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 […]
Can You Dig It?
(Illustration by Alex Fine) 20 Essential Rock Snob Artifacts Unearthed In 2005 1) Patti Smith Horses: 30th Anniversary Legacy Edition (Arista) As the high priestess of punk, Smith revived the shamanistic notion that words could be strung like Christmas lights, and — when whipped around like whirling dervishes atop three-chord garage rock — could open the portal of the ecstatic. 2) Bruce Springsteen Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Three-Disc Set (Sony) After two commercial duds, the suits demanded a hit or else. Written as a time-lapse snapshot of one long summer night in the teenage jungleland of Jersey — with […]
Trusted Travelers
(Illustration by Alex Fine) 10 Albums That Were Drivin’ My Plane in 2005 1. Spoon Gimme Fiction (Merge) Mystery loves company, and everyone loves Spoon. Like the hooded figure on the cover, Spoon’s minimalist rockscapes intrigue endlessly because of what they don’t reveal: the obvious. Masters of the art of subtraction, Spoon makes subliminal three-chord guitar chug strip naked and do the locomotion, and in the vast silence that seems to frame every instrument on this record you could almost swear you hear a singalong chorus or a fist-pumping solo. 2. Bright Eyes I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (Saddle Creek) […]
Home on the Strange
(Illustration by Alex Fine) A Dispatch From Woody Creek. First a note of justification. I’m about to say a few words about Hunter S. Thompson, the writer, in what is ostensibly a column about music because: a) HST was rock ‘n’ roll incarnate; we’re talking balls the size of cantaloupes. b) Despite the pharmacopia of substances controlled and otherwise he ritually pickled his gray matter in, he was in possession of one of the sharpest minds of the 20th century, possibly even up until he personally disconnected it with a gun to his head. c) I just happen to be […]
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Discussed: Girls Gone Wild; Our New Orleans; Charlie Brown Christmas blues; The Fiery Furnaces’ Rehearsing My Choir; The Future Has Already Replaced The PastAs with avoiding the words “funky” and or “gumbo” when writing about Nawlins, it’s nearly impossible to write about a Katrina relief benefit album without bumping up against this ghoulish disconnect: A lot of people died; you should buy this album and party down. So let’s start there. The official death toll is 1,300. But as NPR reported last month, nearly 500 children are still missing. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. How do you […]
Wayne’s World
(Illustration by Alex Fine) Where 40 Is The New 20, And White Linen Suits Are The New Black. Some men are born with lightning in a bottle, and others have to catch it. I’m not just talking about the forest-fire-starting, little-children-scaring, blasphemers-smiting bolts of electricity that, more often than you’d like to think, strike some Great Plains farmer dead in his shoes. The lightning is just a metaphor, people. Let’s call it the lightning of greatness. Where does this lightning come from, you ask? Nobody knows. It just shows up on the nightstand next to the crib. It waits there, […]
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(Illustration by Alex Fine) EXHUMING THE TOMB OF AMERICANA’S KING TUT At the height of the Summer of Love, in the year of our lord 1967, Johnny Cash was fixin’ to die. Men in black were no longer in fashion. It was the time of the Nehru jacket, when people were fair and had stars in their hair. Ten years into an amphetamine addiction that started as a crutch but soon became a truncheon with which he couldn’t help but beat himself unmercifully, Cash could no longer walk the line. Up for days, chain-smoking, with dark circles under his eyes, […]