Stars came from here once. They glimmered from the Ocean Motion party-cruise boat in the bay. The resplendent Sonny Blitt did time with one of the biggest regional party bands of the era before they raised the drinking age. So did Master Moon. Dawnette went from wild local R&B frontwoman to a steady career as a big-city studio back-up singer. The dance parties at the Jupiter Hotel could draw thousands, in the days before television. Lots of musicians in town had houses with swimming pools in those days. Their private parties were as important as their public concerts. That’s how the gods of yore lived.
Now, the best-known players in the local scene all live above the bars where they play most often. No more Jupiter Hotel. No more hordes of drunk teens in public establishments. No more Weekend Hops. No more Apollo.

Hunting for Hidden Gold and Whale Tattoo at the Bullfinch, with whole new found noises you’ve never heard emanate from a stage… Spiral Bridges and Desert Giant at Hamilton’s, covering guess who… Black metal with Shield of Fear, Shadow Killers and The Serpent Teeth at D’ollaire’s; the “Breakdown in Axeblade” tour…

Walked on the beach in the snow. Studied birds.

Beneath Wind and Waves, Non-Etre. Airy whispers which get satisfyingly substantial, building delicately but surely until they’re practically techno tracks. Except they’re much too human for that.

Carla Bley (American Composers series)
By Amy C. Beal (University of Illinois Press, 2011)
I knew the name, but had no real sense of Carla Bley until a few years ago, when the Yale-based experimental bassist Jack Vees told me about her cult jazz concept album Escalator Over the Hill. I downloaded it from iTunes at once and kept it on my iPhone for months, more curious about it than captivated. This book has a very useful chapter on the creation of that album, Escalator’s relation to live theater and other arts, and how it served as a transition to more avant-garde, and jazzier Bley works.
It’s nice to learn conclusively who some of Bley’s artistic influences were on the project, and how deliberately theatrical some of its elements are. Escalator Over the Hill has non-singers vocalizing, the use of performers such as Warhol superstar Viva, a loose narrative that circles ‘round on itself. It’s openly experimental yet supremely confident. It’s cohesion as a longform piece of “chronotransduction” (Bley and her collaborators’ term for what others label a “jazz opera) is remarkable considering how spread out (both geographically and timewise) its composition was.

“The elaborate instrumentation of Escalator Over the Hill,” Beal writes, “reflects Bley’s eclectic tastes, as well as the serendipity and haphazardness of her casting; having little money to pay performers, Bley notoriously drew in everyone she could, plus their relatives and roommates. The musical casting also expressed her affinity for rock music, low brass, elaborate orchestral color, ecstatic solos and occasional experimentation with electronics and unusual sound effects.”
The book is full of such useful matter-of-fact appraisals of how Bley matter-of-factly made transcendent art.
Now I’m less curious about Escalator and dying to sample Bley’s most recent work.
It’s barely over a hundred pages, but as “first compehensive treatment” of Bley in print,” Amy Beal’s book piques interests aplenty.

Yale Daily News, Jan. 10, 2012:
“Yale may not be close to naming its next head football coach.”

Yale Daily News, Jan. 12, 2012:
Reno Officially Named Football Coach

It’s Friday the 13th. You need something better than that Rebecca Black song everyone loves to hate.
There are already some worthy lists of notable Friday songs here and here.

1. Joe Jackson, “Friday”:
Monday morning
Friday’s far away
Pray you’ll make it
It’s a magic day
Bells will ring and you’ll go out to play
Spend your money
Pass the bottle
Friday rules
Friday rules OK
2. George Jones, “Finally Friday.” Did George Jones really worry about which day of the week he looked forward to drinking and partying on?
3. “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask).” One of Alice Cooper’s occasional “comeback” hits—the theme song from the film Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
4. “Thank God It’s Friday.” Not the R. Kelly travesty from seven years ago; the Donna Summer movie soundtrack from 1978.
5. Ice Cube, “Friday.” From the first installment of his motion picture franchise. Note how many Friday songs came from Friday movies.
6. Tiki Island, “The Friday Song.” A catchy children’s cartoon thing, found here.
7. Bob Dylan (aka Mike Bauer), “Friday.” A skillful bit of style-parody retrofitting, but the text mythology which has grown up around this purported ‘60s inspiration for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” has been just as clever as the production itself.
8. The Darkness, “Friday Night”:
Monday cycling
Tuesday gymnastics
Dancing on a Friday night
I got Bridge Club on Wednesday
Archery on Thursday
Dancing on a Friday night
9. Mel Waiters, “Friday Night Fish Fry.” Smooth yet snappy soul/R&B. Another “Friday” fish song is one I noted in my fish-song list of the other day: “The Codfish Ball,” which begins “Friday night you’re all invited to dance from 8 to 5…”
10. Abba, “Dancing Queen”: “Friday night and the lights are low…”

On the hill up the South Side live the elite. They’re hyper-boring yet they’ve got the ear of touring indie bands, and vice versa. Bands you hear on college radio (sometimes even the behind-the-times College on the Hill station) can breeze into town and play gigs on campus to a handful of too-hip-for-town disaffected sophomores, then zip away before the rest of the city even knew they were here.
The local band scene has always been a world apart from what happens on the hill. The first local club of renown, on the west side of town, was Ellie’s Plain Food (no jokes please, they’ve all been made), a downhome diner which was convinced to allow live music on Saturday nights. Fortunate Fields has entered legend as the first band to play Ellie’s. Within weeks of the Saturday bookings, Ellie’s Plain Food had enlisted a Thursday house band, a proto-New Wave combo called I Love the Blast.

This is where the real people played. The gods on the hill saw this, and approved, and sent representatives, and before anyone could stop it there was a town/gown scene.

Airport Mystery tonight at The Bullfinch, with Melted Coins… Crisscross Shadow, featuring Sky Sabotage, at Hamilton’s, for two sets… Metal onslaught at D’ollaire’s with Demon’s Den, Program for Destruction and Racing to Disaster…

Have saved up three months rent already.

Joker, The Vision. Leisurely pops and squeaks suffuse a matter-of-fact futuristic vision intoned with R&B/soul smolder-fervor. “Milky Way” sounds like a ‘70s video game mated with a roadhouse jukebox. The closing number is a portentous piano-introed instrumental which bears the disorienting title “The Magic Causeway,” which is way too Harry Potter-sounding to take seriously.

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
I’ll probably have to buy this. Definitely an in-small-doses only affair. I marvel at Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem’s ability to edit the mountain of Philip K. Dick’s “2-3-74” documents down to under a thousand pages (not to mention creating an index of them!) without going mad—or being picked themselves for visitation from another demension, as Dick suspected he might have been.
This is not a work of imagination. It’s a work of psychological, psychoactive, sigh-inducing overwhelmth. It’s dense and dangerous yet alarmingly enjoyable. It’s full of puns and deprecation:
“Claudia, on this day we must count our cursings.”
“’The three lights coming on indicate the return of Christ.’ And the lights are in my TV set. A circuit few people know about. Nor are they interested.”
“Here my study ends. Except to add: My god, each step is a further fall.
This book would have blown my mind, as did Dick’s fiction, when I was in my teens and 20s. Now, it makes me want to revisit his novels, then sparingly take careful plunges into this most inward and mathematical of memoirs.