Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Pieces focused on a particular recording or performance.

The Feelies: School of Rock, Graduate Division

Rants and Raves

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”

The Wonderful Truth About Burma

Heavy Rotation, Rants and Raves

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”

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Strange Fruit

Diatribes, Rants and Raves

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”

The Residents: Music for Melting

Rants and Raves

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.”

Cachao’s Legacy: Two Nations Under a Groove

Rants and Raves, Slow Jams

cachaobass.jpeg

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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