Can you just imagine digging up the King,
Begging him to sing
About the heavenly mansions Jesus mentioned….
He went walking on the water with his pills.

Warren Zevon, “Jesus Mentioned”

When Elvis left the building a generation ago at what seemed then the very advanced age of 42, I loved a few of his songs, but mainly considered him a bloated, Eskimo Pie-addicted man-cartoon that some kids’ parents liked. Only later did I discover what the fuss was about: the Memphis truck driver getting “real, real gone” in the magical Sun Sessions; the swaggering sex machine; the out-of-control mystery train that not even a dozen corny movies and a thousand prescriptions could completely derail. No wonder even Nixon cited Elvis as the explanation for the Bermuda triangle (”Elvis needs boats”).

This week, at the young, tender age of 50, another larger-than-life man-cartoon made an inglorious exit. Like Presley, Michael Jackson walked on water, first with his brilliance and later with his pills. And as with Elvis, I dismissed most of what he did long before he left. But MJ was an arresting presence even for those who, like me, did my best to ignore him. Elvis even seems an inadequate comparison for his stratospheric global reach. A closer comparison might be Howard Hughes, another man-child of erratic brilliance, whose master aviator’s soaring heights later gave way to reclusive paranoia and heartbreaking tailspin.

For now I will set aside the aspects of Michael Jackson’s life better left to the justice system and to his maker. As an admiring non-fan, I’ll count down five of his huge accomplishments:

1. He Liberated Eastern Europe from Communism.

Who do you think accomplished this, Reagan and Gorbachev? Please. The invasion of Afghanistan was bad enough, but the Kremlin’s most self-destructive act was its 1985 decision not to censor a vinyl version of Thriller. Long before MJ built a 35-foot statue of himself in Prague, his invisible gloved hand shook like a thousand Adam Smiths, securing our opportunity to visit McDonald’s in Vilnius.

Michael Jackson, HIStory Teaser

2. He Made Globalization Irreversible.

Don’t blame him for the shortcomings of NAFTA, GATT and world-beat fusion music. The new century would still be inconceivable without globalization, and MJ was its mascot. If there’s any doubt, listen to Caetano Veloso’s version of “Billie Jean.”

Caetano Veloso, “Billie Jean”

3. He Stopped Quincy Jones from Making Bad Solo Records.

Quincy Jones has a great ear for talent other than his own. Long ago, Q made five-martini bachelor pad classics like “Soul Bossa Nova,” which featured the amazing Rahsaan Roland Kirk. But by the late seventies, he’d spent far too much time making lame film soundtracks. Soon after Q started mentoring MJ, he woke up and started sailing the high seas of Eighties soul-funk cheese, producing bizarre period classics such as 1981’s The Dude, which even features a zany cover of a song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads sideman Chaz Jankel. The Dude abides.

Quincy Jones, “Soul Bossa Nova”

Soul Bossa Nova (Tema da Nike) – Quincy Jones

4. His Voice Was Better than Your Favorite Singer’s Voice.

Once you get beyond the tabloid crassness, Jackson had a voice so divinely inspired than comparisons are almost unfair. Production values, taste and context are things that can be questioned. But his abilities were already astonishing by the time the J5 featured his preteen lead on “I Want You Back.”

Jackson Five, “I Want You Back”

5. He was Jackie Robinson in Aviator Glasses.

It’s hard to describe how segregated most of the pop mainstream was at the end of the seventies, with much of white America (including me) still in “Disco Sucks” mode and rap still emerging from the underground. Off the Wall and Thriller shattered that rigidity. If the path that followed has had some cracks in the pavement—like having to endure Fred Durst limply pretending to be funky—MJ still helped prepare the country and the planet for their multiracial future.

Indian version of “Thriller”

Funny videos

Part One: Life During Wartime

Last week, when Aretha Franklin put on her oversized bow hat and melted fire with her inaugural version of “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)”—Samuel Francis Smith’s 19th Century rewrite of a German rewrite of “God Save the Queen”—a piece of my heart held the memory of another queen of soul, one generation and half a world away, who met with a more tragic fate. Blessed with a voice of equally staggering power and beauty, Ros Sereysothea rose from poverty and illiteracy to become the most beloved singer in her native Cambodia during the sixties and early seventies. Thanks to the excellent Los Angeles combo Dengue Fever, discussed below, the music of Ros and her contemporaries is finally experiencing a rebirth on both sides of the Pacific.

Ros’s story carries a distinctive rock twist. Along with the cherub-faced godfather of Khmer soul, Sinn Sisamouth, a former Royal Court crooner turned unlikely garage rocker, and the more playful female vocalist Pan Ron, who makes me think of Martha Reeves, Ros meshed Khmer music with the range of Western sounds that made their way across the Pacific during wartime—everything from Motown and classic R&B to surf, psychedelic and garage rock. Eastern sounds from Bangkok to Bollywood also entered the mix. The resulting Khmer rock underground was like nothing else heard before or since. A track like Ros’s “Chnam Oun 16” (translated as “I’m 16” or “Sweet 16”) virtually defies description, but to me it sounds a bit like an even more intense Asha Bhosle performing an upbeat Aretha number, backed by the 13th Floor Elevators. The song sounds so alive that it seems to mock death itself for its weakness and cowardice.

Ros Sereysothea, “Chnam Oun 16″

As John Swain captured in his Indochina memoir River of Time, Khmer rock’s seminal figures remained upstarts in their heyday; even Ros and Sinn scrounged for cassette sale revenue and never reached the upper echelons of Cambodia’s economic elite. But their musical revolution came to an abrupt end after April 1975, when Pol Pot’s forces overrode Cambodia. Few of the leading Khmer musicians survived the genocide. Sinn Sisamouth was sent to a work camp and executed. Pan Ron disappeared. Ros Sereysothea’s demise remains the subject of conjecture, but Greg Cahill’s short film about her life, The Golden Voice, concludes that after her discovery in a slave labor camp, she was forced to sing pro-Khmer Rouge songs and marry one of Pol Pot’s henchmen, who later had her killed. In another account, she died from malnutrition in a Phnom Penh hospital weeks before the Vietnamese invasion ousted Pol Pot. Either way, this achingly beautiful and surprisingly rocking music—which often paired melancholy sentiments with sparkling melodies—virtually disappeared, preserved only because fans risked lives and livelihoods hiding priceless cassette tapes. The musical history of a generation went undercover in the face of what Hannah Arendt, commenting on a different genocide, termed “the banality of evil”: ordinary people following orders confiscated and destroyed the tapes, even as they were silently humming these same songs under their breath.

Sinn Sisamouth, “Ma Pi Noak”

Pan Ron, “Rom Ago Ago”

After the click-through: Dengue Fever and the renaissance of Khmer rock and roll.

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When I started writing about music in the Eighties, a prominent beard on a musician was often viewed as a sure sign that the performer was an out-of-touch hippie fossil, or barring that, a member of ZZ Top. That started to change during the goatee epidemic of the Nineties, which I was convinced would make facial hair disreputable for decades to come once the grunge bubble burst. But history has proven me wrong, because the late Zeroes have seen an outgrowth of musician facial hair worth of a post-Civil War presidential campaign, along with a revival of the hierarchy of beards. In what follows below, I’ll survey some of the notable beards of the moment, ranked from zero to ten on the Sanders-Hudson index. For the uninitiated, that index celebrates the beardly perfection of saxophone visionary Pharoah Sanders and Band keyboardist Garth Hudson, whose historic contributions have done for beards what Christopher Walken has done for the cowbell.

Facial outgrowth isn’t always a sign of greatness, or vice-versa. Patchy-faced Bob Dylan and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy have sometimes dabbled in facial hair, but these are not beardly men; you might as well put a spoiler on a Volvo station wagon. Nobody knows that better than Tweedy himself, the author of “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard” (”things got pretty weird, and I grew Bob Dylan’s beard”). And beardrevue.com gave a major thumbs down to Stuck Between Stations favorite Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), ranking him three points below the composite band score assigned to current beard icons the Fleet Foxes. Explaining the Captain’s lowly 5.9 ranking, the site noted: “His lip ferret was merely average. And his poet’s beard was never much more than the obligatory mark of a mad musical genius.”

At the outset, I have disqualified Devendra Banhart, because that would be too easy, like naming Jesus on a list of famous sandal-wearers. This list is for beard-growers, and I have it on good authority that Devendra was born bearded to traveling circus performers from Caracas. Here are my rankings in this year’s Battle of the Beards:

• Kyp Malone, TV on the Radio (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.5)

The guitarist-singer from Brooklyn’s innovative art rockers-turned-mutant funkateers had this year’s beard competition all sewn up. But, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Kyp has now trimmed his beard.

TV on the Radio, “Dancing Choose”

• Jim James, My Morning Jacket (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.0)

James’ Kentucky combo may well rank as the most hirsute band of the past decade. But he’s docked two notches here, because his Prince falsetto on this year’s Evil Urges is less convincing than that of Spoon’s Britt Daniel, and worse, he has reportedly switched to a mustache.

My Morning Jacket, “Wordless Chorus”

More beards after the click-through (more…)

While I found the movie Juno charming, I instinctively thought that the musical tastes of its teenage heroine—the old soul anti-folk charmer who upstages the cynical guy whose head is stuck in 1993—had to be an adult artifice, created for people over 35 (for example, me) to validate their own moldy tastes as “classic.” But generational truth is more complicated than that. It turns out that Juno herself, actress Ellen Page, was the one who touted the Moldy Peaches’ Shaggs-meet-Jonathan hardcore shoegaze to the film’s director, turning “Anyone Else But You” into a late-blooming sensation. (It could have been worse; they could have made the Peaches’ equally catchy “Who’s Got the Crack” the latest teen anthem).

Blowing away any remaining generational snobbery, I randomly discovered a recipe for Monterey Jack muffins on an intermittently updated music blog called Half a Person, whose sixteen year-old author, Nina, says she “likes music and long walks on the beach.” Nina’s accompanying “Muffin Mix” seemed uncannily close to home:

Stay Positive- The Hold Steady
Two Halves- My Morning Jacket
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb- Spoon
The Sons of Cain- Ted Leo
Eraser- No Age
Sequestered in Memphis- The Hold Steady
Alex Chilton- The Replacements
I’m Amazed- My Morning Jacket
Constructive Summer- The Hold Steady
Sheila Take a Bow- The Smiths
A Little Bit of Feel Good- Jamie Lidell

This is how close I live to the Muffin Mix: Swap Bon Iver and Tinariwen for No Age and Jamie Lidell, and you would come very close to my own heavy rotation for the same week. Nor is Nina a guitar-rock one trick pony; her latest post displays precocious taste in rap both new (Nas, Lupe Fiasco, Lil’ Wayne) and prehistoric (De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest). And I doubt I’ll read a better review of Mamma Mia than the following from Nina: “I now have every ABBA song simultaneously stuck in my head. It was charming at first, but now I’m just feeling suicidal.” Nina’s hall-of-fame post thus far, however, is intriguingly titled “Sorry I Accosted You”, where she summons her teenage fortitude to defend Radiohead’s honor (details after the click-through).

Smiths, “Half a Person”

Replacements, “Alex Chilton”

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I) Ferrous Oxide’s Day Off

Remember the bad old days of yore, making mix tapes for yourself and friends, mistakenly believing you could re-use the same cassette over and over again ad nauseum ’til the ferrous oxide particles started to dissolve or flake off? Somewhere between the time you first slid off the shrink-wrap and the time the tape inevitably got stuck between the capstan and pinch roller, leaving 17 seconds of that unreplaceable Minutemen live bootleg tangled up like a knot of dried tagliatelle pasta, there was the “print through/partial overdub” period, when traces of audio from previous recordings or adjacent layers of tape would appear as ghostly traces on the current recording.

The effect was mostly annoying, but also sometimes mystical. Rhythms might accidentally match up, or serve as counterweights to one another. Sometimes you’d think you’d proven finally and conclusively that T. Rex and Marmalade really were involved in a mutual back-masking cabal. But mostly it just sounded weird. In a good way.

After the jump: Backyardigans and Evan Lurie, The Wizard of Floyd, Dali’s paranoia-critical method, and the sonic layering of Solveig Slettahjell.
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Forced to choose my favorite American rock guitarist of the last dozen years, I’d need two seconds to answer: Carrie Brownstein. If you want a showoff guitarist who plays arpeggios with her teeth while wearing a bucket on her head, she’s not going to be your axeperson of choice. And sure, I have moods that demand the range of Nels Cline, the subtlety of Ry Cooder, or the visceral rush of Bob Mould. But riff for riff, I’ll take Carrie for her grasp of what the guitar can say within a song, and for almost singlehandedly restoring the legacy of the late, great Ricky Wilson of the B52s. Almost two years after the breakup of Brownstein’s signature band, Sleater-Kinney, I still miss their combination of raw power, depth of purpose, human compassion, and sheer rock and roll fun. Sleater-Kinney also saved my love life, but that’s the subject for another post.

Carrie hasn’t been resting on her laurels. ThunderAnt, her new duo with SNL’s Fred Armisen, has released what is, scientifically speaking, the perfect pop song (clip below). Slate featured her test-drive of the Rock Band video game. She coaches and promotes a rock camp for girls. Best of all, her Monitor Mix column for NPR’s website has, in just over half a year, become one of my favorite sources of music writing; her written work is passionate, personal, and refreshingly free of hipster posturing. In recent posts, Carrie delivers a great road trip playlist (Wipers, Go Betweens, Music Go Music, Richard and Linda Thompson, Cal Tjader), captures the gift of the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg (“his songs have an adult acuity sung in an adolescent idiom”), admits her weakness for reality television (“I suppose that I’d rather get that artifice-parading-as-truth from The Bachelor instead of my government”), and explains why she enjoys, but can’t bring herself to love Vampire Weekend (“if you take preppy yacht rock too far, you end up back at Jimmy Buffett”).

The posts in Monitor Mix are thoughtful and reflective, even when Carrie is giving simple shout-outs to recent favorites, such as Bon Iver and Blitzen Trapper. One great recent piece uses the strange worlds of underground Christian/ alt-rock pioneer Larry Norman and Colorado hardcore obscurities Bum Kon to segue into the fertile subject of bands that fall under the radar screen. And instead of just sneering at the reviewer recently caught rating a Black Crowes album he’d never heard, Brownstein uses it as a springboard for some hilarious fictional music reviews. Here’s Brownstein on the Shins’ nonexistent opus Honey Poke Shimmy Lantern: “James Mercer and crew can do no wrong. They’ve added the Decemberists, the Thermals, and Spoon to their lineup. Recorded inside a deer carcass, the sounds on Honey Poke are haunting and cervid. These songs will change your life back to the way it was before The Shins changed it the first time.”

ThunderAnt, “Perfect Song”

After the click-through: Carrie on Saddam Hussein and Liz Phair.

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A short trip to Austin earlier this month felt like a homecoming, even though I’ve never been there before. I’ve rarely been bombarded with so much music, with so little planning or effort, for so long into the night, since I left Chicago for California more than two decades ago. Austin is the sort of place where you venture out for coffee after your night of music and find out that the coffeehouse (in this case, Jo’s Hot Coffee on South Congress) has its own house band playing a bang-up set of western swing. A record store mural across the street from the UT/ Austin campus registers the city’s sense of music history: among others, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash share wall space with Dylan, Iggy, and the Clash.

If one figure spans all those influences, it is the provocateur, painter, raconteur and raver Jon Langford. The Welsh-born Leeds-to-Chicago transplant and Bloodshot Records mainstay has—in the 23-year stretch dating from the Mekons’ often-mentioned, seldom heard Fear and Whiskey—done more than just about anyone else to resuscitate the withered heart of post-punk and reclaim the tarnished soul of American country. In Austin, I was thrilled to discover that the Yard Dog Gallery has a fantastic collection of Langford’s visual art, mostly densely layered, distressed images of iconic American roots musicians in graveyard settings. Blindfolded, sullied and marked for extinction, the characters remind me of Chicago artist Ivan Albright’s studies of decay and corruption; constantly “dancing with death,” they are unsettlingly alive and a reminder of the slow death that comes out of greed, fear and homogenization.

As a curmudgeonly first-generation art school punk who writes lines like “John Glenn drinks cocktails with God at a café in downtown Saigon,” Langford is smart enough to realize he doesn’t play or paint “authentic” honky tonk any more than Vampire Weekend is a gang of African tribesmen. And unlike some of his retro-worshipping peers, he acknowledges that the “golden age” of county music had its own problems with pills and pretenders and poor directions. Yet he uses his outsider’s distance as an advantage. While bemoaning the death of country music at the hands of what he calls “suburban rock music with a cowboy hat on,” Langford’s work cuts deeper than that, excavating the signs of life in a cultural landscape pockmarked with interchangeable strip malls and Kenny Chesney records. There’s also a redemptive element in the search; like his protagonist in his Waco Brothers anthem “Hell’s Roof,” he’s reclaiming a lost history, “walking on hell’s roof, looking at the flowers” (and not “walking in a clown suit, looking at the flowers,” as I misheard Langford’s impassioned growl for more than a year).

Jon Langford, “Hell’s Roof”

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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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We can all breathe a sigh of relief now that last week’s Super Bowl managed to conclude without a Tom Petty wardrobe malfunction. Petty’s halftime set was solid enough, although Patriots fans would probably have substituted “Even the Losers (Get Lucky Sometimes)” for “Free Fallin’.” It could have been much worse, and at the Super Bowl, former host of the Up With People Singers and a wax statue resembling Paul McCartney, it often has.

Still, the Sedentary Wilbury didn’t seem up to the task of accompanying one of the most electrifying games in the sport’s history,won on the underdog New Jersey Giants’ last-chance power drive. That task would have required something else, and I don’t mean the Boss. I’m talking about phallic guitars turned heavenward, funky drummers fighting foo, backup dancers with rain-resistant hairdos, and the wankiest stadium-show riffing since Jimi Hendrix cut his teeth on the National Anthem. In short, it would have required last year’s halftime show.

With a week’s reflection and time off for an adult cartoon (and there’s nothing more cartoonish than hearing the phrase“SuperDuper Tuesday” drop out of George F. Will’s mouth), I decided to compare this year’s Super Bowl MVP, occasional karaoke singer Eli Manning, with last year’s Super Bowl MVP, Prince. It helped that Scot hosted a home screening of Purple Rain, which I hadn’t seen since it was really still 1984. After the click-through, I’ll score how Prince and Eli stacked up.

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As our website returns from a winter hiatus, poll results are everywhere, and not just in Presidential politics. When I still voted in the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop critics’ poll, I remember thinking how absurdly fast it seemed to rank the previous year’s best music in January. But this time, when Pazz and Jop followed the Idolator poll and dozens of other young rivals, it already seemed like old news. With a few variations, the top poll results roughly resembled the “year-end” list the now-defunct Stylus Magazine posted in late October.

I can’t complain about multiple poll winner LCD Soundsystem, the brainy dance band that tossed off the best rip I’ve heard on New York’s Michael Bloomberg (“your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king”). I’m also thrilled at the top-ten consensus for M.I.A.’s Kala, which gave a trans-global boom-boom-boom to those of us who have, like the National, spent too long feeling half-awake in a fake empire. Still, there’s a problem in treating lists like these as canons of coolness. They call to mind my favorite 2007 music review, which was so fake it’s real. The Onion reported that Pitchfork gave a rating of 6.8 to “music”—not any one recording or genre, but its entire history. It seems music, while brilliant at times, is weighed down with too many “mid-tempo ballads,” and worse, “the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.”

Maybe I’m just getting as cranky as the music geek in LCD’s earlier song “Losing My Edge”—the guy who was “there at the first Can show in Cologne,” only to get upstaged by “the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.” But I decided to avoid premature evaluations and go where nobody else seemed to be heading: 2006. With a year’s reflection, I wondered, how had my presumed favorites of a year ago held up, and what had I missed that meant more to me now? The results weren’t quite what I expected.

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Canadian reggae and soul, eh? If you expect that combination to go down as easily as curried goat with a side of Canadian bacon, you may be surprised. By the late sixties, economic strains, liberalized Canadian immigration laws, and fear among draft-age men that a United States passport would lead straight to Vietnam led a growing number of Jamaican expatriates to relocate in Toronto. Just 236 miles from Motown, visionary keyboardist/ arranger Jackie Mittoo, who had already cofounded the Skatalites and served as music director at Jamaica’s Studio One, helped guide a gang of upstarts eager to mix their Island recipes with generous helpings of sweet soul and heavy funk. The Jamaicans in Toronto included rhythm king Wayne McGhie, gritty vocalists Johnny Osbourne and the Mighty Pope, dub-savvy crooner Noel Ellis (son of rocksteady legend Alton Ellis), and roots rocker Willi Williams, whose “Armagideon Time” (”versioned” from a Mittoo riff and showcased below) later became the Clash’s most moving reggae cover. The Toronto scene produced music of surprising range and vision for almost two decades, and then seemingly disappeared.

Thanks to Vancouver-based music historian Sipreano (AKA Kevin Howes) this vibrant body of work has been brought back from cultural extinction. The innovative small label Light in the Atttic—whose catalog includes everything from Brazilian iconoclasts Os Mutantes to the Velvets-meets-Roky apocalyptic sound of Austin’s Black Angels—has released two fascinating anthologies and reissued several crucial solo albums (by Mittoo, McGhie and Noel Ellis) chronicling the best of the Toronto scene. Last year’s mostly soul and funk-centered Jamaica to Toronto anthology, discussed more below, already ranks as one of my favorite music collections released in the Zeroes. Worth the price all by themselves are the tracks by Jo-Jo and the Fugitives—the righteous wanderers’ anthem “Fugitive Song,” and the delicious, McGhie-penned “Chips/ Chicken/ Banana Split,” whose huge break-beat deserves a place on your ultimate chicken dance playlist alongside the Meters’ “Chicken Strut” and Cibo Matto’s “Know Your Chicken.”

Jo-Jo and the Fugitives, Fugitive Song

Jo-Jo and the Fugitives, Chips/Chicken/Banana Split

The new Summer Records Anthology, 1974-1988, captures Toronto’s homegrown reggae as it traversed the path that Sipreano describes as “dub to digital,” although only Unique Madoo’s spirited dancehall workout “Call Me Nobody Else” really represents the latter. After a few tracks of Johnny Osbourne’s soulful crooning and house band Earth Roots and Water’s supple rhythms, it becomes easy to forget that Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studio, which operated around the same years, was thousands of miles away. An interesting short film (excerpts below) accompanies the anthology. In it, Summer Records vocalist/ impresario Jerry Brown, Willi Williams, and Jackie Mittoo weave a cosmic, rhythmic and economic thread that connects dub reggae, bicycling and auto body repair. Did you really think those rat-a-tats were just random noises?

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On the second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’m posting my New Orleans odyssey, “Listening to the Water.” The soundtrack to the story features Irma Thomas, Mos Def, the Meters, Amerie, Bessie Smith, Randy Newman, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, with a special public service announcement from Kanye West.

The man at the door of the Blue Angel nightclub had the ugliest mustache I had ever seen. It looked penciled on, like he was playing Rhett Butler in a school production of “Gone with the Wind” without really giving a damn. I moved toward my sister, trying to look married. The man grinned. “Uh, y’all are eighteen, aren’t you?,” he asked. “Yes—uh YES,” I croaked. “Well, come on in,” he said, “don’t get too crazy all at once, you hear?”

It was May 1977. So far, I’d had a New Orleans experience the Chamber of Commerce could have scripted. Stroll the French Quarter’s sunshine-filled streets. Inhale chicory-scented coffee and beignets. Clap as ancient tuba and banjo players at Preservation Hall trot out their millionth rendition of “St. James Infirmary,” and clarinetist Pete Fountain entertains your mom’s corporate convention.

At 15, I didn’t understand that to natives, most of this signifies “New Orleans” the way Rice-a-Roni is the “San Francisco treat.” But inside the smoky club, I sensed more mystery. The cornet player stopped his Dixieland riffing and hit a note so hushed and low it hinted at another New Orleans behind the tourist curtain. Outside the nightclub, a street drummer coaxed ripples and torrents out of garbage can lids. He motioned to me, as if to share a secret. But he only said one thing: “The sound is in the water.”

Irma Thomas – It’s Raining

Mos Def, “Katrina Klap”

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Against my better judgment, I’m succumbing to the craze among online music fanatics to rewite songs in limerick form. Borrowing the popular idea to rewrite famous poems, Carl Wilson at Zoilus wrote limericks for an assortment of rock chestnuts ranging from Zep’s Jurassic classic “Stairway” to Sonic Youth’s adult-aged “Teenage Riot.” Rock, soul and hip-hop limericks started spreading like wildfire.

While this was all good fun, most struck me as stronger in concept than in execution. Then Idolator directed me to “There Once Was a Man From Garageland,” Twin Cities critic Nate Patrin’s Ogden Nash-worthy limerick version of the Clash’s entire London Calling album for his excellent site, Rebel Machine. It’s a complete tour de force. Here’s Patrin’s version of “Lost in the Supermarket“:

Ennui strikes in the middle of Tesco
I don’t fit in where all of the rest go
My life is the pits
But at least Salsoul Hits
And some lager will make it feel less so.

All of the attempts I’ve seen, including Patrin’s, at least have lyrics that can be condensed in limerick form. To make things more sporting, I decided to try John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland album, one of only a few that has changed my life as much as London Calling. Here’s my limerick transcription of Live at Birdland, including the bonus track available only on CD:

Afro-Blue

A fleet-fingered drummer named Mongo
Wrote a rhythm best suited for bongo
But Trane tore it asunder
Elvin thrashed through the thunder
You could hear it from Jersey to Congo.

The rest of the album follows after the click.

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When I think about Tom Snyder, the talk show host who passed away earlier this week, the first thing that comes to mind is his laugh, an old-school guffaw that bordered on self-parody long before Dan Aykroyd made it the centerpiece of a Saturday Night Live routine. Then I think about the eyebrows, twin black caterpillars that gave away his mood just as convincingly as Sam Donaldson’s as he made conversation with guests ranging from Ayn Rand to Charles Manson (and no, I’m not drawing any connection here). But most of all, I remember the music and interviews on Snyder’s signature program, The Tomorrow Show, which ran in my formative years between 1973 and 1982. At a time when even SNL had distinct boundaries on what could be played and discussed during the show, Snyder took risks with performers considered too edgy or unpredictable for most of the “alternative” shows of the day.

Superficially, the slightly haughty Snyder could come off a bit like the Mr. Jones of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” (“something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is”). But Snyder didn’t patronize the performers, wasn’t afraid to call them on their own contradictions, and got some unlikely subjects to stand and deliver. Many of the highlights (although conspicuously, not the Clash and U2) are included in Shout Factory’s recent DVD release The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which captures appearances by the Jam, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, among others. In the rest of this post, I’ll share a few memorable Tomorrow Show moments. (Also discussed below: the hidden connection between Martha Stewart and the Plasmatics.)

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One of our oldest and dearest friends, who goes by the name Rinchen, is a devout Buddhist currently two thirds of the way through a three-year hitch in a monastery in the Santa Cruz mountains, where he is studying with the teacher he’s chosen for life, and practicing almost total silence. Rinchen has no access to the outside world — no phone calls, no newspapers, no internet, no television… and no music. The latter fact is particularly striking, as Rinchen is one of the deepest listeners we know – a man who could spend an entire day tapped into an 8-disc Cecil Taylor free improv set, then put on some Parliament or Missy Elliott and jam the night away. Rinchen’s music collection was breathtaking — before he sold it all to finance his silent expedition.

A few times a year, Rinchen is granted a day or two to visit with family and to write letters to friends. We wrote him a few months ago asking what music runs through a monk’s mind in between the long periods of silence. Today we received the following poem/riff on Cage, Monk, Miles, The Meters and more (with bundled playlist).
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