Mar and I made time for each other. Had coffee between our shifts, then sat up talking until we passed out.

Robert Pollard, Lord of the Birdcage

Doesn’t he sound like ‘80s Bowie now? Definitely removed from the regrouped Guided by Voices sound, more songwriterly and less concerned with pushy solos by other players. The songs with the best titles—“Garden Smarm,” “Ash Ript Telecopter,” “Silence Before Violence”—tend to the be the weakest overall, strangely. Pollard’s legendarily self-derivative prolificity is definitely a liability here. But as someone who only recently came to a real understanding of Pollard’s extraordinary influence on a whole generation of indie upstarts, this is a document worth studying, particularly for its philosophical airs and profound lack of swagger.

Didn’t even know they’d died until I heard about concerts being held in their memory. Takes the chill off, a bit, to have a music show be the obit.

I ran into the eminent local band booster James Velvet last Saturday afternoon at Clark’s restaurant. (James greatly misses Clark’s Dairy, which closed last year, but has acclimated to the other Clark’s.) He mentioned that he would be playing the  next night at the Outer Space, a multi-act bill in honor of Norman Cross.

I knew Norman a little, many years ago. I’d been deeply attached to a cassette album of his—bluesy pop tunes where the blues never got away from the pop. I played it nonstop at work and eventually sought him out.

We weren’t made to be friends, not even in an opposites-attract kind of way. Back then, he struck me as one of the most brash, overconfident people I’d ever met. When I was working in the press office at City Hall during the Daniels administration, I was asked by the mayor’s staff if I knew Norman Cross. He’d apparently called some sort of gathering of artists to hear the mayor’s proposals for the future (it was an election year). All I could tell them was that I knew Norman, that I knew he knew a lot of artists and had some standing in the community, but that also with Norman you never knew what to expect. I went along with the mayor’s contingent for the discussion, held at the old Artspace on Whitney Avenue. Only four or five people were there, none of them part of the sort of arts community I’m sure the mayor was expecting. The look of the faces of the City Hall folks was priceless—they were already chewing themselves out for letting this happen, had already written it off as a waste of time. But Norman acted as if this was exactly the meeting he’d intended. If he’d expected more people, or less, or a more structured encounter, he never let on. He badgered the mayor up close about what could be done for artists like himself.  We all like to think that the average citizen should have the ear of civic leaders. Norman expected it.

He had all sorts of grand visions like that, some of which I considered ludicrous. Except he kept making them happen.

He built a home recording studio that has often been described to me by those who recorded there as just a wonderful place to work. He found galleries to show his artwork. Ultimately, while I came to learn that his pie-in-the-sky were nothing I needed to get worked up about. What I came most to respect about him was how he built himself a life where he could actively pursue his art. That he did so in New Haven is a credit to that city.

Norman had suffered from a host of mental and physical ailments in the years leading up to his death on March 6 the age of 61. Last year, the ever-supportive local musician and music-series host Frank Critelli (along with Shandy Lawson and Roger Arnold) helped Norman create his final album. Sunday’s tribute concert has passed, but I’m playing that album (Ain’t It the Truth) and digging in the basement for that old cassette.

**

I celebrated Max Wilk in print back in 2004, with a cover story for the New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly recalling “When Connecticut Was Cool.” It acknowledged such Nutmeg-nurtured pop-culture legends as Max Shulman, Terry Southern, Walt Kelly… and Max Wilk.

I’ve been an admirer of Max Wilk for nearly my entire life, and never suspected how much I didn’t know about him until reading the obits following his death Feb. 19 at the age of 90. His jazz side, for instance.

I personally associate Max Wilk with The Beatles and with Broadway. I first noted his name when I was eight years old and plowing through the novelization of Yellow Submarine. Wilk was a co-author of the fab cartoon’s screenplay and the author of its book version. Over the years I’d find other reasons to read him: He wrote a novel on which a Jerry Lewis movie was based (Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River). He wrote one of the great books about the golden age of Hollywood screenwriters, with the greatest title: Schmucks With Underwoods. He wrote histories of the makings of the musicals Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, both of which had New Haven try-outs at the Shubert theater.

Sometimes he worked the same interests a few different ways: He co-wrote the memoirs of  famed agent Audrey Wood, then wrote a play about Wood’s relationship with Tennessee Williams. He wrote for television in the 1950s, compiled The Golden Age of Television: Notes from the Survivors in 1976 and wrote a dishy novel about the same era, A Tough Act to Follow, in 1985.

He seemed to have a handle on all the lively art forms of the 20^th century. Including jazz, apparently. A lot of Max Wilk’s Westport musician pals are coming out to mark his memory June 9 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Westport Arts Center Gallery. I’ve been the center a few times to review its gallery shows. It’s a  cozy and progressive spot, a bastion of intimacy and subtlety in an town too often stereotyped as grandiose and stuck in its ways. Wilk railed regularly against the stodgy upper classes and the sheeplike middle classes, so the WAC will serve nicely. Info here.

Somebody knows how to stretch a pun to get a gig, so the Bad Housekeeping Seals played the state aquarium last Thursday.

“We did it as just the BH Seals. People kept asking us what a BH Seal was, like it was some rare class of seal,” says vocalist/ guitarist Bo Ra. “We didn’t want to blow their illusions, so we clammed up. So to speak.”

Not that the BHS didn’t bone up a bit on subjects aquatic: the band learned a wild surf rock medley with just a couple of rehearsals. “You get some amazing echo in an aquarium,” Ra offers. “It adds tone to the instrumentals. And it also helps cover up your mistakes.”

One seal-like mistake, however, was hard to miss. “I tried to balance a ball on my nose,” Bo Ra says, chagrined. “It came down hard and I think it cost us a microphone.”

Honey Spot, The Sleepys, Certified No Brainer and Companions & Homemakers at the Bullfinch, including some shared songs…. The  Hooss Tonics, Pre-Owned Center and The Sacred Hearts at Hamilton’s… Hamburg Sud and an unknown opening act (involving dogs, perhaps?) at Dollaire’s…

699. Wrote a whole book in my head but couldn’t write it down—gooey hands, for one thing—so I forgot the whole thing.

The Revere, Ashia

A power trio that does ongoing multi-character concept albums about romantic identity in the modern age. In the same way that the well-enunciated narrative-filled lyrics pause for anthemic choruses, the jangly rhythm-guitar backgroundstrums ascend into frantic arena-rock power chords. (The EP was co-produced by the guitarist from Sister Hazel, which should give you a good idea of the straightforward old-school rock attitude at work here.) At the risk of using “power” as an adjective for the third time in a short paragraph, Ashia’s title tune (pronounced Ah-shee-ah, with equal emphasis on all syllables) is a power ballad that may slow the pace but actually helps propel what you imagine the plotline to be, and is followed by an even gentler survival-of-the-spirit tune, “I Will Arise,” which at one point erupts into Broadway-intense actor/vocals over classical-guitar noodlings. It’s impressive when a mere four tracks can add up to a interlocking rock statement, like a fucking fugue or something, but will be no surprise to fans of the first Reveres album, The Great City, which first set this epic in motion. A full-length sequel is expected, and required.

It was late Saturday afternoon and the Arts on the Edge festival was ending, but there is still a long line of children waiting to have balloon animals built to their specifications by the unflappable Evan Gambardella, who is committed to inflating and stretching balloons until every last tot is satisfied. Festival cleaner-uppers come and take away his table; he moves his wares to the brick ledge of a deserted storefront. That surface proves too hot and jagged for balloons, so Gambardella shifts across the street, and the line of customers follow as if they were the string on an errant balloon on a gusty day. He keeps pumping and twisting outside Creative Arts Workshop (which really, come to think of it, should offer a workshop on balloon animal craftsmanship). Dogs, monkeys, aliens emerge from his nimble hands. My own children get the balloons they sought, and we head down the street for coffee—you know, at Koffee? Half an hour later, we glance down the block and Gambardella’s still at it. You can’t pop this guy.

Just as we’re leaving the coffeeshop, one of the workers cleaning up the street ambles up with some of the gigantic round balloons which decorated Audubon Street during the festival. We walk them gingerly home, about eight blocks.

As we pass Toad’s, I notice a familiar face—familiar from music videos and from one of my favorite rock albums released last year.

“You’re from Titus Andronicus, right?”

“Yes,” says the band’s lead singer Patrick Stickles, grinning in his rabid-dog manner, then quizzes me amiably about the balloons. He wants me to bring them to the club for that night’s show. Titus Andronicus is all about off-the-cuff punk pageantry.

I thank him for playing so often in New Haven. “We love New Haven,” he says.

On days like Saturday, so do I.

We know more than one band that’s given listeners tinnitus—one of them, The Adventures of Tin Tinnitus, brags about it in their very name. (Please don’t go see them.) They’re not all willfully cruel, however. We know an act who fractured a fan’s eardrum, and was so remorseful that to this day they give a percentage of all their gig money to deafness charities.

So, ear damage galore. But until last week, we never knew a band whose sonic ferocity actually killed a squirrel. Now that’s some kind of bragging rights.

It happened at Hamilton’s, to the Yellow Pinkies, and could scarcely have been more grisly. The song, funnily enough, was called “Skunk”; it’s the one where singer Penny screams “you stink!” like a billion times. At about the 150,000th refrain, a pal pointed out to us that one of the ceiling tiles above the stage was trembling and cracking. Dust was settling on the stage and getting blown about by the whoosh from the monitors.

Then the sky opened up and a stiff furry figure plummeted onto one of punk percussionist Hy-Spy’s overturned trash cans. Hy-Spy (aka Hyram Gaspiri—his parents were into opera and stuff) says his first impression was that one of his cans had gone over by itself—happens a lot—so he just kept thrashing. The squirrel, clearly seen falling by much of the audience, flipped between Penny’s legs and balanced off the front of the stage, teetering with rictus.

There were calls to stop the show, and just-as-loud demands (which sounded like “Whoo!”) to keep it awesome. The anti-PETA punks won out, mostly because the band had no idea exactly what was going on. They were signaled at the end of the song and a hurried clean-up ensued, featuring buckets of that smelly pine cleaner they use in the Bullfinch bathrooms.

Although the diagnosis was that the poor squirrel was probably dead long before the gig, Hy-Spy says he spent the rest of the night in an emergency room getting a tetanus shot “just in case.” Punk rock! And no busted eardrums.

The Ancient Grains, Nature’s Path and Amaranth at the Bullfinch, some kind of hippie-dippy wingding… The Keen Wahs, jamming the surf at Hamilton’s with fellow West Coast cover act Tree Nuts… Singer-songwriter Kamut Khorasan at D’ollaires—“An Evening With,” as they say, with no opening act and no backing band…

708.

Sun Araw, “Crete” (listen here)

This is the modern indie version of a late-‘70s European-prog band like Tangerine Dream—same grandiose imagery and leisurely groove-finding, but without the bloat. Its leanness is what makes this instrumental track (which lasts nine and a half minutes but seems like an hour) at all palatable to me. You can sense the sweat; the creativity is feverish, even if the rhythm is laid back. “Crete” is from the presumed concept album Ancient Romans, on which all the tracks have titles from antiquity, like “Impluvium,” “Lute and Lyre” and “Fit for Caesar”). Sun Araw, otherwise known as Cameron Stallone is currently on an East Coast tour, playing New York, Maryland and New Jersey between June 2 and 7.