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!

Ear Candle Radio's Top 20: November 2008

A very interesting chart this month. JJ's song has vaulted to number one, after a showing on last month's charts. Times being what they are, we're sure a lot of people can relate to JJ's sad tale of a family farm going bust.

Elsewhere, we have three appearances by our own artists, including a piece from the upcoming Experimental Bunnies album as well as the still-appropriate "Get Out!" by the Blame. Our friend Matthew Grasso and his Nada Brahma Music Ensemble show up with Papamagama, which we recently taped a live performance of. As a matter of fact, this is a good month for trippy guitar pieces, from Funkadelic to Television to Kaki King to Steve Barden. Another friend on this month's chart is The Big Takeover's Jack Rabid, who takes a rare lead vocal on a new track from his band Springhouse. Elsewhere, we have a little New Zealand, a little Detroit, a long detour through Cologne, and much more, ending with former Incredible String Band co-leader Robin Williamson offering a wistful bit of social commentary in his craggy, well-worn voice and sounding a far cry from the elf-like boy he once was.

We will be sending buttons to our chart toppers once they arrive.

1. JJ Schultz - Song Of The Independent Rancher - Bustin' Outa Town
2. The Blame - Get Out! - Unreleased
3. Iggy Pop - Cold Metal - Instinct
4. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain - Maggot Brain
5. Can - Bel Air - Future Days
6. Steve Barden - Scenic Drive - Tallulah Lake
7. Nada Brahma Music Ensemble - Papamagama - The Five Deadly Talas
8. Jefferson Airplane - The House At Pooneil Corners - Crown of Creation
9. The Great Unwashed - Born In the Wrong Time - Collection
10. Springhouse - Time Runs Out - From Now to OK
11. Electrelane - Five - No Shouts, No Calls
12. Kaki King - Happy As A Dead Pig In The Sunshine - Everybody Loves You
13. Tall Dwarfs - Up - Stumpy
14. J Neo Marvin and The Content Providers - Kite Song - What is Truth?
15. The Experimental Bunnies - Ready For Your Instructions - Biology And Physics
16. The Dirtbombs - Ever Lovin' Man - We Have You Surrounded
17. Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - Slush - Let's Make Up and Be Friendly
18. A Paper Cup Band - Just Because You Smoke, Doesn't Mean You're A Philosopher (A Brief Intermission) - Midwestern Post-Sarcastic
19. Television - Marquee Moon - Marquee Moon
20. Robin Williamson - Political Lies - The Iron Stone

DVD Of The Week: The Life And Music Of Ronnie Lane: The Passing Show

This is an example of renting a music-bio DVD not so much because I was a huge fan of the artist in question as because I was curious about someone I had only sketchy knowledge about. As a teenager I was a fan of the Faces during their heyday (really, was there ever any other setting where Rod Stewart ever made the slightest bit of sense?) and like a good rock geek quickly traced them back to the Small Faces and their rich, magnificent catalog. But when Lane walked out on the Faces, leaving Ron Wood free to play eternal kid brother to Keith in the Stones and Rod Stewart free to become the thing that he became afterwards, I never managed to investigate any of his subsequent activities for whatever reason, though my sister actually had a copy of the Lane/Pete Townshend collaboation Rough Mix (Why, I wonder? I must have recommended it to her) [UPDATE: No, she was a big Faces fan at one point, I recall now] and I remember liking the song "April Fool" a lot. Then punk comes along and I couldn't care less anymore, until I find out that he died in the 90s after suffering from multiple sclerosis for nearly two decades. So here is an opportunity to get some answers to the question, who was this Ronnie Lane, anyway?

The movie begins in familiar territory with young Ronnie growing up working class in the East End of London, learning guitar, getting into the Mod scene, switching to bass, meeting Steve Marriott, and forming the Small Faces. There is an absolutely riveting performance of "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?" here that knocked my socks off: pure, high-energy garage-punk Motown pastiche, Marriott flinging himself around the stage, shouting soul, and spitting out Townshend-like chords like a little demon. You get little snippets of classics like "Tin Soldier" and "Itchykoo Park", as well as bits of Ogden's Nut Gone Flake material like an intense rendition of "Mad John" and a grungy "Rollin' Over" that previews Marriott's future leading the boring arena-boogie band Humble Pie. (Like Rod Stewart, Steve Marriott achieved greater fame while plummeting to the depths of suck musically when he parted company with Lane.)

Fun also are the bits of Faces footage. The Faces jumped in at just the moment when the Rolling Stones were beginning to lose the plot, taking a similar sound and adding drunken knockabout humor (and leading the way for the Replacements, the Pogues, the Cat Heads, and others) to deliver something joyous, ridiculous and life-affirming. (Not that there weren't quieter moments; there's a great version of "Richmond" with the two Ronnies on acoustic slide guitar and Rod Stewart plunking a stand-up bass to the side) If they had any shortcomings, it was a lack of consistent material (though Lane's contributions like "Debris", "Love Lives Here" or "Tell Everyone" tended to be the highlights of their albums) and the way the band's lovable rogue image sometimes crossed the line into pure misogyny, often in some of their best songs like "Stay With Me" (which Lane had nothing to do with) or "Ooh La La" (which he co-wrote with Ron Wood---a beautiful, wistful song whose lyrics are basically about a sad old grandfather telling his grandson that women will ruin your life, so watch out). Well, it WAS the early 70s; you might as well comment that the sky was blue, I suppose.

Meanwhile Ronnie, energized and inspired by a new relationship (with a woman he met in the Meher Baba community who, like him, was married to someone else when they met), undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming obsessed with rural life. He invests his money in a van containing a mobile recording studio, quits the band, and does the "getting it together in the country" thing. Having grown up on a farm myself, I was always amused by the phenomenon of urban hippies getting carried away with romantic notions of life on the farm. (It's the perfect example of "the grass is greener" thinking; "life on the farm" for me was synonymous with boredom and drudgery, and I ran off to the city as soon as I had the chance.) Running a farm is hard work and requires dedication, and the Lanes' qualifications for the task were pretty questionable; the music that emerged as a result of all this was more promising, though.

The new band, Slim Chance, was a largely acoustic group, a loose-knit backdrop for Ronnie's new musical aesthetic, which brought in fiddles, accordions, and at one point, a black father-and-son sax section. Very much a Basement Tapes sound, showcasing Lane's likeable voice and knack for instantly catchy tunes that served him so well in his previous bands. They put out a lot of music, indulging in interesting ideas like running cords from the mobile studio van and recording a whole record literally outdoors, and later attempting to tour with tents and generators like a traveling circus. Everything they tried was a resounding failure, financially and popularly, and the band broke up in exhaustion. A few of their songs cracked the British charts and the TV clips of the time show a large, loose folk group having a lot of fun. They didn't fit in with 70s butt-rock or the punk scene that rose in reaction to it, and they didn't make it to America in time to take advatage of the singer-songwriter boom. Too eccentric to have fit in with the smug mellowness of LA big-label folk-rock of the time, yet not eccentric enough to be embraced by today's freak-folk scene, Ronnie Lane really was an artist who never found a simpatico audience. Some of the songs you get a taste of in this video are quite enticing though; "The Poacher" is an odd Celtic/country-western/baroque thing that I really want to hear more of. And Lane's voice has an incredibly warm appeal, a rough, nasally melodic Dylan/Richards croon that's very inviting. Must hear more.

But then Ronnie got sick.

What a horrible diease multiple sclerosis is, slowly robbing a sufferer's mental and physical faculties while leaving them all too aware of what they're losing, plus inflicting excruciating pain in the process. Ronnie's mother had it, and by the end of the 70s, it had hit him as well. The 80s saw him recruiting his old rock star friends to do benefit concerts for an organization he founded to fight MS; then, later it was discovered that the woman he put in charge had embezzled most of the funds they collected. What a disgrace. The movie doesn't indicate how he felt about it, but he must have been devastated.

Towards the end of his life, Ronnie married yet another woman who stayed with him until the end. The couple moved to Austin, where his particular brand of rock/country/folk fit perfectly with the local aesthetic and he was treated like a king by his fellow musicians. There are clips of him in a wheelchair or on a stool, bellowing out old favorites in the best voice he can muster. A terrible irony occurs when his old bandmate Ian MacLagan moves to Austin just when the Lanes split for Colorado because Ronnie can't stand the Texas heat anymore. At the time of his eventual passing in 1997, he was a forgotten footnote in musical history, something this movie seeks to change.

So who was Ronnie Lane then? From this evidence, a modestly talented songwriter but a brilliant catalyst who could create magic with the right collaborators. A curious fellow who followed whatever path interested him, and a sometimes flaky, sometimes difficult but ultimately sweet and decent guy who kept a positive spirit under the most brutal and disappointing circumstances. That sense of cheerful stoicism may be what drew him to folk, country, and blues: all working class musical forms that thrive with that same upful-in-the-face-of-hell mentality. I was convinced enough to want to look for a good Slim Chance/solo Lane compilation sometime soon. RIP Ronnie.

Getting closer...

The Experimental Bunnies' second album, BIOLOGY AND PHYSICS, is due in about six weeks. J Neo just completed an improved mix of the song "Waiting For A Bad Idea To Die", and uploaded the ten finished tracks to Tunecore. We have taken advantage of our distributor's special offer of a free single release for every album completed by midnight tonight! Watch this space for a special one-song digital single from The Blame, in which we take a big sour lemon and turn it into a tall glass of the most refreshing lemonade you have ever tasted! (That's just a teaser...we'll be following with more details in the next week or two.)

In other news, we have ordered a big bag of Ear Candle Radio buttons from our Cafe Press shop (we encourage you to mosey on over there for a Christmas T-shirt or mug!), which we will be distributing to any artists who make it onto our monthly Top 20. (Applies to artists who are alive and/or reachable, so stay in touch and stay healthy!) If you are a band or soloist who knows you have a song on our playlist, now (or any time, for that matter) is the time to cast your votes, get your button, and get heard. Cheers!

DVD of the week: The Weather Underground

Now that the Republican noise machine's attempt to portray Bill Ayers as The Scariest Man In America has failed so resoundingly, this movie is a good one to re-examine. (The Rude Pundit has the best take on Ayers himself that I've seen so far...don't worry, it's far less rude than usual.)

The movie places us in the late Sixties and early Seventies without using any music of the era (an effectively alienating decision); instead the predominant theme is an eerie drone piece (possibly courtesy of San Francisco experimental band Tarantel, who show up in the end credits) that creates an underlying tension that suits the story. We are assaulted with gruesome Vietnam War footage fairly quickly, just to remind us of the violent context that gave rise to the whole question of violent vs. nonviolent resistance. Unlike now, where the general public is relatively shielded from the reality of a war their own country has been embroiled in for years, this sort of stuff was on every TV, which may have made some difference. When people think of the Sixties, they invariably think of hippies, the Beatles, peace and love, etc. What can get forgotten is that all this went on during a nasty little war on the other side of the world that was being resisted by a steadily growing portion of the population. (By the same token, why do you suppose there are so many classic reggae songs about peace and love? Because the slums of Jamaica are so horrendously violent.)

The Weather Underground were the stars of the SDS, the most visible, charismatic members of a large and increasingly influential anti-war youth organization who, enraged and frustrated with what they saw as the ineffectiveness of non-violent resistance, broke away and started their own, more militant faction. They were young, magnetic, sexy, committed, and self-serious. As the movie traces their history, there's a palpable sense of envy that these privileged white kids can't hide for their peers in the Black Panther Party. I kept thinking of the old Clash lyric:

White riot, I wanna riot!
White riot, a riot of my own!

In a piece of vintage news footage, one Panther coolly dismisses the Weathermen (as they called themselves in the beginning before the more gender-inclusive name was adopted...how a group with an intense, dominant personality like Bernardine Dohrn speaking for them could ever have given themselves a name with the word "men" in it in the first place is beyond me but those were different times), labeling their actions as "folly" and labeling the group "Custeristic", going on to explain that "Custeristic" means irresponsibly leading others into life-threatening situations for their own egos. (Good word...I must remember it; thank you, Mr. Anonymous Uncredited Panther.) The Custeristic tag certainly manifested itself in the WU's first big action, the Days Of Rage. Oh yeah, I can just see this: it's 1969, a year after the 1968 Democratic Convention fiasco, and somebody decides it'd be a great idea to get as many young people as possible to descend on Chicago, go wild, and mess with the cops. Remember, these are Chicago cops we're talking about. Yeah right. Had I been a young activist then, I probably would have been tempted to respond, "hmmmm, nice idea, good luck with that, I think I'll be washing my hair that night though."

Bill Ayers himself recalls the event (in a slightly cutesy move on the part of the filmmakers, he is shown in his present incarnation as a mild-mannered middle-aged academic, retracing the route of the demonstration with a baseball bat in his hand), saying that they had been assured that there'd be hundreds of thousands of kids there, but it turned out to be more like 150. So they made the best of it, rampaging through a rich Chicago neighborhood, breaking windows and fighting with cops. The film is vague about how they managed to get away with this. The whole escapade comes off as a nice cathartic political tantrum, but ultimately pointless and having zero impact on the war or the power structure, and probably even playing right into Richard Nixon's hands by strengthening public support for "law and order". Custeristic folly indeed.

The expressed desire was to "bring the war back home", to make the average American feel the visceral impact of a faraway, unjust, and deceitful war more directly so that they would be forced to take a stand one way or another. But the fantasy of a spontaneous, violent mass uprising was a failure. The attempt at shock therapy only made them another piece of the spectacle. Former SDS comrades (like Todd Gitlin, now a liberal pundit who contributes to Talking Points Memo and gets a lot of face time here as the Designated Critical Voice) started trashing them publicly for their "kindergarten" ideas of revolution.

Needless to say, our protagonists were undeterred by such talk, but reacted to the less-than-overwhelming response to their attempted mass uprising by concluding that America as a whole was a lost cause, and therefore it was time to step up the violence and make as many ordinary citizens as possible feel the pain that their government was causing other innocents in faraway corners of the world. Call it divine intervention if you want, but this near-turn towards outright terrorism (and there really isn't another word for it, my dear angry punk rock friends) was thwarted when a New York townhouse occupied by a particularly militant faction of the WU was blown to bits by an accidentally premature detonation of a bomb that was meant to be set off at a dance on a military base, killing three members of the group. The tragic accident may well have prevented them from pulling off something really stupid...or, if the New York faction's plan had been pulled off, would it have set a whole different chain of events in motion? A real revolution? Martial law? A quicker end to the war, or internment camps for dissenters all over the US? One has to wonder.

Oh yeah, we have to stop for a moment and ponder the whole "revolutionary" concept. Here is a small collection of people, maybe 20 or 30 strong, who (in Mark Rudd's words) fancied themselves as a "Communist cadre", whose goal was the violent overthrow of the US government. Delusional much? How exactly was this supposed to work anyway? And what exactly, IF all the odds had somehow been defied and this little group had actually succeeded in their goal, what would they actually have DONE NEXT? I can't stop thinking about the old joke about the dog who can't stop chasing cars and the burning question: if said dog actually caught one of the cars it was chasing, would it have the slightest idea what to do with it? OK, here you are, a group of starry-eyed hippies who've read a couple of Marx books, now in charge of a nation of a couple hundred million people, most of whom are less than enchanted with your views. Now what? Now that you're on top, how do you deal with the inevitable dissenting voices of the hundreds of millions of people you looked down on, whom you're now in charge of? Custeristic folly, anyone?

Not to mention the "Communist" thing. At one moment the filmmakers give us a montage of revolutionary unrest happening simultaneously all over the world. Conspicuously absent is the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, though the Chinese Cultural Revolution is shown, as if one could draw equivalencies between a top-down authoritarian manipulation of youth with the uprisings in Paris or Mexico City. As a recovering anarchist turned intensely anti-authoritarian but social-program-supporting liberal Democrat, I don't have much patience with or regard for anyone gullible enough to idealize the old state-capitalist systems of the defunct Iron Curtain; I recommend the history of 20th century Spain or Volume 2 of Emma Goldman's autobiography for anyone who still harbors the fantasy that hardline Communists should ever be trusted, and when Rudd and company start talking Communism (not long after Soviet tanks have rolled into Czechoslovakia), my own personal bullshit detector hits 11. As if the dinosaurs of the Soviet regime would have had any tolerance for these free-love acid-head libertines. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend, dumbasses.

So their ultimate goal was unattainable and ethically questionable nonsense; what fascinates us about the Weather Underground anyway? Perhaps it's their sheer audacity and boldness; here we are, several years into an even stupider, less justified, less popular, and dirtier war, and where are the strong voices that dare to really fuck shit up, who dare to say, "this is enough, and if things don't change NOW, THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES"? Part of the surreal feeling of watching this movie is the thought that "nobody would do this now". Of course, now we have an even weaker Constitution, we have the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, no-fly lists, "First Amendment Zones" for anti-war demonstrators...it ain't the same. On the other hand, the internet has altered the whole concept of mass communication; information is being shared in ways that weren't possible then. It's a different world now, for better or worse; we have the possibility of more access to what's really going on, but can we do anything more than watch it all on our screens?

Back to our story. The stated goal of bringing the war back home through indiscriminate carnage was scuttled after the New York explosion. Here's where things get interesting. The survivors convene, debate, argue, and most of them come to the conclusion that they must ensure that their violence is only against property, and actual human beings should be warned and protected from any harm as much as possible. At this point, the Weather Underground truly goes underground, dropping out and assuming new identities, while their activities become a sort of exploding performance art piece. Public statements are made that a relevant and related building will be bombed as a response to a particular injustice, authorities are informed that the premises must be cleared, BOOM. Sort of a non-violent approach to violence, or is it a violent approach to non-violence? Whatever it is, statements are made, material damage is done, but no casualties ensue. This sort of kinder, gentler terrorism goes on for a few years, and the Weatherfolks' romantic outlaws-with-a-cause stature continues. Some rich acidheads give them a pile of money to bust Timothy Leary out of jail, and they pull it off! You can't say these guys and gals did not know their stuff. (Leary looks especially foolish in this footage, clearly in over his head in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver, mouthing revolutionary slogans less than enthusiastically. What a weird time this was.)

Again, the Vietnam War clips aid tremendously in the context, keeping the viewer focused on what these crazy people were so upset about. Accordingly, the resignation of Nixon and the end of the war sucks the wind out of everyone's sails. Suddenly, the scattered, hidden would-be revolutionaries are starting to feel irrelevant, even though the end of the war did not suddenly make everything better or leave America without any serious issues to argue about. But the war was clearly the main focusing issue for this group. The social dynamic falls apart gradually. Individuals are isolated, only connecting at designated meetings; when a member dissents against the group, they suddenly stop being told when the next meeting is scheduled, and the group dissipates further. By the 80s, most of them get sick of it all and turn themselves in. Many of them end up going free because the FBI conducted themselves so ineptly and illegally that their evidence against them is inadmissible. Other members, like David Gilbert, who is interviewed in prison, ally themselves with even more militant groups and get in far worse trouble. (Gilbert's nose is quite noticeably crooked, as if it has been broken. Who knows from where?)

Most of the interviewees seem dazed, yet sure that they were fighting for a just cause, though many are less sanguine about their own tactics. It's amusingly ironic that so many of these former college students who were so desperate to divest themselves of their bourgeois privilege have reverted to the academic life, but in the case of the Right's would-be betes noires Ayers and Dohrn, it seems appropriate that their obvious intellect and social conscience be channeled into something more constructive and influential now. From all accounts, they are big players in the Illinois educational system who have earned their place there, and only the hysterical inverse-Stalinists of our current nutcase Right could be afraid of them now. Mark Rudd, another former leader and a particularly strong voice of the group, looks emotional and a bit embarrassed towards the end as he cops to his "mixed feelings" about the whole experience. Naomi Jaffe says she would do it all again, but do it "better". Gilbert, in prison, has no doubt that they were doing the right thing.

One of the most affecting characters is Brian Flanagan, all working class New York gruffness (a left-wing Archie Bunker!), now the owner of his own bar. As he tells his story, Flanagan gives an air of older-but-wiser cynicism ("Oh God, they used to go on all night sometimes...it got a little too cult-like") still maintains his conviction about what he and his friends stood for, but takes a jaundiced view at their tactics. Fiercely loyal to the end, he will not give too many details about specific things they did, proudly sloughing it off, saying "I just can't do that." No matter what he's talking about at that moment though, in every scene his eyes are haunted in spite of himself, as if he knows things that he can never tell that traumatize him to this day, but he'll be damned if he ever tells you what they are. He is shown staring at the rebuilt townhouse where his old friends blew themselves up in the process of working to blow up somebody else. The pain in his eyes is clear, then he collects himself and turns away with a little resigned grin.

We've just passed through a time when the country teetered even closer to fascism, with an even more incoherent war and an even more malicious and dishonest administration in charge. Maybe it's because the focus was on the phantom of "terrorism" itself that nothing like the Weather Underground managed to emerge. Maybe we're better off for that, because it could be argued that they really were not very helpful. On the other hand, maybe we'd have been better off with some crazy Quixotic, Custeristic radicals out there on the fringe helping to move that old Overton Window over to a more sensible position.

Each time I watched this movie though (and I ended up watching it about six times trying to work out what on earth I was going to say about it), I couldn't help wondering if the excesses of the Weather Underground were part of the reason that, by the time I entered adulthood in the mid-70s, eager to find some sort of living, vibrant counterculture I could align with, the hippie generation seemed prematurely old, tired, and drained of all their blood, nerve and boldness, with little tolerance for the rude, unruly punk rock scene erupting all around them. Perhaps those oddly uptight longhaired fuddy-duddies I rebelled against so vehemently back then were nursing the same post-traumatic stress disorder that poor Brian Flanagan can't hide in this movie.

And maybe what seemed like apathy in more recent times is more a product of those years..."well, non-violent demonstrations don't work, but violence really doesn't work...what the hell does work?" I like to think that our new interactive media forms are beginning to make a difference---certainly they had everything to do with this new President (and yeah, now that the election is over, I feel perfectly free to say that some ex-Weathermen may have had an influence on him, AND THAT IS PROBABLY A GOOD THING)---and that everything from YouTube to Noodlebrain has had an impact on our evolution, which may be frustratingly slow, but may be ultimately more trustworthy than naive revolutionary fantasies which, given the unending potential craziness of the American psyche, are probably better not messed with, however much we may be tempted to court the notion.

Fun stuff to stumble on whilst poking through Wikipedia

How awesome is the small Welsh town of Aberystwyth? Awesome enough to have had both former Incredible String Band bassist Rose Simpson and Sue Jones-Davies, who played Judith in Monty Python's Life Of Brian, serve as mayor there.

Update: OK, perhaps not quite so awesome since, due to the influence of the local vicars, Life Of Brian is actually banned in Aberystwyth, despite Mayor Jones-Davies' best efforts. No word at this time whether you can find rare ISB albums at the local shops.

Son Of Update: I didn't even notice when I posted this last night, that one of these mayors is a Simpson, and the other is a Jones. Hmmm, maybe we should move there. Wanna be a Welsh mayor, Davis?