One of the selfish (but great) things about being involved with WFMU is how it's repeatedly granted me the opportunity to interact with my musical heroes. I'm no starfucker, but there's something to be said for dancing right nextdoor to the fantasy, and how doing so often reveals details of Our Most Exalted Rock Gods which are strangely absent from the written histories. For instance, did you know that Joe Strummer smells of tobacco and peppermint, Donovan is a bit like a leprechaun, or that Anton Newcombe is actually a really sweet guy?
In other words, there are the people, and then there is the mythology. But within the sacred confines of WFMU, the crossroads of those two competing concepts never resonated with greater poignancy for me than in the case of Nikki Sudden.
In the early 1970s, Nikki started a band with his brother called the Swell Maps, who somehow married the disparate influences of Krautrock and T. Rex to spectactular and lasting effect. His next band, the Jacobites, made no less a statement, albeit with very different ingredients in the cooker. And then there is the decade's worth of amazing solo albums and the memorable NYC-area shows that Nikki played in support of them. I made it a point to see him perform every chance I got, so by the time schedules finally granted him time to swing by my radio show for a live set on March 20th 2006, it felt like a meeting that was long overdue.
Nikki Sudden passed away unexpectedly less than a week after that performance, and it remains a crippling testament to what was a truly wonderful night of music in Jersey City. I wrote a short piece about the evening for the Brooklyn Rail several days after the news broke, so no need to go into all the sad details again. I'm just glad the tracks from that session are finally available for everyone to enjoy. Hosting Nikki on the radio was a years-long dream of mine, and I'm still humbled and honored to have spent some time in his company.
Eternal gratitude to Rob Watts and Danny Hole. Thanks be to Nikki. Stay bruised.
Xposted on the FMA here. Check the other Nikki sessions just made available there, too.
I've been doing weekly radio programs (WPRB, WRSU, WFMU) on and off for 20 years now, and in all that time, you'd think I might have learned something important. Then again, maybe it all depends on how broad your definition of that word is. For example, I have firmly established beyond all doubt that opening a radio program with this song will generate an email or phone call from a girl on the inside of six minutes.
This isn't a hunch or a gag, nor is it thinly-veiled advice for my single friends who also reside behind the mic with some degree of regularity.
In the wrong company, it can be hard to explain why the death of an essentially unknown band's singer is something that I think about pretty regularly. In early 2001, Jerry Wick, singer and guitar player for the band Gaunt, was killed by a hit & run driver near his home in Columbus, Ohio. It took several days for the news to filter through the less-immediate communication channels of that era, but a friend recently reminded me that Jon Solomon and I jointly broke the news locally while on the air at WPRB. Given Gaunt's legacy at the station (beginning with 1992's Whitey the Man EP, they were one of the most played and universally adored bands among the airstaff), it's no surprise that Jon and I fielded phone calls from many listeners who were saddened if not downright distressed by this terrible turn of events.
On a personal level, Gaunt completed a lot of musical ideas for me, and Jerry was Gaunt. His hyperactive and sometimes overbearing persona is what gave the band much of its identity, and although they were quickly outpaced (in terms of success and recognition) by some of their contemporaries, Gaunt retained a unique and special identity—the way all things of tragically undervalued cultural significance do.
Their records? Uniformly great. Their live shows? Totally off the hook—Gaunt was the kind of band whose performances could make a roomful of curious strangers feel like close friends on the inside of 40 minutes. The first time I saw them was at CBGBs, and after that it was all Maxwell's all the time. Every four months between 1993 and 95, or so it seems in retrospect, usually with other great bands in tow. They put out a series of killer albums and a fistful of even better singles and EPs before locking horns with a major label for their final LP in 1998, which promptly flopped. A short while later, the band quietly parted ways, and about two years after that, Jerry was gone. That was ten years ago today.
Take a listen to him performing "Love, Death, and Photosynthesis". It's not really representative of what Gaunt sounded like, but it eerily foreshadows the man's tragic death in a manner that's befitting of someone so talented. It's also just a really great song.
More Gaunt/Jerry around the web:
Bela Koe-Krompecher's excellent blog chronicling his relationships with Jerry and Jenny Mae. Recently unearthed video for Gaunt's "Turn to Ash". (Facebook link, takes about 30 seconds to get going.) Thrill Jockey Records memorial page.
In the imaginary world to which I often find myself retreating, traditional holiday meals are replaced with a series of small-plate dishes, all based around one thematic ingredient. Turkey, for instance. In its traditional Thanksgiving/Christmas permutation, it can be good, but is rarely exciting or adventurous in any way. (To me, at least. I'm well aware of the vast turkey-n-giblets army that exists out there in meatspace, and they are no doubt currently mobilizing to exact an ugly revenge upon me for disrespecting their traditions.)
Call it blasphemy, but I think (and have repeatedly called for) traditional Thanksgiving food to submit itself to a radical re-thinking. For my part, I think the turkey should be cooked a day or two prior to the big familial gathering, to enable the serving of multiple turkey-themed appetizers with something of an international flare. And if my wife and I ever gather enough cache with our normaloid relatives to host the big holiday at our place, I'd like the lead-off dish to be Sichuan-Style Hot and Numbing Sliced Turkey.
"Numbing" being the key term here, friends. This dish is H-O-T, but the heat is balanced wonderfully by the sweetness of the vinegar and cilantro-based dressing. Furthermore, we switched out the Chinkiang vinegar for the plain old rice wine variety, and also substituted almond slivers for crushed peanuts (simply to avoid a market run on a brick-ass cold day.) No matter: the results were far beyond delicious even with said tinkering. Foolishly, I only made enough for one serving, but we've still got a pile of leftover Thanksgiving turkey in the freezer and a ramekin full of homemade chili oil. So guess who's coming to dinner? (Again.)
Great news for fans of Big Blood, one of the most prolific bands of present history, but one which still feels like the best-kept secret in the universe: Brand new album up for free download in the FMA! There's been plenty of prattling on about them before (from myself and others), so no need to rehash it all over again—But whatever you do, don't miss the drop-dead gorgeous video for their cover of The Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary". (Below.) Ahhh, if only everything could be this good...
Here's the MP3 of "She Sells Sanctuary". Ian Astbury, consider yourself officially on notice.
Continued thanks to Big Blood for their willingness to freely sharing so much great music—naming a more refreshing and forward-thinking attitude towards art and commerce would be no easy task—and to Jason Sigal and WFMU's Free Music Archive for providing such an amazing repository of sounds.
This time of year always reminds me of the night a squad car carrying John Lennon's body sped past me on the streets of New York City. On December 8th of 1980, I was eight years old and in the city with my family for a holiday-related dinner with relatives. We were out late—much later than my parents ever kept me out back home, but I'm sure they'd been drinking and having a grand old time. The relatives we'd dined with were somewhat wealthy, and in fact we had eaten dinner at Tavern on the Green, then regarded as one of the city's more exclusive (albeit touristy) restaurants.
I had only a dim awareness of who the Beatles were back then. In 1980, I was far more interested in reenacting scenes from Star Wars with my friends than I was in any kind of music. But the Beatles' legacy was forever burned into my consciousness after my father jerked me away from the street as that squad car came screaming past, the bloody head of its famous occupant slumped against the rear passenger window. The Dakota apartment building where Lennon was murdered is only a few blocks from Tavern on the Green's old location near Central Park West, and sometime shortly before 11 PM, we were walking back to the garage where my father's car was parked. But when we crossed 72nd Street and observed the chaos left in the aftermath of the shooting, someone—a tear-streaked woman, by my father's recollection—told us what had happened. We left the city and drove home to the dark suburbs of New Jersey without speaking, probably listening to the news on the radio.
In spite of the weirdness of having been only blocks away when one of history's most famous murders went down, I never got into the Beatles the way most other kids seem to, and I often wonder why that is. Until I got older and started getting an allowance, the only Beatles record in the house was Let It Be, which belonged to one of my older siblings. Perhaps Lennon's death coupled with the eulogistic tone of that album's eponymous track is what set my associations with the band on such a weird path so early on. When you're a little kid, a song's lyrics are often the first thing that hits you, and lines like "in my hour of darkness / she is standing right in front of me / speaking words of wisdom / let it be" certainly influenced the childhood anxieties I experienced in bed at night. Long after my parents had ordered the lights switched out, the images conjured by that type of poetry were a lot to wrap my head around. It's funny to think about it again thirty years later—by anyone's estimation, a long time has passed since then. It's also quite peculiar for a band that broke up two years before I was born to in some way serve as a milemarker by which to observe my own aging. Maybe that's what people mean when they call Lennon's music "timeless". Maybe it's why that term has always bothered me so much.
I was thrilled to see Dangerous Minds recently post about the Punk chapter of the 1995 PBS documentary series, Rock & Roll, finally showing up on YouTube. (It hasn't been re-run in years, nor is it available on DVD. My homemade VHS copy bit the dust eons ago.) As DM pointed out, it's one of the few docs that really makes a point of completing the critical circuits between 70s punk and the reggae sounds of that same era.
However, the hour-long chapters dealing with proto-punk (The Wild Side) as well as early hip-hop/electro (The Perfect Beat) are also excellent, and now also online. The proto-punk edition focuses on the Velvet Underground (great interviews with Lou, Cale, and Moe Tucker), Iggy, the Doors, and Bowie, and the hip-hop chapter takes on Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaattaa, Grandmaster Flash, and follows the narrative up through Run DMC, Beastie Boys, New Order, and The Orb.
Of course, it's easy to nitpick and complain about what the filmmakers foolishly left out or willfully ignored (ESG? The MC5?), but I still give this series very high marks for their overall presentation of the subject matter. In recent years, only that suberb Rough Trade documentary has surpassed this, I'd say.
Begin watching The Wild Sidehere. Begin watching The Perfect Beathere.
I do not fetishize vinyl records. Running the WFMU Record Fair for eight years landed me in enough confrontations with hygiene-deprived, vinyl-hoarding cellar dwellers to effectively scare me away from that lifestyle forever. Nope, my preference for LPs has nothing to do with that oft-recycled speech about how the look, feel, and smell of vinyl is a component of some shamanistic part of music fandom. I just think CDs are trash, yet I must reconcile this with my interest in physical artifacts, especially those having to do with the cultural flotsam of history.
In addition to the creepy factor, I remain somewhat in awe of people who meticulously care for their record collections as if they were living, breathing organisms. In particular, I love the story that circulated widely after John Peel's death detailing how he maintained a special box of favorite 45s; those which he felt represented something more important or progressive than just a pair of good tunes. I more or less quit buying records years ago when money got scarce, and again, the personal side effects of running the FMU Record Fair for so long certainly tarnished the notion of acquiring more vinyl in my mind for years afterwards. But it was at a Fair sometime in the early aughts that I acquired one of the singles which I would definitely add to my own box of personal favorites, were I ever to compile one. That single was "Romeo", by the Wipers, which I bought from Crowe.
Crowe was one of my first favorite people at WFMU. When I joined the station's staff in 2000, he was already sort of a fringe character there, having not helmed a weekly show for some time. But his caustic wit, intimidating presence, and his willingness to get up in the face of anyone foolish enough to cross him instantly earned my respect. He also seemed to like me—or at least tolerate me, which I took as a major point of pride since I tend to think of myself as a geek, and imagine that everyone else does too.
When I first met Crowe, he was totally unlike the stereotype that many people imagine FMU DJs to uphold. He prioritized his work and family far above the arcane knowledge and music biz hooey that other independent radio types sometimes traffic in, and in that way, he represented exactly what I'd hoped to find at the station. Not music geek heaven, but radio heaven—a place populated by fiercely intelligent and interesting weirdos who were bold enough to speak candidly with a hot microphone in their face. Crowe's acerbic mic breaks were universally crazy, hilarious, and often involved characters who operated several steps outside of society's normal channels. However, he also had a lot of insanely good records crossing his desk in some sort of business capacity, though I never did figure out why or how. Queries for details were usually met with muttered profanity, the lighting of cigarettes, or a story about some guy's house being burned down because he owed a lot of money.
Anyway, I'd been badgering him about doing a table at the Fair, and he finally agreed, though he didn't bother to show up until the last day of the event, when FMU staffers would traditionally catch a price break on the dealer fee. As he began carting his records in, he plopped a filthy box of 45s down on my dealer check-in desk and said: "Watch these. I have to go talk my way out of a goddam parking ticket", and then promptly excused himself back out onto 19th Street. Sunday morning dealer check-in was comparatively slow to the other days, so I began flipping through the box of unpriced 45s, nearly all of which were the sort to give me heart palpitations. Original singles by artists I loved, but which I'd never been able to acquire such early releases by: The Scientists, Johnny Thunders, Sun City Girls, Jah Wobble, Wipers, and so on. I began making a pile of the most desirable 45s, knowing I might have to evacuate my bank account in order to acquire them. (Which even during those better economic times, was not really an option for me.) Vinyl fetishists, as I had learned, often waxed romantic of blundering into some hole-in-the-wall record shop with no expectations, only to discover THE MOTHERLODE: A treasure-trove of all the definitive musical artifacts of one's own personal aesthetic—or however one chose to fancy it, anyway. This was that instance for me, only I hadn't needed to seek it out—Crowe had dropped a complete historical record of everything I was in love with right in front of me on a freezing loading dock in Chelsea at 7 AM. To say that I was pretty floored would be putting it mildly.
The pile was probably twenty or thirty records tall by the time he returned from his dealings with the NYPD meter maid. In the realm of Record Fair price indices, I knew the eventual transaction could end up costing me that month's rent, so I'd been trying to cherrypick only the best stuff. This was no easy task: nearly everything in the box looked amazing and was in what Crowe sometimes called "tits condition".
"You want those?", he asked when he saw me flipping through the pile. "Gimme, I'll work out the damage for you" he said, snatching the records away from me. As he flipped through them, he began adding numbers out loud which quickly climbed into the triple digits, occasionally pausing on a record to either smirk, nod approvingly, or wave it in my face while demanding to know "why the hell [I wanted] this piece of shit". Then, back to the addition, eventually reaching a total that I knew was going to sting badly. In my mind, I'd already begun the mournful re-filing of singles I would have to pass on in order to get the price down, and that's when Crowe said:
"Alright, Lupica... Twenty bucks for the pile—cash and carry. I am hooking you up, do you hear me? Don't ever fucking forget this."
For no reasons other than to satisfy my own enthusiasm and to finally publish this heavily doctored image of WPRB's old broadcast control board that's been soiling my hard drive for a few years, here's a stellar track by the Lame Drivers.
Musical comparisons to Pell Mell are pretty rare around the bloggysphere, for reasons that are either too sad or ridiculous to go into, but I swear it's a point worth making in this instance. Despite the fact that 2010 was not a banner year for my explorations in new sounds (having a kid will do that to you), this track will hopefully find a place of honor on best of the year rundowns besides my own. Stream or download the Lame Drivers' "Working Song" from the Various Deficiencies Vol. 1 compilation using the player below. Looking for more by the Lame Drivers? Right this way.
Here's a picture of the utterly badass apple pie that my wife made for Thanksgiving. As you may have figured out from the general lack of dessert-chatter on this blog, I'm not much of a sweets guy. Choosing sides in the eternal bloody war between sweets and savories is a no brainer as far as I'm concerned, but this was the rare exception to that unpopular opinion of mine.
I used to enjoy baking pies and other sweets because I (incorrectly) assumed it was easier than cooking. Nowadays, I much prefer the latter because no matter how badly you butcher or intentionally veer from a recipe, you can almost always salvage/correct things with a bit of creativity and be thrilled with the results. Baking doesn't usually work that way: You laboriously measure every ingredient, follow the directions word-for-word, toss it in the oven with a panicked prayer, and then fifteen minutes later discover that you've accidentally omitted some critical component. In most cases, you are now officially screwed, and I have found myself in precisely that situation too many times to call myself a serious baker anymore. I'm in awe of those who can submit to baking's militaristic nature, but I prefer measuring by guesstimation, adding wine to the pot even when none is called for, and irresponsibly changing or skipping steps for no reason other than to satisfy my own whimsy.
HOWEVER: When my honey is doing the legwork, I am floored to act as wide receiver for her feats of sugary wonder, and that's where this pie steps into the arena. It would be fair to liken the crust to classic, Jersey shore Elephant Ears, and the apple/cranberry/maple filling was nothing shy of straight-up gooey godhead. Here are the Eaters revealing even more universal truths where matters of "Them Fucking Apples" are concerned. [Stream or download using the player below. Actually, grab the whole album while you're there, especially if you dig waaaay left-of-center hip hop a la Curse ov Dialect.]
One of the selfish (but great) things about being involved with WFMU is how it's repeatedly granted me the opportunity to interact with my musical heroes. I'm no starfucker, but there's something to be said for dancing right nextdoor to the fantasy, and how doing so often reveals details of Our Most Exalted Rock Gods which are strangely absent from the written histories. For instance, did you know that Joe Strummer smells of tobacco and peppermint, Donovan is a bit like a leprechaun, or that Anton Newcombe is actually a really sweet guy?