Category: music

I had a dream that I was at work when “Blueside” from Rooney came on the store’s music system. The rest of the dream became inconsequential as I locked onto the song. It’s really catchy and I marveled because I had never heard it at work before. Come to think of it, it’s quite a bit more appropriate than some of the other songs I hear at work like “Wicked Game” and “Fake Plastic Trees.”

I woke up a lot later still humming it. If you haven’t heard it, the song is a guitar driven power pop ditty. Imagine a mashup of Matthew Sweet, the Beach Boys, and maybe even the Partridge Family thrown in for good measure. The band also took on the old CCR look for the video, the hair, the denim, the earnestness… Check it out!

 

OK, so I finally got my stereo hooked up. I had been listening to it for quite a while up in my tiny room, but I now have more room to spread out. Setting up was delayed for a week because I needed some more speaker cable. Plus, I wanted proper connections on the ends of the wires. The binding posts on my current amp are a bit of a pain to use with bare cables.

Anyway, got it set up and I’m really enjoying it. I now have a decent set up for the first time in… 5 years? My God, it’s been a long time. Things are a little different with this system though. I am streaming my music either from the internet or my computer through my squeezebox player. I switch tracks with my iPod touch, it’s the ultimate remote really. I have full access to every song in my library, plus all of my internet radio stations, and I can also control the volume. Here’s the kicker, the only way I could set it up involves the listening position to be in my bed… I don’t think I could imagine a better set up:-)

 

The speakers are about 9 feet apart, giving me a pretty big sound stage. I still need to fiddle with the distance from the wall a little to tame the bass. Listening again is just sumptuous. No, this isn’t perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than I’ve had in a long time. All of my music is pretty compressed, it was all ripped into the computer for portable listening. I need to go dig up my CDs, rip them in some sort of lossless format, and then get rid of them. Do people still buy used CDs in bulk anymore?

I’m also starting to fantasize about getting tubes back into my system. I own a really nice set of amps, but they are a bit large. Last year, out of the blue, a friend gave me a 300b based amp. I got a chance to listen to it a couple of times and I’m totally in love with it. Plus, it’s a lot more compact than my current amps. Of course, my regular amps use $10-15 dollar tubes, this one uses 150-900 dollar tubes…

With a new computer in my future, I think I will try running the server software I need for the squeezebox off of it. If that doesn’t work, I might invest in a dedicated music server. Once I have the tube amp and some decent source material, I think things will be as good as they are going to get for the foreseeable future. I plan on spending lots of time relaxing, listening to music into the wee hours of the night:-)

I had a dream last night and in it I was trying to figure out what band Don Van Viiet was in. Just like in real life, when something like this eludes me, it drives me crazy. So, in my dream, I googled it and came up with the answer. Captain Beefheart of course! After I woke up I wondered why I had to google it in my dream. Clearly, it was in my head so why did I have to go through the process of finding a computer typing it in, etc. I wonder if this tells me something about how my brain is organized…

 

Woke up this morning with “See America Right” going through my head. It’s a charming tale of co-dependancy (“Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp” “My love is like a dark cloud of rain right there above you”), drunk driving, DTs, and general consternation. It’s rather well done, although I can think of better songs to wake up to.

 

I have an enormous amount of music in my iTune library. Between eMusic, free Amazon tracks, stuff I buy, and stuff people give me, I keep adding more and there is a lot I haven’t heard yet. These days, I mostly use genius to pick the music to put on my iPod, so I don’t know what’s on there until I hear it. The other day, I heard not one, but two bizarre covers of songs. The first one was Melanie singing “Ruby Tuesday.” You remember her, right? Her biggest hit was the irritating “Brand New key” and her best song was “Lay Down (Candles in the Wind)” and even that can be hard to take at times. Her version of “Ruby Tuesday” was… odd. Couldn’t listen to the whole thing. Where the hell did I pick that up?

The other song that caught my attention was Nena’s nuclear armageddon song 99 Red Balloons sung by Goldfinger. The original is a favorite among 80’s pop lovers, but I’ve never liked it much. Goldfinger is (was?) a rock/ska group. And while their version had a faster tempo, it didn’t change my view of the song. Still, it was another oddity I hadn’t expected. At least my drives to work aren’t dull…

Woke up the other day to the White Stripes’ “Death Letter.” This wasn’t all that surprising actually, I had watched a documentary involving jack White before I went to bed. It’s a cover of an old Son House song, old school blues. Like most White Stripes songs, the best thing about it is the hook that jack is able to create with his guitar. It wasn’t so much the song that was running through my head as the guitar lick. Check it out…

 

 

Say what you want about jack White, but he can certainly play a mean slide guitar…

I awoke from a rather bizarre cleaning at work dream to Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” It had nothing at all to do with the dream. I fell back asleep and woke up to the Star Wars main theme running through my head.

The Janet Jackson song is a classic example of a song that I don’t really know getting stuck. I had the chorus looping through again and again. On the flip side, it’s kind of cool to have a stirring John Williams number as a theme for waking up…

Every morning, I wake up with a song in my head. Sometimes it’s a carryover from a dream, other times, it’s totally random with no apparent reason. Think I’m going to keep track of these as I remember them.

 

Keep in mind that these aren’t favorite songs. They are usually catchy, but how much I like them has little to do with what sticks. This morning is a good example. I had a dream I was at a White Stripes concert. Did I have any of their songs stuck in my head when I woke up? Of course not. I had “Let’s Twist Again” by Chubby Checker.

The story behind that is that I started the audience singing that song when I saw Jack White twisting for some reason as he was heading off the stage. I shouted out “Let’s twist again Jack!” and some people picked up on it and joined it “Like we did last summer…” A woman near me ended up leading the audience. One of the crew actually gave her a mic towards the end.

Sigh. Chubby Checker to start my day. I wonder why my brain does this to me….

My friend John at work told me that his favorite punk song is “We are the One” by The Avengers. I have just recently heard that, and I gotta say, it’s a good one.

 

 

Incidentally, John is in a pretty good band himself called protagonist. Check them out on youtube. Why is it that everyone I know in a band is inevitably named John?

 

What’s my favorite punk song? Hmmm, that’s pretty tough to narrow down, there’s a lot of good ones out there. A little while ago I posted a great one called “Television Addict,” and that’s a contender. If I had to name one song, I think I’d have to go with a classic from the Buzzcocks, once again an addiction is involved, but this time “…it’s a habit that sticks.”

 

 

“Orgasm Addict”  has all of the attributes of a great punk song, pace, snarl, it’s a bit offensive, and it’s short. Yes, the Sex Pistols had some iconic songs, and there’s always The Ramones, but if I had to pick one song, this would be it.

 

Of course that opens up the question of what makes a punk song? When someone says “punk” as a genre, I inevitably think of mid to late 70’s British punk and the Ramones. Yes, there were predecessors, and there were American West Coast bands too, but I always come back to the Brits. They re-invented rock and roll, reminded us what it was supposed to be about. I tend to think of bands that came after them with a similar style as just rock groups. But if you want to call all groups with a “punk” style punk, then I have another contender.

The 90’s saw a handful of so-called riot girrrrl bands. They had a real edge to them, and usually had a combination of anger/feminism that fit into rock and roll perfectly. To me, the band that epitomized the sound of that movement was Bikini Kill. Here’s the best version of “Rebel Girl” that they made. Kathleen Hanna knocks the vocals out of the park and Joan Jett provides her signature guitar sound to make one ass kicking single.

 

 

I think you’ll agree that it shares some of the same attributes as my first pick. So what’s your favorite punk song?

That’s the name of a documentary made in 79-80 about the LA punk scene. It is mostly concert footage of various bands like X, The Germs, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, etc. but also includes a fair number of interviews of fans, promoters, and musicians too. I’ll admit to always thinking of the UK first when I thought about punk. A lot of that probably has to do with bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, etc. getting a lot of press and footage. There were also celebrities like John Lydon, Sid Vicious, and Joe Strummer that are well known to me. I had seen the occasional Black Flag or Dead Kennedys album in high school, but I never heard any of that stuff until I went to college. Even then, I was in a school full of New Yorkers, so people looked to east coast bands like Ramones, Talking Heads, Bad Brains, and later bands like the Pixies and Mission of Burma for most of their musical influences.

So most of this music was new to me. A few observations:

1) The west coast seemed to be very much like the British punkers as far as what low lifes they were.

2) There wasn’t much talent involved in the scene. With the possible exceptions of Greg Ginn and Billy “zoom” there wasn’t a lick of talent in the entire film. To be fair, the film was really documenting the emergence of the hardcore scene which put more of a premium on raw emotion, energy, and violence.

3) Speaking of violence, there was plenty of it. Yes, the music was high energy, but there really wasn’t any reason why it had to generate violence. The hardcore music tended to attract the violent element. There were plenty of news stories back then of riots and Nazi gang activity. There are videos on youtube of Henry Rollins (a later singer for Black Flag) getting into fist fights with audience members. In this film, Fear mocked their San Francisco audience until a woman got up on stage and tried to accost the lead singer. She ended up being tossed around, and at one point being kicked back into the audience by the lead singer, only to get up time and again to get at him. A general melee ensued. There was another notable moment when Alice Bag stared down a guy in the audience that was trying to start something with her on stage. A rough scene to be sure…

4) At the end of the day, I wasn’t so sure what it was all about. People seemed to be angry, but it wasn’t clear what they were mad about. Some of the interviews of the fans managed to cement my overall view of the LA area. Violent, white, racist, and with an anger that they seemed to see as a right. This is probably what disturbed me the most in the film. Some of the lyrics show legitimate political or personal grudges, but a lot of it seemed like anger management issues, and the crowd ate it up.

 

Over all, I’d say that the LA hardcore scene was an interesting time in music history, but I don’t really feel any desire to seek out any albums from those groups with the possible exception of X. It seems as though after hearing a few songs I can say, “Yeah, I get it…” I think I might look up some more of the San Francisco groups from that era like the Dead Kennedys, The Avengers, The Mutants, and various “queercore” groups have piqued my interest. They seemed to have a good combination of politics and musicianship. Enough to make the music interesting in its own right, nit just as part of a scene.