Fear Is Fashion

I'm going to announce this bit of self-promotion even though this is my allotted bandwidth of public journal space and so is by nature a forum to promote myself by way of personality, wit, charm and profanity as well as through sale.

I've given my chapbook its due makeover and I must say it's a pretty sexy bit of self-publishing. I'm talking two-sided pages, folded, stapled and trimmed with a 24# Red cover. Baby. All produced in the dead of night at my place of employ. Risk goes up, price goes up--not sure where to ceiling that just yet, but email me [mykejohns@gmail.com] and we'll see.

I got thirty of 'em, and I still have a few of the old $2 edition left. The new ones will appear at Soulshine in due time.

Writers have to eat too.

[EDIT: $3. Eight poems, three dollars. That's value.]

[Trisha, read this.]  ¶ 3/24/2004 09:07:00 PM

  I'm not a gearhead, but change is good

As guitar technique goes, I'm pretty plain. My setup is a Squier Strat (a good one--Chinese model, pretty solid and heavy) run through a Fender tuner (Fall Line Pawn), a Boss DS-1 and into a Seymour Duncan 5-to-100 watt amp (one 12" Celestion I think. An entire post could be devoted to its interchangeable tube circuitry. I've gone tube... I can't go back). I'd kinda like an overdrive pedal--something that won't be as fuzzy as the DS-1 can be... any suggestions anyone? I've been thinking about the ProCo Rat. I've also been trying out delay pedals, but the easy ones to find (Boss, Line 6, DOD) have more knobs than I can manipulate with my feet. Again... suggestions?

But before this becomes a wish list, what I was going to say was that I'm not a very high tech gear-minded guitarist. I never wanted gadgetry to get in the way of songwriting. Though I was never an acoustic purist, I always wrote songs that were interchangeable to electric and back.

This kind of unbending style is probably why I haven't, until recently, written anything in months. I was even starting to write and keep songs I didn't like or didn't know what to do with.

This one in particular, called "The Document Has Moved" (after this funny blank screen that would occasionally pop up while using the internet on my family's ancient Gateway. I think it meant the computer wasn't good at clearing its temporary files. I may not and probably don't know what I'm talking about here) had a really pompous, Smashing Pumpkins/Sunny Day type of riff that could have been passed off as shoegazer-influenced if played without all the flash. I love playing it just cos it damn rocks, but as a song it was a bit much for my modestly rocking self.

Really, the problem that I didn't realize as the problem was that there was nothing tempering the furious guitar heroics. It was all ooh and no ahh.

When musicians run into this problem, the problem of texture, often odd instruments that fall outside of the normal "rock" usage are brought in to kind of distract from the laziness of the guitarist (oh shut up, I'm generalizing). And about here is where the mighty Casio SA-20 100 Sound Tonebank enters my story.

Weighing in at under a pound, sporting 32 keys and chomping an amazing 5 AA batteries, this lovely instrument also features "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" as its demo. Super. I was toying with it over the weekend, running it through a one watt Fender MD-20 amp to get that impressive little crunch. The brilliant feature on this keyboard is the tempo control, which... erm, controls the tempo of the accompaniment tracks. So by slowing down Disco 3, and running it through an overdriven speaker, one gets a passable canned Melvins-style metal beat. It's pretty cool.

So here I am, going through all the cheesy ditties this machine is packed with when--hiding behind the eerily unassuming title of "Child's Play"--I get a series of beautiful distorted music box noises similar to the opening notes to Failure's "Stuck On You" (from Fantastic Planet. Anyone remember them? Led by current Year of the Rabbit frontman Ken Andrews? Anyone?). And what happens when I strum the chords to the errant "Document" song? Magic, kids, pure and simple.

I gots an Art Fix on April 15th. That's a Thursday night, 7:30 in Mayfair Hall. I'll be playing music amidst the works of my beloved Melissa Cranford and the equally lovely/unavailable Danielle Wykoff. Jeff Drye will be reading as well, so it should be a night of intense soulsearching, dry wit, and rock and roll. Be there and be square.  ¶ 3/23/2004 02:57:00 PM

  Tally Up The Influence

Well, it happened. After listening to the likes of Sufjan Stevens ("I should really write about his album" I keep thinking), Royal City, Mountain Goats, Toshack Highway etc. all winter, it was inevitable. What with my roommate having the perfect instrument for it, it seemed like a tiny version of fate.

I've gone and written a song on banjo.

Not just any banjo either. Brian's dad loved the dulcimer, and had a knack for modifying other instruments to the cheerful standards that dulcimers are identified by: four strings (three of which are tuned to the same note), major note-only fretting, and detailed woodwork. At this moment, I think we've got about five or six such instruments lurking about the place. One is a red Fender Strat mod. Another is a gutted Hofner bass. There's a true lap dulcimer and there's one that was never an instrument to begin with. It looks like a bread box with strings on the top.

Then there's the banjo. That worrisome fifth string that only goes halfway up the neck has been removed and its tuner taken out. The bridge has been recut and the tailpiece... hell, I don't know where it came from. Some lovely red-stained wood fleurs have been added to the drum head and headstock and overall, it's an attractive instrument.

Oh, almost forgot--there's a contact mic on the back of the drum head. So not only is it a dulcijo, it's an electric dulcijo.

But what of the song? I saw a sign in the dulcimer shop in Stone Mountain Village once that said "There ain't no notes on a dulcimer, you just play it." Normally, taking that type of attitude toward an instrument would produce a furious racket, but not so with this one. Because there really aren't any minor notes to be found on the thing (unless you have one with that ponderous "sixth-and-a-half fret") pretty much anything you strum is going to sound nice. It took me years before I realized that one could actually form chords on what was effectively two strings worth of notes. So yes, my song has chords in it.

I dropped all them names up top cos that's what the song sounds like. I was listening to them--after a few months, it all sank in and now I've emulated them. And while I was excited to be writing on something other than a guitar, I was slightly disappointed that right away I could see through my unoriginality. Still, it sounds nice--kinda wistful. Music for the coming of Spring, or the going of Winter. The lyrics mention pollen twice.

And I've been making lots of little notes lately. Hopefully I'm building up to writing something of some substance again. The snippets seem promising.

somewhere I am making a phone
ring. This tone echoing
back sounds removed
by dimensions. I imagine a
red telephone sitting in the
center of a green-curtained room, inert
yet overpowering with sound in its own
expansive void.

Hope everyone out there is doing well. More on this as it develops.  ¶ 3/18/2004 08:13:00 PM

  Track 1, Side 1

John Cale: "Dead or Alive": Honi Soit - There's a record store connected to the 40 Watt Club called Low Yo Yo Stuff (I think that's a Capt. Beefheart reference). It's roughly the size of a walk-in closet and is the highest concentration of Stuff That I WANT in the southeast United States. I was poking around in there one day and had picked up Cale's first album, Vintage Violence, whilst an enthusiastic discussion of Cale was going on between pretty much everyone in the store (four people, max). I'm not sure what the other guy bought, but as soon as the owner, in one of those "You HAVE to hear this" moments, dropped the needle on this platter and the horns... "Penny Lane" X 10, blasted through, I was sold.


Quruli: "March": Zukan - Okay, barring the intro track (which are not actual songs, so I'm disregarding them here. Okay, some intro tracks--like the song-length epics that tend to kick off, end and frequently interrupt hip hop records--simply cannot be ignored. But that's as it may be), this explosion of tightly wound Japanese hysteria may actually prevent you from getting around to listening to the rest of this album. I especially like the way it careens in with a pick scrape/snare roll and all sorts of craziness and then brick walls at the chorus for a stately, Beatles-esque cadence... then right back to the heroics. Awesome.


Mountain Goats: "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton": All Hail West Texas - When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/Don't expect him to thank or forgive you/The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton will in time both out-pace and out-live you/Hail Satan!/Hail Satan tonight!


And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead: "Richter Scale Madness": s/t - Here's a little song about killing everybody, let's all sing along now. And you know what? They're right. This song could kill you, could save your life.


Soft Boys: "I Wanna Destroy You": Underwater Moonlight - Great protest song; up there with Cale's "Fear Is A Man's Best Friend" and Costello's "Radio Radio." And speaking of which...


Elvis Costello: "No Action": This Year's Model - God, I love this album. If you're going to have one Elvis Costello record, make sure it's this one. Not only is it brilliant, but in the context of his career, it's pretty amazing. This is his second album. His first, My Aim Is True, took that compressed studio-Buddy Holly-1950's R&R sound and rechristened it as punk. Or maybe it's the other way around... anyway, it was a great first outing and he could have easily rehashed it a few more times. But here, the moment he snarls "I don't wanna kiss you, I don't wanna touch," and the band tears in behind him, something else is obviously afoot. Where his debut wore all its influences like Costello's interesting suits, this one packed them all into a mean little carnival ride--whirling organs, pounding drums and all.

There are of course a lot of Track 1, Side 1's that are so obvious that, while worth mentioning, hardly need explanation.
The Who: "Baba O'Reiley": Who's Next
Beach Boys: "Wouldn't It Be Nice": Pet Sounds
Nick Drake: "Pink Moon": Pink Moon
Bob Dylan: "Like A Rolling Stone": Highway 61 Revisited
Iggy & the Stooges: "Search and Destroy": Raw Power
Boston: "More Than A Feeling": s/t
The Pixies: "Debaser": Doolittle
My Bloody Valentine: "Only Shallow": Loveless
13th Floor Elevators: "You're Gonna Miss Me": s/t (Such a good T1/S1, that High Fidelity used it for its opening credits)
Nirvana... you know what.  ¶ 3/12/2004 03:28:00 PM

  Funny, "blog" isn't in this blog's built-in spellchecker

I'm settled in comfortably enough now to sit around and listen to records. Yes, this type of activity requires a modicum of preparation to really enjoy, don't ask me why.

Also important is figuring out exactly what kind of records make for comfortable (very preoccupied with comfort at the moment) house-listening. I haven't really tried to quantify and categorize, but here's what's worked and what hasn't so far, in order of listening:

Charlie Christian - Picked up his Columbia best-of compilation, mostly his work with Benny Goodman. I normally don't like Goodman (If I have to hear "Moonlight Sonata" one more time, I'm punching the first senior citizen I see), but Christian's slinky solos balanced the otherwise ho-hum big band sound. I put this on late at night while I was trying to move my couches around. It christened (no pun intended) the house, musically anyway, quite nicely.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Areoplane Over the Sea - Crissee'd never heard it all the way through, so we set up on the front porch and engaged in some pretty intense rounds of Othello. See, that's exactly the kind of thing I moved into a house to do. I was kinda worried that Jeff Mangum's off-key keening would disturb the neighbors, but no complaints.

John Vanderslice - Life and Death of an American Four-Tracker - This fit the living room quite nicely. The album rocks, but in a subdued kind of way that makes for good sittin' round the house listening. I don't feel that this should in any way malign the music--indeed, that Mr. Vanderslice can write tunes about bitter disputes between ex-lovers, the universality (and the upside) of human mortality (didn't mean to rhyme there, sorry), and beloved recording equipment all in an eminently listenable pop format displays a mischievous talent.

The Bangles - "Eternal Flame" - I just wanted to hear this song. It sounds good in pretty much any setting, so no calculable data there. Seriously, listen to this song again, it's awesome.

David Bowie - "Heroes" - I dunno, I wasn't paying much attention to this one, playing Uno. Took it off after side A ran its course. Sorry Dave.

Okay, that was yesterday. So far tonight:

John Cale - Vintage Violence - This is just a fantastic album anyway, but it's got this lovely baroque pop sound that really fits the mood of an old house like this one. It's subtle, but never too somber--a good median between the Velvet Underground and Leonard Cohen.

Television - Adventure - Arguably not as great as their first album, but shit, it's got "Ain't That Nothing" on it. In place of Marquee Moon's self-assured, stripped down awesomeness, Adventure has a rounder studio sound.

I realize at this point that I really should have defined my terms earlier re: sitting-around-the house-rock. All my descriptions above seem to idealize a mediocre, mellow sound. That's not really what I'm on about. I've just been in the mood for music that doesn't as much encourage you to leap from your seat as it does to sit down and just listen. And last but not least:

Elvis Costello - Imperial Bedroom - Rarely does an album title describe its sound and mood this perfectly and then go so far as to suggest where to listen to it. "Beyond Belief," the opening track is possibly one of his best songs ever. If you're new to Costello, I'd advise against starting here though. This was actually the first album by him that I got and I was a little disappointed. It helps to actually get his albums in sequence (My Aim Is True, This Year's Model, Armed Forces... etc.) to get a feel for his shapeshifting role as a songwriter--from '50s throwback punk to New Waver to Tin Pan Alley pop. Luckily, Rhino's done some mad reissuing of his best albums. I've yet to get this on CD, but given the setting that I prefer to listen to it, it just makes sense to have it on vinyl.

As my tenure at this address progresses, I'm sure I'll find more and more music that fits these characteristics (Radiohead's Kid A comes to mind). Sorry if this seems kinda self-absorbed and uninteresting, but c'mon, it's a fucking blog.  ¶ 3/09/2004 08:57:00 PM