Money, money, all is money.

Blue October, Any Man in America
If Supertramp had low self-esteem.

Chris Arnott continues to spin his old 45s.

1. Shiv, Look Feel Down/VMJ, . Didn’t realize I owned as many Shiv singles as I do, or that this intense trio recorded that many. I don’t even recall VMJ and Shiv as being part of the same scene at the same time—VMJ was certainly older and wiser, but here they are sharing a red-vinyl 33 1/3 rpm single released on VMJ drummer John Nutcher own Caffeine Disk label in 1992. Both bands are thundering and uncompromising. According to historians, the autumn of ’91 was when “punk broke” with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, but the underground cognoscenti (and Nirvana itself) were several steps beyond that mainstream commercial release. It’s great to hear such a powerful, grinding, sputtering record (both sides!) from a time when so many studios were still dialing it down.
2. The Pist/Malachi Krunch split EP. Malachi Krunch does two songs, “Wound Up” and “Same Old Story (New Haven).” The first has an instrumental break reminiscent of the 40 lashes in Jesus Christ Superstar, while the other is an anthem decrying small-city apathy. I hadn’t realized until replaying it just now that the late great Wally Gates did the lead guitar on it. I checked the liner notes only because I don’t remember main Malachi Krunch guitarist Teo Baldwin changing up chords so often or so fast; that was Wally’s trademark. (Wallys ultimately joined the band for real, shortly before blowing town for Georgia.) The Pist was one of the most important punk bands in the state. Their three quick, articulate, variety-filled songs here show why.
3. Reverb, “The Man Who Came Back”/Tartan Keats, “Freshwater.” I have no idea how I came to have this, but I’m thrilled I do. It has a “US” side (Tartan Keats, one guy who sounds like several of the Velvet Underground at once) and a “UK side” (the pop-rocking Reverb). These opposing sides of the Atlantic ocean operate at startlingly different tempos and attitudes.
4. The New Rob Robbies, “Pig Day”/Vambo Marble Eye, “Jack Fallen”. Speedy punk-pop showcase on Chicago’s Off White label. The New Rob Robbies are relentlessly upbeat, with shoutalongs and yelps of “Yeah,” but also just plain relentless, with a neat reversal of the main riff as a coda. Vambo Marble Eye is more thrashy and straight-ahead, swirling like a studio cyclone.
5. The Monkees, Daydream Believer/ Goin’ Down. Since the other four singles on this day’s list are all two-band split deals, it’s tempting to think of this as one as well. The A-side is one of the higher peaks of commercial studio-concocted Monkeemania, with the cute one, Davy Jones, crooning a blissful love-despite-poverty lyric penned by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio. The songwriting credit on the B-side goes to all four Monkees plus Diane Hilderbrand (a bubblegum specialist who also wrote for Bobby Sherman and The Partridge Family. Since several Monkees have mentioned that Mose Allison was an inspiration for “Goin’ Down,” fan-scholars who clearly haven’t done the necessary earwork claim much closer similarities between the songs than actually exist. Several Monkees references use the same description: “’Goin’ Down,’ a variation of Mose Allison’s ‘Parchment Farm’”— not even getting the title right, and unconcerned that the riff both songs ride is derived from old talking blues and is not original to Allison. The pioneering heavy metal band Blue Cheer actually did a version of “Parchman Farm” retitled “Parchment Farm,” distinctly different from both Allison and Monkees, and not released until 1968; the version of “Parchman Farm” it resembles most is a bluesified one by John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers in 1966. The Monkees version shows that one can genuinely be “inspired” without using the word as a euphemism for theft. Allison’s “Parchman Farm” is a solo piano jazz melody with very few lyrics, about a penitentiary in Mississippi. The Monkees song (a B-side which didn’t appear on an album until Rhino’s Monkees reissue frenzy of the 1980s and ‘90s, though the song did grace no less than six episodes of The Monkees TV show) rides a horn-filled R&B riff, with Micky Dolenz deliriously speed-rapping a mordant tale about a man in the midst of drowning because he’s been stood up for a date.
Here’s the whole lyric, since I love this song—a true breakthrough for the Monkees as recording artists—so:

Floating in the river
With a saturated liver
And I wish I could forgive her,
But I do believe she meant it
When she told me to forget it,
But I bet she will regret it
When they find me in the morning,
Wet and drowned
And word gets round.
Goin’ down,. Goin’ down.
I’m coming up for air,
It’s pretty stuffy under there,
I’d like to say I didn’t care,
But I forgot to leave a note
And it’s hard to stay afloat
All soakin’ wet without a boat
And I knew I should have taken off my shoes
It’s front page news.
Goin’ down, goin’ down.
[sax break]
I wish I had another drink,
It wouldn’t so hard to sink,
I should have taken time to think,
Besides I got the picture straight,
She must have had another date.
I didn’t need this extra weight;
I wish that I could see the way to shore.
Don’t want no more.
Goin’ down.
I’m goin’ down.

Now I see the life I led,
I slept it all away in bed,
I should have learned to swim instead.
And now it’s really got me stumped,
I can’t remember why I jumped.
I’d like to get my tummy pumped,
And I can’t believe they drink this stuff in town.
This dirty brown.
Goin’ down [10x]

I wish I looked before I leaped,
I didn’t know it was so deep.
Been down so far I’m soakin’ wet,
And I haven’t touched the bottom yet.
This river scene is getting old,
I’m hungry, sleepy, wet and cold.
She told me to forget it nice,
I should have taken her advice.
I only want to go on home,
I’ll gladly leave that girl alone.
What a way to spend the night,
If I don’t drown, I’ll die of fright.
My Pappy taught me how to float,
But I can’t swim a single note.
He threw me in to teach me how,
I stayed there floating like a mama cow
And now I’ve floated way down stream,
I know this has got to be a dream.
If I could find my way to shore,
I’d never never do this any more.
They give you three, I been down nine,
And going down one more time.
Goin’ down, goin’ down.
Goin’ down, goin’ down.
Goin’ down, goin’ down.
Goin’ down, goin’ down.
I’m going home
Back to my friends

[More horns and ad-libs]

Now the sky is getting light,
And everything wil be all right,
I think I’ve finally got the knack,
Just floating lazy on my back.
I never really liked that town,
I think I’ll ride the river down,
Just moving slow and floating free,
With this river swinging under me.
Waving back to folks on shore,
I should have thought of this before.
I’ll float on down to New Orleans,
And pick up on some swinging scenes,
I’m gonna know a better day,
I’ll go down groovin’ all the way.
Goin’ down, goin’ down.
Goin’ down, goin’ down.
Goin’ on home

The area singer so fiercely associated with big-city cabaret that she’s known hereabouts as “Cabbie” has a simple rule for her live engagements these days: “I only work where there’s a curtain.”
The rule’s been in place for a year or so now, since Cabbie split the torch-song club scene for higher-profile proscenium/auditorium climes.
She broke the rule last Thursday at The Bullfinch in order to toast an old friend who’s getting married. Cabbie asked the band who happened to be onstage during this hen party—Rank Case of Reason, the onetime punks who’ve cleaned up their act in recent months—if they knew a certain tearswept ballad from a hit musical. They didn’t (or pretended not to), but they knew a saucier song from the same show. So that’s what got done, replete with struts and upthrust bums and all the thrills of, uh, cabaret.

Bergere Shepherdess at the Bullfinch with Pilgrim Revival… The Lincoln Rockers and Eastlake Style at Hamilton’s… Klismos and Wainscots, sedentary Euro dirges, at D’ollaire’s. Bet they’ll sell a lot of brandy…

Raised $1400 singlehandedly. Earned $27.

Three Legged Fox, Always Anyway
Billed as “ska punk” where I came across them, but much foxier than that. Mild reggae beats (the kind soft-pop singers use) and blue-eyed soul strains give half the songs here an unexpected romantic air, like Simply Red crashed a basement party. Very few of the songs really jump—you feel restraint and intelligence at work here. Not that these style experiments are entirely successful, but they’re certainly intriguing, especially when the vocals start cruising atop the chunky guitars and keyboards in numbers like “Comin’ Back Soon.” Other songs include “Get Out Alive,” “Run for Your Life” and “High Time for Arrival”—it’s like some concept album for the peripatetic, and that frisky quasi-Jamaican style suits that theme pretty well.

The independent bookstore R.J. Julia’s email notice that they were closing early Saturday) and all day Sunday because of Hurricane Irene including a photo of a shop employee setting up an umbrella and rainboots as part of a window display.
For appropriate illustrations of the impending storm, however, it’s hard to beat the Yale Center for British Art’s use of John Constable’s painting Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames—Morning After a Stormy Night.
Constable painted the scene in 1829, and on overcast days in Southern England it still looks like that.
Kathleen and I honeymooned in Westcliff-on-Sea, one town over from Leigh-on-Sea, where Hadleigh Castle still stands.
We resolved to hike to Leigh one morning.
We’d heard about the castle, but I hadn’t make the connection between it and the painting in the Yale Center for British Art which I must have passed a thousand times.
It stormed during our hike. It had stormed before. It would storm again. It had been storming on and off since at least 1829.
Kathleen lost a shoe in the treacherous thick brown mud of a potato field.
At one point I looked up at the sky and actually said, “Those clouds look like they could be in a Constable painting.”
We made it up the slippery hill to the castle, wondering why Vikings would ever have bothered. But if the British hadn’t thought there might be invaders, they might never have erected a castle, and Constable wouldn’t have done a painting, and we wouldn’t have had quite an incredible a honeymoon.
There was a paved road on the other side of the castle. We took that back to Westcliff.

It’s been a while since we were at a Bullfinch show so crowded that we couldn’t move.
Us personally, we mean. We usually prepare well.
Sometimes the place is packed but we’ve staked a table spot, so we’re set.
But last Tuesday there were people ON the tables.
Seemed impassable, if not impossible. Yet when we counted up the crowd, the numbers weren’t so staggering. It’s just that the headcount wasn’t as telling a number as the elbow count.
Some bands just take up all the air in the room. The Ephesians is one of those bands. They’ve inspired a dance that’s like a swooping ostrich.
Ephesians fans won’t mosh. They like their choreography flashy, neat, spread out. So instead of sticking to the front of the stage, they go goony-bird all over the room.
We’d like to report that this is spectacular, but mostly it’s bothersome. It’s certainly not why we like The Ephesians. We like the song they do about that splashy painting in the dining hall of the college on the hill, the one that takes up a whole wall. You can see it from out in the street, through those giant doors and picture windows.
The Ephesians, with the same instincts that make some folks HAVE to move booties in pre-arranged ways, make more cerebral folks consider the hues and proportions of that huge modernist canvas.
Fuck dance, let’s art.

A Domestic Conversation at the Bullfinch. This intriguing folk/poetry duo is playing concert halls in some cities, but in this town they insist on only playing the Bullfinch! Very Short Morality Play opens… Piece of Foolishness at Hamilton’s with King Arthur’s Socks… Ibsen Revisited, with the original vocalist Ibsen, at D’ollaire’s…

Showed up at new telemarketing work in a suit and tie (Mar and Gar said to). Felt like dork.

Voices of Extreme, Break the Silence
Extreme? Really? Like the band Extreme was extreme, perhaps? This is that sweetened, harmonized, well-tuned metal that you might associate with early MTV. There’s even a song called “Made of Stone” and another called “Apocalypse.” Accepted only as lighthearted self-parody, which it ain’t.