This too shall pass.
The band I’ve been playing with since October finally has a name, and it is The Whappers.
Naturally, we have an official The Whappers web site (set up by yours truly) and the obligatory Myspace page too.
Last, but certainly not least, we will be playing this Saturday in Asheville at the Emerald Lounge on lower Lexington Avenue downtown. Let the face melting begin.
Playing more drums, and I love it. Last night I had an old fashioned bang session with my buddy Craig on guitar, and this dude Owen on bass, who turns out to have been the previous bass player for the Butthole Surfers during their Electric Larryland tour. Turned out to be a fun night, and I hope to keep rocking out soon. I can’t get enough, and I feel like it’s been pretty quick getting my chops back (and then some). The new drum kit helps!
I went and rocked out tonight, and boy, was it awesome. I ran into Josh Haddix of Greasy Beans fame last weekend, and mentioned that I was looking for people to play drums with. He said he was putting together something electric and needed a drummer, so tonight we met up with a couple guys he works with at Musician’s Workshop. WOW, it was great. Everything seemed to click, and the tunes were great. After one evening, we already have 5 songs in our pocket.
The style has a southern-ish hard rocking edge ala Neil Young or even some Wilco. I’m looking forward to more of this.
In a previous post I wrote titled Searching For Songs, I lamented about not being able to find a song from an 80’s punk band about a kid getting trapped in a refrigerator. Every few months I would do a Google search to see if anything new had been indexed by that wonderful tool of discovery.
I finally hit the jackpot. Through some amazing eruption of forgotten information from my sub conscience, I recalled a line of the song and was able to locate this post by a guy named Glen Case. The song is called Refigerator Heaven, as it turns out, and the band that recorded it is called The Freeze – an outfit from Boston. Moments later, I had obtained the song from the iTunes music store.
How happy am I to finally be able to hear this song again after 22 years of absence? As happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of Kerbango, dog!
On a side note, Mr. Jeter was able to supply me with the other long lost song I had been searching for. I need Mr. Jeter to contact me with his address so I can send him his LP’s back, along with the digitally converted versions from my USB turntable!!!
This week we return to that late-80’s Washington, DC sound. In the early 90’s, I was so into the DC music scene that I could tell you the member of just about every band going back to 1980, and I could count on one hand the number of Dischord Records releases I did not own, and had not spun at least a dozen times.
When I was playing with Substance in 1987, we had the pleasure of opening for this DC band I’d never heard of called Soulside, an insanely intense band driven by the things that made “that DC sound”: emotion, politics, and passion about playing music that meant something. The show was outside of Louisville on the back of a flatbed trailer by a barn on a farm in southern Indiana. It was hot, it was loud, and it was fun.
I had another chance to open for Soulside at Tewligan’s Tavern in Louisville, when I was in Cerebellum, which to this day remains one of my favorite shows of all time.
This tune comes from Soulside’s second record, Trigger, which is in my all-time top 10 list of favorite albums. Enjoy.
Soulside – Trigger.mp3 – from the Trigger LP.
Click arrow to play, or right-click and “Save As” to download
In 1991 I was playing drums with Crain, having just recorded our Speed LP, and heading out on a month-long, coast-to-coast, book-your-own tour in a big-ass 70’s Dodge Ram extension van.
Our first stop on the tour was in Washington, DC, where we had some studio time at Inner Ear Studio, and where we were to meet up with the band we would be touring with, Circus Lupus.
I had seen this band about a year earlier when they came through Louisville, and I knew the singer, Chris Thompson, from the band Ignition and other DC-based punk acts.
Anyway, this song, Pop Man, comes from the then-unreleased LP they had just recorded, Solid Brass, which happened to be produced by none other than Joan Jett. This became my favorite song by Circus Lupus, and I always ended up singing along from beside the stage each night when they played it. It’s catchy, it’s edgy and raw, and of course, it rocks.
Pop Man by Circus Lupus, from the album Solid Brass.
Blue arrow to play, right-click and Save As to download.
If any of you ex-Circus Lupus folks stumble across this, drop me a line!
A post over at TechCrunch pretty much sums up my feeling of the music industry today. Things have gotten completely ridiculous, with the RIAA now suing their customer base, strongarming them into settling out of court, and doing all of this based on IP addresses, for crying out loud.
People want music the way it should be – free and good! When will they understand that?
I’m gonna start something ambitious here, and feature a Song Of The Week. The songs I’m picking will likely be from way off the beaten path, but are songs that I think need to be heard for one reason or another.
The first song I am going to feature is by a band called The Didjits (more at Wikipedia), who were a Chicago-based trio from the late 80’s to the early 90’s. I was way into their first two albums, Fizzjob and Hey Judester. My first exposure to The Didjits was when the band I was playing in at the time, Cerebellum, opened up for them and Squirrel Bait on new years eve, 1988.
This tune pretty much summarizes their almost rock-a-billy, but still punk-ish, and a wee bit surf-ish, style of insanity. Whatever the case, they were all about rocking. I had the pleasure of seeing them two more times, once in Louisville when I was asked to come up and sing a song on stage with them, and once in Lexington, Ky. Wish these guys were still around.
King Carp – from the album “Hey, Judester” (1988)
Right-click and “Save As” to download, or press blue arrow to stream it.
Lyrics:
Pull my line, pull my line
I dive the deepest, I’m King Carp
And you know I really dig your sexy legsYeah I’m the fish with the bad drug problem
I’m the fish with the brand new car
It’s a 1964 ‘Cuda, I thinkI am the king of the fish King Carp, King Carp
I am the baddest dude, King Carp
And you know what my fins can do
I’m driving just for youOn my way back to land and I have to reach out my hand
To cushion my fall as I hit the fine, warm sand
(something something) baboon
And a fish joins in on basoon
And he sports a stylish hairdo, like Vidal SasoonI am the king of the fish King Carp, King Carp
I am the baddest dude, King Carp
And you know what my fins can do
I’m driving just for youBig bad fish goin down to the bottom
(repeat first verse, chorus)
I was updating WordPress tonight to the latest patch and ran into some troubles with my custom layout, so I threw up this prefab one until I have time to fix the problems. Something in the menu was causing an error. I’ll get it sorted out sooner or later.
In the mean time, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the arrival of my iPod, which seemed to have gotten a little too close to a high-powered magnet, which the hard drive seemed to disagree with. Luckily I had the 3 year protection plan on it, so I am waiting for it to come back from Apple. I am secretly hoping they decide it will be easier to send me a new one, in which case I may end up with a newer model. We will see what happens.
It’s been a couple of weeks without the iPod, and I am missing it sorely. Woe is me.
I had one of those strange series of coincidences today. This woman from AFLAC was at work today and was taking my information for some insurance crap I was enrolling for (the one where they pay you like $5000 for each finger you lose…hmmm). She was asking me my birthday, and I told her when it was. She said that was her father’s birthday too. A moment later, she asked my address, and she said, “Wow, my mom and dad live on your street”. So the next thing that made it all really weird was when I looked at my watch to see what the date was, and I noticed it as 2:22 on 2/22. Far out, d00d.
Aside from those types of things happening, I went and saw Mastodon at the Orange Peel the other night. I was mostly excited to go out and see a show in the first place, but these guys rocked the jams, which made it even better. I’m not usually into metal, but it was great nonetheless. The only downside was that the sound was not mixed very well at all, and often, it was really hard to distinguish what was going on.
That brings me to my next coincidence, which happened when I first got to the show and was mingling through the crowd trying to find a good spot to stand before the band started. This guy walked up to me and stopped, pointing at me. My first thought was it was someone I knew from Louisville back in the day, but I didn’t think that was very likely, so I dismissed it. I was like, “Dude, who are you?”
It turned out my first impression was correct. It was Andy Tinsley from Louisville, a guy that was part of the Bardstown Road crowd back in the day. I asked him what the heck he was doing there, and it turns out he was the sound engineer for Mastodon. Go figure.
I promise I won’t wait for more strange coincidences to happen before I do some more writing here. I’ve been slack, I know.