LET US NOW PRAISE RAY DAVIES Before we get started do yourself a favor: cue up “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks. Ah, don’t you feel better already? Music in the left speaker, vocals in the right — totally old school. That twinkling strum of brotherly guitar and gently piddling snare, those drowsy sha-la-las drifting upwards while the bass line tumbles downwards, and the comforting sentiment that even the shittiest day on Earth ends with a glimpse-of-paradise sunset. That, my friend, is the sound of your father’s Brit-pop. They don’t make singles like that anymore — Damon Albarn has long since […]
The Walls Have Ears
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.” –William Burroughs First they came for the terrorists, and I did not speak out, for I was not a terrorist. Then they came for the protesters, and I did not speak out, for I was not a protester. Then they came for Google, and I did not speak out because I was not a search engine. Then they came for me… In the last month, the following changes in the Land of the Free have come to light: the latest software update of iTunes, version 6.0.2, secretly installs […]
Top 5 Of The Moment
THE INVISIBLE MAN Now out on DVD, HBO’s The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is, like the titular changeling himself, by turns fascinating, tragic, trippy, ingenious and a little corny, but in a sweet way. Like Sellers’ existential quick-change act of a life, Geoffrey Rush’s performance is one of those nested Russian dolls: Unscrew Inspector Clouseau and you find Dr. Strangelove, and inside of him is Chance the Gardener, and finally, just when you think you’ve gotten down to Peter Sellers, there’s … nothing. He was a cipher, quite literally the man who wasn’t there, which made for a […]
Pet Soundz
DISCUSSED: Animal Collective’s Feels Back in college — which was longer ago than I care to admit, so let’s just say some time after the earth cooled but before the Internet — I lived in an old Victorian house that the college owned and subdivided into separate apartments. It was a gathering house for all the freaks and geeks who didn’t quite blend in with the frat-boy-cheerleader-chug-a-lug-date-rape ethos of the main campus. Across the hall my neighbors had set up a de facto commune — some of the guys living there weren’t even enrolled — of 24/7 hacky-sack drum-circling […]
Extraordinary Renditions
(Illustration by Alex Fine) WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU TALK I remember thinking shortly after the planes hit the World Trade Center that we really need to start making more friends in low places. I was thinking along the lines of old-school shaken-not-stirred James Bond intrigue: an assassin’s blow dart, silent but deadly, hitting Mr. X in the neck from behind the cloakroom curtain. Maybe a tricked-out Jag that shoots out an oil slick on the treacherous mountain passes of Monaco, sending the terrorists giving chase to a fiery death below. Worst case, we storm Osama’s cave at Tora […]
Free Love
Arthur Lee Lets It All Hang Out Arthur Lee, the outrageous auteur behind the psych-pop legend known as Love, was the hippie prince of the Sunset Strip in the mid-’60s. Love’s music was a potent blend of folk, garage-punk, psychedelia, R&B and easy listening, and the band’s incendiary residency at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go drew an overflow crowd that stretched around the block. Lee had enough juice to get a then-unknown band called the Doors signed to Elektra Records. He dressed the part of trippy royalty, decked out in flamboyant psychedelic dandy attire later rendered iconic by Jimi Hendrix. (It was Lee […]
Now Playing
M. Ward Transfiguration of Vincent MERGE First, a word about his sponsor: While I can’t ever foresee the need to hear a new Superchunk album in this lifetime, the label those folks have set up, Merge, so consistently releases product of uncommon purity and indispensability that it should make the likes of Matador, Touch and Go, Sub Pop and Drag City glow with the red-blush shame of the recently spanked. I tip my hat to them. And now, on with the show … M. Ward is the nom de soft rock of one Matt Ward, a shadowy horse whisperer from […]
December’s Children
How I Learned That A Garage Isn’t Just A Place To Park A Car Gather ’round children, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown. Alas, I’m about to tell you about the Paisley Underground and how I got my mojo. It may be hard to fathom now, but I wasn’t always this cool. Certainly not back in the early ’80s when I was just another Anglophilic dough-faced doofus with a sideways haircut, avidly scouring the NME for the latest post-punk farts from the ass of London. My girlfriend at the time was much, much cooler […]
Dope, Guns And F*cking In The Streets
MC5: A True Testimonial DVD Forget the Clash and the Sex Pistols. Forget even the Stooges. The MC5 was the most balls-out, super-blammo, proto-revolutionary rock ‘n’ roll band ever to leave a powder burn on the face of the earth. Their rallying cry was “rock ‘n’ roll, dope and fucking in the streets,” and they walked it like they talked it — like a street-walking cheetah with a heartful of napalm. The records don’t really do the band justice, and its mythos is filtered through so much dope haze, hype and competing egos that it’s hard to get a clear […]
Voltaire Brothers I Sing the Booty Electric FALL OF ROME All the young turks who’ve been led like horses to water to the Detroit garage scene by the White Stripes should note: None of this would be possible without Mick Collins, truly a brother from another planet, the Prince of the lo-fi shit-rock jet-set. For the past decade, Collins has been putting out gloriously primitive super-blammo garage-punk shake bamalama under a variety of guises — the Gories, Blacktop, the Dirtbombs and the King Sound Quartet — for boutique labels operating on a shoestring just under the radar. His latest project […]
Life of Brian
DISCUSSED: “Some of Them Are Old” from Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets So last week I’m driving down 101 South from Petaluma to San Francisco. I pop in Here Come the Warm Jets, which is, along with Another Green World and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, part of a trio of beautifully organic art-rock albums that Eno made after leaving Roxy Music in the early ’70s. The sun is setting on the rolling pastures to my left and a cottony ocean fog is slowly creeping down the mountains to my right and this song comes on. Maybe it […]
When The Shit Hits The Fans
(Illustration by Alex Fine) WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN THE BAND YOU LOVE HATES YOU We all have bands we hate, really hate — you know, with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. You hate REM, I still hate Journey. There’s a lot of that going around. But how many people can say a band hates them? Tin-eared soundmen, people who jack the gear out of their van while they sleep, and the played jokesters who still yell “Freebird!” — and that’s about it. And when you narrow it down to people who are hated by their favorite bands, […]
Is That All There Is To A Fire?
(Illustration by Alex Fine) How Many Strokes Does It Take To Get To The Center Of Julian? It all started — for me, anyway — at Spaceboy. Dandy Dan Buzzkirk was behind the counter looking, as per usual, like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. “Check this out,” he said, before slapping on The Modern Age, the three-song debut by some band called the Strokes. It was everything I liked about Television/Velvet Underground/the Cars/Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. And the singer sounded like he was reciting the ISOs out of the back of The Village Voice through an electric razor. Every […]