San Diego Serenade

I was asked to guest blog at The Bubble Death, a music blog based in San Diego. I don’t know the protocol about such an endeavor, and was tempted to just shamelessly post Re-Ree songs, but instead I dug deep into my collection and posted a kick ass song by a kick ass band. So go here to check out what I picked.

Both nights of Radiohead’s Sold Out San Diego shows are now available for download. Check out Monday and Tuesday. Click each song for an MP3.

Or download the zip of Monday’s show here. Zip of Tuesday’s show here.

Evidently the Tuesday crowd had their off in the distance visual trump our Monday firework show, when a crazy rocket test launch that Boeing did culminated in an awesome trail and explosion off on the horizon.

Here’s Fake Plastic Trees from Tuesday:

The last thing I can remember ignoring, when it was as guarantee a home run for me as conceivably possible, was The Life Aquatic. Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are two movies that I absolutely love, (Bottle Rocket, ehhhh), but for some reason I didn’t make it to the theater to see The Life Aquatic and ended up watching it at home months after it came out. In the exact same style is The Ricky Gervais show, his downloadable podcast radio show. I remember hearing that this came out like 8 months ago, and was even given the emphatic “It’s hilarious” guarantee by a friend about two months ago. Somehow, it completely did not manifest itself as a priority until yesterday, when I read an interview with Ricky Gervais in Stop Smiling magazine and decided to check the podcast out.

Holy god. I spent all day yesterday looking around, hoping that if anyone at work happened to see one of the many uncontrollable laughing outbursts I was having, that they would notice the headphones and infer that I was listening to something funny. The low point came during an episode of Monkey News (more on that below) towards the end of the day, when I heard something funny while sipping water, attempted to suppress a spit take, and ended up almost choking as the water went down the wrong pipe. The Ricky Gervais show: funny enough to almost kill you, or at least get you fired for spitting water all over expensive equipment.

Anyone who has seen The Office, and Extras needs no introduction to Ricky Gervais, or co-host Steven Merchant for that matter, the man who played the agent on Extras and Gareth’s pal The Oggmonster on The Office. But the central character of these podcasts is the third man, Karl Pilkington, who has already amassed a vast internet following, as well as rumors about whether or not he is real. The show centers around Gervais and Merchant asking him questions, or prompting him to tell a story, which they then dissect and dispute, even as he is still telling the story. They analyze how Karl’s mind works, and the effect is to reinforce why the absurd nonsense, coming out of the calmest, most qualude-ed up sounding guy you can imagine, is so absurd. They make him answer reader emails, read from his diary, (Sample entry: “Had a drink in bar…Everyone sat and watched one of the local cats lick its bollox.”) and of course, Monkey News, where Karl delivers a ridiculous lengthy story about monkeys in the news that Gervais scoffs at.

Karl Pilkington

At least two dozen times per episode, Gervais lets loose with the high pitched girlish laugh that you heard on the office when David Brent was seen helping to pull off an obese co-workers pants in front of the camera. The laugh is so contagious that I nearly caused us to drive off the road on the way home today, even though I wasn’t even driving, and the joke that Ricky Gervais was laughing at was because Karl Pilkington got a piece of mail addressed to “Mr. Dilkington.” Even as Ricky Gervais was laughing and shrieking, “I don’t know why that’s so funny!” I found myself laughing so hard that I almost started hitting myself over the head with a mallet, like the wolf in those old Tex Avery Cartoons.

So there are 18 half hour podcasts so far…That’s 9 hours of hilarity. It’s a guarantee people, a can’t miss. You will love it. I put up one of the podcasts from the first series for download, it features one of the better monkey news segments, and I don’t remember what else. The first 12 episodes cost $4.95 and the last 6 cost 6$.95, all at Audible.com. Don’t sleep on it like I did. They are the funniest things you will hear all year. In a world of tepid comedic entertainment, where romantic comedies like “Wedding Crashers” can pass for edgy, offensive comedy, Ricky Gervais’ humor makes me laugh the way I did when I saw Eddie Murphy “Delerious” for the first time. This is the only time I’ll implore you to not behave like me - download these podcasts without further delay.

Download an episode of The RIcky Gervais Show

The Art Of The Reprise

There are many thing that makes the experience of listening to whole albums great. There’s the cover art, the liner notes, the continuity, the ability to not know a songs name, but to know when it comes along. There are segues, intros, hidden tracks…and there are reprises. Reprises are truly an audacious move when you think about it. Nothing reveals a band as having some sort of hidden artistic agenda quite like a reprise. “Here you go,” a reprise seems to say. “You bought our album, you’re listening to it all the way through and for some reason, now you’ve just come to a song that we’ve decided to repeat in a varied fashion for a shorter amount of time than it took the first time through. Why? You figure it out.”

Though they may be audacious and at times inexplicable, the reprise can also be a nice touch, lending a great deal to the continuity of the album and making you realize that you’re listening to real musicians who put some effort and thought into their music. Or in the case of Oasis, they no doubt just got blown out of their gourds and decided to hire a orchestra one day.

So here are a collection of reprises, from varied artists and eras. I’ve tried to rate them on how effective I think it is as a reprise. It’s a unique and esoteric criteria to judge something by, since I’m not really even sure what it means myself. But let’s give it a shot:

NOTE: I took down the MP3s after over a year. Sorry.

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
A reprise that has found its way onto a mix CD of mine at some point in time, a feat that the original song cannot claim. i think that this song defines what a reprise should be. Contains enough elements from the original, but stands on its own, thus giving it a reason to exist. In the Beatles case, I think that the reprise is better than the original. It may be their second most rocked out song of all time, with killer fuzzy guitar licks throughout. And when they slip the “One and only” into the middle of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” the effect is sublime.

Sufjan Stevens - A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But for Very Good Reasons
There’s nothing particularly wrong with this brief stretch of music. It just doesn’t need to exist. It’s mostly a continuation of the previous track “Jacksonville” on the Illinois album. Jacksonville flows into this song, making “Mary Todd” more of a coda, and I feel like they should have just been made one song. It also loses points for not identifying which song it is reprising. But it’s not offensive to listen to in any way. Unlike…

Nick Cave - O’Malley’s Bar (Reprise)
Let’s list the litany of things wrong with this reprise. First of all, it is not a song. It is disjointed sound fragments. It has nothing to do with the song it is reprising, which is a nifty 14 minute long story about an intense bar murder. It doesn’t even appear on the same album, but rather on a b-side collection. It is very unpleasant as far as sound collages go, and is why scraping the bottom of the barrel for material to release for artists is never a good idea.

Konono #1 - Kule Kule (Reprise)
Innocuous enough, but since i can’t understand the words and all the music by Konono #1 sounds the same to me, its value as a reprise is lost on me.

Dr. John - Familiar Reality (Reprise)
This gets points for being the album closer. It also gets points for revisiting the major theme of one of the albums best songs, as the lady singers wail the title over and over again towards the end of the song. It gets points for being in the right spot, the last song, (even though whether a reprise belongs in the last or second to last spot is a debatable topic.) It also gets points for pioneering the “artist doesn’t even appear on the song” method of reprises, adding to their mystique. It’s just not that exciting of a song overall though.

The Beastles - Root Down (Reprise)
This song, from DJ BC’s first Beastles masup compliation is great. Sampling from the above mentioned greatest reprise of all time and layering it over one of my favorite Beastie Boys raps is a nice touch. Super bonus points becuase it is the strategicly placed last track on the compilation.

Pearl Jam - Wasted (Reprise)
This reprise is far sparser than the song it reprises. It’s just Eddie Vedder singing as a church style organ plays behind him. The effect is quite nice, it puts a neat spin on the rocking album opener. But if you reprise the album opener, I feel like it should come as the last track on the album, and three more songs follow this cut.

Oasis - All Around The World (Reprise)
The second ever reprise that I’ve put on a mix CD. This closes out Oasis’ “Be Here Now” album, and is a orchestral reprise of the already excessive nine minute “All Around The World.” Reprises are an excessive format themselves, so when the reprise kicks in a song after the original, it finishes off the album in ultra excessive fashion. It is also a good antidote if you’re tired of hearing All Around the World in the cell phone commercial or whatever it is in now.

David Bowie - Sweet Thing (Reprise)
David Bowie figures to be someone who would have done his share of reprises in his day, but this one is not one of his finest. It comes in the middle of the album, reprises a song that didn’t need reprising, fades off into oblivion without any epic-ness, comes one song after the original, and is just not a very pleasant song to listen to.

Soundgarden - Full On (Reprise)
This is the last song on Soundgardens early “Louder than Love” album. They try to go out in epic classic reprise fashion here, as a chorus wails “Full On” over and over again for the duration, with Chris Cornell joining in himself with a few more lyrics, but mostly “Full On.” It gradually descends towards the end into guitar feedback. If you only heard this song, you might think that they were up to something on the album a bit deeper than songs like “Big Dumb Sex.”

Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins - Happy (Reprise)
Airy and echoey, this reprise could conceivably work its way onto a mix somewhere. It reminds me sort of the Beach Boys Smile session outtake “You’re Welcome.” Jenny Lewis sings the phrase over and over again with just a wood block accompaniment until it fades away, thus ending her album

Rufus Wainwright - Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk (Reprise)
This reprise of the first song on the Poses album is really more of a remix. It features a drum machine and some different music and studio effects, but is still the same basic song. Since the original version is the first song on the album, this seems like more of a bonus track than a reprise, but it’s still an alright song.

Os Mutantes - Panis Et Circences (Reprise)
This song utilizes the same technique as many of the above reprises: repeated phrasing, extended fades, semi-epic sounding orchestration. It also closes out the album as a reprise of the first track, making it a nice bookend effect. I like this song, but probably wouldn’t stick it on a mix CD.

Son Volt - World Waits For You (Reprise)
This sort of suffers from the coda-effect that I mentioned in the Sufjan Stevens song. Just seems more of an extension of the song that precedes it than a true reprise. I guess in my mind, a reprise means returning to something after you’ve left it for a while, not just continuing it onto another track. It’s got a cool epic sounding countrified guitar solo, and repeated lyrics, but I’d like it better if it wasn’t just a coda.

Ween - She Wanted To Leave (Reprise)
Ween gets points for this song because they were the only ones brash enough to use the ironic technique of reprising a song that was not on the album. And it’s a pretty cool song too. Bonus points for the last sound effect, which reminds me of the dramatic episode ending sound from “Lost.”

Sublime - What I Got (Reprise)
This one is tough. It’s not really a reprise, this version of the song got played on the radio just as much as the original. It’s more of a bonus track in this respect. But I think it’s a much better version of the song, and the fact that I didn’t know today that I’d been listening to a reprise all those years ago made me like it better. Do I contradict myself? Very well then..

Queen - Flash’s Theme (Reprise)
Queen gets points for putting a reprise on a soundtrack album, it shows a degree of commitment and aristry involved in a project that other bands might simply have tossed off. The song unfortunately sounds like a movie preview because of all the film clips, and isn’t very enjoyable to listen to. I do like the way it ends, but would have preferred an entire song to build up to that moment.

Outkast - Player’s Ball (Reprise)
Anybody unsure about Outkast’s staying power back when their first album came out should have taken note of this reprise at the end of the album. Rap albums are known (unfortunately) for their intros and outros, but reprising an earlier song is a feat that is attempted much less frequently. Ironically, this reprise has it’s own spoken intro at the beginning of it, and it is the last song on the album, so it embodies the coveted intro-reprise-outro trifecta that so few have attempted, and even fewer have achieved.

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) (Alt. Version)
This comes from the Anthology Vol. 2 album. The fact that there is an Alternative Version of a reprise is close to being mind blowing. The music on this version is a bit rawer, but every bit as cool as the album version. Unfortunately the singing is a bit sloppier, and the key “One and only lonely” line is omitted, rendering it an interesting yet forgettable footnote in the reprise canon.

Well that was fun! If I left anything out or if you have any suggestions please let me know. If I get enough reprises suggested that I missed, who knows? We could have another entry “The Art of the Reprise (Reprise)”

Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour continues to be a weekly entertaining listen. Though the Baseball theme in week four was rather week, too many novelty songs, not enough Steve Goodman, it is always fun to see what he pulls out of his bag. Hearing what newer songs he chooses to play every week are interesting as well. They’re pretty infrequent, since as Dylan said on the Coffee show “There are more old songs than new songs out there,” but when he puts on a Blur tune, as he did this week with “Coffee & TV” you always have to wonder where he came across it. Next weeks theme is Jail, which should be interesting. My friend Andrew rightly wonders what’s going to happen by the time the third season rolls around and Dylan is stuck with themes like “Corn,” “Potatoes” and “Blue Jeans.”

For those of you without XM, Patrick at White Man’s Stew has set up a page with downloads of all five programs so far. They’re available in MP3s of the whole show, or broken down into segments. Go check them out here.

Why are you inside reading blogs? Enjoy the evenings with a mini soundtrack before the gloom returns!

-Little John and the Merry Men - The Phony King of England
-The greatest song from a Disney movie, period.

-Grateful Dead - Sugar Magnolia
-The longest version I have on my computer. Without the ending breakdown, this song is a shell of itself.

-The New Pornographers - The Bleeding Heart Show
-For when you get tired of Sing Me Spanish Techno (which is impossible)

-Bruce Springsteen - Bishop Danced
-An incredible one of a kind song. I’d be interested to know if anybody has covered it…

-Lee Michaels - Heighty Hi
-Upon recommendation from my dad

That was easy, and surprisingly fun. Let’s hope it wasn’t habit forming.

A month or two ago I posted just the stories from Tom Waits’ VH1 Storytellers episode. People dug them, and demanded the songs. I completely forgot about it until today, when somebody posted a comment and I remembered that I still had yet to post the songs. So here they are!

The storytellers episode is great: the song performances are top notch from an artist that rarely performs live, and as I said before, the stories are just as entertaining on their own. They kind of remind me of the SNL “Neil Diamond Storytellers” sketch starring Will Ferrell - a fantastical story, featuring unbelievable situations and ridiculous characters that launches into a seemingly unrelated song that could have in theory been any song in the artists repertoire. That video is below, actual videos of Waits’ Storytellers performance and the story MP3s can still be found here.

If you want the whole show, download a zip file here.

That link may not work anymore, but I took down the MP3s after over a year. Sorry.

I heard Humble Pie’s cover of “Honky Tonk Woman” on XM today today. Then I heard it like seven more times, each time louder than the next. It rules. Humble Pie, for those of you who were as unaware as I was before today, was a band that included Peter Frampton, among other people, and also Steve Marriott, the former singer of the Small Faces. Their cover of Honky Tonk Woman just blows the original out of the water. The singer can wail, the guitarist alternates between the riff and shredding solos, and the drummer…The drummer is just insane. Just bashing the shit out of the drums for the entire song, letting up for maybe 15 seconds tops, and then going right back into just drumming like nothing I’ve ever heard before. He somhow plays the crash cymbal on like every beat while still managing to pretty much solo the rest of the song. There’s no way that you could hear this song and not instantly imagine Animal, the drummer for Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem Band on The Muppets playing the drums while shackled to his kit. Tremendous.

It’s probably also important to note that the song has been covered by Joe Cocker, The Meters, The Pogues, The Black Crowes and The Rolling Stones themselves, and despite many impressive versions by an equally impressive lineup, no version can touch the Humble Pie one. Lest you think Humble Pie is some kind of one trick wonder, I present to you Thirty Days In The Hole. My friend Richard rightly insists that there is no way that this song should have not been included on “The Spaghetti Incident“. As someone who has argued that every song would sound better sung by Axl Rose, I have to agree that it would have been perfect. What an Injustice. Ironically, Guns N’ Roses has also played Honky Tonk Woman live, and I can’t seem to track it down…After “Thirty Days In The Hole” they could just as easily be a two hit wonder. I haven’t heard anything else. If there’s other good Humble Pie out there, let me know.

After getting the mental pictures of Animal bashing the drums in my head, I found it impossible not to spend the rest of the day thinking about the Muppets. I realized that there was another song that I’ve always associated with a specific duo of Muppets. And though it may not be as good a song, and have nowhere near the energy or repeat listening value of Humble Pie’s “Honky Tonk Woman”, I challenge you to listen to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends” and deny that that picture of Waldorf and Statler sitting on that park bench will be forever etched in your mind whenever you hear the song again. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Muppets did some sort of music video for that song where those two “Old Friends” were “Sitting on a park bench like bookends” because otherwise, it’s just an astonishing way to bring that song to life.

Any other songs out there that make Muppets spring to mind?

Humble Pie - Greatest Hits Live

Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends

Guns N’ Roses - The Spaghetti Incident

Axl Rose - Still Reassuring, Even Underwater

Guns N’ Roses just played four sold out shows in New York. Though they won’t be coming this way anytime soon, I think it is reassuring to know that they are out there. Knowing that Axl and the band are performing somewhere in the world gives me the same feeling as every time I glance down at the bottom of my firefox window and see the picture of Abe Vigoda, indicating that he is still alive.

The MP3s that have surfaced of the show are not the best quality, but I’ve posted the new songs from the show on the fifteenth below, just in case you’ve missed them so far. Also, Sebastian Bach of Skid Row joined Axl to sing My Michelle, Dizzy Reed got a chance to shine playing a piano solo of The Beatles “Something” and each guitarist got to indulge in song length “Eruption” style guitar solos. Brooklyn Vegan has some terrific photos of the show on the 12th. This one is my favorite. Halfway unbuttoned leather jacket and sunglasses at night indoors underneath a projected stained glass window. God, it’s like looking into a mirror…

UPDATE: Links have been removed, sorry!

1. Welcome To The Jungle
2. It’s So Easy
3. Mr. Brownstone
4. Live And Let Die
5. Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal Guitar Solo
6. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
7. Better
8. Robin Finck Guitar Solo
9. Sweet Child O’ Mine
10. Something (Piano Solo)
11. The Blues
12. Out ta Get Me
13. Richard Fortus & Robin Finck Guitar Solo
14. Rocket Queen
15. My Michelle w/Sebastion Bach
16. Madagascar
17. You Could Be Mine
18. November Rain
19. I.R.S.
20. Richard Fortus Guitar Solo
21. Nighttrain

Encore:
22. Patience
23. Chinese Democracy
24. Robin Finck Guitar Solo
25. Paradise City

UPDATE: I’ve posted the Street Scene lineup, with MP3 links, here.

You know the feeling you get as you sit in an airport waiting for you flight to take off when you have a connecting flight you have to make? You’re there an hour early, sitting in the terminal waiting. You notice the airplane hasn’t arrived yet. No matter, you’ve still got plenty of time. As long as you take off no less than an hour late, you’ll still be fine for your connection. But it gradually become a battle between optimism and reality, and as the clock starts ticking down, you come to the grim realization ten minutes before your deadline that the plane’s not coming, you’re going to miss your connection, and your vacation is ruined.

Well that’s what this past week has been like watching the Street Scene rumors trickle in. The latest, collected nicely for us at the UT’s Liner Notes, indicate that She Wants Revenge, My Chemical Romance, Yellowcard and possibly Tool are added to the lineup. The possibility of pulling off an event to rival Lollapalooza that same August weekend appears to have evaporated almost laughably quickly, and as the clock ticks down towards the Monday lineup annoucement, one can only hope that whoever is piloting the Street Scene plane pulls off some Chuck Yeager style heroics to bring the bird in safely. What is most unsettling about the whole thing is not the lack fo indie buzz bands, or major headliners, but rather that the Street Scene seems completely focused in the absolute nadir of shitty genres: the emo/punk bands.

The problem with these bands, none of which I have ever listened to and could not name a song or album by, is that they forgot something about the very basics of punk. Though the Sex Pistols were angry, and the Ramones could only play three chords, both of these bands were essentially pop music gone horribly awry. If you take away the sneering vocals, some of the distortion and slow it all down a wee bit, you’ve got a sixties pop song. Maybe take out the abortion and glue sniffing subject matter, but anyways. Bands like The Clash would further expound upon the inherent poppiness in early punk music, creating songs that build, segue, flow, you know, songs that behave like Beatles songs. I remember in 8th grade when Green Day came out with Dookie, and all the magazines talked about was the “return of punk.” I was confused then, and only now realize that what they meant was the return of punk that you can actually listen to. Nobody’s saying you have to puss out to make a pop-esque punk album. But at some point in time, I imagine that artists get a bit tired of playing unpleasant music, and decide that more ambitious goals (the long rumored fourth chord!) are worth a shot.

So as an antidote for the shitty punk/emo that the Street Scene is offering up, I present to you San Diego’s own Fifty On Their Heels. Listening to these guys the past couple days has really made me aware of the fact that a record does’t have to go by at 120 mph and be shoved down your throat to be punk. The singer has a voice that you’ll feel like you’ve heard many times before, sort of snotty, faux British. But where the band really shines is the music, which manages to never sound the same, and even accomplishes the ultimate punk coup of incorporating different musical passages and even different instruments into the same song. You know how on American Idiot, Green Day had a couple nine minute song “suites” that sounded like 6 different songs put together? Well my favorite song on the album, Occupation, pulls off a similar trick in just three and a half minutes. I hear traces of Rancid in the beginning, and Sex Pistols in the vocals, with a Strokes kind of guitar lick for the chorus and a Clash style breakdown all before it builds to an utterly triumphant, cut off too brief finale.

The guys sound like they’re having fun. Which is important. But more important, they sound like the kind of band that you could have fun going to see. Fortunately for you, they’re playing two shows in San Diego in June, and will be playing lots more all summer long. Check out the myspace page for dates, a few more streaming songs as well as info on where to get their new CD. San Diego has been on a roll with local bands lately. It’s too bad that the major summer festival looks headed in the opposite direction.

Dowload MP3 of Fifty On Their Heels - Occupation
http://www.myspace.com/fiftyontheirheels
June 13th @ The Casbah