Cosmic Letdown

Tool

“Disposition” from the album Lateralus

Volcano Entertainment, 2001

[submitted by Loren Graves]

…

I spent the last 15 years or so referring to this song as “The Weather”.
Turns out I was totally wrong.

But like most things with Tool, the titles don’t really matter at all. They’re a visceral band and the nonsense can be made into whatever fits your story.

I love that there is still such a pervasive perception that this band was super dark, possibly satanic, possibly even fascist.

This is a band based on three things: beauty and humor and making you question your own tired ideas. And they tend to take a path right up your conservative ass to get there.

They were widely condemned by groups of idiots for the song “Die Eier Von Satan” that sounds very much like a Nuremberg rally lead by a Nazi version of Rob Zombie. While appropriately creepy and yelled completely in German, it’s actually a baking recipe for vegan cookies: the title appropriately translated is “The Eggs of Satan” which is just silly as shit.

But then again that’s how you know they’re good, they can scare the shit out of people by reading a cookbook.

On the flip side this song that I’m actually writing about does the exact opposite. It’s sonic valium.

I had this on my mini disc player in 2001 when I was traveling through Europe and when I got lost in Belgium, mugged in France, blew out a wheel bearing in Amsterdam and stopped for drugs in Sweden, I calmed my ignorant American ass down with this song.

LorenGraves Tool

NPR Field Music Recordings

“St. Louis Woman (Exquisite Corpse)” at Woodlawn Cemetary

NPR, 2016

[submitted by Loren Graves]

…

This is a bit of a departure from what I usually write about.

What started as a search for the correct song to fit with a rant that I had boiling in my head about the damage of jury by social media and the larger issue of an American society that is becoming more fractured and polarized and belligerent as it becomes more “connected” I went down the rabbit hole of exactly what I had planned on soapboxing against.

Luckily, what I came back with was refreshing, beautiful and at the end of the day basically makes my argument for me that we need to get out and connect with actual people, not just screens.

I had never heard of the game “Exquisite Corpse” before I came up on this video. My first thought was that it was the most bad ass name for a jazz band ever, especially one that plays in cemeteries.

Turns out it was a parlor game developed in by the Parisian Surrealist movement. The game is one of collaborative poetry where one person starts a line, then passes it on, concealing part of it, to the next who adds their own line and so forth until everyone has added their own line to poem.

Fun. I suppose. I’ll probably never play it.

But what is very much fun is this video in which this group of jazz musicians riffs on the premise of exquisite corpse building their own version St. Louis Woman. I could make the argument that jazz is like poetry, but that’s either super obvious or just sanctimonious horseshit.

Instead I’ll just choose to enjoy that the internet did not waste my time or piss me off today, but provided a little culture and a little history and some damn fine music.

NPR Exquisite Corpse LorenGraves

Morphine

“Lilah” from the album The Night

Dreamworks SKG, 2000

[submitted by Loren Graves]

…

At this point, I think I’m done lamenting the past. It’s a little that culturally we do that so often, especially when it comes to music.

I began writing this post out of respect to “the way things were” with a tone of the “good ol’ days.”

This song, or rather Morphine’s album “The Night” brought it all to mind. I was in the process of moving across the Bay and culling as much useless shit as I could bear to part with. I came across 4 large binders of CD’s that I’ve been carrying from house to house for upwards of 25 years.

I made a firm decision to dump the shit…until I started looking through the hundreds of old memories.

Then the flood of old man get off my lawn thoughts took over as I realized how many of these old albums I couldn’t get on Spotify (this being one of them) and how demo discs are a thing of the past and how when one of your favorite bands released an album you would have no clue what it was going to sound like, but you’d line up at Tower at midnight to drop $20 on it anyway.

CD collections were gold, they represented thousands of hours of busting your ass at some minimum wage shithole job. CD collections defined people. They could get judged or get you laid. Going on a road trip or even to lunch, fuck who had the better car, it was about who had the better music.

There was something magical about record stores, the whole process of physically browsing stacks until your back and knees were sore and you realized it had gotten dark out and you hadn’t eaten all day.

And album art…the lost art of album art. Morphine’s previous album to this, “Like Swimming” was what inspired me to buy an airbrush at 18.

God dammit, those were the days. Kids these days are so uncultured. They’ll never know. They’re worse for it, spoiled little millennial fucks with their auto-curated Pandora stations and their six pop stars on repeat who all sound exactly the fucking same.

But back in reality, I don’t give two shits what kids listen to…has nothing to do with me. I got rid of 40 pounds of CD’s that cost me 15 grand back in the day and replaced it with a $10 monthly charge. I don’t have to lug shit around with me and no-one is breaking into my car anymore for a case that may have had a Dave Matthews disc in it.

I kept the rare and irreplaceable albums and backed them up, yep, that’s simple now–to the cloud.

And now, if someone recommends an album or a band or a song and they text me the info. I can be listening to it in under 10 seconds, instead of waiting for my buddy to ride his bike over and my parents to leave so we can crank new Faith No More.

The old days are beautiful and they have their place, but I’m good with the evolution.

Morphine LorenGraves

Sister Sledge

“He’s the Greatest Dancer” from the album We Are Family

Cotillion, 1979

[submitted by Loren Graves]

…

So far my favorite movie of 2016 has been the Linklater Baseball film “Everybody Wants Some”.

In some ways it could be considered a sequel to “Dazed and Confused” if you want to make the argument that those movies were autobiographical explorations of Linklater’s youth in Texas.

Personally I see both films as assimilations of characters that comprise snapshots of eras as seen through the lens of Linklater’s memory. So, sure, they’re about him, but only in as much as it’s his vision of how he remembers things being.

Recently I found the compilation of songs that inspired the film (most of which are in the film as well) as curated by the producers.

63 songs that span 4 and a half hours.

It only takes about 4 songs to get warped back to 1980 and there’s something beautiful about that time that’s reflected in the music.

That was when just about anyone could afford college–student loans were all but unheard of and federal grants and scholarships are all over the place.

The Vietnam war was over and some of the hangover had begun to lift.

While the people of California knew what a fucking demon Reagan was, the rest of the country, especially 20 year old kids in Texas were wonderfully ignorant as to his impending legacy.

If there were a time and place that I wish I could have experienced (I was only a year old at the time) 1980 Austin Texas would be high on my list.

Enjoy.

Sister Sledge Everybody Wants Some LorenGraves

Paul Simon

“Wristband” from the album Stranger to Stranger

Concord Records, 2016

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

I got into Paul Simon before I knew how not to be into Paul Simon. In the first year of my life my dad spent a lot of time listening to the just released LP of “One Trick Pony”. He was a painting contractor and he was painting the house that he and my mom had bought in the summer of 1980.

Whether I realized it or not, that album, along with the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” were early soundtracks to my life.

It may also explain the backlash I had toward all of it in the winter of 1999 when my dad suddenly died of pancreatic cancer. Listening to shit like “Kodachrome” or “New Kid in Town” or “The Load Out” just sounded like a lie, some flimsy bullshit stacked facade propped up in front the dark reality of how things actually are.

Fuck right off. Seriously go die in a fire, because all that trash is a farce. Most of it still is. Acoustic guitars and a dump truck full of cocaine and I’m sure they believed themselves. Doesn’t make it not suck.

Browne and Frey and Henley are big reasons I ended up glued to At The Drive In and Drive Like Jehu for a solid decade–good post-punk is a farce that knows it and hammers it into your skull so you don’t kid yourself.

I never got back into the Eagles or Jackson Browne (the wife-beating didn’t help), but I slowly grew back into Paul Simon and spent some years revisiting his catalog in the mid 2000’s.

He’s a legitimate poet and an incredibly talented song writer…you never saw him pulling a Henley and write “The Boys of Summer.”

This new album is interesting. I’m still not sold, but rhythmically, I’m curious and from a lyrical perspective, he’s still making some decent choices, so I’m going to give it a few more listens and see where it lands.

LorenGraves Paul Simon

Charles Mingus

“Better Git It In Your Soul” from the album Mingus Ah Um

Columbia, 1959

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

I know it’s not just me, I know that there is a correlation between certain periods of transition in people’s lives where they decide that maybe it’s time to start listening to Jazz.

Maybe it’s divorce or a career change or a sudden death, or even just the realization that you’ve hit a certain age and time has become way too real.

Personally, my recent transition into jazz over the last year came as a response to a short script I had been working on as a way to explore the coping mechanisms and confusion of suicide. As I was writing, I found that I was missing something, my characters were all speaking in the same voice and acting in the same manner, which is a sure sign that you’re writing absolute shit if you can’t tell who’s talking.

But then I realized that the characters that I had written were very musically driven and that their proclivities and needs could be teased out and refined by constructing personal soundtracks. I put together playlists for my two main characters and let their music inform the specifics of the script.

In my search to define my main character, I turned on an album that one of the other writers on this blog had shared with me a year previous.“The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” turned into the inner rhythm of my main character and helped shape his distinct voice.

I’d walk from one end of the city to the other listening to Mingus, stopping to take character notes until I found a real person.

It also started my own mid-life jazz crisis…which, if you haven’t started down the rabbit hole, you may not want to get into it because I don’t see an end to it.

This song in particular has such a sunny, cinematic city feel to it, I turn it on these days when San Francisco fogs in, just to offset the gloom.

Charles Mingus LorenGraves

Ice Cube

“When Will They Shoot?” from the album The Predator

Priority, 1992

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

I’ve never been a big hip hop fan. Well, that’s not true, I have been through my time with Tribe and Pharcyde, Black Star, J5 and Blackalicious and if you count the Beasties then yeah, I’m a fan.

But when it comes to the era and genre that was spawned from NWA and later Snoop, not so much.

That may be changing after I spent the last evening hanging out with my buddy Neal talking about the white washing San Francisco and listening to Ice Cube’s 1992 masterpiece Predator.

24 years later and finally removed from the garbage radio overplay of “Today Was a Good Day”. I’m blown away by how solid this whole album is and to be honest, slightly irritated at myself for not giving it it’s due regard back much earlier.

Then again, I was 12 when it came out and I was already entrenched in Pearl Jam and Nirvana and G n’ R and even then I didn’t feel like I had the proper credentials–being a white little leaguer from Sonoma–to be buying “Predator”, let alone bumping it at home.

Now though–the third time through in 24 hours–this album, especially this song, rings current. Maybe it’s the state of San Francisco right now, between the housing bullshit, the minority shove out or the Police Chief resignation that makes me support the idea that fuck yeah, there’s a reason to be angry, because even now, a quarter century later the problems are still the same.

Ice Cube 1992 LorenGraves

**Marc Cohn**
**“Walking in Memphis” from the album Marc Cohn**
Atlantic Records, 1991
[submitted by LorenGraves]
…
I know the internet is 99% angry noise and cat videos, but occasionally there’s a piece of noise that hits the right balance of irreverence, knowledge base, research and fun-poking.
That is exactly what the guys at Sidespin have done with this College Tournament style bracket system:
“The Worst Pop/Rock Songs Since 1990”
The brackets are aptly named and I’ll have to admit that I had to look up who Justice Stewart was to figure out why he’d have a bracket. He was the one famously quoted “I’ll know it when I see it” in regards to pornography. Well that’s incredibly fitting here as well, because every one of the songs in that category is utter shit, but are difficult to quantify how without a reminder.
There’s some obvious horrible music in there that will probably make the final four like Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” and Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West” but the one that got and actually made me slightly angry was Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis”.
It’s competent in some bullshit manner, but hit’s every sophomoric, schmaltzy pop note to guarantee that at least a couple of my parents friends purchased this CD. What’s worse is that even after not hearing the song for years, I saw the title and it was like someone had cranked KOIT right into my brain…fucking light rock, less talk and here’s Marc Cohn to ruin your day.

Marc Cohn LorenGraves

Kut-U-Up

“Trust” from the EP Worse Than Wolves

Self-released, 2013

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

Some of my buddies back in 2003 put together a “punk band.”

Turned out they were pretty good. Pretty much a Southern California Fugazi with a little Thrice thrown in.

They called themselves Kut U Up, because it was a joke, but they basically jerked off and partied their way to an opening act for Green Day on the American Idiot tour.

I had not listened to them since I hung out with them back in maybe 2005, because they were the guys that would black out on your lawn, try to sleep with your sister (or light her on fire) which ever was easier and at some point I thought I needed to grow up.

They all grew up. Got married, their lead singer became the head editor of Transworld Surf and most everyone else settled down into some section of reasonable North County living.

But shit, they’re back and I threw on their new stuff. It’s good. It’s a little rounded on the edges, but maybe that has to do with a little less cocaine and little more PTA time.

Even with a slightly more refined edge, these guys aren’t pulling punches.

This is my new favorite garbage

Kut-U-Up LorenGraves

Fog Lake

“Rattlesnake” from the forthcoming album, ttk

Orchid Tapes, 2016

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

This song has been banging around in my head for a few days. I have no idea who the band is, or why I’m into it, but my buddy Martin has a way of tossing out links to me on Facebook that randomly send me down wormholes.

His quote about this was “cliche as it sounds the thing really comes alive after several listens.”

And it’s totally true, I think was about 4 listens before I just stuck it on repeat and let it fly for about an hour.

Be careful though you may end up in love or stoned if you do that.

LorenGraves Fog Lake

Sturgill Simpson

“In Bloom” from the album A Sailor’s Guide to Earth

Atlantic, 2016

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

This song simply murders me.

Covers exist in such a weird space, especially the good ones. There’s an odd feeling of stepping on toes, or laziness or lack of respect to so many of them. Obvious problems being something like Alien Ant Farm covering MJ’s “Smooth Criminal” or Fred Durst’s atrocity of “Faith”. Those are glaring black eyes on the music industry in general, but there’s the lesser, more subversive cuts that just shouldn’t have ever been done.

I’m the biggest Pearl Jam fan I know, but I still don’t think that they should be covering “Baba O'Reilly”. And while I’m alright with the Rick Rubin/Johnny Cash experiment…Cash doing NIN’s “Hurt” is hacky bullshit.

This on the other hand. This track just goes out into the woods with your heart, with Nirvana’s legacy, with the soul of Waylon Jennings and puts it all in a bag and drowns it in the river.

In a good way.

Sturgill is the business. He’s talent respecting talent and making something new. This is new territory and it’s beautiful. It’s big and vulnerable and crushing all at once.

Sturgill Simpson Nirvana LorenGraves

Laurie Spiegel

“Patchwork” from the album The Expanding Universe

1980, Unseen Worlds

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

I know that most people look to music like a drug.

I do.

That meaning that you feel like you want to hear something for a certain reason for a certain feeling. You want the chemical effect.

If I’m going for a run and I want an enduring level of energy to keep me moving, I may throw on the Dust Brothers or Explosions in the Sky–kind of depends on the weather.

If I’m at the gym and feel like lifting heavy shit I tend more toward Rise Against or a Deftones Mix.

If I’m hiking the hills in Marin and I just want to have my brain sit into the forests of Endor, I’ll throw on some American Analog Set or Tristeza.

But sometimes when you’re finishing up a few days of overload with work and travel and there’s no ripcord to pull and you’re surrounded by noise: city, client, personal etc. there needs to be another solution.

Laurie Spiegal is aural Ambien.

Listen to this in headphones and you will be transported to a place that just vibrates like an early Nintendo game needing to be reset but with the harmonious quality that suddenly let’s you know everything will be just fine.

I feel like this music is the soundtrack of Carl Sagan heading off to heaven.

LorenGraves Laurie Spiegel

Sarah Jarosz

“The Book of Right On” from the album Build Me Up from Bones

Universal Music Group International, 2015

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

I would prefer to not totally lament the last decade shift of music to digital delivery.

There is something incredible about having a phone that can carry more music than you can listen to in a year. Services like Spotify and Rdio make it possible to find and stream just about anything you can come up. Making a mix is drag and drop and not limited to 74 minutes anymore.

My truck was broken into three times in the last three years and the thieves never even opened my books of CD’s. In the 90’s that would be the reason to break into a vehicle. 1000’s of dollars plastic all replaced for $9.99/month.

That is all very cool. Not to mention at this point all the sharing is essentially legal, you just tell somebody what you’re listening to and they look it up. Done.

But with this one click, cloud bank, have it now without question there’s something lost.

Gone are the record store days. And way gone are the anticipation days, the standing in line the night before days waiting for Tower to open at midnight to sell its 5000 copies of Pearl Jam’s “Vs.”

Actually that part of the record store days was really dumb. But the rest of it, the aisle browsing, the finding physical copies of Import releases from your favorite bands that would have tracks that you never knew existed. That was mining for gold.

Gone are the days of the local music store guru. That proverbial Matt Pinfield that every town had who had a moral responsibility to steer the kids away from No Doubt and toward Mud Honey. Walmart does not have a section at the front of the store labeled “Staff Picks” or “Now Listening”.

Gone are the days of cruising through your friends’ album collections and trading or borrowing CD’s or LP’s. One of my fondest memories of high school is when I traded my buddy Noah my copy of U2’s “Joshua Tree” for Temple of the Dog and Faith No More’s “Angel Dust.” I will still take that trade all day.

These days, I can’t imagine deciding who’s car you were going to take to commute or go on a road trip with based solely on their music collection. There were multiple folks in high school we would not ride with because they had subpar music.

And the album—the entire album—used to matter. Bands would craft a sound around a record. It used to define their evolution. Concept albums can’t really exist anymore. The Beatles “White Album” would really only be 5 of their very decent singles now and not seen as the defining shift and possible end of the biggest band of all time.

Just the comfort in the coherence of track order is a thing of the past. I used to run with a MiniDisc player through the chaparral canyons of North County San Diego and I’d choose one disc for my run and I’d know how my speed was for the day based on what landmarks I hit by certain tracks on “Amnesiac” or for shorter runs “Like Swimming.”

There’s a patience that’s gone. The days of throwing on a disc and seeing where it goes are done. Hidden tracks????? What?

That’s all forgotten now, but that’s how I originally found this artist…when CD’s were making their final gasp. I came across a Sarah Jarosz EP in my friend Nicole’s CD binder.

She said, “you’ll love it, very mellow voice, kinda folk, a little country.”

in 2009, I was very much not folk or country and definitely not a little bit of both sprinkled with coffee shop cute. I was very Lamb of God sprinkled with Devil Driver.

But I burned a copy and probably had the CD in my truck for a couple years where it got a few respectable listens. And it was surprisingly good. But then at some point I scratched the disc and tossed it and that was it.

Until this week she came back up on a digital radio station and I got reminded of how great her voice was and how oddly smart yet comical her writing style could be.

This new album is even better than her early work and I’m getting sucked back in.

So the internet world of things is bringing back to light some of the histories that I would have otherwise forgot. That’s something I can’t knock.

LorenGraves Sarah Jarosz

Speedy Ortiz

“The Graduates” from the album Foil Deer

Carpark Records, 2015

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

Somebody channeled Liz Phair.

I don’t know how they did it without it being a ripoff or some theatrical approximation. That is a fine line and they managed to thread it. Still have that raw early 90’s Chicago sound and yet these guys are a band, not a rip off of a girl from 20 years ago.

Impressive, because they have the energy.

There’s a heartbreaking shove that they have and it makes me think of high school and then the idea of holding onto the idea of what I thought high school was.

This group is a lens and I love it, because it handles all the crap that we thought we had under control, but obviously don’t…but can in these three minutes.

Speedy Ortiz LorenGraves

Mr. Bungle

“Retrovertigo” from the album California

Warner Bros., 1999

[submitted by LorenGraves]

…

I’ve never wished that I was someone else. That’s not a narcissistic thing, but rather, I’ve always assumed that everyone has their own shit and that being rich or famous or beautiful or smart or Mark McGwire had to come with it’s own set of issues.

But…

That said, there are a few people that I’ve thought I would like nothing more than to spend a day as. When I was 8, McGwire was the man and I would have drowned a bag of puppies to have been him for a day in his rookie season, crushing home runs in sunny Oakland. Glory be #25.

Then you hit something like the age of 16 or so and realize you’re not going to be that, ever. But you can still play ball and dream. But other things start to make more sense outside of just sports. Music starts to grab hold and you get a Discman and a whole new world opens up.

Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell start writing the dialog of your teenage years, which is pretty awesome. Until you come across Mr. Bungle.

Doors. Blown.

Mike Patton to this day is the only person to this day that I wish I could dissect and maybe crawl inside.

That may sound really odd, but I think he’d grasp that as reverence for his creative spirit.

Faith No More is fantastic, Peeping Tom is as cool as pop music gets and Tomahawk is simply nails when it comes to hard rock.

Mr. Bungle is it’s own animal. They are my go to for art metal–which isn’t really a genre, and even that doesn’t encompass their breadth of jazz band, circus antic, psycho cinematic mess.

Patton somehow curates this entropy of genius noise and I have to bow to it. It’s amazing.

Mr. Bungle LorenGraves

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.