San Diego Serenade

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 few things before the good stuff:

1. Thom Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser, which was only announced a few weeks ago, and quickly became the most exciting album to be released this summer, has leaked. For the fans who snap up Radiohead tickets in less than four minutes, a summer tour without a new album was a frustrating proposition, and a solo album seemed as good an alternative as possible. If you’re interested in hearing what Thom-y sounds like on his own, check out the Hype Machine. Some Eraser can be heard there, as well as some interesting solo performances and covers.

2. As I mentioned before, the road from Seattle to San Diego happened to take me through Bend, Oregon this Saturday, where Beck happened to be playing. I think there is relatively zero chance that I would have gone to see Beck had he came thru San Diego, and I say that as a fan. Just seemed like it wouldn’t have been a good concert to see at the inevitable larger venue he would have played here. Fortunately, we made the decision to go to the Bend concert, and from the opening notes of Devil’s Haircut, we didn’t regret it. Beck has a large amount of great songs that I’ve listened to so much over the years, that I’ve pretty much stopped listening to, and having them played for you live all at once was a great way to be reminded that you really like his stuff.

The addition of his PuppeTron entertainment system didn’t hurt things either. Throughout the entire concert, a group of puppeteers mimicked the bands action onstage with lookalike puppets, which were then broadcast on the jumbotron instead of the band. This was, in a word, awesome. It was like taking the Flaming Lips Nun-Cam to a glorious new level. To cap it off, for the first encore, the puppets came onstage by themselves and performed a pre-recorded version of Loser.

3. Finally, I wrote a comic while at the University of Virginia. The UVA paper, the Cavalier Daily, had a substantial comics section, and I studied it as detailedly as I did the Washington Posts comics section while growing up. So it came as a huge shock to me when I started reading about a band named We Are Scientists. You see, to me “We Are Scientists” was nothing more than the most mediocre of mediocre comics that the Cav Daily had published during my tenure there as a student.

The wit of “We Are Scientists” the comic strip

Drawn by Nathan Altice, who I never met, We Are Scientists boldly foraged into the abominable copy-and-pasted characters method used by comics such as Red Meat and Get Your War On. It only ran for a semester and a half, before being replaced towards the end of the year. It was not missed.

We Are Scientists the band, on the other hand, has done quite well for itself. Fresh off playing the Indy Jam with the Flaming Lips last week, the band is bringing their Franz Ferdinand style rockin’ to Soma on Friday with the Arctic Monkeys, who I’ve unfortunately not been able to learn to hate. To commemorate the concert, we have some We Are Scientists stuff to give away. Since the show is Sold Out (with tickets widely available for face value on Craigslist) maybe taking some of this stuff away can ease the pain:

-1 copy of their CD “With Love and Squalor”
-1 copy of their CD/DVD Dualdisc “The Great Escape”
-1 copy of their import single “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt”
& -1 copy of their import single “The Great Escape”

We Are Scientists The Band - Funnier than the comic strip

So here’s what you have to do. Since We Are Scientists, no matter how kickin’ the band is (and they’re none too shabby in actuality), in my mind will always be associated with a mediocre comic, I’d like to hear what your “favorite” mediocre comic is. No obvious things like The Family Circus. That’s just a terrible comic. What is your favorite mediocre comic, the one that you just can’t possibly imagine how the author is cashing a paycheck for his efforts every other week? Leave it as a comment, and if I pick yours, you win one of the prize packs with all four of the above items. I have two to give away. Go nuts.

MP3s of the above artists:

Thom Yorke - True Love Waits
Beck - Do You Realize??
We Are Scientists - This Scene Is Dead

I’m heading up to Seattle tomorrow for a wacky Memorial Day weekend of border to border driving. One of the bonuses is getting to see friends in Oregon and San Francisco. The friends in Oregon we meet up with at a Beck and M. Ward concert, and based on that good fortune, I looked into the bands that were playing in Seattle and San Fran just to see if we might get lucky in two more cities.

And not only did we not get LUCKY, we got completely, 100% screwed, because the day after we have to leave Seattle in order to get home in a healthy, non-speed requiring manner, the Northwest Death Fest is playing at Fenix in Seattle. Seeing that such a festival is taking place, with such a wide variety of abominable band names is quite the curiosity provoking event.

The guy on the left from Sadus needs to work on his metal face

Check out this lineup:

Belt Fed Weapon
Bung
Ceremonial Castings
Damage Overdose
Deeds Of Flesh
Desolation
Disharmony
Doom Lit Sky
Embalmed
Embryonic Devourment
Fallen Angels
In Memoriam
Meatshits
Mummification
Near Life
Necrobiosis
Non Existence
Obituary
Passive Aggressive
Sadus
Scorched Earth
Severed Savior
Shitstorm
The New Plague
Try Redemption
Unsanctified
Vulganizer
Wake The Dead
Zuckuss

I have a few questions regarding death metal fests such as these:

1. How does this endless succession of blaring death metal not get old? Do people talk in the line for the bathroom saying “Wow, Deeds of Flesh was great, and Doom Lit Sky was even better, but believe me, Embryonic Devourment is going to blow them all out of the water.”

2. Are band names tossed out of the band name selection process? If so, what are the ones that are left on the chopping block in favor of ones like Meatshits and Shitstorm?

2a. If those two bands formed an Audioslave/Velvet Revolver type supergroup, would they even have to discuss whether to call the band MeatshitStorm?

3. If a normal looking guy like me wearing a tshirt without a prominent skull or corpse were to show up at this event, what would be the reaction? What is the death metal equivilent of a needle scratching across a record as the music suddenly stops?

4. As a parent, wouldn’t it be just infinitely more troubling to learn that your seemingly normal, A and B student is sneaking off to the Northwest Death Fest instead of going to play Wallyball at the rec center like they said they were than to find a bag of weed in your kids room and learn that occasionally they are getting high and listening to Dark Side of the Moon?

All these questions will unfortunately go unanswered. But as a final thought, everyone who writes about San Diego mentions how a bunch of people pegged it as “the next Seattle” during the mid 90’s. Maybe, just maybe, this prediction not coming true was not such a terrible thing.

Enjoy your Memorial Day.

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.

Songs of Summer on Muzzle of Bees

Ryan over at Muzzle of Bees is doing a Songs of Summer feature, where he is soliciting opinions from music bloggers about their archetypical summer song. Would you believe that my summer song kicks off the series?

Just in case after reading my entry you wanted to hear the other three songs I mentioned as being contenders for the summer song throne, here are One Minute Man, Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby and Mr. Chin.

The perils of not having enough band members to spell out the band name with fireworks

There could be a free Street Scene this weekend featuring every band we had hoped would be there and this would still be the concert of the week. This is partially due to the fact that I will be going out of town on Friday afternoon, returning home late on Monday and thus would miss any exceptional concerts that would happen to be taking place. But the rest of it is because I just started listening to Voxtrot a few days ago and have gotten excited for the concert that takes place Thursday night at the Epicentre.

From what I gather, Voxtrot has been around and loved by people for quite some time. Their page of streamable/downloadable music on The Hype Machine shows you all you need to know about how much people with music blogs like the band. What speaks even more about their popularity is this funny little coincidence: the band has released two EPs on Cult Hero records, but preliminary google searches for that record label turn up this exchange at http://www.cult-hero.com/:

Where is Voxtrot’s CD?
While we hold lots of respect for Voxtrot and we like their music, they are on a DIFFERENT Cult Hero Records. We have tried various ways (email, cease and desist letters from lawyers, etc) to get them to stop using the name since we believe we were the first to use the name in Commerce, but have had little luck.

So they generated enough press for the wrong Cult Hero records label that they had to put up that disclaimer. I guess that’s hilarious. I just imagine the guy finally putting up that disclaimer after a few weeks of being like “well, this influx of emails and phone calls about Voxtrot will die down any minute now” and then begrudgingly updating the website while glaring at anyone who walks by. What’s even better is that I can’t find a page for the Cult Hero records that they are signed to…But wacky label mishaps put aside, the band is really good, and deserves their hype. They’ve got a poppy sound that I wouldn’t hesitate to compare to The Apples In Stereo or Belle and Sebastian. I don’t like Belle and Sebastian, so I’m surprised that I would make the comparison, but Voxtrot has that extra something that makes it less something that girls like and more something that I like. I don’t know what that would be, but someone should figure out a name for it.

So listen to this MP3 from their Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives EP, it is called Soft & Warm and decide whether you want to go see them on Thursday night at the Epicentre. They are opening for Elefant, who I’m told are good too.

Tickets are $15 and available here.

Voxtrot home page
Voxtrot myspace
Elefant home page
Elefant myspace

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

The UT interviews Street Scene founder Rob Hagey, who does not call him retarded: check it out.

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

Thanks to reader Peter D Lai, (who is certainly “D” Man), for finding this Street Scene lineup graphic on the Street Scene website while they were updating. Looks like the lineup has hit a few days early, so no more rumors, here’s the real deal. What does everybody think? The Wu is an nice surprise…But it’s surprising that with half of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics being instructions how to spell his name that one could possibly leave the Double G off the poster.

Presale tickets are available for $100, up $15 from last year, plus the $10 convenience fee. They also say the price will increase on Monday. How much more than $110 can the price possibly increase to? Looks like they will go up $10 dollars on Monday, to $110 probably also with a $10 charge. Buy em here.

The website files also indicate that there will be four stages this year, which I believe is one more than last year.

What do people think?

Transcribed it looks like this, click the link to go someplace to hear the artists. For the first half it takes you to their Hype Machine page, where you can download or stream their music, and about halfway through it goes to myspace sites:

Tool
Kanye West
Social Distortion
Snoop Dogg
Sean Paul
AFI
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Modest Mouse
Queens of the Stone Age
My Chemical Romance
Wu Tang Clan
Bad Religion
G Love & Special Sauce
Yellowcard
Slightly Stoopid
Bloc Party
Tricky
The Subways
Matchbook Romance
Donavon Frankenreiter
The Futureheads
Editors
Rock Kills Kid
Bedouin Soundclash
West Indian Girl
Tapes ‘N Tapes
Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited
What Made Milwaukee Famous
Cheb I Sabbah & 1002 Nights
Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s
Dirty On Purpose
The Shys
The Colour
Particle
Lydia
Yard Dogs Road Show
Ska Cubano
The Mutaytor
Lupe Fiasco