Heading home for the holidays. Need to check the notice board.

Phil and the Osophers, It’s Christmas Time With Phil and the Osophers. Silly, underwritten folk-pop carols about Christmas break, ugly Christmas sweater parties, “Brutus the Backup Reindeer” and other lighthearted larks. Hard to get worked up either way about a Christmas EP. It’s a novelty, but one you’ll only listen to once a year, so fine.

Howard Cosell: The Man, The Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports
By Mark Ribowsky (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)
You don’t have to be sportsminded to have an interest in Howard Cosell. He was a popcult touchstone throughout the 1970s. I never watched Monday Night Football or a boxing match, but I knew Cosell from Woody Allen’s political comedy Bananas and from his attempt to inherit the mantle of Ed Sullivan with the TV variety show Saturday Night Live (unrelated to, well, you know, except that both shows featured Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, Brian Doyle-Murray and Howard Cosell at one time or another). Both Bananas and SNL are covered here, and not casually, so the book satisfied me right there. But Mark Ribowsky’s book prodded my curiosity more than I though it would. He covers the obvious highlights of Cosell’s career, in much the same trajectory that Cosell’s own autobiography did. But that’s just the play-by-play. Ribowsky adds a whole layer of color reporting by constantly reminding us of Cosell’s colossal ego. Cosell didn’t just think he could be the next Ed Sullivan, for instance: he thought he could bring the Beatles back together on his variety show, by dint of his passing acquaintance with a bemused John Lennon. This book is a litany of grand schemes and humiliating comeuppances. Cosell is shown to be an excellent broadcaster with great instincts, who undercuts his talents with his annoying air of superiority and his inability to stop drinking on the job.
Not sure what Howard Cosell means to folks today—his non-sports resume was slight, and while he’s still probably one of the best known (and most impersonated) sportscasters in history, mainstream recognition of sportscasters is fleeting if they’re not still broadcasting, and Cosell left ABC in the mid-1980s and died in 1995. If anything’s able to bring him back, it’s books like this which recognize both the myth and the man.

It took me an entire season to warm up to the new Fountains of Wayne album. I didn’t give up trying, and finally I dig it.

I also didn’t notice until just today that there’s actually a New Haven reference in the thing. I interviewed Chris Collingwood of Fountains of Wayne years ago and he told me that he’d lived in New Haven for a time himself, and had lived the same Daggett Street loft space once inhabited by members of The Gravel Pit.
The lyric, from the song “Acela,” is simply:

And it’s entertaining by New Haven
Once you’ve had yourself a drink or two, ooh ooh
All alone on the Acela
Tell me baby, where the hell are you?
(Acela) Ooh ooh (Acela)

I’ve never ridden the Acela, but I’ve certainly had those train rides when a young guy plomps down next to me, twists open several tiny bottles of liquor in a row, lines them up and downs one every few minutes for the rest of the trip to Boston. It’s kind of a holiday memory, crowded drunken trains. As usual, Fountains of Wayne feels it too.

I interviewed Christopher Hitchens just a few days before he was told he had cancer. That cancer killed him this past Thursday. When Hitchens wrote about the diagnosis and subsequent treatment in his regular column for Vanity Fair, he mentioned that he was given the terminal news just after he’d done a booksigning event in New Haven.
I don’t have any illusions that I was one of the last interviews that Mr. Hitchens ever gave. He was at a large New York book industry conference when we spoke, and he probably gave dozens that very day. Mine, in fact, came in the middle of an interview he was giving to the New York Times. I’d been calling the number I’d been given for his hotel room, under the impression that our interview time had been confirmed. When I was finally informed by the hotel that Hitchens hadn’t even checked in yet, I somehow got his cell number.
Hitchens couldn’t have been more gracious, more unflappable and, as a fellow journalist, more understanding. I heard him ask the Time reporter he was with whether he could borrow her desk for a few minutes—which became 40 minutes, I think, as we bantered on. I’d been an admirer of his for years, the typical Hitchens fan who couldn’t agree with absolutely everything he said but certainly was taken by the way in which he said it. More than that, Christopher Hitchens reminded me of my father: also British, also Oxford-educated, also quick with opinions, also impossibly articulate, able to discuss and argue anything at a moment’s notice. (As it happens, they also both died of cancer—my father 21 years ago now.)
I’d loved Hitchens’ autobiography Hitch-22, just then published and the reason for his New Haven visit, because he treated the book not as a recap of his greatest hits and wildest controversies, but as its own opportunity to come to terms with the twists and turns of his life. He told me he had no desire to spend a lot of room defending his atheistic impulses, for instance—he’d done that. Instead he mapped out his life from young revolutionary to middle-aged political insider to settled columnist-at-large.

Hitchens struck a lot of his critics as inconsistent, but I’ve always felt that he carried no greater or fewer contradictions than any other human being, and in fact he was very good at explaining the precise reasons why he, for instance, could defend some foreign wars (enraging kneejerk liberals) while condemning the barbarity of waterboarding (enraging the kneejerk conservatives who thought they’d wrestled him from the liberals). I remember some ridiculous, simple-minded reactions to the news of his illness—a radio announcer barking “Should we pray for Christopher Hitchens if he doesn’t believe in God?,” for instance—when he seldom dabbled in such either-or ironic ripostes himself, his responses generally being shaded and qualified and deepened. I’m already wondering what he might have thought of news events occurring days after his death—the pulling out of troops from Iraq, the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il, the resurgence of Newt Gingrich… You just know he’d have entertaining insights nobody else could think up.

I found him to be as quick-witted, curious, gracious and thoughtful in my interview with him as I find him to be in his many books and countless magazine articles. He treated me as an equal, and listened attentively when I could add facts to some of his conjectures. We were equal in another way—we’re both Christopher who used our entire first name in our bylines. Hitchens writes in Hitch-22 how Christophers should never back down from their birth name, not shorten it or nickname it. I hadn’t really considered this as an activist mission before, but now in Christopher Hitchens’ absence I can carry on his crusade.

The Streams flow again tonight, Dec. 17, through the tributary of Café Nine.
In the early ’90s music scene around here, The Streams should’ve stuck out more than they did. But you had the rising Gravel Pit, the aggressively self-hyped Mighty Purple, the theatrical Blind Justice, slick bands such as The Fictionals and a glut of punk and party bands. So bands of slightly older vintage, based on solid songwriting and musicianship, weren’t the attention-grabbers they might have been in other eras.
David Brooks’ first band in the area was the Lean-Tos, a literate and austere act that put out a single EP and wafted away. They didn’t have much more to show for themselves publicly—a couple of 45s, a few well-placed live shows (including opening for Matthew Sweet at Toad’s Place), but Streams seemed stronger. Which I think is why they’re resurfacing now.
I’ve written about The Streams’ singles on this site before. I also have in my possession some old cassette tapes David Brooks gave me from those days. I played one, “Sugar Shack,” once when I was a guest on WPLR’s Local Bands radio show. Now that same recording (remastered) of “Sugar Shack” graces a Streams CD along with a host of songs of theirs from the same era which I’d never heard (and I was one of the nudgiest fans David had in terms of wanting to hear his recordings). The Local Bands show, I’m told, has been playing The Streams every week for weeks now, breaking a longstanding policy about not granting such regular airtime to any one band.
The Streams didn’t seem like a supergroup in the early ‘90s. They were unassuming. Their other projects could be as slow-moving or quirky as The Streams. But they were a hugely important band of the time, reliably good, dismissive of trends or hype, doing David Brooks’ own thing with focus and clarity. But look at that line-up: Spike Priggen, who’d been a formative part of several long-lasting bands of the ‘80s local band scene, including his own Hello Strangers. Jeff Wiederschall was the Miracle Legion drummer turned Baby Huey. Bill Beckett was the latecomer, but fit in smoothly due to his time with the folk-po-bar-band Mocking Birds.
David Brooks’ thing, at the time, involved songs based on Civil War themes. He wasn’t writing a concept album. He wasn’t a one-trick pony. He wasn’t even unduly obsessed with the 19th century. This was an honest inspiration, the spark for songs which transcended time and place. David added power chords and tough beats to folky acoustic rhythms. A songspoken guy, the songs allowed him to rage a bit, naturally, as their emotions built.
They’re extraordinary songs. They don’t require special knowledge of the Civil War, just an understanding of human drive and determination. The suffering of soldiers on the battlefield can be a metaphor for struggles in all relationships. “Virginia Hellhole” is also just a captivating phrase to heard sung.
Joining The Streams, appropriately enough, is Mocking Bird frontman and PLR Local Bands DJ James Velvet with his band The Ivory Bills.
As with 20 years ago, this sounds will resound outside the current fashions. But you don’t need to know your history. You just need to show up.

The Freakin’ Pines have dwindled to a duo. The parents of the rhythm section have balked at doing any more unpaid roadie duties.
And who can blame them? The band members are in their 20s and none have yet been able to either afford or maintain their own automobile.
Band equipment is another matter. The FPs are renowned for having the cleanest mics and most accurate volume controls on the club block.
So are they selling off some of the mountain of extra amps and axes and traps they’ve amassed? Nope—there’s nobody to drive them to the pawn shop or dump. The band’s gone on indefinite hiatus, which in this case is short for hibernation, while they stay home, cancel all shows, and construct their own studio. What drive!
Fossil Crocodile and Sidenecked, classic hardcore, at the Bullfinch… Stubby Feet and Othniel Marsh at Hamilton’s for beers-so-cheap-you-won’t-notice-how-bad-the-bands-are College Nite… An Evening With The Drinker Copes at D’ollaire’s. Can you cope?..

Tripped on a hole in the sidewalk, ripped my new pants, just lay down on the pavement for an hour in exasperation. Someone called an ambulance, so I had to run away.

The Oh Sees, Carrion Crawlers. Neo-psychedlia that’s not spacy, and seems to be forming and swirling cosmos-like before your very years. The songs are above-average underground garage, but when given such exquisite studio attention, are simply mesmerizing. “Robber Barons” gives new meaning to “chiming,” and “Opposition (with maracas)” is as outraged and prissy as you need a song called that to be. “Crack in Your Eye” is the slow-grind set-piece in the currently trendy Brian Jones Massacre mode. The longest cut on the album, with the title that appears to promise the most stultification—“The Dream”—is in fact one of the fastest and friskiest. The whole ten-song set seems genuine and spontaneous, not so much a tribute to classic garage psychedelia but magically borne from the exact same spiritual place, half a century later.

Drunk Stone Brilliant Dead by Rick Meyerowitz.
I have the complete run of National Lampoon on CD-Rom, and have carried scraps of certain favored pieces—“Toward a Larger English Language,” Politenessman comics–around for decades. Meyerowitz’s record of the magazine’s heyday is one of those rare volumes that transcends a “Greatest Hits” format and becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t behave the way the magazine did—as a grab bag of shocks and pranks which someone mirrored its insane and freeing times. It stands back and reappreciates some NatLamp pieces as fine, lasting works of art. Meyerowitz simply has a good sense of timelessness. He understands how rare and wonderful the National Lampoon work environment was, and cherishes it as more than yearbook nostalgia.