Underworld

Another benefit of being wired (in the on-line, not the high-anxiety, sense) was that in addition to the unlimited quantity of music available for download, he could stream radio stations from across the country. One of his favorite stations in 2002 was probably Santa Monica's KCRW, whom he had discovered from their Morning Becomes Eclectic podcasts.  He listened to the station regularly at work, and due to them he came to regard Underworld's A Hundred Days Off, which they played in heavy rotation that year, as the best record of 2002, or at least the one he most remembers.

Once again he didn't go to Music Midtown that year.  He hadn't been back to the festival since 1995, was two years away from turning 50, and couldn't dance with the energy of the guy in the Underworld video (although he was getting closer to levitating what with the Zen training and all).  For what it's worth, the line up that year included Robert Randolph and the Family Band, War, Jethro Tull, Darius Rucker, Cee-Lo, Francine Reed, Bo Diddley, David Lee Roth, Michelle Malone, Butch Walker, Hoobastank, Incubus, Mark Farmer of Grand Funk Railroad, The Producers, The Georgia Satellites, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Savoy Brown, Joan Jett & The Blackhawks, Bone Thugs n' Harmony, The Ohio Players, Earth Wind & Fire, The Zydeco Boneshakers, O.A.R., Tinsley Ellis, Skid Row, Kid Rock, Dropsonic, 30 Seconds to Mars, Jack Johnson, Pete Yorn, Counting Crows, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, June Carter Cash, Don McLean, Edwin McCain, Mike Mills, Cindy Wilson, Angie Aparo, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Bonnie Raitt, Perpetual Groove, Rick James, Ja Rule, Israel Vibration, Joe Bonamassa, Mother's Finest, Better Than Ezra, Journey, Remy Zero, Garbage, Puddle of Mudd, and No Doubt.  

Little Tybee at 529, Atlanta, June 28, 2014

Okay.  We interrupt the self-indulgent, egotistical, and egocentric retrospective of the music of years past to fast-forward back to the here and now to post about last night's show by Atlanta's Little Tybee, who are starting off on a nationwide tour, which actually kicked off Friday night in Savannah, but came up to Atlanta last night for a proper send off at a packed and sold-out 529.  But before getting into all of that, let's talk about the great opening set by Asheville's Giant Giants.   

Giant Giants is a percussion-heavy indie rock band featuring the usual electric guitar, keyboards and bass, but with two drummers, one on a traditional drum kit and one on varied percussion. In addition, lead singer Reid Weigner is just as likely to pick up drum sticks himself and play a floor tom as he is to play the guitar. The result, as you might expect, is a driving, tribal, almost prog-rock sound that kicked off the evening quite nicely.  

Athens' New Madrid pulled middle duty, with an exciting and driving set of indie guitar rock. I'm not sure where I've been or how I've missed them for so long, but rest assured, I will not be making that mistake again any longer.

I could go on about these guys, but I'd prefer to let their music do the speaking for me.

So that takes us to headliners Little Tybee, a great band which just keeps getting better and better every time I hear them.

Case in point is the most recent song, Don't Quit Your Day Job, that they've released from their forthcoming, fourth album.  

Front man Brock Scott dedicated last night's set to WRAS Album 88, Georgia State's student-run radio station, which was on its last night of broadcast before a hostile takeover by PBS.  He asked for a moment of silence, but the excited audience couldn't contain their cat calls and yells, so instead Scott had to compromise and ask for a shout out for the station, to which the audience raucously complied.  

The Little Tybee tour will take them to Portland, Oregon next month, where they will be headlining at the Doug Fir Lounge, my favorite music venue in that fine city and probably one of my favorite venues overall.  It really is a fine place to hear bands and serves as the MusicFest Northwest (RIP) headquarters for KEXP, and although I won't be able to make it out there for that set,  I would love to hear how they're received by a Portland audience accustomed to like-minded artists such as Typhoon and Ages and Ages.  If anyone from Little Tybee happens to read this, do yourselves a favor while you're there and enjoy my MFNW Breakfast of Champions of veggie chili, cornbread, and black coffee at the diner upstairs from the lounge in the Jupiter Hotel (but please don't stay overnight there in a street-level room). 

Dude, I was there!  Brock Scott tweeted a picture of me just before the set as the intrepid 529 soundman made a heroic, last-minute field splice on the vocals monitor, and the photo got posted to Facebook and picked up by the Deer Bear Wolf Tumblr page and points beyond (including here!). 

In summary, last night was a fun evening with three great bands.  The Little Tybee tour continues tomorrow at the Georgia Theater in Athens, where they open for Hundred Waters, who'll be playing here in Atlanta at The Earl on Tuesday night with the dream-pop duo GEMS opening. The Little Tybee tour heads out west after the July 4 holiday and will take them up the Pacific Coast from San Diego to Seattle, and includes a stop in Daytrotter's Illinois studio on the way back.  Let's wish them a successful and safe trip, and we hope to see them here in Atlanta again when they return.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.