STUFFS & THINGS & "THING" & STUFF (STTS-05)
Chicago House, Thing, Crazy Doberman, Radio is a Foreign Country, Wolf Eyes, Sun Ra, Muddy Waters, James Brown, James Mtume, Creem, Sun City Girls, A.C. Marias, John Keats, Jane Campion
When you live in Chicago for awhile with your ears open, you’re naturally going to learn more and more about house music, even if you aren’t really trying. What is globally known as house music indisputably started in Chicago, and as things often do, went out into the world and became something a little different, a little more simplified and retail-ready. But to this day, if you live in Chicago, you can still get a sense of what it might have been like before it was exported. Just a sense, mind you — I’m not pretending that I now have a full understanding, but I have lived here 21 years and I’m getting there, thanks to beautiful breadcrumbs left all around this beautiful city. Sure, you’re more likely to hear hip hop and Latin American club music blasting from cars, but if you’re paying attention you’ll be hearing that house groove too, that beautiful ambient R&B spin echoing off dense and narrow high brick canyon walls. And you’ll come across articles like this one, written by Leor Galil for the Chicago Reader, about a Chicago zine from 30 years ago called Thing. As the headline says, “Thirty years ago, a Black queer zine captured the scene that birthed house,” and it’s as fascinating as ever to read about the pure street-level Chicago intersectionality of house music, not just the social intersectionality between race and gender and sexuality, but also the musical intersectionality between disco, R&B, jazz, blues, funk, even punk/industrial. And we even get a list of records to go with it…
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Maybe it’s time to do another “76 Tabs Open On My Phone” BlastiStack BlastiLetter, because this article “Acid, The Free Midwest and Predicting The Future with Tim Gick and Drew Davis of Crazy Doberman” by Peter Vilardi has definitely been sitting there taking up space on a Safari tab since its publication date of December 16, 2020. It just looks cool every time I scroll past it, and I always think “I should read that again.” Finally just did, an excellent article & interview published by the internet magazine Music in Motion Rocks, a publication primarily focused on the Columbus, Ohio music scene, and therefore by extension the Free Midwest from which Crazy Doberman hail, Columbus having long been one the true secret capitals of said Free Midwest. The reason I’m talking about this article now, a year later, and finally linking it here so I can close the damn tab, is because of a Byron Coley tweet from December 4th, 2021 in which he called Crazy Doberman’s in-house label Working Man Lay Down “the midwest’s l.a.f.m.s.,” damn, totally…
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Radio Is A Foreign Country is doing some work, the same way free-form regional left-of-the-dial radio stations alway work when they’re happening, ephemeral and transitory, fizzy around the edges, and you rarely know exactly what you’re hearing, even if you see the artist and song title right in front of you, and it feels like such a tiny glimpse into the vast glorious chaos that is human truth/soul/beauty… kinda like listening to any episode of The Watt from Pedro Show, or scanning the CD shelves and pulling this Moroccan Field Diary of Jesse Ebaugh CDR that was released in 2001 and I probably haven’t listened to since 2002, and now, thanks to my boom box and Mr. Ebaugh and the Drone Disco CDR label, I’m somewhere in the Morocco of 20 years ago for 30 or 40 minutes… and what disc is shelved 10 to the right of that one? 20 to the right? 47 to the left? Or, I’ll just go to Radio Garden, that’s radio dot garden on my nearest web browser tab, and start surfing the global dial as it broadcasts live; right now I’m listening to a Sunday morning bluegrass music show on the Columbia University station WKCR, and right before that I was listening to unspeakably generic English-language pop/rock music from a radio station on the Greek island of Naxos.
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Interesting that Wolf Eyes have 50 or 60 releases on Spotify but not their very best song “Rotten Tropics,” which I’ve embedded above for you to listen to, using the currently well-known YouTube technology. You might have a different choice for Wolf Eyes’s very best song, and you might not even think they actually have a ‘best’ ‘song’, but “Dead Hills” is a choice that works for me and I stand by it 100 percent. And to be clear, I’m talking about the version from the 2002 Dead Hills picture disc and CD that was released by Troubleman Unlimited. There is a release called Dead Hills on Spotify, also with a title track, but it seems to be a completely different release than the Troubleman Unlimited picture disc, though also released in 2002, on American Tapes in an edition of 12.
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This French TV appearance was mentioned in Robert L. Campbell’s Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra (2nd edition), and I knew it was probably on YouTube, which indeed it is, probably the most essential glimpse of Sun Ra & and his Arkestra in raw (still brilliant) rehearsal mode I can think of. And right there next to it, hanging out in the related videos, was a link to this amazing low-budget visionary film footage, taken from Arkestra tours in Egypt (probably 1971) and Sardinia (in 1980):
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And as long as I’m finding impeccably great B&W footage of absolute legends at peak power on YouTube…
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This too, which is basically making me weep right now. I believe they call it “high lonesome.”
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Damn, stop it YouTube, now here are two fantastic conversations with James Mtume, legendary percussionist and hand drummer with electric Miles Davis, as well as hit R&B/funk producer (“Juicy Fruit,” “Never Knew Love Like This Before”), who passed away recently in January 2022. The first interview is hand drummer to hand drummer, as Mtume talks to Chicago’s own Alan Rudolph (who played with Yusef Lateef for many years, as well as Don Cherry and Hamid Drake in the Mandingo Griot Society). I really love the part when Mtume says to Rudolph, “I always heard rhythm in three stages: solid, liquid, and vapor. When I say solid, for those who know a drummer, a hand drummer, I mean a trap drummer, Art Blakey is solid. Liquid is Elvin. Vapor is Andrew Cyrille, you know what I mean? Rashied Ali. But those are the stages of rhythm that I hear. So I wanted to take the hand drum… the solid thing I got. How do I make it liquid? How do I make it vapor?”
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Happened upon the Creem Magazine website at creemmag.com, and while I don’t necessarily want to buy a Boy Howdy shirt for $50, it was cool to see some articles from the heyday up there, like this one on Rush by J. Kordosh where he just trashes the band (whoah, the page has been removed, it was there just a couple weeks ago), or this excellent interview with the Grateful Dead by Lisa Robinson, right after the release of American Beauty (also now removed, respect to Creem for maintaining natural scarcity and archival necessity). I really want to agree with Jerry Garcia when he says, “The government is not in a position of power in this country, the kind of power that they think they have is some pretty illusory thing and it exists only as long as people continue to believe in it. One way or another, if you fight it, or go with it. That’s the thing that makes it real. And it’s really no realer than that.” Does this sound naive to you now in a post-Trump era, or does it sound like better advice than ever? I just don’t think this intense proud polarization we’re on is a good way to go, myself, so I especially want to apply Garcia’s thoughts to that. With the polarization of today I think it’s important not to fight it, nor go with it, so that your actions can take on meaning in the vast and fertile middle of the poles. You see where it becomes difficult when the government does manifest its power, however illusory, as Covid policy. If you wear a mask, you’re going with government power, if you don’t wear a mask, you’re fighting government power. In either direction, you’re forced to polarize. What would Jerry do? I don’t know, but I know what I would do, and have done, in order to best depolarize: the more people I’m with that are wearing a mask, the more I will wear a mask. The fewer people I’m with wearing a mask, the less likely I will be to wear a mask. And either way, I won’t be making any noise about it, whatsoever.
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Just a reminder that there’s this hour-long Sun City Girls show from 2004 just hanging out on YouTube, killer power trio assassin mode in a Boston club, camera extremely close to Alan, his bass sounding especially heavy. Actually, there’s like 19 shows I wanna watch right now on this same channel, which is a bunch of shows that music writer Marc Masters filmed with his miniDV camera in the early 2000s. Amazing!
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Took me this long to find out that the greatest performance for television in the entire history of the rock and pop era was “Just Talk” by A.C. Marias on the British TV show The Other Side of Midnight in 1986. With this shocking turn of events, PiL on American Bandstand (1980) has finally fallen into 2nd place, and The Fall’s Brix-in-green “New Big Prinz” (also performed on The Other Side of Midnight, two years later in 1988, with that same blank white set, and again with your ever-cheeky host Tony Wilson) drops to 3rd. A.C. Marias was (is?) at its core, and as they are in this video, the enigmatic Angela Conway on vocals with Bruce Gilbert from Wire on guitar. Their first release was a 1981 7-inch, the similarly minimalist but more ominous “Drop” b/w the shorter and even more haunted “So,” and then they waited 5 years for the second, which was a 12” single with this very song “Just Talk” on the A side and “Just Talk (No Talk Instrumental)” on the B side. As A.C. Marias, Conway never was terribly prolific, and in the 1990s she shifted to a career in music video production and directing, with notable clients being the Smashing Pumpkins, for whom she directed the videos for “Siva” and “Rhinoceros” that frankly blew my dorm-roomed mind when they were on 120 Minutes back in the day. Early Pumpkins ruled okay?
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And finally, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness; but still will keep/A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.” Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Keats. Yes, I just watched Bright Star. Jane Campion rules. Rooting for Power of the Dog to win a bunch of Oscars.