In a brief break with the past, Personal Conflict bassist-turned-punk-historian par excellence Toby Gibson suggests an amusing palate-cleanser to catch up with our present doings: What is everyone listening to today, and what are your guilty musical pleasures?
“I’m presently working on a pointless short story whose conclusion has been eluding me while my kid naps on the couch,” Toby writes to tee things up, “and I’m listening to Joe Jackson’s old stuff on the headphones. Twenty years ago there’s just no chance — no way — I never would have guessed this is where I’d be right now here today, but I guess to some extent there’s just no predicting what path a certain person will end up taking. I certainly was ‘too punk’ to admit to enjoying Joe Jackson — or about a million other bands and performers I missed until much later in life. Sad but true.”
P.S.: ‘Fess up, and maybe I’ll list all the Andrew Lloyd Webber numbers I absorbed osmotically during my daughter’s early “Cats” fixation! Nothing you come up with can be more embarrassing than that.
Toby’s got a good idea…
I stopped playing music once we moved from San Diego about 10 years ago and gradually got less and less interested in listening to music…no current bands interested me much, and I was tired of most of what I’d been listening to for 20 years.
Finally I decided that was ridiculous and started listening to all kinds of stuff I never had before. I was lucky enough with someone who was really into jazz, and he turned me on to lots of music, and burned me a buch of cds. That’s a lot of what I listen to now.
One time a few years ago, my wife and I drove to northern CA to visit relatives and were sick of the cds we had, so we stopped at a chain record store in a mall for something to listen to on the drive home. The only thing they had that was going to power us through the long rainy drive was Led Zeppelin…and this started our tradition of listening to late 60s/early 70s rock on all road trips. Those long Allman Brothers guitar solos really make the miles disappear…haha. Try listening to the Ramones, and the album’s over before you’ve gone 20 miles.
Seriously, though…Jimi Hendrix’ Axis Bold As Love has become one of my all-time favorite albums. Also, the very last era of the Byrds when they had Clarence White on guitar…who’s playing blows my mind.
Toby, I have a great reggae compilation I listen to a lot… Arkology by Lee Scratch Perry. Its a three cd set of music he produced at his studio in the early 70s, including the original version of Police and Thieves. Lee Perry was a crazy, wild creative force. He’d record backing tracks, then have his artists sing over it… so many of the songs have the same music. Then he create dub versions, instrumental versions, etc. This is some of the best, most creative music I’ve ever heard.
I’ve also been listen to 90s era hip hop like Tribe Called Quest and Pete Rock & CL Smooth lately…great stuff.
I left out a ton. I have one CD wallet that is dedicated to hard rockin stuff like the Who and Thin Lizzy, Blue Oyster Cult and the like. I also have one dedicated mostly to Neil Young and that kind of melancholy, cynical stuff. When my dad died I totally got into listening to stuff he played- which ranged from the Carter Family to Hendrix to Zappa to Leo Kotke, etc… I became particularly fond of Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Sr, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristopherson, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, etc.. This led to that and I was into everything from Willie Horton to the Blasters Anthology, back to John Doe and Dave Alvin’s solo stuff, again back to Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran- there’s no end to where you can take it if you keep going. The Meteors and Guana Bats.
I have come to be very fond of some of Marvin Gaye’s work. I picked up a thing by a guy named Bill Frisell a while back that was pretty cool. I was kind of bummed to realize late in life that the blinders I had on that had me looking for more and more hard core music kept me from experiencing some of this stuff sooner. Now days I don’t really give a shit- I listen to nearly everything. It’s really too bad that most of the hip-hop/rap guys are such corporate whores. I really think more could be done on that front if there weren’t bags of dollars dangled in front of their noses. I love guys like Mike Watt just for this reason- that they never strayed too far from the path they started out on- and it seems like it was a pretty righteous one. I had an Mp3 of Mike Watt doing “I’m Burning for you” (who was that? BOC?) that was about 100 times better than the original. That guy knows no boundaries, and it seems to work.
Where the hell is Jason Seib*rt? I loved this last post and it’s going to take me about a year of downloading to play catch-up. But Jason would be way into some of that stuff, I’m sure of it.
Its so easy now to expose yourself to different sounds now with Youtube and (especially) Pandora. I listen to Pandora all day at work, and have heard so much great stuff that way that I probably never would have otherwise. If you dont know what it’s all about, you create your own streaming radio stations based on the name of an artist or song…it plays similar music. You can create up to 100 stations, and put as many of them as you want into shuffle mode.
Paul, there’s an album I really want to get by Grant Green called Aint It Funky Now. You probably have this album if youre into his music, but I’ve just heard some of this for the first time, along with Greyboy Allstars… I remember when they used to play all the time in SD, now I wish I’d gone to see them then.
Ive been listening to blues too, like Freddie King…the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album and some other stuff. And then there’s my latest (unfortunate) musical purchase…a cd called Harvest by the Venice Beach Drum Orchestra. These guys were playing on the Venice boardwalk with four or five African drums, electric bass and rhythm guitar, and a great bluesy/jazzy sax player. They sounded great! I would have stayed a while to listen but my wife was ready to stroll on, so I bought a copy of their homemade cd for $15…I got it home and the cd was blank. 🙁
Yeah, where is Jason? someone call Jason.
A couple of years ago I bought the Superfly soundtrack on vinyl at a swap meet for 2 dollars. In spite of it being scratchy as hell, it’s become one of my favorite albums. What a beautiful laid back groove.
And here’s a couple of my favorite youtube clips:
I’ve much liked Crosby, Stills, Nash OR Young, but this song kills me… especially Steven Stills guitar break.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v5E27Fp59c
Let Sister Rosetta save your soul with her HOT licks on a white SG…I think she’s my new favorite guitarist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeaBNAXfHfQ&feature=related
I just got off the phone with Jason. He’s away from the computer for a couple days but will be back after the commercial break.
Truly- he’s the guy for discussing eclectic- he always blows me away, the stuff he ends up with in pristine condition on vinyl.
I’ve had a couple of opportunities to observe Neil Young up close in a relaxed and expansive mood … He does seem quite a nice fella, and his model train projects are very cool! (He’s been known to visit incognito this gonzo model train Mecca here in New Jersey. It’s the dusty crown jewel of Flemington — I highly recommend it.)
Dave Ellison: I love Pandora.com too … I’m such an overscheduled old fart now, it’s really hard to even think about checking out new sounds, or old sounds I never exposed myself to back in the day. Since the attributes Pandora uses to find matches have more to do with instrumentation and arrangement (“clean guitar, tight harmonies, strong bass riffs”) than with a pre-conceived idea of genre, it comes up with some pretty awesome mash-ups.
I like putting it behind a few other windows on my desktop and willing myself not to look at who’s playing until I’ve made my own aesthetic decision about whether I like the song or not. I’ve surprised myself a few times that way!
I try not to look at what’s playing on Pandora…mostly because I have to keep interupting whatever Im doing at work to look at it…but I always end up having to look anyway to make a mental note of what Im listening to.
So yeah, Ive been interested in Neil Young after I heard that song on youtube. That was a typo though on my post though… I was trying to say “I never much liked Crosby, Stills, Nash or Young.” I never knew they wrote really dark songs like that though…or that anyone did at that time. With the lyrics to that song along with Neil Young playing guitar with his eyes rolling back in his head, it’s no wonder parents thought rock music was going to turn their kids into Charles Manson.
Actually, it wasnt true anyway…I used to love Marekesh Express when I was a little kid.
Great thread! I spent much time in the mid eighties with my head up my ass. My comrades and I had a number of firewalls built which would automatically filter out exposure to music which did not fall into a certain time period or did not meet an arbitrary set of criteria (e.g. guitar solo too long, band member wears mustache). By the end of the eighties and after I had been treated for depression, I felt a little like Rip Van Winkle upon awakening.
I set about rediscovering a lot of music I liked before I cared what others thought, starting with what I liked in high school: Elvis Costello, the Clash, etc. I think it was Ben Fong-Torres who wrote about what he called the “Puberty Principle”: that music we listen to during puberty strongly affects our tastes and influences for the rest of our lives. For me that was mid seventies a.m. radio, and I am an unabashed fan of the three minute pop song. Like Dave, I go through periods where I am absolutely sick to death of everything I own, and I’ll listen to oldies radio (which now primarily focuses upon the seventies) and it feels like a cattle prod to the hippocampus.
There is a lot of incredible music being produced nowadays. There seems to have been an explosion of creativity in the past few years, and as young artists have essentially abandoned the corporate formats available, anything goes. Pandora is a godsend! I have discovered hundreds of new groups and artists through the site. My students cannot even begin to relate to the process I used to discover music in the late seventies. Many times I’d buy an album or single at Tower because of the picture on the cover only to bring it home and have it reveal itself as a dud. I discovered music through magazines like Trouser Press, live shows, of course, and word of mouth. There was a lot of trial and error.
Current tastes: In the last hour or so, my iPod has shuffled the following: Hank Williams, the Left Banke, George Gershwin, Elton John, Jenny Lewis, Elliot Smith, Elvis Costello, Otis Redding, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Black, The 88, Sondre Lerche, The Beatles, Eddie Cochran, Ryan Adams
I dont think people from our generation should kick themselves for having narrow musical tastes at that time, because the situation was a lot different then. Punk rock and everything that came after (including revivals of different periods) represented a whole different way of looking at things…not just music, but everything in your life…and it automatically put you at odds with 99% of the people you met. So of course a kid in that situation is going to walk around feeling superior and more hip than everyone else… thats just your defense.
When I started playing music and hanging around other musicians, that’s what gave me a broader view of music…especially hanging out with Sam, who’d listen to any record that was lying around and usually find something cool about it. We never spent much money on records… we had a few, but then we’d listen to our parents country records and Sam had some blues records that he’d borrowed from people. Of course, that probably just made us feel even more superior.
Yeah- but now that the smoke has cleared I’m stuck with this morbid fascination for Hall and Oates and Air Supply.
I agree, Dave. The truth is that we became narrow minded in response to the abundance of bad music and style that was everywhere. I still abhor that eighties drum sound and I cringe at most of the guitar tones that period produced. But my filter did not allow me to recognize anything cool after 1968 or so, and I could pretty much forget giving fair consideration to anything contemporary. At my age, I now have both the perspective and the taste to rediscover stuff I used to dismiss out of hand.
So yeah, ultimately, without an “us vs. the world” mentality, there wouldn’t have been much of a movement. It is the passion that goes hand in hand with hating everything that fuels creativity and makes for music that hits you at a visceral level, like a punch in the stomach. Although I still play music, I often think about how the fact that I’m happy now has had a deleterious effect on my own creativity. I just don’t have the anger and sense of urgency that used to drive me.
But Toby, I guess I’m still just pissed off enough to hate Air Supply.
When you run out of anger to fuel that fire, sarcasm, cynicism, and condescension will fill that void in a pinch! 😉
and then there’s http://www.hairsupply.org/
b/w = “backed with”…i dont know how i know this.
Yes, Pandora plays music from any and all eras! If you make a “Les Paul and Mary Ford” station, you’ll get similar music from the same era.
When I was 14, the main thing that warped my thinking and corrupted me forever was a magazine called Rock Scene. It wasnt a fanzine, but not exactly a professional magazine either… published in New York by people who were very hip to what was going on in the mid 70s. They would cover almost any band on the New York and London punk scenes, but also featured big name rock bands.
It was almost nothing but photo layouts with captions…all black and white printed on cheap newsprint. So you’d have The Clash on tour…and not just concert pics, but backstage, on the bus, eating in diners, etc. Then next would be a bunch of photos of the Ramones hanging out in New York and playing pinball at CBGBs. There were lots of photos of parties with bands hanging out together.
More than anything, this magazine brought you into the world of the people involved …this was the world I knew I wanted to live in! Most of the music I was into was just from seeing these bands in Rock Scene. A lot of what are considered classic photos of the original punk bands were shot by photographer Bob Gruen for Rock Scene…he may have been their only photographer. Without Rock Scene, I may never have started to play music.
I used to read Creem, but they were more into making jokes about the bands. The rock journalism most influential on me was a book called The Rolling Stone History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Btw Dave, Grant Green’s Ain’t It Funky Now is a great record. Its a best of, spanning 6 albums from ’69-’72.
RE Creem and rock journalism, I do love me some Lester Bangs (an Escondido native, as alluded to in an earlier thread.) When I wrote a weekly Mac rumors column in a previous incarnation, I channeled much Lester Bangs along with Hunter S. Thompson.
I just found this online:
http://www.postmodern.com/~fi/pattipics/htm/rksc0678.htm
If you go down to the bottom of the page, there’s a link to the photo layout of the Patti Smith group in that issue. It’s exactly what I was talking about…photos of the band playing, Patti eating fried chicken, people hanging out like Hilly Crystal from CBGBs (typical of the magazine, he’s only referred to by his first name). Each picture has a caption that narrates the story. The whole magazine was like this! It made you feel like you were a part of this great, glamorous scene…the same people would be hanging out in each issue. The big name bands were on the cover, but the New York scene was really what it was really all about. At that time, this magazine was as big an influence on me as any band.
SORRY! Before anyone cuts my head off- “American rock media”.
…”at that time”!
Geezus Chris I have my foot in my mouth, 24/7.
Ray, my wife and I both love Almost Famous…its one of my favotite movies ever. We saw it like five times while it was still in the theaters. Of course we own it on dvd. How could anyone who’s into music not like this movie? …especially anyone from San Diego
Sunday morning, house is empty, doing some dishes and cleaning up a bit.
Tom Waits- The Early Years Volume 2. Perfect Sunday morning picking up a bit music (also great ‘after dark my girlfriend left me for another guy and I think tonight I might just put out the pilot light’ music. Though it’s stuff like Natalie Merchant that really gets the rope up over the ridge beam for me. Could sombody please kick out this chair before the record ends?) I think this is my favorite Tom Waits. The arrangements are so spare it lends the feeling that he’s recording it in his living room.
I don’t know what I will have to remove to put this on my desert island scenario five records, but it’s up there. Cowboy Junkies and Natalie Merchant have also sprung to mind over the last couple days (I have this whole fake country and western rotation that also includes Dave Alvin, John Doe and KD Lang.)
OK, so our tax man has told us today that my wife and I are going to be recipients of the full amount of The Asshole’s Economic Stimulus Package™ …and I wouldnt want The Asshole to think that we werent doing our part to stimulate the economy. So we went out and bought two cds. I got Grant Green and my wife got Ray Charles. Yes, we’re splurging big time today.
Tony, the album is The Best of Eddie Harris on Atlantic from 1970. It spans ’65-’69 and includes Listen Here. I like the sound he gets by using amplification and maybe subtle effects.
Dave E., I’m glad to hear the New York Dolls show wasn’t so good since I decided not to go. I really liked a song they were playing from the recent CD, maybe that was Rainbow Store, I don’t know. But when I thought about it, plunking down $35 to see them at the Fillmore with a few original members just didn’t seem like the way to see such a raucous, trashy band.
Every year there is a music festival called the Low Budget Rock Showcase which moved from S.F. to Oakland. A couple years ago Leighton’s Morlocks played. I missed ’em (damn, they came on late, I got up early, oh well) but I saw a great band that gets together once in a while called the Original Sins. Organ and guitar driven garage rock. The Morlocks are going on a European tour this summer.
I’m off to San Diego now for Sergio’s wedding to Season next week.
Dave, now we’re buying CDs with our tax rebates?!? Aggh…
I think you need to seriously re-think coming out to London for that Spex gig with me. All of you guys do…
What happened? Did I kill the conversation with my Bush comment? 🙂
Most bands I’ve liked over the years started out good and slid downhill, but one that did the opposite was Los Lobos. I didn’t dislike the rootsy music they made in the 80s, but it was never all that inspiring to me either. Then sometime in the mid-nineties they came out with two really great albums…Colossal Head and Kiko. These albums are really experimental, psychedelic and soulful at the same time. Both are filled with heavy bass, distorted guitars and vocals, strange percussion sounds and poetic lyrics. After that, I think the band returned to more of it’s traditional sound… so several members started a side project called the Latin Playboys, who were even more experimental than those two albums. A guy I used to work with had these albums…they’re all on my list of stuff I want to buy.
Dave, I’d make it if I could…and thats at the Roundhouse too…a classic venue I used to read about back then. Im sure it’ll be a blast.
Actually Colossal Head is better than Kiko…in my opinion.
I thought I was the thread killer.
This morning it’s been all greatest hits, XTC and 999. I’m toying with the idea of actually putting Devo in but they always seem to be better in theory, and then when I actually listen to it I remember that they mostly annoy the absolute shit out of me.
I’ve noticed lately that I’m very much stuck in the eighties.
Mark Mothersbaugh has been pretty successful orchestrating and performing movie soundtracks. I actually just learned this not too long ago when I looked at the extras on my kid’s cartoon “Cars” video.
Mark Mothersbaugh has orchestrated some great soundtracks, including “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tennenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”
Mothersbaugh also did all the “Rugrats” music and a buncha other cartoon stuff with Klasky Csupo. When my kids were small (ca. 1997), McDonald’s Happy Meals came with a series of Klasky Csupo-produced Ronald McDonald cartoons on VHS, all of them scored by Mark Mothersbaugh. Not only did we find them sinfully catchy, I even picked one up for Dave Fleminger.
Total random non sequitur, but just today I was thinking how punk lasted to the end of Reagan mostly because his name had such great rhythm- four syllables just work- both with ronald or ronnie, two syllables with just the last name. Bill Clinton really didn’t work, nor did or does George Bush (beautiful half-assed double entendre there!) I think we will finally see a youth movement as rebellious as punk, Mod, and the like as soon elect a president that we can not only hate but who’s name the kids can actually write songs around! (Oddly enough, Barak Obama has four syllables, which fits nicely. John Mccain is out. Hillary Clinton has five, which just might work and she’s easy to hate.)
Barak Obama is already inspiring great songwriting, and he hasn’t even been elected yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTtd5n03-FY
That was awful.
But subject to interpretation.
But still pretty awful.
There is always so much useful information in a conversation like this.
I am going to have to check out Pandora and the above mentioned Mog. Thanks!
You know, my one big regret is that I always missed X live. I would have loved to have seen them, and had several opportunities that didn’t work out. I really like the way X and the Alvin Brothers (and Tom Waits and a few others) represent what country was before it was country- when country WAS what rock and roll later became.
I finally listened to that Devo today, and was pretty impressed. God those guys were so on their own trip.
Also today I was pleasantly surprised to find a package from Cliff Cunningham in my mail with seven bootlegs that he’s recently gotten onto disc- Fear at the Palisades Roller Rink 1983, DOA at Fairmont Hall (I may be wrong on the venues, but I’m not going down to the truck to look) c 1983, Bad Brains at Wabash, Circle Jerks somewhere in San Diego, Black Flag at the NPLC, 45 Grave in L.A. 1981, descendants somewhere I dont remember. Cliff told me the story a while back- that he’d been plugging into the sound boards for years, documenting many shows in San Diego and abroad. He only recently realized that if his house were to burn down we’d lose a huge chunk of very valid music history, and so has been actively trying to get the stuff out to people.
The Fear at Palisades was really decent in the first half. Bad Brains- most clear live stuff I’ve heard by them. Circle Jerks was epic- those guys played really well live but hardly talked at all between songs. Fear and DOA are the most hilarious, though by Palisades Lee Ving’s asshole Schtickt had become a little redundant and derivative. I think I heard my voice a couple times from the audience. The 45 grave was also a very clean live recording. I’m guessing that Cliff has the treasure trove of live performances. Who knows- maybe some of it includes bands outside of that specific genre.
I have a cassette tape of the Cramps show at the Adams Ave. Theater…the second time they played there with the Tell Tale Hearts and (I think) the Red Hot Chili Peppers opening (this was right after the Chili Peppers first album came out…unfortunatly, they’re not on the tape). I dont know who taped it originally, but I think it came off the board…the sound quality is really good.
I had that tape years ago. In fact, there may be a video of that show floating around somewhere, too--I think I saw it at the El Cajon Blvd. Off the Record location back around ’86. Jimmy Jazz videotaped a lot of shows also, and he made me copies of the Cramps/Pandoras and Tell-Tale Hearts at the California Theater, along with the show we played a few weeks later at the NP Lions Club with Specimen and Three Guys Called Jesus. I posted some Tell-Tale Hearts clips on YouTube a while back.
I was at that Cramps/Tell-Tale Hearts/Red Hot Chili Peppers show. I remember thinking the Chili Peppers were super tight but kind of lacked soul. Lux Interiors was impressed by the Tell-Tale Hearts. I’m going to have to check out MOG and WFMU.org. A Bay Area station I like is UC Berkeley’s KALX http://kalx.berkeley.edu/ . It’s very eclectic. I’ve been checking out some of Ray Brandes “Best of” CD (ADD has prevented me from listening to the whole CD yet (nor the Volume II!) plus I like to really direct my attention to music instead of listening to it in the background). There are some really great pop songs there. Thanks, Ray.
Seconded — I’m listening to Ray Brandes now!
Another genre of music I really like is Afrobeat. Invented by Fela Kuti in the late ’60’s, it’s a mixture of traditional Yoruba drumming, highlife, jazz and funk. Fela played sax mainly, had a big band and was very political, landing himself in jail in Nigeria for 3 years for his outspoken views. A bunch of young American bands have picked up the style, among them Antibalas from Brooklyn and Albino from San Francisco. Fela’s son Femi continues his father’s tradition. Basically, think of a big horn and guitar driven band playing complex African rhythms mixed with funk rhythm, in long jams with lots of improvisation and lyrics expressing democratic and Pan-African sentiments.
I’m oftentimes stunned at how little I know.
This thread is a gold mine for anyone who’s open minded and loves music.
Thanks one more time.
Oh shoot. I found some Yoshida Brothers stuff on a asian compilation- Fukaki Umi No Kanata (I believe roughly translated that’s “Beyond the Deep Sea”). Kind of Cool Jazz (not my favorite style at all) meets 5000 year old guitars. Interesting combination. I’m on the prowl for more, better fusion.
Presently listening to a demo version of “Guilt By Association”someone sent me a while back. If you didn’t get this it’s a compilation of indie people performing their ‘guilty musical pleasures’. There’s a great version of Mike Watt doing “I’m Burning for You”.
i think one the best bands i’ve ever heard in my life is comets on fire
I literally just heard this 30 seconds ago … Fun song, but what a cool lineup to play together: Moe Tucker- Vocals and Guitar (Velvet Underground); Sterling Morrison- Guitar ( Velvet Underground); Sonny Vincent- Guitar (Testors, Shotgun Rationale); Victor Delorenzo-Drums (Violent Femmes); John Sluggett- Bass (Half Japanese)