Wednesday night I saw Nonie Newton-Breen as the outspoken nun in Late Nite Catechism 2: Sister Strikes Back. Prompted by a question from the audience, “Sister” addressed whether pets can enter into heaven. The official Vatican call is no, because animals don’t possess immortal souls. Sister’s personal view is “Dogs yes, cats no.”
Which leads me to run a second installment of “Pet Songs” sooner rather than later.

1. Hounds of Love. Title song of Kate Bush’s 1985 album, her fifth album and among her most popular. Not a very pleasant image, being pursued relentlessly by hounds of love. The video for the song eschewed any literal version of the lyrics in favor of visual cues from Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.
2. Get Down. Leo Sayer, in a decidedly unthreatening tone, cautions “You’re a bad dog, baby, and I don’t want you around.”
3. And Your Bird Can Sing. There’s a killer 1980 cover by The Jam listed as “previously unavailable” when issued on the invaluable The Jam Extras CD in 1992.
4. Spiders & Snakes. For me, Jim Stafford’s 1974 comedy romance song falls in the same category as Loudon Wainwright III’s hit of two years earlier, “Dead Skunk”: Bugs and squashed skunks may not be pets, but seldom have they been sung about with such affection and amusement. If it weren’t for Wainwright, Stafford would have that genre pretty much to himself, since his repertoire also includes “Your Bulldog Drinks Champagne,” “Cow Patti” and “Turn Loose of My Leg.”
5. What’s New, Pussycat? Bacharach/David tune popularized by Tom Jones, the theme song for the Woody Allen-penned film of the same name. It’s a relationship song, but all that meowing makes you hope it’s a pet song.

Shy Turtle with a Soft Spot is a side project of, you guessed it, the withdrawn bassist of The Musk Turtles band.
Since the MTs are such a harmony-heavy vocal group, having the bassist go off and do an instrumental variation of the same general precepts seems both obvious and bewildering. Is this the ultimate vanity project: “Hey Ma!—Hear what I’m playing when they’re usually singing!”
But that’s mean. Bass Turtle—his given name is Fritz—insists he just wants audiences to hear the wonders he hears through his monitors. English is a third language for Fritz, and not one that he’s mastered particularly well yet, so he’s adapted the Musk Turtles’ carefully wrought lyrics to synthesized keyboard sounds. Then he’s machine-tuned the drumbeats and channeled the guitars until they’re echoes of their former selves. Only his bass has a live bite.
OK, frankly, we’re still unclear whether this is sensational or solipsistic. But it’s wild to hear a local band’s tunes turned inside out and upside down. Fritz has given his misshapen reconstitutions as much care and thought as Missy and her fellow founding Musks gave to the originals. The band seems pretty confused themselves about what Fritz is doing, and have expressed neither support nor indignation. There are no plans for back-to-back pure-Musk and deconstructive-Musk sets at the moment, which should tell you something—either in sweet vocals or bleeps and bloops.

The Calamites and Grallator at Hamilton’s… The Bullfinch is closed for cleaning (a story for another time)…. D’ollaire’s also closed, for no reason that we can yet believe…

The Bagel Place only wanted one of us, so Mar and I both quit.

Jasta, Jasta
Of the hundreds of bands I covered avidly during seven-plus years as the New Haven Advocate’s local music columnist, I didn’t expect that Jamey’s Jasta would have the longest and most enviable careers. Through his Sabbath-approved band Hatebreed, Jamey’s been an innovator in one of the highest-profile hybrid rock genres of the ’80s, hardcore/metal. He’s been a TV host (of MTV2’s Headbangers Ball), run a label and even created a Hatewear clothing line. Now he’s going the solo album route. I’ve heard two tracks onfit, and in their best moments they bring me all the way back to the roots of Jamey’s surname—his brief stint as baby-faced frontman for New Haven’s highly touted local band Jasta 14, which was plying a singular mix of various hard styles back in the early ‘90s, when such experiments were simply classified as “alt-rock.” Now, lowering the vocal volume and cutting holes in the hardcore wall of sound seems quaint. But Jasta does it well. The Jasta album is also commendable as another chapter in Jamey’s spiritual growth. They’re songs he says (in the YouTube teaser below) wouldn’t fit with Hatebreed or other projects. He’s gone from anthems about Perseverance to more complicated riffs like “Mourn the Illusion” and “Enslaved, Dead or Depraved.”

An uneaten jawbreaker, the cross-section of an exactly half-eaten jawbreaker and, to establish scale, a Breathsavers brand breath mint. Looks vaguely planetary.
Jawbreakers purchased at Gumdrops & Lollipops http://www.gumdropsnlollipops.com/
In Niantic. Connecticut, a key element of one our favorite family day trips.
(Breathsaver mint purchased at News Haven (1058 Chapel St., New Haven).

You remember our “comfy” contest, using that word (from an ancient ad for cheese hanging in the club) to describe something in the Bullfinch nowadays? How about the related challenge, to find a new slogan for the Bullfinch– anything but “comfy.”
Well, that turned out to be the winning entry: “anything but comfy.” Except that if we made that the winner of the second challenge, out would negative the first challenge altogether. So we’re giving that slogan a special honor instead: —-, who suggested it, gets a framed Philly of the Comfy sign.
So let’s dispense with the comfy contest first. Top “things that are comfy about the Bullfinch”:
1. Suggested by Mister Gillie: the foam that’ s sometimes on the top of the beer, when it isn’t stale.”
2. Suggested by Phoebe, phrend of the Figgits: when they remember to trunk the toilet paper in the girl’ s room.
3. Suggested by Sonny Blit of the
Blats: sonny Blit of the Blats. “I’m the comfiest guy I know,” he alleges.
4. Suggested by the old guy who has a Daniels and Coke every afternoon in the corner and never volunteers his name: “the squishy floor.”
5. Suggested by Missy, the every other Saturday bartender: “the group hug during a hardcore show.” uh, we think you mean a mosh pit, Missy.
More comfort, not to mention the first round of Bullfinch applicants, in a future column.

Hmm hmm hmm. A new song in my head.

Computer Magic, “Running.”
A comforting video in which a child levitates out of her bed into the psychedelic heavens and morphs into Computer Magic vocalist/synth whiz Danz.
The song has the same dream comforts—fulsome keyboards and beats to stabilize the vision. Not groundbreaking, but ethereal things rarely are.

For sensitive surfer boomers among us, the paramount summer album of all time is Pet Sounds. But the Beach Boys opus is not really about pets, and pets are really what’s been on my mind this week as I’ve watched the family dogs’ fur fry in the 90 degree summer heat.
Our corgis have become parapetetic, impertinent messes. Our cats too. Even the gerbils. So I’ve been lining up some Pet Sounds to comfort them.

1. Soapy. The original 1965 sax-saturated single was by Mickey & the Clean Cuts, but a later generation of garage fans learned it via The Lyres. I interviewed Lyres frontman Mono Mann in the early 1980s for Rocco Cippilone’s fanzine Bang!, which gained me entrance to the esteemed Mann’s Boston apartment. (There was a secret knock to get in.) One of the many revelations of the hours-long interview: Mono Mann loved cats, and had named one of them Soapy.
2. My Pet. Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer had one of the most remarkable mindmelds in the history of jazz, bonding and fetching and following each other leads as assuredly as a man and his dog. “
3. Martha My Dear. Bestial Beatles, since it’s about Paul McCartney’s sheepdog. The Beatles’ White Album could just as well be called the Animal Album: “Piggies,” “Blackbird,” Rock Raccoon,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey,” the elephant in “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”… (I only recently read, in Dorian Lynkskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day, that “Blackbird’ was inspired by a human and not a bird. As Lynskey amusingly writes, “Discovering that ‘Blackbird’ was about a female civil rights activist, an (oh dear) ‘black bird,’ does nothing to enhance one’s enjoyment.”
4. Shannon. Henry Gross wrote this 1976 hit single in honor of Beach Boy Carl Wilson’s Irish Setter Shannon, who had just died. This might explain Gross’ falsetto squeal on the chorus, a sound only dogs can hear. Knowing the song is about a dog invigorates the lyric about “maybe she’ll find an island with a shady tree/just like the one in our backyard.” Something to pee against.
5. We Are Siamese If You Please. May be Peggy Lee’s finest moment as a songwriter. In his new autobiography Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler cites this song as a stirring memory of a three-year love affair he had with a teenage groupie he took on tour with him: “That sweet girl used to recite poetry and constantly sing songs to me like my mother did when she put me to sleep. It was an inspiration to my heart. One of the songs she taught me was ‘We Are Siamese,’ which I’m sure you’ll all remember from the movie Lady and the Tramp.”

Oh, we’re just getting started. More pets in future posts.

Emil of the House Whites has been compiling a list of performance-enhancing drugs. But just the musical performance-enhancing kinds. Emil’s an amateur pharmacologist, and has been examining both medical texts at the college on the hill and and live shows at the Bullfinch to further his studies.
He’s got subsets so far for:
• drugs which, in the short term, arguably could make you physically sing or play instruments better. (Example: a still-experimental pill which claims to strengthen the vocal cords.)
• drugs which, in the long term, might alter your body in which which suggest that you might play better. (Example: a little-known fluid which helps build callouses on your fingers.)
• Drugs which aid you psychologically into playing better. This is by far the longest list.
Drugs which focus you. Drugs which unfocus you. Drugs which relax you. Drugs which stimulate you. Drugs which, if you’re in any music scene anywhere, you know all about.

We have no desire to swipe Emil’s research here. That’s because we don’t really believe in it. We’ve been collecting our own evidence from the other side of the stage. The only list we stand by is the one of drugs which musicians THINK will make them play better. From our perch in the audience, we haven’t seen any that reliably work.
These are the same drugs which make writers think they can write better, streetfighters think they can streetfight better, and accountants think they can account better.

Go ahead. Drink and puff. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re doing it for someone else’s benefit.

No Nutty, The Story Needs and Dame Rumor all at the Bullfinch. Not only that, we hear Beloved Infidel is making a guest appearance on TSN’s epic “Big Envelope Marked Scott.” Who says solo singer-songwriters are lonely?… The Disenchanted and College of One, conjuring up memories of fun times that never really happened, via contrived cover tunes at Hamilton’s… Latest all-star line-up of supposed punk all-stars France By Big Shots, invading D’ollaire’s: Don the Red, Ted the Fink, Bud the Untalented, Pat Hobby and Stahr. Where’s Philippe, Count of Darkness, when you need him?…