The Parson Redheads, “Burning Up the Sky.”

It feels like 1967 or so, and we’re on a lawn outside a West Coast college somewhere. A scarecrow is playing guitar under a tree. In the branches above him a woman starts cooing harmonies. A badger starts playing ocarina. One by one, all the people and animals in the area slowly joins in. Their voices rise into the heavens until the whole world achieves inner peace.

We promised we’d cover the COH festival at Community Stage (Firehouse 28), but you can hear it all for yourself. Every show was lovingly taped. Set lists have been framed. Leisurely afterparties allowed for
Which makes the whole thing kind of sad. Upstarts pop up where they weren’t expected, turn the town upside down for a few days—gathering at shows, starting debates, documenting everything in sight, then vamoosing as swiftly as they’d swooped in.
The memories:
A band member getting fired onstage, with the onstage patter for the rest of the night all about how the band was going to deal with—song by excruciating song.
The soldiers who wandered through a show blasting the bohemians.
The big out-of-town rock star who showed up ostensibly to trumpet the local scene but wouldn’t stop talking about his own legend.
The reunions, guest stars and switch-ups—soap operatic onstage hook-ups of talents who seldom speak to each other offstage, but went for it this time because the whole fest was obviously something special.
A least a couple of amazing performances unencumbered by non-musical drama.
The exploding electronic devices, the unintelligible field recordings and other clashes between body-rock and wire-rock.
We may tell some of these stories more fully later. For now, we’re still just recovering and wondering what exactly happened.
Art & Idey and Ray Darvish at the Bullfinch… Fist Fast Fussed at Hamilton’s, a band name we care not to dwell upon… The unfettered Frayed Fringe Musical Circus Revue at D’ollaire’s, and school’s not even in session…

Gar moved my paper theater to a prominent position on the dining table.

Fair to Midland, Arrows and Anchors

Not only is the opening track given the Snagglepussy title “Heavens to Murgatroyd,” it opens with heavenly church organ chords and an only slightly intelligible music-hall preacher-style interlocutor voice—before getting into a punk smash-up, a swirl of hard rock guitar riff, some declarative, evenly paced vocals, then some falsetto and harmonies. I got bored quickly, but what a kick-off!

Storyteller—The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
By Donald Sturrock (Simon & Schuster, 2011; 672 pages)

It’s a big book, and a detailed one. There’s a neat description of a wad of foil chocolate wrappers which Dahl had pressed into an orb “between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball” and used to show off to his friends.
But given Roald Dahl’s varied output, unapologetically nasty reputation and old-school sexist-and-classist personal life, one wished for a book that isn’t so… steady.

Sure, this is the “authorized” biography, but so was David Michaeilis’ Schulz & Peanuts, which allowed lots of leeway for scandal and analysis. Dahl is dead, as are most of the people who could claim to be offended by some of the revelations here. What happens actually is that when the bio loosens up and starts behaving like a Road Dahl novel, characters come to life. Congresswoman/playwright Clare Booth Luce as a sex-crazed adultress? Ian Fleming admitting his own deficiencies as an author, and justifying his fondness for that “ugly stuff,” money? Walt Disney as cold businessman discussing the allure of gremlins?

Taking a tip from the economical Dahl learned in his slam-bang short stories and chaotic yet well-charted children’s chapter books, this weighty and sluggish bio should have been half the length and twice the pace, with all the qualifying statements cut out. Dahl was clearly a let-the-chips-fall kind of guy. Donald Sturrock spends too much time walking carefully behind him and picking up the chips.

Of Faith & Light got their band name from a stick of butter in a convenience store. The keyboard/oboe duo builds tunes out of the classical repertory, jamming gracefully on classical riffs which swiftly devolve into chaos.
“We think of it as comedy,” reveals the tooting Faith Spread. “We thought that was pretty clear. But we did a show on campus last year and a college kid did a serious paper on us. It’s not like we don’t get it, you know? We’re classically trained. We know all those big words for what we do. But this is not some deconstructionist theory we’re working here.”
“If we could throw pies during the set, we’d do that,” pipes up Larry Light, whom some might remember as Harold Zeller Jr. of the late great—and more consciously pompous—Hazeus. “But it could be bad for the instruments.
“I turned into a swan for this band,” L/Harry allows. “But it’s the squawky, silly, flapping kind of swan.”

The Amazing Dr. Darwin and Billion Dollar Boy at the Bullfinch. Two solo men, one night before the all-women bill of Ganymede Club and My Brother’s Keeper tomorrow… Putting Up Roots, Dark as Day and Between the Strokes of the Night keeping under cover at Hamilton’s. Where do they get them all from? And who comes out to see them all while the college is on break?… The Nimrod Hunt and Cyborg from Earth, technindustrialectronica at the penitent D’ollaire’s…

Made a paper theater out of a cut-out book I found at Better Read Than Dead.

Young Buffalo, Only We Can Keep You From Harm
Part Gregorian chant, part Hotleg’s “Neanderthal Man,” part white funk jam, this was the perfect song with which to start a fractious week. The lyric, by adding a single syllable, comes off as more menacing than the title:
“IF only…”