Category Archives: Lost Chords & Serenades Divine

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #12: Safe as Milk Dialogue

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #12 by Stephen McClurg and John King

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Safe as Milk (1967)

STEPHEN: Unlike Machine Head, Safe as Milk has been a favorite album for about two decades, though I felt late to the Beefheart party.

Safe as Milk

After college, I played music regularly and met several Zappa fans. I knew Zappa as a pop culture reference, a guest on The Monkees. These guys discussed how Zappa and Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) went to high school and played in bands together and I thought that was interesting.

Most of my friends were not into Top 40 music. Everyone had a few overlapping tastes, but I had a friend into noise, a friend who played fingerstyle blues, friends playing jazz, etc. I had unknowingly played a few Beefheart songs in one band.  I played to the chords, since I hadn’t heard the songs, but they stood out to me and I wanted to hear more. When I found out it was The Magic Band, I asked what I should hear next.

Mistakenly, I was told Trout Mask Replica.

Trout Mask Replica

While it’s not my favorite Beefheart record, I do like Trout Mask now, but upon first hearing it, I felt cheated. Initially, I thought, “They’re playing two or three songs at once. Ok….” I had heard so much about this record over the years and I just didn’t get it. I know I’m not the only one who has had or will have that experience. It’s not an easy record to digest.

I gave up on Beefheart until I heard “Electricity” on a documentary. I immediately responded to that song and we started covering it. That made me want to check out Safe as Milk.

The album opens with “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I Do,” a variation on the blues standard “Rollin’ ‘n’ Tumblin’.” It’s funny to think of this band–known for being challenging–whose first song (on an album, I think they did some previous singles) is essentially a “girls-and-cars” song.

That first verse has a mysterious quality. The desert part happens to be true for Van Vliet and it seems to place it out of the traditional Delta blues, but it’s a quote from “Minglewood Blues” that the Grateful Dead eventually popularized–after this record. Mentioning New Orleans brings in the hoodoo, voodoo, gris-gris, and all that which is accompanied by the slide guitar, something more akin to the devil’s instrument–the fiddle–than to traditional European guitar. The “tornado” piece reminds me of American tall tales, Pecos Bill, in particular, and finally, I love “the moon stickin’ in m’eye,” but I feel like that comes from somewhere, too.

The rest of the lyrics are mostly about pursuing love or sex, which just gets old to me and probably why I listen to a lot of instrumental music. Sometimes I just find that stuff boring, particularly men singing about “girls.”

During the third verse they play a two-measure break. That rhythmic sense in that verse, moving from something relatively smooth and pulsing to more stuttering parts becomes a method that the band will use throughout its existence. It’s one of the ways that they build contrasts.

Part of the lyrics at the end make me laugh: “Stick with me and I’ll stick with me and you.”

The most exciting aspects of this track for me are Ry Cooder’s slide playing and John French’s drums.

JOHN: If memory serves, I first started listening to the good Captain while recovering from a hernia operation deep in Interzone, quadrant 9.7. The bat couriers were disrupted by the sulfur hurricanes, and on a really bad TV set with sandpaper reception I probably saw the same documentary that you did: The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart.

“Electricity” drew me into its web, too, in part because the song is an ecstatic hoedown with swooping and galloping slide guitars and a theremin and the Captain is yowling like the ghost of Wolfman Jack who wasn’t even dead yet. It almost sounds like a 1950s novelty record. Those tinkling high notes on the guitar recall the Indian whooping of young David Lynch indicating something about the passage to the Black Lodge. One thing I find strange is that this never made it onto the classic psychedelic songs featured on the radio.

STEPHEN: In one of the Black Lodge or dream sequences, there’s a close-up of a mouth saying “electricity.” And almost every film uses flickering lights or sparks as some sort of sign of evil or danger.

The original idea before theremin was to use a saw, but supposedly they couldn’t get a good recording of one. Saws on metal making music and sparks (metal machine music?) which oddly links with the future Lynch work. I’ve always imagined that they would have sounded similar to the various metallic sounds Peter Thomas was able to conjure in the 1971 Fists of Fury soundtrack.

JOHN: Safe as Milk might be the safest Beefheart record, but it sure punched a big psychic hole in 1967 and marked a major psychedelic turn, but it’s also a trippy march through so many classic genres of songs. On a first listen, Safe as Milk is both weird and very familiar.

STEPHEN: One of the interesting things about the record is the mixture of genres you mention. They do garage rock. They do soul/R&B, blues, and whatever “Electricity” is.

“Zig Zag Wanderer,” again, in some ways is a rock-and-roll cliche: the drug song. Most of the time that’s also boring to me. Zig Zag is a type of rolling paper.

I do like the fairy tale imagery. I feel like “the wanderer” here isn’t going to lose his house because he is in some ways his house and is always traveling with it. “You can dance, you can prance. / These old timbers got strong beams.” The house is well-built: he’s got strong legs.

Again, like that “stick with me” line, I love “Heaven’s free, ‘cept for a dollar.”

JOHN: The lyrics get so specific for Beefheart, even if I don’t really follow what he is saying. Maybe I am not listening hard enough, or maybe I am listening exactly as lucidly as can be without going crazy. This was the same year The Doors released Strange Days, The Grateful Dead released The Grateful Dead and Anthem of the Sun, and The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper and The Magical Mystery Tour, though “I am the Walrus” certainly reaches Beefheartian levels of lyrical disjointedness.

STEPHEN: I love the bass and vocals section of “Zig Zag Wanderer.” The bass sounds like a tuba. There are a lot of complaints about the way this recording sounds, especially from the musicians involved, but I’ve always liked it. It’s not clean, but it is full of character. I know there were quite a few overdubs, but it captures a band playing together in a room really well.

JOHN: Compared to the Beatles, the good Captain seems to be recording in a tin outhouse somewhere in Albuquerque. “Zig Zag Wanderer” is a bit repetitive to me, and a bit too on the nose–the song doesn’t zigzag as much as the lyrics would suggest. Not a bad vamp, and wow that bass is fat, but not a lot of surprises outside of the general crusty texture. Honestly, the strength of this record is its profoundly crusty texture and the odd arrangements.

STEPHEN: The only record I know well on that list you mentioned is Strange Days and it has marvelous production, but I agree, the texture and arrangements here help make the character of the record. I’ll take odd and crusty as much as marvelous.

“Call on Me” always makes me think of the intro to The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” It’s partially because the guitar effect sounds somewhat like a 12-string. The lyrics don’t do much for me on this one.

JOHN: “Call on Me” is rhythmically interesting. The jangly guitars bouncing with the harpsichord bits make this a seasick adventure in the best possible way. The lyrics are vapid, instructing the listener that the singer can help appease her (his?) loneliness while the music is a bit batshit, suggesting that the singer is lonely and weird and maybe not the most reliable antidote to loneliness, but then again if you are lonely you probably need someone weird to identify with. But frankly when listening to Beefheart, I often ignore the lyrics, except when he speak-sings poetry.

STEPHEN: I’d never thought of that, but Beefheart’s narrators come off as unreliable as Poe’s.

I like the horn parts on this and that they fade into the riff from “Then He Kissed Me,” which turns up in a lot of places.

JOHN: “Dropout Boogie” is the first great song on Safe as Milk.

STEPHEN: Yeah, even though the voice is stylized after Howlin’ Wolf, this one feels like the first “Beefheart” tune on the record. He sounds menacing even though the lyrics, again, aren’t much to me, though I love this section:

You told her you loved her,
So bring her the butter.
You love her adapt her.
You love her adapt her.
Adapt her adapter.

Something about “Adapt her adapter” reminds me of early domestic relationships in Cronenberg films.

And then there’s a great pseudo-waltz section with marimba that transitions to solo guitar that builds the phrase higher and then when the main riff slithers back in it just sounds even dirtier. The rhythmic sense of this track has nice off-kilter moments like the “What about after that?” phrase.

JOHN: The feel is if The Trashmen had a cold and were covering The Kinks and forgot the lyrics, with the odd dainty flourishes of the marimbas.

STEPHEN: “I’m Glad” is fine as a soul track, but it’s not my favorite thing that the Magic Band does.

JOHN: It’s a cross between The Philly sound and Van Morrison. What’s weird is how not weird it is.

STEPHEN: It does serve as a kind of palate cleanser for “Electricity,” which we’ve discussed a little. But, yeah, imagine being in a crowd and seeing them play “Electricity” and then “I’m Glad.” I would be energized hearing “Electricity” last, but confused if “I’m Glad” were last.

“Electricity” reminds me of Blue Velvet, “Now it’s dark,” “In Dreams,” the lipstick scene, etc.:

High-voltage man kisses
night to bring the light
to those who need
t’ hide their shadow-deed
hide their shadow-deed
Seek electricity………..

“Yellow Brick Road” is one that I normally wouldn’t like. Too positive, but besides “Electricity” it is one of the tracks that oddly defines the record for me. Lynch also uses Wizard of Oz imagery in several films. There’s a simple bell or xylophone that plays a simple, happy melodic line, and I’ve always liked the kind of bouncy, fairy tale, “peppermint kite” aspect of this track.

These works are all Americanizations of the European fairy tale tradition. Similarly, Lynch mines The Hardy Boys and ‘50s Big Boy culture in a way that Beefheart mines these American musical traditions.

“Plastic Factory,” for me, is like “I’m Glad”: It’s fine for what it is, I’m just not as interested in it. I like some images in the lyrics, the vocal whoops that Beefheart does so well, I’m not sure what they’re called, but it’s almost like an octave shift on a syllable, and the primal nature of the bridge that shifts into a three-feel.

“Where’s There’s Woman” has some cool echo or delay effects and creates a dangerous, sexy–maybe noirish?–mood. I think Zappa is on the backing vocals, but that’s about all I think about the track. I like what it evokes, but the details aren’t necessarily interesting to me.

JOHN: The tempo of “Where’s There’s Woman” is so fucking creepy, like insectile smoke unfurling into the mind of a city, and the lyrics seem to match:

Where there’s truth, the green valley steals cottonwood

Where there’s peace, a little cloud of music gleams brotherhood

STEPHEN: One of my favorite drum tracks is on “Grown So Ugly,” especially what French does with the high-hat accents on the verse. The guitar intro has that off-kilter blues sound the band could do well. Also, there’s a magnificent use of tension before the band shifts into what I guess is a pre-chorus of fantastic howls in a two-measure guitar and drum phrase that builds to those wolfman sounds (Oooohhhhh Baay–Bay!”).

There’s a sense of the wolfman’s story or something like a doppelganger, though it’s explained through the line about being in Angola prison for 20 years. Unlike “Where’s There’s Woman,” there are a lot of details in this one I find more interesting. The bass part is traditional, but perfect in this song.

JOHN: When white people appropriate the blues, it helps for them to find a gimmick that lets them in. Jack White used avant garde style with the costumes and color schemes of The White Stripes. But weirdos like Tom Waits and Beefheart seem to transcend the question of race, which is to say their blues are reconfigured into their own weirdness.

STEPHEN: For me, the weakest part of “Autumn’s Child” is the vocal lines with Zappa and the theremin that then become the chorus. They sound boringly psych-rock to me, but the rest of the track is spectacular. The song has a range of parts and maybe my favorite lyrics on the album. There are several spots I like, but I might as well quote the first verse:

Autumn’s child got a loophole ‘round her finger.
Halo rings her head.
Cornhusk hair makes me linger.
Her cat’s stare meets my dare.
A man’s chair greets my stare.

I’ve always heard that second line as “Halo razorhead,” but I guess the pronunciation is something like “Halo rangs’er head.” I’ll still probably always hear the former.

JOHN: You’ve skipped over the absolute best song on the album: “Abba Zaba”! The rumbling percussion with those madenning lyrics sung with such confidence:

Song before song before song blues
Babbette baboon
Babbette baboon

STEPHEN: Yeah! I don’t know why I skipped it. I feel the same way–everything works here, which is maybe why it was supposed to be the title track. The company who owns the candy of the same name had issues with it. The back of the record has the pattern that’s on the wrapper! I’ve heard the Babbette baboon reference is to the artwork or some kind of artwork associated with the candy, but I may be confused about that.

Of course, as a bassist I was intrigued that there was a bass solo. I should relearn it. I love how French, as usual, drives the song. I just find the lead guitar parts on this one beautiful: crackly, birdlike, sometimes insectile, but still beautiful.

The “song before song” lyric you mention is one of my favorites, along with “two shadows at noon” and “tobacco sky.” Pungently evocative imagery. It gives the listener a lot of room for interpretation and discovery.

JOHN: That dominant bass and noodling guitar reminds me of how gorgeously off-kilter Primus is. That is a fine bass solo, and the song is this rhythmic chant of joyous nonsense. Hopefully that description can be put on my tombstone.

Marc Maron bought the LP and a stranger who saw him asked, “Catching Up?” Aren’t we all?

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

 

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #11: Machine Head Dialogue

06 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #11 by Stephen McClurg and John King

Deep Purple: Machine Head (1972)

In my weekly blog post, I discussed the recent circumstances that led me to hearing Deep Purple’s classic album for the first time. John won’t shut up about it.

Deep Purple Machine Head

JOHN: Turns out a “machine head” is the part of an instrument for tuning strings. Hmmm.

STEPHEN: Yeah, it is a “machine head,” but I’ve never heard a musician call it that. Everyone calls it a “peg” or a “tuner,” though “machine head” may be more common in England. I just figured it was a not-so-subtle sexual reference like their name.

Is the cover supposed to represent the title? Heads reflected in a metal machine? It freaks me out, like they’re all standing behind me in an elevator and I’m looking at their reflections on the door desperate to get to my floor. Maybe they’re all staring at a metal sex doll trying to figure out how it works and wondering who will go first.

I had written about how I happened to hear the album. What about you? When did you first hear it?

I’d also be interested in what your experience of the record is as a non-musician—or do you play guitar? The song (you know which one) is so attached to guitar playing that it’s almost impossible for me to divorce my listening experience from my musical apprenticeship. [In my original post, I discussed how “Smoke on the Water” was verboten in most musical contexts.]

JOHN: I got the LP of Machine Head around ‘87 or ‘88 if memory serves. Vinyl was cheap then, a dying format, and I got it out of a pure dumb hunger for more music. The crudeness of the cover is exactly how I felt, and I was pretty sure it couldn’t be any worse than Quiet Riot, who invited us to bang our heads in 1983.

I don’t remember if I cared about “Smoke on the Water.” What I remember is that I was wowed by the organ and the drums on this record, much more than the guitars. One of my favorite records at the time was Long Player by the Small Faces, and I also had this 45 of theirs that had an instrumental called “Skewiff (Mind the Fuse)” that was a good jam. Deep Purple felt like a hard rock version of them. Side 1 of Machine Head grooves.

STEPHEN: I like that the criteria for the purchase was “this can’t be worse than Quiet Riot.” Well, that and a “pure dumb hunger for more music.” I can still relate to that sentiment.

The drums haven’t struck me one way or another. It’s possible I haven’t listened to the record enough. Paice is a crisp, tight player, but I love Jon Lord’s organ work on it and I quite like Blackmore’s guitar playing.

I think I like “Highway Star” much more than you do.

JOHN: “Highway Star” is an okay vamp, but it never quite goes euphoric. The lyric conceits seem to be that the inamorata of the rock singer is a car, or is like a car, or he is some sort of trans-dimensional god zooming over the highway trying to keep up with a nymphomaniac’s libido. The music is good, and the lyrics weird enough to be listenable, but it doesn’t really get over.

STEPHEN: After “Highway Star,” “Maybe I’m a Leo” had some good lines, but didn’t strongly catch my ear.

JOHN: “Maybe I’m a Leo” is a funky groove that’s so desultory it’s beautiful. In 1972 when this record came out, being conversant in astrology was a prerequisite for getting laid—poor dumb bastards trying to walk in bell-bottoms—so the lyrics come off as really funny to me. Paice’s fills and the guitar and keyboard solos all seem to soar off the general sloppiness of the tune.

STEPHEN: I knew I would listen to the whole album when I got to the lines “I’m alone here/with emptiness, eagles, and snow” in “Pictures of Home.” That line works for me on multiple levels.

The first level was just how surprising it was. It caught me off guard with the connection of multiple levels of abstraction. Visually, it mentions mountains and such, too, and reminded me of Rush’s concept songs and albums—which I love. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons image.

But the lines are also interesting poetically. The repetition of the vowel sounds, especially how the “e” sounds are used, is nice. Also, that it sets up the long “o” early and comes back to it. In the full chorus, it plays off the assonance of “alone” and “snow” with “home”—a home that isn’t there. The words are connected by sound, but contrasted in terms of image. The syllables count down in an effective way: emptiness (3), eagles (2), snow (1).

This connected to my memory of Anglo-Saxon poetry with its ubi sunts, imagery, and alliteration. Making the literary connection, whether they intended it or not—really endeared me to the track. And it connects to both the outsider image, the Byronic aspect of rock’n’roll, and the warrior image of hard rock and metal.

Plus the bass solo! It’s kind of sloppy and raw, but punchy. I hear a lot of Mike Watt, or I should say that I think Roger Glover influenced Watt’s playing.

JOHN: “Pictures of Home” is bouncy like “Highway Star,” but really the song is an excuse to jam, and Ritchie Blackmore’s quivering guitars and that Jon Lord organ droning work well, and the singing is strong. I don’t listen to the lyrics too much, or else I’d probably have to stop listening to most rock music period. You’re a better listener than I am.

Perhaps it’s my tinnitus—SUPER FUCKING LOUD since seeing George Clinton earlier this month—but I can’t find the bass through the organ.

“Never Before” is a pulsing groove that sounds a lot more earnest than “Highway Star.” I am charmed by the chorus, “I’ve never felt soooooooo baaaaad … before” sung so prettily by Ian Gillan, the way no sad person could ever sing … unless one is a highway star.

Tracks 2-4 are truly great to drive through.

STEPHEN: That’s exactly what stands out to me on “Never Before.” I wish my heartbreak and sorrow sounded as sweet. Overall, it’s a groove and a chorus and not much else for me.

“Lazy” is the longest track on the album, but it’s ultimately a blues jam with vapid lyrics. It also gives them a chance, for maybe a minute, to almost play some “classical’ music. I would have liked more of that, especially the noisier possibilities, but I wonder if where the organ sounds novel to me, if it wasn’t something that people had gotten used to and were maybe tired of after the ‘60s. I’m sure a ton of psych-rock covered that territory.

JOHN: “Lazy” begins sounding like some live Doors vamp then veers into what could almost count as straightforward blues of that era, hints of Booker T and the MGs. Note: Ian Gillan is actually singing to himself, I think, as a lyric writer.

Lazy
just stay in bed
You’re lazy just stay in bed
You don’t want no money
You don’t want no bread
If you’re drowning
you don’t clutch no straw, no
If you’re drowning
you don’t clutch no straw
You don’t want to live
you don’t want to cry no more
Well my trying ain’t done no good
I said my trying ain’t done no good
You don’t make no effort
no, not like you should
Lazy
you just stay in bed
Lazy
you just stay in bed
You don’t want no money
You don’t want no bread

That was one unmotivated cat. Good harmonica, though. They do have the good taste to wait 4 minutes into a 7 minute song to start the singing. A minute and a half later, the band returns to jamming.

Actually, “Lazy” is fucking superior to Mick Jagger’s variation on this theme, “Let’s Work,” which should count as exhibit A in why Mick isn’t cool—not primitive cool, either.

Clearly the director of this video thought, “Mick means every word of this ironically, doesn’t he? Let’s have clichés of workers trying to prance along with Mick in the middle of dangerous vehicular traffic.” My favorite part is when pallbearers drop a coffin on the highway.

STEPHEN: I know the song preceded both of these films, but I was hoping “Space Truckin’” would be more Alien than Flash Gordon. But despite that silliness, it’s a rockin’ track. I’ve always liked that kind of Motown beat with the snare on all four, and in a rock situation it often gives the drummer space to do some interesting bass work.

I love how the gnarly, weaving chorus riff is an unexpected, but really cool, transition in and out of the verse, which has the same beat. That might be my favorite riff on the record.

The verses wouldn’t be as great if the band didn’t experiment with texture. The verse as it is isn’t that special, but right before the solos, Blackmore plays a choppy, muted rhythm against the verse, while Gillan goes shrieking full-on, like a Muppet in space on fire. For a verse! Of course, he brings it back and goes even higher for the conclusion of the song.

Also, that spacy chromatic transition from the solos seems out-of-place and perfect at the same time. There’s some string-bending like the beginning of “Iron Man.”

JOHN: The rollover riff to “Space Truckin’” is okay, I guess. Angus Young would speed up the tempo to that trick with “Who Made Who” and then more with “Thunderstruck” (which I always thought was an overblown copy of “Who Made Who”).

The lyrics of “Space Truckin’” are there maybe as part of the rhythm section, just to give Ian Gillan something to do. Clearly they could have taken more drugs, lyrically speaking. Really, this whole record belongs to Jon Lord and Ian Paice. If you think that Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars came out a year later, “Space Truckin’” is even more lyrically disappointing.

In 1996, there was a movie called Space Truckers starring Dennis Hopper. It didn’t use the Deep Purple song. Or special effects better than what MST3K was using at the time. Ash vs. Evil Dead used the song, though.

STEPHEN: I think part of the elevator pitch for Alien was that it was part Jaws and part truckers in space. It makes sense someone just ran with it.

How did you get into Small Faces/Faces? You mentioned them earlier, but even at the height of Rod Stewart’s fame I don’t remember hearing much about those groups. I think there was a lot of British rock that just didn’t make it over. I’m guessing anyway.

JOHN: I just had the one LP from The Faces (Small Faces), and it really came down to the randomness of what records I came across cheap in my teens. Rod Stewart confuses me in that he could be a hard rocker (“Hot Legs”) or disco trash (“Do You Think I’m Sexy?”) or treacly pop (“Forever Young”). Liberace had more musical integrity.

STEPHEN: There was a Zappa fan in our college orchestra. He was a percussionist who sat behind me and was a good-natured snob who was really into prog rock. I used to warm up every day with something like “Smoke on the Water” just to drive him crazy. “In a Gadda Da Vida” or even parts of “Do You Think I’m Sexy?”—etc. Sometimes I threw in some Police songs. I loved to see how much I could make him cringe.

Then again, he could have been cringing at my intonation on upright bass, but I like to think it was more about my skill of finding the most annoying riff at the right time.

JOHN: Yeah, out of context, the riff on “Smoke on the Water” sounds dumb. It doesn’t sound much better in context—like a satanic bowel movement. Come on cheese!—come on donuts!—get this evil—out o’ me!

I loved when the song was on season 2, episode 1 of The Sopranos. Tony is driving around in jersey and bopping awkwardly in his seat, and the CD glitches on Frank Zappa’s name, and goes Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap, and Tony blacks out crashing his goddamn SUV.


One of the reasons Deep Purple doesn’t get half the respect it deserves is because this one song is their legacy according to classic rock stations.

I fucking hate classic rock and all its two to five hundred song-lists set to replay and replay and replay and half of those were utterly fucking stupid the first time. No more “Hotel California” or “Paradise City” or anything by Bon Motherfucking Jovi. This isn’t the death of rock and roll. This is the zombie afterlife of actual rocks. It grinds my last fucking nerve, this bullshit.

STEPHEN: I think I used to know what “classic rock” is, but I don’t know anymore. It just so happens I’ve never been a fan of any of the bands you mention as “classic rock.” The Eagles just never caught my ear. I remember being a kid and being trapped in the car with my parents listening to the radio. My mom has always liked and still likes Top 40 music—-whatever happens to be Top 40. She heard Kanye before I did, though she’s never liked his stuff. When I was a kid she liked Devo, Talking Heads, and Blondie, so that’s what I heard growing up. But if I were in the car and “Hotel California” came on, I just hated how long and boring it seemed. I still don’t like the Eagles, but I’ve also never heard a whole album, which is the same situation I was in with Deep Purple which sparked this whole conversation to begin with—so I don’t know. Maybe I do like The Eagles and I just don’t know it yet.

I was already into Jane’s Addiction and Metallica when I heard Guns N’ Roses. Overall, I just wasn’t interested, I think I peaked in hard rock around White Lion and Def Leppard and just wasn’t interested anymore. It’s good that I’ve always been ready to hear something new, but bad in a sense that I think I understand something more than I do based on genre. Sometimes I’m just wrong. I’m willing to admit that. I think a lot of us do this. It’s partially survival—-otherwise the world is overwhelming, but there is something about getting into the details. They almost always subvert our shorthands.

I never liked Bon Jovi either, though “Runaway” cracks me up and that talk box effect on “Living on a Prayer” I always liked, but I always turned it off when the verse started.

But I actually like a lot of classic rock. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, etc. I still love “White Rabbit” or “Barracuda” or….Is Lou Reed classic rock? Velvet Underground? I guess sometimes.

JOHN: I saw both Aerosmith and AC/DC in 1988, and White Lion was the opening act for both of them. GNR was the opener for Aerosmith for half of their tour, but nope, not for the Hollywood Sportatorium date. Wait? Wait? Why, White Lion, will you fucking get better if I wait? How about you wait, you skinny bitches.

Everything about Bon Jovi fills my heart with hate. They make White Lion sound like Slayer.

STEPHEN: I love “Wait.” That would have been an exciting time to see GNR.

I admire your ability to be angry about these things. I think for many years I felt poisoned by music around me and felt physically affected by music I didn’t like. These days I just say “not for me” and move on. I can be moved to tears by music, but I rarely react negatively to it.

I do not like that almost every public place I go to pipes in music.

JOHN: Now I lock myself into my iPod as much as possible when in public, which keeps me saner. I mean Taylor Swift’s music is purely anti-human and Katy Perry is a triumph of cliché, but I have mostly avoided them, whereas Bon Jovi and Poison and Van Hagar and a lot of other shit got their toxic tentacles into my ears as a teenager because iPods didn’t exist and I had to rely on the radio and (shudder) MTV.

Wait, you think I’m angry? What the fuck makes you say that?

Technically, the machine head is the peg, plus the gear and housing. The back of the LP featured the whole back neck of a … bass?

Deep Purple Machine Head back
I guess they thought that out of context “machine head” sounded really cool. They were kind of right.

STEPHEN: The digital age allowed me to call this album up and listen to it, but one of the things I don’t like, and maybe this is a “get off my lawn” moment, is the lack of artwork, lyrics, and notes. I’ve never seen the back cover, even after all those years of shuffling around used copies.

I agree. It’s a cool name! It cracks me up that they put the bass headstock on the back of the album. It’s so obvious that I find it as confusing as the cover. That looks like a Fender bass, but someone more eagle-eyed would be able to tell if it’s a Precision or Jazz bass.

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #10: Diamanda Galás with John Paul Jones: The Sporting Life

16 Wednesday May 2018

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #10 by Stephen McClurg

Diamanda Galás with John Paul Jones: The Sporting Life (1994)

[…]For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. Stephen Mitchell

“My voice was given to me as an inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies. An instrument of truth.”   ~Diamanda Galás

The Sporting Life

In listening to this album again, I remembered how often I heard Diamanda Galás referred to as either “the crazy one” or “the one who shrieks.” There’s a certain amount of truth to this. Galás frequently portrays characters that run the border between sanity and insanity (a few examples–just on this record–include “Skótoseme,” “Devil’s Rodeo,” and “Baby’s Insane”), though I think she’s performing “madness” in a way to comment on what she sees in the world.

An Anne Carson essay, “The Gender of Sound,” is useful here. Carson writes, “It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God.”

Glass Irony & God.png

While Galás can conjure seemingly anyone or anything with her voice, she is often remembered for the high pitches and wailings which Carson says go “together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self control. […] Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable.” I think this effusion, this overflow of sound and energy, levels this traditional idea of quiet or silenced women. I believe Galás is playing with the tensions that Carson discusses, reappropriating these gendered ideas similar to how Kara Walker reappropriates racist and sexist imagery in her art.

Carson writes that “Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts.” Galás is no stranger to performance art (she also uses glossolalia, or speaking in tongues), even her persona as an artist could be described as a kind of possession or a kind of ecstatic ritual. Other than being “that one who screams,” she’s probably best known for performing topless and covered in cow’s blood in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine during her Plague Mass, part of a body of work protesting the Catholic Church’s treatment of those suffering during the AIDS epidemic.

In discussing a poem by Alkaios, Carson writes, “the women are uttering a particular kind of shriek, the ololyga. […] It is a highpitched piercing cry uttered at certain climactic moments in ritual practice (e.g., at the moment when a victim’s throat is slashed during sacrifice) or at climactic moments in real life (e.g., at the birth of a child) and also a common feature of women’s festivals.” The sound can represent either “intense pleasure or intense pain.” These outpourings had to be regulated in that they could either represent madness or create madness in the listener. Much of Sporting Life’s material represents scenes of amour fou, or obsessive love, also a weaving of pleasure and pain. It’s interesting to note that her music is called “sexy” by some and “demonic” by others. In other words, Galás reappropriates elements of the oloyyga and its rituals, and spins them into modern narratives.

One set of songs on the album is built out of the rhythm section of John Paul Jones and Pete Thomas (of Elvis Costello and the Attractions). The eight-string bass that Jones plays on the record mirrors the effect of a tightly played riffs played on both guitar and bass. In effect, he sounds more like Jesus Lizard on “Skótoseme” than Led Zeppelin. The title track riffs sound similar to Rage Against the Machine. “Do You Take This Man?” is built on a structure reminiscent of Morphine and the keyboard line on “Hex” could be on an early-post pop Ministry record.

The album opens with Jones tremolo picking on a reverby eight-string bass and Galás mirroring this on voice, similar to many styles of Arabic music. Galás doesn’t simply mimic musical genre, she incorporates textures and techniques from various sources and synthesizes them to express seemingly anything at whim. Galás often performs multiple voices like multiple characters in these songs. She sings in Greek, English, Spanish, and glossolalia–maybe even other languages I didn’t pick out–on this track alone. Each character seems to speak a different language and if you listen to the record on headphones, these voices float around you, an effect I think of as “The Furies.” At the end of this track, as on other tracks, she manages so much vocal force she overdrives the recording equipment, but controls it, similar to a guitarist using feedback. While the track features her fusion of extended vocal techniques, operatic vibrato, and blues, this overdriven effect is nothing I’ve ever heard another singer do.

The title track is in some ways an extension and lyrically an inversion of this opener (called “Skótoseme,”  which means “kill me” in Greek). If “Skótoseme” is directed inward, then “The Sporting Life” is directed outward and ponders a variety of ways of destroying the once-beloved.

The other strand on the record includes ballads, particularly blues and soul ballads.“The Dark End of the Street” is unexpected, but magnificent. It’s a song frequently covered, and Galás and Jones perform a particularly gorgeous one here. The song is originally out of the Memphis Soul tradition, which Jones nails, while adding lines similar to James Jamerson of Motown fame. He spent several years as a session musician before Led Zeppelin, and at least at the recording of Sporting Life, hadn’t lost any of those chops.

Galás’s performance on this track, hammond organ and vocals, is sublime. In relation to the gendering of sound, this song is normally performed by men, so she also flips the power dynamic on the song, telling the man not to cry and just “walk on by.”

“Baby’s Insane” is a favorite not only of this album, but also of her catalogue, and it’s a gospel tune–of sorts. The hammond organ began as an alternative for churches that couldn’t afford a pipe organ. The musicians here are cheekily playing within the idiom, which often features vocals, hammond organ, drums (often tamborine, too, but they don’t go that far), and bass. The melody is fairly simple, as many sing-alongs are supposed to be. The refrain of “Baby’s Insane” is frequently repeated. The song is in a way an extension of how Galás uses ritual and music, and often fuses the sacred and profane. Here the lyrics provide the profane. They begin:

Arms covered in blood, the war has begun.
Hide the straight razor ’cause Baby’s insane.
New telephone number, new lock on the door.
Hide all the knives, ’cause Baby’s insane.

On top of incredible vocal technique, an intensity of performance, and sometimes serious and disturbing subject matter, Galás is often wickedly funny.

While Diamanda Galás still records and performs, Sporting Life is out-of-print, though there are copies floating around for sale online and in used bins. You can hear the record on YouTube, and see a few live videos, including a performance on The John Stewart Show.

Carson, Anne. “The Gender of Sound.” Glass, Irony, and God. New York: New Directions,
1995: 119-142.

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #9: Stump: Quirk Out (1986)

02 Wednesday May 2018

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #9 by Stephen McClurg

Stump: Quirk Out (1986)

Stump Quirk Out.png

Stump, a band difficult to categorize, is compared most frequently to Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Stump formed right around the time that Beefheart’s last official album, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), came out, so maybe something in the ether passed on there, but Stump rarely reference the blues, a basic ingredient in the Beefheart stew. Stump comes out of pop-rock in terms of melody and punk in terms of aggressive, emphatic rhythms–though they share a similar sense of arrangement with the Magic Band: independent, weaving guitar and bass parts that lock up with the drums on certain beats, and sudden shifts of tone or tempo. Stump also reminds me of Wall of Voodoo, The Residents, or early DEVO, and were precursors to ‘90s bands like Primus or Mr. Bungle.

One characteristic that all of these bands share is a sense of humor, which turns some listeners away, something I’ve never understood. Maybe my predisposition for it was growing up and reading MAD or listening to The Muppet Movie soundtrack and enjoying the funny songs as much as the tender ones. I’ve had more than one person tell me that humor in music “makes me feel stupid.” It makes me feel human, and many of these bands revel in a type of humor that can be gleaned from literature like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (if read as a mock epic), Beckett’s Endgame (“If you must hit me, hit me with the axe.”), or Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Despite having turned into “vermin,” Samsa’s worried about getting to work on time.)

But I digress.

Quirk Out opens with “Tupperware Stripper,” a song that showcases a punk approach to the Beefheart aesthetic. Mick Lynch, the singer and songwriter, opens the song chanting about a housewife looking forward to a Tupperware party for reasons other than the plastic. Lynch frequently tells absurdist stories built from quotidian elements, yet steeped in beautiful and bizarre imagery. Don Van Vliet (the “Captain” of the Magic Band) is known for a similar approach, but Lynch doesn’t use Van Vliet’s growled dadaisms. Lynch leans toward more traditional senses of narrative and melody.

This song also showcases Kev Hopper’s idiosyncratic playing. Hopper plays fretless electric bass and utilizes the expressiveness of the instrument, and at once exploits the characteristic smooth glissando and works against it with a variety of rhythmic clicks. His lines weave traditional roots with harmonics, sliding harmonics, chords, and ghost notes that become either rhythmic or melodic depending on how he deploys them.

The second song, “Our Fathers,” is a kind of rock ballad, reminiscent of Tears for Fears or Big Country, with the exception of Hopper’s harmonics and chorusy, sliding octaves, which would have likely been performed on a synthesizer in those other bands. Stump scattered a few pop-rock ballads throughout their brief catalogue. “Our Fathers” is surprising in how comfortably one can imagine it on Top 40 radio or on a film soundtrack, yet the song has probably rarely been heard out of the UK, especially pre-Internet. The song’s lyrics are about “the sins of the fathers” or how, as Philip Larkin put it, “man hands on misery to man” without learning anything from the process.

Built out of wobbly, skronky guitar and bass lines, the verse (and guitar solo) on “Kitchen Table” is probably the most Beefheartian piece on this record. The chorus switches into a more traditional rhythm and sing-along that eventually becomes a dense, roiling noise of an ending.

“Buffalo”–their “most famous” song–was my introduction to the group. While watching the video, it’s hard to deny the charisma of Mick Lynch despite the fact that (or because?) he looks like a rubbery, spastic Tintin spouting seemingly jejune lyrics like “Swing bottom / Swing big bottom / Swing-a ling-a” or “How much is the fish? / How much is the chips? / Does the fish have chips?” My children have been dancing and singing to this song since they can remember and still request it. So it’s childish, but maybe in the purest sense. Besides, how many times can one hear “The Hot Dog Dance” or “Let It Go” and not lose it? Lynch says in a few live videos that this song is about the reincarnation of the American Buffalo, which I presume means, given the song narrative, that they come back as American tourists, “bulls” in the “china shop” of London.

Chris Salmon’s guitar solo is sublime, stuttering wonkiness. There are moments in his output with the band that sound like Snakefinger or D. Boon. He plays country licks on a few tunes reminiscent of other ‘80s oddball groups like Wall of Voodoo that had similar forays into the genre. One of my favorite songs by any group, and one that highlights Salmon’s use of country-styled guitar is “Charlton Heston” on their only full-length release A Fierce Pancake (1988). While Salmon pseudo-chicken picks, the backing rhythm is built out of a plague of croaking frogs. The lyrics are built out of puns of Biblical language along with references to film and the apocalypse. Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” is a similar example of Cold War apocalyptic anxiety filtered through humor.

“Everything In Its Place”–a sort of song built out of chorusy bass and country-esque yelps and phrasing–delineates a crude Panglossian approach to human biology, including lines like “You should be glad he put two nostrils /  in the middle of your head. / You might have to smell the roses / through your underpants instead.” “Bit Part Actor” reels like a noisy punk stomp, with a snaky, scalar guitar line that ends the verse phrases. Drummer Rob McKahey anchors this last track with what sounds like violently-played homemade percussion. Another comparison to Beefheart may be how Rob McKahey drives Stump’s music similar to how John French’s drums anchored the Magic Band. McKahey favors high hat patterns more than French, who is known for his tom and full-kit patterns. McKahey, on other releases, also plays bodhran, an Irish frame drum frequently played with a double-headed stick or tipper.

None of Stump’s work is in print, though there is an odd early and late collection available. Their other albums are worth hearing, especially if you like Quirk Out, which in some forms includes their first EP Mud on a Colon (1986). A Fierce Pancake, mentioned above, is worth hearing along with the disc of unreleased material on The Complete Anthology (2008, now also out-of-print). Their music does exist in various forms digitally, and maybe the Anthology will get released again.

In 2014, the band released a YouTube video called “Finding Mick Lynch” in which the members had gotten back together and tracked down their vocalist. Evidently this led to rehearsals and spots on the festival circuit. Unfortunately, none of it panned out as Lynch died in December 2015.

Since Lynch’s death, there has been more discussion on the Internet and more video uploads about the group. Lynch helped found an Irish puppeteering group that is still going. I would love to see any puppet work that he had either performed or had written. He also evidently did a one-man show of songs on a guitar with no strings. More recently, I’ve discovered Kev Hopper’s music. Along with free improvisation, Hopper also recorded a pop album with a single and video that is like Thomas Dolby and David Lynch collaborating with Peter Greenaway.

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #8 : Oumou Sangaré: Mogoya (2017)

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #8 by Stephen McClurg

Oumou Sangaré: Mogoya (2017)

Innovation in pop music seems connected to production rather than musicianship. I hear great sounds and textures sometimes in pop music, but it’s rare I get excited by musical performance. Maybe that’s my own failing in not putting in the listening hours in the genre. Whatever it may be, I’ve been enchanted by not only the production, but also the depth of musical performance on Oumou Sangaré’s recent album Mogoya.

Mogoya

The initial allure was a pop record played by humans. Sangaré’s voice isn’t overproduced or layered in effects. Sometimes it’s bare and raw, yet still melodic. She’s effective and beguiling in any dynamic—understated or soaring—though I do not understand the lyrics. I still enjoy music, especially pop music, with lyrics I can’t understand. Even my elementary school-age children were undaunted by the language barrier. Their reaction to this record was to simply dance.

From what I understand she sings in Wassoulou, the name of the language and region in Mali in which she lives. She has been a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations and is frequently working for and singing about women’s rights. Part of me dismisses needing to know anything about her biography or the lyrics in order to enjoy the music. Another part of me rejoices that she does humanitarian work and is a role model for women in and outside of Mali. Like Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, Sangaré’s music is proof that politics, poetry, and dance do not have to exclude each other. Incidentally, master drummer Tony Allen, who helped create Afrobeat with Fela, appears on Mogoya.

The album opens with the track “Bena bena” and the now iconic sound of Malian acoustic guitar. The other musicians come in together with a bass riff that drives the song–a line that plays off of the rhythmic tensions of a meter based on 3 and 4. Sangaré is also called “The Songbird of Wassalou” and as on many of the tracks, this one highlights her and her fellow singers’ voices.

“Yere Faga” carries an anti-suicide message, according to NPR. The groove and some of the synth sounds are similar to those from the Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues-era. Dark, rolling marimba chords provide an atmosphere punctuated by distorted slide guitar licks.

“Mali niale” is a ballad that is undergirded by polyrhythms, and initial chord changes that are reminiscent of the beginning of the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” The similarities end there. The stars here are not surprisingly the choral and solo vocals that are powerful, but still tender enough to make the song work as a ballad.

“Kamelemba” features a syncopated bass groove that accents the and-of-2 and the 4 (as a reference, the stereotypical classic country bass plays on the one and three–the BOOMS of the BOOM-chicka rhythm). Like “Fadjamou,” it’s a nice groove-oriented dance track, but like “Mali niale” the vocals are a highlight. The interplay of the choral vocals and Sangaré’s solo voice is one of my favorite performances on the album. Complementing the weaving of the voices is the exchange between the guitar and the n’goni, an African harp with a rustic quality to it used throughout the album (a likely ancestor of the banjo).

“Koun koun,” another ballad, develops throughout the track. The bass line begins with a three note phrase and lots of space over several measures that becomes more complex as the song continues. Again, the n’goni provides a foundation and the drums eventually slide into a double-time feel. It’s a dreamy, low-key track, but one that is far from filler. “Mogoya” is a tender, gorgeous closer featuring strings and synth washes and other abstract electronic sounds that help build the soundscape for the vocals.

Song order matters and care has been taken in organizing this record. The performances and both the attention and restraint of the production team make this an overall exceptional selection of pop music. I intend to dig into Sangaré’s earlier recordings, but I am a little wary given how high the bar is set with Mogoya.

Oumou Sangaré’s Mogoya is available through her label, No Format, and other online distributors. World Circuit carries her previous releases.

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #7: Angles 9: Disappeared Behind the Sun

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

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Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #7 by Stephen McClurg

Angles 9: Disappeared Behind the Sun (2017)

If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it’s about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.

        —Charles Mingus

My first notions of music as political and social commentary grew out of seeing the once omnipresent TV commercials for Time-Life box sets. I mostly remember boomer nostalgic over the music of the ‘60s. This was all vocal music, stuff like “Give Peace a Chance” or “Fortunate Son,” with the exception of Hendrix’s jagged take on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Was it protest? Or drugs and distortion?

I’ve heard arguments about the beauty or crassness of that moment, but it’s not often that instrumental music, unless nationalistic, evokes much commentary, at least in the world in which I’ve grown up. There are stories of people walking out, hissing, or being generally disgusted over the third movement of Mahler’s first symphony when he turned a children’s song into a death march in 1889. Stravinsky caused a riot with the premiere of “The Rite of Spring” in 1913, though the intensity of the disturbances in both of these cases seems to grow and get mythologized over the decades. Ornette Coleman was bullied by other jazz artists and had his head shaved by police–for being different and playing differently.

“Blues People” by LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) opened me up to ways of hearing politics in instrumental music. For example, he reads bebop drummers as engaging particularly African approaches to rhythm and polyrhythms as a rejection of the swing style that had been a part of many of the large, mostly white, big bands.

There has been an openly progressive and protest movement within the large group improvising tradition. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has been known for its avant-garde creativity and has been a rich ground for African American and other artists of color. Similarly in Europe, the Globe Unity Orchestra wanted to unite players from around the world in a large free jazz ensemble. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra made pointed protests against America’s involvement in Vietnam. Maybe Sun Ra created his own universe, through the Arkestra, in order to break free and comment on the one Herman Blount was born into.

disappeared_behind_the_sun.png

My assumption is that Angles 9 is working in this tradition of free jazz ensemble with “Disappeared Behind the Sun.” The title of the record is a translation of an Iranian phrase that is meant to describe people who are detained by governments, but not formally arrested or tried, and never come back. The music is born out of frustrations and the complicated emotions of difficult political climates. This music shrieks in protest and howls affirmations. It rocks and swings, cries and punches, laments and screams.

“Equality & Death (Mothers, Fathers, Where Are Ye?)” opens with free sax playing, an expected sound for a record like this. But the drums come in and drive the track using a variation of the Motown rhythm, a snare hit on each down beat, often played by Uriel Jones, which is unexpected and propels the track. It’s one of my favorite recordings I’ve heard this year. Andreas Werliin’s drum sound is dynamic, with a bass tone at times wonderfully cavernous–likely a large marching drum. His use of tonal colors with cymbals and slight altering of rhythms with the same beats, creates interesting alternating textures throughout each tracks.

Along with the sensibilities of a free jazz ensemble, Angles 9 mixes in the sounds of Balkan brass and occasionally New Orleans second line marching bands and funk grooves. A few of the tracks echo elements of the late 60s’ Coltrane groups, particularly the Jimmy Garrison bass ostinatos. But regardless of influences, Angles 9 is making a music that is beneficially filling and fulfilling: a music for the body and mind, heart and soul.

You can hear the recording and purchase it from Clean Feed Records.

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #6: John Maus: Screen Memories

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

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Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #6 by Stephen McClurg

John Maus: Screen Memories (2017)

The less music is a language sui generis to them, the more does it become established as such a receptacle. The autonomy of music is replaced by a mere socio-psychological function. Music today is largely a social cement. […]

Individuals of the rhythmically obedient type are mainly found among the youth—the so-called radio generation. They are most susceptible to a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism. The type is not restricted to any one political attitude. The adjustment to anthropophagous collectivism is found as often among left-wing political groups as among right-wing groups. Indeed, both overlap: repression and crowd mindedness overtake the followers of both trends. The psychologies tend to meet despite the surface distinctions in political attitudes.

      —Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”

It’s rare that I find new music on the radio, and I haven’t seen MTV on purpose this century, though when I grew up these were still the places that allowed one to hear new music. I used to look through my local library’s music section, but then I moved and my current library has no music. I look through local record stores when I get a chance, hear about music through word-of-mouth, or dig digitally the way I used to comb through dusty boxes. This is how I came across John Maus’s Screen Memories, which I listened to because I liked the cover art, especially that staticky old TV.

John Maus Screen Memories

I had never heard of John Maus, and when I found out he has a political philosophy doctorate, I was intrigued: that doesn’t seem like the norm for rock and pop musicians. He also built all the synths used on this record. This record and subsequent tours will also debut his backing band. Previously, he had presented his music karaoke-style. His live persona is part Ian Curtis (Joy Division) and part Casey and His Brother (Tim and Eric).

Driving bass anchors most of the songs that are textured with synths and drum programming. “Driving” is a simplistic way to describe the bass tracks, but on one level, the bass is the leading instrument on this record. The bass is often accenting an upbeat, and the chord changes aren’t always where one expects. The way textures and vocal melodies weave in and out of songs and the timing of when phrases begin and end is dynamic, but these are musical qualities that don’t call attention to themselves. On the one hand, he’s not amazing anyone with chops in the stereotypical way progressive rock musicians are talked about. On the other hand, if one digs into the songs, one would notice how solidly, and interestingly, they’re built in a musical sense. There are layers and textures and phrases (the horizontal plane of melodies), but they are built upon each other in what sounds like formal ways (the vertical plane of harmony). In other words, there’s a musical crafting to the songs that extends beyond something like “let’s jam” or “punch in a tabla here and see what happens.” For example, you can dance to these songs, but at least one (“Teenage Witch”) is mostly in 10/4. There are extra measures in other songs that alter rhythmic expectations.

The lyrics on Screen Memories are almost haiku, rather than narratives. “The Combine,” the lead track, shows Maus crafting a distinctive pop song out of two sentences (“I see the combine coming. / It’s going to dust us all to nothing.”). Considering the repetition in pop songs, it’s surprising he makes that tradition even more concise, yet it still feels whole. The Residents constructed something similar on their Commercial Album of sixty second songs. The theory behind the record was that most pop songs were about three minutes long, but the chorus and verse repeated about three times, so the project was an attempt at making concise, though narrative, pop songs by cutting those repetitions. Maus simultaneously maintains traditional repetition and enigma without falling back on noise.

This track gets better every time I hear it. I recently saw the video and it’s interesting to use farm imagery in what has been called “electropop retrofuturism,” a Janus-faced vision, a kind of technology of the past representing a technological future that doesn’t exist. The farm imagery inverses Sun Ra’s imagery of spaceways and rockets. But in a digital society with various types of synthesizing processes at our fingertips, the combine is an interesting and effective image, regardless. A combine gets its name from the combining of actions that actually separates physical ears from stalks, or grains from grasses. The combine, like the computer, has altered labor forces. In the video, we see chaff and dust whirl, which matches up visually with the frequent pixelated images, even that static on the cover image from the television age. The combine could be the computer, the internet, the “matrix,” or whatever dystopic vision, including nuclear holocaust, one would want to feed back into the machine of the lyrics. The dust is the chaff, the ones and zeroes, the pixels, ashes, all that information. And like the antithesis of a combine that separates, the lyrics tell us “all” will come “to nothing.”

Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that, “knowledge itself is power.” It would make sense then that controlling information, mediating it (and our memories), is also a form of power. Maus uses the form of pop music, which itself is tied to commerce, capitalism, and power. The church, also historically a sign of power, is represented here through choral elements and a organ/synth-horn combination fanfare that within this context sounds nothing short of apocalyptic.

“Teenage Witch,” at first, seems out of character for the record, though not for pop music. The speaker says, “Want to start a fire, witch? For that icy titty?” There are no other potentially sexist lines like this on the record that I’ve heard. For me the key is the synth solo that reminded me of Rush. I thought about this as an outsider speaking: what if this song were from the point of view of the id of the kid in Rush’s “Subdivisions”? I hear the Puritanical echoes (and the fantasy imagery that Rush used) that many subcultures create or define for themselves in the track. Even outsiders burn others.

It feels like more of a comment on sexism than simply repeating it, especially when paired with “Touchdown,” which could be commentary on toxic masculinity and the cultural energies of competition and domination. The song and video represent clearly the retrofuturism that he’s been labeled with. “Touchdown” reminds me of the masculinity of ‘80s TV shows. The mood, music, and images reimagine something like the original Tron (1982), or action shows like Airwolf or Knight Rider. Just look at those titles: wolves, knights, gladiators. “Forward drive across the line!”

There are other ‘80s touchstones throughout the recording. “Walls of Silence,” “Sensitive Recollections,” “Decide Decide” sound like songs for disappointing school dances or end credits in John Hughes movies. “Find Out” features lo-fi guitar and bass interplay reminiscent of early Cure (particularly Three Imaginary Boys era), where there is this developing element, Goth rock or whatever, traditional bluesy guitar licks, and punk influences. I hear elements of Devo in “People are Missing,” “Pets,” and “Over Phantom.”

There are textures that will be familiar on Screen Memories. I don’t make any of those connections or suggest any of those influences (and there could be more: there is a baroque undercurrent or something–I’m not sure how to phrase it– to a lot of the record, but also little bits of Wire, Falco, Bauhaus, Tomita, etc.) The music looks forward as much as backward. Screen Memories, like any dystopian or retrofuturist vision, while reconstructing out of the past and envisioning possible futures, is even more about the present moment.

Screen Memories and other recordings by John Maus are available here.

McClurgStephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #5: Hellraisers

07 Wednesday Feb 2018

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #5 by Stephen McClurg

Hellraisers: A Complete Visual History of Metal Mayhem (2017)

Fists are in the air,
banging everywhere!
Thrashing to the sound,
Face melting down!
It’s time to fight
for metal tonight!
Bangers take your stand
and obey…
our metal command!

—Exodus, “Metal Command”

The coffee table books I generally see in stores cover niche interests in illustrated or visual form. They seem indefinitely on sale, yet still too expensive for me. Their subjects alternate between generic–Movies!–and specific–a visual guide to Sherlock Holmes adaptations. I imagine these are often impulse buys, akin to other popular culture books like South Park (or The Dark Knight or Game of Thrones, etc.) and Philosophy, that I imagine are rarely, if ever, picked up after they’ve been bought, except to take to a used bookstore. I’m not sure who reads them, but surely someone is as they’re like an invasive species in the philosophy section, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about them nor have I seen one on a friend’s bookshelf. Those coffee table books on the other hand…

In the past few months, I’ve found two of them that I’ve enjoyed, despite my skepticism. The first is Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix. I rarely get caught up in nostalgia, but this book brought back memories of when horror fiction was everywhere: grocery stores, drug stores, and even small local newsstands, when they existed. These novels and their cover art were my Aurora monster kits, which besides EC horror comics, were the thing that horror heroes like John Carpenter and Stephen King mentioned as dear to them in their childhoods. I never saw anything like those kits, but I was also less than crafty, so even if I found one, I doubt that I could have put it together or painted it to any satisfactory degree. But I loved these books–wonderful, cheap horror paperbacks with sometimes wonderful and sometimes cheap cover art. Hendrix delves into the biographies of a few cover artists (all unknown to me), the history of horror publishing, its fads, and its eventual demise. Hendrix obviously loves his subject matter, but he also knows how silly, and just plain awful, some of it is. But when we really love something, we often tolerate, and sometimes even love, its particular faults.

Axl Rosenberg and Christopher Krovatin strike a similar balance in Hellraisers. They love metal. I mean really, really love metal. That love is on every page and in every detail about the albums, genres, dress codes, and evolution of the music. Like role players arguing about alignment violations or battle axe weights, Rosenberg and Krovatin revel in the minutiae of metal genres: the difference between death metal and black metal vocals, the virtue of various -cores, the heaviness of the umlaut, the riffs, the mascots. While they classify and critique the genre, something that sounds dry and analytic, they do it with self-reflexive humor. They know that it’s trivia, and ultimately trivial, but that’s sometimes what’s fun about being into a thing–arguing about the stuff that passes by “outsiders.”

Hellraisers

The authors intend the book to be both a primer for newcomers and a refresher for older listeners. Since I grew up with metal, I may have responded to the humor more than a newcomer will, but if someone takes their conceit seriously, the book is meant to be a course on metal, they will be caught up in no time. The larger chapters are classes on “The Metal Ages,” while there are shorter “Crash Courses” and “Cultural Studies” intermingled into each Metal Age, which is also paired with a playlist to listen to for homework.

One of the moves that endeared me to the book is that it opens with a bit of music theory trivia. The interval of a tritone (depending on musical context, a flattened fifth or augmented fourth) is said to have been so disturbing in medieval music that it was outlawed and referred to as “The Devil’s interval” or the diabolus in musica. Of course, this meant that the Romantics, given their appreciation for Milton’s Satan, had to use it and later it became a cornerstone of the blues (it is part of the minor blues scale). This idea works fabulously with the Faustian myth of Robert Johnson, who supposedly sold his soul at the crossroads. The blues and its power, energy, and subversion then became one of the main influences on music in general, and rock-n-roll specifically. Infamously, the tritone is the opening interval of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Combine that with the occult dabblings of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and the Manson Murders killing off much of the thrall of hippie-dippiness, and you’ve got some of the basic ingredients for the birth of metal.

It’s a great story, but I’ve always wondered how experimental composers and jazz musicians using the interval fit into the story. I guess Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, tried to provide one answer. The earliest source of the story I could find is Johann Joseph Fux’s book on counterpoint, Gradas ad Parnassum. Fux cites an old rhyme about intervals that mentions the diabolus in musica, but then says it’s avoided because “it sounds bad” and “is hard to sing.” Even if the story is more fun than the possible truth, at least Rosenberg and Krovatin don’t take themselves too seriously. The book is fun and funny. One of the first things you see in the book is its dedication: “to the Birmingham sheet-metal machine that ripped off two of Tony Iommi’s fingers. Thanks for everything.” Black Sabbath’s sound is often said to have partially developed because of Iommi’s accident. He built his own prosthetics, experimented with string gauges, and eventually detuned his guitar, which is now a standard practice in metal. When considering the metal levels of Led Zep, Robert Plant is described as “a sexually unhinged singer shrieking about hobbits.” One of the sections on glam metal is titled “Your Name In Lights And Your Ass In Tights,” which perfectly captures the era’s focus on parties, ego, and sex.  And while they pay compliments to Pentagram’s singer, they also say “[Bobby] Liebling looks like a giant spider wearing the decomposing corpse of a high school theater kid.” That’s kind of mean, but it’s also really metal.

Some of the fun facts I learned: That Entombed record, Wolverine Blues, that I liked, but couldn’t quite place the sound of, especially since previous albums had been pretty straightforward death metal, was the birth of a sub-genre now called “death-n-roll.” Slayer’s Kerry King, the one who frequently plays with a giant metal porcupine strapped to his arm, was high school valedictorian. Axl Rose’s inspiration for “Welcome to the Jungle” involves a homeless man screaming in the face of a sleeping homeless man, “You know where you are?! You’re in the jungle, baby! Wake up, it’s time to die!” Axl, evidently in need of an alarm clock, was the sleeping homeless man. Overall, it was nice to share some opinions with the authors: a love for Chuck Schuldiner’s music and a disdain for nu-metal (Korn, Limp Bizkit). While my listening had turned toward jazz, noise, and experimental classical music, nu-metal and pop punk killed any taste I would have for rock or metal for about a decade.

I grew up as many of the genres discussed here were developing, and wanting to hear the music again, I started going to local shows several years ago. I was confused when hardcore bands would play technical riffs I associated with thrash coupled with traditional hardcore and then do chugga-chugga breakdowns similar to Sepultura. As silly as it sounds, these were mostly distinct styles when I was growing up. I enjoyed how the authors analyzed the mutations and traced the lineage of riffage from within and without metal, which helped me make sense of current trends. I can’t help thinking that musicians are also influenced by the sheer amount of music that we have access to these days.

While I was initially baffled hearing younger players and newer records, I ultimately think the crossovers are a healthy thing, an evolution of the music. Not that change itself makes something better, but when it also broadens people’s minds and tastes, it probably is. This is music that was created by outsiders for outsiders, but one of the pervasive problems over the course of the music’s history is territorial and idiotically divisive ideology, which in several cases, even turned murderous. One infamous example is the onstage murder of Dimebag Darrell (Abbott) of Damageplan for supposedly breaking up Pantera.

Sections of the book celebrate diversity in metal. Though the origins are in British and North America, the music has spread throughout the world, with a strong presence in Japan and South America and even the Middle East, including Iraq. The documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad shows devotion to the music even under threats of violence and death. If you think getting a gig is difficult, this may make you feel better. Another section discusses sexuality in metal, from the homophobic to the homoerotic, from LGBTQ to transgender shredders.

As an old, and sometimes jaded, listener, the best compliment I can give the book is that rather than just sending me back into all those records I used to have, it inspired me to check out music I have ignored, thinking I’d heard it all. I didn’t know I needed Paperbacks from Hell; I didn’t know I needed Meshuggah in my life either.

I also need that Lemmy autobiography.

McClurg
Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #4: Fever Ray’s Plunge

24 Wednesday Jan 2018

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #4 by Stephen McClurg

Fever Ray: Plunge (2017)

“Seeing these exhibitions I’ve longed to laugh, with the rest, but that strange imitation was impossible. Taking a penknife with a sharp-edged blade, I slit the flesh at the points joining the lips. For an instant I believed my aim was achieved. I saw in a mirror the mouth ruined at my own will! An error! Besides, the blood gushing freely from the two wounds prevented my distinguishing whether this really was the grin of others.”

~ from Les chants de Maldoror, by Comte de Lautréamont

Around the millenium, I avoided electronic music like I did movies with newfangled, but clumsy, CGI. The technological improvements over almost two decades have helped me soften towards electronic music. Either that or my tastes have changed, or maybe a little of both. Some of the recent electronic music I’ve liked has harnessed new ideas to old synth and keyboard sounds similar to movie scores by John Carpenter, who is himself putting out new recordings these days.

Fever Ray Plunge

Something similar, a reinvigoration of once obsolete sounds, is happening on the newest Fever Ray record, the solo project of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronic duo, The Knife. One strain of sounds reminds me of the arpeggiated keyboard and synths, not too dissimilar from runs in Zappa pieces that were in children’s nature and science programming. Shows like 3-2-1 Contact often featured these kinds of compositions (Check 55 seconds into that clip and again at 11:28). The second strain reminds me of music on Miami Vice episodes. Not just “In the Air Tonight,” but particularly music from club scenes or the drive montages of Sonny Crockett set to Jan Hammer’s synths or songs like Al Jarreau’s “Raging Waters.”

Not only are the sounds of Miami Vice a touchstone here, but so are some visual elements. Michael Mann, who created the look of Miami Vice and Manhunter (1986), informs Fever Ray’s videos. Similar to hearing Carpenter synths on shows like Stranger Things, Mann’s visual style has influenced aspects of Drive (2011) and The Guest (2014), particularly the uses of smoke, neon pink, and cool blue colors, and the overall ‘80s nostalgia that popular culture has embraced. And like the tone of Wingard’s The Guest, much of Fever Ray’s visual output is at once monstrous and playful. [If you decide to check out more videos or audio, they are likely NSFW.]

This leads me to the cover. I don’t think the skin carving/black metal font makeup on the cover is meant to be taken seriously, unless you take that kind of thing seriously, and then it’s possibly a warning that this record isn’t for you. Like the videos, in which Dreijer appears in various monstrous guises, there are weighty topics covered here: desire, sexual politics, loss. But like the cover and other visuals promoting this record, it is not without playfulness. These clashing tones and themes will likely make the album uneven and unsettling for some listeners, particularly those interested in cohesion across a record. I find the tensions enjoyable: desire and the grotesque, warmth and sting, human and machine.

“Mustn’t Hurry” and “Falling” remind me of the aforementioned Miami Vice driving sequences, when the show sulked in the silent stoicism of Sonny Crockett, whose bright white or pastel suits were an antithesis to these moody drives. While there are ‘80s synth sounds here, I don’t mean to say that’s all there is. These tracks pack plenty of contemporary sounds and as songs, I find them much more likeable than much of the Vice pop spotlights.

“A Part of Us” features melodic vocals, some robotically filtered. I find this a dazzling pop love song, though it’s edges burn with anger and danger. In recent interviews, Dreijer discusses how the record comes out of becoming a mother, then a divorcée, and then a lesbian, though I get the sense that these are all labels that Dreijer would eschew. The anger (“one hand in yours and one hand in a tight fist”) and danger (“What we are/Brings the wrong kind of attention out here”) come from the policies and violence against same sex relationships in her home country of Sweden.

“IDK About You” opens with electronically manipulated ritualistic percussion, reminiscent of Jane’s Addiction on earlier versions of “Chip Away,” and bursts of melodic vocals, grunts, and whoops. Upon first listen, this was the song that stuck with me the most.

“To the Moon and Back” and “Plunge,” remind me of the arpeggiated melodies I mentioned hearing in certain children’s nature and science programming, but the lyrics (in “Moon”– “Plunge” is instrumental) explicitly explore lust and desire. Both of these tracks have grown on me, and I love that the title track is an instrumental, even though I’m not sure what I like about that. Maybe that it makes the record more of a cypher, in that if I were going to look for some way of conceptualizing the record, that’s an obvious place to start. Instead of being able to bind the record together in some sort of concept, I find the instrumental makes that kind of easy encapsulation difficult, with that difficulty itself, possibly the point.  

Although it is not my favorite track, “This Country” — a slow burner, with sleazy keys and an anthemic chorus vocal declaring, “This country makes it hard to fuck”–may offer an entry point for listeners. It is a dark piece about desire, anger, and discriminatory sexual politics, and while I believe the subject matter is important, it is the least interesting track on the album. It grinds and swears, but maybe that’s the point. We’re denied, like those suffering under discriminatory laws, something in the song that could lift us out of it’s oppressive atmosphere. However, after this track, I find the rest of the record delivers manifold pleasures, beginning with the aforementioned “Plunge” to the final whispers of “Mama’s Hand.”

As I stated above, I’m not deep into electronic music or singer/songwriter material, so I hadn’t heard her previous band. I wanted something that I wouldn’t normally pick and a friend suggested this record, which makes me want to dip into the discography more. More information is available at Fever Ray’s website.

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #3: Sparks: Hippopotamus (2017)

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #3 by Stephen McClurg

Sparks: Hippopotamus (2017)

The writers and composers work the street.

Bach’s new score is crumpled in his pocket,

Dante sways his ass-cheeks to the beat.

~ from “Hollywood Elegies” by Bertolt Brecht (trans. Adam Kirsch)

Sparks has maintained their standards and strangeness throughout more than a four-decade career. Their new album broke the top 10 in England, the first time they’ve been on the charts since the ‘70s. They are also in their 70s and, thankfully, not an easy band to describe. Much of their work reminds me of Roxy Music filtered through musical theater. Since most of their output features songwriter Ron Mael’s keyboard and piano playing, they’ve been called “baroque pop,” which as a genre seems to mean pop music with a dash of classical instrumentation, such as the piano pitched up to sound like a harpsichord in the Beatles’ “In My Life,” or the grand little symphonies of mid-’60s Beach Boys. They’ve been called glam, and even electropop, and I can’t think of another band that has been described as a The Mothers of Invention meets the Monkees. All of that really means one never knows what to expect from a Sparks album. While not perfect, some songs lack the expected vibrancy of a Sparks track, Hippopotamus is a fun pop record, made with intelligence and wit.

Sparks Hippopotamus

“Probably Nothing” is a gorgeous opener and one of several places on the record that reminds me of Michael Nyman’s work, particularly with director Peter Greenaway. At less than two minutes of piano and vocals, with maybe four chords of strings, and a cymbal wash, it somehow manages to tell the story of almost every love song–without a chorus, or at least not a traditional one.

“Missionary Position” seems like a bad joke, but somehow they make it work. It’s a track that feels like it could be a part of a Broadway show and is an ode to either practicality, even comfort, or to a lack of adventurousness, depending on how you interpret lyrics like “You might pride yourself, you’re so Avant garde/ But we’re neoclassicists, I guess, at heart/ Patronise all you like, we both like the missionary position.” If we take that baroque pop tag seriously, Sparks is a neoclassicist group, but not just because of the piano. They aren’t working with the hippest producers, making the sickest beats, but that, overall, works in their favor. At once it announces a songwriting tradition, but also renounces fads or noise as the only options for sounding new.

I may be misreading it, but “Scandinavian Design” seems to be a response to “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, but for an Ikea generation. “Norwegian Wood,” about an affair involving John Lennon, is a reference to a type of cheap paneling that was in style at the time. In the song, a girl leaves a guy and he gets his revenge by burning the paneling to keep warm, or in some readings, by setting their love nest on fire. There is a similar relationship, in “Scandinavian Design,” though it doesn’t end in fire, but in the icy “elegance [and] simple lines” that offer “no escape.” Neither partner is happy. Neither is angry. With or without the connection to a classic song, the last twenty seconds with slide guitar are sublime.

Sparks’ lyrical wit oddly balances with a penchant for the absurd, even silly.

The title track makes me think of the Residents writing children’s music. It’s about things stuck in a pool, including a hippopotamus, which is later joined by a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. “Giddy Giddy” is at once funny and nightmarish; I envision rapping aristocrats. “Giddy” fills in for whatever slang is being used for being happy or with-it or whatever. The track feels like a dig on our culture’s frequent default to entertainments that mask deeper anxieties and resentments

“I Wish You Were Fun,” an almost perfect ballad to me, wryly takes on pop sadness. They even work in some “la la las” and lyrics like, “In every other way I find you amazing, but one / I wish you were fun” and “Glad that she’s no Ayn Rand, humorless to the nth degree.” A few tracks later, “A Little Bit Like Fun” plays like a lost ELO / Beach Boys collaboration track for an ‘80s movie soundtrack that I never knew I wanted.

“Life with the Macbeths” is powered by stately piano reminiscent of Moonlight Sonata that turns both baroque and Rosemary’s Baby with the addition of harpsichord. Lady and King Macbeth sing to each other in this bizarre, but effective, showpiece that closes the record. The lyrics reimagine the Macbeth’s on a reality show whose ratings soar with their increasingly bad behavior. Like the band itself, not everyone will enjoy this conceit, but it becomes that much better for the particular listener who does.

You can find Sparks records, interviews, and videos online.

McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.