Getting through winter

Yesterday (and today) was very frigid. I grew up in Western NY and lived for a while in Madison, WI. Winters seemed interminable in these places. (They are a little better here on the island.) I've recently been listening to tapes of various bands I've been in. My therapy during winters was to write songs and poems about them. It helped to take some of the power of the cold and dark away. Here are the lyrics of one such song, called "Lithotripper" (named after a service called "Lithotripter" provided by a local hospital; we never found out what this was, actually).

I taste you like nothing
Hundredth hour of the same old dream
Nothing feels like yesterday
Hundred dollars thrown away

[ch]
Dark snowflakes
Make snowbanks
Ice recedes
And we bleed
This freezing
So easy
Spring will bring
Some different thing

Drank this beer like waterfalls
Dark and lonely Saturdays
Brilliant incoherent stories
One more writer blown away

[ch]

Winter just means rotting
Feed the mushrooms sending spores
Fossils smile in stones somewhere
Stones corrode on distant shores

I see you in stairways
Finally you grace my door
Finally we share the sunrise
Finally the wind is warm

Damaged Goods - Gang of Four

Leeds UK's Gang of Four worked the temporal seam between punk and the genres that came after that which were classified under the rubric "post-punk". "Damaged Goods", an early single from 1978, displays their strongly punkish beginnings. They would later incorporate funk, reggae, and technopop into the 80s, during which time they influenced a lot of bands.

(sorry neither the sound nor the video is great in this live footage from 1979; but it's the best one Youtube had to offer)

[A commenter corrects me - this is from a 1980 show. Thanks!]

Echo Beach - Martha and the Muffins

One of the great new-wave pop bands of the late 70s-early 80s was Toronto's Martha and the Muffins. You just don't hear sounds like this any more. The great low but light vocals of Martha Johnson, backed by a solid band of rockers, a healthy dose of sax (which was common in pop then and virtually absent these days). They are fun to listen to and, as in this video of their biggest hit "Echo Beach" (1980), fun to watch:

Wonderland - Big Country

Scotland's Big Country was one of my favorite bands of the 80s. They had great beats, a soulful, bagpipe-like lead guitar sound, and earnest songwriting and vocals from Stuart Adamson, who tragically committed suicide in in 2001. My favorite album of theirs is Steeltown, but here's probably their best single song, "Wonderland"

Woo Hoo!

Wigan beat Derby County 2-0! Of course, Derby is at the bottom of the Premier League. Well, the three points will help Wigan avoid being relegated along with Derby.

Cartoon Network suckage

Tonight I discovered that there's a mini-subculture of video rants on Youtube about how Cartoon Network sucks. Here's one:



I disagree with this guy about the reasons why CN sucks. I expect their shows for kids (i.e. during the day and up until 10 or so in the evening) to suck. But for me, what sucks the last few years is their adoption of completely awful Williams Street shows and the relegation of most anime to really late at night. He's also wrong about One Piece, which I find to be a very fun, interesting, and endlessly creative anime series. Nevertheless, I agree that CN has gone downhill in recent years.

Also found on the same page as this video is this, which is really funny (F U Baltimore!!)

Promised You a Miracle - Simple Minds

One of my major influences was Simple Minds. I originally discovered them like just about anybody in the US, via "Don't You Forget About Me" (1985), which they did for the movie "Breakfast Club" but IIRC they did not like (and is not on any of their albums). This led me to purchase the album "New Gold Dream 81-84" (1982) which is an immaculate collection of synth/rhythm oriented pop. One of the hits off that album was "Promised You a Miracle". Here is a lip-sync of the studio version, with Jim Kerr and the band looking very much the pretty boys:



In contrast, here is a (probably later) live version of the song, with the band in full arena mode.



The sound of Simple Minds went through a bunch of incarnations, from very edgy synth-punk at the beginning, through very smooth (danceable in many tracks) pop, exemplified by "New Gold Dream 81-84" to the U2 envy years after the "Once Upon a Time" (1985), in which they were filling arenas around the world (but never quite achieving U2 type success. As with many bands, the earlier stuff is more interesting. The peak for me was the "New Gold Gream" LP.

From 1987

Some live 'Til Tuesday for your Tuesday. This is a pretty difficult song (Aimee's demanding vocal lines, rich harmonies, layered keyboards and guitars) that they carry off quite well live. Interesting to see after hearing only the study version of this track all these years...

Cattle and Cane - the Go Betweens

While we're talking about Australian bands, there's always the Go-Betweens, one of my favorites. They had that catchy but contemplative, semi-dejected sound that the Church has also cultivated very successfully. Here's one of their hits, "Cattle and Cane". Possibly the most popular song ever done in 11/4 time. (that's right, count the beats, there are 11 per measure).

Send Me An Angel - Real Life

I bought the 45 of the original version of this song, by Australian band Real Life, which came out in 1983. The song was re-released in 1989 and much later remixed in a number of incarnations by a latter day version of the band. The original is still the best. It captures both the edgy new wave pop sound of the time, with synths and electronic drums, as well as the very strong gothic flavor. I had never seen the video before. It's a fun medieval interpretation which hits on the gothic aspects. This is a great song for the introverted, unrequited teenage lover inside all of us.

Autonomy

Driving to work this morning, I was ruminating on various conscious and subconscious obsessions of mine during childhood/young adulthood. A major one was autonomy. That is, the ability to move free in the world. The object that triggered this memory was seeing a driver education car passing in the other lane. Getting a driver's license was a major way to gain autonomy. But my yearning for a semblance of autonomy manifested itself in even more abstract ways than this. For example, I remember being obsessed with obtaining lead figures (i.e. miniature figures representing characters/monsters, but we only ever called them "lead figures"; they were made of lead) during my early D&D playing days. Not obtaining a huge collection of them. Just having them at all. This allowed a representation of my characters in D&D playing space. Also, this creeped into my love of arcade video games. In a video game, a representation of you could move freely, controlled by you. The most basic example that typically springs to my mind is the ship in the Asteroids game, which could move anywhere on the board using some basic (but somewhat difficult to master) controls. I remember these yearnings/images of autnomy even invading my dreams at the time. Now that I am a more or less fully autonomous adult, and have been for some time, it's curious to remember those old feelings. Adult autonomy came so gradually, that these feelings of limitation and weakness seemed to have disappeared without my really noticing that they had gone.

Lyrics

Another song lyric from the other night...

Nothing in Particular

Stack four rocks if you can
If your vibe is right
You can

Feel the earth
Feel the air
Be between them perfectly

Be the cold
The lines on the map
Tracing nothing in particular

[ch]
Nothing in particular
Vibrate with the train going by
Nothing in particular
Climb out of town into sky

Something in particular
Forms a snowflake
Forms her shape

Flickers like an alien message
Footprints in fog
Kisses in the weeds

You dwindle to a line
Haunted in too much time
Too well defined

[ch]
Nothing in particular
Back yards on film
Only back there
Where no one is

Singapore Rice Noodles of the Month

From Szechuan Garden in Port Jefferson Station NY. Very meaty. Nice delayed spiciness. Quite fresh and authentic.

Some Lyrics

Megachild came up with a few new songs the other night, even in the absence of our lead singer, who was off on unspecified business of some kind. The lyrics were hastily penned by yours truly. Here's one:

Meer Stroma [Mary Ann in the Mud]

One thing was for sure
The horizon ran around
I was floating in the sky
I was raining on the ground

She was dancing in my hand
A blind ballet
But if I ever closed my fingers
She would disappear like mist

[ch]
Follow her through history
Follow me falling through

Back in those days
My hands were made of clay
I would throw perfect jars
Holding nothing but me

She might as well have been wild
I knew nothing but the room
Between my eyes
Between then and now

[ch]
Circle around, she leads you
Through the field, the only thing real

Story of her life
I could just about make up
Her myth would spread like fire
Like ice in April

But the clock slid off the wall
We all grew into dust
Crawled into wrinkles on her lips
Twinkles in a wheelchair frown

[ch]...

Leave It - Yes

Yes was very successful at injecting the progressive rock agenda into the mainstream. Their success peaked with the 1983 album 90125, which was crafted to inundate radio (including Top 40) and sell in droves. The most experimental of the songs that got airtime was "Leave It". Here's the live video version, with the art-metal track "Cinema" grafted onto the front:

late night

crap, Wigan lost to Sunderland 2-0. They're only one point out of the relegation zone.

Here's some Talk Talk for the late night...



apparently the video is from a German TV show, There's informational stuff in German across the bottom as an added bonus,,,

Some Bootsy...

...for your funky Wednesday.

A Win

Woo Hoo! Wigan beat West Ham yesterday 1-0! For the moment, they are out of the relegation zone.

To celebrate, here is the song "She's Got The Looks" by the Wigan band Audiorush

Perfection

If there is a perfect vocalist, I think it's Sade. I've had a thing for her music for a long time. Not enough O's in Smooooooth to describe her voice. And she has a penchant for producing songs with the most amazing jazz-pop atmosphere.
Here's "Nothing Can Come Between Us" (lip synced to the studio version, but gives a good indication of the instrumentation for her live shows, which must be truly amazing...)

The Outfield

Mix a little Men at Work with a little American arena rock (say Journey or REO Speedwagon) and you get the apparently baseball-obsessed UK rockers The Outfield. (sorry, the vid is not embeddable). I always found their songs to be catchy and quite listenable.