closed down for good. And even though I hadn't gone in years, I felt a little part of my youth die then.

Right now, I'd like to share one of the bands that I loved going to see @ TacoLand: Big Drag.

Big Drag, well.. take the Ramones, take the Sex Pistols, take the Jesus and Mary Chain-- and sprinkle some Southern-Fried-Beach-Blanket-Bingo-Play-Me-Some-Songs-with-Lots-of-FeedBack-and-Make-Me-Dance Mojo and you have Big Drag.

It wasn't smart music. It was get drunk and dance music.
There was no pretension to aspire to something larger than loud and sloppy; they didn't need it.

I remember going to see a show--- walking out tired, drunk and deaf.
I haven't had as a good a time since and I doubt I ever will.

Not every Big Drag was a great show-- as a friend of mine said... sometimes they faxed in their performances. But I didn't care, even the crappy shows were loud and full of feedback and whine and lovely rhythm.

They broke up sometime in the late 90s. It was sad. But not as sad as Ram getting shot.
At least they get back together every so often.
None of us will ever share another drink of Ram's funky mix- a bottle he kept behind the counter that he drank from all night. Many of us shared in the back wash.

Good times.

Here is their myspace page... listen to the music


Sunday, July 12, 2009

Husker Du--- again

Whenever I'm down and I feel the need to reset my mental state.
I find my Husker Du. Zen Arcade and Flip Your Wig.
I will probably say more about them later.
But I found these on You Tube and wanted to share.
Enjoy.











Friday, July 10, 2009

REM

I was kissed by an older woman at an REM concert in 1987. I was 19. She must have been 35 or 40.

It was a strange moment.
The concert was a highlight of my freshman year in college.
I knew every song and they were at the top of their game.
The album was Life's Rich Pageant. Stipe still had hair. He had yet to get his cueball head on.
They still struggled to say anything directly.
Begin the Begin SEEMED to be a hopeful anthem. But it was so full of pretentious lyrics that it was hard to take seriously.

Birdie in the hand for life's rich demand

The insurgency began and you missed it

I looked for it and I found it

Miles Standish proud, congratulate me 
A philanderer's tie, a murderer's shoe  

Hell, even Dylan's most vague and pretentious songs were more direct than that i.e. Hard Rains Gonna Fall.

REM turned out to be a real disappointment.
It always felt like they were on the verge of saying something great and back then when my own generation struggled with finding a voice--- it seemed appropriate.
But as time went on and we grew up, REM just seemed stuck in the same babbling; incoherent, always seeming inchoate never coming to full voice. And the music became dull and predictable for me. Gone were the powerful riffs, the quiet beautiful chimings, and occasional lullabies.

I was a big fan and, for me, they sadly deteriorated. Personally, I blame it on an inability to say anything directly caused by the pretension that it's somehow more artistic to be vague.

I remember the moment that I lost respect for Stipe. I read in an in interview that he never wanted to write or sing a love song because he didn't think much of love songs. And I thought, "What a pretentious ass. People will be singing You Must Remember This or I Love You For Sentimental Reasons LONG after your sorry ass is gone".


Yet, some of their songs remain deeply lodged in my psyche. If I want to really remember my college years, all I have to do is put on Pretty Persuasion or anything from Lifes Rich Pageant and suddenly I'm 19 again. I'm at UT Austin. The drag is still a cool place. I still have a record player. The sun is shining and the world is open and inviting.




Monday, July 6, 2009

Paganini

With all the media coverage around MJ... I thought about "classical" pop stars of the past...
I thought of Liszt and Paganini... both crowd pleasers.
And Paganini-- well people used to say the he done sold his soul to the devil

The dreaded 24th caprice.
scratch that...
I mean...
I won't go into details about Paganini and the 24th caprice- I won't tell you how it's one of the most difficult violin pieces, how it's a theme, with eleven variations, and a finale, how he was supposed to be all demonic and stuff,

Yawn...

My favorite version is by Izthak Perlman. It's the warmest and most tasteful.
Often people play it too fast.

Hilary Hahn's version is my favorite on YouTube.

Listen to it... in the dark. It's not a transcendental piece of music, although parts of it soar-- The older I get, the more it strikes me as darker than when I first obsessed over it . I can truthfully say that I've heard the 24th caprice-- close to a thousand times, maybe more. How can I say that? Over a two year period I probably listened to it-- at least, 3-5 times a day.
There are a couple of other pieces that I can say the same thing about- Ry Cooder's "She's Leaving the Bank" from the Paris, Texas soundtrack is one of the others.

But back to the 24th Caprice, it does seem to attract the obsessives-- there are tons of versions of this...on different instruments as well. I'll hunt some of them down for you- but honestly. they won't mean much if you haven't heard it on a violin.


I don't know why I've come to think of it as a dark paean, maybe I'm a happier person, but as I listen to it now I can't help but shiver a bit.. not because of the diabolic silliness, but because it sounds so desperate.










A biography

Saturday, July 4, 2009

80s pop songs that don't suck

I loathed the 80s. Really. 80s pop music. Yuck.

These are the number 1 hits from the 80s-
Number 1 80s hits

I looked through it and I suddenly wanted to call my therapist.

Sure there were some great pop albums in the early 80s (Double Fantasy, Blondie, and I will even grant you Thriller -- even though I can't listen to it.. I'll admit that it was well crafted but when I sit and try to enjoy Billie Jean... well.... it just doesn't move me.)

I will repress my inner Jack Black at the moment and will share with you My favorite 80s moments,
I've left out some stuff... like the Eurythmics.. because as much as I loved Sweet Dreams-- it used to piss me off that the song never seemed complete.

I would include When Doves Cry but....You Tube has restrictions on it... go figure..

I realized something about these songs after I listed them... all the melodies...well.. resolve...

I don't really like intellectualizing this stuff... pop songs are powerful w/o intellectualizing...so just enjoy.













Friday, July 3, 2009

and then there was this.... the Irish Mexican

I don't drink. I used to. But... it's just too much trouble. It's one of those basic universal laws you can't get something for nothing. So it is with drinking, you drink , you feel good... next day... the universe forces you to pay up.
And so it is with me. The universe forces a higher tax on me than with most...even with a couple of beers my hangovers are just terrible.

I used to love Guinness Stout...because it was dark and chocolatey... AND because I think I was Irish in a former life (I'm also sure that I was a rabbi... thus my love of klezmer music... oy!)

Today I will share one of my favorite Irish songs with you.

She moved through the fair.

There is NO way to put a happy spin on this song. It's dark, depressing and haunting.
Here is a version of it by an Indian woman. Her voice is simply amazing. I've heard dozens of versions of this song. This is one of my favorites.




While You Tubing I found this version,
WOW



The riff has been used for other songs.... some Zeppelin songs owe quite a bit to Davey Graham's version ... but Simple Minds reworked it for a more ...well a bit more optimistic song called Belfast Child

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The truth the dead know

I am a child of the 80s. Which means that I've had a very ambivalent relationship to baby boomers.

On the one hand, as a teenager and young adult I thought they pretty much screwed the pooch. They had the chance to change the world (or so their mythology told us) but sold out, became yuppies, etc. Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street, yadda yadda. AND if they didn't sell out, they were burn-outs.

And of course, there was the music.
I love 60s music-- I grew up wanting to live on Haight and Ashbury.
I was probably the only kid in my high school who had a copy of "Surrealistic Pillow"-- not the greatest of 60s albums but it has some classics beyond Somebody To Love and White Rabbit( Check out Coming Back To Me, Today and Embryonic Journey).

The 80s bored me. The music was slick, overproduced and challenged no one (which is why I just didn't care for Michael Jackson. He seemed to be just another 80s star; slick and dull. His 80s songs never felt like pop gems to me. They just felt dreadfully superficial. His 70s songs...that's another story)

So my 60s heroes , were either burn-outs, sell-outs, or dead.

I had a lot of mixed feelings about the whole lot of them.
For example, The Grateful Dead.

I could never get into them because they seemed to symbolize what killed the 60s-- overindulgence.
I don't think I could have sat through an entire Dead show.

But I do love this song- I prefer the all-acoustic original but this is cool.




About my boomer ambivalence, I've reached a point where I have little ambivalence. They did the best the could given what they had. I started thinking better of them, when the book , "The Best Generation" came out.

I read it, and just couldn't agree with the basic premise. Beating back the Nazis was a brave and incredible thing, but it was also the ONLY moral choice. It was a fight against absolute evil. It was brave, courageous and heroic. The sacrifices were immense.

Yet, it was an obvious battle. The boomer generation had a battle at home to deal with. It was a difficult moral choice to make. How many boomers took on their own racist families, their own sexist parents? How many of those relationships were broken through the years because boomers confronted the evil in their own homes?

Think of men and women in the South that had the courage to buck their own communities, their own families because of lynchings, beatings, and a social apartheid that nearly destroyed the foundations of this country.
They too sacrificed--- some with their lives, some by giving up their identities as "southerners", or as children of their own racist parents. There was carnage there too but not as obvious. There was carnage on the sides of Latinos and Blacks
as well- we too had to fight the complacency and ills in our own homes (yes... we have a history of notorious sexism).

I realize that many boomers fought these home-front battles in different ways.
But the older I get the more I appreciate the battle they fought.


Here is Today from Surrealistic Pillow,



and Coming Back to Me



what the heck ... Embryonic Journey