The Tweetle Beetles won the battle of the bands at that new club on the turnpike, the Puddle. A tribute act! And look who lost: downtown college town icons like The Blats (Blits, Blots, Bloats, whatever), The Model Marvels and a brand new band which we’re so excited about we won’t even mention who they are in case it sullies their nascent reputation to have lost their first band battle to some noodle-eating poodles. Wahhhhhh!, we cry… Or rather, “wha…?” We roll our eyes with incredulous wonder.
We’ve never been a fan of the competitive music process. It’s one thing to say like one band better then other, another still to gauge them by appreciable standards. But to shunt them into a popularity contest without even the usual weaponry of sashes and fancy gowns! No wonder the wig- wearers won.

At the Bullfinch for the Sunday high school mosh pit: Our Game is Done, Chicks With Bricks and Sue’s Clothes, plus a zillion other kiddie bands yet to be announced (because they probably haven’t formed yet)… Blues cover act Slow Joe Crow at Hamilton’s, which expects oldsters from some college alumni gathering to turn up… The salacious song parodies of Is Your Tongue Numb? returns to D’ollaires for No Date Nite, which has now become a regular monthly stag party at the venue…

All the literary journal cats meet at the middle eastern joint with the two dollar grenadines, where if you wear a beret you get served quicker. This place makes our journal sick. We found a cheap Chinese place a few blocks off the hipster path, where we could actually spread out the galleys and the templates, and have room to do more than just watch each other think.

(I’m playing catch-up here. I really like averaging one a week.)

Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. By Carolyn Williams. Columbia University Press, 2011. 454 pages.

This is a slog through all the Humanities-hip academic aspects of what we must never forget was a mainstream pop culture comedy phenomenon. It gets as stodgy as seeing a Savoy show overdressed in an opera house. But at the same time, this book explained more of the lost jokes in Gilbert & Sullivan shows than did any of those scrapbook G&S-themed coffee table books which have proliferated over the years.
Carolyn Williams doesn’t just pontificate. She does her research, and is kind of a context detective, seriously wanting to know which elements of Gilbert & Sullivan were familiar to their audiences, which were subversive, which was smartly satirical and which were just silly.

She divides her interests cleanly into “Gender, Genre, Parody” and ably explains the terms at the outset. She uses plenty of photos and line drawings to aid her investigations into what made comic operas like The Sorcerer and H.M.S. Pinafore laugh riots in their time, and how they endure today.

It’s always dangerously annoying to put forth one’s views on why something is funny, but in some cases the exercise is valuable. It’s one thing to notice that The Grand Duke sounds like Offenbach; it’s another to accept it as a precise parody of The Gand Duchess of Gerolstein. Likewise, it’s worthwhile to dissect whether Patience is laughing at Oscar Wilde or using him as a handy icon for a more general joke about the cult of celebrity.

Williams’ gender-genre-parody ponderings can get pretentious, but that’s easily excused by the mass of information she unfurls. It’s like she’s used one of W.S. Gilbert’s patented magical cloaks or medicines on the century-old scripts to these oft-overformalized shows and let a Pandora’s box of itty-bitty, long-invisible yet indelible fringes of these scripts fly free, for our augmented amusement.

Got a fancy flier for a Blats show next Saturday, outdoors on Lancelyn Green. But didn’t we recently report that The Blats were The Blits now? Our integrity at stake, grizzled investigative news guy that we are, we sidled up to the band at the Bullfinch and got more bull than we expected. First, official band pain-in-the-ass (i.e. self-styled “manager”) “Spawn” Smith said he forgot he’d mailed out news of the name change, which he says is “still under discussion.” (Got it right here in the files, Spawny, if you want proof.) Then, for no apparent reason, he backtracked. “Since this is an out-of-town show”—true, Lancelyn’s nearly six miles from here!—“we thought it was best to go with the established name.” Established to who: singer Sonny Blitt’s parents? The gig, by the way, is not only in another town but another era of time—The Blits play on one of the outlying stages at the Lancelyn Green Renaissance Faire. “They’re pretty loose about who plays that stage,” The Blits/Blats’ Sonny Blitt told me (while Spawn kept trying to interrupt). “They told us we didn’t have to change what we do. But we might throw some “thees” and “thous” in there just for fun.”
Renaissance Faire types don’t mind holding festivals in the dead of winter, apparently, because they wear body armor or bustles or whatever. If it snow, the fest simply moves inside to the field’s unheated barn. Also on tap, entertainment-wise: “Cavalcade of Dragons” and, uh, “Cavalcade of Magicians.” Oh, The Blats should fit in just fine.

In more modern and consistent times: Singing Rose gets the midweek acoustic happy hour slot at the Bullfinch, while the only-ever-electric Satyr Plays and Lord High Tiger rule the same place with a one-two swipe on Thursday night… Tellers of Tales and The Beaver Book dwell between the covers at Hamilton’s on Friday, for the college crowd. It really is Beaver Book, by the way, not Beaver Brook, though we hear they may be changing their name to Beaver Blats, since it’s all the rage…

We played scrabble without “E”s and drank what we wanted to believe was Absinthe.

During the peak of my Arts Editorship at the New Haven Advocate—back in the early and mid-‘90s when a thing like Myspace was science fiction, demo tapes were required to get a gig, and major labels signed anyone of promise—I was receiving upwards of 100 CDs a week in the mail. Marriage and housebuying became an opportunity to winnow a staggering collection down to the manageable couple of thousand I have now. A lot of bands still communicated through cassette tape—I still have hundreds of those, but they’re hard to sort and display, and remain boxed up and hard to get at.
Vinyl singles, however, I’ve always found hard to part with or stash far away from view. I’ve lost or misplaced hundreds—a box of treasures, including my original Sex Pistols singles and lots of early punk rarities, were donated to a pirate radio station and left behind when the operator moved on. What I’ve retained, especially from the Advocate arts-desk years but also from flea markets and small-club merch tables, is the smallest collection of music I have on any specific playback medium, yet perhaps the most diverse. Since I’ve never winnowed it down, see, it’s not so much about my tastes as about time, place and circumstance.

Here’s the first batch, snatched at random from a stack of a couple hundred singles I am committed to converting to mp3s via my Ion Profile USB turntable (around 70 bucks at CostCo; just saw a smaller Ion USB turntable at a Bed Bath & Beyond close-out sale for a mere $25.)

1. Holiday, Permission Slip/Fifteen Dollars.
This was a smart, couth Yale band, a bit too aware of their talent but nice guys nonetheless, and more eager to play off-campus than most of their college-indie ilk. They moved west, if memory serves, and kept recording. But this slab, released on the Yale P.O. Box-based label Tasty Bits, stood out in the New Haven scene at the time for being so reserved and refined yet still raw enough to entice all those Pavement worshippers around then. (I got the same vibe from another Yale band of slightly earlier vintage: Drastic Yellow Plastic, whose “Roadkill Messiah” was a stand-out on Caffeine Disk’s Blood From the Streets of New Haven local comp CD). The single came on red vinyl, with a liner-note slip and a small sticker-sized (but not a sticker) slip of paper with the Holiday logo on it.

2. Can Kickers, Dark Molly.
This one isn’t all that old, but sounds properly bog-ancient. Vinyl is the most appropriate medium for New London’s scarpering scrapers of rustic fleet-folk wonderments. My copy of this five-song 33rpm EP has developed pops and squeaks and crackles which only add to the flavor. As if a title like “Rebel Radish” isn’t already sharp enough.

3. New Vaudeville Band, Amy/Peek-a-Boo.
I don’t know which is supposed to be the A-side here. It isn’t even scratched in the vinyl. I could look it up, but I don’t really want to know. The whole thing, of course, reeks of also-ran, a follow-up to what anyone could recognize as the one-hit-wonder fluke “Winchester Cathedral.” Imagine trying to figure out how to keep a mainstream British Ragtime revival going! I passionately adore failed follow-up projects. The sound of desperation is just heavenly.

4. Bug, I Read Her Diary/ Dream World.
The 1994 vinyl debut (I believe) of Jeffrey Greene and Daniel Greene, the Hamilton College classmates who share a surname yet who are otherwise unrelated, who gravitated to New Haven and recorded this 33rpm, translucent-puce vinyl single live in their apartment, whereupon it was mixed and mastered by Mike “Whirltone” Arafeh for the Middletown-based Coffee House Records. The label denotes “Diary” as the “super smash A side” while Dream World is the “super groovy B side,” hit-speak which mocks the record’s then-out-of-fashion lo-fi languor.
The joke turned out to be on them, as the boys of Bug ended up having a longer and livelier career (recording a Peel Session, getting the godlike Mark Mulcahy to be their drummer) than all the slicker bands in the scene at the time who actually dreamed of chart success.
I remember when Bug told me they had to change their name because there were other Bug bands out there complaining. They’d decided on “Butterflies of Love.” I told them that just that week I’d received a vinyl single by a band called Butterflies. “Yes,” ex-Bug said, “but we’re the Butterflies of Love.”
My copy has a scratch on the Dream World side, which comes just as the rangy guitar playing gets hauntingly experimental and out of control. So it fits.

5. Jennifer Trynin, Better Than Nothing/Too Bad You’re Such a Loser.
I was, she told me at the time, the very first journalist to interview Jen Trynin. Our phone conversation was full of coincidences. She mentioned that she was auditioning bassists so she could play out more, and the most eager candidate (whom she ultimately picked) turned out to be a guy who I’d gone to high school with. I knew she was friends was someone who was friends with some New Haven bands, but it turned out we had lots of people and fave bands in common. Many of those connections revolved around the pop-friendly Q Division Studios, whose co-founder Mike Deneen produced Trynin’s records and became her husband. She would go on to frustratingly fleeting national fame, which she ably chronicled in her 2006 memoir-of-sorts Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be.
Trynin played Rudy’s and Cheri’s and—well after she’d gotten signed to Warner Brothers, whose Squint Records imprint put out this single—Toad’s Place and The Tune Inn, where I reconnected with her momentarily and bought this single at the Tune Inn record shop for an exorbitant $4.99.
Jen Trynin coincidence still occur in my life. I was humming “Too Bad You’re Such a Loser” while washing dishes, the very night that I later went downstairs to fetch and sort all these old singles. I had completely forgotten that this great album track was ever on a single, or that I owned it, let alone that it came on marbled blue vinyl.

6. Shirley & Lee, I Feel Good/Now That It’s Over.
Leonard Lee and Shirley Goodman’s lesser-in-all-respects follow-up to their immortal “Let the Good Times Roll.” Both sides are penned by Mr. Lee. My copy’s on the Aladdin label out of Beverly Hills, California, which was alone in seeing the potential of rowdy New Orleans R&B to jostle all the romantic crooners on the pop charts in the syrupy mid-1950s, packaging Shirley & Lee as “the sweethearts of rock & roll.”

7. David Brooks, Virginia Hellhole/Rust Red Shore.
History-minded New Haven-based popsmith David Brooks turned his interest in obscure Civil War tragedies into this captivating single, recorded in Philadelphia and released on the Bus Stop label in 1992. The cover photo shows “ruins of the Gallego flour mills in Richmond, VA set ablaze by the evacuating town authorities preventing the capture of provision by the invading union forces,” which the illustration for the flipside is of “the sidewheel steamer, Sultana and her cargo of released Federal prisoner of war,” a photo “taken nineteen hours before her boilers exploded shortly before dawn of April 27, 1865, north of Memphis on the Mississippi. Throughout the next month, Union Army corpses bobbed up downstream and further confused the death toll of the accident which was estimated at no less than 1238.” Highest compliment to the songwriting is that it matches both the doom-laden and the sensational sides of those storylines. David Brooks stopped being The Streams a few years after this release, went to a cool culinary school, then took over management of Judie’s European Baker/restaurant (famed for its French bread) on Grove

8. Dean Martin, Innamorata/The Lady With the Big Umbrella. This Dino sub-classic belonged to a “Miss Barbara Paolillo” of Thornton of Hamden; she affixed an address label to the record. “Innamorata” is one of the overblown Martin productions which appears to mock his “That’s Amore” success as much attempts to replicate it. The truly flip flipside is a goofy bit of “lalalalala”-aced doggerel with a Spanish beat and a kickin’ horn section. This side is deeply worn and scratched, suggesting that Miss Paolillo preferred it, or in any case played it harder, than “Innamorata.” Perhaps she used an umbrella tip for a stereo needle.

9. Broken, At the Border EP: At the Border, Hollow Threats, Broken ‘R’ Dicks, Die.
At the Border and Hollow Threats bleed into each other with a feedback screech, though they are very different songs with different sentiments. One is about immigration and travel-visa annoyances, the other bellows “I don’t owe you anything” and harks back to vocalist Jim Martin’s earlier New Haven classic hardcore/punk band, Malachi Krunch. While the bands aren’t profoundly different song-wise, the main distinction being the change in guitarists from Teo Baldwin to Jason Gorman, I vastly preffered Malachi Krunch to Broken, and tried several times to get the old band to reunite under for various New Haven Advocate-sponsored events. I just felt that, for all its anger, Malachi Krunch (named for a hot-rod stunt on the Happy Days TV show) was a funner, more comical and satiric outfit than Broken, whose blunt title promised violence and hopelessness. (When Malachi Krunch finally did reunite, just last summer, it was to honor the late Wally Gates, who’d briefly joined the band in its last throes.) This 2007 EP has some of the silliness I miss from Malachi Krunch, thanks largely to the self-deprecating track “Broken ‘R’ Dicks.”

10. Jiker , Kitty Pool 45: Brawl at da Hut/Mike Prendergast
You’ve got to love a band that puts a collective title on a 2-song 45 as if it were an EP or album, probably just to justify the cover art of a cat sitting on a pool table.
Brawl at da Hut kicks off with a riff that sounds like the band might assault you with a cover of “Gonna Fly Now,” but veers into a rap about Pizza Hut, carried largely by those horns and a hip-hop beat. Mike Prendergast is the complementary traditional slow-ska tune, an instrumental even. Recorded in New York by a band which frequently headlined skankfests at the Tune Inn, the club which released this disk on its own Elevator Music label. The numerous scratches on my green-vinyl copy only add to the crazy beats.

WHERE I WAS WHEN I WROTE THAT SONG
A random survey, Sunday at the Bullfinch.
(Artists and titles removed to protect the creative.)

“At the supermarket. In the detergent aisle. “
“Reading this old book my grandfather gave me.”
“Shitting on the pot.”
“Backyard. Hammock.”
“There was once this song I literally had to go to the library to look stuff up for. The local history section at the main branch. They were like, ‘Don’t write a song. Write an article for the historical society!’
“Down in the hole.”
“Up in a tree.”
“Coffee shop. Laptop.”
“Begun while I was shoe-shopping. Finished in a dress shop—Marie’a. I started jotting down the lyrics outside the changing room and they thought I was a shoplifter or something.”
“I was standing on a street corner and wrote this song about standing on a street corner. Yeah, I know, first guy ever to do that.”
“It was a card I decided not to send to a friend who I thought was becoming more than a friend. It’s a really good thing I never sent it.”
“Walking the dogs. Any song you ask me about, I wrote it while I was walking the dogs.”
“Fuck if I know. Why the fuck do you care? Either you like the fucking song or you don’t.”
“Oh, I didn’t write that one. It’s a cover. Sorry.”

Mar, Gar and I are walking down High Road when Gar suddenly announces:
“Time for something beginning with c and ending with e.”
“Confidence? Concupiscence?,” I begin.
“Consequence? Cone?,” says Mar.
“No, something hot.”
“Contraceptive?”
“You drink it hot.”
“Chocolate?”
“It keeps you up at night.”
Columbine?
“You mean concubine,” Mar opines.
“It involves a cup.”
“Cupcake?”
“Just about everybody drinks it.”
“Kool-aid is spelled with a K, I’ll have you know, and I must say that you have a disturbingly bleak view of society at large.”

A boy slips on the landing of the stairwell at the end of the vast corridor of his suburban high school. His dizziness is as colorful as the school’s bright shadowless walls. He descends, legs akimbo, arms flapping, suspended momentarily (a panel or so) in midair. His face exhibits more confusion than shock, and bears a sideways “S” of a smile.
He has slipped on the stairs. He is carrying important test papers for the principal, which are now scattered to the winds. He has once again eroded an authority figure’s trust in his ability to carry out a simple menial task. The boy plays on numerous school sports teams, has run for student government. Yet this is his prevailing reputation—the kid who falls on the stairs carrying the papers.

The boy experiences the exact same sensation of wide-eyed disorientation when he falls in love. He floats, he loses focus, he loses control of his limbs, he has trouble holding onto things. His infatuations trouble his friends, who catch him in acts of callous neglect or outright dishonesty. Like the grown-ups who trust him to carry things, they are forgiving, or just forgetful, and the damaging situations repeat themselves endlessly until this is his legacy.
He is able to sustain social and amorous relationships with the two most popular girls in school. He leads a popular local pop band, is able to build community spirit among a wildly diverse group of friends and classmates, has organized protests and stared small businesses. Yet to many of those who presume to know him best, he is the perpetual skirt-chasing moony-eyed romantic.

He is often grounded for his misbehaviors, and even for his well-intentioned acts which snowball, beyond his control, into widespread chaos. But of course he can’t ever really be grounded. He is ever ungrounded, floating, flipping out, unfettered, slipping and falling upward.

Everyone talks about big in Japan or signing to a major or groupies in the limo, but the rock dream which drives most of the serious musicians I know is a lot more straightforward: make just enough doing music so that you don’t have to do anything else. This modest goal is tantalizingly just out of reach for most of the members of this city’s little scene. In fact, out of maybe 300 bands I imagine are gigging at any given time in the county, only a couple of dozen can be said to free and clear of non-tuneful day jobs. And nearly all those gainfully self-employed musicos are in cover bands.
I dug hard to find a guy who writes his own songs, remains outside of the big music-making industry cities and makes a semi-decent living. And to count him, I had to bend the rules a bit.
Here’s John Flute, and you know him as the house entertainment at Singleton’s strip bar on Church Street. This paper’s done plenty of stories on him over the years, plus his tiny face is in ads next to tasseled boobs in the Singleton’s ad every week in our back pages. Five nights a week John plays piano in the lounge and backs any performer who’d rather work with a live accompanist than tapes. There aren’t many of those, but John says he keeps the gig because he’s old pals with the owner, Tony Little. His other claim’s a little harder to swallow: “I bring in my own crowd, not just the guys who come to hear the strippers.”
That’s five nights a week, but accounts for less than half of Flute’s income (though one suspects the Singleton’s perks are swell). One Saturday night a month, Flute plays with the Postures, the R&B cover band at Hamilton’s. That’s mostly covers, sure, but fans of the band know that the first set (before the rowdies arrive) is almost all originals. In the mornings and afternoons he hangs around Radio-K, which airs his parodies of current pop hits during its classic rock block from noon to 1 p.m.
“They’re all real jobs. Gotta show up on time, be ready to work,” Flute stipulates. “But don’t think I’m complaining.” Just last week at Singleton’s he says he found a new riff while backing a stripper, and by the end of the night he had most of a song. He’s been known to try out his Radio-K material at the club too, “only they like me to swear when I’m singing at the club, so I have to tone it down for the radio.” At Singleton’s, apparently it’s enough just to say “fuck” anytime the original song says “love”; brings the house down. For the radio, it has to be much subtler, like “screw” or “snuggle” or something.
“All I know is I get to be creative all the time.”

Man the Beast and THE VIP Party-Tossers and Wild Wild Women bend Hamilton’s beyond recognition Saturday. Expect as much action under the tables as on the stage… Likewise, the Bullfinch is getting down and dirty with New Faces on the Barroom Floor, Bottle Fatigue and Where to, Dream Boat? (featuring the Filstrups from Here We Go Again)…. Even Dollaire’s is on the trashy tip with Cheap Luggage, Lousy in Slacks, Moosehorn and Bar Guide… Cut out of the action: Face in the Finish, which in its short existence has never NOT opened for their similarly monikered pal band News Faces on the Barroom Floor, couldn’t do this gig (which would’ve been their Dollaire’s debut) because of, get this—a high school marching band gig. Yeah, the sax is needed elsewhere….