Neko Case And Jenny Lewis Got Nothin’ On Patsy Montana As of 2005, Patsy Cline’s 12 Greatest Hits sold 10 million copies. Not bad for a ghost. She got on a plane to Kansas City in 1963 — just a couple years into her newfound fame as the sweetheart of the Nashville rodeo — and never came back, disappearing into the ether of immortality like Amelia Earhart in spurs. Her ghost has been haunting American music ever since, and any vaguely countryish thrush will have to suffer comparisons. Just ask KD Lang. Still, Patsy Cline didn’t come from nothing. Her […]
Pussy Galore
Cat Power Purrs! Destroyer Kills! The only drag about living in the Information Age is that there are no miracles, just miraculous statistical anomalies otherwise known as coincidence. True story — happened on November 21st, 2002, 35 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, according to the New York Times — two sisters decided to make unannounced visits to each other’s houses, at exactly the same time. They both died in a head-on crash — with each other. Tragic? Sure. Freakish? You bet. Impossible? Statistically speaking, nothing is impossible. There are enough people now living on Earth that anything can and eventually […]
Nerds Do It Longer
Stars of Track and Field Still F*ck Like Champs Boy-o-boy, did Joey Sweeney get his underoos in a bunch when I mentioned that a new Belle & Sebastian album was cause for “a legion of cardigan-clad Millhouses to raise their skinny arms to heaven like antennae.” Speaking like a man who’s taken all the locker room towel-snapping he was gonna take for one lifetime, he told me to get my gang together and meet his gang on the playground for a badminton death match. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Sweeney’s shuttlecock, but needless to say I was concerned. […]
The Art Is Deceitful Above All Things
(Painting by Killer Luka) JT Leroy Is A Great Literary Hoax, But A Mediocre Rock N’ Roll Swindle I have a distant cousin who once punked his parents into believing he’d been going to college, when in fact he had been pocketing the tuition dough and playing video games at the mall — for four years! That his parents were divorced and lived states away from each other and the college helped facilitate the deception. He tearfully confessed on the eve of his supposed graduation. There was a big party planned: catering tent, live band, folks flying in from all […]
Time Takes A Cigarette
Discussed: Aladdin Sane (30th Anniversary Two-CD Edition) Detroit circa 1973 more or less WAS A Clockwork Orange, a post-apocalyptic urban dystopia minus the funny Brit accents but with added ultra-violence and racial strife. Bowie channeled the Motor City vibe from the safety of four-star hotel rooms, envisioning a plotless rock opera of leather-clad bully boys and pimped-out thuggery where panic strutted around on platform shoes and you just know somebody was gonna get slapped. Back then Bowie held a cracked mirror up to rock ‘n’ roll and reflected it back as art, trading glittering extraterrestrial personas like spangled jumpsuits, each […]
This Record Is Illegal
Donna Summer This Needs to Be Your Style IRRITANT RECORDS First thing you need to know is that this has nothing to do with disco diva Donna Summer, but is instead an identity-theft/media prank on the scale of the Negativland/U2 showdown in the ’90s. The first hint is the cover, which features a grainy black and white photo of what appears to be a satanic ritual but upon closer inspection is actually some dirtball metal band apres-gig, wringing the sweat out of their T-shirts and getting high in their graffiti-scarred dressing room. The second giveaway comes when you press “play” […]
Furry Blooze
Discussed: Furry Lewis Good Morning Judge FAT POSSUM Sometimes, as the saying goes, having a little luck is the best plan. Furry Lewis was never much for planning, and luck was a luxury he could rarely afford. From the age of 12, he spent the better part of his life as a street sweeper in Memphis or working medicine shows, where charlatans sold snake oil to gullible yokels. When Furry was 17, he lost his leg hoppin’ freight trains. Legend has it that a friend came to the hospital and Furry told him, “It ain’t so bad. I can see […]
Brit Papa
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 […]