Sex and rock & roll go together as smoothly as do sex and drugs, or drugs and rock & roll. But the devil, as Car Wild is discovering, is in the details.
The band’s leader, Ian G., wrote a concept album based on a book he loved, a small yellow volume that’s been in his family for generations and which he first discovered when he was 10 years old. He is of course a known commodity from having playing guitar in The Earnests (later known as The Bunburys when The Earnests UK sued over the name) for a decade or three. So he was able to put together a short tour of small clubs and casino lounges for a concert version of the record, which came out on his own Devoted Friend label late last year.

The reaction wasn’t exactly what he expected. “Let’s just say my intentions were misread,” Ian allows. “Anybody who knows about the original author of this book mostly knows that he was put in jail for being gay 100 years ago. I just hadn’t realized that certain works of his are just never done, because they can’t escape that context.
“Everywhere I played, it was like a big gay dance party. I was congratulated for coming out—which I haven’t, by the way. I feel weird having to say this now, but I just don’t happen to be gay. The album isn’t a gay album. Yet all I was getting was gay audiences—who were expecting something very different.”

It doesn’t help that Ian G. dresses, in his own words, “foppishly” on stage, is slim and handsome and youthful, and even looks like he wears make-up. He swears he doesn’t—“My whole family has long lashes and red cheeks.” (True; witness his sister Windy of The Mere Fans.) He says he’s never minded if people speculated about his sexual tastes—goes with the ‘70s rock territory he was once immersed in, he figures. He simply does not want his private life to be entangled with his work, which is currently entangled with the life and work of a prominent homosexual historical figure.

At first Ian played up the connection between the album/concerts and the book and its author. Then he subdued the writer’s name and just mentioned the book. Then he downplayed the book’s title.

Leaving it out altogether isn’t an option. “This is one of my favorite books of all time. I don’t want to be accused of plagiarizing it. I’m proud of my adaptation. But I’m not adapting some subtext of the novel, or the realities of the writer’s life. I’m telling the story, and people don’t seem to want to get that.

“I’m proud of this project, worked on it for years. But I clearly haven’t worked out how to present it yet.

“Part of me still thinks that I’m going to be in my 40s and people are still going to be looking at me wondering if I’m for real. But I know in my heart that’s silly. The art is over there, and I’m myself, over here. I even think how people look at that author, and that little yellow book, will change.”

Notice how we got through this whole column without mentioning the noted author who’s colored this whole project with his irritatingly influential brilliance? That was intentional, though we don’t think it helped much.

Ian G. performs Friday in the Music School concert hall of the college on the hill. The solo set will include a suite of songs from his concept album plus a few Earnests hits.

The Saviles, The New Helen and Under the Balcony pop until they drop for an early show Saturday afternoon. But wait—there’s more! Millie and the Model Marvels are doing a one-off gig with vocalist Les Ballons of In the Gold Room, as The Model Millionaire. The live music rages from 2 p.m. until some sort of televised sporting match begins… Panthea, Roses & Rue and Quantum Mutata keep the gloom throbbing for a sardonic Saturday at Hamilton’s, where the big screen TV’s in a whole other room… The True Knowledge and Young King, Christian reggage, at D’ollaire’s…

Bus to nowhere: end of the line was a converted train roundhouse where buses go to sleep. It took me three hours to walk back to campus. The house took me out for Chinese food at our new literary hang-out because I was broke.

A couple of real-world theater pursuits to share in:

1. I’m leading a theater workshop Tuesday Feb. 22 from 2-5:30 p.m. at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., New Haven. Children are especially invited, but it’s open to all ages. The concept is that we will collectively adapt, build, rehearse and perform a short play based on a theater classic. (For this first attempt, I’ve narrowed it down to either Chekhov or Aristophanes, depending on who shows up.) If this one works out, I’ll definitely do more. Admission is free. Call Never Ending overseer Roger Uihlein at (203) 773-9510 for more info.

2. I will be starting a new Playreading Gang, real soon, at the wonderful Institute Library on Chapel Street. A lot of folks remember that I used to gather with friends at Rudy’s Bar in New Haven and read theater scripts aloud. That gang lasted for over five years of Sunday night meetings, and led to several full-fledged theater productions in town. This one is likely to be somewhat more sedate, considering my age and sobriety, but some of the scripts will likely be the same and I’m hoping it will bring the same opportunity to share our theater tastes in a vocal, interactive manner. There’s a prerequisite to joining this Playreading Gang: membership in the , Institute Library, which currently costs $25 a year. Library membership has many other privileges: see www.institutelibrary.org for details. We have not yet scheduled when the readings will be. I’d like to hear from a few potential members and find out what’s best for them before finalizing the schedule. But it will be a regular thing, and I want to get started pronto!

Men in Bondage on an Easter Sunday have changed their name to Two Teachers—Nuts, Two Human Beings… Blurbs & Statements is now Ubiquitous Mailer vs. Monolithic Me… The Fabulous Dickie Boy undergone a sex change of sorts and reemerged as My Sister, Joyce Brothers… The 215,000 Word Habit has become The Kerouac Legacy…. Hearing the Story changed to This Cat’s Story… Inside the Green House has spun off into Two Hermit Gamblers… Coming Back to New York has expanded to Our Lunacy in America… City of Scars is toying with the new name How I Hated London Before I Got to Like It a Lot & Then Had to Go Away…

…and we can’t remember our new debit card password.

Gar got drunk (of course) and paraded outside Mar’s room pretending to be a dead pigeon with a nest on its belly. Mar had no idea what he was going for, and it’s probably better that way… though NOT knowing might have been more disturbing.

And The Show Went On—Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris

By Alan Riding. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010. 400 pages.

Nice to see a book like this come out from a mainstream rather than an academic publisher. It can be a trying subject, explaining how the arts maintain themselves during times of governmental crisis, but former NY Times European cultural correspondent Alan Riding explains circumstances without getting too wonky, and has the taste and talent to make you appreciates the art he’s writing about.

Riding’s chosen a fascinating time and place in history to open what he instantly turns into a grander exploration of the relationship between art, commerce, national culture and politics. He tells, with far-flung sources that range from contemporary art reviews to obscure French history tracts (in French) how some arts thrived, others ebbed, and expensive media like film were practically snuffed out. Famous names like Andre Malraux are put in new context, having to publicly defend—or hide away because of—their political views whilst creating their art, or interrupting long-term projects for topical protest-oriented ones. The aftermath of the occupation, when Nazi sympathizers and collaborationists were put on trial, adds a concluding central platform for a book that’s already full of scattered episodes of questionable behavior during wartime: Maurice Chevalier explaining why he performed for POWs in Nazi camps, for instances.
The little-known adventures of big celebrities adds to Alan Riding’s already lively style. His chapter titles couldn’t be more inviting: “Resistance as an Idea”; “Writing for the Enemy”; “The Pendulum Swings”; “Surviving at a Price.”
This is as valuable a book about how artistic temperaments cope under political pressure as anything written about the Hollywood Blacklist.

Tik-tok has changed. It began, and thrived for a time, as a mechanically inclined dance beat machine with better than average vocals and vocabulary. The new tik-tok recordings, however, are ghost and slick and ornamental. It’s hard to get get into them, they’re so ghost.
But help may be on the way. We hear a record label has asked Tik-Tok to remix and remaster the tracks, and all have agreed that another local techno-charged band of note, The Wheelers are the ones for the job. We never know what exactly to do with information like this, since if it all falls apart on the rocks, nobody in either camp is likely to let us know. But we’ll keep an ear to the ground, and stay hopeful that others will eventually hear these songs besides us and a few sleep-deprived studio cave-dwellers.

Happy hour featurettes at the Bullfinch: Langwidere, followed by Billina. A strange pair. Let’s hope Langwidere has her head on straight (inside joke) and that Billina does that blues song where she cackles like a chicken. At the same time, if she doesn’t, she’ll probably be right not to. Nobody can read a crowd like Billina. She can look at the faces around her and decide the perfect set list on the spot. Just magical.

Hamilton’s has just got DJs tonight. Hope that doesn’t become a trend, though they happen to be good ones: The Oz Bros., TW and SC. Hey, why weren’t THEY considered for the Tik-Tok remixes?… D’ollaire’s is dark all the way until Thursday. Renovations, or inventory, or payback for that recent raid where underage drinkers were found—can’t remember which it is this time…

I slept through four classes today. Two of them I was in, and one of those was a seminar. On the other hand, I’m the Gee-Oh Quiz Game champion of the house.

(Christopher Arnott continues to convert his 7″ vinyl collection to mp3s.)

1. The Turtles, Elenore/Surfer Dan.
I remember when Peter Sellars, at the height of his ubiquity in the 1980s Boston arts scene—when he was running the Boston Shakespeare Company, staging special events at his Harvard alma mater, contriving one-act spectacles for local arts festivals, directing operas around the country and even programming a film series at a big Boston Cineplex—he was included in one of the local-celebrity surveys of “what’s your favorite song of all time?” and chose this one.
“Elenore”’s the famous follow-up to “Happy Together.” Its inexperienced composer Howard Kaylan, better known as one of the band’s lead vocalists, tells of how he carefully studied the specific strengths of “Happy Together” (by the not-all-that-much-more-experienced songwriting team of Bonner & Gordon) and refashioned them into a song that exemplified those elements without just aping them.
It’s a sterling example of rousing by-the-numbers songcraft, but what everyone really loves about “Elenore” is not how it honors conventions but how it mocks them. The line “Elenore, gee, I think you’re swell, and you really do me well, you’re my pride and joy etcetera” has brashness at every turn. Kaylan’s said folks often ask him if he knew how comical it was to use “etcetera” in a love lyric, which is an amazing example of how an audience can make themselves feel superior to a performer. Of course he knew—hadn’t he also put a “gee” and a “do me well” in the same line. The Turtles were the most whimsical band of the ‘60s, and only got crazier when, as Flo & Eddie, Kaylan and fellow Turtles vocalist Mark Volman joined Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and later formed their own subversive act.

This copy of Elenore is cracked and unplayable, but no way am I throwing it out. The Turtles were one of the first bands I ever loved—when I was seven years old, I had two pet turtles I named Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman—and “Elenore” is a key reason why. (“Can’t You Hear the Cows,” from the same album, The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, is the other, but that’s a passionate reckoning for another time.) The flip side (also from “Battle of the Bands”), “Surfer Dan,” is a reminder that Volman and Kaylan had been gigging since their mid-teens, when they were in the surf combo The Crossfires.

2. Dinky Doo, Slow Motion/Superdrag, “Sleeping Beauty.” At a time in the mid-‘90s when it seemed that all the good songwriters were going alt-country, bands like Superdrag (and Splitsville and Best Kissers in the World) held out hope for good ol’ power pop, even if some of them did later soften. This split single, which I’d forgotten I’d owned and maybe even never have heard before now (stamped “No. 00104” of a limited edition and probably purchased along with a mountain of other stuff when the Tune Inn went out of business) has power chords to match the powerful emotions—the antithesis of the whispery maudlin strains alt-country was peddling. Both sides are loose live-in-studio takes that sound like club shows you wish you were at. I did get to see Superdrag once, but it was at Toad’s, where they were playing at rock stars rather than ruling a smaller room the way they surely could.
So, who Dinky Doo? No idea, and no Superdrag, but enough like them to make this a well-conceived single, a double-shot warning for those who would soften pop.

3. Richard Chamberlain, Love Me Tender/All I Do is Dream of You.
I am of the opinion that Richard Chamberlain should have had more of a singing career. This single, however, is not the evidence, Chamberlain’s thin voice buttressed by Jimmy Haskell’s overreaching orchestra. The band’s jaunty take on the flapper standard “All I Do is Dream of You” (the song during which Debbie Reynolds jumps out of a cake in “Singing in the Rain”) practically moves into Louis Prima swingersville, while Chamberlain gets behind. “Love Me Tender” benefits from what we now know of the erstwhile Dr. Kildare’s personal life. Sung by a man who seemed (from his memoirs) to be comfortable with his homosexuality, yet unable to come out to the legions of young female fans, the song choice of “Love Me Tender” seems loaded and clouded.
Where I began to appreciate Richard Chamberlain’s singing potential was when he toured in the musicals The Sound of Music and Scrooge and made me cry both times.

4. Willie Loco Alexander, Kerouac/Mass. Ave.
One of the seminal singles of the 1970s Boston music scene, and thus a major part of my life. This is the studio version of Kerouac, which also appeared in a live version on the Live at the Rat album in 1976. For years, due to shoddy turntables and such, I had no idea what was being said in the line which I now clearly hear as “you’re on the top of my shelf.” Mass. Ave. is an anecdotal slice of Boston life as detailed and vital in its way as Lou Reed’s vision of New York in “Walk on the Wild Side.”

5. The Gravel Pit, The Devil/Paul Westerberg. Recorded at Wallingford’s Trod Nossel studios but mastered at the world-famous Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, where The Gravel Pit travelled to record their first full-length album, this 45 was released on the New Haven-based Caffeine Disk label in 1992. The B-side joke of naming a song after the man who named a song “Alex Chilton” is somewhat ruined by having a text clarification on the record sleeve stating “The song on the flip side is called “Paul Westerberg.” This is a band that appeared to plan their conquests carefully and, in any case, did things differently than a lot of other bands around at the time. This single marked a pivotal moment for them, a break from the prolific demo tapes and frequent live shows into fewer but heftier well-produced statements. I couldn’t get enough of these guys, and saw every local show they played for a period of several years (OK, I did miss one; still regret being sick the night they played the Little Theater on Lincoln Street.)

6. Willie Alexander, Perfect Stranger/Lonely Avenue.
One of my idol’s releases for the French label New Rose, which I found at the Mystery Train used record shop in Cambridge for $4.50 some years ago. Both were recroded at Boston’s Studio Outlook and are part of what could be considered Alexander’s dance-rock period, when the eclectic singer/composer/keyboardist seemed obsessed with synthetic rhythms. These aren’t really dance records, of course—Alexander’s jazz and rock instincts intersect over throbbing steady beats, adding warmth and unpredictability to stolid beats and familiar riffs. The Doc Pomus cover “Lonely Avenue” is in keeping with Willie Alexander reworkings of “Bebopalula” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’”—profound meditations on the insidious simplicities and symmetries of basic rock & roll.

7. Banana Pad Riot EP: Boris the Sprinkler, We’re the Banana Splits; The Vindictives, Two Ton Tessie; Young Fresh Fellows, Doin’ the Banana Split; Mr. T Experience, Don’t Go Away (Go-Go Girl).
Young Fresh Fellows and Mr. T Experience are arguably the best known and most accomplished of the four bands here. But Boris the Sprinkler, who once covered The Ramones’ End of the Century album in its entirety and was made for wacky cover concepts such as this Banana Splits tribute, is justly rewarded the lead-off track, “We’re the Banana Splits,” and sets a pace the other bands can’t quite keep. Mr. T. Experience gets the best-written song of the bunch, “Don’t Go Away (Go-Go Girl),” which jibes nicely with the band’s unique ‘60s perspective as proffered in “Love American Style” and “Danny Partridge Busted.”

8. Dash Rip Rock, Dosed/Living the Lie I Love
Woke up this morning feeling like toast.
Was then I realized that I had been dosed.
Every line of this understated, effects-laden mindbender is quotable. It’s a singular kind of psychotic rock—rootsy rather than psychedelic, depicting the after-effects of a hallucinogenic trip as equivalent to a bad alcoholic hangover.
The flip side, “Living the Lie I Love,” is a much more conventional rockabilly barnburner. Nothing wrong with that, but “Dosed” is something miraculous, a real non-chemical mind-expander for those who don’t see how capable and far-reaching traditionalist rock & rollers can be.

9. The Contours, Do You Love Me.
At the season-end party for a bunch of us summer camp counselors from the Boston area who’d helped bring urban kids out to the wilds of Maine, I badgered the host incessantly to play this record I’d found deep in his collection, but he was feeling much more current that night (this was the era of Michael Jackson and New Edition), I finally snuck it on, whereupon I threw up, passed out and chose not to return to camp the following summer, lest my camp moniker change from “Chief Archie” to, as threatened, “Chief Upchuck.”
This is a record that really should only be owned as a 45 vinyl single. I’ve always dug that the title is unpunctuated. The flip side of my copy, which is a bargain reissue on the Motown Yesteryear label, is “Shake, Sherrie” (aka “Shake Sherry”) which marries The Contours to the then-gestating subgenre of garage frat rock, was the follow-up single to the huge hit of “Do You Love Me,” and shares its Carrie-esque false ending surprise gimmick.

10. The Ben Yost Singers, Let’s All Sing EP
No less than “16 Old Time Favorites,” arranged as four medleys and all fit on two sides of a 45 rpm single (“unbreakable”) on the Royale label. The cover art is of a striped barbershop pole with a bowler hat and curly mustache, crooning and waving his skinny barbershop-pole arms. So it’s not really “Let’s All Sing”—it’s extravagant four-part barbershop harmonizing that you don’t want to get in the way off, especially when they flit so quickly from one melody to another. From “School Days” right into “East Side West Side” right into “The Bowery.” From a bunch of drinking songs to “How Dry I Am.” From “Little Annie Rooney” to “Frivolous Sal.” Music to get a crewcut by.

The band knows him as “glasses guy,” their pet nickname for him. But who’s petting who? They giggle about his interest in them, and don’t understand the relevance of the articles and recordings he’s continually loaning them for their “elucidation.” Yes, that’s how he talks.
The band is the all-female teen “skunk’ combo The Candy Christians. Peter Whiffle, associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the college on the hill, has been studying them for a paper he hopes to present at an international conference on what he calls “rock linguistics.” He picked them for analysis when he heard their cupid song “The Blind-Bow-Boy’ over the college radio waves. But sassy friends of the band say Professor Whiffle has also been dogging Tattooed Countess for no apparent academic elucidation, that he probably just has a thing for black hennaed hair, and that he’s kind of creepy.
We’ll clarify that The Candy Christians themselves have no kick against the prof. If they did, they’d surely spit at him during shows, as they done to members of Spiderboy who gave them an, ahem, improper introduction when the bands played back-to-back at the Bullfinch a few weeks back.
This story bears more research. Next Candy Christians gig is three weeks hence, which coincidentally will be college vacation week. You never know how these weird hook-ups will work out, anyhow. Maybe a few years from now “Blind-Bow-Boy” will be part of a bestselling $100 humanities textbook. All bands crave that sort of notoriety, no?

Very little happening tonight, despite all the love in the air. Except dance parties. Let’s not forget dance parties! Wait, we were struck by something sharp and pointy there for a second. Of course we should forget dance parties. We should banish them altogether to the sunken depths of the netherworld. It’s their fleet-footed fault that the only live show of note tonight is The Floyd Dells, Briary Bush and Moon Calf at the Bullfinch. Thank the god of Love for the Bullfinch…