Hello Sunshine

Fall is here. It's almost October. Would love to go to Colombia one day. But maybe not by train.

Super Furry Animals -- Hello Sunshine [mp3]

Tinariwen - Amassakoul 'N' Ténére

Thom Yorke - Reckoner

Easy Listening

Somebody I know has teased me that my posts on this blog are very 'emo' -- presumably meaning that I emote, that I talk too much about emotions. So maybe I should be witty and ironic and acerbic and euphoric or something? If I am 'emo,' then it's probably because I try and generally avoid writing about the events in life, focusing instead on my (ahem) aesthetic preferences. But ... it's hard to write about one's preferences and not allude to how one feels. Which I guess leads to emoting. Hmm.

So ... I thought I would every explicitly emote in this post. Emoting about music is usually about remembering. It is usually about nostalgia. It is now 1.30 am, a suitable time for remembering. I'm listening to "Saudade" by Love and Rockets, the beautiful instrumental that closes their first album Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. No specific memory associated with this album but vague images that run through my mind. The front of an apartment complex on Boyett Street. Being young. Being too young. Being skinny. Having a crush on a girl who didn't have one on me (until much later). Lying on the couch falling asleep during the day with a Calculus textbook opened on my chest. My roommate buying me a pack of cigarettes. A time that is most definitely not today. Not today at all.

Here is an excerpt from my rock'n'roll book about that time:

In Texas, there was either Austin, Houston, or Dallas to go to. The latter was the furthest, and therefore infrequently visited. But there was a memorable trip in the spring of 19_, memorable not because anything particular happened, but because on the drive there, as I was lazily watching the vista of the scenery move by from my passenger’s seat window, I saw a rainbow set, almost like a colored architectural (drawing) implement balanced over the horizon; in the foreground a cemetery with gravestones raced by until the headstones strobe-lighted through my brain into an image that I’ve never forgotten. Later, I wrote a poem-song called “Rainbow Cemetery Freeway” for that one memory—of movement and death and loneliness that I felt on that trip to Dallas.

Nadeem had some old friends from __ who went to school at the University of Texas at Arlington. This was a little “town” located right between Dallas and Forth Worth. There’s nothing remarkable about any of these three places—although Dallas would figure a little bit in my life in the years hence: several times I flew kites over a suburb of Dallas. Nadeem had a friend who lived in Arlington whose name was Pappu, an incredibly skinny dude who dressed like a punk. He wore black all the time, made up his hair, had lots of piercings, and seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time making himself look good (which he did). We would always be late for shit, ‘cause Pappu was doing his hair. I looked positively suburban next to him. He put in some serious time with his sartorial eloquence. Well, Pappu had an album he was playing at the time, "Meat Is Murder," by a band I had hitherto not heard of, the Smiths. It sounded like warbling to me, definite signs of warbling and moaning. I was nearly ready for the Smiths, but not quite so. However, we heard the album dozens of times that weekend while smoking cigarettes and sitting outside his apartment.

Pappu had a gorgeous white chick for a girlfriend who also wore black all the time. One time I was sitting on the steps outside their apartment. Nadeem and Pappu were somewhere else. It was just me and her. She put on 'Meat is Murder' yet again. She said it was the only thing she could listen to. We sat there smoking cigarettes and not talking. This was a recurring theme in my American Adventure. The soundtrack, the cigarettes, and the silence. It was like being placed in freshly fallen snow on the side of a highway after a car accident that didn’t really hurt you that bad.

Pappu was later killed in a carcrash. I'm not sure what happened to his girlfriend.

There were other more deeper trips into Americana. On my first spring break out of College Station, in the late '80s, I went to visit my sister at her school, Wellesley College near Boston. I took a flight out of Houston, via Newark, and landed in Boston. It was the first time that I had been in the north, or indeed anywhere outside of College Station in America. She came and picked me up and first we went to Harvard Square. It was cold. We stopped at Au Bon Pain and we had some hot melts-in-your-mouth croissants, a food I had never tasted before, and actually, have not tasted since. No matter how many croissants I have eaten since that day, I have never been able to secrete the same juices of joy in my mouth as that winter day.

My sister had been in Wellesley for a little over a semester now, and I’m not sure how she was adjusting to it, but it seemed clear that life wasn’t exactly easy for her in terms of money, school, social life, etc. Wellesley was this beautiful isolated oasis in the middle of nowhere, with the most picturesque backdrop one could imagine, especially in the winter—with wide lakes and tall pine trees and distant forests and gliding hills and mysterious pathways that led off to shaded hollows. I met a few of her new friends while I stayed in her room. I remember the big hit on the radio at the time was a song called “Easy Lover,” a duet by Phil Collins and the former lead singer of Earth, Wind & Fire whose name I can’t remember now. I wrote many (love) letters to S__, sitting in my sister’s dorm room. I don’t think S__ ever replied to them. My sister did her best to take care of me, but I think I was a lost case. I was right in the midst of my deep chasm of feeling lost, just having come to America, so it must’ve showed on my face.

While at Wellesley, I decided to go visit an old friend who was a freshman at Brown University. __ was the ex-girlfriend of my ex-best friend. She was beautiful to look at, maybe a bit too much, and I was never sure why she was so fond of me at the time. She really devoted a lot of care to our friendship over the years but it was that first trip that cemented something new. I took a Greyhound bus from Boston to Providence with my bags, not really knowing where the hell I was supposed to meet her. I remember leaving the Greyhound station in the bitter cold with two heavy bags walking around the city trying to look for a small college building where I was supposed to meet her. I walked for miles, finally convinced I was lost. My shoulders hurt. I didn’t have her phone number either. I sat down on a corner street and huddled up in the bitter cold as night fell and it was snowing. I smoked a lot of cigarettes. I walked to the campus of Rhode Island College. Amazingly, out of the blue, she showed up in a friend’s car, leapt out of nowhere and hugged me. They took me back to her dorm, where __ immediately told me to take a shower because I smelled bad. I don’t remember the rest of what we did. But I do remember that I smelled bad. Later, after a couple of days, __ hugged me goodbye and we began writing letters regularly to each other, her chronicling her tumultuous love affairs and me chronicling my imaginary ones.

Throughout that trip, I had a small walkman (remember those?!) with me and a few cassette tapes. One of them, stolen from Shammu, began with the song “I.G.Y.” by Donald Fagen—a beautiful, lilting, and absurdly cheesy song if there ever was one. Except, listening to it just made me more wistful, and eventually pitifully nostalgic for “what a beautiful world it used to be.”

"I.G.Y" remains an oddity. It's one of the few songs I've ever heard that is about the euphoric joy of expecting a bright future. The narrator is a kid in 1957 (hence the International Geophysical Year or IGY), just after the launch of the Sputnik satellite into space. And he's excited. He's excited about going to space, about the new space age upon us. The song might as well have been written for me as a ten year old. It's weird that as you get older, the songs that often move you are the ones you remember as a kid, the ones that are willfully discarded as lowbrow (or worse, middlebrow) by the arbiters of good taste. But, really, who could resist when Fagen sings:

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free.

Donald Fagen -- I.G.Y. [mp3]

Cool

I had an idea once to write an album full of songs called The Catastrophe Years. I hope I hope I hope that they are not upon me.

So, yeah, I, um, have written a lot of songs over the years. There was a broken Hawaiian guitar in our house when I was a kid, and lacking anything better, I screwed around with it for a while before my parents got me a real guitar. I don't remember how or when but I was roughly about 15 or 16 years old. I started writing a lot of songs at the time partly because I was unable to learn other people's songs. I was basically a self-taught player and took no lessons. I learned by listening but recognized later on that I learned a lot of things wrong. Totally wrong. I still can't play barre chords. But....I suppose, lacking formal training, I started right off the bat with odd tunings and chords that really make no sense. Which can be an advantage if you want to write really weird songs.

At some point, I wrote so many songs that I started to put them together into make believe "albums." In fact, by the time I got to college, I lived in this secret world where I would spend months, sometimes a year, painstakingly putting together an album of songs. By the time I stopped writing songs completely, I had written about 300 songs, most of them were arranged into about 15 or so albums. I stopped writing songs as a regular habit in 1991. Not sure why. Probably got too depressed to write. Or bored. Something like that. But I did do one thing that I'm really glad about now: During a Christmas break in college, I spent a couple of weeks recording on shitty cassette tapes every song I've ever written. These demos were basically skeletal, with nothing but me on acoustic guitar and vocals, so they lack dynamics and color, but they will help me remember the songs and the chords one day when I revisit them. My plan is to record full-fledged band versions of all the songs. (Of course, I'll never do that because I'm too busy, but one can always hope...)

One of the "albums" I wrote (in 1990-91) was called Home and consisted of 16 songs, most of which I still really like, which is surprising as I am much older now. These were essentially sound poems about a broken relationship (yeah, I know) but not as maudlin or sentimental as some of my earlier stuff. Here is a demo from Home. In my mind, it's a psychedelic song, but with just me and the guitar, it comes off a little spooky. I recorded the demo in 1992.

Joy -- Cool [mp3]

Rock'n'Roll Nigger

I first heard Horses in the early winter of '89, probably January. Needless to say it blew my fucking mind. I don't think there has been an album since or before that so profoundly fucked with my sense of what was "possible" in music. I didn't want to fuck Patti Smith, I wanted to be her. I remember playing "Gloria" for my friends, almost proud that I had stumbled upon a piece of musical archeology. I remember the rush, the unbelievable chill I got hearing those first words on the album: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." There were a lot of songs about fucking on that album but that's not why I loved the music. Horses was fundamentally about a challenge. It challenges you to see beyond, to look outside, to break through, to delve deeper. And yes, perhaps it works best when you are 20 years old and not when you're 30. But in that way, I was lucky to have stumbled upon her genius at that age. (Smith herself was 29 when she recorded the album.)

The picture of her on the cover of Horses -- well, what's the point of even trying to describe it in words? It may be the best album cover of all time. Robert Mapplethorpe, he of the tragic end to life, captured the weird androgyny of Patti Smith that is at the heart of the best rock'n'roll. (Aside: Mapplethorpe was also the photographer for Television's Marquee Moon, another inscrutably brilliant album cover).

Instead of offering something off of Horses, today I offer the b-side of Smith's first single from June 1974, "Piss Factory," supposedly the first punk rock song ever released. She didn't include the song on Horses, but it's worth a listen for the boundaries she was already pushing before the album. When I was a TA for the "history of rock'n'roll" class at Carnegie Mellon in the spring of 2001, I played all of "Piss Factory" to my class (100+ students!) because I wanted them to know the possibilities inherent in the medium of pop music. I also handed out lyrics to her song, "Rock'n'Roll Nigger." In an interview from the spring of 1976, just after Horses was released, Smith noted:

Every time I say the word pussy at a poetry reading, some idiot broad rises and has a fit. “What’s your definition of pussy, sister?” I dunno, it’s a slang term. If I wanna say pussy, I’ll say pussy. If I wanna say nigger, I’ll say nigger. If somebody wants to call me a cracker bitch, that’s cool. It’s all part of being American. But all these tight-assed movements are fucking up our slang, and that eats it.

Patti Smith -- Piss Factory [mp3]

Swell Season at Radio City Music Hall -- Gently Johnny

I was at this show (below, in the video, on May 19, 2008) at Radio City Hall here in New York, just after the semester had ended, to watch the band Swell Season. The year before, we had seen the movie Once which I really enjoyed -- it was a touching fictional story about a street-singing singer/busker in Dublin who falls for a sweet Czech girl. The two characters were played by the two main singers of Swell Season who also wrote all the songs.

So.. about half way through the show at Radio City Hall, Markéta Irglová (the Czech girl, just 20 years old), did a solo number, inviting her sister (Zuzana) to sing. They did a particularly haunting version of "Gently Johnny," a song originally featured on The Wicker Man soundtrack. Wicker Man was a rather obscure British horror movie put out in 1973 which featured a few British luminaries of the time including Britt Ekland and Christopher Lee. In recent years, there's been a general reassessment of the movie, and many critics now consider it a horror classic. I was totally blown over by the song and immediately got the soundtrack (which is middling at best).

Below I have Swell Season's beautiful version, followed by an mp3 of the original by Paul Giovanni who composed the soundtrack for The Wicker Man. Giovanni's version is much more in the form of an olde English folk parable, probably the way it was originally meant to be. Irglová's version is like a spooky Joni Mitchell song. Both are awesome. (And no, I'm not going to mention the horrible 2006 remake of The Wicker Man.)



Paul Giovanni -- Gently Johnny [mp3]

Anhedonia

The first song by Low I heard was the following, "Shame." I saw them live in the late nineties when I was living in Philly, opening for the Swans down at the Trocadero. They had a certain aesthetic, combining silence and understatement with violence and frisson. In the continuing search for my "this-is-how-i-feel" moments in music, I found two Low songs, one of them "Shame" and the other, "Sunflowers." I need to do a longer post on the latter, but here is "Shame," and yes, fuck you, I was (am?) of those people best described as anhedonics [sic]

Babylon

There have been many versions of this song, most notably by Don McLean, the 1970s singer dude. Here is one version, featured in an episode of Mad Men, a TV show shown here in the U.S. on AMC for the past couple of years. David Carbonara scores the music for the show.

David Carbonara -- Babylon [mp3]

Phule Phule Dhole Dhole

Below, a short scene from Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964).

The song is, of course, "Phule Phule Dhole Dhole" written by Rabindranath Tagore, who adapted the melody from "Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon" by the 18th century Scottish bard Robert Burns. The change to a minor chord gives the melody a deeply yearning quality (as opposed to the more maudlin nature of a lot of his other work).

Below also, an mp3 from a contemporary Bengali singer, Sahana (shown below), who recorded this version in 2007 for her album Notun Korey Paabo Boley. More about her here.

Miss home.



Sahana -- Phule Phule Dhole Dhole [mp3]