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:

(Christopher Arnott’s latest stack of old 45s)
1. Buddy Richard, Tu Carino Se Me Va/ Guitarra Toca Otra Vez. I’ve stared at it a lot, and can’t figure out which song is the A-side. (Such things used to be important in the record industry.) But it dates from 1974, on the Dicesa. Whoops, I’ve just looked him up and it turns out not just that “Tu Carina” was a major international Spanish-language pop hit (the other side’s a schmaltzy ballad), but Buddy Richards is still with us. That oomphy trumpet-and-string thing is a fine art.
2. Baby Ray, Sorry/Open Season. A Boston band featuring Nathan Logus from Jules Verdone’s backing band and several other respected indie acts of the late ‘90s. The band’s apparently still out there. I remember commiserating with them about the closing of predominant Kenmore Square punk club The Rat, which dates all of us. So does this very ‘90s single—that whole sped-up wordy repetitive-rhythm-and-riff thing.
3. The Three Suns, “To Think You’ve Chosen Me/It Is No Secret. Instrumental with pumpy accordion, loungey keyboard ambience, and what sounds like way more than three Suns—enough suns (and daughters) and satellites to mmake Saturn feel jealous. It really is a trio—they ruled the charts in the early ‘50s, just pre-rock & roll—but the lead voices get sucked in by the backing choir. The deep-voiced spoken-word interlude on “It Is Not Secret”? One Sun.
4. Lee “Scratch” Perry, City Too Hot/Kentucky Skank. Before MOJO Magazine started regularly sticking free CDs on its covers, it offered this weathered-looking vinyl reissue of two Lee “Scratch” Perry tunes with red/yellow/green reggae-rainbow label and a silkscreen-blurry red sleeve that proclaims “Dub It Up, Blacker Than Dread.” When Perry made a rare (ultimately postponed) trip to the U.S., I remember poring through decades of MOJOs in my basement to find an (equally rare) full-length interview with the guy so that the New Haven Advocate could be well-informed when he played Toad’s Place.
5. Miracle Legion, Little Drummer Boy/Blue Christmas. Released on the Incas label in a wondrous sleeve of childlike drawing printed in blue and green ink on a snowy white background, Drummer Boy is the purported A-side but both tracks are strong. Mark Mulcahy brings his wistful-longing vocals to holiday songs—albeit ones that are already downbeat, but since Miracle Legion was also defined by the slicing guitar work of Ray Neal, this a real ‘90s rock record.

It was so hot, we actually went to a club for beer more than we went for music. We didn’t care who was playing. When the sounds displeased our ears, we didn’t walk out in disgust. When the band tried to strike up a conversation afterwards, we forced ourself to be gracious and polite. We simply didn’t want to leave our barstool and walk out into that hot sun again.
This is what the 33-and-a-third circle of Hell feels like. Trapped in a bar with a shitty band, knowing what you’re missing elsewhere, but not wanting to melt.

Basin Bulletin and The Lure of High Places at The Bullfinch. Both bands travelled here from greener, cooler climes. Try to drag yourselves out to support them… Slow Motion Landslide and Spring Sweetness at Hamilton’s, where the hard lemonade specials are really the main draw… Begrudging gratitude to D’ollaire’s for booking Fossilized Dung, the band that refuses to live up to its name. The last album tanked, so this is a painful rebuilding process for FD, and it’s nice that D’ollaire’s didn’t give them shit about it…

The Bagel Place case has been solved, but Mar and I might lose our jobs anyway because of the expense involved in fixing up the place and changing the locks. We strategize all night about our futures.

Cinema Cinema, “Lady Abortion” and “Pleased to Meet You, Anesthesia”.
Couple of rowdies from Brooklyn who did a radio interview/live performance last night on Western Connecticut State University’s WXCI, and who play The Space in Hamden tonight (Sat., July 23) with Dalliance, White Savages, The Monumentos, Fifties Slang and Modus Operandi.

You’ve got to give Cinema Cinema props for variety. They can move from slow moody inner musings to high squeals of feedback within a single song. Their questionable tastes (apparent in their song titles) are intriguing, and they clearly play better than they let on. They answer to “experimental,” but also to “freak-out, fucked-up,” in the early ‘70s Zappa or ‘90s Oh My God sense. You just know they’ve got to be a singular live experience.

How Mabel and Sally spent the hottest day of the year: Cleansing and cooling in a “Kid Wash” constructed from plans in Family Fun magazine.

The sign above the back boarded- up window of the Bullfinch reads “comfy.” it was originally an ad for a local brand of spreadable cheese–“makes the toast feel comfy!—but few who drink at the Bullfinch today know that, let alone know that before the Bullfinch was a full time bar it was a diner with one of the best cold lunch buffets in Christendom.
So our sweetie Millie has known about the sign for eons—like lots of optimistic patrons, she actually believed that the crusty old window could still be opened. Millie tried for over an hour, or for at least three gin and tonics, on a particularly hot night one summer, and got to know that comfy logo intimately. To our eternal amusement, she thought it was a slogan for the pub itself, not for some foodstuff.
But Millie’s “comfy” confusion led to a new bar challenge, a two-parter even:
1. What’s comfy about the Bullfinch?
2. What should the Bullfinch’s slogan really be?
We’ll print the best suggestions (that won’t get us permanently thrown out of the place) in a future column.

Bizzare bill at the Bullfinch: Appalachian ensemble Sounds from the Mountains and boogie-DJ The Original Transformer… Awesome Fences and Green Sea Urchins at Hamilton’s. We don’t mind all the covers when it’s garage and surf rock… An Evening with Dord and The Ghost Words at D’ollaire’s. This time the expense may be justified, since the band has reportedly been doing three-hour sets, with lots of patter explaining each sharply written tune…

Weird day of Mar and I wondering if each other would be capable of knocking over the Bagel place. Turns out it was one of the delivery drivers.

Hymns from the House of Horror Volume II

Rue Morgue magazine has assembled its second “Rue Morgue Radio” compilation, , a FREE 20-song download (with printable cover art) available here. The set’s only available through the end of July 2011, so act now or have your curiosity hacked to tiny pieces by a bloodthirsty maniac.

This is great chainsaw-and-daggers ammunition with which to convince naysayers that horror music isn’t all Goth, just as horror fiction isn’t all Stephen King.

Black Moth Super Rainbow’s “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise” is a commercial, rock-riff driven track for zombies and vampires who can dance. The Brains’ “Screaming” is a punkabilly horror short story. Calabrese’s “Violet Hellfire” hearkens to ‘80s metal. The Crypt Club’s “Crush” is Cure-ish prog-punk. Suck Me” by Spooklight featuring Ryan Lindsey has both Country/Western and New Romantic aspirations. There’s even a birthday song, by horror rappers So Sick Social Club. I’m, most partial to the clock-rocking “13 O’Clock Rock” by the Memphis Mortician (one of several tracks which evoke the masters of the B-movie retro-rock punk genre, The Cramps), the disorienting piano-calm “Bad Ritual” by Timbre Timbre. Best-known band on the comp is GWAR, with the glorious “Zombies, March!” and the slow-building rave-up “You Can’t Give Me Anything” by Kreeps.

The download also comes with a brief creepy baritone-voiced intro to the whole comp (which segues into one of the least frightening, straightahead rock tracks, “Shhh…” by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets) and four hilarious radio ads for the icky fictional Z-movies The Kill Murder Killers, Zombies of the Dead, Day of the Rocks and Murder on the Gondola. The spots contain such come-ons as “You’ve seen all the other zombie movies. Now see this one,” “What could make ordinary people enter a stake of primal death murder for kick thrills?” and “This summer, stones will break your bones.”
For “Murder on the Gondola,” the title is intoned interminably while a huckster elaborates:
“The movie where one of the ushers is hired to actually stab the audience. … Don’t see it alone, or even with other people. Sensitive viewers will be provided with vomit bags filled with real vomit. An ending so shocking, we can’t even tell you that the killer did it. Starts this Friday. Ends this Thursday.”

I strongly recommend buying the print edition of Rue Morgue magazine which sponsors this comp, since it has four pages of lovely liner notes introducing you to all the bands. The May issue, leaving newsstands soon, also features a tribute to Vincent Price illustrated with fresh portraits of the sly stage/screen/radio sensation by 13 contemporary artists. The cover story’s on John Waters; that piece, “His Master’s Maniacs” by Rusty Nails, made me finally check out Waters’ 2010 book Role Models, a masterful memoir which I hope to discuss here at scribblers.us in the future.

A labor of gore-love all around, Rue Morgue is a great underground dwelling during the summer heat.

My friend and longtime colleague Josh Mamis finished up his seven-year gig as publisher of the the New Mass Media chain of alt-weeklies earlier this month, a result of the latest round of corporate cutbacks at Tribune Corporation, which owns The Hartford Courant, which owns New Mass Media, publisher of the Hartford Advocate, New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly.
Before he became publisher, Josh was co-CEO of New Mass. Before that, Group Editor. His longest stint was ten glorious years as editor of the New Haven Advocate, during a time of great growth and prestige for that scrappy paper.

I won’t dwell on the downsizing—there are no surprises, only sighs, in print journalism job-slashing these days.

I left full-time Advocate duties myself three years ago, by my own volition. (I still freelance regularly for the papers.) I occasionally pop in to clarify some business and wave at friends.

I will miss seeing Josh at his desk. I would come in complaining about some recent injustice and exit whistling a Sondheim tune. Josh has the amazing ability to turn any conversation with me into one about the state of American musical theater. He was also an attentive editor who, whenever I overwrote (which was always) would resist the slash-and-burn approach and provide thoughtful line-edits which would

My time at the Advocates actually predates Josh. I remember him coming in for his interview as editor. The buzz in the office was that he was the only candidate who hadn’t worn a tie. He had lived many places, including New York City and South Africa, but he was then living in Vermont, a place I’ve come to learn that is distinguished by its passion for community journalism and local activism.

When then-publisher Gail Thompson gave Josh the Editor job, he visited all the writers at their desks, gave us pep talks, and calmed our fears about the transition. The paper he’d been at, the now long-defunct Vanguard, had once done a story on my father (who toured Vermont annually with his marionette theater), and we talked about that. Throughout the search for an editor, I had been badgering Gail Thompson not to avoid the most common sort of candidate—writers with inflated opinions of themselves—and to find someone with actual editing skills. Josh had those skills. He immediately formatted the paper so it flowed more easily from news to features to reviews to comics to personal ads. He gave the writers, especially myself and news junkie supreme Paul Bass, extraordinary freedom and leeway. A lot of people think it was my doing, since I was always the designated comics-lover at the paper, but it’s Josh who initially conceived of our groundbreaking All Comics issues, in which every story in the paper was rendered in comics form, requiring our usual reporters and columnists to collaborate with local illustrators. We did that logistically harrowing issue for three years in a row. Among the finest of the freelance artists we’d contract for those issues was Josh’s wife Julie Fraenkel, who for one Comics issue memorably visualized a Letter to the Editor regarding an obsessive Kiss fan, and for another, graphically blandished the lunchtime crowd at a strip club.

Some of the old Advocate gang held a shindig for Josh last night at BAR. It was funny to be with them again and be thinking of the 1990s as the good old days of the Advocate. There were some tortures then as there are now—being thinned down so we could be sold to the Courant, seeing some fiery colleagues implode before my eyes. But, in hindsight, this was indeed the golden age. The papers were fat, informative and entertaining. We not only gained readership but (with Gail’s stewardship) developed previously lackluster advertising bait like our dining listings and “Best Of” awards into powerhouses of profitability which somehow also maintained an air of journalistic integrity. The Advocate began to have a shape, an image, an influence.

That was Josh at the Advocate. There will still be Josh as a friend, and since it’s been years since I gave up my own desk there, for me it will be swell to chat with him without having to discuss work. We can cut right to the Sondheim songs.

Yesterday is done
See the pretty countryside
Merrily we roll along, roll along
Bursting with dreams

Bending with the road,
Gliding through the countryside.
Everybody merrily,
Merrily,
Sing ’em your song,
Rolling along!
—Stephen Sondheim, “Merrily We Roll Along