Upon returning home from camping, I noticed a deservedly long obit for noted folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax, along with considerably flakier kook Harry Smith and redoubtable businessman Moe Asch, are the most important and influential record producers of the century.

Smith, in addition to performing duties as all-around visionary freeloader on the order of Joe Gould (which entailed, among other things, films featuring hand painted animation, a collection of “string figures’, and the basic visual vocabulary of sixties psychedelica), compiled, for Moe Asch’s Folkways Records, the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, which I’m quite overdue to discuss here. Smith’s aesthetic for the project required that the cuts he included were originally commercially released, that is, not recorded for posterity by someone out to document a vanishing culture but rather recorded in an act of commercial egotism. Additionally, he conceptualized the records themselves as a literal magic incantation, intended to change the course of American music. He quite indisputably succeeded.

Lomax, as noted in many obits, is the sine qua non of the itinerant documenatrist, out to preserve from exctinction the authentic sounds and songs of the nonprofessional singer or performer.

Moe Asch, looking to make a buck and maybe also to keep leftist kooks the likes of Woody Guthrie and Smith in pocket money, released works by both Smith and Lomax; today, Asch’s vast store of recordings and notes is, as it should be, the property of us all, Folkways now functioning as a subsidiary of the Smithsonian Institution.

It should be noted that Rounder Records has also been doing a kick-ass job on archival releases from the Lomax treasure.

Jason Webley may or may not be taking the ferry to Bainbridge Island on Sunday, July 21, at 3pm.

You may or may not be taking the same boat.

You may or may not want to don your trusty cutlass, brace of flintlocks, eyepatch, wooden leg, tricorne hat, shirt of East India calico, and thigh-high boots should you choose to do so.

You may or not wish to have the telephone number of a lawyer with you.

You may or may not wish to read The Pirate Hunter to get into the spirit of things.

In the video for the song itself that comes at the end of ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, there’s a shot of Joey Ramone in front of a blackboard that the director cuts into and away from over the duration of the song. There’s a phrase written on the blackboard, drawn from the lyrics of the song:

“I don’t care about history”

Joey, of course, points to the words with a pointer as he sings them.

However, as he shifts his stance back and forth during the rest of the song, his body occludes most of the phrase such that for most of he time he’s on screen, the black board actaully, in a literal sense, reads:

“I do care”

So. I should have titled my post about American Hardcore and Please Kill Me “I don’t care about history” instead of the lame paraphrase of the Clash’s “I’m so bored of the USA” that I chose.

I stand by much of my thinking in the earlier post. I’ve grown pretty jaded with rock literature over time, because it seems, mostly, to tell the same story over and over again. That story is almost always tragic, which, in my opinion, is because of the terrible working conditions people who choose to pursue careers as rock and pop musicians are exposed to. Whether you’re on the road or you stay close to the base, you don’t get paid very well, there’s no health insurance, and you’re encouraged to drink and do drugs, etc., etc.

But I’m not here to crab about how fucked up the industry is. I’m here to say it loud:

The Ramones are the greatest rock band of all time.

After reading the books I mention above, I started thinking about the Ramones a lot, partly because of my flip dismissal of Dee Dee. Well, there was the rap thing, but what about the Ramones material? The answer is, he contributed some great songs; frequently they are kind of dumb. This is a part of the genius of the band.

Let’s hit the books, shall we?

1975: Ramones
1976: Rocket to Russia
1977: Leave Home
1978: Road to Ruin
1979: It’s Alive *
1980: End of the Century
1981: Pleasant Dreams
1983: Subterranean Jungle

I stop here becasue I never really cared for any post Subterranean Jungle recordings – the urge to speed of hardcore entered the mix, and understandably enough, the musicians began to explore more diverse sonic textures (translation: keyboards and synths, ick). All in all, as the sound becaome more commercially palatable, my interest in it declined.

* I only just learned that this was a European release that did not become available in the US until 1995. I bought it in Switzerland in 1982, and it is ESSENTIAL – the later live recordings of the band are simply not as good, as perfectly executed as the performances on this record, a 2-LP set when orginally released.

Look at that track record! Until Pleasant Dreams and Subterranean Jungle, there’s not a bad record in the bunch, not even a bad song! (YMMV) Pleasant Dreams was my first Ramones Record; then I got the first record, and eventually picked up all of the records listed above before Subterranean Jungle came out (so, like over a year or so).

Because Pleasant Dreams introduced me to the sound of the band, in some ways it is the record I’m most intimate with; however, it’s not my favorite: that’s definitely It’s Alive. And my favorite songs are from all over the map, but nothing surprising: I can still spontaneously sing every word to “Danny Says”, “Sedated”, “Needles and Pins”, “California Sun” and probably more that I haven’t thought of.

So why are these guys the best? It’s hard to say, really; consistency is a part of it. My other candidate for best rock band of all time is LA’s X, who have a much more varied, and in some ways more ambitious catalog. Their two best records, “Los Angeles” and “Wild Gift”, contain some incredible songwriting, both lyrically and structurally. Doe and Cervenka deliberately set out to transcend rock songwriting by ignoring conventions of structure and meter while mantaining the brevity and intensity of the form; however, this sort of approach is difficult to maintain over time, and their most critically acclaimed album, “Under the Big Black Sun”, consistently disappoints me even today.

Stupid critics.

The Ramones’ work, however, deceives via its apparently ambition-free design and execution. Of course, having an LP produced by serious nutcase Phil Spector gives the lie to that: however much that record may have been slagged in the press at the time, it was an act of heritage, a statement by the Ramones that they were the inheritors of Motown, of the Beach Boys, of all the great American pop and rock produced prior to the AOR era.

This assumption of that mantle is wholly accurate on their part. These albums represent the apotheosis of American postwar pop. Long may it wave. Dee Dee and Joey, I’ll see you soon enough, and thank you.

I finally was able to lay hands on a copy of Jason Webley’s new CD Friday night. There are twelve songs, and it’s called “Counterpoint”. Word is that time’s been too short for comprehensive site updates chez Webley, so here’s a scan of the cover, and the songlist:

You can order the CD here via paypal.

I’m still listening to it and will write more about it when the time is ripe. I was very happy to see that Train Tracks is on this record. The interior cover of the CD is fairly elaborate with linocuts by Jason which were reproduced on a large scale at the CD release party.

My wife remarks that she wants to hear a recorded version of the song which includes the line “I am not your lover, I’m the map you use to find her”, which appears to be too recent a song to have made it onto the record. I wonder if Baby Bok Choy recorded the CD release show, and if that song was performed there?

The show in Olympia was quite enjoyable, and was sort of the usual Jason solo deal: a few guitar numbers, a few accordian numbers, then a big audience piling, singing, into the street to find a parking garage.

I always enjoy visting Olywa; it reminds me of Bloomington, my hometown, but has a larger downtown area. After seeing Jason, we strolled down the street o a bar called “Charlie’s”, where good pal Chuck Swaim was doing karaoke with a bunch of his buddies. He looked great, sounded great, and it made me very happy to see him, rocked in the bosom of his community.

Here’s links to Chuck’s old magazine, “the Arm’s Extent“, and to more current stuff of Chuck’s here.

Bloomington, Indiana is my hometown. I lived there from 1976 until 1982, and from 1983 until 1990. I graduated both high school and college in Bloomington. In high school and college I was deeply involved in the local music scene, specifically the punk scene. I had friends that played all kinds of music, though, and as I’ve gotten less mercilessly arrogant about what’s good and what’s not my tastes have broadened quite a bit. Whether or not that means I now like pablum is left as an excercise for the reader.

I spent the last five years playing mandolin in an irish rock band, for God’s sake, and I totally, utterly love bluegrass; either of these genres would send me shrieking from the room when I was a teenager. As a teenager, though, I never played music, really; my first band was Modock which ran for 9 months in 1989 and 1990, and I pretty much haven’t stopped playing since.

Which brings me to the subject of this entry. A surprising number of people from that period of my life have retained a professional or casual interest in making music. Among them are Jake Smith and Freda Love. Jake, Freda, and John Strohm were in Antenna together in the early nineties, and before that, John and Freda were founding members, with Juliana Hatfield and Seth White, of the Blake Babies.

Jake and Freda are married and have kids. Jake also plays with my favorite musician of all time, the criminally underappreciated Dale Lawrence of the Gizmos (v2.0) and the Vulgar Botamen. The three of them together have an indie label, No Nostalgia. I’ll do a Dale entry or two eventually, I assure you.

I first recall Jake from a band he was in while he remained in high school, “My Three Sons”; he was the bassist, and absolutely stood out as a very talented musician. He was very open to the antics which we engaged in in that scene, and I recall in particular a five-or-six-person one-off performance by a band consisting entirely of basses. He went on to gigs with the Nids and perhaps other bands, while I think, attending IU. Knowledgeable corrections are welcome.

At any rate, the music that Jake and Freda have made on these three discs (in order from oldest to most recent: “Keep a Secret”, “Come Clean”, and “Distant Relative”) is so good it makes my teeth hurt. The images in this entry link to Amazon for your purchasing convenience, although I’m not getting a cut from Amazon simply because I’m a very lazy man.

My personal favorite of these three discs is “Come Clean”, whch was a major label release on RCA; apprently there were the usual personnel shuffles at the label just after the record came out, and it was never properly flacked, which hurt sales, which led to the band leaving the label. If you have any interest in contemporary music at all, you’ve heard this story a million times.

The music itself is sparely arranged indie-pop, which reflects the midwestern music scene of my youth. In thinking about the sound that emerged from early-eighties punk, new wave, and no wave in the midwest, it’s strange to realize that the music is in fact reflective of what could fairly be described as a midwestern heritage in American music. It’s difficult to put a finger on, but bluegrass, Hoagy Carmichael, John Mellencamp, the Zero Boys, the Vulgar Boatmen, and the Mysteries of Life share an aesthetic which I’m still struggling to describe.

It’s got to do with internalization and limits, I think.

“Stardust” is clearly an individual’s meditation on their environment. Honestly, to me it sounds just like an early-winter evening snowfall along Indiana Avenue by Dunn Wood in Bloomington, directly across the street from the Book Nook in which, legend has it, Hoagy composed the tune. Big, fat, feathery flakes float through the cool dusk air against the brilliance of fall color to smack softly against the sidewalk. A few students hustle along the street to eat eat a sub or buy a record. Woodsmoke and wet leaves linger in the nostril.

(Update: I just remembered that there’s actually another piece called “Snowfall” which is similar in texture and tone to “Stardust” but written by pianist and bandleader Claude Thornhill. Could be my impressions of “Stardust” are derived from “Snowfall”; or maybe Thornhill was thinking of the same things I did when he wrote it. Interestingly, Thornhill’s from Terre Haute, Indiana, and was born in 1909, ten years later than Hoagy.)

Bluegrass is about retooling the most conservative aspects of our musical heritage for use in a modern world via mythmaking about that lost past, a desperate, anxious clutching colored by aggression. That blazing mandolin expresses violence as well as mastery.

Mellencamp’s small-town anthems incorporate some of the views of the defiant, self-defeating rednecks who beat the shit out of me when I was in high school. Fists pumping in the air or on my face, their fearful pride expressed a fear of change, of the outside world altering their familiar landscape of hills, trucks, and Molly Hatchet tunes.

Allow me to clarify that I don’t think the music of Bill Monroe or John Mellencamp is unreflective or badly made; far from it, it’s carefully made music that reflects the artist’s ambitions. What musican doesn’t know that one of their functions is to speak eloquently for the listener?

Mysteries of Life use traditionalist music-making strategies – guitar, bass, drums, and vocal harmonies – to explore self-imposed boundaries of another sort, those within relationships. The songs use physical place and phenomena to express the singer’s emotional point of view: “Rain on the window rolls away, and each drop weighs a ton” (“Come Clean”); “All of the regulars moving away – and I see Maya and Luna waving to me … Maya and Luna across the street / Ooh, the change in the tone of voice; Ooh, did I ever have a choice” (“Maya & Luna”).

These boundaries, a kind of midwestern fatalism, are also present in Dale’s music, especially in the Vulgar Boatmen’s work. I’ll save a detailed discussion of that for my eventual Dale Lawrence entry.

Jake and Freda’s sonic pictures of my hometown are like a visit home for me; the indivdual characters drawn in the songs are not necessarily indivduals that I know personally or specifically, but more like expressions of recognizable characteristics of the people I came of age among, and will naturally love as family until I pass from this world. Additionally, I associate individual songs with specific physical locations and atmospheres in Bloomington: for example, “Hey Kate” is a walk along near-to-downtown South Washington street on a spring afternoon.

I was very happy to see John and Freda when the Blake Babies played here in Seattle not too long ago. What with kids and all, I doubt that there’s much chance of seeing the Mysteries (or for that matter the Boatmen) here soon, but I sure hope I get the chance. Go buy their records.

As Spencer is wont to do, he made my musical day at Saturday’s dinner by bringing out a couple of discs that I’d known about for quite some time but never located because of incomplete knowledge concerning the records. This entry is about the later work of Raymond Scott on the disc set titled
“Manhattan Research, Inc”, the eccentric composer whose work is best known as the quirky, high-energy soundtrack to a number of Warner Brothers cartoons. I’ll just assure you that you’ve heard his work and let you dig up the details if you’re interested.

Beginning in the late forties, Scott began to explore the possibilities for compostion and performance available by mechanical and electronic means. Apparently, he was frequently frustrated by what he perceived as individualistic execution of his arrangements by the musicians, arrangers, and recording engineers he worked with as a successful composer of pop and advertising music. His solution? Build machines that he could control directly.

A great deal of this charming and often incredible music has been re-issued by
Basta in collaboration with the Raymond Scott Archives. The disc under discussion collects material recorded by Scott for primarily commercial use, and I personally have a deep fondness for “IBM MT/ST: The Paperwork Explosion”, which is a four-and-a-half minute commercial for an early IBM word processor. Scott intermingles futuristic beeps with actor’s voices stiffly repeating simple lines such as “In the past, there always seemed to be enough time to do the paperwork” to convey the idea that effecive use of the IBM device would create sufficient time for knowledge workers to, well, think.

This stuff is priceless, and Scott helped to shape our aural ideas of what the future once sounded like. Listening to it is like running into an old acquaintance.

One of two discs that surfaced (thanks as usual to the industrious Spencer Sundell) during the weekend’s festival of food is by an obscure offshoot of LA roots-rockers Los Lobos. In a 1995 review by David Levine concerning the first release (“Latin Playboys“) he writes:

This music is so original and yet so familiar, it’s almost archetypal.

Which begins to convey the depth of the deliciousness of the band’s work.

Trolling for info I aso came across this review of a show at Aro.Space here in Seattle – and Bloomington musican Lisa Germano opened. Guess I need to read the Stranger more often.

The recording style on “Dose” is deliberately primitive, reminiscent of Pussy Galore and The Butthole Surfers’ exploration of the aesthetics of noise. However, in contrast to the work of these bands, which frequently buried a groove under loads of high-frequency noise or other grating aural effects, the Playboys embrace the groove; the squeezed and scratchy quality of the sound creates an effect similar to that of listening to a field recording. It dramatically enhances the power of the music.

Naturally enough, there’s a distinct Latin beat to the music which is infectious as well.

Interestingly, Amazon customer reviews prefer the first disc; however, the reviews for “Dose” include a number of highly negative reviews in which individuals were drastically put off by the more experimental nature of the recordings than the average Los Lobos cut. I have not heard the first record, but it seems likely that I should check it out.

I recall hearing a couple of cuts from “Dose” when it was released and very much liking them, but I did not know the name of the ensemble, and thus remained ignorant. Now, my knowledge is greater. Thanks, Spence!

Local musician Jason Webley will be presenting his May Day concert this upcoming May 1st on board the retired ferry Skansonia moored in Lake Union.

Jason is a gifted songwriter who somehow chose the accordian as his primary instrument, and uses his gifts to craft entertaining, poetic landscapes that express a kind of doom-laden Blakean mysticism. He’s a first rate ham as a performer as well, which means that his shows are never less than entertaining.

The last show he gave here (which, in an apparent tradition, was the Halloween show) was a full-scale theatrical production, involving set-peices, story-telling, zombies in costume, Jason leading the several hundred people in attendance at the show on a torchlight parade down University Way to the foot of Lake Union culminating in the ritual flaming destruction and rebirth of a giant puppet and two tower-like totems. After the torching of these objects, Jason departed in a small wooden boat, apparently accompanied by both Charon and la Belle Dame sans Merci, and has since been listed as “missing at sea” on his website. I wrote a detailed account of the show which may be read here.

Jason has two CD’s available for purchase via his website, both of which I heartily recommend. There are rumours floating that there will be another available at the May Day show as well. I look forward to seeing what wonders Jason has cooked up for us this time around.