Color Me Embarassed

I just looked at the date and it's been two weeks since our last post. Embarassing. Our collective bad. We weren't really doing anything -- we just weren't blogging. In fairness to us though, the DC concert slate has looked a little barren lately, but it's about to heat up soon.

In the meantime, I've personally been doing a lot of rock-reading, as my last post suggests. Last night I finished Decemberist head hauncho Colin Meloy's 33 1/3 series book on The Replacements' seminal Let It Be. I picked it up this weekend in Boston (the Harvard Book Store had an extensive collection of them) and started reading on Monday evening. It's a slim volume.

This was my second in the series, the first being Love's Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans. The two could hardly be more different. Where Hultkrans was all about setting Arthur Lee and Love's anti-Summer-of-Love, psych-folk manifesto in its proper historical and cultural context, Meloy's is really about himself. Frankly, he barely even touches the material at hand, providing no details about the album's genesis, its musical style and structure save a few lyrical snippets that serve only to illuminate his emotions as a middle-schooler in Montana.

In that sense, it was pretty disappointing. When Meloy offers a taste of that in describing the MTV-baiting "Seen Your Video", it seemed to promise that more might be on the way. In fact, he's much more concerned with discussing the cover -- which I never found particularly remarkable at all, though appropriately tossed-off and well-suited to the 'Mats -- than the music within. Meloy mentions that some of his fans might find his choice of an all-time favorite album surprising, as it doesn't sound a damn thing like his own band, The Decemberists. It's somewhat ironic, then, that the book probably most appeals to Decemberist fans (I wouldn't count myself in that group), as it's a nice little read about how Meloy fell in love with music, about how music became a part of his personal identity as a young teenager in Helena, MT. He also writes well, with a short, concise style that is just as far from his word-stuffed songs as the Replacements music is from the Decemberists'.

So I didn't love it, but still an interesting entry to one of my favorite concepts in music writing. Next time I'm checking out the Velvet Crush/Tyde drummer Ric Menck's take on one of my dad's favorite, The Byrds' David Crosby swansong, Notorious Byrd Brothers. Anybody else care to recommend (or not) one of the books in the series?

Revolution in the Head

Last year I gave my dad Ian McDonald's book, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties. He loved it and passed it on to me when he finished. I'm in the middle of it now, and it's terrific. McDonald first gives a pretty healthy introduction into what he means by "Revolution in the Head", and then lays out the social and cultural atmosphere that helped mold the band and the atmosphere that they themselves helped shape. He opens with a quote by Aaron Copland -- "If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of the Beatles" -- which seems particularly appropriate, and also makes me feel like I have some kind of grasp of what the Sixties were all about.

What the book does really well, though, is make their music come to life. I have never wanted to hear these songs so much. I listened to "She Loves You" maybe a dozen times yesterday, just to catch the little "jazzy sixths" and "offbeat tom-tom quavers" that he's going on about. There are also some great anecdotes of the recording sessions, reminding you what an incredible band (in the technical sense) they were and also just how far out some of these recordings (masterminded by the genius George Martin) were at the time. Here's one of my favorites, from the entry on "Twist and Shout":

"The Beatles had been recording for twelve hours and time was officially up. George Martin, though, was looking for one more number -- something to send the album out with a bang. Accordingly, he and his team retired with the group to the Abbey Road canteen to take a final breather and have a think. Over coffee (or, in Lennon's case, warm milk for his ragged throat), they weighed their options before deciding on the wildest thing in The Beatles' act: 'Twist and Shout', their cover of a record by the black Cincinnati family act The Isley Brothers which had been a summer hit in America the previous year.... Back in Studio 2, the group knew they had at most two chances to get this demanding song on tape before Lennon lost his voice. At around 10:30 pm, with him stripped to the waist and the others 'hyping' themselves by treating the control room as their audience, they went for it. The eruptive performance that ensued stunned the listening technicians and exhilarated the group (as can be heard on McCartney's triumphant 'Hey!' at the end). Trying for a second take, Lennon found that he had nothing left and the session stopped there and then -- but the atmosphere was still crackling. Nothing of this intensity had ever been recorded in a British pop studio."

Don't know about you all, but the thought of Lennon drinking warm milk just to stay in the game then tearing through one of the greatest covers of all time, the band so riled up and buzzing that even Paul's hollering during the recording -- it kinda gives me goosebumps. This was February of 1963. Just to give you an indication of the other stuff also released in 1963, you have Lesley Gore's two big hits, "Judy's Turn to Cry" and "It's My Party", "My Boyfriend's Back" by the Angels, "I Will Follow Him" by Little Peggy March, "Hey Paula" by Paul and Paula, and freaking "Dominique" by the Singing Nun. It's a great portrait of what came before The Beatles, and just how much things changed when they hit the scene.

And also, one year later, in the first week of April 1964, The Fab Four held the top five singles in America (1. Can't Buy Me Love, 2. Twist and Shout, 3. She Loves You, 4. I Want to Hold Your Hand, and 5. Please Please Me). Just one week later, they would hold FOURTEEN of the Top 100 -- something I can't imagine we'll ever seen again.

Observations from Iraq

During my stay here in Baghdad, I've noticed a couple things: the current US Embassy has the greatest sandwich bar known to man (100 feet of meat and cheese, with more energy drinks than you can handle), a white MacBook was probably not the best choice of computers to bring with me (it's no longer white), apparently "Monterey Jack fuckin' cheese" is delicious, and as much as I love our soldiers and contract soldiers and respect what they do for our country, their taste in music is slightly (read: extremely) irritating.

It's unfortunate that the best music I've heard is the Iraqi guy on a bullhorn wailing away in Arabic after dark. If I have to listen to another GnR or Linkin Park song in the bar on camp, I'm going to shoot someone. I'm still searching for Iraqi rock and roll in the Haji shops (and no, that's not an invitation to send me Clint Black albums).

On that note, I'm off to the shooting range to pop off a couple automatic weapons. Goddamn, I am manly...

Proggy Style

The AV Club has a wonderful feature up about ridiculous prog-rock album covers. This struck a chord with me personally, as my roommate in college owned every single one of these albums (save for the Mars Volta and Coheed and Cambria, of course. I mean, we went to a private college, pshh.). So taken with progressive rock was my friend, that he once said, sans irony, that he would "blow Robert Fripp". I wish I were lying.

A Rockist Mind F*ck

R.E.M., The National, Modest Mouse
Merriweather Post
June 11

The rock sauce will be flying.

Boognish Rising: Ween Live at Constitution Hall

G.L. and I went to DAR to see Ween last night. A very strong performance from Dean, Gene, and their friends Claude, Dave, and Glenn. More on it later.

In the meantime, I jotted down the setlist last night. Here it is:

WEEN - DAR Constitution Hall - 1/23/07 SETLIST
Exactly Where I'm At/ Pork Roll Egg and Cheese/ Spinal Menangitis/ Bananas and Blow/ Learning to Live/ Voodoo Lady/ Back to Bosom/ My Own Bare Hands/ Take Me Away/ Transdermal Celebration/ Waving My Dick in the Wind/ Nan/ Touch My Tooter/ I've Got to Put the Hammer Down/ Object/ Buckingham Green/ Your Party/ Beacon Light/ I'll Be Your Johnny on the Spot/ Zoloft/ Roses Are Free/ Spirit Walker/ The Mollusk/ Did You See Me?/ Ocean Man*/ Dr. Rock/ Shamemaker>Fiesta // Mister Richard Smoker/ Mister Won't You Please Help My Pony?/ Stroker Ace/ You Fucked Up

Also, some quality pics here.

Five Brownest Ween Tunes

G.L. and I are going to see Ween down at DAR Constitution Hall tonight. To preview, I thought I'd do a list of Ween's "brownest" musical moments. For those of you unfamiliar with the band, the band and its fans use the term "brown" typically to refer to the inherent "Ween-ness" of something, usually something lo-fi, terrible, but awesome in its terribly low fidelity. Ween fans, does that seem like an accurate definition?

Here's the list:

1. "Poop Ship Destroyer" - The most requested Ween tune by far, and the most evocative of the term "brown". The Brothers Ween pull this out to alternately punish terrible crowds (by playing long-winded versions of it) and express their gratitude to rabid ones.

2. "Awesome Sound" - This lengthy, repititive favorite from The Pod is a live staple, where sheer enthusiasm and volume make it seem like an actual song, as opposed to just maniacally fuzzed-out vocals buried under a pile of heavy riffage.

3. "Spinal Menangitis" - It almost hurts to listen to, as Dean Ween adopts a child's voice during this tune about Ween's favorite of subject matters: disease. When they play it live and that little keyboard melody comes in at the beginning, you know a wave of brown-ness is upon you.

4. "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" - This is something of a personal preference, because I think to be truly "brown", a song has to retain some elements of normalcy. So here's a quaint middle school love song that aurally recreates the experience of huffing paint-thinners (or what I imagine that might be like).

5. "Happy Colored Marbles" - Off 2003's quebec, it's got a vaguely "Spinal" feel to it, but then takes off out of nowhere with this brown-defining, trademark Deaner solo. The plunking synths are also the perfect combination of crappy, unnerving, and spacey -- this is vintage Ween.

Honorable Mentions: "Mushroom Festival in Hell", "The Golden Eel", "Papa Zit", "The Stallion Part 5", "Stroker Ace"

Those are my five. Anyone care to add to that?