"I get thee top bunk...."

According to this article in Radar, Genesis P-Orridge, agent provocateur of Psychic TV and Thobbing Gristle, escaped the UK and:

wound up crashing, oddly, with a young Winona Ryder and her parents—because the authorities back home, while declining to charge him with a crime, had warned that they couldn't guarantee his safety or that of his family if he returned to London

Of all the weird things I know about Genesis P-Orridge, this little detail seems one of the weirdest. What were Winona Ryder's parents into, I wonder?

Also it said that he broke his arm escaping by jumping out of a window to escape a fire at Rick Rubin's house. Please, I hope that it implies he was working on a Rubin-esque cover album ala the Johnny Cash ones. Genesis P-Orridge has a particular if peculiar talent for cover songs (see "Good Vibrations" (youTube, no video), so this could be rather brilliant.

I couldn't find footage of them doing a rather stirring version of Neil Young's "Only Love Will Break your Heart" that I know exists out there, but here is my favorite Psychic TV song, "Unclean" (video by acclaimed and notorious British filmmaker Derek Jarman)

For an explanation of the title of this post, click here , website for Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a quasi-cult started by and later disassociated from Genesis, and scroll down to "Why does TOPY spell funny?"

Pete Townsend had brunch for all your sins

The Hold Steady last was steady brilliant, living up to every expectation: loose-limbed and tightly wound at once, drinks akimbo, rock 'n' roll. But there was one little pointilist interlocking opening-of-"Won't Get Fooled Again" guitar moment inspired a mental note of Pete Townsend died for all your sins but this morning, a soft, high voice from the feathery ferns that border the dark woods of my sonic consciousness whispered "Genesis" to me, and there it was in "Firth of Fifth" or at least something with passing resemblance.

In drinking metaphor, Selling England by the Pound is the Sunday morning mimosa after the Saturday night of tequila shots that was the Hold Steady last night.

And as we weave our way through the morning-after Sunday brunch metaphors, Robert Wyatt is the Eggs Benedict - a succulent complex greasy treat that sounded brilliant when I ordered it, and I wholeheartedly love Robert Wyatt and this album, and Eggs Benedict for that matter, but I'm not sure I'm up to actually taking it in right now. But in restaurants, I feel a perverse obligation to choke it down when it comes, and this pointless dedication transfers to my listening habits as well; thus, I float mildly seasick on the choppy organ noodling of Rock Bottom, liking each bite unto itself, but wishing the plate was clean.

I've never really liked Add N to (X) all that much - a little too goofy maybe? - in minute 3 of the penultimate bite of Wyatt, I needed a way out and the player-suggest-omatic-thingy offered this, and it's like when the AC kicks on in the car after the miserable suffered-through brunch, synthetic balm for being too organic for ones own good. Plus there is a song titled "Machine is Bored with Love" which is hilariously perfect .

Ry Cooder's mid-century Los Angeles trilogy

I've only been a couple of times in short stretches but I rather love Los Angeles, a most non-European of American cities, and there is a scrappy beauty in that.

These albums are about music he listened to on the radio growing up there, learning to play guitar from hillbilly and Mexican radio shows and wishing he could make the 45-minute trek across the city to see Ray Price. They are also about UFOs, Communism, cars and drunks. These records are dense, sprawling and as corny as they are weird - a lot like Los Angeles itself.

He did a lovely interview in Rolling Stone about all this and more that you can read here.

Rhapsody playlist

it will be stoney and adorable

ATTN scant warm-blooded Baton Rougeans: The Hold Steady are playing at Chelsea's tonight and you need to hear them, Normally I'm-live-and-let-live with whatever it is you want to see and listen to, go for it, it's a free country, U! S! A! etc. etc. but in this case I feel I must intervene and point you to the righteous path that starts in the blue collar snows of Minneapolis, hangs south at Brooklyn and ends right at the intersection of convulsive youth culture and making it out alive. There might be people around you saying they are all hype, talk talk talk, drug problem, then guitar solo, but these people are fools and their opinions are not to be heeded. The Hold Steady is the Real Thing for the Real Now.

I'm just now getting around to Bob Mould's new disc despite the urgings of friends whose opinions I trust. Bob has that model of a very modern aging rockstar thing going on - the sheen of District Line is positively radio-friendly at points, reinterpreting the power rock he helped hone with Sugar which has been an innocent founding document of the seamless, bloodless compressed status quo rock sound. The rare thing Bob Mould understands is that compression one works when there are actual contents to be pressurized - you need to feel that violent tension in the can and have some trepidation when you depress the nozzle.

"Old Highs, New Lows" is the most tasteful use of an vocal autotuner ever. Or right behind that big Cher hit anyway. and "Return to Dust" might be my new favorite song of the year.

and not that I have a single solitary thing against Paul Westerberg or The Replacements, but I trolled through Wikipedia's Minnesota musical groups looking for some new sons of the 12th largest state in the Union whose virtues I might extol, and came across the perfectly-monikered Small Towns Burn a Little Slower. STBALS, or stuh-balls as we immediately new fans of the band are led to call them, are in full posession of the Minnesota glory grind - I bet people shout a lot in Minneapolis and have the Wide World of Sports theme running through their heads at all times. A bit too da-DAAAAAAAAAH-Dah emoey at points for my tastes, but in the valleys between their peaks are some interesting stuff, nice textures, a little exposed underbelly. Those guitars chime like church bells in the distance, clouded by the hum of low-hung power lines. Nice surprising slide work on "What is it Worth?" Thankfully, STBALS has resolved the urge I've had to dig up some old Get Up Kids albums. Plus, great name y'all.

[The Record Crate] Pink Noise and Solid Rock

I am a fan of Ariel Pink's brand of twisted experimental pop, finding his slapdash, home-recorded albums to be repositories of the best and worst of popular culture -- often sounding like someone trying to sing along with a radio as another idly scans the dial. But after seeing his show at the Spanish Moon a couple years ago, when he enlisted Slobot to fill in as his band, I started to wonder if I was projecting instead of receiving the things of value I saw in Pink's act.

Then, in August 2006, Pitchfork announced that Pink was playing a one-off gig at Bogalusa's Centennial festival, as a part of his stepfather's mayoral campaign. A friend who had witnessed the same train-wreck show remarked, "He'll never make it out alive," and I was inclined to agree, but I also needed to see this, so I went. I stood in the back of an abandoned park full of carnival games along with Ariel Pink's mom and sister, a homeless guy, a small documentary crew from Los Angeles and 10 thousand mosquitoes as Pink and a couple performers took to the dimly-lit bandstand festooned with Old Glory.

The most unexpected thing happened in this perverse setting: Pink played his songs straight without the static and the arty naïveté (or is it naïve artiness), and the songs were lovely, lonely synthesized tales of a wild-eyed kid trying to find some kind of meaning in it all, crooning about "the big silence" into the blank night air. It remains one of the most poignant live music moments I've experienced. What form his show will take in the early show Wednesday at the Spanish Moon is anyone's guess, but I am willing to bet it will be different than anything you've seen before.

(Ed: here is an account of that show I posted at outsideleft)

Homegrown brilliance will take the stage at the Manship Theatre when Tab Benoit, David Egan, Benjy Davis and Maggie Warwick appear as a part of the Louisiana Songwriters Show on Thursday night. Benoit and Davis are no strangers to Baton Rouge audiences; Lafayette's David Egan, appearing on the heels of his stellar, encyclopedic blues album You Don't Know Your Mind and Shreveport's Maggie Warwick will join them for a night of great music you should get to know.

Oh, and if you're into safe bets, The Hold Steady is one of the best bands in the country, and they are playing Thursday at Chelsea's. Go see them so you won't one day, after they have ascended into their rightful spots in the American Rock Pantheon and become bloated aftershocks of their hungrier youth, lament that you didn't see them way back when. Just go see them. Also, upstart rockers What Made Milwaukee Famous make a pit-stop on Saturday, and the band still known as Blind Melon, soldiering on 13 years after the death of their iconic frontman Shannon Hoon with new singer Travis Warren, will be at The Varsity on Saturday as well.

Link to original with local events calendar

trading crippled introspection for a cosmology

Somehow, I've never gotten around to listening to Planet Waves before. I love the lazy gospel-folk smear of the music, that roll-out of bed-onto-the-floor-into-work-back-for-dinner drowsy lope of it - perhaps it informed the informality of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. The vocals - and keep in mind, we are talking about Bob Dylan - sound forced. Of course they are; everything about Bob Dylan is forced, which is why it either comes out centrifuged and clarified or emulsified and mushed once it runs through his precisely calibrated filter masquerading as a prospector's pan.

But there is a bit of the caterwaul here and there, which I have always thought his strongest vocal point. Bellowing "Forever Young" into the crowd hoping someone will get the message.
He's a great practitioner of art informel, the term French critic Michel Tapie came up to describe the abstract painting of Wols and Jean Farutrier, who reduced their images to stains and smears, crusty boils festering on the canvas, cysts remaining from letting life filter through gessoed linen. Dylan can stain a song like nobody's business. The piano and guitar and drums rattle along like normal but somehow his all-wrong holler resets the situation, and the song bends around it, contorting to make it all fit - like either a mother cradling a child or a Venus fly trap closing the jaws on its prey, I'm not sure which.

A friend recently asked me for recommendations about Jandek, and if you think Bob Dylan is contentiously in possession of genius, then Jandek is a crap shoot. A few of his albums feature an unnamed guitarist who can "play" while many of his records consist of a near depraved abandonment of convention. I like the ones that fall in the middle best, like Blue Corpse - the songs are simplistic blues strums of a few chords with our boy crooning the best he can (with a little reverb on the assist) and comes to that gap between the song and songcraft that Dylan does from the other direction. This album, one of his more pastoral, is among my favorites - the economy here is palatial, broad strokes subbing in for intricacy, monotone for melodiousness, crippled introspection for a cosmology. Blue Corpse is Pink Moon for a darker night.

The music nerd in me finds perverse pleasure in segueing something as polished and smooth as John Martyn after a Jandek record, but I swear it matches up. Both contain a lunar logic of shadows and rustles in the trees, a libidinousness that sidesteps patterns. Not that Martyn isn't a great musician - Solid Air has the cobbled feel of a Van Morrison record without the showboating, fleeting emotions kept in a tight cage. Jandek's records will make you feel like you can really play guitar, while Martyn's will make you throw your six-string in the hopefully nearby roaring fireplace.

But all these quandaries of form and formlessness, racket and song, rules and breaking them, stillness vs. the beehive of life are neatly resolved in the deep recesses of Pharaoh Sanders' Black Unity -- four hundred tears of suffering, two thousand years of salvation, and 13 billion years of cosmic swirling since that first blast from Gabriel's horn in The Creator's quintet -- is neatly collapsed in this thirty-seven minute treatise on unity.

And Burial, the recently unmasked dubstep/grime/dubiously-distinct-genre dude that is currently the toast of England? I have no threads to weave or grand statements to make except that I dig this record. I won't a week from now probably, didn't a week ago, but right now it is pop music of the future is now... no, now...no, now... of the highest water.

Rhapsody playlist

fatigue shortcuts commentary