We were speculating last week that Volk, the renaissance craftsman who runs the Music Dump on Mansfield, was slowing down.

Turns out he was just in hiding. He emerged last week with three female shop assistants on his arm. He’s been schooling them as a rock act, with himself on guitar and the brother/sister duo Celeste and Al as the rhythm section. The vocal threesome are calling themselves The Golden Handmaidens, and if that seems creepily sexist and submissive to some of you, get this: They don’t have names! “Volk taught us everything we know,” one of them giggled to us. “Why shouldn’t we do what he says?”

At least he’s got the gear shop to fall back on.

Political rock with Pentagon Spy and Masked Monkey at the Bullfinch… Four-Headed Dragon (a penis reference) and Infinity Clue at Hamilton’s, cock-rock covers… An evening with Submarine Caper at D’ollaire’s. Bring a sleeping bag for the guitar solos…

Slept for two days.

When I came out of my room, nobody knew I’d even been home.

John Updike, Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism (Knopf, 2011)

Never connected deeply with John Updike, though of course he was prolific and ubiquitous and unavoidable for anyone who reads anything.

We apparently shared a lot of tastes, so I’d find myself knocking up against his opinions in forewords, introductions to anthologies and of course the zillion magazines and journals he wrote for.

But ultimately we come from different places, Updike and I. He embraced that whole suburban lit snobbery aesthetic from which I generally run screaming.

So this posthumous volume was a sore temptation and a sore trial. My last chance to come to terms with the guy.

I couldn’t. Elitism and erudition drive me nuts. Nuts!

Updike can’t write about pop culture honestly; he’s always reaching for the intellectual justification. His visual art reviews are more about words than pictures—he analyzes his own descriptions of the paintings, not the paintings themselves.

Updike works so hard and being unflappable and unshockable and above-it-all that you wish he’d just stop writing and go to bed.

Listening to… Sharon Van Etten

Sharon Van Etten, Tramp.

Nice to hear that PJ Harvey isn’t an island unto herself, and has had some pervading influence. If Sharon Van Etten recorded these songs 20 or 30 years ago, you could imagine them turning out very, very differently. That’s not to say that Tramp is derivative, or rides current trends. It just has an open, explorative sense, a studio daring. Van Etten can sing gorgeously, clearly, crisply, but just doesn’t always choose to. That makes for a varied, swooping, human set of songs. The production tends to counter the vocalist’s whims—when she gets raw, the backing sounds get smooth and classical. When she croons sweetly, she gets a stark rhythm backdrop. The songs are fine, but the open-minded manner is which they are presented, and the challenges Van Etten sets for herself, make Tramp a keeper that you can return to again and again, in a variety of high and low moods.

Thirty-seven acts, the most ever, will play the Merident Daffodil Festival this year. Every one of them has some connection to Connecticut—they live here, first formed here, etc. Of those, ten or so are indelibly linked to the festival’s host city of Meriden.

The Meriden Daffodil Festival is the oldest and largest festival of Connecticut original-music bands in the state. You can thank Meriden citizen Rob DeRosa, who books the festival, for turning it into such an extremely valuable and cutting-edge showcase of the current Connecticut scene. DeRosa, who also hosts the Homegrown local-band radio show on WESU 88.1 FM, arranges extraordinarily balanced schedules—established bands and new ones, cover acts and originals, acoustic and electric, ancient and modern, popular and obscure… yet all Connecticut-bred, with a special focus on those who’ve emerged from Meriden. The middle of the state is anything but middle of the road. How many town’s spring-in-the-park festivals turn into major statements on the state’s place in the music universe?

I’m proud to be the first to publicly divulge the names of the bands playing the 2012 Meriden Daffodil Festival. The days and times the bands are playing have yet to be announced. The festival takes plays Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29, in Meriden’s Hubbard Park. The official Daffodil Festival website is here.

Music highlights include Mates of State, the reunited ’70s local lights Saucers, and the popular Barefoot Truth; fresh acts such as the pre-teen act The Foresters and the psychedelicized The Guru; scene stalwarts such as The Manchurians, Ivory Bills, Frank Critelli and Big Fat Combos; earnest downcast singer/songwriters such as Sidewalk Dave, M.T. Bearington and Farewood; and, um, me, playing Velvet Underground covers on my trusty uke. No kidding, Rob DeRosa booked me.

Here, in alphabetical order, are the bands:

Amalgamated Muck: Lauren Agnelli and friends, well-known from the Small Concert series in Chester. Agnelli was a member of the folk combo Washington Squares. Daffodil debut.

Christopher Arnott & His Ukulele. Yours truly. Jazz-age and punk covers on a battered acoustic four-string. My Daffodil debut!

Barefoot Truth (hugely popular straightahead rock five-piece, on the bandshell stage at fireworks time on Friday night)

The Big Fat Combo: Tom Hearn is the master of working-class roots rock with a punk edge.

Bird ‘n Boys: Covers-and-originals quartet, with British vocalist Ellen Sackman being the “bird.” Meriden connection.

Bop Tweedie and The Days: Some recall Bop from 23 Hello back in the ’80s. Others know him from a flurry of recordings he’s done in the past year.

Boxxcutter: Rock cover band. Meriden connection.

Burrito Betty: Rock/crunk experimentalists, with intriguing guitar sounds and sound rappy vocals.  Meriden-based. Daffodil debut.

Anne Castellano & The Smoke: The New Londo-based blogger behind “Anne’s Shore & More” on localbandreview.com, and her band. Daffodil debut.

Chico & Friends: Frequent festival entertainers, doing acoustic covers and originals. From Meriden.

Chuck E. Costa: Named Connecticut state troubadour, and the composer of a “Connecticut Sings” anthem about Meriden, performed with some of the town’s middle-school students.

Frank Critelli: A longtime Daffodil favorite, known throughout the music scene as a folksinger, coffeehouse concert host and all-around local-music-lovin’ good guy.

Crosseyed Cat: Accomplished area R&B/rock cover band. Daffodil debut.

The D. Smith Blues Band: One of the area’s reigning blues legends.

Dagwood: Young rockers with a noble lineage: Some of Dagwood members’ dads play in Big Fat Combo and Mold Monkies. Daffodil debut.

The Forresters: Three siblings, all still in grade school, playing blistering pop-punk. Daffodil debut.

The Gonkus Brothers: quirky cover act, doing Irish folk and Grateful Dead and such. Meriden connection.

The Grimm Generation: Hard-working band which dwells in shattered romances and other harsh realities. Distinguished by the scratchy-throated vocals of Carmen Champagne. “Nothing astral going on.”

The Guru: Spacily complex rock quartet with a solid following at the teen clubs. Shouty, worldly and psychedelic. Daffodil debut.

Jennifer Hill & Co: rousing piano poster who writes of darkness, decay and long sentences. Daffodil debut.

The Ivory Bills: The most electric of illustrious singer/songwriter James Velvet’s multiple musical personalities. Velvet of course is the host of the Local Bands radio program on WPLR and the leader of one of the best-known bands in New Haven in the 1990s, The Mocking Birds.

Kelly & Sean: “Soft rock covers.” Meriden connection.

M.T. Bearington: Local indie sensations and Safety Meeting Records signees, built up into a solid band from Matt Thomas’ initial solo musings.

The Manchurians: Venerable Connecticut R&B/rockers fronted by Roger C. Reale (whose songs have been covered by B.B. King and others) and assisted by ubiquitous local guitarist Dean Falcone.

Mates of State:The internationally acclaimed husband/wife indie duo, playing on the intimate The Jeff Crooms Welcome Stage at fireworks time on the Saturday night.

Mark Mirando: Pop songwriter who grew up in Connecticut bar bands and now has worked with Ringo Starr and Kristin Chenoweth. Meriden connection.

The Pedro Valentin Orchestra: Dozen-member-strong Latino orchestra. Daffodil debut, with added Meriden links.

River City Slim & The Zydeco Hogs: Some swamp boogie for the masses. Can’t stay this festival doesn’t cast a wide net.

The Rivergods: New London’s roots originalists.

Riverstreet: Rock cover band known at the Daffodil fest for backing local-boy-mad-Nashville-songwriter Gary Burr. Meriden based.

The Saucers: The legendary Connecticut band that Rocket From the Tombs bassist and Craig Bell put together when he moved to New Haven. The group reunited last year and has made some new recordings. Though Mark Mulcahy was the original drummer, the “new” line-up features another pounder from the vital ‘70s scene, Kerry Miller, plus founding Saucers Craig Bell, Malcolm Marsden and Malcolm Doak. Daffodil debut.

Sidewalk Dave: His website reads “Sidewalk Dave can’t be your friend, and the juxtaposed up-beat mid tempo folk-punk arrangements of the music accompany the reasons why.” Full-bodied folk-rock with groovy keyboards and earnest yowls of frustration. Daffodil debut.

691: Classic rock covers. Meriden connected.

String Theorie: “World fusion trio” from the Hartford area working out new ideas on guitar. Daffodil debut.

The Swingaholics: Country Swing outfit. Daffodil debut.

The Tropical Hotdog Band: Prog-rock-jazz combo, as you might tell from their Captain Beefheart-derived band name. Daffodil debut, plus a Meriden connection.

Happy Groundhog Day yesterday! A friend wrote to remind me of a radio sketch we did back in high school which involved him as a news reporter stuck down a groundhog hole. This was three and half decades ago. I’m sure neither of us remember the punch line to the sketch.

My daughters are all about Groundhog Day. We checked the web upon waking and learned that there are six more weeks of winter. This suits Sally fine, since we are taking a family trip to Vermont this month and she needs there to be snow for sledding.

When Mabel was just a few months old, she was part of a road trip to a friend’s wedding in Pittsburgh. We stopped in Punxatawney, PA, for dinner. The main recollection of the place is having  to special-order vegetarian food at a Chinese restaurant. All is groundhogs and carnivores in Punxatawney, PA.

A New Haven-based kids-entertainer we admire, Les Julian, has a Groundhog Day anthem, titled “Punxatawney Phil,” on his 2009 album Good Things Happen:

 

The groundhog whispers in the emcee’s ear

As everybody strains to hear

Tophat nods and shouts the news

“Six more weeks of winter blues!”

 

Happy St. Blaise Day today! This is a remembrance my wife vividly recalls from her Catholic youth, when throats are blessed by making a makeshift crucifix with candles in front of believers’ necks. Does this help ward away vampires, having blessed necks? I researching the martyr St. Blaise last night, I was pleased to discover a long British tradition of bonfires in his name, which has no direct relevance to his life and works but is based upon a pun on his name: “Blaze.”

The Joopiteers was one of the bands that escaped the clutches of “Sat” Satin, though they had to move out of town and lay low a while before they made their break. They also had to swap the psychedelic style on which they’d been weaned for a new harmony-pop angle. Label interest in them was immediate, and we’re talking national. For various reasons (their schooling, mostly), the band stuck around town and made their first album at Olympus Studios. They played several times a month at student centers throughout the county, and singlehandedly birthed an upbeat sunny-sky teen-pop scene that the music landscape wouldn’t otherwise have had. Lead singer Joop (who seems to be some cryptic relation to “Sat” Satin) wielded a gold-painted guitar specially made for him by Volk of the music dump. His onstage partner and erstwhile girlfriend Joopette the Eaglet played tambourine and genuflected during his guitar solos.

Joop is now married to Junie, keyboardist and songwriter for the Peacock Queens. The couple has been living quietly in the Hill neighborhood for decades now, coming out of retirement only for benefits and such. They just announced that they’ll be doing a series of fundraisers for the Zing Kids nursery school. One of the projects is a kids-music record, the first new recordings for Joop or Junie in several years. You can hear some of the songs live, over the wails of tots, Saturday morning at the school bake sale and open house. Gosh, when we were a kid all we got to do on Saturday mornings was watch TV cartoons.

Hidden Harbor and Short-Wave Mystery at The Bullfinch; not as doom-and-gloom as you’d suppose… Idol rock with Desert Giant and Viking Symbol (who wear those hats—fun!) at Hamilton’s… Jam band Whale Tattoo plays their 49-minute version of their four minute radio hit at D’ollaire’s, with Outlaw’s Silver opening…

Ate all the cookies myself.

This stuff is so light and fresh and airy, it has no right being so accessible in the wintertime. I’ve been grooving (that’s the word, in the Young Rascals sense) to Eytan & The Embassy’s album The Perfect Break-Up non-stop for a couple of days now. It’s got that classic Raspberries or late-ELO feel, where songs are translated in a perfect pop lingo using phrases and notes coined by masters such as The Beatles (heavy on the Lennon), The Turtles (for the harmonies), Northwestern R&B/garage bands, Bolan & Bowie, and many unsung one-hit-wonders of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Musically, this is comforting and familiar, yet fresh. Lyrically, it’s human and honest and confessional, yet fresh. The fact that bandleader Eytan Oren appears shockingly young, and that these ambassadors of London, Detroit, Memphis and L.A. sounds base their embassy in Brooklyn, gives the whole project an otherworldly, out-of-time feel. Yet here they are, in the here and now, giving contemporary teens a forebear of what kept their poor punk-starved parents going in the late-middle 20^th century. “The Good Life” features guest bleatings and bashings by Locksley, one of my all-time fave pop/punk/British invasion blenders. I’m a power-pop purist; this is a hard artform for the post-modern set to crack. Locksley’s done it, and so now has Eytan & The Embassy.

Things get even brighter with the brand new Eytan & The Embassy single, released Tuesday on iTunes. “Everything Changes” doesn’t exactly change everything—it’s the same heady brew of power-pop, white soul, Motown horns and ‘70s AM radio rock—but this time the studio production seems to keep up with all the melodic voices in Eytan’s head. It overwhelms with confidence and energy. It’s also a song of optimism and self-awareness, which is nice to hear during these cold-season just-broke-all-my-New-Year’s-resolutions doldrums.

Eytan & The Embassy play tomorrow, Thursday Feb. 2, at the Outer Space in Hamden. As impressed as I am by the extravagant pop production, I imagine this would be a special band to see live. Eytan takes pride in his soulful voice, and I expect one of the balladdy tunes such as “Juliet,” where he croons “Come on, I am on your side,” could be intoxicating in a small club as a surefire rave-up like “Queen Bee.”

Eytan & The Embassy play Feb. 2 at the Outer Space in Hamden—a single release party of sorts—with Super Bad, Matt Maynes of Johnny Mainstream and Patrick McHenry.

The Amazon alert I received yesterday is titled “Sax Rohmer’s New Book.”

Rohmer died in 1959. The book in question is The Mystery of Fu Manchu, which will be reissued in a couple of weeks by Titan Books as a ten-dollar paperback, or via Kindle for $6.39.

 

The Mystery of Fu Manchu is already available on Kindle for a buck and a half, within the 615-page Fu Manchu Omnibus 1, which also includes the other two volumes of the initial Fu-Manchu trilogy: The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu and The Hand of Dr. Fu-Manchu. Under its American title, The Insidious Fu Manchu, there are several Kindle editions available for free.

 

The Titan edition’s distinction will be “a special feature by Leslie S. Klinger.” Klinger’s cool. He’s a trusted authority on both Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, and edited the new annotated edition of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics (a 560-page hardcover).

Context is everything with Fu-Manchu, and Klinger can provide it. The novels are unconscionably racist, appealing to a readership to which “inscrutable” was a better adjective than “mysterious” when describing an “oriental” villain with evil powers and world-conquering intentions. Yet these books are cornerstones of 20^th century adventure fiction. Offensive, undoubtedly, but from an era which boasted no end of things which offend modern sensibilities. Up to you whether you need a new $6 preface to tell you that.