Sixteen years ago today, on Cinco de Mayo 2008, I was hanging out at the local Clicks where I shot 9-ball on a pool league. I went to the bar for a refill and found a twenty-dollar bill on the ground. The only other person around was the woman sitting at the bar, so I asked her if she was missing any cash. She wasn’t, so I put the twenty on the bar and ordered a round for both of us.
She later told me she thought I was lying about finding the money as an excuse to hit on her. Maybe after sixteen years of my sticking to the original story, she might believe me.
Anyway, there was a simple melodic idea in D Major I would play on acoustic guitar when I stayed at her place. At the time, she had trouble sleeping — and no one needs to tell me what it’s like dealing with sleep disorders. But when I’d play guitar, she would peacefully drift away. Even when I was playing absolutely insane shit on my electric Ibanez Iceman at three in the morning, it was like a tranquilizer.
I took the first idea and added a second bit in E minor, which became the first part, and I experimented with looping both parts, adding multiple layers to the loops, and even running them backwards using the Boss RC-20XL pedal I used to go nuts with. And that was Gina’s Place.
One afternoon, in my livingroom jam studio in Phoenix, I switched on a single microphone and made the only surviving recording of the piece. I opened the windows and doors to capture the ambient sound of the rainstorm that had kicked up out of nowhere. The result is my favorite single-take improvisation that never got a studio-quality recording. The timing on the E minor loop is imperfect, the overall warbly quality sounds like warped magnetic tape, and the performance is obviously off the cuff.
But it was an awesome rainstorm, and I had a blast playing a duet with it. Near the end of the recording, the sun has come out and is pouring through the windows.
Remains in Space, the newest album from Maybe Human, is even better than the last one I reviewed here. It’s so good that the first thing I did after listening to my advance copy was listen to it again. Remains in Space combines the sensibilities of heavy, progressive rock with stoner rock and post-rock in the vein of King Buffalo and If These Trees Could Talk.
Even more melodic and polished than its predecessor, Ape Law, this album presents multi-instrumentalist Christopher Williams taking his musical vision to the next level with groovy basslines, hypnotic guitar work, and atmospheric vocal samples that will transport you to another realm. It even comes with a comic book!
Maybe Human loves vinyl so much that they had physical records pressed by Licorice Pizza, a west-coast label that has put out records by everyone from Smashing Pumpkins to Ziggy Marley. Maybe Human printed a twenty-page comic to accompany the new release. The comic expands on the space theme with a story about spaceships, aliens, humans, love, and grief—all part of one young woman’s journey into the unknown. Taken from a short story written by John Elkin, the Remains in Space comic is about learning who you are through self-discovery.
I’ve been following this band for a while now, and every release gets better and better. Remains In Space presents the band at the top of its game with hard-rocking riffs, tasty distorted guitar melodies, spacey sonic textures, and brilliant compositions.
You can get Remains in Space from the Maybe Human website or on Bandcamp, or listen to it on Spotify.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I hosted a public radio show dedicated to the awesome songs of black jazz musicians who pushed creative boundaries in the 1960s and 70s when modern jazz was giving birth to free jazz with an Afro-conscious vibe, and many of the albums I found along the way are still among my favorite recordings of all time. Below, in chronological order, are five of those gems that no music collection is complete without.
Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music (1968)
Trumpeter Eddie Gale recorded with musical luminaries such as Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, and his debut album as a band leader remains one of my favorites. The diverse blend of genres on Ghetto Music defies easy categorization, and in the first few minutes of bolero-style guitar and gospel-influenced singing, you might not even realize you are listening to jazz. With an ensemble combining acoustic guitar, two female singers, two drummers, two bassists, and more, Gale’s band created a unique and compelling musical statement that remains unmatched to this day. From the opening guitar notes of “Stop the Rain” to the album’s conclusion, this album both defies the boundaries of jazz and unifies it with other modes of musical expression.
Some consider the Last Poets to be the forefathers of modern hip-hop, with topical and fearless rhythms and rhymes addressing racial oppression and racist violence, urban life, drug abuse, and societal revolution. Their first album is an uncompromising beginning to everything they would record later. Like the Black Panther Party, they were listed as a target for the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, which gives you some idea of how dangerous their no-nonsense, street-level poetry was considered by the status quo. And this was just a few guys with some conga drums! Formed in Harlem on the birthday of Malcolm X, the Last Poets embodied the spirit of musical militance, and I had the pleasure of seeing them perform on the University of Michigan campus in the 1990s.
Rashied Al Quartet: New Directions in Modern Music (1973)
Drummer Rashied Ali was a member of the late-period John Coltrane ensemble, and he and Trane recorded one of my all-time favorite albums as a duet: Interstellar Space. After Trane’s death, Ali continued to perform with Alice Coltrane and as a leader of his own quartet, which recorded this album in 1971 two years before its release. The original vinyl of New Directions in Modern Music contains only two songs, one per side, each clocking in at about twenty-one minutes and delivering absolutely fiery musicianship centered around Ali’s ever-fluid drumming style, taking basic themes and exploding them in a way that remains as challenging and stunning today as when it was recorded. To some ears, it will sound like chaos, given its lack of pop-song structures. But the adventurous listener will be rewarded with a powerful, multi-layered sound that pushes the boundaries of jazz and clears out the cobwebs of musical clichés.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Return of the 5000 Lb. Man (1976)
This album features two of my all-time favorite jazz tunes. Kirk’s interpretation of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat”, a Charles Mingus composition that paid tribute to the highly influential tenor saxophonist Lester Young, includes lyrics that add much depth to what was originally an instrumental. “Theme for the Eulipions” pairs spoken poetry with transcendent musicianship. Kirk lost his eyesight at age two, but he never lost his vision. He’s widely known for playing multiple woodwind instruments at the same time and performing with a variety of additional instruments strapped to his chest—a feat some dismissed as gimmicky but which he masterfully employed to create musical textures of profound depth and energy. He was an outspoken proponent of the black civil rights movement in America and, after a stroke that paralyzed half his body in 1975, modified his instruments to be played with one arm. This album was recorded that year.
Marvin “Hannibal” Peterson: Hannibal in Antibes (1977)
Hannibal Lokumbe, born Marvin Peterson, recorded this musically adventurous album with his band in 1977 at the Antibes Jazz Festival. The original vinyl release has two sides, each featuring a track about 20 minutes in length. Hannibal plays his trumpet on side one’s “Ro” and switches to flute on side two’s “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—a stunningly avant garde rendition of a Negro spiritual tune that bears little resemblance to any gospel-music interpretation. African-American history and the black civil rights movement have long been central to the trumpeter’s artistic concerns, along with a deeply humanist philosophy. His website currently features the quotation, “My efforts as a musician have primarily been to affirm that humans are the miraculous replication of an eternal process.”
In 1989, the Cult’s Sonic Temple was probably my favorite album, and it was well-loved by many of the wildly disparate groups of people I hung out with. Metal heads liked it. Punks liked it. New wavers liked it, even if they preferred the Love album. Even the mainstream liked it. Singles from Sonic Temple enjoyed massive airplay on commercial radio, but even my friends who preferred underground music thought it rocked.
With Billy Duffy’s iconic black-leather, guitar-god pose on the cover matched by insanely catchy riff-rock on the tracks, Ian Astbury’s passionate vocals, and a cameo appearance by Iggy Pop, Sonic Temple embodied all that was awesome about rock’n’roll.
These days, I tend to prefer the Electric album for classic Cult, maybe because my high-school self played Sonic Temple so many times on cassette that I wore out the magnetic tape. But if you were to hand me a beer and tell me were about to listen to the entire Sonic Temple album from start to finish, I’d be all aboard.
Last year, I tried to find a t-shirt that featured the killer cover, but what bugged me was that I couldn’t find anything with an image from the inside of the cassette sleeve.
So, I went to eBay and picked up a copy of the original cassette for about five bucks to scan all the artwork. Yes, piracy is alive and well in the twenty-first century, but I doubt the Cult is going to send me a cease-and-desist order for making my own shirt for personal enjoyment. No one has arrested me for wearing my pirated Parasauralophus shirt I had made from a scan of Topps Dinosaurs Attack cards last year.
Episode 39 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
Mags takes Patches and two of her closest friends on a tour of the Asteroid Belt to promote her second solo piano album, unaware that her enemies have planned to kill her.
Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Readers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
Listen or Download the MP3. 61 minutes. 128 Kbps. View or Download the playlist.
Playlist:
Clutch – Wicker A Winged Victory for the Sullen – Every Solstice & Equinox Black Light White Light – Solstice Valley of the Sun – Solstice If These Trees Could Talk – Solstice James Carter – Equinox (John Coltrane) Hoodoo Gurus – Bittersweet Pinkshinyultrablast – Glow Vastly Vast – Thrown Away Psychlona – Gasoline The Freeks – Before The Freeks – Big Black Chunk Stonerror – Red Tank The Atomic Bitchwax – Ice Pick Freek Miss Lava – Murder of Crows
Notes:
Equinox is one of my favorite John Coltrane compositions. Its simple minor-key melody and basic twelve-bar blues structure make it easy for almost anyone to pick up and play. Trane composed quite a few numbers like this that were practically beginner-level blues tunes with charts so easy that even I can follow them. Other examples that quickly come to mind are Mr. P.C. and Cousin Mary from the “Giant Steps” album, and the Mongo Santamaria composition Afro Blue. In concert, Trane and his bandmates tended to treat simple songs like a spaceship treats a launchpad: as a starting point for greater explorations.
Some of my favorite interpretations of Equinox are the rock version from Clutch, the piano-heavy version from Red Garland (who recorded many times with Trane, beginning with their tenure in the Miles Davis Quintet), and the delicate original version from the John Coltrane Quartet.
This playlist features a true gem from James Carter’s 1994 album Jurassic Classics. In addition to the beautiful arrangement, Carter summons an incredible array of sounds and tonalities from his horn—the kind of array that I used to spend anywhere from hours to years trying to achieve with various electronic “effects” during the two decades when I was obsessed with playing guitar. But Carter doesn’t need any effects pedals, effects boards, or studio wizardry to create a monumental tribute to one of the most innovative and influential horn players of the twentieth century, and to take a very simple tune and create something absolutely new with it.
Supported by a solid rhythm section and beautiful, harmonically complex piano work from Craig Taborn, Carter breathes new life into the tune like it is being played for the very first time—not an easy thing to do when the guy who used to play it was John Coltrane.
Making a jazz tune the centerpiece of a playlist full of heavy rock might seem like an odd choice, but if you listen closely to Carter’s interpretation of this classic, then you might agree with me that it blazes with the same kind of intensity that some bands need a stack of fuzz-drenched amplifiers to create; and the wonder of it all is that his band achieves such energy with only acoustic instruments.
For more expeditions into what I consider awesome music, see the PBN Page.
Sandra Leans Toward Eternity from Ssih Mountain is also on Spotify and Soundcloud.
The challenge of reviewing an ambient album like Kenneth James Gibson’s soon-to-be-released Ssih Mountain is that it isn’t music you review. It’s music you write poetry to, or paint ethereal landscapes to. It’s music you close your eyes to and let wash over you while you daydream or meditate or play out imaginary film scenes in your mind. It’s a collection of songless songs that use droning tonalities and slowly changing washes of chords to play with your emotions; sometimes uplifting, sometimes menacing, sometimes peaceful, sometimes pensive. Ssih Mountain is the countryside of dreams and the wind that blows across the distant hills of insomnia.
Probably the best-known similar works are Brian Eno’s most ambient albums. Neroli, New Space Music, and Thursday Afternoon come to mind. I don’t doubt that Kenneth is influenced by Steve Reich’s minimalist works, and Ssih Mountain also reminds me of the Incandescent Cinema album my friends in Trio Nine recorded. Ssih Mountain is one of those albums I like to play on repeat for a few hours to cleanse the musical palette and chill the heck out. It’s like sonic incense to calm the senses.
After listening to the complete album that was sent privately to me for review, I bought Kenneth’s 2016 album, The Evening Falls. It uses more recognizable melodies than Ssih Mountain, usually minimalist piano or slide-guitar melodies played over drones and washes like those found on Mountain. Imagine someone took the first couple of minutes of Pink Floyd’s Shine on You Crazy Diamond and made an entire album with that vibe. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
January 2023 Update: This album is now available to everyone!
Maybe Human’s album Ape Law is a hard-rockin’ tribute to the original Planet of the Apes movies. Each song contains samples of iconic lines of film dialogue which are sure to please longtime fans, and they even work artistically if you lack that context.
But don’t expect the eerie atonality of the first film’s original soundtrack. Instead, you’ll be treated to a combination of post-rock melodies and prog-metal riffs that bring to mind bands I like such as Tool, If These Trees Could Talk, Tuber, and Cambrian Explosion. Maybe Human even throws in a few electronica vibes and some industrial riffage in the vein of vintage Ministry albums. Ape Law is an ambitious combination of sounds and genres, but somehow it all works and feels cohesive thanks to the unifying theme and outstanding bass and guitar performances.
In case you haven’t seen the original films, Ape Law is based on the idea that the apes had two fundamental laws concerning social relationships. One: Ape shall never kill ape. Two: Humans shall never say no to an ape. Clearly, these are a comment on racism, fascism, slavery, and the subjugation of an “out group” by an “in group”, but this instrumental album is not in any way a political manifesto. It’s an affectionate tribute to a beloved series, and the only axe Maybe Human has to grind is an axe with six strings.
The full album was released on November 25, 2022, and Maybe Human made the first track available for your listening pleasure. (See the video at the top of this post.) You can purchase the complete album on Bandcamp at https://maybehuman.bandcamp.com/. There are both digital download and vinyl versions available.
Now take your stinking paws off my blog, you damn dirty apes!
Country Hate Machine began as a solo acoustic side-project to record hillbilly versions of songs by Nine Inch Nails, whose first album was called Pretty Hate Machine. Eventually, CHM evolved into a punk-influenced hybrid mixing rage with humor. I recorded a bunch of demos in informal settings, but life got in the way of doing formal studio sessions. So, I’ve collected twenty of my favorite acoustic demo and concert recordings from twenty years of musical madness for your listening pleasure. They contain strong language and adult subject matter, and they might be inappropriate for children or any other form of mammalian life. Consider yourself warned.
Country Hate Machine: The Lost Years is now available as a free mp3 album including twenty songs, the album art, and a mini-booklet in PDF with credits for all those who contributed lyrical and musical ideas or were kind enough to share their recordings.
I have also added several other out-of-print projects as free downloads on my Music Albums Page.
Reunions and shared laughter. The band greets them all.
Then in unison: a chord. Not just any chord.
It’s a harmony of light, shining in the dark.
This poem is a variation on Japanese poetic forms that often use groupings of five and seven syllables. It is named after my favorite local band in Ann Arbor in the mid-1990s. Bassist Geoff Streadwick was previously a member of the locally legendary Morsel, created 40 oz. Sound studio to record local talent, and sadly passed away many years ago while still a young, creatively brilliant man.
The vinyl single.
You can still find Gondolier’s music online thanks to their drummer, Jayson, on his Soundcloud page. Although those recordings remain amongst my favorite things, they pale in comparison to the jaw-dropping majesty of experiencing Gondolier in concert in a friend’s basement or Ann Arbor’s Blind Pig or the bar formerly known as Ypsilanti’s Cross Street Station.
The flip side of the single.
For many years, I had a Gondolier t-shirt silkscreen-printed with the first single’s cover art by the company founded by Morsel’s bassist Brian Hussey. I wore it through seven kinds of hell until the damn thing nearly fell off my body. I still miss it.
The only surviving picture of me in my Gondolier shirt from 1997, and you can’t even see it.
Gondolier was three young men from Michigan who made music that inspired me and continues to inspire me to this day. I had the pleasure of interviewing them once, for a music review in a local publication. But nothing has ever compared to being right against the stage when they belted out the greatest sounds I’d ever heard.
A few years ago, I read a draft of a scene from the Meteor Mags stories to my workshop group. In the scene, our space-faring criminals turn on the ship’s radio in time to hear the DJ back-announce a few songs and say what comes next.
During the feedback session, one of my workshoppers asked, “How do you come up with all these crazy song titles and band names?”
I’m rarely stunned into silence on matters of writing, but that question hit me like the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs. It took me a moment to realize that when it comes to music, I might as well be from another planet than some of my writing comrades.
My answer? “I didn’t make them up. Those are all real songs and real bands! And they kick ass!”
You can find a list of all the real songs the characters in the series have broadcast, performed, or just plain argued about on the unofficial soundtrack page of Mags’ website.
I like to think those songs might be played if Mags and Patches ever get made into a film or a cartoon. Nothing could make me happier than seeing and hearing Mags perform Porcupine Tree’s Trains as a solo piano piece in the dead of night by candlelight from Red Metal at Dawn, or her brilliant, butt-naked rendition of the Hoodoo Gurus’ Down on Me with a tribe of space monkeys and telepathic space octopuses in Small Flowers.
I have always felt that when the end credits roll on Mags’ first film, the song that must destroy the theater’s speakers is Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl.
It’s a fuckin’ barnburner.
I don’t know if Kathleen Hanna and the gang in Bikini Kill had in mind an even older song to which Rebel Girl traces its roots: a pro-labor, feminist acoustic jam by Hazel Dickens called The Rebel Girl.
Decades before Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter became a country-music hit in the States, multi-instrumentalist Hazel Dickens was singing pro-union, pro-people, and pro-women bluegrass songs in a folk-music vein, advocating through music and direct activism for America’s miners. She also eulogized her brother in song after he died of black lung disease.
Born into a coal-mining family, Hazel died in 2011, and you don’t hear about her very often these days. But she loved rebel girls, and I love her for that. The social problems she fearlessly addressed nearly a century ago have not yet been solved in our country, and maybe they will never be. But music gives me hope.
Most songs on the unofficial soundtrack page have a similar bit of history behind them and a thematic or emotional relevance to the stories. They appear in the text for a reason—even if the only reason is because Patches is obsessed with gangsta rap.
But my workshoppers were right to suspect that I have been making up a hell of a lot of other songs for my imaginary bands: the Psycho 78s (named after a line in the Misfits song Horror Business), the teenage Dumpster Kittens (who are some of the nicest kids you’ll ever meet despite singing about suicide, murder, interplanetary death armies, and nuclear infernos), and the Sterile Skins (a ska-punk crossover band that filled its choruses with the British “Oi!” despite being mostly Chicanos from SoCal).
But what I’ve never told my workshoppers (or anyone else, until now) is that for every imaginary song whose lyrics appear in the series, I put together real music.
And for that, I blame Greg.
Greg was the awesomest drummer I ever had the good fortune to share a house with, and it was a unique pleasure to hear him bashing away for hours in the basement. He was in a number of ass-kicking bands whose shows I enjoyed, and we’ve kept in touch over the years despite being thousands of miles apart now.
I miss that guy.
Back in 2015 or so, I sent him a message about how I wanted my characters to have their own unique songs, not just other people’s material they referred to. He told me, “Then you need to write those songs.”
He always had a way of cutting through my apparently complex problems with straight-forward advice.
That evening, I picked up an acoustic guitar and bashed out chords for the song that appears in the episode Whipping Boy. Ever since, I have done the same for every absolutely bonkers “imaginary” song that gets its lyrics printed in the series. It’s now a fundamental part of the creative process.
Whipping boy! What’s your name? Whipping boy! A life of pain! Maybe you should take the cash and run. Maybe you should get yourself a gun, before they kill your soul. Alright!
Most of the earlier songs can be played on a standard-issue acoustic guitar using basic power chords. After all, despite teaching several aspiring musicians about music theory and performing in small jazz combos, I still enjoy a straight-forward, punk-rock approach to songs you could perform drunk around a campfire.
But a few years ago, I got a baritone electric guitar from ESP. With its longer neck length and scale, and a weight that’s somewhere between a guitar and a bass, the baritone is designed to be tuned a fourth below standard guitar tuning, with a low A instead of a low E.
I tried that tuning, but after Wo Fat convinced me that C minor is the heaviest key in all eternity—and considering my love for Jimmy Page’s open-C tuning from Poor Tom on Led Zeppelin’s Coda—I tried a low C instead, keeping the standard string intervals from a normal tuning.
As far as C minor goes, one of my favorite heavy pieces in that key is Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. Ukrainian pianist Anna Federova brings even more life to it than my concert recording of the composer performing it.
When I ran my C-tuned baritone guitar through a Logan Square Destroyer distortion pedal, ultimate heaviness resulted: crisp treble and gut-punching bass. I bought this pedal because I am a raving maniac for the first four or five Queens of the Stone Age albums (and their predecessor, Kyuss), so I thought it might help me get closer to that sound.
It did not disappoint.
To push heaviness a little further, I sometimes keep the C-based tuning but drop the low string to B flat—just like how you would tune to Drop D on a standard guitar. That gives me a power chord on the low three strings, and if I throw on a capo, I get some stupidly heavy sounds from the ESP in a variety of keys.
I am all about truly stupid levels of heaviness. If your riffs don’t give me permanent brain damage, then you’re wasting my time!
Maybe someday I’ll produce an album of these imaginary songs. But as much as I love to sing them, we need Mags or her teenage friend Sarah on the mic—not me.
I’m no brilliant singer, though I’ve never let that stop me from performing or recording. But I often fantasize about hammering the hell out of my baritone axe while someone more talented than me takes over on vocals. I like to think we’d give Alice in Chains a run for their money.
Happy Thanksgiving, Martians! This year I am thankful for ripping riffs and brutally heavy jams, for that annoying pain I get while building up my guitar callouses again, and for music in general. It remains one of the great joys of my life.
Last year I sent copy of the Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition to a band whose albums I listened to approximately one million times while writing the story Voyage of the Calico Tigress. Mags and her crew, including space monkeys and telepathic octopuses, do an impromptu performance of one of Snail’s songs. In return, I received a note saying, “This is the coolest thing ever,” which made me smile. I’m glad the guys got a kick out of it. Here are some other albums in heavy rotation in the writing lab.
Unida: El Coyote.
If the Internet is to be believed, Unida’s final album was never released by their record label, but was eventually made available directly to fans at concerts. It is often found on the web with different titles, but I like El Coyote. Singer John Garcia, formerly of the legendary Kyuss, is Mags’ favorite vocalist, and references to his various projects pepper her stories like buckshot.
Hell Camino: Hell Camino.
I usually listen to this album back-to-back with its follow-up,Orange Lily.
Wo Fat: Noche del Chupacabra.
Wo Fat convinced me that C minor is the heaviest key of all time. They are the reason I got a baritone electric guitar to tune to Drop C. My favorite songs on this album are Common Ground and Descent into the Maelstrom, the latter of which shares a title with a totally different yet amazingly ass-kicking song by Australia’s Radio Birdman. You really can’t go wrong with any Wo Fat album. Psychedelonaut slays with tunes like Analog Man, and The Black Code is a masterpiece withHurt at Gone and Sleepof the Black Lotus, a title I believe to be inspired by my favorite Conan story Queen of the Black Coast, about a female pirate.
Orange Goblin: Time Travelling Blues.
I never heard an album I didn’t like from Orange Goblin, but this is the one that stays in heavy rotation. From the rumbling drum riff that opens to album to the closing song that shares the album’s title, it’s such a hefty slab of rock and roll that I usually listen to it twice in a row. The title song’s declaration “We own the sky” has become a recurring motif in Mags’ stories, and her band covers it in their concert in Blind Alley Blues.
Black Angels: Passover.
I attended a Black Angels concert last October in downtown Phoenix, and the music was so simultaneously heavy and beautiful. These cats annihilate me. The band hails from Austin, Texas, but I first heard them courtesy of the Europeans who run my other favorite Internet radio station, GRRR Radio. GRRR Radio’s streaming URL is: http://pstnet5.shoutcastnet.com:50390 This album doesn’t have what is perhaps my favorite Black Angels song, Currency, but it’s damned amazing all the way through. Black Grease and Bloodhounds on My Trail are my faves on this one.
My father died two years ago today, after a long bout with cancer that spread from his spleen to eventually his brain and his whole body. Dad and I did not agree on most things, and my teens were times of conflict, to put it mildly. But in my twenties, we were able to put most of that behind us and just hang out.
Dad never understood my love for playing guitar until I was in my thirties. Then one day, he started sending me emails asking about mandolins—and I’m an easy target for anyone and everyone who has questions about music theory and stringed instruments. I don’t know exactly what turned him on to the mandolin, but soon he got into guitar. Our relationship reached a turning point after he got his first guitar and told me, “Now I get why you were into this.”
All I could say was, “It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?”
By then, we were separated by great geographical distance. But when I would visit, Dad stocked the refrigerator with beer and tuned up his growing collection of guitars, and we would play together for hours. I would show him a few techniques and answer his theory questions, and we played from charts he had for country and worship music he liked.
By the time I got into my forties, Dad’s arthritis made it increasingly difficult for him to play. But he still loved buying guitars, and trading them in later for other models, and getting on Internet forums to discuss gear, and trying new types of strings. He often performed at his church, accompanying his impressively deep bass voice with his ever-growing arsenal of acoustic guitars.
It was a massive about-face from his discouraging attitude toward my love of something which, for twenty years, had basically defined my entire life: playing the guitar. He eventually told me why he was so antagonistic toward my interest, and the reason is probably too personal to blog about. The important point is this: he eventually changed his tune.
Perhaps my fondest memories of Dad are the ones we created over a 12-pack of beer and 12 vibrating strings, jamming in unison. He never got to the level he wanted to with the instrument, but he kept trying and learning and improving. At the age of 44, I can tell you that journey never ends. One day, you pick up the axe, and something changes inside you. You’re never the same afterwards.
Long live the glorious island republic of Scandinavia. They make some awesome music there. What’s that you say? You can’t find it on a map? Then try this one.
I started to get a clue about what a Scandinavia is right about the time I first heard Hoven Droven’s tune SlentBjenn. Taking the energy of a rock band, adding fiddle and saxophone, and drawing on folk material, Hoven Droven lays down some seriously heavy grooves with beautiful melodies.
This post includes scans of their album Groove, which you can score on Amazon, and the first Nordic Roots sampler that features one of their tunes. If you want to get totally Scandinavian, Nordic Roots put out a second and third sampler of awesome bands from the region.
In 1962, Art Blakey recorded The African Beat not with his quintessentially swinging Jazz Messengers but a percussion ensemble. Yusef Lateef, who also recorded modern jazz albums using Asian and African ideas, joins the ensemble. The result is a sumptuously rhythmic album that often gets overlooked, perhaps due to its defiance of easy categorization.
Nat Hentoff’s liner notes give a brief but enlightening explanation of the music’s sources and the musicians’ cultural backgrounds. I recommend The African Beat for fans of jazz, percussion, “world” music, and African music. Fans of jazz/rock fusions and prog rock might also like this album, if they want to expand their listening into some other types of musical fusion.
2022 Update: This compact disc went out of print in June 2021 due to changes at Amazon. However, you can find it available to download as an MP3 album, at no cost, on this blog’s Music Albums page.
Making art quickly makes chaos out of your walls. Things get hung at random and, over the course of a year, lose all sense of order. Closing out 2015 required a bit of wall patching, cleaning, painting, and re-hanging.
Yesterday saw the arrival of the proof copy of a music album I’ll be publishing this month. The artwork, which I designed using scans of an acrylic painting and an ink drawing, came out really nice. 2022 Update: This compact disc went out of print in June 2021 due to changes at Amazon, but you can download it for free as an MP3 album from this blog’s Music Albums page.
I don’t do the tree thing in December, but the art studio desperately needed some suitable greenery. Here in the desert, we get ordinary house flies all year long, even in the winter. Otherwise the weather is so nice you can open windows and doors and let the cat come and go as she pleases and enjoy the sunlight and play guitar on the porch and… then the flies. It doesn’t take but a couple in the house to drive me mad. But, when life gives you flies, grow Venus flytraps.
Nothing says seasonal festivity like a carnivorous plant. I ordered this one on eBay from “Joe’s Carnivorous Plants”. She just ate her first fly yesterday. I was so proud. The leaves are thin enough that when the sun shines on them you can see the pesky little fly trapped in there.
That should keep the freshly cleaned and organized sketch room from devolving into pestilence and infestation for another year! Go, little flytrap!
While patiently waiting for our 1-in-2500 limited edition album The Gate to arrive this week from the sonic headquarters of Swans, we went looking for other extended psychedelic monster jams.
And that’s how we ended up with a massive musical marathon courtesy of Germany’s Electric Moon. This guitar-bass-drums trio, formed in 2009, has been playing festivals all over Europe and releasing many mind-blowing albums in the process. Here are three of our favorites so far.
Inferno
This is the first one we listened to, and we were hooked.
D Tune
This one incorporates synth sounds, and has a more driving, upbeat vibe.
Flaming Lake
This video has some cool space imagery to go with the jams.
P.S. Yes, The Gate did finally arrive on Saturday. With three of its songs clocking in around 30 minutes each, it is a supremely awesome sonic experience of pure Swans power.
After listening approximately a gazillion times to the Motor Dolls album we posted twelve days ago, we had to pick up this one, too. Burning Memories is the second and final solid slab of Detroit rock and roll from this trio, the stand-out cuts being “You Want It” and “Nailed to the Cross”. Several people have told us to include “Power” in that list, too, though the whole album is a veritable non-stop blaze of straight-up rock fury. You can find it on Amazon as Motor Dolls: Burning Memories, and it is usually selling for about half the price of Motor Dolls: All Fired Up.
One of the songs on this 1996 album, “Hangover”, appeared two years later on a compilation called Motor City’s Burnin’ 1: 1968-1998. That disc places the Motor Dolls right alongside legendary acts like the MC5 and The Stooges, and other hard-rocking southeast Michigan bands of the mid-90s like Big Chief. We think after hearing this album you will agree that placement was well-deserved.
We love getting weird stuff in the mail. Who doesn’t? No, not creepy weird. More like “strange and mysterious and fun” weird. This mysterious postcard arrived in the martian mailbox signed only by “The DJ Who Shall Not Be Named”. That just brings a smile to our little late-night-blogging-obsessed faces. It features Scotty Karate, and you can witness him performing in this same outfit and colorful stage set-up in the video below.
Video notes: Scotty Karate plays Dig A Hole at Smalls. February 13, 2011. Part of the Henriettahaus Coffee Roasters Acoustic series.
Once upon a time, I lived in Michigan and held a copy of this awesome album in my hands as a volunteer DJ at the college radio station WCBN. But that was 20 years ago, and the album has been out of print for some time. So, this month I got a copy from Germany. Yeah, Germany! eBay is an amazing thing.
At WCBN, we had a section of the massive CD and vinyl library dedicated to local music. You could find on that shelf so many great bands from Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Detroit, and all over Michigan. But, it was not that special shelf that introduced me to Motor Dolls, though I would often pull this disc from the shelf to play on the air.
No, I had a friend who was into this band, and we went to Detroit together many times to catch their shows. Motor Dolls could seriously throw down in concert, and we always had fun. So you know what? Instead of recouping my cost by putting it back into the eBay market, I’ll just send him this disc in today’s outgoing mail. He’ll get a kick out of it.
The Motor Dolls t-shirt I bought at one of their shows was one of my favorite pieces of clothing ever, and I wore it until the damn thing practically disintegrated and fell off my body. I haven’t loved a shirt like that in a long time. And you know what? This album sounds even better to me than it did 20 years ago. It would go well in a set with L7, Mensen, and Bikini Kill, for starters, along with Ann Arbor/Detroit legends Big Chief, Easy Action, Speedball, and Wig.
If you want to hear this great little slab of mid-90s Detroit rock, you can buy it on Amazon. Currently, the lowest price is around $20. Feel free to hate me for picking up the only available copy on eBay for less than $10, even including shipping from Germany.
And, don’t forget to pick up the Motor Dolls: Burning Memories album, too! (That one, you can currently obtain for less than $10 including shipping to the USA.) These two albums have never, to my knowledge, been made available as “official” downloads.
Here’s a Motor Dolls video from singer/guitarist Paula Messner’s YouTube channel. The jam is “You Want It” and appears on the Burning Memories album. Paula was a bad-ass frontwoman, and her rhythm section (Monic on drums and Dana on bass) was a powerhouse. Where are they now? I honestly don’t know. But their rock lives on.
This album is available on Amazon as Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Soup. Though you can currently find CD or even cassette versions, Amazon does not yet have it available as an MP3 download. Numerous Amazon customers have rated it four and five stars and written reams of praise. So let us simply say, we concur. It is truly awesome.
When Voodoo Soup came out in the mid 1990s, Hendrix fans had fewer posthumous releases of quality than we do now. This and Rykodisc’s stellar album of Radio One BBC recordings, later released in expanded form as the BBC Sessions two-CD set, were among the finest. Few if any of the recordings released since then can match these two recordings for sound quality, energetic performance, song selection, and production choices. Even songs released on The Cry of Love receive superior post-production on Voodoo Soup, and in our opinion sound more like what Hendrix would have aimed for in final mixes than most other “posthumously completed” compilations.
We scanned the CD booklet, including the complete 19-page essay on the context and production of the songs, for our archives, and share it with you now. As our CD copy had a cut out on the front cover, we did not scan the artwork by Moebius, but you can easily find that in any product listing for this album.
Sonic’s Rendezvous issued this live recording from 1978 twenty years later in 1998. It features the late Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5, Scott Asheton of The Stooges, Gary Rasmussen of The Up, and Scott Morgan of The Rationals. It’s a bit of a who’s who of Ann Arbor rock and roll legends.
Though we can’t recall exactly when and where we purchased this disc in Ann Arbor in 1998, it might have been at one of Scott Morgan’s live shows. We caught him once at a basement party in the house of a friend from the radio station (WCBN), and perhaps once or twice at Club Heidelberg. If there is any doubt as to whether or not Scott Morgan’s blues-driven rock guitar impressed us, the not-so-subtle handwriting on the last page of the booklet should clear that up. It looks like we added our own graphics to Fred’s guitar on the cover, too.
Despite our enthusiastic vandalism, this album remains a favorite memento of Ann Arbor’s rocking musical history. Check it out. You can find it on Amazon in CD, MP3 (only $8.99), or vinyl as Sonic’s Rendezvous Sweet Nothing.
Note: Since the release of this album, more material from Sonic’s Rendezvous has come out of the archives. They are not all filed in the same place as this album on Amazon, but under “Sonic’s Rendezvous Band.”
Although you can now download these two albums in mp3 versions which sound better than my old cassettes, I’ve held on to them sentimentally. They are among my favorite hard rock albums of the 1980s, along with 13 Songs by Fugazi, Bleach by Nirvana, and Louder than Love by Soundgarden.
I don’t have any certification or evidence that Henry Rollins really did sign this copy of Do It. I can’t prove its authenticity. But I can tell you that in the mid-to-late 1990s in the rock-and-roll blur that was my twenties, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I heard Rollins come and speak at the amazing Michigan Theatre several times. On one of his tours, he did a book signing right across the street at the Borders bookstore. I went to that signing and asked him to sign my copy of Do It, which was and still is my favorite Rollins Band album.
The inlay to the Screaming Trees tape has obvious wear. You can see the dirt and what appears to be moisture damage to the paper. That’s exactly what it is, and the same goes for the Do It inlay. I never spilled anything on these but they did endure some humid and inclement weather in my old truck when I was travelling back and forth across the country for fifteen years as if there was actually something out there worth driving to. Now I am a cynical old bastard who doesn’t even have a cassette player.
The last time I played these tapes was 2009. I played them on a dual cassette deck with a USB output and digitized them into glorious mp3 files. Yeah, it was kind of a waste of time since I could download them now from Amazon or something, but it verified they play. Since then, for six years, they have been stored indoors, free from inclement weather, on my bookshelves with the rest of my pirate treasure. ARRGH! You can see there is a little wear to the text on the cassettes, but you can easily read all the song titles and stuff, and the tapes themselves are in amazingly clean and solid shape for being more than twenty or thrity years old now.
“It’s a one way ride to the end of the universe.” — Mark Lanegan
Sub Pop put out a limited edition EP from the Screaming Trees — at gas stations, as one reviewer recalls, and perhaps through their subscription-based mail-order service of the late 1980s. The songs on Change has Come are five of the Trees’ best. But somehow they missed making it onto either of the Screaming Trees collections: Anthology the SST Years 1985-1989 and Ocean of Confusion 89-96. At the time of this writing, no one has seen fit to issue official mp3 downloads for them! The compact disk retains its status as a rarity.
For many years, no one wanted to sell their copy. But, the global Internet marketplace has expanded greatly since this album came out. In the last ten years, it has become regularly available in the $20 to $40 range: Screaming Trees Change Has Come EP.
Amazon claims a date of 1994 on this, but we remember listening to it many years before that. Perhaps a German release came out in 1989 on vinyl, with a CD pressing for the USA in 1991. Our best friend’s brother had a copy we never saw, but we heard our friend’s cassette copy dubbed from that unidentified source.
Do you think you have the definitive proof of the correct release date? We’d love to hear from you then! Comment, please! And now, archival photos & scans, including the original shrink wrap!