Saturday's are for wild dogs

I rolled down the street last night to check out Project Object, a Zappa tribute band featuring Ike Willis and Ray White.  My low expectations were unfounded, it was tremendous.  The musicality the six of those guys had...one head, twenty four appendages.  Luckily for everyone involved, the head belonged to the great, dead Zappa.  Here's Saturday's party jam, "Flakes."

 

Real Estate - Days

Out Tuesday

I don't know if I like the first Real Estate album. I can't remember it, to tell you the truth. And I know I've listened to it in the past month. I know I don't not like it. It's fine, still on my iPod.

Days, is a totally different story. Every time my attention drifts away, I get brought back in by something that sounds damn near perfect within its context. This is where I need to put a beach metaphor. Whether it's the floating green bottle (the melody) or its message for a castaway sweetheart (the lyrics), the bobbing and shifting discoball sea (the music) eventually delivers it to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (my brain). I especially dig the way the keyboard solo on "It's Real" pops out like a Magic Eye. "Green Aisles" is late nineties. I'm not completely sold on that one, it seems like it's drinking too much of the yesterday juice.

 It's Real
 Green Aisles

Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Get Their Ya-Yas Out

Chris, Franko, and Dave have been putting on three-piece shows as of late, trying out some new material.  The hope is that most of this will end up on an upcoming EP and/or album within the next calendar decade.  No Fables here.  If that's what you're into, go to the BBBlog or send buffalompls@gmail.com an album request.  All you ex-pats enjoy.  All you Upper Midwesterners, see them for yourself at their next gig. 

Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

Live at the Fine Line Music Café

October 6, 2011

New Moon

Sparrow's Sorrow

The Bourbon Murderer

Friend Island

Tables of the Cloth

Pride Weekend

Fine Forever

Stranded in the Dark

Check it out, you can download it for keeps!

Rejected from the rising storm

Robbie Basho
The Voice of the Eagle

There’s a moment near the midpoint of “Wounded Knee Soliloquy” where Robbie Basho abruptly aborts the song’s deliberate strum and pick method in favor of a ringing wall of jangle while he calls out to the heavens. His voice, which to this point had been a controlled groan with the occasional flare, is freed into a full out bellow over the caterwauling guitar rubble. “Are you ready, my son / For to ride This Rainbow of His Light?” Such a spiritually obtuse suggestion, while certainly present, rarely fits well within the ethos of the early Seventies outsider folk scene. It can seem too bold and grandiose for the usually timid, simple melodies of the era. But in Basho’s hands they are commonplace and become extragalatically comforting.

Much like his music, Basho’s life was an adventure of human spirituality. From his early orphan days through a youth of Catholic schooling, he catapulted into the beat-inspired, wild cultural melting pot that existed on the fringes of Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s. Along with John Fahey, Sandy Bull, and Davy Graham*, Basho helped pioneer a new era of experimentation in the American folk community, both technically and stylistically. Over a bed of Americana-laced Indian ragas, he meandered through ancient Hindu teachings, samurai honor systems, the dark corners of the Caribbean magic, and American Indian mythology. Along the way the recordings, melodies, and mantras became clearer, while his voice developed from a piercing howl into a musically emotive, melissma-laden croon.

For 1972’s The Voice of the Eagle, Basho stays solely in the Western hemisphere. The Hopi, Lakota, Incan, and Nez Percé stories and imagery provide a stable narrative of honoring nature and the Creator, while living in awe of their accomplishments and striving for a blessed path. Punctuated by a South Indian log drum, “The Voice of the Eagle” and “Omaha Tribal Prayer” bounce along as if they belonged to the American road music trope while they, unmistakably, do not at the same time. The album’s sole terrestrial fare, “Roses and Gold,” ruminates, with a melancholily deliberate delivery, on the emotional ecstasy of love and sitting quietly in a forest, watching nearby deer graze. At Eagle’s close, the ascension of “Moving Up a Ways” with the seemingly infinite expanses of Basho’s six-string propulsively droning bigger and stronger, his voice warbles and careens until he comfortably relaxes in redemption.

Towards the end of his career, Basho’s form had become something extraordinary. Always a willing guitar smith, he had made his career on experimenting and honing a style that knew no bounds when it came to imaginative musical story arcs. Similarly, his voice had, album by album, become a sharper conduit of spiritual empathy. Eagle marks the first moment where both his playing and singing could stop you in your tracks. It’s unreal. In fact, there are moments when it’s easier to imagine Basho as a face in a cloud, his booming voice drifting down a mountain slope, than it is to picture him as a man. While that might be taking it a bit far, Eagle and the rest of his later catalog can create equally otherworldy ideas about the man and his motives. He is a unique force that needs to be taken in and digested.


    

Get your fix at ghostcapital.

*Actually British. Thanks Chris.

Movie Time

Below is a sordid affair largely based in the fairy tale '90s. You have the classic mix of lust and love going along with money and power. Your strong-minded heroes standing tall in adversity to attain the unattainable. Twists and turns, corruption and greed, love and resentment. And such familiar characters! The evil, creepy Russian lady, the stereotypical money-grubbing Jew, and dough eyed, naive small town hick. A story like this was made for Hollywood. Get your popcorn ready and feast your eyes on the destruction of the American middle class (and billions more, for that matter). This is part one of the three-part BBC series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

A Summer Wasting

Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.  A year or so ago I remember someone posting a strikingly philosophical idea on Facebook.  It wasn’t Nietzsche to be certain, but a short, concise, existential pondering.  Not a ‘what is life?’ or ‘dust in the wind’ blab either.  It was sorrowful, introspective, and came from a very soft piece of meat.  I don’t remember what it was exactly; if anything it was the medium that makes it stick out in my mind. The medium and one of the comments:  If you’re thinking about those things you have too much time on your hands.

There’s my Summer Wasting.  Or maybe Stuart said it better when he sang “I keep taking everything to be a sign.”  I’ve always been a consummate schemer, going limpless and still anticipating the feel of my next steps, only to find they’re normal and no amount of anticipation or worry would change a thing.  So with school out and the nail biting anxiety of being left at a train station only to look into the dusk as the station clears, I’ve sat, over-thought, over-indulged, and over-compensating.  I think there’s been five weeks or so of this.  Eighteen of those days were without deodorant—a streak I am happy to announce has now come to a close.

Now that the sun has crested, I feel a sense of rebirth and awe.  I’m one complete tilt from 30.  Let the cleaning commence!  So while I’ve been in a self-imposed writing block, here are some shorts that I should have been writing about.

How about the fact that I hate trends?  It doesn’t matter the type.  I’ve considered writing a piece on summer fashion with my head stuffed way up my ass.  Probably not worth it, though.  And technology?  Please let some of this be a trend.  I went to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams tonight and there was a preview/commercial for Nintendo DS where the kids were talking about Mario Kart making it the best summer ever.  Drive a go-cart.  Speaking of the movie, the 3D was cool; the flowing cave walls stretching bison and mammoths as Herzog stretched our imaginations.  But was it necessary or did it just unnecessarily make people strain and shift to get the pictures in focus?  I’m on the fence for that movie, but the rest of them?  Drive a go-cart.

How about some triumphs of personal resilience?  BWIWYA contributor and long time friend Jon Poulson recently fell into wedded bliss.  I think Mark was a groomsman.  I wish I could have been there.  On the band front, the gang in Minneapolis opened some boxes and started holding on to years of work as The Fables of the Cloth has finally come full circle.  The amount of work and dedication, in my modest opinion, pales in comparison to the diverse, anthemic musical joy ride on the other end.  I’m endlessly proud to have been a part of the process and the continuing growth.  Speaking of which, not to toot my own horn too loudly, I caught a breeze of a muse a month ago and the resulting work will push the band further than we’ve been before.  Now I just need to keep putting my pen where my mouth is.

How about that bad-ass job interview in New York that I tackled deodorantless?  They wanted me, but the finances weren’t right.  It was hard saying no when I knew so many unknowns were lurking in that foreign, pin cushion of excitement.  As I shuffled through Manhattan, I was Map Master supreme—practically a local.  I didn’t know exactly where I was going but I knew that I could find it if I looked like I knew what I was doing and walked fast.  Still, I was stopped on the street and asked if I wanted a CD of “beats made by a local artist.”  I turned, gave the guy a buck, and he gave me some shit CD that I will never listen to.  First thing out of his mouth: Where you coming in from?

Later that night I had the opportunity to do exactly what I wanted to do, when I needed to do it.  For the second time in my life I was in the presence of my second-cousin Margie Haley.  While I was unfamiliar with her in fact, I was more than prepared for the type of person she is from my father’s ravings.  Margie is an 80 year-old smoker, a whip-smart Scotch drinker, foul-mouthed bull shitter.  I stepped off the Hudson Line with a real get-along attitude, maybe even a touch of that uncomfortable easiness that has plagued me of late.

While we exchanged pleasantries and formalities, I got the sense that she was sizing me up.  Word from relatives painted me in a certain color and she wanted to hold it up to the light, see if it made weight.  I just drank.  After five beers you can feel it in your cheeks.  Soon the humidity checked out while the breeze swept the sun away, leaving the heat.  Switch to the hard stuff, pack another box of smokes, laugh to cut the mutual-meeting pressure.  I wanted to drink and I wanted to smoke cigarettes but when we started slinging quantum physics, its effect on the notion of humanity, the bigness and smallness in all its blackness, I started watching the minute hand pass the second hand.  Fifty years of separation, nothing but a distant set of limbs on the family tree—at different levels no less—and a commonality that ran as strong and constant as that raging stream that once cut the valley of our conversation.  A unique opportunity in the arc of making connections.   That night I was less consummate schemer and more belly-up dreamer.  I like myself more that way.  I’m looking forward to making it more of a habit.

Bigger and Better - 2008

We tied them to the trees in some old April glow.
We're avenging giant ghosts.
Bigger and better buildings will surely come along.

We tied them to our heads through rain and wind and snow.
The bald will rule the world!
Bigger and better bandanas riding Harley's west,
some with flags on leather vests.

Will the sun burn out in our lifetime? I'm kinda hopin' so.
Or a meteor come and lay us next to dinosaur bones?
Or like they said on Discovery, when Yellowstone finally blows
will the second-coming be surfing its pyroclastic flow? On a dinosaur bone?

We tied them to our sleeves--our mouths say 'change' and 'hope.'
We're avenging silent ghosts.
Bigger and better wet dreams will wash away our blues
and with some luck one day come true.