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Behold:
Pâté.
In a squeeze tube.
Sold at Ikea.
Brand name?
Abba.
I swear I can hear the laughter emanating from Ikea Corporate HQ all the way from here.
Here's the only band I know of who've had a mixture of crustaceous meat blended with fat and minced into a spreadable paste named after them performing a song called "The Visitors". How the heck did I not know this song until recently?
Big ups to Scott Williams for motivating my quick action in order to get one of these—there are allegedly only 700 in existence! But oh the joy of coming home from my afternoon walk with The Kid and finding the peculiar brown package containing Big Blood's new Dead Songs LP thoughtfully concealed under the doormat by the mailman. In all honesty, I don't believe I'd been as excited for mail since my days of fanzine editorship, during which time the arrival of peculiar brown packages was commonplace, but regarded as something of a religious event.
I'm no collector geek, but the folks at Time Lag Records certainly went out of their way to fire off the vinyl fetishist synapses in my brain. This sucker is pressed on gagillion gram black vinyl and comes in what seems to be a hand-crafted heavy stock gatefold sleeve. I haven't yet listened to the whole thing enough times to declare an overall impression here, but Scott, ever the tastemaker that he is, quickly identified "The Archivist and the Archeologist" as a singularly spine-tingling selection, and one which is certainly on par with Big Blood's most commanding efforts—up until now, most commonly heard as digital downloads only. Here's a link to check out Scott playing that song on the radio. Yowza.
Word rolled in this morning that nearly every recorded Fugazi live show (and that's a number that's gotta be in the thousands, dear readers) may soon be available for download. According to a post on the fan-operated World of Fugazi website (seriously?), the band has made major strides towards digitizing their famously comprehensive archive of live shows and plan to make them available for download, possibly beginning as early as late 2010.
With any luck, the show advertised in the flyer at left—which was a rather crucial benchmark of my angsty teenage existence of the 1980s—will be among those that make the cut. (Seeing your favorite band play outside, in the rain, in their hometown, and on only ten minutes notice sorta does that to you when you're 19 years old.) However, even without consultation of the band or any representative of Dischord Records, I can personally guarantee the show advertised via the other flyer will not be appearing on the internet anytime soon. (I'll spare you the short and not-very-interesting story about two bored kids with a dopey sense of humor, a Sharpie, credit at the local Kinko's, and the 200 people who subsequently showed up expecting to see "Fugazi".)
In the meantime, I'll be hoping that whichever show this recording of the song "Suggestion" [Listen] originally came from (anyone know who that is on guest vocals?) will be re-upped in better quality than the hotly-dubbed Fugazi live/demos cassette that squeaked out of DC around 1989 and slowly made it's way up the coast via Teac. It was eventually dubbed for me by the bassist of a long-gone NYHC band I was chummy with for a short time, and it remains one of maybe six or seven cassettes that I can not bring myself to part with, even though I haven't had a working tape deck in eons.
Let me ask you a very serious question: Can you imagine Bryan Ferry lighting his farts? Or giving a purple nurple to Phil Manzanera?
Of course you can't.
"Bryan Ferry is every bit as suave as the Roxy Music oeuvre attests", you're saying. And I agree. They released ten albums between 1972 and 1982, and I've been slowly acquiring them on vinyl (usually for a buck each) since around 1990. My introduction to them came several years earlier, when, in high school, the one alterna-girl who prioritized them over Depeche Mode and the Smiths made me a mixtape of her favorite Roxy Music songs. Unlike everyone else I went to high school with, I imagine this girl went on to some unimaginable level of awesomery simply for bothering to have good taste.
Looking back, it seems almost absurd to imagine myself or anyone else listening to Roxy Music as a teenager, since nothing about their music is relevant to most listeners until he or she (usually she) gets out of college. Maybe a little earlier if they went to art school in a city. That's why I don't think I hit my full stride of Roxy Music appreciation until I was around 27, recently pardoned from the long-term relationship I'd been in, and was living alone in the city. All of those circumstances helped me come to regard Roxy Music as the white male's ultimate expression of urban sophistication, and that's a considerable achievement given that their lyrics so often deal with themes which in most contexts I find uninteresting. Regardless of how valid you think topics like glamor and nightlife are for lyrical fodder, there's no denying that they're most often addressed in a way that's tacky and lame. Turn on any commercial radio station that plays contemporary music right now and you will probably hear an example of what I'm talking about.
Roxy Music was wholly unlike anyone who came before them, and while their subsequent influence has been vast, no one's ever come close to matching them since they broke up. (Mercifully, no one's been stupid enough to try.) So the question is, why have I been so slow to acquire their back catalog when I could easily wander onto the internet and download everything I'm missing, or into a used record store and do the same for something south of a fiver? Is it just my own laziness, or is there something else at work here? I gave all of this a bit of recent consideration after buying a copy of the Avalon LP for a buck from some guy on 14th Street. I took it home, put it on, and when the title track began pouring out of the speakers, I was immediately blown away by a song that I clearly remembered from early MTV, but hadn't given any consideration to in the twenty five years since. I then listened to it about ten more times in a row, which is a practice that most of us probably remember from our younger selves, but which has more than likely waned as we've all gotten older and more jaded. As such, I realized that my slow road towards uber-fandom has allowed me to bask in their greatness and give each record the kind of consideration they all deserve. Thinking back, they're the only band I've ever demonstrated this courtesy towards—I've greedily devoured everything else I've ever liked as much, at least until the inevitable boredom of familiarity sets in.
Last week when I guest-hosted with my pal Julia on WPRB, we played "Same Old Scene" (from Flesh & Blood) and it prompted her to astutely wonder why no early Roxy Music demos have ever been released, as seems to be the customary practice now for 'legacy' acts of their stature. Granted, they are anything but a band to follow the breadcrumb trail laid down by others, but I'll bet there are plenty of fans out there who are hungry for some insight into what Roxy Music's—for lack of a better term—"garage days" were like. Which brings us back to Julia's question, and ultimately, Bryan Ferry: When were his awkward years? How did he earn the confidence to deploy lyrics like when you bossa nova, there's no holding... would you have me dancing, out of nowhere in a way that still doesn't make anybody wince? Was he always such a mysterious ladykiller, or are there some long-closeted demos that might reveal the presumed fumbles of his early philandering? Maybe you don't want to know because knowing would unmask one of pop music's more legendary Casanovas. If that's the case, you've probably got the high road advantage in a discussion with anyone who feels otherwise, but feel free to consider it further with this smattering of favorites from their back catalog. If you're lucky, maybe I'll take an even bolder stance than "I like Roxy Music" in my next post. You wanna hear my controversial opinions on the Beatles, or what?
"Prairie Rose" The direction of LeBron James' career doesn't really phase me one way or the other, but from a media-crit perspective, this chilly front cover from yesterday's Cleveland Plain Dealer is one for the record books.
Ouch.
No doubt this will figure heavily in the future curriculum for media studies majors everywhere when it comes to understanding the last gasp of the once mighty newspaper.
And let me just add what a thrill it is for me to take to the Delaware Valley airwaves as Miss Factorial's guest. By her own reckoning, she started calling into WPRB as a listener back when she was barely a teenager. As one of the DJs who frequently fielded those calls from a great many years ago, I'm proud to say that Julia and I have become fantastic friends since, and she is now among my most trusted of radio confidantes. To frame Wednesday's radio event in the vernacular of WPRB circa 1996, it is safe to say that the Rock Shall Be Delivered Unto The People. And with this accursed heat predicted to break right around showtime, it'll be the perfect way to cool off with an icy and delicious beverage of your choice.
Julia will be pulling the lion's share of the show's music, but my DJ bag so far includes platters by the Equals, Citay, Moon Duo, Oddateee, John Cooper Clarke, the Boys, and the Eddy Current Suppression Ring. We'll do our best to prevent things from receding into a mid-90s PRB lovefest, but I can't guarantee that Circus Lupus and the Wedding Present won't assume their long-vacated positions at centerstage.
See ya on the radio!
I was on the road for much of the July 4th weekend (and therefore away from my rightful place behind the grill), but matters were finally settled yesterday by means of marinated swordfish skewers served with an incredible black bean-cilantro-lime-mango-poblano salad. (Clearly a dish that's desperately in need of a more efficient name. Got any suggestions?) I took care of the fishy business behind the grill while my wife rendered the salad—seemingly out of thin air—and so delicious was her off-the-cuff concoction, that I didn't think twice about helping myself to some this morning before I'd even had any coffee.
Now that's what I'm talkin' about.
Regardless, I hope you'll join me in wishing America a happy belated birthday. In fact, never mind about me: let's all join Big Blood in a singalong of "Oh Country"—still one of the best songs in recent memory, and one which captures the sentiment with a poignancy that's on par with side one of The River.
