RECORD STORE DAY 2012

There is something more to Record Store Day than long lines and overpriced albums.

Or so I said as I stepped into Record Theatre (one of Buffalo, New York's only 2 record stores), and saw a line at the register that snaked through the store, winding to the back wall, coiled around corridors of records, and seemed to go out the back door infinitely.

No way am I standing in this line, I said. And immediately, savage customers were scooping up a pink vinyl split 45rpm single of The Flaming Lips and Mastodon's recordings of The Lips' "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton". And there were only a few left. So I scooped up mine, defended it like a precious living thing against my chest, and an armful or records later, was the last son of a bitch in line.

We seemed a gloomy bunch, standing in line like they were handing out bread to poor people. It wasn't the festive, prize giveaway, raffles-galore, bargains! bargains! bargains! day described on the web sites. It felt more like waiting in line for Catholic Communion when you know you've sinned since your last confession.

The young and accomplished guitar band playing live in the store got little response from us when they finished a song. We were all holding records and had no use of our hands to applaud. I said as much to the kid guitarist when they finished their set and he informed me that he and his band, "were fucking great!", in case I hadn't noticed.

It was murder as the line inched through the store and every few feet a prominently displayed record screamed "Buy Me! Buy Me!". It was all I could do to get out of that store with my budget only shattered.

I feel obligated to go into a record store on Record Store Day. It's a commercial but earnest holiday championing one of my favorite past times. I like to consider it as a prep race for the upcoming Free Comic Book Store Day.

The other Buffalo record store is Spiral Scratch Records, so I ventured out to their new location on the West Side. Compared to Record Theatre, Spiral Scratch looks like a soup kitchen. Wedged in a trendy architecturally hip neighborhood next to a swanky Italian restaurant, coming upon the storefront is like being whisked suddenly away to a cheap laundromat where they cash checks.

And that's its appeal. It's a small, cool and comfortable store with a downstairs "dungeon" where local bands play. I caught a bit of solo artist Bill Nehill's performance and he was rather brilliant in a slow introspective "life in Buffalo sucks" set that recalled a young Tom Waite. Nehill is also the bartender and promoter at Buffalo's legendary rock club, Mohawk Place.

So the records. Like I need more fucking records -

I bought a RSD exclusive copy of Genesis' Spot The Pigeon. It's an EP (less # of songs than a regular album) that includes songs recorded during the Wind and Wuthering sessions in 1977, but weren't included on that album. It's been in spotty, limited release ever since.

And I bought a RSD split pink vinyl 7-inch of The Flaming Lips' "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton", with band Mastadon on the flip side doing  (what seems on one listen) an unimaginative version of the song.

I also bought a RSD exclusive 7-inch by The Blues Project, beloved late 1960s psych-blues-rock band that features two live recordings, never before on vinyl, of the band playing at Howard Solomon's Cafe Au Go Go in New York City in 1965. It has the original Verve Folkways label on the vinyl and looks very vintage and cool. The record's A side, "Parchman Farm" is eclectic in its hippie minded fusion of rock, blues and folk.

And a new, sealed copy of Son, Ambulance's double album, Someone Else's Deja Vu, complete with a cool psychedelic poster and fake credit card with a code for a free download of the album. I first heard them on their split album with Bright Eyes, Oh Holy Fools. They hail from Omaha, Nebraska. If Big Brother doesn't swoop down on my blog you can hear "Juliet's Son" from the album on the widget at the top of this post.

And a nice used copy of Elton John's 11-17-70, a live recording from 1970 of a small rock 'n roll show at a New York City radio station studio with a very young Elton John and a roomful of howling fans. I saw Elton John early in his career and it's a reminder that he used to rock. His concert at the old Buffalo Auditorium, I believe, is the first concert I ever saw. I was a child wondering why the people all around me were smoking funny smelling cigarettes.

And a used record with a beautiful and shiny vinyl sheen of The Friends of Mr. Cairo by Jon & Vangelis (that's Jon Anderson of Yes and Chariots of Fire film composer Vangelis). It's a 1981 record with a killer title track that merges Hollywood nostalgia with progressive rock. There is a shortened version of the song on the widget at the top of this post.

With these last two album purchases I've reached my goal of repurchasing every record I've ever owned.

Till next year, wax nostalgia!

there's nothing i can do to stop a corporate swine from adding commercialism to various words on my blog.

Music Review: Peter Gabriel, LIVE BLOOD

Peter Gabriel's Live Blood is a 22-track double CD follow-up concert recording to last year's New Blood, an album in which Gabriel reinvented several of his and others' compositions for orchestra. Recorded live in London in 2011, Live Blood encompasses songs from Gabriel's entire solo career that began in 1976 when he left his home base as front man for Genesis.

It is no surprise that this is a stunning live album with pitch perfect interpretations enshrined by the 46-piece New Blood Orchestra as naturally as a gust of wind. A violin soaked Wallflower from 1982's Security (released as Peter Gabriel in the UK) is ethereal with the strings bleeding compassion for the song's theme of socio-global imprisonment and torture. It is a particularly fine rendition of a song that now seems originally designed for orchestra.

Likewise, Paul Simon's The Boy In The Bubble from 2010's album of cover songs Scratch My Back, (a proposed follow-up album And I'll Scratch Yours has yet to materialize), dramatically nails the heart of Simon's pop infused Afro-rhythmic view of social inequality with a sobering interpretation. Gabriel slyly and apologetically introduces the song by saying, "we stripped all the African blood out of it and we're left with another miserable white man's song".

The Magnetic Fields' The Book of Love and Lou Reed's The Power of Your Heart are given beautifully crafted string arrangements that sound simply heavenly. Downside Up becomes a danceable hand-clapping swirl of orchestra and band, and Mercy Street, inspired by Anne Sexton's poem of the same name, is a sad and ghostly lament of childhood lost that sounds alarmingly delicate when heard live.

One of Gabriel's most familiar songs, Solsbury Hill, is celebratory with the audience joining in on the "boom, boom, boom" vocal refrain and Beethoven's Song of Joy naturally drifting into the closing bars.

There is a genuine concert hall feeling to the album, although Frampton Comes Alive it certainly is not. Gabriel interrupts on several occasions to give credit to individual instrumentalists, vocalists, and arrangers, and finally gives a special mention to the tech and stage crew that is as heartfelt as Jackson Browne's The Load Out. You can just feel a tireless roadie beaming with pride at the probably unexpected acknowledgement.

Live Blood is the next best thing to being there, and for this music lover and Gabriel fan, a well deserved cosmic-psyche getaway for a rainy weekend.

this review was first published by me here

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