Pewter Suitor, LP version by Tyrannosaurus Rex

Always the self promoter, please allow me to point out that I was a regular reader of Melody Maker after the English Invasion took hold. Melody Maker, and to a lesser extent, Rave magazine, were the only places to discover things that were happening under the radar in UK rock/ pop music, which is to say, beyond the charts. That's where I first read about projects like Gong, David Bowie, Fairfield Convention, the Creation, the Incredible String Band, and Tyrannosaurus Rex. 

It wasn't every newsstand that carried those publications. You had to search a bit. I had to get off the subway, go upstairs, walk about a block, and then backtrack and pay another fifteen cents to get back on the subway. It was worth it. 

I do not approve of the current ambiguation caused by the mixing up of Tyrannosaurus Rex and T. Rex. Predictably, I also totally approve of T. Rex as a band, and I had/ have all of their records. But T. Rex was later on and it was a completely different animal than Tyrannosaurus Rex. As you can hear. This earlier iteration was a lo-fi labor of love and a desperate cry to the rock-gods to "fund me!" Tyrannosaurus Rex really got my attention. This shit is boss, and it was also a bit otherworldly. It was simple, weird, ambitious, catchy, and charismatic. 

Anyway, enjoy. 

Outkast - Hey Ya! (Official HD Video)

This video is really a high water mark for both video and music. I've been to whole cities that didn't have this much life in them. Twenty years ago I had a one hour per week radio show in mountainous, small town, northern Thailand. It was called English by Songs. Most of my song list was chosen for a certain combination of musical quality, clarity of the English, and a story that was easy to follow. I played Ray Charles' Unchain my Heart; I played Lulu's To Sir With Love. One week I told my listeners that I had a special treat for them. I just said, this is what great American music sounds like...I told them not to worry if they couldn't follow the story, just see what it feels like. And I played this. I had that show for about a year, and it was funny. At first, people didn't admit that they listened. After about six months, people started to admit that "at first, I didn't like the music that you played. But now, I like it." This is Asia, don't forget. Most of the locals had to be taught how to swing.

Peter Laughner - Cinderella Backstreet

Ohio, and in particular Cleveland, was like an explosive star-nursery in the 1970s. This generation digested the music of the 60s, and out came a rush of originality and talent that glowed and vibrated in new ways. Peter, certainly, Rocket from the Tomb, Devo, Pere Ubu. Stretch the web a bit and you get Destroy All Monsters. Any local aficionado could expand my little list. Maybe it was something in the water. It was flammable, after all.

Fun fact: all through the 1970s, Ohio was the country's biggest market for Krautrock import LPs. Plus the few German bands that had American releases. Think Kraftwork in, I believe, 1974. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Been A While

 Alert the media! Blogger found alive!

An apology would be polite, but I'm not inclined to offer one. The nature of time itself takes on different aspects as one moves through the stages of life. It's one of those things that overtake us without reference to our desires. 

I came across a fragment of a poem used as the heading of a chapter in a nice book that I'm in the middle of. It hit me as illuminating a bizarre epiphany-like experience that I had last year. My two sons, both good men by all accounts, are now officially in middle age, which means that the experiences of their lives are beginning to take on new aspects for them as well. My oldest contacts me by the Line app or e-mail about one time per year; my youngster, much less frequently. I had always been proud of them, and I had a firm belief that I had been an okay father. It seems that even that estimation may have been overly optimistic.  

I know that poetry is avoided by more clever bloggers, being the boring literary equivalent of someone talking about their dreams. But here's the fragment: 

Poem title: A German Requiem, by James Fenton, an Englishman

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.

It is not the houses. It is the spaces in between the houses. 

It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. 

It is not your memories which haunt you. 

(It continues...) 

It is not what you have written down. 

It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. 

This was quite a kick in the chest for me. What I realized last year, thanks to my son's concise prompting, was that I was living in a dream world. I was nothing like the middling and kind of okay dad and husband that I had considered myself to have been. 

I had forced myself to remember only what I had built, ignoring what I had knocked down. I was concentrating on the houses, when I would have done better to pay more attention to the spaces in between the houses. 

I was considering only my memories, even though I am quite familiar with my survival technique of enforcing a strict policy of forgetting many of the things that had happened to me and, I'm afraid, many of the things that I had done. 

Porco dio, how I hate being old. No surprise though. I also hated being a boy, being an adolescent, being a young man, being a grown up, being middle aged, and everything in between. I was a baby that failed to thrive, but lacked the dignity to die. 

Cafe

Thinking of my friend from the DR. That would be the Dominican Republic. We've been around the block. He moved up to NYC, where I was born and raised. We met by chance, both of us married by then. We got along, and my education in Caribbean Latin music and cooking was a great benefit to me. I moved to California and lived there for thirty years, and by now I've lived in Asia for twenty years. He's back in the DR. We still manage to stay in touch. 

Fun Fact: Puerto Rico, the DR, and my adopted home, are all about 13 degrees north latitude. I was thinking that the weather should be about the same, or maybe it's cooler on the islands, with the breeze and all. Not true. I've looked it all up a couple of times, and the Caribbean islands are much hotter. Actually, much more humid. It rarely goes above body temperature where I live (37 Celsius; 98.6 Fahrenheit). In the Caribbean the temperature is often rather higher than that. (Note: it's always hot where I live, in fact almost every day it reaches 35 C, 95 F. But rarely more. Lower when it rains, which is often.) 

The difference is the humidity. In the Caribbean it is humid like Florida, humid like the East Coast up to New York. Summers over there it can get up to 100 F and 98% humidity. By me? Humidity usually thirty points below the temperature. 95 F and 59% humidity. There's a big difference in the feel, to say the least. 

I miss my friend, but I'm too old to move again. Also too old to feel like traveling. I guess I'm just at the age where one looks backwards more than forwards. There's so much back there. 

Velly Joonas ‎- Stopp, Seisku Aeg! (FULL 7", soul, Estonia, USSR, 1980-1...

Just stashing this here because now YouTube does not feature anything like "Favorites" or "Watch Later." Are they trying to tell us something? 

Answer: yes. 

They're trying to tell us: "PAY UP, peasants, or fuck off." 

PJ Harvey & Björk cover the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfacti...

Maybe the 1990s weren't so bad after all. There was the Shibuya-Kei pouring out of Japan, and Nirvana were very good, and there was this.  

I was pretty scattered then, and for a few years in the middle I did drink a bit too much, and I was in the process of finally figuring out Jazz, so perhaps I could be graciously forgiven to have missed occasional gems like this. But hey, nobody's perfect.