Mike Watt's online diary of the Stooges recording sessions w/Steve Albini.
My review of KHLYST, from PTW.
A little piece on metal tokenism, from the Scene.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
500% MAN
Just downloaded the 2CD Bo Diddley Chess box. Holy fuckin' hell. You don't listen to records by him or Chuck Berry or Little Richard for a few years, and you start to forget. You start to view them through the misty haze of memory and the fog of their place in Rock History, and you forget how goddamn anarchistic those records were. I mean, Billy Zoom of the punk band X stole every one of his licks from Chuck Berry, but when you listen to the original recording of "Roll Over Beethoven" you realize that Zoom cleaned 'em up! These Bo Diddley sides are so raw, so soaked in from-the-bottomless-pits-of-hell reverb, they're psychedelic long before there was any such word. And Little Richard's Specialty Records sides are just flat-out explosive—there's no other word for it. He sounds like he's gonna overload the microphones with every note.
But never mind all that crazy talk. The 1950s were a time of boring conformity in America, and we were very nearly doomed to a life of Leave It To Beaver stultification until the Beatles came along to save us from ourselves. Right? Right?
But never mind all that crazy talk. The 1950s were a time of boring conformity in America, and we were very nearly doomed to a life of Leave It To Beaver stultification until the Beatles came along to save us from ourselves. Right? Right?
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
KEN JOHNSON, R.I.P.
Ken Johnson died. You probably didn't know him. He was my best friend for almost 20 years. He came home to his apartment last night and fell asleep. His girlfriend discovered him this morning. His little brother just called me. They don't know yet what happened, or what the arrangements will be.
Ken was the guy I'd always go to shows with. The one person I knew in high school who I still hung out with. The first time I ever heard Keiji Haino was at CBGBs with Ken, in 1991. A decade later, Ken next to me at Irving Plaza, watching Ted Nugent, and eventually looked over and asked, "You're not appreciating this on any kind of ironic level at all, are you?" He went to two Ozzfests with me (2004 and 2005). We went to CBGB one night because there was nothing else to do, with about eight bands on the bill, and were standing by the pool table talking when gradually our heads began to perk up and one of us said "What the hell was that?" That was Thinking Fellers Union Local 282; Ken went backstage and bought a T-shirt and one of their albums, on vinyl. We saw Slayer; we saw Fishbone with the 2 Live Crew opening up; we went to the Vision Festival almost every year; we saw an all-night King Sunny Ade gig in 1990. So many more gigs, too, in so many places I can't even remember them all. My wife has always had right of first refusal whenever I decide to go see a band, but anytime she said no, I knew I could invite Ken and he'd be up for it. He came with me to see GG Allin at Space At Chase in 1992; you can see us walking out the door afterward (the show cost us $10 each and lasted 10 minutes before the cops arrived) in the movie Hated.
We met in an art class in high school. He listened to the Cure, and Metallica, and not much else, back then. I gave him Ministry and the Minutemen, and we started exploring other stuff together. Occasionally, early on, I'd talk him into buying something neither of us was sure about, like Diamanda Galas's You Must Be Certain Of The Devil, by swearing up and down that I'd heard it, and it was brilliant. On the weekends, we'd sit on his couch watching Headbanger's Ball and 120 Minutes and Video Jukebox, a real-life Beavis & Butt-Head. We successfully shoplifted an 8-VHS set of Berlin Alexanderplatz from the local video store once, just to see if we could; never did watch the damn thing.
Another old friend, Mike Nuzzo, a guy I'd known since the fourth grade, died a year or two ago. My two best friends from childhood are both dead now. I'm gonna be 35 in December. What the fuck kind of world is this? And who's gonna go to gigs with me now?
Ken was the guy I'd always go to shows with. The one person I knew in high school who I still hung out with. The first time I ever heard Keiji Haino was at CBGBs with Ken, in 1991. A decade later, Ken next to me at Irving Plaza, watching Ted Nugent, and eventually looked over and asked, "You're not appreciating this on any kind of ironic level at all, are you?" He went to two Ozzfests with me (2004 and 2005). We went to CBGB one night because there was nothing else to do, with about eight bands on the bill, and were standing by the pool table talking when gradually our heads began to perk up and one of us said "What the hell was that?" That was Thinking Fellers Union Local 282; Ken went backstage and bought a T-shirt and one of their albums, on vinyl. We saw Slayer; we saw Fishbone with the 2 Live Crew opening up; we went to the Vision Festival almost every year; we saw an all-night King Sunny Ade gig in 1990. So many more gigs, too, in so many places I can't even remember them all. My wife has always had right of first refusal whenever I decide to go see a band, but anytime she said no, I knew I could invite Ken and he'd be up for it. He came with me to see GG Allin at Space At Chase in 1992; you can see us walking out the door afterward (the show cost us $10 each and lasted 10 minutes before the cops arrived) in the movie Hated.
We met in an art class in high school. He listened to the Cure, and Metallica, and not much else, back then. I gave him Ministry and the Minutemen, and we started exploring other stuff together. Occasionally, early on, I'd talk him into buying something neither of us was sure about, like Diamanda Galas's You Must Be Certain Of The Devil, by swearing up and down that I'd heard it, and it was brilliant. On the weekends, we'd sit on his couch watching Headbanger's Ball and 120 Minutes and Video Jukebox, a real-life Beavis & Butt-Head. We successfully shoplifted an 8-VHS set of Berlin Alexanderplatz from the local video store once, just to see if we could; never did watch the damn thing.
Another old friend, Mike Nuzzo, a guy I'd known since the fourth grade, died a year or two ago. My two best friends from childhood are both dead now. I'm gonna be 35 in December. What the fuck kind of world is this? And who's gonna go to gigs with me now?
Monday, October 02, 2006
RAWK
Lately all I want to listen to is early-'70s blues-rock/proto-metal. It doesn't matter how big or how obscure the band was. I like Cactus as well as ZZ Top, Buffalo as well as Sir Lord Baltimore. Deep Purple, Atomic Rooster, Mountain, Cream, AC/DC, Blue Cheer (and Randy Holden's solo disc, Population II), Grand Funk Railroad,Ted Nugent, the James Gang...they're all in my iPod. My copy of the first Josefus album, from 1970, hasn't come in the mail yet; we'll see how much I like them. I have also thus far failed to investigate Humble Pie and Free, but they're sure to get their turn soon enough.
This stuff has always been paradigmatic, for me. When I was studying audio engineering not too long ago, I didn't want to learn how to make pristine records like Steely Dan's Aja, much as I love those guys. I wanted to learn how to put three or four guys in a room with some mics and some amps and get a sound as stripped-down, yet crushing, as the Grand Funk album.
Anybody making music that doesn't follow these rules is just gonna have to work harder to gain my approval (assuming they're seeking it) than a random trio or quartet of knuckle-draggers cranking out variations on "Baby Please Don't Go" or "Mississippi Queen" for 40 minutes. The visceral pleasure of big, stomping, feedback-laced crunch-rock has a grip on me nothing else can quite match, not even death metal or free jazz. Much as I love tech-death (both old and new school - Cynic, Atheist and Death did one thing, Neuraxis and Necrophagist and Arsis do a whole different thing, but both are fine by me), it doesn't have that swing that Mountain or Cream or even the Jeff Beck Group has. (Though the Beck albums - Truth and Beck-Ola, both about to be reissued by Legacy with a bunch of bonus tracks each - have a really fractured rhythm thing going on that's almost anti-rock at more than a few points. They really seem to be actively subverting, say, "Jailhouse Rock," turning the original's groove into a lurching, square-wheeled-car rampage. And I'm sorry, but Rod Stewart was always a horrible vocalist. It sounds like he recorded "Shapes Of Things" in a single take, and if there were any notes there to be hit, nobody pointed them out to him. His reputation is totally inexplicable to me.)
Anyway, I don't know how long this phase is gonna last, and I don't know how it's gonna interfere with my job as a world music magazine editor or my freelance work as a jazz critic. But right now no album of, um, highly evolved music, even one as brilliant as, say, Jason Moran's Artist In Residence, sounds half as good to me as Sir Lord Baltimore's "I Got A Woman."
This stuff has always been paradigmatic, for me. When I was studying audio engineering not too long ago, I didn't want to learn how to make pristine records like Steely Dan's Aja, much as I love those guys. I wanted to learn how to put three or four guys in a room with some mics and some amps and get a sound as stripped-down, yet crushing, as the Grand Funk album.
Anybody making music that doesn't follow these rules is just gonna have to work harder to gain my approval (assuming they're seeking it) than a random trio or quartet of knuckle-draggers cranking out variations on "Baby Please Don't Go" or "Mississippi Queen" for 40 minutes. The visceral pleasure of big, stomping, feedback-laced crunch-rock has a grip on me nothing else can quite match, not even death metal or free jazz. Much as I love tech-death (both old and new school - Cynic, Atheist and Death did one thing, Neuraxis and Necrophagist and Arsis do a whole different thing, but both are fine by me), it doesn't have that swing that Mountain or Cream or even the Jeff Beck Group has. (Though the Beck albums - Truth and Beck-Ola, both about to be reissued by Legacy with a bunch of bonus tracks each - have a really fractured rhythm thing going on that's almost anti-rock at more than a few points. They really seem to be actively subverting, say, "Jailhouse Rock," turning the original's groove into a lurching, square-wheeled-car rampage. And I'm sorry, but Rod Stewart was always a horrible vocalist. It sounds like he recorded "Shapes Of Things" in a single take, and if there were any notes there to be hit, nobody pointed them out to him. His reputation is totally inexplicable to me.)
Anyway, I don't know how long this phase is gonna last, and I don't know how it's gonna interfere with my job as a world music magazine editor or my freelance work as a jazz critic. But right now no album of, um, highly evolved music, even one as brilliant as, say, Jason Moran's Artist In Residence, sounds half as good to me as Sir Lord Baltimore's "I Got A Woman."
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