On the hill up the South Side live the elite. They’re hyper-boring yet they’ve got the ear of touring indie bands, and vice versa. Bands you hear on college radio (sometimes even the behind-the-times College on the Hill station) can breeze into town and play gigs on campus to a handful of too-hip-for-town disaffected sophomores, then zip away before the rest of the city even knew they were here.
The local band scene has always been a world apart from what happens on the hill. The first local club of renown, on the west side of town, was Ellie’s Plain Food (no jokes please, they’ve all been made), a downhome diner which was convinced to allow live music on Saturday nights. Fortunate Fields has entered legend as the first band to play Ellie’s. Within weeks of the Saturday bookings, Ellie’s Plain Food had enlisted a Thursday house band, a proto-New Wave combo called I Love the Blast.
This is where the real people played. The gods on the hill saw this, and approved, and sent representatives, and before anyone could stop it there was a town/gown scene.
Airport Mystery tonight at The Bullfinch, with Melted Coins… Crisscross Shadow, featuring Sky Sabotage, at Hamilton’s, for two sets… Metal onslaught at D’ollaire’s with Demon’s Den, Program for Destruction and Racing to Disaster…
Joker, The Vision. Leisurely pops and squeaks suffuse a matter-of-fact futuristic vision intoned with R&B/soul smolder-fervor. “Milky Way” sounds like a ‘70s video game mated with a roadhouse jukebox. The closing number is a portentous piano-introed instrumental which bears the disorienting title “The Magic Causeway,” which is way too Harry Potter-sounding to take seriously.
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
I’ll probably have to buy this. Definitely an in-small-doses only affair. I marvel at Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem’s ability to edit the mountain of Philip K. Dick’s “2-3-74” documents down to under a thousand pages (not to mention creating an index of them!) without going mad—or being picked themselves for visitation from another demension, as Dick suspected he might have been.
This is not a work of imagination. It’s a work of psychological, psychoactive, sigh-inducing overwhelmth. It’s dense and dangerous yet alarmingly enjoyable. It’s full of puns and deprecation:
“Claudia, on this day we must count our cursings.”
“’The three lights coming on indicate the return of Christ.’ And the lights are in my TV set. A circuit few people know about. Nor are they interested.”
“Here my study ends. Except to add: My god, each step is a further fall.
This book would have blown my mind, as did Dick’s fiction, when I was in my teens and 20s. Now, it makes me want to revisit his novels, then sparingly take careful plunges into this most inward and mathematical of memoirs.
The Yale Daily News has been laying into Toad’s on a regular basis for months now. In November, there was a news story, “Alternative venues leapfrog Toad’s,”
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/nov/16/alternative-venues-leapfrog-toads/
which suggested that “changing crowd demographics and a growing number of alternatives are eroding the decades-long dominance Toad’s has held over Yale nightlife.” In other words, Yalies are apoplectic that more riff-raff from other colleges—notably busloads of Quinnipiac students—are daring to set foot on their turf.
In the YDN’s last issue of the fall semester, there were two stories denigrating the club. One was an op-ed by the resident of a nearby dorm decrying the noise and squalor at closing time. This screed which made me laugh out loud, as I’ve lived in neighborhoods where Yale societies and sports teams hold “private” parties, and the students’ squalor far eclipses any found at a state-regulated, police-enforced downtown club.
The other was a news article declaring the Elm Street bar and steakhouse Box 63 to be serious competition for Toad’s. That wasn’t the first article to make such a claim; on Sept. 30, the Yale Daily ran a story titled “Boxing Out Toad’s,” which began “After decades of dominating Yale’s nightlife, Toad’s Place might have some new competition.”
Never mind that the same September story quote managers at both Toad’s and Box 63 as saying they don’t consider each other to be major competition, considering the differences between the two. Never mind that Box 63 doesn’t offer live music or dance parties. Never mind that Toad’s is not a restaurant. Never mind that the YDN’s case for Box 63 cutting into Toad’s audience is based on increased drinking at late-night hours a couple of nights a week.
I was a frequent Toad’s-goer from my mid-20s into my early 40s. I didn’t regard it as a rite of passage—there were plenty of other places, including my neighbor Rudy’s, where I could just drink and converse. The purpose of a cover charge or ticket price is because there is a whole other opportunity being offered: live music, or a DJ dance party or a community benefit.
I’m ecstatic at the swift success of Box 63. They took a building that had been empty for over a year, and which hadn’t been used to its full potential for maybe a decade, and restored it to the glory it once had as Fitzwilly’s and other restaurants.
But it’s ridiculous to tout its success as a slam on another place. Not when there are so many other options also in the neighborhood, from Elm Bar to Mory’s to the new spate of bar/restaurants on Upper Chapel. Not when places like Richter’s, which drew a Box 63-type crowd, have gone under. And especially not when you minimize Toad’s as merely a place to drink with Yale friends.
I don’t fish. I don’t even eat fish. But I was intrigued by this list of songs about fishing, published in 2008 on the Oklahoman newspaper’s blog site NewsOK.
I was lured to add a few of my own, without that whole “angling” angle.
1. The Codfish Ball, Shirley Temple and Ray Bolger. I play this one on the ukulele, and while I’m neither as cute as Ms. Temple or as tap-happy as Mr. Bolger, the song always a highlight when I play live because of the atrocious wordplay: “Catfish is a dancin’ man, but he can’t can-can like a [pause] sardine can.” It’s sort of a Teddy Bear’s Picnic of fish: “There’ll be no hook in sight at the Codfish Ball.”
2. Modest Mouse, The Whale Song. Doesn’t really mention whales, just scouts. But it’s The Whale Song.
3. Tom Waits, Fish in the Jailhouse. From the collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, in 2006. Waits also (with his wife Kathleen Brennan) composed “Fish and Bird”: “A song that we’d never heard, a song of a little bird/That fell in love with a whale.”
4. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine.” An early showstopper in Showboat which also nails the (at that point) unrevealed multi-cultural background of the character who sings it, Julie. “Fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly.”
5. Harry Nilsson, “Think About Your Troubles.” From The Point. There’s a wonderful cover of this, appropriately enough, by the band Jellyfish.
You can take your teardrops
And drop them in a teacup
Take them down to the riverside
And throw them over the side
To be swept up by a current
And taken to the ocean
To be eaten by some fishes
Who were eaten by some fishes
And swallowed by a whale
Who grew so old
He decomposed.
6. Barnes and Barnes, “Fishheads.” Eat ‘em up, yum. Iconic early indie experimental novelty hit from 1978. One of the Barneses was Billy Mumy of Lost in Space “Will Robinson! Will Robinson!” fame. The other is Robert Haimer.
7. The Punk Group, “Fish Sticks for Jesus.” New Wavey keyboard-driven 98-second song with low growling vocals followed by a chirpy guy going “Fish Sticks for Jesus! Fish Sticks for Jesus!”
8. Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five, “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” British TV star Stephen Fry adapted the title for his late-‘80s series Saturday Night Fry.
9. Townes Van Zandt, “The Catfish Song.” It begins:
Down at the bottom of that dirty ol’ river
Down where the reeds and the catfish play
There lies a dream as soft as the water
There lies a bluebird that’s flown away.
Seems you can’t write a song about fish without mentioning birds.
10. Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, “Lazybones”:
And when you go fishin’
I bet you keep wishin’
The fish won’t grab at your line.
Another Carmichael song, “Small Fry,” was turned into a classic 1939 Fleischer Brothers cartoon, in which the mischievous protagonist is a young fish.
One day all these bands will be broken up. Some will wonder if they ever really existed.
Their powers are vast. They can magically distract us from nonstop drinking. Rise above the din of the rowdiest celebrants. Get spat on and take it as a compliment.
The universe is changing shape. Not long ago there were heavens and firmaments, and mortals aspired to dwell there at the feet of gods, looking down at Earth and rocking it. Now, there is doubt and indignity, yet the bands still play. They still gather and serve.
These are their stories.
Our scene here is flat and easily navigable. There is a high-born breed who inhabit the College on the Hill. Down the slope are the people’s temples, with their distinct congregations:
D’Aulaire’s Famous Rock Club Cafe, the colorful mainstream mecca of dance, joy and expensive tickets. Altar for nationally touring bands uplifted by the collegiate economy.
Hamilton’s Tap Room, for glorification of mortals who cover the music of the gods and spread it to those gifted followers who can drink, dance and whoop simultaneously.
There are makeshift meeting-houses of musical appreciation found in basements and lodges and churches and school halls throughout the city. There are boiler rooms and lounges and attics on campus. There are bedrooms with recording equipment stashed under the bed, for private worship. There are diffuse local-band radio programs.
Then there is the Bullfinch. When the gods return to the planet, or create a new breed right here on land. When the outside world traverses the river and finds us and realizes that the gods have landed before them, the mangy location where the lightning strikes will be the Bullfinch.
That’s not why we hang there. But that’s what we believe.
Worship services this night: The Hyperboreans return to the College on the Hill where they formed so many years ago, for a reception and student-only concert. Then they play all night at D’ollaires… Sun Bright Deep and Golden Gardens at Hamilton’s; the latter has several Hyperborean covers in their repertoire… At the Bullfinch, dark dismal calm to counteract the party spirit elsewhere: Winds of the North, Becalmed in Sleep and the live debut Silent Conchs…
Seeker Lover Keeper, Seeker Lover Keeper.
Cute pop. No frills, except the harmonies ahhh harmonies ahhh harmonies. Delightful, delicious, delovely. The lyrics are comforting too: “You can rely on me.” “Rest your head on my shoulder.” Lots of sleepy and restful images, yet these are not lullabyes. Something to listen to when you want to sleep but are up writing and just want to cool down without passing out.
Three Stooges FAQ—Everything Left to Know About the Eye-Poking, Face-Slapping, Head-Thumping Geniuses.
By David J. Hogan (Applause Books, 2011)
Distinctive in how it divides the Stooge canon not into its various line-ups (Moe & Larry plus Curly, Shemp, Curly Joe…) but into their preferred foils and themes: “The Stooges and the Fairer Sex,” “The Stooges on the Job,” “…Out West,” “. Rewrite History,” “…Puncture High Society,” “…and Show Biz,” “…Go to War.” All headings which would fit the Marx Brothers just as well, or Neil Simon for that matter. So whether or not you’re particularly fond of the Stooges (I’m a Shemp man myself, which puts me in a misunderstood subcult of their fan base), this is a useful study of 20th century film comedy in general. It’s augmented with profiles of essential Stooge co-stars. Books like this help me appreciate them for their ability to sustain their act for their entire lifetimes, refine their knucklehead artform and create a vast body of work that, I see now, is underestimated as social satire. So many Stooges books are created for a frat-boy fanbase. This one’s for the classmates who do their homework.
