STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-22)
Steve Albini, Wicked Lady, Bob Dylan & the Band, Laura Nyro, Donna Summer, RHCP (yep), Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Wu-Tang Clan, the Charmels, Cool Bands 1, 2, & 3, Back From the Grave 1, 2, & 3
Steve Albini was tested for The Wire magazine’s “Invisible Jukebox” feature way back in April 1994, an article now free to read on the occasion of his untimely recent death in May 2024. It’s no surprise that he said many quotable things in this article, and whether he’s being insightful or ridiculous, there’s always that impressive mind and personality at work. For an example of the ridiculous, Albini on Black Sabbath: “I’ve always hated them. They mean nothing to me.” Although, even as an avowed “Laguna Sunrise” and “Rain Song” lover, I can concede that Steve may have a point here: They would have these folk and classical moments on their records — absolutely excruciating — and those in a way legitimised equally unendurable moments on records appearing nowadays. The entire Unplugged movement, I think, is directly traceable to the folk and classical moments on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath records.” Albini on John Zorn: “John Zorn’s kind of an interesting character in that he’s managed to make a career for himself by assembling groups of outstanding musicians and blowing a duck call over them, and taking a royalty off record sales.” This is a truly sick burn (though not completely accurate or justified). Steve goes on to say, “I can’t help but think if he would form a three-piece that would develop its own aesthetic instead of trying to pirate them from other people, that he could make music of substance and quality that would endure.” It seemed entirely possible to me that Zorn read this when it was published in April of 1994 and was immediately inspired, solely by this article, to form his Masada project, a stripped-down acoustic sax/trumpet/bass/drums quartet that really does rip and prove unequivocally (although it was already fairly apparent underneath the surface gimmickry called out by Albini) that Zorn is a legitimate composer and instrumentalist. But, as it turns out, the first stirrings of Masada were in 1993 and the acoustic quartet studio recordings that became their first release Masada: Aleph took place in February of 1994, a couple months before Albini’s challenge was published . . . so it would seem to be a pure example of parallel thinking. Albini on the Beatles: “I don’t own any Beatles records, they never meant a thing to me. I really have almost no appreciation for hippy music, except for certain bits of Neil Young. If the Beatles over the course of, what, seven or eight albums, managed to produce that one good song (“Helter Skelter”), I really don’t know that the rest of the trouble was worth it.” I personally despise the phrase “hippy music” and the effortless and unearned othering and negating it promulgates among otherwise worthwhile cultural and musical thinkers, so whether you use it to describe the Beatles or Neil Young or Bob Marley or fucking Jamiroquai, I’m already annoyed regardless of what else you have to say. I like hippies, and I like punks, except when I don’t. Liking and disliking people from either group happens all the time, for many different reasons, but one thing that never sits well with me is othering. Albini on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: “This song means nothing to me, other than there was a period of about nine months when you couldn’t go to a public place without being sure of hearing it.” He continues, with that trademark cold-bloodedly analytical sense of fairness: “They’re the archetype Grunge band. That style was sitting there waiting, ripe and pregnant, to give birth to a new era of MTV. I don’t begrudge them their success in the slightest.” (I had to remind myself of the dictionary definition of “begrudge,” and it basically means “envy” which, when substituted, makes the line even more cold-bloodedly Albinian.)
Oh not much, just sitting around listening to Wicked Lady’s “Run the Night” as I often do, thinking about its grunged-out self-recorded tavern (inn?)-basement fidelity, and how it never got an “official” studio recording or release, and how it reminds me of Dylan and the Band making The Basement Tapes a couple years earlier. This was Wicked Lady’s basement tapes for sure, and some music simply cannot be professionally recorded and mass-released because it simply will not come out the same. It will not be the same art. To sidestep explaining this another way, allow me to quote legendary hip-hop etc. engineer Bob Power, from his appearance on the Questlove Supreme podcast: “‘Chasing the demo’ is when someone makes a demonstration recording of the song which is not a full-on version of a song, because they don’t have the resources. It’s just an outline for the song. But when the demo is, like, really incredibly cool, you end up making the real thing but then it’s too good, and it doesn’t sound as cool as the demo, and then people say ‘Well why don’t you just use the demo for the record?’ [The answer is] because it’s too messed up. It’s just — you can’t quite do it.” Dylan and the Band and Wicked Lady both happened to have put their very best art into the demo. Maybe they tried to make “the real thing” after that (certainly other groups, like the Byrds and Peter, Paul & Mary, tried to make “real things” out of Dylan’s demos), maybe they didn’t, but one thing’s for sure — the original recordings were both too “messed up” to release, and also too magical to ever be improved on. And of course years later the original recordings become very releasable indeed, because the artist himself endures and continues to generate interest in his particular brand of artistic magic.
Speaking of artistic magic, oh not much, just watching this “Laura Nyro - COMPLETE ON FILM [1967-1972]” video that’s on YouTube, in full, like once every three weeks, somewhat obsessively.
And btw hot tip if you wish you could spin “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer again but fear it may be too temporarily played out and/or obvious of a choice: reach for “Lucky” instead, from the 1979 Donna Summer album Bad Girls. Same Giorgio Moroder hard-electro pulse’n’tickle, but a lighter, more frivolous, more human take on it. Part of why we fall to our knees before “I Feel Love” is because it is so superhuman, one of the most superhuman songs ever recorded . . . but that can also be intimidating. Take a “Lucky” break every once in a while!
Speaking of “I Feel Love,” this ^ is quite credible. Also, it’s funny how Anthony Kiedis is truly at his best when he’s silent, as he completely kills it in this video while making no sound whatsoever. Normally he’s like both Bez and Shaun Ryder from Happy Mondays combined into one body, but here, mercifully, he’s just Bez.
Was reading Jeff Conklin’s Ambient Audiophile newsletter, issue #27, and he said something about Neil Young I agree with one-hundred percent but haven’t heard anyone else say: “The thing with Neil is — his music since 2014’s Psychedelic Pill has been miss after miss after miss… for me.” Me too, Jeff. I also haven’t enjoyed a single Neil album since Psychedelic Pill, and one day it hit me that Pill is also the last Neil Young album Frank “Poncho” Sampredo plays on. Up until this moment I had thought Poncho’s rhythm guitar playing was fine but a little too simplistic, and that the band could soar in spite of him, not because of him, but now that he’s retired, I wonder if maybe even the great rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot still needed Poncho’s ever-reliable guitar to both root the band and drive the band, and most importantly, to hold Neil accountable. No matter what Neil wanted to do with Crazy Horse, he always had to hold it accountable to Poncho’s open-chord rhythm guitar drive. Since Poncho’s retirement, according to my best count, Neil has made a total of eight albums. Three under his own name, two more with a different backing band called Promise of the Real, and now three straight with a new Crazy Horse lineup in which Poncho has been replaced by Nils Lofgren, who would seem to be a great choice, because he’s a great musician who goes back even further with Neil than Poncho. But he’s a different player than Poncho, less crude and hard-driving. He’s also a multi-instrumentalist who defers to Neil, and will step off electric rhythm guitar and follow the not-necessarily-reliable leader wherever he wants to go. He simply doesn’t hold Neil accountable to the groove, or even the song itself, like Poncho did. I saw Neil & Crazy Horse live on the Psychedelic Pill tour, at the United Center in Chicago, and it’s definitely one of the two or three greatest concerts I’ve ever seen. I feel so lucky to have seen them before Poncho’s retirement . . . especially after hearing the subsequent albums.
Never really did the whosampled.com thing with Wu-Tang Clan, so it was a pleasant surprise to come across “As Long As I’ve Got You” by the Charmels via a years-running Stax Records deep-dive recently accelerated by a viewing of the excellent Stax: Soulsville USA HBO docuseries (2024, d. Jamila Wignot). I immediately recognized the opening piano hook as a Wu sample, but admittedly had to visit whosampled.com to remind myself exactly which song, the one you more astute beat-diggers already know is “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me),” which I probably hadn’t listened to in 20 years. It’s crazy how in the Charmels original that fantastic two-bar keyboard hook over a single minor chord is just the first of a series of chord changes that quickly resolve, but for “C.R.E.A.M.” RZA just looped those first two bars, keeping the hook locked and repeating within that single first minor chord, not only intensifying the sadness and the melancholy and the pain, but locating both the listener and performer within it, just as any historically segregated urban underclass is almost literally physically locked within a geographic neighborhood and a psychographic social class.
Excuse me, just looking for somewhere I can set down these Cool Bands YouTubes before I go. I’m getting tired of carrying them around, and want them to find a safe and permanent home where I’ll always be able to find them later, the next time I’m in the mood for a spontaneous little 30-minute Northwest Indiana egg punk party. You see, Cool Bands was a series of three somewhat-hard-to-google short-run cassette EP compilations released in the halcyon days of 2014, documenting the Northwest Indiana punk rock scene that spawned bands like the Coneheads, Ooze, Big Zit, CCTV, and many more, not to mention an entire subgenre that came to be known as . . . egg punk? Okay, I know you want to get grandpa to bed now, but before I change into my nightshirt, I’d like to thank YouTube user Jimmy, also hard to google, for posting these and many many more egg punk (and beyond!) classics on their YouTube channel. (I’d also like to thank the late great David C. Berman, who was also a fan; it was someone on the internet bringing up Berman’s May 29, 2019 blog post about the NW Indiana scene that got me back into it just now.)
OK, thanks so much! I’ll be back soon to jam those Cool Bands YouTubes! Maybe I’ll see you here. Thanks again for the space, and you know . . . seeing all this extra space you have, would you mind if I left a couple more things here? No, you wouldn’t? You would not mind, which means that I can do it? OK awesome, lol! Yeah, it’s just that those Cool Bands videos reminded me how, just as we had this wild punk rock movement in Northwest Indiana sometime in the mid-2010s, we had an even more wild and completely nationwide punk rock movement that blew the entire United States of America wide-open from within circa 1966! So, I’m gonna leave these here too, check ‘em out if you’d like! Just make sure you always put ‘em back when you’re done. Always leave the campsite cleaner than it was when you found it, right? Lol, anyway, bye:
And so on . . . or just go live in this Back From the Grave Vols. 1-10 playlist for awhile . . . and check out this recent Fanzine Hemorrhage post from Jay Hinman about a one-off Back From the Grave zine published by Johan Kugelberg’s Boo-Hooray, with a still-active-as-of-this-writing link to a PDF at archive.org.