Lux Interior, lead singer of the Cramps, passed away last week.  The Cramps were the first punk/new wave/alternative/psychobilly/whatever-the-heck-phrase-you-want-to-use that I ever saw.  I saw a note they were appearing at the University of Hartford in 1978, dragged my friend Dan along, and there we saw the original line-up, including now-also-dead guitarist Bryan Gregory.  It was quite something.  Their first three records, esp. the first two produced by Alex Chilton, were awesome, and the third, PSYCHEDELIC JUNGLE, was on my turntable (you see, they had these things called records, and you’d lay them on this spinning circle and, and…ah, forget it…) through most of college.  When I moved to Michigan, my co-workers at Favor-Ruhl Art Supplies took me to see them at the now-extinct Bookies Club 870.  So really man, they were pretty great, and they made some great memories.  I never really followed them much after that (though I was a big fan of the video “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns“), but was always surprised and happy they did so well for so long.

I’ll miss ya, big guy.

Went to see Nick Lowe last night at the Ark in Ann Arbor.  He was in really fine form.  As he’s gotten older (he’s 58 now), his music has gotten more and more straightforward and direct.  He really lays it out there.  I’ve heard his newer music described as “country”, and whlile this is not true in instrumentation,  I think what people are reacting to is the emotional directness of what he is saying.  And what is he saying?  Well, certain themes couldn’t be more clear:  Regret.  Ending up a bitter, lonely person.  The slim chance at redemption that is, nonetheless, a chance.  He is not pussyfooting around what he thinks is really important, and there are no Elvis Costello crosswood puzzle lyrics.  It’s just out there.  Oh, and it’s very catchy, too.

The lowlight of the concert (though I’m sure it will be a highlight to read about!) is that for the first time ever at The Ark we had the kind of drink, unruly losers you normally see at metal concerts, screaming out at inappropriate times, drumming along in double time, talking loudly, etc.  I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here to say the average audiences at the Ark are white middle-class forty-something college-educated professionals who hired a babysitter for a night out (myself included here!), so needless to say no one was very happy about this.  Intimidating liberal stares did nothing.  “Shush” from audience members did nothing.  The Brad-meister actively thought about asserting his adult male, ntesterone and Wine-tini infused self, and whether or not a head butt really works in real life.  The ushers  came by and there were loud shouts and they refused to move.  So during “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” (can you say “irony?”), the Ann Arbor bike cops showed up, and there was a scuffle, and one guy “fell” to the floor and was handcuffed, and the other guy and their girlfriends were escorted out (the other loser in the Savoy Brown T-shirt wisely clammed up when the 5-0 showed up).  I musy say, it certainly made for a memorable evening’s entertainment!

 Encore:  “The Beast In Me” (but of course!)

 I gotta tell ya, I’ve got a soft spot for any of those non-singer type singers who mostly talk over sophisticated backing tracks, like Lilly Allen and now Kate Nash.  It especially helps if they have cool accent, like British or Jamaican.  One of my absolute favorites was the band Touch and Go, who did the unbelievably cool “I Find You Very Attractive.”  The majority of these singers are usually the front person for a sophisticated producer type who does all the music, and the music is usually pretty awesome, like Lily Allen’s quasi-ska-pop-dub, and Kate Nash uses this plinky piano and sometimes sounds like vintage Brian Eno.  This harkens me back to other uber-cool talk-singers of the masculine persuasion, such as John Cooper Clarke, who talked his poems over backing of Martin Hannet’s’ excellent Invisible Girls.  The biggest criticism I read of this kind of stuff is something obvious like “They’re not good singers” which isreally kind of beside the point–they are excellent communicators, and the new kitchen-sink topics of stuff by Allen and Nash give you a Bird’s eye view of what it’s like to be twenty something in England today.  Plus a lot of it’s funny, and a lot of its catchy, and honestly, what more do you want from pop muisc, anyway?

Bonus:  A JCC video!

From last week’s Flight of the Conchords, my favorite FotC song!

Brett and Germaine are just two guys from New Zealand trying to make it in the world of popular music. They have a Manager who manages them during his breaks at the Tourist Bureau of New Zealand. They have a run-down apartment in a bad part of New York. They have one fan, but she’s obsessed with them. The write write very catchy songs and perform them in music videos made up in their own minds. Brett has awesome falsetto. They are Flight of the Conchords, on HBO, or the usual torrent sites. Here is one of my favorite songs by them, “What You’re Into”.  They are easily the second or third best novelty folk duo from New Zealand, hands down.

 Been listening a lot to the boxed set CITIZEN STEELY DAN (though in this era of the iPod, is anything really “boxed”?  Let’s call it a “virtual” box) , which collects everything they did from the beginning up to their reunion a few years ago.  Like the fair-weather fan I am, I’ve always loved “the hits” and the one album I used to listen to a lot as a teenager, “Katy Lied”.  My comments are as follows:

Good Things About Steely Dan

1. Catchy songs with excellent melodies and “jazzy” chord progression and harmonies
2. Really awesome guitar solos by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, esp. “Reelin’ In The Years”, “My Old School”, etc.
3. Runic lyrics that can be interpreted in a variety of ways (though I’m fairly certain “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” is about discovering you are gay, and “Bad Sneakers” is about being an undercover cop)
4. Cool, clever cats

Bad Things About Steely Dan:

1. They were very much “studio” musicians, who rarely played live at this point in their ouvre, so their songs are to my mind ”too” perfect, and they never really cut loose (or if they do “cut loose”, it’s on overdub 2,134, take 6, track 2)
2. Runic lyrics are a world unto themselves, to the point where you need this Steely Dan lyrical interpetation site.
3. They are so clever they wrote “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies”,which is about showing underage children 8mm pornographic films.  And while I used to think that was clever and hep, as I get older and a little more worried about my own kids, I have to wonder — does the world really need another toe-tapping song about pedophilia (cf. Gary Pucket’s “Young Girl Get Out Of My Life”, Andre Williams “Jail Bait”, and every song Chuck Berry every wrote)?  Then again–it sure is catchy!

Been listening to two very good records lately.  First up is the new Spoon record, GA GA GA GA GA.  The thing I most admire about Spoon is their ability to take just about everything possible out of their songs (instruments, words, bombast, length) and still maintain a level of rocking-ness that few other bands can even approach.  They “broke into the mainstream” (as the media says) with their last record and that song “That’s The Way We Get By”, and on this record they actually seem interested in putting stuff back in.  I read a funny an interesing interview with lead guy Britt Daniel in the “never met a band we didn’t like” newspaper Real Detroit, where the interview actually brought up the idea of having horns on the some of the songs as some of sort of “sell out”.  Am I missing something here?  Do people actually still care about such things?  Are their lines of people waiting to pick up the latest “songs with horns” records on the dancefloor?

 There are also horns (and strings!) on the new Nick Lowe record AT MY AGE.  And they sound great, very classic soul-Otis Redding-y.  For those of you who don’t know, Nick wrote the song “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding” which, after being famously covered by EC, also ended up on the soundtrack to the Whiney Houston-Kevin Costner romantic actioner THE BOYDGUARD, and the soundtrack album sold about a bazillion copies, making Nick a millionnaire in the process.  He payed off his parents house, bought a Bentley, and decided from that point on he was going to do his songs his way at his own pace, which he has been doing for several years now.

Now I will admit that when Nick started his ”new direction” I was one of many people who said “Hey Nick–can we, like, pick up the pace a little?”  But he continues in he same vein on this record, and I think I’m finally ready for it.  Mid-tempo songs, plainly sung, about love and loss and other universal concerns.  The record is almost more admirable for what it doesn’t have than what it does.  For instance, it doesn’t have a “new” sound,  or crosswood puzzle without the clue lyrics, or a “new direction”, or songs featured in Lexus ads and American Express commercials like some of his friends.  He’s not trying to stay “relevant. ”  If anything, he’s sounding more and more like his former Father-in-Law, Johnny Cash, only with his own flair for wordplay and heartache.  Check out this excellent number from the new album, Join The Club .  And grow old gracefully with Nick!

I’m almost finished reading the new oral biography of Warren Zevon, called I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD. It’s a pretty entertaining, if not particularly insightful book. The thing that most impresses me, like other artistic biographies I’ve read, is how much quality work he was able to produce despite a crippling number of psychological problems, such as alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sexual addiction, etc. It really is amazing he got anything done. I will honestly say not a month goes by that I don’t think about him or listen to one of his songs. In the spirit of WZ and his quoting of Ross MacDonald, I’ll end with one of my favorite WZ lyrics:

And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing
Until I pay my bill

This new song by Bright Eyes, “Four Winds”, is truly the sh*t. It has an awesome video to go with it. The very meaningful words are here. It also made me look up The Whore of Babylon. Why can’t all music be this great and sincere?

Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There’s people always dying trying to keep them alive
There’s bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building where
Squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She’s standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hair

There’s a lot of reasons not to like the music of Neil Young. For example:

–His singing has been compared to the sound of a prarie dog caught in a barbed wire fence
–He helped popularize the ubiquitous soft rock of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
–He helped to inspire a generation of personal “naval-gazing” singer-songwriters
–He is responsible for several really bad movies, a couple of which I actually saw
–He has more slavering, syncophantic rock critics profiles about his rock and roll and roll music and “the power of The Horse” (his on-again, off-again band of inspired amatuers, Crazy Horse, for those of you not in the know…) then is really entirely necessary in this lifetime

On the other hand, I have been reading SHAKEY, the excellent biography by Jimmy McDonough, which has over 800 pages about Neil’s life; his family background; the inspirations for his songs; the drugs he took; the drugs his friends took and could not overcome; the snap decisions he made to satisfy his artistic muse, irrespective of any effect it would have on his friends, fellow musicians, or record companies; his constant f*ck-ups; his stand-up qualities as a friend; his inspiring dedication to his two sons with cerebral palsy; his cold, calculating business acumen; his constant desire to go to edge and over it… Suffice to say, he is one awesomely interesting and complex individual well-deserving of such a detailed biography. (It’s no surprise Neil has an unreleased song called “Young Citizen Kane Blues”, as the person he most reminds you of is Orson Welles).

It helps that the author shares my feeling that Neil’s “Doom Period” of TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT and ON THE BEACH are his most awesome records, and that FREEDOM is not far behind. If you love these records like I do, you can learn a lot from this book. Unlike Bob Dylan, who genius is more distanced from his personal life, Neil is into it, and it is very difficult to seperate the work from the man. To paraphrase Neil in the book: “I was a bad person in my relationships, and I did a lot of things i regret now. And if I went back, I could have been more polite and more respectful of people’s feelings. But I also would have had 4 or 5 fewer albums…”

If you like Neil, I would pick this book up. And if you like rock and roll music, definitely check out TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT, ON THE BEACH, or the recent LIVE AT THE FILLMORE with, yes, “The Horse.”