Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

Totally daft, punk

Daft Punk is Playing at My House is playing at my house. (OK, right now, it's an apartment.)

Addendum: The track named above defines "bass hook." Googlebot, I AIN'T TALKING ABOUT FISH. NOT FISH. I mean hook, like "Kashmir," like "Smoke on the Water," like "Satisfaction." Wicked deep hook. Lord don't let me outlive rock and roll.

Glug

I'm not saying I didn't like Sideways? I actually liked it a lot? I am saying that just because a guy who was being a jerk doesn't like Merlot doesn't mean I have to give it up?

But on the other hand, I like Syrah better these days. Which probably brands me somehow different. Ly.

One Ringy Dingy

GET HIM OUT OF MY HEAD. Seriously, this is so me. I had dinner with friends in Palo Alto in, like, 2001. And I had with me my Sony Sprint PCS phone. (This was long after Sony had stopped making phones.) It was this huge, construction site-looking thing, with a battery on it you could wedge in a crocodile's jaws if you needed to pull out both feet and you were wearing hiking books and crampons.

And the guy part of the friends just keeps saying, "THAT IS NOT YOUR PHONE. THAT CANNOT BE YOUR PHONE." His flipped open and shut; he used it to talk to V.C.'s. 

There were something like six people from those phone recycling programs walking around behind me hoping I would drop the phone. (The thumb wheel only worked if you squeezed the phone really hard.) Phone was $20, and the screen lit up when it rang. Didn't vibrate. If it was on silent, you just had to watch the screen really closely to see it kind of get a vibrate-y look.

Flying solos

Spoodely indeed. "Spanish Fly" more of a spiddley thing, but worth noting.

Just Shine On, Crazy or Not

The Mars Volta's sound, even live, is a little dismal, a little thick, a few too many layers of paint to get off with a nail dragged over the sheet steel surface. But it is that impenetrability that lends it heft and import.

I got to the show at the Palladium last week a little later than might have been best, (Worcester’s Palladium is to grit what Cape Cod is to sand) and was consequently in the mezzanine, in a broken seat (which was better than the torn-out seats next to me). The volume was overwhelming, and ear plugs were absolutely critical to my enjoying it.

The Mars Volta’s style makes at least the modern King Crimson seem light, airy, and even charming. They bring enough guys to win the rumble, and they succeed, with complex, interdimensional guitar and a solid threaded hub of keyboard and drums. So, what they ultimately deliver proves chambered enough, and synchronized enough, to be far from a jam band. The point of Art Rock, it seems to me, is to lift off thoroughly from the home planet and leave behind the blues and the folk and the dance step. The idea is that enough precision creates a sonic machine, a tricked-out engine of music that turns so smoothly that its strokes and cam spins are inaudible and all that’s there is the power and force of its output.

If that’s the goal, The Mars Volta has the attitude of King Crimson and Robert Fripp (wouldn’t you love to call him “Bobby” just once?), but not the ease or the certainty. The group is supremely self-important. No stage talk, no encore, just a cursory throwaway line as they finished about how great it is not everyone is into “fast food” music. But they didn’t invent arrogance in rock music, and they won’t be its final practitioners. They have the hard part settled: Their technique was very sharp. The band was on target, on note, on mark. No slop or silliness. Now their material needs to catch up. “Ummagumma” awaits “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”

Ultimately, what I liked best about The Mars Volta is that I was there, and that they were there, and that the best part of rock -- the experiment -- can still pack a gloomy concert hall with fresh-faced kids in black T-shirts.       

A picture is worth a thousand years

They're back. I saw them in Hampton in 1981. We figured The Rolling Stones were so old then, it HAD to be their farewell tour. 

Cellular Communication

So Joe and I are talking. (A theme recurs.) He's in the tub. I'm not reading my copy of The Position.

"Daddy," he says. "What was the very first thing to be alive?"

"On the Earth?"

"Yeah."

"Well," I say, "there were things that had just one cell. These organisms just had one cell, one little piece."

"What came next?" he says.

"Well," I say, and I'm thinking furiously back to Biology AP, "then there were organisms that were made up of lots of individual cells, all of which do the same things, like, they're the same kind of cells? But they live together."

"Like what?" he says. I pause. "Like algae?" he says.

And I say, "Um, yeah. That would be a good example."

He's four. I hope to be able to help him with his homework until he is at least six.

Blustery Isn't the Half of It

Not much at Moore State Park today in the foul weather, but it's always a find place to take pictures. Joe and I saw some tree swallows working the lake's surface (gotta keep that protein coming when it's still getting cold at night) and we heard the usuals, like robins and titmouses. As for live things, we had a few blooms, but mostly fiddleheads and hopes for chipmunks someday soon. 

The Lord God Bird!

Can I get a witness? CAN I GET A WITNESS? It's like a rock and roll fan discovering Jimi Hendrix is still alive; like a jazz fan finding Billie hale and hearty at the gates of the Betty Ford center. It's like discovering Keats is alive and Salinger has been writing a book a year and they're all available now at the library. It's finding the Amber Room in a Fort Wayne attic. I told my mother tonight -- it's like walking into the living room in Graceland and Elvis is sitting there.

Now let us all be grateful and not, until tomorrow, worry that it will not last and that it is only the last few and that now it will be in our lifetimes that that they will well and truly and finally, and cruelly, vanish.

ivory-billed woodpecker

birds

endangered species

extinct-species

Here Comes Mars Volta

It's like Robert Fripp got a ahold of a Led Zeplin tribute band by the neck, ripped off its head and sewed Freddie Mercury's on in its place. Except, like, more violently.