My seven year-old girl loves a book called Math Curse, which begins when a girl’s teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, notes that “you can think of almost anything as a math problem.” The girl starts seeing crazy patterns and cruel fractions in everything from schedules to snacks. Later she conquers fear and makes peace with her semi-irrational world…at least until Mr. Newton, her science teacher, tells her everything is also a science problem.

Mrs. Fibonacci came to mind when I found Indian-American pianist Vijay Iyer’s recent essay, Strength in Numbers—which followed and partly explained his trio’s fascinating 2009 album, Historicity. Iyer’s graceful essay is a great read even though its subtitle, “How Fibonacci Taught Us to Swing,” brought back uncomfortable memories of math majors at school dances. The real-life Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa) was a rabbit breeding-obsessed 13th century Italian mathematician. His signature sequence starts with 0 and 1 and gets each remaining number from the sum of the previous two ( 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc.)

The ratios of consecutive Fibonacci numbers approach the golden ratio (i.e., 1.6180339887 and change). That number (phi in Greek and geek-speak) has captivated everyone from Euclid to Le Corbusier and Dali–as well as conspiracy theorists, sellers of bad stock market tips, readers of Dan Brown novels, and people who’ve spent too long playing Dungeons and Dragons or Spore.

Iyer’s essay describes the recurrence of the golden ratio in settings ranging from the architecture of the Parthenon to the opening chords in “Billie Jean.” But he isn’t some boneheaded numerologist. Having grown up with American R&B and the karnatak music of South India, Iyer makes music for the body as well as the brain. Iyer argues that the golden ratio also appears in the rhythmic durations and pitch ratios used by Bartók, Debussy, and Coltrane, as well as his former collaborator Steve Coleman.

Historicity includes a cover of Ronnie Foster’s seventies soul number Mystic Brew, a song some will recognize from its sample in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation.” Iyer gives “Mystic Brew” a Fibonacci-inspired makeover, getting surprising warmth out of a pair of asymmetric chords (three beats followed by five)—and I can almost hear Beavis and Butthead snickering at this sentence. So let me be more direct: Historicity rocks, dude. Bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Markus Gilmore are fierce and fluid throughout; the pulse swirls around but never relents on the title track and numbers by the likes of Stevie Wonder and Andrew Hill.

Two other knockout covers on Historicity deserve special mention: the slow-building, smoldering funk of Julius Hemphill’s early cult classic “Dogon A.D,” and a blowout version of M.I.A.’s amazing “Galang.” For the three minutes of “Galang,” Iyer seemed more magician than mathematician, since he fooled me into into thinking that my favorite rhythm track of the Zeroes may really have been written for a piano trio of math majors.

Vijay Iyer Trio, “Galang”

Vijay Iyer discusses “Historicity”

Coastal California in January is a setting for unpredictable bursts of melancholy and joy. Scandinavians or Minnesotans would barely recognize “winter” here, but we have impossibly thin skins for ours. We have too many sunlit summer teaser days to steel ourselves for the bleakness, and when the big storms hit the Bay Area, you might as well be walking through an Ingmar Bergman movie or a Leonard Cohen album. This makes January the perfect time to listen to Neko Case’s weather-obsessed 2009 album, Middle Cyclone.

Calling a musician a “force of nature” is a tiresome cliche, because who isn’t? We humans are a bunch of animals, and the “artificial” music of Kraftwerk and Gorillaz comes from nature just as much as Delta blues. (I’ll exclude Coldplay and Sting, since they appear to be pure cylon.) But I digress. What matters about Neko Case isn’t that she’s “natural,” but that she has such a fluid force. Galvanizing calm and rage, she can take a phrase lesser lights would turn into mushy prattle (“I’m a man-eater” or “never turn your back on Mother Earth”) and make you believe her life and your life depend on it. She doesn’t just sing about stormy weather, she is the weather.

On “This Tornado Loves You,” perhaps Neko’s best song yet, she is the speed of sound, stalking lost love like a funnel cloud ready to strike. She is the force of love and danger spinning out of control. She’s the perfect soundtrack for a continent hanging on to hope while flirting with impending doom. She’s even the cool hood ornament on a 1967 Mercury Cougar. For those of us who emerged from the Zeroes with our attention spans twittered into submission, it’s a revelation to hear in Neko’s “Tornado” a rock musician with an ace geologist’s sense of timing:

I have waited with a glacier’s patience
Smashed every transformer with every trailer
’til nothing was standing
65 miles wide
Still you are nowhere
Nowhere in sight

I’ve played Middle Cyclone repeatedly while reading Dead Pool, James Lawrence Powell’s gripping account of how decades spent denying the forces of nature have left the western landscape vulnerable to climate change, potentially turning places like Phoenix into dusty, uninhabitable ghost towns. The rivers whisper and scream with the violence of lost love, but still we are nowhere in sight.

In the first clip below, Neko Case performs “This Tornado Loves You.” In the second, she chats with a Canadian talk show host about mesocyclones and animal instinct, Goethe and Harry Nilsson, Loretta Lynn and PMS. At the end, she hallucinates about George W. Bush visiting a taco wagon dressed in a grimy tank top.

Neko Case, “This Tornado Loves You”

Neko Case Interview

Since Thanksgiving weekend gives us all the chance to dwell on the huge chasm between the Norman Rockwell expectations and Jackson Pollock realities of our everyday lives, it’s all too easy to make it an occasion to break out the Schopenhauer and wallow in self-pity. That’s what makes it the perfect time to pay homage to one of the unsung heroes of Western philosophy, Ian Dury. A new biography and forthcoming film may signal a Dury renaissance as we near the tenth anniversary of his passing.

Dury is best known as the post-Freudian theorist who identified the three things a brain and body needs. He contracted polio as a child and passed away in 2000 at age 57. He was human and needed to be loved, just like Morrissey and everybody else does.

But Dury never played the victim, since he was too busy finding little sources of delight in the surreal and debauched spectacle that is real life. As the missing link between Benny Hill and Bertrand Russell, Dury had ingenious ways to find the sublime in the ridiculous. His backing band, the Blockheads, stayed tight and funky in an era better known for its sloppy chaos. His manifesto, “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3″ finds all sorts of wonderful reasons to keep on keeping on. No Thanksgiving toast I could devise could compete with that song’s “Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty/ Going on 40 – no electric shocks.” And the reasons keep getting better from there:

Bantu Stephen Biko, listening to Rico
Harpo, Groucho, Chico

Cheddar cheese and pickle, the Vincent motorsickle
Slap and tickle
Woody Allen, Dali, Dimitri and Pasquale
balabalabala and Volare

Something nice to study, phoning up a buddy
Being in my nuddy
Saying hokey-dokey, singalonga Smokey
Coming out of chokey

John Coltrane’s soprano, Adi Celentano
Bonar Colleano

The BBC, which once upon a time was known to ban the occasional Dury ditty, now features a glossary of all Dury’s reasons to be cheerful. The song also inspired Dave Gorman’s one-act play, which supposedly presents research testing the validity of Dury’s reasons.

Need more reasons to love Ian Dury? He had the opportunity to adapt the lyrics for the musical Cats and turned down Andrew Lloyd Webber. As Dury explained while terminally ill: “But I said no straight off. I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. He’s a wanker, isn’t he?… Every time I hear `Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ I feel sick, it’s so bad. He got Richard Stillgoe to do the lyrics in the end, who’s not as good as me. He made millions out of it. He’s crap, but he did ask the top man first!”

Ian Dury, “Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3″

[Ariel Kitch]

Part of what he was is a part of me now.

Uncle Tupelo, D. Boon

Part One: Kids and Kidsmoke

Wilco will always be too traditional for those who want them to be weird, and too weird for those who want them to be traditional. For all the hype about its sonic experiments, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot can still break your heart into twin towers mainly because of Jeff Tweedy’s arresting songs. Yet to certain hipsters—call them peasants with their Pitchforks—Tweedy has since become the archetypal boring dad, leading a mythical genre known as dad rock.

Tweedy does seems like a devoted dad. This July, he smiled warmly when his son (heavy metal drummer Spencer) came onstage in Berkeley dressed like one of the Fleet Foxes. But the haters are getting ugly. Vice offered Wilco fans the sensitive advice that “you might as well sterilize yourselves, because if you have kids they are guaranteed to be assholes too.” Reviewing this year’s Wilco (The Album) the Village Voice trash-talked Tweedy as “a pale father of two” who makes music for white people to relax.

The notion that “dad rock” is a bad thing brings out the fighting side of me. I am a pale father of two. I wash dishes and mow the lawn, though not particularly well. I find myself trying to “balance fun with crushing depression,” just like Tweedy. Despite the occasional bad haircut or twelve-minute migraine, Tweedy has special gifts. He channels the Replacements and the Carter Family. He croaks strange poetry in gorgeously cranky second-generation Dylanisms. He hallucinates about spiders doing tax returns to the tune of Can’s “Mother Sky.” If Wilco is the new “normal,” my life is a David Lynch movie.

Wilco, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”

Part Two: So Misunderstood

I wish I’d been a fly on the wall in the meeting brainstorming the cover art for Wilco’s new eponymous disc, destined to be known as The Camel Album:

Record executive: “Jeff, we’ve got a problem. People are starting to think you’re a tired fossil who has no rock and roll fun.”

Tweedy: “Wait, I’ve got it! Let’s give them a fez-wearing camel with an enormous birthday cake! And let’s have the photo shoot at Mader’s Restaurant in Milwaukee, home of the Schnitzelbank drinking song! Beer-loving Lutherans will love us once again, especially once they discover that Bon Iver is really the Unabomber.”

I love that, after getting lambasted with the “dad rock” label, Wilco chose to use a children’s birthday party theme on the cover. Despite more ups and downs than the camel, Wilco (The Album) is a truckload of fun for dads of all ages. Once in a while, as with Sky Blue Sky, it could use one of Tweedy’s frenemies named Jay — Jay Farrar, or the sadly departed Jay Bennett — to give Tweedy a kick in the pants and keep things moving. The album won’t bring back the Neil Young Country of Being There, the lush chamber pop of Summerteeth, or the fractured anthems of Foxtrot. But it draws memorably from all the Wilcos we have known, as well as a few of their heroes. Here’s a sampling of the new tracks, with accompanying sermonette and source material:

Waiting for My Van

The taut, chunky guitars plugging along at the start of “Wilco (The Song)” reveal it as a dad-friendly reworking of the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man.” But rather than going to Lexington and 125th to buy drugs, like Lou Reed, Tweedy sounds more like he’s on the prowl for a neighborhood featuring tree-lined streets and an excellent school system. Pure genius. But it gets better. He refers to his own band in the song, like he’s in Wang Chung telling everybody to wang chung tonight. And instead of trying to break your heart, he throws out warm fuzzies. “Wilco will love ya, baby,” he intones, like he’s Telly Savalas. And who among us doesn’t need a dad-friendly hybrid of the Velvet Underground, Wang Chung and Telly Savalas?

Wilco, “Wilco (The Song)”

Velvet Underground, “Waiting for the Man”

Bull Black Volvo

Those who think Tweedy is now only serving happy meals should listen to “Bull Black Nova,” The Album’s chilly melodrama in the tradition of “Via Chicago” and “Spiders (Kidsmoke).” Tweedy and superlative lead guitarist Nels Cline build a high-wire frenzy that sounds like a lost track from Television’s Marquee Moon. But Television’s Cadillac pulled into the graveyard in different times, when General Motors wasn’t yet a public works program. There’s nothing remotely dad rock about a Chevy Nova, which probably doesn’t even have airbags. I want Tweedy to write his next murder mystery about my Volvo V70 station wagon.

Wilco, “Bull Black Nova”

Television, “Marquee Moon”

Bastards of Old

“You Never Know” is shimmering power pop in Wilco’s Summerteeth tradition, sounding like Big Star playing something from George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Then the lyrics kick in, and they deserve a hallowed place in the dad rock hall of fame: “Come on children, you’re acting like children/ Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world.” As I blurted out to my six year-old girl last week: “Will you please stop acting like a child?” Wilco gets it, and I feel so validated.

(The flip side of the “You Never Know” seven-inch single is Unlikely Japan, a version of Sky’s “Impossible Germany” that sounds more like a Foxtrot outtake).

Wilco, “You Never Know”

George Harrison, “What is Life”

Wilco (The Duet)

Jeff launches into lullaby mode on “You and I,” proving those crib-side crooning sessions with his boys weren’t in vain. Then, faster than you can count to four, Canadian mathematician Leslie Feist joins in for a little game of She & Him, with Feist playing the role of Zooey Deschanel while Tweedy turns into Matt Ward. A shade too cute, but it’s dad-tastic!

Wilco (with Feist), “You and I”

She and Him, “This is Not a Test”

Part Three: A Can of Spiders

Spiders are singing in the salty breeze
Spiders are filling out tax returns
Spinning out webs of deductions and melodies
On a private beach in Michigan

Why can’t they wish their kisses good
Why do they miss when their kisses should
Fly like winging birds fighting for the keys
On a private beach in Michigan

This recent rash of kidsmoke
All these telescopic poems
It’s good to be alone

Wilco, “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”

Can, “Mother Sky”

I enjoy cathartic, noisy racket as much as just about anyone, but there are times when I just need music to transport me breathlessly and rapturously to a magical place I’d never see on my own. As a little kid with a homemade cardboard rocket, I remember hearing Julie London’s version of “Fly Me to the Moon” and not admitting to my friends how much that song played with my head. A more contemporary lunar mission can be found on Mayra Andrade’s gorgeous “Lua,” one of the high points of her excellent debut album, Navega. That album has gained Cape Verde more recognition than any record since Cesaria Evora’s 1992 landmark, Miss Perfumado. The earthy Evora mostly sings in the mournful morna style, which makes me think of Portuguese fado. Andrade sings stirring mornas as well, but she also sounds more like the world traveler she is (she was born in Cuba, and in addition to Cape Verde, has lived in Germany, Angola, Senegal, and her current Paris).

As a teenager, Andrade became entranced with the music of one of my favorite singers, Brazil’s Caetano Veloso, whose fluid shifts between the breathy parts and the rapturous parts are echoed on Navega. She also had the opportunity to work with Orlando Pantera, credited in his country with revolutionizing the traditional Cape Verdean batuque. Sadly, Pantera died in 2001, reportedly on the day before he was supposed to go to Paris to work on his debut record.

The album version of Andrade’s “Lua” has the rhythmic intensity Pantera became known for, but the acoustic version below provides a clearer opportunity to focus on Andrade’s otherworldly voice.

Mayra Andrade, “Lua”

If I had the opportunity to replay video footage of my entire life (a horrifying prospect, for those who haven’t seen the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life), I could pinpoint the precise moment where music became more than just background noise and started to become a passionate life force. While still in elementary school, I stumbled upon a free music festival in my native Chicago, and noticed an unfamiliar name on the stage sign: Koko Taylor and her Blues Machine.

On first glance, I could tell Ms. Taylor was roughly old enough to be my mom–that is, if my mom were half a foot taller, the daughter of Tennessee sharecroppers, and dressed in a glittery evening gown. But when she started singing, I entered a different world, never to return. I’d had a few experiences with live music before, including an encounter with a lame local band called Styx, but nothing in the world I knew prepared me for her complete command of the stage, and for a voice that sounded like it had been raised on a diet of sandpaper and velvet, with an extra helping of sandpaper. The first song I remember hearing–I’d later learn it was a cover of Irma Thomas’s first big hit, the self-explanatory “You Can Have My Husband (But Don’t Mess with My Man)”–was inappropriate grade-school listening at its finest, especially in its recounting of the two male rivals’ mismatched sample menus (husband serves red beans and rice, man “keeps me in steaks,” and this being the midwest, red meat wins in a landslide).

The truly magic moment came later in the show, when Koko ripped into her signature song, “Wang Dang Doodle,” with a force that sounded like it could travel halfway to Wisconsin. Koko’s tornado of a voice made a perfect match for one of of unsung hero Willie Dixon’s many brilliant compositions (Dixon himself reportedly thought the song was a silly trifle, but that’s why we don’t ask artists to critique their own songs). Topical songs and complicated poetic songs will come and go, but “Wang Dang Doodle” is timeless. I think of it as a classic work of Chicago architecture, in which form follows function without a wasted line or note. Deceptively simple, “Doodle” works simultaneously as cryptic secret code, melodramatic short story, risque nursery rhyme, and kick-ass empowerment anthem (to this day, when I have moments of doubt, I think to myself, “I’m gonna break out all the windows, I’m gonna kick down all the doors”).

“Wang Dang Doodle” has been covered by everyone from Howlin’ Wolf to P.J. Harvey, but Taylor’s remains the best. (In the 1967 version below, Taylor gets great accompaniment from harmonica virtuoso Little Walter, and eleven-fingered guitarist Hound Dog Taylor.) This week, obituaries reported that Koko Taylor passed away, that she won a bunch of awards, and that some called her the queen of the blues. But none of that would convey why, when I broke that news to my kids, all of us started crying. Someday when they’re older, they’ll have moments of doubt and need to find the strength to kick down all the doors. And I hope I’m still there to sing “Wang Dang Doodle” for them, all night long.

Koko Taylor, “Wang Dang Doodle”

Burrowing through the hidden recesses of Tivo’s “Video on demand” menus, past the usual high-profile Amazon and Netflix offerings, I recently tripped over a set of sub-menus that surfaced lo-fi, low-profile offerings pulled straight off the web. It was there I stumbled on Gemini Rising, a web-only mini-series about a mythical ‘74 band that looks like a bit like Skynyrd, sounds a bit like Tull (or is that Deep Purple?), and acts like everyone you knew in high school (assuming you went to high school in the 70s/early 80s). The elevator pitch:

In 1974, progressive rock band “Gemini Rising” returned to the studio to begin work on their second album and were never heard from again…until …

A somewhat more detailed back-story can be found on the band’s MySpace page, if you squint hard enough through the background images:

Welcome to the rise and fall, and rise again, of one of the most progressive of the 1970’s progressive rock bands: Gemini Rising. A rare American act, the McKenzie brothers of Levittown, Pennsylvania, created a unique blend of celtic/blues/space/carribean/utopian rock fusion that propelled songs such as “Electric Lady of the Lake” and “Golden Star Showers” to the top of the FM radio play lists. Tragically, the Mckenzie brothers recorded only two albums together, but due to the rediscovery of rare archival footage partially assembled here, you may experience the triumphs and tragedies of this unique band of talented troubadours.

Beyond that, little is known about Gemini Rising. The rest you’ll have to divine from the clips.

Gemini Rising is not a garden variety Spinal Tap or Mighty Wind knock-off tackling ‘74 prog rock — it’s more subtle than that, and quite a bit more believable. In place of satirical concert footage, Gemini is more inclined to show the band hanging around a scuffy apartment smoking weed in anticipation of a pathetic-looking vegan Thanksgiving dinner, which is brilliantly interrupted by a band-mate bursting into the room clutching a copy of the latest Genesis record. To accompany the sonic unveiling of what they all agree is “the future of music,” lead singer Robert (Righteous Jolly) eats some bad acid and freaks out in the tub, questioning his worth as a real musician. Pathos ensues.

When Gemini Rising retreat into the wilderness (with guitars) to “find themselves” and end up noodling mindlessly to the accompaniment of birdsong, their manager claims that a nearby goose is making more music than they are. Robert, whose fatal flaw is a volatile temper, counters with a powerful philosophical rejoinder to which no rational reply is possible: “The goose is an artist. The goose is a @#%$^& artist!”

My 6-yr-old son shot this image of Righteous Jolly off the TV screen. Really.

The band’s epic photo shoot climaxes when a world class photographer none of them have heard of gets them to stand around in loin clothes in knee-deep mud, going for a set of publicity shots that will give them a more “authentic” look.

The series really gets down to business in episode 5, If Encounter Group, which plays on the shaman-as-sheister theme of EST and other self-help groups of the time that purported to be about self-improvement, but turned out to be about getting the spiritual guru good and laid. The “Pillar of Self cocoon,” aka gauzy-make-out-booth-in-the-woods sequence is just ridiculous enough to be believable. The episode also includes the excellent conflation of bongo-ist “Blind Cleve Jefferson” with “Blonde Cleve Jefferson.”

The footage is all hand-held, verite’ style. And, like all cheaply developed film from the 70s, the film stock is yellowed and scratched, with the random stray hair stuck to the projector lens. A cheap trick, but it works.

Mouth watering, right? The mini-series can be viewed in all its weed-fogged, amber-tinted, vegetarian glory here. The Gemini Rising blog is also worth checking. A single track from the mythic band is available on iTunes.

Just shy of 23 years ago, when I shared a tiny apartment in D.C. with two music-obsessed buddies, a staggering collection of vinyl, and zero umbrellas, I walked a few miles in an insane rainstorm wearing a garbage bag to see the Feelies play the 9:30 Club, and it was worth every soggy step. On another grey day a month ago, I traveled 3000 miles on a redeye in time to see the Feelies play again in the 9:30 Club (now no longer at 930 F Street, but with more space, better ventilation and non-poisonous drinks). One of the least prolific great bands ever and one of the few that roll as much as they rock, the Feelies played as if they’d never skipped a single kinetic beat during their 17-year hiatus. Once the hyperactive teenage pride of Haledon, New Jersey, they’re holding their own as the quadragenarians with perpetual nervousness. “Reunion” doesn’t quite do justice to their recent shows, which come off more like an alternate history of popular music, as it might have sounded if smart people had ruled the world.

As a longtime fan who witnessed the show astutely observed, the Feelies played as if they were holding a clinic on how to be a rock band. This wouldn’t be their first academic adventure. Long ago, billed as the Willies (one of several alternate monikers used by their shifting alliances, along with the Trypes and Yung Wu), they played the high school reunion scene in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. If the Ramones were lifers in rock and roll high school, the Feelies are custom-built for graduate school, from their Aldous Huxley-inspired band name to their role in inspiring Rick Moody’s novel Garden State (not to be confused with the Zach Braff movie/ Shins vehicle).

If that pedigree sounds a shade uppity, rest assured that Feelies University is a place with little pretension and truckloads of rock and roll fun. Here’s a sample curriculum:

• Velvet Revolver (Professors Mercer and Million)
No, not that Velvet Revolver. In this class, the affably mysterious guitarist/ singer Glenn Mercer and perpetually grumpy rhythm guitarist Bill Million demonstrate how to mesh the shimmering legacies of the late Velvet Underground and the Beatles’ Revolver. While some contemporary lessons come from Mercer’s solo 2007 return to form, Wheels in Motion, this could not be a Feelies course without the participation of Million, newly returned from his lengthy, self-imposed Florida exile.

• More Cowbell (Professor Weckerman)
Feelies percussionist Dave Weckerman (not the drummer, the percussionist) shows how just the right amount of cowbell—or woodblock, or maracas, or triangle, or virtually anything you can bang—helps turn a song into an adventure.

• Crazy Rhythms (Professors Demeski and Sauter)
Rhythm masters Stanley Demeski and Brenda Sauter weren’t yet in the Feelies for their exhilarating and hard-to-find debut Crazy Rhythms, which featured Keith DiNunzio on bass and drummer Anton “Andy” Fier before he went downtown to work with the Lounge Lizards and Golden Palominos. But they’ve mastered the art, and were the anchors of the Feelies’ three remaining albums. While neither is flashy, together they create an unshakable pulse.

• Advanced Band Dynamics (Full Faculty)
There’s a time and place for bone-crunching 4/4 rhythms, but that’s in Professor Young’s AC/DC seminar. If you want a song to whisper and twist and turn and howl and pounce, slip into something like the Feelies’ “Slippping (Into Something).”

• Undercover Studies (Full Faculty)
Learn to cover the Velvets (“What Goes On,” “Real Good Time”), the Beatles (“She Said She Said”), Neil Young (“Barstool Blues”), the Modern Lovers (“I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms”), and Patti Smith (“Dancing Barefoot”) in a single show and add something fresh to each of them. Surprise final exam: cover “Boxcars (Carnival of Sorts)” from REM’s debut Chronic Town, which way back then came off like a rural southern take on the Feelies–that is, before the Feelies raised the ante with their own pastoral soundscape, The Good Earth.

The Feelies are reportedly working on long-anticipated reissues of Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth. In the meantime, crawl through locusts, pestilence or whatever else stands in your path to see them if you get the chance.

Feelies, “The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness” (instrumental version)

Feelies, “Higher Ground”

Feelies, “Dancing Barefoot”

Feelies, “Crazy Rhythm”

I love art and I love rock, but to say that “art rock” has usually been neither would be an understatement. This problem calls to mind Matt Groening’s French sex comedy paradox: the French are funny, sex is funny, and comedy is funny, yet French sex comedies are are never funny. I know, there are good exceptions, from Robert Fripp in his livelier moments to Brian Eno, when he’s not busy recording ambient seal mating noises to play at low volume in European airports. But if art rock is usually a fever, my most reliable cure for three decades running has been Boston’s Mission of Burma, a band that still cranks its amps to eleven even though its guitarist has tinnitus. How “art rock” is Mission of Burma? Well, they’ve recorded two songs about Max Ernst. But unlike, say, Don McLean whining about how nobody loved Vincent Van Gogh, Burma’s art songs are alive with a visceral, spiritual connection to their subject matter. “Dada-dada-dada-dada-dada-dada,” it turns out, makes for one rocking chorus.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that my most-played “new” album of 2008 was Matador’s re-release of Mission of Burma’s 27 year-old Signals, Calls and Marches. Meticulously produced by Ace of Hearts svengali Rick Harte, it doesn’t sound remotely dated. Since the Zeroes have already seen the likes of Interpol, Kaiser Chiefs, Ted Leo, M.I.A., and just about everyone else channeling the early Eighties underground, the time is ripe for a Burma renaissance. Mission of Burma is enjoying a surprisingly productive second life since its 2002 reunion; if you think the band is a nostalgia act, play 2006’s scorching The Obliterati right after any other recent release. One of the best shows I saw in 2008 was Burma’s San Francisco performance of everything from Signals, which reached even further into the band’s back pages with the dark and mysterious “Peking Spring.”

Matador’s 2008 reissue of Signals actually improves on and completes the original version. This year’s model adds four tracks to the original EP’s length, including both sides of one of my all-time favorite singles (Clint Conley’s wonderfully grumpy grad school anthem, “Academy Fight Song,” and Roger Miller’s frenetic “Max Ernst”) and two formerly instrumental tracks from the same sessions (“Devotion” and “Execution”) that the middle-aged Burma gang gave a vocal makeover sometime after recording The Obliterati. Without the dynamics of the original Signals‘ signature number, “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” the reworked songs still blend beautifully, sharing a style that has one foot in the conservatory and the other in the mosh pit. The sum total is thirty-five minutes of heavenly bliss disguised as punk rock. About the only thing I miss is the lyric sheet from the original release, which arranged all the words in alphabetical order.

Mission of Burma, “Academy Fight Song”

Mission of Burma, “This is Not a Photograph”

(more…)

Do you remember the first time you heard a song that gave you the chills? For me, that moment happened the same month Richard Nixon resigned. Too young to fully grasp current events, I still knew that a disturbing otherness was intruding into daily routines, something unsettling enough to make grownups forget their keys at the supermarket or lose their train of thought in mid-sentence. People seemed strange, and I didn’t know why. During these culminating moments of Watergate, a Billie Holiday anthology from the library gave me my first taste of “Strange Fruit.” For reasons I couldn’t explain, the way she sang her way through her numbness captured the unsettling strangeness around me. I had no idea that the song was about lynching; for years, I still thought it was about fruit. Decades later, when I saw photographer Amy Kubes’ “Little Worries” collection, which features images of a bandaged pear and a cantaloupe wearing underpants, I couldn’t stop hearing “Strange Fruit” in my head.

For the past few weeks, “Strange Fruit” has followed me everywhere. Partly that’s because recent events made me recall a picture of two studious-looking little boys who reminded me a bit of myself—little Robert, dressed in a Brooklyn Dodgers t-shirt, looking over the shoulder of his big brother Michael, with his face buried in a newspaper. But these boys were the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the newspaper in Michael’s hand bore details of their parents’ impending execution. Robert and Michael became the adoptive sons of Abel Meeropol, a Bronx-based schoolteacher, union activist, and occasional poet/ songwriter who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. After seeing Lawrence Beitler’s gruesome image of a lynching in Marion, Indiana, Meeropol wrote a haunting poem that he later turned into “Strange Fruit.” One wonders whether he saw the Rosenbergs’ execution, which Jean-Paul Sartre once termed a “legal lynching,” as strange fruit of a different sort.

The iconic picture of Robert and Michael reading the newspaper reappeared in the news this month along with new evidence confirming Julius Rosenberg’s involvement as a Soviet spy, while adding to doubts that Ethel was guilty of more than being a loyal wife. That news prompted the Meeropol brothers, who spent decades attempting to prove both parents’ innocence, to confront the strange reality that things were not quite what they seemed. Ironically, the revelations about the Rosenbergs coincided with the near-collapse of the banking system and plans for the most sweeping state takeover of private enterprise in American history—not because of a Russian invasion, but because under-regulated and over-leveraged financiers ran out of ways to creatively repackage crushing debt. Time will tell whether the reaction to this crisis will, 78 years after the lynching that inspired “Strange Fruit,” lead to the election of our first African-American president. I’m trying to be hopeful, but much of the time, I’m singing my way through my numbness and feeling a little strange.

Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

When I was growing up just outside Chicago, my indoor cats used to shed in reverse seasons. It made perfect sense in context, because they’d spend their summers pressed against the air conditioner and their winters asleep on the radiator. But there were times when my musical preferences reminded me of my cats. I’d want to listen to classic summer music–surf instrumentals, Motown, Springsteen mumbling about a “barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain”–sometime around mid-February. On the hottest day in July, the record I couldn’t get out of my head was the chilliest music I’d ever heard: the Residents’ sprawling 1979 opus, Eskimo.

Two decades of blandly comfortable coastal California weather have made most of my summer listening preferences decidedly more conventional. But as I sat down after a glorious Independence Day barbecue to bang out a summertime playlist, I felt an uncontrollable urge to put on the Residents’ faux-arctic anti-classic once again. Newly re-released for 2008 notwithstanding resident spiritual adviser N. Senada’s vaunted theory of obscurity, Eskimo remains a complete tour de force, a soothing and menacing soundscape with more nuance and subtlety than my two other favorite Residents albums, Third Reich ‘n Roll and the Commercial Album. And if Eskimo’s insertion of pseudo-Inuit advertising jingles for Coca-Cola and other products may have seemed like harmless goofiness when the record was released, it seems very prescient in 2008, with the future control of the rapidly warming arctic heating up as a political issue. Considering that the National Snow and Ice Data Center is reporting even odds that the North Pole will be iceless this summer for the first time in modern history, I can only hope that three decades from now, I won’t be listening to Eskimo for its wistful nostalgia.

Brainwashed has posted several samples from Eskimo in connection with its re-release, and the Prog Archives is featuring its brilliant culminating track, “The Festival of Death.”

Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao” Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940. As a member of Arcaño y Sus Maravillas in the late 1930s, Cachao and his multi-instrumentalist brother Orestes “Macho” Lopez reworked the rarefied French-influenced parlor music of the danzón into the mambo. But by the 1950s, when Perez Prado and many others (from Rosemary Clooney to Bill Haley) rode the mambo to international fame, Cachao had moved on to perfect the descarga, the “jam session” format that provided breathing room for serious instrumental improvisation. More than a rhythm master, Cachao united melody and harmony into an irresistible connecting thread—what George Clinton would later call a “groove.”

Because Cachao was a Cuban expatriate who spent his postwar years in places ranging from Madrid to Miami, it would be easy to give his career the Buena Vista Social Club treatment, viewing him as a nostalgic relic of Cuba’s romantic past. But that would understate his legacy. One of Cachao’s few peers, pianist Bebo Valdes, has noted that before Cachao, Cuban music had counter-tempo, but still lacked real syncopation. Cachao, who spent decades in the Havana Symphony performing with conductors ranging from Ernesto Lecuona to Igor Stravinsky, elevated the seriousness of the bass even as he made it dance, swing and shimmer.

Some of Cachao’s obituaries quote from a hero of mine—musicologist and “cowboy rumba” innovator Ned Sublette–whose astonishingly good book Cuba and its Music describes Cachao as “arguably the most important bassist in twentieth century popular music.” While this may beg the question of whether Charles Mingus was “popular,” Sublette has a point. As he notes, “with Cachao, the modern bass feel of Cuban music begins. And with that begins the bass feel of the second half of the twentieth century in U.S. music as well—those funky ostinatos that we know from later decades of R&B, which have become such a part of the environment that we don’t even think about where they came from.”

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A Tribute to Devendra Banhart

And hey there mister happy squid, you move so psychedelically
You hypnotize with your magic dance all the animals in the sea
For Sure

Devendra Banhart – Little Yellow Spider

At first spin of Devendra Banhart’s Little Yellow Spider, one might think it a children’s song. That is what came to mind when I first heard it on a mixed CD a friend sent as a New Year’s gift. Then I reached the line about the pig mating with a man. The appeal only grew.

Who was this poetic troubadour artfully warbling lyrics that were both playful and taboo, naturalistic and psychedelic, odd and profane? Suddenly a drawer had been opened and in it, amongst the lacy vintage shirts and bright paisley dresses, lay the sparkling spangles and baubles of wonder, magic and healing. Every time Little Yellow Spider came on my daughter would yipe, “I love this song,” and I would cough loudly over the pig verse.

I was driven to learn more about this man who could equally endear my child and myself, yet had a secret darkness, a seedy underbelly, a heart that had been broken by human folly.

And hey there Mrs. Lovely Moon, you’re lonely and you’re blue
It’s kind of strange the way you change
But then again we all do, too.

Over the course of a few months I purchased all of Devendra Banhart’s CD’s and found myself enraptured by song in a way I hadn’t been since my birth in the Summer of Love. Wordsmith of alchemical poetry, knitter of connections between microcosm and macrocosm, Banhart was projecting a wolf cry for our generation. In one album I could find pagan spell work, poignant love ballad and subversive declarations of liberation. Banhart was showman with a bowler hat and cane, skinny 60’s love child smoking peace pipe amongst oat straw and star thistle, edgy outrageous queen performing acts of desire behind closed doors, mother, yogi, long haired child. All this, and multilingual vocalist extraordinaire, who can, as my husband likes to say, “play his axe.”

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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.

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M.I.A. mania is starting to sweep the world in anticipation of the official release later this month of Kala. The new album follows the thoroughly unclassifiable British/ Sri Lankan aural graffiti artist’s breakthrough Arular album and Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape, the sources of several of the Zeroes’ most arresting rhythms so far. Since the artist otherwise known as Maya Arulpragasam–whose website should remain unvisited if you are not wearing sunglasses–has been known to draw from everything from bhangra and baile electro-funk to dancehall and Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, you might wonder about the source of the leadoff sounds you will hear on her new album. Uh, how about…Jonathan Richman?

That’s right. In her continuing quest to bring the noise to college radio-obsessed geek rockers, Maya’s new “Bamboo Banga” starts out with a twisted, tripped-out reworking of the Modern Lovers’ car radio classic “Roadrunner,” which will remain Richman’s most iconic song no matter how many charming ditties he writes about dinosaurs, bumblebees and lesbian bars. Achieving speeds usually reserved for professional stunt drivers and Lindsay Lohan, M.I.A. doesn’t even notice the Stop n’ Shop as she drives “with the radio on,” and I’m betting that her car is equipped with satellite radio. Here’s an audio snippet from M.I.A.’s mini-cover, juxtaposed with a video playing “Roadrunner” Modern Lovers-style.

“Bamboo Banga” isn’t even the most interesting reworking of a rock classic on the new album; after the click-through we’ll present her take on the Clash.

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