Up with the birds again

I may have mentioned that I am getting up at 5:30 these days. Mostly it sucks, and I am walking around like a zombie half the time, but there is one good thing: by 9 a.m. when I sit down to write this ridiculous blog, I have already listened to two, three records and run 6-10 miles.

About my run this morning, let me just say that I started out in fog and very dim light and that, with three miles or so to go, the sun broke through and everything turned to soft colors like the inside of an oyster shell. I ran from town, along the Connecticut River, and though we are somewhat past peak, the trees are still radioactively, psychedelically colorful, some of them as if they had caught on fire and others like they got some acid mixed in with the ground water.

About the music, I’m not going to talk about The Joshua Tree because I mostly listen to that with my son (who had to be at school early this morning, earlier even than the very-early bus, so I drove), and you have undoubtedly already made up your mind about it one way or the other.

However, I will mention Elliott Brood’s Mountain Meadows, a really very fine rough-house country-ish album, with banjo (expected) and garage-y group shouts of “hey, hey, hey!” (unexpected). Mark Sasso and the rest of Elliott Brood (a band name, not a guy) is from Toronto. They probably know the Sadies -- my guess is that they would all get along really well. Mountain Meadows is the band’s second album, and it’s out now on Six Shooter records.

Here they are playing “Write It All Down for You” which is just such a good song.

I’ve also been listening to Now It Can Be Told: Devo at the Palace 12/9/88 a good bit, since buying it for $5 in the bin at Turn It Up. I didn’t actually have any Devo anymore, and being the age I am, they obviously played a role in my formative years…so it’s been sort of fun, but I’d forgotten how kitschy they could be. The album starts with kind of an unplugged version of “Jocko Homo” but gets going about halfway through with “Girl U Want” and “Whip It.” It ends with a medley that includes “Shout” “Disco Dancer” and, oddly, “Somewhere” from West Side Story.

Here they are in their heyday, eight years before the concert that I’ve been listening to:


And finally, Introducing Brilliant Colors is absolutely kicking my ass. I had it on a random mix yesterday while I was running right next to the Au Pairs’ “You” (for reasons I won’t go into, I have to listen to random mixes in alphabetical order, by artist name, or my iPod gets very confused), and it won, hands down. So I listened to the whole thing today and it totally rips…hope I’ll get to review it somewhere. I wanted to do it last summer when it came out on some tiny little label, but they had run out of copies by the time I asked and anyway passed this band onto the slightly bigger time. If you like late 1970s girl punk, it’s sort of in that vein…really fun, have to listen to it 7-8 more times to get a handle on it.

Here they are in Brooklyn last summer

I’ve been busy, but nothing to show for it

So I’ve been writing up a storm lately, but no one’s running my stuff, so nothing to post.

(I have a really nice interview with Fennesz that PopMatters has been sitting on since January…I’m thisclose to saying fuck it and just posting it here.)

But meanwhile, I interviewed Allen Toussaint earlier this week and just finished my interview piece on him. He’s written some very famous songs – “Fortune Teller”, “Sneaking Sally through the Alley”, “Get Out of My Life, Woman,” “Southern Nights,” etc. – which have been covered by lots and lots of bands. This is maybe the oddest, and also one of my favorites…Devo covering “Working in the Coalmine,” which was originally written for Lee Dorsey.

The Baron…sort of 007 lite

No music today, but PopMatters is running my review of the 1960s television show, The Baron.

“The Baron, which ran for one season from 1966 to 1967, came from the same studio as The Saint, the television serial that launched Roger Moore’s career, and it shared many of that show’s basic elements: baroque spy plots, improbably beautiful women, fantasy jet set lifestyle accoutrements, and a fascination with – but not any real knowledge of – foreign cultures. It also had a certain amount of technical infrastructure in common with The Saint, including one alley-like set that appears in a slightly different guise in almost every episode. And as in The Saint, the Bond series and other spy fiction of the era, there is a then modern, but now old-fashioned whiff of the ‘60s.”

The rest of the review:

And, in an only tangentially relevant attempt to add some tunes, here’s Devo doing “Secret Agent Man”