The Big Green House

Goofy Videos for Good Songs

Why yes, I am stunningly lazy. You’re just now noticing?

White Denim – “Let’s Talk About It”

Boris – “Statement”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”

The Downfall of Indie Rock – UK Version

Does The World Need Another Indie Band? (Answer: not really, no.) A nice little piece from the Independent, even if the guy does champion Fleet Foxes and Kings of Leon. I guarantee that I will be lifting the term “landfill indie” for my own use.

Also: NEWSFLASH! NOEL GALLAGHER HAS HIS HEAD UP HIS ASS, WHILE SLATE MUSIC WRITERS MEAN WELL BUT JUST CAN’T SEEM TO GET IT TOGETHER! IN OTHER NEWS, SUN RISES IN EAST – EXPERTS PREDICT WESTERLY SETTING SOMETIME THIS EVENING!

SP20 pictures

As promised, pix are here. Nothin' special, really, but it's nice to have show photos not come out all wiggly for once. I think Science Girl has a couple she'll be posting later.

Sub Pop at 20: Selling Loser T-Shirts to a New Generation of Kids (Who Probably Don't Get the Reference), or Sunday in the Park with Jonathan and Bruce

As you've no doubt already been beaten over the head with multiple times, Sub Pop celebrated their twentieth anniversary with a music festival last weekend. Science Girl and I were there for the second day – the first day having been mostly loaded with the sort of twee beardling stuff the label specializes in these days.

Before I jump into a quick rundown of the show, I'd like to take a moment and acknowledge the great job done by the King County Parks Department, King County Sherriff's Department, and, um, whoever ran the show. Outdoor shows can be a pain in the ass, to say the very least, so I was very pleasantly surprised by how well this thing came off. Security was present but relaxed, alcohol sales were sane (IDs checked and wristbands given, and after that if you wanted to walk around with your $6 beer, you could do so – drinking was not confined to the usual feed pen/"beer garden"), and the grounds were patrolled regularly by Parks Dept. employees picking up trash and recyclables. The switchover from one stage to the next was fairly seamless, the sound was amazingly good, and the food was really tasty (pulled pork sandwich, red beans & rice, and some of the best greens I've ever had). A tip of the Big Green House cap (available at the merch table) to all involved.

We showed up a little late – hey, it was Sunday, which is sleep-in day in our house – so we missed the first couple of bands. The somewhat somnolent Grand Archive was playing as we arrived. They weren't as dire as I'd thought they'd be, which actually brings up another point I wanted to make: although there were a number of bands playing the show that I really wasn't all that interested in, I'm happy to report that none of them (the aforementioned Grand Archive, Foals, No Age, Red Red Meat, and Beachwood Sparks) outright sucked. This may seem to be damning them with faint praise, and I guess it is in a way, but mostly I'm just expressing relief. There really isn't anywhere to hide from bad sounds at Marymoor Park, so it is indeed fortunate that we never felt the need to do so.

Why I love the Internerd, volume 29,076,287,697

I’m currently working on a longer piece (in the few spare moments I get these days). In the meantime, you should be heading over to the truly indispensible TWILIGHTZONE! and stocking up on some first-class out-of-print goodness. R&B from when it still really meant Rhythm & Blues? It’s there. Soul from back in the day? They’ve got that too. Howzabout some Western Swing and Country Boogie? Knock yourself out. Plus Surf, Garage, and a lot of other unclassifiable stuff. As the kids say, big ups to Ryp and Gyro1966. Go check 'em out.

Fleet Foxes - Cure For Insomnia or Carriers of Narcolepsy?

In a recent conversation regarding the band Fleet Foxes, an acquaintance of mine used the term “Gentle Rock” to describe the band’s sound.

“Gentle Rock”.

Now, I’m reasonably certain that said acquaintance wasn’t in a coma at the time, given that we were conversing online, but I can’t guarantee that he hadn’t suffered some sort of debilitating brain injury. He lives in New Hampshire now, and I’m told the winters there can drive the sanest individual ‘round the proverbial bend. Perhaps he’d gotten carbon monoxide poisoning from a poorly ventilated fireplace, or maybe taken an icicle through the temporal lobe.

Given the current popularity of Fleet Foxes, though, it’s entirely possible that none of this had taken place. We have fairly divergent tastes in music, after all, and I would be hard pressed to think of a new band that I hated so completely and so fiercely before the first song of theirs I’d heard had played all the way through. “Mykonos” is a pastiche of the very worst sort of squishy-soft pablum that gave the phrase “music from the 70s” the low-tide-in-high-summer stench it carried for so long.

I ask you, in all sincerity: does the world really need another Crosby, Stills and Nash? Especially one without a Neil Young to swoop in and add something interesting to the sonic oatmeal? Because it’s all there – the squealy hamster-torture harmonies, the semi-angsty interpersonal-love-affair-gone-sour lyrics, the glacial timing, the “oh my god will it never fucking end”-ness of the originals. Is Young America truly so sleep-deprived that a snore-fest like this seems like a good time?

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a really well-done, well-crafted piece of work. So, too, is Sominex. Neither one is a fun night out.

Embracing My Inner Melonhead

I’ve had this song stuck in my head for something like a month now, and it’s showing no signs of going away. Now I share the joy with you.

Yeah, the video is a little on the cheesy side, but you’ve got to remember that it’s a product of its time. (I’m pretty sure it’s lip-synched, too; I have a bootleg from that period, and the song doesn't fade like that live. Having seen Mr. Melonball on that particular tour, I will say that it matches up pretty well with my memory of what the show was like.) Full disclosure: if I could do those James Brown splits, you can bet your ass I’d be doing them at every opportunity.

I love the way the song sounds. The production is fairly light-handed (for being from the 80s), and the interplay of the fiddle and accordion knocks me out every time. It’s that little riff that’s been buzzing around my skull all this time. And hey, let’s give it up for the fierce background singers – especially the one stage left, with the maracas.

Usually Melonhead’s songs fall down in the lyric department. Dude wrote some really good rock & roll records, but the words weren’t always there. In this particular case, though, I think he did alright. It’s difficult to do the “rocker sliding into adulthood” thing well – there are a couple of other attempts on the same album, The Lonesome Jubilee, that plow the same field and only turn up stones and bad lines:“That’s when a smoke was a smoke / and groovin’ was groovin’ / and dancin’ meant everything / We were young and we were improvin’”, from “Cherry Bomb”, for example. Not bad enough? How about “She had a dream / And boy it was a good one / So she chased after her dream / With much desire” from “Paper In Fire”? They’re both decent-sounding songs, but the lyrics just ain’t getting’ it done.

With “Check It Out”, though, I think ol’ John cut a little closer to the bone. Or maybe it’s just that I’m twenty years older now and it resonates now in a way it didn’t then. I’m officially older than dirt now, so I dunno.

Anyway, there it is.

Hey Ho, Let's Go!

The Ramones, San Francisco City Hall Plaza, 6/8/79

I’m pretty sure that this show was broadcast on KSAN (more on which later). The sound of the recording is pretty good (which would also lend some credence to the KSAN broadcast theory), and Joey gives the station a shout-out at one point (could be because of a simulcast, or it could be due to the fact that KSAN was one of the few stations in the bay area playing The Ramones at the time). Dee Dee’s backing vocals get a little lost in the mix, but his bass is right there (most of the time), as are the all-important “1-2-3-4”s (and the occasional “eine-zwei-drei-vier” – Dee Dee spent part of his time growing up in Germany). The performance is just what you’d expect from The Ramones – tight, fast and loud. Joey has a little fun, stretching out a few syllables (“I’ve gone mental” becomes “I’ve gone may-un-til” at one point), Johnny does his Amazing Human Buzzsaw act, Marky is a metronome, and Dee Dee is, uh, Dee Dee. (For more –much more – on the phenomenon that was The Ramones, go here. Make some coffee first, though.)

I don’t know how much more I really say about the show. I’m not saying that one Ramones show is like any other Ramones show… well, yeah, I am. Sorta. I saw them something like five or six times over the years, and while it was always a good time, it was also one that didn’t usually hold much in the way of surprises. It’s not like they ever stretched out and did the jazz odyssey version of “Blitzkrieg Bop”, y’know. (For which we should all be grateful.) It’s a good record of their set at the time, but I can’t say it’s really all that different from any other live recording of theirs that I’ve heard. If you’re at all interested in the band, you should probably have at least one of their live sets in your collection. You could probably do worse than this one.

A boot up the arse

Oh, hey. Is this thing still on?

Um…

Well, let’s try to catch up, shall we? What have I been up to? The usual: insomnia, melancholia, dyspepsia, apnea. That sort of thing. Oh, I also got new glasses, which means that I can read for fun again. So that’s a plus.

Mostly, though, I’ve been listening to bootlegs. Since there’s generation of cute l’il lemmings sleepwalking over the precipice of indierock in a seemingly non-stop narcoleptic frenzy of twee crayola doodlings and klDSHfkuhaifhrpRP Pahfoannafzobv aporagjas-t AESFOyuYURFAFYGp0WOFEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEE

Wha?

Oh, sorry; I seem to have dozed off there for a moment. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the fact that “the kids”, as we used to refer to the under-thirties, have now become the boring old farts we’d always accused our elders of being. A temporary glitch in the March of Progress, I’m sure, but it doesn’t leave much for the discerning ear to amuse itself with.

Fortunately, though, there’s been a quasi-new development in the world of music blogs – namely, the bootleg blog. (I suppose we could shorten that to “bootblogs”, but that’s just a little too cutesy to use and not have to check the blood sugar levels.)

Now, I know that some of you are even now recoiling in terror at the idea of half-assed audience recordings of fifth-rate arena-rockers. As well you might. That being said, I’m here to assuage your fears, although I’m drawing the line at hand-holding. Most of what I’ve found has been of a decent enough quality that it doesn’t offend the delicate sensibility one develops listening to studio-only recordings, and a lot of it sounds really quite good. Plus, there’s no money changing hands, so the slightly creepy sense I used to get buying boots of unknown provenance and knowing that not a penny would be seen by the artist who actually, y’know, wrote and performed the music is no longer a problem.

And it’s not just live tapes, either. The really exciting stuff, for me, anyway, is the demos and outtakes I’ve been able to find. It’s truly fascinating (in a fairly geeky fanboy way, I suppose) to hear the changes an artist will put a song through before finding the right approach. The most striking example of that would be the outtakes from Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks. The demo for “Tangled Up In Blue”, for example has a somewhat tentative, melancholy feel to it, whereas the released version is full of confident vigor.

And yadda yadda. What’s all this got to do with anything? Well, my plan, for the moment, is to maybe take a closer look at some of these boots I’ve found here and there. Since new music has sorta gotten stinky lately, why not? I’ll still weigh in with new stuff that passes the boredom test, of course. Ideally we’d have a “boot of the week”, but it’s much more likely that it’ll be the “boot of the fortnight”. Possibly even “boot of the month”, although I really do want to write more frequently. I can feel my brain going all soft from the lack of use. It’s not a good feeling.

So look for something maybe by the end of the week, unless I surprise myself and finish it sooner rather than later. Hey, it could happen.

In the meantime, have a look at some of the cool places I’ve been gleaning all these recordings from. (And if anybody follows these links back: I will make every attempt to identify where I picked up whatever recording I’m writing about, and to link back to that particular post when possible. I’m not trying to take credit for anybody else’s work.) This is by no means an exhaustive list – just a few off the top of my head.

Nargo the Bort's Deviant Subculture
Nargo Too
The Ultimate Bootleg Experience
Captain's Dead
rbally

Content to come