MIRRORBALL

It's one of the most ubiquitous organ riffs of all time – ba da ba DA duh DUH duh da, ba da ba DA duh DUH da, laid down nice and smooth over a smooth, funky drumbeat, with that guitar stabbing in on the downbeat just so. You know it as soon as you hear it; it's been used to sell cars and mortgages and retirement plans and Vagisil and probably kidney transplants too. For some I'm sure it conjures up images of Kennedy-era kitsch – formica tables and Jackie bobs like my grandmother still wore in those old home movies from nearly a decade later and wood paneling and Kewpie dolls and the mountain of blasé pukey junk they sell along the interstate in Indiana.

It's a demonstratable fact that white people didn't listen to Stax Records releases back when Booker T & The MG's were beginning to hone their craft. The early 60s were the great rock n roll chasm between Elvis's last brilliant pre-war singles (he was more concerned with his assault on the box office in '62, anyways...at least his robotic clone was. Elvis died in Korea and you can't convince me otherwise) and the fast-approaching Beatle menace from the east, the year of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” for Chrissakes. This is the record, however, that put out their Chesterfields and got their clumsy asses on dance floors from Memphis to Montana and that launched the Stax label into the stratosphere, paving the way for the likes of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Isaac Hayes. “Green Onions” was the first in a string of huge hits for the all-instrumental combo, who served as the house band for Stax from '62 up until organist Booker T Jones's departure from the label in 1971. Booker and company peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 with the song, and it went all the way to the top on the soul charts.

But for me, the album's title track conjures nothing but memories of flouride-scented dread and the prick of a numbing needle just behind your impacted molar. Yes, kids, the first time, the only time, I heard Green Onions was beneath the spectral whine of dentist equipment and the ferocious staleness of Dr. X's breath. So when I say that Green Onions sounds like an extended trip to my dentist's office, pay no heed; my biases are buried deep. But it remains a groovy and tasty thirty-five minute sojourne through the waiting room nonetheless. “Rinky Dink” has me remembering the receptionist's thunder thighs jiggling like Jello molds underneath her scrubs...funkily? (There's no saving that sentence.) “Stranger On The Shore” makes me think of the time when that crazy fish with the huge translucent bubble cheeks got sucked into the filter; I watched its frenzied struggles like Zeus snickering from the safety of Olympus. I find the stretch of three bluesy numbers in the middle of the record intoxicating, yet puzzling, like the horse puppet with huge white teeth that grinned at me from the corner of the room...many many nightmares...it always chased me with its fiery toothbrush and dental floss lasso of doooooooooooooo

Parts of Green Onions would also serve as the ideal soundtrack to a frenzied cab ride to the hospital with your wife, who happens to be in some serious labor throes (“You Can't Sit Down” really grates on those maternal instincts), or to your murder mystery-themed dinner party (toss back those brandy alexanders to “Comin' Home Baby” and see how many of your guests walk out that front door alive haha that's right NONE). These are just serving suggestions, however: with a record like Green Onions in your collection, you have the power to act out your own timelessly groovy manifest destiny anytime you please. Whether you're clambering over Antarctic glaciers in fishnets and bunny slippers or kicking back with your favorite escort-service representative in the confessional, you're sure to do it with panache when Booker and friends are on the Victrola. SEVEN OUT OF TEN.

So sometime last week, I clawed my way out from underneath the mountain of blankets I've layered my bed with during the winter with alarm clocks screeching sweetly in my ears.  I pawed blindly among the detritus on my nightstand for the snooze button and was promptly bitten by a stray pushpin hiding behind last week's paystub.  "YAOW!" I howled, jerking my punctured finger back to my lips.  The recoil from doing so, however, promptly propelled me onto the floor with a THUD and a long, exasperated groan.  (I am the expert at getting up on the right side of the bed, you see.)  While I laid there, finger pounding along with the fresh egg swelling on my head, I happened to glance at the calendar and suddenly my pain faded with the realization that it was late February!  Had I really been sleeping for...six weeks?  No wonder I smelled so bad!  And that concentration-camp, hangdog look in the mirror?  Easy to explain.  But I see that all of you have been waiting here expectantly for news from the front, and I, poor reporter, have given you none.  Let your hunger now be satiated!  I bring manna from City Market!  And Schlitz, too!

Silliness aside, we've been resting after a couple of eventful months in Mirrorland.  That big back-East trip took the gumption right out of us for awhile.  (Fruitcake gives a fella the worst kind of indigestion imaginable.)  But we did see all the prerequisite people and dispense with many frivolous dollars - well, at least I did.  January brought a good string of gigs here in Cortez, Montrose, Telluride, and other places where people slipped me funny drinks and I woke up in bathtubs full of ice with missing internal organs.  But who needs those, anyways?  Now that I've got my nth dimensional dialysis machine hooked up, I can't even remember what it was like to have kidneys....

but yes, February was fun.  Very fun.  We ate some tasty treats, caroused with loose women, lost ten thousand dollars in penny stocks, and started the long and laborious process of recording our first album.  Booyah, says I.  The principal rhythm tracks are complete and Willis and I are hunkering down in our super-secret headquarters in the earth's core to finish guitars and vocals and accordions and murderous screams in the night.  With any luck, you'll see this baby drop hot and fresh sometime near the end of the month.  And how!  World peace will instantly be achieved.  The lame will walk and the blind will see.  Yada, yada, earthshaking buildup to doubtful promise of lifechanging bliss...you think you've heard it all before.  But NO - you haven't.  Trust me.

We hope you are all well and thriving and whatnot, and look forward to seeing you on the road these next few months!  We'll start a new cycle of reviews soon, too...I've got some hot fresh po....er, opinions, OPINIONS, to drop on ya'll soon.  Til next we meet, dearies...

bass player from eastern hell under-the-stairs

Music From Big Pink (The Band)

Today I want to get off the 'final release for a band' train, and instead talk about the 'first release for The Band'.  And I'll get some of the negative out right away - I personally think Music From Big Pink is an overrated record, not terrible, but certainly not exciting and only occasionally moving.

One thing I will say in the Band's favor though.  They sound authentic, and never moreso than on this first recording.  Even when the writing isn't up to par, the band's vocal deliveries and ensemble sound keep things grounded in real human emotion.  And what about that ensemble sound?  These guys really do have a unique vibe all their own.  It is roots music, but the abundance of piano and organ, as well as the guitar and especially vocal style, gives it a distinctly soulful feel that I find missing in a lot of 'Americana'.  But when they get more adventurous with their arrangements on this record, I feel the results are spotty.  I genuinely love the twists and turns of "We Can Talk", but I hate the overblown organ intro to "Chest Fever", and repeating it in the middle of the song was a terrible, terrible idea.

The songwriting is similarly inconsistent.  The strongest songs for me, both melodically and lyrically, are when they clearly have Dylan's help:  I could listen to "Tears of Rage" a million times and still be riveted.  But when left to their own devices, they simply cannot deliver on the same level, despite some attempts like "The Weight" and "Lonesome Suzie".  These aren't bad songs, but they're both longer than they need to be.  Even some of the shorter songs tend to drag a bit ("In a Station" comes to mind).

When I think of Music From Big Pink as a whole, I must admit that it is a very cohesive record.  It has a sound all its own, while avoiding sounding particularly repetitive.  Nevertheless, it's also a fairly plodding record where the only real standouts occur because of outside influence.  And while the sound may be homely and authentic, it's not particularly grabbing or exciting.  But enough of my complaining, Dave claims to like this album a lot, so maybe he'll say something different.

First of all, we owe an apology for the lateness of this update.  We usually like to get a review up on Tuesdays, but we were on the road all day this past Tuesday before playing a show that evening, and that's part of what I want to talk about.

The show was great.  We played at a fairly large neighborhood bar in a cozy residential zone not far from downtown Indianapolis.  The place is called the Vollrath Tavern, and the venue rep's name is Elvis.  We got there and Dave asked him where the bathroom was.  He immediately fired back with "Men's or women's?"  I knew right away that this dude and this night were gonna be awesome.

It turned out that the venue was an original-music-only venue, and after getting called and threatened by BMI or ASCAP or some other such fascist organization, they actually enforced it.  When the first band played a cover song, they were immediately addressed by one of the workers and told they couldn't do that again.  Then when we played our set, we played a relatively new song of our own, and we had our sound shut down in the middle!  Someone in the audience swore that it was a cover of a Queen song.  We were apologized to and given a free shot for our trouble; plus it was a good laugh when we started the song from the middle to finish it.

But it kind of got me thinking, as a songwriter, is it good to write something that reminds someone of something else?  Obviously if it reminds him of something terrible, the answer is, "Go find a day job, clown."  But if it reminds him of something he likes, shouldn't this be taken as a compliment?  I think so.  While it is important to have a voice and sound of your own, when a person listens to you for the first time, he doesn't know what you sound like, so he can't very well compliment your new song as sounding like you.  It is notoriously difficult to describe music in and of itself without comparisons (try it sometime, and then you can come back and complain about my album reviews).  So if a new fan is ready to believe that something we wrote was written by Fredury Mercury and company, I'm willing to take that as a compliment by comparison.  It certainly means the crowd is listening, anyway!

ONCE UPON A TIME, when the world was young and unicorns still smoked joints in fields of clover, when the rain was made of rootbeer and I didn't grow sandpaper on my chin every few days, I kept a regular record of my tiniest and most precious thoughts in a blog much like this.  A blog, much like this, which is likely still tucked among the balled-up tissues and old grocery lists in the wastepaper of an Internet past, somewhere, waiting in the weeds for me to announce my run for state treasurer and pounce with fangs bared and bad poetry dripping from its hungry teeth.  (Excuse me while I change my underwear.)  This is the scary thing about the Internet:  that terrible limerick you wrote about your grandmother's nassssty breath is never going away.  Ever.

But here I am, back again, pecking away at the keyboard with bated breath, waiting for MAGIC to happen.  Writing, however, has not taken kindly to my vacation.  It's hard work, man!  Thinking all day of things to say and when the time comes to say them, coming up cobwebs.  (Have I written enough yet?)
But I'm no boring slouch - I've got things to say!  Adventures to recount!  Anecdotes to amuse!  I could keep you riveted for hours spinning yarns about organ abuses past, present, and future, complete with local color courtesy of my terrible accent from the City-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named.  And, oh how you'll laugh.  You'll shoot beer out your ears, you will, you will.

(Where's the word count on this thing?)

Here's the first Interesting Thing I will share with you lucky ducks: my list of things to do on my Holiday Wonderland Adventure-Time! (tm)

1. Eat.
2. More eating. (preferrably of these)
3. Ringing of eardrums with old war-buddies (i.e. JAMMING).
4. Going to THIS!!!!!!!!!!!
5. Forgetting temporarily that the sun exists

Anything else I'm forgetting?  I'm a bit of a Scrooge, so don't hesitate to ream me out for it.

ANYway, I'm thinking that I'll have more to say next week after we've been on the road for thirty hours and hit as many of those roadside casinos in Oklahoma as we can.  Hope you and yours have a wonderfully commercial-free interruption of your regularly scheduled programming.  Toodles!

This week I'm kind of continuing the theme of reviewing a band's final release.  This time I want to talk about what is probably my favorite overall Pavement record, Terror Twilight.

I spent a good while trying to decide why I like this album so much.  It's not as energetic as some of their earlier work, and nowhere near as diverse as Wowee Zowee.  The lyrics are no more or less decipherable than on any given Pavement album.  But one thing that occured to me was that this record is focused, and that's partly what makes it stand out.  There's no musical half-assery going on here; everything sounds like it was carefully considered and arranged.  The pop songs are tight and catchy, while some of the more expansive numbers feature very intricate guitar interplay.  But at the same time, the record does not sound sterile at all.  Oh sure, the production is sparkly clean as needed, but while the various musical twists and turns sound planned and rehearsed, they do NOT sound either forced or tame.

The writing is a big reason why.  Malkmus can come up with a catchy little set of chords and melody in his sleep, and he's no slouch at letting it all hang out with a heavier rock riff either.  And his vocal delivery makes sure that things never get boring; even when he sounds lethargic ("Major Leagues" comes to mind), the slight sarcasm is still there, proving he doesn't need to shout or warble out of tune anymore to get his "I really don't care what you think" attitude across.

For me, the standout song on the record that really highlights everything I love about it is "Speak, See, Remember".  It starts out as a catchy little jazz-pop thing, punctured by some sharp vocals over a pause or two, but in the middle it suddenly morphs into this beautiful jangly double-guitar heaven of melody.  But just when you're smiling all over, in comes the distorted guitar that breaks the formerly tight rhythm into a slacker-rock riff that builds with harmonizing guitars before crashing back into a small reprise of the beginning of the song.  These are all the things I love about Pavement - catchy chords, double guitar jangle, vocals that alternate between beautiful melody and sneering attitude, and a good slacker's riff every now and again - and they are all on display in a measured and mature fashion on this album.  Is it possible to call a "slacker's riff" mature?  Yeah - it means it's got the attitude without being obnoxious.  Like this record.

It's been quite the year out here, and I'm having a hard time believing my December-minded calendar.  But, no matter how I deny it, he days are growing shorter and the Christmas lights are popping up all over town.  The last month of the year always seems to fly by the fastest and this has been no exception.  We're heading out for our big roadtrip back East next Sunday, a leisurely jaunt across 1,700 miles of truckstop politics, Little Debbie hangovers, and the occasional bluehair plowing down the left lane at forty miles an hour with the turn signal blinking.  We're playing shows in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, partying with friends and relatives, and making music in spare bedrooms; a distillation of all things heady about the homeland in ten short days.

But there is still so much to do before then!  There's a gig later this evening in our neighboring town of Dolores, another the evening before we leave, and all manner of gift-buying, packing, ass-scratching, venue-calling, sleeping.  But Christmas always comes when I'm feeling most restless, so no complaints from me.

Christmas also leaves me speechless, because there's always so much bullshit in the air that it's hard to think. Those days when Toys-R-Us catalogs had me dreaming feverishly of the Big Morning have long gone, and I do not miss the terrible television commercials and dedicated twenty-four-hour-a-day holiday music barrages on the radio when January rolls around.  I don't get the need for conspicuous consumption.  I don't understand the competition implied in the act of gift-giving, the silent, instilled need to feel like you're showing someone else up.  But the beautiful thing about travelling during the holiday season is that you get a chance to see what's really happening in people's lives this time of year.  The drama of life is more interesting than any Hallmark special will ever be....and tastes better, too.

And it's because I have nothing but good things to say about Christmas that I end this post with a picture of a two-headed turtle





See you guys in the New Year, when I've run out of things to bitch about (temporarily)


-DAVE

and asking me if I keep all kinds of random stupid shit.  The kitchen sink sloshes and steams with discarded pasta water as we discuss the theory that all artistic types are packrats.  And I nod knowingly - I do, in fact, keep all kinds of random stupid shit, including plenty which passed their expiration date well before I was able to grow a beard (true story), hoping vainly that on one shiny incandescent day far into the future, the scattered pieces of my creative consciousness will spontaneously coalesce into a masterpiece.  But as any length of time spent pursuing the arts will teach you, those sorts of days never happen.

However, every once in a while, you get lucky.  Willis and I transformed a typical piece of castaway creativity into our very first co-written song.  We've both been in a creative funk lately and having something new to kick into the ears of the masses - a lilty and melodic gem entitled "Watching The Ceiling" - does a lot to restore some lost confidence.  It's that first goal after a seven-game drought where the defensemen share the name Clark Kent and the opposing goalies have water bottles filled with Kool-Aid.  Songwriting, as with everything else in life, is best explained in hockey metaphor.

So hang this one on your fridge, Grandma - there's a lot more to come.

P.S. - We're gonna name our next record "Pittsburgh Skyline", no matter what that other guy says.  Don't tell him I let you know, though!

Okay, so given that this will be the first 'rant' on a band's official website, you're all probably wondering about our thoughts on music.  With that in mind, let's talk about hockey.

One thing that a generous portion of the Cortez hockey fans with initials MW have always wondered is, "Why do the Pens always play lackluster hockey in Tampa Bay?"  The weather is certainly not conducive to a hockey atmosphere down there, but judging by Tampa Bay's record the past few years, that doesn't bother other teams so much.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say coaching.  I'm generally a Dan Bylsma fan overall, but one thing he does NOT have going for him is his demeanor.  He may be an intense and passionate coach in practice, but behind the bench it doesn't show through.  So in a town where hockey intensity is low (it's Tampa Bay, FL, of all places!), where maybe a bit of a 'ferocity injection' is needed from the coach, Bylsma can't deliver.  I say all this because we watched the Tampa Bay feed of last night's game, and they showed Guy Boucher talking to his team during the timeout near the end of the game, and holy crap you could pretty much see the fire in his eyes.  You NEED to be an intense coach to win in TB (Tortorella, anyone?).  Boucher is intense and on edge.  Bylsma is calm and in control.  And don't we all know that the best coaches can be both as needed? (Scotty Bowman comes to mind)

So going back to music, that is in a puck-shaped nutshell what Mirrorball is all about.  We want to be both.  We have our mellow songs to lay the groove, and we have our intense songs to push the pulse.  Now admittedly, as a 2-piece/occasional 3-piece, the mellow comes a bit easier than the intense, but no one ever accused Bob Dylan of being mellow.  Except maybe on that iffy Nashville Skyline album that Dave likes so much.