The mice turn out to be acrobats. We find one of them halfway squeezed through the bars of the gerbil cage.

Always happy to provide positive feedback, especially when a T-shirt is in the offing, I sent a few paragraphs of praise to the Splasm, the creators of Audiobook Builder, who were holding a contest for those who offered feedback on their array of apps.
Their blog about it all is here: http://www.splasmata.com/
My admiration for Splasm’s Audiobook Builder is sincere—the app has greatly eased the process of converting audiobook CDs (which I tend to get out of the library) and shoveling them into my iPhone in the correct order.
And now they’re sending me a Splasm T-shirt, though I didn’t get the grand prize of an iPod touch. But heck, if I didn’t already have a device like that, I wouldn’t have needed Audiobook Builder in the first place.

Speak of the devil. Just yesterday we were reporting some Blat blather, and the next we know their manager’s “just checking in.”
Scott “Sponge” Smith (or was that “Spawn”” We get confused) has continued in his quest to bring legitimacy to The Blats (aka The Blits) by bringing the band ever closer to breaking up. He’s selected a new wardrobe for the band to sport at the Lancelyn Green Renaissance Fair a couple weeks from now. The garb’s been paid for with the money the band was saving up to tour and record with. Not a princely sum, granted, but principles are at stake here.
“Sponge” begs to differ: “Stuff like that gets you noticed.” Granted, we haven’t read Women’s Wear Daily in a while, but are torn ruffle shirts and sweatpants really a trend waiting to happen? “Believe me, it’s worth it,” Smith insists. Believe us, he’s not paying for it…

Eddie Rick took Martin Gibson’s high-end wireless guitar out for a spin Friday at Hamilton’s, and spun it right into a coathook on the post near the side door. We didn’t witness the incident, but it also apparently involved a torn coat, a bruised arm and a broken neck—the guitar’s. A benefit memorial is being held next Tuesday at the Bullfinch to give the instrument a proper send-off, and raise funds to help Eddie pay back Martin….

John H. of the Hickenloopers has a drug problem. “I’m telling everyone,” he said, and implored us to put it in our column just like that. Guess what drug it is? One of the ones that makes you strip your clothes off because you’re so hot (in the uncomfortable sense). Was he taking it before his Bullfinch shows? Usually.

The only show worth mentioning tonight is a midweek hootenanny at Moyle’s Empire, the modern equivalent of a roadhouse out in the sticks. The New Waterfords are featured for the early set, but the closing jazz jam (which goes into after hours) is why everyone shows up. What’s the distinction? Unlike most of those other bar jams, this one draws suburban teens, brandishing their school-band horns and electric keyboards. We’re checking it out for a future column. See you there.

After a day in a large pickle jar, kind-hearted Mar found the mice a cage at Good Salvation for a dollar. It’s a gerbil cage, but the mice are fat and ought to fit.

[Only there are six this time, as Arnott continues to catalogue his 7-inch records.]

1. The Trashmen, Henrietta b/w Rumble.
Rare live tracks from a dance at “Proaches Popular Ballroom” in the summer 1965. Neatly remastered to reduce what must have been a teeming cloud of hiss and crowd noise. What’s notable about these two tracks from the young madmen behind the original “Surfin’ Bird” is how steadily and professionally played they seem. The Link Wray classic “Rumble” is delivered with the subtlety it demands.

2. Ben Folds, Bizarre Christmas Incident b/w Lonely Christmas Eve.
Folds is now the patron saint of collegiate a cappella ensembles, but he used to be an ironic indie Elton John, alternately sentimental and arch. This 2002 Sony single captures those two opposing forces as only a Christmas single can. “Santa he’s a big fat fuck/Down the chimney got his fat ass stuck/Oh honey call the lawyers fast/’Cause Mrs. Claus is gonna sue my ass.”

3. Willie Alexander, Burning Candles b/w In Your Car.
One of many recordings Alexander made with Erik Lindgren’s Arf Arf Records. Some of my Boston local rock hero’s tenderest, most carefully produced work is on those Arf Arf sessions. In Your Car is a poetic late-night remembrance of simpler times, its calm lyrics graced with an elegant sax solo. The A-side is a rave-up by Lindgren, to which Alexander brings his inspired vocal technique, neatly roughing up a song that would otherwise be way too cleancut.

4. Tedio Boys, Go Country!!! EP.
This was the pet management project of Tune Inn clubowner Fernando Pinto, an unhinged punk act from his homeland of Portugal. The colorful yet busy record sleeve design has country & western iconography aplenty (and two of the record’s three songs have the word “Country” in the title), but what people really noticed about it was the legend “Fuck the Beatles” over headshots of the band that vaguely resembled the Meet the Beatles album cover. “Back from the Crypt” is a crazy-fast, snarling lump of fun with an actual rockabilly beat. It upholds the glories of country while scaring off the boring traditionalists.

5. Mark Mulcahy, C.O.D. b/w Kind.
Part of Mark Mulcahy’s genius is that when he made this single, it sounds like a single ought to sound—catchy, short and complete. Yet it’s still a typically dark and warped Mark Mulcahy, sounding bright but full of doom. I still feel shivers (of joy and everything else) whenever I hear it. “C.O.D.” stands for “couple of days,” yielding this refrain: “A couple of days more, and I’m sure that I can find a cure/A couple more minutes and I’ll be fine, for a minute.”

6. Saucers, A Certain Kind of Shy b/w She’s Alright.
Before he started Miracle Legion, Mark Mulcahy was a drummer (and a fine one at that) in this band overseen by Craig Bell, who released this single on his own Gustav Records label in 1980. Bell’s importance in the nascent New Haven original music scene of the 1970s can’t properly be measured. He ran a label, led a fine band, and had come to town from the estimable Cleveland, Ohio scene, where he’d been the bassist in Rocket from the Tombs. This single has always sounded too pristine to me. The wonderful bits when the drums and the guitars come up together must’ve been amazing to experience live.

The old soldier, several youngsters and ourself are at a Bullfinch bench, discussing the brand new album by the band from just a few cities over whom we all agree is the best rock ensemble on the planet.
The band in question is not so unanimously lionized elsewhere, and that is the crux of this discussion.
Sonny Blitt of the Blits wanders by, feigns interest in the conversation so he can fill his glass from the pitcher we bought, then when he finally catches the gist, and launches into a fierce rebuke of our praise.

Sonny, even though he’s old enough to need reading glasses, still has stars in his eyes. His theory is that bands need to constantly be ready to jump to the next plateau. The fave band of the rest of the table hasn’t altered what they do in years, he argues. They were almost big once, then slipped back to relative obscurity. This is not something he respects. Sonny, though he’s never known a tenth of this other band’s fame (or talent), feels they took the wrong path years ago by (if we understand him correctly) sticking with what they do best.

This is not a theory we think we’ve seen Sonny actually put into practice himself. To our ears, The Blits play a loose, blues-based form of punk rock that’s been around for at least 35 years. Sonny wears the same striped T-shirt onstage for every show. But, to hear him tell it, he’s a career-minded forward-thinking rock strategist. As you know, The Blits (formerly The Blats—now there’s a career move right there!) recently became one of the few bands in our little scene which feels they need a so-called manager. So he’s knowledgeable about things like, you know, wasting your time and money on managers.

The rest of the table just stares and wishes he’d go away. Especially the old soldier, who’s had numerous brushes with the big time himself, as a session musician and nostalgia-tour sideman, yet has been arguing more passionately than anyone the divine merits of to-thineself-be-trueness.

Sonny’s injected the kill word into the conversation. We haven’t been talking about superstardom, or power, or majesty. We’ve been talking about greatness. Plus, he’s finished our beer. The conversation dwindles to nothingness…

Anyone seen Q? Apparently the revered Bullfinch barback and occasional show-booker is still lugging kegs down the basement stairs in the early morning, and has been glimpsed at a few after hours gathering, but otherwise he’s vanished.

Some suggest that Q’s fallen into the same black hole which has pulled in so many of the town’s classical players. It’s a mysterious recording project which has been sucking up studio hours for months now, at a location we no longer care to disclose. (Yes, we know more than we’re telling; give us some credit for a suspenseful narrative).

Thursday at the Bullfinch: Lost on Xandu (one of those keyboard acts that sounds like a whole universe in motion), Solution #1 (smoothest garage blues grooves around) and the speedy Rats in My Kitchen… Hamilton’s College Nite Party: Bite of Soul, Atom Spies and La La La La Reprise… D’ollaire’s, meanwhile, is stealing some of Hamilton’s thunder with a slate of regional party bands that used to play the smaller club: Rockin’ This Joint, One More Time and Nothing to Go On. They said it, we didn’t…

Har brought two mice home. He’s saved them from the chem lab, where they were about to be given cancer. Other mice have been given cancer instead.

The new Fleshtones got released yesterday, and nothing’s gonna bring me down.

I first saw the band 30 years ago, and have sought them out over 50 times since, yet I still consider myself a latecomer to their awe-striking power-stanced superock. That’s because they’d already been signed to IRS, released an EP and a full-length, and were touring with The Police by the time I was first able to see them, at the Orpheum Theater in Boston in 1980. They’d already made it. I’d missed whole chapters in their existence. Luckily (for me, if not them), the ups and downs since that early burst of notoriety have kept avid fans guessing and gushing. This has never been a band you can convince yourself to give up on because they’ve “sold out.”

After perfecting the old-school basement-party aspect of their persona on umpteen earlier albums, Brooklyn Sound Solution marks a new phase of Fleshtone. It’s less cocky, more artful, less chaotic, more crafted.

Like The Ramones before them, The Fleshtones have allied themselves with a host of well-known producers over the years, all of whom may well have proclaimed themselves to be devout fans of the bands but not all of whom have brought the necessary skills to the task of capturing them on record.

Lenny Kaye—the revered Nuggets compiler, pop music historian and Patti Smith bandmate—turns out to be an inspired overseer, even while taking the Fleshtones in what might be seen as a new direction. He highlights two tones of Fleshtones which often get short shrift on disc: their heritage and their musicianship.

The instrumental groove on “Solution #1”—the rock equivalent of an Edgar Kennedy silent movie slow burn—sends the same shivers up your spine that you used to only get at Fleshtones live shows. That’s a much finer accomplishment than replicating yet another of guitarist Keith Streng’s hyena-scream anthems, though Kaye shows that he can do that too, on “You Give Me Nothing to Go On.” In both cases, it’s great to have the garage R&B jams that are so much a part of Fleshtones live recordings flare up so strongly in their studio work as well.

In fact, there are so many long intros, drawn-out fades and held-back vocals that Brooklyn Sound Solution could be accused of starting a new genre of ambient rock. The songs are punchy but don’t worry about structure and climax. The album has the amazing quality of behaving as if The Fleshtones are playing at a club you’re at, while you’re having a great conversation and perhaps have gotten a little drunk. Listening to a Fleshtones take on Day Tripper, you keep idly wondering where it’s going next, then wonder suddenly if you’ve completely missed the lyrics; there aren’t any; and it would have ruined the cover if there were. “Bite of My Soul” is mixed not so nobody sounds up-front: not the lead vocals, not the shouty chorus. The aforementioned “You Give Me Nothing to Go On” comes in a regular version and an instrumental version… and the instrumental one is longer, and arrives on the album five tracks sooner.

So many of their old new wave compadres—from Greg Kihn to Paul Collins—turned to solo acoustic blues as a soundtrack for their middle age crises that it became a genre cliché. I hope Brooklyn Sound Solution is as close as The Fleshtones ever come to that. It gets a little darker and a little slower than a lot of other Fleshtones records, but then so did 1994’s Beautiful Light. This is a full-band work-out that shows the eb and flow of Fleshtones rather than just the shouty highlights. That’s a mature statement, but it’s not old-man rock. It’s The Fleshtones showing they

We hate that word “cult.” One person’s fanatical coven of obscure demon worshippers is another person’s opening band on College Nite at Hamilton’s. So we avoided the c-word completely when describing The Shaking Quakers—rafters-rocking farmhouse band of the Meach family—last week in this space.
Other people can’t seem to use any other word to describe the SQs, including a few folks who sent incensed letters. “Crazed cult,” they say. “Dangerous cult-like activity.” There. We’ve just revived the Fairness Doctrine and presented opposing views.
“Cult-cult-cataaw!!!,” as one of the Meaches’ chickens might say. We attended about seven hours of the weekend house party at the farmstead, along with dozens of other noisemongers. Yes, it was different—drinking and debauchery were discouraged, and people did yoga exercises before entering the mosh pit. The opposite of a typical night at Hamilton’s, where the kids are hopped up before they’ve even entered the club and would rather fight than just about anything else. We’ve never been to another show remotely like it: When Silver Cup’s “Vision Song” got to the bit about “Go On Dear Children,” an impromptu march began around the fields…

Feminist Studies disco scholar Frieda Bettany is back from break and appears to have sewn up a late afternoon gig for his rump-shaking thesis project The Other Foot: Dance Dance Epistemology” two Saturdays from now at D’ollaire’s. This is where she did a lot of her research. The show will thus be held just hours before one of the actual social dance extravaganza it holds a mirror ball up to…

They’ve slipped us the sure things on the so-call open mic list for the Bullfinch tonight: Uncle Gruesome, Leroy L. Leroy, Leonard and Lola, Drawing with John Magee, Leena Queen and Crossed Skillets. Plus surprise demented German guests…. Hamilton’s has the fun-loving, if mainstream-leaning, On the Corner and Good Look… a rare delight at D’ollaire’s—the quirky, listen-in-close Eugene and the Sunday Color Carnival, who you’ll recall packed ’em in at the Bullfinch just two years ago…

I asked Har why he always wears ties. Not even the poseurs in our set wear ties. He said it’s like a small scarf. So I wore a tie today in my coldest class, and fell asleep.