Rock Gods #41: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

By Artie Capshaw

Little victories matter in our sensitive scene. Yesterday we were riffling through the rejects at the Stupendous Triumphant Acetone Records shoppe when a woman in her 30s wandered in looking for “Latent” by American Hop. A woman! In her 30s!

Joy of joys (not for her, but for our scenario here), she didn’t know the name of the band, or the right name of the song. She’d heard it on the radio! She didn’t know anyone who had anything to do with the record. SHE JUST LIKED IT! Take that, industry suits! The A-Hops turned out a disk on their own, with no development money or focus groups or farm teams, and caught the ear of an unlikely demographic. Sign ’em. And listen to ’em!

During the same bout of browsing, we were told Babahoya killed at our new gov’s inauguration ball, and suddenly has bookings for similar hoity-toits across the capitol, plus a few leads into other jurisdictions altogether. Way to go—but make sure you come back from time to time, guys. We need our regular dose of “Banana Bunchy Top.”

Do days get brighter than this?

Well, sure, when there’s all that sunshine reflecting off the newfallen snow. Let’s see if we can spin this in a positive way—no guaranteed shows at any of the regular clubs tonight due to the intense snowfall. Bullfinch was trying to plow the sidewalk, so there’ll at least be drinking there.

Bat liberty

The rock bands these days seem like the same bands of a decade ago, only younger. And the same can be said for municipal superheroes. The ones we’ve glimpsed along the skyline at dusk in recent months (yeah, we’re capespotters; go make fun) are decked out like their forebears. But it would take a lot of looking the other way to accept that these are the same heroes, or even blood relations of those heroes.

In Gotham City alone, we’ve seen a younger, blonder Batgirl, the nimblest Robin in decades and what seem to be a plethora of Batmen. Has someone started a franchise?

Alas, not much is known about the habitats and nesting habits of superheroes, especially the more batlike ones. More’s the pity. Over in Metropolis, Superman has subjected himself to numerous scientific tests over the years, and his younger self has even reportedly been cloned. The man himself is currently hiking cross-country, allowing hordes of gawkers the opportunity to observe him and his legendary muscles up close.

Some worry about this preponderance of new batpeople the way we worry about the woods around the city when the deer or bear populations rise.

Batfolks skulk and hide and do their work in secrecy. They have been accused of holding vigilante philosophies and using illegal work methods.

On the other hand, more of a unified bat culture could result in more communication among the heroes, and hopefully more accountability and moral fervor.

Unless bats just don’t swoop that way.

Rock Gods #40: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

Inquiring readers—both of ’em—wanna know: What’s that infectious sample which leads off the Hugheses’ new single “Spruce Goose”? No sure we believe them, but the band says they wrote the riff all by themselves. That’s right—a self-sample! Which begs a question. To put it charitably, “Spruce Goose” doesn’t hang together all that well as a complete melodic-type song. Why didn’t The Hugheses flesh out the sample and put that instead of this mishmash?

And the reply is what you might expect. “Well, we couldn’t finish that song, but we really liked the riff and the drum fill. It came together in the studio,” agree the Hughes twins Irving and Clifford. Or came apart, you could say. The Hugheses explain themselves further on college radio (you know which one) tonight at 7 p.m. Listen in—we hear they’re enjoying dark studios so much that they may never play out live again.

Robard, The Outlaw Bra and Humble Birthplace tonight at Hamilton’s for a frat nite of sorts… The Bullfinch has Stone Gano, Two Arabian Knights and The Racket—one, two and three-piecers respectively… For a chance, the big excitement is over at Dollaire’s for Floyd Odlum’s Atlas, featuring a whole rhythm section of local boys made good, namely Billie Durkin and Neil McCarthy. That band’s got its fortune made, and is currently touring by plane just ’cause they can. Focke-Wulf, a side project featuring much of the FOA team,  opens…

Theater Book of the Week

The Play That Changed My Life,—America’s Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them (Applause Books, 2009)

This one’s a year old, but a real perennial since it makes such a good gift book.

Connecticut theatergoers will appreciate the East Coast bias of this collection of short essays by selected theater writers who aren’t hesitant to say that they were influenced by others, and who for the most part seem proud to be part of a distinct theater tradition and heritage. So many writers put on the loner/maverick/prodigy masks that it’s nice to see a whole pack of ’em celebrating traditions and rituals.

Many of the participants are familiar from productions hereabouts—Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, Horton Foote, Regina Taylor. A few, including Christopher Durang, David Ives and Lynn Nottage, studied at Yale. One—Pulitzer-winner Donald Margulies—even lives in New Haven. Margulies, whose breakthrough play was The Loman Family Picnic, unsurprisingly picks Death of a Salesman as his answer to the book’s titular query. Other writers are less obvious—in an opening epigraph at odd with the longer essays which the book solicited from others, Edward Albee cites the elephantine Rodgers/Hart/Hecht/MacArthur musical Jumbo as an inspiration (for Zoo Story?).

You’ll plow through this in one swell evening, but then you’ll be gathering up all the classics it mentions and poring through that stack for months to come.

Rock Gods #39: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

By Artie Capshaw

The Blats have a manager! Or, to put it more precisely, one of the band’s fans has taken it upon himself to “help them out.” Scott “Spawn” Smith, who loads a truck with bandleader Sonny Blitt (we all need day jobs; ours is sitting at this desk waiting patiently to go out and get drunk in a few hours), has been calling the papers, sending out fliers and has even got the band off their ass and into a studio—OK, a bedroom—to make a demo he can send to labels and clubs. Sounds real professional, huh? Yep, that’s our job, to make nothing-better-to-do-today favors-for-friends sound like something they do in the real world…

Too Much Action, Not Enough Talk

Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary and Off-Screen Secrets

By Dick Cavett. Times Books, 2010. 304 pages.

I really wanted this to be the antidote to Bill Carter’s The War for Late Night—a discourse on what talk shows were like in the old days, before they were overscrutinized for their moneymaking and youth-mongering potential, when they were just a cheap and relaxing way to wrap up a programming day.

Imagine my disappointment when this turned out to be a collection of Cavett’s online columns for the New York Times website. The book has much less to say about talk show hosting in general than Cavett’s long-ago autobiography and subsequent books did. The title “Talk Show” is more a device to remind us why Dick Cavett is famous. Years ago, I’m not sure he would have taken a title that pigeonholed him thus. Now he uses it for a book which is more freewheeling than that title allows.

In any case, Cavett takes his position as columnist seriously, even stating his trepidation at taking on the assignment in the book’s introduction. He doesn’t behave like a blogger—his style is more composed and formalized, in the manner of magazine columns of yore. As for his penchant for namedropping and for retelling the tales of how J.I. Rodale dropped dead on his show—well, one imagines that’s exactly why he was given this gig, because he had an excess of ready material to spit out into the internet void.

As for Cavett’s rabid devotion to Groucho Marx, I share that particular enthrallment. So even though Talk Show is not the book I needed it to be, it warms me because of its frequent and worshipful references to Groucho.

Rock Gods #38: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

By Artie Capshaw

Ow! To be outed in the Letters section of the very periodical for which we scribble!

We were given a heads-up, so to speak, about the letter, and could have responded in one of those italicized addenda right after it on the same page. Instead, we choose to address the issue here, for two reasons. One, this is our domain, where you expect us to spout. Two, for us, this is not a sexual issue but a musical one.

It all started when we were slammed as a homophobe for writing mincingly of a local drag diva. You could say it really all started not with the letter but with our article, but we are among those who still don’t know what all the fuss was about. Suffice to say we pissed off someone who couldn’t quite explain why they were pissed off. And that pissed off even more people.

Anyhow, post-slam, a well-meaning soul from the scene rushed to our defense with the revelation that we we knew whereof we minced, that we’d kissed a boy and that he, our righteous defender, should know.

True enough. We won’t elaborate, except to say it’s only half the story. In the great traditions of jazz and fusion and cross-genre experiments and remixes, we are proud to relate that (to use another musical term) we swing both ways.

Here, look at our record collection. There is a nary a club-dance track, extended or otherwise. But check out the stacks and stacks of sequin-studded made-up dudes in platform (and even high) heels stomping and shouting out anthems of individuality and acceptance. Those are anthems to which we doff our hat and pat our heart: “PoMo.” “Dual Attraction.” “Closer to Home.” “Any Other Name.” You’ve probably shouted along to them yourself—though you may well complain that you didn’t understand what these songs were about. Well, we do.

We are as bi as a cycle, as bi as a focal. Plane-ly, we’re bi. And we have our record collection to thank for it.

We’re sure we’re not alone in this. We wager that more people locate their sexual center through their clubhoppings than their bedhoppings. The club scene is less anxiety-prone, less prone in a whole lot of ways. The undercurrent is heavily sexualized, but in a way that formalizes and dramatizes and verbalizes and harmonizes the act. It’s hard to be closeted in a club.

So that’s our story, and —ewww!—we’re sticking to it. Nevertheless, we apologize to that initial letter-writer who took offense at our suggestive language regarding Fairy Fay a few weeks back. We’ll doubtless continue to offend, but we’ll also continue to apologize, because we realize respect must be paid to all eager listeners in this scene. Almost everything we write about is “not for everyone,” yet we do it all in one place. We will take care in future to warn the more tender-eared fans to cover ‘em when we wander in certain suck-centric directions.

But back to our own orientation, and a final point of order. If we were reading such revelations about another writer, we know what we’d be asking—not “What’s he like in bed?” but “How does this horniness impact his reporting?” Namely, in our case: Have we slept with Fairy Fay—or Polly, Wally or Doodle, for that matter? And the answer is no, not even in our dreams. We have not had, or sought, such an honor. In most matters of the scene, we love what enters our ears—the music—better than anything that might enter other orifices.

And we dare you to bi that.

But enough about (sodo)meee! Here’s what’ll be assaulting your earlobes, and shaking your extremities, in days to come:

The Canterville Ghosts at the Bullfinch—national act, yes, but with sterling local openers For Love of the King, Star Child and Vera & the Nihilists. … For one night only, the Model Marvels become the Model Millionaires. It’s for a Casino Nite fundraiser at frisky frontwoman Millie’s alma mater, Windemere High School (on the Windemere Green; band starts playing 7 p.m.) … A daylong dose of gloom Saturday for the first annual Selfish Giant festival in the basement of Urbs Sacra Aeterna Hall, across the street from (and vaguely connected to) the university on the hill. Thirteen bands in twelve hours: Les Ballons, Rome Unvisited, The New Remorse, The Burden of Itys, True Knowledge, The Fisherman & His Soul, Her Voice, London Models, Decay of Lying, Massacre of the Christians, Young King,  Roses & Rue and Pen, Pencil & Poison. It’s a battle of the bands, though truth be told at least half these bands are making their debuts—side projects worked up for the fest. Dress as your favorite yellow book … Devoted Friend, By the Arno and A Vision assail Hamilton’s. The first and last and cover bands; the one in the middle might as well be. … Tell your parents that Fabian de Franchi, famous local Italo-pop warbler who held court in the Gold Room of the Harmony Italia restaurant for decades, has come out of retirement for a concert Saturday at the Pan Center, a charity event for Madonna Mia.

Hmmm… that’s two charities and a French philosophy-inspired high school rock festival. And you doubt our free spirit?

Theater Book of the Week

The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy

By Bill Carter. Viking Adult, 2010. 416 pages.

Theater book, this? Well, it is when you read between the lines. For all its arguing about the natural talents of Leno, O’Brien, Letterman and other celebrities who cajole you to stay up past your bedtime, the real truth I took away from this book is that talk shows are barely about “talk” anymore, and yet to produce anything grander on a daily basis is foolhardy. There’s lots of pontificating about time slots and egos, but Carter doesn’t emphasize enough the fact that the real problems with O’Brien’s Tonight Show and Leno’s prime time show was quality control. Neither host, it seemed—and more crucially, their producers and writers—grasped the amount of effort it would require to both pacify their loyal fans and create whole legions of new ones. Both assumed that prepared filmed comedy routines would do the trick, but producing scripted material on that schedule is calamitous.

Carter’s book is overly concerned with listing every conceivable argument for every decision made, whether corporate or personal. The justifications begin to jostle and openly contradict each other, and the narrative loses focus. But there are some fascinating insights nonetheless. I never suspected, for instance, that in his early days of Late Night, Conan O’Brien actually had a cohesive plan and tone he was trying to implement—”Silliness” as a needed alternative to the increasingly stentorian old-school stances of Leno and Letterman. O’Brien’s the one who really upped the need for prepared comedy sketches in a talk show, since he never really excelled as an interviewer and had made his name mostly as a writer.

I wish Carter would have gone further down this path. He does note how overpreparedness can spoil the spontaneity which late night viewers expect. Letterman apparently tapes his Friday episodes back-to-back with his Monday ones so he can have long weekends—viewers have detected the lack of immediacy on those nights and the Friday ratings are appreciably lower than that of the fresher Thursday shows.

But I do realize that I can advance my own theories only so far before they fall apart. Early late night TV in the 1950s and ’60s was the province of inventive and instinctive comedians such as Groucho Marx, Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen, who filled 90 minutes a night and rarely went into reruns or vacations.

This is definitely a sensitive equation, mucked up in the modern era by marketing and demographics which have turned what was once a method of keeping the network lights on a couple hours longer and milking a few more advertisers into a much-hyped, intensely scrutinized industry of its own with its own territorial superstars.

Take these entertainers out of their comfort zones and they’re like Howard Cosell when he was picked to become the new Ed Sullivan and host his own weekend variety show. Taking your natural charisma and improvisational skills and adapting them to something more formalized and commercialized takes time, and is fraught with danger. The Late Night debacle wasn’t a war, or a tactical programming error. It was an out-of-town try-out or shakedown writ large, and it couldn’t hit the marks.

Rock Gods #37: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

The Jung Seeds, Valentine Giant, Pink Wonder and Bella Anna are the first big–name booking at the Quality Value Service Annex. This is problematic for us, since a note sent along seeking publicity for the show intimated that “you can’t ignore us now!” When that wasn’t the issue at all.

Does that sound like us? Overlooking the local bands and waiting for a national act everyone’s heard of to show up?

We’ve been wrestling with our conscience to find the proper way to deal with this venue. Too much of the wrong kind of press, we know from experience, will get them closed down, yet what they’re doing over there is too important for any self-respecting music journalist—and even us—to pass up. There’ve been theme shows, new band revues, side projects galore, open mics and happenings, all within a matter of weeks. So why have many of you faithful reader/scenesters probably not heard about the place?

Because, on a few levels, it’s operating illegally. Not if its shows come under the definition of “private parties,” for which everyone in attendance has been personally invited. But not if they really want to running a club. Which they do.

We’re caught in the middle here. Bands that don’t understand the circumstances are convincing themselves that we are ignoring QVS Annex because we’re willfully ignorant, or petty or something.

“If these shows were at the Bullfinch, you wouldn’t be ignoring them,” one wrote. Well yes, but that’s because the Bullfinch has a back exit, handicap access, a liquor license, an ASCAP license, bouncers and managers who know and care what the capacity of the joint is, and other niceties largely implemented for the audience’s safety and comfort.

“Unfair,” another correspondent shouts about the lack of Annex coverage. What seems unfair to us is how the real clubs in town have to worry about, and shell out serious cash for, all these provisions and cautions while the Annex loox the other way.

We respect the volunteer efforts and magnificent growth this alternative club project has shown. We fear, though, that it will be strangled in its infancy by lack of foresight and common sense. We know that makes us part of “the establishment,” but it’s the branch of the establishment that wants these fine bands to be seen in relative safety, not the kind that wants them shunted off to some creepy warehouse with bad wiring.

Anyway, The Jung Seeds, Valentine Giant, Pink Wonder and Bella Anna are the first big–name booking at the Quality Value Service Annex. Do with that info what you may.

Elsewhere: Cajun Belle Pepper, Moonsong and Opera Supreme at Hamilton’s… The PowWow, Double Wave, Suncatcher and Trailing Petunias at The Bullfinch… “New Blossoms” festival of high school and even junior high school bands at Dollaire’s, with Semi-Dwarf Meteor, Montmorency, Danube, Red Juice and The Lapins….

More old LPs to Convert to mp3s

Thought I’d made a sensational find at a thrift shop in Middletown—one of those rare Strawberry Shortcake LPs featuring Flo & Eddie (in a career lull between their Zappa phase and the nostalgic rebirth of The Turtles).

But when I went to play it at home, the actual record inside the sleeve was not Ms. Shortcake but a generic album of “Kindergarten Playtime Songs.” Damn you, unregulated thrift shop record racks!

Which brought into sharper focus the attributes of the albums I bought which actually had the correct disks inside them:

A six-LP “Treasury of the Golden West” from the oft-mocked Longines Symphonette Recording Society, supplemented on this yee-haw! project by Ken Carson and the Cavaliers.

Gene Pitney’s Big Sixteen, which the liner notes call “a collection of a dozen-and-a-third of the lad’s greatest musical triumphs.” My daughters know “Town Without Pity” from the original Hairspray film, which they’ve now seen several times. They also know who Burt Bacharach is. This LP will singlediskedly increase their knowledge of Pitney songs arranged and conducted by Bacharach by three, since besides “Pity” it includes “Liberty Valance,” “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa,” “Only Love Can Break a Heart” and “True Love Never Runs Smooth.”

Redd Foxx—Laff of the Party, the comic’s debut party record on the Dooto Novelty label. Far from a first edition, since it lists four subsequent volumes of the series on the back of the record cover, plus other intriguing Dooto comedy titles such as “Sloppy’s House Party, Allen Drew’s Stag Party (tracks on that include “High Nuts” and “The Queer Burglar”) and Gene and Freddie’s Party Record Party (with “Superman’s Balls” and “Short Arm Inspection”). Despite the success of these records, though, later editions still came in shabby covers with amateurish artwork that’s so appalling it’s appealing.

Mr. President—original Broadway soundtrack of Irving Berlin’s ill-fated final Broadway musical, starring Robert Ryan, Nanette Fabray and Anita Gillette.

A couple of those well-remembered K-Tel “original hits, original stars” compilations hawked incessantly on UHF TV stations in the 1970s. Block Buster, from 1976, contains “Sky High” by Jigsaw, “Chevy Van” by Sammy Johns, Leon Haywood’s “I Want’a Doi Something Freaky to You,” 5000 Volts’ “I’m On Fire,” the Johnny Rivers rendition of “Help Me Rhonda” and Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed,” which has had its title prudishly condensed to “Only Women” and, as they say, much much more. Music Power, released two years earlier, shows how schizophrenic top-40 radio could be in those days, jumping from novelty songs like Jim Stafford’s Spiders and Sankes and Gordon Sinclair’s recitation “The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion)” to the hearteningly popular soul-bearing of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” The Chi-Lite’s “Oh Girl” and Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Where Peaceful Waters Flow” to the variety show theatrics of Tony Orlando & Dawn (“Sweet Gypsy Rose”) and Sonny and Cher (“When You Say Love”) to the mainstream incursion of glam and power pop represented by Brownsville Station (“Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room”), The Sweet (“Little Willy”) and The Raspberries (“Tonight”).

The real prize out of the record stack turns out to be “Selections from Porgy and Bess and Other Standard Hits” performed by the National Concert Dance Orchestra. It’s copyright 1957 on the Halo label, whose motto is “The ‘Colorful’ Line”—is that a euphemism for African-American artists? The recording is, I think, wondrous and warm, low-key and straightforward without sounding cheap. It’s skillfully orchestrated on a budget such that it completely brings out the “folk opera” conceit of the Gershwins’ magnum opus. Interestingly, while there are five “Porgy & Bess selections, as advertised, on Side One, another song from the show (“Bess You Is My Woman Now”) is shunted onto Side Two among a passel of Gershwin songs from other places—“An American in Paris,” “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” “S’Wonderful,” like that. And the rest of Side One consists of non-Gershwin material: Schumann’s “Traumerai,” Dietz’s “Hoops,” Mascagni’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, Bach’s Minuet in G and Arthur Schwartz’s pop composition “Hoops.”

This is the kind of record which I would have played until it wore out had I owned it as a child—and which would have warped me for life into thinking that the Minuet in G was part of Porgy & Bess somehow.