Listening to… AM & Shawn Lee

AM & Shawn Lee have done a remarkably respectful cover of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ mid-‘70s hit “Jackie Blue.” Not the first indie-rock cover of the song. No less a band than Smashing Pumpkins did it on the K-Tel covers project 20 Explosive Dynamic Super Smash Hit Explosions! compilation. AM & Shawn Lee’s version takes advantage of the opportunity to jam electronically, then slow the thing down to a crawl. The poppy elements and vocals remain pristine, slavishly aping the Daredevils to the point where they seem ironic or parodic. It’s that middle jam that’s so smart, taking the song apart from the inside and leaving that AM (radio, that is)-friendly shell intact.

Literary Up: Lip Baum

The girls and I have been rereading L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz. We read it just over a year ago, then decided to read The Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz, followed by the short Woggle-Bug Book. Then they wanted to hear Ozma of Oz already again, just because they want to do them in order. Between our first and second readings of Ozma, the girls were avidly following Eric Shanower’s comics adaptation of that book, so they really know it well by now.
Shanower’s version shows the characters other than how they’ve imagined them, but it didn’t jar them at all, as he follows the books’ plots very closely his adaptations.
Just as theatergoers these days are as likely to know Oz from the musical Wicked as from the 1939 MGM movie, Mabel & Sally are aware of the famous John R. Neill illustrations of Baum’s original Oz books, but much more familiar with Shanower’s. The Kindle edition of the Oz books which I read to them from—all 15 or so in the series, for just a few bucks—doesn’t have any illustrations at all.
The supporting characters and regional villains are what Oz books are all about, though Baum learned that they couldn’t quite carry the series by themselves. Ozma marks the return of Dorothy Gale as heroine; she was absent from Marvelous Land. Ozma was in that one, but mostly in her enchanted guise as Tip, a young boy unaware that he’s actually a beautiful princess inside. (It is my belief that the gay men who label themselves “Friends of Dorothy” should more accurately be called “Empathizers of Ozma.”) Marvelous Land features a motley crew of supernaturally charged stragglers—a figure made of sticks with a pumpkin for a head; a sawhorse; a winged beast with no limbs and a couch for a body—who would not be alive if not for magic powder. There’s also the Woggle-Bug, a know-it-all irritant whose cultural brethren of later generations would seem to include Jeremy Boob from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and Yoda from Star Wars.
Ozma’s cast includes a talking chicken named Bill, whose name Dorothy changes to Billina because the hen is female. The first villains encountered are The Wheelers, who have wheels instead of hands and feet and could be one of the street gangs in Walter Hill’s The Warriors.
Best of all is Tik-Tok, an all-metal mechanical man, from a time before the word “Robot” had even been invented. Baum presents Tik-Tok’s speech by inserting lots of hyphens between syllables. He’s anticipated not just artificial intelligence but the very invention on which I read Ozma of Oz to my daughters: when I read Tik-Tok’s chatter aloud, it breaks up into monotonous word-bites which sound just like the Kindle’s own text-to-speech function. Perhaps if I tire of reading to them, the Kindle can take over, and all Tik-Tok’s talk will sound just right.

For Our Connecticut Readers: Marketing Research

The Elm City Market in the big new building at 360 State Street has received more fanfare even than Stop & Shop’s recent takeover of the vacated Shaw’s supermarket in Dwight Plaza on Whalley. Since well before it was a sure thing, ECM had style and attitude and confidence. Now that you can look through the windows and see what’s in store when the store finally opens. Organizational and financial issues have delayed the project, but it clearly hasn’t lost its focus. As planned, it will be a “community owned food co-op” with paid memberships and an involved, aware clientele who are invited to serve on the market’s various committees.
The store is living up to its hype as a mecca for progressive, earth- and health-conscious yuppies. Signs in the aisles point out where you can find soy milks, energy bars and bottled teas. Another sign, touting “Beer and Wine,” has been a point of consternation for some. But one suspects that the Night Train guzzlers won’t be comfortable in these environs and will continue to imbibe elsewhere.
The new Stop & Shop on Whalley will likely be unaffected by Elm City Market, all the way on the other side of downtown, just as Whalley’s own health-foods supermarket, Edge of the Woods seemed unchanged when they was a Shaw’s just down the street, and equally unchanged when there wasn’t a Shaw’s down the street. Some markets are simply good identifying their market base. Elm City Market’s base is the ground floor of 360 State.

Five More Pet Songs

1. “My Dogs.” I only just discovered this one, on one of the Broadway internet channels the girls and I listen to. It’s from the William Finn song cycle “Elegies.” On the soundtrack album, it’s sung by Christian Borle, a wonderful actor whom I first raved about when he played Riff at the New Haven’s Shubert in a non-Equity national tour of West Side Story. A lot of performers never make it out of that circuit, but Borle moved up to Equity tours, returning to the Shubert in Footloose and joining that show’s Broadway cast in the final weeks of its
years-long run. Adept, from the very outset of his career, at shows that blend death and comedy, Borle totally nails Finn’s fetching numbers about deceased best friends and short-lived relationships.
2. “Pup Tune.” My favorite Willie Alexander song, and that’s saying a lot. Improvised during the recording of the Live at the Rat sets in 1976. Between namedropping (Is that Celia Cruz he’s wailing about? And how nice to mention “Rodney Rush, just like Third Rail”) and his patented goo-goo-ya-yas, Willie “Loco” spins a yarn about how “the dog just swallowed another pair of panties. He puked them up in the hall; they’re in a ball now.” Punk rock in Boston started right here.
3. “Teddy Bear’s Picnic.” Are they pets? Well, they eat like pets. One of the thing I love about this classic kid’s song, which I love playing on ukulele, is how it introduces the concept that a picnic for teddy bears might be terrifying. “You’d better go in disguise.” “It’s better to stay at home.” Seriously, you’d think this was the dismemberment of Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae, not a play date with stuffed bruins.
4. “Theme from Ruff and Reddy.” This early Hanna-Barbera foray into low budget, limited-animation series for television is notable because, unlike in Tom & Jerry where Tom is indeed a tomcat, here Ruff is a red-haired cat and Reddy is a white dog. Perhaps due to these counterintuitive monikers, “They sometimes have their little spats/Even fight like dogs and cats … But when they need each other/That’s when, they’re rough and ready.”
5. Pet Soul. The band Splitsville developed their deft blend of Rubber Soul Beatles and Pet Sounds Beach Boys, in the late 1990s, returning to the highly harmonized, studio-precious pop of two of the founding members’ days in the band Greenberry Woods. I remember Splitsville bestowing an advance cassette version on me at a show at Yale GPSCY Café. I treasured it, and still have it. It was years before The Complete Pet Soul came out on CD, with Splitsville’s history-of-rock cover of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” as a bonus track. No songs directly about pets, but the whole EP is recalled and loved as fondly as one.

Rock Gods #207: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

The Acrobats of Etiquette fought their first—and, they insist, their last for at least nine months—battle of the bands last Thursday. Simple two-act bout, and our pirate pals (we write unflinchingly with home-court bias) was in rare fettle, true fighting form. Had a new singalong anthem even, a sucker punch if ever there was one.
What the AoE hadn’t accounted for, and the reason why they’ll never stumble through this particular forest again, is the size of their opponent’ s family.
Ever been to an Arnold Rice show? Ever noticed that just about everybody in the crowd looks out of place? How you could never imagine so many people willingly coming out to see a middling singer-songwriter who has neither the presence nor to projection skills to command the stages he infrequently plays?
It takes nothing away from his performance skills (such as they are) to reveal that Arnie Rice is part of an immigrant wave which hit this town in the 1960s. He’s related to several entire neighborhoods which are walking distance from Hamilton’s. Plus he tends to book his gigs on family reunion weekends and holidays.
If the majority of the local population wants to corral a well-situated club for family festivities, who’s to stop ‘em? But isn’t holding a battle of the bands on such a night a tad unfair?

Far from being sore losers, the Acrobats of Etiquette are taking this loss as a further challenge. They intend to build their own fervent family-filled fanbase, starting right now.That’s where the self-imposed nine-month moratorium between battles comes in. “None of us have kids,” the Acs of Et regret. “We’ve got our work cut out for us if we want to have a few fresh faces at the next battle of the bands.” Then, in another generation or so, they’ll be beating mama’s boy Arnie Rice at his own game.

Poll Parrot and The Devil and Mr. O at the Bullfinch… Gene and Glenn and Forty-Five Minutes, economical cover acts, at Hamilton’s… Kitchen Klatter and The Planet Man at D’ollaire’s; two more unalike bands could apparently not be found…

Listening to… Dark Dark Dark (playing at The Space in Hamden Sept. 27)

Dark Dark Dark, Wild Go.
Builds catchy tunes excitingly sideways, with accordions and strings and whatever (I can’t really tell) carrying melodies while vocals and organ sound grow into cascading waterfalls of sound—then, just as quickly, dry up, leaving the sweet vocals and frisky-weird keyboards alone. Alternately sensitive and silly, and brilliant at both. I want to see this band live. More than that, I want to see this band live in a German cabaret at the turn of the last century.

Literary Up: Family Tie-ography

Sit Ubu Sit by Gary David Goldberg.
I dug this out after reading Meredith Baxter’s autobiography, in which she speaks very well of her Family Ties producer. He on the other hand, barely mentions her in this book–not out of spite or anything, but because he’s crafted a story with just a few interwoven threads. He wants to talk about the most special relationships in his life– on Family Ties, that wound be Michael J. Fox (whom he discovered when Matthew Broderick became unavailable). Offscreen, it’s his wife.
He writes, with selfless insight, of health issues and professional crises. He streamlines and connects the stories so that they mean something. Goldberg’s voice is calm and collected. He escaped Hollywood tensions for an idyllic east coat retirement in Vermont. Hie tells his life story not out of bravado or ego, but because he wants to share what he learned. And even more than very special episodes of’80s stockings, his are lessons worth sharing.

For Our Connecticut Readers: Apple for the teachers

You’ve got to love a technological showdown like this:

Barnes & Noble, home of the Nook ebook reader, downsizes its Yale bookstore, giving up half of its real estate and shunting two stores worth of merchandise into one. (Very capably, I might add; the redesign is still roomy and browsey.)
And who got the lease on the vacated space? Apple, creator of the Nook’s nemesis, the iPad.
An Apple store is overdue in this part of the state; an Ivy League university would seem to demand proximity to an Apple store. Yet it’s taken this long.
They’ve put the time to good use at least. The whole summer was devoted to construction on that section of Broadway. (Besides B&N, neighbours include the Thali 2 vegetarian restaurant, a Yale dorm and the shop that sells touristy university t- shirts.) one hopes the inconvenience was worth ir for the other businesses. It certainly helped make the Apple store a shining testament to the hallowed computer company’s sense of style.
A whole new edifice was constructed for the store, a stand-alone bearing with the aesthetics associated with apple products: airy, spacy, freeing. The high ceilings and wide aisles resemble the generous frames and uncluttered appeal of Apple products. Giant windows on all sides lure you to the screens within. The products themselves– phones, computers, pads, laptops, all with that distinctive fruit logo–laid out on inviting try-out tables.
The staff are the eager-beaver, if bleary -yed and unshaven, sort of young men and women who clog the streets around Yale at any given time,
A long line formed Saturday morning for the grand opening, which dissipated quickly once the doors opened, because there’s lot of room in there,
Hyper space, meet new haven retail space. An apple seller on the main downtown marketing route in or fair village. The apples don’t fall far from the elm trees. Welcome to town, technology hounds. We may have lost a bookstore over the summer (Labyrinth on York), but we’ve gained an ebook store.