Here’s an old ad for Wildroot Cream Oil, glimpsed through the front window of Ron’s Barber Shop, across from the Westport (Ct.) train station.
The hair product’s popularity peaked in the 1940s and ‘50s, when it had an unlikely spokesperson: Fearless Fosdick, a perforated parody of Dick Tracy beloved by the infantile title character in Al Capp’s satirical comic strip L’il Abner. Capp himself was Connecticut born (in New Haven) and raised (in Bridgeport).
I’m reluctant to add this link to Wildroot’s radio jingle, it’s so infernally catchy. I first learned it through sheet music when I was a kid, and it’s been stuck in my head for 40 years.

The Leafcutters started built songs a certain way for 18 months. Then they reversed themselves.
“We called it clumping,” fills in Jo Goba, co-founder of the Leafcutter collective. “We’d all bring little snatches of sound, slivers of things, and put them in a pile. We’d clump it all together, and these ‘listening holes’ would magically form. Now we take those strands and connect them into one long extended linear sound.”
It helps to know that the LCs are industrious tape-snipping DJs and that mixtapes are their main oeuvre. They developed their multi-multi-track methodology after studying radical early 20th century art theory at the college on the hill.
But clumping has lost its luster.
“We Were bunching shards, and that worked for warehouse raves. But now we’re mostly in clubs, so it was worth experimenting with extending strands—connections, nerve endings, communal Babel-building.”
Yes, that’s how they talk. How do they sound? Similarly confusing, without the verbality. Find out Saturday at the main common of the college on the hill, where Leafcutter sound montages will blast out of PAs for an hour, starting at 1 p.m.

A soggy folk-pop double bill of Watershed Way and Closer to the Lake at the Bullfinch..
Beluga Digs and Listening to the Uplands at Hamilton’s… An Evening With The Gift of Bark at D’ollaire’s. Great booking, but those prices!…

Still cleaning melted ash/clay gunk off the table.

The Capstan Shafts, Kind Empires
The Capstan Shafts get rapped for sounding so much like (and apparently being nearly as prolific as) Guided by Voices. Like that’s a bad thing. But now that Dean Wells has availed himself of steady bandmates and full-fledged recording studios for a while now, the differences are apparent and invigorating. The guitar solos, for starters. The plaintive wails, for another—totaling different emotional angle from the bar-band bravado of Robert Pollard et al. Interludes such as the disarming two-minute romantic swirl “Like Them from Arthouse Floozy” or the tempo-laden “Hating on the Fleshless Days.” The unabashed real-life-expectations rave-up of “The Deli Girls Give Me What I Ask For…” Totally stands on its own, this stack of all-American pop (via Vermont and points South). Dean Wells, to poach his own words, is no “Garbagetime Pumpfaker.”

Jet Jaunt
Cool Fool
Basket Banter
Bath Banter
Flower the Power
Sammy the Whammy
Game Shame
Ice Cream, You Scream
Vile Visit
Dream Scheme
Burn and Learn
My Favorite Fiend,
Ballet Ruse
Prize Problem
The Great Grind
Finny Finis
A Bit of a Wit
Merrily We Bowl Along
Some Total
Money Honey
Money Makes the Scene
Stop the Music
Cost Conscious
..plus two separate bits entitled “He’s a Card,” and numerous reprinted Archie newspaper comic strips with the collective title “Gag Bag.”
You really got to give it to ‘em for the French plays on “Finis” and “Ballets Russe.”

Kaufman & Astoria, already a side project of sorts, has grown into the new band Famous Players, with Perry Montkeith and “Biggy” House of the Original Astoria Queens. So quickly did the act gel that they’ve already assembled an album, though it may take a few fundraising gigs before they can make it widely available,,
…and if they don’t split off into yet another band before the disc is ready.
This could happen, because one of the first FP songs, “Bo Care,” is being used on a Cable TV show. Though there’s little money involved, there’s been some interband squabbling about writing credits, and also now about which act to credit it to.
Consider this an intervention, then: Rule wisely, Queens. This is the sort of dilemma which bands kill for—but don’t kill each other. You’ve already written a dozen or so songs together. You may have hundreds soon, and the prospects are excellent. These are your fishing buddies. Stick with them and famous-play well together.

At least through next Friday’s gig opening for The Nectarine Cops at D’ollaire’s. Then you’re on your own, as far as we’re concerned.

The Human Bedbug, Winghead and the sidewalk collective Monterey Skate (huh—didn’t know they played instruments) all at the Bullfinch Saturday afternoon, a benefit for cleaning that wall in the alley… Ox-Eyed Oreo (is that a sex joke? Sounds like one), and former Wedgetail singer Torrent Loach with his new band Triggerfish at Hamilton’s. A lot of trouble to go to just to keep playing the same tired classic-rock riffs… Pancake Bat at D’ollaires, with solo opening set by Lori Cariid. Hope it goes better than Millie’s did in a similar situation last month…

Woke at 2 a.m. to a horrible conflagration at the PCPC.

Cut Off Your Hands
The new breed of old New Romantics from New Zealand. A couple of tracks from the imminent new album are already circulation, plus a free EP from the band’s Facebook page. The thrill of the new is balanced by the “Heard this all back in high school” factor. But honestly, such a mix of earnest heartstring-pulling and synthesizer-nostalgicizing is hard to pull off, and Cut Off Your Hands don’t waste a single echoing “Wooooo.”

The Ebony Hillbillies played a free concert on New Haven Green June 19 for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Here they were Thursday, July 14, rousing ambient villagers of a whole different culture and pace, at the Grand Central subway stop in the band’s accustomed NYC stomping grounds.

The beanbag chairs thought they’d found a hip band name. Them they played out three times and each time were asked “where are the beanbag chairs.” if you choose a certain sort of name, it appears that you are obliged to furnish props.
So for their fourth gig, an opening set for The Sluks at the Bullfinch six weeks ago, they bought and brought beanbag chairs. And tried to sit in them while playing. When that didn’t work, they tried to stand in them while playing. When bassist Dorie nearly took her head off pitching suddenly out of a bag when her feet got tangled in the… beans?, the set came to an abrupt end.
The beanbag chairs are nice people and have lot of friends. They also have parents who told them never to give up. So they booked themselves another Bullfinch show. Again it was an opening set (for the fotomatics this time). Only a gleeful sadist would’ve expected till see the (non-musician) beanbag chairs this time, but there those fat lumpy fabric menaces were, filling the stage when the crowd started arriving around 9 pm.
The beanbag music started playing around 9:30– but we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Some recorded tracks seemed to be involved, but definitely some live vocals (you could tell because of the giggling), kind of muffled.
Then, like the miracle of a butterfly breaking out of its chrysalis pod, zippers were heard to zip and the beanbag chairs broke free of their beanbag chairs. Then they kicked the empty vessels of the stage and rocked out.
(And no, they didn’t need rocking chairs).