perfidy

I used to really dig indie music stores. Of course, this was back in the day when I could walk into such a store and know more than 30% of the bands in the bestseller section, but I digress.

I was never totally comfortable with the default attitude of indie music store clerks. We all know what they're like: assholes. On the other hand, you gotta love their pluck. Witness the following, pulled from an indie-store industry newsgroup.

From: xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 12:17 AM
To: xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: the indie record store; TOO good not to share

>From xxxx, [Dinkypeter Records] in [Springfield City]:

Well, Dinkypeter bought 400 [of the Tom Waits box set]. We pre-sold 179 copies, and I wanted to be the only place in [Springfield] with 'em on 12/24. Yesterday, this dude calls and says, "Will you match the Best Buy price on the Tom Waits box?" We'll refer to him as BBF (you know, Best Buy's Friend) in the dialogue below.
BBF: "Will you match the Best Buy price on the Tom Waits box?"
Me: "What's the price?"
BBF: "$44.99."
Me: "Sure, I'll do that. And I'll put $44.99 on it, so there's no confusion."
BBF: "Cool, because I think your shop is awesome. Can you put one back under the name 'Dave'?"
Me: "Yup, not a problem at all. See ya in a bit."
Then, about 10 minutes later...
BBF: "I spoke to someone on the phone, they're holding a Waits box. The guy said he would match Best Buy's price. He said he would put a note on it."
Me: "Yeah, that was me. All right, it comes to $47.91."
BBF: "Your price tag says '$39.99'."
Me: "You asked us to match Best Buy's price. Our price is $39.99 Theirs, you said, was $44.99, so it comes to $47.91 with tax."
BBF: "Dude, that's a f*(king sh!tty thing to do."
Me: "I'm not sure I understand. You asked us to match Best Buy's price, and we are."
BBF: "F*(k you, man. I'm not shopping here again."
Meanwhile, I turn around and put the box set back on the shelf next to ones for the winners that got signed editions.
Me: "OK, so I can put this back? Because this is the last signed one we have, and we'll just put it back for the next person."
BBF: "What do you mean it's signed?"
Me: "We got signed ones, direct from the label."
BBF: "That's bullsh!t. Let me see."
I reach back and get a signed one from the stack next to it, and...
BBF: "OK, I'll take it."
Me: "You said you were never gonna shop here again. I don't want to see you make yourself be a liar."
BBF: "I'm serious, man. I'll take it."
Me: "Dude, it's not worth it. Your personal integrity is more important than this signed Waits CD. Believe me, you'll hate yourself later for going back on your word."
And now the big ending...
BBF: "F*(K YOU!&#*#*^(@*$(^$(@Y$(&$@*&(*&@$!!!!!"
Next customer in line: "That was awesome."

The Slits were one of the more interesting stories to come out of the great first wave of London punk bands in the late 1970s. Indeed, they are only incidentally 'punk,' in that the teenaged founding members (all female) began their careers as musical incompetents of the "bashed guitar and screamed vocals" school. But by the time Cut, their debut album came out in 1979, the group had moved far beyond the strictures of formal 'punk,' integrating reggae rhythms and dub production into their arsenal. Their second (and last worthwhile) album, 1981's Return of the Giant Slits deepened their commitment to experimentation, adding world-music gestures to their already wide-ranging sound. After these two achievements, the band broke up as its members began to work in other ensembles. They joined bands like X Ray Spex and The Raincoats as legendary pioneers of independent-minded feminist punk, but for the next two and a half decades didn't record another note together.

The closest comparison I can make to the Slits' classic albums is to Public Image Ltd's Metal Box LP, which merged reggae, rock, punk, scratchy and sketchy guitar work, and (let's say) "interesting" vocal performances) in a similar manner. If you're not familiar with that record, then all I can say is that the Slits' music was difficult, catchy, bassy, super-feminist, creative, and off-putting in equal measure, and they deserve the reputation they have as one of the most pioneering and essential British punk bands. It's not necessarily anything that every person on the planet needs to have in their collection, but people who are into PiL, Neil Young's noisy and angry side, Lou Reed, or post-punk of the Mission of Burma/Sonic Youth school, really need to get their Slits on.

And now The Slits have re-formed and seem intent on recapturing the old magic. Last year, core members Tessa Pollit (sometimes Pollitte) and Ari Up (sometimes Upp) teamed with Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook, Adam and the Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni, and the daughters of Cook and The Clash's Mick Jones to record three songs for a newly released EP, Revenge of the Killer Slits.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Revenge is either a nostalgia trip or a bold new offering, or it could be both. I can't tell. The lead track, "Slits Tradition" is a clattering and edgy mess that merges their old blocky punk-reggae sound with 2006 hip-hop beats to decent musical effect. However, the lyrics aren't anything special, featuring Ari Up boasting about the Slits' greatness in a faintly embarrassing dancehall accent. It's a little good, a little not-good, faintly embarrasing, but deeply intriguing.

The second track is more straightforward; an old-school punk workout called "Number One Enemy" that was written in 1976 and belongs completely to that era. From the Sex Pistols-y guitar to the one-note vocals, this is 100% nostalgia trip, albeit a pretty good one.

It's the third of three that's worth the price of admission. "Kill Them With Love" is a dubby and spare drum-and-bass track which puts Up's vocals (which influenced Siouxsie Sioux and Bjork, to name just two) right up front. Although it's not exactly the greatest thing I've ever heard, it does promise good things from a more permanent Slits reunion. It indicates that Up and Pollit still have some of the old magic and possibly some new mojo too, and are not just adults who still think they can relate to kids these days. If nothing else, the fact that they are trying as adults to revist what they did so very well as teenagers suggests they haven't lost the boldness that made them great.

There's a lot left unsaid by this three-song EP. The original Slits were stunning partly because they were so consciously political, so consciously feminist, and so musically fearless. The risks they took and the rules they broke paid off in spades in 1979, and whether that's because they were too young to know better to too young to care is beside the point. But the Slits are now in their forties, and it's too early to tell whether that crazy-ass energy that made their original work so thrilling and creative has left them, or merely matured into something new and thrilling.

It's hard to overstate how much, as a pimply and earnest teenager from Ohio with a serious jones for escapism, heavy-duty philosphizing, and wailing guitars, Jane's Addiction meant to me. By 1991, I'd gotten pretty far on my own, crawling past Warrant, Poison and Def Leppard to artier stuff like Zep and Tull, and finally discovering Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. By that time, the creepy din of Trent Reznor and Al Jourgenson had my adolescent mind primed and ready for the decadent racket of Jane's.

I remember the winter of 1991-1992, driving around in cars with my friends. Shawn had the treacherous old Chevette with no floorboards he'd gotten for $35, and Tom had the tiny Toyota truck and then the boat-sized woodpaneled station wagon. We'd be tooling around the barren back roads of Northeastern Ohio, tuning the radio obsessively, searching for another dose of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

No fooling, when Alternative Rock hit, it was like the dawn breaking through a permanent midnight. Sure, we already had what we in my area called "progressive music," our Information Society, Depeche Mode, Cure, Violent Femmes, and so on. But as good as that stuff was (and is), the incurable Britishness of most of these bands failed to really connect with something primal inside me. As a red-blooded briarhopper (that's 'flatland hillbilly') my need for rock (the same primal urge that fuels my enduring love for NASCAR, demolition derby, and NFL football in the rain and mud) just can't be satisfied for long with synthesizers and doggerel about blisters in the sun.

Rising out of the same trashy, glammy El Lay scene that gave us Motley Crue, Black Flag, X, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even The Eagles, Jane's Addiction combined parts that just should never have worked together into one messy machine. Stephen Perkins was a clattery, sticky drummer who played like he'd be as much at home in some tweeked-up bebop band, Eric Avery's bass was just a little too metal to be funky, Dave Navarro was a metal guitarist with an amazing head for dissonant rhythm parts and bluesy leads, and Perry Farrell was... well, what he hell was he? An androgynous little walking id with a thin whine of a voice who keened and snarled and bled lyrics that in anybody else's hands would have been painfully earnest, high-school jottings somehow given dignity through sheer force of will and questionable sanity. They were like Guns 'n' Roses' arty little brothers, hanging out smoking pot in the high school art room while their big bro lurked behind the school beating up nerds.

Together they made two absolutely classic albums, 1988's Nothing's Shocking and 1991's Ritual de lo Habitual that threw together art-school pretension, metal, a few nods to prog-rock, and a heavy dose of Mexican mysticism.

And then they were gone. That was the end of the road for them. Three albums (counting their rarely-heard debut) and gone. Perry Farrell threw his energy into the diminishing returns of the Lollapalooza festivals, and into his next musical project Porno for Pyros. He seemed to be trying to throw his arms around the world and give everyone a big patchouli-scented Los Angeles hug. Dave Navarro retreated into a sleazy demimonde of drugs and prostitutes, eventually shacking up with Baywatch babe Carmen Electra and engaging in some legendary feats of debauchery while cutting himself off from the world. Just like in Jane's Addiction, his darkness and rock energy pulling in the opposite direction of Farrell's utopian guttery poetry. Avery and Perkins launched projects that few people seemed to want to hear. But between their music and Farrell's brilliant idea for Lollapalooza, Jane's Addiction did as much as anyone to usher in the sea-change that overtook popular music in the early 1990s, the decade or so where rock was young again.

Frankly, I can't think of a single band in the world more deserving of a best-of compilation than Jane's Addiction, and I'm shocked that it took until 2006 for one to show up. I'm also shocked that it's goddamn fantastic. The good people at Rhino, who must surely rise every morning amazed that they can do the work they do while drawing pay from their resolutely mainstream masters at Warner Brothers, have put together Up From The Catacombs: The Best of Jane's Addiction, a seventeen-song retrospective of the band's history that actually manages to do justice to their legacy.

I can't believe it: everything works.

The song choices are practically bulletproof, with the highlights of both the big albums present, plus a couple choice tracks each from their debut and 2003's "comeback" album, Strays. Wisely skipped is the fairly awful and decidedly inessential Kettle Whistle, a 1997 stopgap (Janes' own The Spaghetti Incident?) that did more to tarnish the band's legacy than could ever have happened if Perry Farrell, say, had suddenly turned up in Vegas doing lounge versions of "Jane Says" and "Had a Dad."

The sequencing is inspired too. The first three songs progressively raise the ante, skipping from the clattering "Stop!" (the lead track on Ritual) to the huge drama of "Ocean Size" (the lead track on Nothing's Shocking) to the metal attack of a live version of "Whores" (an early favorite). We then detour to the bad hangover of "Ted, Just Admit It...," a disjointed and, I suppose, arty offering off Nothing's Shocking that ably showcases that side of the band's identity. After a couple more heavy rockers (including the unjustly ignored "Just Because" from Strays), the compilation veers into the contemplative almost for good. Here is where we find the eight-minute epic of "Three Days," the pastoral lurch of "Summertime Rolls" and the quiet devotion of "Classic Girl." The comp ends (naturally) with the snarling "Pig's In Zen" (which closed out Ritual) and an absolutely fantastic live version of the band's signature "Jane Says."

Absolutely anyone who doesn't have any Jane's Addiction already in their collection should run right out and pick up Up From The Catacombs. Actually, anyone who doesn't already own them should pick up both Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual, but since I can't tell you how to spend your money, I suppose all I can do is tell you that ownership of either the best-of or the two great albums is more than just highly recommended; it is required. I'll be checking.

Soul legend Solomon Burke's latest album, a set of country songs redone in his inimitable style called Nashville, was released on September 26. I interviewed him by email on October 10.

What music are you listening to these days?

I'm listening to india.arie, Christina Aguilera, Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch. For the guys, I love Usher, Bruce Springsteen's latest cd, Alan Jackson, Eric Clapton. I also am enjoying the Foo Fighters, the Raconteurs, the Wreckers and anything by Merle Haggard.

Who selected the songs for "Nashville"?

The songs were selected by [album producer] Buddy Miller, [executive producer] Shawn Amos and me. We all listened to a ton of amazing songs - together, probably over 200 songs. There were certain songwriters whose points of view were important to interpret, in our minds, so that helped us narrow down the list and focus… and then just trying to see what shape the various combinations of songs took that would be a respectable body of work. It was really tough to let go of certain songs that I loved, but that's a part of the process.

You do Springsteen's "Ain't Got You" in a nearly bluegrass style, there's some nods to Billy Shirell-style strings on "Atta Way To Go," and the rest of the album covers all the territory from honky-tonk to country blues to soul to gospel. (Yes, there's a question in here somewhere.) The arrangements are definitely a departure from what you've been doing recently, and (in the good way) definitely not what I would have expected. Who was in the driver's seat when deciding on arrangements?

Buddy Miller was very much the driver when it came to the arrangements. But the beauty of how Buddy works is that his arrangements left me a lot of room, and he brought together such amazing musicians that when I "turned left" on a song, the entire band turned left with me. It was a great feeling.

On the last album you covered a Hank Williams song, and this time around you cover a George Jones song. Between them, they're two of the most iconic singers of the last 50 years; how do you go about singing a song that belongs completely to someone else, and make sure it's not a mere tribute? How do you take the George out and put the Solomon in?

Well, first off, I love Hank Williams and George Jones and I love their bodies of work. For me, there are a lot of songs that I would never ever try to sing, for that exact reason. But if I can feel the song inside of me, then what I sing is a tribute to the original artist as well as the writer, but mostly it's a tribute to the listener. I think we all try to reach out to people and if a George Jones song, sung by Solomon Burke and Emmylou Harris is going to be the way to get a message to one person who would have otherwise missed the message, then we are all successful and the story of the song is richer for it. Along these lines, I just want to mention that I have never experienced such graciousness from songwriters and artists as I have on this project. Their generosity in allowing me to sing their songs freely was overwhelming and in my career, historic!

There's a few great duets on the record, with Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch, and Patty Loveless, among others.

Thank you!

This is, if I'm told correctly, is the first time in your career when you've done duets. How much collaboration was there between you and your duet partners? Did you have the opportunity to sing face-to-face, to vibe off each other and work out your arrangements together?

Actually, I did a duet with Zucchero ("The Devil in Me") and with Junkie XL ("Catch Up To My Step Up") in the last few years. Let's go ahead and mention each lady who sang with me: Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Patty Loveless and Gillian Welch… I am a lucky, lucky man! Each duet on this cd was as unique as the artists with whom I sang… Buddy did all of the arrangements and really had it set up so I could come in and sing without worrying. He accommodated every artist that came through his door as a friend coming to his home, and that was the vibe of the entire session. My experience with the duets was so personal, I treasure each day, each session, each recording experience of this project. I received so much love and support from the ladies who "duetted" with me, as well as from the songwriters and musicians. What I received from this project was far more that what I was able to give, and the lessons that I learned in Nashville are lessons I carry in my heart.

Do you have any plans for future collaborations? I've read that you'd love to work with Willie Nelson, and that you'd even be willing to work with KISS...?

Heck, I'm 66 years old. I'm just happy to get a gig these days! I'm still reeling from working with Buddy Miller and his wife Julie. But once I start looking toward the future, I would love to work with Willie Nelson… Would love to work with Vince Gill and Kid Rock. I met Jerry Lee Lewis on stage for the first time in our lives, and it felt so good… I would love to do more with the Killer. I don't think it's a question of my being willing to work with KISS… It's a question of them being willing to work with me. I love those guys - I'm a huge fan. My dream is to perform with Aretha Franklin. We sang together briefly in Cleveland last year and I still get chills thinking about that night.

What made you decide to do a country album? Considering that when you started out, there wasn't much of a difference between a country song, a soul song, and a gospel song (and didn't you chart on the country charts a few times?), it certainly makes sense. Have you always listened to country? If so, who are your all time favorites?

My first song at Atlantic was "Just Out of Reach of My Open Arms" which was a country song. I have always loved country music and it has always been my desire to record country. It took me a while but I think this was meant to be at this time in my life. When I was a little boy, it was Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Still is - my alarm clock wakes me up to "I'm Back in the Saddle Again" every morning. Later on, it was Patsy Cline, Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn, then Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette… and the list goes on.

You've made a number of gospel records over the course of your career, and preaching has been an important part of your live since you were young. Now that your career seems to have entered a new phase and you are reaching an audience who doesn't necessarily know anything about gospel music, do you have any plans to make a gospel album in the same vein as the last three records? How about a duet with Mavis Staples?

Wow, you know, this whole thing about country music and soul music and gospel music just wears me out. The truth is that for me, these are all separating categories that do a disservice to music. Because if you go back and listen to my work through the years, you will see that regardless of the category, it all comes down to a message of love which is the most Godly thing there is. I would love to sing with Mavis. It would be an honor. But regardless of who I sing with, the most important thing is to find a new way of reaching out to people, so if they maybe missed the message in one song, they're going to get it in the next one. I'm going to keep on singing and working towards that message "'til I get it right."

I hear you used to be famous for making fried chicken for your touring partners, or at least that's what Peter Guralnick claims in his biography of Sam Cooke. Can we have your recipe for fried chicken?

No, but you're invited over to try it out for yourself!

In Dream Boogie, Peter Guralnick's fantastic biography of soul music innovator Sam Cooke, very few people come off completely well. Cooke, for all his genius and generosity was an avid womanizer with a boundless ego. Sometime tour-mate Johnny "Guitar" Watson often slagged off touring because pimping paid better. Little Richard, well, the less said of his freaky-deaky exploits the better for us all. Better to think of him as the king of "R&B uptempo! R&B uptempo! WOOOOOOOO!" than as a tortured soul with poor impulse control and a Bible whose margins he filled with scrawled records of his sins.

One of the only figures in the entire book who seems like someone you'd trust with your house keys is soul-gospel-blues singer, "The King of Rock & Soul," Solomon Burke. A religious man (he was preaching from the age of twelve) he (according to Guralnick) was more famous for cooking up fried chicken for his tourmates than for any epic feats of sin and dissipation.

Burke was one of the yeomen of the early soul period. He racked up a number of hits and a great deal of respect among his peers in the late 1950s and 1960s as a performer and singer of gospel-country-soul-blues raveups and confessions, but he never quite cracked the upper reaches of the pop charts. Although his career never reached the critical mass of a James Brown or a Ray Charles, he continued releasing albums throughout the '60s, '70s and '80s, and also returned to his roots as a minister. And although his popularity waned over time, his albums remained, if not inspired or inspiring, refreshingly free of self-parody or outright desperation.

A few years ago, Burke signed with the good people at Fat Possum Records, one of the keepers of the true flame of the deep blues, and released what turned out to be a comeback album, 2002's Don't Give Up On Me. For that project, Burke was paired with young indie rock producer Joe Henry, who (yes, just like Rick Rubin did with Johnny Cash) sat Burke down in a comfortable chair with a batch of songs by top-notch writers, and made sure that Burke's own church organist was sitting in on the sessions to boot. The result was a landmark career revival, as good as any of Johnny Cash's comeback records, Loretta Lynn's comeback record, or that of any other formerly neglected rootsy legend you might care to name.

Burke's latest album is Nashville, a collection of country songs, reintepreted in his own style.

But I need to interrupt these proceedings to talk a little about what that means, "country." What is "country?" One answer is, "it's what's on the country charts," but I don't mostly like that answer. What's on the charts is crap. Another answer is "anything that Hank wrote." That's a pretty good answer, but limiting. Another answer, according to Solomon Burke himself in an interview I did with him recently is, "[T]his whole thing about country music and soul music and gospel music just wears me out. The truth is that for me, these are all separating categories that do a disservice to music. Because if you go back and listen to my work through the years, you will see that regardless of the category, it all comes down to a message of love."

That works for me.
Solomon Burke has some seriously high-profile fans. Don't Give Up On Me featured songs by Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Nick Lowe, and Van Morrison, and Nashville is just as studded with talent, including songs by Tom T. Hall, Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch, George Jones, Bruce Springsteen(!), Patty Griffin, Don Willams, and more. Moreover, many of his female song contributors (Parton, Welch, Griffin, Patty Loveless and Emmylou Harris) actually appear as duet partners on the album.

From the first notes of the opening "That's How I Got To Memphis," a country standard written by Tom T. Hall, Burke infuses each song with truckloads of expression and emotion, bending his voice into a whine, a howl, a barely veiled sob, wrenching every bit of meaning out of the words he's singing. The result is probably the best album I've heard in 2006, an amazing set of performances by an artist who's old enough not to give a damn anymore about how much he's going to sell, but deeply concerned with making music that hits the spot.

Highlights (from an album full of highlights) include "Valley of Tears," which is a plaintive and ragged duet with Gillian Welch, the aforementioned saga of misplaced devotion, "That's How I Got To Memphis," the love-gone-bad lament of "Does My Ring Burn Your Finger, " written by producer Buddy Miller and his wife Julie, the quiet devotion of "Up On The Mountain," with a deeply affecting, nearly wordless duet contribution from songwiter Patty Griffin, and a stunning performance of "Atta Way To Go," a Don Williams song that Miller produces in the ornamented style of George Jones' hits with Billy Sherrill, and which Burke takes from an intimate chat to an over-the-top cry of anguish without apparent strain to his considerable vocal gifts.

And what a gift! Burke's voice has burnished with time, and at 66 he is in total command of his instrument. He can growl, whisper, moan, plead, cry, laugh, even give an evil cackle without breaking the musicality of his singing, and he has a flair for the dramatic and the theatrical that doesn't ever descend into mere melodrama. His performances on Nashville are thrilling, and his ability to adapt himself to the style of his duet partners is a welcome treat.

However, the single weak spot on the album is in Emmylou Harris' wan and marginal vocal contribution. Though he tries mightily, Burke can do nothing delicately enough to keep her from practically disappearing from sight. This might be a simple matter of song choice, as Burke and Harris are paired on the George Jones-Tammy Wynette classic "We're Gonna Hold On," and Harris is a far, far lighter singer than Wynette ever was. But regardless of why, in an album full of inspired performances from all parties, Emmylou Harris is, surprisingly, the only weak patch.

In keeping with Burke's stated disdain for genre titles, the styles represented on Nashville run the gamut from bluegrass (on Springsteen's "I Ain't Got You") to countrypolitan to country blues to gospel and beyond. "Country" is a concept as hard to pin down as "soul," or what the Spanish call "duende." To play flamenco music you have to have duende - you either have it, or you don't, and you can only tell it's there when you hear it, but without it flamenco music is just some fool playing the guitar really, really fast. Same with soul and country. You know soul when you hear it, and you know country music when you hear it (in everything from Travis Tritt to Tom Waits, from Kitty Wells to Neko Case), and what Burke's got on this album is the Platonic idea, the eidos of both of those things in spades.

At age 66, Solomon Burke is at the top of his game and deserves a fuller dose of the belated success that has come to him in recent years. Nashville is a spectacular album, and he can be proud of what he's done. People spend so much time talking about the ridiculous exploits of artists, searching for evidence of genius in dickish behavior, that it's easy to believe that a man who's good at making chicken, whose day job is looking after souls, couldn't possibly possess that same secret flame. Well, crap to that. Solomon Burke is the real deal, and Nashville is God's honest proof.

It is said that there will always be an England. In the grand geological sense, that's as true as it gets. Britain is situated on the far trailing edge of the Eurasian Plate as it slowly crashes into the Pacific Place, meaning that barring calamity, asteroid collision, or devastating attack by giant space robots, Britain is the closest thing the world has to a permanent feature. As long as there is a world and humans to live on it, there will be will always be an England, full of old gaffers in tweed caps, shaven-headed football hooligans and their pasty girlfriends, Sikh cabdrivers, old sheep villages full of amusingly skewed Tudor homes, cul-de-sacs full of quiet little old ladies with razor tongues, milky tea, Bovril, and people leaping behind the couch at the first sight of Daleks.

And if the English and the cockroaches do ever manage to prevail as the only remaining multicellular species to walk the blasted and parched face of the Earth, I guaran-damn-tee you they will still hail every tousled and precious power-pop band to come down the pike as the saviors of all humanity.

The latest in this long and occasionally distinguished line of rakish English popsters are the Kooks. And like their forebears the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, The Dave Clark Five, Badfinger, The Small Faces, The Monkees (yes, The Monkees), Suede, XTC, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Supergrass, all the way up to this year's heavily promoted Arctic Monkeys, they make raffish and occasionally gorgeous pop music with a distinctly British form and flavor that crosses echoes of the Victorian music hall with crunchy rock, symphonic flourishes, and a typically boozy and distracted demeanor.

The Kooks are young. The Kooks need shaves and probably a bath. The Kooks have floppy hair that hides their eyes and surely moistens panties from Norwich to Newcastle. The Kooks slouch endearingly in promo shots, grinning diffidently or striking halfhearted rawk poses that they are clearly a generation too young to take seriously. The Kooks could have been put together in a laboratory or- better yet- a focus group.

The Kooks have sold out four tours on their own in the UK. The Kooks have opened for the Stones. The Kooks have charted five singles and sold over a million copies of their debut album, Inside In/Inside Out in the UK, an area that is home to only 60 million. The Kooks have been hailed, as were Blur, Oasis, Supergrass and The Arctic Monkeys, as champions by MOJO and the NME.

So are the Kooks are a thrilling story. But are they any good?

Sure, I guess. Why not?

Inside In/Inside Out begins with a bit of Ray Davies-ish rococo songwriting called "Seaside" that lines up the hooks one after the other, bang-bang-bang, as lead singer Luke Pritchard croons about vacations at the shore. For thirteen more songs (only five of which last more than three minutes), the Kooks deliver winsome pop that at times recalls every one of the bands mentioned above, plus a few others. The songwriting is definitely competent, the playing is good, and production flourishes like the reggae touches on "Time Awaits" keep things from smearing together into an undifferentiated mass of goo.

I listened to Inside In/Inside Out cold, without reading any of the band's press releases, without looking up any of the fevered praise they've garnered from the UK press, and without even bothering to find out which songs were the singles. Over the years, I have fallen madly in love with plenty of bands, crushed on them like crazy for a week or so, and then suddenly realized that everything they had was in one pretty good song and a bunch of repetitive fluff. Since then, I've learned to play albums by wannabe popsters until I'm good and sick of them, because only then do you figure out what's what.

After all this, I am happy to report that Inside Out/Inside In contains exactly no songs that verifiably suck, and at least seven songs that could be mistaken for lead singles. On the other hand, none of those seven possible singles are particularly distinguished or memorable - the minute the album ends I find I can't recall any hook or melody - and the same diffidence that makes the band so very cute in promo shots robs the music of any enduring qualities.

Their biggest singles, like "Eddie's Gun" compare favorably to golden-age-of-powerpop British hits like "Starry Eyes" by the Records or "School Days" by the Starjets. However, Oasis, the Arctic Monkeys, and especially Supergrass have already done this revival to death. At this point, it's not enough to write winsome pop songs you can sing along to; I now find myself asking Britain's musicians, en masse, "but what have you done for me lately?" In the USA, It's easy to see the Kooks becoming a college hit and selling a bunch of records, which is good for them and their label. But it's also easy to see the album ending up in a couple months on the shelf next to Bush's Sixteen Stone and (just to prove it's not Britain's problem alone) the Strokes' first album as a mildly interesting reminder of that one band, who had that song, that I could probably sing if I could just remember how it starts.

The Kooks are trashy and huggable. The Kooks write incredibly cute pop songs with competence and just enough attitude to make them seem more dangerous than the boys from 'N Sync. But unfortunately, the Kooks are a little boring, too. Inside In/Inside Out is just fine, but 'just fine' doesn't get me hard anymore. If your personal kink is for young and attractive British sensations, or if you're new to the cycle of hype-and-bust, then by all means check this out; it's as okay a place to start familiarizing yourself with Britpop in the '00s as any. But if not, you're probably better off picking up The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society and the Supergrass album of your choice.

The Smoking Gun has the tour rider from the latest Iggy Pop tour.

I daresay, without reservation or levity, that it is the finest piece of literary writing I have read in the last twelve months. The roadie responsible has seen it all, dealt with it, and mastered every sort of fuckery from shitty tom toms to the worst dressing rooms in the world.

I'm not kidding; a tour rider that contains references to Pepys, Santiago de Compostela, midgets, the Insane Clown Posse, and more discursions and asides than Pynchon, Sterne, and Emo Phillips put together. Go and read, and try not to laugh out loud. Frigging sweet.

I'm not sure what's going on. Either New York slide-trumpet player and bandleader Steve Bernstein is getting better, or I'm coming around (maybe both). Bernstein, who with his band Sex Mob have been making reasonably amusing and background-filling albums for the better part of a decade, never really clicked with me. His music seemed so insubstantial, so resolutely finger-poppin' hey-daddy ironically-detached aren't-we-cool hipsterish, that I never gave it much of a chance.

In retrospect, I think that's a shame. Because behind the wide-lapel cheapo porno shtick he's peddled is a bandleader whose guiding purpose in life is to make music for people to have a good time by.

That skill of making good-time music doesn't seem to get a whole lot of respect. All the music critics swoon over Brian Wilson's brain-fractured experimentation, and ignore the sweet and fun stuff. They flip out over the far-out stylings on Smile, but what about "Surf City?" "Surf City" is a perfect song, a summer song, a song about good times and scantily clad ladies cavorting on a white sand beach. No respect for "Surf City."

All the nerds (all the world!) swoon over Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for some silly-ass reason, and while they acknowledge that the early stuff sure is some crack songwriting, the concensus seems to be that drugs and four hundred hours of studio time somehow trump, you know, attention to extraneous cruft like melody and lyrics. A song like "A Day in the Life" demands to be appreciated, like it was hanging in some museum, but there ain't a damn song in the world that sums up the innocence of young love more than "I Want To Hold Your Hand."

And, okay, yes, over the years I have spent a lot of time talking up music that's more intellectually rewarding than aesthetically pleasing, I won't deny it. How could I deny it? Y'all got Google. And yes, I haven't always cared for Sex Mob. I always thought they were more gimmicky and clever than actually good. And I stand by that assessment.

But recently, Steve Bernstein's been on a hell of a tear. He recently turned up on drummer Bobby Previte's outstanding Coalition of the Willing project, a Bitches Brew for the new millennium that cuts an atmosphere of Miles-esque darkness with generous slices of rock, thrilling improvisation, and twisty, funky soloing from Bernstein.

And now, his new project, the Millennium Territory Orchestra is a bold yet frivilous tribute to a gone and nearly forgotten era in American popular music.

In the 1920s and 1930s, 'territory' bands plied circuits all around the country. Minneapolis bands would play from Madison to Kansas City. Cleveland bands would range from Detroit to Pittsburgh to Yellow Springs, bringing that era's freewheeling proto-swing sound to dancehalls, honky tonks, and bars. Many if not most of these bands vanished without a trace, remembered only in faded photo albums and in stories swapped in nursing homes around the country. Few made recordings, and those who did released three-minute 78s to a market that was not yet national, that did not yet have any mechanism for preserving their work. Little wonder, then, that not many people remember a genre that's not quite Dixieland (tied to New Orleans, a city very good at remembering) and not quite swing (whose rise coincided with the rise of radio).

Forty years later, groups like the territory bands would be playing psychedelic lunk-rock and being collected in lavish four-disc box sets with hundred-page booklets chronicling the history of every one of them in loving detail. But for the territory bands there were no box sets, there was no national FM radio network. There were just dance floors, open roads, and the occasional chicken dinner.

Steve Bernstein recently came across some recordings from this great lost era in American music, and heard something he liked. "I was getting really fascinated with this music and wondering what would happen if you played this music live again. Because any version of this musc we have is like a three-minute bad recording. We know what it looks like, because ther's all these great pictures of guys in tuxedoes holding their instruments. But it's almost like there's more pictures of the music then there are recorded documents of the music. I wanted to bring this music back to life."

In 1999, Bernstein first brought together a group of New York's finest improvisers to play some of this music. Since then, he's been periodically soaking in it, so much so that on Volume 1, the first album by the Millennial Territory Orchestra, he can graft the sound and style of the territory bands, with their hotchachacha big lapel black bottom crawling style, to both original compositions and modern adaptations of Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" and Prince's "Darling Nikki" without batting an eye.

Volume 1 is a great party record, a serious slab of frivilous good time music, full of hot jazz, nasty soloing, and juke-joint funk replete with banjo and saxophone that somehow captures the atmosphere of a long gone era without sounding like a mere tribute. It helps that all nine players in the ensemble contribute exuberant solos as well as loose and crafty ensemble playing, strutting their stuff like a Dixieland band while coming together like a big swing group. From the light and carefree cover of "Pennies from Heaven" to the deconstructed crawl of "Darling Nikki," the band capture the vibe and sound of Kansas City 1933 while retaining the snap and polish of New York 2006.

Steve Bernstein's music might not be monuments for future generations of critics to fawn over, but that's really, really OK. I haven't listened to either of Radiohead's past two albums, because I just don't have the patience for that much artsy-fartsy seriousness from what is basically rock and roll music, the same genre that gave us "Louie, Louie" and The Bloodhound Gang. Steve Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra throw a hell of a party; what else do you need?

...just by their faded Dream Theater t-shirt.

Dr. David Thorpe at Something Awful unveils his Your Band Sucks Aptitude Test.

I was already hemorrhaging points by the time I had to admit former affiliation with a semi-metal act. I knew the final result wasn't going to be good, but never reached it thanks to this question:

27. I tend to dress:

a. In a zoot suit (-15)
b. In leather and safety pins (-5)
c. In tight jeans, Chuck Taylors, a faded t-shirt and a half gallon of hair-shellac (-10)
d. Like a normal human being (Automatic fail)

Mmmmm, the familiar kiss of failure.

I checked the answer key at the end anyway, and found I was well within the "play air guitar forever" category. Which is really not so far off the mark.
It was plain as the moles on Lemmy's face that my band sucked; I knew it, but did it anyway to alleviate my stifling boredom. But this quiz might be very helpful to those who are not well-adjusted enough to notice the level of their own suck. By taking it, and applying the result, they might save the rest of us minutes of face-pinching displeasure the first time we hear their noise and, grimacing, turn their shit off.

The following was published at blogcritics.org as a supplement and companion piece to my review of Pere Ubu's Why I Hate Women:

Over the past decade and a half, I have probably written a couple hundred reviews of albums by artists from Sam Cooke to Samhain. When the PR firm handling the fifteenth album by the formerly Cleveland-based new wave band Pere Ubu, Why I Hate Women, asked me for a review, I agreed to give it a shot. I'm a big fan of Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas, and his last couple projects have been right up my alley. But as I sat there staring at the blinking cursor on a blank field of black, I tried to write a straight review and found I just couldn't do it.

What I turned out instead was (very kindly) kicked back to me by an editor, who asked in essence, "um, this is very nice... what is it?"

Well, long story short, I love music, but I'm damn sick and tired of writing music reviews.

The usual formula goes as follows:

"Band X formed in Year A and influenced Y1, Y2 and the incredibly obscure Y3, who had one single on the Kankakee, MI based Fancypants label. Their newest album, X', is a (adjective) non/departure from their previous work. Adjective, adjective adverb quality assessment, subordinate clause hedging previous assertions. X' is recommended to fans of A, A', and A'', but is not as essential as classic album X''. "

There's a lot you can do with that basic template, and a quick glance back through my Blogcritics archive will reveal a number of (if I do say so myself) pretty good variations on that classic theme. Unfortunately, templates are limiting. If you'll permit me to disappear up my own bunghole for a thousand words or so...

The novel form was stale as long ago as the 1760s, when Laurence Stern broke all the rules of narrative and continuity in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ever read that book? It's awesome. Ostensibly the autobiography of Tristram Shandy, the 900-odd page novel only gets up to recounting the events of a few hours after his birth before Shandy (Stern) gives it up and quits.

The entire book is a sort of deconstruction of the novel form, as well as a very smart parody of the eighteenth-century penchant for flowery apologies. I mean, the first four or five chapters are an extended explanation-by-way-of-apology for his parents' moods at his moment of conception, followed by a chapter following young sperm-Tristram on its journey to meet egg-Tristram!

The rest of the book is a study in digression, with fake-but-accurate musings on noses, names, women, and tragic groin injuries, and every so often an entire chapter apologizing for not ever getting to the point of writing about his life. That book was written a good hundred years and more before Dickens and Hardy would perfect the English novel, and already the form was done!

The modern record album review dates from - what? 1966? That's when Paul Williams published "How Rock Communicates" in the inaugural issue of the rock-zine Crawdaddy, which was just about the first time that anyone took rock music seriously as a worthy subject of critical examination. Only five years later, Lester Bangs was kicking back against that staid and hoary 'tradition,' writing first-person-heavy rants and love letters only thinly disguised as "reviews." That's less then five years between the genre's inception and jumping the shark.

So little wonder that, after writing a couple hundred-odd album reviews, some of which are perfectly normal and some of which have merely nibbled at the boundaries of what a review normally is, I've gotten dangerously bored. As if you care.

Here's the trouble. I think many, if not most, of the people who write about music for Blogcritics would agree that it's impossible to be perfectly objective about music. Part of its attraction, after all, is the intensely personal reaction that it evokes in someone. That is, part of music's appeal is its subjectivity - how it makes you feel.

Long ago, I gave up trying to be The Voice of Authority. What the hell do I know that other people don't? Nothin'. So, I figure the best I can aspire to is to relate to music fans and prospective buyers what exactly a certain album does for me; yep, how it makes me feel. Whether or not someone else will encounter a song or album the same way as I do is a one in a million shot, but still I can't see it any other way.

I can't possibly imagine for the life of me why my good friend Ron doesn't think Wolf Confessor Brings The Flood Neko Case's is the best album of the year, and I have no idea why anyone thinks the Black Eyed Peas have made a half-decent single since "Joints and Jam" in 1998. So, all I can do is make sure when I write a review, that the reader understands where I'm coming from, because that's as important as what I say about the music. But how do you make what you feel about the music relevant to the album, without tipping too far over into mere masturbatory autobiography?

When I sat in front of that blinking cursor trying to write a review of Pere Ubu's new album, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't bear to write another X-Y-Z review, especially of a band that has spent nearly three decades deconstructing rock music. That would just be weak. So, instead I ended up with a short story (or something) that summed up how the album made me feel. By a stroke of luck, the lyrics (which I hadn't even really absorbed by that point) matched the story in my head pretty much exactly, so in they went.

Was the result a review? I guess, but only at a remove. My wife read it and opined that she never ever wanted to hear any album anything like what the story described, and she's right. It's totally not up her alley. So, success! Okay, what I wrote won't tell you whether Keith Moline's guitar work is reminiscent of Robert Fripp (sure it is, why not?), but that's not really as important as knowing whether the album is going to make you run screaming, and I figure a story can do that just as well as a sober transmission of data.

Anyway, after all that hoo-ha and bullplop philosophizing, if you still hunger for a more straightforward review of Why I Hate Women, here you go.

The press release I have describes Why I Hate Women as "a disorienting mix of Midwestern riff rock, 'found' sound, analog synthesizers, falling-apart song structures and careening vocals," and that's about right. Having had someone already write this is a load off my mind, as I don't have to struggle to come up with the appropriate metaphors on my own. I really am sick of writing descriptive music reviews, even about such a disturbing, fascinating, and very nearly brilliant piece of post-rock.

Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas (a bearish Clevelander who now makes his home on the English coast) has spent thirty years tearing at the fabric of rock music. His first band, Rocket From the Tombs, wrote songs that were for the time (the early 1970s) and place (Cleveland), practically from another planet. His singing voice was then (as now) a strangled whine that seems to emanate from that part of the chest that clenches when you puke (Neil Strauss of The New York Times describes it as "David Byrne with a plugged nose,"), and the lyrics to Rocket From The Tombs songs like "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" and "Final Solution" toyed with the outer reaches of suicidal disaffection with a surprising amount of wit and grace. Even before there was such a thing as punk rock, Thomas and RFTT band members Peter Laughner and Gene O'Connor (better known as Cheetah Chrome of The Dead Boys) seemed to be trying to move right past it to the next thing.

Thomas has made fourteen albums, with Pere Ubu, none of which I'm incredibly familiar with. But I do know Rocket From The Tombs, and I do know Pere Ubu's reputation for making difficult and stand-offish music that attempts to reinvent the wheel to varying degrees of success. How could I write a straight review about a band fronted by a guy who was postpunk before there was a punk to be post of?

All of this was in my head when I gave Why I Hate Women its test spins. The first time I listened to it through, I didn't like it very much at all. Nearly every song on the album features a heavy dose of Theremin (the electronic instrument that gives cheesy old horror movie soundtracks their noooWEEEEoooo factor), and through my bargain-basement earbud headphones, listening to the album was like taking a power drill to my eardrums. Upon repeated listens through better speakers, the music took on more focus and balance, and the underlying attractions began to show through. Jackhammer guitar riffs alternated with queasy atmospheric soundscapes, and Thomas' nasal vocals lend a suitable sense of dread and foreboding to his elliptical and impressionistic lyrics.

Thomas claims that Why I Hate Women was written with an overarching story in mind: "the back story is more or less detailed and peopled with characters. The purpose of the album then becomes to capture a specific psychological moment from one of those characters." I figured, why not take a shot at that story?

David Thomas has compared this album to a Jim Thompson novel, and I can see his point. Thompson was another stylistic innovator, a crime writer who wrote pulpy and disturbing novels from the point of view of the unredeemable killer rather than the rugged and flawed (but likeable!) detective. Although not easy, the album does bear repeated listens, in the same way most people have to experience Frank Zappa's music as unpleasant twaddle a few times before things finally click and his approach begins to make sense.

So I wrote a story for a review. Have I jumped the shark? Have I inaugurated a rich new genre of music writing that will sweep the world in the weeks and months to come? Or, in the immortal words of Mel Brooks, am I just jerking off?

It gradually dawns on you that the drive from Vermont to Cleveland probably shouldn't have been attempted at night, especially given the circumstances. Tarry highway coffee can't beat back the buzzing behind your eyes and the vile taste of exhaustion rising at the back of your throat. The last time you looked in the mirror, the bruises around your neck had blossomed from faint red suggestions of violence into splendid purple and blue memorials of the last hour you'll ever spend in that town. You need a shave and a transfusion probably wouldn't hurt either.

You reach down to press in the cigarette lighter, and as you look away from the road the edge of your eye catches sight of the furry... thing... driving the white panel truck as it blows past you on the right. What the hell?

Later, pitching the dead end of the same cigarette out the window, you swear the trees furring the black hills to the north suddenly resolve themselves into a gigantic man-shaped figure rising out of the woods against an inky Berkshire sky and striding off to the west. A second later, you pass a tractor-trailer. When you are able to look back north, there is nothing there but trees and sky.

As the exhaustion creeps deeper into your chest, you drift in and out of awareness, the center line a punctuated commentary on the tedium of driving through upstate New York. You climb that line hand over hand, every mile one mile closer to Cleveland. The radio cuts in and out, a jittery melange of classic rock, bad country, and paranoid ranting about God, UFOs and government conspiracies.

It is some time before you realize that the whirring you hear is the car's front wheels grasping blindly at mud. You open your eyes. It is some time before you realize that you aren't driving any more, and that you probably shouldn't try to move in case it makes the pain hurt worse. It is some time before you realize there had been someone in the car with you, and you don't remember where they came from. You wonder what could be making that thrashing sound in the brush down below you.

The night is getting colder, and over the occasional whoosh of passing cars on the highway above, the radio is playing again, a curious mixture of agitated rock, stealthy nightmares, and electronic squealing that echoes the buzzing behind your eyes. There's a theremin playing like a demented steel guitar, and the singer's disembodied nasal voice hovers just above you like a wisp of fog, intoning cryptically about lost luggage, two slices of white bread sealed in a ziploc bag, and bars where the beer don't walk on him. He's got a job for life. In your head -- in my head is a white room where all the good things go. A man with a bag walks in, drops it on the floor and he goes. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

I gotta get out of this place else I swear my head will crack - crack!
I gotta get out of this place else I swear my head will crack
What will you do for me?
Johnny Two-Toes says to Betty Groove

I wait for the dawn but I fear the dawn will not come back
I wait for the dawn but I fear the dawn will not come back
What will you do for me?
What will you do?

There's something that's closin down on me feels like a hand grabbed round my throat
There's something that's closin down on me feels like a hand grabbed round my throat
What will you do for me?
Johnny Two-Toes says to Betty Groove
What will you do?

I gotta get outa this town for I swear this town will be the death of me
I gotta get outa this town for I swear this town will be the death of me
What will you do for me?
Johnny Two-Toes says
What will you do for me?

Sleep finally overcomes and the night is split by the red pulsations of emergency vehicles. The activity comes nearer, and the man and the electronic buzzing sing together just for you, with the infinite love of a father for his helpless newborn child,

My eyes are growin tentacles for to grab you
My eyes are growin hand grenades for to have you
My eyes are growin tentacles for to grab you
I live in a house without any windows

My hands are growin spectacles for to grab you
My hands are growin half the night for to have you
My hands are growin spectacles for to grab you
My hands are growin spectacles...
I live in a house without any windows
I got a 40 watt bulb to light up my life.

As the music grows to a stormy climax and abruptly fades into the busy sounds of an upstate New York freeway night, it gradually dawns on you that Cleveland is going to have to wait a while.

I play the guitar. By which I mean that I know some chords and can improvise a lame lead built in a pentatonic box. That knowledge pretty much grants access to the entire AC/DC catalog which, really, ought to be enough for anyone.

But there are legions of folks in this great land of ours who are just starting and can't yet play by ear. Others seek more than what Angus Young can teach us- odd, yes, but they're out there and I've met them. They want an edge, a little more knowledge, or at the very least, a more refined dabbling in the guitary arts. Some people take private lessons which, judging by the fliers I see at any given moment on any campus or metro area, must be a booming business.

The quickest way though to learn how to play a song yourself, and if you can't do it by ear, is to use tablature. Tab is a graphical shorthand that explains where your fingers go on certain strings. Tab can help you fret a weird chord you didn't hear in the song, or with a spiffy lead run you can't pick out yourself. It also has the benefit of having near instantaneous utility, as opposed to having to train to read formal sheet music. If you can see, you can apply tablature. Its main drawback though is that tab cannot help you if you don't already know how the song is supposed to sound.

As with every other perversion, the internets are full of tablature sites. Typically, more skilled players will post their shorthand interpretations of popular songs for novices. They are free, and understood to be a sort of fraternal public service. Yours truly, not 2 weeks ago, consulted a site because I knew the tuning of a song was all fucky, and didn't get it. In about 10 seconds I was able to find the song, see the layout, go "Oh, THAT's how...", and presto-change-o, could play the song.

But now the lawyers got wind of it, so it's all fucked up for everybody.

The site I used for tab, OLGA, has been down for awhile. They've now posted links to the nastygrams they got from the law firm representing the National Music Publishers Association and the Music Publishers Association of the United States that accuse OLGA, and several similar sites, of copyright infringement and ordered them to stop operating. Their argument is that because music writers, transcribers, and related fields have to go through the legal hassle of following copyright law when they do their business, the result of which is selling songbooks and such to musicians, offering what is ostensibly the same service for free (yet still generating an income with blogads and such) is illegal.

So dig, I can get- marginally- the infringement argument. That's the law, the publishers feel threatened, and seek remedy through legal action. As far as a reasonably well-adjusted society's legal mechanism working, I get it. But the MPA said a little too much with this remark:

We are doing this to protect the interests of the creators and publishers of music so that, the profession of songwriting remains viable and that new and exciting music will be continued to be created and enjoyed for generations to come.

So- just so I'm clear- the Music Publisher's Association's position is that, if the broader population know how to play older, previously released music, musicians will no longer care to produce new work?

I'm pretty sure that wide popularity has not yet worked AGAINST a musician. And it's odd that a dilettante has to explain this to the MPA, but here you go: musicians are artists. Artists create because if they don't, they go mental. Admittedly sometimes they are mental beforehand. But regardless of their personal sanity timeline, artists make art because they have to, not for the friggin pay; are you kidding?! As for the income, I am highly skeptical of the claim that some schmoe running a tab site is winning the big money and fabulous prizes. The whole point is to share information to enjoy the music, not to play musical capitalist. It's not like Russell Simmons made his gajillions on tablature.

And thinking about it, are they going to file cease and desist orders on every cover band in the Union? Because not only do they play copyrighted material, they profit from it too. Sure some get paid in cocaine, but it is, strictly speaking, compensation. And as much as I would love to see crummy cover bands wither and fail, I'd rather it done through people telling them they suck by not paying to see them, than by playing lawyer-ball. Although, to be fair, they may have tried serving them with court papers, but often those folks have no fixed address and it's tough to deliver to "the van with all the bondo on it in the field behind the old fire station."

But let's test the waters here, and see how music publishers feel about this. I will reveal the most secretest secrety secret of rock and roll, right here and now. I am gambling that this revelation will not cause popular music in general, and rock n roll in particular, to screech to a jarring and disastrous halt. I am willing to gamble that, contrary to the MPA's weird assertion, its transcribers will continue to be able "to feed their families". It is nothing less than the Key to Rock. It is the entry path to Chuck Berry; through Crosby, Stills, Nash and (sometimes) Young; past KISS; on to the Ramones, Pearl Jam, and the nu-metal flavor of the month.

I stand at the cliffside now, Prometheus-like, and hereby give the gift of rock and roll fire to the yearning multitudes:

A-C-E-A

Use it wisely, my children.

Now let's see if they send their legal vultures to peck at my innards for all eternity.

In the continual search for newer, better, and more satisfying employment- more satisfying than, say, removing the sharp stick lodged 3" into your left quadricep with a long, satisfied sigh- I came across this opening:

Vice President of Education and Public Programs
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is currently considering applicants for the position of Vice President of Education and Public Programs. The Vice President of Education and Public Programs reports to the President and CEO and is responsible for establishing and directing all educational activities and programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

A suit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame! At first blush it seemed so wrong- but after a few seconds of thought, it makes total sense. Most rock musicians can't manage their own personal affairs; dare we trust them with the cultural heritage that the form has become? Suits run their money and their careers; might as well run their legacy, too. The ad goes on:

Creates educational programs and materials relating to the unique content of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, focusing both on the permanent collection and temporary exhibits. Develops curriculum and learning materials to teach the widest possible audience, from toddlers to adults, about rock and roll culture and its social and historical significance.

Not only just another suit, then- a nerd, too! What an improbably cool position for a museum-trained historian or, failing that, a record-store clerk; often the same thing, I can attest. And is there any other person more insufferably arrogant about music than humanities majors? If we were comparing fingerprints here, we'd be talking about a 9-point match. Designing programs, displays, and other instructional media at the Hall of Fame sure beats the hell out of doing public history work in a musuem no one goes to, designing displays no one gives a shit about like "Whither Butter?"; or "The Evolution of the Overall" (in Kansas, "The Creation of the Overall"); and certainly better than that musty archive your friend who majored in history worked in, the one where he contracted that nasty eye socket infection.

So say you're the new guy, just hired for this position. What would be some programs or exhibits you might pitch?

My first thought? "It Doesn't Mean That Much To Me To Mean That Much To You", a whole series about rock 'n roll suicide. You get everyone who's offed himself, plus the David Bowie and Neil Young tie-ins for the soundtrack. Logo would be a Strat with a noose around it, or a gun to its head(stock), and would appear on all associated merch. Pretty good, huh? And that was just off the top of my head!

What would you do?

Just in case you're surrounded by militant hip-hop fans, here is a detailed how-to for surviving a Freestyle Rap Battle. Personally, I'd rather be surrounded by very, very angry laser-wielding giant fighting robots, but your mileage may, uh, vary.

Perhaps the most useful tip in this compendium of useful tips is this:

Warnings

"Spit" as used in the context of this article is a synonym for rapping, not the forcible expulsion of saliva from the mouth. Please do not practice the latter kind of spitting; it does not make you look nearly as cool.

I'll keep that in mind.

There's a certain inescapable sense of destiny to being named Thor. Indeed, it's hard to imagine the man from Canada named Jon Mikl Thor doing anything else with his life besides bodybuilding and playing heavy metal music. Such a name is a fait accompli. I mean, really... "Hi, I'm Thor. Have you considered refinancing your mortgage lately?" Not so much.

Some bodybuilders, once their career is over, open gyms. Others go into politics or pro wrestling (same thing). Vancouver's Jon Mikl Thor, former Mr. Canada, Mr. USA, Mr. North America, and Mr. Universe, went into metal. It only made sense. Blessed with a flair for the dramatic, a taste for the faintly ridiculous, and one of the greatest heavy-metal names since Jethro Tull invented the seed drill, His live shows are minor legends of excess, featuring amazing props (winged helmets, chariots) and incredible stunts (bending steel bars with his teeth, breaking bricks across his chest), and he has amassed a nearly thirty-year legacy of B-movie-tinged heavy metal, leaving in his wake a vast wasteland of vanquished demon-foes, busted mic stands, and leopard-print clad groupies panting in wonder at his awesome might.

Thor's latest album is Devastation of Musculation (Smog Veil, 2006), and insofar as it's accurate to say that Thor is growing as a musician (within the confines of traditional metal, anyway), he is. His last album, 2005's Thor Against The World, drew mainly on the glammy sounds of KISS, Alice Cooper and Sweet. It was a damn good album, but there were times when the metallic content dropped lower than might optimally have been desired. It seemed that, for all his talk of epic space-battles and Norse gods, Thor was going soft here and there.

Not so on Devastation of Musculation. The new album is harder, faster, and darker than its predecessor, and is evidence that, after decades of half-jokey and often-forgettable entertainment, Thor is figuring out how to do it right (albeit without sacrificing what makes Thor, Thor). The very first track, "Lords of Steel," stomps along in a Black Sabbath mode and features some very nice extended guitar wailing the likes of which have rarely been sighted since acid-washed jeans went out of style. Maybe it's not the greatest thing ever put on tape, but it's a damned entertaining invitation to bang your head. The rest of the album continues in a similar British Heavy Metal vein, galloping along with an array of galloping Maiden/Priest grooves, while Thor grunts about the Devastation of Musculation, The Queen of The Damned, Odin's Son, and Lies of Eternity in a voice that, for what it lacks in technical accomplishment, more than makes up for in personality and commitment to the moment.

After all, isn't that what metal is about? If you strip the music away from, say, a Slayer album, you're left with what amount to a bunch of supremely silly words. There's nothing inherently scary about

Trapped in purgatory
A lifeless object, alive
Awaiting reprisal
Death will be their acquisition

The sky is turning red
Return to power draws near
Fall into me, the sky's crimson tears
Abolish the rules made of stone

I mean, come on! Every high school has some trenchcoated dork who writes doggerel like this in his notebook and thinks he's being deep! And yet, throw in some manic drumming and heavily distorted guitars and the very same silliness that would get a dark and serious high-school poet laughed at, shunned, and these days examined by a team of psychologists, police investigators and anti-terror "experts," somehow transmogrifies into a pounding, sinister all-time classic of thrash metal.

By the same token, lyrics like the following from Thor's "Queen of the Damned"...

The deadliest of hungers
She feasts on human blood
The rapid sound of thunder
Bringing evil from above
The vampires all surround her
For the final feast
But she still holds the power
Until a new queen is released

... kind of suck out of context. But as hundreds of overly serious college theses and misguided poetry seminars have inadvertently proven, rock lyrics are not meant to exist apart from the music they are sung to. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right? Write "Louie, Louie, hey, hey, wa ne ga go" on a page, and you've got nothing. But put it over that classic riff, and you've got magic, son. In the same way, once Thor puts his lyrics over thrashing guitars, a double-bass-drum attack, and presents them in his own powerful and guttural voice, those same stanzas become exactly what they should be: the audio equivalent of the best B-grade horror movie ever made (which, by the way, is Evil Dead II. No debate allowed.)

Oh, in case you're wondering, the phrase "Devastation of Musculation" refers to two things: the poorly defined retribution that awaits the foes of THOR as he rides the universe on his steed; and a story that Thor heard about a guy who pumped up his biceps so far with steroids, oil in injections, and heavy reps that his arm actually exploded. According to Thor himself,

"Everyone is under pressure to achieve the impossible every day. People risk their lives to be more beautiful, more handsome, more skinny, more muscular and faster, stronger, richer, and deadlier. Trying to make sense out of these desperate measures is what this new album is about. It is easily the darkest and most powerful album I've ever written."

Coming from a guy who used to pose in poodle hair and tiger-stripe bikini briefs, this kind of statement might be easily dismissed. But, even considering that metal at its finest needs to stay stupid in order to stay metal, there's something to this. Thor seemed to wear a smirk through half the songs on Thor Against The World. On Devastation, there's not much smirking. There's more skulls, smoking corpses, demons, and smoky battlefields. And if the music doesn't necessarily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Number of the Beast, Reign In Blood, or British Steel, it's still the best B-Movie Metal you're gonna find.

If you're looking for subtlety, I suggest you pick up Tool's excellent latest album. But if you're looking for well-done classic metal sung by a former bodybuilder who had the sense to stay out of politics, you're in good shape with Devastation of Musculation. Somehow, now, in his third decade of recording stone-obvious muscle rock for a parade of indie labels, Thor seems to be figuring out how to balance camp and carnage. By any standard, Devastation of Musculation ain't half bad, and as long as you take it for what it is - the aural equivalent of movies like Escape from New York and, yes, the animated classic Heavy Metal, you can do much worse than to heed the mighty word of THOR.

[Crossposted at blogcritics.org]

No, not a perverse children's game, but an actual musical. Z-Spot: The Zombie Musical is playing this June 25th at the Wonderland Ballroom in DC. Check your local theatres, and then run screaming in the other direction. Everyone knows Zombies can't sing.

[wik] The Wonderland has an exceptionally poorly executed website.

While you may not have noticed, writhing in pain as you were from five days of perfidy withdrawal symptoms, yesterday was the National Day of Slayer. Here is the post that would have appeared yesterday, had not our HTML gnomes been held hostage by Islamic Terrorists who hate our (but not HTML gnomes' ) freedom.

Today, [yesterday -ed.] as some of you will have noticed, is June 6, 2006. Written that way, it seems like any other date. But with some subtle rearranging, it becomes…

666

So, all the goody-two-shoes will be raptured up to the great, poorly designed upside-sown fundie boat church in the sky, and the rest of us can get on with what’s really important. To wit, celebrating the National Day of Slayer. Pull out your old Slayer albums, crank it up to eleven, and let the creator know that you appreciate one of his less appreciated creations.

Sometimes an album comes along that catches you totally by surprise. I mean, I'm ready for anything: Balinese gamelan music, recordings of shortwave static, German industrial music, Ace of Base, but I wasn't ready for Bobby Previte's Coalition of the Willing.

I don't know much about Bobby Previte. I know he's from Buffalo. I know he's a drummer and that he's big on the downtown Manhattan jazz scene. I know he's got a reputation for being a great player, a pioneering composer, and a freaky cat. He has interesting hair. But beyond that, the music of Bobby Previte is terra incognita to me.

I'm up for third stream, new wave, nu metal, Japanese dance, Greek art music, art house, acid house, acid jazz, jazz flute, Malinese song-flute, Hawaiian nose-flute, power pop, hard bop, Billy Joel and Iggy Pop, rockabilly, punkabilly, Carter Family, Manson Family, the Family Stone, the Stone Temple Pilots, Temple of the Dog, and antisocial synthesizer belches from two-person bands from northern Vermont.

But I never expected surf music.

Surf music! And psychedelic garage rock! And Miles Davis-style chugging electric glowering! And, and spy music! Like James Bond! And remember Lalo Schifrin, the guy who wrote the "Mission Impossible" theme, whose personal style mixed Continental snazzery with Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass and a dash of neatly tailored rock and roll? Him, too!

When Bobby Previte's new album crossed my decks, my first thought was, verbatim, "... The hell is this?"

Mainly, this was brought on by the cover art and album title. Previte's current band is called the Coalition of the Willing, which on its own is kind of funny, a gloss on a phrase that's been around since the 1980s, but which George W. Bush catapulted to fame (or infamy) when he applied it to the nations that backed the libervasion of Iraq in 2003. Fans of Robert Anton Wilson will remember the running joke toward the end of the Illuminatus! trilogy with all the bands named after real-world things, like "The American Medical Association." Other, less nerdy people might be familiar with Dave Barry's running joke that things like The Coalition of the Willing "would make a great band name." Either way, "Coalition of the Willing" is a great name for a band.

However.

Over the last five years or so my patience for all things Orwellian has run thin. This goes both for actual pieces of Orwelliana like the fatuously named "Department of Homeland Security" as well as pretend pieces of Orwelliana, like albums that take half their song titles from the pages of 1984. Indeed, The Coalition of the Willing features the titles, "The Ministry of Truth," "The Ministry of Love," "Memory Hole," and "Oceania," as well as an album cover in the classic Che/Castro/Anarchist hues of red, white and black and festooned with raised fists. Ugh. Whatever they were going for with the cover art, what they came up with makes my eyes roll, my gorge rise, and awakens an urge in my heart to grab a truncheon and stand guard on the nearest barricade on behalf of The Man, The System, and capitalist pigs anywhere. Filthy lucre forever!!

Oh, right. The music. What's the music like?

It turns out that The Coalition of the Willing features one of the largest differentials between cover art quality and the quality of the music inside since Guns & Roses scrapped the original "robot rape" cover to Appetite For Destruction for the less awful version we all know and love.

That is to say, The Coalition Of The Willing is a damn good record, eight long instrumental slices of jazz-inflected rock spiked with liberal dashes of surf and spy music, fusion a la electric Miles Davis, and even house and reggae. There's not a slack bit, there are no twiddly precious solos, and all the genre-hopping manages to add spice, rather than just confuse matters.

Previte is a sensitive drummer with a great sense of groove, and the players he assembled for this project are uniformly top-notch. Notably, guitar wizard Charlie Hunter plays on every track, even choosing to lay aside his trademark eight-string guitar for a standard six-string model. And although he is by far the best-known musician to grace these tracks, he doesn't overshadow the other contributors, who include Steve Bernstein (of the unfortunately-named New York group Sex Mob) on trumpet, Jamie Saft on the Hammond organ, Stew Cutler on occasional harmonica, the one-named Skerik, a tenor saxophonist who plays with Les Claypool of Primus, and Stanton Moore, drummer for the jammy New Orleans funk outfit Galactic.

Anyway, about the music. Given that Bobby Previte and Charlie Hunter are pretty well known for playing hip, cerebral and challenging New York jazz, the last thing I expected when I popped this album in the player was to be met at the door by a groove that is about 50% "Incense and Peppermints" and 50% theme music to some lurid imaginary Roger Corman film with a title like "Surf Nazis Run Wild!!!" or "Bikini Girl Go-Go Shootout!!!"

And yet, the very first track overcomes its Orwellian title ("The Ministry of Truth") with just such a sound, a snazzy, tacky vibe driven by the jet-setting Hammond organ of Jamie Saft and a foursquare beat from Previte that would be equally at home on a Lalo Shifrin album or some lost track from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. Over this, Charlie Hunter spits edgy chromatic James Bond-theme-style melodic fragments until he is mugged by a scratchy harmonica solo from Stew Cutler. The whole thing brings to mind a dizzying array of great pop culture moments, from the original Batman TV series to Ren & Stimpy, and that's just in the first five minutes of the record.

Throughout, Previte and his band switch gears without even trying. "Oceania" jams a 12-string guitar riff that sounds like a broken-down Midnight Oil song right next to more spy music right next to reggae without even blinking. Impressively, this all sounds perfectly natural. None of the transitions anywhere on the record sound forced or awkward, no matter how unrelated the two sections might be. Whether it is Hunter's metal riffage on "The Ministry of Love," the atmospheric house-inflected groove of "Anthem for Andrea" or Skerik's ruminatory make-out sax on "Memory Hole," there's not a moment where the album sounds flat or self-indulgent. For an instrumental album made by a bunch of serious jazzheads, that's flat out impressive.

The final test, of course, is to try this album out on someone unsuspecting. Someone whose relationship to music is less fanatic than mine. Someone who doesn't dig on modern art-music that sounds like you've stuck your head in an air duct. Someone who doesn't get the melody lines from archival Frank Zappa live performances stuck in their head for days on end.

What I'm trying to say is, my wife dug this album too.

The Coalition Of The Willing features players of fearsome talent playing stylish, sinister, beautiful, fractured, epic music with a sense of fun that dumps any consternation caused by the strange song-title and cover art choices right down the memory hole.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org.

Their deep commitment to rocking your intellect as thoroughly and enthusiastically as your hole.

Dig:

There are 23 generally accepted canonical works, mostly studio but some live records too. If you take the first letter of every word in the album title and string them out, you get this, the Motorhead Power Word:

MOBAoSNStHIFAPDNMORnRNSAA1916MoDBSOSSBLELTEEWAMTBoMHLaBAI

If you record yourself saying the canonical Power Word, then play the recording backwards at 1/3 speed, you should hear, "LEMMY ROCKS YOUR HEAD AND HOLE LEMMY ROCKS YOUR HEAD AND HOLE" in a forgotten dialect of Aramaic indigenous only to a small band of Levantine pirates who, in the early 1st century, used a smallish slab of Lemmy-shaped coral as their sea lair.

But that's not the half of it.

Consider the mystical number 23. Add that to the 57 characters of the Power Word and what do you get? 80.

Next consider the album title 1916. Pretty odd that it's the only numerically-titled release, no? And why that number? Well think it through:

1+9+1+6=17.

Now add that to 80 and you get 97. 97.

Ninety-seven is Lemmy's height in inches, or a hair under 8'1.

I mean, it's stuff like that, the number games, the language games, the historical awareness...the deep and broad intellectualism that is at the core of Motorhead's music and message is what makes them unique, and allows them to kick your ass in all kinds of subtle, eye-opening ways.

All I can say is, thanks.