Cursive, Ottobar 8/8/09

YES, WE CANNOT RESIST CURSIVE, especially when they play the club less than five minutes from our house, on a Saturday night. As I’ve just returned from the show, have a drink to mix and a water to glug, I will stick (for now? eh, let’s not kid ourselves…) solely to the set list. I will add, however, that as blown away as I was by “What Have I Done” at the DC show earlier this year, having him sing it from the audience, and reach the “take a look around you, you’re preaching to the choir…” part two people away from me was unbelievable.

They started around 11:15, went until 12:40.

Dorothy at 40
Mama, I’m Satan
The Radiator Hums
Driftwood: A Fairy Tale
Making Friends and Acquaintances
Bad Sects
Butcher the Song
Mama, I’m Swollen
The Martyr
Some Red-Handed Sleight of Hand
Art is Hard
What Have I Done?
[encore]
Big Bang
I Couldn’t Love You
Modern Love (yeap, Modern Love, with members of Love Language on percussion and vocals and general goin’ crazy)
The Recluse
The Great Decay

Note: This was one of the, uh, other kind of Cursive shows. Actually, maybe the DC was the other, and this was the normal? In other words, Mr. Kasher seemed a bit soggy (only in his demeanor, the playing and singing was pretty much up to par), and rather than the occasional dramatic pause, songs like The Martyr or Dorothy paused for a good three to five minutes at the dramatic peak so we could all have a good smarm fest (on both sides). In “The Great Decay,” this actually devolved into a ridiculous(ly entertaining) rooster-call/vocal-scat call-and-response session between Tim, members of the band, and a couple of audience members he tilted the mic to. When he first started doing it, I thought first that it was a subtle “Arrested Development” reference, then for a brief instant believed/wished/hoped they were about to dive into “London Calling” (or as I called it before I knew the name, “the rooster song”).

Another political plea

So hey, everybody. It’s been two months and you deserve better. I was actually thinking of a putting a post up saying I’m gonna go on hiatus indefinitely, just in case anyone was still checking. But then congress went and starting fucking everything up, so instead, here’s some political boringness.

Basically, here’s an email I just sent to one of my senators, Ben Cardin. I’ll probably just copy-n-paste it to Senator Mikulski and Congressman Cummings, too (though Cummings rocks my health-care world, having signed on to the Conyers-Kucinich HR 676 years ago).

Naturally I urge you all to write or call or email your representatives to let them know how you feel about the health care legislation that’s starting to turn out so awfully. Unless of course you disagree, in which case: do us all a favor and keep it to yourself.

[For those who aren't vigilant about this: the thing that's making me seriously depressed every morning and afternoon--seriously, I'm getting very upset about this--is that from what I'm hearing/reading, the ideas of changing the way our health care system works has gone from not even hearing what single-payer advocates have to say to let's have a public insurance option to keep the private insurers honest, to okay, yeah, so the public thing isn't gonna happen because of these Blue Dog Democrats (and naturally the oh so smart, oh so caring Republicans), so maybe you'll get to form some co-ops or something.]

Dear Senator Cardin,

Please, please, please don’t vote for any legislation being proposed in the Senate that does not include a public/government option. At this rate, it’s the least lawmakers can do to appease those of us who desire real change in the way health care works in our country. For the record, I’d like to see a single-payer system, but have calmed my anger about being denied that option down to a “well, at least we’ve got the public option” attitude.

I’m 29 years old, and have had Type I diabetes for 18 months. I know that for the rest of my life, I’m going to depend in a very intense way on doctors and medicine if I’m to stay alive and healthy. Right now–and especially in this economic climate–I feel like I’m living with no safety net. If I were to lose my job and thus insurance, it would be a matter of months before I’d be both diabetic and broke. And it’s months, rather than weeks, only because of money that could be going toward a house, a new car, any of the things people invest their savings in when they aren’t waiting for that catastrophic combination of medical bills and no insurance.

I’m one of the people that President Obama talks about: I’m happy with my health insurance. However, I’m afraid of the power that such a corporation holds over my life, especially as someone with a “pre-existing condition.” I think that the very reason some people are so furious about the thought of a government option is that it really will force private health insurance companies to undergo the changes necessary to make health care about health, not money.

Speaking of money, in terms of taxes: be they directly on health premiums, or taken out of something else, or on private insurers, I’m okay with it. I don’t mind paying more taxes to help other people who otherwise can’t afford health benefits. Also, as someone putting more than my share of the financial burden on the medical system, I can stand to put more in the pool.

Thank you for already being a supporter of real health care improvement, and especially for being vocal about a public option. Now, frankly, I expect you to hold to those views and vote accordingly.

Thanks,

Greg Storms

It was the best I could do sitting in my hot car at work, sweating my ass off, knowing my phone could ring and I have to stop at any time, ten years after taking Persuasive Argument in college. I feel like every time I’m listening to the news on the radio, or even listening to crazy batshit drive-me-to-punch-a-hole-in-my-windshield WBAL hosts, I have great arguments and points all lined up in my head. Then when it comes time to actually try to convince somebody, I have nothing.

So: it’s all very confusing, it’s all very complex, if it weren’t for the fact that the Republicans are going to use the time to shred the bills to pieces and shore up support against everything good that was going to happen, I’d say it’s actually good that our elected officials would have August to actually read the bills. At any rate, all I know is it now sounds like nothing at all is going to change. Your life is still going to be decided by a corporation that only cares about profit.

Have fun!

Why is Senator Max Baucus ignoring Single-Payer?

I”VE INTRODUCED A NEW CATEGORY FOR THE BLOG. It’s called “ready to punch someone in the face.” Today it’s Max Baucus. Listening to the Diane Rehm show on Friday, Ms. Rehm (Mrs.? Madam? Dame?) brought up the health care debate and said that she’d gotten a lot of complaints about not talking about a Single-Payer option on a previous show (I’m guessing the blog post “On Helath Care, Diane Rehm Makes Me Sick” was one of them) and how they would be dedicating an entire hour to Single Payer on Monday (yesterday). I missed that, but I did get to hear Dennis Kucinich talking about it on Tell Me More earlier last week.

Basically at some point, probably during the News Roundup or Tell Me More show, I heard someone saying, “If you want to talk about Single Payer, you have to do it now, as in TODAY,” because the door is closing on health care reform debate. Sure enough, my lazy ass finally gets around to–ahem–finding out what, exactly, single-payer is–it’s been a long time since the election cycle, so I’m rusty, I did remember that I kinda leaned that way–seeing as how my idea of a good Friday night does not involve delving into health care reform debate–and what do I discover? Both on NPR this morning and in a good article from the Great Falls, Montana Tribune I see that Mr. Baucus, being a solid, Washington-entrenched, health-care-industry-supported typa guy has “closed the door on” the single-payer debate.

We pause now for a great, big, FFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Excuse me, my apologies.

This debate is so fucked up. And before I delve into it, let me just say that I am nearly clueless about health care and insurance–you could say I’m an average American who deals with health issues, bills, and questions as they come, just sort of getting the inkling that I need to be the pro-active one, the one that speaks up and demands more time with my doctor in the assembly-line system they’ve (often by necessity of staying afloat) developed. I know some, but I don’t know much. And let me just say, for maybe the first time on this blog, bold-faced for everyone, I have Type 1 Diabetes. This is a chronic disease, it involves intense levels of personal- and physician-based monitoring and multiple prescriptions and doctors (The type of treatment I’m on is actually called intensive insulin therapy). I will have this disease for the rest of my life.
In other words, to use a phrase I usually use for laughs, this is serious business. If I lose my job, I lose my health insurance. And that’s the crux of what most of my arguments boil down to–I have no safety net. Here’s the scenario I imagine: federal, state, or private funding dries up for the projects my company works on due to the depression (yes, we’re in a fucking depression, say it.); they say, sorry kid, we love you, but we gotta let you go; I lose my job, I lose my health insurance. I can’t get another job (this is a worst-case scenario here); the savings I have for, well, no specific purpose really but recently as a backup for just this situation, are dwindling fast to pay for my prescriptions, my doctor visits, that “not-if-but-when” visit to the ER with hypogycemia, etc; and…well, to be honest with you, I never take the what if further than that.
But the important thing I didn’t spell out there, the biggest freak-out, is this: I can’t get another insurance plan. I can’t even say, here BlueCrossNationalAetnaUniCareMetGiant, look, take my car keys, empty my bank account, just give me another year’s worth of insulin, sign me up, because the answer will be, “Oooh, you got Diabetes? Man, I hear that’s bad. Complicated. Sorry. PRE-EXISTING CONDITION! Baaamp.” (That’s the ugly You Lose buzzer.) The Man gets to choose who to take and who not to take. And it doesn’t matter how many miles I run, how many vegetables I eat, how many pushups I do, high-fructose-corn-syrups I avoid, I ain’t shaking loose The ‘Betes. No matter what angle they take, the insurance companies look at me and they see a money pit. (Aside from, you know, those nice, juicy amputation surgeries they reap after the whole sowing of the let-the-diabetic-go-undertreated business.)

Okay, I digress a bit. So from what I’m reading and hearing, there’s a great big blind spot in someone’s argument. The woman I heard on Tell Me More, and Mr. Baucus, say something along the lines of “most Americans are satisfied with their health care services” (one number I saw was 87%), and therefore we don’t need massive change, we just need to reform the system so that it runs better and is more affordable. On the other hand, seemingly completely opposing that notion, is that apparently 59% of Americans support single-payer insurance. Personally, I think it’s the old apples and oranges argument. To paraphrase “Election,” if you like apples, you’re pretty happy with apples. But maybe that’s because no one’s ever offered you a banana before…oho! Take me–I have a good job, with what I believe to be good health benefits (my optomotrist friend says our vision coverage stinks, but whatever). My doctors treat me well. But I know I’m unique–my primary doctor is the uncle of one of my oldest and dearest friends (her mom gives me a hug every time I visit the office); when I got diagnosed with diabetes, two amazing people (a DE and an NP) at the hospital wouldn’t let me leave until they’d set up an appointment for me with their personal endocrinology office.
And this is why I want to talk about this–because I have it good. I think there are a lot of people out there–especially a lot of those with diabetes–who don’t, and don’t have the time, energy, and resources to speak up.

To those who say we don’t need to change the system because people are happy with it, I say, well, yes–I’m happy with my health care coverage and my doctors, but that’s because I’m lucky and careful, things I can afford to be. And I’ll add this: up to 2008, before I got diabetes, I didn’t give a shit about health care (in fact, I didn’t want anything to do with it). I would let years go by, years of being uninsured, years of being insured and never going to a doctor. And I think that most people are pretty much like I used to be: call them up, take a poll, ask, “Are you satisfied with your health care?” They’ll be like, “shit, I just wanna finish watching Apocalypse Now, go have a beer, and not think about the next time I go to the doctor”–okay, so that would be the 20-somethings, the rest of the grown-ups are probably thinking, “eh, you know, well” teetering, but they’ve planned their lives, they’re employed, so they’ve got that chunk for the food, that chunk for the cars, and that chunk for the doctors, so sure, they’re satisfied. Just like I was.
To those, like Max Baucus, who says, 

“We’ve got to reform our system fairly quickly, and to be candid with you, very few members of the House and Senate advocate single-pay. The vast, vast majority do not,” Baucus said in an interview Friday. “It tells me that if I go down that road, it’s not going to be successful — it’s not going to pass the Congress.” [Great Falls Tribune]

…I say, are you kidding me? That’s why you can’t listen to another opinion? Because it has to happen fast? And you don’t think the members of Congress want to do it? I get it, it’s politics, but you’re a fucking REPRESENTATIVE of the people who voted you in, and 59 fucking percent of them think it’s a good idea. [In fact, I'm proud to say that my member of Congress, Elijah Cummings, supports John Conyers's HR 676.] Don’t you think you should at least bring in, say, a Harvard medical scholar (<cough>Marcia Angell!), or maybe like the mother of a 27-yr-old diabetic and 25-yr-old with epilepsy who can’t get insurance and called in to Diane Rehm, to see what the Single Payer idea is about, not just in numbers but in everyday pain?
And to those of you who say, hey, gergathon, you need to check the facts, maybe spend some time looking at the arguments, because you are dead wrong: I say, I’ll see what I can do about squeezing in some heavy-duty non-wikipedia research on the history of health care in America, current legislation, and what’s going on in Baucus’ head (not to even mention President Obama, whom I feel I should remind of the stirring scene in his World Series-half-hour ad in which he said he wanted to make sure no one ever again got turned down because of a pre-existing condition…) between my 12-hour work days, blood sugar monitoring, healthy eating, and insulin doses. For now, cutting administrative costs, not worrying about where my health care is going to come from, and not having to decide between having money for prescriptions and maybe buying a house someday sounds good to me.

Thanks for listening. As always, figure out what you want and call your congresspeople.

Cursive songs from 5/3/09 Black Cat, DC

I DIDN’T GO AS FAR AS ACTUALLY taking down the songs as they were played at Sunday night’s Cursive show. However, the next morning I was lucky enough to have work rained out, so I lulled myself to sleep by counting Cursive songs. See if I can remember:

They played…

from Burst and Bloom:
The Great Decay

from Domestica:
The Casualty
The Martyr (finished with this)
The Game of Who Needs Who the Worst

from The Ugly Organ:
The Ugly Organist
Some Red-Handed Sleight of Hand
Art is Hard
The Recluse
Butcher the Song (opened with this)
A Gentleman Caller

from Happy Hollow:
Big Bang
Dorothy at 40
Rise Up! Rise Up!

from Mama, I’m Swollen:
From the Hips
I Couldn’t Love You Anymore
Mama, I’m Satan
What Have I Done?

I remember in my snoozy-counting there being 18 songs (including The Ugly Organist), but apparently I’m missing one. Anyone?

[Update: From commenter Chelsea, the song I missed is "Mama, I'm Swollen." You know, the title of the new album? Easy one to forget. Check out her complete set-list below--thanks, Chelsea.]

Spectre of the Specter

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090428/ap_on_go_co/us_specter_switch

I’m sure there’s a down side to this, but for now, I say to thee, “hell yes.”
For the last few years that I have been actually paying attention to news, government, and legislation in my idle way, Arlen Specter’s name has been one of the first and few that I distinguished from the rest, the congress-person I actually remember other than my own from MD. This is mostly because the guy has a head on his shoulders and a conscience in his…uh, conscience-compartment. Pretty much every time I hear he’s done something or said something, I’m thinking, “THANK you. Somebody making some damned sense here,” or “Maybe there’s hope after all if this guy’s a veteran Republican.”

So, take that Tom Skerritt!
(Title pun/obscure film reference brought to you by the Roy H. Park School of Communications)

Top 5 Albums of the College.

Okay, I swear I’m just gonna blow this one out real fast. No liner notes, nuthin (Update: now featuring liner notes!). Just boom boom boom. Go–[no particular order]

1. Cursive’s Domestica
   I had this one day that kind of sent me soaring off in new musical directions. It was the end of 2000, and I had a final for my film sound post-production class. At some point I realized I had locked myself out of my on-campus shared-studio-style apartment, so I walked back to Park, where my acquaintance and fellow final-taker Jay L. was still hanging around. Hearing my predicament, he basically was like, I gotcha, and took me out to lunch, which doesn’t seem like a big thing but I thought was exceedingly generous (somehow I didn’t have my wallet either? I feel like he paid for me? Or maybe it was just the generosity of offering to fill up the time until my roommate would be home, coming from a guy I liked and worked with on a TV show but was by no means friends with. At any rate, I totally associate this day with Jay’s sharing nature.) On the way to the diner (Manos–the days of going to the State diner had passed), at the diner, and on the way back to campus, all we talked about was music. Mostly, he talked and I listened. (In other words, for those of you who’ve been subject to relentless music ramble/oppression/educational lecture from me, I was in the other seat.) He turned me on to Cursive, who I think I’d heard of through starting to get into Bright Eyes, but had not yet heard, At the Drive-In, and probably a dozen other bands that didn’t stick as well. On the way back to campus I heard “Ceilings Crack” by Cursive for the first time–”Passed out in your yard!…”–Jay explaining that the song caused him to make sure he’s drunk each Bastille Day–I first heard the Cursive story, of the release of the first album, the breakup as Tim Kasher left and got married, then came back…Of course, Jay and I also bonded over the Beach Boys. For the rest of the year, we’d see each other and kind of go nod, nod. I think somewhere I have a picture of him on Fountain Day with Portland Native, he’s wearing a vintage Beach Boys shirt.
   So. Point is, I bathed in Cursive for the rest of college, mostly Domestica. It was catchier than Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, and for some reason I didn’t get The Storms of Early Summer until last year. Domestica is pretty much perfect. It’s got the Cursive-cohesive story holding the songs together (it’s a breakup album, perhaps THE breakup album as far as I’m concerned, although I feel like recently I read somewhere that Mr. Kasher at some point said he saw the couple sticking together in the end). Great, great lyrics that make the physical and figurative battleground and weapons come scarily to life, and some things that are just awful, awful to imagine saying to someone you love(d) (“To prove you still feel/you only feel sorry for yourself”…yeah, I was trying to think of more and pretty much any line on the album works.) It’s not so relentless in its rocking that you’re burned out by the end, but there aren’t really any “slow” songs per se. My favorite (with about eight others coming in close second) is “The Radiator Hums.” Also, randomly, this is the album that made me start paying attention to drums.
2. Bright Eyes — Fevers and Mirrors
   I read about Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst in a magazine that was sitting around at Portland Native’s house. No idea what magazine, I think I’d never heard of it before and haven’t since. I’m not sure what intrigued me, but it was basically this kid who was about my age, who appears so nervous on (very small) stage that he can barely sing, that his voice comes out all tremolous. Whatever it was, I hit the napster (hell yeah napster.) and downloaded most of Fevers and Mirrors. It actually took some time for me to fully get into. I loved “Movement of a Hand” for a quite a while without getting much into the rest, then “Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh” and “A Scale, A Mirror, and These Indifferent Clocks” fell into place. Eventually I really liked the whole thing, though I prefered the more traditional-sounding ones to more…I dunno, different-tempo’d? ”When the Curious Girl Realizes She is Under Glass” or “Sunrise, Sunset.” If I listened objectively now, I’d probably pick out “An Attempt to Tip the Scales” or “Something Vague.” “Something Vague” and “Haligh” definitely hold some forever-sway, though, due just to being so fucking crushing and time-travely. I think I learned the chords to about half the album; every time I hear “Haligh” I’m sitting up against a car in the parking lot of the Oakwoods in LA, waiting for some people to get their shit together to go camping at Joshua Tree (a story unto itself), when I grabbed either Kurt’s guitar or my own and for some reason plonked out  and sang “Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh” note-perfect. There were maybe two people there, half-listening, maybe it was just Jimmy BigHead. I’ve never done it as well since. Apparently I still had my pipes in LA ’01; I think I did something similar with “Something Vague” in the living room of MP and Richard From Home Depot In The Bronx (though naturally MP also played his own song, which was just as good…) So yeah, it certainly says something about my, er, emotional disposition during college to put this one on the list, but it’s undeniable. I’ve lost touch a bit, but for half a decade or so there, it was really nice to age in tandem with Mr. Oberst as he wrote the soundtrack to my life.
3. Neutral Milk Hotel — In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
   Yeah, so what hasn’t been said? Thanks, Eli for an IM away message that put me onto them. Thanks, Mr. Mangum, for providing one of the only parts of my senior film I’m actually still immodestly proud of. Thanks, Shleigh (and my fellow Pollution Tour 2001 travelers) for tolerating me singing every word of this, drunk, at the top of my lungs as you propelled us swiftly, wind-blown, through the hills of South Dakota in the middle of the night. This album worked best for me by revealing itself slowly.
4. Grandaddy — The Sophtware Slump
   During a small period of college (say, half a semester or so) in which I got myself broken (figuratively), this album fixed me. It had help from the kindness of a stranger, and the listening ears of some real friends, but this album was my medicine for a while. Earlier that fall, Portland Native, Penny, and I had gone on a road trip to my house, where we stayed for a weekend in order to see Elliott Smith at the Recher in Towson. Grandaddy opened for him, and it was quite amazing. Not mind-blowing, like the Flaming Lips show I would see there a few years later, but really good and a little moving and surprising coming from an opening band I’d never heard of. (On my keychain I actually still keep an orange bottle opener that used to have the Grandaddy logo on it from that show.) There was a large video screen behind them, and it probably played different things, but the one I remember looked basically like the cover of The Sophtware Slump except without the lettering, and with digitally-animated deer bounding gracefully across. This very well could’ve been during “So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky,” a song that played a large part in my healing process. Basically during that time in which I felt dumb to the world, I could put on that or “Hewlett’s Daughter” and feel five times better.
   That, of course, puts it up near contention, but I’m sure other albums consoled me at other times (Crooked Fingers, say). Thing is, The Sophtware Slump–and I still believe this today, comparing it against pretty and really good other Grandaddy albums–is fantastic. It’s a sound that seems so commonplace today–throw some bleeps and chirps over an otherwise lo-fi indie-rock song–but at the time was surprising and beautifully executed. There’s a wonderful, disturbing theme of nature vs. technology running throughout, not in an obvious “hey, save the trees down with cars” kind of way, but rather a strange, almost ridiculous way (“Broken Household Appliance National Forest”). Most of all, of course, there are great songs, regardless of what they sound like or are “about”–”The Crystal Lake,” the opener “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” “Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)…and so on. I’d really like to just mention “So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky” one more time. It’s worth it.
5. Tullycraft — City of Suburus
   Tullycraft! Seen before on this blog (albeit in my usual “I’m gonna totally write about this band from first album to last, super-thorough, give a primer kind of deal” and then I conk out after the third release way), this album is what started my love affair. Thanks to both Portland Native and Penny–they can duke it out amongst themselves as to who introduced me, who introduced them, although I believe it was a guy named Ian whose radio show Portland Native and I tried to revive before the Man shut us down who introduced them to Tullycraft. Again, like nothing I’d ever heard. My high school listening to Nirvana and Beck and the Halo Benders brushed me up against Calvin Johnson, but otherwise I didn’t know what twee, or as I like to think of Tullycraft (and how I heard it described then), softcore, was. I know I loved it instantly, wanted for extended periods to hear nothing but. (Portland Native coming through with several tapes full of stuff like Bunnygrunt, the Softies, All-Girl Summer Fun Band, and the like.) City of Suburus just put me in a good mood–no, it didn’t just do that, it made me feel like the world was all right, like my life was fucking great, it was like the soundtrack in a movie that makes the scene MORE than it would be with dialogue or no sound, except the movie was my life. Nearly every track on this is stellar–”8 Great Ways,” “Ticket Tonight,” and of course “Vacation in Christine, ND.” Seeing Tullycraft live last summer may have been the biggest fulfillment of an Always Wanted to See Them/Never Thought I Would dream I’ve ever had.

Bonuses:

1. Modest Mouse — The Lonesome Crowded West/This is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing to Think About/The Moon and Antarctica [One of these would be on the real list, but I couldn’t decide on just one of them; I got into mm in I think late 1999 thanks to both my friend Ash and the Spin 90 Greatest Albums of the 90s feature that mentioned them as a “see also” after There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and I thought, geez, I keep hearing this name, and now from Spin, okay, it’s time to find some…So, I think by the time I returned to Ithaca in late January I was insane for the first two full albums and in breathless anticipation of the third. All three certainly lived all over my college career, so they really deserve to be up there. Oh, and don’t forget Building Nothing Out of Something!
2. At the Drive-In — Relationship of Command
3. The Flaming Lips — The Soft Bulletin
4. Everything else released by Saddle Creek from 2000-2002. (I think at some point I had at least one album by every band on their roster, and every one was awesome.)
5. Both of the Elliott Smith compilation tapes made for me by Portland Native.
6. Jets to Brazil — Orange Rhyming Dictionary
7. Built to Spill — Keep it Like a Secret
8. 764-HERO — Weekends of Sound

Top 5 Albums of the 90s

IN THE SPIRIT OF THOSE FACEBOOK top 5s, the avclub, and of course High Fidelity, I’m offering an attempt at decision-making.

Here are my top 5 albums of the 90s, meaning albums I heard and loved during the decade (not got into later,  a la Emergency & I, or even just on the cusp of the decade–I think I first heard Modest Mouse in late ’99), albums that I think are great but not necessarily the Best, albums that I think may go unnoticed by history, albums that I have remembered in the last few weeks–for surely next week or even tomorrow I’ll remember one and realize it just HAS to be on the list.

This is in no particular order:

1. The Scofflaws–The Scofflaws
I’ve been digging through all my old ska tapes and digitizing them lately. This was really the first one I wanted to have. It’s just a classic. Groovy, great arrangements. I’m digitizing a tape of the first “Skarmageddon” collection right now, and thinking about this album versus the songs on that makes me feel like the Scofflaw’s first album doesn’t even really belong under the “3rd Wave” of ska label (which I guess I associate with distorted guitars and more fast-paced/punk rhythms–the guitar is not a prominent instrument on this one).  It’s almost more of a lounge album. There aren’t many originals, but the covers/re-arranged tracks are really the standouts: “A Shot in the Dark,” “The Man With The Golden Arm,” and of course “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” I think in the 90s I was drawn to the fun stuff –”Pee-Wee,” “Paul Getty,” but as time went on it was really the instrumentals that I loved, especially one of the CD bonus tracks, “Rudy in Paris.” Thinking about it now, The Scofflaws probably gave me a good excuse to keep playing the saxophone, or at least feel cool while doing it.

2. Soul Coughing–Ruby Vroom
This was my brother’s CD that I found, I think in the basement, while he was away at college and I was in high school. I remember I must have been close to leaving for a band trip to Europe, because the tape of it (with Beck’s One Foot in the Grave, and album that I should probably put in the runners-up down there) is one of the few I brought on that trip, and I think I didn’t actually listen to it until I was traveling. What a fucking mind-blowing experience! Sure, Soul Coughing’s sound probably seems kind of old hat to most people now, but I was 16 (which I remember was old at the time but is young now, at least in terms of music-exposure), I had no idea who these people were, it was a weird name, the album had a collage of a woman in an old-timey astronaut suit and a Ren-like weasely guy holding a pitchfork and a pipe, and it sounded like someone dropped their entire record collection in a blender, put some beats to it, and sang/rapped/spoken-worded over it. I guess it wasn’t long before I was in heaven, memorizing lines like “I could get lost in a lunch box/lie low in the mittens in the lost and found” and “gone savage for teenagers who area aesthetically pleasing/in other words/flyyyy” and every ridiculous one of “Sugar Free Jazz.” I eventually named my first email address after one of the songs, my computer monitor in college had “…if you were the Baltic Sea and I were a cup, uh huh…” scrolling across it for a lot of months.  Ruby Vroom lives on a lot of bases, from the bouncy, loose opening track “Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago” (The Soul Coughing Underground has for years had some “song explanations” by M. Doughty, one of the best of which is for this one.) to darker, full songs like “Blue-Eyed Devil,” to some pretty devestating sparse tracks. The best, for me, are “Screenwriter’s Blues,” “True Dreams of Witchita” (“I’ve seen your hand turn saintly on the radio dial/I’ve seen the airwaves/pull your eyes towards heaven…”) and, of course, “Down to This.”

3. Grant Lee Buffalo–Mighty Joe Moon
One of my favorite bands that no one else likes or ever mentions, it seems. I know Grant-Lee Phillips gets some recognition by my music-snob pals out in LA where he had (has?) deep roots at the club Largo, but that’s it. I think I’ve known one guy who ever heard of or liked them, and my (unrelated to GLB) recent attempts to contact him have drawn only silence. This is perhaps why my listening to the GLB collection Storm Hymnal a week or so ago was so depressing and enthralling. (I’ve never had their first and third albums, so tracks like “Fuzzy” and “Jupiter and Teardrop” are still really effective.) Mighty Joe Moon is really a great piece of “americana,” one that to me stands up there with albums by The Band and Neil Young. It starts with a searing guitar line, in a searing song about, well, the Branch Davidians in Waco (“Lone Star Song”). There are a couple other rockers on it, including “Sing Along,” a sort of cornucopia of man’s accomplishments that features one of my favorite stand-along lyrics of all time:

“Evel Knievel and the legacy of John Wayne
Gacy, Gacy…”

…then crashing into the chorus. They reference Tecumsah, the Cumberland Gap; there’s a whole song about Johnny Cash. But like I said, most of this came later for me. At first it was just the haunting, huge-sounding music, Phillips’ voice going from deep-pit hollows to eerie falsettos, the tracks bouncing back and forth between the guitar crunchers and restrained, sparer mid-tempo numbers. It’s definitely a sad, heavy album, and I’m sure I spent a little too much time with it going into college (“I’m bad at this thing, happiness/if you find it, share it with the rest of us”). But then again, it’s also got one of the sweetest songs I know of, “Honey Don’t Think,” about a feeling anyone who’s ever fallen for someone they just know they don’t deserve but get anyway has had.
So yeah. Good album.

4. Built to Spill–There’s Nothing Wrong With Love
Hmm. I could ramble, but instead et’s just say:
“In the Morning,” “Car,” cello, Doug Martsch’s voice, “Twin Falls,” “I’m all right, said the man to his wife,” guitar, guitar, guitar, “Big Dipper,” okay, every song on it and everything about it. This one’s actually on some of the professional Best of the 90s lists.

5. Pavement–Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Since the early 00′s, Brighten the Corners has pulled up alongside and tied Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain as the Pavement album for me. I’ll admit I was never the hardcore early-years Pavement guy; although I love Slanted and Enchanted, Pavement started with CR for me. Brighten the Corners is somehow a little more developed, I like the tempos, I love the lyrics. But this is a list of 90s albums, and to me nothing says 90s like Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. (I’m also ashamed to admit I somehow completely missed the boat on Wowee Zowee, I remember Andy D having/playing it in my car on the way to school once, then Johnston made a tape of it for me, and…I dunno, maybe it got engulfed by Archers of Loaf roaring onto my radar? I didn’t buy a CD of it until last year, and I’ve still only listened to it two or three times…) I have a feeling nothing Malkmus or the rest of the Pavement boys makes for the rest of my life will top this album. I had at least two tapes of it, one CD that skips during the climax of “Cut Your Hair” now. Credit where credit is due: I think I’d heard “Cut Your Hair” on HFS and spent a month trying to remember the name of the band, then somehow I ended up with a CD that was given to my brother but he already had a copy of it, I think by his girlfriend, and he made me promise to thank her for it. I think I did (I remember knowing to look for her in the journalism room at school), but if not, thanks, Shannon. At any rate, I remember playing it everywhere, playing on a boombox in my grandfather’s old Dodge, playing it at home, singing it while running, etc. Now that I think about it, I guess I knew of Pavement before Built to Spill, because I remember looking forward to their set at Lollapalooza (in WV, where they walked off stage) but also “discovering” BtS there.
So yes, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is what everyone says it is (everything good, anyway). There might be a track or two I can take or leave if I’m just driving half an hour and know I gotta get to one of the last songs, but they’re all excellent one day or another (a few weeks ago I found myself thrilled to have “Hit the Plane Down” stuck in my head while walking around at work; that was probably a first). I have at least two excellent “Fillmore Jive” moments: one during the summer between high school and college, when my friend Dr. Ive and I drove my brother back down to Blacksburg, VA, where he was, with several college friends, to depart carless to the wilds of San Francisco and the rest of his life. She and I drove down one afternoon, dropped him off, and drove back the same night. I think I had something like 18 or 24 hours between shifts at Little Caesars; at 4 in the morning, under a cloudy moon, I stuck my head out the window as I blew over the bridge at Loch Raven Reservoir, singing “I need sleep…I need sleep…I need sleep, why won’t you? why won’t you let me?…” The other was a night in college, possibly on or near my birthday, when I got suddenly drunk and surreptitiously sick at the place of a friend of a friend (most likely due to a shot of old, nasty whiskey from his “Little Pisser” statue; it should also be said that these were the days when I was smoking filterless cigarettes and only had a tolerance for three beers, max). I somehow found a very unexpected copy of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain that I proceeded to play, I think even skipping to the song I felt just like, “Fillmore Jive.”

Runners-up (also in keeping with my new [4/16] title for this blog that I’m too lazy to change, Top 5 90′s albums of the 90′s):

Soul Asylum–Grave Dancers Union
Beck–One Foot in the Grave
R.E.M.–Out of Time
Counting Crows–August and Everything After
Ben Folds Five–Whatever and Ever Amen
Lemonheads–It’s a Shame About Ray

World Book of Facts

I like the CIA’s World Factbook website (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html), but tend to forget it’s out there. When I do remember, I usually end up spending half an hour jumping around: “oooh! What about Norway, what’s the population/climate/type of government of Norway? Hey, what about Moldova, where is Moldova, anyway?” and so on.

Right now I’m reading Dispatches by Michael Herr. It’s an excellent book, really beyond excellent; it’s a classic, it’s Important. If there’s one out there about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, please somebody let me know. But I doubt there is, unless it’s written by a soldier who happens to also be an incredibly talented writer and journalist, because the unique thing about Dispatches is the unique thing about the Vietnam war: apparently (forgive me for my non-specificity and uneducatedness, I’ll get to that in a sec) journalists were allowed to just roam around the country, talk to whomever would talk to them, see whatever they could see. Anyway. I’m just saying it’s an amazing book for someone like me who knows about Vietnam only what I’ve seen in the movies, come across here and there, and learned in school (although to be honest with you, if we had a unit or something on Vietnam, I don’t remember it). For anyone who’s not familiar (I’d only heard of it through doing a paper on New Journalism in college), I’ll give you what I would plaster on the cover if I were selling it now: “By the co-writer of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.” When I first started it, I basically had Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard’s voice reading to me in my head.

Right. This was supposed to be a short post. So. I’m reading Dispatches, I’m constantly wondering whether I should know more about the War, or at least the geography, as I read, and I’m continuing to come down on the side of no, it’s kind of written so that it doesn’t matter where is where or when is when or what the hell is going on, and this way it’s even more Grunt’s Eye View. But today I got off work early, I got the internet right there, I may as well at least see where the hell Khe San is and what the deal is with the DMZ. So I look at the CIA’s World Factbook, get the sense of the geography, and start to read the brief “background.” I had to share it.

This is what a major institution of our government, one with the word “intelligence” in its name, had to say about the Vietnam War:
“Under the Geneva Accords of 1954, Vietnam was divided into the Communist North and anti-Communist South. US economic and military aid to South Vietnam grew through the 1960s in an attempt to bolster the government, but US armed forces were withdrawn following a cease-fire agreement in 1973.”
I included the first sentence for context. It’s really all about the second one.
Now, I’m not laying down a judgment here. That actually sounds like an extremely well-put, unbiased sentence. I am just thoroughly tickled by how it is smoother than a sculpture, how it shines like the bronze Terrapin in College Park, having been touched by so many different hands.

Again, my disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the Vietnam War. Michael Herr’s book is giving me an amazing sense of what it was like to be there, though. Check with me later, after I’ve satiated my curiosity for that part of history, after I’ve (hopefully) moved on to the copy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American that’s in the stack in the back room.

Add It To the Best in Shows… [J. Roddy Walston & The Business/Egg Babies Orchestra/Young Sir Jim @ the Ottobar 3/28/09]

…WITH THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE CONTRIBUTING quite a bit.
So it started back at the beginning of March, when I was all up in the air about what to do for my birthday. This happens every year, where I feel the need to celebrate my birthday, and no shame in being the catalyst for everyone else to do it, too–I do not remember most people’s birthdays, and therefore do not expect them to remember mine, but everyone likes a party. This year, I ran into the too-many-ideas problem (duck-pin bowling? Baltimore Blast game? Kareoke?). The result came in a conversation with my friend J: we were standing in the parking lot at work one early morning, I ran him through the dilemma I just ran you through, he told me that he has a dilemma for his birthday: that it occurs on a Saturday, opportune party time, but that he had promised (in his specifically generous, big-hearted J way; that is, whether or not he’d actually committed, he felt the tug of loyalty he feels to all his friends) a friend that he’d go see his band that night at the Ottobar.
Anyhoo, long story short, one of us suggested having a March Birthdays Party for all (including him, his wife, me, and at least three other friends) of us together. This, through a couple reschedulings, took place on Friday night. Saturday night was the show, and since e and I hosted the party–we thought it would take to the streets and bars of Hampden eventually, but it was pretty clear that wouldn’t happen even before the party started–I almost forgot about the show, or at least it diminished in my looking-forward-to-ness. That’s mostly because it seemed like a no-cares show, like, more a night at the Ottobar, or a brief couple of beers at the Ottobar than Goin To a Show at the Ottobar. We knew the bassist of the first band through a longtime friend of mine who’d been in a relationship with him for a couple of years. By Saturday night, I was teetering on the usual weekend fence of See My Friends or Chill on the Couch With E and Whiskey and Books and Movies and Music, but eventually said, okay, sure, I’ll go for a drink or two and Young Sir Jim’s set, then come back, finish watching almost-terrible-ass Brokedown Palace.

Well, I was wrong.
As soon as I pulled onto 26th St. and saw people parallel parking, I knew it was not going to be the night I thought. Indeed, there were no spots in the lot, and I had to drive around to Maryland Ave. to get a spot. Then the doors were on the side rather than the front, and there was a line spilling out. When I got in, I thought, Shit, this is more people than I’ve seen at the Ottobar in years, besides for Ted Leo or the Walkmen.
J and I chatted with the Friend of a Friend until his band went onstage. Even for them (Young Sir Jim), our place at the back of the crowd was nearly at the sound booth. Young Sir Jim did a pretty good job; the crowd seemed fairly appreciative. It was hard not to think that this was the biggest crowd they’d played for, and it was clearly a pleasure for them. Personally, I thought they didn’t suck: the lyrics made me cringe quite a bit, but the vocals often made up for it (actually, it’s possible that if they’d been buried a little more in the guitars, it would’ve been alright). The music was thankfully varied enough from song to song; if I’d heard the same thing over and over, as I feared at the beginning of the set, it would have been capital a Awful. They did set off my jammy/stoner radar, though, which always gives me the mixed feelings of “ayy, not so much my thing” and “aww, this reminds me of college…”
So by this time, despite still wanting to go back home and wondering how I would make it through the next whatever it would be, 3 hours, with only one or two beers left in my Still Driveable quota, I had the sneaking suspicion I should be sticking around for the rest of the bands. The crowd was thick, not-overly-hip, not all 18-22 years old, and I’d seen a couple of familiar and friendly faces from The Scene, as I know it, which is mostly from high school and very little.
J and I retired to the upstairs, if only because we’d both not been to the Ottobar in “awhile”/”forever” depending on who you asked. They’d managed to keep the clique pocket over by the DJ area, where tonight instead of BBCers or soul-night goodfooters like I remembered from the early Aughts there was a clutch of people who appeared to be having some sort of Boogie Nights/Divine tribute night. Mind you, this is my ascertation by trying not to stare, so take it how you will.
[Twelve hours later, I continue writing:]
So after partaking of another beer and some heretofore at the Ottobar unseen snack plates, we felt the bass through the floor and headed back downstairs. As we’re descending the skinny staircase, I hear, I swear, the theme to Top Gun. That huge ringing guitar line, fully orchestrated. This, apparently, was Egg Babies Orchestra. We’d not only stumbled upon a J. Roddy show, or an Egg Babies Orchestra show, but Egg Babies Orchestra’s second annual Movie Show. By the time I left my beer by the front door, went out the front door, came in the back door, and pushed my way up to–I just want my beer, I swear–the front, the sheet hanging behind the band was filled with the sweaty, hunky visages of Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards playing volleyball, and the band–two or three guitarists, bass, keyboards, xylophone, vocals vocals vocals, and drums by Mr. Anders (also of Gary B. and the Notions).

I went around the building to the upper/back area again where I met up with J and we watched Egg Babies cruise through “Xanadu,” “A Quick One,” “The Never Ending Story,” the theme from St. Elmo’s Fire, “UHF,” and so on and so forth. Staggeringly delightful. My only regret is that the sound doesn’t really translate to the top bar area, but there were enough people down there I felt the need to reserve energy for the last band.

And that need turned out to be accurate. In between Egg Babies and J. Roddy Walston & the Business, I ran into someone I’ve mostly known through shows since high school, and I mentioned that I hadn’t seen J. Roddy before. “Really?” he said, seeming kind of surprised, “You’re in for a treat.” It was quite an understatement.
I’ve read enough in the last two days of the few paragraphs floating around the internet about J. Roddy Walston & the Business that I won’t belabor too long to replicate that feeling I had at 2:30am Saturday night through words.
But I said goddamn!
I both said goddamn! and said I said goddamn!
J. Roddy & the Business beat you up, shake you around, hammer it around, stomp all over it, rock you, and roll you. He plays piano like a hungry kid with his utensils pounding on the table, a hungry kid who is also trying to fuck the shit out of something under the table. Okay, it’s there, it’s hard not to see it, but I’d say it’s better described as a maniacal lurching around, probably the only way to really let it all out while still playing piano (I’m guessing; I’m mediocre guitar player, a piano player not at all). He also romps it up on guitar, for Saturday’s set maybe a little less than half the time. Meanwhile, the Business are there, matching every single physically-rocking ante Mr. Walston throws in the pot, and upping them a fair amount, too. I had one of those moments I love at shows, where you see certain people milling about the crowd all night long, and then they end up onstage at the end of the night and totally blow your perceptions of them. There was a guy who walked by me during Egg Babies’ “UHF” rendition that made me think, “And there goes Weird Al himself–or at least the new, non-fro’d version of him.” Now I’m pretty damn sure he was the bassist for the Business, who whipped his long curly hair about and threw himself around and screamed his fucking lungs out like he wanted to show My Morning Jacket a thing or two.
We’d perched outselves on the mezzanine, I guess I felt like an outsider for not having seen them before, so I wanted to let the floor go to those who seriously wanted to party. Plus, hell, the mezzanine is fine place to watch the show.
So, yeah. Unbelievable. Best new band I’ve seen or heard in a long time. Had some thoughts along the lines of “won’t be surprised if that’s the last time I see them in a venue that small” and “they’re gonna get much, much bigger, if there’s any justice in this world.” Today I read something about there being trouble translating the live energy to record for awhile, though I think they said that was solved on last year’s Hail Mega Boys. All I know is today I looked in my wallet and was like, “20 dollars, what the hell are you still doing in there? Why didn’t I trade some of you for that J. Roddy CD? Why on earth did I think a rad t-shirt was enough?”

When not even all was said and done, I ended up getting at least one or two more beers than I should’ve to drive home. I said, wait, fuckit, this is badass, my foot is stomping relentlessly, no, my whole leg is stomping like crazy, I’m headbanging…keep ‘em coming, I’m walking home.
(In the end e came and got me and J, so big thanks to her!)

PS: For those Gary B. & the Notions fans out there (oh, wait, e, I already told you this…), I talked to the drummer for a bit after the show, and while I’ll let Gary and the band divulge their releases and news when they want, I’ll say that he quelled my fears that the band was fading away. They’re just working and waiting.

a little lesson in songology

“LIFE IS ATTACKING ME!” I FAUX-complained. I picked up the magnet and free DVD coupon that had dive-bombed me from the refrigerator off the floor.
“Life is a Highway?” e said.
I leaned against the door of the fridge, realizing something.
“Does he–
Is he saying, “I wanna ride it all night long?”
“Yeah, he is.”
I thought and/or said to myself that I’d never realized that, despite having played the song in front of an audience, and therefore rehearsed it many times.
“That’s actually kind of hard to sexualize,” I said. This was a turnaround from two seconds before, when I was shocked at that phrase appearing in that song.

I explained.
“First of all,” I said to e as she sat on the red pommel horse chair, “You can’t really ‘ride’ a highway.’
“Secondly, if you were to ride a highway, you couldn’t really ‘ride’ it like you would if you were doing that sort of thing having sex with someone.”
The ice in our glasses melted, waiting for whiskey and vodka. e started to chortle.
“Thirdly, I don’t think he wants to have sex with life.”