Conspiracy Of Beards: New York Diary, Pt. 3

Today's earworm: the la-da-da-da chorus from "A Singer Must Die". Bursts from the throat and rolls off the tongue like honey.

The street crazies in New York are louder, scarier, and way more entertaining than the ones you find in San Francisco. This morning, a youngish black man with blazing, enraged eyes and a receding hairline was running around, pounding on restaurant windows, bellowing something about Obama, and marching into the street on red lights. (Striding purposefully into oncoming traffic is something all New Yorkers do well, but this guy was a master.) I expect to spot him again soon as a token black pundit on Fox News making a special guest appearance on the Glenn Beck show.

Yesterday, on the Bowery, a disshevelled, wide-eyed fifty-something white man was communing intensely with his headphones, stomping briskly through the crowd, and providing edgy, enthusiastic running commentary: "These guys! Were GENIUSES! Back then they made MUSIC! Not like this TECHNO PUSSY SHIT you hear now!" He would take breaks from his tirade to leer at all the hot, sharp-dressed New York women who wisely gave him a wide berth, then he'd resume his riveting rock criticism. Maybe Christopher Stigliano was visiting New York this weekend too.

A conversation I had more than once this weekend: "So, you're an all male choir, you don't have any instruments, and you only do Leonard Cohen songs?" "Yeah, that's right." "And that's it? You guys don't do anything else?" "Well, it's good to have a focus, don't you think?"

Actually, there was a moment yesterday that broke the instrument barrier. Deron, our most extroverted member, the one who throws his head back, contorts his face and visibly feels every second of every song with the utmost intensity (if you've seen the Beards, you know who I'm talking about) is also an ace harmonica player, and there is a trio arrangement of "Stories From The Street" which employs two voices backed by Deron blowing a humungous chromatic bass harmonica. One day I hope to see this performed for myself; unfortunately, this was the opening number while we were all sequestered in a tiny (literally) green room behind the stage at the Bowery Poetry Club last evening, so I have only experienced the audio so far.

The Bowery Poetry Club felt tiny after the Highline Ballroom, a long narrow corridor of a venue with a busy little deli up front and a bar and seats in the back room and paintings of great New York poets on the wall above the bar. The set was exciting, possibly the best performance of the weekend; the audience up close, noisy, and engaged. We pulled off the best version of "The Window" yet. David Bentley's solo vocal is tear-jerkingly beautiful on this song, one of Cohen's most cosmic, universe-embracing spiritual pieces ever; I am in awe when we do this one.

For the second time that day, we did "Bird On The Wire", two rows of dudes swaying like happy drunks with our arms around each other's shoulders. It seemed like every baritone singer was singing a slightly different part, but this time, rather than straining to figure out what was correct I just threw my voice in the mix and relied on my sense of harmony. Turns out, according to Tom, one of the wise elder Beards, this is the appropriate approach to this song: the more somebody tries to tighten up the arrangement, the more divergent versions are created, which then end up all being sung at once. But why argue with success, when all this disagreement results in such a mighty sound? Other songs benefit well from precision; "Bird" is magnificent "midnight choir" chaos.

Larry and his cousin converged at the bar the same time I did, and Larry bought us all a round of Guinnesses. Generous. And delicious. As we all gathered to plan how we would all get to the loft party that night, Sloan, one of our bass singers who was leaving and wouldn't be joining us there, passed me by and cryptically shouted, "Arrange memories!"

"What's that now?"

"Arrange 'Memories'! That song we were talking about!"

"Oh yeah! Thanks!" I kind of like the way I misheard it, though. "Arrange memories." That is what I'm doing right now in this Chelsea internet ice cream parlor, actually.

Larry's cousin led the way to the L train, walking faster than anyone I have ever tried to keep up with, and I always thought I walked pretty fast. If I lived here, I would no doubt be getting an aerobic workout every day of my life. When we got to the Bedford Ave. station in Brooklyn, he steered us to Driggs Pizza, where we had some real New York style slices. Now I like some of our local pies, and am especially loyal to our good friends at Eagle Pizza on Taraval (a really friendly, funny, and down-to-earth couple who make some of the best food in San Francisco), but Brooklyn pizza is a category all its own that must be experienced.

On to the party. Williamsburg is going through the sort of transition that SF went through during the original dot-com boom, where live-work spaces moved from being a raw pioneer experience for arty types seeking cheap living and freedom to being a status symbol for the upwardly mobile, ("the hedge fund managers are pushing the artists out now", we were told) but the transition is not fully complete, and you can still find cool, progressive, artistic young people living in well-furnished storage-locker-like digs in highrises that look foreboding on the outside and teem with life on the inside.

The party was a maelstrom of noisy, shouting conversation with faint sounds of Beirut coming off of a laptop. (I always liked Beirut OK, but I was curious as to who actually listens to them. Now I know.) The acoustics were so live, and sound carried so well, that everybody kept talking louder to hear their own conversation. Some of the younger, more hippie-ish Beards were arguing strongly that we should all perform with our shoes off, but the sound of breaking glass quickly put a damper on any such notion. I milled around, drinking Cabernet and locating pockets of interesting conversation while we waited for Daryl and his wife and adorably trouble-seeking two year old son to show up.

The woman hosting the party came up to some of us. "I think it's about time you guys got started."

"OK, but we're still waiting for our director."

"He's not here yet? OK..."

"You'll recognize him when you see him. He's a bit shorter, wears glasses and a mustache, and radiates an aura of calm authority."

"Well, I hope he gets here soon." In another corner, Ruben had already seized the reins and was putting a set list together in case we had to go it alone. Happily, in came Daryl and family in the nick of time and we assembled. I recruited Tim's (a Beard bass and excellent vocal arranger) sister Allison to videotape us as we performed. Thanks, Allison!

It was a loose, fun singing session; now all the pressure was off and it was time to just indulge in the fun that we all got into this thing for. Several party guests called out requests for great songs we have never done like "Tonight Will Be Fine" and "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye". There's plenty more material for us to do in the future! As usual, everybody loves "Hallelujah". That song touches something deep in people; even atheists and agnostics relate to the theme of just opening your heart to the universe and singing "Hallelujah"; no explanation or justification necessary. It's nothing more or less than all our humanity coming out, rejoicing that, in spite of everything and no matter what your circumstance, it's such a goddamn gift to be alive.

That may be the central message, if there is any, of Leonard Cohen's mission: a deep, ecstatic, yet clear-eyed inquiry on what it means to be alive. Even when he has written and recorded songs like "Dress Rehearsal Rag" or "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" that confront with terrifying empathy how it feels to be driven to suicide, every word and note from a Leonard Cohen song is full of the sheer wonder of life. And if that sounds corny to you, you have some growing up to do.

Anyhow, after our set, the party changed its tone, and suddenly the music got louder and more rhythmic as Beards and other guests went wild, break-dancing and ecstatically throwing one another around the room. As I was just saying, here it is: the wonder of life.

I have been on enough tours in my time to know full well how reality has a tendency to bash you on the head with a hammer once you get back home and return to your regular routine, but I feel regenerated by the last few days, and have a strong intention to stay that way. Next week, we will be seeing Field Commander Cohen himself in person in Oakland, so I know this feeling will not be passing quite so quickly.

Now, a long shuttle ride, a longer flight, and a reunion with my girl await. Your correspondent is signing off for now. Cheers.

Conspiracy Of Beards: New York Diary, Pt. 2

The Stain Bar is a cozy little joint a block away from the Grand St. subway station in Brooklyn. On this night, they had a special on mulled wine, which was nice for the throat before singing. The courtyard is decorated with a giant sculpture of a quarter, with George Washington's profile fashioned from what appears to be old auto parts. To the left, various artists (or is it one artist with many moods?) have contributed to a graffiti mural (which may still be a work in progress) with fire-breathing monster men, sultry mermaids and more. The room itself is full of comfortable couches you can sink into. Behind the bar is a turntable on which the bartenders spin old vinyl by the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, and Lou Reed.

Gradually, the place began filling with people: Beard friends, relatives, and sweethearts; and, most gratifyingly, strangers who showed up because they read about it in the listings. There was a good write-up in the AM Metro that helped bring the people in, though Daryl was disappointed that the writer used all of his least favorite interview quotes in the piece. That's a Murphy's Law of journalism one should always allow for: they will always end up using your worst quotes, so be as brilliant as you can to journalists (without trying too hard...that can bring on the lameness if you're not careful). With L. Cohen on tour right now, excitement about his work is running high, which makes it a good time for the Beards to be on the road.

We did a full set, including some smaller group pieces like "Suzanne", the arrangement of which was changed again, just before the show. (And what an arrangement it is, a quintet with Daryl himself as lead tenor and staggered wordless harmonies that actually sound like boats rolling along the river!) We also laid out while various small groupings did "In My Secret Life" (my first time hearing this) and "Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On", a supremely ridiculous, rollicking potboiler from Death Of A Ladies' Man, Leonard's ill-fated, lush & lusty Phil Spector collaboration. Later after our set I brought up the over-the-top doo-wop ode to adolescent hormones, "Memories", my favorite song from that same album which is currently in rotation on Ear Candle Radio (there's also a very sparse voice/piano version by the Extra Glenns on their Martial Arts Weekend CD which we've played in the past) and was told more than once "You should do an arrangement! You can get some help from some of the others if you need it!" to which I said, "that'd be fun, maybe a ways down the road, when I feel ready." It would certainly bring down the house to have the Beards do THAT one.

Other than my dissatisfaction with my part on "First We Take Manhattan" (I'm switching from the low baritone part to the high one; there may more guts in my voice in that range, I think), the set went swimmingly. We had our first successful live version of "Land Of Plenty", and I think we're all feeling like we got over a big hump there. It was a sweet evening, and the subway got me back to Chelsea like a charm. Then my darling rang my cell phone just as I opened the door to my room. Perfect.

Woke up early this morning and jumped on the southbound E train to keep my promise to check out Ground Zero and videotape what's there now. What's there is a well blocked off construction site surrounded by blue fences and barbed wire to keep out the snoopers, while cranes diligently raise and lower themselves and cement trucks pass through the security entrance. The area is dotted with camera-wielding tourists, myself included, all seeking some sort of epiphany. Across Liberty St. is a museum devoted to 9/11, but the walking tour did not fit today's tight schedule. But being present there did conjure up the same "is that all there is?" feeling that ends Wim Wenders' Land Of Plenty, which I can now draw from my memory banks when the choir performs the title song. At least the scene hasn't been turned into a grotesque monument to patriotic kitsch yet. Overall impression: New York has moved on, thank you very much. And if you're gonna just stand there gawking, you might as well come in and buy some memorabilia already.

On to the Highline Ballroom, where the boys have an afternoon show. A nice mid-sized rock club it is too, perhaps analogous to Slim's in SF. (Maybe a bit smaller than the Great American Music Hall.) We share the bill with Peter Whitehead, a former Beard doing a solo set playing folkish music with instruments he created and built himself like a 10-string sort of guitar-mandolin hybrid. We performed two sets, served by a good sound system, which compelled us to lean towards subtlety. I did my best to blend and not stick out. There were some beautiful moments.

The audience was seated at tables, a bit polite at first, cheering and whooping by the end. (Do I need to tell you how good that feels?) They went wild for "Hallelujah". Of course, who doesn't love "Hallelujah"? I really appreciate that in our arrangement, we sing "do ya" and not "do you" in the first verse, unlike most interpreters of the song. (Jeff Buckley, please rise up from the grave so that you may receive your well-deserved spanking!) [UPDATE: Leonard himself sang "you" at the Paramount on April 15! I still prefer "ya", though.]

Next on today's busy agenda: the Bowery Poetry Club, followed rapidly by a loft party in Brooklyn. Zounds! I should know these songs pretty well by the time the night is over.

Conspiracy Of Beards: New York Diary, Pt. 1

I read Cat's Cradle in its entirety on yesterday's flight to New York and spent the remaining hour daydreaming ominously about Ice-Nine while passing over what I think was Lake Huron. If you read the book, you'll know what I mean.

My fellow newbie-Beard Larry stepped up to say hello on the same flight. Later, my seatmate, a middle-aged woman traveling with her husband and her mother, asked me if my friend and I were traveling to New York on business. No, I replied, I'm in a choir called the Conspiracy Of Beards. "What a name!", she exclaimed. "Yeah, we're a men's chorus who do Leonard Cohen songs." Her mother, who looked to be in her 70s, lit up. "That's so great!" Leonard crosses all age boundaries.

We convened at the 14th St. PATH station and took the train to WFMU in Jersey City, where we did a live-on-the-radio spot on Billy Jam's show. I remember Billy Jam from the Bay Area where he was a hip-hop DJ on the radio back in the 80s. He's still playing hip-hop, but he also has crazy men's choirs belting it out live in the studio, or at least this one. The station was a homey little hipster haven full of astonishing oil paintings of famous villains like Donald Rumsfeld, Osama bin Laden, and Phil Spector; great kitschy old album covers; back issues of zines like Roctober, XLR8R and Motorbooty; and (buried somewhere deep in their library) some of our label's Content Providers and X-tal CDs. Call 'em up and request them sometime.

Much stretching of limbs and limbering of voices in the green room as we warmed up by doing vocal imitations of the Asteroids game in the room, then did lots of songs before our director Daryl Henline showed up and put us through our paces. Daryl is great at kicking your ass and putting you at ease in the same moment, a true example of leadership. There is a version of "The Window" we do that is arranged for octet and solo voice, with the rest of the group bursting in on the choruses. In rehearsal, it was exquisite.

Time to go on. We strolled upstairs into the performance room while Billy and his assistant watched from the other side of a window. We rolled through "First We Take Manhattan", hit a snag when "So Long Marianne" morphed into "The Window" in the first few bars, and got our groove back with "Famous Blue Raincoat", "If It Be Your Will", "A Singer Must Die", and the amazingly arranged (kudos to Ruben Fonseca for this...various choir members write arrangements for the group, each with his own style...it makes for fun and challenging singing) "Is This What You Wanted?" I really think the Beards need to do a good studio recording of that last one. It's a hit, man!

It's amazing to be part of this THING that happens when the hard work pays off and this diverse group of imperfect voices suddenly meshes into a powerful musical force. I was a fan of the Beards before I joined, and I am a fan now. It's a thrill to be here doing this.

On the PATH train back to New York, the boys collected in one end of the car and sang "Chelsea Hotel #2". I grabbed the camera and shot a crude movie of us performing, until the conductor yelled at me, "Hey you! Didntcha HEAR ME! You can't take pictures on the train! Put it away or I'll call a cop!" Fortunately the song was already over. I think I caught an awesome moment. Hooray for spontaneity.

This evening, it's off to the Stain Bar in Brooklyn, where we will be doing our first live show of the weekend. I think it's going to be great; WFMU was the perfect warmup. Wish me luck. Gotta run.

Ear Candle Radio's Top 20: March 2009

What a stunning bunch of tunes this month! We added this classic Davy Graham track in memory of the recently deceased maverick British folk guitarist, and our listeners responded by kicking it up to the top spot. Elsewhere, we're proud to present loads of rare punk and post-punk vinyl from the Plugz (whose album, Electrify Me, was one of the first independently released full-length punk albums of the L.A. scene; Tito Larriva's performance here is stunning, railing against complacency in the verses and softly whispering "No, no, no" between power chord assaults on the chorus), the Slits (whose definitive take on "Man Next Door" is extremely hard to find), Snatch (Judy Nylon and Patti Palladin collaborating here with Brian Eno on a rare B-side inspired by '70s Euro-terrorists and airplane paranoia), and Alan Vega on the fluke hit single (in France, of course) from his awesome first solo album, circa 1980.

A much more serene (and dryly funny) take on air travel is brought by Australia's mighty Cannanes in the seemingly inappropriately titled "Marching Song", while the Poison Girls show that no one can express political anger more strongly than a concerned mother on "Statement".

The Damned show up with a peculiar and catchily melodic track, "Lovely Money", which is notable for featuring a cameo performance from the Bonzo Dog Band's late mad genius Vivian Stanshall, who portrays a disgruntled London tour guide whose cheerful historical banter gradually degenerates into a nasty, incoherent drunken rant. (When he starts going off on Argentinians for no particular reason it gets a bit uncomfortable, but here at Ear Candle Radio we make the likely assumption that Viv was just being in character, playing the role of the xenophobe in "unreliable narrator" fashion rather than being one for real. Since the Damned's Captain Sensible has always been a cool cat with both humanitarian ideals and a rollicking sense of humor, and the Captain even collaborated with Crass around the time they were raging bravely against the Falklands War, we have a hunch we're right about this. We do love our Argentine friends!) A great track nonetheless; it's always good to hear Mr. Stanshall play with language like putty.

Much trancing out on this month's list also; our listeners are enjoying being taken away by Windy and Carl, Terry Riley, and the Master Musicians Of Joujouka, as well as the downhome singalong kirtans of our friend at Harbin Hot Springs, Peter B. Are our listeners on a spiritual path, or do they just have marijuana in their brains like Dillinger? Or perhaps they dropped a tab and are watching the dripping walls with Vomit Launch? Whatever the case, the fantastic soul-punk-yodeling Detroit Cobras agree, everybody's going wild.

1. Davy Graham - Blues Raga - Mojo Presents: The Quiet Revolution
2. The Plugz - Satisfied Die - Electrify Me
3. The Slits - Man Next Door - Wanna Buy a Bridge?: A Rough Trade Compilation of Singles 1977-1980
4. Peter B & Friends - Radhe Sham - Harbin Temple Kirtan
5. Windy & Carl - Lighthouse - Drawing Of Sound
6. The Detroit Cobras - Everybody's Going Wild - Baby
7. Snatch - R.A.F. - SNATCH
8. The Cannanes - Marching Song - Cannanes
9. The Wild Magnolias - (Somebody Got) Soul Soul Soul - The Wild Magnolias
10. Poison Girls - Statement - Poisonous
11. Kevin Ayers - Run, Run, Run - The Unfairground
12. Dillinger - Marijuana In My Brain - Straight To Prince Jazzbo's Head
13. Wire - Sand in My Joints - Chairs Missing
14. Vomit Launch - Dripping Walls - Mr. Spench
15. The Master Musicians Of Joujouka - Your Eyes Are Like A Cup Of Tea (Al Yunic Sharbouni Ate) - Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka
16. Generation X - Wild Dub - Wild Dub - Dread Meets Punk Rocker
17. The Damned - Lovely Money - Smash It Up: The Anthology 1976-1987
18. Alan Vega - Jukebox Babe - Jukebox Babe
19. Terry Riley - A rainbow in curved air - A rainbow in curved air
20. Suicide - I Remember - Suicide

Keep listening, dear friends!

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Here are the young men (and women), the weight on their shoulders

Our most devoted commenter Ian recommends a couple of new bands:

Where did all these new "crystal" bands come from all of a sudden? Funny how certain words catch on everywhere at the same time. I guess X-tal were ahead of the curve on this one.



This band does a terrific cover version of "Life In Vain", one of my favorite Daniel Johnston songs ever, but I couldn't find a video of that one.



And one more we've been sort of debating the worth of (personally I think they're pretty superb):



Thanks to the next generation for bringing the noise.

Seen Your Video: The Quiet American

The second film adaptation of Graham Greene's novel from 1956 was suppressed here when it came out in 2002, because producers feared to release a movie that criticized U.S. foreign policy at the time. Just thought I'd throw that in to remind us all of that wonderful time after 9/11 when we ALL were UNITED...or else.

Anyway, it's an interesting take on colonialism and Vietnam before the U.S. war, seen through the eyes of Fowler, an aging British expatriate journalist in Saigon (played by Michael Caine) as his cozy world of detachment, opium and hot sex with a pretty local woman is shaken up, first by scrutiny from the home office, then by the arrival of Pyle (Brendan Fraser), a seemingly goofy innocent American volunteer on a mission to treat trachoma outbreaks in the outlying villages. A love triangle ensues, complicated by Fowler's wife back in the UK, a devout Catholic who refuses to divorce him, vs. the girlfriend Phuong's protective sister as well as her own desire for a real future, which Pyle offers in the form of a nice suburban marriage in the richest superpower in the world during its most prosperous decade. Phuong is loyal, but she's not stupid. The movie (apparently like the novel before it) doesn't allow Phuong much of an inner life, but Do Thi Hay Yen enriches her role with some subtle acting; you can see her thinking through her situation even as she plays the "sweet Oriental flower" for the foreign men who are enthralled with her.

But it's the geopolitical story that really fascinates in this movie. France is fading as a colonial power and can no longer hold back an emerging Communist uprising, while the Americans are counting on what they call a "third force" to bring stability and independence to the country. A mysterious "General The" has emerged as an alternate revolutionary force, but where did he come from? And where is he getting his support? I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but if you know about the history of the region, the answers are pretty obvious.

The movie is framed as a flashback after Pyle's body is found in the Mekong River. Who would wish to kill this innocent aw-shucks goofball? This is the part you have to see for yourself, 'cause I ain't telling. But when the pieces fall together, it all makes sense.

There's another performance in the movie worth mentioning: that of Fowler's friend/contact/news source Hihn, played by Tzi Ma. Through the course of the movie, we discover he is more than just the obligatory local color; in his final scene, the emotions in his face are more powerful than the shock of what we see him doing. Suddenly a minor character's whole life comes into sharp focus. Tzi Ma doesn't appear in many scenes, but that one moment should have won him an Oscar.

"It wasn't my fault! I wanted to belong!"

Just follow the link and watch the video, then come back.

Why is it that we require a comedian to give us some proper news on TV? I don't follow these cable business channels, so I missed all the shenanigans on CNBC. But it's hard to avoid this clown Jim Cramer and his show when you're channel-surfing. People put their faith in these characters, and they basically defrauded them. And Jon Stewart has been doing a bang-up job lately exposing the scam. (Who really thought he would run out of material when the Democrats took office? Not me. There is SO MUCH to expose and mock out there.)

So Cramer has been running around defending himself indignantly against this mere "comedian" who has attacked him, finding sympathetic ears with the odious likes of Joe Scarborough. But this clip stunned me. The man gets a chance to face his accuser, and what happens? He folds like an accordion. Look at him in the video. The word is ABJECT. He's kissing ass and promising to do better, like a teenager caught sneaking a cigarette in the backyard.

There is rot in the American capitalist system that this stimulus won't come close to touching. When you look at the hard times you are going through, don't forget: somebody has profited from this, and they are still doing so, and when they get caught red-handed in front of a camera, all they can do is shrug sheepishly, "oh, it's true, I'm a bad boy!" You just know every one of these slimeballs has a dominatrix on call to give them the punishment they crave, and they walk out after their appointment thinking that they have purged themselves and their conscience is clean. No, more and more of us trying to make ends meet in a sinking economy want to see some accountability, and we want to see it now. At least there are comedians who get it. Thank you Jon Stewart.

This song still says it all. We are working on new Blame material to round out our next digital release. There is so much to say, both personal and political, and we need words and music that are strong enough to describe it and speak for these times. And when the commercials for "creditreport.com" coming from the other room start to sound like the ultimate in anemic indie-rock, you know it's time to pull out the big guns and remember what the point of all this music was in the first place.

A fantasy-based economy

Tom The Dancing Bug nails it.

Seen Your Video: Land Of Plenty

A Vietnam veteran cruises through the wasteland of Los Angeles in a beat-up old van crammed full of state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. It's 2004, and the US is being bombarded with frantic news of shadowy terrorist plots about to happen and sleeper cells all over the country just biding their time until they launch an attack that will make 9/11 look like a dry run. The THREAT is IMMINENT, you see; they're all around us, and this is no time for doubt or wimpy French words like "nuance"!

Our man rolls along, gathering samples of water, shredded documents, etc. and bringing them back to his comrade, who runs a crime lab in his garage. (Richard Edson here, playing his usual role as the put-upon sidekick/brother) Something big is in the works, and these two heroes, working deep cover, intend to be the ones to stop it. One day the van driver happens to catch a man in a turban hauling boxes of borax to a chemical plant and begins tailing him; this is undoubtedly part of a plot. Soon after, the man in the turban is killed in a drive-by shooting, and now we know for sure something is up; perhaps two rival terrorist groups are working against each other. Thank God our hero is watching, getting ready to bust it all open. Great set-up for a trashy action movie, perhaps starring Bruce Willis, or even better, Chuck Norris, right? Too bad. It's a slow-paced, meditative, subtle mood piece by Wim Wenders instead, and more will be revealed. (I intend to keep the spoilers to a minimum, though. It's better if you watch it for the first time without knowing what happens.)

The deep-cover operative has a niece: the daughter of two missionaries, a guileless young Christian girl who just flew back from the West Bank where she had been demonstrating with a group of Israeli pacifists against the building of the wall separating the Jewish settlements from the Palestinian population. She's come to deliver a letter from her deceased mother to her only living relative in the States; meanwhile she takes a job in a rescue mission in LA, serving the growing homeless population. We're with this girl as she prays, e-mails her friends, worries about the world, and gives herself over to service. Your agnostic movie reviewer marvels to himself that here is a credible character exhibiting all the tenets of Christianity, but you would never find the likes of her anywhere in an ostensibly "Christian" piece of cinema like Left Behind: The Movie. Wonder why? Hmmmmm...

The plot ends up taking the two characters to Death Valley, where we find out the secret of the borax conspiracy and learn a few more things, while Wenders indulges his love of residential American desert landscapes. I'll leave it at that. See this movie for yourself.

At the end, two people in New York stand in the site of Ground Zero. One begins to complain and the other essentially says to shut up and listen. Then Leonard Cohen sings.

Other musical notes: at one point we hear what sounds like a growly modern pop-punk song with the chorus: "It's expensive being poor/because everything costs more!" The singer turns out to be T.V. Smith, formerly of seminal London punks the Adverts. Nice going, T.V. A lot of songs feature a German singer named "Thom" who is not Thom Yorke, he just sounds like him. The songs comment on the story and set the mood; Wenders is a rare filmmaker whose rock scores actually seem to belong in his movies rather than functioning as product placement.

Ear Candle Radio's Top 20: February 2009

Another wide-ranging chart, honoring fallen heroes Lux Interior and Yma Sumac, juxtaposing hip-hop remixes of Bollywood with a raga from the great Ali Akbar Khan, and setting our controls for the heart of the sun with two contrasting explorations of the cosmos from Spacemen 3 and D.J. Shadow.

The Love Dogs continue to thrive with their Albert Ayler tribute, and the Interstellar Grains and A.J. In Evolution grace us with more instrumental goodness, as does Kaki King with another tangled virtuoso guitar piece. The Vivian Girls teach a new generation how to say "NO!", the Incredible String Band and Irma Thomas curl up and get romantic, and our own label is represented by one each from the Blame and the Experimental Bunnies.

Keep on tuning in as we continue to tweak the playlist! And if you show up in our top 20, get in touch so we can send you an Ear Candle Radio button!

1. Spacemen 3 - Take Me To The Other Side - Singles
2. DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4) - Endtroducing.....
3. The Cramps - Sunglasses After Dark - Songs The Lord Taught Us
4. Yma Sumac - Chicken Talk - Mambo
5. Various Artists - Inspector J From Delhi - Bombay The Hard Way
6. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan - Raga Chandranandan - Traditional Music of India
7. Interstellar Grains - The In Between - Interstellar Grains
8. The Vivian Girls - No - Vivian Girls
9. Paleface - There's Something About a Truck - Paleface
10. Fatal Microbes - Violence Grows - Rip It Up And Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984
11. Burning Spear - Civilised Reggae - Social Living
12. The Love Dogs - Universal Indians - The Love Dogs
13. The Experimental Bunnies - Danger - Music For The Integrity Tone Scale
14. The Blame - Get Out! - Unreleased
15. Judy Collins - Pirate Jenny - In My Life
16. Easy Star All Stars - Us And Them - Dub Side Of The Moon
17. Kaki King - Close Your Eyes & You'll Burst Into Flames
18. Irma Thomas - Take A Look - Time Is on My Side
19. The Incredible String Band - Everything's Fine Right Now - The Incredible String Band
20. A.J. In Evolution (Aka A.J. Fritscher) - A Trip In Barcelona - A Work In Progress

While we're on the subject of Beatles

I stumbled on this brilliant article on the myth vs. reality of Yoko Ono. It didn't tell me anything factual I didn't already know, but the way the author gathers her narrative together and argues her case is stunningly thought-provoking.

What's missing here, which writer Cara Kulwicki admits freely, is any analysis of Yoko's own music. Kulwicki is a Beatles fan, not a fan of Ono's music (though she is a big fan of her activism and conceptual art), and her thrust here is to confront how misogyny works its insidious, ugly way everywhere, even in the hearts of our beloved old idealistic countercultural icons. The link she offers to another writer's critique of Yoko's own body of work is, alas, dead.

Don't let that stop you from investigating some amazing records, though. Plastic Ono Band and Approximately Infinite Universe are great places to start. The Content Providers did not cover "Kite Song" for nothing, I'll have you know.

If this is a fraud, it's a cool one

As one of those twisted freaks who considers "Revolution 9" one of my top 10 Beatles songs of all time, I had to notice this.

In one of John Lennon's final interviews, he explained how "Revolution 9" began: "The slow version of 'Revolution' on the album went on and on and on and I took the fade-out part, which is what they sometimes do with disco records now, and just layered all this stuff over it." Supposedly, this is the original 10:47 take of what became "Revolution 1" with screeching psychedelic guitar drones, shoo-be-doo-wop harmonies and John primal-screaming and panting (all the unnerving shouts and gurgles that percolate through "Revolution 9"), and a segment of the murky, highly-distorted last few minutes of the latter song/collage stuck at the end. (The bit after "take this brother, may it serve you well" always sounded like a completely separate piece recorded on cheap equipment by John & Yoko, compared with the previous six minutes of frighteningly vivid tape loops, so it's plausible that smaller bit was always intended to a part of the original "Revolution".)

BUT...is this for real? These days, some creative electronic wizards specialize in mash-ups, throwing separate songs together for copyright-infringement comedy fun; there are even dance clubs devoted to this stuff. So is this really just some seamlessly-edited Frankensteinian fantasy of lost Beatle-lore, a Piltdown Man of Merseybeat? Or is this a genuine, rejected version of a Beatles song? The main body of the song is SO similar to "Revolution 1" that I'm a tad suspicious. But I'm not sure how much I really care about the track's authenticity; at the moment, real or fake, it's become my favorite version of "Revolution".

Because I was in the mood for some Robert Wyatt

A fun interview with Robert Wyatt from 2007:



A vintage clip of the Soft Machine doing one of Kevin Ayers' finest songs (dig those cheesy psychedelic effects in black and white!):



Wyatt lip-synching "I'm A Believer" on Top Of The Pops in the 70s. If he looks pissed off, it's probably because the producers suggested that the sight of him in a wheelchair would be too upsetting for the audience. (We take no responsibility for the misspelling of the song title on the YouTube clip.)



A hypnotic live-on-video clip of "Gharbzadegi", from back before Robert quit drinking, as you can see at the beginning when he takes a hearty swig of an undetermined dark liquid while grooving to the musicians' Coltrane-esque pulse. Exquisite jazz combo and supple vocals from the great man.

Wonder what they thought

Yesterday, according to our stats, someone in Saudi Arabia tuned in to Ear Candle Radio for one hour and fifty-nine minutes.

We'd like to imagine it was a housebound woman getting a little culture in while her husband was away. Or perhaps an oppressed Filipina housekeeper taking a well-deserved break.

Or was it our buddy Glenn, on a working ESL-teaching vacation away from the Emirates?

Whoever it was, do stop in again any time.

I've heard there was a secret chord

For reasons that will soon become apparent, I have been immersing myself in the work of Leonard Cohen lately. It's a pleasure to delve deeply into the catalog of one of the great masters of songwriting. We can all learn a lot from the way he shapes a melody line and turns a phrase.

Some of the things I've found poking around on the Internets:

Here is a fascinating interview from the 90s, where Cohen describes his writing process at great length. Some songwriters just blurt it out in complete, spontaneous bursts of pure inspiration, while others ruminate, rewrite, cut, edit, question, and analyze. Leonard Cohen, of course, is famously in the second category, and it's good to read in detail how his mind works.

I found this as well: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins together doing "Who By Fire" on the Jools Holland show. This is so many kinds of awesome. Check it out:



UPDATE: Subject line changed from "The little Jew who wrote the Bible" (a lyric from "The Future") because we decided some people who weren't familiar with the song might misinterpret our intent and get bent out of shape.

There's nothin' on the radio when you're dead

Very sorry to report that Lux Interior died today. We just happened to have put several early Cramps tracks on our current playlist, including a horrific/hilarious run-through of "I Was A Teenage Werewolf" that figures prominently in our "in the studio" set.

I once ran into Lux and Ivy on Haight St. in the 80s. (They had just come out of a comic book store...how perfect is that?) As you might expect from their wild, deranged stage act, they were very sweet, friendly and seemingly a bit shy in real life. I can't say I followed the Cramps in recent years; I always thought they made a terrible mistake in the 80s when they got a bass player instead of another guitarist. But I will always love that band, and now they're gone.

I feel sad for Ivy. Not only has she lost a husband, creative partner, and best friend, but her musical genius no longer has the perfect outlet. I hope she keeps playing guitar in some context; that mighty twang is too righteous to be silenced for long.

UPDATE:

Just what you need when you're down in the dumps. (Hey! Our first embedded video! Look out, we may start doing this all the time now!)

Ear Candle Radio's Top 20: January 2009

As we yank up bits of our old playlist by the roots and water the new one, our charts reflect the transition with a mixture of old and new.

Tino's Sunday Dub tops the charts at last after throbbing on our station for a year.. "I want to make a record." "Everyone want to make a record!" We also get healthy showings from old favorites like Beat Of The Traps, the Bonzos, Curtis Mayfield, Public Image, and Fuxa.

Some of the newest additions connected with you this time, including some longtime and new friends. The Love Dogs, an early-80s Santa Cruz band featuring saxman/conceptual artist Jeff Grubic (who once showed up at UCSC in the best Halloween costume ever...covered in pots and pans and other clattering objects: "What are you supposed to be?" "I'm NOISE!"), Small Nambas and Riot Of Perfume founder Taani Lee, and future drummer for Cracker (and many others) Joey Peters. They hit #14 this month with a fantastic version of Albert Ayler's "Universal Indians". Thanks to Taani for sending this our way.

A new set of acquaintances are the Mod-Est Lads, an extremely silly parody band who love the Bonzo Dog Band almost as much as we do and figured we'd appreciate their consummate silliness. And they were right: the cautionary tale "Birthday Suit" is creeping up the charts at #20.

Elsewhere, one of Neo's favorite cartoonists from his childhood, the late great Walt Kelly, shows up here, bellowing out the theme from the Pogo musical (did you know they made a Pogo musical?) with copious gusto. Suicide weighs in with a dread benediction to the youth, Jon Langford rocks up a Gertrude Stein poem, forgotten San Francisco band the People remind us that they were the ones who had the hit with that great Zombies song, and Mike Heron leads a Who/Small Faces/Velvet Underground/Incredible String Band supergroup on an energetic song about love being the best dessert there is (or something like that).

Closer to home are a couple of our own artists: the Experimental Bunnies with a languid piece from the new album Biology And Physics and J Neo Marvin And the Content Providers with "Take Me By Surprise" ("convince me there's a better future") from the What Is Truth? album. We also get the original version of one of the cover songs from that same CD, the pulsing, dripping-with-sleaze "Slow Drain", courtesy of Mink DeVille.

We are editing our DJ segments bit by bit to entertain and enlighten you. We've already gotten some feedback for our "in the studio" set. Some people hear the Byrds at odds in the studio and think, "I'm lucky my band gets along better than that!" We are always happy to give people a little perspective.

Keep listening!

1. Tino - Sunday Dub - Tino's Breaks Vol. 5 - DUB
2. Rod & the MSR Singers - Beat Of The Traps - The American Song-poem Anthology: Do You Know The Difference Between Big Wood And Brush
3. Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - Rawlinson End - Let's Make Up and Be Friendly
4. Tall Dwarfs - Rorschach - Weeville
5. Jon Langford - Butter Song - Skull Orchard
6. Curtis Mayfield - Other Side Of Town - Curtis [Remastered]
7. J Neo Marvin and The Content Providers - Take Me By Surprise - What Is Truth?
8. Fuxa - Cheree (Richard Formby mix) - Fuxa Commits Suicide
9. Arthur Lee - Everybody's Gotta Live - Vindicator
10. Public Image Limited - Lou Reed, Pts 1 and 2 (Where Are You?) - Commercial Zone
11. The Dirtbombs - Indivisible - We Have You Surrounded
12. The Soft Boys - There's Nobody Like You - Underwater Moonlight
13. The Experimental Bunnies - Ready For Your Instructions - Biology And Physics
14. The Love Dogs - Universal Indians - The Love Dogs
15. People - I Love You - Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970
16. Walt Kelly And Others - Go-Go Pogo - Songs Of The Pogo
17. Mink DeVille - Slow Drain - Le Chat Bleu Expanded Edition
18. Mike Heron - Warm Heart Pastry - Smiling Men With Bad Reputations
19. Suicide - Child, It's A New World - American Supreme
20. The Mod-Est Lads - Birthday Suit - Let's Get Clecky!

Seen Your Video: CSNY Deja Vu

Odd to finally see this in 2009, after the outgoing president has NOT been impeached and none of the people responsible for the Iraq fiasco or any other well-documented Bush administration crimes have been held accountable in any way (and the war in Iraq is not over yet, and now we show every sign of escalating our well-intentioned disaster in Afghanistan). Now we have a new administration presiding over a ruined economy, a corrupted society, and a population bombarded with years of deranged, disingenuous propaganda to the point where many of them have no clue why they are so angry, but if you question their reality they will kick your teeth in for flag and family. No wonder "hope" is the buzzword so many have clung to during this last election; what else have we got? We are still screwed, and it won't change overnight.

So let's go on a nostalgia trip, all the way back to 2006. The old folk-rock institution Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young has already scheduled a reunion tour when Neil Young spontaneously gets a bug up his butt about the Bush administration, the war, and the hapless US media, and quickly bashes out a new album of songs reflecting the state of the union. Living With War may, in retrospect, have been a tipping point for the country, an inflammatory protest album wrapped in patriotic rhetoric and compassion for soldiers and their families, veering between outright sentimentality and righteous anger. It was an immediate work of musical journalism framed in terms that average Americans could relate to. Urban cynics like myself might have been more drawn to something like Mudhoney's Under A Billion Suns, but it was Young's album, with its blaring trumpets, anthemic choruses, and closing cover of "America The Beautiful" that spoke to the so-called heartland and may have been just enough to open a few minds. (We are treated to some nice footage of the 100 voice choir being recorded for the album.)

Anyway, with an urgent new album in the can, Young goes back to his old bandmates and lays down the law: the tour is now the "Freedom Of Speech Tour", performing songs from Living With War augmented only with material that is relevant to the war-crazed USA of 2006. Crosby, Stills and Nash quickly go along with the plan and we're off. Right away we see who's in charge. At one point, Crosby admits that CSNY is a benevolent dictatorship with Neil Young as dictator, not because he bosses the others around, but because he's the one who has the good ideas and knows how to see a plan through.

The pruning of their back catalog actually serves the other three songwriters well because their protest songs have aged far better than most of their love songs, which often reek of self-indulgent male hippie pomposity, or pointless, nonsensical gibberish like "Helplessly Hoping". Mostly, we get a very smart reimagining of their repertoire, drawing on the other members' solo material as well to find the best, most relevant stuff like the little-heard "What Are Their Names", a highlight of Crosby's odd, meandering post-psychedelic solo debut which is rearranged here as an a capella audience participation game. (The idea of finding out where the goons in power live in order to "ride right over this afternoon and give them a piece of my mind" never fails to charm me, all the more in this decade because...well, isn't that precisely what Cindy Sheehan was trying to do in the first place?)

But a tour in and of itself is not enough to reach this fragmented country (plus there are many people who would never shell out $200-300 to see a rock show...I certainly wouldn't), so Young, or his cinematic alter-ego "Bernard Shakey", plans a film right from the start, recruiting war correspondent Mike Cerre to serve as the tour's "embedded reporter", riding in their van and, most pertinently, interviewing audience members. These sequences are crucial to the movie, keeping it from being a mere "follow a bunch of superstars on the road" wankfest. We see a lot of people there who clearly needed something like this just to reassure them that they're not insane traitors for seeing things the way they do. We see some who are very politically articulate and others who are just into hippie nostalgia. And of course, we get plenty of people who completely lose their shit because don't they understand, the Muslims all wanna kill us! Then there are the odd ones, like a guy who identifies himself as a "conservative Republican from Tennessee" who is elated with the show because he is also against the war and highly critical of the Bush administration. Welcome to the real world, pal. Baby steps, baby steps...

The big confrontation, and a centerpiece of the movie, happens at a gig in Atlanta on a day that one of the Bush administration's many nebulous "terror alerts" has been in effect all day. Cerre takes us to a local radio station where a pair of morning show cretins who call themselves "The Regular Guys" are ranting about how unfair and egotistical it is for celebrities to have the audacity to try to influence their audiences. (Not that the "Regular Guys" are local celebrities intending to influence their audience; oh no, they're just regular guys after all.)

All this sets us up for a classic Dylan-At-Newport moment when the band breaks into Young's blunt singalong, "Let's Impeach The President". (There's a hilarious scene earlier in the movie where a TV reporter actually asks Young, "You have a new song called 'Let's Impeach The President'. What's it about?") The audience explodes in cheers and boos, until the boo-ers, unable to sway the others to boo with them, stage a mass walkout. Cerre catches them in the lobby and captures their venting: "They have no right!" "You shouldn't criticize the government because they're smarter than you." "He has a lot of nerve to say he's for the troops and then do that kinda crap!" One particularly scary redneck who seems to have little black holes for eyes says of Neil Young, "Ah'd lahk to kick his teeth in, 'cause he's a stupid sumbitch!" Hey, if y'all wanted to pay for an overpriced show by some washed-up old 60s rock stars who won't challenge your world view, you should have saved your money for the next Stones tour.

Not that ticket prices aren't a valid issue. Why did the shows cost so much? The movie kind of glosses over that a bit. These were big shows, with projections and props, but why can't the punters get that for under $100 at most? There's no indication that the shows were benefits, which would have been appropriate. I can only think that, well, Crosby and Stills both have expensive medical needs (Crosby and his new liver, Stills and his cancer) and musicians don't have health insurance. Nevertheless, I do see a blind spot for our heroes here.

After the Atlanta blowout, the tour continues, and Cerre takes us to meet various Iraq War veterans to get their take on the story. We meet a young singer-songwriter Marine named Josh Hisle who started out as a gung-ho metal dude in a uniform, proud of his involvement with the initial "liberation" of the country and overthrow of the government, but after being repeatedly sent back to continue participating in the occupation (where they were locked in a stalemate of "go out, take casualties, come back") ended up questioning what the whole point was. Accordingly, his songwriting changed, addressing what he was seeing and feeling out there. Here we are introduced to Neil Young's Living With War website, where musicians are encouraged to send links to their own songs that deal with the issues and charts are compiled. (Somehow this managed to happen without Ear Candle Productions ever hearing about it; we intend to make up for lost time and participate in this project which is still going.) Hisle ends up topping the chart with one of his songs, and Cerre introduces him to Neil, leading to a very nice scene of the two of them playing guitars together. (What is that weird little miniature guitar Neil is playing?) When they talk afterward, you get a sense that Neil Young really wants to connect with veterans and relate to their experience. Later, CSNY are performing the Living With War track "Shock And Awe" and we watch Hisle stock-still, arms folded, staring straight ahead with haunted eyes as the music takes him back to the horrors he lived through.

We also meet a group called Vets4Vets (not to be confused with other groups or websites by that name), who specialize in counseling for the new generation of traumatized veterans from the current messy wars. When Davis and I were spending a lot of time on the local open mike scene, we got to know a few Vietnam vets who were deeply scarred by their experience, and when Bush got his war, I could only think about all the kids who were going to come back as damaged as the guys we'd met. A few of those who returned had the vision to start this support group, and it's good to spend some time with them in the movie.

Other veterans deal with what went on in different ways. Many have gone into politics, in order to do something about the kind of policies which created the bogus war that they fought in. Stephen Stills is shown spending his days off on the tour campaigning for 14 Iraq War veterans running for office as Democrats. It's an interesting karmic twist for Stills, who went through a bizarre period of cocaine-induced psychosis at one point where he imagined that he himself was a Vietnam vet.

I actually was surprised to find Stills rather likable in this movie; he comes off as good-humored, irreverent, and politically astute. Unfortunately, the poor guy's voice has been badly damaged by years of drug abuse, not to mention the cancer treatments he was undergoing at the time of the tour, which also bloated him to the point where he is as huge as Crosby here. On his Buffalo Springfield hit, "For What It's Worth", you hear him struggling to get the vocals out, though he gets in a great moment on the final chorus when he lets out a rough, loud scream. ("OK, maybe I can't sing pretty now, but here's an AARRRRGHHH you can feel!") Stills carries himself off with bullish pride (refusing to let a roadie help him back up when he falls down in the middle of a guitar solo) and the strong support of his bandmates. (Nice to see a band who don't make fun of each other's weaknesses onstage.) His guitar playing certainly hasn't suffered (more elaborate and note-riddled than Young's, which makes for a good contrast), but Stills' voice problems have a definite impact on a group whose main trademark was their harmonies.

Nash, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be able to hit the high notes he used to, so I noticed that many of the harmony parts on the old songs have been completely rearranged, with Young joining in on the group vocals more than he did when he originally joined the band. His voice, of course, is as weird and unique as ever, but at this late date, it is also by far the strongest. As a result, what Jimi Hendrix famously referred to as "twinkling western sky music" takes on a decidedly rougher hue now. The intense, lurching physicality of Young's guitar playing dominates the music here, turning a bouncy little pop song like Nash's "Military Madness" into a real foot-stomper and transforming the instrumental section of Crosby's "Deja Vu" into something reminiscent of the first Television album. (I kid you not.)

But in spite of all this, it's not really a music documentary at all. The musical sections are more a support system for a documentary of the state of America just a few years ago. Even if you don't care much for Crosby, Stills and Nash or even Young, this is well worth seeing just for the people you meet, the stories told, and the spectacle of a group of aging stars daring to go out on a limb and take a risk in order to do something more relevant than an oldies show for baby boomers.

An E-mail From God

OK, if you're like me, your outlook on life would be vastly improved if you could spend the next hour laughing uncontrollably at the top of your lungs. To this end, I humbly submit Spamusement, a site devoted to "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines" that does just what they say it does.

This one is my favorite so far. "Seriously, what the hell", indeed.

How To Live Without Fear In America is another strong contender.

UPDATE: The Last Wish Of A Dying Man.

Ear Candle Radio: The Inaugural Ball Set

We indulged our fantasy of being DJs at the 2009 Inaugural Ball. It's such a great set we're going to leave it on the air for the foreseeable future. Celebrate the news!

Mudhoney - On The Move
Parliament - Chocolate City
James Brown - Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved
Jefferson Airplane - Volunteers
The Byrds - Change Is Now
Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson - A Lovely Day
The Beatles - Blackbird
The Blame - Democracy
David Bowie - A New Career In A New Town
Suicide - Child, It's A New World
Sly & The Family Stone - You Can Make It If You Try
The Beach Boys - Celebrate The News
MC5 - Back In The USA
Patti Smith - People Have The Power
The Magnetic Fields - Washington, D.C.
The Impressions - We're a Winner
X-tal - Good Luck

Keep listening!

That's what I'm talkin' about

A great way to start the new regime. Thank you, sir.

If anything bad happens tomorrow

We will know who to blame.

Say, isn't there a law against this? Didn't some guy get thrown in jail a few years ago for making a joke about a "burning bush" in a bar? How come this guy gets to walk free?

First DVD of the new year, Part 2: Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

The Clash chapters of The Future Is Unwritten cover much the same ground as Don Letts' Clash film Westway To The World did, only quicker, with more of a focus on Strummer himself and with the benefit of another eight years' hindsight.

One big difference is that in the earlier movie, Topper Headon looks like walking death. He looks a lot better here, which is good to see, and gets to tell more of his story this time and not just wallow in shame and regret. And Topper's side of the story is well worth hearing. A phenomenal drummer who kicked the Clash's sound into high gear, Topper didn't even care much for the Clash's music at the start. Here he candidly admits that his goal was to join the band, make his name, and then move on to play "proper" music. Didn't quite work out that way, as the Clash were developing so fast that before long, Topper got a chance to play more diverse rhythms than he would have in some "normal" band, and began flowering as a composer in his own right. ("Washington Bullets", "Ivan Meets G.I. Joe", "Rock The Casbah") If he hadn't been seduced by the poppy, who knows what would have happened?

The Clash's early years go by so quickly it becomes a bit disorienting. Whole albums are skipped, we go from raw punk rock to London Calling in the blink of an eye, etc. The band history as a whole is less of a focus than the radical psychic change in our protagonist, who shifts from his carefree slacker persona to the stern, deadly serious representative of something bigger than himself. The Clash's mission was to redefine rock stardom (as opposed to many other punk bands whose stated goal was to do away with the concept completely...so they said anyway) and no one took that notion more seriously than Joe. There's a bitter irony in the contrast between: an early scene where Joe pontificates that he's studied all the mistakes of bands like the Stones and the Beatles, and the Clash are too smart to fall in those traps; and a later voiceover where Joe muses sadly that the Clash had made every possible mistake a band could make. Turns out that while it's hard enough to be successful in music at all, it's even harder to try to control what kind of success you do end up having.

The original punk scene was exclusive by necessity. There was such a powerful sense that music had gone horribly wrong, and it was time for a bottom-up movement to set it right, with all the ensuing dissent over what "wrong" or "right" might actually mean. Early punk was as much defined by what was not allowed as by what was. The Clash were as flash a group of rock stars as any that ever walked the earth, but success never sat well with Joe Strummer, even as he pursued it wholeheartedly. (More clever Julien Temple editing: When the Clash play their triumphant Bond's Casino engagement and meet Martin Scorsese, we jump-cut from a brutal boxing scene in Raging Bull to a dazed, seemingly punch-drunk Joe shaking his head onstage trying to get his bearings, as if to signal a foreshadowing of times to come.)

But one good thing about this movie is that you are never expected to swallow any notion that Joe was some sort of saint. I was surprised to discover that not only was he a bit of a ladies' man, he was often a prize jerk about it. "I wouldn't steal money from a friend (long dramatic pause) but I'd steal his girlfriend." You would not want to get in a fight with your girlfriend in the middle of a Clash tour, and if you did, it's a safe bet which bed you'd find her in the next morning. This is a bit beyond anything that can be explained away by "free love" ideals. Oh Joe, you cad!

On the other hand, from all indications, he respected and even revered his audience, knowing what a privilege it is to have fans who care about your music and what a responsibility you have to give those fans nothing less than 100%, whether that means performing live with breakneck energy at all times or cramming your lyrics with political observations, history lessons and manifestos to communicate something worthwhile to the crowd. Mick Jones was more comfortable with being a pampered rock star, but several interviewees accuse Joe of using Mick as a fall guy to express softer and less strident sentiments that didn't fit his own militant persona, thus leaving his own "hard" reputation intact. (For instance, the poignant "Lost In The Supermarket" was written by Joe, but sung by Mick. Too lightweight for Joe, supposedly. Let Mick be labeled as the "soppy" one.)

Meanwhile, Bernie Rhodes got the boot not long after the Clash's initial success. A voiceover from him is startling in its clueless dismissal of each member of the Clash; the man clearly had no idea what made the band work. The band seemed to be doing fine without him (after he admittedly got them off to a fine start), but after Sandinista! came out to a puzzled world that needed another 20 years to catch up, Strummer had a panic attack that he'd been going in the wrong direction and demanded that Rhodes be reinstated as manager. If there was one single action that destroyed the Clash, it may have been that one. The remaining years of the band are a non-stop circus of staged disappearances turned real (the first of many Joe Strummer career suicide pranks), catastrophic firings of first a drug-sodden Topper and a bratty, miserable Mick Jones, and a last incarnation of the Clash that people don't usually like to talk about. (Don Letts completely omits the Cut The Crap period from Westway To The World.)

I never actually heard all of Cut The Crap, but boy, do I remember the hype. Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, along with a fresh crew of new boys, were going to take the Clash back to their populist punk roots and reconnect with those guttersnipes by whom the truth is only known, blah blah. The public didn't buy it, probably smelling the desperation. Temple unearths a striking clip of the "new" Clash being interviewed. Joe introduces the new band members while Paul scowls sullenly in the back, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. The interviewer asks Joe how he feels about the new group. "Great! Do ya hear me? GREAT!" Joe snarls back, as if he's trying to force himself to believe his own words. Of course, New Clash went over about as well as New Coke, while Mick Jones and Don Letts were already tearing up stages together as Big Audio Dynamite. The real story seemed to surface in the heartbreakingly beautiful valedictory single, "This Is England", where Joe sounds like a broken man despondently combing through the wreckage of his ideals, searching for clues. It was one of Joe Strummer's finest recorded moments, but it wasn't enough to salvage the Clash legacy. One more laughable quote from Rhodes about the possibility of the Clash carrying on without Strummer (Simonon's perspective is most missed here; did he finally say to Bernie, "NO MORE!" in the end?) and the Clash story ends, like a deflated balloon.

The movie suddenly changes tone as we enter the "Wilderness Years". What does it mean to be Joe Strummer in a world without the Clash? We follow the aimless career of a disoriented drifter who can't seem to find an artistic niche. Dabbling in acting (I saw Straight To Hell in a theater when it came out; at the time it looked like it was more fun to make than it was to watch, and I doubt that it's aged well), movie scores (I recall hearing the Walker soundtrack album once, and it sounded pretty good) and solo projects (Earthquake Weather sounded terrible to me when it came out; wonder how it's aged?) and raising his kids, Joe Strummer seemed more lost than anything. Subbing for Philip Chevron in the Pogues (I saw this lineup at the Fillmore in the eighties; it was a fantastic show) and later filling in for Shane McGowan himself kept him in the public eye for a while, but without a real band of his own to work with and against, Joe Strummer became the perfect candidate for a role that no longer existed.

So what is one to do with the rest of one's life? I know the feeling of spending years committed to a project and falling into depression when that project no longer exists. There is a weird, melancholy sequence where we see Joe, alone in the studio, pacing madly, working on overdubs for a musical score for a friend's film project. Plunking a piano, trying out handclaps that he ends up hating, moaning a bottomlessly sad melody, and bantering with an unseen engineer, he looks like the loneliest man in the world. Fortunately, the movie (or Joe's life) does not end on this eerie note.

Suddenly, we meet a new wife (we aren't told what brought Joe's previous marriage to an end though we can imagine---Joe's Achilles heel seemed to be his relationships with women; all of his exes tend to talk about him with equal parts admiration and annoyance) who seems to arrive at the same time that Joe discovers the rave scene and sees the counterculture turned upside-down and a new paradigm in which hippies and punks are nothing but two sides of the same coin. Approaching middle age, our protagonist gets it that he no longer has to pledge allegiance to a particular subculture, and there is a place for all of the personas he adopted in the past to exist in one integrated alive human being. Now our punk patriarch begins holding marathon outdoor campfires where minds can meet and ideas are shared, and the seeds for a new band, the Mescaleros, are sowed.

The three Mescaleros albums are something special, the culmination of what Joe Strummer was all about: catchy, rocking tunes full of humor, farsighted social observation and unpredictably eclectic international influences. I ignored this stuff when it came out because I didn't wanted to be let down by another disappointing Joe Strummer solo project. Hearing the Mescaleros material in this movie made me change my mind. Global A Go Go just might be a better album than London Calling, time will tell. If Joe Strummer had to die young, at least he ended it all on a high note. And The Future Is Unwritten gives us a complete picture of an artist/commentator whose sharp, critical mind always took the backseat to an impulsive, idealistic heart. What ultimately makes this more than just another rockstar biopic is Strummer's ongoing, burning need to establish a deep communication with his audience, and his successful struggle to keep his sense of wonder intact in spite of it all. "Hey!" we see him exclaim at a huge Clash stadium gig mid-film. "We're all alive on this planet at the same time!" It's one of those statements that seems so obvious on the surface, and so improbably amazing when you start thinking about it. We're all alive on this planet at the same time; how do we make use of this chance? Thanks for leaving us with that thought, Joe.

First DVD of the new year, Part 1: Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

We've held on to this disc for almost a month now. I have so much to say about it I'm going to have to break it into at least two parts. Here's the first.

I ran out and bought Global-A-Go-Go by the Mescaleros soon after watching this comprehensive, heart-tugging, often exasperating movie, and I'm on the lookout for a good 101'ers collection as well. The Future Is Unwritten fully immerses you in the arc of Joe Strummer's life without ever putting him on a pedestal. The inspirational, conscientious, warm Joe and the capricious, superficial, flaky Joe are saluted and dissected in one complicated, all-too-human portrait.

The central gimmick is both brilliant and exasperating: friends, family, exes, ex-bandmates, and party-crashing celebrities all gather round a campfire and share their memories of the deceased in a sort of post-punk Burning Man-esque wake. It's a nice way to frame the story, and the viewer can feel as though he or she is there with everyone, singing along with old punk and country songs, warming cold hands, smoking, drinking and sharing the camaraderie.

The exasperating part of this is that, in some kind of fit of arty pretentiousness, director Julien Temple decided to leave every speaker anonymous, perhaps thinking that the lack of captions would aid us in feeling we wandered into this place and are listening to a group of strangers talk about their friend. The actual effect is the opposite; we are removed from the action because we're constantly trying to figure out who the hell everybody is. We're meant to be experiencing a ritual, and end up taking notes, running to the computer, or fast-forwarding.

Now, most people will recognize Mick Jones, Topper Headon, and fucking Bono (to be fair, he's far less pompous here than in that Leonard Cohen documentary, mostly talking about being a teenager at his first Clash show); some of us will go, "Hey, that's Palmolive/Richard Dudanski/Don Letts/Pearl E. Gates, etc; others, wanting an introduction to an unfamiliar musician they've got a hunch they should be checking out, will sit there playing guessing games and not get half of what's being talked about. I've never seen a movie in more dire need of footnotes, and I've seen the film version of Joyce's Ulysses twice. Happily, the bonus interviews on the DVD helpfully identify many of the cast members (though Palmolive, among others, does not appear; perhaps she spent the rest of the interview talking about Jesus, and there wasn't any more usable footage) so that we could learn, for instance, that this one middle-aged guy with big glasses is actually Micky Foote, who produced that life-altering first Clash album.

Aside from that major flaw, the movie is fascinating and thoroughly entertaining: fifty years of history seen through the eyes and words of a magnanimous-yet-often-ridiculously-harsh punk ideologue with superhuman drive and charisma who tore through life in search of connection and excitement, made a difference, fucked up royally, and finally appeared to integrate all the paradoxical sides of his own nature, achieve some wisdom, and have a little bit more fun before his heart gave out without warning in 2002.

Aside from the campfires (echoing Strummer's own predilection for campfires in his final years), the other recurring motif is clips from Strummer's BBC radio show; we hear him spinning one great record after another and rhapsodizing about the songs, the artists, the culture, the emotions and keeping us coming back to the importance of music itself in his life. Like John Lennon before him, Joe was simultaneously bent on conveying a Big Serious Message For The People, and helplessly in love with the pure joy of simple, fun, dumb old rock and roll because that's where the juice is.

There is a beautiful scene in the weird Clash movie Rude Boy where, after about an hour of the Clash being intense, intimidating and aloof, we see Joe (I think it's the scene where he has to tell the title character, a Clash roadie, that they've decided to sack him) silently stroll over to a piano and pound out the sweet old New Orleans song "Come On Baby, Let The Good Times Roll". He makes it sound like the greatest hymn ever written. It's a beautiful gesture to this confused kid, a statement of "it's not working out but let me just share a little piece of myself before you go", and a moment where Joe drops his militant tough guy persona long enough to reveal the kind-hearted soul underneath. It made sense; being a kind-hearted soul is a risky proposition in this world, and only a kind-hearted soul who'd been screwed over countless times for excessive kindness would be likely to notice this state of affairs enough to write a lyric like

Hate and war! The only thing we've got today!
And if I close my eyes, it will not go away!

We follow the life of diplomat's son John Mellor from his birth in Turkey and childhood spent everywhere from Egypt to Mexico to Germany to Malawi, and it's plain how this international upbringing fed his later interest in world events and world music. We get the impression of his parents being likeable, progressive people who were driven by class pressures to send their sons off to boarding school, which clearly left scars both on older brother David, a shy misfit who flirted with fascism before committing suicide, and younger brother John, who spent the rest of his life both rebelling and trying to create community in reaction to being cut off from his family, while at the same time nursing a guilt complex for being a child of privilege, which led to him playing an ever-changing set of roles, constantly reinventing himself in search of something meaningful and relevant. Yes, it's true, Joe Strummer was always a bit of a poser. At the same time it's hard not to agree with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones when he bristles, "I don't care where he came from, he weren't no phony!"

Temple is relentlessly clever with the editing throughout the movie; the early boarding school years are peppered with clips from old English schoolboy movies and Lindsay Anderson's If. When young John Mellor (not yet "Woody" or "Joe") leaves school, we're treated to the final scene of If (SPOILER: Think Columbine starring Malcolm McDowell) while "Kick Out The Jams" blasts in the background. It all works for the most part, because there are so many home movies and photos available that the clips work as punctuation, context, and amusing in-jokes without taking over the early scenes; later, clips from movie versions of 1984 and Animal Farm keep turning up all through the Clash years, as if to say there was a touch of Orwellian mind control to the punk ethos. (And we could certainly have a field day arguing back and forth on that one, but it's a hoot to see how Joe's views on, say, "hippies" and pot-smoking, evolved over the years.)

A real treat that shows up on occasion is a few pieces of animation built from drawings that Joe did himself. (He had a knack for cartooning, his figures slightly reminiscent of those of recently-passed artist and Clash friend Ray Lowry.) There is one riveting moment set to a wonderfully clattering low-fi rendition of Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips" by Joe's first successful band, the 101'ers, that makes me want to jump out of my seat as drawings of the 101'ers spring to life in a crescendo of mad, feral one-chord bopping that sounds like Bo Diddley and the Fall thrown in a blender. It's just a bunch of drawings, but you feel like you are there, it's so urgent. And of course, this is just the warmup.

Richard Dudanski (a legendary drummer and intriguing figure in his own right) and other ex-101'ers get in some good stories in the chapter covering the history of that band and the squat community they grew out of (which Joe became the de facto leader of and which evaporated quickly as he moved on---he was a born ringleader); we also meet Dudanski's wife Esperanza Romero and her sister Paloma, Joe's girlfriend at the time (better known as Palmolive, the Slits' original drummer---later on, we get some tantalizing seconds of Slits footage; god, she was something back then). The bohemian pub-rockabilly of the 101'ers was on the verge of hitting it big on the London scene, but the Zeitgeist interfered in the form of a shared gig with the Sex Pistols.

We know this part of the story. A stunned Joe is shocked out of his complacency by the new paradigm shift and is moved to junk everything familiar to him and set out on a new course. Enter Bernie Rhodes, who did not agree to appear in this movie, but who is captured through audio clips, pontificating outrageously in a voice uncannily reminiscent of Pete Townshend. Rhodes is of course key to the story, but he's something of a cipher himself. While Malcolm McLaren guided the Pistols like a Situationist charlatan out to stir up shit for the sake of stirring up shit, Rhodes comes off as a true believer in his own hype who drove his charges to great heights of inspiration when he wasn't sabotaging them with nasty mind games. To Joe, a natural leader without a sense of direction of his own, Bernie was someone worth following, and he did so for years. There's an interesting moment where Dudanski reveals he could have been the Clash's original drummer, but upon meeting Rhodes, he refused to work with him. (He did all right, joining the early Raincoats---before being replaced by sister-in-law Palmolive---moving on to Public Image, Basement 5, and then rejoining the Raincoats again, among other activities.)

But whatever you think of Rhodes, he was the one who brought Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Keith Levene together; there wouldn't have been a Clash if he hadn't made it happen. Somebody needed to say to Joe and Mick, "write about what's around you" rather than string together cliched rock and roll lyrics. They wrote the songs, but it took someone else to fire their imaginations to write the songs they wrote. It's hard to imagine now how badly punk was needed in the 70s. (You kids have no idea, now get off my lawn, etc etc etc.) As a catalyst, you can't fault Rhodes. Later on, he proved to be a problem. Over and over again.

Levene, of course, was the first to go, and not the last Strummer bandmate to succumb to a drug problem. (Though not before making his mark in Public Image, working with Dudanski during their Metal Box sessions.) Poignantly, Levene reminisces in the firelight about how Joe loved his guitar playing and how Keith lobbied hard to get Joe to join the band, only to be forced to leave. (Levene is now rumored to be collaborating with Slits guitarist Viv Albertine---I hope we get to hear that!) Terry Chimes joins on drums, and they record that debut album. We get some great early Clash rehearsal footage where we see a speed-crazed, driven band in a noisy little box of a room shaping their racket into something revolutionary. We see Joe's demeanor change from the goofy beatnik squatter to a surly, stiff-yet-wildly-agile raging frontman flanked by youngsters Mick and Paul.

Paul Simonon is not here, but Mick Jones gets a lot of face time. Affable, slightly silly, possibly stoned and/or drunk, he giggles incessantly and then catches you off-guard with a perfectly insightful observation. There's a wonderful bit where he gestures out a balcony window at the Westway in London at night. "If you want to write a song, just look out your window. It's all out there." Another time, he stops and listens to the noise below. "The roar of the city...it sounds like our music." And it does.

Illuminated Corridor is up

Ear Candle Productions was commissioned to chronicle the Oct. 3, 2008 installment of the Illuminated Corridor, a gathering of visual and sound artists in various public spaces in Oakland. This one was held in the plaza outside the Oakland Art Gallery downtown. Enjoy the total sensory overload (with some generalized descriptions) below:

1. What it all looked and sounded like, with everything happening at once.

2. A lively orchestral piece.

3. An insane computer light show. Beautiful, or hard to watch? You decide.

4. A free-jazz ensemble collides with electronic noise, resulting in pure energy music.

5. A strange and beautiful epilogue.

Pills

Just swallow what they're giving you
You'll no longer feel the pressure
It's socially acceptable
Welcome to the New Drug Culture!

If you've been following the commercials on TV lately, you'll understand that I wrote this song for a reason. Wow. Just...wow.

Arrrr

More reasons to love pirates.

"Our side" does it again

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake: "I want to play poker with Harry Reid."

Let's see. It's 2009, the country is in crisis, and the Democrats currently have the power to set a new agenda that could take us out of this idiotic, destructive spin and bring the world's remaining superpower into the 21st Century. What to do? I know, let's get bogged down in a tawdry and suspiciously convenient alleged "scandal" and make ourselves look like idiots again, helping the short-attention-spanned US public forget all about the criminal regime of the last 8 years. Say, if we keep up this level of lameness, maybe we can ensure Sarah Palin is a shoo-in in 2012! But at least we showed that uppity Illinois governor who's boss!

Ugh. It really is high time we sent the established Democratic leadership packing along with the Republicans they so effectively enable. Looks like The Blame's "Get Out" remains relevant, and will continue to do so, long after the Bush clan is gone.

Another one gone

R.I.P. Ron Asheton.

While you're waiting

...and while I wait till I have enough time to compose the next long post, here's my old Santa Cruz friend Dag Weiser, who is winning an award for his unusual art.

A riot of our own?

No More Mister Nice Blog is being added to the blogroll because of this post. Go over there and read it.

There is a very real possibility that things may not really change unless an angry mob or two gets busy. Sad, but maybe true?

My Clash story

In anticipation of our review of Julien Temple's Joe Strummer movie, here's an old piece of writing from a long-proposed picture book/punk memoir in the making on my first Clash experience. With me at this event were Annie Hesse and the late Maati Stojanovich.

The Berkeley Community Theatre wasn’t designed for this kind of show. A theater with assigned seating for the Clash? Ridiculous! But we were not going to miss the first-ever U.S. appearance by the band, no matter what. We had every intention of showing up for the not-so-secret underground show in San Francisco the next day, but we had to be there to witness the official event. And being a fan, I was very keen to see Bo Diddley as well. Well, if you know anything about Bo Diddley or Chuck Berry, they are the type of ‘50s rock and roll legends who simply show up in a town and the booker puts them together with a local band and little to no rehearsal. After all, everybody knows “Who Do You Love” or “Johnny B. Goode”, right? Just pay the gentlemen up front and the audience gets to bask in their glory.

So Bo Diddley came on, all dressed in black, and the band was a serviceable but hardly memorable boogie-rock unit with a touch of funk and a lead guitarist who liked to indulge in flashy solos, in other words, what we would nowadays refer to as a “jam band”. Despite this lackluster supporting cast I was thrilled to death because, come on, it’s Bo Diddley up there! Bo, to his credit, was trying out some new material as well as his old standards. I recall one song, another entry in the long list of Bo Diddley songs extolling the greatness of Bo Diddley, called “He’s A Hell Of A Man”. The audience seemed restless, but not too disrespectful. (The Clash always tried to pick rootsy opening acts. Two years on, they’d be touring with New Orleans rhythm and blues singer Lee Dorsey and reggae toaster Mikey Dread.) Unlike many punk bands, they seemed to be consciously working to place themselves in a thread of musical history, rather than simply declaring Year Zero. Year Zero was already passé for them, a relic of 1976.

When the headliners hit the stage, everyone stood up. I had my camera, but I couldn’t see much. Gradually I rose, first standing on the cushioned theater seat, which felt too unstable, then finally balancing with one foot on each armrest. Maati, beside me, was doing the same, and so were more and more of the audience, a rickety swarm of human beings swaying, shaking, and jostling one another. It wasn’t a floor where you could jump around, pogo, and play bumper cars with one another, but the energy crackled through the crowd all the same.

The Clash were all over the stage, racing around, jumping and throwing shapes like a sped-up film of an excited teenage boy practicing guitar in front of a mirror. They looked impeccably cool. Of course they opened the show with “I’m So Bored With The U.S.A.”; how could they resist? The audience of Americans sang along joyfully. The band played sloppier than on the records and Joe Strummer’s lyrics were even more garbled than usual, but hell, it sounded just like the Clash. The power of the music overcame our uncomfortable, even dangerous footing, and it felt as if gravity was suspended for a moment. If this was how they sounded in this inappropriate venue, the show at the temple was bound to be unbelievable.

Maati, Annie, and I headed up front afterwards. Using the press pass Maati had obtained (for the brilliant, seminal Santa Cruz-based fanzine City Of The Dead, which only existed in our own minds, but would have been absolutely fantastic if we had ever gotten off our asses and actually put one out), we talked our way backstage. The excitement trumped my shyness and I felt ready to exchange a few words with the great Joe Strummer.

I took a picture of a sleepy-eyed, possibly nodding, Topper Headon holding a carved wooden sign reading “The Clash” that someone had given the band. Pearl E. Gates, former member of Leila and the Snakes and frontwoman of Pearl Harbour and the Explosions, who had gone on tonight before Bo Diddley (and would later marry bassist Paul Simonon), was on the stairway with him. Topper was so small and skinny, it was amazing to think that such loud, forceful, precise drumming came from that little body.

Maati and I greeted Joe Strummer, congratulating him for the set, the new album, and for finally coming to play the States. Annie was snapping away with her Pentax, capturing our conversation. I was really into Give ‘Em Enough Rope at this time, finding more details in it the more I heard it. A recent magic mushroom fueled listening party had further convinced us that this was the band to replace the Beatles and the Rolling Stones forever. One of our favorite songs was “Last Gang In Town”, a doomy, apocalyptic-sounding portrait of warring youth cliques in London that switched from a Stones-like major key stomp to a subdued, haunting minor-key chorus with Joe blurting out words that no matter how hard I listened, I just could not decipher. And here we were with the visionary frontman of the band we had been obsessed with for the past year. This was my chance!

“Joe”, I said, “I really like that song ‘Last Gang In Town’, but I can’t understand the chorus. What are you singing there?”

Joe looked not only unsure of the answer, but puzzled and possibly annoyed that someone would ask such an unimportant question. “I can’t remember…we’ve never done that one live. I only ever sang it once in the studio….HEY JONESY!”

He shouted to Mick Jones, who was embroiled in a deep conversation with a shrill-voiced red-haired woman who clearly wanted him badly.

“Jonesy, what’s the words to the chorus of ‘Last Gang In Town’?”

Mick had to think for a moment. “The crops whipped the spiffs and the spikes whipped the quiffs?”

I didn’t understand that at all, and made them repeat it a couple of times.

“You know, they’re like all the different gangs that were fighting in the song.”

“Oh.” I felt a bit stupid at this point.

“Mick!” the red-haired woman asked suddenly. “What’s ‘Protex Blue’ mean?” I may have unleashed the floodgates of confused American fans looking for meaning in the very UK-specific lyrics of early Clash songs.

Mick looked very embarrassed and mumbled. “It’s a rubber Johnny.”

“A what?”

“A rubber Johnny.” By now Mick was beginning to turn red.

“What’s that mean?” She was not going to let this go.

Maati spoke up loudly. “It’s a PROPHYLACTIC, sweetie!”

Now everyone seemed a little sheepish. In these pre-AIDS days, condoms were largely considered an anachronistic and slightly grotesque form of birth control.

We hung out a little more, said our goodbyes and split. A few months later, I saw an interview with Joe Strummer in a magazine where he expressed his regrets about playing Berkeley. “We never should have played there,” he declared. “It’s a university town, and they’re all boring snobs.” Uh, thanks Joe.

Ear Candle Radio's Top 20: December 2008

Wow. Our last charts for 2008 include a sizeable portion of our own music. Thank you, listeners! Now go out and buy some for yourselves to help keep the wolf from our door, please.

The irrepressible Ari Up tops the chart with a great dancehall-punk rant from her recent solo album. Can we hope for some new Slits material in the new year?

The number two slot is held by a local mostly-instrumental group, the Interstellar Grains, and their brief sitar piece, "The Past". We have a couple of Interstellar Grains tracks on our upcoming playlist, and are looking forward to their show at the Boom Boom Room in a couple of weeks. We saw this band open for the Mountain Goats and Kaki King last year and asked them for a CD. Next thing you know, they're at number two. How about that?

Third is a Liliput track J Neo Marvin really loves. A convulsive post-punk roar. Fourth is 801, Phil Manzanera's side project from the 70s. Here, Brian Eno sings a song written by Charles Hayward, who went on to form the legendary post-punk band This Heat. Beautifully dreamy.

Brian Jonestown Massacre's "Feel So Good" is back again, and why not? A sexy, romantic male-female duet from these psychedelic provocateurs. An early Stones B-side with hilarious minimalist lyrics, a definitive Neu! drone piece which gave birth to a million Stereolab songs, and the Fall's trubute to reggae and Protestantism all make their appearance.

Belizer, an artist from the wartorn country of Georgia, shows up with a strident piece of criticism against...someone? And Takeshi Murata, our friend from Japan, re-enters with his On-U Sound-like instrumental number, "Decipher". Fuxa, a longtime Ear Candle favorite, delight us with their cover of Suicide's "Cheree".

And that's not all. A little roots reggae, Jesus & Mary Chain feedback, a dreamy song from the late great Electrelane, a hoedown from X-tal's former labelmates Harm Farm, and our friend Celine Keller's sultry Eurodisco theme for her animation featurette, Turnaround.

Artists, please get in touch to receive your Ear Candle Radio buttons! (And if you are a band, let us know how many people there are to send the appropriate number of buttons to.)

And listeners, remember it's your votes that matter most here. Keep listening; we have some excellent radio in store for you in 2009.

1. Ari Up - Allergic (Featuring Terranova) - Dread More Dan Dead
2. Interstellar Grains - The Past - Interstellar Grains
3. Liliput - DC-10 - Liliput/Kleenex
4. 801 - Rongwrong - 801 Live
5. X-tal - Apocalypservice - Who Owns Our Dreams
6. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Feel So Good (Previously Unreleased) - Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective (Disc 2)
7. The Rolling Stones - Stoned - The Rolling Stones Singles Collection: The London Years [Disc 1
8. Neu! - Fur Immer (Forever) - Neu! 2
9. X-tal - The Humboldt Desert - The Humboldt Desert
10. The Fall - Kurious Oranj - I Am Kurious Oranj
11. Belizer - No Deal - Catharsis Gallery
12. Fuxa - Cheree (Richard Formby mix) - Fuxa Commits Suicide
13. Earth & Stone - In Time To Come - Kool Roots
14. The Jesus And Mary Chain - Bo Diddley is Jesus - Barbed Wire Kisses
15. The Experimental Bunnies - Nonexistence - Music For The Integrity Tone Scale
16. Electrelane - To The East - No Shouts, No Calls
17. Takeshi Murata - Decipher - Decipher
18. J Neo Marvin And The Content Providers - Are You A Good Witch Or A Bad Witch? - What Is Truth?
19. Harm Farm - Jersey Devil - Spawn
20. Celine Keller and Holger Fath-Tati - Turnaround - Turnaround Soundtrack

Feliz Ano Nuevo!

We are back!

After a long blogging hiatus (where did the time go?), in which we've been working hard creating the next Ear Candle Radio playlist, making the holidays happen, and replacing both a computer and a DVD player (thankfully we got great deals for both on Craigslist), we are gearing up for new activities and will be brimming with new bloggy goodness for you all.

In the meantime, here's a couple things to entertain you:

The Horribles' drummer got in touch recently and was interested in buying copies of our footage of his old band, so Davis made a new, improved edit of their set in two parts. Check it out here and here. Keep in mind that this is a one-camera shoot, mostly shot by me in the middle of a mosh pit, so don't be surprised to see a few shaky moments. But aren't these kids adorable?

(Soon to come: our edit of the latest installment of Oakland's Illuminated Corridor, a wild experimental multimedia free-for-all staged in various public spaces in Oaktown. This latest edit captures the beautiful chaos of these events, and we look forward to sharing it with you.)

The second Experimental Bunnies album, Biology And Physics, is busy being processed by our distributor, and we'll let you know when you can download your own. I have to say I'm pretty proud of this one; in my less humble moments I've been known to tell people, "this is the greatest instrumental album of all time!", which may be stretching it just a little, but really, it's very, very good.

The next musical task is to focus on more new material by the Blame, starting with our upcoming single, "Tropical Fish", a song salvaged from the scrapped sessions for Meri St. Mary, who suddenly decided our little label just wasn't good enough for her because we actually wanted her to sign a contract. (Not to mention telling other people that we aren't trustworthy and our recordings are poor quality; hiring a big entertainment lawyer to try to strong-arm us into destroying the tapes, which of course we refused to do and he promptly backed down; plus she walked off with a few possessions of ours that we may never see again...the thanks we get for helping an old friend back into the spotlight. Bleahhh...) So we're taking the music we made for her song, finishing it ourselves, and putting it out as a cover version by the Blame! We will not be thwarted by petty nonsense! And it is an excellent (and excellently recorded) song (we wouldn't be doing this otherwise) that only becomes more poignant after our experience. We'll let y'all know when it's done!

Not to be forgotten: We've gotten a lot of responses to our live shoot of Matthew Grasso and the Nada Brahma Music Ensemble performing "Papamagama". Here's all three parts:

Papamagama, Part 1
Papamagama, Part 2
Papamagama, Part 3

If these are loading too slowly for your computer, visit our You Tube site, where we have fistfuls of video treats for you.

One of my favorite things recently: Celine Keller, who some of you may remember for her artwork on the first two Content Providers albums and more recently is responsible, along with her partner Paula, for the very creative and productive NENA TV, has a brilliant new blog called KrustelKram, which compiles some incredible video clips from all over. Recently, Celine and Paula found this fantastic BBC documentary on Brazilian music that provides lots of great footage and insight into the fascinating history of the Tropicalia movement. Interesting how the military dictatorship was far less threatened by the doctrinaire leftist opposition than by wild hippies like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who the local Marxists, in their short-sighted People's Front Of Judea fashion, hated almost as much as the oppressive government itself. Another example of why one of our slogans at Ear Candle Productions is: CULTURE TRUMPS POLITICS!