Stinglet, the stripey-shirted singer of The Bobbie Truncheons, shut down a major stream of malicious gossip last week when he admitted that, accent and attitude aside, he’s not actually British.
How did this major, potentially professionally damaging personal revelation come about? Somebody asked him.
We’d never thought of that ourself. The whole Stinglet persona is so farfetched we assumed it came with a self-protective streak. Not so, as we learned in a follow-up conversation.
“It’s just a lark, innit? I mean, I’m just having one off, taking the piss.” said—oh, you know who said. Who else in our little scene would say like that?
For the record, Stinglet was born just outside Winter Garden, 37 years ago. He has no European heritage that he’s aware of, though he’d like to believe that his father, whom he’s never met, and knows nothing about, is from England.
Stinglet seems alarmed to learn that members of our creative community have taken his stage identity to be anything except a joke. “They must think I’m barmy,” he blithers. “Off me bleeding rocker.” Actually, we think we speak for the whole community when we say we’re just relieved.
The Bobbie Truncheons play Thursday at Hamilton’s—UK ales discounted during their set. The Red Whites, doing American R&B stolen from British R&B stolen from American blues, open… A more independent American streak that night at the Bullfinch, with idiosyncratic solo sets from Patricia Henry and Ben Arnold… The Booming Skies at D’ollaire’s, a patriotic drinker’s night out…

Tried to sort albums by common subjects, but they’re all about love.

Radical Dads, Mega Rama

Such a good name for a band, especially since there’s a woman in it, that you want them to succeed. Radical Dads have a leg up already because of the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah pedigree of guitarist Robbie Guertin. With the recent release of Mega Rama, the band (which formed in 2008) has more than doubled their recorded output. They play a special strain of Brooklyn rock that will resonate with elderly Velvet Underground acolytes and disenchanted contemporary youth alike. Crazy chord blurts and spectral consciousness-expansion combine in three-minute wonderments like “No New Faces” and “Little Tomb,” while the five-and-a-half-minute opus “Hurricane” is a wandering blissful thing unto itself. The most commercial-sounding, straightahead pop track, “New Age Dinosaur” is indeed the album’s first single and video. Lindsay Baker chirps the vocals on this one, which mentions power lunches and giant moths.

33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day
By Dorian Lynkskey. Harper Collins/Ecco, 2011.

This is a tremendous, if unwieldy book about music making a difference.

It’s full of lively scholarship, done up in the style of Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train, where a central topic is allowed to grow into a garden of related strands of useful tangential subtopics. A chapter on, say, The Clash’s “White Riot” covers the birth of British punk in the mid-70s and the social irrelevance of the prevailing pop genre of the era, disco. The following chapter gives disco its due concerning the gay rights struggle, centering on Carl Bean’s “I Was Born This Way.” Which leads, in turn, to chapters anchored by Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Dead Kennedys (with useful material on the creation of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL magazine), Grandmaster Flah, Crass, Frankie Goes to Hollywood (yes! and justified beautifully!), U2 (the “Pride” period), The Special AKA’s “Nelson Mandela”, Billy Bragg (introduced thus: “If you ask someone to name a British protest singer, there is invariably only one response”) and REM (“Exhuming McCarthy,” though who knows what other trenchant politically conscious insights lie in Michael Stipe’s mumbled lyrics of that time?).

The secondary arguments and also-ran artists explored in this deeply annotated study (660 pages, of which 60 are source notes, 23 are the index and 30 are appendices listing songs listed in the text, important songs lying outside the book’s already broad boundaries and some recommendations for further listening.

The whole book also suffers from that maddening frame of mind which maintains that art which is more “important” when it pertains to real-life events. Plenty of perfectly progressive and protest-fomenting songs are dismissed or ignored because they’re too generally or don’t fit a newsy framework. Many which do make the cut are called out for not being specific enough.

Ultimately, his treatise is undone by the lack of workable definitions for what a protest song is or could be. Lynkskey rightfully wants to make room for genre-breakers such as “What’s Going On,” so he throws occasional wrenches into his own organizational methods. But as a cultural history and as music criticism, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is exceptional.

Still, what Lynkskey, an arts journalist for the UK Guardian, has collected here is remarkable on its own terms. Lynkskey could limited himself any way he damn pleased and still have a heck of a book. He went for a research-intensive approach that also allows for a lot of criticial analysis. One of my favorite bits is this hyper-qualified, hilariously disdainful appreciation of “Eve of Destruction”:

It was a somewhat gauche shopping list of reasons to be fearful: segregation, nuclear war, Vietnam, Red China, the JFK assassination, all conspiring to sweep humanity into an early grave. It had none of the judgemnet-day terror of Dylan’s apocalyptic songs, and none of their agility (the third verse has no fewer than seven rhymes for “frustratin’”), but a gripping momentum nonetheless. The hoarse-throated Barry McGuire, who had just left folk revisionists the New Christy Minstrels and was looking for solo material, deigned to record it.

We need more pop-music books like this.

Nobody in our little scene can surf. Ffew are even coordinated enough to pinch a cigarette into their fretboards while onstage. But music hath charms, so you gotta try.
Seven of us headed down to the public water park on a bus. There, we found bunches of cardboard which we fashioned into boogie boards and skim boards. (Nothing was long enough for an actual faux surfboard.) We balanced them on boulders and trashcans and had a great time until someone got hurt.
Best part was the soundtrack. Rule was that the music could never die. Nobody, however, had brought a player, so we had to sing it all. We kept up a constant chorus of rumbles and yips for what seemed like hours (especially to the pissed off picnickers around us).
Saturated with sweat and surfiness, we all melted onto the bus and dripped back to the Bullfinch for cocktails to soothe our burning flesh. The rocks were on us!

Inflatable Float at the Bullfinch with WhaleSharkDolphin. First 20 people at the bar get bitten… The Striped Towels and Season of the Beach at Hamilton’s, which its experimenting with a new outside “deck area” for this show only… Dollaire’s is back down for the count. Those friggin’ drunk minors!…

Tried to sort all my albums by the key the first song is in.

The Topshelf label has just issued a sampler LP that would be a true shelf-toppler if it were on disks and not conveniently digital-only. Sixty-eight tracks! From not only Topshelf signees but, quoth a press release, “friends and bands the label thinks you ought to check out.” The variety, and the volume, can be overwhelming, from indie wisps to hardcore onslaughts. Among the stand-outs for my discriminating ears: Duck, Little Brother’s jangly emo “Steve Jobs (All is Fun Until Someone Gets Stabbed), Everyone Everywhere’s unabashedly poppy “I Feel Fine,” The Guru’s strikingly clean and well-played funk “Reel It In,” Bozmo’s propulsive new-wavery “Milksnakes” (with its terrifying blasé declaration that “You’re in middle school for life”)—and literally dozens of others.

Here in New Haven, Connecticut, the Peabody, Mass.-based Topshelf is revered for distributing Fuck Off All Nerds, the benefit album (available here http://topshelfrecords.bigcartel.com/product/fuck-off-all-nerds-single-lp) put together in the wake of the home-invasion murder of New Haven scenester Mitch Dubey.

Only two bands—Into It. Over It. and My Heart to Joy—appear on both Fuck Off All Nerds and the new Topshelf comp, making the sampler a real introductory feast even for those already acquainted with the label.

The sampler’s free from http://tpshlf.co/tsr2011, as long as you deign to “friend” the comp or tweet its importance.

When George Baker arrived in New Haven in the mid-1990s, his reputation preceded him. He’d been Marvin Gaye’s music director, had toured with everyone from overnight sensations to nostalgic acts, had even backed Sammy Davis Jr. Baker provided some of the best bar conversation in town. You couldn’t drop a name without him humbly mentioning some gig he’d done with that very act.

His magical affinity for the guitar needed no advance promo. It remains instantly apparent whenever he plays.

It didn’t take long for Baker to find a comfortable perch as one of The Convertibles, the old Thursday night houseband at Café Nine when it was still Mike Reichbart’s joint. It wasn’t long after that they he formed his own local combo, a versatile outfit which could headline a weekend night of multiple sets and also gracefully lead an afternoon blues or jazz jam.

There’ve been many line-up changes over the years, while Baker has also found fame on the BET Jazz channel and with his album Mojo Lady.

It’s been said that serving in the George Baker band is an apprenticeship, an education, a master class. The first class to graduate—saxophonist Lou Ianello, drummer Chris Lyons, bassist Kyle Esposito and keyboardist Nick Lloyd—is convening Friday, July 8 at (where else?) Café Nine, for a reunion gig beginning at 10 p.m.

These are all accomplished, multi-faceted musicians in their own right—Lloyd, for instance, produced The National’s first album and founded the Firehouse 12 studio/club on Crown Street—but the Baker band gives them a special bond. It’ll also likely be an old-home night for “musician’s living room” regulars of a decade or so ago.

Our beloved Millie of the model marvels got the call to open for Copperfield at Dollaire’s a couple weeks back. The MMs are on a kind of hiatus (Creative differences? Never! Summer camp counseling!), and Millie had a quiver full of new songs, so why not?
Copperfield is one of those bands that likes to fill the stage with all their gear before they go out to dinner, so they insist on a low- maintenance opening act, preferably female.
That’s Millie to a T, which in thus case could stand for “tough gig.” she couldn’t have been treated worse by the crowd if she’d been a radio DJ.
Her name was mispronounced. The monitor didn’t work. A short-term drink special was announced at the same time she was, causing a mass rush to the corners of the room just as she started playing. A middle-aged man whooped about her physical attributes for the whole set. The set was cut short by three songs. Copperfield apparently forgot the customary courtesy of thanking the opening act during their own set.
Business as usual, we were told by D’ollaire’s regulars when we bitched about it. But we’re Bullfinch folks and this was unacceptable.

The Itchy Thornys at the Bullfinch tonight, with a (lengthy) opening set by NIo Calamite… Fight-o-Saurs and Uintatheres at Hamilton’s, an unusually bold bout of original headbanging for the covers-friendly club… Who cares at D’ollaire’s? That’s not a band. We really mean who cares?…

Sorted all my books, by geographical region rather than alphabetically.