For the past 231 years or so, a favorite American pastime has been to pretend to hate the French, while secretly admiring French cuisine, art, architecture, philosophy, and yes, even its music. And the French have helped us become ourselves. It took French intervention to secure victory in the American Revolution, French theorist Alexis de Tocqueville to comprehend American culture, and French real estate in the Louisiana Purchase to give our country decent places to get barbecue. Years later, it took Brigitte Bardot to make us appreciate the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as an object of unbridled lust (sorry, Steppenwolf).

Recognizing that the original Bastille Day was literally a riot, we at Stuck Between Stations are coming out of the closet as Francophiles. To many Americans, “French music” has a limited reach, consisting of Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Johnny Halladay, and the anonymous Eurodisco that plays in the background at the Gap. A smattering of words from “Lady Marmalade,” “Games Without Frontiers” or “Psycho Killer” might also come to mind. I asked our regular contributors to put together playlists of music sung in French or recorded by artists based in France.

Four playlists appear below. Mine riffs off the global reach of French-speaking musical traditions, taking flight with a mix that moves from Paris to Algiers and Dakar, and then across the pond to Lousiana and Quebec. Malcolm Humes starts with France Gall’s most scandalous teen-pop anthem (a far weirder variation on the “I Want Candy” theme) before settling into a list that is heavy on adventurous prog and moody experimentalism. Christian Crumlish’s list celebrates the French role in Anglo-American music, and vice versa. Scot Hacker conjures an alternately loopy and romantic concoction that includes both jam and fromage.

There’s nowhere better to start than with Serge Gainsbourg, the genius, provocateur and pipe-smoking lothario who, according to Richard Gehr, still lived with his parents until he was 40. Gainsbourg’s “Couleur Café” is the obvious choice, because nothing says “liberty, equality and fraternity” to me quite like this video, which features an exotic dancer cavorting around the room and pouring Serge what has to be the single sexiest cup of java in music or film history. With all respect to the great Bob Dylan, next to “Couleur Café,” his “One More Cup of Coffee” sounds like something brewed at the AM/PM minimart.

Continue reading Globe of Frogs: Stuck on Bastille Day →

Something you probably didn’t know about proto-spudboy, de-evolutionist, and original jocko homo Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed-media postcard every day — for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found objects, unexpected backing materials. Some of them are gorgeous, some borderline art brut, but these have very little of the scent of late-model Devo. “I’ve probably got around 30,000 of them filed away now….and I keep making more every day,” Mothersbaugh says. His Beautiful Mutants series is also interesting, but the Photoshop tricks there are much more predictable than his more original paper-based mashups.

God made men, but monkeys applied the glue.
-From “Jocko Homo”

The Dylanhearsawho.com site we mentioned a few weeks ago is getting lots of attention this week, with a fresh article on Salon confirming that legal threats took the site (or at least the music) off line.

With luck, archived versions will continue to be posted at other web sites, and the music will survive virus-like for decades to come. But for now, your best bet is to scour file sharing networks, where the tracks will certainly become a cult classic.

While reading the Salon piece, I started thinking that if it’s parody, it should be clear because of the 2 Live Crew scandal some years back where their parody of “Oh, Pretty Woman” got taken to the Supreme Court as a free speech issue. The band Negativland ran with that court case ruling, covering it in their book Fair Use: The Letter U and the Numeral 2 , which became a de facto primer on copyright and digital culture.

The thrust of the book was that Negativland could have won their case if they could have afforded to take it to court, but that their label, SST, backed away. The book also points out The Supremes conclusion that not only is music parody protected as free speech, but that there was no legal grounding at the time requiring music companies to license sampled work. Nevertheless, business practices had evolved based on paying for sample usage, even if that usage would otherwise have been protected as fair use.

In a perverse twist, what became chapter one of the book was orignally published as a magazine, which pissed off SST enough that they sued Negativland.

Page two of the Salon piece explores the legal angles in more depth, and makes the point that it’s hard to think of Dylan Hears a Who as parody when it lifts the Seuss “lyrics” whole-cloth. Humorous vocal delivery alone does not a parody make. A Dylan parody, sure, but a Dr. Seuss parody? Not buying it. In the end, Dylan Hears a Who is just a set of brilliantly executed cover tracks, published without permission.

But wait — what’s this?

How is that Jesse Jackson can read Green Eggs and Ham on Saturday Night Live and get away with it, while this unheard-of musician with a little traction in the blogosphere cannot? Why is Jackson (or NBC) able to lift Seuss’ words in toto and have it remain on YouTube after all this time, while the little guy can’t get his “parody” in edge-wise? Did SNL obtain permission from the Seuss estate? Maybe. But I doubt it.

And where do we even begin with this cover of the theme lyrics to Gilligan’s Island, sung to the tune of Stairway to Heaven?

Truth be known, I’m not much of a Dylan fan, but a friend does some killer karaoke covers of Dylan as channeled by Elmer Fudd. I’ll try and track down some samples of that, and we’ll see how long they stay online.

Jefferson Airplane and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters may have invented the acid test, but after a while, black lights, fluorescent paint, and ink swirling between the sheets of an overhead projector – as trippy as they were – had to pull up a beanbag and make way for the integration of the greater pop culture.

There’s a long history to the art of film – or film collage – being played behind live performances. Ghost images of Nico and other band members flashed behind the Velvet Underground at the happenings of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In Clint Eastwood’s 1968 “Coogan’s Bluff,” Clint visits a New York disco where half-nekkid go-go dancers cavort with a band playing in front of projected films. The Stones and early Pink Floyd were known to perform in front of films in 1960s London clubs.

These days (or more recently anyway), the Butthole Surfers blast a hole through concert-go’ers trips by projecting footage of penile reconstructive surgery behind their performances. And on a completely different, non-filmic but genetically related planet, Norton Wisdom paints ever-morphing hypo-allergenic stick men and swirly gigs live behind the intricate thud of Banyan (Janes Addiction’s Stephen Perkins, plus Nels Cline and ex-Minutemen Mike Watt).

Jump sideways a few years, to the mid-90s. “Post-rock” has risen to fill an unnamed void, and Boston’s quartet Cul de Sac (not to be confused with the Croatian improv group of the same name) are bringing the ghost of John Fahey together with Can, Faust, and the Velvet Underground, creating fascinating, pulsing instrumentals that go way beyond hybrid, into uncharted territory that belongs exclusively to New England. Film makers Scott Hamrah and Chris Fujiwara started assembling powerful collages of classic obscure film, 1970s TV advertisements, and found scraps into films specifically designed to play – much larger than life – behind the band, helping to make Cul de Sac performances the unforgettable performances they were. Nearly a decade later, at least one of those films – a piece made to accompany “Doldrums,” from Cul de Sac’s 1996 album China Gate, has made it to YouTube:

Seeing the piece again swept me back to Boston, Glenn Jones’ potato-masher guitar rig, and memories of a piece I wrote on Cul de Sac for the Utne Reader in 1996, shamelessly reprinted below, regardless how embarrassing.

Continue reading Doldrums: Rock Film Redux →

Plastic Bertrand is not answering his email. I’m trying not to take it personally — maybe he’s on tour in Eastern Europe, playing “Ça plane pour moi” over and over for 40-somethings in Buda, or across the Danube, in Pest. Maybe he’s overwhelmed with interview requests. Maybe he just doesn’t check his MySpace page very often. Shame though – I really wanted to learn more about his “cellophane puppet” girlfriend, and where she got the “large rubber beer glass” mentioned in his 1977 punk/new wave crossover smash. Does he still have that magnificent rubber glass? Does he use it to quaff large quantities of Belgian ale? (Bertrand is one of Belgium’s finest one-hit punk rock exports).

In case you don’t speak French – or in case you do but can’t make heads or tails of those jackhammer lyrics, an English translation is in order:

Allez-oop! One morning
a darling came to my home,
a cellophane puppet with Chinese hair,
a plaster, a hangover,
drank my beer in a large rubber glass
Oooo-ooo-ooo-ooo!
like an Indian in his igloo

Continue reading Plastic Bertrand: World Scrabble Champion →

1. She’s a genius, she’s gorgeous, and Bjork is out of your league.
2. As far as we know, she isn’t a blood relative.
3. The harp is the sexiest of all musical instruments, other than the bagpipe and the accordion.
4. She will introduce you to Devendra Banhart, who can help you do something else with your hair.
5. She’ll give you something to brag about next time San Francisco political rival Matt Gonzalez attempts to flaunt his knowledge of John Coltrane, Joy Division and the Clash.
6. Her arranger is Van Dyke Parks, who has worked closely with Brian Wilson and can hook you up with a good therapist.
7. Her obsession with the mythical Breton city of Ys will help educate you about the dangers of coastal flooding.
8. Gift shopping at second-hand stores and Renaissance Faires rather than designer boutiques will save you money.
9. The next time you give a speech that is a bit lengthy and self-involved, you can mention that “Only Skin” lasts almost seventeen minutes.
10. You’d make an excellent mayor of Nevada City, California.

Don Aicardi (aka the “Egg Roll King”), roots archivist extraordinaire and our favorite authority on all things Dylan, passes along this classic new bit of inspired insanity, featuring a faux mid-sixties Dylan voice assaulting Green Eggs and Ham, the Zax, and the Cat in the Hat, among other bits of classic Dr. Seuss. I wish he’d also taken on Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?, but it’s really hard to quibble. As these things go, it’s even better than Bruce Springstone: Live at Bedrock, and almost as good as the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra’s all-kazoo version of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

When he tired of the expense, the navel-gazing, and the circular conversations in the weekly sessions of therapy, his bright idea was to revive his interest in drumming, and what he lacked in actual ability he could always compensate for with enthusiasm and volume. This was not music to the ears of his wife, for if there was one trait she brought from her four-year tenure at UC Santa Cruz, other than a healthy respect for diversity and an unhealthy interest in thrift-store bargains, it was her fear of drum circles. But a drummer in Berkeley, like an addict in a methadone ward, needs more than words to make him stop, and besides, it felt so good.

It brought him back to when he was fifteen, staring in the mirror with sticks in hand, thinking, well, they may think I live in the library, I may be the captain of the debate team, but damn it, I will be the next Zigaboo Modeliste.

They met every Monday. They studied a different Third World rhythm every month, and to assuage the guilt that accompanied their idleness, they tried to discuss the human rights problems of every country whose rhythms they clumsily appropriated. And it therefore came to pass that blond-haired, blue-eyed misapplications of son and rhumba rhythms were downed in minty mojitos and debates about the legacy of Castro. The rat-a-tatting of failed doumbek rhythms led to hooka pipe and hash-intensified meanderings about the problem of Palestine, the multiple meanings of Zionism, the dreams of diaspora, and the wandering of Western Sahara. Borderline unlistenable tappings on a tabla, coupled with too many six-packs of Singha beer, led his little circle to tie themselves in knots over nuclear proliferation between India and Pakistan and the unresolved status of Kashmir. The hollow echo of the talking drum, and the ingestion of a green substance he could barely hold, much less identify, left him with a vague sense that something was amiss in the slums of Lagos. Fumbling attempts at samba rhythms brought an appreciation of the old souls of Bahia and a sense of wonder about the Brazilian rainforest. Then came the steel drums of Trinidad, the reverb of reggae, the deluge of rum punch, and the sudden desire to atone for 500 years of colonialism in the Caribbean.

He couldn’t stop himself. He may have been white, and born to parents who revered Pat Boone and Andy Williams, but he was damned if he wouldn’t at least try to understand the world and its conversant rhymes, the march and pacing and order that spoke a universal language in which he was only a beginner, but determined to try.

The restless searching finally ended the week he saw his Middle Eastern drumming teacher play in a large festival with her star pupil, who performed the same rhythm he had learned in class, yet flawlessly and five times faster. The star pupil was eight. He went home, put his sticks and worldwide collection of percussion instruments into a box in the basement, and opened a book for the first time in months.

I could call Prince a “genius,” but would it matter? In music, art, and writing, everybody’s a goddamn genius. So let’s come at it from a different angle. My dad, a physician, tends to look at things from a genetic point of view. When we’re watching a truly brilliant athlete or musician, he’ll point out that their “genius” is based on their genetic aberrations. Basically, they’re mutants, if you want to make it sound comic-book sexy. Or, as I prefer to look at it, they’re freaks.

Michael Jordan? Total freak. Absurdly mutant-like muscular control combined with freakish creative spatial analysis abilities. He won the genetic lottery and got to test-drive the prototype genes. In 10,000 years, all of us will dunk like Jordan.

And everyone will make music like Prince.

Continue reading A Freak’s Freak: Sign 'O' the Times @ 20 →

Guardian piece looking back on the origins of The Stooges and “the great Rock Iguana at 60.” Iggy talks a bit about his parents and how they viewed his quitting school to do music:

And my dad told me later, ‘Weeell, you remind me of a lot of pitchers that I used to go to see – a lot of speed, a lot of flash, no control.'”