pro-universe, go Team Everything

The Byrds, Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde (lala)

I have not seen Treme yet, so don't spoil it for me.

My weekend was filled with (1) Lego Atlantis Gateway of the Squid, (2) prosciutto croissants from Stand's, (3) and a great salad from bland-ass Zoe's Kitchen, of all places. There is a layer of German potato salad inexplicably but thankfully at the bottom. The weekend also involved (4) rocking the third dimension with Lego's and gardening and an interview with the guy from Men at Work (unpictured) then the Baton Rouge International Heritage Festival. In past years, this has been little more than an exploded social studies fair where the kids take a passport around and answer a question about Bulgaria and get a stamp and their name written in Thai and things like that. When we arrived, there was a martial arts demo being staged by the Chinese contingents to "Kung Fu Fighting" as a Celtic Club table guy idly played along on pennywistle. All I really get out of this is that the varied peoples of the world are innately prettier (5) than us mongrel white folk (6). This year we mongrels remembered that we do outdoor dealies right so I got to kick off the festival food season with a plate of mole and guacamole as the U.S.S. Kidd fired off its cannons and Selahattin Alpay and Band, hailing from our sister city of Malatya, Turkey, tore it up, accompanied by circles of men dancing in the street. One day I want to be in a band that sounds as cool as they did.



Later that evening we went undersea, to the Gateway of the Squid. Music from Bloom for iPhone.



For as pro-universe, go Team Everything as the weekend went, "King Apathy III" from the weathered tailfeathers of the Byrds was my jam all weekend.

King Apathy III - The Byrds

The great value of the Byrds is their role as curious prism through which the truths of the sixties can be discerned. For instance, dig the haggard menace of the first version of "This Wheels's on Fire," a week one in my opinion from Dylan's years with the Band. I more immediately associate it as the curious theme from Absolutely Fabulous, but here Roger McGuinn casts it as the perfect music for a drunk pawing the bushes for where he's dropped his keys or similar heroic tableau.

This Wheel's On Fire - John Yo...

There's nary a bum track on this album, not even the terrible/awesome cover, as there was no bum moment to the weekend.

what my juke joint book is about

Big Star, Columbia: Live at Missouri University 4/25/93 (lala)
Charles Simic, Sixty Poems (Amazon)
Frank Sinatra, A Man Alone (lala)

I consulted a friend to see if posting a Charles Simic poem would be cool; I know he was the Poet Laureate and all, but I wasn't sure if that's a good thing, like maybe Rod McKuen was also a Poet Laureate. McKuen wasn't, but badass William Carlos Williams was appointed twice and didn't serve. Turned his red wheelbarrow right around on'nat! My friend said Simic's a million times better than Billy Collins, so that works.

And I've been known to defend Rod McKuen. Frank Sinatra did a beautifully schmaltzy album of his songs and poems, which has got to be at least as cool an accolade as being poet laureate, if not better.

From Promise To Promise [The F...

Some Traveling Music [The Fran...

And poetry generally defies justification, right? Isn't that what makes it poetry? If it could be justified, then wouldn't it be something else? But anyway I found Simic's Sixty Poems in the library while trying to find the new book of Sam Shepherd stories and the one below spoke to me. I think this is what my juke joint book is about.

Country Fair
for Hayden Carruth

If you didn't see the six-legged dog
It doesn't matter
We did and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

Another thing that needs no justification is the Shrimp Tuscan at Zeeland's, pictured above.

You look like a kitty

Big Star - "Nighttime"
The Fall - Grotesque (After the Gramme) (lala) and Your Future, Our Clutter (out soon)

The above photo is the view from the balcony power spot at the new pizza joint Schlitz & Giggles, whose soundtrack of "Shades of Grey," "Paradise City," and that goddamn Spin Doctors song further underscored the fact that people really will listen to the same songs forever if allowed. One progressive note: I say at least three families from the neighborhood across Perkins Road walking over to sit outside and eat pizza by the slice. Families. Walking. One slice. This may sound mundane to you, but in commuter Purgatory, eat-away-the-pain Baton Rouge, this is practically revolutionary. Were it not for the giant TV's and a sound system so loud that my daughter shout-whispered "is making my bottom rumble" I'd have thought we'd fallen through some kind of wormhole. Look out Portland, we're about to catch on! And our artisan bullshit whatever will come in Cajun Spice flavor!

Media Announcement: The Oxford American has put up a fine tribute to the late Alex Chilton featuring a long gaze into the well of memory that is the Keep an Eye on the Sky boxed set by yours truly. I should be more flexible, I guess.

How I Wrote Elastic Man - The ...

I woke up with both Big Star then the Fall in my head; the former a tummy rumbling from the long feast of over-thought and the latter for a different taste in my mouth, but I suppose there are lines that can be drawn between the two (as long as there is blank space and a pencil, one always can.) Both can drive off a band like nobody. I suspect both enigmatic frontmen could wax poetic about Red Sovine and could give a bullet-point presentation on how Punk Rock never existed as a thing-itself outside of a marketing plan penned by dear departed Malcolm McLaren, bless him for it.

Anyway, I couldn't stop singing the opening to Big Star's "Nighttime" a song of theirs I never really embraced until this morning

Nighttime [Demo] - Big Star

And when I set my eyes on you
You look like a kitty

My daughter twisted her face up at my singing of this line in my terrible falsetto. "A kitty?" I feel the same way when Big Alex does it, but now it is confounded with how precise kitty is. What other word could get you exactly there? Kitten is too sexually loaded, as is cat with cool. The guy could write a song.

The Fall's Grotesque is a cleansing strut of a record, abrasive yet about as swinging as a dour drug addict from Salford can reasonably get. This double punch is a leaf blower to the brain.

English Scheme - The Fall

New Face In Hell - The Fall

This version of Grotesque has quite a different track order than the version I memorized on CD a decade+ ago. The re-ordering of tracks is a concern I voice in the OA piece, and maybe it only matters to me, but why would you ever do that, especially in the digital/CD age when fitting songs physically on one side or another is no longer a concern? Would you reissue a book with a different chapter order? Serve Thanksgiving dinner pie first? Dry off then take a shower? A good album is in an order for a reason. I can go on a similar tirade against "shuffle mode." But I won't.

The forthcoming Fall record has a track "Bury Pts 1 + 3" where a demo is joined with the finished version of a garage stomper like beat-up truck towing a shiny new jet ski. Neither are remarkable until you get to that joint between the two and then things really open up in both directions. Smart band, that Fall is.

now, that is the meat

Colin Hay - Trancendental Highway (lala)
William Lee & the Modern Primitives - Lost Blues & Forgotten Ballads (lala)

Even as an unashamed contemporary adult, I just can't get cozy with adult contemporary. I like the sauce just fine but it drowns the meat. The word meat peeked out at me yesterday in the flyer from the new Piggly-Wiggly down the road and I figured some opportunity would arise for which its image would be useful.

William Lee, now, that is the meat. He was wandering around the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy show at Bourque's last night in a baseball cap, cradling a cardboard box I suspected contained a mummified cat or something along those lines. When I wandered over to the bar next door during the show, he was there with one of the aforementioned dimebags of beefy jerky before him. I asked hopefully, "Was the box filled with beef jerky?" but to some mutual disappointment, he handed me a CD instead.

It worked out, for I am here to say William Lee's album is wilder than a box of either beef jerky or mummified cats. Rock 'n' roll at the crossroads of literate and haywire. The Fall on a bellyful of tainted cornbread, the Grandpa Jonestown Massacre, the man-baby of Julian Cope and Micha Blue Smaldone. It's what I want my band to sound like when I get cool. He's aimlessly wandering from Los Angeles to some shadow destiny point in Alabama; one does not arrive in Scott, LA through purposeful wandering. You should have him play your backyard cockfight or halfway house social if he passes through.

Blues For Day - WILLIAM LEE AN...

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and serious beef jerky

The Picassoid Will Oldham.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Dege Legg, and Hurray for the Riff-Raff at Bourque's Social Club, Scott, LA, 4/7/2010

What a tremendous show. Will Oldham is a my-body-is-my-instrument actor/singer/presence-in-and of-the-room guy when he's on, and he was on last night, full of gesture, sweet of voice. Just sitting there during one of the opening acts, he was a satyr in repose, a shambled couch his dewy bed of clover. His harmonies were so strong, it was hard to believe this was that same squeaky kid from There is No-One What Will Take Care Of You so many years ago. I unfortunately did not capture his best numbers, among them "Troublesome Houses" off the new album and a version of (I think) "Bowling Green" "Omaha" (Thanks, robbbb!) by the Everly Brothers, where they bellowed "Scott, Louisiana!" in gospel fervor replacing the town name, but this is an example of what was on the docket.


Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & the Cairo Gang - "Teach Me To Bear You." Dig the shadows.


Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & the Cairo Gang - "Go Folks, Go"


Dege Legg - "The Battle of New Orleans"


Hurray for the Riff-Raff - Unknown song. I wish I'd gotten the one where she harmonized with the passing train.

The opening acts did their own share of the heavy lifting. Dege Legg plays with the gusto you wish street guitarists would embody. Pushed that shit to the cliff's edge. Hurray for the Riff Raff nail the delicate, vintage-ish, old/new/timeless, faerie-airy/dead serious New Orleans thing in all its glory.

Bourque's (discussed in some length here) is one notch above (or below, depending on perspective) a house show amenities-wise, so in one of the many sojourns to Cue Time, the bar next door, I encountered a barfly that brings his own air freshener, itinerant troubadour William Lee on his way from Los Angeles to his destiny in Alabama, and a dimebag of some serious beef jerky. I love you, Scott, Louisiana. Thanks to Will Oldham, Drew Landry, Dege, Riff-Raff et. al. for everything, once again.

behold "The Devil"

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Beware and (with the Cairo Gang) The Wonder Show of the World
WinterBand - various tracks (via The Awl)
Surfer Blood - Astral Coast (lala)
The Halo Benders - God Don't Make No Junk (lala) and Don't Tell Me Now (lala)

Media announcement/show promotion: We are stoked to go see Bonnie 'Prince' Billy at the teeny, middle-of-nowhere Bourque's Social Club tonight in Scott, LA, y'all. We are temporarily trading the V. on our name for 'Prince' as well as adopting the royal plural in appreciation. We did a story on Bourque's Social Club a couple months back, and here's a bit about the Calvin Johnson's Halo Benders/Ian Svenonious's Chain Gang show we caught out there last May.

In this week's Record Crate blog for 225, we get all fanboy squeely about upcoming shows by Bill "Hot Rod Lincoln" Kirchner, Philip "!" Glass, and So "they are really good y'all" Percussion. End announcement/promotion.

WinterBand is peopled by sketchy-politicked Christian fundamentalists worked up about everything from scary Muslims and women talking up in church. That shred. Their message is hard for a liberal heathen like myself us to support but nonetheless, behold "The Devil."



We have decided we like Surfer Blood. Not as much as some people, but it's good. And this too.

Snowfall - The Halo Benders

We were having trouble coming up with an image to illustrate this post, and were considering this "Prostitute Crossing" sign depicted in the Daily Mail, thus opening a speculation about the lucky underpaid state graphic designer that got that assignment, but then we say the above while flipping through a 1997 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery we found in the hall, and, well, how can we not use that? We'll stop now with the plural.

As did Buck Owens

The Magnetic Fields - Realism (lala)
Various Artists - Mississippi Records Tape TLC Vol. 1: Men With Broken Hearts (ROOT BLOG)

Scenes from a life: (1) the sudden onslaught of irises outside our front door, (2) functional string art, (3) the dazzling violence of the azaleas, and (4) my wife's mindbending ragù alla bolognese. It's a good life even with the pollen.

I stopped into the Rite-Aid for some Zyrtec so I wouldn't asphyxiate under all this beauty, and a lady was buying carts of stuff there with two kids in tow. One kid pointed his ring pop and addressed the other in a gravelly monster voice, "You are a dirty, dirty germ" which made the whole ordeal worthwhile.

Your Tender Loving Care - Buck...

As did Buck Owens' "Your Tender Loving Care" and Yodelin' Kenny Roberts' "Sweet Little Cherokee" and Slim Whitman's "At the End of Nowhere" from Men With Broken Hearts as I was stuck with the spring break, reduced-schedule bus stop limbo blues.

At The End Of Nowhere - Slim W...

Best mix tape ever made. Now that the antihistamines have taken hold, it's this Charlie Feathers song that's killing me.

Live & Let Live - Charlie Feat...