Dancing About Architecture 05.05.09
Posted by Ian Wright on 05.05.2009
Loads of Sonic Youth videos, an essay on Daniel Johnston, New Orleans and shit jobs, Wilco’s new record, ATP NY, Fork fest, R.E.M. reissues and more.
The bit at the start
The summer that I graduated from university I went to New Orleans on a J1 visa. 6 of us (though after I left the numbers swelled to up 13) lived in what was inaccurately described as a Double Shotgun Shack (from the outside it looked like one but it didn't fit the "you could shoot the back door from the front one" requirement) in the French Quarter about a block and a half off of Bourbon Street. The whole experience was a bit of a revelatory one for someone who, as it turns out, had up to that point led a far more sheltered life than he realised.
My first night in the city my housemates and I went looking for a place to play some pool in the neighbourhood and walked into a bar called "The Corner Pocket" assuming that there would be pool tables there. We were correct but the only problem was that there were dancing dudes with their dicks hanging out and swinging all over the place on top of them. After making a quick exit we found another place up the street and spent about 90 minutes playing pool and it wasn't until about the 75 minute mark when a 6'+ 300lb+ black woman pushed past me while saying "excuse me baby" in a really deep voice and went into the men's jacks that I twigged that it was a middle aged gay/tranny bar. I had even noticed the rainbow decorated pride march posters on the walls but had merely thought "oh that's very tolerant, New Orleans is really chilled out". The people I was with had copped to what was going on much earlier.
There was plenty of unusual things that I saw and that happened to me when I was there; mostly though I just spent my free evenings drinking in a bar on Toulouse St. called Molly's and trying to avoid getting scammed by the locals, be it at pool (even I knew enough not to ever bet on a game of pool with someone who brings their own cue to a bar) or just at life ("Hey man, I bet you $1 that I can tell you where you got yo' shoes." "OK, deal." "You got them on yo' feet." or "Hey man, I if you tell me your first name I bet I can spell your last name." "Okay, my first name is ..." "That's cool man, your last name is spelt 'y', 'o', 'u' ... ") but amongst the mundanity of drinking too much too often there were also the nights when I also found myself getting propositioned by very pushy wannabe Lana Lees who, along with a friend of hers offered to help "relax" me.
On another occasion I spent most of a morning in Jackson Square hiding from a plumber and playing chess with a homeless wino ex-con who, though he didn't remember me, had tried to serenade myself and a girl who I'd befriended in exchange for a couple of bucks as we were making our way back to mine in the middle of the night about 6 hours previously (he even shoehorned both our names into the song, seemingly everybody in that city who didn't work was working a hustle) and while telling me about jail he also mentioned that a woman had been shot in the face by her boyfriend in the square the previous week.
He didn't get any money for the song but he did for the chess games, the dude played trash-talking prison chess and if he was attacking my queen would say "motherfucker, I'm gonna get your bitch" and for that alone he deserved a couple of dollars.
But by far the oddest thing I experienced when in New Orleans was working as a waiter in The Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. The Bubba Gump Shrimp Company is a chain of Forrest Gump themed restaurants. Considering that this was 2002 and the film had been released 8 years previously I think you'll agree that the whole company was really capturing the zeitgeist like a motherfucker.
One of the first thing one does as a waiter at The Bubba Gump Shrimp company when one approaches a table for the first time is ask the customers if they have eaten there before. If they haven't you then explain to them how the sign in the middle of their table works, if they want a waiter to stop at their table they just have to flip over a sign that says "stop" (just like in the film) and the waiter will stop. Another thing to do during your first interaction with the customer is to ask them if they've ever seen the film. If they have then you try to make their dining experience a little more fun by asking them a trivia question about the film, there's a list of about 50 of them in the employee handbook. If they haven't then you try to resist the urge to scream "THEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN A FORREST GUMP THEMED RESTAURANT?" at them.
But the first thing, the very first thing that you do when you approach a table for the first time is greet the customers. But you don't say "Hi my name is [your name] and I'll be your server this evening," because that sounds too rehearsed. Instead you should say something like "Hi, how are you" because it seems natural. Being Irish I went with something that sounded natural for me to say, "Hey, how's it going?" It wasn't long before I was pulled aside by someone above me in the food chain and told "Ian, the line is 'Hi, how are you?'" Which brings me on to what I actually want to write about.
Like, I think, a lot of people I had my first experience of Daniel Johnston's music (as opposed to merely reading his name whenever there was an article about people that Kurt Cobain was a fan of) through Jeff Feuerzeig's excellent 2005 documentary about him. Shortly after seeing it I bought a couple of compilation albums of his songs and thanks to them I've developed a bit of a fandom for his work. The thing about it though is that in a lot of ways my view of and appreciation for his music was filtered through having first come across it via the film and I think that perhaps that's the same for a lot of people. Certainly many of what have become his best known songs in recent times fit nicely into the documentary's narrative; "Walking The Cow," a child-like love song with an absurdist lyrical refrain, "Devil Town", only a tortured mind could come up with an a capella song about vampires infesting a town and make it work, and then there's "Story Of An Artist", such a perfect summation of The Devil And Daniel Johnston that Feuerzeig used it in the opening sequence.
Another part of it, for me at least is that by listening to the songs as part of best-ofs (The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered which features one disc of originals and another of cover versions is a particularly good one) meant that I was missing out on hearing the songs within the context of the albums they originally appeared on and, to go back to something I wrote earlier, the compilers of those collections seem to only have chosen songs that fit into the common perception of Daniel Johnston's persona as that of a disturbed man-child innocent.
A few weeks back I was browsing the racks in Tower Records and found a couple of Johnston re-issues on vinyl (so that you can hear the tape hiss better than you would if you just got them on CD). Yip/Jump Music and Hi, How Are You (the one from the t-shirt) were written and recorded during a very productive 1983 which saw Johnston also release the More Songs Of Pain album. The most widely known songs from the two records would probably be "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances" and "Sorry Entertainer" from the former album and "Walking The Cow" from the latter and they're very much ones that conform to the stereotype that Johnston writes naive in tone, poorly recorded, simple songs.
But listening to these two albums I now realise that to think of his music in such terms does him a huge disservice. One of the things that always stuck with me from the film was a sequence where one of the interviewees claimed that if you listened to Johnston's music for long enough you eventually began to hear The Beatles, it's something that up till now I'd never been able to agree with. However listening to these albums and the accomplished and sophisticated second side of Hi, How Are You in particular I now see what was meant by that statement.
Beyond the way that he recorded his songs, beyond the way that he just had a knack for a tune, beyond his ability to shamelessly be truthful about himself in his lyrics, (beyond the palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard) the lesser known songs on that part of the album irrefutably demonstrate to me that Daniel Johnston is blessed with an artistic vision and musical ambition far beyond what I'd previously credited him with. Away from "the hits" there are musical sound collages, stuff that sounds like the soundtrack to 50's radio Sci-Fi serials, spoken word pieces and most impressively of all a couple of songs where Johnston overdubbed himself singing on top of old instrumental big band tunes (at least one of which and possibly both were by the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra), an audacious idea that he pulls off as easily as if he'd been there for the composition of the music. You don't get away with that sort of thing if you've only got a rudimentary idea of what you're doing.
Beg, borrow, buy, steal or download this album.
David Kitt – Small Moments
A lovely little lo-fi gem.
You news, you lose
Running out of ideas?
So we already knew that the forthcoming Wilco album would contain a song entitled "Wilco The Song" and that it's coming out in June on Nonesuch. Get this, it's going to be called Wilco (The Album).
Can somebody please buy Jeff Tweedy a joke book.
Tracklisting:
01 Wilco the Song
02 Deeper Down
03 One Wing
04 Bull Black Nova
05 You and I
06 You Never Know
07 Country Disappeared
08 Solitaire
09 I'll Fight
10 Sunny Feeling
11 Everlasting
Oh Shit, that sounds awesome.
This year's ATP New York takes place once again in Monticello, NY from September 11-13. Last week there were a number of performances announced for the Sunday (which is being curated by The Flaming Lips) which just about makes me want to puke with jealousy at the people who will get to be there. Boredoms will perform a 9 drummer BOREDRUM set in honour of the number that at the end of what year this is. Also No Age will perform a Husker Du covers set and Deerhoof will perform with visuals provided by Martha Colburn, who directed their video for "Wrong Time Capsule". Additionally Caribou's set is being dubbed as "Caribou Vibration Ensemble" which will see Dan Sanith joined by a horn section, a choir, 4 drummers (boy is he going to get shown up by Boredoms or what?) as well as Kieran Hebden, John Schmersal of Enon/Brainiac, Stones Throw artist Koushik, Kathryn Bint of One Little Plane, and Ahmed Gallab of Sinkane.
Oh, and Iron and Wine, Deerhunter, Boss Hog, Bridezilla, and Stardeath and White Dwarfs have all been added to the bill.
Fo' sho' Fork Fest.
The latest batch of names playing the Pitchfork Music Festical (yadda yadda yadda, Chicago's Union Park, July 17-19) are: Beirut, DOOM, Frightened Rabbit, Lindstrøm, DJ/Rupture, Ponytail, Mae Shi, Dianogah.
This means that the lineup now looks like this …
Friday, July 17
"Write the Night: Set Lists by Request"
Built to Spill
The Jesus Lizard
Yo La Tengo
Tortoise
Saturday, July 18
The National
Beirut *
DOOM *
Yeasayer
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Fucked Up
Plants and Animals
Matt and Kim
Lindstrøm *
Wavves
Ponytail *
Charles Hamilton
The Duchess and The Duke
Disappears*
Sunday, July 19
The Flaming Lips
Grizzly Bear
M83
The Walkmen
Pharoahe Monch
Blitzen Trapper
Frightened Rabbit *
The Mae Shi *
Black Lips
The Very Best
Mew
Vivian Girls
Japandroids
DJ/Rupture
Women
Dianogah *
* Just added
You Reckon?
R.E.M. are to follow up last year's reissue of debut album Murmur with a special super-dooper mega great reissue for 1984 sophmore effort Reckoning.
The reissue will be a 2 disc set with the second CD featuring a live recording from the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago on July 7 1984 which was originally broadcast on local radio station WXRT. The gig featured 8 songs from the album as well as older songs "Gardening at Night" from Chronic Town and "Radio Free Europe," "9-9" and "Sitting Still" from Murmur, and new songs "Driver 8" and "Hyena", which would eventaully appear on show up on Fables of the Reconstruction and Lifes Rich Pageant respectively.
As well as that for the vinyl geeks 180gm versions of the band's first 2 albums will also be released on July 23.
The YouTube video of the week
4 videos this week, all of Sonic Youth from last week's Jools Holland
What We Know:
Sacred Trickster:
Antenna:
Teenage Riot:
If you can you should go to these gigs.
Tortoise
05-29 Buffalo, NY - Tralf Music Hall
05-30 Brooklyn, NY - Bell House
05-31 New York, NY - World Financial Center Winter Garden
06-12 Athens, Greece - Synch Festival
07-11 Los Angeles, CA - Troubador
07-13 San Francisco, CA - Great American Music Hall
07-15 Austin, TX - The Mohawk
07-17 Chicago, IL - Pitchfork Music Festival ("Write the Night") *
07-19 Washington, DC - Black Cat
07-20 Philadelphia, PA - Sanctuary at First Unitarian Church
07-24 Tokyo, Japan - Fuji Rock Festival
* with Built to Spill, Yo La Tengo, the Jesus Lizard
Writing under the influence
Without which this column would not have been possible:
Talk Radio
Built To Spill – Keep It Like a Secret
The bit at the end
Right, I'm gone for another week, take care dudes.
Semi permanent plug for my blog. In the past week there was a load of video content put up including a great Clash cover by Bruce and the E-Streeter
