Hmm hmm hmm. A new song in my head.

Computer Magic, “Running.”
A comforting video in which a child levitates out of her bed into the psychedelic heavens and morphs into Computer Magic vocalist/synth whiz Danz.
The song has the same dream comforts—fulsome keyboards and beats to stabilize the vision. Not groundbreaking, but ethereal things rarely are.

For sensitive surfer boomers among us, the paramount summer album of all time is Pet Sounds. But the Beach Boys opus is not really about pets, and pets are really what’s been on my mind this week as I’ve watched the family dogs’ fur fry in the 90 degree summer heat.
Our corgis have become parapetetic, impertinent messes. Our cats too. Even the gerbils. So I’ve been lining up some Pet Sounds to comfort them.

1. Soapy. The original 1965 sax-saturated single was by Mickey & the Clean Cuts, but a later generation of garage fans learned it via The Lyres. I interviewed Lyres frontman Mono Mann in the early 1980s for Rocco Cippilone’s fanzine Bang!, which gained me entrance to the esteemed Mann’s Boston apartment. (There was a secret knock to get in.) One of the many revelations of the hours-long interview: Mono Mann loved cats, and had named one of them Soapy.
2. My Pet. Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer had one of the most remarkable mindmelds in the history of jazz, bonding and fetching and following each other leads as assuredly as a man and his dog. “
3. Martha My Dear. Bestial Beatles, since it’s about Paul McCartney’s sheepdog. The Beatles’ White Album could just as well be called the Animal Album: “Piggies,” “Blackbird,” Rock Raccoon,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey,” the elephant in “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”… (I only recently read, in Dorian Lynkskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day, that “Blackbird’ was inspired by a human and not a bird. As Lynskey amusingly writes, “Discovering that ‘Blackbird’ was about a female civil rights activist, an (oh dear) ‘black bird,’ does nothing to enhance one’s enjoyment.”
4. Shannon. Henry Gross wrote this 1976 hit single in honor of Beach Boy Carl Wilson’s Irish Setter Shannon, who had just died. This might explain Gross’ falsetto squeal on the chorus, a sound only dogs can hear. Knowing the song is about a dog invigorates the lyric about “maybe she’ll find an island with a shady tree/just like the one in our backyard.” Something to pee against.
5. We Are Siamese If You Please. May be Peggy Lee’s finest moment as a songwriter. In his new autobiography Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler cites this song as a stirring memory of a three-year love affair he had with a teenage groupie he took on tour with him: “That sweet girl used to recite poetry and constantly sing songs to me like my mother did when she put me to sleep. It was an inspiration to my heart. One of the songs she taught me was ‘We Are Siamese,’ which I’m sure you’ll all remember from the movie Lady and the Tramp.”

Oh, we’re just getting started. More pets in future posts.

Emil of the House Whites has been compiling a list of performance-enhancing drugs. But just the musical performance-enhancing kinds. Emil’s an amateur pharmacologist, and has been examining both medical texts at the college on the hill and and live shows at the Bullfinch to further his studies.
He’s got subsets so far for:
• drugs which, in the short term, arguably could make you physically sing or play instruments better. (Example: a still-experimental pill which claims to strengthen the vocal cords.)
• drugs which, in the long term, might alter your body in which which suggest that you might play better. (Example: a little-known fluid which helps build callouses on your fingers.)
• Drugs which aid you psychologically into playing better. This is by far the longest list.
Drugs which focus you. Drugs which unfocus you. Drugs which relax you. Drugs which stimulate you. Drugs which, if you’re in any music scene anywhere, you know all about.

We have no desire to swipe Emil’s research here. That’s because we don’t really believe in it. We’ve been collecting our own evidence from the other side of the stage. The only list we stand by is the one of drugs which musicians THINK will make them play better. From our perch in the audience, we haven’t seen any that reliably work.
These are the same drugs which make writers think they can write better, streetfighters think they can streetfight better, and accountants think they can account better.

Go ahead. Drink and puff. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re doing it for someone else’s benefit.

No Nutty, The Story Needs and Dame Rumor all at the Bullfinch. Not only that, we hear Beloved Infidel is making a guest appearance on TSN’s epic “Big Envelope Marked Scott.” Who says solo singer-songwriters are lonely?… The Disenchanted and College of One, conjuring up memories of fun times that never really happened, via contrived cover tunes at Hamilton’s… Latest all-star line-up of supposed punk all-stars France By Big Shots, invading D’ollaire’s: Don the Red, Ted the Fink, Bud the Untalented, Pat Hobby and Stahr. Where’s Philippe, Count of Darkness, when you need him?…

The Bagel Place announced that they can’t afford to replace the timeclock card system. We love our jobs again.

Gold Leaves, “Cruel/Kind.”
Four minutes of leafy love. Why don’t more folk bands use extraneous echo effects? There’s an exquisite alone-in-nature creepiness to the opening of this delicate cut, which picks up the pace mid-song and turns into a model ‘60s AM folk-pop single from the “hey, let’s clean up Dylan” era.

Deadly Duo
She-Go ‘n’ Ego
Is He Ready to Go Steady?
Takes the Cake—Doesn’t That Frost You?
East Feast
Work Smirk
Parole Denied
Queen Scene
Dum-Dum
Two Girls on a Torpedo, or They Went Down to the Sea in Slips
Without a Point
Spellbound
Air Tear
Brain Waves
Unhappy Talk
Cooked Goose

Lips Teeth did this thing Thursday at the Bullfinch where they sang arias, then told jokes, then hit cymbals for a while, then did a showtune, then played a pop song.
All originals. All connected by a weird continuous buzz, like waves crashing and wind blowing.
“You got it,” confirms LT co-founder Jim Smit. “We were the human clock radio ambient noise machine. We just didn’t want to be obvious about it.”
Well, no wonder we fell asleep! Just kidding. But the show was disorienting—especially the nonstop fluidity of the jarring, oddly juxtaposed pop strains. Whoosh!

Very few shows to list this time, but they’re both unmissable, so there: The New World’s First Fashion Victim at the Bullfinch (brand new, but trust us), and Write Hard at Hamilton’s (can’t describe it, but trust us)…

Mar and I offered to clean up the Bagel Place for cheap, and saved our jobs.

Keith Top of the Pops & His Minor UK Indie Celebrity All-Star Backing Band, “Two of the Beatles Are Dead.” Punk-obvious and not particularly well produced—you miss a lot of the jokes in the lyrics—but a noteworthy novelty nonetheless, right up the “Day in the Life” plonk chord at its finish.
The song premiered on PopMatters.com, which shares this embed code: