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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Category Archives: Music

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #16

13 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #16 by Stephen McClurg

Dua Saleh: Rosetta EP  (2020)

The songs on Dua Saleh’s Rosettasurge through rap, pop, and rock–sometimes in the same track. Considering the namesake of the EP is Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Dua Saleh’s Sudanese-American Musilim background, the record expresses the desires, joys, and challenges of a multi-hyphenated existence.

A video of “Umbrellar” has qualities of both ‘90s hip hop and Afrofuturism. It’s a catchy single and evokes a similarly nostalgic, yet uplifting mood as something like Chastity Belt’s “Different Now.”

“Smut” begins as a rap that gets pitched into alien voices and then transforms into an electronic R&B track while holding threads from the opening. Toward the end, a guitar line comes in that would sit comfortably on a Cure album. The unique structure of “Smut” keeps growing on me.

“Windhymn” features organ, percussive sounds, and wailing among several vocal overdubs. There’s an effective whispering voice featured on this track and throughout the record. Here it makes sense as a wind hymn. The track ends not in a whisper, but in a rupturing jazz sample. One of Rosetta’s characteristics is the unexpected noisy qualities at the end of most tracks.

Like Dua Saleh, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is difficult to describe. Mostly well-known as a gospel artist, she played gospel in jazz settings and also is considered the Godmother of Rock and Roll. Though she was married a few times, she also had relationships with other women. Check out her record Gospel Trainfrom 1956. The first track “Jericho” is one of my favorite performances, as is this live performance of “Didn’t It Rain” that proves what a goddess she was.

Bandcamp is one of the best ways to support living musicians. Rosetta and other recent singles and EPs are available here.


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.

452: Grace Elizabeth Hale!

26 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, History, Music

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Episode 452 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

This week, I talk to historian Grace Elizabeth Hale about how Athens, Georgia helped launch an indie music revolution with the B52s, REM, Pylon, and other bands, and the art and college scene that spawned them.

TEXT DISCUSSED

NOTESScribophile

  • TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
  • Register with Miami Book Fair Online in order to stream its free events, including a debut poet panel moderated by yours truly.

  • Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Episode 452 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Episode 432: Kyle Eagle!

09 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Music

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Episode 432 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

IMG_0732

This week, I talk to podcaster Kyle Eagle about music and everything.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Wynton Marsalis The Midnight Blues

Dizzy Gillespie Groovin HighCachao

NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Check out Kyle’s jazz podcast, The Major Scale.

Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.


Episode 432 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Episode 430: Jared Silvia!

25 Saturday Jul 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Music

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Episode 430 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Jared Silvia and Gear

In this week’s show, I talk to writer, musician, and producer Jared Silvia about the connections between music and writing, the history of synth-pop, and the role of randomness and patterns to experience.

 NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Check out Jared’s label Circuit Church over at Band Camp.

Jared’s King-of-the-Hill-inspired fiction appeared on episode 167.

Michael Iceberg brought some strange hardware to play at Disneyland and Walt Disney World in the late 70s and early 80s.


Episode 430 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #14: Sweating to the Goths

18 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #14 by Stephen McClurg

Sweating to the Goths

In middle school, I couldn’t elude the yearly discussion of the science fair project on how different music affects plants. In English classes, someone would try to recycle their report as their English research paper.

Today, there is keen interest in the link between music and physical performance.

Much of the research shows how music supports workout intensity better than other activities. As much as I like reading, I’ve never been able to read and exercise. Unless I’m walking or cooling down, I don’t maintain workouts with podcasts or audio books either. That bears out in the study in which people gave a thirteen-percent higher happiness rating when listening to music rather than podcasts. 

My gym time is now essential. For complicated reasons and another essay, I ended up weighing 400 pounds and on the verge of some serious health issues. I worked with my doctor on diet and exercise, and had some counseling on changing behaviors. I was able to drop over 100 pounds, but like so often happens, I’ve gained 30 pounds or so back, which I’m working on getting rid of now.

Having to go to the gym has also meant that I have had to figure out ways to make the experience something that I want to do. I’ve found music essential. 

The way I choose music goes through phases. Preferring albums, I don’t like playlists. Initially, because high tempo music can increase exercise rates, I started with uptempo music that I knew well: most of Public Enemy’s records, Ice Cube’s The Predator, a variety of rock and metal, especially Entombed’s Wolverine Blues, The Misfits, and Faith No More’s albums through Angel Dust. These are still favorite records for workouts, but I had to find ways to vary it.

I discovered that I could listen to almost anything that had one of three drummers: Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, or Billy Cobham. They are ferocious, master musicians, who propel their music forward. Oddly, a fourth drummer I deeply love, Zigaboo Modeliste from the Meters, just does not work for me a workout. Modeliste has one of the deepest grooves ever, but I find his music too relaxing, maybe too bound with Mardi Gras, revelry or something. Modeliste makes me dance. Elvin Jones has a similar deep pocket, but he also has the forward propulsion of someone like Williams, albeit approached dissimilarly.

Another phase of listening has been simply checking out new music, whether a new release or an older album I’ve never heard. I never thought this would work, but workout intensity hasn’t suffered. If a record just isn’t keeping me going, I skip to a new one. If I check out three that don’t work, I go to an old faithful like almost any Fishbone album or Mastodon’s Moby Dick-inspired Leviathan, which was I found through this process. Even when I’m working out, I need music of some substance. I’m not much of a dance fan, and though I like electronic music, I can’t workout to it. Hearing some of these rock and pop records from year’s past has worked. I also get to hear new releases that I normally wouldn’t. Lizzo’s work has been refreshing and energizing lately.

One of the records that I didn’t expect to enjoy with workouts is Bauhaus’s In the Flat Field. I had only seen “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” on MTV’s 120 Minutes, but I had never listened to an album by the group. For whatever reason, Flat Field was recommended to me and I thought it was contrary to my setting enough to be fun, like listening to Joy Division or The Cure and looking at brightly lit rows of ellipticals and tank tops. The first song, “Double Dare,” has a slow descending riff like “Bela,” so I thought that if this is their thing, then I was going to have to listen to it at home. As the song continued, though, I found myself settling into my workout. 

In “Spy in the Cab,” the guitar felt oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And the drums, which sound like some sort of hand drums were also messing with my musical memory. A few minutes into cardio–it hit me. Secret Chiefs’ “Renunciation.” The guitar parts and arrangements, forwardness of the melodic component as well. Peter Murphy’s voice in the case of Bauhaus and Eyvind Kang’s violin/viola in the case of Secret Chiefs. I thought Bauhaus–though not an impossible–but at least a strange influence for SC3, but they certainly share some theatricality–especially the live versions.

Then I remembered that “Renunciation” was a cover. It was originally written by Ananda Shankar. Maybe it influenced Bauhaus, too, and that was possibly the connection. 

“Stigmata Martyr” seems like an obvious influence on Ministry, particularly “So What” and maybe in title only– “Stigmata.” For one, even early on Al Jourgensen was singing in a British accent not too removed from Murphy’s own. The approach toward basslines, the noise, the repetition, all seem cut from the same prayer cloth. I love Murphy’s exorcism in this song, as scary as anything Ministry has done. The bands project a similar chaos and energy on stage as well, though Ministry was certainly upping the ante throughout the ‘90s. 

I’ve thought about music as something fun, spiritual, or intellectual most of my life, but there’s been a joy in experiencing music in a practical sense–How fast can it make the flowers grow? I’m too late for the frizzy hair and leather pants, but I feel lucky to find In a Flat Field when I needed it, on the elliptical, bathed in the most unflattering fluorescent lighting.

We should all be lucky enough to find the music when we need it.


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.

Aesthetic Drift #22: Celestial 57

07 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, Essay, Music

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Aesthetic Drift #22 by Chelsey Clammer

Celestial 57

 

The stars vibrated above me. Within me. Synchrony. At 2 a.m. I would walk back to my truck at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, having come from a concert, the music still clamoring along my bones. Late ’90s, downtown Austin, where my favorite band, Sister 7, played frequently—at one point, weekly.

universe-2742113_1280

Looking up, crisp night air breezing into my skin, the post-show silence surrounding me, but Sister 7’s sounds still coursing through my body. Breathing in a lungful of exhilaration, I was completely sober but felt so high. Always in that walk back to my truck, always as I looked up at the Texas stars so big they felt graspable, always the anticipation for the next show that started steadily building within me with each step. Always all of that after every concert.

Sister 7

The band members of Sister 7, from left to right: Darrell Phillips, Sean Phillips, Patrice Pike, and Wayne Sutton.

It was about leather pants and feather boas. Inked art on skin that glistened with sweat. Bongo solos and scatting. A female lead singer in a dude-dominated rock genre. The sound of turning one syllable into a rhythmic melody, or a four-minute song into a twelve-minute jam session and loving every extra second of it. Being so young, yet feeling like a part of something so grand. Black Xs on our underage hands. It was about being freshly gay, being one of the front-row teenager baby dykes and budding feminists, body pressed against the stage, the sweat of desire dripping. Then, arms up to clap and punch the air because score! They’re playing your favorite song! Which isn’t that rare because all of the songs are your favorite song. But still. Arms triumphantly raised up in the air. It was about Superman tank tops and women with spikey, gender-busting haircuts. Voices screaming themselves hoarse, hollering a hell yeah to the band between each song. Knowing all the lyrics and singing along. Grabbing posters and snatching set lists after the encore. Becoming all flushed and being the blushing fangirl at the merch table while getting posters signed. Plus, innovative rhythms and kickass women. It was about feeling energy and connections vibrating through you.

Vibrating up to those stars.

Having just stepped out from massive amounts of energy contained in one space, the distance and breadth of the stars felt like they were soaking in that energy, then reflecting it back to me as I walked, as if the stars felt what each Sister 7 concert was like and they stood hovering above me, helping to remind me about the type of energy and connection that can be created with music and empowering crowds. Rhythms had guided my dancing body, and it was those stars that guided me into believing in something—that life was worth experiencing.

Sister 7 shows were celestial.

***

Celestial navigation isn’t anything new. Since the beginning of recorded history—and most likely even before then—stars have been used as a navigational tool. We humans have always looked to the stars as a way to move, to navigate ourselves through space. Stars as guides, we have created methods of calculation to measure our position in the world relative to these gorgeous celestial bodies. They tell us where we are, where we are going. We let the stars lead us, help us in our wayfinding.

Celestial means anything positioned in or relating to the sky. Means belonging to or relating to heaven.

Celestial also means supremely good.

***

The origins of Sister 7 stems from a street festival in Dallas in the early 1990s where high schoolers Patrice Pike and Wayne Sutton met and soon formed their own band. The singer and guitarist duo eventually met drummer Sean Phillips and bassist Darrell Phillips (the two are totally NOT related. Sean is a kinda geeky but awesome white dude and Darrell is a badass black guy with amazing dreadlocks who used to put his cigarette on the last fret of his base as he played, the strings holding it there for him). Together, these four musicians created a band called Little Sister. After relocating to Austin to be a part of its thriving music scene, Little Sister quickly transitioned from being an opening band to a headlining one with their invigorating and innovative sounds. After they put out their first record, “Little Sister,” in 1994, they discovered there were six other bands out there called Little Sister. So, being one of the seven Little Sister bands in existence, they renamed themselves Sister 7.

I went to my first Sister 7 concert when I was sixteen. This was after I cut my long curly hair because I thought lesbians had to have short hair, but before I found someone to claim as my girlfriend who could help me proclaim my sexuality. I felt socially awkward as I hid this part of me in my proverbial closet and needed someone to show me the kind of woman I could become, the kind of woman with confidence and a sense of freedom found with empowerment. But I was in the middle of Texas, attending a high school with 4,000 students—not one of them openly queer. What’s a young questioning girl to do?

Enter: fate.

My friend Rebecca’s mother took us to a show with her lesbian friends Tammy and some other dyke. It was my first time being around lesbians (to my knowledge) and I was intrigued.

The lead singer Patrice Pike was an out bisexual. Flocks of women of all genres of sexuality came to the show and I felt like I had found my tribe. Navigating teenagedom is hard enough. So much identity-latching and figuring. Navigating social pressures and expectations and feeling brave enough to test who you might want to be. Add a lesbian sexuality to that coming-of-age phase, and it can be hard to find your way. I was grasping for anything I might be able to identify with. Anything that spoke to me. That showed me I didn’t have to squeeze myself into the shape of a socially constructed woman I never felt like was me.

Then, there I was at a concert where the lead singer was female, had a killer voice, wore snake skin tight leather pants that looked both butch andplayfully femme, her sports bra showing, awesome tattoos caressing her shoulder and conveying something spiritual, a woman who presented such an invigorating mix of butch and femme, who danced and rocked out on stage rather than sitting modestly behind a mic, and all these women cheering her on and so—BAM! I saw what being an independent and passionate woman could look like.

I was hooked.

There was that something about Patrice and Sister 7 that made me feel more assured in my own skin. Maybe it was Patrice’s style. Maybe it was the awesome jams. Maybe it was spending time with in a feminist and queer-friendly community, whatever it was, when I got out of those shows and looked up into the 2 a.m. stars, I felt more like who I thought I could be.

My first experience didn’t actually involve stars or the walk back to my truck. Rebecca’s mom gave us a ride. I don’t remember much of that first show—they all kind of blend together in my mind as a capital-E Experience—just that Rebecca’s mom drove the wrong way down a one-way street and that, of the show itself, I loved it enough to go again the following Friday. And again. And again. The entire summer of 1999 spent doing this. And then three years of it. Shows at the Black Cat Lounge, Antone’s, The Steamboat, Momo’s, even Lilith Fair. Anywhere Patrice played and I was old enough to be allowed admittance, I was there. Her voice, a source of encouragement to keep finding myself, a type of guide that pointed to how life could be freeing if you followed your true self, if you could just figure out how to be you—no, scratch that. How to celebrateyou.

I don’t remember that first show because they became such a regular part of my life that it feels like they had become a part of me—a part of who I was—and like I had forever been going to the shows. No first or last, but an always.

I started listening to Sister 7 by the time they released their second album, This the Trip.

Neat fact:

There are actually 57 tracks on This the Trip. After the twelfth song, “Some Things Are Free,” there are 44, four-second silent clips and then a final, “secret” song. Why do this? Because that last track, that “secret song” is track number 57. And in the era of cd players, the digital display first shows how many tracks are on a cd. Start This the Trip, then end the album, and what you see is “57.” As in: “S7.” As in: “Sister 7.”

What this meant in mine and my friends’ lives: Pin numbers set as 5157 (Sis. 7); sports jerseys toting the self-picked number 57; screennames as cclammer5157 or kicker5157 or superwoman5157; a silver necklace sporting a 57 pendant, pick a number between 1 and 100 and it will be 57 every time.

This the Trip Sister 7

Backside of the Sister 7 1997 album, This the Trip.

There are 6,000 stars visible to the naked eye. That’s 6,000 specks we look up at in amazement on any given night. For celestial navigation, the North Star is the main point by which we orient ourselves. But we need more than just a single star to tell us where we are. We need more stellar markers to make our position-making more accurate.

Published in 1958, the Nautical Almanac officially selected and identified a group of stars to be fixed navigational points. These stars were chosen based on their brightness, ease of identification, and their distribution across the celestial sphere. Chosen across a span of thirty-eight constellations, these celestial bodies that burn brighter than our sun have been used to create star charts that work as a source of orientation. Hold a star chart up to the sky, look at those selected stars, their arrangement, and you will see them reflected up there, their brightness pointing to your position.

Neat fact: the number of stars officially selected to help us navigate time and space is 57.

***

After I got a girlfriend and came out, I brought her to a Sister 7 show. Then I made some lesbian friends at school, and they came to a show. And then their friends came, too.

We were the front row baby dykes. The underagers who stood in line outside the venue hours before the show began so we could claim our front row positions. We were Chelsey and Courtney and Sabrina and Stacy and Amanda and Val and April and Lee and all the other young women whose faces we recognized from show after show. We waited through the opening bands, antsy but respectful, eyes darting around to see if Patrice had shown up yet—the woman we looked up to both literally as she would rock on stage above us, and figuratively as a role model. As a guide. We felt pulled toward Patrice and the jamming band, toward what she represented for us and what they created together. Exhilarating empowerment. The strength of a woman’s voice. A Sister 7 concert wasn’t watching a band perform. It was seeing the beatific energy humans—performers and listeners together—can co-create.

And so we hollered hard and clapped voraciously. Too young to drink, we let the music itself intoxicate us. We were high schoolers or recent grads. Retail workers and soccer players. We wore cargo pants and baggy shirts. Backwards baseball caps and Teva sandals. We stayed late, not caring about sleep or worried about what time we had to wake up the next morning to get to basketball practice. We were young feminists and LGBTQ-ers thirsty for an identity. A safe place. A collection of moments where we could wrap our arms around our girlfriends’ waists without looking over our shoulders. At Sister 7 shows, we were in heaven. They were a haven from what the world threw at us. We held onto each lyric that held meaning, music that gave us something to grasp, something to take with us, to become a part of who we were becoming.

At the end of every show, we walked back to our used cars and clunker trucks, drove back to our hollowed home lives, our confining families and restlessness at work or school, retreated back to the space where a community like this didn’t exist, but the anticipation for the next show gave us hope, something to hold onto.

Pike from Journal 2

Picture of Patrice Pike geekily taped into the author’s journal in 2001.

Like everything else in the natural world, stars are also born, they live a life, and then they die. The trajectory of star’s fate is dependent on how it keeps a balance in its core’s gravitational pull. Too much inward pull, and a star collapses. This sounds like a simple non-event, but when it’s a massive star that is collapsing, a huge eruption can occur. A supernova, it’s called. A stellar explosion so luminous that it shines brighter than an entire galaxy.

More than just a shooting star, a supernova is an event. And when these massive stars explode, they release gravitational potential energy. Everything around it persuaded into movement.

Because even when that core gravity collapses, when its pull weakens, it doesn’t disappears completely. Rather, the pull extends outward to infinity. 

***

Sister 7 eventually disbanded in 2001 when one of the band members needed to follow a different career path. The disbanding was sad but the music continued. Not just in a nostalgic way like in our hearts or something, but in the music that Wayne and Patrice continued to play together as a duo, the record label they created, and the Sister 7 reunion concerts they’ve played throughout the years. Patrice’s music career also followed a less-conventional path for a little while. In 2006, she was a part of a supernova—Rock Star: Supernova, that is.

A contestant TV show of rock stars competing to score a record deal with Tommy Lee, each week on Rock Star: Supernova, singers would either get voted off or picked for another round. Then, it was practice practice practice, thrown in with some televised back stories and contestant drama.

I never would have considered Patrice as the kind of person to be on a reality TV show, but here’s the thing about her: I see her as a woman unafraid to stretch the boundaries of creativity, to try out something new for herself. From Austin jam band to singing a song with Tommy Lee on the drums that was viewed nation-wide, Patrice’s strength to continuously grow as a singer and creator is what has always inspired me. It’s about bravery and leap-taking. About pushing yourself in different ways to see how you evolve, how your shape and sound and pull towards different creative expressions oscillates and shifts.

I didn’t own a TV when the show was being aired, so I didn’t get to cheer her on each week as she steadily remained a contestant until a few rounds before the end. Now, I watch clips of Patrice on Rock Star: Supernova, and all I can think is, “That doesn’t seem like Patrice.” They are damn good performances, but that’s exactly it—for me, it seems like she’s performing. I hop over to live Sister 7 videos on YouTube and that’s when I watch the rock star that I experienced twenty years ago—Patrice is in her element. She’s a kickass woman on stage with a voice so powerfully raw and clear, that the sound rings up to the stars. Reality TV show or not, there is something celestial about Patrice, her performances, and her empowering energy that has forever rippled outward to her audience.

***

We are made of stars.

milky-way-916523_1280

Each star contains, creates, generates the chemical elements needed for life. Everything a universe necessitates for its own existence comes from stars. They contain the basic chemical units of who we are and how we got here. We know that stars are light years away and that they shine for billions of years. But what we’re still discovering is the interesting aspects of a star’s demise. A star on the verge of collapse has a magnetic field that’s strengthening. Whether a small star that eventually blinks out of existence or a massive supernova explosion, its chemical elements disperse throughout the universe, and will eventually create new stars.

All of this is to say that the energy and magnetism of those brilliant sources of light never fully die. They may collapse or explode in different ways, but the chemistry needed to create the universe remain. Everything is there like it always has been, vibrating. Pulsing with the new, re-created life, one with its own shape and energy. Stars cycle, shift, evolve. But the elements remain—continue.

We are made of stars.

***

It’s 2019 and I’m staying with the woman I was dating during the reign of Sister 7 in my life. We haven’t really talked much after we broke up eighteen years ago, but we’re friends now, thanks to social media. Her mom recently, suddenly, tragically died, and so I go to stay with her for a few days to keep her company and help to hold her grief.

When I arrive at the house she shared with her mother, I find a Master lock on her gate, a 4-digit combination needing to be entered. I call my ex.

“Hey. What’s the gate code?”

“You know what it is,” she says then hangs up and, duh, now I feel like an idiot. I twirl the numbers round, line them up properly. 5157. The lock opens.

Two decades later, Sister 7 is still a part of who we are and how we live in, how we navigate this world.

Sister 7.png

Patrice Pike playing at the Saxon Pub, in Austin, TX. April 25, 2019. Photo credit: Amanda Buffalo / Osage Buffalo Photography.

Along with the logistical aspects of celestial navigation, we have also always looked to the stars, to all those celestial bodies, as a type of spiritual guide. Astrology, the zodiac, moon phases, and planetary alignment are all ways we in which we try to chart out our fate by looking up.

We have also looked to the heavens in numerical ways. Angel numbers, for instance, are number sequences that carry divine guidance. These angel numbers refer to specific numerological meanings. Consider numbers as a type of divine science, where the digits each carry a specific vibrational meaning that reaches way beyond a simple quantity. Numbers as fate, as leaders in life, cosmic counsel, as opportunities, intuitiveness and opening ourselves up to divine numerological meanings.

When we repeatedly see a certain number, it means our angels are telling us to pause and ponder its meaning.

So of course I’m curious.

Angel number 57 means change, means persistence. It’s a number that is a combination of intuition and personal freedom.

57 means encouragement and hope.

***

It’s been nearly two decades since Sister 7 disbanded and thirteen years since I went to a reunion concert. And although Patrice has been doing shows with Wayne in Austin regularly all of this time, I’ve been chasing careers and academic degrees and girlfriends and boyfriends across the country, but have just re-landed in Austin.

It’s a Thursday night when my friend from way back when, Amanda, and I decide to go to a Patrice Pike show at the Saxon Pub.

Driving there, we are giddy as hell, excited because just the thought of Patrice brings back so many fantastic, visceral memories. We arrive at the venue a handful of minutes before Patrice starts. We’re no longer the baby dykes who get there early to grab good seats, but we sit in the back to just chill and listen. I’m no longer losing my voice from screaming loud, but rather sitting in the dark corner and knitting a tank top while hollering a “WHOOO!” and clapping between each song. And although I’m not sweating and pounding the stage with my palms (no one is doing that, actually, since it’s not that kind of show any more), I’m still smiling so much that my face hurts by the end of the set.

When the show’s over, Amanda and I go outside to smoke a cigarette, which is when I look up and see how brilliantly the stars are shining, like how they always did after Sister 7 shows. I’ve been looking at those stars for forever now. They have become something for me, helped me, in a way, to see how there was a world beyond the small, awkward microcosm of my home.

Still giddy as hell, Amanda and I linger outside the Saxon Pub, then decide we want to try and talk to Patrice—tell her our story of being those front row baby dykes and how much tonight’s concert was just as thrilling, even though the energy was different—and maybe even take a picture with her.

As we hang around a bit, looking through the door at everyone stopping Patrice to say something, I think back to a picture I took with Patrice. It was 2000 and she was hanging out in the audience during one of the opening bands as she occasionally did. I got up some guts, handed my camera to my girlfriend, tapped Patrice on the shoulder, and of course she wanted to take a picture with me. In the photo, my smile is wider than my face and one of the regulars in the background is wearing the hip cowboy hat style that Patrice established.

Patrice and Me

Patrice Pike and the author in the audience before a Sister 7 show at the Black Cat Lounge, circa 2000.

Amanda and I are still waiting, wondering how to approach Patrice when so many people are trying to talk to her. Then she makes her way to the merch table and we hop in the line that quickly forms, and as we wait some more, I remember that at one point, I too had a hip cowboy hat signed by all the band members. I had forgotten about that because with each move throughout the years, Sister 7 mementos drifted elsewhere, got lost, or—gasp—were thrown away. It’s what happens as we grow into being new people. Mementos—like friends, like band members, like stars—fade away, and new ones take their place. But the feel of what those mementos meant to us, what those friends, that music, and those stars gave us, never fully fades.

Finally, it’s our turn and my and Amanda’s energy immediately ramps up. We tell Patrice our story of being fans when we were just teenage baby dykes and then we buy a cd and get an autograph and our dialogue bounces back and forth like loose protons and Patrice is smiling and she gets it and I am probably making a total fan girl fool of myself, but my god this woman and her music and what all she represents for me is just excellent. Exhilarating. We end up not taking a picture because we forget to do it, but that’s okay. It won’t be needed to remember this night, this experience, this re-feeling of being a part of some source of empowering energy.

The stars’ grandiosity can really make a person sense their speck-like status in the world, but looking up at those stars after a Sister 7 concert—and now after this Patrice Pike solo show—I am reminded that I’m not just in this world, but a part of it.


Clammer Meadows photo 7-12 300dpi

Chelsey Clammer is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017) and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School and Black Warrior Review. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. Her next collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. www.chelseyclammer.com

Episode 387: Mixtape 11: Dark Thoughts from a Very Pink Room

05 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Mixtape, Music

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Episode 387 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

In this week’s episode, music!

TDO Mixtape 11.png

NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame Cover


Episode 387 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #13: Palm’s Rock Island

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Palm, Rock Island

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #13 by Stephen McClurg

Palm: Rock Island (2018)

A something in a summer’s noon –
A depth – an Azure – a perfume –

~Emily Dickinson

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

~Anon., “Summer Is I-cumin In”

Palm’s Rock Island conjures an aura of summer, from the sharpest July light to the dimming of vacation’s last rays. The music is vibrant, partially because of the vocalists using higher registers and partially due to bright guitar tones. Despite being described as experimental or post-rock, there is a commitment on Rock Island to vocal melody, reminiscent of Lush’s floating, silvery vocals, and sometimes even Surf’s Up-era Beach Boys.

Palm Rock Island

At odds with this melodic catchiness is Palm’s approach to rhythm. A recurring compositional element on the record is a battery of stuttering rhythms and syncopations, several so severe they sound like skips or loops. Because they are performed, they don’t register like electronic or mechanical repetition, but feel like an organic jab-and-stammer. One of the ways they achieve this sound is by using slow strums, sounding one string at a time, rather than playing full chords, an effect emphasized by a kind of hyper-chorus effect that frequently sounds like steel drum triggers to me. It’s like a steak knife in the honey. The bass sometimes shifts to upbeats, rather than the traditional downbeats in a rock band. While it’s a technique common in funk (Larry Graham is a master), Palm uses it to disrupt anticipations rather than groove.

Other rhythmic approaches include polyrhythms. I regularly hear parts in three played over rhythms in two or four. On some tracks, rather than lock in on a riff, the band will play a musical statement across multiple instruments. For example, in “Forced Hand,” a musical phrase starts on guitar, continues on drums, and ends on bass. Some first-time listeners may find these approaches jarring, but after a few listens, the songs are as hummable as any radio pop.

The lyrics, often about relationships or lost loves, are cryptic, but not wholly abstract. 

The story in “Pearly” feels just outside of comprehension, but shimmers with vague dread. The song is about a love and a vow, but it’s unclear what kind of love and what kind of vow. 

The first verse ends with “My own rules/Are always best when broken” and leads into the commitment or warning of the chorus: “I want nothing but the best for us.” The end of the song turns, and makes the direction of the danger ambiguous. Someone “enduring a vow” sounds unpleasant and recasts the “I want nothing but the best for us” line:

In a void
You put a lock on the door
But you endure
A vow

A vow to stop at nothing
I want nothing but the best for us

The lyrics are tinged with obsession, while the music ripples with bright elements like a vocal choir sample or trigger saying “Ahhh!,” chorus effeects, and handclaps. The song feels like horror in daylight as it bleeds away, slowing, then staggering to silence. 

“Composite” features the aforementioned strumming effect, yet bounces in ways reminiscent of late-’60s Beach Boys or yacht rock. The “composite” in the lyrics–“Let me put the pieces back in place”–could be referring to a relationship or the world at large. Lyrics like “Fake a nap to breathe in for a while” capture that kind of peculiar dread about the unpeculiar, an amorphous doubt on a sunny Saturday. 

“Composite” also describes the song’s structure. For example, the last “verse” is really a composite of various song elements. Many of the songs on Rock Island play with verse-chorus-verse structure, but bend and alter it, often by having one or two different bridges or alternate, sometimes intertwining, sections.

While “Dog Milk” and “Color Code” are two favorites, I keep coming back to “Heavy Lifting.” And though the songs may have little to do with each other, I keep pairing it in my mind with the Talking Heads’ track “The Book I Read.” Both songs take quotidian objects and events, but say so much with that simplicity. “The book I read was in your eyes” has been a line that has stayed with me since I first heard it. Similarly, “Heavy Lifting” has lines like “Go out and let the cat in/Work out a plan to retire” or “You want more/Well, so do I (conditioned?) / The last one / I’ll ask you for.” Half of the song is a gorgeous, hypnotic intertwining of mostly instrumental parts. It reminds me of the “Na na na na” part of “The Book I Read” or the last third of “Found a Job,” David Byrne’s short instrumental section written as a tribute to Steve Reich–or at least meant to emulate some of Reich’s compositional techniques. These are short, meditative musical gifts big enough to live in.

While the lyrical content is more in line with the rest of the album, “Swimmer” sounds like the Residents covering “Kokomo.” It combines lyrics like “They’ll bend your eye’s ‘til all you can see is the sunshine” with electronic horn and percussion sounds that echo Residential soundscapes. 

Sometimes instrumentals feel out of place on rock/pop records, like unfinished songs. On Rock Island, the instrumentals contribute to the whole. The instrumental track “20664” opens with Eno-esque buzzing and synth before uneven hip hop electronic drums or drum triggers–that echo the opening of the album– take over the track. “Theme from Rock Island” features jangly guitars under a theme built on melodica or keyboard violin–or possibly triggers meant to sound like that. Either way, they have a breathy quality and the melodic sense of other vocal songs on the record.

Rock Island approaches at slants and angles that make it evocative, but hard to classify. Palm satisfyingly sounds like a coherent, unique whole, and not a solo project in waiting. It will be interesting to hear where they go next.

You can listen to and order Rock Island on Palm’s Bandcamp page. 


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 #12: Safe as Milk Dialogue

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Safe as Milk

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.

 

Episode 375: Chet Weise!

13 Saturday Jul 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Episode, Music, Poetry

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Chet Weise, Third Man Books

Episode 375 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Chet Weise, the publisher of Third Man Books.

WeiseAuthorPhotoSmallbyJamieGoodsell

Photo by Jamie Goodsell.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Lucy Negro Redux CoverAscend Ascend Covermary wants to be a superwomanMy Dinner with Ron Jeremy

NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Check out my debut novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame Cover


Episode 375 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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