Tried and True Attention-Getting Tactics

Amoeba Music

Sometimes when you go to the Amoeba in Berkeley, there will be stacks of old records propped up against the wall outside. What's happened is that some aging couple whose kids have moved out and left all their junk for their parents to deal with will decide it's time to make some space up in the attic. So they haul those bulky LPs that are taking up so much god damned room upstairs over to the store to cash in. Once inside, the middle-aged-to-elderly spring cleaners find that Amoeba's snobbish buyers will refuse to take about 80% of their collection for reasons ranging from slight scratches to general musical shittiness. The oldsters don't have the time nor Web savvy to list the music on eBay, so instead of lugging heavy boxes back home, they stealthily drop the cargo off outside, hoping there are no litter cops watching.

Zero-dollar records can provide real excitement for nerdy collectors like myself. The stuff outside Amoeba is more often than not moldy Montavani and "Up With People" crap that it turns out you literally wouldn't take if it was just sitting there for free on the sidewalk. But sometimes you'll find a genuine mother lode.

Once, when I had a friend in town from southern California, we went to Amoeba and there were dozens of cool old hip-hop records lining the sidewalk like so much rappy gold. Eric B & Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, Big Daddy Kane ... classic shit for sure. We grabbed 'em all up and didn't even go inside the store that day. There was no need to - we had come up on a pile of free music that we would have gladly paid good money for.

My friend told me I was lucky to live in the Bay Area. He said you'd never find an original pressing of MC Shan's first album lying on the ground in Tustin. I agreed that I had it pretty good.

Then, a fortyish man with long, matted gray hair approached on a giant tricycle that towed a flatbed with five young gutterpunks onboard. The elder statesman of the stoned clown troupe slowed his roll, gave my friend and I a once-over, and cracked wise about us looking like we were on our way to the Gap to buy new chinos. It was then that I remembered that for every upside about living in a creative and free-spirited community, there's a patchouli-reeking downer.

===


The late, great Minnie Riperton

Right this very minute, I'm rocking this Rotary Connection record I found for free outside of Amoeba about two years ago. For those who ain't knowin', Rotary Connection was a late '60s/early '70s psychedelic choral pop project that featured the awesome five-octave vocal range of Minnie Riperton and the chamber soul production steez of Charles Stepney. It's a unique and elaborately beautiful sound. I'd love it if you joined me in enjoying the band's cover of "Ruby Tuesday."

So Maybe He's Not a Complete Douche Bag: Fred Durst has a blog. It's pretty interesting to read what he has to say, since I've never really thought of him as a guy with anything much to say at all. Which is totally unfair, now that I think about it. The guy's a marketing genius and a trendspotter extraordinaire. With Limp Bizkit, he plucked just the right pieces out of about thirty youth subcultures, packaged the whole deal up, and made a quadrillion dollars selling it all back to kids. No, he's not innovative. But he's certainly smart.

Back when Limp Bizkit actually got face time in the fickle world of music media (way back, like 18 months or so ago), you'd often read writers blaming the band for things like the fact that suburban boys are bratty shitheads (not to mention the Woodstock '99 riots). Those writers are lazy twits who lack any sense of music history or cultural context. Sure, Durst willingly allowed himself to be portrayed as an insufferable fuck in order to win an audience of immature testosteronians. But the list of other rock and roll frontmen who have been guilty of this same charge is long and illustrious. The difference with Durst is that image is essentially everything (i.e. he's good at being a jerkoff, but he's not quite a musician of the same importance as Johnny Rotten).

Now, Fred desperately wants the world to know that he's not really an asshole. Via his venture into poorly-designed online micropublishing, we see that the goateed scowl and fitted baseball cap turned backwards are just part of a facade, behind which hides a sensitive, caring everyman who loves his kids, is a fan of fine art, and reads Nietzsche.

He also listens to Sigur Ros, My Bloody Valentine, and - as evidenced by what I'm guessing was a recent Urban Outfitters t-shirt run - Sonic Youth. See pic for proof:


Fred Durst: "I like when Kim Gordon sings about the nookie."

There's definitely a clumsy, corny, new agey feel to some of the stuff he writes in his blog. But you gotta appreciate the fact that he's letting it all out there - live, direct, and unedited. And you can't hate on a dude who gets emotional when an overweight teen writes in to say how much Limp Bizkit's music means to the underdogs of the world.

Live 105 was aggressively advertising a Limp Bizkit-free playlist recently. Meanwhile, they're still playing Linkin Park every other fucking song.

===


Beastie Boys

I betcha twenty bucks that every member of Limp Bizkit owns the first Beastie Boys album. As for myself, I'm a bigger fan of their second and third records. After that, I can pretty much take it or leave it.

Here's a Peanut Butter Wolf remix of the Beasties' classic, "Shadrach." Listen to this instead of their crappy new song, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the 2 Live Jews' later work.

Buck 65 - dressed quite nicely for the occasion

I'm syndicating my own "content" to myself, Part 1: I wrote a slightly different version of this verbose-ass blurb about Buck 65's "Sore" for a community music blog I sometimes contribute to. When I decided to post the mp3 here, I said "Fuck it, I'mma just steal my write-up from that other site and shit." Basically because I have nothing more to say about the song other than:

Although Buck's "ragged old man" routine can be funny, it often comes off feeling more like a Tom Waits rip-off than a Tom Waits homage. "Sore" succeeds because it exchanges the overly-cute oddball beat poetry that Buck sometimes indugles with the sincere sad song of the wayfaring nomad / poor white trucker. Here, Buck's in a one horse town with a broken down pick-up, left to set up shop in a shoddy motel and reflect on his life. The lyrics are country gold all rapped up pretty: "I'm drawn to familiar environments and dangers / I look in my photo albums and all I see is strangers / What is my problem?" Awesome stuff.

I'm a sucker for good desolation-hop and "Sore" fits the bill perfectly.

===


Terry Callier

I'm syndicating my own "content" to myself, Part 2: Same deal with this somewhat-less masturbatory write-up on Terry Callier's "Spin, Spin, Spin."

This is a graceful and romantic folk song which Callier sings with a smirk - almost as if he's in on a secret joke. His guitar phrasing is pitch perfect and his voice is rich and subtle. HP Lovecraft covered this tune as a string-heavy psych-lite track on "HP Lovecraft II," but I prefer this original rendition's low-key and unpretentious acoustic charm.

DJ Spooky, most likely ruminating on serious subjects of academic importance

Not coming in pocket paperback for leisure-time beach readin' anytime soon: DJ Spooky has a new book out about digital art called "Rhythm Science." Spooky, who never met a multisyllabic word he didn't like, unsurprisingly chose the smarties over at the MIT Press to be his pals in publishing. "Rhythm Science" examines the Web as a massive palette of images and sounds that artists can tweak and customize to make their own unique works out of. The book's a pretty dense read - but it's also an articulate look at how the creative methods DJs have used for years are now being co-opted by filmmakers, designers, writers, etc.

If you're so inclined, I wrote a supershort review of the book for Wired. It's the second-to-last blurb on the page.

===



Jesus God, Nancy Sinatra was smokin' hot in her day.

I'm in a CD club with a bunch of my friends. We're each assigned a month to make a hot-ass mix and burn copies for everyone else in the crew, in the hopes of turning each other on to new and exciting music. The club's been around for about a year and a half and there hasn't been a bad mix yet, but this past February's disc was a real fave - chiefly because it introduced me to the weird wonderfulness that is Lee Hazelwood. Like Jacques Brel, Hazelwood is a name I always knew (mostly from seeing his producer credit on Nancy Sinatra albums), but never paid much attention to. That all changed when I heard "Some Velvet Morning," a duet between Lee and Nancy that absolutely could not be more up my alley. Overwrought (in a good way) baroque arrangements meet cryptic/kinda creepy lyrics? Um, I'll take it!

Here's a Nancy/Lee track that's not quite as ridiculously great as "Some Velvet Morning," but it's from the same album and is pretty awesome in it's own way. It's called "Lady Bird."

"I swear on the wet head of my first case of gonorrhea." An Ol' Dirty Bastard lyric? Nope, that's Jacques Brel!


Jacques Brel

I don't speak a lick of the Gallic tongue, so although I've known a bit about Brel for a few years, I always kind of thought he was just a French Frank Sinatra or something. That's until about a year ago, when I was introduced to the sheer genius of Brel's words through Scott Walker's first three solo albums - each of which contains numerous Brel songs translated into English by Mort Shuman (the songwriter behind oldies staples like "Save the Last Dance For Me" and "Teenager in Love").

Shuman was crazy for Brel. Not long after he first became familiar with Brel's work in the mid-'60s, he moved to France to work with the legendary crooner. The result was an off-Broadway musical called "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris," which used English reworkings of 30-plus Brel classics.

Many of those translations found their way on to Scott Walker albums as well. "Next" is one of the best of the bunch. It's hilarious and devastating and Walker absolutely nails the character - a soldier lamenting his loss of innocence (the sexy kind) - with a perfect mix of sneer and naivety.

===


Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, feeling blue per usual

I reviewed "One Jug of Wine, Two Vessels" - a six-song collaboration between Bright Eyes and Neva Dinova - for RollingStone.com. It's the seventh write-up from the top on this page. Either the editor or some intern involved in formatting copy for the Web wrecked up the name of the label, because like Shaggy said - "It wasn't me." The true and correct name of the label that released the CD (let's call it BE/ND - "OJoW, TV" for short) is Crank! A Record Company.

But it was definitely the editor who snipped "fucking" from the top-notch phrase "Oberst can sometimes come off as the lyrical Steven Spielberg -- pummeling you with sad scenes until you break down and cry your fucking eyes out." Can't blame the intern for that bit of revision. I guess it was a totally superfluous swear in the context of a piddling little 150-word record review, but it felt real right when I was getting my scribe on.

I haven't listened to BE/ND - "OJoW, TV" since I wrote the review, and re-reading it now makes me remember that I liked the disc a lot and that I should plop it back into rotation. Consider it done.

The Jim Yoshii Pile-Up

Spiggity spellcheck yourself: Pitchfork gave the MMC side of the new Jim Yoshii Pile-Up / Meanest Man Contest split 7inch a pretty good review the other day. I'm assuming the part of the phrase "chill Anticon-meets-Madrid shuffle" that makes very little sense was written as "Madlib," and got spellchecked into meaninglessness. Fucking computers.

Just brushing off the JYPU song like that is quite sucky, if you ask me. JYPU is a great band which makes wonderful and inventive music, and "Deservedly So" (JYPU's contribution to said split 7inch) is a blazing-hot scorcher on par with the group's best album tracks. Download it here and check it out for yourself.

===

I got the first album by the Association ("And Then...Along Comes the Association") at the Out of the Closet thrift store in Berkeley the other day. Only one dollar and they didn't even charge tax - that's a super value, y'all. The record is awesome - it's got "Cherish," "Along Comes Mary," and a bunch of other terrific overproduced (by Curt "Mo' Strings" Boettcher") melodic radness. Here's a picture of my roommate holding it, and looking damn good doing it:


My roommate, Sepi - a real nice guy

Now, I've driven by Out of the Closet stores dozens of times and I've even been inside once or twice, but somehow it never occurred to me that not only is the store called Out of the Closet, but it's also drenched in pink and baby blue paint. As I was paying for my slice of sunshine pop, it hit me:

"Something real queer about all this," I said, though not out loud.

So I asked the woman ringing me up. Turns out the company is a subsidiary of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and is a major source of funding for HIV research. Some of the stores even offer free testing inside. Cool shit.

Oh yeah - first post, fuckers.