The Change Music Variety Show

Earwacks Discography

2011-06-23T22:36:00.000-05:00

Most of these records will be available for sale at the Earwacks concert at the West End Bar and Grill, Saturday, June 24th, 2011.

For the vinyl fetishist, especially those who collect Saint Louis releases, Earwacks is beyond all others both in output and the quality and historical significance of their releases. Three LPs, two singles and a flexi disc is quite a bit of material to collect and listen to. Here's my list of their releases, in chronological order.

Lauren Garbo b/w The Trouble With My Treble Is the Space In My Bass
1979

Dominic Schaeffer's Lauren Garbo was the first song they released on this thick slab of 33 1/3 rpm vinyl. It was engineered by Oliver Sain, the St. Louis R&B legend, at his studio. The b-side was Dominic and David Udell's The Trouble With My Treble Is the Space In My Bass from the same studio and engineer. The classic Earwacks lineup of the 1970s were all here: Dominic and Benet Schaeffer, David Udell and Tracy Wynkoop. The cover reads: Behind the scenes: Mark Gray (who used to roadie and run live sound for them and now owns the Famous Bar on Cherokee), Tim Maue (who helped move gear, too) and Danny (aka Fo Jammi, who was in Jambox at the time). The photographs were by Matt O'Shea. It also says produced by Wax Theatrix (sic). The label number is WTI-1. I bought my copy as a 99 cent cutout at Streetside shortly before they closed. God only knows how long it had been sitting around in there.

The Scrape! b/w Oliver and This Kid's Perspective "Dim"
1980 and 1978

David Udell's tricky and complex The Scrape was a hugely popular song for Earwacks. The 33 1/3 rpm vinyl is slightly lighter than Lauren Garbo, but still quite heavy. The b-side is an aural collage featuring the band sitting around bullshitting with producer Oliver Sain, who claims that "Disco music will eventually drown in it's own puke." and the complex and emotionally-charged David Udell piece "Dim". The photography is again by Matt O'Shea, and engineering by Oliver Sain.

Distances
1980?
An extremely rare LP, one I only saw back when it was new and never since, and one I currently don't own. Some of their best compositions of the 1970s are on this album. David tells me that less than ten LPs have been found and will be sold at their show at the West End Grill on June 24th, 2011. They are plain sleeved albums without covers or liner notes, but better than nothing. An essential Earwacks disc.

Noisy Paper Flexi-Disc
1981

Songlist: The Magic of Fear, The Motion Song, and Ronald Reagan. Clear flexi-disc inserted into Noisy Paper No. 8. This disc was censored in the mastering process by the persons producing the disc, who even censored non-objectional words that sounded suspicious. Recently seen selling for over $40 on eBay. This was when they changed their band name from Earwacks to Wax Theatricks, though the disc was produced by "Earwacks Inc", though I'm quite sure they never legally incorporated a damn thing.

I'm unsure of the order the next two LPs took, though I'm sure that Wax Theatricks came out in 1984, Fo Jammi's Name Magic (featuring the entire Earwacks lineup) has no date. I'll assume that Name Magic came first, for convenience. Both of these albums are relatively easy to find, as quite a few copies are still in the hands of the artists. Lucky for us, since these are some of their most well-recorded songs.

Steve Pick's Cock

2011-05-13T21:32:00.000-05:00

For years I've had a cracked and silly idea that all my favorite melodies of a certain kind were actually a song, and that I wanted to call it "Steve Pick's Cock". It's not a song about Steve's cock, though I'm sure a song about anyone's cock would be an amusing and peripatetic tale if done right. I wanted to call it that because there was a moment, long ago, in Webster Groves, right before I left St. Louis, when all of my new wave and punk rock friends of the early 1980s came together in an unprecedented orgy of creative energy and fun.

Dana Ong started going to Webster, and Duwann Dunn, and the punk rock scene of the 80s was turning dark and destructive, but the fun 100 was still running all over the city being fired up with various happenings as sweet and unusual as Duck Feedings and White Castle Weddings, to the usual deathless musical achievements. Everyone was Rene Spencer's best friend, and we all did the Lizard with Tony Renner while dancing to Get Smart at Blueberry Hill. We all knew Alex Weir was really Ed Eno, of course, and Riot Act changed players almost every practice as things veered crazy out of control down in Jeff Roth's north side schoolhouse. Hangouts were walls, next to the Tivoli, across the street from Duff's.

One of the best completely Webster Groves bands was the mighty, mighty, mighty Oozkicks. Yes, three mightys worth. They were among the youngest punks around, supposedly all 16 and younger when they first played at some VFW hall or something and blew all of us old twenty-somethings away with their relentless, incredible energy as they bopped and bobbed in furious punk lockstep with their fractured and unusual beats. The minute they played their first song in front of me I realized they were exploring, with great urgency and depth, melodies and themes I loved that I had never taken seriously enough to develop as fully as they had. I had only gone so far as to allow myself a signature interval as a taste of this more advanced musical thought, which in my continuing ignorance of even the most basic idea of music theory, I called diminished fifths, since it was a love for the note a half step down or up from the fifth of any note. This is why my song "Surf's Up, Gang!" is rooted in a two chord modulation from A to F, a half step up from the fifth of A, which is E, of course.

From the earliest days of Jambox I had been developing tiny melodic fragments that explored this affinity I felt for this diminished fifth idea. When I lived and worked in a medical fraternity house next to Compton Hill Reservoir park on South Grand I taught myself as much piano as I could figure out for myself by spending my lunch breaks playing an old piano I found in their outbuilding across the small yard from the basement kitchen where I cooked them meals. The piece I composed that showcased my primitive ideas I have always called "Diminished Fifths", and it's a pretty standard exploration of the interval with some really basic counterpoint. That's the only real piece of music I ever composed that fits into this idea that isn't included in this rough recording. All the other pieces and snatches are either in my as-yet unrecorded long instrumental piece "18th Street" or here in "Steve Pick's Cock."

The song section of this piece was sketched out after The Obvious dissolved away, so I never really developed it as a song. I can play a song I write over and over to the point of ridiculousness (because what is more ridiculous than singing songs no one knows but you to yourself?) but this song always needed parts that are more like bare melodies than a series of chords, so playing it alone wasn't satisfying to me. I always wanted to put the other parts in there somehow, the tiny little mathematical diminished progressions and scales that make up the rest of the song, and the intro and outro were also Jambox sketches I'm sure Geo Ramsey would easily remember.

A few days ago my buddy Gabe Katz threw up an Amun Duul II youtube of a song he thought remembered featured what he called whole tone scales, and when he was telling me about it on his new iPhone 4 I thought about "Steve Pick's Cock" and the vague plan I had to finish it some day. I thought the intro and outro were maybe whole tone scales, and was hoping he might be able to tell. I realized that now I could record a crude version of it myself at home, at least to preserve the ideas in some form, even a crude form. I revisited the song as I had last revised the lyrics, and changed a few words again, and noticed it was a rare lyric that was a poetic series of impressions about all my Webster Groves punk rock pals from back in the day.

I wondered why I thought the phrase "Steve Pick's Cock" was significant enough to me to be a song title, and I remembered the first time I ever heard the phrase, falling from the rose-petalled lips of the most beautiful girl in the world, as she told me about some famous photographs taken on a wild night at the cemetery with the gang when I wasn't there. It was a turning point for me, because now I saw myself as a point along a continuum, rather than good or bad, strong or weak, but merely as fuzzy and indistinct placeholder that means I'm as good as I can be, but never more, and never less only if I managed to cling to what I have and keep it all as good as I can be. Plus it was funny, the whole idea that such a thing could be the stuff of normal lazy conversation, on the telephone on a school night, homework open on the bed behind her, lights burning in the soft Webster Groves air. And if you love Steve Pick as much as we do, you know that you can laugh about some things because they can't be diminished by anything but time and age, and even then, the eternal reality of the indestructible and immortal past still lends them a strength other things will never have at all.

Download this song if you want to hear it.

It's my birthday again, but...

2010-11-09T08:11:00.003-06:00

Let's get one thing straight! Beneath all the lies of my fleshly disguises, I'm still not old.

Here are the words:

The time has come, and I just don't know how
To sing of when it wouldn't ever be now
Go back against our wills in time
Remember when you were mine

'Cause if you gaze deep into my dark brown eyes
You're gonna see back behind a thousand lies:

I'm not old

I'm still a rock'n'roll star
I'm back in love with you
The fans are going wild
There's only one thing to do

Now that I'm not old

You say you're in a fit
You're getting ready to cry
You're such a nervous girl
There's only one thing to try

And that's the very same thing
I once did with you

Download "I'm Not Old"

I played this at my 50th birthday party, and I had a fun story about that in this old post.

Italian hit record covered by Francoise Hardy

2010-11-08T19:13:00.002-06:00

Above you'll see two youtube videos, the top one being Mina's "Se Telefonando" and the exquisite Francoise Hardy doing a French cover of the same song with French lyrics.

My old friend Robert Hunt posted the Francoise Hardy song on facebook, which prompted me to post the lyrics and a my rough translation. So here's the Italian lyrics; the french lyrics can be found on the youtube page hosting the french video if you click on it.

Se Telefonando

Lo stupore della notte
spalancata
sul mar

(I don't know what the stupor of the night may be, but I like it) The stupor of the night is scattered across the sea.

ci sorprese che eravamo
sconosciuti
io e te.

We were surprised, you and I, that we didn't know each other.

Poi nel buio le tue mani
d'improvviso
sulle mie…cresciuto troppo in fretta
questo nostro amor…

Then in the dark your hands suddenly on mine… Grown too quickly, this our love…

Se telefonando
io potessi dirti addio
ti chiamerei…

(Those who know Italian might note that the chorus of this song is entirely in the subjunctive, a tricky tense in any Romance language, and one more suggestive of poetry and highfalutin sentiments than everyday speech) If I, when telephoning, could say goodbye, I would call you...

Se io rivedendoti
fossi certa che non soffri
ti rivedrei…

If I were to see you again, if I could be certain that you wouldn't suffer, I would see you again...

Se guardandoti negli occhi
sapessi dirti basta
ti guarderei…

If, as I was gazing into your eyes, I were to know how to say Enough! I would look at you...

Ma non so spiegarti
che il nostro amore appena nato
Ë giá finito…

But I don't know how to explain to you that this, our love, is already finished..

Then she repeats it from the top. I just love the relative strength of her voice compared to Hardy, but I love looking at Hardy and I do love her voice.

Our Republican Bosses

2010-10-28T16:50:00.006-05:00

Since there's to be a mid-term election next week, and if you believe the polls and pundits, the Republicans will soon be bringing their jackboots down squarely on the faces of the American workers and poor because people are upset that we don't live in a utopia as our just reward for electing an African American President, I have decided to resurrect my Paycheck Party theme song from oblivion.

This song is merely a sketch, and references some of the worst insults to decency of the previous administration, such as a lust for torture they never even tried to disguise, but the idea is still valid. The very richest people in the world are controlling our politicians, and the party they control the most is the Republican party. They are intent on taking this country back to the plutocrat days of the 1880s at any cost, and are spending tons of money and using their near-total media influence to bring about the complete subjugation of the American worker to their agenda of increasing their already obscene wealth from most of the money in the economy to all the money in the economy.

The real crisis in America is that nobody cares about their paychecks. Instead they mostly care about proving someone else wrong about their views on things completely unrelated to their paychecks. In France they are fighting to the death for the right to retire at 60 instead of 65, while in America people are completely indifferent if grandmothers are eating cat food in slums or required to work into their nineties as long as Glen Beck keeps them distracted with his apocalyptic fantasies. As if anyone can even get a decent job if they are over forty these days. Wise up, fools!

It's a crappy song because no one I respect has ever bothered to try to help me edit it down, which it needs. Plus, I wanted to do the song in a waltzy 3/4 time but I couldn't figure out how to do that recording on the computer. So if anyone out there wants to help me finish this song, I would love some help!

Republican Bosses

They lie and they cheat
and they rob and they steal
our Republican bosses today.
They give you a job
then they take it away
because that’s the Republican way.
They fire you and cheat you
deny you and use you
Republican bosses that say:
That they control everything
all of the money and
guess who they’re not gonna pay?

They own you, they use you,
deny you and charge you
for everything that should be free.
They think that they’re better
than everyone else,
and they think that they’re
better than me.
They wheel and they deal
and insist that it’s real,
these Republican liars today.
They’ll give you insurance
and take it away
because that’s the Republican way.

We just got to fire these
Republican bosses;
we just got to throw them away.
We gotta get rid of them.
sue them. disarm them;
then down in Guantanamo Bay
we’ll give them the treatment
they gave to those Muslims,
and ask if they’d rather decline
to define what is torture,
and what is illegal;
to finally make up their mind.

They’re not paying taxes,
don’t cover their asses
and hiking up CEO pay.
They lie and they cheat
and they rob and they steal,
and they smirk that Republican way.
As if they all know that
we know that they screwed us.
As if it will all be OK.
We just got to fire these
Republican bosses,
we just got to throw them away.

Blame it on politics
blame it on government
blame it on cable TV.
Blame it on spin
you can’t even begin
to uncover the lies that we see.
But we’ve got the votes,
the one thing that they fear
and we’re going to vote them all out.
We’ll vote them all out
on the streets and we’ll show them
what poor folks is really about.

We’ll take back our government
take back our laws and
take back all the rights of the free.
We’ll turn back the clock
to when a corporation
was less than a person like me.
We’ll tear down their privilege
expose all their exploits
and drain all their bank accounts dry.
We’ll build a new country
where people who work
are as good as some CEO guy.

They lie and they cheat
and they rob and they steal
our Republican bosses today.
They give you a job
then they take it away
because that’s the Republican way.
They own you, they use you,
deny you and charge you
for everything that should be free.
They think that they’re better
than everyone else,
and they think that they’re
better than me.

Download Republican Bosses, or listen to it on my blog.

For my original, astounding, simple, foolproof ideas on fixing our economy, see The Minimum Laws blog.

Intelligent Love

2010-10-13T21:28:00.004-05:00

I love intelligent girls, I mean, really intelligent girls. The presence of an enormous brain infatuates me at the moment of apprehension, I feel a real tightness in my chest, and my heart bursts. A brain is far more potent than any mere physical attribute.

When you meet anyone, it takes a while to figure out just how smart they are. Sometimes you never quite get it, because the occasion never arises; but usually there's a moment when you get that flash, thinking, oh my god, this girl is so freaking smart I'm struck dumb. Add youth and beauty and a fellow could pass out cold on the floor out of excitement.

So here is a song for all the really smart girls I've been so very lucky to love, only one of whom was smart enough to love me back.

If this sounds a little new wave, that's because I wrote this back when I was still in the Obvious, right before we broke up. Much of the melody is based on the brilliant lead solo Alex Mutrux was working out to it when we used to play it together. As you can tell, it needs either a lead guitar or sax solo and some kick ass rock and roll drums. If anyone wants to help me out with such things, please let me know!

Download this song if you want to hear it.

Unrequited Love

2010-05-10T15:05:00.007-05:00

As an adolescent, I was the king of unrequited love, as many an ex-girlfriend will affirm, usually with a nervous glance around at all the available exits. I bought into the idea of romantic love without a critical thought, since who was I to argue with the poetic successes of Petrarch, Dante or even the king of terrible relationship choices himself, Marcel Proust?

Once I was exposed to the commonsense ideas of what is known as radical feminist theory, I became aware that women may not be very excited about being the object of some loser's thwarted desire. I looked back at my self-absorbed ways with a more jaundiced eye. In some instances, I could see that my love was nothing but the fascination anyone can have for a shiny object half-seen from the corner of your eye, whenever it was about a girl I never knew. When it was - rarely, all kidding aside - for a girl I knew very well, I realized the love was a normal love for a friend, but frustrated by my own shortcomings as a person and the cultural taboos against being too friendly with any girl you once dated, out of deference to anyone who has loved her since.

This song started out as another song about sex, like Erotic. But I decided to make it a general statement about the foolishness, if not the inhumanity, of loving someone you only think you love because you desire her.

Here's the shameless lyrics:

I’ll come if you call, I’ll run, I’ll even crawl
If you would invite me… It would delight me…
But you neglect me! Only to spite me!
Though I just love to be punished by you
For all the sweet little things that I do
In return I’m sullen and mean
You never notice what you’ve never seen

Unrequited love, just as in heaven above
Lives on nothing but hope and a well-practiced mope
My love is nothing but thwarted desire
Hormonal throes by your beauty inspired

I’ll come if you call, I’ll limp, I might even sprawl
I’m such a good boy, I’m such a steady.
Call me your Nigel, I’m always ready.
And if it’s getting harder and harder to do
‘cause I’m all tired and dried out and blue
You can send me out for a coke.

I’m gonna love you anyway no matter what you do or say
Because love is nothing but whatever I desire

And if you insist on rejecting me may I request most respectfully
That you somehow cease being the object of my desire.

Download Unrequited Love.

Or listen to it on my blog.

Best of the Naughts: Star Death

2010-03-07T14:48:00.004-06:00

Three pieces of astronomical detritus falling to earth and shattering the noise barrier. From the death of stars comes the roots of life itself: bursts pop, Blue yells, Tobi flips, Aleta knocks, in and out of constant rock frenzy and song.

I mused many times over the name. This was one band that never seemed to crave stardom. Death to the stars! Who do they think they are, anyway, lording it over us all? It's just a sickness, the way they hook you on their star lives, all carefully revealed through cunningly calculated media outlets. The Star Death are the anti-stars, the black holes of celebrityhood. They seemed to play and write songs without the slightest hint of that creepy sick need to be famous.

The Star Death was a powerful trio to hear live, and were somewhat responsible for inspiring me to start watching local bands again at the end of the late 90s. I was intrigued by their feminist politics, more so than I even knew at the time, and loved the way they built abrupt changes of mood and timing into their songs. Most people my age, even when they liked punk, were put of by Blue's screaming fits and ever-changing vocal style, which goes from little girl lyrical to tuneless proclamations to outraged screams of defiance.

Blueberry was the leader of the band, and was also well known as a solo singer-songwriter around town. She was extremely cordial when I decided to try shooting documentaries about local bands in my spare time. Toby was the bassist, and very easy going and able to play extreme runs of manic notes while she played. The drummer was a quiet kid named Aleta, who had some decent chops as well, and who seemed tireless as she banged out entire sets of challenging material.

The Star Death put out at least 2 CDs, and the video above is taken from their first CD, The Sweetness Killers. Part of the images on the tape came from them actually playing the song, though I gave up on syncing it after the first few notes. The first part of the video contains some drunken male obscenities that could offend the ears of younger listeners.

Remember Me!

2010-02-14T13:09:00.006-06:00

Remember Me is my first love song. I remember feeling strange about it, because I wrote it for no particular girl, and I wondered if that was somehow dishonest. Over the years I've come to be happy with the song being about an idea rather than a person. Falling in and out of love, wondering what love is, and finally finding it after all these years means that the song is more honest than any song about an individual could be. The one exception I have to offer is the song I wrote for my wife, Cathy, last year. My most fervent aspiration is to never write another love song again unless it's just for her.

I wrote this song when I was just a kid, yearning for the love that was somehow denied me by circumstance and my own inner conflict. It represents the simplest and most barren appeal to a lover possible, to just be remembered. Just don't forget me. I love you, and I'll always love you if you remember me. Originally the words were somewhat different, as I discovered when I listened to the 1979 version with Jambox. One line in this song was suggested by Rico DeBool, "I'll always hold you in my heart". I'll never forget when he suggested it, we were living in Homer Townsley's P-Funk Playpen on Victor and we were sitting around the attic room where we practiced.

The idea that I would always love anyone I ever loved was very important to me. I still don't understand how people can just stop loving someone. If you can stop loving someone, you never loved them at all. It has a lot to do with how you look at people. If they are simply objects that you project whatever emotion into that you want to, well, then love is something entirely within yourself and has nothing to do with the human qualities of an external person that caused it to happen. I happen to believe that the love I feel for my friends and lovers is a feeling of mutual humanity, that embraces and exalts all the complexity and beauty of a person who returns our love. Once you feel it, you'll always feel it again, even after many years have passed. It's far beyond mere sexual attraction, which seems to be the beginning and end of love for many people.

The new version of this song here was one that I worked really hard to finish for Valentine's Day. Singing this song without going flat, with all the tricky elisions, is no picnic. I finally managed to finish it just this morning. The older version of this song is from a cassette tape Jambox made to market ourselves to some rich county girl who was hiring a band for a party. I was surprised to hear all the little differences between this, the actual finished version of the copyrighted song, and how I've been singing it lately. It's amusing and cute to listen to my 18-year-old voice sliding all over the place with no idea of which range I should sing it in.

Here's the 1979 Jambox version of Remember Me, with Slash Brannon on violin and Rico DeBool on bass - note that this mp3 is not safe for work, and features an obscenity quite loudly and distinctly in the first several seconds:

Here's the 2010 version of Remember Me, which I just finished this morning!

Best of the Naughts: Unfairly Obscure

2010-02-12T10:08:00.004-06:00

Though everyone in this series is unfairly obscure, two bands stand out for me, one because I've been following them almost all my life, and the other because I know next to nothing about them.

The Blastoids are yet another group featuring the talents of my old and very dear friend Dominic Shaeffer. My awe for Dominic will never fade, because the very first local band I ever saw was Earwacks, down in Nik Moon's basement in the early 70s sometime. Yes, almost 40 years ago. This was a far cry from me shouting Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida into a tiny reel-to-reel tape recorder with Gary Wilson in the fourth grade. This was no bunch of fools playing covers badly. This was a full-out rock band playing original material that was polished and professional sounding. They sounded much better when they were teenagers than a lot of bands of grown men do today, and they were writing songs that were as good as anything I'd ever heard. Even as a bitter, alienated teenager I knew they were great.

Here's one from their only CD, Memories Will Pay. The lyric and tone are somber and real.

Then there's The Sayers. This band was one I never got to see live, but listening to their incredible single on Steve Pick's or Cat Pick's radio show won me over instantly. 5-4-3-2-1 is a song that is so great, that once you hear it, you'll want to hear it over and over. It's such pure uncut rock that you won't believe your ears.

Download Memories Will Pay.

Download 5-4-3-2-1.

Best of the Naughts: Opposites that attract

2009-12-30T20:12:00.011-06:00

Tinhorn and Sullen are opposites from the beginning of the last decade. Tinhorn was a group of grown men at the top of their game, adept and with poetry bursting from every well-groomed pore. Sullen was a group of very young punks who put everything they were right out there raw as dirty diapers. Tinhorn crafted pop masterpieces, Sullen slopped out noisy rock. They were both among the best at what they did.

Tinhorn put out a very fine CD called Stereowide that I admire unrestrainedly. Sullen put out a little home-made CD that I admire guardedly, yet with equal fervor. Tinhorn had the stink of advertising agencies and art directors all over them, Sullen had the faint odor of crayons and spray paint.

I never got to know the Tinhorn people, though I suspect they ran in the same advertising agency circles I once knew. A fellow named Sean Garcia seemed to run this band, and he did the very excellent art direction of the CD, and another fellow named Mike Martin did the production and musical work. If I were a normal guy we would have been friends, since I aspire to do work like them. But I never made any effort to get to know them for whatever reason, perhaps familiarity of my own type.

I got to know Jason and Shanna, the two kids who fronted Sullen a little bit, hanging around the Way Out Club, watching them play various gigs. Shanna was especially nice, and would hang out with Bob Reuter and I. Part of my love for Sullen was my love for punk; the DIY thing, the carelessness, the expression of truth at all costs, the disdain of calculation and pomp.

Bob Reuter also knew Mike Martin from Tinhorn, since he recorded and played on his CD Down In America. Bob knows everybody, I guess, since he is out there playing, night after night, year after year, wherever somebody wants to hear him.

Here are a couple of my favorites of their songs. Stars was also on a couple of local compilations. The Sullen song is just a personal favorite of mine. Shanna told me she wrote it by herself, and the lyrics always got to me. They made me think of Bob.

I gotta boyfriend
I gotta girlfriend
I gotta grandpa
I'll tear your heart out!

No Sleep by Sullen

Stars by Tinhorn

Best of the Naughts: Larissa Dalle & Getaway Car

2009-12-20T21:25:00.004-06:00

Around the same time as Bob Reuter's big CD release I was watching an awful lot of local bands. One of them was Getaway Car, a band with my old friend John Taylor and this genius named Don Williams as the leader. John Taylor was the bass player for the Unconscious, a band I managed to miss almost completely because I was living in Italy during the height of their fame.

Don put out a short CD in 2001 called "First Gear" that this cut, Deep Down, is taken from, and it's a really good collection of songs with great beats and lyrics. Since Don was a bass player himself, John Taylor isn't on the CD. They were a great live band, too. At the time I was impressed by the way they merged beats with a house music sound, though that particular style seems to have passed.

In the early naughts there was a lot of action around a recording studio run by Jason Rook and Chris Deckard called Penny Studios. Jason was a serious, very talented guitarist and Chris was an avant-garde electronics guy who also wrote songs. Hanging around the outskirts of this scene was the beautiful Larissa Dalle, who has one of the most heart-stopping and beautiful voices I have ever heard live.

Larissa would sing and the world would stop. It wasn't just me. I saw her sing at Frederick's Music Lounge one night, and the crowd, normally a drunken, rowdy bunch prone to talking and laughing and clowning around during bands, was dead silent. It was miraculous. Her voice did it. There's really no explanation for it, and I don't know if she ever realized it only happened when she sang; that other people didn't have this same gift.

She seemed to think her songs were simple little things that weren't deserving of any serious consideration, but I always thought some magic touch she had elevated them far beyond the ordinary. So here is one she sang often, Diva, which used to shush the crowds of drunken punks and grunge kids in the early years of the last decade.

I saw Larissa play an outdoor RFT gig in the early naughts with James of Julia Sets (who will be coming up in one of my next posts) and she managed to still an entire street full of people with her voice. Then this siren came up out of nowhere in perfect timing with some silent moment in one of her songs and everyone on the street, including Larissa, stopped in wonder for a second.

Larissa grew up a little, fell in love with Jason Rook, and married him. She now plays with Wormwood Scrubs, and they have toured the world in a small way. The last time I saw them play in 2009, they were doing some very cool acid rock long-form blues jams that were outstanding.

A streaming file of Diva:

A streaming file of Deep Down:

Best of the Naughts: Bob Reuter

2009-12-18T14:36:00.008-06:00

The last ten years in St. Louis music came in with a bang and out with a whimper as far as I'm concerned. When thinking over my favorite St. Louis CDs of the past ten years, I have to start with the 2000 release of Bob Reuter's masterpiece, Down in America.

I'd known Bob a little since I saw him at the first punk rock show I ever saw at a house on Forest Park with the Retros and The Camaros. I was there to see his band, The Dinosaurs, and was not disappointed, since they played both sides of their single, (It Might Be) Rose and Rock'n'Roll Moron.

But when Bob released this CD - or whoever released it for him - I was knocked out. The songwriting on the disc was incredible. The band ferocious, on fire, all-consuming. It was country-ish, but it was pure rock. I'm linking to just two songs from this CD below for those who have never heard it, because I think it's sad that everyone in the world who loves rock and roll doesn't have a copy and I'm pretty damned sure it's been out of print since forever. I'm sharing two songs, but, damn, there's so many more.

I'll be posting a few more of my favorite St. Louis CD releases of the past decade in the upcoming week or two, so stay tuned if you like that sort of thing.

Here's Bob's great website, and here's It's Late, and here's Lauri.

Lauri

It's Late

(Don't Funk With Our) Fame

2009-12-05T10:24:00.003-06:00

Jamchild and Rico D. Bool, at the height of their fame in Shorty Long's basement.

One of the most iconic songs of the Change Music songbook, Fame represents both our typical delusions of grandeur and the farcical absurdity that we mixed in our approach to music. Inasmuch as Jambox was a punk band before any of us had ever heard of punk, this song is completely punk in all the ways that I later found appealing in punk.

First, there's the fact that we didn't really have any kind of ear for what we were playing together, and didn't really care. I admit that it perplexed and bothered me that what I heard in my head came out as thunderous chaotic noise when we played together, but I was never the leader type and couldn't tell anyone else in the band what to play or how to play it. Then there's the idea that we were actually making fun of ourselves for playing music and trying to be famous, by pretending that we were already famous in our minds.

This jokey approach to music grew in me to become a lifelong bias towards regarding fame as something highly personal rather than monolithic and universal. After the first hollow chuckles at the stupidity of a bunch of drunken hippies caterwauling about their so-called "fame" die away, the idea behind the conception of fame as something everyone has - a very punk rock idea, to my mind - starts to grow.

The people who are famous to me include a long list of the usual celebrities and geniuses. But the most famous people I know are the ones I actually know. In my world, the local bands I love are just as famous as the Who or the Beatles to me. Fame is actually an elastic and subjective description for anything I choose to give my attention to. When you pay attention to me, I feel the tiny twinge of fame you give me, and when I pay attention to you, you feel the tiny homage of fame from me.

I hope for a day when celebrity and fame become more and more local. I see no reason why we should give the precious gift of our attention to a handful of strangers in far away places when we have so much talent and entertainment right here in our own town. This especially seems truer and truer in these days, because the sheer amount of great stuff out there is almost impossible to acknowledge. In a time of 1,000 flowers, I prefer to give my attention to the flowers closest by, because they are the easiest to see and belong to me.

Download the supremely silly Fojammathon version of Fame to see what I always wished it would sound like. I'm quite proud of my odd guitar solo in this one.

Funkentelechy

2009-12-03T20:06:00.002-06:00

When we were young funksters jamming to the sounds of Parliament/Funkadelic night after frantic night we worked as busboys, cooks, and dishwashers in the glamorous restaurants and nightclubs of the fabulous Central West End.

It all started with the late Kevin O'Connor, brother of Annie O'Connor, the most beautiful girl in the world, according to several of us, and disputed by others. Kevin had a beat-up old van and he liked to drive it across Forest Park to the Steak'n'Shake on Hampton to eat burgers in the middle of the night and while he did it, he listened to WESL, the greatest station in the nation for funk, soul and R&B in the 1970s.

Kevin was a slight, tall boy with elfin features and big blue eyes rimmed with thick black lashes. He was usually smiling, smirking, or laughing at some snide comment he'd just made, living life with the sidelong glances of a pigeon kicker. He had a pronounced Central West End accent, a kind of strange midwestern posh tone that I would find hard to describe any other way than by saying listen to Charlie Leonard for five minutes and you've got it. But his voice was even more languorous and slow, with a throaty rasp to it. I can still hear it.

Kevin had discovered that the WESL DJs, especially Jim Gates and the DJ who would become Dr. Jockenstein, were partying live almost every night from clubs in East St. Louis and that listening to them on the radio was almost as good, if not better, than actually being there. One of the songs they kept playing was an insanely infectious little jam that had some crazy deep voiced man repeating over and over again that we're gonna tear the roof of the sucker, tear the roof over the mother sucker, tear the roof off the sucker! Kevin was delighted with this breach of good taste and refinement in every way, and would crank it up on the car stereo whenever he heard it. Riding along with him, I fell in love with it, too.

Shortly thereafter I discovered that the name of the band was Parliament, and I was the first kid on any block south of Delmar to buy a copy of the LP Mothership Connection. I began to turn on everyone in hearing distance to the Funk, especially Slash Brannon, Geo Ramsey, Linda Fields, Dominic Shaeffer, Fo Jammi, Tracy Wynkoop, and more than I can remember, and we started buying every Parliament/Funkadelic album we could find. From 1975 until 1980 - the entire last half of the 1970s - my musical world was very different from yours, if you were around then. It was all funk. I saw Parliament/Funkadelic live more times than I've ever seen any band, starting from the KC Funk Festival in 1977 (Take it to Heaven in '77) until the tour for One Nation Under A Groove, where the magic paled when I realized George Clinton, the leader, wasn't even in the show anymore.

There can be no disputing my gilt-edged credentials as a bona-fide Maggot Brain of the First Order. So years later, in the early 1990s, I challenged Fo Jammi to create a little funk piece like we always wished we could back in the Jambox days when we thought we were just as good as Funkadelic but were actually more like chaotic noise more suitable for the Dr. Demento show.

So in one night we whipped up this tiny little fragment, Funkentelechy. I always loved the Funkadelic concept of Funkentelechy, and the lyrics didn't get much deeper than one line. We may have both done some keyboards on this, and I hear a little guitar, but you can bet it's almost totally Fo Jammi brilliance. I have a vague memory of Mark Gray playing that guitar solo, supported by the conviction that I never played that good in my life.

Download Funkentelechy.

Believe In Me! (A Foxtrot)

2009-11-26T11:24:00.004-06:00

The New Maryland Jug Band was improvised in every possible sense instantly after the noise of the tape recorder signals that I had just pressed record on my cheap boombox. It was composed of Rico D. Bool, Slash Brannon and me, Professor P.T. Lobotomie. Our purpose on Earth was to create this one tiny slice of Jambox, with Rico on bass, myself on harmonica, and Slash on the nearly-inaudible jug. Even the name was invented as instantly as you hear it. Cello the dog got in on this one.

I had just started listening to jazz from the late 20s and early 30s from the 78 collection of Jerry Udell. I remember perfectly the night he first brought out the Bix Biederbeck 78s, and showed me how the numbers on the label put them in a series where it was more likely that Bix was on the record. The first one he played for me was "You Took Advantage of Me," still my favorite Bix Biederbeck record of all time, one that critics and admirers still point out for the uncanny Bix and Tram chase duet/solo right before an audibly astonished and delighted Bing Crosby comes in for the vocal, also one of his best jazz vocals.

The song segues without any effort at all into the common motif of Slash's comedy style, little kids behaving badly and being punished beyond all proportion for it. I cut this one off in a very peremptory manner, showing myself once again that I was a lot bossier than I thought I was at the time.

Download Believe In Me!.

Download You Took Advantage of Me.

Back to Beat!

2009-11-20T08:51:00.003-06:00

Alex Mutrux wrote the melody to this song and brought it to the band shortly after Chuck joined the band. I did my best to write a rather lame middle section to give it another part and wrote the words.

Beat was on my mind a lot as a teenager. It intrigued me to think that there was a literate generation of hipsters before the hippies. The only real hippie writer I could think of was Richard Brautigan, who was half beat himself anyway. The second half of the hippie days, the seventies, hadn't really brought about any great minds or writers that I knew of. I surmised that greatness and hipness did not always coincide, and that the culture of beat hipness was more creative and artisitic than hippie freedom from actually producing anything of merit.

In my limitless ambition I envisioned our punk generation as being more like the beats than the hippies, with a vibrant literature (which I would myself provide, of course) and artisitic credibility. I figured maybe creativity just skips a generation now and then. So I proclaimed a movement in my own mind, Back To Beat.

Alex's guitar work on this song is both propulsive and refined. I remember how carefully he crafted his solo. One of our finest moments as a band, it has Kevin Brueseke on drums and Jim Saltsider on bass. Jim sings some backup, and I sing some out-off-key backup too.

She's a modern chick in a modern world
Doing her hair, she doesn't care
He's a modern cat like you see on TV
Cowboys & cars, cruising the bars

Take out your telescope
Put 'em under a microscope
Confess it to the Pope
We're in another world
They're reality and we're not alive
We're shoveling jive
We're in another world
Back to beat

Bangs & mascara & very tight pants
Splittings a chance
Watching her dance
Leather & cool, you're a drug-taking fool
Viewing the jazz with distant romance

Hippies were stupid
But we were smart
We're into Art!
We're in another world
Parker was fine
In the mainline
Tingling spine
Back to beat

The new bohemians - that's us.
It's back to beatnik - or bust.
The cycle of stupidity in the avant-garde will never pass
We've got the best of the past
With which to surpass.

Download "Back to Beat!"

Uberimma Fides

2009-10-26T17:05:00.004-05:00

In February of 1990 I worked on this song rather fiendishly with Fo Jammi over several weeks. I was immensely proud of it and we put everything we had into it at the time.

I had written the basic words and melody a very long time ago, probably at least 1978 if not 1977. It was called "Ah-Ha" for a long time because that's what I sang instead of "Immortal" over the choruses. I played around with it for years, and back then people seemed to like it, but I never could knock it up into a proper song. I remember singing it in the bedroom I rented from Homer Townsley on Victor, the P-Funk Playpen Party Room. I remember singing it in summer, on the backsteps, out my seldom-used back door.

I remember that I once played this song for Renato D'Elia, who was my boss at the graphic design studio I worked in when I lived in Italy. He disliked the dirgelike drone that starts it off, without stopping to appreciate that I was going for the pseudo Ambrosian chant effect.

Despite it being an intensely religious song I tried to make it something someone in any faith could agree with. Though the fundamentalist subtext is for the listener to decipher as she pleases.

(Angels:)
We’re getting wrapped in chocolate whispers
We’re getting lost in his phrase
(God:)
Velvet dark-eyed angel transistors
Existing only to praise

(Angels:)
We were raised on his fantasies
Baroque excess through the haze
(God:)
I don’t mind if you say you love me
I don’t mind if you stay

(Angels:)
But now that God is all over modernity
Now he’s all over the place
We can count on our own divinity
Looking straight in his face

(God:)
I can look back until I’m unable to
Getting bored with your praise
I can guess as to why you love me
And why I let you stay

On this planet in these bodies
Longer than the pyramids
We’re living, this much is true
And if you’re living its never through
We are immortal.

You and me together through eternity.

I see you see they see we see
Existing through eternity
A vision, crystalline and true
there is no truth that is outside of you
And we’re immortal.

You and me existing through eternity.

That old time religion
Is good enough for me

Download Uberimma Fides.

How to promote your record

2009-10-19T08:13:00.006-05:00

When I was a little kid, my favorite little kid rock band was Paul Revere and the Raiders. I liked lots of bands, of course, from the Beatles to the Dave Clark Five, anything on KXOK in St. Louis was usually pretty good for me. But Paul Revere and the Raiders were the best, before the Monkees came along, because they had a show on TV called "Where The Action Is", everyday, at an after-school time of day if I remember correctly. Mainstream pop music used to be naturally marketed to kids, back when it was successful. Seems like the more they strive to position music for adults and college kids, the less of it they sell. Because the music companies are all staffed by brain-dead losers who know nothing about marketing.

Paul Revere and the Riaders had plenty of hits during the short life of that show and another one, plus frequent appearances on all the variety shows that were on everywhere in the 60s, 720 appearances in all. But around about the time of their last few albums they kind of went out of style. A lot of big bands were going psychedelic, and were growing quickly as musicians and songwriters. Mark Lindsay, the front man for the Raiders, had one of the best rock voices on the radio, effortlessly crooning or shouting as aggressively as anyone out there, but their songwriting chops were starting to sound a little weak in comparison.

I recently bought a couple of their later albums, both from 1969, through a reissue record company out of Germany called Repertoire. I bought "Alias Pink Fuzz" and "Hard 'n' Heavy (With Marshmallow)" because I had never heard of them before and became more and more curious the more I thought about them. Repertoire has a bunch of interesting and obscure CDs that you can't find anywhere else, like stuff by Family and a few excellent Spirit CDs, among many.

Both albums have a couple of decent songs and a few surprises, but nothing too insanely great, outside of the forgotten hit "Let Me." But what really intrigued me was the inclusion, in a sneaky way, of two radio commercials promoting the album that show either a desperate attempt by Columbia Records to goose sales on a failing cash cow, or a typical method of promoting an album from a time when record companies actually tried to promote their product, instead of suing their customers for stealing. The two commercials were stuck on the end of a demo song, with no track of their own, and were unremarked upon in the liner notes.

Here they are, for you to hear:

Download Paul Revere and The Raiders Commercial 1.

Download Paul Revere and The Raiders Commercial 2.

There was also, on "Hard 'n' Heavy (With Marshmallow)", this Pontiac GTO commercial:

Download Paul Revere and The Raiders Pontiac GTO Commercial.

Sleet at the Urban League November 6th 2009

2009-10-14T08:47:00.004-05:00

The man, the symbol, the group.

Thom Sleet has been evicted from his studio. We played one last recording session there and started with an extremely free version of "A Love Supreme", which was played as Coltrane might have liked, with little or no reference to his version at all except the first three notes.

We plan on doing something like this at our upcoming gig at the Urban League on November 6th 2009. Hope to see you there.

Download an excerpt from "A Love Supreme".

Entombed in the Bozo Galaxy

2009-09-16T15:55:00.003-05:00

This crazy little sketch is one of my favorite trifles from the FoJammathon sessions of the early nineties. I felt like I was really singing well on this song. In all the FoJammathon sessions I was determined to pitch my voice in a lower and more resonant key than I had in the Obvious or Jambox. Listening to myself sing this way through Fo Jammi's nice studio mics, with his reverb and eq set in a very flattering way, made me think I could really sing well for the first time.

Like Cicca Bu Pop, this song was written in the studio with Fo Jammi as a series of midi loops carefully crafted and arranged by Fo Jammi as we smeared them across his various keyboards. He would stare intently at the primitive screens of Atari 1040, using the Smpte Track software. It had a dongle that doubled as the MIDI interface.

It was all very arcane and mysterious to me, though I liked watching him delete sour notes and move around good ones with the mouse. He liked to apply a natural sounding correction to the tracks called "Humanization" and I liked the way that sounded.

At the time we created this song I was concerned about the lack of AIDS awareness in popular music thanks to some idiotic article I read somewhere, and had decided to correct this lack all by myself, and save humanity from this terrible scourge. As a result, I wrote and rewrote several songs to be incredibly depressing turn-offs. The only redeeming facet of this theme when I dealt with it was my consistent inability to write anything serious or devoid of sarcastic intent.

Here's the lyrics:

Entombed in the Bozo Galaxy
So far away we just can’t relate
Separate in the workings of fate

I was out on a date, it was getting late,
And we couldn’t communicate, when I said “Figure it out.”

We’re all entombed in the Bozo Galaxy
Misunderstanding it face to face
Discrete in emotional ‘splays

We were lyin’ in bed, gettin’ some head,
When she said “Get on down.” and I said, “Figure it out.”

We’re all entombed in the Bozo Galaxy
Freakin’ on some goofy disease
No longer doing just as we please
So rubberfied we just can’t relate
Separate from a soap opera fate

We were out at a club, living in dub,
And you loved to get on down, and I said, “Figure it out.”

We’re all entombed in the Bozo Galaxy
With you and me and them at the gate
Alive enough to party ‘til late

As with Cicca Bu Pop, I may or may not have contributed some simple hooks to this piece on the keyboards, but most of the awesomeness was from Fo Jammi alone.

Download Entombed in the Bozo Galaxy

Cicca Bu Pop!

2009-09-13T14:42:00.003-05:00

Being ancient in age if not soul, I feel a strange nostalgia for those long-ago days when I would go over to Fo Jammi's little house in South Saint Louis and shoehorn myself into the large closet he had carefully crafted into a studio, using mostly his wits, a determination not to spend a dime more than he had to, and carpentry skills. We did this almost every Monday night for a year or two, and then stopped for some reason, probably paying recording projects that he took on instead of self indulgent projects with me.

My selfish agenda was, and still is, to record every song I ever wrote, and to re-record some of the songs I felt hadn't been done justice to. As time passes I have become more and more convinced that this ambition will never be realized; it's just not important enough to me to take the place of family and work. But we didn't just record Tony Patti songs, thank god. We would also kind of horse around and do little one-off experiments with total freedom, too.

Cicca Bupop is one of those little sketches. As we threw this together, playing keyboards, Fo Jammi would make midi loops on his extremely useful and capable Atari computer. I would play something simple that repeated itself and he would add whatever he wanted, being able to play keyboards with both hands in a rather expert, show-offy kind of way that did little to increase my delusional regard for my own abilities.

The Atari was quite a decent midi editor. I've yet to see a program to surpass it for usability and interface, and think Fo Jammi hasn't yet really found something he likes as much, since he uses midi very little these days.

As we were putting together this mellow little jam I felt the need to interrupt it totally with some kind of harsh punk freak out. So don't turn up the volume on it and hold on to your hats. It lasts just a few seconds, then calms right back down again. Kind of like life.

Download Cicca Bu Pop!

Rio

2009-09-07T19:48:00.007-05:00

As soon as I quit playing punk music in disgust after the Obvious broke up I started writing bossa nova songs. I'm pretty sure I wrote this song in 1983, and I remember playing it for Earwacks and hearing Benet Shaeffer, their ace drummer, proclaim it the only true bossa nova beat I'd come up with yet.

I moved to Italy, still playing this song. I played it in The Zantini Brothers back in the 80s a few times. I never felt the need to get any deeper into the lyrics, for some reason. I wanted this song to just exist, as it is, a tiny wistful bossa nova breeze blowing through my brain.

When I got back to St. Louis and started jamming with Fojammathon I felt like I just had to record this song with some nice strings and some approximation, however lame, of the kind of off-kilter yet stunningly precise drums like the guy who played on Jobim's The Composer Plays LP. I sang the strings to Fo Jammi and he played them for me, and recorded this rough sketch, complete with me whacking the drum machine at random intervals, trying and failing to capture the unexpected magnificence of that drummer.

The song just fades out in our sketch, so I faded this cut early so you don't hear all the parts die away, until there's just guitar. It's a pleasant little number. I used to imagine I could sell it as a commercial jingle. How ambitious I am!

Download Rio.

The Barfy Carson Show

2009-09-05T00:35:00.003-05:00

Starting with the P-Funk PLaypen fave "Cocaine Puffs", a 30 second commercial cereal radio spot, the Barfy Carson Show quickly becomes a De Bool tour de force as Rico basically becomes "Barfy Carson" himself. From the sound of this tape I would say that this entire piece was worked out exactly in advance, with names and songs planned and written.

Then Slash Brannon slaps into his classic Steve Mizerany routine. "Caressing tidal waves" and shit.

Then, as if you hadn't already expected it, comes the old Tonight Show theme sung by a small crowd at the Playpen. Slash does his comical fast-talking shtick. Hamilton Jordan is lampooned, then Cathy does Zsa Zsa Cataro from Mesopotamia. "My diaminds on my uh breasts, is..."

Next Slash does his Muddy Racket routine, trying to be the world's worst comic, including his classic cookbook joke, and I remember the crowd had strict instructions to laugh at every joke. Then there's a shameful "Don't squeeze the sand paper."

Slash and Rico play a bickering couple who are recommended Toast Brand Soap because your mama used it and your daddy used and your aunt used it and your cousin used it, etc.

Then we arrive at the lugubrious "Faster than light" boys. We did them as a flipside to Slash's usual fast-talking comedy thing, the faster than light boys talk reeeeeeeaaaaaal slooooooowwww. After a long interview, they "play" a cut from a Mahavishnu Orchestra record played at 78 rpm.

It's all so painfully crude but if you were there, it's funny.

Download The Barfy Carson Show

Why Don't You Take It Off?

2009-08-29T16:22:00.004-05:00

Here's a song from Jambox Tape A, a Maxell tape about thirty years old, maybe more, that we used to record ourselves back when I live in Homer Townsley's P-Funk Playpen on Victor.

In our neighborhood in the summertime we would all sit in front of our turn-of-the-century red brick building as the shadow crept across the tiny hill of weeds with our shirts off, drinking beers. The stoop steps were nice and cool to the touch; I think they may have been marble under the dried-blood-red and cape cod green paint that flecked off to reveal flecks of white beneath. All the other hoosiers up and down the block would do the same thing as us - there was no air conditioning for miles around us. We always had our afternoons free because we worked the lunch shifts at restuarants in the Central West End: cooking, bussing tables, washing dishes. The smell of rotting bus pans would waft up from our caked and faded blue jeans.

This was the way we sounded when we were practising. This song is interesting to the two or three fans of Jambox - mainly me and maybe Rico De Bool only - because it shows we tried to arrange our songs a little bit and it certainly showcases Joe's bass playing, raw but ambitious, like our singing. Another nice thing is you can hear De Bool singin with Patrick and I. This is a song I'd almost forgotten for many years.

The lyrics were my idea of silly seduction lines. I had a bunch of them, all offensive, never used.

Say, isn't that a tear there?
Bare flesh showing through everywhere.
Shame, a tear in that skirt there.

Why don't you take it off? It's only proper, dear.
No need to show fear.

Whaddaya mean you can't see it?
That don't mean that it's not there.

It's right over here where you can't see it, right here.

Download "Why Don't You Take It Off?"

You! Me! Dancing! to Los Campesinos! last night

2009-08-12T09:19:00.006-05:00

Actually the yous that were dancing with me to Los Campesinos! weren't you, probably, since no one I knew was anywhere near the place last night. But I couldn't help it, Los Campesinos! are just so intoxicating, and far better live than on record, like all true dance bands.

It's so easy to make a bunch of interesting noises on record these days that I hardly notice anymore. But when you have two guitars, a bass, a violin, a kid's xylophone, an ocarina, and some keyboards and drums all going at once right in front of you it's a rich and dense sound. Their strength is their strangulated-sounding front man, who bangs a single drum or the xylophone with the beat you can only get from a frantic youth's flailing natural rhythm. The beats were swinging, dancing, crazy beats, unconfined by computerized counts or mechanical tempo.

They're from Cardiff, Wales, as they remarked last night at one point, and are quite young and beautiful, though not hollywood beautiful. Gareth, the singer who does the least else, sings in a gasping, strangulated yelp that sounds like a drowning boy fighting for his last breath of air to punch out just a few more arch verses. I was fascinated to see he looked very little like I suspected he would, being a strong, fit looking kid with red hair and a pleasant face. He acted like you might think, though, rather shy and maybe even uncomfortable, preferring to sing to the band or the floor at times. He was still a dynamo, wanging on his drums and stuff, flailing around, caught up in the frenzy.

The other singer, Aleksandra, was shockingly thin - I hope not sick, though she did have plenty of energy. Her voice is a little soft for a live show but she sang well otherwise, and played keys and an ocarina.

It was ridiculously easy for them to whip up the rather jaded-looking collegiate crowd, despite the evident inhibitions preventing the cooler sort from succumbing to the bounce. Los Campesinos are very good at dynamics, since they seem to be almost consciously against any mechanical beat. Maybe you can program Pro Tools to build to a crescendo, but a real crescendo has the uncertain pulse of life in it, the barriers of machine being more rigid than the permeable osmosis of a room of people being swept away.

I knew I would find myself dancing, but the kind of wild up and down bouncing and twisting they inspire is something I don't feel hardly ever. It was almost like the old New Wave beats, a little faster than normal, a little more out of control and intoxicating. Plus what they were all playing was dense and so full of ping-ponging counterpoint and swing that it was a frenzy. Dionysius was in the house.

Not every song was killer, but they were all at least novel and interesting. Listen to their live favorite and you'll get a tiny taste of the greatness I saw last night:

Patty Pravo

2009-07-11T17:09:00.006-05:00

I love Patty Pravo's voice, an alto quaver that throbs with suggested desire and obsession. She's like a Nico who sings in key, or a Marianne Faithfull, or even a Dusty Springfield. There's a certain decadent sexuality in her voice that reminds me of the depths of the drug and sex haunted seventies; a certain after midnight on 'ludes growl.

Her biggest hit was the ultra-misogynistic twin sides "La Bambola" and "Se C'é L'Amore". La Bambola means "The Doll" in english. Here are the lyrics:

Tu mi fai girar, tu mi fai girar
You make me spin
come fossi una bambola
as if I were a doll
e poi mi butti giu', poi mi butti giu'
then you throw me down
come fossi una bambola
as if I were a doll
Non ti accorgi quando piango
You don't notice when I cry
quando sono triste e stanca, tu
when I'm sad and tired, you
pensi solo per te.
only think of yourself
No ragazzo no, No ragazzo no,
No boy, no
del mio amore non ridere
don't laugh at my love
non ci gioco piu'
I'm not playing any more
quando giochi tu
because when you play
sai far male da piangere
you know how to hurt me until I cry
Da stasera la mia vita
From tonight my life
nele mani di un ragazzo, no
in the hands of a boy, no
non la mettero' piu'
I won't place it any more
No ragazzo no,
No boy
tu non mi metterai
you won't ever put me
tra le dieci bambole
among the ten dolls
che non ti piacciono piu'
that please you no more
Oh no, oh no -

Tu mi fai girar, tu mi fai girar
come fossi una bambola
poi mi butti giu', poi mi butti giu'
come fossi una bambola
Non ti accorgi quando piango
quando sono triste e stanca, tu
pensi solo per te.

The other song is somewhat the same, except a little more typically italian. The refrain goes "If love exists, there's a tear also" - I love that 'tear' in Italian is lachrima, because I'm a lachrymose sort of mope myself half the time.

Download "La Bambola" and "Se C'e L'Amore".

The Jambox Changezine

2009-06-16T16:56:00.004-05:00

I've painstakingly scanned and cropped and paginated my 1979-1980 comic strip promoting the Change Music philosophy.

It's got some humorous moments that are just faint echoes of the comedy tapes I copied them from. Most of the plot was lifted from a Mo-Mo the Monster at Summer Camp tape that Slash Brannon masterminded. This tape has been lost, so the best we can do is read some of the things Slash spewed forth from his uncensored brain.

Heaven's Never Letting Me In

2009-05-31T20:18:00.003-05:00

Now that I'm finally learning how to play songs I didn't write, after more than thirty years of just playing whatever chords sound good to me, I've turned my attention to a few obscurities that I admire unrestrainedly. So I'm going to blog abut a few of them, as I have "If You Got To Make A Fool Of Somebody" a few weeks ago. The song I'm writing about this week is "Heaven's Never Letting Me In" by the Webb Brothers.

The full, total horror of what the music business has become is perfectly displayed in the obscurity of the Webb Brothers, as it is in many other artists scattered throughout the fringes of our culture today. They've done three full-length CDs, each one better than the last, each one a deathless, timeless expression of pop magnificence, perfectly performed by artists who have more talent in their little finger than fashionable artists such as The White Stripes or Little Jeezy have in their entire bodies.

Jimmy Webb, their father, wrote some of the greatest songs of the 20th century, so it's true that maybe they should have to try a little harder or something. But their songs are incredible works, the kind of thing you'd expect from kids who grew up immersed in music in such a way that all the finest skills and tools that it takes most of us decades to achieve are present at once.

I wish I knew all the lyrics to this song, but this is the best I could decipher it:

No business at the venue, no mischief on the menu
On a bender and it’s bound to bend you tonight
I’m so uncomplicated, underground and underrated
Seeing feeling was reciprocated, let’s give all the people a fright!

California here we come again take this bore and make it fun again
I’m so tired of trying to be good, Heaven’s never taking me in!

I’ve taken all your babies, I’ve pumped em full of rabies
Pulled a carcass through the gates of hades better lock your children up tight

California here we come again take this bore and make it come again
What’s the point of trying to be good, Heaven’s never lettin me in!

Oh oh can’t you hear the whistle blow? California here we go
Never thought you’d hit so low, no, you were much too slow

When I was a boy I pulled the wings off pigeons, now I’m causing class divisions
I’ll start my own religion, oo you’ll never stop me, oo you’ll never stop me
Cause I say I’ll fast my dominion I’ll rule this whole dominion
Run my face on every television till everybody weeps at the sight

California here we come again take this bore and make it fun again
I’m so tired of trying to be good, Heaven’s never lettin' me in!

Oh no Heaven’s never lettin me in

Anyone who's ever read Paradise Lost will recognize the sophistication of the way this song deals with choosing evil over good. It gets right to the heart of the idea of forgiveness, which is seen as impossible because of the sinfulness of the singer. The singer boasts of his sins, and is proud of being unforgivable. The rejection of forgiveness is central to his belief that heaven's never letting him in. The one truly unforgivable sin, as I read it in these lyrics, is the disbelief in the possibility of forgiveness.

And the song rocks so incredibly hard, and goes from circus-like whimsey to slamming power chords behind the wails of the self-damned. This song has haunted me since I first heard it in 2003, and last night I stayed up all night - looking over in astonishment at 4:20 a.m., trying to figure out the lyrics and play it. That's something I've never even done for a Blind Idiot God song!

Download "Heaven's Never Letting Me In", then go to the iTunes store and buy everything they ever recorded.

Hoochie Coochie Poochie

2009-05-27T09:41:00.002-05:00

Slash and I loved his dogs Topaz and Cello, who were also David Udell's dogs. Topaz was the stray from nowhere, a medium yellow dog with gold eyes and short fur, tough and wise. He was the alpha dog, but he ran to East St. Louis when Fojammi and Slash had their famous accident on the old MacArthur Bridge going for beer at 4 o’clock one drunken morning. Slash rolled the VW bug with Fojammi riding the roof on one of the dangerous curves entering the bridge, and when Topaz heard the ambulance sirens he took off for the East side, never to be seen again. Fojammi, who should have been killed - legend has it that he lifted the entire car himself - ended up in the old City Hospital. We searched for Topaz for weeks.

But we loved Cello as much, and wrote this song for him long before Topaz split. Slash wrote the melody, and I put the chords to it, which are the same as Big Noise From Winnetka, Hit the Road, Jack, or (I’m not your) Steppin’ Stone. He wrote most of the lyrics, too, though I helped a great deal.

In the kitchen you will find
Strongheart dog food is always on your mind.
A bass, a string, a chord, a thing
Splattering into your brain
Brewed for you a Cello stew
Plain-tasting canine strain
My ears erect, my nose just blew.
Hoochie Coochie Poochie

When we spell O-U-T
He heads straight for the nearest alley
Splashing his smiley face all over the front page
of everyone’s reality
Cello’s my man, you know he can
Show all the world his master plan
Funky Butt Mutt

Cello was a medium dog, mostly a German Shepard of some kind, black with a brown face and Cleopatra eyes with black rings around them that led off toward the back of his sleek head like mascara. He loved to eat ice and once I saw him chew up some broken glass he thought was ice. He must not have eaten it - though it sure looked like he ate it - because he never got sick. He did suffer from flea and skin allergies, though, hence the Funky Butt Mutt appellation.

The only thing in the kitchen at our hippie crash pad was a refrigerator with an empty cardboard bottom or two from the cases of beer we drank each weekend and a pantry with several cases of Strongheart canned dog food piled high. Slash always made sure there was dog food, and we all worked in restaurants, so there was little or no need for any other kind of food.

This song was always one of my favorite Jambox songs. It was the one song I felt always came across well, without as much of the uncontrolled and chaotic meanderings that characterized the Change Music style. But the vocals were always little better than the dog howls that inspired them. Slash’s girlfriend Lisa remarked that she thought we were going to pop a blood vessel singing this song.

The line about ears erect, nose just blew always charmed me, since a dog sneezing and putting it’s ears up is an image that you really don’t find much outside of the tiny Change Music catalog. I’d like to think it was one of my lines. Slash and I wrote songs the way we imagined Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote their songs: he’d write a couple of lines, I’d write a couple, and in singing them, rephrase them until they worked. Now, over thirty years later, I can’t really claim to remember who wrote what, even though I remember writing this song very well.

I remember Slash came home, and started playing the melody right away. He’d been jamming somewhere, maybe Jeff Golde’s house, and he had seized on the melody and kept it going until he got home. I loved it so much I learned to play it, too, and made it the start of my big guitar solo in the beginning of the song. This recording has several keyboard parts layered over the top of my guitar, which I didn’t like very much. Fojammi will forgive me this opinion, I hope.

Here's a Fojammathon version of this song I like a little better, and the original EP version.

Stuttershark SLEET

2009-05-14T11:45:00.005-05:00

Thursday, May 21,
from 8-11 pm
at the Sci-Fi Lounge,
6010 Kingsbury Ave.:

SLEET:
Improvisational percussion performed by William Morris, Tony Patti and Thomas Sleet. With abstract video by William Morris.

Admission: $2

Bill, Thom and I will be doing our improv percussion-based art performance music live with video by Bill. I might throw in some video to the mix, too. We'll attempt to explore the creative side of music, pushing ourselves to sync up and still explode outward in new and unexpected ways well outside of any structure or form that we can't immediately destroy while still presenting beauty.

This is the kind of music that is best live, for some reason, so come and listen. Here's a short piece to give you some idea of what to expect when we gel and flow:

Download "Stuttershark"

If You Got To Make A Fool Of Somebody

2009-04-25T14:06:00.017-05:00

Me, Simona, and her punk rock boyfriend in the Italian night.

Here's a post about a song I have neither written or performed, and high time it is. That's why this blog has variety in the title. So I can blog whatever I want.

When I lived in Italy in the late 80s I went nuts over Italian rock and roll from the sixties because it was like a whole new world of nostalgia was opened up to me. My friend Richard Wachter had once described me as being nostalgic for a past I never knew, which is pretty insightful. Two of the artists particularly appealed to me, Adriano Celentano and Mina. Both of them hugely popular, incredibly talented, and with the charisma of true stars in their own culture. One unforgettable afternoon I chanced on their movie "Blue Jeans" on RAI, the Italian national TV network, and it made a huge impression on me - a group of kids rise up against the Mayor of Rome when he bans Blue Jeans in the city. Corny but cool.

One of the Celentano songs that came to haunt me - one of many - was Il Problema Piu' Importante, which I didn't know in it's original version. The amazing vocal arrangement blew my mind. Take a listen:

Il problema piu' importante per noi
(The most important problem we face)
e di avere una ragazza di sera
(is who will be our girl tonight)
se restiamo da soli, soli tutto male
(if we find ourselves alone, alone in misery)
non si puo neanche cantar
(we can't even sing)

Forse non ci crederete ma e vero
(perhaps you won't believe it but it's true)
la malinconia ci prende di sera
(depression hits us at night)
con la barba gia fatta
(with our faces freshly shaved)
soli, senza nessuno,
(alone, with nobody)
ce ne andiam per la citta
(we go out into the city)

Gira e rigira, fra le balere
(going round and round, among the balere)
ci sara pure un anima buona
(there might be some good soul)
che si accompagna con noi
(that will accompany us)
anche perche
(also because)
non la troviamo mai, MAI!
(we never find her, never!)

One fine day I came to hear a version of this song by Bobbie Gentry, from the same album that brought us the song "Fancy", a typical 1960s song about a young poor girl being turned out to a life of prostitution by her own mother. Further investigation revealed that this song had been a minor hit called "If You Got To Make A Fool Of Somebody". So I had to dig up the original James Ray version:

I mean no disrespect to Rudy Clark, who wrote this fine song, (in addition to "Good Lovin'" and "Everybody Plays The Fool") but I have to give the edge to the Italian lyrics, since the theme of going out looking for girls in the soft Italian night speaks more to me than being made a fool of for no reason by someone. But you can see that this song is just one delirious arrangement, complex and mysterious, in any language. Check out the unprecedented combination of tuba, banjo and harmonica. Where did they come up with that?

Download If You Got To Make A Fool Of Somebody

Download "Il problema piu importante per noi"

Slow Drag aka The Sunglassed Masses

2009-04-04T10:00:00.004-05:00

Me on Delmar when I hung out with the cool kids.

I was honored to be included among the hippest kids in St. Louis, despite being an ancient old man to them, since they were all teenagers going to Clayton or U City high school and I was old enough to drink, though I still felt too young to actually hang out in bars. Instead, I spent my time messing around with my teenaged girlfriends and going to teenaged parties in various apartments and houses when the resident fossils left town and the kids held parties.

The kids I remember the best were Gabe Katz, who shared my love for Beats and who was just endlessly fascinating, Darren O'Brien, then LeDeen, and the mighty mighty Mark Higgins. Known universally as Higgens, he played the bass sax in Riot Act and cracked wise with a certain lordly demeanor that was impressive and magnificent. I won't go into the girls, for reasons of discretion, but I loved them all unashamedly.

I got to sing on one song with Higgens, a Don Green blues he called "Slow Drag"

I don't remember laboring over these lyrics or the singing of them, and they certainly sound dashed off and improvised. I can tell they were written down and that I was singing them from a piece of paper, because some of the phrasing is rushed and awkward, indicating that I've lost my place. The highlight of this long song was Higgens honking away on his sax, and I, for one, mourn the loss of the low end on the mastering of this song.

Skyscrapers fallin' down
Radiation all around
Suicide will end this mess
I'll buy my wife another dress
It's a slow drag
We need more ghetto blasters in the city

Longer unemployment lines
Dizzy astrological signs
Goofy kids be making noise
Excited girls be chasing boys
Don't beat me, they say
And turn around and run away
And all this time you get fed up
And listen until you shut up
Are you ready to bop? Step up and blow, it man!

Riding around like you got it made
Brilliant colors made to fade
And facts and rumours merge with tact
Let morals and manners make a pact
We need more ghetto blasters in this town

Society girls in gowns around
The sunglassed masses downtown bound
The sunglassed masses east and west
The sunglassed masses off your chest
The sunglassed masses know no crime
The sunglassed masses dance in time...

This is the other song I wrote lyrics for and sung on the After Hours LP, and it shares the same credits, though only Nick Georgieff knows for sure, and he ain't tellin'. It's a longer song than usual, but worth it, if you like hearing someone singing under the influence of Johnny 'Guitar' Watson and a heritage of true gangster inflection from North Saint Louis.

Download Slow Drag.

PKG. LIQ.

2009-03-27T17:15:00.003-05:00

Cover by Jeff Roth, baby!

Nick Georgieff played keyboards in Riot Act, if I remember correctly, and he had some kind of half-assed studio set up in his bedroom in an apartment in University City. He was a very cool guy, and friends with Don Green, who wanted me to make up some lyrics and sing on a couple of songs he'd written.

So sometime in 1983, shortly before I left for Los Angeles with Don, we sat around in Nick's studio and knocked off this song, which I called PKG. LIQ.

I loved the guitar licks on this song. The R&B turn that Riot Act was taking this year inspired Don to create some tiny little tricky licks that repitition could only enhance, rather than weaken, like all great R&B figures. I even regret that this song isn't twice as long. Every time I hear the last part, I wish it would go on and on.

Don and I were both South St. Louis white trash with some limited experience in the trashy side of St Louis, North and South, and he knew what I meant by the title - those cheap little neon signs you'd see on the lower class dives that sold beer on Sundays back when - listen up, children! - back when it was illegal to sell beer on Sundays unless you had a special license they mostly gave to restaurants and taverns.

What we were really thinking of was the greatest of these Sunday Liquor store substitutes, though, the popular Regal Sports on Olive. You could barely drive down Olive, a six lane street, on Sundays, thanks to the dozens of cars parked up and down the block, often double-parked near the door. The wino stuff might have been based on some actual encounter with a wino somewhere.

Listening to it, I felt the love I have for all my U City punk rock friends, Darren, John, Gabe, Higgens, and the gorgeous girls like Lisa, Tracy, Angela, and the rest of the crowd of that time. They were all at least five years or so younger than me, and they thought I could sing. I remember lots of the teens thought these songs were funny.

I don't remember the lyrics to this song, so your guess is as good as mine. The guitar is Don Green. The drums and synth lines are Nick Georgieff. The vocals are probably Don, Nick and me.

Download PKG. LIQ.

Introducing Don Green

2009-03-26T00:03:00.005-05:00

Don Green was the guitarist for one of the first punk bands in St. Louis, The Retros. When the Retros broke up - why I don't really know, except that I do know that his band mates Chuck DeClue, a bass player named Paul and the remnants of the Oui Oui Twins formed The Obvious right afterward - he ended up playing R&B and Ska with Riot Act and was damned good at it, too. Everyone agreed that Don was a freaking machine on the rhythm guitar.

Don was one of the guys who moved into the apartment upstairs from the OP-P Club with me after I opened the club. We all played guitar - Jim Saltsider, Don Green, Brian, and Paul Beasly. Shortly after they all moved in with me I came up the stairs one night and everyone was sitting on something - a mattress, an old couch, a box with a lamp on it, and playing solid body guitars of one kind or another, and the sound of fingers needling away at almost imperceptible strings was like a distant insectile buzz, so I decided to call us Don Green's Guitar Army.

Despite the fact that I was the landlord, I felt like Don was our leader, since he was the only one of us with a job.

Don dated Alissa Feinberg, the lost Oui Oui Twin, and we were pals. Long after the club closed up and I was at loose ends, mourning over the loss of a punk rock girlfriend who I should have never gone out with anyway, Don and Alissa asked me to come with them to California in Don's rebuilt Volkswagon.

I test drove the Volkswagon before we went on the road with it and noticed that the steering wheel had a quarter turn of play in it, and told Don he had to get it fixed before we drove it across country. Don refused flat out because he had just spent over three hundred dollars getting the engine rebuilt and that was a lot of money back then.

Soon after we hit the road the car started shaking violently on the highway. Somewhere outside of Springfield Missouri a high wind caught us as we were crossing an overpass going at least 60 and I smashed the car up on the median, tearing my side of the car completely off. Luckily we both walked away from the accident unharmed, but we had to take a Greyhound bus the rest of the way to Los Angeles and while Don forgave me, I'm not sure that ever really forgave me, if you know what I mean.

In my next post I'll put up some of the Don Green songs I have lying around, which would be the two cuts from After Hours that we did together right before we took off for L.A., and a few of the Hollenbeck tapes of the Retros.

The Last of Jim Saltsider

2009-03-24T20:12:00.004-05:00

These songs were pretty famous for being daring, bold explorations of the seamy underbelly of our cultural landscape. Either that or they were snickered at by the less analytical among us for being dirty. When I first realized what he was doing in these songs I was pretty amused.

It's pretty ingenious to take your lyrics entirely from alternate sources of verbiage like bumber stickers and graffiti on bathroom walls. Especially because he follows through on the concept completely, without dipping into editorial comment or any kind of judgement. However, these songs aren't safe for work, or home environments where children might be encouraged to engage in antisocial behavior of a sort unbecoming to the standards of those who wish to take our children from us and put them in foster homes for the licentiousness these songs exhibit, far fetched as it might seem.

But they are some funny, simple little country songs, and they would've been huge hits for Jim and Buddy Ebson if they had done something elementary like a lo-fi youtube video of them, because this is just the kind of humor people love to circulate via email to all their buddies.

Download Sh*thouse Walls.

Download Honk If You're Horny.

Jim's dark side.

2009-03-21T14:48:00.004-05:00

I can feel love for just about anyone but still be fully aware that they have faults. I'm not a black or white person, I don't deal in dualities, but see the world as shades of gray, as points on a continuum rather than guilty or innocent.

Here are a couple of Buddy Ebson songs that are supposed to be knee-slapping hilarious but which are also painfully heartfelt. They are both firmly within the country vein; the white trash St. Charles old-school country tradition Jim grew up around. When St. Louis went alt-country in imitation of the stunning success of nearby local boys Uncle Tupelo, most of my friends took to the country sound without the slightest hesitation. These two tracks show what many of them reverted to, turning their backs on pop, new wave and punk.

This alt-country turn started right before I moved to Italy, with my friends Mort Hill and Carol Crudden's brilliant band Diamond Stud, and when I came back to St. Louis it surprised me how country all the old punk rockers had turned. I had grown up associating country music with conservative, racist, intolerant assholes and it took me quite a while to get over these prejudices and appreciate country music at all.

These song titles are my guesses:

Download Let's Start With The Lawyers.

Download Going Postal.

Download Dope Smokin' Hippy.

A short addendum about Jim Saltsider

2009-03-20T17:22:00.006-05:00

In my last post I mentioned "Fantasia For Strings" and a nameless 60s sitcom theme that were two of the mainstays of my repertoire of sarcastic guitar licks; the kind that musicians throw out when practicing or showing off. I have recorded two short examples of me playing them quite badly on the guitar so that you can hear what I was writing about.

I did a cursory search on iTunes for "Fantasia For Strings" and found nothing that sounded remotely like it, so the title of it is just a fossil of my unreliable memory. Here it is:

This snippet was once the subject of furious debate. Exactly which 60s sitcom was it from? I heard many people swear it was from "My Three Sons," though the music played over the titles of that show was completely different. I call it the Fred MacMurray Museum of Modern Art Anthem. The 60s sitcom theme:

Download Fantasia and or 60s.

Whatever happened to Jim Saltsider?

2009-03-18T19:21:00.006-05:00

Did you ever really love somebody for no good reason? You just love them, and whenever you see them, you get all happy and excited and ready to start some shit? Start a band, write a song, hit the bars, anything? Jim Saltsider was a guy like that to me, though I wasn't nearly as bat shit crazy as he is.

I miss that rat, and he's been gone to parts unknown for quite while now. Dave Winklemeyer claims that he went to the Northwest about seven or eight years ago, maybe longer. But I haven't actually seen Dave for many years now, so that's pretty vague. The last few times I did see Jim he was playing with his new band, Buddy Ebson, at Frederick's Music Lounge, and that place has been closed a long time now.

Bloody Ebson was the brilliant, virtuosic joke-band answer to a previous virtuoso joke band Jim had called Jethro Bodean. Jim had become one hell of a guitarist. Back when we were in the Obvious together, I was the one who could play Great American Classics such as "Fantasia For Strings" for laughs, along with a tiny little melody line that was universally recognized but heatedly debated - was it "My Three Sons"? or some other sixties sitcom theme? By the time I saw Jim play at Frederick's, his mastery of the cheesiest of KEZK Klassics was incredible. It bespoke of hundreds of hours of intense study of what he liked to called "Great American Songs."

Fred Friction was nice enough to burn me a copy of a recording he had of Bloody Ebson, and it has been a prized possession since. I'm pretty sure that it was recorded live, but I don't hear any audience noise, but it's definitely a recording without overdubs or studio trickery. I assume that it has Mike Burgette on bass, since he played with Bloody Ebson. I'll be posting a few of these tracks if anyone wants to hear them. I'll start with these covers, and next I'll post some of his original tunes, which will not be safe for work, children, or the easily offended.

I'm tired of waiting for Jim himself to actually release this stuff one way or another. Maybe if I put this music up on the web, he will appear out of nowhere to kick my butt for doing it. I hope so. I miss that crazy rat.

Kaya Ungu Mala!

Download Bloody Ebson Track 3.

Download Bloody Ebson Track 4.

Pharmaceutic Rock Again

2009-03-13T11:26:00.004-05:00

This time, with Jeff Hess, KDHX DJ and local rock god, on drums and backing vocals. He also lent me the fuzz-tone guitar you hear that makes this piece such a wall of punk noise. Recorded at Soft Sound Studios with FoJammi on the mix, and on the elegant keyboard motifs, with an additional vocal overdub and a sleazy guitar lead thrown in at my basement studio.

Read my note about this song, and even listen to the demo version, here.

Download the new improved version of Pharmaceutic Rock.

Erotic

2009-03-10T10:28:00.007-05:00

I brought this song to Soft Sound Studio in the early nineties, and FoJammi and I worked on it for a couple of weeks to get it as finished as it is now. Since we couldn't track guitar and vocals at different times, FoJammi and I made several short samples of the guitar line and synched them with midi to the rest of the synth tracks. This freed me up to sing this with all my heart, putting a great deal of effort and thought into the actual performance of the vocals, instead of doing whatever I could to deliver both at once.

I've loved to sing since I was a kid. My family was a singing family, one that sang when we got together for birthdays and picnics and whenever my grandma got out her little plastic ukulele. But when I heard my voice going through FoJammi's nice studio microphones and through his banks of reverb and EQ effects and compression and whatever else he had going I fell in love with my own voice for the first time. And this song was one of my best vocal performances of this time, perhaps the one that convinced me that I really could sing, if I pitched my voice right and worked hard enough at it.

I gave a great deal of thought to Erotic. First, I wrote it with all minor chords, as an experiment. Then, the words, which are about my post-pubescent relationship with eroticism, forced me to become allusive and vague instead of painfully obvious, as my lyrics almost always are.

Right after we recorded this version of this song, which is probably the final version, I wanted to redo it. The guitar solo was good, but had a couple of glitches that I can't hear any more. And many years later, I wanted to rewrite some the lyrics to reduce the unconscious assumptions of male privilege I now heard. But I've resigned myself to leaving it as it is, since experiments with resurrecting the ancient midi files have been nothing but a lot of hard work for very little good.

Plus, I'm unwilling to sacrifice the incredibly beautiful keyboard work FoJammi did on this song. The keys come in on the second verse, with pleasant counterpoint and harmonies, and then soar on the French Horn arrangements. I'm sure he could do it again, but is it worth the time, when this version is so good already? Better to live with the flaws.

Let’s get one thing straight—I never use imagery.
I’m not that kind of boy; I believe in honesty.
It’s an image with weight; it makes you circumvent
Circle around all the things that you might have meant.

And it doesn’t hurt anyone
And it isn’t real dangerous
And when you want it bad enough
You can even think it up on your own.

It’s just a little vice, and it shouldn’t shock anyone.
Between you and me, it’s acts of unlimited love.
It’s a fever that builds—it comes and it goes, you know.
You’ve got to admit that it’s all in our minds by now.

And if you try to examine it
And you take all the measurements
and read in between the lines
You’ll find out that you’re missing the point.

You shouldn’t ever judge an act of creation.
The myths that inflame our highly volatile brains.
The mystery of the act of attraction proves
you can never disprove what happens in solitude.

I don’t care about morals
I don’t care about prudity
But here is the way it is
Resplendent in nudity:
I want you to use your brains,
Now what do you think about that?

Download Erotic.

My Bird Eats Turkey

2009-03-07T22:16:00.006-06:00

Slash Brannon was a poet much admired in Jambox circles. His brother David and all the Earwacks cats dug his words, too. I copied a few of his poems in one of my oldest notebooks in the hopes of preserving some of heir mad frantic glamour. I knew I couldn't rely on Slash himself to preserve them, since he was hell bent on self destruction from birth.

One of our first projects together, after we decided to start recording every Monday night, was My Bird Eats Turkey, a poem by Slash Brannon that came up one way or another, perhaps by browsing through my old notebook.

We used the first line of the poem as it was, to set the rhythm of the lines to follow, which the poem didn't, more meandering than song. Then Fojammi went nuts on it, in a process that I think I contributed to as much as I could, but since I don't really play keyboards, in ways that probably either resulted in minor structural parts or else chaos.

I worked on adapting the lyrics, throwing as much of myself into as I wanted to. We recorded it a few different times before we made the take you hear below, with George Crider and Peter Wood helping out with the Low chorus:

The lyrics go something like this:

Lillian slipping within crisp whirlpools gripping within concern
Lazily beans aligns with the main screen thinks about the curves

Low low low
That's about as low
As a fellow ought to go

Everything's happenin' and everything's changing and every thing's going by
I don't know nothing that I can't remember and I can't exactly remember

Patiently patiently waiting to awe the carnivore of all time
My bird eats turkey for breakfast every day
Never asks for bacon, I know just what she'll say
She'll say:

This was perhaps the best of all the pieces we did together at this time. Fojammi totally knocked it out of the park on this, and I was really happy with some of my ideas for the vocals, though it was never really fully realized, since I could never get it quite right in one live take with no overdubs.

This poem was written for a waitress at Duff's restaurant in the West End, where we all worked off and on in the late 1970s. She was a beautiful crazy blonde named Kate Brune, and we were partying over at her apartment one night when Slash heard her say "My bird eats turkey."

We were all in love with her, she was so incredibly cool and smart and older and sexy. She was like Dorothy Parker to my romantic young eyes, and if I had been older, or had even looked as old as I was, I would have tried to get together with her. But we were all teenagers and she was at least 21 or 22 years old, so it was like howling at the moon to even think of such a thing.

Download "My Bird Eats Turkey"

Rendered Pimpless

2009-02-28T13:22:00.008-06:00

This song was one I contributed very little to, but Jambox was a band, so I helped as much as I could. Slash Brannon wrote the brilliant misogynist lyrics. Rico wrote that blistering bass line and I love that much of it. Fo Jammi considers this piece Jambox’s finest moment. In this song I tried to do guitar parts that reflected the jagged intelligence of the bass, but I always felt I fell fall short of doing good work.

It's the least pop of our work, that's for sure. It was recorded on the vinyl Jambox EP, which I named this blog after, The Change Music Variety Show, Featuring Jambox.

She earned herself a loveless life
She worked so hard with her painless lies
She was rendered pimpless
She got so ripped

Rendered pimpless rendered loveless
Rendered lifeless in her eyes
Rendered stiffless instead of gripless,
Rendered a mess, she thought I tripped!

The morning bolts truth in paradise
The lady fried as I told her she lied
She was blitzed in shitsville
She got so lipped

Blitzed in pimpless, witless, loveless
Her fires just cinders, she’s paralyzed
Rendered stiffless instead of gripless
The Change just jammed on in her eyes

Way back in the late seventies Jambox had a whole pimps and ho’s world going that was making me increasingly uncomfortable. At first it was shocking and funny, and also ghetto, which we knew we were. Slash in particular had a strange success with girls who liked to be treated with a certain indifference that was close to contempt at times. This success emboldened him.

He delighted in calling girls bitches and ho’s, and god forgive me, I did it, too. But I doubt that it was something I ever liked much, even though who knows how much you can lie to yourself over thirty years later? I remember it was a cheap giggle to me that never came easily to my lips. From ho’s to pimps is an easy leap, so he came to this song. Nowadays such casual misogyny is commonplace in hip hop, but back then you’d never hear such crap except in secret party tapes and Redd Foxx records.

All I did on this cut is sing dreadfully off key and play some frenetic lead guitar. I also did the vocal arrangements, such as they were. Rico wrote the song and played it with monster abandon. I kind of like the music. I thought it was a creative and unusual bass line, especially for the seventies, when most bass lines weren’t nearly this punk.

I was also blinded by my uncritical love and admiration of Slash Brannon, of course. His poetry never failed to thrill me, even when it was degrading to women. Rendered stiffless! Blitzed in shitsville!

Down at the Studio

2009-02-27T16:18:00.003-06:00

Down at the studio we're still making serious noise. Enjoy this out take from one of our Sleet-Morris-Patti creations. It seems a better mix came with my tiny five-watt amp, more suitable for the small room we play in.

Overgrown & Undesexed

2009-02-23T10:13:00.011-06:00

After showing last week what a sweetheart I can be, now it's time to confess what a dick I once was.

I started "Overgrown & Undersexed" with the urge to write a put-down song, like the Blondie song "Rip her to shreds", but without the drag queen subtext, since I was oblivious to the appeal of a drag queen subtext, and thoroughly immersed in my own little world of teenaged girls who liked punk rock boys like me. These girls fancied themselves little tough stuffs, ready to take on the entire world of sex, punk rock music, and find a personal mix of sex and autonomy that I couldn't even begin to fathom because I was inclined to regard girls as mysterious beings, vastly different from me, who seemed to like what I liked, and then suddenly didn't, and I refused to think through why.

I had the mistaken idea that these girls were just as tough as they pretended to be, even though they were all between 16 and 18 years old and couldn't have known what they really felt anyway, since none of us were examining critically our sex roles through the lens of gender bias and shared humanity. When a beautiful teen girl would let a tear drop from her huge blue eyes, telling me her father was threatening to put me in jail for violating the statutory rape laws that everyone constantly flouted openly back then, there was a moment of profound disconnect between the punk streetwise front and the little girl just underneath. A disconnect far more worthy of profound exploration than the crap song I wrote instead, but hints of this conflict can be sniffed out by those sympathetic to the situation.

The lyrics of this song have many weak spots, and when you are already a weak lyricist like me, it can get pretty stupid pretty fast. I liked my songs to be fun, and that meant bad jokes when I failed, and below we can see not only bad jokes, but mean spirited and smug lyrics, too. But set in this bright sunny pop frame, I was trying to deliver an amusing contrast, and by ripping off a tiny bit of "Bus Stop" by the Hollies and then nosediving into what I called a middle-eastern scale based on a half-step repetition, I tried to mix it all up the point where it could become interesting. So take a listen:

Overgrown & Undersexed
You don't realize that you are a mess
Overgrown & Undersexed
You're about to climb out of your dress
You're the kind of girl
Who turns around when flashbulbs pop
You've got plenty of mirrors
To show you who's on top
If you want my opinion
I'll give it straight to you
You've had it too easy girl,
It will come back to you
You know I like to watch your
Curves and fleshly swells
But underneath all this
We find funky smells
As long as you're living,
Why don't you join us in some tea?
You're so independent,
You can do without me

This song was recorded at the second big Obvious recording session somewhere in Illinois, when we recorded and mixed five or six songs in one long day. It has the usual Obvious lineup on it: Alex Mutrux on guitar (I remember teaching him the scale to use on his solo, which was a struggle for him, but much better than mine), Kevin Brueseke on drums, Sally Barnes on Arp, me singing, and my brother Augustino playing bass and singing.

Download "Overgrown & Undersexed"

Cathy Dearest

2009-02-12T21:09:00.004-06:00

For the one who loves me most.

Just in time for Valentines day I have my first real love song, "Dearest Cathy". Dedicated to everyone lucky enough to feel that crazy surge of joy and love whenever they lay eyes on their sweetie. I feel it every single day.

It's also the first song I ever composed on the ukulele. It's just one and a half minutes of pure vocal excitement. More John Phillips than Magnetic Fields. That's just me. Recorded at home.

Download Cathy Dearest.

Surf's Up, Gang!

2009-02-03T09:54:00.017-06:00

Here is the principal cast for "Surf's Up, Gang!" from left to right: Duwan Dunn, Steve Pick, Beatle Bob, Tony Renner, some unknown guy in a referee shirt, Rene Spencer and myself. Standing behind us is Ed Mantels-Seeker and John the Mailman.

Even a talentless dilettante such as myself has one song that stands above the rest, partly due to the reaction it gets, and partly because, as a result of this reaction, of the amount of time I've spent promoting it over the years. Unfortunately, for me that song is "Surf's Up, Gang!"

The song started around the same time I started to get tired of Jambox, my first band. It was conceived as a movie idea for Jambox, and together with David Udell, I started a seven page script for it that I lost a long time ago. I remember practicing it with Jambox and being unhappy with the Jambox sloppy drunken careening out-of-control style. Not even the fresh young loveliness of the Changels could redeem it.

It was one of the songs that the members of the Obvious liked from the start, though. So the lineup that perfected the song was Kevin Bruseke, who sculpted the mammoth classic surf beat that defines the song now, Alex Mutrux, who added some brilliant guitar harmonies and one of the defining riffs of the instrumental section of the song and myself.

After Alex and Kevin and I decided to kick Chuck out of the band for never showing up to practice, we started to save our gig money up to go into a studio in Illinois to record this and two other of our most popular songs. The recording session, which was one day of recording, dubbing and mixing, went really well. I met up with my childhood friend Ed Mantels-Seeker, who was taking a film class with Roy Zurick, and together we resurrected the idea of making a movie with the music as the soundtrack, since sync sound was well out of our budget, which was basically nothing. Ed provided all the 8mm film stock we needed and intended to edit it also.

Now I just needed a bunch of people to come down to the Mississippi River to shoot it. I was working at the RFT at the time and had access to typesetting machines, so I whipped up a flyer:

A flyer to recruit the fun one hundred for the movie shoot. I handed this out everywhere I went for a week or two prior to the first shoot.

Gabe Katz volunteered to shoot also, though I don't know how much of his footage made it into the movie, since I was insensitive to Ed's vision of doing his own movie. We had a pretty small crowd the first couple of times we shot, so I did yet another flyer:

Judging from the breathless copy on this flyer, which was also an ad in Reverb (a local new wave publication produced by the incomparable Donna Knott) the bulk of the filming was probably done September 20th, 1981.

As one can easily see if you click on the image for a full-sized version, I wasn't shy about self promotion back then. In the innocence of youth I considered myself the director, though Ed did the editing all by himself, with a tiny viewer and hundreds of pieces of editing tape. Below you should see the link to the movie itself, a director's cut version I made from an old VHS copy I found among Paul Stark's box of new wave videos of the early 1980s.

This movie retains the ability to surprise and delight even after more than 25 long years have aged it, and the central conceit of a beach party on the Saint Louis river front remains as wonderfully stupid and ill-advised as it ever was. So my pride in the achievement, though somewhat diminished by the failure of the Obvious to rise to the occasion by actually touring and raising ourselves to some kind of cult prominence, is still vaguely flickering somewhere in the bottomless depths of my natural tendency to self-loathing and bitter regrets.

Here are the credits to the movie, with a soundtrack of the Obvious song "Dot-Pop!":

Download "Surf's Up, Gang!"

Pharmaceutic Rock

2009-01-21T15:38:00.007-06:00

Here's a quick rough of a punk song I never did with any band. It's a rewrite of the Jambox song Sweet Weaving Dancer. I was always fond of the guitar parts. It was like Trout Mask Replica, I always hoped.

The idea for the lyrics came from my old friend, the late Chuck DeClue, singer for the Retros and our band the Obvious for a while. Chuck had a pulp magazine sensibility towards rock lyrics, demonstrated best by his song Henpecked Husband, a song about a henpecked husband who rises up against his wife and kills her and stuffs her body in a trunk one fine day.

After a while I came to think of it as a song about STDs, especially since I usually sang it about sex instead of rock; sex and drugs, and how desperate the need for them is, and how similar the lack of impulse control works with both of them.

When I actually sat down to record it yesterday I couldn't sing it as vulgar and shocking as I should have. So here's the newly-sanitized and less shocking version. You'd almost think it was celebratory if you didn't look behind the words to see sex and need and sweats and death.

Rock me till I bleed
It’s what I really need
Rock me on the floor
Until I beg for more
It’s such a rare disease
And I’m so hard to please
The only cure is more
Of what I came here for

It’s all so vague it can’t be displayed it’s time to call the doctor:

Pharmaceutic rock
Tell me, Doc:
Can you cure the bug?
I’ve ruined another rug!
Pharmaceutic rock
Tell me, Doc:
Should I pull the plug?
Or try another drug?

Rock and roll party doctor!
Rock me, rock rock me rock!

Drug me till I need
Another whack o’crack
Drug me on the floor
And I’ll still beg for more
It’s such a rare disease
And I’m so hard to please
The only thrill is more

Download Pharmaceutic Rock.

(I Lost My Club) Down On The Stroll

2009-01-13T21:53:00.011-06:00

The first punk club in St. Louis by Tres Vite

When Mort Hill told me I could do it, I believed him. He was so utterly convincing. My dad had a uninhabitable shell of a storefront in the worst part of town, and we had a dream. CBGBs on the stroll.

It happened because Mort was so damned lovable. Annie O loved him, I loved him, everyone loved him. All the art twits from Wash U loved him.

Mort had a name he liked that he spelled a variety of different ways, a name for things he liked, for cool things that were too cool to be simply called cool. Oppy, he said. So I wanted to call the club the OP-P Club, because I said it was pop spelled inside out. So I cut out the letters from the masthead of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, back when it was still a Pulitzer paper, and made a punk little logo out of it. I put some of Mort's cute little dumbbells on the side, like a real logo. Everyone loved it.

The OP-P Club business card.

Sad to say, the fun days of "Hey, kids, let's start a punk club!" ended when we decided to incorporate and I said I wanted to own 51% of the club. All the people who had spent so much time and effort, especially Mort, were aghast at my effrontery, and they all went away and told me I couldn't use Mort's beautiful logo or name anymore. It was so sad and stupid, especially since it was all about no money and nothing to gain anyway. I called it the Change Club, but everyone else still called it the OP-P Club.

After a few months of diminishing crowds and living on AAA Do-Nuts from the corner of Taylor and Olive bought for me by Don Green of the Retros and Riot Act, my dad finally told his buddy Duke to kick me out of the club.

I might not have gone, but somehow this scary guy with dreads named Benny got into the club and he told me he'd kill me if I ever came in there again and that was the real end of it; some big black guy squatting up in my club and me out on the street, peering in the windows at the spray painted walls, wishing I still was a person of substance.

I wrote this song about it.

I found love in the Change Club Bathroom
I found love, it was hard to resist
Oh, I found love, but alls I really wanted
Was to piss.

I tried to open the door for at least half an hour
I could hear moans and sighs through the keyhole
The girl I've been waiting for
Was on all fours on the floor.

I lost my club down on the stroll
It could happen to you
I lost my club down on the stroll
Now what should I do?

My Dad had a shack in the worst part of town
-Ghetto city, man!
He lived on the West Coast wasn't ever around
-We went crazy, man!
I decided to try it - for the bands and fans
-Without getting wasted, man!
Now nobody even knows my name!

We called it change, they called it OP-P
-Names don't matter, man!
We made up lots of photocopy
-Posters and platters, man!
They decided the local bands and clubs they didn't need
-The place was too sloppy, man!
Now nobody even knows my name!

Who's club was it, man?

This was recorded in the second big recording session of the Obvious which mostly had my brother Augustino playing bass, but on this cut I was lucky enough to have the greatest punk rock bass player ever to attend Roosevelt High School, Mark Sheridan of the Zanti Misfits. Alex Mutrux plays lead, I sing, Kevin Brueseke slams the skins, and Sally Barnes played Arp Synthesizer.

Download "(I Lost My Club) Down On The Stroll"

Final Mix of Just a Moment

2009-01-13T09:58:00.005-06:00

Just a short post to announce that I have finally procured a final mix of my song, Just a Moment.

Fo Jammi mixed it down with a a really loud bass track at first, which was nice, but overwhelming. I asked him to pump up the guitars and pull down the bass by half and we came up with a more rock mix. Then I grafted on the louder bass to the intro and have a final mix for you to enjoy.

This song features Mark Gray, of The Famous Bar, Funkabilly, and Go Dog Go on lead guitar, doing a stellar job. Fo Jammi added the rock piano and some organ, while I did the vocals, and guitars, including the Mark Sheridan-inspired bass line. Ever since Mark did a killer bass line to I Lost My Club (Down On The Stroll), the punk rockest of all the Obvious recordings, I have wanted to do a bass line like his. The drums are by William Morris.

Download Just a Moment.

The Oui Oui Twins

2008-12-30T21:14:00.012-06:00

Alissa Feinberg, the lost Twin

Punk wasn't an easy choice back in 1980. I had already laughed it off several times before, after buying the first Ramones album and having a laugh or two over Beat On the Brat With A Baseball Bat and I Don't Wanna Go Down In The Basement.

It might seem foolish now, but at the time, punk didn't seem so much a musical thing as a fashion statement. The idea that music didn't need to be played well was so totally alien to everything music had been throughout the 1970s that it was almost impossible to grasp; and the consequences were completely unforeseen. Nobody knew that punk would spread like crabgrass and cover the land, choking out every last vestige of proficiency in music, leaving us with the souless studio drones and rap musicians to rule the airwaves while thousands of new bands fought for our attention just beneath the horizon of profitability; we all thought that music would continue on as before, with those who played far better than average wanking away on their ever-more difficult and ornate variations of blues, funk and country while the rest of us strived diligently to imitate our betters.

As we all now know, punk did not go anywhere, but just got bigger and bigger. I remember, with visceral clarity, in the dying days of Jambox, sitting on a fire escape behind where West End Wax would once be, reading an article on the Sex Pistols, chuckling at the effrontery of Johnny Rotten claiming that sex was just sixty seconds of sweat and noise, among other nonsense calculated to challenge our seventies preconceptions of right and wrong, and thinking the man was onto something big here.

So when Rommie Martinez and Alissa Feinberg came to invite me to join their new punk band the Oui Oui Twins, I said yes on the spot. They were both beautiful young girls, just barely sixteen, and I liked the idea of a punk band fronted by two underaged young girls just on the face of it. Back in the barbarous days of the late seventies, the whole idea of even pretending that teenaged girls were incapable of agency in choosing whether or not to have sex with anyone of any age was considered so prudish and quaint that we all found it quite laughable.

When I heard the lyrics that the girls had written I was pretty convinced that we could put together a credible punk act. We practiced a few times at the apartment where I was living with George Crider and his roommate Bob, once inviting Brett Rosenberg over for a little light necking and music playing. Alissa and Rommie were already jealous over Brett, who was a big-eyed, big dicked little guy who played a mean lead guitar and was famous for wearing revealing satin pants on stage in his last band, Surgery.

Soon the rest of Surgery, minus whoever played bass and Howard, the lead singer - a legendary performer who was known to grope and sexually assault girls while singing - was lined up to form the new band. Alex Mutrux would play guitar, like me, and Kevin Brueseke would play drums. Kevin was a well-known drummer in the punk scene in Saint Louis. He was, in fact, one of the first St. Louis punk drummers I had ever seen myself, though I didn't realize it at the time. I had seen him playing with the Camaros at a legendary show at some house on Forest Park Boulevard maybe a year or so earlier, along with Bob Reuter and the Dinosaurs and the mighty mighty Retros. That show was the very first St. Louis Punk show I and many other people had ever seen, though I'm not sure if it pre-dated the Cool Jerks in Nik Moon's basement sometime in the late seventies also.

Soon after we started this band, Mort Hill and I were working on opening the very first punk club in St. Louis, the Club OP-P on Olive, in a worthless old building my dad had bought. In this building, in the same room where many of the top punk bands of this time were to play, we started practicing, and one day we made a down and dirty recording on a cheap Jap boombox I had laying around just for shits and grins. And this is how, after all these many decades, we can hear the faintest echos of the majesty of the Oui Oui Twins.

Of course, the blinding poreless engorged youthfulness of the Twins themselves can never be recaptured. Their tiny brunette bodies, tight and hot, can only be dimly glimpsed even by those who still cherish the memories of those long-gone days. So try to listen with indulgence and compassion to these crude practices, while understanding that the Oui Oui Twins never really got much better technically, they were always nothing less than the rawest wildest yawp of sex-crazed punk abandon ever seen on a St. Louis stage.

On the tracks here I'm pretty sure that the lineup is Alissa and Rommie on vocals, Kevin on drums, Alex and me on guitars, and my brother Augustino on bass.

The Oui-Oui Twins at their second and last gig at Club OP-P New Year's Eve 1981.

First, try the Oui Oui version of Dot-Pop, which was called I've Got Class!

Next, the hit single that never was, I'm Electric.

Last, if you wish, a song that was pretty lame, Last Night.

And if you remember them at all, I will share with you my deep regret that no recorded version of their insane rap/dirge My Brain Is On The Floor survives, and is probably lost forever.

A Thom Sleet/Bill Morris Change

2008-12-23T16:01:00.008-06:00

While taking a much needed-break from my video editing job I had another session with Thom Sleet and Bill Morris. Here is an excerpt from the best of what we did. Don't know if I could ever do it again, but I'll always try.

We started this session by sketching diagrams of what we would play, to give us some kind of direction. I also decided I would play melodically if I wanted, since that's just me. Listening to this back, right afterwards, I felt it was stone cold fever in jam.

This track has Thom Sleet on drums and such, Bill Morris on guitar, and me on the wah guitar.

Download "Knocking a Riff"

Coming Attractions: The Obvious

2008-12-17T09:37:00.003-06:00

There are only a few Obvious songs to put up, in all. But this is a list of everything I'm planning on throwing up her over the next few months:

Surf's Up, Gang! - gotta do this soon, I guess. Everyone's seen the video, but there are stories to tell and photos to share.

Venturesque - the only perfect Obvious song, written by Alex Mutrux. I'm really proud of my guitar parts on this, though I realize the art of the rhythm guitar is lost on most people.

Back to Beat - my punk cry for beat legitimacy, prefaced by a quote from Howl.

Those were the first three songs we recorded, all of them pretty decent recordings. The next recording session was much more rushed.

Overgrown & Undersexed - some pop snide put down of an imaginary girl.

(I Lost My Club) Down On The Stroll - my post-punk song about the OP-P Club, the first punk club in St. Louis.

Dot-Pop - this one's done.

Lights, Camera, Action! - this one's done.

Jailbait - a regrettable subject that seemed funny at the time. There was a time, kids, when statutory rape was just a joke. The hook for this song was swiped so directly from Charlie Langrehr that he even had the temerity to bring it to my notice once, and I, of course, denied it furiously.

Then there are some live tracks Alex Mutrux coughed up in honor of my 50th birthday. If anyone even cares, they are a version of "Waitin' For My Man" with local legend Jim Saltsider on vocals, our off-key version of "Pleasant Valley Sunday", always a Tony Patti standard, and a truncated version of a song even I had forgotten we did that I guess is called the Celebrity Song.

Dot-Pop!

2008-12-02T16:46:00.011-06:00

The Obvious was the best band I was ever in, just ask Alex Mutrux, even though it was never one of Alex's "favorite" bands or anything like that. Jim Saltsider himself gave us our entire supply of ultra hipster insiderness thanks to his dabbling's in White Pride and sundry other crimes.

But the Obvious, more than anything else, was what is indisputably known as a new wave band, though aspects of punk and post-punk nihilism were in evidence in every single recorded instance of the band.

And this is where we find Saltsider and Mutrux sitting inside the filthy trash container in front of my Mom's apartment where I was crashing right after the O-PP Club fell apart.

Look at Jim Saltsider grinning his evil elfin Kaya-Ungu-Mala smiles at the camera while fingering leftover crumbs of Sugar Smacks, while Mutrux thumbs through a magazine, seemingly unaware of his magnificent hipster past, instead rather annoyed but still game enough to crawl in there in the first place.

He wrote this song for the Oui Oui Twins, who had some lyrics that no one seemed to like that were something like "I've Got Class!" and if you check back here every so often I'll get around to posting it, since I have a very lousy cassette tape of a practice with this song.

I rewrote the lyrics and we sped it up quite a bit before we finally recorded it in the second of our two recording sessions. This version has Mutrux on guitar, me on guitar and vocals, Kevin Brueseke on drums, my brother Augustino on bass and Sally Barnes on Arp.

"Dots dig dada den drink soda pop!"

It was a typical boy teen delusion grown stale - the idea that somewhere there were dots, dots who somehow dug you, dots who doted on you, dots only signed to shine with the phosphorescence you provided. And that was supposed to be enough. And that was supposed to be the end of it. But it wasn't, and it hardly ever was any other way.

You got used to the dots, started to kind of expect them one way or the other. Dots, you'd tell yourself in moments of deepest introspection, these Dots are just plain daffy. One day these dots came to you in the form of a Oui-Oui Twin or two. And from then on out it was just the Obvious - with and without Chuck DeClue.

It was a big mystery to anyone as much as me, what I would say when we actually recorded the song. I tried to keep it on the one but must admit I Kerouaced it on up as much as a trained stream of consciousness boys can wain it. Can wing it. Wanna wang it, dol-gang it to death and damnation!

We'll start out with Feedback & Flashback,
The world's most engaging Dots.
They decided to use what they got to ooze
And they moved at the party to prove:

Dots pop Dot-Pop.

"Let's take a break here to clarify the vague terminology in this song: Dots are beauty personified, and pop is the ultimate explosion of love."

We tied up the Dots in cellophane-
We intertwined them between our strings-
Played chords on their epidermal kernel-
Pop Dots - have a little fling!

"When Dots drink each other's Dot-Pop, it's only a question of abnormal florals or oral morals."

Dots dig Dada den drink soda pop

You know you know nothing if you don't know you know what you know. But, anyway... You don't have to remind me what I don't know even if I did I might not anyway bein the way I am and all. I'm not saying I know, I'm just asking if you do, and if you do, then everything you do is inclusive in the limited plan of action and law allowable under precedents long-established and benign.

Download "Dot-Pop!"

Tacky Neon Blood! A Comedy of Manners

2008-11-19T20:08:00.003-06:00

Back in the far off days of my heavenly youth, there existed a simple technology called a tape deck. Kids with wit and humor seized upon these devices to record themselves goofing around. We had all heard Firesign Theater and the records of the Bonzo Dog Band and knew that we could make a comedy tape as easily as they did. It was a kind of punk comedy, but without the narrow cultural focus that punk came to represent.

Slash Brannon was the name I coined for Patrick Udell for this very comedy tape, and Rico D. Bool was the name I coined for Joe Ramsey. Later I also came up with Fo Jammi's name, since it seemed to be my job to invent nicknames for the entire band. Of us all, I think only Joe and Fo Jammi have kept their teen nicknames, which is amazing to me.

After a considerable amount of crude editing I have smacked this chaotic sketch into something worth listening to. I just had to take out some of the long, drawn-out scenes of torture that we resorted to all too frequently, since we just did it because we couldn't think of anything funny to do, and cruelty is the natural refuge of the amateur comic.

Personally, I find these comedy tapes to be hilarious, but I realize that my humor is spawned of affection for the knuckleheaded kids who tapes it together.

This was recorded in 1977 or 1978 in the South Saint Louis Funk Lab. The female voice was supplied by Lisa, Slash's girlfriend.

Just a Moment

2008-11-17T16:21:00.004-06:00

Another song I played at my 50th birthday party was one very important to me: Just a Moment. The very reason I went to so much trouble and expense to have such a big party was because I wanted to have a moment in time where everyone who loved me would be with me in one room, and I got as close as I possibly could to having it.

I have a theory of time that orders my life and provides me with the faith to endure as much as I can the passing of time and helps me to fill even moments of tedium and impatience with a spark of the eternal. This theory is based on the idea that time begins in the present moment, rather than in the past.

Time begins, as it does in actual experience,
in the present moment,
and on this I have chosen to rely

It’s not some antique philosophical conception
a bang before all time
that you can measure like a simple length of string

If you switch the ideas about all time beginning
From past to present moment
You'll understand the bang is nowhere but our now

Time… Is nothing but a moment
It’s what’s going down
And it’s happening to you

Time… Going backwards going forwards
Infinitely outward
From an omnipresent now

We can’t get any closer
To the current state of time
We listen to impressions
Of the bang of now behind
Sooner or later
Our conceptions of linear time
Become a strong illusion
Called the arrow of time

Time… Like a wasp stuck in amber
Is a fossilized fragment
of a moment called now

Time… Existing solely in the present
We’re all presently recording
Every memory of now

If you disconnect the dots you
Might lose yourself in time
Our construct is our lifeline
The timeline is our mind
But regarding pure physics
It could happen at any time
The consensus will be shifting
To this moment in time

It's more than just a moment, really. It's every moment all at once in one. My very faith in existence stems from nothing more than the knowledge that there is a now, and there was a now, and now is all we'll ever see.

After reading an incredible book called "Time: The Familiar Stranger" I became very interested in time, and set aside my former cock-assed theory (all of my theories are arguably cock-assed, of course) that you couldn't go faster than the speed of light forwards but you could go faster than the speed of light backwards, which I made up because I thought it was really funny on a trip with my friends in 1978.

The patient and digestible way the author presented the concept of time is actually a mental construct that is extremely hard to verify using anything other than another mental construct became quite real to me, even though I continued to order my life around the idea that there are three states of time: past, present and future. You can't really get a thing done without using these concepts to order your life, and I'm a practical person.

But a great deal of thinking on the subject over the years led me to reject the idea of the future existing. Even if you were able to see all time outside of time, much like we can see incredibly far into the past by simply glancing up at starlight. I decided that the future can't exist, even outside of time, because it hasn't been created yet. Time begins in the present moment, and persists in the past, or else we wouldn't get to see starlight from millions of years ago.

This song was recorded at Soft Sound Studios by Fo Jammi, who also played piano and mixed it. I played the guitar and bass, Bill Morris played the drums, and Mark Gray played the incredible, otherworldly guitar solo that snakes throughout the piece.

Download Just a Moment.

I'm Not Old

2008-11-13T20:45:00.009-06:00

I'm in the now, just like you and all of us. In a solipsistic mood due to the increasing weight of my accumulated past moments, I had to write a song of defiance.

You call it age, I call it a large collection of past moments I personally witnessed. The envelope carrying my consciousness, if compared to the body of ten years ago, is aged. Everything inside feels the same.

This was one of the four rock songs I chose to sing at my 50th birthday party. It seemed ridiculously appropriate, and when Bill Morris said he dug it, that clinched the choice for me, since he is one of the few people to have ever heard it and I wasn't really expecting him to dig anything I wrote at all.

When I sang the song, a small group of middle-aged women friends of mine gathered together in front of the band. When I got to the big dramatic ending, they all swooned and screamed on cue, even though none of them had ever heard the song before, and it cracked my ass up. I had to laugh right in the middle of trying to sound earnest and sincere. It was the best moment of an unforgettable night.

I'm going to dedicate this song to the lovable rock god Steve Scariano, who has been playing bass in a variety of great bands for a long time. Listening to one of the bands he plays in, Prisonshake, I became inspired by the mix of casual ability and sloppy precision they put across in all their best songs. To put it simply, I became excited again by rock, because Prisonshake has it both ways, complexity and simplicity, rawness and refinement. It helped me to remember that a good song should have both.

So I put together a delicate melody and a hard chorus and made it work as best I could, trying to show both sides of music that I love. I sang in the way I usually do, smooth and controlled, and then sang in the way I ought to more often, contrived and exciting. Like Doug Enkler or some other rock god.

After composing the guitar part and sung melody, I took it to Fo Jammi's studio to record it. After laying down the basic tracks, I took it home and wrote a nice bass part for it, hoping it would be the kind of bass part Steve Scariano would like.

Here are the words:

The time has come, and I just don't know how
To sing of when it wouldn't ever be now
Go back against our wills in time
Remember when you were mine

'Cause if you gaze deep into my dark brown eyes
You're gonna see back behind a thousand lies:

I'm not old

I'm still a rock'n'roll star
I'm back in love with you
The fans are going wild
There's only one thing to do

Now that I'm not old

You say you're in a fit
You're getting ready to cry
You're such a nervous girl
There's only one thing to try

And that's the very same thing
I once did with you

Download "I'm Not Old"

Sweet Weaving Dancer

2008-10-13T12:18:00.000-05:00

The first song recorded on The Change Music Variety Show EP was called “The Sweet Weaving Dancer.” Though I remember I wrote the song and lyrics myself, I also remember many of Slash Brannon’s lines and ideas were part of the song and he has the co-credit for writing it. Rico De Bool claims to have written the bizarre, shuffling refrain, but I remember writing it, too, and find it hard to believe that I could have learned something so guitar-centric from Joe, who played bass. I guess that we worked it out together somehow.

The conceit of the EP being like one of our comedy tapes was typical of our thinking. Having Dice Mosely introduce the recording was unanimously agreed by all.

I was very proud to have been the only person to have obtained an actual U.S. Copyright on the childhood doggerel that opens the song. I used to brag that every time I kid sang that song he owed me royalties. I never thought, being 18 years old myself, that maybe kids had stopped singing this particular song in the last decade or so. I wonder if anyone born in the late seventies or later has even ever heard this song:

Girls are made of greasy grimy gopher guts
Mentholated monkey meat
Chicken’s little dirty feet
French fried eyeballs rolling down a dirty street
That’s what Jambox loves!

A dancer hasn’t got the answer, she’s only a prancer
until she’s the Sweet Weaving Dancer.
I’m not talking bout your mother, I’m talking to you,
And your little sister, too.
Little kids of America, we’re talking to you,
You’re intelligent too - and let’s prove it now!
Everybody right now must get fucked up (actually sung: plugged in)
Everybody must stay high, at least for this party.
We don’t need no pedigree girls tickling curls, stay stray!
You gotta party to play.
You know that you’ve got to party hearty to play
Because this is the law around here
Head for the bar, no matter who you are
We’re not gonna funk near, we’re gonna funk far
Far beyond the farthest star.
Meanwhile back inside the mind of the girl I love
I find her entrancing, but she isn’t dancing!
A dancer hasn’t got the answer until she’s dancing
Dots all do the dance!
I find you entrancing my dear, but you never know
until you’re dancing, entrancing, you gotta party to play! Stay stray!

Dance dance, dance dance, dance
I can do more than just…
Never too cool to…
I just quit school to…
Unbreakable rule to…
I’m much too young to…
Gotta be twenty-one to…
I’m always the fool who’ll…
I can do more than just…
Let’s get up on top of it!

The song started out as a birthday song for a friend of Rico’s, who we hoped would share drugs with us in return. Whether or not he had drugs is impossible to ascertain all these years later, but we believed he did, with the over-excited delusional pothead glee we had for everything intoxicating back then. The song was called Rich Bitch, and had words like “...a bitch ain’t nothin’ but a bitch, unless she’s a rich bitch,” which I guess we all thought was pretty funny when there were no girls around to destroy the illusion of male privilege. But the whole band thing was about attracting girls, not insulting them, so it was kind of a waste of a song after the party was over.

Feeling a vague sense of dissatisfaction with this lyrical bent, I somehow decided to bring my favorite romantic poetical conceit into it instead. I had written a series of tiny prose poems about an ideal dream girl I called The Sweet Weaving Dancer. Though she was not any girl in particular, she was most like Anne Marie O’Conner, who we all worshipped in our own way, except Slash.

This song was chosen to be the leadoff song because of the manic headlong beat and for the way it called out some of the more typical elements of the Jambox P-Funk Playpen philosophy. Also, it showcased the Changels, our beuatiful teenaged West End girls backup singers. The lineup for the Changels on this song was Tammy Stone, Annie Byrne and Sue Leonard.

First off, you have to understand that we all grew up in urban St. Louis around tough cool black kids. We had a shared vocabulary that we assumed everyone else got as easily as we. And we had all come to worship, above every other band ever, the whole Parliament/Funkadelic thang of the 1970s. We aspired to have the same little kid appeal as Bootsy. Slash was the inspiration in this, I think. He loved little snotty kid brattishness and brought it out often when we did our comedy tapes. We agreed that kids were treated with less respect than they deserved, and that when we were kids nobody appreciated our intelligence as much as they should have.

Then, in the second verse, Slash kicked in some classic drunken party lyrics that were left over from the original birthday song. I brought in the cracks about pedigreed girls, and threw in a couple of my favorite catch phrases, Stay Stray and You gotta party to play. Then the lyrics shifted back to drunkenness.

In the last verse I tried to bring back the romantic yearnings for the perfect girl, while still entreating this generic girl to dance, a common lyrical exhortation of the disco days.

Throughout the whole song you hear side cracks, prepared yelps and jokes, all to suggest the wild, party-crazed atmosphere of a real Jambox show up in the attic at the P-Funk Playpen on Victor Street in South St. Louis. You hear The Changels singing “Dance dance, dance dance, dance”.

Fojammi was responsible for producing and recording this mess, and I have to admit that he couldn’t have done a much better job. Jambox actually sounded much worse than this recording might suggest.

Married To Royalty

2008-10-06T20:25:00.006-05:00

After my disgust with the hipper-than-thou excesses of the second wave of punk out of L.A,, I turned to the music of my youth, jazz, especially bossa nova, which I love unreservedly. Aiding me in this shift of musical taste was my good friend Norty Cohen, who is also a collaborator and mentor to me in advertising and promotions here in St. Louis where we both live.

Norty had been the conga/percusssion man for Riot Act in the glory days of that incredibly great ska/punk/funk band. But he was an ad man of the highest rank and abilities, and had to leave the local band scene alone while he turned himself into a local legend. But he still liked to jam, and I liked to jam, so we started a kind of group we jokingly called the Fabulous Zantini Brothers. My brother has lately joined us, making us really brothers, too.

One of the first songs Norty and I played together was this little confused rush of mixed impressions, Married To Royalty. I intended to write a song about ridiculous aspirations, around the same time that Diana was marrying Charles, the future king of England. The song never really made any sense, but it has a couple of wry lines:

Whatever you say would go,
we’d go to Tokyo
and if you got bored there,
we’d go to Rio.
Now don’t you be ashamed,
just have some more Champagne,
Why did I ever fall in love with you?

We were riding round in Limousines
and reading Paris magazines
Deciding what you’re wearing tonight.
Why do you why do you
why do you have to marry him?
Just because he’s royalty?

Sunlight on snowy mountains
All of the Alps to ski
Or on your own private island
In the Aegean sea
It won’t bring you back to me
Visions and memories

The last time I saw you you were
Chartering a jet to carry
the aristocracy to marry
someone who you’d barely met before
You! Why do you why do you have to marry him
you know what your mama said
she said “Daddy says you
shouldn’t ought to marry such a bounder
because love will only flounder in
the wings of his endless romances

I could be loving you
and I could be squeezing you
and you would belong to me
and I would belong to you
but things don’t work out that way
I’m just watching your parade
watching the masquerade.

Now it’s not a question
of a kind of morality
and it’s not a question
of a sense of loyalty
But this is how it will be
Married to royalty.

And now I’m riding on an endless cruise
and downing large amounts of booze
Did you know that you ruined my life?

I recorded this at home, overdubbing a few guitars and singing.

Download "Married to Royalty"

21st Street Time

2008-10-05T18:47:00.008-05:00

The Tom Sleet Art Music Setup

I got a comment from my dear friend Tracy on this blog about always talking about the past when I blog about music. That really got me where I live, which is in the immediate past, after the actual present moment that we all watch through the actions of our consciousness recording time, one now after the next. In simpler terms, it got me where I live, which is in the past, since everything I'm conscious of is at least in the immediate past.

Philosophy aside, when it comes to music I feel like once it starts we're in the time of the music, not in the linear time of our lives. Despite the fact that certain songs were recorded at different times, or created at different times, once I sit down and play a song the time is that song. I've listened to too much jazz to think of a song as merely the recording. The song is the music and lyrics and how I choose to sing or play them when I'm doing it.

In that spirit, I've always really loved listening to completely free improvisation like that done by the 21st Street collective, which has always been Bill Morris and Thom Sleet with various other musicians over the years. I also really like the music put out by my good friend Jay Zelenka at Freedonia.

I was pretty excited when I got to sit in with them on guitar and piano last Saturday, so in the spirit of also honoring Tracy's implied request, here is an excerpt from the session:

When I'm doing music like this, or even the more conventional pop songs I write, time contracts down to the moment and a few bars in any directions at the most. One of the reasons that I know that music is good for everyone to play, no matter how poorly, is that getting your mind out of the chaos of constantly juggling long term goals, short term needs, worries, expectations, and the effort of retrieving memories from different times is a needed break from the normal grind of time.

Back to Back Again

2008-10-02T00:22:00.006-05:00

The older I get, the easier it is to understand why age is even more important than sex, when it comes to mutual compatibility. There's a certain comfort that, as one slips comfy into the melancholic nighty-night of a lifetime's dotage and dose dere dithering days, that the older one gets the younger the other one gets, until what once seemed old seems gravid, whiskey and stubble-scrubbing young and always with more than a teeny dash of ambergris and anise.

But so much for me, dumpling gums! So much for everything I once stood for, when back I stood with all the ding-dong Daves and Stanlies in yesterday's quiver. Because when sparkling's the rave then gumbo's the mumbo, and jumbo sized is any fries that blows through the drive-by scatterflies of any hipster's passing chance. Hoopties linger in driveways idling mad with the rich thick smoke of leaded gas sweet and insistent on the evening breeze.

In other words, an immature take on gender and love relations, adolescent male categorically and explicitly. "Back to Back Again" is one of the first songs I ever wrote, and it has always had many different parts, which I like as a condition or perhaps more generally an ambition of Change Music is that it change, and change drastically, as much as concievable in any given song.

The opening chords were created specifically to demonstrate how good I was on the guitar to David Udell, who never took any real notice of the song, as far as I remember. So this effort of mine that I expended simply to impress David Udell was basically pointless, since nobody knew it but me, and me mostly in retrospect.

The lyrics were a simple reflection of my own fears of abandonment, and the wistful longing for a sexual prime that has passed. I used to think a lot about how the frequency and hotness of sex would diminish between partners and the range of reactions to this eternal decline between every single partner known to man, excluding liars and braggarts, of course.

I can’t make you be my friend
I can’t even pretend
That I don’t really love you
That I don’t really want you
That I’m not dying to be back in your arms

‘Cause don’t we get down?

You wonder was it ever more than sex?
Looking back to back to with your ex
And you realize that it’s only fair
The need you felt developed into greed
Blossomed into hatred like a weed
And left you there with just sex in the air.

You wake up in your bedroom late at night
You reach out and turn on the light
You look around and I’m no longer there.
Wouldn’t that be less than a delight
Maybe even closer to a fright.
Light, no longer light; air, no longer air?

This was a song I used to like to play acoustically with Slash Brannon in the pre-Jambox innocence of a couple of stoned kids messing around with some chords and violin. The essential nature and sound of the song is pretty unchanged, but the get down parts have gotten more latin and swinging and better. It's interesting to me as a songwriter to reflect on all the changes in this song I've made over years of playing it, all the stuff left in and left out.

I wonder what all my songs would sound like if someone else sung them, but this one might really be fun.

I recorded this song myself at home, as you can probably tell. The vocal is a little loud, I might change it someday and throw in a few egregious little guitar parts while I'm at it. Download "Back to Back"

Lights, Camera, Action!

2008-09-21T16:31:00.006-05:00

A new wave fashion show from 1982

Here's a recently-unearthed document of the early 1980s in St. Louis new wave.

My friends Ed Mantels-Seeker, who had helped by doing almost all the work on Surf's Up, Gang! had been shooting super 8 movies for a while using the single-frame technique he had picked up from Roy Zurick. According to what he told the interviewer on the program Airtime, which aired this movie in 1983, I told him his footage would work as a music video with this song. So he shot some extra footage of me and spliced it in with the footage he had been shooting of girls dressed in new wave clothes.

Lights, Camera, Action!

You're the kind of girl
who takes all the film
my camera's got
Get your lens in focus
open up your eyes
what a bop shot

Turn a little to the right.
We're gonna do this all night.

Your beauty's rooty-tooty
and a little snobby snooty
I hope you know
You've really been a pest
but you've passed my test
and done all my snow

You're such a high fashion girl.
It's such a high fashion world.

You're a walking groovy movie
and you know you always prove me
you're really hot
I've directed what's expected
and the chances are a thriller
is what we've got

I got the film on TV.
Next time you better believe me.

You're a leaning tower of Pisa
with a screaming Mona Lisa
in a danger zone
We're gonna take the image
and rotoscope it
overblown

Cartoons. Comics. Hitler.
Make up. Violence. Hit her!

My band The Obvious recorded this song at our second recording session in Illinois at some studio in Collinsville or Belleville. It was one of the last songs I wrote for the band, as I can tell by the reference to "getting the film on TV", which is about the hollow triumph of getting Surf's Up, Gang! on the Airtime program on the local PBS affiliate in St. Louis. So this song was probably written in 1982 sometime, and in retrospect I can see some dark undertones about the direction punk/new wave was taking.

I started off my new wave musical career high. I got together with two really beautiful and sex-crazed 16 year old girl friends who called themselves The Oui-Oui Twins and my dad bought an abandoned building on Olive just West of Taylor in the West End of St. Louis. I moved into the legally uninhabitable building - it only had one working toilet, in the retail space at the bottom, and in the trashed-out apartment I squatted in there was just a reeking toilet that didn't work but which had been used by accident a few too many times.

Many friends popped up, eager to help and encourage me in my dream of opening St. Louis' first punk club. First and foremost among these friends was the amazing artist Mort Hill. He attracted a goodly crowd of art twits and hipsters and we went at making a club out of an empty room like Our Gang in an old Mack Sennet short.

There was a small crowd of punk fans in St. Louis at the time, and it was pretty open and close-knit, because we were all there were. We had all spent our door money on renting bowling alleys and VFW halls up until now, and we were all desperate for someplace to play.

After about six months I closed the club for a variety of fascinating reasons that I will address later, and spent the summer, filming Surf's Up, Gang! Closing the club was a huge blow, but I was never cut out to be a club owner and only half-heartedly pursued the idea of opening up another one, mostly because people would always tell me I should do it again.

I find it interesting how difficult it was to actually film something back then compared to now. Look at Ed's technique and you'll see he did an enormous amount of work - much of it edited in camera - to make his frantic little pieces. Nowadays we have digital video with instant results and it's hard to find anyone who will even bother.

Over the year we gradually fell apart as a group, first losing our bass player, Jim Saltsider, the night that Surf's Up was broadcast on TV. The hardcore punk scene started changing the attitude of the local punks, people became more hateful, and The Obvious and my attitude became hopelessly unhip. I tried to hardcore myself up a little, like in the last verse of this song, but nobody was buying it because anyone who knew me knew it wasn't real.

Watching this video after Surf's Up is like watching me go out of style before your very eyes, yet, at the same time, I'm almost amazed at how much effort went into what was a decent song and a decent stab at a New Wave video. I've seen much worse from national bands dating from the same time. And it makes me wonder if I hadn't been falling apart and under funded, could I have gotten some positive record label response if I had been able to send a copy of this video out to them?

Classical Music

2008-09-19T15:42:00.001-05:00

Classical Music was one of the first songs that Slash and I wrote with lyrics. I remember we wrote it when Slash was living on 12th street, after the final abandonment of 18th street. It was the first crazy statement of our pop ambitions, and a completely sarcastic and insincere boast. At least back then I thought so.

This was the oldest song we recorded on the Jambox Change Music Variety Show EP. As the time between the jokey conception of this song and the recording went by, the delusions of greatness we sing about became a little too real for my stomach. It’s rather strange to think that of all of the bands in the world you might expect to be our ideal, it was the incredible Parliament Funkadelic group of bands that we aspired to sound like. If you have the sound on and the QuickTime plug-in on your computer, you can hear the incredible arrhythmic pace is far closer to punk than funk.

We had nothing against punk ourselves, it was just a peripheral tangent at best when you had all the funk you wanted thumping out of tiny boombox speakers from WESL and other radio stations and no money for records at all. It’s funny how punk Jambox was by sheer accident and by dint of a range of influences that stretched from Captain Beefheart’s immortal Trout Mask Replica to Jaco Pastorius or the Mahavishnu Orchestra. You take a love of free jazz style noise rock and fusion jazz and mix it with a certain amount of dexterity and an overabundance of energy minus the inclination to try to sound coherent and you get the signature Change Music sound.

We’re playing Classical music for ya
We’re a group of infant prodigies
We’re playing Classical music for ya
We’ve each written twelve symphonies
But we’re declinin’ to play ‘em for ya
Because we’d rather Jambox at our ease
We’re playing Classical music for ya
And if we could you know we might
We’re playing Classical music for ya
And if we could you know we might
We’ve got the sound of a million
In the air it’s quite a fright
But we’re playing Classical music for ya
And we’re gonna jam all night

Over the brewery and into the grain
Mash madhouse mixture desires grow plain.

We’re playing Popular music for ya
We just formed ten minutes ago
We’re playing Platinum music for ya
Tragical blues sick rules? Dog no!
We’re playing Popular music for ya
And we’re number one on the charts
We’re playing Platinum music for ya
And we’re number one on the charts
We’re playing Popular music for ya
This is where the jammin starts
We’re playing Popular music for ya
And we’re gonna break your hearts.

I blush to admit that I alone am responsible for the tone and braggadocio of this song, though it was written with Slash Brannon, who contributed the two most beautiful lines in the song: “Over the brewery and into the grain/Mash madhouse mixture desires grow plain.” which is the most beautiful lyric ever written of a man longing for a beer. I also used one of his signature catch phrases “Tragical Blues Sick Rules” which might have actually been one of his super-short little poems. Another one of his mini poems in the same vein was “Sort short lock shit type niceties OUT”

Slash and I started out playing together acoustically when we became roommates living on 18th Street near Russell in the greater Soulard area of South St. Louis. I wasn’t a great guitar player; I was possessed of just the most rudimentary ideas of music theory and a few chords, some of which I had simply invented, though any fingering you can think of has probably been done before.

Slash Brannon, however, was a good violin player, very fast, and he played with a technique he had developed on his own that was more like bebop than anything else, long shimmering runs of notes that seemed crazy at first but which made a unique harmonic sense after you started to grasp the patterns. The sound of my classical nylon-stringed guitar and the violin blended well, especially since I was fond of playing the bass strings and he held down the high end, when acoustic, without much of the unstable screechiness that most of us dislike about amateur violin.

I have strong visual memories of us sitting in his room next to mine in the weak winter sunlight playing together, just me doing chords in patterns and him improvising along. From the start I was organizing my chords into melodic structures that resembled songs, in order to make it easier to jam to and to make it easier for me to enjoy what he was playing. Much of the stuff we played ended up turning into songs over the years, especially after we started considering ourselves a band and got Rico DeBool to play bass.

Many times through the years I played with Slash I longed for a return to the acoustic sound we started with. Amplified guitars and violins were exciting, but the sound wasn’t nearly as light and pleasant. I never really accepted Rico DeBool’s bass playing, also, even though he was light years ahead of his time in some ways. I would have preferred a bass player like Kent Gray, who could do slamming funk patterns you could dance to, while Rico was strictly an improvisor and fond of strange melodic lines that bubbled away under the melodies in an almost random manner. This left the guitar and vocals alone to hold up the melody. When Fojammi joined up as drummer, he played the drums in the same random, melodic manner, until whatever melody we once had was like a tiny little voice in the back of your head screaming, almost inaudibly, that something was wrong here, that something was not quite right.

Here's a revamp of Classical Music from the early nineties Fojamathon sessions.

Download Jambox's "Classical Music"
Download Fojammathon's "Classical Music."

A Change Music Manifesto

2008-09-18T21:48:00.005-05:00

When I was about eighteen years old I was thoroughly sick of all the old fat rock and roll stars. I'd heard every fantasy rock cliche, every bombastic, self-important guitar solo; suffered through the meandering experiments and pseudo-country inversions presented to me throughout the seventies, and was done with it.

When I played my own free-floating excursions into melodic invention with my friend Slash Brannon I heard something new and different. It was easy to mistake the fumblings of innocence with the divine spark of creation. I still wonder if it isn't really the only way to create music that is true, this obscure and heedless tumbling through notes unknown, harmonies never before heard, changes written by the deaf presumptuousness of youth.

I seized on a central conceit and boldly decided that we could by step critical dismissal by inventing a new musical genre for ourselves, many years before the electronica crowd started naming every other dance beat another obscure name.

It was some of the Beatles best songs that suggested the idea to me, and the ambition of music in the seventies in general that made it clear: Music that changes drastically and notably at least once per song. Though we failed miserably at realizing this dream of songs that took you from one strong melody to the next seamlessly and with style and fascination, I can point out some songs that did what I hoped my Change Music would be.

"Uncle Admiral Albert Halsey" by Paul McCartney, is perhaps the greatest work of Change Music ever written. I used to always hold it up as the explanation of what I was getting at when I spoke of Jambox writing change music. I think Paul knows what I'm talking about. He recently did it again, as if it were something he does when he wants to, deliberately, as a style of his own, in his last album "Memory Almost Full". The song "Mr. Bellamy" is much like "Uncle Albert" and listening to either song will reveal exactly what I mean by Change Music.

I explained it to anyone who would listen by emphasizing that it would help stop critics from saying that our music was either rock or folk or jazz or funk. I liked the idea that if I was to be pigeonholed, I would name the pigeonhole. I wasn't aware that what we were doing, while not the Change Music of my ambitions, was so chaotic and indifferent to any kind of rational expression that it was a genre unto itself. You could simply call it bad, off-key, rhythmically crap music if you wanted and it would be hard to argue the point. But you might as well call it Change Music and the hell with it.

My next post will feature some of this infamous Change Music. So subscribe to my blog and you won't miss a single insane note of it.

The Ballad of the Lonesome Cowboy

2008-09-16T21:29:00.008-05:00

My Grandpa, Mom and Grandma.

Whether some ineffable essence called talent actually exists is a question I'll never fully resolve. My own view of music as a delightful entertainment that can be executed enjoyably by anyone is rooted in a mythic American past when families gathered around the piano or the ukelele, and simply sang what they liked all together with little thought of art or style.

As a teenager I quickly grew disgruntled with the contrast between the sweet fantasy of the hippie counterculture and the long-haired pot-smoking hoosiers who were sporting the outward trappings of hippieness without any grace or beauty. I was trapped in a mid-seventies world of popular hippieness and I felt ill-defined by it. I was also into so many things which were fringe aspect of the seventies, like the rediscovery of swing music, glitter, jazz rock fusion, and the bombastic excesses of fantasy rock.

In order to give myself a slight, ironic distance from the all-too-common hippie guitar player I was going to become, I decided to regard the guitar as a primarily cowboy instrument in order to downplay any seriousness of intent I might have been mistaken for having.

So one night, hanging out with my friend David Bohannon from Honors Art class, he urged me to learn a few chords on the guitar because it was so easy, he said, anyone could do it.

He showed me a few chords, which I rejected as being too difficult, like a G chord, which just looked freaky to the inexperienced eye.

"Are there any chords you can do with two fingers?" I prompted. He thought for a second, and then he demonstrated the E minor chord. Perfect. I tried it out. Plaintive, wild, low. I liked it.

"Sounds like the frontier wind whipping across the trackless desert sands around a cowboy's lonely campfire." I said, squinting into the imaginary dust storm in my brain.

"Have you heard the ballad of the lonesome cowboy?" I sang, and then hit the notes. "The lonesome cowboy's - let's see."

"I need another easy chord." I told Dave. He must have suggested the A major chord, and in doing so also showed me how you could add a D on it to get a nice little variation on it. It didn't do the job for me, but I made the two chords into a song anyway. Later on I discovered the chord I needed was a C major chord.

I used to love to play this with sarcasm and irony around school whenever I thought the guitar players were getting too much attention, which was all the time.

Download "The Ballad of the Lonesome Cowboy."

The Change Music Variety Show

2008-09-08T22:30:00.006-05:00

Portrait of the author as a young punk club owner.

Music is the strangest cultural construct in so many ways, and I've been of many different minds about it and what it is supposed to mean to me and the world at large.

I came of age in the midst of the change from monolithic bands who sold lots of records to the punk/new wave revolution of every snot nosed punk in a garage banging out chords and dreaming they were hits. From the arrogant aristocracy of finely-crafted talent to the current wasteland of endless noise. And I was possessed by the delusional yet amusing belief that I too could have been one of the best.

Because what I went through was both typical and also extreme I'm going to examine here my various attempts, which range from absolute drivel to the best I could possibly do. Though I've never been endowed with too much talent I think I've been clever and hopefully interesting. The posts will be coming with some regularity, and will include both music and crude comedy.