BY JONATHAN HOULON FOLK MUSIC EDITOR I was always surprised that Tom T. Hall wasn’t recognized during the Great Alt-Country Scare of the 1990s in the way that, say, Johnny Cash and, to a lesser extent, Willie Nelson were.  Sure, there was the obligatory tribute album to The Storyteller (as TTH was often called) that included No Depression stalwarts at the time such as Richard Buckner, Joe Henry, Iris Dement, and Whiskeytown.  They called it Real: The Tom T. Hall Project and it almost seemed like a reclamation effort to rescue the great man from obscurity.  Hall was an enormous country music star in the ‘70s but, despite the good intentions of the alt-country crew, he never seemed to get his critical due.  Well, lemme tell ya:  Tom T. was a giant.  In his own unique way worthy of inclusion on the Hillbilly Rushmore alongside the Man in Black, Hank, Hag, or whoever else you’d put up there.

Tom certainly could veer deep deep into the cornfield at times.  Check out some of these song titles:  “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine” (yucko).  Or how about this howler?  “I Like Beer.”  Is that so, T.?  He named one tune “I Love” and then, as he was wont to do in his less accomplished moments, listed the objects of his affection, including in the very first line, “little baby ducks, pick-up trucks, slow movin’ trains and rain.”  Doesn’t really make you wanna check him out, I know!

BUT, at his best, which was really most of the time, Hall abided by his own hard-hitting adage that “some people can go around the world and not see a thing while other folks can take a walk around their block and see the whole world.”  Hall was an eagle-eyed observer – especially of the community he grew up around in rural Kentucky – and has been compared to Hemingway and Carver.  Indeed, his lyrics possess a lapidary dignity that warrants such high praise.

Ol’ T. passed away on August 20th at the ripe old age of 85.  Here’s a baker’s half-dozen for your consideration:

 
“That’s How I Got to Memphis”:  First track on T.’s first record and one of his most covered songs.  To my ears, no one does it better than Tom.  He was not blessed with much vocal prowess but there’s a mellifluous quality to his limited range that works perfectly with his simple but compelling melodies.  Hall sings, “If you love somebody enough, you’ll go wherever they go/  That’s how I got to Memphis.”  He’s singing about a place but also a state of mind.  Legendary Nashville producer Jerry Kennedy gets it all down cold, approximating a sound, to these ears, not dissimilar to that of Blonde On Blonde.  Curious aside:  At a Musicares awards ceremony a few years back, his Bobness attacked Tom T. for writing overcooked lyrics.  The Nobel Laureate was trying to compliment Kris Kristofferson by setting up Tom as a strawman of sorts.  But the whole thing didn’t make sense:  Hall was as responsible or perhaps even more responsible for revolutionizing country music lyrics than Kris Kris and, as far as recorded output goes, the two aren’t in the same league:  T. put out at least a dozen certifiably great records.  You’d be hard pressed to find a single great-start-to-finish platter in all of Kristofferson’s oeuvre.

 
“Forbidden Flowers”:  Tom T. wrote in his Songwriter’s Handbook, “I have often lamented that some of my favorite songs are tucked away inside albums that are out of print. I sometimes wish they could have been single records and given the chance to star in the galaxy of good songs.” Indeed, there are buried gems to be found in almost of all of Hall’s records, especially through the 70s.  “Forbidden Flowers” is one such gem that, like “Memphis,” resides on his 1969 debut, The Ballad Of 40 Dollars.  Though known for his narrative abilities, here Hall leans on symbolism.  I used to sing this one with my band John Train in the old North Star days.  But I was too young at the time to really understand that “if you pick forbidden flowers, you may shatter someone’s dreams.”  I may need to give this one another shake.

 
“Homecoming”:  The title track from T.’s second record, also released in 1969.  Concerning this track, Joe Henry in the liner notes to Real: The Tom T. Hall Project writes: “Here is a one-sided conversation of an adult singing star who pops in on his widowed father for the first time in years for a brief obligatory visit while traveling through on tour.  It’s like a Raymond Carver short story – a bite out of the middle of someone’s life, beginning abruptly and dangling at the end with a flash of almost unspeakable regret.  It’s remarkable that with conversational small-talk, we know in a handful of verses all we need to about this man, his relationship to his family, his arrogant façade and his gnawing self-doubt.”

 
“I Flew Over Our House Last Night”:  I always loved Joe Henry’s version of yet another great sleeper from The Storyteller.  Joe cut it for his 1993 release Kindness In The World where he was backed by the Jayhawks on what has to be one of the best records from the aforementioned alt-country scare of the ‘90s.  At first glance, Henry and Hall seem like odd bedfellows but a closer listen demonstrates that Joe writes with the same sort of precision about our interior world as Tom writes about the outside.  Both problematize the actual distinction i.e. what counts as in vs. out?  Dig? ( Last time http://www.phawker.com/2019/05/16/tribute-let-us-now-praise-joe-henry/ we talked about Joe, he was in the middle of a very serious cancer scare.  I am happy to report that he has recovered and is actually hitting the road later this year!)  In The Songwriter’s Handbook, Hall wrote of this number: “Picture a successful businessman-type in a jetliner; perhaps separated for some reason from a girl he had loved or a woman he had been married to.  Now they are living in completely different worlds.  On this evening, he is flying over her house.”

 

“The Year that Clayton Delaney Died”:  If Tom T. had fallen off the radar, I suppose Steve Young was never even in range as far as the general public is concerned.  I’ve written about him at length in other quarters.  https://www.trainarmy.com/single-post/2017/02/12/rip-steve-young  Check out how the Renegade Picker belts out this Hall classic which originally appeared on 1971’s In Search Of A Song, probably The Storyteller’s best overall collection and as good a place to start as any.  Tom T. travelled down to Kentucky for a week, took some notes, drove back to Nashville and hammered out “Clayton Delaney” alongside a bunch of other bangers based on his trip.  They don’t write ‘em like that anymore, Tom!

 

“Mama Bake A Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)”:  When I was putting together John Train’s Mesopotamia Blues LP, I tried to connect the then-raging Iraq War to past U.S. conflicts (yes, the record was a flop!).  I chose this Hall number from 1971’s 100 Children.  Hoss was prolific AF, right?  Here’s the opening stanza: “People staring at me as they wheel me down the ramp towards my plane/the war is over for me I’ve forgotten everything except the pain/thank you, sir, and yes, sir, I did it for the old red white and blue/and since I won’t be walking, I suppose I’ll save some money buying shoes.”  Damn. Convinced yet?

 
“Coffee with Tom T. Hall”:  Talk about criminally underrated, check out this one from my old Record Cellar labelmate, Chet Delcampo.  If my memory serves me well, I think the Man himself might have heard this and given it his seal of approval.  In any case, Chet’s worth checking out too! Hall certainly loved his coffee – he even wrote a couple of songs on the subject – and undoubtedly needed it to wash down the “hot bologna, eggs, and gravy” he sang so affectionately of on “A Week In The County Jail” off his debut album.  I guess Tom T. wasn’t exactly a foodie!  But a legend he was and remains.  Godspeed, Storyteller.

NEW YORK TIMES: Indeed, Mr. Watts was a man of contradictions — a jazzman in the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, an old-fashioned gentleman among pirates and bad boys, a homebody who spent much of his work life on the road. It was also his contradictions — his loose, swinging style combined with his love of precision; his idiosyncratic technique combined with his remarkable versatility — that made him such an exceptional drummer, and the perfect musical partner for Keith Richards in forging the Stones’s signature sound.

As the band’s former bass player Bill Wyman recalled: “Every band follows the drummer. We don’t follow Charlie. Charlie follows Keith. So the drums are very slightly behind Keith. It’s only fractional. Seconds. Minuscule.” But it makes the Stones impossible to copy.

The propulsive drive of “Get Off My Cloud”; the manic, percussive beat of “19th Nervous Breakdown”; the gathering sense of menace in “Gimme Shelter”; the jazzy syncopation of “Start Me Up”; the lovely, laconic swing of “Beast of Burden” — all were testaments to Mr. Watts’s gift for modulating the mood of a track to create a musical conversation with Mr. Richards’s galvanic guitar and punctuate Mr. Jagger’s vocals and performance. The drummer had a minimalist’s instinct for how to make the most emotional impact with the most economical of licks, when to withhold and when to step on the gas, and how to effortlessly shift gears between the languid and the urgent, between savage immediacy and elegant formality. MORE

EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the sad passing of ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill [pictured above, center], we’re re-posting this 2012 concert review that even back then read like an epitaph. Rest in power, Mr. Hill.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER It is a well-known fact that only two things will survive the coming Apocalypse: cockroaches and Keith Richards. A betting man would add ZZ Top to the list. After 40 years of chrome, smoke and BBQ’d blooze licks, their party time ubiquity shows no signs of diminishing. Wherever there are men on scaffolding, they will be there. Wherever Harley meets Davidson, they will be there. Wherever stripper meets pole, they will be there. Wherever a DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS sticker meets a mud-caked pickup truck bumper, they will be there. They were beardos before it was cool, and they will remain so long after the hipsters have moved onto handlebar mustaches. The Top are on the road in support of their first new album in nine years, the thoroughly butt-kicking, Rick Rubin-produced La Futura, wherein, amid other strokes of bawdy genius, they rhyme “chartreuse” with “big caboose.” And they ain’t talking about trains, my friend.

Friday night, they set up shop at the Keswick with three matching tour buses (one for each band member), plus an official tour dog named Gizzmo. They also brought their A game, delivering a scorching 90-minute run through their fairly deathless back catalog — which has, to date, sold more than 50 million copies – and somehow made it look effortless.

They still have the Li’l Abner beards, the cheap sunglasses, the will to rock, and the keys to the cages that set the working man free for a few Bud-fueled hours of ecstasy on a Friday night. Frontman Billy Gibbons still sounds like he eats cactus for breakfast — like he’s toked his way through the 25 lighters on his dresser that he sings about on the new boogie-powered “Gotsta Get Paid” — and his guitar still sounds like John Lee Hooker in the electric chair. Bassist Dusty Hill still rides the subwoofer like Slim Pickens on a nuclear missile, and he can still belt those immortal words: “Lord take me downtown, I’m just looking for some tush.” Ironically named drummer Frank Beard is still the only clean-shaven member of the band, and he can still take it from six cylinders to eight when the song is in the passing lane. And best of all, you get the feeling that after four decades of hard-rock blues-breaking, and more than 50 million served, the tres hombres are still tres amigos.
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BY JONATHAN HOULON FOLK MUSIC EDITOR 2020 was a brutal year all around and the folk ghetto here at Phawker was hardly spared:  John Prine (covid), Jerry Jeff Walker (cancer) and Billy Joe Shaver (stroke).  And, then, they had to take down one more hero on the way out the door:  legendary bluegrass singer/guitarist Tony Rice died on Christmas … of all days.  In bluegrass circles, Rice was long acknowledged as one of the greatest ever, both as a picker and as a vocalist.  But outside that rarified jurisdiction, he is almost completely unknown to the general public.  Well, Deadheads – who most certainly are not members of said public — know Tony from his work with Jerry, most notably “The Pizza Tapes” named after a delivery man allegedly swiped a session tape off of Garcia’s kitchen table when dropping off a pie.  My guess is that ol’ Jerry had a few more slices than Rice who was always rail thin.

I myself discovered Tony Rice via his membership in J.D. Crowe and the New South, whose eponymous release from 1975 is one of the most influential bluegrass albums of all time.  To be sure, bluegrass is a genre in which the “album” is not especially privileged – you are more likely to hear a fan talk about a festival they attended or an artist they revere versus reference to any particular collection of songs.  But Rounder 0044 – as fans affectionately call it after its label and catalogue number – is the exception that proves the rule.  I came across it sometime in the 80s and it really knocked me out … but not for reasons usually associated with bluegrass.  Sure, JD had assembled a peerless group of musicians, all very young at the time:  Ricky Skaggs on mando, Jerry “Flux” Douglas on dobro, and, of course, Tony Rice on guitar.  Rice pretty much redefined bluegrass guitar with his sparkling solos, impeccable rhythm, and unique voicings.  But what made 0044 standout for me was the repertoire.  I can only take so much of the traditional bluegrass fare i.e. songs about mama and Jesus.  I mean, as Saint Strummer once declared, he who ***** nuns later joins the church.  But it’s just not my jam.  What I loved about Rice – both with Crowe and in his illustrious solo career that would follow – were the songs he sang and the way he sang ‘em.  Rice leaned heavily on some of the best singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s, particularly Gordon Lightfoot.  Moreover, vocally, he eschewed that high lonesome sound – associated with Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley – in favor of a more honeyed, welcoming tone that better fit the sophisticated lyrics he sang.

So in celebration and in memory of the great man, I offer up five of my favorites from the Rice repertoire>>>

“Church Street Blues”:  Lawd have mercy!  1) whatever you do, don’t try this at home 2) if this doesn’t instantly make you a Rice convert, you are beyond hope and I suggest you join the Republican party forthwith.  Here Tony essays Norman Blake’s classic composition re:  hard times.  Blake is known more as an instrumentalist than a songwriter but this particular tune fits Tony like a flat-pick.  It’s basically his signature.  For you musos out there:  this is a great example of cross-picking which is the foundation of bluegrass guitar soloing.  And for you Martin guitar buffs:  Tony is playing the D28 that he somewhere inherited from the late great Clarence White of Kentucky Colonels and Byrds fame who was also a mentor of sorts to Rice.  Notice the enlarged sound-hole.  What a tone, Tony!

“Shadows”:  As noted above, Rice was particularly fond of covering Gordon Lightfoot.  In fact, there is a wonderful Rounder compilation called Tony Rice Sings Gordon Lightfoot consisting entirely of Tony’s renditions of good old Gord, arguably Canada’s finest songwriter (and, yea, that does take Neil and Joni into account).  Rice covered Lightfoot chestnuts such as “Early Morning Rain” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and made them his own.  But he also unearthed lesser known gems like “Shadows” which he performs here with the Tony Rice Unit.  I always dug the fact that Rice subtracted banjo from the bluegrass equation and replaced it with a second guitar (played in this video by his brother, Wyatt).  Banjo surely gives bluegrass its incredible drive but, to these ears, it quickly becomes annoying AF.  So good riddance!  Also check out dobro whiz Jerry Douglas’ mullet.  That’s some party you’ve got going on in back, Flux!

“Why You Been Gone So Long”:  From the pen of late songwriting legend, Mickey Newbury, who surely deserves a Wire of his own at some point.  This one is from the same session as “Shadows” and features the wonderful mandolin and harmony vocals of Sam Bush.  Take a listen to Douglas and Rice trade solos starting at 2:10.  So many people can play fast and these two certainly could.  But very few play with this kind of soul.  Tony always dressed to the nines, his classy appearance reflecting his classy sound.

“Summer Wages”:  I had to include one from Rounder 0044.  What really gripped me about this record was that the New South could play with blinding speed on bluegrass standards but they tempered that (im)pulse with uncommonly beautiful ballads sung by Tony.  I can’t even hear leader J.D.’s banjer on this track which is, rather, highlighted by a very young Ricky Skagg’s fiddle.  Sounds double-tracked to my ears but we’re not purists here, are we?  Ian Tyson – another great Canadian songwriter whose “Four Strong Winds” is practically considered an alternative national anthem up there in the land of snow – wrote this one that begins with the following words to the wise:  “Never hit 17 when you play against the dealer.”  So noted!

“I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”:  This one’s from Tony’s Cold on the Shoulder LP which is named after yet another Lightfoot composition and also is a good place to start investigating Rice’s work.  Randy Newman wrote this number and it contains both lyrics and music that most bluegrassers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot cross.  Try the opening stanza on for size: Broken windows and empty hallways // a pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray // human kindness is overflowing // and I think it’s going to rain today.  Can you imagine, say, Uncle Dave Macon singing let alone comprehending the irony contained therein?  But Rice delivers it in dulcet tones that somehow make Newman’s words seem almost hopeful.

Well, that’s enough of yet another sausage fest.  I’ll let Patty Griffin have the last word from a song, to be sure, about someone else that popped into my head for obvious reasons:  “Hey, Tony, what’s so good about dying? // He said I think I might do a little dying today.”  But wait, Patts, how about trading in that flaming red for a little blue sky?  And I think it’s going to rain today!

BY BILL HANGLEY JR. Eddie Van Halen dies, and the word that comes to mind is “joy.” That’s m’lady’s word for his music, and she’s right. She’s a huge fan, and many are the nights we’ve spent with a bottle of wine and the pounding rubbery cartoon violence of 1984. What Eddie embodied, she always said, was “pure, male joy.” Not the meathead glower of your modern vomit-vocal metal. Not the prosthetic-penis fakery of your day-glo hair bands. But instead, from Eddie Van Halen, godfather to them all, true joy; the jolly roar of a chainsaw crossed with an ice cream truck. Open, generous, dressed for frights but promising delights. For all the cartoonishly-crass fist-shaking, pelvis-pumping sizzle of Van Halen’s best work, it was always as welcoming as an amusement park at the end of the pier.

Singer David Lee Roth was the carnival barker. Drummer Alex Van Halen powered the roller coaster. Bassist Michael Anthony propped up the facades and spun the cotton-candy background vocals.

And Eddie?

Eddie was the thousand-foot candy-colored plastic slide that dropped you from ninety feet up, spun you around sixteen times, tossed you into the air, and finally dumped you into the Pacific with a massive, joyous splash.

This was a great pop craftsman who launched flares of true genius. Not just any Dutch kid could take one of Michael Jackson’s best songs and – in Jackson’s own words – “not just blaze a solo … but make it better.” Eddie Van Halen didn’t just play on “Beat It,” he rearranged the tune in ten minutes in order to ensure that when it came cranking out of somebody’s car stereo, they’d have no choice but to stomp the gas. Resistance was futile.

The resulting rush was as American as the 20th century. Wanna feel good? Hit play on Van Halen and hit the road. Make speed. Move, baby. At its best, Van Halen was your car, no problems, and an open highway. Was there anywhere to go? Who cares? Let’s go anyway! Van Halen was the Beach Boys of the shopping mall age, and Eddie was the band’s Brian Wilson.

And now Van Halen is truly over, and with it, a chapter of late 20th Century American history.

Because in Eddie and Van Halen we can see the beginning and end of a very particular American time and place: the sprawling postwar California suburbs that are smoldering as you read this. All great bands need a great scene, and for Van Halen the scene was the massive, folks-away cul-de-sac keg parties of the 1970s. The text to consult for a full, beer-soaked account is Van Halen Rising, by Greg Renoff, a tremendously entertaining band bio of the best variety: written by a fan, with a fan’s commitment to accuracy and detail, and focused entirely on the early years when the band was coming together and fighting for success.

Renoff’s book reveals the perfect party Petri dish of Pasadena: an endless sprawl of yards, pools and rumpus rooms, stuffed with Boomers’ kids, with money and cars and nowhere to go but to each others’ houses whenever somebody’s parents went away. California’s drinking age was already 21, but people acted as if it was still 18. High school meant weed, rock, beer and birth control. The five-buck-a-head backyard kegger was a summer standard.

And what those parties needed was bands. To play. For hours. And hours. And hours and hours and hours.

Eddie was a perfect match. Van Halen Rising describes an absolutely typical guitar nerd: weirdo loner teen, shacked up for hours at a time, piecing together solos from the stadium rock of the day. Clapton. Page. Alvin Lee’s “Going Home.” California’s first sight of Eddie Van Halen was of a kid staring at his sneakers playing note-for-note versions of what they already knew from the radio.

It took David Lee Roth – himself an extraordinary California story, a singer who couldn’t sing but who kept Eddie from devolving into just another self-indulgent 70s guitardroid – to shape the band into what became Van Halen. Roth’s unbridled ambition got Eddie out of the suburbs and into the LA clubs that made them both stars. Without Roth, Eddie might have spent his life basements, unraveling Steve Vai solos under the black light headphones and wondering if he could have been somebody.

But he got out. Van Halen left the keg parties behind just in time. Van Halen Rising describes a scene that grew well out of hand: cul-de-sacs lined with hundreds of cars, impromptu parties turning into massive drunken mini-festivals. Suddenly American teenagers had too much time and money and horsepower and real estate for their own good, and America had to clamp down.

So by the time Van Halen started hitting the pop charts, Carter had been replaced by Reagan, the national drinking age was officially 21, the sexual revolution had met the Moral Majority, and surfing safaris had been replaced by shopping safaris. The beach was out; the mall was in. The Beach Boys were out; Banana Republic was in.

Van Halen helped carry America across that great divide with its rock and roll intact. The band packaged the sprawling, raucous spirit of seventies rock into the kind of plastic container appropriate for sale at the Galleria. They shrink-wrapped all of “In A Gadda Da Vida” seventeen-minute madness into blistering three-minute singles like “You Really Got Me” and “Panama.”

And they did it with pleasure. The invited everyone in. The responses to Eddie’s death from people of all walks of musical life tell you how well they succeeded. Stroll down the boardwalk and there’s a lot of crap for sale, but when you pass the Van Halen booth, who could resist going in?

Hardly anybody, that’s who. Irresistible: that was Van Halen at its best.

And that might sound simple. But look at how few can do what he did – especially guitarists. One of the easiest things to do on guitar is act scary, and by the end of the ’70s there were a lot of wannabe-scary guitarists around. It’s not hard. Lots of people can make guitars scream or groan or roar like a chainsaw falling down a flight of stairs. Sometimes all you need to do is push a button or stomp a pedal.

But precious few players can make a guitar laugh. No pedal does that. Off the top of my head, the very short list includes Joe Walsh, Doc Watson, and John Scofield. Bill Frisell can squeeze out a wry chuckle. Jerry Garcia could make it giggle like it was baked.

But Eddie Van Halen could make a guitar open its mouth wide and laugh out loud, and when he did, the world laughed along.

These days there’s not much to laugh about. The suburbs are burning. The malls are closed. Kids party on Zoom. That warm California sun will kill you. Five bucks barely buys a cup of coffee, let alone all you can drink at an all-day California pool party.

But somewhere there’s a kid in a bedroom, headphones on, a guitar in hand, a sound in mind, who will change music again. It’s not working yet. It still sounds just like somebody else’s guitar. But when you do a little like this, and then a little like that, and then you press that like that – wow. That’s cool! That feels like…something.

RIP, Eddie Van Halen.

ESQUIRE: Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) is a Civil Rights icon and a Mt. Rushmore-worthy American hero. At the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, Lewis marched fearlessly into the maws of the Jim Crow South, through angry, racist mobs and truncheon-wielding state troopers, armed with nothing more than the courage of the righteous and unconditional love in his heart. Lewis shed his own blood to shame this country into living up to its founding promise that “all men were created equal.” This remains a work in progress.

At 76, he is the last man alive who spoke at the March On Washington in 1963. He is the last of the so-called Big Six—the six leaders of the Civil Rights Movement shepherded by Martin Luther King Jr.—and as such he is the closest thing we have to an American Gandhi still standing. Two weeks ago, Lewis was awarded the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy. Previous recipients include the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Muhammad Ali.

His remarkable journey from chicken-tending son of a sharecropper to 15-term United States Congressman is told in a gripping 600-page three-part graphic novel called March. The trilogy documents Lewis’ central role in the white knuckle saga of the Civil Rights struggle—fraught with intolerable cruelty, daily indignities, appalling ignorance, and unspeakable violence—which is bookended by the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2008. March does not sanitize the brutal realities of the struggle, nor does it shy away from spelling out the N-word, which was hurled at Movement activists with shocking regularity by everyone from JFK-appointed federal judges on down to toothless backwoods Dixie thugs. “We wanted to make sure the story was told in an accurate and unflinching way,” says Nate Powell, who illustrated March.

March does for the Civil Rights struggle what Art Spiegelman’s Maus did for the Holocaust: shine a light on the darkest corners of the history of the 20th century—when the human race collectively realized it had reached the outer limits of its own humanity and stepped back from the abyss—rendering it knowable, and thereby unrepeatable, for children of all ages, in perpetuity. The second installment of March won the Eisner Award, which is like the Pulitzer Prize of comic books, and the just-published third and final installment has been nominated for the prestigious National Book Award. To date, school districts in over 40 states have adopted March as part of their core curriculum. Going forward, every 8th grader in the New York City school system will read March as part of their study of American history. MORE

FRESH AIR: People who have been taking antidepressants for several years sometimes hit a wall, a point when that treatment no longer seems to ease their symptoms. Psychiatrist Julie Holland says that’s where psychedelic drugs could help. Holland was in charge of Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room on the weekends from 1996 until 2005, and currently has a private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan. She’s a medical monitor on the MAPS studies, which involve, in part, developing psychedelics into prescription medication. Her new book, Good Chemistry, explores how she thinks psychedelic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and marijuana, might be used more widely in psychiatry to make treatment more efficientand effective.

“There are certain plant medicines in particular — things like psilocybin or ayahuasca — that really help people not only explore their personal trauma,” she says, but also “this feeling of unity and connection. People really come away from these experiences having a new perspective.” Holland acknowledges that the use of psychedelic drugs in psychiatry is controversial — but she says the practice is slowly gaining acceptance.

“Good psychotherapy takes years and there are a lot of fits and starts,” she says, “and people run away when things get too heavy. But it’s changing more and more. … The data is so compelling that in my opinion, people in my profession have no excuse for not knowing what’s going on.” MORE

VIA BANDCAMP: Long Lost Solace Find — the first Mike Polizze solo release for Paradise of Bachelors, due out July 31st — finds the Purling Hiss frontman and Birds of Maya shredder stepping out from behind the wall of guitar noise into the bright sunshine. Performed entirely by Polizze with longtime friend Kurt Vile and recorded by War on Drugs engineer Jeff Zeigler, this intimate Philadelphia affair clarifies the bittersweet earworm melodicism of Dizzy Polizzy’s songwriting, revealing bona fide folk-pop chops. Long Lost Solace Find finally harvests the wild local honey from the buzzing hive of Hiss.

“Cheewawa,” the second single from Long Lost Solace Find, is accompanied by a meditative DIY video filmed and edited by Polizze himself outside Philadelphia, who shares “’Cheewawa’ was shot and edited in one day during the height of quarantine. On that afternoon, the spring cheer felt eerie against the bleakness of the pandemic. Things don’t seem much better lately, but hopefully this will provide a brief moment of solace.” The video layers footage of acoustic performances of the bittersweet singalong, beginning with the lines “I’m gonna see your face, every corner I turn/ Running through the dreams, and it’s starting to burn,” all set against a purple paisley haze and a blue tree-lined sky. Polizze is joined by longtime friend and collaborator Kurt Vile on the track, who shares “I wish I wrote ‘Cheewawa’ (guess I’ll have to cover it!). Luckily I got to play harmonica and sing ghost vocals on it… I’ve been waiting for this kinda Polizze.”

The story of Long Lost Solace Find is a Philadelphia story. Mike moved from nearby Media, Pennsylvania to Fishtown, Philadelphia in 2004, co-founding Birds of Maya with Jason Killinger (later of Spacin’) and Ben Leaphart (later also of Purling Hiss, Watery Love, et al.) and subsequently falling in with a nascent scene that included the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile, Espers , and the future Founding Fathers of Paradise of Bachelors . In the early years of the new millennium, Philadelphia, and particularly the affordable neighborhoods north of Northern Liberties that attracted artists and musicians, could be a brutal and sinister place, with acres of abandoned and blighted post-industrial blocks ripe for reclamation through thoughtless gentrification. The primeval caveman roar of Birds of Maya—through which Polizze carved savage solos, wielding his guitar like a garotte—reflected that uneasy, transitional urban milieu.

Beginning with his first record as Purling Hiss in 2009, Polizze gradually pivoted to a more pop-inflected idiom that increasingly recalled the classic indie rock of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although, particularly in the early days, it sometimes constituted a de facto solo bedroom project, Purling Hiss eventually released six studio records (on the estimable Woodsist , Richie , and Drag City labels, among others) and toured for ten years as a proper band. Mike never entirely ventured out from behind the moniker, or the clamor. In 2015 Christopher Smith of Paradise of Bachelors urged Polizze to play his first proper solo show under his own name, opening for the Weather Station . The present album developed from that decisive moment, with Polizze, Zeigler, and Vile hunkering down in Uniform Recording to chip away at the twelve songs that would become Long Lost Solace Find.

With very little electric guitar and few effects audible, Polizze’s expressiveness and dexterity as a fingerstyle player (not to mention a singer) emerges. The endless hooks sound casual, almost shrugged-off, despite their carefully constructed recursive and ramifying nature. Long Lost Solace Find demonstrates Polizze as a fount of perfectly turned little melodies and riffs and guilelessly sung ditties—not unlike the way that fellow Philadelphian Ben Franklin was a fount of indelible, perfectly phrased aphorisms. Here’s one that feels rather relevant to Mike’s move from the shadows into the sun: “Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What’s a sun-dial in the shade!” Long Lost Solace Find represents the apotheosis of Polizze’s evolving craft.

DA 5 Bloods (directed by Spike Lee, 154 minutes, USA, 2020)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Films often take years, even decades to come to fruition, so it’s rare when a filmmaker manages to make a movie that is perfectly timed to comment on a moment. Spike Lee has done just that with his latest, Da Five Bloods, which is also his most ambitious since Malcom X. Illuminating as it is entertaining, the film is supercharged by our current sociopolitical climate as it dissects Trump, race, family and war. I found it reminiscent of The Irishman in that it’s a veteran filmmaker using the medium to tell a story that resonates with the insight and wisdom of a long life well-lived.

The plot follows the surviving members of an all-black Army platoon, nicknamed “Da Bloods” (Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo), who have returned to Vietnam 45 years after their final tour in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader/mentor, “Stormin” Norman (Chadwick Boseman). What we soon discover is that during the conflict, the five Bloods were on a mission to deliver to the South Vietnamese, America’s ally in the war, $14 million in gold. When their plane was shot down in hostile territory, the men buried the gold and reported it stolen by the Vietcong after the crash landing, which also resulted in Norman’s death. Gold tends to bring out the worst in people and it does just that here as the men who never really left the war are now pulled back in for an epic adventure that will test their friendships and push the men to their limits.

The film explores how and why the US government used black soldiers as an expendable resource in their wars, as well as how these soldiers and the racial dynamics in play were viewed by the enemy. It’s becomes apparent during the first flashback, with the Vietnamese dialog in subtitles, that Lee is going to dig his heels in a bit deeper. It’s a pretty common subliminal trick in most of these war flicks that the enemy dialog is never subtitled, because knowing what the enemy is saying humanizes them. Lee paints the Vietnamese with empathy and the film is intercut with graphic newsreel footage that contextualizes the Vietnamese’s treatment of the visiting G.Is. Visually the film switches up the format and aspect ratios to denote the shifting back and forth of past and present as well as the perspective — sometimes we are looking through the eyes of the Americans, other times we are looking through the eyes of the Vietnamese. The most revealing choice, however, is how Lee chooses to depict Da Bloods in flashbacks. All the men are old, trapped in the same aging bodies they inhabit in the present. That their fallen comrade hasn’t aged a day since his death is an eerily effective creative choice.

Narrative-wise Lee really goes big here, and Da Five Bloods’ war/heist film hybrid mix works really well, for the most part, and the cast of characters all have believable trajectories. The film originally started out as a spec script with Oliver Stone attached. After making the rounds in Hollywood for seven years, Lee decided to take the project on and infuse it with his own perspective. It doesn’t feel as preachy or heavy handed as Blakkklansman tended to get in its darker moments. The most curious bit is making Da Blood named Paul (Delroy Lindo) a MAGA-hatted Trumper, which allows Lee to dissect the psychology behind black Trump voters. It’s much more complex and nuanced than I expected, to be honest, given Lee’s very vocal disdain for Trump.

Given the recent death of George Floyd, it’s hard not to view this film through that dark prism. As the narrative flashes back to Civil Rights riots, which are reminiscent of what we’re seeing unfold in the unrelentingly bleak news cycle of the here and now. Lee could have easily just focused his lens only on the plight of the black soldiers, who were continuously sent to the front lines of these wars to fight for a freedom they would never enjoy when they came home. Instead, he infuses the film with the painful legacy of the Vietnam War and those who fought on both sides of the battle field were forever changed by the experience. Da Five Bloods is uncompromising and stark and that is exactly what we need right now.

THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND (dir. by Judd Apatow, 136 minutes, USA, 2020)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC In The King of Staten Island, now streaming on VOD, director Judd Apatow returns to the formula that worked so well with Trainwreck : creating a vehicle around a comedian’s perceived public persona. This time around he’s chosen SNL’s resident bad boy Pete Davidson, who’s been going through a bit of a rough patch recently. After a very public and messy relationship/separation from Ariana Grande, he then went on to bite the hand that feeds by publicly criticizing SNL during a sit-down with Charlamagne tha God. Given the tragic outcomes of previous SNL Alumni, I feel like they’ve done nothing but try to humanize Pete, while also giving him a platform to raise awareness of his battles with drugs and depression, which is basically what The King of Staten Island also attempts.

The resulting movie is a hodgepodge of the autobiographical details of Pete’s life intermixed with a fictional narrative. The true parts are as follows: he’s from Staten Island, lives in his mother’s basement, has a younger sister and his father was a firefighter, who died when he was seven years old. Surprisingly, the film surprisingly shies away from the fact that his father died while in service during the 9/11 terror attacks on New York City. The fictional part is that he wants to be a tattoo artist and open the first tattoo shop/restaurant which will be called…wait for it…Ruby Tattoosday’s. The faux narrative has Pete’s younger sister going off to college and his mother (Marisa Tomei) finding love in the arms of another fireman Ray (Bill Burr), forcing him out of the nest. This of course goes how you’d expect: at first he rebels but soon winds up befriending Ray and together they try to work through losing his father while also dealing with living up to his memory.

When I saw that the movie is two hours and sixteen-minute long, I expected that Pete Davidson’s “pothead weirdo” schtick would wear out its welcome long before the credits roll. However, Davidson shines here, and is easily the best thing to come out of this convoluted mess of a narrative, littered with lame comedy clichés, tired tropes and plot threads that go nowhere. The King of Staten Island is constantly battling with whether it wants to be a light comedic romp about arrested development, a la every Adam Sandler film not called Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, or a gritty autobiographical story of one troubled manboy’s rise above his demons a la 8 Mile . One minute he’s hanging with Ray’s with eight-year-old son and spitballing what would make an awesome superhero, and the next he’s involved in a shootout while robbing a pharmacy.

One thing King makes abundantly clear is Davidson has the chops to carry a film and his brand of off-color humor translates surprisingly well to big screen. Where Apatow fails Davidson, however, is not steering this film away from the darker thematic tones and elements that were obviously Davidson’s contributions to the script. It’s those odd tonal shifts and interludes that derail what I realistically think would be a solid 90 minutes instead of a muddled two hours and twenty. The King of Staten Island isn’t bad, but the potential for a great film remains tantalizingly just below the surface and that’s what I ultimately find so frustrating about it. It’s like you can see that tonal battle of egos play out on screen, resulting in a film that simply gets tired of fighting with itself, and runs out of steam before brokering a proper peace accord.

BY JONATHAN HOULON This week’s Wire is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Langfeld, musical associate and friend of our subject, Go To Blazes.  I swear that I selected Blazes (as they were sometimes called by their fans) before these incendiary, recent days.  By the way, starting a fire can, indeed, be a component of anarchism.  Fetishizing, coveting, and collecting commercial merchandise (is there any other kind?) is decidedly not.  Not sure what — if anything — that has to do with the below but … really, folks?

In any case, when I moved up to Philly from Austin, TX, in the early nineties, I had a serious chip on my shoulder.  To be sure, I had no right.  All I’d “accomplished” in the Lone Star capital was living in a co-op down on The Drag, working in a bakery by day, and getting kicked out of open-mics by night.  Somehow my 10 minute version of Woody Guthrie’s Tom Joad was not well received.  But as far as learning how to write songs goes, I couldn’t have chosen a better place or time.  I sat at the feet of Masters such as Butch Hancock (by far the best), David Halley (another member of the so-called Lubbock Mafia in distant second to Butch but still quite formidable), Ohio transplant Michael Fracasso (who had none other than Dylan’s guitar player Charlie Sexton in tow last year when he played the Dawson in Manayunk.  Jeez, I hope that place survives Corona), and the late great Jimmy LaFave (who, God bless him, actually encouraged my lengthy Joad at the Chicago House where he presided over the open mic).

So coming from that scene, I presumed that Philly would not compare favorably.  Boy, was I wrong!  A chance encounter with Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner near 45th and Osage, outside of Sam’s Grocery, opened up a world of musical possibility that I thought I had relinquished.  Based on his wearing a Richard Thompson t-shirt (I figured he couldn’t be as weird as he looked!), I struck up a conversation with Mike that resulted in my taking up residence in the Low Road house just down the street.  The Low Road, which Mike fronted, were, at the time, one of the best and most popular bands in Philadelphia.  I am so grateful that Mike and Low Road drummer Mark Schreiber would join me in John Train just a few years later and have accompanied me for the last quarter century (yikes!).  Mike also directed me to the wonderful Rolling Hayseeds whose electric and steel guitarist Mark Tucker and bassist Mike Frank would later join John Train as well. Around the same time, I caught Bill Fergusson strumming bouzouki and mandolin for Burn Witch Burn at Fergie’s Pub where their singer, then former Milkman Rodney Anonymous, stood on a table and gulped down an entire bottle of ketchup.  I was impressed … and Bill’s playing wasn’t bad either so we recruited him too! In short, the Philly music scene may not have shared Austin’s songwriter riches but, as far as bands go, I’d give it a considerable edge.  Still do.

One evening, I distinctly recall Slo-Mo, with a grave, almost fatherly look on his face, saying, “Jon, you really NEED to hear Go To Blazes.”  And so it was that I made my way down to Silk City (then a legitimate rock club before, like so many venues, it became a discotheque with flashing lights and dope beats) and first encountered GTB.  Mike was right.  I did NEED to see these guys.  The first thing I noticed were the women dancing in front of Silk’s little stage with Dionysian fury but also Apollonian grace (second Nietzsche reference in two weeks. Hmmm?).  I need to proceed cautiously here but let’s just say that this Philadelphia Flower Show would easily wilt any Blue Bonnet bouquet. Dig?  As for the Blazes, they flat-out kicked ass.  If there was ever a more powerful honest-to-the-Christ Rock’n’Roll band to blow out of Philly (yes, I know that they actually began in DC), I’m not aware.  Puuuuhleease don’t send me letters regarding well-meaning acts such as War on Drugs, Kurt Vile, or Herr Doktor Dawg:  they ain’t Rock’n’Roll, if you’re still on the fence, to paraphrase Jumpin’ Joe.  Indie Rock is NOT the same thing.

I instantly became a Blazes devotee and actually got pissed off when others failed to follow suit. One former friend (they know who they are) announced that all of GTB’s songs sounded the same.  Well, yeah!  Blazes certainly had a limited harmonic vocabulary but as I mentioned in a Wire about David Allan Coe, it’s actually much harder to write a “simple” song than one with a bunch of fancy chords.  Nick Lowe tells the story of how he bowed out of Costello’s Brutal Youth sessions as some of the songs had “too many Norwegians” i.e the songs were too complicated to follow. I revere Elvis Costello but the Jesus of Cool knows of what he speaks.  GTB was blessed with two fine songwriters in Tom Heyman and Ted Warren, both of whom seemed to effortlessly tap into an Exile-era Stones vibe and, in Heyman’s case, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago blues that kept Blazes socially and musically distanced from Norwegians, tho I understand they developed an impressive fan base in Europe.  My same “friend” also claimed that GTB sounded like the Black Crowes.  I suppose I can hear that but minus the awful Southern boogie-woogie cliches that rendered the Robinson brothers irrelevant and quite annoying to these ears.

So: a powerful live act, coupled with compelling recordings (I am especially fond of their last album, 1996’s Waiting Around For The Crash).  So what happened?  Why did Blazes go up in flames?  I don’t know and, honestly, I’m not sure it matters, even to them.  Perhaps it was a failure of promotion by their label, East Side Digital.  Bad timing?  Blazes were, indeed, just a little in front of the alt-country No Depression scare that would catapult lesser bands to fame.  Uncle Tupelo: overrated.  Trust me. I saw Joe Henry (or was it Jimmie Dale Gilmore?) expose them at the TLA (another venue that I hope survives Covid). Props, however, to Jay Farrar (whose UT spin-off band, Son Volt, I actually admire) telling Jeff Tweedy not to talk to the audience or smile on-stage.  Now that’s Rock’n’Roll!  Wilco: wimps.  David Berman famously sang that “the dead do not improve.”  But bands can and, I must admit, Wilco got better when Tweedy kicked out Jay Bennett whose songwriting was largely premised on Norwegians.  Plus, Nels Cline is NOT a wimp.  Drive By Truckers?  Have you heard their attempts to write protest songs?  Well, I haven’t either but I can assure you that they need to go back and study the complete works of Phil Ochs and Strummer/Jones or, at best, they’ll replicate the leaden “Living with War,” Neil Young’s well intentioned but poorly executed protest dud concerning our last Oil War.  The Bottle Rockets (GTB’s stablemates on ESD before their promotion to Atlantic.  What if Blazes had had a major’s muscle behind them?) are actually pretty cool but I’ve got to dock them for their jokiness.  Don’t smile, man.  This shit’s life or death.  Or supposed to be, anyway.

Sheesh! Enough snark!  The point here was to celebrate Blazes so let’s set Phawker on fire with 5 of their best>>>>

“New Morning Sun”:  Tom Heyman is an ace songwriter based upon not only his work with GTB but also his post-Blazes solo career. I urge you to check that stuff out.  But “New Morning Sun”, from 1996’s GTB swan song “Waiting Around for the Crash”, is definitely my favorite song of his and, as far as I’m concerned, a lost classic of the 90s.  Check out Ted Warren’s keening vocal on this one, right up at the top of his register.  He sings circles around those mentioned above and producer Eric “Roscoe” Ambel helps Blazes achieve a country-rock sound here that is, at once, pretty AND tough.  This ain’t no Poco rehash.  Try this lyric on for size:  “Things are great when there’s no one who knows where you are // I piss in the alley and remember where I parked the car.”  These kind of “men are losers” lyrics may, in part, have been why GTB attracted a considerable group of female dancers to the front of their stage.  Well, that and the deep-in-the-pocket rhythm section of Keith Donnellan on drums and Ted Pappadopoulous on bass.  Teddy P’s always spot-on harmony vocals were also a highlight of GTB’s recorded and live work.

“No Mercy”:  Another one from Crash which, again, is easily GTB’s best record (and makes one wonder what may have come next if they hadn’t gone to blazes).  Ted Warren, who split songwriting duties with Heyman, was responsible for some of GTB’s hardest rockers and “Independence Day” from this same platter was arguably his best in that regard.  But I choose Warren’s “No Mercy” because if there’s a more fitting song about the premature death of a sibling, I haven’t heard it and because of this lyric:  “The thought of you alone in some hospital bed // that’s something that still haunts me today.”  Great lyrics have legs, man.  Warning:  Warren’s description of his dying brother in the last verse is not for the faint of heart but it IS for those willing to unflinchingly confront the Reaper.  Kudos, again, to Roscoe and also Joe Flood (what a name!) on fiddle for the sound here:  there’s a sort of thickness that reminds me of some of Neil Young’s best work.  GTB were Shakey fanatics and actually covered “Harvest” in its near entirety (they wisely skipped that awful one that Neil sez Dylan loves) on NYE at the Khyber in ’93.

“Bloody Sam”:  From Blazes’ first East Side Digital lp, “any time … anywhere”.  Heyman portrays Peckinpah more effectively in a four minute song than others have in four hundred page books!  A rhyme and line like this should be the envy of any songwriter:  “Cocaine on a switchblade that he got from Jason Robards // he left him back in Hollywood with all those other blowhards.”  Again Flood’s fiddle and its placement in the mix are perfect.  Joe Flood, where are you now?  Greil Marcus said somewhere that the right question to ask a songwriter is not who influenced them but, rather, who inspired them?  “Bloody Sam” inspired me to check out the complete works of Peckinpah and then write a song called “Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia” which is the lead-off track of John Train’s Mesopotamia Blues record.  Thanks, Tom!

“Underneath the Bottle”:  In between their two ESD releases, GTB knocked out an album of mostly covers called “Go To Blazes and Other Crimes” in one day!  Direct to two-track, no overdubs.  This one runs a close second to Crash as GTB’s best work and, again, I found inspiration in the fact that Blazes always made time in their sets for several well chosen covers.  And not easily recognizable stuff either but, rather, carefully curated numbers that had fallen by the wayside.  Some of their choices immediately resonated (I was delighted to discover that I wasn’t the only Gene Clark fanatic in town) but others again pointed me in directions I may not have considered.  Bottle is from Lou Reed’s “Blue Mask” lp which, for reasons unknown, I had previously overlooked.  Gotta once more call out Flood’s fiddle which contributes to the bitchin’ brew Blazes stirred up here.  And, at the risk of heresy, I’ll say that Ted Warren actually improved Lou’s lyric.  Lou sang “gimme another scotch with my beer”.  Ted sings “gimme another shot” which any editor worth their salt would have caught.  Scotch and beer???  I always hated when writers called music “whiskey stained.”  What an awful cliche.  Blazes were whiskey fueled!

“Pagan Baby”:  Disclaimer: this one was not in my top five.  I wanted to include GTB’s take on Gene Clark’s “Gypsy Rider” which was collected on their post-Crash roundup “Almost a Decade” (another nod to Neil!) on the Glitterhouse label out of Germany.  But, alas, it is not available on you-tube and I know that it would be asking way too much of you to find it on your own.  To be sure, if you don’t, we’re no longer friends.  Plus, my Phawkin’ editor told me that if I DIDN’T include this cover of a semi-obscure Creedence number from GTB’s 1991 release Love, Lust & Trouble, it would go on my permanent record.

As we say around here, you decide!  See you in week, friends.  And PLEASE don’t tell ’em you were friends with Bloody Sam.

[Illustrations by ALEX FINE]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally ran back in November of 2011. We are re-posting it today on the second anniversary of his untimely death. Good night Mr. Bourdain, wherever you are.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Anthony Bourdain is a man who needs no introduction, but for those not in the know or without a consumptive cable habit, understand that he is the enfant terrible of the foodie world who came of age on the Punk Rock Planet of New York ‘77 simultaneously pogoing to the likes of the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, and Patti Smith and shooting smack in the shithole bathrooms of CBGBs. Upon graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, he ran the kitchens of various fancy Big Apple eateries — including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, and Sullivan’s — before winding up the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in 1998. In 2000, he penned the gonzo fin de siecle memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which expanded on his infamous New Yorker piece, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, that begins thusly:

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger–risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese and shellfish. Your first 207 Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your 208th may send you to bed with the sweats, chills and vomits. Gastronomy is the science of pain.

Kitchen Confidential soon occupied the New York Times best seller list and led to Bourdain hosting his own show on the Travel Channel, No Reservations, wherein he trots the globe sampling the outre customs and exotic cuisines of various indigenous peoples and, for fear of offending his hosts, and in the pursuit of damn good television, bravely chomps down just about everything put in front of him, including: sheep testicles, ant eggs, seal eyeballs, a whole cobra with its heart still beating, and, most disgustingly, a warthog’s anus, which required him to take Cipro for two weeks. In my book, he is pretty much The Coolest Man On Earth. Given that chefs are the new rock stars, I hereby dub him ‘The Lou Reed of Food’ — just remember you heard it here first, folks. Recently, Phawker got Bourdain on the horn to talk about eating dog, shooting smack, dissing Philly and, of course, hating on Billy Joel.

PHAWKER: You caused a bit of a ruckus a few years back when you sort of dismissed Philly as a “two-horse town,” Stephen Starr and George Perrier. Would you take that back if you could? Do you still feel that way?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I certainly would take it back in a hot second. The only thing that’s in my way is there are increasingly large numbers of really good restaurants there or interest places for sure, a large number have come to Philadelphia since I made that comment. But having great restaurants only is not generally what I do. I’m looking for something different. If you had a huge Cambodian community, that would be interesting. Good fine dining which Philadelphia has, good Italian food which Philadelphia has, that’s not making a show for me yet.

PHAWKER: Aside from the fancy-pants restaurants in town, which there are more and more of these days, there is interesting stuff out in the neighborhoods.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I don’t know anything about it. It’s a personal failing that we haven’t found a way into yet. We will, there’s no doubt about it.

PHAWKER: Where are you planning to eat when you get to Philly?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m in the middle of a tour so generally I pull in late in the afternoon, all I have time for is to check into the hotel, throw some water on my face, take a bite of cheese from the complementary cheese tray, do my gig, by the time I’m doing the signing and the picture taking afterwards I collapse into my bed at 1 AM, wake up at 4:30 or 5 and I’m off to the next city. So unfortunately this time around I will shamefully not be getting around.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk about some of the stranger things you’ve eaten – sheep testicles, ant eggs, seal eyeball, whole cobra with it’s heart still beating, warthog’s anus, which required you to take Cipro for two weeks – where do you draw the line? Is there anything you wouldn’t put in your mouth?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I try to avoid dog, that’s for sure. I’ve managed to gracefully avoid having that presented to me. I try to be a good guest. I try to eat whatever’s put in front of me. But at the same time, I’ve made efforts to not find myself in a position where my host is surprising me with dog.

PHAWKER: There is a Mexican place here in Philly called Los Taquitos De Puebla that sells eyeball tacos.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Oh yeah, that’s very classic, I’ve had a lot of that in Mexico. That’s very ordinary food. I’ve had a lot of it. It’s good.

PHAWKER: Touché. Is it cow eyeball?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yes.

PHAWKER: A couple things here I wanted to check off in the true/false column. Did you really tell your kids that eating at McDonald’s causes retardation?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I wanna be careful for libel purposes here, but I may or may not have suggested that there might be some linkage.

PHAWKER: Fair enough.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: That was hyperbole I think. I have definitely said that it’s icky and might have suggested a link with cooties.

PHAWKER: How do you stay so trim while cooking and eating for a living?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: It’s really something to think about. If I’m shooting in Italy for ten days, the crew and me we’ll all gain ten pounds. If I’m shooting in Italy or south of France I try to schedule a shoot some place where the food’s not very good or we don’t have much expectation of eating heavily, maybe a noodle and broth culture or someplace like a very poor country. We try to mix it up, cause you know, if I’m shooting in Italy, France, and Spain all in a row, I will come home and find myself 15 pounds heavier. With me, if I put on six pounds it feels like a ton.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk a little about your take on vegetarianism, which you have labeled a “first world luxury.”

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: What I mean by that is, personal choices people make in their own homes and their own communities, I have absolutely no argument with. If you choose for whatever reason, reasons of conscience or personal preference or for whatever reason, if you live in Philadelphia and choose to live a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I hardly argue about it. It’s your choice. In fact, if you’re traveling to Rome or Paris or the industrialized world, again, these are restaurants you can generally call ahead and inquire if they have vegetarian options and you can eat reasonably well. But I have found from my personal experience that many of the most of the most interesting and amazing places in the developing world, it’s very awkward and will not be understood when you say, “I cannot eat what you’re offering me. I will not eat what you’re offering me.” First of all, it strikes me as being curious when one would go to Thailand or China, these amazing countries with these amazing cuisines and not wanna find out as much as you can about their culture, especially their cooking culture which is so extraordinary, but you would again and again find yourself having to offend often very poor hosts who are very proudly offering you their best. Like it or not, they will just not understand and not accept it, they will be offended and in some cases disgraced in front of their neighbors. I just see it as rude, with traveling, to be many of the places I’ve been, to insist on eating in your preferred style would force you to be rude.

PHAWKER: When in Rome, right?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I believe when in Rome, eat as the Romans. Otherwise, why bother to go? Most of the relationships I’ve made around the world are to my willingness to accept with good grace and good humor and with gratitude what’s offered.

PHAWKER: What is your take on the whole ‘buy local’ or the slow food movement?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m all for it. Who could possibly be against it? It’s wonderful that we increasingly have these options. Even at its silliest and most ideological it’s certainly a good thing.

PHAWKER: Not that you’re an expert on these matters, but what do you make of this notion that the only way to feed the world is through factory farming?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: That is an inescapable fact, an unavoidable fact. We’re not going to revert to an agrarian society where every foot of real estate in the entire world is arable land. There are millions of Indians toiling on farms now working their fingers to the bones so their kids can be engineers. Who will work these farms of the future that we’re talking about? It’s the sort of thing that people who already envision this, like Berkeley, where they’re getting plenty of good delicious local vegetables and live in a fertile area, feel free to say. Many of the people in the world who work on farms are working hard so the next generation doesn’t have to. It’s hard to be a farmer. Also, a rice farm struggling to make a living for his family in Vietnam is probably pretty damn happy with pesticide. It’s inconceivable. There aren’t enough fish in the world to feed the whole world. Unfortunately, fish farming is a way that a lot of the world can eat. Hopefully we can do it in a sustainable and non-toxic way, there aren’t environments contaminating some of the few remaining wild fish. I don’t like Big Corn, I don’t like the system as it is, but there are a lot of hungry people out there. That’s what has to balance these things. I’m very happy any time I hear of a small farmer doing organic local seasonal food and forming relationships with chefs and restaurants, a real community of growers and some providers, people cooking and selling food – that’s great. But we have to be realistic about what our planet is. All these things are interlocked. In order to change the world, it’s not just our food supply we’d have to change, we’d have to change our entire socio-economic structure worldwide. Unless the Khmer Rouge get back to power as an international force I don’t see that happening.

PHAWKER: What do you make of the whole Occupy Wall Street movement?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I understand the anger. My understanding of what their message is, I don’t know what it is, it’s not so well defined in my head but I certainly understand the anger and frustration. I’m generally supportive of that anger, a banking system that’s privatizing profits and socializing losses. I’m against that. Who wouldn’t be? Except the bankers.

PHAWKER: You’ve been very frank about your appreciation for recreational drug use over the years. If there was one drug you could take now consequence-free out of all the drugs you’ve tried, what would it be?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Oh, heroin. Consequence free? No health effects?

PHAWKER: No health effects, you can’t get arrested.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: When I had the time, and I didn’t have any personal responsibilities, or the responsibilities of being a father – I certainly enjoyed that part for a while until it ruined my life, as it always does.

PHAWKER: No one ever seems to beat heroin. Heroin always wins.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yeah, that’s kind of the point. It’s a death-trap of sorts.

PHAWKER: I know you dig music, what you’re listening to these days?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m obsessed with the Rome album, the Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi album. I think it’s awesome.

PHAWKER: I wanted to confirm this very hilarious Billy Joel story, that you banned the playing of his music in your kitchen, that he heard about this, came to your restaurant, snuck into the kitchen and posed for pictures with your cooking staff, then emailed the photos to you and said “See, I’m in your kitchen” —  that is all true?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: We had had dinner previously, he called, made a reservation and he came in and we had dinner together, and we got along very very well. He was well aware of my position on his music before he came to dinner. We’ve had dinner a number of times. But yes, he did sneak into my kitchen once and sent me a photograph saying, “I guess you do let Billy Joel in your kitchen.” It also said, “PS, I also hate the Grateful Dead.” I like him very much by the way, I’m just not a fan of his records.

RELATED: In 1965, Tacoma, Washington’s The Sonics released a debut album of raw-boned, hemorrhagic garage-punk and maximum R&B called, simply, Here Are The Sonics. Exponentially louder, wilder, and weirder than their woolly-bully frat-rock brethren on the SeaTac teen club/roller rink/armory circuit, The Sonics sang about witches, psychopaths, Satan, and strychnine as a social lubricant, along with the more standard themes of hot girls and fast cars, or, even better, fast girls in hot cars. The 12 tracks on Here Are The Sonics capture the needle-pinning, speaker-blowing, tonsil-shredding, balls-to-the-wall mating call of five hormonal mid-’60s teenage savages forever in hot pursuit of Mad Men-era booze-cigarettes-sex-magic and the glorious din that made it all possible.

Fifty years after its release, Here Are The Sonics still sounds, as one wag aptly put it, “as raw as a freshly scraped kneecap.” On the continuum of rock ’n’ roll as a 20th-century art form, Here Are The Sonics remains a vital and important relic, the aural equivalent of a prehistoric cave painting, as primitive as it is seminal. It changed music. More accurately, it changed the people who would change music. Jack White called it “the epitome of ’60s punk.” Kurt Cobain said it had “the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard…it sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever heard.” On “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy concludes his itemized list of the essential artists in the definitive hipster record collection by invoking The Sonics four times in a row, as if casting a spell.

Feeble national promotion and ham-fisted distribution may have ensured that few outside of The Sonics’ Pacific Northwest stomping ground heard Here Are The Sonics when it was first released, but in the fullness of time its sphere of influence now transcends generations and spans continents thanks to the Esperanto of electrifying noise. Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN’s Parts Unknown, used “Have Love, Will Travel” in promos for the current season. He emailed the following when I asked him why: “The Sonics were true originals, garage before garage, the way rock and roll should be: loud, dirty and dangerous.” MORE

Self portrait of photographer Astrid Kirchherr.

FRESH AIR: Astrid Kirchherr, who took the first publicity photos of a then-struggling rock group called The Beatles, died last week. She was 81 years old. In 1960, young Astrid had just completed a photography course at the College of Fashion and Design in Hamburg when her boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, took her to the seedy Kaiserkeller in Hamburg’s red-light district. He wanted to show her a new rock group from Liverpool he had discovered the night before.

When Astrid met the group in 1960, The Beatles consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and two others. Pete Best, not Ringo Starr, was the drummer then. And Stu Sutcliffe, an art student friend of Lennon’s, played bass, but not well. Before long, he quit the group to pursue his art career and live with Astrid, who quickly became his girlfriend. She gave him, then the other Beatles, what’s now known as the moptop Beatles haircut and also photographed the group in many now-iconic formative photographs. Stu Sutcliffe died in 1962 at age 21 of a brain hemorrhage. Astrid became a professional photographer.

The 2008 book of photographs by Kirchherr and fellow photographer Max Scheler called Yesterday: The Beatles Once Upon A Time captured The Beatles in 1964, during the first flush of Beatlemania. When the book came out, Astrid Kirchherr visited FRESH AIR and told Terry Gross about the first time she saw The Beatles perform in that small cellar club in Hamburg. MORE