HAPPY RECORD STORE DAY

Elegy For Stanley Gorski, Men of Like Passions, Regrets, The Beatles, Drive-By Truckers

Joe Laspro left and Victor Morales in "Elegy For Stanley Gorski" at Subversive Theatre.


Big house for Elegy For Stanley Gorski at Subversive Theatre Saturday night, a play I'm cast in. Thanks for coming, guys. And for picking up the tab.

I run into a person I casually know on Elmwood Avenue. Should we hug? Hug? Are we hugging? Yes! It's a hug. Hugging. Hugging.

Men of Like Passions at Buffalo East.

Playwright Justin Karcher of Theatre Jugend asked me to come and review his new play Men of Like Passions which just completed a run this past weekend at Buffalo East. After serious deliberation with myself I posted a mostly negative review on my blog. By the end of the day I realized how wrong my review was and deleted it. His back alley anti-everything comedy about three young slackers navigating life with an unhealthy Christian obsession indeed possesses a strange magic. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Troubling and alienated, it defines a moment in today's aimless youth culture that is the historical now. I'm thinking, rock musical?

Last night I didn't get to sleep at all, all ,all. - The Fifth Dimension

No, but seriously. Asking to befriend someone on Facebook and de-friending them a little while later is an exercise in malice normal social life doesn't offer. Go punch a mirror, clown.

So anyway, I got this play cooking on the back burner. OK I exaggerate, it's simmering on the back burner. All right! All right! It burnt on the back burner. Here's the only line I salvaged and I'm thinking it may serve as the closing line of the play:

"He didn't, as I feared he would, run up to the stage and clobber me with his Rudy Valle megaphone".

Any suggestions?

"one, two, three, comp, comp, comp, four, five, comp, comp, comp ..." (Kathleen Gaffney counting the house during the last days of Studio Arena).

Victory: The Father Baker Story. Still haunts me. Nasty comments were inexcusable. Talk about your misdirected malice.

And Susan Sorenson is still the finest actress I've ever seen on the local stages, (and I had the pleasure of working with her twice). How I managed to say anything else about her on this blog is beyond me.

Time for me to go to church. The church of music that it. Forgive me Father for I have wanged, danged and doodled all night long. The iPod gods have handed me my 10 random penances:

1. The Beatles, Fixing A Hole

Indeed I am. Hundreds of years from now music lovers will still be listening to Beethoven, Bach and The Beatles. It's a comforting thought. The Paul McCartney penned and sung Fixing A Hole is all about fixing what you can and embracing what you can't. It's the quintessential Beatles art-psych song. The simple stark vocal track has just a perfect bit of dubbing manipulation causing me to imagine, "Seven Beatles standing there", (The line is "See the people standing there"). Could somebody somewhere be suggesting that an entire team of talented recording engineers worked on the record? That's producer George Martin on harpsichord. From Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

2. The Beatles, Here Comes The Sun

While being a simple and lovely ode to sunrise, Here Comes The Sun is also an intricate and complex recording with illustrious technological wonder. Loaded with subtle syncopation (the crawling Moog synthesizer rising just above the last stanza's rhythm; the manipulation of speed), the song draws the listener in to a garden of audio delights. It's a George Harrison composition and project without any contribution from John Lennon who was recovering from a car accident when it was recorded. The late astronomer Carl Sagan tried to include Here Comes The Sun on spacecraft launched in The Voyager Space Program in 1977, on a recording intended to provide to any alien life forms an example of human civilization. The corporate owner of the song, music giant EMI, refused to relinquish the rights to the song. From Abbey Road.

3. The Undisputed Truth, What It Is?

Over-powered by funk. The Undisputed Truth were a 1970s psychedelic soul group who had a smash hit with Smiling Faces Sometimes, and a minor hit with What It Is?, a funk guitar driven jam with lyrics suggesting we all go down dancing with the system - "Ain't no words to this song, you just dance and hum along". If this beat doesn't get you moving, you have no brain cells left. From the album, Face To Face With The Truth. Funk out! http://grooveshark.com/s/What+It+Is/4agICu?src=5

4. Caustic Resin, Fry Like Ace Jones

God, what a beautiful song. Did you ever get a cold chill right through your heart while looking at an old 1930s police file photo of a gangster getting electrocuted? No? Well, you and me don't mix well anyway. A soul stirring, slide guitar wailing, acid tinged cry-out for humanity from a doomed rat. It's lovely. Brett Netson, original bass player for Built To Spill, and his band Caustic Resin played an intimate show some years ago at Mohawk Place in Buffalo, NY, (there were about 5 of us in attendance), and it was truly inspiring. When Netson's guitar string broke in the middle of a gorgeous slow ballad and I laughed out loud, I was certain he was going to set his guitar down, walk over, and kill me. In my humble opinion, one of rock 'n roll's best kept secrets. From the album, Keep On Truckin.

5. Drive-By Truckers, Wallace

I've done these random iPod lists three times on my blog, and all three times Drive-By Truckers have showed up, with three songs appearing on this list alone. Wallace is a brass and bluesy Skynard sounding song with a Sweet Home Alabama chorus welcoming the late segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace to Hell - Throw another log on the fire boys / George Wallace is coming to stay / When he met St. Peter at the pearly gates / I'd like to think a black man stood in his way. From the album Southern Rock Opera. Hear Wallace here.

6. Angels of Light, Song For Nico

Michael Gira's (Swans) other band. I don't know Nico (Christa Paffgen). I 've never actually listened to The Velvet Underground and Nico's debut album from 1967, even though it's widely considered to be one of the best rock music albums of all time. Her influence on pop culture is considerable. Bob Dylan was inspired enough to write a song about her, I'll Keep It With Mine. There are at least two other songs with the title Song For Nico by Marianne Faithful and Los Angeles band The Warlocks. She was a model, singer, songwriter, actress and beloved heroin addict who died in 1988 as a result of a bicycle accident. She made films with Andy Warhol and hung out with Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Not knowing her doesn't keep me from loving Angels of Light's Song For Nico, a song so audio friendly you just want to plug an electric guitar into an amp and play along. Easy chords. Hard-as-nails Michael Gira has a sweet, tender side and it finds him here conjuring a richly textured simplicity hip deep in flowery love and cosmic longing. From the album, How I Loved You.

7. Drive-By Truckers, Dead, Drunk and Naked.

Proud to be an alcoholic and working on the drug addiction. Oh, youth! You can here Dead, Drunk, and Naked.

8. General Public, Tenderness

An 80s new wave lollipop of confectionery pop that is irresistible. Love the (French?) horn dropped subtly into the mix and the lyric, I open my mouth and out comes something spiteful. General Public was an 80s supergroup with members from The Beat, The Clash, Dixies Midnight Runners and The Specials. They dissolved after a severe lineup change and a second album. There is a great 12-inch extended version of Tenderness somewhere out there in eBay land. From All The Rage. Get a little Tenderness here.

9. Drive-By Truckers, The Southern Thing

Given the odds of The Truckers showing up here so many times, I really should go play craps while pumping them out of my iPod. Another decry at Neil Young's anti-racist rants (Southern Man), the song says to "stay out of the way of the southern thang". I will because I'm a damn Yankee. The song has a great pump and hook. Get some Southern Thing here.

10. The Beatles, Wild Honey Pie

From The Beatles, (The White Album), this short ditty sounds like love's last anguished remorse as sung by dying vegetables in an autumn garden.

funk power. over and out.

SHOUT LOUDER, LOUDER, I DON'T UNDERSTAND!

the sound of silence lyrics - YouTube

Music Review: Lambchop - Mr. M

Kurt Wagner has been repeating the same few bars of tinkering piano chords for 11 albums of his musical collective, Lambchop. With, what seems a martini atop the baby grand and blue smoke rising from an ashtray, Wagner composes music that combines a 1001 Strings session, an old Stax soul record, and an excursion in progressive lounge.

At the intro of the band's new release Mr. M, it's apparent that the album will focus on orchestral strings as the music gently dips into what sounds like Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song", before Wagner's smoky voice interrupts "chestnuts roasting on an open fire", with "don't know what the fuck they talk about", in the same nine syllables.

And then it's off to the la-la land of Lambchop where Wagner's soothing slightly off-kilter vocals sound like someone counting sheep in a twilight zone dreamland where a fine line is drawn between the cosmic and the mundane. "It was their last night on the continent", he sings like a spirited Cats Stevens on "Gone Tomorrow", and just as we're envisioning vacationing Europeans donning parasols and carousing the continent, he observes, "it looks like water comes from somewhere else".

You have to be in the mood for a Lambchop album and go with the thing. In a heartbeat I understood "water coming from somewhere else" to be an H.G. Wells-like observation of ancient aliens surveying a young planet Earth. Blame my sharp interpretation on too many weekends with The History Channel's "Ancient Aliens". Far out, man.

In Mr. M, a lot of fuzzy audio sound bites at various levels of sound lure, grab, and startle the listener, like David Lynch dropping the needle on a cursed 78rpm record. Is that somone chopping wood or swatting a flyswatter? A knock at the door or the beating of your own heart? A raspy voice from the telephone or from beyond? Earphones enhance this ghostly experience.

The album is dedicated to James Victor Chestnut ("Vic"), celebrated American songwriter and performer who died in 2009, and who collaborated with Lambchop on his 1998 album The Salesman and Bernadette. The sense of loss is great but enchanted in Mr. M.  Life goes on and remorse is a matter of fact, like the passing of a day. "And the warm comes back, even though I thought it would not", he sings on "Nice Without Mercy".

If there's a glitch in the album, it's the patchwork instrumental passages which are at times, trite. The exception being "Betty's Overture", an homage to another fallen musical hero, Elliot Smith, and a reminder of his haunting song, "Son of Sam". But the lengthy instrumental end to "Gone Tomorrow" is superflous and unloving and sounds like it was thoughtlessly tacked on. It should have been replaced with the lazy, summery instrumental "Gar", which sits vulnerably at the center of the album like a lost Sergio Mendes track, and fits into "Gone Tomorrow" like a glove.

But the rewards far outweigh the quibbles. There's enough soul mining here to last far into summer. Dig it.


this review was first published by me here.

Movie Review: No Time For Rock Stars: The Vans Warped Tour

This documentary is not a comprehensive view of the summer punk/metal tour, The Warped Tour. It is a study of the underbelly of the 2010 edition, following only those participants the producers had access to.

Major rock 'n' roll names included in the 2010 tour like Pennywise and Alkaline Trio are seen only in fleeting moments, if at all. Instead, the film examines three musical acts not necessarily representative of the tour, and an unsigned band that follows the tour across the country, in the hope of getting a moment of stage time.

So while being an interesting documentary on the grueling hardships faced by these young vagabonds of the road (in another century they would have been circus people), the film abandons us to stage left when we want to see the main attraction. It's like being a witness to the mosh pit, when we want to participate.

Never Shout Never, a band led by 20-year old Christofer Drew, is woefully out of place on The Warped Tour. Drew comes across like an intelligent one-fifth of a boy band with a belly of teeny-boppers following him around and begging him for an emotional squeeze and autograph. His compositions are accomplished but his band is anonymous and his music is decidedly light. His presence here is mystifying.

In one disturbing scene, he injures himself diving from the stage into the mosh pit just as the human sea is parting. He is swarmed by fans as he hobbles off to the hospital, clearly in pain. Not quite the punk riot Warped is legend to be.

Mike Posner "broke out" on this tour. The Timberlake-like singer, writer, and producer, who takes the stage alone with a microphone and sings to computerized music, is extensively interviewed. He seems destined for a successful career with a business-sense savvy and several hit singles as a result of Warped. He flies in and out of the tour while "finishing his album in L.A.". The do-it-yourself on a jet ethic.

Suicide Silence is more representative of Vans Warped Tour; a heavy metal outfit with a scowling sore throated-ed singer, Mitch Lucker, who transforms from menacing stage star to tattooed working-class joe when he's interviewed. He sees his career as a practical way to raise his daughter.

Finally there is Forever Came Calling, a band not signed to The Warped Tour, who follow the tour around the country in their modest van while selling their CD for $5 a pop. Their story of a band begging for attention, hoping for a big break on the stage, is the rock 'n' roll equivalent of Broadway's 42nd Street.

The camera work by Josh Salzmans glistens in sunny sky blue and is alive with excitement while capturing looming Texas thunderclouds threatening to close the show down. The entire film looks great.

             Mitch Lucker of Suicide Silence.

But No Room For Rockstars only skirts the issues and dynamics of The Warped Tour. It never tries to be anything more than a fly on the wall of the tour's lesser stages. Even brief interviews with the long haired, charismatic, ex-con stage manager, or the Santa Claus-looking tour bus driver, (the Warped tour's very first employee), outshone the musician's time in front of the camera. Rarely do rock 'n' roll acts have anything significant to say outside their performance.


this review was first published at blogcritics.blogcritics.org/video/article/movie-review-no-room-for-rockstars

MUSIC REVIEW: Spielgusher, "SPIELGUSHER"

Of poetry, spoken word or music, Spielgusher's debut album can be best described as poetry with an ambiance of bass, guitar, and drums. Famed music journalist and Blue Oyster Cult mentor Richard Meltzer (he bunked with B.O.C. for awhile and wrote "Burning For You"), recites his socially diseased diatribes as Mike Watt (Minutemen, The Stooges) on bass, Hirakata "Shimmy" Shimzu on guitar, and Yuko Araki on drums (both played in Japanese artist Cornelius's band), create an alternative universe of cosmic blues-rock that fits rather succinctly into his twisted pornographic observations.

Here's one non-pornographic "poem" called "The Man Who Thought Death Was Dying" in its entirety: "If I only had to wash the upper half or lower half of my body, I would take more showers. I bet you didn't know I only take one every other day."

Add the fact that Meltzer delivers his words as if he has a metal plate permanently lodged in his forehead and you may want to politely toss your listening ears into his Salvation Army coin kettle and quietly move along.

Yet, as if through some manipulative power of poetic persuasion and dirty joke joviality, somewhere between "Fuck Awareness Week" (track 9) and "Tropic of Nipples" (track 41) in this 63-track CD of musings and music, a true art emerges. It's suggested here that the most common language from the lowest street trash philosophy speaks volumes. In Meltzer's sordid world of body waste flow and nonchalant menace ("Fuck My Sister") he unleashes an intimacy of animal-like urges, as if reciting from a crude room in a downtown hotel, that are as disturbing and familiar as our most deviate deepest thought.

Not many sympathizers will be pro-activated by his views on child abuse: All parenting is abusive; depriving children of pornography is abusive; teaching a child the concept of heaven and hell is abusive and should be punishable by a lifetime on a chain gang ("Red Herring"). But, it's pause for a sober moment's thought.

Nor will everyone be romantically inclined by his valentine to love, in which his beloved waits on her menstrual cycle before sitting on his face ("Premenstrual"). But there is no denying the sloppily pronounced "dar-ling" and "lo-ve", as if using all effort to stop his tongue from slipping out his mouth, speaks from the hungry and poetic heart.

And the dreamy, interluding music seems keenly aware of Meltzer's warped yet not insensitive point-of-view, like a paddy wagon combo casually following and ready to snatch him up at the first sign of true dementia.

Spielgusher is 27 years overdue as '80s hardcore punk legends Minutemen had planned to collaborate with Meltzer in 1985 before Minutemen guitarist D. Boone was killed in a car accident.

It's better late than never, and given Meltzer's penchant for death-affirming issues, not a moment too soon. His own words provide an invitation to a session with Spielgusher. "Be playful, be generous, invite snails into your home and offer them beer.".

there's a suspicious black sedan sitting outside my home so i gotta tell you this review was first published by me here

Music Review: Sunkissed - Bad Weather California

The theme to Bad Weather California's sophomore album, Sunkissed, on the Family Tree record label, is the sun - how it shines when you're hanging at the beach, skateboarding down a street, or just killing time making love and getting busted for weed on a sunny California afternoon.

Tommy James and The Shondells said it: "There's a ball of fire in the sky, it keeps watching over you and I", ("Ball of Fire"). So did beloved mid '60s pop band The Cyrcle: "The worst is over now, the morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball" ("Red Rubber Ball" written by Paul Simon). All three bands agree, the sun is - there.

Bad Weather California celebrates the big yellow ball with a Vitamin C enriched celebration of blessedly ignorant youth with an element of reckless teen danger, as if '60s cartoon band The Archies ("Sugar, Sugar") were to break with convention and rob a liquor store.

A flash of fluid, exotic West African guitar highlights this teen tribe's dopey, surfer-without-a-cause songs which are all about smiling and sunshine and loving and hot guitar licks. Picture a laid back beach party bonfire you feel compelled to approach, and in no time find yourself stripped down to your skivvies and joining in on an awkward teen dance to the Sun Ra. Meanwhile the party is passing around a joint and experiencing a cosmic connection to - well, everything.

The most compelling track, "Let it Shine" ("Sunshine! Taking me home!") features a Richie Valens-like guitar plugging rhythm into a funky, downbeat, hand-clapping jam which reaches fever like a hot Calypso number begging you to the dance floor.

When they're not hanging at the beach, cooing lovemaking, or lamenting the stems and seeds at the bottom of their stash, they're championing rockabilly stomp, Jesus and Mary Chain slop, and precious Green Day teen philosophy. Given the thirty-something photo of the band on their CD, a proud arrested development prevails. Mom and Dad will just never understand, man.

Produced by Akron/Family's guitarist Seth Olinsky (the difference between the two bands seems to be that Akron/Family prefers doing their drugs indoors), Bad Weather California's Sunkissed is for anyone who ever allowed the sun to kiss their shoulders while gazing at the ocean as mom and pop pointed to an NPR-light-jazz listening future.


An agreement upon risk of death compels me to say this article was first published by me, the author at blogcritics.blogcritics.org/music/article/music-review-bad-weather-california-sunkissed/