Saturday, June 28, 2014

9/11


How do you write a recap of 2001 without answering the question, "Where were you on 9/11?"  It's become the next generation's "Where were you when you heard about the Kennedy assassination?"  In his case, he was boarding a school bus after a day in the Third Grade (the latter question) and on the fourth day of a week-long Zen meditation retreat (the former question).   What he was doing at a week-long Zen meditation retreat needs a little explaining.

While he was dead in 1999 and 2000, he had thrown himself into his work and by the end of that second year he had not used a single day of his annual vacation time (dead men don't take vacations).  Management denied his request to let the time roll over into the next year and basically ordered him to go home and take most of the month of December off and to not ever let that much time accrue again, and he suddenly found himself home alone with nothing to do and nowhere to go for an almost month-long holiday "stay-cation."

On one of the very first days of this poorly planned time off, his computer broke down and he could not access the internet.  He couldn't imagine facing a month home alone without an internet connection (how would he download music?), so he went off to a Barnes & Noble to find a how-to book on computer troubleshooting.

While he was there, among the "For Dummies" series of books (Automobile Maintenance for Dummies, German Language for Dummies, Computer Troubleshooting for Dummies, etc.), he noticed a book titled Zen Buddhism for Dummies.   He had always been interested in the topic, and had taken an elective course in Eastern Religions while in college and had read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and some Alan Watts back in the 70s.  He bought the book along with some other light reading for his time off, and eventually restored his internet connection and spent the rest of the holiday month at home reading and downloading music.

He didn't find the Zen Buddhism for Dummies book to be particularly informative, but it did spark his curiosity enough for him to search the web, now that he was back on line, for local Zen resources in Atlanta and by the beginning of 2001, he found himself formally pursuing a study of Zen as a student under the guidance of a recognized Zen teacher.  Like many neophytes, he initially pursued the study with a newcomer's zeal and diligence, and by September 2001 he had already participated in one previous week-long retreat and several weekend retreats.  Management was glad to see him using up rather than hoarding his vacation time.

On the morning of the fourth day of the second retreat, an announcement was made of the September 11 attacks, and many of the retreat participants chose to leave to be home with their families.  He chose to stay, and for the next several days was blissfully unaware of the angry rhetoric apparently spewed over the radio and television.  He hadn't watched the video clip of that plane flying into the building over and over and over again, and by the end of the week, his heart wasn't filled with hatred and rage against the "enemy."


Leaving the retreat was a surreal experience. Even though the retreat was held locally, the America he came back home to was much angrier and more intolerant and more militant than the America he had left.  His friends and co-workers had seemingly transformed over the course of the week he was away into rip-snorting, mouth-breathing, Islamophobic neocons, but in his own heart, he felt not hatred but compassion and sorrow for the delusion and ignorance of the hijackers, and could find few others with any sympathy or tolerance for his point of view.  America was getting itself ready to go bomb themselves some Muslims, and he couldn't have been more opposed to that action.

One way that he inoculated himself from the hatred and anger around him was by immersing himself in Arabic art and music.  Listen to another man's music and you'll understand something of his heart and soul, he reasoned, and William S. Burroughs once wrote that Arabic music seemed to work on "hashish time," evolving without discernable beginnings as it weaves and drifts endlessly through the air. With the seemingly limitless resources of the internet at his fingertips, he started downloading and listening to Near and Middle Eastern musicians such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, DJ Cheb i Sabbah, and Natacha Atlas.  





Probably one of the most interesting and provocative of the lot was the prolific Bryn Jones, who recorded under the name Muslimgauze.  His first reaction to hearing this music was wanting to check that the recording wasn't damaged - was it really supposed to sound like that? Maybe a speaker wire was loose? The sound was fuzzy and static-laden, a lo-fi soundscape with sudden drops and rebounds in volume. Album and song titles (e.g., Hebron Massacre, The Rape of Palestine, and Vote Hezbollah) were intentionally provocative and confrontational.  "The political facts of Palestine, Afghanistan and Iran influence the music of Muslimgauze," he declared on the back cover of one album.  Jones passed away in 1999 and never lived to see the events of 9/11 or their aftermath.



So that's what he was quite deliberately listening to back in 2001.  It wasn't popular then (or now) but it kept the hatred at bay.  He still feels that his positions then were correct and that history is proving that the wars were enormous errors of historical proportions.  But at the very least, he was no longer dead - he had reincarnated into a pro-tolerance, anti-war, pacifistic Zen Buddhist.  

Friday, June 27, 2014

The Internets



The brief era of Napster lasted only from June 1999 to July 2001, but it had a profound and well documented impact on the music industry.  He was only an occasional Napster user himself, but downloaded a lot of music during this period and later from Usenet MP3 groups.  He felt justified in the free downloading, as did a lot of Napster users, in that he had already once purchased a lot of the music he was downloading in either LP or cassette version, or both.  But with time he got used to obtaining music for free and just downloaded because it was out there and available to be had.

Much of this was before he had access to high-speed cable modems, and he remembers that the very first album he downloaded in its entirety, Steely Dan's 2000 comeback album Two Against Nature, took him an entire weekend on a 128k dial-up modem, starting on Friday evening and not finishing until late on Sunday. By the way, he was fairly disappointed by that album.

But things got better.  It almost took arm-twisting on his part, but he finally got his cable provider, Charter Communication, to set him up with a high-speed connection, and at the same time, more and more music was being uploaded to the newsgroups.  Soon, he was recreating not only his entire LP collection from the past 30 years - rock, jazz, blues, and various other genres - but also filling in all of the blanks in the collection until he had nearly everything that had been released by the artists he liked, including box sets, reissues, remixes, B-sides, etc.

One of the consequences of all of this downloading was that he was spending so much time looking backward into the past, downloading recordings from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, that he wasn't paying much attention to what was being recorded right then.  He had even started to download albums from artists and trends the had missed over the previous decades - electronic house music, Indonesian trance music, lounge, Malian afro-beat, etc. - which even further distanced him from the music of 2000.  Eventually, his hard drive was virtually overflowing with MP3s to the point where he had to upgrade computers on a couple of occasions just for more storage space, and he burned more CDs than he could ever hope to even listen to in one lifetime.  He still has whole storage boxes of CDs that he still hasn't yet heard and is unlikely to ever play. 

He had owned a few of Medeski, Martin & Wood's groove-based jazz albums before the downloading had begun, but they were one of the bands that he kept finding posted to both the jazz and the rock boards and he downloaded everything by them that he could find.  It being such an acquisitive and eclectic year for him, that no artist, album, or song stands out to him as the "sound of 2000," but in recognition of the amount of MMW he downloaded that year, here's The Dropper.

For what it's worth, the 2000 Music Midtown lineup included Speech form Arrested Development, Bob Weir & Ratdog, Collective Soul, Creed, Guster, Jeff Healey, Johnny Hyde, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Kitty Snyder, Koko Taylor, Meshell Ndegeocello, moe., Nas, Our Lady Peace, Sevendust, Southern Culture On The Skids, Susan Tedeschi, The Allman Brothers, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Tinsley Ellis, Travis, and Ultrababyfat, but once again, he didn't go.  He was still dead inside.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

1999 Mr.Bungle



If 1997 found him stuck in the present with Blur and 1998 had him anticipating the next decade of indie rock via Mercury Rev, 1999 found him looking back in time with the release of the third Mr. Bungle album, California.

He had been a Mr. Bungle fan that whole decade, starting in 1991 when he discovered their first self-titled album while living upstate New York.  Songs from Mr. Bungle could have been posted for that year, but it would have disrupted the narrative flow and, besides, 1991 really was the year of Nirvana.  He could have posted something from Disco Volante for 1995, but how would that have fit in among My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and Music Midtown? 

Speaking of Music Midtown, bands that played the festival in 1999 included Everclear, Hole, OutKast, Wilco, Ben Harper, Berlin, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Blueground Undergrass, Bobby ’Blue’ Bland, Branford Marsalis, The Count Basie Orchestra, Cubanismo!, Destiny’s Child, Dr. John, Etta James, The Funky Meters, Galactic, George Thorogood, The Goo Goo Dolls, Issac Hayes, Salt-n-Pepa, Widespread Panic, Willie Nelson, Iggy Pop, and Jonathan Richman.  But he didn't go that year, violating his own Jonathan Richman vow, because he had decided that at 45, he was too old to go hear live rock music anymore and besides, it just didn't seem as much fun without his little red-headed girlfriend.  He hadn't noticed it at the time, but from 1998 to 2000, he was a dead man once again, just like at the end of the 80s.


Despite being dead, though, he still liked Mr. Bungle, and even though 1999's California was less experimental and more accessible than their previous albums, it wasn't just a case of yet another band putting out a mediocre album in the late 90s, it was a case of a subversive band being even more subversive by presenting their music with a more mainstream sound on the surface, but a deeper insanity hidden just beneath the surface.

As a band, Mr. Bungle had only one "official" video that immediately got banned from MTV for graphic imagery of twitching bodies dangling from nooses, but these two videos are both fan produced and really quite impressive for their high quality and narrative skill.  And if the singer's voice sounds familiar to you, it's because Mike Patton was also the vocalist for Faith No More, among other bands.  Patton was quite an exceptional singer and a utility player for a number of outfits but, apparently, he was not God.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Mercury Rev


In the 90s, most new, cutting-edge music was called "alternative."  The new sound had been called "New Wave" and "punk" in the 80s, "progressive" in the 70s, and "underground" in the 60s.  

In 1998, he started listening to a band called Mercury Rev out of upstate New York (initially, he thought they were out of Albany, but they were actually from Buffalo, the other end of the state). They played a kind of music that couldn't be called "alternative," as it sounded nothing like anything else being played at that time under the very broad umbrella of alternative rock.  It wasn't being played on the alt rock radio stations and the only reason that he had heard it all was because of WRAS, Album 88.  In retrospect, both by distribution and by sound, Mercury Rev were probably the first true "indie" band, a label that would later be slapped on most anything new coming out in the next century.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

1997


Of all the years of this retrospective, he had the hardest time picking a song for 1997.  In a lot of ways, it was a terrible year for music - everything on the radio was all Everclear and Third Eye Blind, or smug and pompous Brit-pop, or American power-pop disguised as punk.  The music press and MTV kept trying to convince people that they really needed to take The Spice Girls seriously (as it turned out, you didn't).  A really awful year, and even good bands came out that year with sub-par records (yes, he's looking at you, The Sundays), with the notable exception of Radiohead's OK Computer, which he didn't even listen to until years later.

Given all that, the song that best sums up that garish, cartoonish year for music was Blur's garish, cartoonish Song 2, a 99X radio staple and the soundtrack to a great many television commercials for years to come.


It didn't help matters that in 1997, he wound up drifting apart from his flight-attendant girlfriend.  She seemed to be going through some dark times of her own and while he tried to be present and supportive, she became more and more withdrawn and distant and by the end of the year she decided she had to move out.  They still saw each other into 1998 after she had left, but the tension became too great for them to bear continuing the relationship much longer.


She had grown up in Hawaii, but her family had eventually settled in the Pacific Northwest before she took the job with Delta and had to move to ATL.  But while they were together, she had instilled in him a dream of eventually moving to Washington State.  Her grandmother had a house in Friday Harbor, a small town on Puget Sound accessible only by boat, and while they could have moved in there when Grandma eventually passed, they also talked about moving to Anacortes or Port Townsend or even Seattle itself.   Even after she had exited his life, the seed that she had planted remained, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he still fantasized about a life somewhere up in the Northwest.  He even read David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, which only made the fantasy more vivid.

If there was one thing he had learned in his Atlanta-to-Albany-to-Pittsburgh-to-Atlanta escapade, it was that the one thing he couldn't run away from was himself.  But in 1997, 10 years after Paul Weller had saved his life on that bridge, little did he know that 10 years later he would finally get his chance to move to the Pacific Northwest.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Atlanta 1996



1996 was kind of a big deal in Atlanta as it was the year the Olympic Games were held in his home city.  In the mists of his memory, the Olympics overshadow any musical event.

He didn't go to Music Midtown that year.  He had been dating a new girlfriend since the autumn of 1995, a Delta flight attendant who was away at work as much as she was home (three days on and three days off). She moved in with him at the beginning of '96, and when the Music Midtown weekend rolled around, they preferred to enjoy each other's company in the solitude of home rather than immerse themselves in the crowds and the heat and the noise of the festival.


They traveled a lot, a benefit of her employment by an airline, scuba diving in South Florida or the Bahamas, weekends in New York and Boston, backpacking and dayhiking in the North Georgia and North Carolina mountains.  They occasionally went out to hear music, but not as much as they dined out or went to movies. CD shopping trips were a weekend ritual, each buying three or four discs, and when they got back home they competed over who got to hear who's purchases first.  Their tastes were different, but they usually managed to come back home with mutually agreeable selections of current rock, some jazz, some blues, maybe a soundtrack or two, and a lot of salsa and tropicalia, a taste that they'd picked up on diving trips down to Miami.  Celia Cruz and Cesaria Evora were as frequently purchased as Depeche Mode, Beck, and Bjork.


One of the songs that stands out to him from that period was from the collaboration of Brian Eno, U2, and Luciano Pavarotti known as Passengers.  The song Miss Sarajevo captured the gestalt of the times - the Balkan Wars and the Clinton presidency, as well as their own eclectic tastes in music.  



For those who are too young to remember or whose memories are short, the siege of Sarajevo stemmed from the ethnic struggle between Serb and Bosnian government forces in the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs had surrounded the capital and initiated the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, lasting from April 1992 until February 1996. Sarajevo was reduced to ruins, and the citizens had no access to public transit, water, gas and electricity.  But the besieged Sarajevans stubbornly refused to be demoralized, and despite all of the horror and bloodshed around them, in 1993 they still held their annual beauty pageant, won that year by a 17-year-old blonde named Inela Nogić.  A documentary film of the event and of the seige of Saravejo contains a clip of the contestants gamely holding up a sign reading "Please don't kill us."

So for a year in which Olympics, travel, international politics, and romance overshadowed music, he offers Miss Sarajevo as his representation of 1996.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

His Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

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There are a lot of pictures in this particular post. It might take your computer a moment or two to download everything.

1995, as it turned out, was a pretty good year in Atlanta for outdoor concerts and events. In April, something called the Sixth Annual Great Atlanta Pot Festival was held in Piedmont Park, finally giving him his chance to see the band Cypress Hill.

By 1995, Cypress Hill was already a highly successful Latino-American hip-hop outfit, considered by many to be early and seminal exemplars of West Coast rap. They had already released their first two groundbreaking albums by the time of the Pot Festival, and while it was a bit surprising to see a band of their stature at a small, marginally legal event like the Piedmont Park festival, The Black Crowes had previously headlined the 1992 event with over 60,000 people reportedly attending. What's more, Cypress Hill had always been staunch advocates for cannabis, as demonstrated in their breakthrough hit Insane In the Brain, featuring rapper B-Real's exaggeratedly high-pitched nasal vocals, for which he credits The Beastie Boys for inspiration.

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Black Uhuru, one of his favorite reggae bands, headlined the Pot Festival.  For the record, he first heard Black Uhuru on WRAS, Album 88, when they started playing the song Anthem. The album of the same name went on to win the first-ever Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album.

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That year, he also attended the Second Music Midtown Festival.  The 1995 Music Midtown line-up included Gov't Mule, Little Feat, Blind Boys of Alabama, Our Lady Peace, Collective Soul,  Edwin McCain, Chris Duarte, God Street Wine, Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies, The BoDeans, Matthew Sweet, Everything, The Band, Buckwheat Zydeco, Adam Ant, Bottle Rockets, Magnapop, Delbert McClinton, The Josh Joplin Group, Rebirth Brass Band, Cigar Store Indians, Bone Pony, Five Chinese Brothers (who were not REM under a different name, as rumored), Francine Reed, Gracie Moon, The Kentucky Headhunters, Matthew Kahler, Shawn Mullins, The Sounds of Blackness, Supreme Court, Jackopierce, Lonnie Brooks, The Cruel Sea, Memory Dean, and Murphy & Vidal.

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He recognizes a lot of the bands from his pictures of that festival, but there are also a lot of bands he can't recall.  Here's who he can identify:

CAKE

This wasn't his first time seeing Cake - they had played the inaugural festival the year before, and their quirky angular songs were alt-rock radio staples that year.
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TINSLEY ELLIS

A veteran bluesman with several smoking albums under his belt, Ellis looks to him now a little bit like Kenny Powers from Eastbound and Down.

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NRBQ, WITH THE SUN RA HORNS

Another veteran band, the unclassifiable NRBQ, were touring that year with "The Sun Ra Horns," but which turned out to be only two of the recently deceased bandleader's sidemen, Tyrone Hill and Dave Gordon. He's heard that when the band played around the Arkestra's home base of Philadelphia, saxophonist Marshall Allen and percussionist Donny Allen had also joined them.  Still, a little Sun Ra is better than none and goes a pretty long way.  

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THE VILLAGE PEOPLE

Let's see:  a leather-bound biker, an Indian chief, and a cop - it isn't hard to identify the band in these pictures.  Even in 1995, though, the band were an anachronistic holdover from the 70s disco era, but the audience still went nuts for them.  On a somewhat disappointing note, in interviews during this comeback tour and in some of their stage banter that night, they disavowed any association with the gay community and strenuously refuted any implication that they might be gay themselves.  Who cares dudes, and why turn your back on the very audience that brought you fame and fortune?  

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THE STONE ROSES

Manchester's The Stone Roses were already nearing the end of their run as a band at the time of their May 1995 Music Midtown appearance.  Some of the original band had already quit and remaining members were apparently feuding, and the tensions were apparent on stage. 

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Amazingly, someone captured the set on video, including the bass player's on-stage tantrum - fast forward to the 1:20 mark for the drama.  Shortly after this set, the band cancelled their June appearance at Glastonbury, and the lineup that played on the Atlanta stage that afternoon never performed together again.  


The sound and picture quality isn't that great, but seriously, who had an iPhone in 1995?

BUSH

Bush were still rising in popularity at the time of their 1995 music Midtown appearance, but their songs Everything's Zen, Machinehead, and Little Things were already getting heavy airplay on radio station 99X.  They'd return to Music Midtown in 2002 to play an evening set, but in 1995 they were still relegated to the daytime slot.

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JONATHAN RICHMAN

Jonathan Richman had been a favorite of his for years, from back in the mid 70s when Roadrunner was a Boston radio staple and through Jonathan's quirky early 80s records that were broadcast on Atlanta's WRAS, Album 88. He caught Richman live for the first time in the late 80s at a club (QE2) in the back of a White Castle hamburger joint in Albany, New York, and he vowed that night that he'd catch every Jonathan Richman show he possibly could from then on.  He's kept that vow, and by now has seen Jonathan a countless number of times, more times by far than any other performer.  His next scheduled Richman show is in Seattle on Labor Day weekend.

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So that's who he can recognize.  Here are some of the bands below that he can't.  Any help at all identifying any of these performers would be most appreciated.  Seriously, please.  Anyone?

He can't even tell if this first band is reggae, hip-hop, or rock, or some hybrid of all three.

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Any idea who this studious-looking guitarist is?

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Or these guys?

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Or these?

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Does anyone know who this all-female band is? (He assumes the drummer was probably female, too.)

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Or these two ladies?

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No clue below, but the hat suggests country, or at least alt-country or folk.

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Meanwhile, beyond these festivals and concerts and shows, somewhere around the time of the murder in the red barn, he had become a fan of the Chicago-based My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult.  He even got a chance to see them perform at Pittsburgh's Rosebud.  By 1995, when he wasn't attending Pot Festivals or Music Midtown, even though he had already turned 40 by then, he was cruising the dark streets of Atlanta playing 13 Above the Night, looking for love, looking for adventure, looking for action, looking for anything that was out there to be found.



At least he wasn't in fucking Albany any more.

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