A Quick One (amidst the chaos)
"If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own."-Scoop Nisker
For those of you who regularly read the newsletter, you might have noticed there have been fewer published over the past weeks. It is nothing more than a little life-takeover: kids home from camp, getting a cold (not Covid), a higher-than-usual summer workload, finishing up The Specialty boxset, prepping for some records coming out (more soon) and readying for two bands that Birdman releases to hit town this weekend (more below).
And it’s funny…I do still try to keep these newsletters up, often sitting down to write, only to get necessarily distracted by all of the above and more. Just in the last few days I wrote…partially…about Roy Milton’s birthday, the hitmaker whose work is showcased on The Specialty boxset we are working on…as well as the 150th birthday of the cable car (which was two days ago)…and the 35th anniversary of the release of the single that ushered in the grunge era, Mudhoney’s Touch Me I’m Sick (making me feel really old, for that matter. 35 years???) just ten years after Boston release Don’t Look Back (no…no true connection/reaction….or….)…and even the Taylor Swift concert that the family went to last weekend (shout out to the 11 year old sitting nearby who yelled….screamed…every lyric to every song…even the ballads…even after half-way through when her torn vocal chords produced a sound quite similar to Nick Blinko’s in Rudimentary Peni). There has been a lot to write about that has gone half-written.
So as the coffee bubbles up under an overcast grey-pink sky sleeping on the valley before me, as the kids start to stir and the dog stares quietly, listening to Nikhil Banerjee’s 1967 Raga while awaiting a walk, I will keep this quick…with more to come in the next few days.
There are two bands I work with who are coming to the Bay Area to play this weekend, The Seedsmen To The World and Infinite River. While musically the bands are very different, they share common members with the exception being that The Seedsmen feature the folk singer Ethan Daniel Davidson and a droned-out acidy murmur that sets the stage for Ethan’s yarns. Infinite River, an instrumental outfit who feature members of Sparks, Slumber Party and Sponge, provide soundtracks a la the space in between Krautrock’s Cluster, the American weirdness of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Pink Floyd (without Roger Waters’ idiotic politics). Infinite River’s sophmore LP, Space Mirror, will be out later this month on Birdman Records (more information here).
For those Bay Area bound, here is info for the shows this weekend. I have a pair of tickets to the Saturday night show for the first person who contacts me about them.
Saturday Night (August 5th)
What: Seedsmen To The World with Paula Frazer and Jacob Aranda
Where: The Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110
8pm start time
Sunday Night (August 6th)
What: Wolf Eyes, Bill Orcutt, Infinite River
Where: Thee Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA
Happy Hump Day and Happy 99th Birthday James Baldwin!
Beatle Bob, St. Louis Dancing Legend, Has Died
Even though I did not live in St. Louis, I witnessed the crazed dance of Beatle Bob at music festivals I attended in the 90s and early aughts. Damn did he love music. Characters such as Beatle Bob add such color to the concert going experience. Anyone remember “Kevin” the biker…mid-80s San Francisco…always had dozens of roses he would give out to all the ladies? Bob could dance to anything…always with a beat that almost defied the music. RIP.
What would you do if you were brought back to life after a 46,000 year sleep. Yes, start making babies!
The master of the primitive guitar (and great blues and folk student) John Fahey was also a painter (I had no idea). From this website…which showcases his work: “John Fahey was a great investigator of that deep and ancient underground pulse. His paintings, like his music and his stories, are alive with that strange, dangerous, magnetic intelligence that entered our world through his labors. John Fahey may no longer be here with us among the forms, but his relics remain, souvenirs brought back from those loamy, cold-blooded fields.” (thank you Steven Baker for sending this one to me!)
Aquarium Drunkard Presents: Transmissions :: Andy Zax
I was lucky enough to work with Andy at Warner Brothers in the 90s. Just a great guy and one of the most musically knowledgable people out there. He was the music geek on that TV show BEAT THE GEEKS!!! When people say to me that I know “more about music than most people” I always retort saying: oh…there are people who know a whole lot more than I do! Andy is one of those people who has also done SUCH great work in the field (just check out the Woodstock reissue he oversaw). This is a GREAT interview.
Black artist creates wooden guitars that are relics of Black history
This is a beautiful piece….
Much has been written about this crazed NYC Upper West Side cult…and this is a great article based on a new book about it.
THE PICASSO CAPERS: The misadventures of Hannah Gadsby’s “Pablo-matic”
An interesting take on an interesting exhibit that attempts to both look at the Picasso legacy as well as a history of feminist art
Ghost Nets
By: A.E. Stallings
Pale syllables drift
through the ear, reticulate
and mercurial
as moonlight’s ladder
glitching across the water:
skeletal rigging
of a doomed schooner
crewed by the damned, the phantom
lace of mermaids who
have evanesced to
bone-white spindrift, foam
scudding leeward; un-
canny descant of
whales braiding down the spiral
Fibonacci stair-
case of the hollowed
nautilus; sea dingle of
the eldritch sea witch,
her garden of stings
and fleshy polyps crisscrossed
with neon wiggles,
the trireme’s open
rib cage spilling amphorae
checkered with coin light;
or do they involve,
instead, the waterlogged souls
of drowned migrants locked
in the rust bucket’s
vomitous hold—mothers and
minors, cohort of
seventeen-year-olds
held for ransom by smugglers
till families paid
four thousand a head
for their sons’ passage to no-
where, the deepest trench
off sandy Pylos,
to be chum, sea-worm mumbled,
queasy shades thridding
wakes of superyachts
and ferryboats sardined with
red blistered tourists?
Yet they’re real: frayed webs
of nylon filaments cut
loose to sleepwalk like
zombies through the seas
snaring loggerhead turtles,
dolphins, birds, squid, fish,
claws, scales, cartilage,
ghastly trash. What’s ghosted is
the future: oceans
of unlife, grimed and
slimy, starved, hypoxic, bath-
water warm. Drastic
measures are needed,
they’ve been saying, as long as
I can remember,
making their plastic
promises. It went sour in
my lifetime, children:
something untangles
and comes undone, but not the
concatenated
undecomposing
mesh of permanent slaughter.
We watched it happen.
So sorry to hear about Beatle Bob. I used to see him at Jazz Fest. I’ll never forget the time that he was “killed” by Fred LeBlanc of Cowboy Mouth. He came onstage during their set, and Fred warned him that there would be dire consequences if he kept it up. He did, of course, and Fred shot him. They had a fake second line for him and everything. It was hilarious.
Nice poem as usual!