Still can’t believe we actually went camping and not just “camping.” Took us all day to dry out the tent.

Generationals
The languid dance beats, lowkey vocal delivery and cocktail-party conversational ambience make the incursion of reggae styles, guitar riffs and other forthright effects that much more disarming. There is a new Generationals album out there, but I’m more fascinated by the Medium Rarities EP, which features remixes by Bent Black and Richard Swift. Generationals is a naturally laid-back, rough-edged band, and it’s interesting to hear how they, and outside mixers, are coming to terms with studio trickery. Shades of later projects by members of The Vaselines, or the Belle & Sebastian/Trevor Horn machinations.

Sally and I made a Zoetrope out of a midsize “Nostalgisk” (round black box) from IKEA. I’d wanted to do a Zoetrope for ages but I couldn’t figure out how to make one spin properly. Then the library book Making “Movies” Without a Camera by Lafe Locke (Betterway Books, 1992) suggested just putting the Zoetrope on top of a turntable. Duh!

Our house is not lacking for turntables. We have a clunky portable one designed for records that read to the blind (it has slow speeds and not the faster ones), a cheap turntable in the basement, a slightly classier one in the girls’ bedroom, one that converts LPs to mp3s in the Study and—the obvious pick for a Zoetrope—a colorful toy turntable that used to grace my desk at the New Haven Advocate and which I picked up for a song at an antique store in New Hampshire 15 years ago.

Having a Nostalgisk handy, rather than having to devise a sturdy round slotted Zoetrope body all by myself meant that Sal and I were drawing and screening films within minutes of starting the project, rather than spending all the time perfecting the apparatus. The Nostalgisk has a raised bottom, so it fits slugly atop the turntable spindle without the need for drilling.

The only hazard, and it’s a fun one, with this set-up is that, at high speeds, the Zoetrope might careen off the turntable and hit viewers in the nose. Our own low-tech form of 3D movie thrills.

In record time, being in a band got Elizabeth “Bonnie” Beetz of the Bonny Joes published in a poetry journal, a professional modeling gig, and an invitation to study at the fashion institute at the college on the hill.
So she broke up the band. Are her longsuffering bandmates pissed!
“It wasn’t her band in the first place,” whines guitarist Jack Dee, who started the act two years ago as an Irish bar band. Denial aside, Bonnie made that band, putting them on the radar of managers and label suits. Now that she’s decided to be nonmusical, the setback is unforwardable. A few rounds of infighting occurred even before Bonnie’s bolting. But nobody’s acting as if she’s replaceable.
All the Bonny Joes have dayjobs, of course. But Bonnie’s different—she’s got prospects! Potential! A future! Sucks to be her ex-sidemen.

Move, over, Bonnie. Another eclectic thrush, Blake Lee sings a set with the Zeps, then a different one with The Frank Sins, at the Bullfinch. Watch out, boys… The Rizzo Honeys and Sure Diners—admittedly both on the more interesting end of the regional cover act circuit—at Hamilton’s… Beer Band Bingo at D’ollaires. That’s an event, not an act. We have no idea what it means…

If we’d looked for work the day we got fired, we wouldn’t have been camping on the only rainy day this week.

The BoDeans. Like beer, this Milwaukee band is a reliably lowgrade buzz. Honestly. Maintaining this manner of mainstream mediocrity is an artform in itself. The same perfectly adequate rock which the band has been delivering for decades, the kind I associate with cut-out bins and background music in ‘80s teen movies.

I missed my friend Brian Robinson’s set with his classically-tuned rock band Tet Offensive last night (July 28, 2011) at Café Nine. If you missed it too, you can get a taste of Brian’s vocal antics on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/thetetoffensive
I missed The Shellye Valauskas Experience too, though Shellye did show me a photo of her newborn niece.
At least I did arrive at the club in time to see the string quartet that backs Brian get back up onstage to accompany the evening’s headliner, the great Mike Viola. I’ve been a Viola fan since his early days as a performer, which were early indeed—with the Boston pop act Viola Project in the early 1980s, when he was barely into his teens. He’s now a comparatively mature 45-year-old singer/songwriter/producer/movie-soundtracker. He referenced both his mother and his daughter in his between-song patter. On the other hand, he made a lot of cocaine jokes.
The concept of having classical musicians back him up at Café Nine was proposed the last time Viola played the club, and Robinson was in his audience. Charts were arranged for several songs (some of them new). The results were calming, glowing, resonating and inspiring.
Viola would like to record the tunes he did with Tet Offensive on a future trip to New Haven, perhaps at Firehouse 12 studios. Robinson is looking to make Tet Offensive (for which he gathers students he knows from his day gig as Managing Director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra) a more solid and sustainable project.
The rest of us just want to see it happen again, however.

By Artie Capshaw

We hoped we’d never write anything that would cause a band to break up. You want the comments to be constructive, the jests made in the right spirit. Then again, when the band is the freshly reunited (and, as we wrote, “overripe”) Georgia’s White Flesh, you suspect a distinct lack of a sense of humor from leaders Mary and Pete Papadumus, not to mention simmering discontent from some of the band’s founding members.

M&P had the band learning gimmicky new routines, in the hopes that they could get lucrative wedding and corporate gigs. After our review came out, elderly guitarist Benny Rabbit, feisty fiddler Lady Min and brassmaster Patches Smith—who’d already been balking at the new choreographic and joke-telling requirements—quit the band. The good news is that they’re back working with the two guys M&P ousted from the White Flesh: vocalist Singing Sam (do we really have to write the word “vocalist” before his name? Hasn’t he qualified himself enough?) and keyboardist “Cringe” O’Leary. It’s a decidedly straight-ahead and unornamented R&B project with this working title: The No-Show Stoppers. There are multiple meanings within that name: “No showstoppers,” as in “no fancy dance or comedy routines like the GWF” and “No-show Stopper,” which is Singing Sam’s pledge not to miss any more gigs, which is one reason he got let go from the old band. The No-Show Stoppers. We helped with the punctuation. Do you like it?

We’ve certainly mended fences with Sam, Patches, Benny and Min. (Southern Comfort will do that.) Mary and Pete aren’t speaking to us, so our news of their forthcoming new act is hearsay: A Southern folk duo, with Mary swapping her bass for an acoustic guitar and Pete scaling down his drum kit to washtub percussion. Maybe they can do a little tapdance in the tub too.

While we’re in an apologetic mood, we must say “Sorry, sorry, sorry” to those who clean and maintain the bathrooms at the Bullfinch. You know who you are, and you were rightfully offended by comments made in our “Comfy” contest recently.
In our defense, we can only say that we were quoting someone else (who has personally apologized to staff, fearful that he’d lose all Bullfinch bathroom privileges.
“It was a dumb joke that occurred to me because of the whole “Comfy” thing, and wasn’t really about the Bullfinch at all,” the evildoer maintains.
For our part, we can’t remember ever setting foot in the ladies’ bathroom. True, we’re told we were in there once, getting very sick all over everything, one time when the men’s room was unavailable. But we don’t remember it, and in any case we would have been in no state to notice whether the toilet paper rolls had been properly placed.

Too early to look for work. We’re going “camping.”

The Red Button, As Far as Yesterday Goes
Beatle-esque is such a broad term, so casually dropped, that you hardly ever expect it to mean Beatles VI or Beatles ’65 or Rubber Soul—the gentler, hypermelodic, harmonica-enhanced side of Fab. Even weirder, you can break down The Red Button album to Paul-like songs, John-like songs and George-like songs. A more contemporary big comparison name that comes to mind is Jon Brion, who (like The Beatles) had nothing to do with this, but whose specialty is crisp analog recording and clear-as-pinged-glass harmonies. Beyond the obvious, though, The Red Button—an industrious two-man band—stands firmly on its own four feet, bringing in influences and original thoughts that stimulate whole new sounds and textures. Without ever getting downbeat.