Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
How the World Sounds
You need a mind massage. Stop in the the Little Theatre Café tonight for a short warm drink or a tall cool one. Take your hat off and put your feet up. Relax your mind and float down stream. The Explosion will be so gentle you won’t know what hit you.
The surge of rush hour traffic is still outbound when the work day ends in Rochester. Empty lofts are being converted and empty nesters are coming back but most of downtown is still pretty much a ghost town at night. Less a ghost town than it was in the Scorgie’s days but still pretty hostile. State Street near the old four corners is particularly forlorn so the new Tala Vera California style Mexican restaurant/bar/nightclub is almost like a mirage.
We were there kind of late on Saturday night and there was only one other couple in the dining room. The place looks beautiful and the empty stage looked inviting. There is a sound system in place, a piano and oriental rug on the stage and a drum set in the corner. The new restaurant lets you bring in your own wine with no corkage fee until January one so we brought a bottle of Spanish red and our jalapeño appetizer was so hot we drank it fast. Their tortilla soup was delicious as were the dishes we split.
A laptop on the other side of the room was playing the kind of guitar driven, tight snare jazz that drives us crazy so when the other couple left we asked the the owner if we could plug our ipod in. We had just been listening to a Margaret Explosion gig from a few weeks ago and we picked up right where we left off in the car. It was just like being at home in a five star restaurant. We had two Christmas shows to go to and I wished the owner good luck on the way out. I do hope he can bring people downtown to his cool spot.
Watkins & the Rapiers were in full Xmas drag when we showed up at the Tango Café and the place was packed. The band took a break while Scott, accompanied by Steve Piper on guitar, did a beautiful song of his called “Stars at Christmas”. His lyric, “Walk down each street as if it’s yours,” is one hell of an image.
The Christmas season wouldn’t be right without Bob Henrie and Goners take on the season. So we packed up and squeezed in to Abilene for their rockin’ last set. Bob Cooper was sitting in with the band on piano. Peggi bought her red Farfisa from him about thirty years ago.
Peggi plays Farfisa organ on this Hi-Techs chestnut, “Screamin’ You Head.”
I don’t remember this yellow cherry tree from last year. It’s the first thing we saw today as we entered the woods. The skiing was excellent as long as we didn’t stand still. The ground is not quite frozen yet so the snow is sticky down there.
People were talking about sixteen inches but that doesn’t seen possible. We have about five out there now and I just checked the weather – “Occasional lake effect snow showers. Additional accumulation 3 to 5 inches in the most persistent snows…greatest near Lake Ontario and in the eastern suburbs. Lows in the lower 20s. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph becoming west. Gusts up to 30 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.” Didn’t keep Peggi from going to her yoga class.
Did anybody see that article about the State of Kentucky using economic development funds to build a replica of Noah’s ark. It’s kinda down there near the Creation Museum. Separation of church and state issues make it sort of controversial. They’re talking about rebuilding the Tower of Babel down there. I’d like to be there when they speak in tongues. Or how about that article about the neo nazi’s lawyer who has hired a make up artist at $125 a day to cover up his defendant’s tattoos during his capitol punishment trial. “Could be distracting or prejudicial to the jurors.” Is there such a thing as a fair trial? My friend Rich sorts a lot of these issues out for me.
Leave a comment“Far Out Charlie” shot this video of Margaret Explosion last Wednesday. It’s a view from his table and it has even more crowd noise than our recordings. Pete LaBonne plays piano in this video and Jack Schaefer is on guitar. Bob Martin will be back in the guitar chair tonight and James Nichols joins us on piano. Stop out and make some noise. It is an essential part of our sound.
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Jack Schaefer brought his bass clarinet and Pete LaBonne was in town for the holiday so he played the grand piano. Bob Martin was out of town for the holiday so Wednesday night was all new and different for Margaret Explosion. Just the way we like it. We also picked up another gig at Rochester Roots annual dinner party next Friday.
There was an article in yesterday’s paper about Netflix coming out of nowhere a few years ago and going from the Post Office’s largest customer to the internet’s biggest bandwidth hog. If someone raves about a movie they have just seen my inclination is to “Add to Queue” not “Go the Theater.” The Little Theater is a local treasure and they’re hurting. The independent film network is no loner independent. They need your support. If the the theater goes down the café goes with it. Hope you can stop out tonight for the Little Theater Benefit. Margaret Explosion plays one set at 7:45.
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Last night “The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector” played on the big screen at the Dryden Theatre in the George Eastman House in glorious mono. Most of the songs anyway. It’s adventurous and reckless and almost over the top. There are essentially three pieces running around: Old footage of the Wall of Sound bands, Court TV video of Phil’s first trial and and an amazing interview. You get the sense that the interviewer doesn’t really care about Phil or is even interested in the topics he raises. He just keeps that tight shot on Phil and prods him to open his mouth. Is he drooling? We went in thinking he was guilty and then wound up with a soft spot for the guy.
Donovan, on the other hand is strangely pure. John Gilmore came over the other night with a Donovan documentary. We drove with John to see Donovan in Buffalo a few years back. He still has a beautiful voice and his songs are as good today as they ever were. He played two sets in Buffalo, mostly solo but he had a clunky backup trio for a few songs. Donovan does NOT need a rhythm section. He has a perfect sense of rhythm and other players just clunk up his material (except for the Mickie Most, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck backed records). The movie is a bit encyclopedic (three hours and we didn’t make it to the end) but it gives Donovan a chance to introduce his songs by playing abbreviated versions on acoustic guitar.
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I’ve been giving my orange ear plugs a workout in the last 24 hours. I wore them this morning while blowing leaves off the roof and I had them on last night at the Bob Dylan show and then after that I shoved them in as far as they would go for the second set of SLT at the Montage.
John Gilmore bought us reserved seats for Dylan but we never saw them. We arrived while Dylan was half way through his opening number, “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35, and we worked our way through the crowd on the floor to about forty people back. Bob was great, loose and adventurous and mischievous. His band kept him in check.
It occurred to me that you can’t get too good as a working, rock musician without getting into steamroller territory. That’s why Tommy was a better drummer than Marky Ramone. Bob spent half the night at the organ and that was the best half. He’s already got another rhythm guitar player and a lead guitar (who was trying to be annoying with repetitive figures) and a steel player so there was no way he could shape his own songs while on guitar. Was his band trying to make his harmonica playing sound out of tune? Rock can’t be too healthy. It doesn’t work.
“Like A Rolling Stone” was so sensational when it came out, way more than a pop song. It blew me away and I’m not a lyric kinda guy. I never know what bands are singing about. I remember going wild when they played the long version. Dylan finished with that song last night and it is still sensational. It was great to see him.
SLT was the better band last night.
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Ken Frank was in “5 Star Buffalo”, one of my favorite bands in the Scorgie’s days. I played with Personal Effects back then and we released a few albums on Earring Records. Colorblind James Experience released their first lp on Earring Records. Ken Frank joined Colorblind in the nineties. Ken plays bass with Margaret Explosion and he never sounded better than he did last night at the Little. His bass amp crapped out so he’s been playing his stand-up bass acoustically and he sounds more melodic and punctual than ever. The overall band volume is lower now and his bass notes have a clarity that gets lost when it’s amplified. It’s subtle but an earful! And subtlety counts for a lot in my book.
But back to Earring Records. They have just released a new recording by SLT called “Gone Dead Gone” and it’s on the other end of the volume spectrum. It’s dedicated to a gone dead old friend, Luke Warm, the one who took to the dj booth at Scorgies to remind the patrons to, “Don’t forget to tip the bartenders for keeping you drunk.” Ken Frank plays bass in this version of SLT along with Phil Marshall and they asked me to supply the cover art, specifically something with a bare light bulb and moths. It sounded like Philip Guston territory to me. Ken co-wrote and produced this rip roaring hard core pop anthem.
Listen to SLT – “I Should Have Been A Guru” on Earring Records.
Matt and Kim are the complete package, a minimal two piece pop music machine. I’m so happy we got to see them. Last time they were in town Kevin, their manager and my former band-mate, called from the Bug Jar to tell us to get down there but we were out at Peggi’s mom’s place. This time they came to town in a huge tour bus with a trailer of equipment in tow and they parked behind the Water Street Music Hall while Donnis warmed up the room.
Kevin put us on the guest list and took us upstairs where we grabbed front row seats in the balcony right next to our friend Olga. Matt and Kim smile relentlessly and Kim’s smile is incredibly infectious. She’s a Joan Jett style tomboy with a swinging, stripped down drum kit, no rack tom or hi-hat and only one cymbal. She spent a good bit of the set standing on top of her kick drum. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Maybe some of the girls watch Matt play his keyboards but I doubt it. No wonder her’s was only picture on the balloons thy released. Kim is a star but Matt did write one hell of an anthem.
We hung around after the show while the crowd threw money at the merch table. I considered buying one of their Treehouse t-shirts but I’m desperately trying to bring less stuff into my life. Our garage, that I spent the summer cleaning out, may soon be stuffed with my mother-in-laws stuff. This will be a lifelong struggle. And I would have bought a 45 but the only vinyl there was an English pressing and I’m partial to the big hole American ones.
1 CommentWednesday nights at the Little Theatre Café are always interesting but many times it’s the conversation between the hangers-on after Margaret Explosion has finished playing that is the most interesting.
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I spotted an article in the paper about Ron Carter coming to the Eastman to receive an honorary “Doctor of Music” degree from his alma mater for his life’s work. He has played on more recordings than any other bass player. His senior year was 1959 and he almost wound up staying here as bassist with the RPO but the Board of Directors was not ready for a black man to anchor their orchestra.
Ron introduced the second song, “My Funny Valentine” as one of his favorites and Jacques Terrasson’s piano intro was astonishingly beautiful. These guys were so under control and on top of their game the percussion player played with his fingers throughout, the drummer played mostly brushes and didn’t even have a clattering ride cymbal. The bass was melodic. No PA for the instruments, just the natural sound and dynamics, makes Kilbourn my favorite place to hear music in the whole world.
Ron Carter plays on some of my favorite Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane records and one of my absolute favorite albums of all time, one credited to Eric Dolphy and Ron Carter called “It’s Magic”. These guys pulled of some real magic here.
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Margaret Explosion started back at the Little Theater Cafe last night. We’ll be there every Wednesday until the new year so you have some time to see what all the fuss is about. We had a good night and the place was packed. Those two things don’t always go together. Our best song of the evening is usually the first one when there is hardly anyone there. We had emailed people that we were playing all new material which is true but it implies that we worked on new songs when in fact we hadn’t even seen each other all summer except for the two art openings we played. A few people told us how much they liked the new stuff and one even thought we were going in an electronica direction. Jame Nichols sat in on piano in the second set. He said he would have been there earlier but he was teaching a Mexican history class at RIT.
Each night is different and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We perform songs that have not been written or predetermined. We spontaneously compose them and if we try to go back to a song, it never sounds as good as it did the first time. As Paul McCartney once said, “You can’t reheat a soufle”. We are best off going out on a limb every night and that can be intense or it can be mundane.
I’m happy that most people don’t see it for what it is because we are doing our best to make them sound like songs and not jams. As we packed up Peggi was talking to a young kid who who also played sax and an old couple came up to tell Bob and I how much they enjoyed the music. They were such a cute couple I felt like I was looking at a Grant Wood painting and I could hardly digest what they were saying. Before heading to the door the man asked, “Is your music off the cuff?” I was more than happy to fess up.
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Bill and Geri bought an old-fashioned, state of the art, type-making machine along with hundreds of patterns and type faces. The original patterns can be used to carve out font families in various sizes as long as they are smaller that the pattern. You would use these fonts on a letter press. I’m thinking we should do a Margaret Explosion 45 cover with some of these.
We helped Bill and Geri unload the type making machine that is hidden behind the boxes of patterns and type in the photo above. Nine of us gathered on Sunday afternoon as Bill pulled off a marvelous, madcap, engineering performance that ensured a graceful decent for the 800 pound, steel machine.
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We brought some Vietnamese food out to Peggi’s mom’s apartment. We call it “Chinese” and it seems to go down better with her mom but she is not eating all that much these days. I went down to get my mother-in-law’s mail and pick up a prescription that had been delivered to the front desk. I volunteered to do this since I hadn’t had any exercise all day. Plus the temperature in the apartment is in the eighties and it’s hard to think in there.
A woman with oxygen tubes in her nostrils was talking to herself at the mailbox. She looked up at me and said, “I look like I know you.'” I kind of knew what she meant and introduced myself. I said, “I’ve seen you around.”
We stopped in the Little Theater last night to see the new Leonard Cohen concert movie. I don’t know what it’s called. We were late and missed the credits. Oddly there were no credits at all at the end of the movie. People were complaining about it being too short but it felt too long to me. It seemed all the songs were in exactly the same mode.
Our friend and neighbor, Rick, does a show on WRUR from 6 til 8pm on Thursdays. He’s calling it “Gumbo Variations” and he told us he plans to play a wide variety of music. He played a Monk tune last week and apparently jazz is a little too wide. He got an email from the big cheese over there telling him the jazz tune seemed like it lasted an eternity. Speaking of music that is not jazzI love the video of Neil Young delivering the video of his new album on an iPad to the execs at YouTube. And I love the movie Rich Stim did for Angel Corpus Christi’s version of “Heaven“.
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We missed all sorts of cool stuff this weekend. Nod played at a house party on Plymouth Avenue and Jim Mott had a an opening at the Oxford Gallery. We spent most of our free time restoring my dad’s brand new computer.
Peggi decided to to try one of Tom’s yoga classes at the Downtown Fitness Club. Tom used to be in her class there when Jeffery taught there. Peggi walked in a little late (runs in the family) and some familiar music was playing. Peggi said, “That’s our our music” and Tom said “What do you mean?” “That’s our band,” she said. Tom explained that his friend, Paul, made the compilation cd for him.
Here’s Margaret Explosion – Floating At The Bug Jar.
I’ve will soon be able to cross one of the items on our summer to do list off. Our garage is almost organized. It had become a dumping ground since we moved in. People keep asking us if we’ve seen the Hoarders show. We don’t get cable so we haven’t but I can imagine. I’ve been pushing the limits of our Waste Management pick-up service each week for the last month. I have a pile of old paintings out there including the one above. I’m stripping the old canvases and saving the stretchers.
I’ve been a fan of Peggy Lee since “Lady and the Tramp“. Now that we digitized our music library iTunes calculates it will take months to hear it all but we can’t go an hour in shuffle mode without hearing a Peggy tune. As it should be. So I was ecstatic to see Kevin’s post this morning. We played it three times in a row. Stunning arrangement. Minimal for maximum impact. Please stop reading this and visit “So Many Records” now.
Our old band, Personal Effects, covered “Is That All There Is?” and our new band, Margaret Explosion, covers “Fever” and we don’t do very many covers. Duke Ellington called her “The Queen”.
Peggi and I were watching tv at her parents house in the mid eighties and a Peggy Lee tv special came on. We flipped out and scrambled to get a VHS cassette in the machine. Peggi’s dad said, “Not that old broad?”. Peggy (with a “y”) had already had a stroke and she was having trouble with one side of face but she was god like.
Soon after we visited Peggi’s (with an “i”) sister in LA and asked if she knew where Peggy Lee lived. She had a hunch so we headed up in the Hollywood Hills. We bought a star map and Peggy Lee was not on it. We asked around and had it narrowed down to a particular street in Bel Air. We walked the whole street and looked at every house so I’m sure we saw it.
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We had to weigh our tomatoes to gauge the proportions in the sauce recipe we follow. Twenty one pounds of tomatoes had us multiplying each of the other ingredients by seven. It took us us two hours to chop the basil, onions, peppers, carrots, oregano and parsley and another hour to clean up. We had to borrow Rick and Monica’s restaurant style sauce pan (more like a bucket). It simmered all day and we froze about twelve big containers of sauce.
We had the blight in one of gardens but the other has gone to town. Six plants have produced over a hundred tomatoes. We have very few sunny spots on our property so we have set up shop in our neighbors back yards. They genuinely enjoy the company so it’s a fair shake.
Kevin Patrick stopped by last night with with a dj from a local station called “The Zone”. Can’t say that I have ever heard the station. I can only imagine what kind of stuff they program. We sat around the table drinking Guinness and talking about music. I was remembering flipping from WBBF to WSAY to WKBW (from Buffalo) in the mid sixties. The radio was some sort of lifeline back then. Now, I mostly listen to PBS which coincidentally happens to be at 1370 AM, the former home of WSAY. Kevin said his most recent post was for us because we liked “jazz”.
I’m totally sold on the idea of jazz forty-fives but I didn’t have the heart to tell him I can’t stand jazz guitar. Guitar should stay out of the way of jazz and I could almost say rock would be better off without it. I love rhythm guitar but piano and the organ covered that ground pretty well. Sax is a much better instrument for solos.
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I heard quite a bit of music over the weekend, most of it on my iPod while I was cleaning out the garage but we did go out on Friday to hear Ed Downey and his son at the Village Gate. They were kinda Dylan-like. You knew the words were probably great but you couldn’t understand them in the live setting. Ed told Peggi he was playing in another band, an avant jazz band, later that night in a parking lot across the street from the Cinema so we headed over there. We found a young, old fashioned prog rock band there so we kept moving. John Gilmore was driving and Peggi was sitting in the front seat when she spotted Joe Tunis hanging outside a bar near Monroe and Goodman. We pulled in the parking lot and watched a band with twins on guitar and violin set up for their performance. Nuuj was sitting behind his homemade analog synth playing booms and chiks with random sweeps.
We visited Peggi’s mom on Saturday and I ducked out to check up on our nephew who works at a nearby at pizzeria. I was happy to find he still had his job. I swung by Ken Frank’s place and interrupted his lawn mowing. He gave me an advance copy of a nasty sounding SLT record. “All killer, no filler” as Duane would say. I was listening to a German opera, probably something from Wagner. I know how much my mother-in-law likes opera so I tuned it in back at her place but first I had to turn the sound down on the tv. We watched “Animal Planet” with the opera as a soundtrack for about twenty minutes, a surreal experience, and Peggi’s mom said, “This is the weirdest music for this show”. Peggi suggested that we pop the André Rieu dvd in instead and we hit the road. About an hour later Peggi’s mom called and asked if we could come pick her up and give her a ride home from the concert. She was home, of course, bit it was nice to know she escaped for a bit.
Leo, our next door neighbor stopped by to see if we knew where his big magnet was. He had lost his hearing aid and thought he might be able to find it with the magnet. Peggi helped him locate that and we took a long walk in the neighbor next to ours stopping frequently to look at the silly things people do with their lots. The mini installations are every bit as interesting as the art you see in Chelsea.
Monica’s brother rode in on his Harley, the first one to show up for our neighbor’s house concert on Saturday. This one featured San Francisco via Buffalo singer songwriter Peter Case. We got in free for supplying the mic, cords and stand. Between songs Peter read the second chapter of his book, skipping the first one that concentrated on psychedelics. That was our favorite part and Peggi bought a copy. Monica’s brother and a couple from Cleveland stayed over and Monica came by on Sunday to borrow all our eggs so she could make breakfast for them all. I went back out to the garage and listened to some Sun Ra.
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We tossed the toxic hard plastic bottles that WXXI gave us for joining and we bought these stainless steel Bios water bottles. It was hot in the woods today and we both finished our bottles. On our return we walked right by our house, grabbed our mail and our next door neighbor’s mail and headed straight for the pool where we plopped these things on the table.
Peggi had picked up the two autumn colored leaves in the lower right corner and I found the apple in the road. I found four golf balls when we crossed the course. I always like finding Nikes especially the Number ones although I learned they are no better than the other numbers. And I found a Callaway which I’ll give to my brother. That’s all he uses and the last time I saw him he was wearing a Callaway hat.
That’s our mail on the top with the two cds I ordered. Here I am trying to get rid of those things and buying more at the same time. One is the Chico Hamilton soundtrack to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the other is a recent Sun Ra re-release of two of his old self pressed Saturn lps. I bought two of those Saturn lps from the band when they were at Red Creek in early eighties. They were supposed to be ten bucks but the two I got had no sleeves so they were five each and one had a pure white label so I asked Sun Ra to sign it.
And that’s Peggi’s hand in the upper left hand corner.
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8-Tracks have to be one the clunkiest mediums ever invented for playing music but in 1969 they seemed wondrous. My college roommate had a white Plymouth Barracuda and a collection of ten or so 8-Tracks. I couldn’t get enough of Led Zeppelin’s first but the one that seemed absolutely perfect for our off campus outings was Paul Butterfield’s “In My Own Dream.”
Elvin Bishop played guitar on that album and I always figured it was him that sang the title song but Bob Mahoney straightened me out. It was Paul Butterfield singing and playing the slinky guitar part. Philip Wilson had left the Art Ensemble and he played drums on this album and a young David Sanborn played sax but the gorgeous sax solo on this track is credited to Gene Dinwiddie. In my own dream, what a place to be!
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