The old soldier, several youngsters and ourself are at a Bullfinch bench, discussing the brand new album by the band from just a few cities over whom we all agree is the best rock ensemble on the planet.
The band in question is not so unanimously lionized elsewhere, and that is the crux of this discussion.
Sonny Blitt of the Blits wanders by, feigns interest in the conversation so he can fill his glass from the pitcher we bought, then when he finally catches the gist, and launches into a fierce rebuke of our praise.

Sonny, even though he’s old enough to need reading glasses, still has stars in his eyes. His theory is that bands need to constantly be ready to jump to the next plateau. The fave band of the rest of the table hasn’t altered what they do in years, he argues. They were almost big once, then slipped back to relative obscurity. This is not something he respects. Sonny, though he’s never known a tenth of this other band’s fame (or talent), feels they took the wrong path years ago by (if we understand him correctly) sticking with what they do best.

This is not a theory we think we’ve seen Sonny actually put into practice himself. To our ears, The Blits play a loose, blues-based form of punk rock that’s been around for at least 35 years. Sonny wears the same striped T-shirt onstage for every show. But, to hear him tell it, he’s a career-minded forward-thinking rock strategist. As you know, The Blits (formerly The Blats—now there’s a career move right there!) recently became one of the few bands in our little scene which feels they need a so-called manager. So he’s knowledgeable about things like, you know, wasting your time and money on managers.

The rest of the table just stares and wishes he’d go away. Especially the old soldier, who’s had numerous brushes with the big time himself, as a session musician and nostalgia-tour sideman, yet has been arguing more passionately than anyone the divine merits of to-thineself-be-trueness.

Sonny’s injected the kill word into the conversation. We haven’t been talking about superstardom, or power, or majesty. We’ve been talking about greatness. Plus, he’s finished our beer. The conversation dwindles to nothingness…

Anyone seen Q? Apparently the revered Bullfinch barback and occasional show-booker is still lugging kegs down the basement stairs in the early morning, and has been glimpsed at a few after hours gathering, but otherwise he’s vanished.

Some suggest that Q’s fallen into the same black hole which has pulled in so many of the town’s classical players. It’s a mysterious recording project which has been sucking up studio hours for months now, at a location we no longer care to disclose. (Yes, we know more than we’re telling; give us some credit for a suspenseful narrative).

Thursday at the Bullfinch: Lost on Xandu (one of those keyboard acts that sounds like a whole universe in motion), Solution #1 (smoothest garage blues grooves around) and the speedy Rats in My Kitchen… Hamilton’s College Nite Party: Bite of Soul, Atom Spies and La La La La Reprise… D’ollaire’s, meanwhile, is stealing some of Hamilton’s thunder with a slate of regional party bands that used to play the smaller club: Rockin’ This Joint, One More Time and Nothing to Go On. They said it, we didn’t…

Har brought two mice home. He’s saved them from the chem lab, where they were about to be given cancer. Other mice have been given cancer instead.

The new Fleshtones got released yesterday, and nothing’s gonna bring me down.

I first saw the band 30 years ago, and have sought them out over 50 times since, yet I still consider myself a latecomer to their awe-striking power-stanced superock. That’s because they’d already been signed to IRS, released an EP and a full-length, and were touring with The Police by the time I was first able to see them, at the Orpheum Theater in Boston in 1980. They’d already made it. I’d missed whole chapters in their existence. Luckily (for me, if not them), the ups and downs since that early burst of notoriety have kept avid fans guessing and gushing. This has never been a band you can convince yourself to give up on because they’ve “sold out.”

After perfecting the old-school basement-party aspect of their persona on umpteen earlier albums, Brooklyn Sound Solution marks a new phase of Fleshtone. It’s less cocky, more artful, less chaotic, more crafted.

Like The Ramones before them, The Fleshtones have allied themselves with a host of well-known producers over the years, all of whom may well have proclaimed themselves to be devout fans of the bands but not all of whom have brought the necessary skills to the task of capturing them on record.

Lenny Kaye—the revered Nuggets compiler, pop music historian and Patti Smith bandmate—turns out to be an inspired overseer, even while taking the Fleshtones in what might be seen as a new direction. He highlights two tones of Fleshtones which often get short shrift on disc: their heritage and their musicianship.

The instrumental groove on “Solution #1”—the rock equivalent of an Edgar Kennedy silent movie slow burn—sends the same shivers up your spine that you used to only get at Fleshtones live shows. That’s a much finer accomplishment than replicating yet another of guitarist Keith Streng’s hyena-scream anthems, though Kaye shows that he can do that too, on “You Give Me Nothing to Go On.” In both cases, it’s great to have the garage R&B jams that are so much a part of Fleshtones live recordings flare up so strongly in their studio work as well.

In fact, there are so many long intros, drawn-out fades and held-back vocals that Brooklyn Sound Solution could be accused of starting a new genre of ambient rock. The songs are punchy but don’t worry about structure and climax. The album has the amazing quality of behaving as if The Fleshtones are playing at a club you’re at, while you’re having a great conversation and perhaps have gotten a little drunk. Listening to a Fleshtones take on Day Tripper, you keep idly wondering where it’s going next, then wonder suddenly if you’ve completely missed the lyrics; there aren’t any; and it would have ruined the cover if there were. “Bite of My Soul” is mixed not so nobody sounds up-front: not the lead vocals, not the shouty chorus. The aforementioned “You Give Me Nothing to Go On” comes in a regular version and an instrumental version… and the instrumental one is longer, and arrives on the album five tracks sooner.

So many of their old new wave compadres—from Greg Kihn to Paul Collins—turned to solo acoustic blues as a soundtrack for their middle age crises that it became a genre cliché. I hope Brooklyn Sound Solution is as close as The Fleshtones ever come to that. It gets a little darker and a little slower than a lot of other Fleshtones records, but then so did 1994’s Beautiful Light. This is a full-band work-out that shows the eb and flow of Fleshtones rather than just the shouty highlights. That’s a mature statement, but it’s not old-man rock. It’s The Fleshtones showing they

We hate that word “cult.” One person’s fanatical coven of obscure demon worshippers is another person’s opening band on College Nite at Hamilton’s. So we avoided the c-word completely when describing The Shaking Quakers—rafters-rocking farmhouse band of the Meach family—last week in this space.
Other people can’t seem to use any other word to describe the SQs, including a few folks who sent incensed letters. “Crazed cult,” they say. “Dangerous cult-like activity.” There. We’ve just revived the Fairness Doctrine and presented opposing views.
“Cult-cult-cataaw!!!,” as one of the Meaches’ chickens might say. We attended about seven hours of the weekend house party at the farmstead, along with dozens of other noisemongers. Yes, it was different—drinking and debauchery were discouraged, and people did yoga exercises before entering the mosh pit. The opposite of a typical night at Hamilton’s, where the kids are hopped up before they’ve even entered the club and would rather fight than just about anything else. We’ve never been to another show remotely like it: When Silver Cup’s “Vision Song” got to the bit about “Go On Dear Children,” an impromptu march began around the fields…

Feminist Studies disco scholar Frieda Bettany is back from break and appears to have sewn up a late afternoon gig for his rump-shaking thesis project The Other Foot: Dance Dance Epistemology” two Saturdays from now at D’ollaire’s. This is where she did a lot of her research. The show will thus be held just hours before one of the actual social dance extravaganza it holds a mirror ball up to…

They’ve slipped us the sure things on the so-call open mic list for the Bullfinch tonight: Uncle Gruesome, Leroy L. Leroy, Leonard and Lola, Drawing with John Magee, Leena Queen and Crossed Skillets. Plus surprise demented German guests…. Hamilton’s has the fun-loving, if mainstream-leaning, On the Corner and Good Look… a rare delight at D’ollaire’s—the quirky, listen-in-close Eugene and the Sunday Color Carnival, who you’ll recall packed ’em in at the Bullfinch just two years ago…

I asked Har why he always wears ties. Not even the poseurs in our set wear ties. He said it’s like a small scarf. So I wore a tie today in my coldest class, and fell asleep.

Not sure how I feel about Elvis Costello, or Jane’s Addiction, for that matter, being part of the Furthur Festival in Bridgeport this year. The literate, culty guys are always dwarfed at these big festivals, and

I know it’s been over 30 years since the whole ’77 thing. Elvis has conquered umpteen worlds into which few could have predicted he’d even ever want to set foot. And Furthur, I further realize, has diversified beyond its original smiley-bear/tattoed skeleton audience. The wide array of reggae and funk acts it attracts are a great frosting for its jammy middle. But however far from Shakedown Street the programming strays, hasn’t it still been mainly about guitars and seldom about words?

The first batch of confirmed Furthur bands (quirkily alphabetized by me):
Big Gigantic
Dark Star Orchestra
David Gans
Deep Banana Blackout
Dr. John and the Lower 911
Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk
King for a Day
Phil Lesh and Bob Weir
Jane’s Addiction
John Butler Trio
The Levon Helm Band
Steve Kimock and Reed Mathis
The McLovins
moe.
The New Mastersounds
The Rhythm Devils with Keller Williams
Ryan Montbleau Band
Taj Mahal Trio
Tedeschi Trucks Band
Toots & The Maytals

Details at www.gatheringofthevibes.com

“Why aren’t you talking to…?”
(An informal survey, Friday night Happy Hour at the Bullfinch.)

“He stole my girlfriend.”
“She stole my song.”
“He stole my style.”
“Because you’ll put it in the column.”
“Tried to turn me into a tree.”
“Gave my father a drink laced with stuff that made him vomit.”
“Wouldn’t let me join their pantheon.”
“She knits better than I do.”
“He’s pro-war, and he’s convinced her that she’s some kind of muse for war or something.”
“No reason. Just don’t like talking.”

Gar’s getting weird. Thinks everything’s about him. Always thinks you’re talking about the music he has on.

[Christopher Arnott continues to rummage through his old 45s)

1. Dada Banks, Microwave b/w Communism?
This 1980 New Haven new wave single features an old New Haven Advocate colleague of mine, Hank Hoffman (now proprietor of the Connecticut Arts Scene website) on—to quote the record sleeve—“Guitar, fuzz guitar, vocals,” in that order. (Randy Stone is on bass, Richie Gleen the drummer). Hank’s now hard at work on a studio-honed psychedelic power pop masterpiece, but this single represents his scruffy early days, and it’s a treasure. “Microwave” is a rant against capitalist corporate culture, a sentiment underscored by the flip side, which mocks Western preconceptions of Russia: “Communism, Communism, that threat we’re taught to fear.”

2. Quest of the Moon Breed, Mares of Night b/w I Felt It.
Quest of the Moon Breed crystallized what was going on at the Tune Inn.
Bandleader Stark evoked Einsturze Neubaten, Nine Inch Nails and novelist Clive Barker (from whom I assume the “Moon Breed” part of the band name came from) in his nihilistic stage antics (smacking a lighter-fluid-laced cymbal drum with a flaming torch, getting all tribal and naked) but he’d assembled a hardcore band to back him, not the sort of synth band that was becoming the fashion.
This single’s tracks were prepared for QotMB’s album Legion of Sleep, and I notice now on MySpace that Stark has a current band called Legion of Sleep. That’s a sleep of Rip Van Winkle proportions.

3. Cavedogs, Step Down b/w Proud Land.
The Cavedogs were to the Boston music scene of the early ‘90s what Bobcat Goldthwait was to that same city’s comedy scene around the same time: they were embraced by the scene, then resented when they started getting national attention. The old “Too soon! Not your turn!” refrain. The fact that they fully deserved to make the leap was immaterial. The Cavedogs had it all. All three members were strong songwriters, they knew exactly how to adapt their material for the stage, the studio or their comedy/variety radio specials, and they perfectly fit the raucous pop feel of the times—until grunge hit, at almost exactly the same moment that The Cavedogs released their second album, Soul Martini, on Capitol. This is an early Trust Records single from the late ‘80s, both sides of which later appeared on their debut album Joy Rides for Shut-Ins. The copyright has been issued to “Hey Leggo, That’s My Donker” Tunes.

4. Brian Stevens, The Piper b/w Zasu Pitts.
Speaking of The Cavedogs, following the band’s dissolution, they all quickly found other projects, most of which seemed to involve the then-up-and-coming Q Division Studios and the Q Division record label. The other two Cavedogs formed bands, but Brian Stevens went solo—that kind of studio-intense solo which yields brilliant, layered pop junkets like this. It’s an overwhelming sound, but Stevens manages to inject his old Midwestern Cavdog sense of humor: the lyrics are interjected into a faux interview on the record sleeve. Both tracks are from the mindboggling full-length Brian Stevens album Prettier Than You. Stevens play most of the instruments, though sax, clarinet and drums/percussion sounds are by others, and the great Jon Brion is credited with “lead and professionally executed guitar solos.”

5. Thee Roman Gods, Panic b/w San Fransisco Girls.
Spell check: “Thee” and “Fransisco” are both the correct use here. This is a Fleshtones one-off, covering songs by Otis Williams (A-side) and The Fever Tree (B). It’s the familiar live Fleshtones guitar/keyboard/harmonica/handclap/sing-along frenzy. Which sucks as a single, because the party’s just getting started.

It is a sad fact of our existence that we not only hang out at the Bullfinch most nights. We also drink a lot of our lunches there. After one such repast, we were sitting out on the stoop with the marvelous Millie (hasn’t the weather been delightful lately?) when we noticed a little girl at a separate stoop across the street. She had brown hair, an amused expression, and a huge stack of books and drawing paper by her side.
We waved and smiled. We are always kind to little girls. They could grow up to be in great bands.
The girl smiled back, then went back to reading and scribbling. A few minutes later, she waved a paper at us.
“I’m not allowed to cross the street!,” she yelled.
“So?”
“So I have a present for you!”
Millie and I crossed the street. (We are allowed.) The girl clutched two ballpoint-pen pictures in her hand. She was chewing gum.
“Who are these people? They look like they could be in rock bands,” we chatted.
“They’re you. I drew YOU!,” the girl declared.
Now, when we meant these drawing weren’t of us, we weren’t disparaging the drawing abilities of a child. We saw no resemblance. The clothes were different. The hairstyles. The whole gaze, as our art history teacher used to say.
“This is you,” the girl insisted more adamantly.
“Thank you very much,” we said.
We think we get it now. We think we were standing outside of a scene and not realizing we were in it. We didn’t know how much we were a part of things, accepted. We didn’t realize how we looked to others inside the Bull, and especially outside the Bull, in the light of day, after a pleasant midweek lunch. We didn’t even realize how often we are now seen with Millie, and how that affects how people see us that same way we’ve come, though this column, to see people as “bands” and not individuals.
I guess we look like that. I don’t think we mind at all. In fact, I think we probably love it.
We owe a certain little girl a fee for spiritual soothsaying and prophecy. If you see her, tell her we’re looking for her.
Unfortunately, we can’t tell you exactly what she looks like.

In our own warped crystal ball: In Gee, The Taw Rats and LDS (featuring Joe Smith) at The Bullfinch…. That Flurry (from Philadelphia), The Paling Boers and Moorish at Hamilton’s (College Nite; we predict several American bottled beers will be $2)… Rapper Ad Em at D’ollaire’s, sans posse….