Short deadlines and lots of wrapping to do, so some random items for now…

If you’re one of those purists who can’t imagine changing a single word in the lyrics of an established song, Wacken Faith would drive you nuts. Wacken (pronounced wah-keen), who also goes under the name Art Books when he plays keyboards and sings backup with the lower-case band custom framing, says he’s written as many as a dozen separate sets of lyrics to the same song. Not verses, mind you, but whole different songs with their own inherent themes and rhymes and meanings.

Granted, many of these songs are roadhouse anthems along the lines of “he/she’s a [adjective] wo/man,” but still a distinction. One which has just been cited by Slambang magazine (often referred to in these parts as “Slam Band”), which deems Wacken Faith to be the “Biggest Self-Plagiarizer” of the year in its annual “Biggest and Bangest” issue. We called Wacken Faith, who had no comment. Then he did have a comment. Then he changed it. Then he told us earnestly that he’s both thrilled and embarrassed, and that’ll have to do. Wacken Faith has a show coming up in a couple weeks at the Bullfinch, when you can give him and his amorphous supersongs the support they deserve…

In other periodical huzzahs, our little scene has been acknowledged in a major national magazine. A Top Ten band that appears to enjoy making Top Ten lists actually remembers stopping here, though the context has caused some concern. Seems that we boast “the skankiest groupies” found on the band’s most recent tour. And everyone in the scene thinks they know who the skanks in question are. I will maintain a shred of dignity by not telling them whether they have guessed correctly. …

No, it’s worse than that: It’s not that we missed last night’s 219 show, it’s that, until now we’ve never missed a 219 show ever. That’s an impressive 34 shows in a row, every one the band ha ever played. Now we’re back to zero. Someone saved us the set list, but you know what? Just not the same…

The annual MAD magazine “20 Dumbest People, Events and Things” issue is out. To borrow a common sort of MAD logic, its editors are the dumbest thing about it. Not because the list isn’t spot-on and hilarious, as it has been for the half-decade that the annual project  has been around. The editors are dumb because they they repackage MAD material so many different ways now, but they still stick this in the regular magazine and not make this some sort of special edition. My wallet thanks them, but their accountant probably thinks they’re morons.

With “it takes one to know one” savvy, this index of dumbness usually brings design and illustration talent on par with National Lampoon in its prime

MAD’s “20 Dumbest People, Events and Things” section is interrupted in the magazine’s centerfold. Not by an advertisement, though some of us still can’t get over that the once ad-free MAD has accepted paid advertisements for over a decade now. No, it’s a 2-page pull-out “Spy vs. Spy 50^th Anniversary 2011 Calendar,” with illustrations not from the feature’s current artists Peter Kuper (the force behind the venerable underground political comics journal World War Three Illustrated) but by its late creator Antonio Prohias.

This reminds of another wintertime cartoon humor mag tradition—the Viz pin-up calendar. Viz began 30 years ago as a savage and salacious lowbrow parody of British comic books. The classic style of comics in which a child rails against his teachers or parents become, in Viz,  bouts of rampant unhinged swearing and violence. The sort of strips where kids have a magic device that fuels countless identical adventures inspired such Viz features as “Felix and His Amazing Underpants” and Tin Ribs, the useless faux-robot who invariably gets used by his clever young owner to lacerate, disembowel or castrate his bad-tempered schoolteacher.

While having no more depth or dimension than the mainstream stuff they mocked, Viz’s snide satires—The Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist, Biffa Bacon—gradually became sustaining features themselves. Other recurring features—the Beckett-like Drunken Bakers—

And some non-comic, text-driven features have taken on a life of their own. Top Tips is a take-off on Hints From Heloise-type housekeeping frugality columns “Save time when counting to 10 by starting at the number four”), several items each issue are are current-events commentary written up in this odd journalistic format, which makes them doubly funny. From the current issue:

“Chilean miners: Take a large range of pornography and crossword puzzles to work with you, just in case.”

“Axl Rose: If turning up at a venue within twop hours of a pre-arranged time is too demanding for you, then why not consider a career with a more generous appointment window, such as a Parcel Force delivery driver or Virgin Media broadband installer?”

In the magazine’s back pages, the “Profanisaurus” of slang sexual phrases presided over by another Viz Comic icon, amoral broadcaster Roger Mellie (“The Man on the Telly”) has been getting added to for years, and is now a huge and hugely useful compendium which I imagine many academics would have been overjoyed to have compiled.

In any case, Viz does a calendar every year. A full dangly one, 24 pages. This year’s, “The Saucy Ladies of Viz,” isn’t very good and I would never hang it on my wall. But they’ve been funny in the past.

The sign outside the big room at Olympus Studios reads “All sessions start on time.” Can that be true? No. It’s about respect. Signs can do that. “Ladies will kindly remove their hats.” “No spitting.”

When Olympus’ founder and main producer Dennis “X-Max” Keynes got his first chance to sit in on a professional recording session at a well-stocked studio, in a distant land he chooses not to identify, “I’d never been so prepared for anything in my life. I’d badgered this guy who worked there to let me sit in, like literally just be in the room.” For him, the room was enchanted, and he felt he needed to earn his entrance through its hallowed portals. “I had charts, arrangements, diagrams” for every conceivable thing that might happen. “I knew every knob, I lugged in my own back-up equipment in case anything went wrong. This band had two albums out already, and I studied their sound, slowed it down and sped it up and just took those records apart, studying. And I wasn’t even the producer!

“I was barely considered an assistant. I was just in the room. It wasn’t even a big-deal studio, just a good one in a good location that’d gotten a reputation. But I’d never been around so much expensive equipment before, and I didn’t want to blow it. I was basically just in awe.

“So I show up at the studio early, like hours before the session, and there’s nothing to do but wait in the waiting room. Finally it’s time, and the band that’s there leaves the studio. I go in there and it’s just more waiting. I don’t even want to touch anything. I’m just looking at my notes, going over my homework, expecting this life-changing experience. “And I wait a really long time. So long that I’m sure that something’s gone horribly wrong, like I’m in the wrong place or the band had a car crash. What else could be keeping them? One of the engineers would sometimes look in at me, but nobody said anything. They must have thought I was crazy.

“Like two hours later—really, two hours, of course to me it seemed like 20 but two is a lot—the musicians finally arrive. They’ve got their manager with them, and some guys who I think were just friends, not anybody, you know, important to the organization. And girlfriends. They brought girlfriends! That was just a mindblower for me, an abomination, the most unprofessional behavior I could imagine. Like, who brings their girlfriends to work?

“They talk forever, about nothing, at least nothing to do with the recording. One of them had just bought a car, and couldn’t get bucket seats because they were being phased out—I remember the exact stupid details, all these years later. I get introduced, but nobody seems to want to hear my ideas and I’m too intimidated to offer any. They finally can the chit-chat long enough to, no shit, order lunch. I’m dying. Every illusion I’ve ever had is shattered. Telling it now, it seems extreme, but I was a kid and I was that kind of passionate. I couldn’t imagine anyone walking into a place like that, where every treasure I’d ever wanted was just lying around waiting to be used, and not bow down in gratitude.

“I spent four days with that band: running out for coffee, cleaning up spilled drugs, fixing mic stands with duct tape. I think maybe they recorded one song in that time, and it was one they hadn’t even written when they’d shown up. Now I know you could see that a different way—the creative mood striking and all that. But I thought it was bullshit. You know, the nerve! To waste the session by sitting on a couch writing something you could have written at home.

“The whole experience was like slopping hogs in hell. I didn’t resent my, uh, lowly position. I would have done anything they asked to be part of that process. I’d dreamed about being in a proper recording studio for years, and I though it may be years before I’d be trusted to work in one as an engineer, forget producer. I thought there was this long, slow learning curve, like becoming a priest or something. Seriously.

“It was the attitude that killed me. The jaded taking for granted thing. I won’t tell you who they were, they were well-known and a couple of them are still in the business. I might find myself working with them again someday, though believe me I’ll try not to. It took me years to get over—myself, partly. To get over myself. Now, of course, I understand why an artist would be casual about just about so much of what he does, there’s just so many pieces, so many things beyond their control, whatever. But then? I mean, Jesus! How dare they?”

That’s our little holiday meditation for all you Rock Gods readers. Respect others. And rock out responsibly.

Out and about: The Ask Tells kiss and make up for the holidays, sharing a bill with Treaty Spoilsports at Government Center Garage Thursday… Student Squeeze says they had nothing to do with that “riot” at Dollaire’s last week, and to show what a tame, safe, fun-loving, frolicsome act they act, they’re playing out three times this week: acoustic Wednesday at the Bullfinch, Thursday on the showcase bill at Hamilton’s and Friday at the campus student center. Dollaire’s will have them back, they say, once all three bands on last week’s ill-fated “College Nite” bill have apologized and agreed to do a bit of public service clean-up duty at the club. Student Squeeze both they and The Gilmour Memorial are up for doing the penance, which makes Camilla’s Car the only hold-out—and the likeliest instigator of the onslaught, during which (ho-hum) a chair apparently got thrown… Not many local shows to look forward to this week, eh? Well, what’re you complaining to us about? Go book yourself somewhere already!..

I was shocked and delighted to get a Kindle last year for Christmas. The first book I downloaded onto it was Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. I guess there were other ironic purchases I could make, but that was the first one that occurred to me.

Steal This Book (to explain it for those born after computers were) is a hacking guide for a culture where the most complicated device most people could hack was a pay telephone. In the book, Hoffman, one of the best-known political activists of the 20^th century, teaches you how to scam free food, self-publish and otherwise stick it to the establishment.

Nearly all the sneaky tips in the book are 40 years out of date, and many resulted in change-ups and clampdowns before the book even hit a second printing. Still, Steal This Book ain’t just a icon of a certain era of free expression. Turns out it still directly inspires an occasional revolutionary runaround.

In mid-March, I received this email from Kindle Store proprietor Amazon.com:

Hello,

We are writing to inform you that we need to refund your purchase of the book ‘Steal This Book (Vantage Point Classics)’. This book was added to our catalog by a third-party who we now believe did not have the rights to make the book available for sale.

We will be removing the book from our servers, making it unavailable for re-downloading from your archived items. Any copies you already have on your Kindle devices will not be removed, but you may choose to remove any such copies yourself.

The total refund amount of $1.99 will be credited to your account in 3-5 business days.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Any information and assistance you might need on your Kindle can be found here: www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department

Amazon.com

“I usually only have anonymous sex with people that I don’t know.”

That astute observation from a local scenester has been mocked as if it came from some great aphorism-garbling ballplayer of yore. But in rockspeak it nearly makes sense. This musician has the luxury of fleeing town and touring on a regular basis. That’s where true anonymity lies.

Don’t dirty the nest by sleeping with co-workers, any office grunt will tell you. Good advice, hard for some to keep. To a working musician, your immediate job-related social circle can number in the thousands. Yet some impressively tread that line between being unwilling to settle down and being TOO available.

So this muso walks into a bar, hundreds of miles from here, and apparently meets a soulmate. Here, it’s all crawl-off-to-sleep-in-the-bath, while there, amazingly, there’s an apartment and shared expenses and housekeeping.

Why not just leave town, and move in full-time? “What, and leave the scene?!” Seriously, that’s the reaction we got when we told this wandering minstrel that we’d learned of this stable out-of-town romance.

To the lucky elsewhere spouse: We can vouch for the fact that you never need be jealous of another human being encroaching on your loved one: adultery’s absolutely not in the repertoire. A local riff, however, or that wondrous feeling that comes over you when you’re on the back deck of the Finch discussing college loans or other local industry while sipping a freshly brewed house ale—well, that’s your competition.

Happy homemaking.

Tonight at the Finch, a bill better suited for Hamilton’s—popular rock from the Netflices, with high school emo epistolators Lost an Envelope and metal mockers Problem Playing opening. At Hamilton’s, a bill even better suited for Hamilton’s—reggae retreads Yellowthroat, mainstream “crazies” The Nuthatch and—what this?—downcast solo provocateur Grouse, spreading his wings into a new venue. Shout out “Don’t Play That Song” and see if he smiles.

The local daily gave Blake Edwards’ death short shrift. But so, I imagine, did all publications everywhere. This was one of the most prolific and well-rounded comic artists of the 20th century, and it would take several books to do him justice. What I liked about him was that he seldom played safe. His failures were as  staggering as his successes. There wasn’t much middle ground. There were the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films and then there were the Ted Wass and Roberto Benigni ones. There was Dudley Moore and Bo Derek running on the beach in 1o, then there was Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger inexplicably sliding down a vertical mattress in Blind Date. The composers he got to do soundtracks for him, mainly Mancini, were impeccable, but between he and his wife Julie Andrews between them rendered the one-two punch of Darling Lili and Star! which nearly killed off the American film musical for good in 1969-70. His S.O.B. is considered a cult classic which Wikipedia deems “autobiographical”—until you read the far superior Terry Southern novel Blue Movie from which it was clearly ripped off. I interviewed Southern shortly before his death and he told me that both Edwards and Andrews had been attached to a movie adaptation of Blue Movie that never got green-lit. Southern was appalled at S.O.B. and still held a huge grudge.

In any case, funny guy, and more of a risk-taker than anyone gave him credit for being.

I’ve recently become enamored of Edward’s early-career work on the radio detective series Richard Diamond, Private Eye, which you can find on several on the Golden Age radio websites. The show’s edgy but not as manic as his later TV series Peter Gunn, funny but not as campy as his Honey West

A rainy day, and the only show we’d been planning to attend got cancelled. (Fie, Deer Guild!) So we’re stuck home listening over and over to the greatest record ever made, “Yip” by the New Nation, recorded in 1968 just a few blocks down the street from our humble apartment.

“Yip” is one of the reasons we stuck around this town in the first place. We found it in a used record bin a thousand miles from here, seemingly a thousand years ago. The first time we spun it, it took our mind apart piece by piece. The singer’s cool, contrite, controlled, completely composed. Yet he has no language—he just says “Yip.” Behind him—we always assume this is the drummer, but it could be anybody, just a guy passing through the room—there’s a raucous unhinged yell from time to time. Could be excitement, but then why wouldn’t the singer be excited too? He’s not. Could be that the yowler just dropped some hot coffee on himself. Several times, whenever the next “verse” (lyrical cue: “Yip!”) commences.

The rest of the band take the middle road, but in the language of the young. They are organized, yet they are progressive. They want action, yet they want to keep the party going, now burn out quickly. They are steady, yet they rock. These aren’t ancient swing-jazz rhythms converted to the latest rock fad—it’s the base discourse, the core language for these kids. It’s a conversation that allows for the suave “Yip” on one end and the wild beast attacking on the other.

“Yip” is the sound of the ‘60s, and that indeed is what a vinyl anthology I later found it on was titled. None of the other songs on the LP sounded like the ‘60s at all. They sounded like the ‘50s retreaded or the ‘70s anticipated, but not in between. “Yip” was the juncture, that antic intersection.

Very little has been written down about The New Nation, and much of what has been turns out to be lies. The legends are fascinating—the jealous brawls, the pranks pulled by competing bands, the shows New Nation allegedly staged in clubs they’d been banned from.

Someday that book will be written. Perhaps we’ll write it ourselves. But that’s not the point this rainy day. The point is “Yip,” the perfect mid-‘60s studio garage chaos-amid-the-establishment anthem.

Fuck this whole essay, then. Words fail. Just think “Yip.”

Yip!

I’ve got a whole section of my book collection demarcated “Theater mysteries.” Several dozen of them, and nearly a dozen of those are by Simon Brett and star the itinerant and alcoholic actor Charles Paris.

Brett, sadly, gave up writing Charles Paris yarns years ago and turned to other characters, such as Mrs. Pargeter. So the best we could hope for was that the old books could be adapted into other media. Which the BBC has recently done, clogging the airwaves with them this past week. The latest adventure has been running in weekly installments on BBC4 while older ones have been getting broadcast daily on the web-0nly BBC7.

Roam around the radio pages of www.bbc.co.uk and you’ll find various ways to access episodes which have run within the past week. It’s a fitting medium for Charles Paris, not only because one of the murders, Dead Side of the Mic, is set in BBC Broadcasting House, but because Simon Brett worked for years as a radio producer himself.

In the BBC series, which take three episodes to complete one novel, Charles Paris is played by Bill Nighy. Not at all the actor I’d always imagined might play this actor. I’d always thought of Charles Paris as boxy, plain, vaguely handsome, like Ann-Margret’s husband Roger Smith or perhaps James Mason. There are always too many of guys like that, and it would explain why Charles works steadily though not often enough. A reedy, distinctive character actor like Nighy, however—well, he stands out in a crowd.

But of course that’s the wonder of radio. You don’t have to think of what Bill Nighy looks like. And he sounds like a drunken hammy actor, just as he behaved like a drunken hammy pop star in the Christmas film classic (just ask last week’s Entertainment Weekly) Love, Actually.

Somebody in food service had a sense of humor.

The sternos, the plates and coffee maker all heated up the annual holiday party for hotel workers at the Connery convention center last weekend.

Why didn’t we know to tell you of this beforehand? For one thing: Private party. For another: None of the bands believed it was really going to happen,
“It paid real money. But i don’t think they’ d even heard us when they asked us,” conjectured Plates keyboardist Ronnie plate. Is she sure nobody requested as much as a demo tape? “Positive. We don’t even have a demo tape.”
Intrigued, we tracked down the social committee of the hotel employees’ local. Seven phone calls later, we found out who booked the bands. Turns out we could have got his info much quicker by just raising our voice anytime at the Bullfinch.
The bands were recommended by Q, tireless servant of the scene, who turns out to work in the laundry room at the Connery two overnight shifts a week. (What does this guy not do?). Q, ever conscious of the integrity of our hardy scene, thought it would look better if the booking went through proper channels. So he passed oh his suggestions to the appropriate committee, who trusted his punning instincts and made the bookings.

Q, ever the unassuming humbleton, apparently didn’ t  mention his involvement to anyone. Nobody is surprised by that. The bands just wish they knew so they could thank him.
So the gig went well then?
“Bunch of shitfaced workers kicking back in a ballroom while somebody else does the work they usually do? This was nirvana for them,” quoth a Plate. Plenty of spooning afterwards at that gig, we reckon.

In the usual places: Audrey and the Peapods with Luxor and Tress at the Finch tomorrow (bring a present for a tot and get in free)… Sea Drift and Asian Birds at Hamilton’s also tomorrow, following a Happy Hour acoustic set by Avignon Bright… Tress again two nights from now, kicking off the Woodruff/Aquatique bill at Dollaire’s. As local openers, they’ve been granted a whopping 20 minutes and no sound check. You’re better off catching them at the Finch…

He was on his way back from a deathbed confessional at the nursing home when he noticed it. He could only sigh, the exhalation turning to vapor and chilling his nose.

Someone—more than one person, considering the quality of the thing—had made a snowman in the meadow, and had pretended it was him.

It had a hat and pipe like Parson Brown’s own, which he found somewhat flattering. What ruined it all for him was the  sign designating his snow effigy as the “No Man.”

Brown happily answered to the old-fashioned title of Parson, since his father had been a Parson Brown before him. But in recent months the quaint nomenclature had turned on him. Now he was being called Parsimonious Parson Brown, Prissy Parson Brown and, worst of all, Impossible Parson Brown. There were letters about him in the town paper nearly every week.

He couldn’t remember the first time he’d ever said “Are you married?”—or exactly what he’d meant by it. But now this had become his catchphrase, his albatross, used by those who conspired to criticize his silence on the subject of same-sex marriage. He admitted he was conflicted. But they wouldn’t give him any peace. A conspiracy, that’s what it was.

He walked on, only to see another snowman. This one was a circus clown. Was this meant to be him as well?

Behind it, flowing from the branches of a tree, was a flowing ribbon, with signs written in the same hand as the “No Man” one, plus pictures of flapping bluebirds of happiness. “Here to stay is a new bird,” one of the placards read. “He sings a love song,” announced another.

Parson Brown headed upmeadow, now more curious than upset.

A ceremony was in progress. Two men stood hand in hand, their eyes glistening like the newfallen snow. They were reciting vows they’d written themselves:

“To face unafraid

The plans that we’ve made.”

Parson Brown silently watched them, realizing what he was being privileged to witness

He glanced around to see who was officiating. No man, it seemed. Just the snowmen.

It was a beautiful sight. And it was cold. Because it was just pretend.

Parson Brown marched forward boldly, as if stepping deliriously into a magical wonderland. He broke the wintry calm with a loud “Ahem” that was anything but frosty.

“I’m in town,” he thought. “I can do this job.”