Trades

(via crampmystyletv)

…and also, this.

Martin Mull,  I’m Everyone I’ve Ever Loved

This was my most recent Sunday morning record. I woke up yesterday with “Ship of Fools” by World Party stuck in my head.  I dug out Private Revolution and after playing the side one smash a satisfactory number of times I got down to business and played my second-favorite Martin Mull record.

My all-time favorite is 1979’s Perfect/Near Perfect, but I’m Everyone I’ve Ever Loved, released two years earlier, was always my preference in the pair (?) of albums he recorded for ABC.  In addition to the musical heavies like Ron Carter and Richard Tee, there are cameos by Ed Begley, Jr, Billy Crystal as Howard Cosell, Rob Reiner as the president of ABC records (“Good morning, Martin, sit down, you want a beer?”) and Tom Waits as a bartender.

Along with the well-known co-write with Steve Martin, “Men” (which opens with the spoken word intro, “I wonder how many of you remember the big Folk Music Scare of the 60s…Boy that was close, that garbage almost caught on.”), there’s the duet with Melissa Manchester on “They Never Met”, and the almost-serious “Buy Me A Drink”.

There are highlights everywhere, but taken as a whole, and reading the lyrics along on the inner sleeve, it’s a titan.  Mull’s recorded output, which existed mostly between 1972 and 1979, was unavailable for years, which was a drag.  Luckily, alongside the good citizens posting on youtube, the last decade saw a smattering of reissues on cd, and two of the main mp3 retailers offer, along with this record, both Perfect/Near Perfect and 1973’s Martin Mull and His Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room.  The lyrics are online too so we all win.

Lydia Lunch, Queen of Siam

When I bought this record, I remember that it made me feel the same way I felt when I heard Rain Dogs several years earlier.  Listening to it now, I can connect a few of the dots: I guess at first, Queen of Siam may seem to be a dark, bleak, and almost hopeless-sounding listen, but it’s also complex and yearning and very very beautiful, like some of the best film noir.  Like the aforementioned Waits record that came five years after this one, it’s a musical excursion just as much as it’s an exercise in storytelling, and the different voices employed by Lunch, from demented child-chant to funeral bleak to hipster shrug, all seem to paint the same picture of anticipation, if not longing.

I recently heard someone refer to this as a “lonely goth masterpiece”, and that sort of struck me, because while I love a good lonely record, this one never made me think of sitting home in the dark as much as it made me think of youth-at-heart, of hitting the street at 11pm on a summer night with everything to come. 

Sun Ra Space Is The Place

So I was going in on this movie all last week.  I remember being in a class in college and a guy stood up and said that Sun Ra was never interested in socio-politics in his time, because he was too busy telling people that he was from Saturn.  I don’t think the guy who said that had seen this movie. 

This being Sun Ra, the film, released in 1974 (filmed two years prior) contains plenty of sci-fi and space travel, and dialogue about “transmolecularization” and “isotope teleportation”.  As classics of the genre like Metropolis and The Day The Earth Stood Still used themes like futuristic societies, robots and interstellar travel to teach lessons regarding the shortcomings of humanity, Space Is The Place uses its own science fiction aspects only as far as its commentary on violence and racism.  “We’ll set up a new colony for black people here,” Ra muses regarding the  new planet he and the Arkestra discover in the film’s opening scene.  Sun Ra then heads to earth to travel through time and spread the word.

 The mode of transportation that will be used to deliver those chosen from the hands of white aggression is Sun Ra’s music.  The Moog-heavy parts of the soundtrack at times hearken back to the theremin-led scores accompanying earlier sc-fi cinema, but it’s clearly all Sun Ra action, recorded at a time when he used the early synths to push his playing to the most ferocious point.

 I have the VHS version, which about ten years ago I was awfully excited to have found, but it’s shorter than the widely available DVD reissue from 2003 by about 20 minutes.  However, the shorter version is apparently the cut that Sun Ra preferred personally, and the longer version doesn’t contain any footage of Sun Ra or the Arkestra.

Here’s a link to the long version of the film (thanks for posting):

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v683427yKejB2KR

Sonic Youth, 4 Tunna Brix EP (Sonic Youth covers The Fall for Peel Sessions)

So about seven years ago I was working at the record store and this record came in as part of a huge collection someone had just sold us.  My boss wanted to put it out right away and I begged and pleaded for him to sell it to me instead, offering the full going rate, which I think was $60.  This was a record I had only heard about, never actually seen.  Basically The Greatest Band Ever doing covers of One Of The Greatest Bands Ever, including the former’s cover of the latter’s cover of The Kinks’ “Victoria”?  I needed it.  He finally relented, I did a little budgeting and went to an ATM to free up the sixty.  I took it home that night and played it over and over, and the next day I got up and played it three more times before work.

A few nights later a friend came over to hang out and play records, and I was still in my enraptured state as I put this on the turntable.  My friend kind of shrugged and said it was ok.  The next day I ran into him on the bus and just before his stop he mentioned that when he went home that night he happened to see the album on a free download site so he grabbed it. Hence my hatred of the game, not the playa.

Thirdborder, Return, Return

So I’m way into this Thirdborder record today.  It’s basically a top-to-bottom killer.  These guys were sorta all over the map in the BEST possible way.  The record goes from Stooges-style garage romps to mathy riffing to 70s-style folk balladry to noisy freakouts, with guitar colors and textures that keep popping out in different ways.  As I write this I’m on my third consecutive play of the album, and each time I’ve noticed something new.  And I’ve had this record since it came out.

We were lucky enough to play some shows with this band a few years ago, and I went to see them a bunch of other times and it was always heavy.  Last I heard they were on a sort of hiatus, which is a drag.  I wish there were more bands around like this one.

Genesis Nursery Cryme

We flew back from the St. Maarten show yesterday, and though we were only an hour out of our own time zone I’m still feeling jet-lagged.  Or maybe it’s just being away from my own turntable for so long that had me up at 5am with my headphones on.

Like everyone else, I could sit and listen to “The Musical Box” all day.  I read that Steve Hackett had really wanted to write a song where the guitar sounded like a musical box, and Mike Rutherford had tuned his top guitar strings all to F#, to really whallop the big thing at the end.  Add to that the little organ fugues in the middle and I guess all you need is a singer who can come up with lyrics based on his own original fairy tales.  Good thing Peter Gabriel was still in the band. 

Tony Williams, The Joy of Flying, or more specifically, “Murphy’s Motion”, duet with Cecil Taylor

To be honest, I’ve never listened to this record in its entirety, so I can’t say too much about it.  I bought it a few years ago because I saw that the album closed with a duet between Tony Williams and Cecil Taylor, and that’s the track I’m listening to now.

I’m not sure how many Cecil Taylor records I’ve owned over the years.   I think the number is somewhere around….a lot.  Some of them ended up in the stacks that I would reluctantly swap for rent money, some were loaned to people who decided that they’d actually prefer to just keep them, and some were lost to the great Shelf Collapse/Coke Spill of ‘03 (Unit Structures promo…goodbye old friend), and while I’m just a fan and not by any means an expert, I can say that “Murphy’s Motion”, the aforementioned finale of The Joy of Flying, is one of my favorite Taylor tracks.

The piece is a little over eight minutes, the first few of which feature Taylor boldly claiming his ground, with Williams seeming to take his time, mulling over his own positions.  When they do finally meet up, what takes place is as close to a spirited agreement as it is to a boxing match. 

I have to assume that this piece makes the record worth owning, and at some point I may listen to the whole thing.  The inside jacket has a picture of Jan Hammer with the key-tar, so there’s that.

Third Ear Band  Alchemy

Happy MLK.  On this Monday I’m way into Third Ear Band’s Alchemy.  I actually woke up feeling like some straight-up prog (again), but this English band’s 1969 psych-folk-raga-chamber-medieval-drone killer has been on the turntable all day.