Friday Random Ten on Saturday Morning

Finally, some time to sit, check in on the blogs (with frustrating dial-up slowness), and listen to iTunes. Currently it's at 18,325 songs, 62.22 GB. I was trying to keep it to 60 gigs, but didn't hold. I'm sure there's plenty I could cut if I really went through it. Maybe I'll find some to cut this morning.


So . . .


1. "Tandem Jump" - Jonathan Richman - I, Jonathan

Ah, good morning, Jonathan! This is a way to start a day: microwaved leftover coffee and big dumb fun from JoJo. A great, kinda-"surf," guitar instrumental (with comic talking intro), stripped-down and rocking.


2. "Are You Experienced?" - Devo - Shout

iTunes is showing me the love this morning; another favorite. Beat-heavy, vaguely fascistic-sounding cover of the Hendrix classic from the Band of De-Evolution. This album should be known better; it came out after their moment in the "accepted oddball" spotlight position of American pop culture (post-"Whip It" and the ten million TV appearances they did to promote Oh, No! It's Devo) when they had been used up by the masses, and tossed to the side. One of my favorite bands of all time, anyway.


3. "Forever Changed" - Lou Reed & John Cale - Songs for Drella

I'm glad I put some pieces from this song cycle in the computer; I often remember disliking more of it than I do. Reed was a big favorite of mine for some time, but I got a little sick of him after listening to the New York album a few too many times and getting to feel his songwriting had gotten sloppy, and not in a good way. When he decided to start promoting himself as a "poet," his lyrics went all to hell. I saw Reed and Cale perform this live at BAM, and I think that was another big step in growing annoyed with Reed -- I disliked a good 2/3rds of this one immediately. But this song is great, actually.

Beautiful vocal from Cale and guitar from Reed here.


4. "Comeback" - Reeves Gabrels - The Sacred Squall of Now

Pretty pop song from Bowie's (great and wild) primary guitarist and co-songwriter of the 90s. Not sure if his distorted, doubled, dissonant guitar works on the solo, but it's good on the lead line and chorus flourishes.


5. "Unity: The Third Coming" - James Brown & Africa Bambaataa - Star Time

Oh damn straight!

There's never much to say about James, and here he's got Bambaataa with him, and they're both workin it hard. This should be playing loud at a party; it's somewhat wasted on headphones in the morning.


6. "Eccentric Trick" - Eddie Warner - Le Jazzbeat! 2

Great funky late 60s library music track. Bizarre organ playing, almost Sun-Ra-ish, spiky, off-beat, on top of the solid groove. Great behind a car chase or something.


7. "Help Yourself" - Tom Jones - Rato's Nostalgia Collection

Damn, I've grown to love Tom Jones' voice. Good solid pop fluff with a great vocal and horn section. Oh, whoa, big chorus in at the end way off on the right channel; beautiful.


8. "Cherry Cherry" - The Music Machine - Turn On

Love this band, but this is a little loping and lackadaisical for them. Good vocal, in any case. Still a keeper; this band's too good.


9. "20th Century Boy" - Def Leppard - Yeah!

Ooh. Downloaded this recently in a group of 4 covers of this T.Rex song (which I love). All of them were "good" covers, but still paled to the original, or rather, were somewhat pointless as ALL the covers were as much a note-for-note, sound-for-sound, close-as-they-could-make-it copy of the T.Rex. So, why? Especially with vocalists all imitating Bolan's distinctive mannerisms.

So this is good, but I might as well be listening to it with Bolan singing and playing and Visconti producing.


10. "I Think I'm a Mother" - PJ Harvey - To Bring You My Love

Polly Jean's bumming me out here, man. Cool track I've heard but don't know well. Should remember it; it would be good in a show. Simple, quiet-but-firm guitar, repetitive and driving. Would work well behind a scene. Yeah. Really gotta remember this one.


Okay, so much for today -- seems short and incomplete. And nothing to cut, either. Well, I'll keep listening. I need more music.

Quotes Within Quotes

from The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus, 2006, in the section "American Pastoral: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer":


In 1978, in The American Jeremiad, the historian Sacvan Bercovitch described the American artist as pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be"; the result was retreat, the artist taking refuge in the creation of "a haven for what Thoreau called 'the only true America'." That meant a place of concord and love where everybody knows everybody else: precisely what, in "the End of the Innocence," in 1989, Don Henley, unafraid of the wind he was blowing through fields of true American corn, so perfectly called "that same small town in each of us."

For David Lynch, though, the same small town in each of us has no meaning as a haven; it has meaning only as a cauldron. "I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret," the philosopher Norman O. Brown said in 1960, "and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged." For Lynch, America as it ought to be comes into being when the secret takes over the town that stands for the country, when the secret is revealed and then suppressed, reburied in the town cemetery, the new tombstone carrying the same Puritan death's-head-with-angel's-wings that was chiseled on the old one.

As Lynch wrote in the booklet that accompanied the soundtrack album for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in big letters filling an entire page as if scribbling graffiti on his own movie poster, "IN A TOWN LIKE TWIN PEAKS NO ONE IS INNOCENT."


Again, the simple, obvious phrase that stuck on me like a shirttail on a thorn when I reread it earlier today on the subway, and kept me from reading further, having to think instead . . .


. . . pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be" . . .