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. 

Magic Sam ~ All Your Love and Lookin' Good

Well? What do you think? Sam was pretty good, 'eh? Yeah, I think so too. I think he was great. 

The way that I heard it, Sam was less than reliable when it came to money. He drank a bit. His guitar was usually in the pawn shop, so he had to borrow one. From the photographic evidence, he often borrowed the guitar of his buddy, Earl Hooker. He could be hard to find when it was time for the gig too. He generally had no place or phone of his own, preferring to share the lodgings of his girlfriends. I don't think he ever had his own amp. The clubs always had a few around. 

I think that there are two albums, or were. I couldn't say what was available at this point. One studio; one live. Don't quote me. 

I think that Magic Sam made a guitar work harder than anyone else. He kept them ringing like bells. No dead spots for Sam, no dramatic pauses. Racing the devil, I guess, and he lost in the end. He was thirty-two. 

The Internet Is Sinking, And It's Taking Us Down With It

It gives me no joy, and only a bit of relief, to know that the individual who left two disagreeable comments in March of last year has crossed the river. 

Not to worry, though. You open the door to such rough handling when you leave the comfort of a simple, anonymous life and write a blog. I cannot say that they did not phase me at all, but the reality of it is that I am much harder on myself than any of my critics could manage. 

Those comments were reassuring in their way. They were a human touch to our constantly evolving Internet. At the very least it is quite unlikely that they were generated by an AI bot. And likely that they were not planted for the purpose of positioning any other blog above mine in the order of importance that AI is in the process of creating and refining. 

I'm sure that you have all noticed by now that the Internet is becoming less useful, less enjoyable, and more of a tool of oppression than we had been accustomed too during its Golden Years. Google search? Clogged with money grabs. YouTube? I never thought that I would see twenty minute advertisements. Facebook? Fishing scams, hacks, and contact with maybe six of your friends. This will only get worse as time goes on. Always the reduction in human input, and always the ever more voracious cash grabs. 

Strange things happen because websites of all types are entirely machine operated now. All you want to do is some simple thing, like sign up for a streaming service, or renew a magazine subscription, but the machine misinterprets something and says, "no way, Jose." This kind of thing has happened to me several times in the last year. In each case, there is no opportunity to contact the vendor. No chat button. Remember those? There were always pleasant, knowledgeable Indian twenty-somethings ready to help you. In my experience, they did a very good job. I don't have problems of first impression, no problems that are particularly challenging. Very run of the mill. The young person takes care of it almost immediately. 

No, now we just hit the stone wall of the machine. Frankly, I have a low impression of any company that would release such defective software to accomplish its business with consumers who simply want to sign up for something and pay with a long established credit card that works. And the wall is made of genuine stone. "We're sorry, but your IPO doesn't match the address on your credit card." End of story. No Deezer for you! The list goes on. One of the world's largest corporations, with whom I have been doing business for decades, refused to recognize that I was me, even though I signed in at the IPO that I used to buy software from them fairly recently and signed in with the user name and password that they gave me on that occasion. Their machine gave me a series of tests designed to prove that I was me. The questions included, "what were the subject lines on your last ten e-mails?" Again, no possible way to contact a human being, where the problem would be solved in two minutes. "Please send me a photo of you holding your passport next to your head." Even I could do that fairly quickly, and I'm not good with this stuff. 

Has everyone noticed that the new scam is that you can't buy software anymore? Now you only buy a "subscription." What you used to pay for the software now only covers you for a year, and you must pay with a credit card and allow automatic renewals. This is neoliberalism at its apex of piracy. Increase the number of contracts, and reduce the duration of contracts. Textbook stuff. And annoying. 

So far, every year since 1999, I have hated the Twenty-First Century more each new year than the last. Although, as I have said before, it does take the sting out of imminent death.  

Sadistic Mika Band in UK TV show “Old gley whistle test “1975 サディスティック ...

This band brought me into the world of Japanese bands/ singers/ music. I've got several records by this group. Pizzicato 5, FPM, and Shibuya-Kei in general have been my jam since the late 1990s. I've lived in Asia for about twenty years now (almost exactly). Most of the local music is either syrupy sweet love/ pop or morbid traditional songs about longing. Canto-Pop, etc. Japan really is a world apart. Tricot, Elephant Gym, the new stuff is really amazing. They are the funky Asians. 

I have a guess about how this happened, but I fear it ain't woke enough to mention in todays boring cancel climate. 

Tired of Trying, Bored with Lying, Scared of Dying

Almost all of the English Invasion bands started out as cover bands. That includes the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. A lot of those bands, however, were very talented, and quickly moved on to writing material for themselves. The Manfred's singer, Paul Jones, wrote this one. 

I'm starting to think that bands that got the best advice were the ones who moved up into the "making money zone." The Beatles had Brian Epstein and George Martin playing big roles. The Stones had Andrew Oldham, whom I am beginning to think was smarter than he's gotten credit for. 

Maybe it's just a tough business. Certainly the Kinks, the Who, and the Hollies had talent to spare. All three of them had as much entertainment value as the two big winners. They also had good writers. So, weak management? Poor planning? I don't know enough of the details to sort that out. 

Bad advice was definitely involved in some dramatic crash-and-burns. Paul Jones decided to go solo, and so did Wayne Fontana ("Game of Love," with the Mindbenders). Both of them were leaving bands consisting of very talented musicians and some reason to expect further success. Who advised them on that move? Both singers went off the radar immediately, and the only subsequent material that I've heard was very weak. Both bands went on to greater success than they'd had with their original singers. 

Want to have some fun? Get ahold of the WF and the Mindbender's Game of Love LP. It's hugely entertaining, and musically excellent. Those fellows could really play.  

New Challenges For Travelers

There is a remote chance that I will return this year for a visit to the country of my birth. That would be America, specifically California. Six years have passed since my last visit, and it appears to me that the situation on the ground has changed dramatically. The changes have not run in favor of an easy and comfortable trip.

The new COVID variant, Omicron, is statistically significant and obviously dangerous. Every day, people are contracting the disease. People are being admitted into the hospital. Most impressively, people are dying. In spite of that obvious threat level, I don’t see a lot of masking going on. Instead, I hear a lot of yelling about not wanting to wear masks, and freedom, and you can’t tell me what to do, and take off that mask you fucking commie. Has any work been done about the possibility that COVID has a potential psychological impact? Subtle, perhaps, but acting to make sufferers irritable and unreasonable?

If, indeed, I do travel to the indispensable country this year, I will be masking. Probably double masking. I have seen examples of masked people being accosted in retail establishments or travel situations for having the freedom-hating temerity to wear a mask. As though, perhaps, the only possible explanation could be that the masked individual was a libtard, or under the spell of ex-President Obama and his puppet, Joe Biden. I have formulated a strategy to use if I am faced with this behavior in a convenience store or something.

My play will be to feign weakness, cough into the mask, and say in an unsteady tone, “I’m sorry. I was in Africa for six months (cough) and my doctor thinks that I was exposed to Ebola. He says I must wear (long, wet, wheezing cough) this mask to protect (cough) other people.” (Reaches out to lean on something, holding chest and coughing.) “Oh, shit! I forgot my rubber gloves!”

It was a lot of fun to run this strategy past a couple of friends of mine, but I know that in reality it would only make someone want to shoot me. A lot of the unreasonable Americans are now strapped.

Proof Of Life

 

Alive, although that condition is subject to change. I am typing on a new laptop, using a version of Word called, “Home and Student.” I am finding it very peculiar in many ways. Things tend to disappear. I am finding that as time marches on, computers in general become more difficult to use, less functional, and less intuitive. It’s annoying. Or perhaps it’s just that life is passing me by, which is true one way or the other.

Blogspot is full of moribund blogs. The reasons are many, and the phenomenon is interesting. Many people set up a cute blog and post two or three times about the wonders of cats. And that’s it, the blog idea expends itself. Perhaps they were killed by their cats. Many people, like Doghouse Reilly, set up a blog and write fantastic posts for years about mostly politics, with some culture and a little sports thrown in for variety. His blog disappeared. He was ended not by cats, but by the human condition, which stalks us all. I still draw breath, but I have reached the age where the entire horizon is sufficient only for a vague terror of waiting for the other shoe to drop. The nearness of death inspires some people. Others, like me, are merely paralyzed by dread.

Best wishes to all. I should be writing more soon.