Not sure how I feel about Elvis Costello, or Jane’s Addiction, for that matter, being part of the Furthur Festival in Bridgeport this year. The literate, culty guys are always dwarfed at these big festivals, and

I know it’s been over 30 years since the whole ’77 thing. Elvis has conquered umpteen worlds into which few could have predicted he’d even ever want to set foot. And Furthur, I further realize, has diversified beyond its original smiley-bear/tattoed skeleton audience. The wide array of reggae and funk acts it attracts are a great frosting for its jammy middle. But however far from Shakedown Street the programming strays, hasn’t it still been mainly about guitars and seldom about words?

The first batch of confirmed Furthur bands (quirkily alphabetized by me):
Big Gigantic
Dark Star Orchestra
David Gans
Deep Banana Blackout
Dr. John and the Lower 911
Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk
King for a Day
Phil Lesh and Bob Weir
Jane’s Addiction
John Butler Trio
The Levon Helm Band
Steve Kimock and Reed Mathis
The McLovins
moe.
The New Mastersounds
The Rhythm Devils with Keller Williams
Ryan Montbleau Band
Taj Mahal Trio
Tedeschi Trucks Band
Toots & The Maytals

Details at www.gatheringofthevibes.com

“Why aren’t you talking to…?”
(An informal survey, Friday night Happy Hour at the Bullfinch.)

“He stole my girlfriend.”
“She stole my song.”
“He stole my style.”
“Because you’ll put it in the column.”
“Tried to turn me into a tree.”
“Gave my father a drink laced with stuff that made him vomit.”
“Wouldn’t let me join their pantheon.”
“She knits better than I do.”
“He’s pro-war, and he’s convinced her that she’s some kind of muse for war or something.”
“No reason. Just don’t like talking.”

Gar’s getting weird. Thinks everything’s about him. Always thinks you’re talking about the music he has on.

[Christopher Arnott continues to rummage through his old 45s)

1. Dada Banks, Microwave b/w Communism?
This 1980 New Haven new wave single features an old New Haven Advocate colleague of mine, Hank Hoffman (now proprietor of the Connecticut Arts Scene website) on—to quote the record sleeve—“Guitar, fuzz guitar, vocals,” in that order. (Randy Stone is on bass, Richie Gleen the drummer). Hank’s now hard at work on a studio-honed psychedelic power pop masterpiece, but this single represents his scruffy early days, and it’s a treasure. “Microwave” is a rant against capitalist corporate culture, a sentiment underscored by the flip side, which mocks Western preconceptions of Russia: “Communism, Communism, that threat we’re taught to fear.”

2. Quest of the Moon Breed, Mares of Night b/w I Felt It.
Quest of the Moon Breed crystallized what was going on at the Tune Inn.
Bandleader Stark evoked Einsturze Neubaten, Nine Inch Nails and novelist Clive Barker (from whom I assume the “Moon Breed” part of the band name came from) in his nihilistic stage antics (smacking a lighter-fluid-laced cymbal drum with a flaming torch, getting all tribal and naked) but he’d assembled a hardcore band to back him, not the sort of synth band that was becoming the fashion.
This single’s tracks were prepared for QotMB’s album Legion of Sleep, and I notice now on MySpace that Stark has a current band called Legion of Sleep. That’s a sleep of Rip Van Winkle proportions.

3. Cavedogs, Step Down b/w Proud Land.
The Cavedogs were to the Boston music scene of the early ‘90s what Bobcat Goldthwait was to that same city’s comedy scene around the same time: they were embraced by the scene, then resented when they started getting national attention. The old “Too soon! Not your turn!” refrain. The fact that they fully deserved to make the leap was immaterial. The Cavedogs had it all. All three members were strong songwriters, they knew exactly how to adapt their material for the stage, the studio or their comedy/variety radio specials, and they perfectly fit the raucous pop feel of the times—until grunge hit, at almost exactly the same moment that The Cavedogs released their second album, Soul Martini, on Capitol. This is an early Trust Records single from the late ‘80s, both sides of which later appeared on their debut album Joy Rides for Shut-Ins. The copyright has been issued to “Hey Leggo, That’s My Donker” Tunes.

4. Brian Stevens, The Piper b/w Zasu Pitts.
Speaking of The Cavedogs, following the band’s dissolution, they all quickly found other projects, most of which seemed to involve the then-up-and-coming Q Division Studios and the Q Division record label. The other two Cavedogs formed bands, but Brian Stevens went solo—that kind of studio-intense solo which yields brilliant, layered pop junkets like this. It’s an overwhelming sound, but Stevens manages to inject his old Midwestern Cavdog sense of humor: the lyrics are interjected into a faux interview on the record sleeve. Both tracks are from the mindboggling full-length Brian Stevens album Prettier Than You. Stevens play most of the instruments, though sax, clarinet and drums/percussion sounds are by others, and the great Jon Brion is credited with “lead and professionally executed guitar solos.”

5. Thee Roman Gods, Panic b/w San Fransisco Girls.
Spell check: “Thee” and “Fransisco” are both the correct use here. This is a Fleshtones one-off, covering songs by Otis Williams (A-side) and The Fever Tree (B). It’s the familiar live Fleshtones guitar/keyboard/harmonica/handclap/sing-along frenzy. Which sucks as a single, because the party’s just getting started.

It is a sad fact of our existence that we not only hang out at the Bullfinch most nights. We also drink a lot of our lunches there. After one such repast, we were sitting out on the stoop with the marvelous Millie (hasn’t the weather been delightful lately?) when we noticed a little girl at a separate stoop across the street. She had brown hair, an amused expression, and a huge stack of books and drawing paper by her side.
We waved and smiled. We are always kind to little girls. They could grow up to be in great bands.
The girl smiled back, then went back to reading and scribbling. A few minutes later, she waved a paper at us.
“I’m not allowed to cross the street!,” she yelled.
“So?”
“So I have a present for you!”
Millie and I crossed the street. (We are allowed.) The girl clutched two ballpoint-pen pictures in her hand. She was chewing gum.
“Who are these people? They look like they could be in rock bands,” we chatted.
“They’re you. I drew YOU!,” the girl declared.
Now, when we meant these drawing weren’t of us, we weren’t disparaging the drawing abilities of a child. We saw no resemblance. The clothes were different. The hairstyles. The whole gaze, as our art history teacher used to say.
“This is you,” the girl insisted more adamantly.
“Thank you very much,” we said.
We think we get it now. We think we were standing outside of a scene and not realizing we were in it. We didn’t know how much we were a part of things, accepted. We didn’t realize how we looked to others inside the Bull, and especially outside the Bull, in the light of day, after a pleasant midweek lunch. We didn’t even realize how often we are now seen with Millie, and how that affects how people see us that same way we’ve come, though this column, to see people as “bands” and not individuals.
I guess we look like that. I don’t think we mind at all. In fact, I think we probably love it.
We owe a certain little girl a fee for spiritual soothsaying and prophecy. If you see her, tell her we’re looking for her.
Unfortunately, we can’t tell you exactly what she looks like.

In our own warped crystal ball: In Gee, The Taw Rats and LDS (featuring Joe Smith) at The Bullfinch…. That Flurry (from Philadelphia), The Paling Boers and Moorish at Hamilton’s (College Nite; we predict several American bottled beers will be $2)… Rapper Ad Em at D’ollaire’s, sans posse….

What I ate today: Cold pizza for breakfast, chicken fingers for lunch, hot pizza for dinner, two Oh, Nurses! at cocktail hour.

[I know, I know. Theater Book of the Week is on hold as I build up reserves to start a designated area of this site just for theater stuff. You got a problem with Comics Book of the Week?]

The Norm was the break-out comic strip sensation of a time when newspapers happened to be dropping strips, not adding them. Originally about a young single man who doesn’t like his workplace very much, it abruptly and cleverly shifted scenarios wholesale several times. Norm got fired. He had girlfriends. Ultimately, he got married, to a friend who’d been around for the whole history of the strip yet hadn’t been considered a romantic interest. The most brilliant bit about the marriage was that Jantze refused to dwell on the engagement and wedding and newlyweddedness. He simply fast-forwarded a year or two, as if announcing “I’m not going to waste all our time on that stuff.” The Norm became its own sort of marital sitcom—wife Reine’s parents moved into the house next door and badgered the younger couple relentlessly to have children.

But for all its Blondie-esque normalcy (the style and casual air respect and honor the funny-papers rules laid down by classic strips), The Norm always seemed contemporary. It trades in the usual clichés about geekiness, 9-to-5 nonsense and awkward romances, but it stays honest and human. There are plenty of arguments, but also frequent strips about the sheer joy of being in love, or of being outdoors, or of being alive. There are gags about the complexities of modern life, but I can’t imagine this dialogue happening between Hi and Lois:

Reine: I like my cell phone too much to quit using it. So I bought an earpiece! This way the radiation won’t give me brain cancer…
Norm: Where do you set the phone when you talk?
Reine: In my lap.
Norm: Isn’t that where you keep your ovaries?
Reine: AAAAA!

The Norm never got into a lot of newspapers, but its creator Michael Jantze proved to be a canny marketer, creating new opportunities for The Norm to be found by the faithful. The strips were collected in book form, comic book form and various coffee-table or collector’s-box formats. There were shirts and stickers and buttons. Online, it’s been an Apple desktop dashboard app, an annotated site where Jantze jotted down commentary on each strip, and a jandy device which flashed a different Norm trip every 30 seconds. (One of the most deliriously distracting computerized comic strip concepts of all time.) Currently, The Norm persists on gocomics.com, which posts a “new” old strip every day.

Yesterday came news that The Norm had been adapted to yet another medium, the Kindle. Several hundred strips from the dawn of the 2000s, originally packaged as the “Ball Collection,” are available for $10 from amazon.com. The selection includes a sequence where Norm and Reine start dating—as subterfuge on her part.

Norm: You told your folks we’re dating?
Reine: Actually, we’re real serious.
Norm: What? Why?
Reine: It was a slip! My parents only judge my successs by…
[Her mother strolls into the room. Reine throws her arms around Norm and kisses him. The mother whistles cheerily.]
Reine [breaking the liplock]: So when they started in about my brother…
Norm: Okay, rule one! If we’re just pretending, then put the tongue away!

The Kindle device itself is not a great place to read comics—you can’t pinch them larger, and if there are several on a page, the print’s too small to read. The Kindle App, on the other hand, lets you read Kindle books on iPods and iPhones (where you can expand them to readable size, even though the device you’re reading on is smaller than a Kindle) and especially on iPads and home computers.

The Norm only ever existed when newspapers had already shrunk comic strips to their smallest conceivable sizes. Jantze is a skilled designer (when The Norm had its own grandiose website, it was a clean, colorful, easily maneuverable joy) and strives to make that confined area work in his favor–with the iconic slumped-over figure of Norm waking up in the morning, for instance.

I don’t like that The Norm doesn’t get produced anymore (Jantze appears to have been having success with animation and other artistic projects), but I happily read the old strips over and over, and the Kindle edition gives me another option of how to do that. This Ball collection is only the tip of an enormous Norm archive. May many more Kindle Norms follow.

By Artie Capshaw

The guy behind the counter at the Strange Ten-Inch Audio Recordings shop used to be lead guitarist in a band. OK, you’re not surprised.
The woman in the back office of the newsstand next used to play electric bass in a folk-rock act that had a houseband gig for over a year at a now-defunct bar a few towns over.
And the lawyer who’s hung out his shingle in the office space on the second floor of that building used to be in a REALLY good band, which toured the East Coast and would have seen their album released on a major label if their singer hadn’t gotten locked up.
The music scene’s not all at the Bullfinch, you know. It’s everywhere. The lawyer tells me he still keeps his sax in a closet at work, and plays it after hours on lonely nights. The newsstand manager once heard him, went over to STAR Records, and brought up not only a bass she’d borrowed but the guitarist from behind the counter.
You think you know the fairy tale ending. The trio found a drummer, formed a band, and are playing the Bullfinch or Hamilton’s or, god forbid, D’ollaires, this weekend. Stop thinking that way. They get together and jam once in a while. End of story. Fame and fortune’s not the point. Music’s the point.
Will they EVER play out? Would you like to hear them? Well, they’ve gotten beyond aimless jams and written a few songs which they practice fairly often. They haven’t told practically anyone about their little after-work get-togethers.
So how do WE know? Funny you should ask. We like to buy magazines in the evenings. We especially like to hear original music wafting from unexpected quarters like legal offices. We love our job.

Bands playing ON the beaten track soonish: The Blue News, Brookers and De Rebus at Bullfinch, really abusing that “b” consonant… Trials Digest (the smaller version of Trials, without the horn section) at Hamilton’s, with local musically bacnkrupt supergroup-in-their-own-minds ABIJ opening…. Kentucky Bench & Bar, the Southern rock sensation, at (where else?) D’ollaire’s, where whisky shots will be a-flyin’ from 10 p.m. until closin’…

Joined a medical study and joined a pre-Law study group. The study is for people who stay up late and don’t eat well. So is the study group.

A new publication touting the exploits of some marvel-minded superheroes is entitled Fear Itself Sketchbook. It’s being distributed as a come-on for a full-on Fear Itself periodical with the reality-TV type concept of confronting esteemed superpowered world-savers and crimestoppers with “threats they’ve never seen, including the Asgardian God of Fear, who’ll take them to their limits, and change them dramatically.”
We’re scared already. What is it with fear and insecurity now as a main motivating factor in so many superheroes’ day-to-day business? Whatever happened to incentives such as rescuing people from cataclysm, or creating new opportunities for goodness in the world? Inspiring others? Rooting out obvious mortal evils like dictators and world-conquerors and damsel-distressers? Have we jumped straight to the Fear, past all those affected by fear who could be helped along the way?

The Fear we would like to see chronicled in full-color slick-periodical glory is the famous late-‘70s California punk band Fear, founded by hardcore heroes Lee Ving (vocals, guitar) and Derf Scratch (bass). Their original second-guitarist was even surnamed “Good.” The superheroic strain is also indicated by these interuniversal conflict-friendly headlines: “Give Me Some Action,” “Foreign Policy,” “Let’s Have a War,” “Honor and Obey,” “Null Detector” and, since nearly all superheroes are pro-urban, “I Love Livin’ in the City.” On several occasions, captured onscreen, the band Fear took social norms and raised all known mortal standards of speed, noise and attitude: In their interviews for The Decline of Western Civilization; with their competitive cover of the blues standard “Hoochie Coochie Man” in the film Get Crazy! (where the Willie Dixon song is also interpreted by Malcolm McDowell and Bill Henderson); and in their liberating, mosh-pit maelstrom of an appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1981.

Yes, they also do a song called “Demons Stickin’ Pitchforks in My Brain,” but we argue that there’s more to Fear than there is to Fear Itself. Occasional pure-evil oppression is cool as long it’s not relentless mindnumbing fear all the time, such as the fears which Thor (“Do You Fear… Family Secrets?”), Captain America (“Do You Fear… A Loss of Faith?”), Iron Man (“Do You Fear… The Legacy You’ll Leave Behind?”), Spider-Man (“Do You Fear… Tomorrow?”), X-Men (“Do You Fear… What You’ve Become?”) and Hulk (“Do You Fear… Losing Control?”) will reportedly be facing. If we were the Hulk, what we’d fear most is the apparent loss of the adjective Incredible in my name.

Superheroes are still struggling with a long period of death, loss, bereavement and awkward inheritance of legacies. Now comes fear. Truly the winter of their superdiscontent. They should go listen to some Fear records and feel better about themselves.