Grant Hart

Though I hesitate to big foot my own post, I have to here. It is Friday, when I usually try to say something about music - and god damn it - there's another obituary to write about. Two actually, though one in front of the mics and one behind....

Grant Hart is dead. He was 56. He had cancer. It's still too soon. I've written about Husker Du - it's probably true that I've listened to them less, thought about them less, than the other bands I loved in the mid-80s - but that is praising with very faint damns, since I go back to all those groups a lot. Replacements and Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers and Feelies and REM - and Husker Du. I could praise them with faint damn by saying they were the third best band out of Minneapolis in the 80s - you know, after Prince and the Replacements.

That's trivia, I guess. I sure liked Husker Du. I started buying their records when they came out; a friend of mine who knew them gave me a tape of a bunch of their early stuff, singles, maybe, pus Metal Circus, and I gave that, along with tapes of some of their newer records, to another friend, and we wore them out (we wore out a lot of tapes), driving around the South Shore. (That reminds me - he bought New Day Rising on his own, maybe because I hadn't bought it yet...) So yeah.

I have to admit as well, I always liked Hart more than Mould. He was a better singer, and he had a better way with melodies - and, I think, usually a better way with words, though both of them seemed to be slipping by the end... Mould talked about how much he loved the Beatles, but Hart's songs were the ones that sounded like the Beatles - at least like the early, direct, Beatles impersonators, like Badfinger and ELO. (Not coincidentally, the guy who kept their tapes in his car was a huge ELO fan; and I have always adored Badfinger. Everyone loves the Beatles, obviously.) So - all right. A sad day.

The other obituary is for Paul Hamann - who, following his father Ken Hamann, was a major studio force for bands like Pere Ubu - and thus, another rather important person in my world.

So: here's Hart solo, singing So Far From Heaven, from his recent Paradise Lost album:



And here he is with Husker Du in full flight, doing Books About UFOs:



And Hart solo, singing one of those magnificent ballads from Candy Apple Gray:



And here is a Pere Ubu video for We Have the Technology, produced by produced by Paul Hamann:

We Are Only Strangers

Another week gone - easy to despair, with our Senate bravely shoving a bill through to get rid of Obamacare, to finance tax cuts for the rich from the blood and treasure of everyone else... Transparent theft, open repudiation of campaign promises even Donald Trump made (though who didn't know he was lying through his teeth?) I despair. The Republicans seem determined to extract every penny from the country before it burns down that they can get - the Democrats - somehow manage to end up seeming to be more concerned with sup[pressing the wrongthink on their side than in stopping the GOP. Maybe that's a symptom of reading Twitter, where people seem to spend all their time mocking their enemies, and shivving whoever is standing just to your right or left.... I suppose conservatives do that as well, but they still seem to somehow keep the votes in line.

There is only so much of that we need. Instead, let's talk music. First, June 22 marked the 40th anniversary of Peter Laughner's death (19771) - my opinions of Pere Ubu are no secret, and though their legacy came mostly after Laughner left, he was certainly instrumental in their sound. And I like Rocket From the Tombs almost as much - and in fact, like Laughner's work, separate from Thomas and company, almost as much. He was different from Thomas - and different from Cheetah Chrome and Stiv Bators, as well, though he overlapped with them all. RFFT mixed up the Velvets, the Stooges, Captain Beefheart and Cleveland - Pere Ubu dialed up the Beefheart (so to speak), Dead Boys the Stooges - Laughner doubled down on Lou Reed, and used that as a departing point to bring in more folk, more mainstream rock - blues, Richard Thompson, The Stones. If he'd lived (if he hadn't killed himself on booze and speed at 25), he might have been really big - maybe not record selling big, but reputation big. He wrote great songs, he was a very good guitar player, he was a passable singer with a distinctive voice... He should have been somebody. Here, in any cae, is a Stones cover recorded, I believe, the day he died...



And a Peter Laughner tribute, from Wilco:



Meanwhile, on a less depressing front - I was doing some cleaning, trying to get some of my junk in order, looking at my boxes of cassettes and trying to get them down to something manageable, and I found this: Translator's second record, No Time Like Now, with the son Un-Alone on it. I had forgotten about Translator - forgot they they existed. Usually that happens rooting around YouTube - stumble on some band that sounded really cool 35 odd years ago... but sometimes, it happen in the atom world too. I wish I hadn't forgotten them - they were pretty damned good. They sound like a nice bridge between new wave and the kind of psychedelic jangle pop that filled certain radio stations in the 80s - that is to say, they sounded like a west coast version of REM, more or less contemporary... Some win, some lose, I guess... but they were good.

Here is the video for Unalone, good sound, and what looks like scenes from Twin Peaks, of all things...



And a very energetic live performance, on old videotape...



And also live, their first single, Everywhere That I'm Not. That's impossible, that's imposs...

Are We Not Men?

Happy Friday. My band of the month post this month is pretty much pre-empted by the two long film posts - but the last one was half a music post anyway, so here's the other half.

The Criterion edition of Island of Lost Souls has a very nice interview with Gerry Casales and Mark Mothersbaugh, talking about the film and their experiences of it, and including a film, featuring Secret Agent Man and Jocko Homo. It's a feature worth getting the DVD for (though only part of what is on there.) It's not on the web - but I summarized it in the Island of Lost Souls post... It's good stuff.

Fortunately the Devo films are online: so here's Secret Agent Man (with some industrial ruin, masks and beast men):



And Jocko Homo - every man woman and mutant on this planet will know the truth about de-evolution!



And maybe a bit more. Here'sBruce Conner's film for Mongoloid:



And a live bonus version of Mongoloid:



As for Pere Ubu: here's a live cut of Heart of Darkness, with stories. Ascribing the lyrics all to Raymond Chandler - wherever they came from, the lyrics are dense with literary and film allusion, which really was how Thomas worked in the 70s. This sounds very great, though you can't get the lyrics exactly...



So here's audio only, the single version:



Folk music of the urban pioneer movement: two parts of an interview with Thomas, talking about the band - and Cleveland, in terms that get to the congruence with Island of Lost Souls - the decay and downfall of the rust belt: at what point did those Aztec and Mayan cities become ruins? "Witnessing the death of a city, moving to ruins" - "this is the unloved thing"...

Part 1:



Part 2: and Utopia - rock music as utopia lost - "too stubborn to change our ideas and too stupid to quit":

August Friday Fun

Happy Friday! Happy August! An eventful week - the Local 9 have remade their roster, trading their best two started - Jon Lester and John Lackey, as well as a bunch of other players of varying value (Andrew Miller, Stephen Drew, Felix Dubront, Jake Peavy, last week) for all sorts of things. Actual major leaguers! Yoenis Cespedes comes from the A's - nice right handed power hitting outfielder; Joe Kelly and Allen Craig from the Cardinals - a promising right handed pitcher, a decent hitter; the Yankees gave us a long time scrub, Kelly Johnson, for Drew - whatever Drew is. The rest are prospects. All told - an interesting day. Probably not quite up to 2012's massive salary dump (which remains one of the steals of the century, whether the 2 starters they got out of the deal stick or not - though De La Rosa has pitched pretty well, and Webster has promise) - and it doesn't have the thrill of 2008, when the Sox traded Brandon Moss (currently leading the A's to the post-season) for Jason Bay (throwing in Manny Ramirez to make the numbers work, right?) - there haven't been many thrills of any sort with this Sox team. But you don't see that many major leaguers moving around these days - between the sox and the Tigers, getting David Price in a complicated trade that apparently involved everyone in the league except the red sox, but again - with plenty of major leaguers moving - it was a lively day. Fun stuff. Might make the Sox worth watching, out of curiosity at least. They do have enough young players to leave one more optimistic than a last place team ought to make you feel. The Bogaerts, Bradley, Betts, Holt contingent, the De La Rosas, Websters, Workmans - and here comes Renaudo! where's Henry Owens? - make this year easier to take. They have not all been up to snuff this year, but they are all young - a few of them ought to be involved in this team's success for a while to come. Keep the big league team running and things could get back to the good next year after all...

Okay - that's that. Historically - August 1 is the day the German's declared war on the Russians in 1914 - World War I was already going by then - Austria attacked Serbia on July 28 - but this is probably the point of no return. Once Germany and Russia started fighting, it was all going to come apart - France was committed to help Russia; Germany's plans committed her to attacking France before they attacked Russia, so if they were going to start fighting one, they would have to fight both - so off it went. The next month or so would be a bloodbath, as bad as any part of the war (and all of the war was a bloodbath.) So there is that.

Well - I don't have any way to connect those two bits to music, so thank god for randomization!

1. The Kills - Wild Charms
2. Pere Ubu - Thoughts that Go By Steam
3. Heroin - Meaning Less
4. 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me
5. Pere Ubu - Muddy Waters (who can complain about 2 Pere Ubu songs in 10? not me!)
6. Pere Ubu - Ice Cream Truck (this might be a bit much - iTunes is messing with me.)
7. Arcade Fire - Here Comes the Night II
8. Mission of Burma - What We Really Were
9. Volcano Suns - Animals (all right - now I know iTunes is messing with me.)
10. Wire - The Other Window

Video? All that Pere Ubu (though all of it fairly obscure) demands a response: so here's Pere Ubu live in San Diego, a full set.



And - howsabout - some Boston rock? same deal - here's a full Volcano Suns performance from 1991:



Okay - we need at least one video people can watch in one sitting: Roky and company sound right - 13th Floor Elevators:

Punk, Ubu Style

Friday again, more music - and I have to follow up on last week. Actually - go backwards from last week - from Pere Ubu, to Rocket From the Tombs, mostly. A couple weeks ago, I went to see a kid I know who plays in a band - high school kids, they're a punk band, hammering away at their stuff, pretty good at what they do - though it sometimes gets very disconcerting watching them. Teenagers playing a 40 year old type of music, their parents pogoing and moshing along.... it is all very strange, given the claims of punk, then and now, to rebellion - to being a rejection of the past. All the talk back then about rejecting the worn out mainstream rock and roll - nonsense in the 70s, of course, but extremely bizarre now. It's another illustration of my theory that rock stopped in the mid-80s (say) - this bunch of kids (the first couple bands we saw) are playing their parents' music - without any anxiety about it at all. Which is fine with me - though I wish if they were going to play oldies, they'd play better oldies. I kept wishing they'd play Sonic Reducer.

Because before punk even existed, David Thomas and company pretty much summed it up and moved along, a lot of it in two songs: Sonic Reducer, Final Solution. They are very good - and very smart, the way they play their teenaged angst both for real and for a joke, and as something that's already old hat in 1974. Since it was old hat in 1974. They're so smart - their irony, their mix of wild hyperbole and solipsism (which is pretty close to the adolescent condition: hyperbole and solipsism), their distance and knowingness, playing alongside the sense that, at some level, he really means it - or meant it, when he was younger. Something like that. The way those songs embrace the fact that there is nothing new in their teenaged blustering, that it has always been thus for the Youth of Today, and that it has been pretty much exactly thus since rock and roll became the sound of Youth of Today... while at the same time, getting across the point that the reason teenagers keep repeating the same kinds of things is that this is what it feels like to be a teenager - ready to explode and being stomped down at the same time - "they all just pass me by, but I'm not just anyone..." And that became something like the point of an awful lot of punk rock, ever since - and it's all there, more self-aware than it would be again, in 1974. That self-awareness helps, too - it doesn't seem ridiculous to me for 60 year olds to play those songs - they were never a direct expression of teenaged angst - they were always about it, and always in on the joke, and written in a way you could be in on the joke when you are 50, partly because they make you remember just what it felt like to be 15. Always balanced between the real thing and making fun of it - balance of those classic rock riffs and the sense of their ridiculousness, which plays out in the straighahead parts of the songs and the ironic parts and the weird parts. They are nostalgic and mocking, modern and old; they rock out and deconstruct rock. They are fascinating.

It's interesting that Pere Ubu, especially, came up with some songs that seem a bit more direct in their angst. Heart of Darkness and My Dark Ages especially - they seem like a more adult kind of angst, with their literary and film references, their sense of restlessness and solitude, and a kind of loneliness that doesn't feel like it is going to go away any time soon. And musically, they are moving past the standard rock and roll templates - with their drones and minimalism and Ravenstine taking a bigger part. I recognized myself in those songs, far more than the others (especially when I first started listening to them) - I was never a particularly angtsy teenager in the usual sense, but I was a lonely and over analytical young adult. And shoot - there are days, you get in a certain mood, and everything I see seems so deformed - none of the faces fit a human form... you get that....

So - I wish those kids would cover RFTT. Pere Ubu if they want, but hey - they're just a punk band. Rocket is fine. Sonic Reducer is a better punk song than anything since, and not really done to death - it's in there with a couple others early punk songs - Final Solution, Suspect Device - that just never get old.

Though on the subject of RFTT and angst - the Peter Laughner songs are a bit of a different matter. Ain’t it Fun - jesus christ. That’s murder. You get contempt, self-contempt, despair, laid out like a patient on an operating table. In some ways it has distance, but it's almost the inverse of the Thomas songs: something that sounds like it's standing outside the angst, but is all of it exactly accurate. I mean - as far as I can tell that song is pretty much a straight recitation of Peter Laughner's sins. Right up to knowing you're going to die young. It has bite. (And every time I listen to it, I remember a remark someone made about the original RFTT recording - the way in the middle, Laughner takes a guitar solo - and it's completely drowned out by Cheetah, who's amp is closer to the mic.... Poor Pete - he was extraordinarily talented, and drank himself to death at 24, quite knowingly, guessing from Ain't It Fun.)

Videos - latter day Rocket from the Tombs:



Cheetah singing Ain't It Fun:



And maybe Joey Ramone playing Sonic Reducer, with Cheetah Chrome on guitar:



And finally - Living Color doing Final Solution:

Boy That Sounds Swell

After I posted last month's Feelies essay, I remembered something I should have said. It's something that contradicts the gist of that essay - or at least reminds me that most of what I posted I wrote in 1989-90. That image of the Feelies as caretakers of dream albums comes from The Good Earth, and their later records; it doesn't fit Crazy Rhythms so well. Now, back in 1989, I didn't have much doubt which I preferred - I remember talking to my boss about the Feelies, before I saw them play that year - he said he loved Crazy Rhythms; I said, that's a great record but I like The Good Earth more... I did - for all the reasons I wrote about last month. But that was 1989, this is 2014; you should take note of the balance of songs on my top 10 - 3 top 5, 4 top 10, the top cover, all from the first record. You might notice the title I gave the essay. You might well ask - what IS your favorite Feelies record, anyway? WOuld I still say The Good Earth? Actually - yeah, I might - but that would be mostly because it stands as a proxy for their live shows. That 1989 essay was written on the occasion of the 7th time I saw them play, and it is rooted mainly in their live performances - which transcend the differences among their albums, turning everything into something fast and sleek - integrating the edginess of the first record with the pastoral and rock of the later ones...

But really, in isolation, as a record, today, Crazy Rhythms would be my favorite. And it's not just a matter of preferring one record by a band to another - it's a matter of preferring a sound, an approach, maybe a tradition. (And this is about preferring one thing I love to another thing I love - a matter of ranking within my favorite things, not about things I like and don't like). It's something that changed in the 90s - in 1989, my tastes were defined by the base of classic rock, and the immediate, conscious influence mostly of the Velvet Underground (plus some country floating around). 10 years later - the ground had become classic rock plus the Velvets and punk plus jazz (and floating country) - but the band at the center was different. I start with Crazy Rhythms, then, because its aesthetic reflects that change in taste - and because it provides a direct tangible link, in the person of Andy/Anton Fier, to the cause of this change. By the end of the 20th century, Pere Ubu was The Band.

There's a fair amount of autobiography involved in how that happened. Like most things, I discovered Pere Ubu late - I heard them - heard OF them - back in 87, about the time they got back together to make The Tenement Year. I bought that record and liked it, without, maybe, overdoing it; at more or less the same time, I found a copy of Terminal Tower, their singles compilation, and that, I will say, hit hard. Even now, their singles are what they are known for, among non-obsessives at least - Heart of Darkness, Final Solution, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo - and they certainly convinced me. They weren't a radical departure, of course - those early songs grow pretty directly out of the Velvets and Stooges and such, which I was long since immersed in back then. And I was immersed in a lot of 80s bands that had certainly been listening to Pere Ubu for a while - Mission of Burma, Husker Du, Butthole Surfers all have their moments. (And the Pixies, though they might have gotten prominent a bit later.) So I took to Pere Ubu fast, and took to them hard - hard rock, literary allusions, Jimmy Doolittle, guitar solos - they had it all, and I was convinced. I found a copy of 390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo; I went to see them play (fall '88 - the people who were supposed to go with me bailed for some reasons - work, most likely, so I went alone, and had to take a cab home - spending some $50-60 on the gig - the most money I have ever spent to see a show, I think, to this day.) I listened to them obsessively for a while, and over the years associated them very strongly with the beginning of summer - something about Street Waves makes me think of the first hot day of June... maybe I should have waited to write about them...

What I didn't do at the time is buy more records. The most flattering explanation I can come up with is that the early ones were out of print - that might even be true. I seem to remember seeing a couple of them - The Modern Dance, maybe Dub Housing - as imports or rarities, wrapped in loose plastic, priced over $20 - as a poor graduate student who wanted to buy as many records as possible, that did not seem to be a good investment. And why didn't I buy Cloudland? I don't think I knew it existed - they weren't on the radio, they didn't get talked about anywhere; and I admit, I rather thought of them as a 70s band, trying to relive the past... But what I had was a good start - and between the singles and the love record, I had most of the early stuff, most of the Modern Dance - even on those old bootlegs, I could tell that was the real thing - if I could find the record, it would probably become one of my favorites; the live record was up there. (One song I didn't have was the one about boozy sailors that made the strongest impression when I saw them live - if I'd known what it was called, or what record it was on, I would have bought that.) In any case - they were one of my favorites in the late 90s...

And then came a real disruption to my musical habits. I went to New Orleans in late 1991 - and when I came back, more or less simply decided that from now on I would listen to jazz. And I did - for half the decade - obsessively - buying everything I could (I had a job; I could buy lots of records), reading about it, etc. And then - I had worked throughout he history of jazz, arriving at last at electric Miles, John McLaughlin, Bill Frisell, Sonny Sharrock, James Blood Ullmer - guitarists - and found myself drawn back into rock and roll. Specifically to Richard Thompson, since this was mostly a guitar obsession; but also - Raygun Suitcase, which came out about that time. And had about the same effect that Terminal Tower did - I listened to it obsessively... and this time, I had money, and their old records were in print - not just in print, packaged in a nice big box.... which I listened to, end to end, singles, 5 LPs, live record and fellow Cleveland bands, for the next 3-4 years.... and came to measure everything else against them.

The seeds were there in the 80s. Terminal Tower has the singles arranged in order - you can work your way into them, trace their development, trace the development of the aesthetic they represent. Call it post-punk - a style looser, more angular than punk, usually more rhythmically interesting, less consumed by its attitude. It's a style that includes Pere Ubu - Television - Joy Division - Gang of Four - Minutemen, all very dear to me; PIL, Mission of Burma, Young Marble Giants, Pylon; that first Feelies record - it leads more directly (I think) to more avant grade music - Sonic Youth and DNA (another direct link to Pere Ubu), the Butthole Surfers; or even backwards, to prog and its ilk - especially Krautrock, Captain Beefheart, Red Crayola (another direct link), Soft Machine, etc... And in Pere Ubu's singles, you can hear it coming - hear it emerging, almost like a process of stripping things away. The extra guitar player, the classic rock sound, the denser, hard rock style riffing - being dropped, bit by bit as you move from the strange noisy rock of 30 seconds Over Tokyo to the classic rock/proto-punk of Heart of Darkness and Final Solution - until they arrive, at the song that probably tipped me, more than anything, to the fact that they were different: My Dark Ages.

It's the first record they made with their classic lineup - Thomas, Herman, Krauss, Maimone, Ravenstine - and it's a song that really defined post-punk, before punk had really gotten going. Even now, it's rather shocking how bare it is - they've pared things down to something a bit beyond the basics, stripped to the bone, digging into the bone - guitar, bass, a bit of drum, and some kind of splatty synth riff, a splash of piano, all separated, with miles of space between them, with lots of empty spaces in the sound, none of it in any hurry - and Thomas coming in like a taxi dispatcher muttering into a mic... I loved Heart of Darkness, but I loved My Dark Ages almost as much, and it was something new - it was strange, it was beautiful, it was haunting and a bit scary, it evoked night in the city where the air can shine - it was great. And there was a guitar solo! (I'm a sucker for electric guitar, and for solos.) A real one, and as thrilling and radical as the song itself - those long, slow slides, the strings of single notes, the biting, acidic tone. Tom Herman’s style is remarkable - simple enough, but brilliantly controlling the tone. His solos are fantastic, absolutely ace. Punk never made much of guitar solos (though that's not fair - American punk, especially, produced a swarm of superb guitarists - Verlaine and Lloyd, Quine, D. Boon, Mould, Kurt Kirkwood), but Herman played solos, solos that didn't sound like much of anyone else - he is hugely underrated... This clip, from 1995, I think proves my point:



It's startling, even now, to notice how spare they are, and almost always have been. My Dark Ages is something of the extreme in their early days (though they certainly stripped things down even more on some of the more experimental records - Lost in Art!), but they almost always have as much space in their sound as any band. Rocket From the Tombs was not spare - two guitarists battling for space, the whole thing dense and powerful - but Pere Ubu's versions of the RFTT songs are already stripped down, cleaner, patient. They stay like that - sounds distinct (even played live) - parts related, complimentary, but not getting in the way. Instruments coming in one at a time, circling each other - maybe coming together into a neat little chorus, only to break up again, wander off, into a guitar solo, a bit of synthesizer or theremin weirdness, a found recording, or Thomas doing his thing... They were never afraid of losing the plot - partly because from the start, they were tight enough to come back to the organizing riff without missing a beat - and when they wanted to, they could swing. They could do anything, and did - abstraction, solid rock songs, pop songs, various warped forms of country, folk and such - all at once! They weren't, in any meaningful sense, a jazz band, but my own enthusiasm for jazz certainly helped me become the obsessive fan I am - it tied to their avant grade tendencies, but also to their ability to navigate the twists and turns their songs took, the skill to get back to the beat when they needed to... and it made me pay attention to things like tone, tones - Herman's slides, the sounds from Ravenstine's synths - less notes, more sounds, something jazz relies on...

And finally - I can't stop this without writing about David Thomas' lyrics. Song by song, they are good enough - but I am not sure anyone has supplied such a store of lines that echo in my head...

I don’t get around, I don’t fall in love much
Image object illusion, go down to the corner, where none of the faces fit a human form
Yeah, I oughta know that nothing's worth the half of half of what it used to
Mom threw me out 'til I get some pants that fit
Out in the real world, in real time, technoramic heartache!
walked around took the bus walked around took the bus
Here's to the details that so often get overlooked
If the devil comes, we’ll shoot him with a gun, if he shows his face, we'll laugh
Don’t fret now baby! Don’t be so tired
On a day such as this insist on more than the truth
(The folderol of fretful peregrination)
one day they're crawlin in the streets, afraid of a strange, free, wide open land
Marchin on the Home of the Blues
In the ghost town inside of my heart the downtown is parking lots
I want to hang around in your Greyhound terminal
One day I will be the best that you can do.
And the radio, AM radio, oh the radio will set you free

There are concrete reason for the excellence of his work - all those turns of phrase; but also the imagery - sharp and clear, and usually concrete - things, places, actions, real or imaginary, realized in clear imagery - we'll drive around and oh we'll fall in love... night in the city where the air just shines - they evoke a place you can see. The emptiness of the nighttime city streets, the loneliness of the lone driver. The settings change - the city in the early songs, the open road, usually, in the late records - always cars, though, diners and bars... All this runs along with his literary and film allusions - titles, lines (maybe in a secret lab works Dr. Moreau), stories (30 seconds over Tokyo), situations - books and movies weave through his work along with the roads and cars and skies and rain... and who doesn't want songs about books and movies?

So finally - when push comes to shove - other than the Beatles maybe, maybe the Stones - this is it: Pere Ubu might as well be my favorite band. Maybe more than that, they are, more than anyone else in this series, mine. I like them more than anyone I know in real life; they have a pretty strong claim for being my favorite band; they are the band I identify with most. I did it literally back in my AOL days - stealing a song title for a handle (instead of a secondary villain in an atrocious juvenile book) - actually, using a couple song titles as handles, figuring it would signal the right people that they were both me - it is a credit to the people I hung out with that more than one of them made the connection. If I ever go to that desert island, and take one band's music along, it will be theirs - if I took one CD along, it would be the first CD in the Datapanik in the Year Zero box set, with the Modern Dance and the singles on it.

Songs - I am tempted to split this out: first run - post-reunion, maybe. Not a balance, but they were better during their first run - but not so much better I like to see the later stuff swamped by the early songs, which is what happens this way. Longevity counts - the fact that they have continued to produce excellent records right to the present day is no small part of my affection for them. I should list off my favorite records, while I am at it.... But - well - start with the top 10:

1. Heart of Darkness
2. Humor Me
3. My Dark Ages
4. Caligari's Mirror
5. Memphis
6. Go
7. 30 Seconds over Tokyo
8. Wine Dark Sparks
9. Final Solution
10. Beach Boys

But I am willing - 10 pre-breakup:

1. Heart of Darkness
2. Humor Me
3. My Dark Ages
4. Caligari's Mirror
5. Go
6. 30 Seconds over Tokyo
7. Final Solution
8. Street Waves
9. Misery Goats
10. Over My Head

And Post reunion:

1. Memphis
2. Wine Dark Sparks
3. Beach Boys
4. Busman's Honeymoon
5. Dark
6. Folly of Youth
7. Electricity
8. I Hear They Smoke the Barbecue
9. Kathleen
10. Rhythm King

And, finally - 5 best LPs:
1. The Modern Dance - you need to memorize this.
2. Raygun Suitcase - a very welcome return to the experimentation of their early records, which simultaneously contained some of their best songs
3. Dub Housing - things are starting to get odd, but this still kicks
4. Art of Walking - really you say? hell if I know. This is as strange a record as I have ever heard, and certainly the strangest record I have listened to end to end dozens of times... but it's fascinating, and contains 2 classic tunes...
5. The Tenement Year - a nice set of songs, with plenty of noise going with it - how much of their style can be traced to the guitarists, I don't know - but they do seem distinct - when Laughner was in the group, they sounded like the Velvets and the Stooges; Herman's records all of a version of that stripped down sound I wrote about; Mayo Thompson makes AOW and SOABM sound like Red Crayola; the Jim Jones records are built around solid indy rock songs, almost pop; the Keith Moline records verge on electronic music - it's noticeable... Anyway - there's nothing in their catalogue quite as strange sounding as Cloudland - pop songs with pop productions - and David Thomas singing? Rhapsody in Pink becomes reassuringly normal after that... But Tenement Year hasn't gotten there yet - it sounds like 30-somthing art punks, like later Wire say - and that is a very good thing.

And now, video. They can be frustrating - there is very little old stuff - nothing before Birdies, in Urgh! A Music War:



They are very well documented in the 00s - here's a complete set from 2013:



And Sonic Reducer, played in a Borders in 2006; you might see something stranger or cooler somewhere, but I doubt it:



In between you can find things - they were on Letterman, and David Sanborn's show, back in the late 80s; here they are with Sanborn and Loudon Wainwright... children point and say he is the one...



And finally - Final Solution, in 1988 - I saw this tour - they were a force of nature, with Chris Cutler and Scott Krause in the back - I was still somewhat of a neophyte as far as they went, but that was a great show:

Friday Songs

Home again this Friday, back from my travels, up into the north country...



...a good time had by all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming (such as it is):

1. Melvins Lite - Holy Barbarian [one of the very few records I have bought this year... sad, I suppose... good record though; Melvins are reliable]
2. The Mars Volta - Cicatrix (live)
3. Doctor Nerve - Take Your Ears as the Bones of their Queen
4. Minor Threat - Salad Days
5. Stooges - No Fun
6. DNA - Calling to Phone
7. Pere Ubu -Sentimental Journey
8. The Who - Summertime Blues (Live at Leeds)
9. U2 - 40 [after dwelling in the more challenging corners of my music collection, we suddenly seem to have shifted to much more familiar grounds]
10. Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey

And for video? How about some vintage Stooges footage?



And I suppose - contemporary Pere Ubu footage:

Friday Music & Otis Redding

Today - Otis Redding's birthday! probably worth a mention, and a video at least...



It's an odd fact that I have exactly one Redding song in iTunes - Mr. Pitiful, obviously. I have records, but no CDs - so nothing has made it to the computer. I have more of those kinds of records than I care to admit, including a few things that rank pretty high up my list of bands - I've never replaced most of my Husker Du LPs for instance. I should do something about that, I suppose, but....

Anyhow - let's go with a straight random list today [ Plus annotation, I see!]:

1. Saint Etienne - Action [a CD I have no idea why I bought in the first place and have barely heard through the years.]
2. Wilco - Everlasting Everything [a band I probably should be more of a fan of - I loved Uncle Tupelo, but am almost always underwhelmed by Wilco - until they get to Nils Cline's parts anyway]
3. Bloc Party - Idea for a Story [from the second (I think) record - I didn't like it as much as the first, which was one of the neo-post-punk/new wave records of the early 21st century that actually seemed to live up to its models... So I haven't listened to this all that much - but this is a pretty neat song, with its skittering drums and odd synth sounds... Actually better than that - this is a bit of a revelation. This is what comes from actually listening to the songs that come up on these shuffle tests...]
4. Loren Connors - Airs No. 17 [very pretty guitar work... though this is music that does not fare well on iPods]
5. Pere Ubu - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo [The live, Shape of Things Version. This is of course one of the great songs of the 70s, one of the crucial songs of the decade, of music history. The secret history, perhaps, where Pere Ubu is accepted by more people than me as American's greatest rock band. This one's got Tom Herman and Peter Laughner fighting over the guitar parts. No Ravenstine, though - but the guitarists are taking up the slack in the Strange Sounds Department... I'm never going to leave the house this morning, cause I am going to have to listen to the whole thing again...]
6. The Mars Volta - L' Via L' Vazquez [no one quite brought guitar wanking back so well as The Mars Volta...]
7. Galaxie 500 - Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste [... not that Dean Wareham ever slacked in the guitar wanking dept...]
8. Melt Banana - Stick Out [will they finish before I finish this line? nope.]
9. Pere Ubu - Indiangiver [short piece from Pennsylvania - still - America's greatest band?]
10. Michio Kurihara - Canon in "C" (C is for Cicada) - [somewhat disappointing solo record from probably the best guitarist of the last 20 years. My favorite anyway...]

Video? Recent Pere Ubu, with Robert Wheeler providing the Strange Sounds on theremin:

Music Friday

Another simple random ten, this Friday. I have some new records I have to listen to, and maybe get around to writing about - but that is still to come... Right now - Friday 10:

1. You La Tengo - Lost in Bessemer
2. Richard Thompson - Burning Man
3. Pere Ubu - Synth Farm
4. John Hartford - I Am A Man of COnstant Sorrow (Instrumental)
5. Pere Ubu - Heart of Darkness [specifically, a demo from one of their collections, a rehearsal session, working out the pulse... Neu would be proud]
6. Richard & Linda Thompson - Hokey Pokey (live)
7. Rites of Spring - Drink Deep
8. Merle Haggard - Silver WIngs
9. Yoko Ono - Why Not
10. The Doors - Back Door Man

That was interesting. Here then - video? Rites of Spring thrashing in the dark might be a good place to start....



And while the video is just an odd piece of animation - one never goes wrong with Pere Ubu:

Friday Music Cleveland Noir Edition

In honor of the blogathon - here's one of the noiriest songs you will ever hear, by frequent pulp and film citing Pere Ubu - My Dark Ages, live in 1995.

in the dark I get so confused, I fall in love like a fall from grace...



You can donate to the film preservation fund at this link.