Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
How the World Sounds
My favorite scenes in “Blue Velvet” are the ones that take place in the “Slow Club,” the nightclub where Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy performs multiple versions of the Bobby Vinton song. Angelo Badalamenti makes a cameo appearance as the pianist. Margaret Explosion is always getting compared to Lynch music. “The music is slow, sinuous and spooky. It is David Lynch soundtrack material. I could dig being in the house band at the Slow Club.
2 Comments
I usually chop my hair with scissors by pulling it out and cutting it all at about the same length and then I ask Peggi to help with the rear. It takes all of five minutes. But today I decided to tag along with Peggi when she went to Chi Wah’s on Monroe Avenue.
Our friend Jeff and Mary Kaye’s daughter, Maddie, works there now and we signed up for her. We chatted with Chi Wah and of course the only thing you can think of when you talk to her is the role she played in “China Doll” and Rochester bust. I haven’t really looked in the mirror yet but I think Maddie did a good job. I’ll know when I get out of the shower tomorrow morning.
8 Comments
We were at the Dyden Theater for “Blue Velvet” when we saw the previews for “The Great Beauty.” We had not seen that since it came out and this ages like a fine wine. We’ve spent a lot of time in movie houses in the last few weeks. I wore my long underwear for last night’s showing of “The Great Beauty and almost nodded off. I was plenty engaged, the movie was so dreamy and Tony Sevillo does such a great job of getting into his character that I found myself as detached and then introspective as Jep Gambardella. This is a beautiful movie to look at and listen to. ESG’s brilliant “Moody” is even in there. Director Paolo Sorrentino reminds us Fellini is not dead.
We watched Hitchcock’s “Rope” over the weekend. By the time we get to the end our Hitchcock binge it will be time to go around again. “Liv and Ingmar: Painfully Connected” was perhaps a perfect winter movie. I finally like Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie. “The Wolf of Wall Street” was an all out romp. And I was happy that “Inside Llewyn Davis” was so dark. I was afraid to see the damn thing not because of the David Van Ronk revival but because of all the nostalgic, reverent singer/songwriter myth making going on.
Leave a comment
I forgot how many great songs there are on “Transformer.” “Classic Albums; Lou Reed – Transformer,” 2001 was shown at the auditorium in the MAG tonight. The coolest thing about this documentary is how cool Lou Reed is. That and Lou Reed playing accoustic guitar versions of the songs on Transformer. Then after that there’s Herbie Flowers playing his stand up bass line from “Walk On The Wild Side” and his tuba part in “Goodnight Ladies.”
Lake Shore Record Exchange, who presented the movie, topped it off with a screening of the BBC’s “Lou Reed Remembered.” My favorite section in this movie was the interview with Lou where he talks about the beauty and power in delivering songs with detachment.
Leave a comment
It is still possible to round up enough energy to leave the house at ten thirty or quarter to eleven at night. Nod does not play that often these days and they were splitting a bill with The Fox Sisters at Skylark Lounge. It was a bit like the old days there. We met Rick Cona and his girlfriend at the door. Rick was the original guitarist in the Chesterfield Kings and we had just seen Greg Prevost at Spevak’s Xmas party.
This week’s New York Times Magazine had an article about Rochester’s Lydia Lunch in the Magazine section and they quoted Greg talking about Lydia as a customer of the House of Guitars where he worked before she left town. The two surviving founders of the Bug Jar were there and Mark Bradley was playing sax with the Fox Sisters. We played pinball between sets and had a good time. Nod sounded great. The trio is incredibly rhythmic and unique as hell and that’s why we love them. Fox Sisters looked and sounded like the Dap Kings without Sharon Jones.
Leave a comment
Who knows what tomorrow may bring. As far as we know tonight is our last night at Café. Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year and no schedule has been announced for next year.
Bill Coppard owned the Little Theater when we first started playing in the café and for over ten years we have felt very lucky to do what do in this magical space. Minimal amplification for guitar and sax, acoustic bass, bass clarinet, drums and occasional grand piano. No pre-planned sets of music, no songs in fact until we play them for the first and last time. A low wire trapeze act bolstered by the belief that it is never as good as the first time.
“When We Were Young” was recorded two weeks ago at the Café. Peggi says the cover may be an early “selfie”. As usual the song is a free download. We have almost 200 of them on our site. We hope you can stop by the Café tonight. We’d love to see you.
2 Comments
I took this photo in Indianapolis sometime in the very early seventies, about the time Miles’ “On The Corner” was released. I was so into that lp. A couple of weeks ago we got into a groove that reminded me of that period. I saw a chance to use this photo on the cover of the single and I took it. Margaret Explosion has two more Wednesday night gigs and then the next Wednesday will be Christmas so we will be off for a while.
Ken Frank is at the top of his game. He plays in six bands and writes all of Hook Face’s material. They had their debut performance last night at Monty’s Krown, headlining a bill with another of Ken’s bands, The Crabapples. Hook Face was lean and mean. Driving bass and drums with enough air to hear Jack Schaefer’s sensational guitar parts and Matt Sabo’s vocals. We had heard their demos and some rough mixes of new songs and were thrill to hear them blow that stuff away with their live performance.
Leave a comment
I’m glad I snapped this shot the other day because today because these tall brown weed-like flowers collapsed under the weight of the wet snow. They look like the invasive species variety that now grow in the wetlands around here but these were planted by a gardener.
Everything is changing. Ticks bearing Lyme Disease are now in our area and their season is longer on both ends. Not all these changes are unwelcome. We heard realtor, Mark Siwiec, on the radio today talking about how our recent warm winters have bumped the start of the high season up by almost a month. A hundred years ago upstate New Yorkers were not able to have fresh pineapple for breakfast. But I’m still pulling for a cold winter with piles of fresh snow.
Leave a comment
We feel as though we have adventurous musical tastes but we are probably just as stuck in our ways as the next guy. I know we are lucky to have the Eastman School of Music in our community and their student run program of modern music, called Ossia, is sensational. Tonight’s performance included five wildly different compositions all expertly performed. And just look at how young these students are. They are seen here performing Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Ten Pieces for Wind Quartet,” my favorite piece of the evening. Peggi’s favorite piece was sung by an operatic, solo soprano.
The most radical piece was Stockhausen’s “Mikrophonie I,” in which two people played a tam tam. Two people played microphones, one on each side of the tam tam, and two people, off stage, ran the filters for the microphones.
They struck and scratched the tam tam with an assortment of things you might find in your kitchen or storage closet and the ever moving, hand-held mics were panned hard left and right. The filtered sound was amplified and sent to the giant speakers that are above the two double door exits. The wide stereo experience was like something off of Led Zeppelin II.
Leave a comment
The night before Thanksgiving is usually a good night to play out. People are in town visiting relatives and air is festive but then some people leave town. Margaret Explosion guitar player, Bob Martin, is in Chicago visiting his son and bass clarinetist, Jack Schaefer, is picking his son up at the train station so we may be doing this one as a trio. Not the first time. Somebody say, “bowed bass solo.”
Leave a commentThe cold snap changed the color of our giant pumpkin from rusty yellow to a deep orange. I figured we better get it out of our doorway before it thaws so we rolled it into our wheelbarrow and took it across the street to ask our neighbors if we could roll it down the hill behind their house so the deer could have it. Other years we’ve rolled our pumpkins down the hill behind our house but we have a road down there and if they manage to get through the trees they zoom across the road and wind up in the creek. This year’s pumpkin was big enough to take out a car so we rang Rick’s bell. The crazy thing is that when we let it fly it scared the hell out of the three deer that were down there and they hightailed it out of sight.
Rick and Monica asked us if we’d like to come over for dinner and we took them up on that. Eric and Amy were staying with them. Both Eric and Amy are art school veterans so we started the evening looking at my paintings and talking art. I’m thinking of buying one of Eric’s Kodak paintings.
Dinner conversation switched to music as we discussed matters such as whether The Stooges or The Ramones made a bigger impact on music. Eric has a piece in the new Mojo about his upcoming reunion of the Len Bright Combo but he is defiantly moving forward. The Mojo interview contains this killer quote. “It might even sound modern now but in the ‘80s it probably sounded horrible to people because in those days every snare drum hit was an event in itself.” And Amy is at the top of her game. She is a brilliant songwriter. I am a huge fan and am looking forward to her book.
Leave a comment
Nod stole the night at the Lou Reed tribute with their cover of “Run, Run, Run.” The trio, with Hugh Edwards on bass replacing Tim Poland for the night, tore it up.
Margaret Explosion rehearsed, via email, the last minute addition of “The Day John Kennedy Died,” the ACC version not Lou’s. We banged out a three song set, “Dreamin’,” “JFK” and “What Goes On,” and then backed D&C music critic, Jeff Spevak, on his version of “The Gift.” Hoping to get some good press for that.
We saw today as our last chance to get the leaves out of our backyard before the snow flew. Our neighbor has a leaf mulcher and plenty of space to pile up a mound of mulch so we raked the piles onto a tarp and hauled the tarp up to the road so he could do his thing with them. The payback comes once the leaves have decomposed when we bring our wheelbarrow down to his place for a load of rich black top soil.
Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby are back in town but this gig is a private one, tonight at Artisan Works. It’s a wedding reception of sorts for someone we don’t know so we’ll miss it.
I’m looking forward to the dark winter months. Time to get get caught up with all my silly projects.
1 CommentTom Petty is a rock ‘n roll romantic. Free Fallin’ is my favorite of his songs and I’m knocked out by this brilliant new version by Angel Corpus Christi. Angel’s big label record was produced by Craig Leon and featured Herb Albert and the Wrecking Crew’s Hal Blaine. This record sounds even better.
Leave a comment
A few weeks back Margaret Explosion recorded a session at Rochester’s Community Access TV station for an upcoming series entitled “Pythod Remix.” The Pythod was Rochester’s premier jazz club in the late fifties and early sixties and the MC for this RCTV series is Jose DeCosta from “Exodus To Jazz.”
Pete LaBonne was in town for the gig and Jack Schaefer is back in the band on bass clarinet so we couldn’t all fit on the sound stage. Pete volunteered to set his piano up off stage. The director asked how long the songs were that we were going to perform and we told him we don’t do songs, we improvise. This caused some confusion so we asked him, “How long do you want us to play?” He said he was trying to put together fifteen minute segments so we offered to do two seven minute songs in that period and damn if we didn’t do that four times in a row.
They set mics up all over the stage and took a number of the instruments live and who knows what their mix will be like. We set our little Zoom up in front of the band and grabbed this live stereo mix. Here’s the song we opened with:
Listen to Margaret Explosion – “Passage” from upcoming RCTV Pythod Remix Series.
In all of New York state there is only one pair of plates with “ART” on them and it is fitting that they would be on a Caddy. Art and money are entwined like never before. Warhol brilliantly blew the lid off this thing a long time ago. Which brings us to Lady Gaga’s new release, “Artpop,” with cover art by Jeff Koons.
There is a direct line from Warhol’s banana art on the Velvet Underground’s first lp to this. This a natural progression but did you ever imagine Lady Gaga covering Sun Ra (or at least getting close enough to the song to split writing credits with him)? Sun Ra will make more money with this song than he made his entire career.
2 Comments
Jimy Chambers was one of the original members of Mercury Rev and his new band, Odiorne, played at Monty’s Krown last night with Small Smalls and NOD. We studied the poster for the gig and determined Nod was going on first. Odiorne was in the biggest type and both they and the Small Smalls were from Buffalo and Nod was listed last in small type. We got to the club about a quarter to eleven and before paying our paltry three dollar cover we asked the doorman if Nod had played yet. He said, “Nope, they’re up first and should be starting any minute.”
Monty’s is a classic rock and roll dive. It smells like cigarettes even though smoking in bars was banned years ago. Ted Williams was still there but this is no longer “the literary bar.” We ordered a pint and found Nod, now just a three piece, sitting at a table. We shot the shit for a bit and learned they were going to be last on the bill. They should be the headliners. They have everything I like in a rock band. They’re gnarly and rough, loose and danceable, and their songs get stuck in your head like a pop song. We had a long day and had to pack it in during Odiorne’s set so we missed Nod.
“World Still Wants You” by Nod fron “Tree Stuff & Lightning”.
1 Comment
Pete LaBonne coined the name, Margaret Explosion, back when we had a weekly Friday evening Bug Jar gig. That’s him on bass in the 1998 photo above. Jack Schaefer is seen on guitar with Peggi and me, the ME in Margaret Explosion. Just kidding! Pete has lifetime privileges and joins us and tonight on the Little’s grand piano. Jack has rejoined the band although both Jack and Pete are now playing different instruments.
Each gig is as different as we can make them. No set lists etc. Last week’s was more different than most. Ken, our bass player could not make it and Rick McCrea joined the band on trombone so we had three horn players. Oh yeah, and Ken Columbo sat in on piano.
Margaret Explosion tonight – Little Theater Café. Listen to “Hippie Dance” from “Live at the Village Gate”
People talk all the time during Margaret Explosion gigs. There are no lyrics. We are hardly performers, most of us have our eyes closed. But the crowd does shut up when the music gets engaging and that is all as it should be.
We were standing in the back of the Tango Café last night while Scott Regan played songs from his new cd. His folk country songs sit comfortably in the Americana tradition and his backing band, The Grownups, push him in a JJ Cale direction. Most of the crowd was seated up front around tables and most were smiling. As jam-packed as the the place was the sound was great.
The Grownups, Phil Marshall, Ken Frank and Jimmy Mac, were the foundation of the great Colorblind James Experience. Janet, Chuck’s (Colorblind James) wife and Phil Marshall’s sister, was down front catching up with Ken Frank’s (also bass player with Margaret Explosion) wife when someone turned to Janet and told her her voice was too loud. This really got Janet going. She left her spot and stood next to us at the bar in the back while she unloaded.
I was struck by the similarity between this incident and a story her husband, Chuck, told us a few years before he passed. He was listening to Bat McGrath when Bat stopped a song and turned to some un-rapt audience members to chew them out for talking. Chuck was blown away by this pompous lecture and threw the blame squarely back in the performer’s court for not being engaging enough.
6 Comments
I bought the banana album at Midtown Records. It had just come out and Tom Campbell and I were ogling the package. The purchase was made strictly on the basis of that cover. We peeled the banana right there in the mall. I had no idea what I was in for once I got home with the lp. It spooked me and attracted me at the same time. Little did I know at the time but this record had every essential ingredient of a masterpiece.
Still in mourning for Lou but these videos helped.
Leave a comment
