Are video games art?

Yes. Certainly they are.

But are they GOOD-worthy-of-being-taken-seriously art?

No. Not very often anyway.

This discussion was going on in a comment board I was reading and a video game guy defended video games from the charge of being "war porn" (because video games fetishize blowing shit up and discourage the player from criticizing violence) by arguing that the content of games wasn't the issue because, in his words, "Gaming is about gaming, not the story."

Exactly. And that is a good explanation of why the vast majority of video games are completely disqualified from being serious art. They may be clever ways to waste time. They may be great escapism. They may even help the use to develop cognitive or problem solving skills. They can be a fun hobby that allows you to interact with other people. (Like all hobbies and pop culture, games are a good ice breaker and a good way to develop casual friendships. The stereotype of the antisocial loner gamer is, in my experience, false.) But none of those things make something good art. If we do use the "art" standard to evaluate most games, they might be art, but they are dreadful art. Because the story generally doesn't stand up to much strutiny. Because that isn't why people play video games.

Most video games are indeed "about the gaming" and "not about the story." Certainly plenty of art is non representational or non narrative, so it's not that "story" needs to be an important concern of a work of art, but the idea that the plot doesn't matter kinda means you aren't dealing with art. "War Porn" is a pretty good term for what many of the most sophisticated games we've got these days are. It's fun to pretend to be a super soilder/secret agent/hitman/name your fantasy fighting dude character, but a narrative built around characters like that is going to have an awfully hard time passing the sniff test.

That doesn't make games "illegitimate." I have yet to read about a video game that has anything to say about the human condition that isn't recycled from either a really shitty sci-fi novel or a Micheal Bay movie. But so what? Everything doesn't have to be great art. I really liked the first Tranformers movie. It isn't serious art though. To borrow a metaphor from another post, I also enjoy masterbating from time to time. That isn't serious art either. Although I do tend to take it rather seriously at the time. . .

People into geek culture (I'm talking about people I know and about past versions of myself, not about some straw geek out there) have a tenancy to confuse "stuff I like" and "stuff that is cool" with "serious art." "Serious art" is evaluated by "serious art" criteria. You are free not agree with "serious art" criteria if you'd like, but don't be all insecure. The truth is that great art happens either because of the friction created by great artists or by folk traditions that allow for individuals to put their own stamp on archetypal tropes. Blockbuster big budget consumer culture DOES have elements of both of those things, but the ways that commercial pressures work in those kinds of media generally mean that seriousness is impossible. Hell, the GENRES that big budget pop culture productions like fancy video games have to work in make serious at really hard to come by. Face it, when you are doing something that involves pretending to blow up things with big ass guns, you might pick some kind of standard for us to talk other than "art." Unless you really enjoy looking silly.

Not saying video games are stupid. Not saying people shouldn't play them. Am saying you really shouldn't expect the rest of us to take them seriously. Not yet. There's no reason why a videogame couldn't be serious art. To my knowledge, it hasn't happened yet. There's lots of really fun, amazingly crafted stuff out there. But I'm not aware of a video game that has anything to say about aesthetics or about the human condition that's remotely valuable. But that's not really the point of a video game is it?

Just to clarify, when I say "serious," I don't mean "without humor" or "dramatic." I mean "worthy of critical scrutiny," "changes something about the way the viewer sees the world," and "overcomes the constraints of genre and convention." "Serious" art is worth considering no matter what. You often have to learn how to fully appreciate it. Even if your first encounter is engaging and fun and easy, you need to go back and see what's there. "Great art" is something that you engage in a life altering, serious way. You may not like some serious art, but if you grapple with it, it'll make you a better, more thoughtful person, even if you decide that it's a load of shit. There are handful of really exceptional videogames that do what they do so well that the player may be awestruck, but I know of no games that a non-gamer would have any reason to give a damn about.

Blah, blah blah. I'm done.

Vic Chesnutt, R.I.P.

I found out on Christmas Day that Vic Chenutt died. He had passed away a few hours before after lingering in the hospital for a few days after his latest suicide attempt. It was his fifth (I think) attempt at it. This one took.

Very very sad. He was a big deal to Georgia Music, and traces of him were all over a lot of music and a lot of local culture that I care about. He was one of our great poets and one of our great musicians. I just recently got around to listening to him though, which makes me feel pretty dumb for not paying more attention. I had started checking his website for tour info. I wanted to be extra sure to catch him the next time he came around, since his health hasn't been great.

His death is very sad, but also infuriating. Part of what was dragging him down during the last years of his life was the tremendous difficulty he had with the American health care system. He HAD insurance. He made a decent living. His family was over 70 grand in debt from his bills. His insurance had paid out over a hundred grand, but it wasn't enough. He needed a lot of little operations for the complications from his paralysis. The latest thing was a kidney stone operation. According to an interview I read recently, he couldn't get that operation. It meant that he might lose a kidney.

Since he tried to kill himself so many times during his life, it's hard to blame that stress for his death, but it couldn't have helped. It's overwhelming to think about.

Here's a link to where you can donate money to his family to help pay off that medical debt, and below is a link to some music.



http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/vic/


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV_5HtxV3H4

Music for the holidays

Travelin'. Shoppin'.

Bought this:



and this:





Rockin it.

Dave Grohl

It has again come to my attention that Dave Grohl is awesome. The fantastic Nirvana Reading show was released (long overdue) recently, and the Them Crooked Vultures album came out, making me remember "holy shit, that Dave Grohl knows just how to play the drums."

And there's Probot, which is just fantastic.

I like the Foo Fighters fine, but Dave's extracurricular activities are always much cooler than his main gig. Sorry Dave, but the Foo Fighters aren't as neat as hearing you play the drums alongside John Paul Jones. If Robert Plant would ever agree to it, I'd vote for a Led Zep reunion with Dave on the drums. I know, I know, Bonzo's kid is up to the task and the legacy thing and blah blah blah.

But you know good and well that hearing Led Zepplin with Dave Grohl on drums would be the coolest thing ever.

I read an interview with him today on my lunch break where he told a story about Bob Dylan talking to him backstage. Apparently Bob made Dave almost faint when he told him that he though that song that goes "promise not to stop when I say when" was a great song. As usual, Bob Dylan is right.

So in honor of Dave Grohl, here's perhaps his single greatest non-Nirvana accomplishment. It's pretty awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBG7P-K-r1Y

Damn thing won't let me embed the vid, but click the link. It's awesome stuff.

Just got Tom Wait's new live record. Amazing stuff. This s clip from the tour that the record comes from:

In regards to nothing in particular

Awesome Sauce

Vic Chesnutt

He's one of those artists who I've always been aware of and have known I'd love but haven't gotten around to. Like Pere Ubu. I know I'll love Pere Ubu when I get around to it.

Today Vic Chesnutt was on NPR and I "got around" to falling in love with him. This is my favorite song today:

MORE METAAAALLLLL

I was looking through my last post, and I saw that I mispelled "Pantera" as "Panera," which is really funny. In an totally unrelated Pantera note, I watched some old "Beavis and Butthead" episodes the other day, and there was a funny Pantera video. Beavis and Butthead looved Pantera. Beavis goes on a long riff about how "Pantera's dad must have really kicked his ass. . . DON'T TALK LIKE THAT TO YOUR SISTER PANTERA! TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE PANTERA!"

Mike Judge is a genius.

While I'm all full of metal, I thought I'd list my ten favorite favorite metal bands. I'm kinda thinking through my "metal triad" idea, and I thought it'd be fun. Also, lists are fun. Well, they are fun to make anyway. . .


1. Slayer- definately on the METAL part of the triad. In fact, they pretty much define the METAL part of the triad. Atonal, brutal thrash metal with lyrics about murder, war, and Satan. Intense enough to fool people who don't know better that it's death metal, but it really, really isn't. It's as dense and brutal as that, but not quite the same thing.

Slayer is kinda like blues. They do variations of the same thing every time, but they put enough new spin on it to make it new. And nobody has more raw brutality in their sound as Slayer. This is mostly because they have a really, really, great drummer (Dave Lombardo) who can accent a beat in ways that are uncomfortable and exciting instead of the typical Death Metal bludgeon fest.

Bludgioning is okay too, but it's less cool that what Dave Lombardo does.


2. Mastodon- Metal with punk sprinkles. Sludgy wads of racket mixed with proggy bombast. Bottomless waves of cool. And another GREAT Drummer. Braun Daillor seems to be playing drum rolls all the time, which is generally a stupid idea, but he's Braun Daillor, so it works fine.


3. Pig Destroyer- punk metal with METAL sprinkles. Imagine having someone drill a hole in the back of your head while they sexually molest you. That's kinda the effect these guys are going for. RAAAAAAAAAAOORODOOAOAOEODOOAOOEO!!!!!!!!!!!!

On a more serious note, the guitar dude from this band, Scott Hull, has several grindcore bands he's been associated with over the years, most of which have heavy "obvoxious prank" overtures, but this is his "serious band." It's pretty scary sounding stuff. Completely great. They don't tour much, as Scott Hull has a day job. I really wish they'd get out to Iowa.

4. Entombed- METAL with odd flirtations with everything you can imagine. Hyper influential Swedish Death Metal band that started when the dudes were teenagers and has gone on to a long, diverse career. Some of the detours they've made haven't really been particularly productive, but their best stuff is as good as it gets. Their first three records are as good as Metallica's first three records.

5. Emporer- METAL. Norweigan black metal at its best. Sounds like a jackhammer at first, but sounds like a symphony when you get used to it.

6. Meshuggah- METAL. Complicated experiements with time signatures with convoluted lyrics about humanity merging with technology played with the greatest possible brutality. "DETROY ERASE IMPROOVVEE!!!"

One of my intellectual interests is postmodern science studies. Meshuggah is kinda interested in the same things I am, but they yell a lot.

Also, they play detuned EIGHT STRING guitars. Roar.

7. Metallica- METAL with mainstream metal sprinkles- thrash metal that evolved into mainsteam metal/alternative rock. There first three albums are essential. After that, the records got spottier while they flirted with mainstream rock. I'm not in the "those fucker's sold out" camp actually. I think it's fine that they fooled around with alternative rock and classic rock since I get the idea that they sincerely like that stuff, and they had kinda defined a certain school of proggy thrash metal during the eighties. After you make "Master of Puppets," you gotta branch out. I'm really glad that they made "Death Magnetic" though. James Hetfield's vocal melodies are underrated, and the new record really shows off the best of the "more sophicated songwritery" side with some good old thrash metal kicks.

"Load" really is pretty bad though. I liked it when it came out for some reason. I do rather like "Until it Sleeps," although it's be better if Chris Cornell sang it.


8. Satyricon- METAL. Old school Norweigian black metal that evolved into a groovier mainsteam meatl band.


9. Cephalic Carnage- punk metal/ METAL- These guys are really, really brutal and heavy, but really, really funny. You can't ever tell what's serious and what's goofy, but it's all fun. And really, really heavy.


10. I'll save this spot for the progressive U.S. black metal underground. Wolves in the Throne Room, Xasthur, and Nachtmystium are pretty much where it's at right now. Really, really smart guys playing atmospheric, staticy music that is oddly pretty.

Wolves in the Throne Room have one of the more intelletent and serious takes on religion and neo-Paganism in metal. Lots of bands sing about that stuff, but these guys are worth taking a little more seriously. Their music is really pretty if you are used to black metal.

Metal RAAAAOOORRR!!!!

Went to see Mastodon, Dethklock, High on Fire, and Converge a couple of weeks ago in De Moines.

That's a pretty badass lineup. About as good as any I can think of. Until that Slayer/Meshuggah/Emporer/Gorgoroth/Dillinger Escape Plan tour gets off the ground I'll have to consider this a pretty ideal metal show. 'Bout as good as it gets in fact. For real ya'll.

Converge is a respected extreme hardcore/deathgrind (although people who are really into grindcore don't think so)/metalcore band who are on a hot streak right now. There new recored is the best reviewed album on metacritic right now. A great band. Basically a metal band playing hardcore punk and screaming through a distortion pedal. Takes skill to keep that interesting for an hour. They kept it interesting. Lots of neat texture, lots of gut level force, lots of energy.

They did THIS for an hour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utT0lLC6d5Q



High on Fire sounds like Motorhead wearing battle armor. Awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89h-X-tZa_w


Mastodon sounds like force of nature. It's so knarled and intricate, but the loud metal sludginess of it keeps you from being able to hear everything. And Braun Daillor makes the drums sound like they are exploding. A great, great band. You can certainly play "spot the influence" when their records (there's a dash of Iron Maiden there. . . a little Neorsis there. . . ) but nobody sounds like Mastodon. They really do sound like some kind of organic monster metal.

They played their new record (a concept album about Braun's sister's suicide, Bill's head injury, and Rasputin) straight through while they projected pictures of stars and monsters on a giant screen behind them. It was totally awe inspiring and oddly poigniant. I've been in the tank for those guys for a while now, but I'm pretty much a fanboy geek now. Godalmightydamn. They are something special.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKCnHLJDInE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKfDDzVgiXY


Dethklock was awesome and silly. We laughed, we yelled, we threw up Devil horns. They were sort of the headliners, but they were really more like dessert after the more substantial (if less accessable) band that came before them. They really are very good though. You want to see a really funny show from a really good death metal band, go see 'em.

Then we staggered outside and went and ate eggs. A great evening.




P.S. One of the funny things about metal is that it's all subgenre-ed up to the point where the vast majority of people who like extreme music are weirdly narrow minded.

Which lead me to my metal triangle theory. . . . . .

There's sort of three groups. There are the METAL genres (black metal, death metal, thrash, Doom Metal), the punk genres (grindcore, metalcore, extreme noise music, whatever Converge is, math metal), and the mainstream extreme metal (alternative metal, metalcore, power metal, melodic death metal).

People tend to gravitate toward one or two of those groups. Not all three. Most bands fit somewhere between two of those categories. A few bands do actually manage to be all three. Sepultura was an alt metal band with strong death metal roots and they played a lot of hardcore punk inspired music. But most metal fits them categories. Slayer is METAL. Mastodon is METAL with some punk sprinkles. High on Fire is METAL. Metalica is METAL with mainstream sprinkles. Naplam death is punk metal with METAL sprinkles. Pig Destoryer is punk metal, as are all of Scott Hull's bands. Trivium is mainstream extreme Metal. Underoath is mainstream extreme metal.

I'm METAL/punk guy. I like old school death metal, black metal, and extreme noise music. For the most part, I think metal that has mainstreamness is shitty. That doesn't mean metal can't have melody, but I like songs about Satan, Vikings, or sex criminals. I don't care about your problems with your parents or your girlfriend and I don't care about how tough you are. I really really don't. Some bands are good enough to transcend the category they fit in. Panera is pretty much mainstream extreme music with METAL sprinkles (alt-metal with thrashy guitar playing and more aggressive than usual singing), but they were very, very good. Not GREAT in my book, but they certainly were orinical, and nobody can begrudge Dimebag's guitar playing.

My preference for the more extreme end of the stick means that I don't really need a big metal collection to be happy. I've got a smattering of the classic Norweigian Black Metal records, so I don't need much more from that genre in my record collection. Although do I have completely unreasonable enthusiasm for the genre, so I'll pick up one every now and then when I'm in a decent record store. (re: when I'm in Atlanta or Lexington). I LOVE old school death metal, but really, how much does anybody need? I've got some Entombed records, some Celtic Frost, and a few complilations. That's about as much as any sane person needs.

And I LOVE that genre.

We won't even get into grindcore. If you've got "Scum" and an agraphobic Nosebleed record you've got the general idea.

And I really like grindcore.


The reason I'm on about this is that Mastodon and Dethklock attract a contingent of really hardcore METAL people who hated Converge and have managed to post lots of nasty comments all over the converge videos on youtube, which is mostly funny, actually, but it's odd. These people come to see a BAND THAT WAS CREATED TO PLAY THE SOUNDTRACK FOR A CARTOON and get all indignant about the "mainstream emo shit" that Converge (who are way over on the punk side of metal) played.

People I ask you, does this sound wimpy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIB9Cai5kZ4&feature=related

Now, for some poeple it'll sound annoying, but for the love of God, they're doing it AS HARD AS THEY CAN!!!!!!!!!

They can do it pretty hard by the way.

Of course, I would be writing bitchy comments all over the place if I had to sit through Trivium to see Slayer or somebody.

Check this out

I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say about this, but it's beyond awesome:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQGjkBuMGAU


Wait for Jerry Douglas's little solo. That's why he gets invited to play on EVERYTHING. That ole boy knows what to do with that dobro.

Well, I do have something semi-intelligent to say. . . I made a long post not long ago about Townes Van Zant and Steve Earle. Guy Clark hung around with them folks too, and he frequently plays Townes songs. Although his own songs are plenty amazing.

Seriously, though. Are there many songs out there that are better than this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwUpkEK6yk&feature=related

The Big Surprise

When I went home last time, I made an overnight stop in Nashville to see a show on the "Big Surprise" tour. The Felice Brothers, Old Crow Medicine Show, Justin Earle, and The David Rawlings Maching (David Rawlings and Gillian Welche, but with David as the frontman and Gillian as the backup singer).

The gimmick of the shows is that the bands played with each other frequently, and people were constants coming and going from the stage. "It's Justin Earle with the Old Crow Medicine Show. . . . is that a Felice Brother plugging his guitar in during the middle of the song. . . who's that guy. . . oh it's Benmont Tenche. . . holy shit, that's Benmont Tenche!"

It was pretty much 100% awesome, although the order the bands played didn't quite work for me. Old Crow was treated as the headliner, although they are probably my least favorite band on the bill (although I like them a lot. . . hell, I'd drive down to De Moines on a Monday night to see them). That made the last hour a little anticlimactice, but then there was an encore featuring EVEYBODY, which was completely awesome.

Great show. I recommend seeing any of those bands in any configuration.

While I'm thinking about it, Justin Earle is one of my favorite young performers, and he gets better all the time. I saw him in Macon a couple of years ago with just a vague idea of who he is. DAMN. I was pretty much blown away. His onstage presence is pretty much Hank Williams Sr. but with tats and a greaser hairdo. He's the real deal. He's not much like his dad in terms of what he sounds like, but he's got that same "thing" that great performers have. At the show I saw in Macon, he had the whole bar rocking, with people dancing and hollering like it was a punk show. And it was just a skinny dude with an acoustic guitar. Bad ass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjOkIlF_bGQ

Great Songs, pretty good record: Stupid song, great record

"One of These Days," and "Uncle Frank," both by Mike Cooley (of DBT). Phenomenal songs that I hadn't much paid attention to until recently, mostly because "Pizza Deliverance" was recorded before the Drive By Truckers really found themselves. I've got it and I've listened to it, but some of it doesn't connect in the way that their post "SRO" stuff does. When the band plays those songs NOW, they are AMAZING, but the versions on the record are just good. "One of These Days" contains some of those great Cooley lines that I can't help but share:

"Dropped out of school when he was just sixteen
fell right in to a tire plant
building the very things that make the asphalt sing
and put Alabama far behind you"

Here's another one:

"It's no wonder everybodie's scared of downtown Birmingham
it's just a little too close to home
But there's more crooks down here and the cops don't care,
while old white men wearing ties can do anything they want."

And another:

"One of these days when my face looks like a roadmap gonna find my way back home.
And i'll go walking on the west side after dark and leave my gun locked in my car.
One of these days you'll take one look at me and run. "

Mike Cooley is something else boy.

Luckily, "Uncle Frank" got rerecorded and released on "The Fine Print," so it's ready to appreciated for the masterpiece that it is. I think DBT needs to do a big live record someday so that we can hear the band as it is now play some of the early stuff. The astonishing versions of "The Living Bubba" and "18 Wheels of Love" on the Austin City Limits thing suggest that there are other songs would be well served by a little refurbishing.


AS I was considering this topic, it occured to me that many of the classic 50's rock and roll songs are kind of interesting in the light of my categories. Little Richard cut some undeniably great records that redefined popular music. Most of the songs he recorded are way beyond stupid.

Tutti Frutti, for example. It was originally a song about anal sex, and a pro songwriter came in and scribbled down some quick couplets to replace the original lyrics.

Here are some of the original the lyrics to Tutti Frutti:

"A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam!
Tutti Frutti, good booty
If it don’t fit, don’t force it
You can grease it, make it easy."

Here are the revised versions that are in the record:

"I got a gal named Daisy
She almost drives me crazy
I got a gal named Daisy
She almost drives me crazy
She knows how to love me, yes indeed
boy you don't know
What she do to me"

Not really up to Cooley's line about tires, but it's still a great record. There are a few good covers of it too.

And one truly god-awful one, which was actually a bigger hit than LR's version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvieb2OedWE


This shit is awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYHgbrUyirE&feature=related

Upcoming Posts

A lot running interest of mine is the difference between a great song and a great record.

Bob Dylan has written dozens of great songs. He's only made a few great records. (Although the majority of the records he's made are really good.) Some of his best songs are merely very good records: "If You See Her Say Hello" for example. This is no slight on Bob Dylan. His stuff is kind of "of the moment," if that makes any sense. His songs exist in performance. His very best performances are live. The Manchester Concert from 1966. . . the famous "JUDAS!" show. . . is undoubtedly the best Bob Dylan record ever. For years it was just a live bootleg. It was an accident of a particular time and place.

It's plenty hard to make a really good record. No shame in a forty plus year career filled with records that are mostly very good and a songbook waiting for others to mine. Garth Freakin' Brooks even got a hit out of an overlooked Bob Dylan song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkiD_vkXITE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqUFHEyu5hM&feature=fvw

(By the way, the guy playing the drums in that BD video later had a small part on "Home Improvement." He was the big guy with the crazy red beard who showed up on "Tool Time" occasionally and mugged while Tim Allen did dangerous nonsense. Ah, TGIF.)



Joy Division, on the other hand, wrote songs that were mostly just pretty good. By the standards of pop radio, they were pretty astounding, but that's not saying much. But they made records (and created live performances of the arrangments that are on those records) that can only be described in superlatives. Ian Curtis certainly had a way with a lyric, but most of his stuff kind of floats into the either. It's the tension between him and the rest of the band that makes it work. That's why Joy Division songs aren't covered very often. It's mostly a dumb idea. You can:

1. Do it real faithful but make it more aggressive or modern sounding. NIN did this with "Dead Souls." Worked out okay, and it was cool to get to hear the song more often, as NIN was more popular that JD back in the day that NIN was popular. But there's no reason to listen to that anymore. Techno artists like to cover Joy Division. It usually doesn't embarrass anybody, but it's not a good use of time.

2. Be New Order.

3. Do it acoustic. This means you are clearly an idiot. But knock yourself out. Idiot.

Seriously though. This shit is pointless:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIe3IgmdSlI&feature=fvw

Here, wash that stupid out of your head:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVEoNuEYgE&feature=related




In my world, the Clash made great records. Leonard Cohen writes great songs. Beach Boys: great records. Jimmy Rogers: great songs.

Of course there's pleny of overlap in my silly categories, and the two aren't really seperable. It's tough to make a great record out of a bad song (although Phil Spector did is many times), but it's easy to make a terrible record out of a great song. Leonard Cohen's version of "Tonight We'll Be Fine" is revolting unless you consider it to be a joke. I do think that in pop music, artists tend to lean one way or the other.

A few of the greatest of the great really can't be described in this way. Merle Haggard is one of America's greatest songwriters and his classic records are among the most well produced and perfectly considered pop recordings ever. The Beatles reinvented both the songwriting and record making wheels several times over, although I'm not the biggest Beatles fan. (That's a subject for another day.) Duke Ellington's compositions were meant for specific musicians to play. That's Jazz too, where composition and performance get blurrier.

Maybe breading it down my artist doesn't work that well. It's an interesting little excersize though. If you had to list the greatest SONGS in pop music history, that wouldn't be the same as the greatest RECORDS in pop music history.

Songs might include "Like a Rolling Stone," "Satisfaction," "Chealsea Hotel No.2," "Your Cheatin' Heart". . . .

Records might include "Strawberry Feilds Forever," "Lucille," "That's Allright," "Anarchy in the U.K.," "Love Will Tear Us Apart," "God Only Knows". . .

Anyway, an intersting topic. I'll keep considering it.

Jim Carroll Died

He sure did.

Seriously though, he was an accomplished artist who I haven't gotten around to exploring seriously yet. I mostly revere him for writing this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBbuPnfG0Vo

The Drive By Truckers often play it as an encore. They played it at the Macon show I saw last month. When somebody plays that song seriously it's an amazingly cathartic thing, as it was in Macon when Patterson started yelling and hollering about the people he had recently lost.

R.I.P. Jim Carroll.

DBT MUTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah baby.

It's been a few weeks since I've posted. Been busy. I said I was going to do some more DBT stuff. That is correct sir.

As I advertized, I was going to see the Drive By Truckers in Macon. I did. It was great. ANYONE reading this should make a habit of checking their website to find out the next opportunity they'll have to see them. I hate when people talk about pop music in term of "authenticity" and "realness," but there isn't really another way to really explain what's so great about DBT without resorting that. They are one of the very few real rock and roll bands around. I don't know what I mean by that, but if you get the chance to watch Mike Cooley make silly faces at people while playing guitar solos for three hours, you'll agree.

As I hoped, they were in better spirits this time around. They were awesome last time, but they seemed a little burned out. This show was a much looser, goofier. . . happier show. Shawna kept grinning and winking at the audience. Patterson kept laughing and waving his arms around. Cooley floated around with his eyes closed, except when he'd make an exaggerated "guitar face" and roll his eyes back in his head. They were obviously about half lit up on whiskey, but they never missed a cue, musical or emotional. I was standing two feet in front of Cooley and Shawna.

It was heavy on the more humorous side of the band, which showcased a part of the band's personality that some of the "Southern Rock Opera" worship can obscure sometimes. When it comes to black humor, these guys are in the same league as Warren Zevon/Frank Zappa (more on Warren Zevon later). They started the show with "Hell No I Ain't Happy," which pretty much set the tone for the night. The cool thing about DBT is that they have such a deep catalogue and such a wild onstage presence that you never quite know what you are going to get. They aren't exactly a different band every night, but depending on the mood of the crowd and the mood of the band, they can play a pretty different show for any occasion. In Macon we were drunk and weird. I was standing next to ANOTHER big ole dude with a shaved head and a black t-shirt. People kept asking if we were brothers. Where was I. . . . oh yeah. . . the neat thing is that they played a show without "Sinkhole," "Putting People on the Moon," "Two Daughters and a Wife," "Heathens," "The Living Bubba," or a bunch of other great stuff, but we didn't miss it. This show was catered to a particular vibe. It was sort of perfect, even if it wasn't the definitive DBT show. There is no such thing as the definitive DBT show. That's why DBT is so great. This show was very different from the more measured performance they gave on "Austin City Limits," but just as good (seriously). I'm not the first person to note this, but what they really need to do is to put out a serious of concert albums ala Pearl Jam or the Dead that document the band on different nights. Or a big live boxed set with good shows from different periods of the bands history. (It's been a long decade for these guys. . . they've been through three different periods already.)

High points. . . . a rocking version of "The Company I Keep" which evolved, as it always does, into a goofy singalong ("sometiiiiiimes I feeeeel like SHIT!! Sometiiiimes it ain't the half of it!"). . . . "Dead Drunk and Naked" because that three chord riff gave us all a chance to headbang. . . "People who Died" because it's fast and morbid.

Alright then. . . that's enough of that. . .

In other DBT news, they put out a new record the other day. It's an odds and sods compiliation called "The Fine Print," and it'll end up being my favorite record of the year. Like most albums of this nature, it's got a couple of songs that wouldn't make the cut normally, but UNlike mose albums of this sort, most of it is fantastic. There are several songs that are as good as anything that DBT has ever done, like "Talking George Jones Cell Phone Blues" (which is what it sounds like, except it's a country rock song and not a talking blues song) and "When the Well Runs Dry" (one of Isbell's meditations about the performer's life. . .oh yeah, most of this stuff dates back to when he was in the band. . . this is mostly the "Dirty South" DBT), there are several GREAT covers which were done for various compilations or tribute albums, including a version of Warren Zevon's "Play it All Night Long" that songs pretty much like a song from "Southern Rock Opera" (and which includes Patterson yelling "SWEAT, PISS, JIZZ, BLOOD!!!) and a version of Tom Petty's "Rebels" that is waaay better than the original (which I have always actually liked, even it Tom Petty overproduced it. . . by the way, Tom Petty was working on that song when he got frustrated, punched a wall, and broke his hand so bad he almost lost the ability to play the guitar. . . don't do cocaine kids). Of course it also includes "Mrs. Klaus's Kimono," a weird novelty song about killing Santa Claus. It has lyrics about Santa having sex with a reindeer. It's nice to have it around, but it's not hard to figure why they hadn't released it yet.

Best song is Mike Cooley's "Great Big Horse," which is seems like something left over from "The Basement Tapes." It's a beautiful little song that was apparently inspired by a dirty joke. Figures.

Check this shit out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLP_r7NZY_w



And this is from the actual show! I was watching this from the bar. Capital needs to get more bartenders. This actually a pretty fun moment. Patterson is messing the crowd to see if he's gonna be able to do any softer stuff. Nope. Yeah, we got that he was ribbing us. That's Tift Merrit playing guitar. That's Jack Daniels in the bottle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7zE3vICYY


I don't remember this at all. Beer memory. Capricorn Record's offices are down the street from where Patterson is standing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xp3cqDCnfY&feature=related



And here's the end of the encore:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF5nY_pC8c0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj8YxEqnGWM&feature=related


There are two big dudes who look like boulders jumping around in front of Cooley. I'm the littler one with glasses. That's David Barbe playing Bass. His band played down the street after the show and all the DBT went down. I got to meet them down there.


This is very unlike what they did in Macon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5OiZ9C8zU&feature=related



That's enough DBT posting for a while. I think I'll write something about horror movies next.

Or about the "Big Surprise" show I saw in Nashville.

Steve Earle is Awesome

I'll get back to that DBT thing before long, but I need to do a little Steve Earle posting first. Me and the Davis saw him in De Moines the other day.

By the way, I can't imagine a cooler idea than a Patterson Hood produced Steve Earle record with the Drive By Truckers as his backup band. They've done that before, for Bettye Lavette and Booker T. Jones. And can you imaging a DBT/Steve Earle tour? Holy God. That'd be the coolest thing ever. Steve's AA sponsor might not approve though.

First a little background for those who don't know who Steve Earle is. Steve Earle is a really big deal. He's widely considered on of the fathers of "alt-country" and of the whole indie roots rock thing, and his legacy as a songwriter makes him a towering figure. For some people, he's like Bob Dylan or Townes Van Zandt (whose name will come up a lot in this post). Because he's an ornery left wing agitator, other people consider him a huge pain in the ass, which is okay by him.

Steve began his career as a kid in the seventies. He was basically a folk singer who was a part of the Townes Van Zandt "cult," and he established a career as a somewhat successful professinal songwriter and a less successful performer. Mostly, he was woodshedding, learning his shit and wracking up experience. After a few false starts (including a shitty neo-rockabiliy album), his career got going in earnest with 1986's "Guitar Town," a a modest hit which is now considered a classic. Steve was kind of a cross between Dwight Yolkham and John Mellencamp: twangy, country-flavored rock music with a strong populist streak. He kept this up for a couple of albums, and then on "Copperhead Road," he upped the rock quotient in his writing and had a big crossover hit, mostly thanks to the song "Copperhead Road," a big ol' badass redneck rock song with some seriously smart lyrics about a Vietnam vet who decides to follow in his grandad's moonshiner footsteps by growing pot for a living.

Guitar town:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytHMQyJfVfg

Copperhead Road:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc86_Weoye0


Then things got ugly. Earle's slowly deepening dependency on drugs got really bad, and he slipped into being a semi-homeless junkie before finally getting sentenced to a year in a rehab facility.

Don't do heroin kids.

He got so messed up that people pretty much expected him to die. He was so bad off that he got a couple of intervention-type lectures from Townes Van Zandt, who at that time was deeply involved with drinking himself to death. When Townes Van Zandt is worried about your health, you are in trouble.

Not all was a waste during this period though. He did write one classic song that showed some real growth under all the fucked-up-ness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBtQcZx9gAo

Incarceration cleaned him up, when he got out he mounted a hugely artistically successful comeback that produece five classic albums that made him a cult favorite. His rep these days is pretty unassailable. His music also got a lot more diverse. He went deeper into hard rock and even punk rock, he also played more straight-up country and folk music, and he made a couple of bluegrass records. During the 2000's, he's gotten increasingly political (which has made some of his recent albums a little strident, even if he was mostly right about how bad the Bush administration sucked). He really got in hot water when he wrote a song about John Walker Lindh.

Here he is kickin ass in 1996 (BTW, MTV has really fallen in recent years. I can't imaging this being on MTV now):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhj5Y4gG1Ss

A sample of Steve in Irish folk mode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-PM_4aeE4


So that's who he is. . . . .

The show we saw was great, not only because it's Steve Fuckin' Earle, but because he's touring behind "Townes," his new record which is, for my money, the best thing he's done in ten years. Townes Van Zandt was one of the greatest country/folk songwriters ever. He was a seriously troubled guy who suffered from mental illenss (his teenaged years were defined by a disasterous enoucnter with electroshock therapy) and addiction, and his various problems meant he wasn't really willing or able to craft a successful career. He spent most of his life as an obscure cult figure, and only after Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard made "Pancho and Lefty" into a big hit did people start seeking him out. He died in his early fifties from a heart attack brought on by a life as a alcoholic. During the last few years of his life, his guitar playing suffered from the nerve damage that achohol had done. That's pretty bad, dude.

The show Steve Earle played in De Moines was in part a tribute to Townes, who was a friend and mentor, and this focus encouraged him to revisit some of the darker episodes in his own life. Before he went through rehab, Steve Earle looked to be on the road to being another Townes Van Zandt, but with faster and with heroin.

The show was an acoustic solo show, but Steve managed to kick it off with a bang. He took the stage and immediately dove headfirst into an intense version of "Where I Lead Me," followed by "Colorado Girl," followed by a bunch of other Townes Van Zandt songs (including, yes, "Pancho and Lefty"). He was in really great form, and his intense delivery and rapid fire approach was overwhelming. His last tour, in support of the relatively upbeat "Washington Square Serenade" (Steve's first album after moving to New York and getting married), got good notices, but the somewhat lighter tone of those shows didn't overwhelm people. (That tour was also marred by some semi-successful experements with a DJ and samplers.) This was something else. It was intense and dark. You don't expect folk music to feel like that.

After about half an hour of heart in the throat intensity, he backed off a little and the show started getting more diverse and more Steve Earle songs crept in. It was just a really good Steve Earle show, with folk songs, political songs, and personal songs mixed and mingled, and lots of stories and political ranting serving to connect things together. Steve stopped touring with a band a couple of years ago. I'd say he's gotten the hang of it.

The most interesting thing about this particular show was the way that Steve has managed to reconnect some of the different parts of his career. By focusing on Townes' life as an outisider and his own past problems, the set managed to connect Steve's political work to a broader interest in anyone who is marginalized. You might say that Townes and Steve brought there troubles on themselves, but Steve does a good job of pointing out that life in the gutter is something that can happen when you chose to opt out of mainstream society. Not that he'd endorse the life he led, but there is a connection between Steve's principles and his painful past.

A couple of moments deserve special attention. As I've said, this show started off pretty dark. One particular harrowing moment was Steve's telling a story about one of Townes' efforts at intervention. Steve gets home and Townes' truck is in his driveway. Steve finds Townes on the couch and Townes comments that Steve looks "like shit." Steve agrees. Then he comments that "your arms look like shit." Steve agrees. Then he asks if he uses clean needles. Steve claims he does. "Every time?" "Yep." "Okay then, I want you to hear this new song I wrote."

And then Steve procedes to play THIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feM4QT9_AmM

(That vid appears to be from the same tour, so you can kinda get a feel for what the setup was like.)

The other moment was the performance of "Fort Worth Blues." "FWB" is a Steve Earle song written a couple of years after Townes' death about Townes. When Steve wrote it, his son Justin was dealing with the kind of trouble that Steve and Townes had been through, and you have to think it was on his mind. In any event, its a beautiful song, and hearing it in this context made it more so. I like the line "you always said the highway was your home/but we both know that that ain't true." I also like the way the lyrics shift from second to first person in the last verse. It's like Steve is moving from a memory to the present, and the way the lyrics of the last verse echo some of the lyrics in earlier verses really connect the "I" to the departed "you."

This clip is an especially great performance of the song from a television show. It's kinda neat because you can see everybody's trying not to loose their shit. Seeing Steve Earle singing his song makes people loose their shit. There's a famous clip of Steve Earle playing this on "Austin City Limits," and Nancy Griffith is sitting next to him crying her eyes out. The poor guy at 5:10 almost makes it, but not quite. . . . The kid with the funny hat at 4:40 is Justin Earle. Actually, his full name is Justin Townes Earle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMknbUBLu5E&feature=PlayList&p=BED976106B2BC81A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=20


And just to screw up that perfect ending to this post, here's the Austin City Limits clip I referred to in the last paragraph:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4WOys7sWvU

Last DBT post for today

Having a little series on one topic is fun. I'm new at blogging, and this seems to be getting me going a little. . .

I'll do some more of these song things 'till I feel like I'm getting redundant. I want to talk about "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife." If you're familiar with that song and don't know what it's about, you'll be heartbroken when you hear the story behind the song. You might not want to hear the song again for a while. It's just one of those awful things.

In the meantime, here's a clip somebody recorded of the last DBT show I was at. I was standing just to the left of where the camera is. One of the cool things about DBT is that they are big enough to get written about in the national press and do television every once and a while, but you can still see them at venues where you can get three feet away (if you're willing to get there 20 min before showtime to claim a spot).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHrdGnqGWKo

Remember, this was them on a somewhat off night when they were kinda tired.

That reminds me, do not see them without earplugs.

John Neff looks like he's doing homework back there at that steel guitar.

DBT Lyrics project no. 2

This is fun, so I'll do some more.

This is my analysis of Patterson's "Let There be Rock," a key track from "Southern Rock Opera." As always, my comments are in brackets:

Dropped acid, Blue Oyster Cult concert, fourteen years old,
And I thought them lasers were a spider chasing me.
On my way home, got pulled over in Rogersville Alabama, with a half-ounce of weed and a case of Sterling Big Mouth.
My buddy Gene was driving, he just barely turned sixteen.
And I'd like to say I'm sorry, but we lived to tell about it
And we lived to do a whole lot more crazy, stupid shit.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet
With 38 Special and the Johnny Van Zant Band.

[This song is impossible to talk about without talking about the album is comes from. "Southern Rock Opera" was DBT's breakthrough, both commercially and artistically. Before "Southern Rock Opera," DBT was basically a local alt-country band, although they toured all over the place. They played drunken, stumbling electric country music with weirdly morbid lyrics. An intriguing group with a few great songs ("The Living Bubba" and "The Night G.G. Alin Came to Town" which are flat out great, are from this period), but not a first tier band. A great little group that could deliver onstage, but not the kind of band you'd devote a lot of time thinking about. They were clearly a group with "potential."

"Southern Rock Opera" changed all that. It's worth explaining that the record was mostly recorded live, and the band actually had to go out and raise money from investors to make the damn thing. They also had to recruit more musicians to play on the damn thing, seeing as how a concept record about Lynyrd Skynyrd really needed female backup singers on some tracks, and seeing as how it would just be fucking lame to do it without three guitars. This extra guitar slot eventually became the reason they recruited a chubby 23 year old named Jason Isbell to join the touring band. Turned out he could sing and write songs pretty good too. Jason lost weight from smoking cigarettes and rocking out, got a better haircut, and became a star in his own right. Although he can sometimes look a little world weary these days. Drinking a fifth of whiskey onstage everynight for five years will do that to you.

"Southern Rock Opera," despite sounding like a coked-up Skynyrd demo tape, is in many ways a punk record. Homegrown and independent. When they released it, it got the band unprecedented attention and led to their getting a record deal. (Actually, their first record deal fell apart, but they ened up on the estemable New West records where they still are.) But more importantly, it redefined what the band sounded like. Instead of playing slightly kitchy country music, they invented a super heavy duty crunchy guitar roar. This incarnation of the DBT essentially sounded like a cross between Lynyrd Skynyrd and the early Replacements. It doesn't make sense on paper, but it sounds perfect. This record also marks Cooley's debut as a mature songwriter. Several of the best songs on the record are his, including "Zip City," "Shut Your Mouth and Get Your Ass on the Plane" (which includes the great line "the price of being sober's being scared out of your mind"), and "Women without Whiskey."

"Southern Rock Opera" is a concept album about Patterson's relationship to rock music and to Alabama. There are reflections about Southern racism, about Lynyrd Skynyrd, about the costs of living the rock star life, and about the sometimes painful class issues of the South. "Let There Be Rock" is in many ways the central song on the album. Patterson celebrates fucking up and rocking out. "But I lived to tell about it," seems like the moral of the story, except that it isn't. HE might have lived to tell about it, but lots of people DON'T live to tell about it. "Southern Rock Opera" is haunted by dead people. The first song is actually about kids dying in a car crash.]

One night when I was seventeen, I drank a fifth of vodka, on an empty stomach, then drove over to a friend's house. And I backed my car between his parent's Cadillacs without a scratch.
Then crawled to the back door and slithered threw the key hole, and sneaked up the stares
And puked in the toilet.
I passed out and nearly drowned but his sister, DD, pulled me out.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet
And the band that I was in played "The Boy's are Back in Town."

[Drunken bravado. Drinking a fifth of Vodka is a bad idea. I should know. But part of the point of doing "crazy stupid shit" like that is to accumulate stories to tell about what you did. You unscrew that plastic cap, toss it off the end of the porch, and act like an asshole. Then you get really sick. These stories are really kind of humiliating, but we keep telling them. Patterson passed out with his head in a toilet after drinking a fifth of vodka. One time I passed out in the passenger seat of my car after puking the better part of a fifth of whiskey all in the window. I think this is funnier than my wife, who was behind the wheel, does. I sincerely hope I'm old enough not to do shit like that anymore.

These dumbass things that we do, for whatever reason, are key to the whole rock and roll experience. We want rock stars to live it up, to be a traveling party. We want that escape from common sense and responsibility. We pay our money down and let them lead us away from the responsibilities of real life for a while. Elsewhere on "Southern Rock Opera" Patterson points out this this image of rock and roll is mistaken. You have to work fucking hard to be any good at rock and roll, and if you are lucky enough to live out your rock and roll fantasy, actually living in a cocaine and whiskey saturated bubble really sucks. As Mike Cooley wrote elsewhere, "Rock and Roll means well, but it can't help telling ya'll boys lies."]


Skynyrd was set to play Huntsville, Alabama, in the spring of 77, I had a ticket but it got cancelled.
So, the show, it was rescheduled for the Street Survivors Tour.
And the rest, as they say, is history.

So I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Rhoads in 82
Right before that plane crash.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw AC/DC
With Bon Scott singing, Let There Be Rock Tour.

With Bon Scott singing, LET THERE BE ROCK!

[Bon Scott, or course, died in what might be described as a drinking related accident, and the plan crash that Randi Rhoads died in was completely avoidable. A friend of the band was flying a small plane up and down over the top of a moving tour bus, playing a game. The plane crashed and killed Randi Rhaods, who was a serious and sober young man, instantly.

This is a particularly strange way to end the song. Two completely stupid deaths that we can chalk up to "rock and roll living," and we are supposed to chant along "Let There Be Rock!" Patterson is, in some weird way, honoring these guys for being martyrs. However stupid all this is, for some reason we need it, and these legendary musicians lost their lives to it. The more earthbound albums DBT has made since "Southern Rock Opera" are in many ways about trying to reconcile all the contradictions in this song. In one song Cooley's singing about saving himself by getting married and getting off the road, but three songs later he says "I might have slipped the ring on your finger from a van as it drove away." (Come to think of it, that song refers to Lynyrd Skynyrd too. The refrain is "Lawd knows I can't change/ sounds better in the song than it does with hell to pay." "The song" in question is, of course, "Freebird.")

In many ways, "Southern Rock Opera" fits squarely into the tradition of several great "classis rock" albums. Van Morrison's "Atral Weeks" is also about nostalgia for youthful freedom and sadness for it's consequences. Van end the record on the note of "now I have to say goodbye and move on." Bruce Springsteens breackthrough records "The Wild The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle" and "Born to Run" are pretty much different treatments of these same themes. This "classic rock" thing is probably deliberate, as part of what "Southern Rock Opera" is about is Patterson's struggle to reconcile the music of the "parking lot" in Alabama with his experience as an outsider. It took him a long time to coming around to appreciating Lynyrd Skynyrd.

We need this youthful bravado, but you really can't base your life on that stuff. "Southern Rock Opera" ends with a song about a plane crash, the fantastic "Angels and Fucelage." "I'm scared shitless for what's coming next," Patterson sings as he imagines his plane crashing into the swamp.

Last time I saw DBT, they were clearly a bit tired of the big rock show thing. This was just before Jason Isbell left, and from the hints we've gotton of the story, there was some real tension within the band. They had also just come of opening for the Black Crows in a serious of big stadium shows. It was still a great show, but there were stretches when they were clearly plowing through the songs, searching for momentum. They found that momentum for several amazing stretches (by any reasonable standard it was a great show, although not one of DBT's best. . . . a mediocre DBT show is fantastic), but you felt a little fatigue. At the end of the last encore, they played a hair raisng version of "Angels and Fucelage" then ended with massive bursts of feedback. The band left their guitars up against the amps when they took their bow and walked off the stage. Perhaps not the happiest statement, but oddly perfect.]

As a part of my ongoing DBT kick, I want to talk about one of Cooley's best songs. This one's called "Zip City." Below are the lyrics with my commentary. My comments are in brackets:

Your Daddy was mad as hell
He was mad at me and you
As he tied that chain to the front of my car and pulled me out of that ditch that we slid into
Don't know what his problem is
Why he keeps dragging you away
Don't know why I put up with this shit
When you don't put out and Zip City's so far away

[This is a perfect job of capturing the character's voice. This is just what a horny 17 year old would say about his girlfriend's dad. "Don't know what his problem is. . . Don't know why I put with this shit." Great stuff. This kid is kind of a punk, but he's funny. And the parallel between "dragging you away" and pulling the car out of the ditch is great, as is the detail of the car BEING in a ditch. If you grew up in the rural South, you know what that's all about. There are at least two other DBT songs that describe cars in ditches.]

Your Daddy is a deacon down at the Salem Church of Christ
And He makes good money as long as Reynolds Wrap keeps everything wrapped up tight
Your Mama's as good a wife and Mama as she can be
And your Sister's puttin' that sweet stuff on everybody in town but me
Your Brother was the first-born, got ten fingers and ten toes
And it's a damn good thing cause He needs all twenty to keep the closet door closed

[He's not just pissed cause he's not getting laid, but because of the hypocrisy of the "fine upstanding family" that's standing between him getting some action. The last line of this verse is halarious.]


Maybe it's the twenty-six mile drive from Zip City to Colbert Heights
Keeps my mind clean
Gets me through the night
Maybe you're just a destination, a place for me to go
A way to keep from having to deal with my seventeen-year-old mind all alone
Keep your drawers on, girl, it ain't worth the fight
By the time you drop them I'll be gone
And you'll be right where they fall the rest of your life

[He's still kind of a dick, but he's getting more interesting by the minute. There's some genuine angst here. His sexual frustrations are just a part of the problem here. There's a class thing going on here too. The town names say it all. It's not as much fun to grow up in Zip City as in Colbert Heights and this kid wants out. His girlfriend's refusal to get horizontal is just a part of a larger tension between her wanting to play it safe and be a good girl and her boyfriend's being pissed off at the world around him. That doesn't excuse his sexual put downs, but he's a dumb kid. He's not stupid, but he's still kinda dumb.]

You say you're tired of me taking you for granted
Waiting' up till the last minute to call you up and see what you want to do
Well you're only fifteen, girl, you ain't got no secretary
And "for granted" is a mighty big word for a country girl like you
You know it's just your Daddy talking
Cause He knows that blood red carpet at the Salem Church of Christ
Ain't gonna ever see no wedding between me and you

[Now he's being a little mean. And finding out about the age difference her makes him a bit less sympathetic. 17 can be a long way from 15. But again, we get those little hints that there's a bigger anger that has more to do with social class than with just sex. She's a good girl, and that pisses him off for reasons that are bigger and more important that the fact that she won't take her pants off for him. Of course, his trouble is that he doesn't really have the means to articulate all that. What he knows for sure that she's not putting out and her Daddy's a pain in the ass. He feels like there's something more serious than that going on, but he can't put it all together. It almost seems like fucking her would be a way to get even. If he can't do that, he'll try to hurt her by breaking up with her. He's not a nice kid, but you sympathize with him.]

Zip City it's a good thing that they built a wall around you
Zip up to Tennessee then zip back down to Alabama
I got 350 heads on a 305 engine
I get ten miles to the gallon
I ain't got no good intentions

[Great last verse. He's got a jazzed up car and he lives on the state line. He's out of here.

If he doesn't run out of gas first. That's a distinct possibility.

If you look up Zip City on a map, you'll find that it's a real place. It's an unincorporated town near the Tennessee Alabama border (just where Cooley says it is). It's a community that doesn't enjoy the respect of being "official." It's the perfect place for the kid in the song, who's a disreputable neither-here-nor-there guy to live. He's always driving around and seething.

In the notes Patterson wrote for the album, he insists that this song is mostly true. Cooley's songs always turn out to be autobiographical, and Patterson's always the one explaining them. That pretty much exemplifies their roles in the band. Cooley's got real depths, but he plays it cool. Meanwhile Patterson's waving his arms around and yelling about his family stories.]

I'm all abuzz because I'm going to see the Drive By Truckers in a Month.

Of course tonight I'm going to see Grant Hart (formerly of Husker Du), which is also kind of a big deal to me, and in a couple of weeks I'm going to see Steve Earle, who's one of my all time heroes.

All in all it's been a pretty good summer. As cool as my musical experiences have been this summer (including seeing an awe inspiring Jonathan Richman show and finally getting to see Public Enemy live), I'm most jazzed about the DTB show. Nobody commands a stage like the mighty DBT.

Seeing a great band a great moment in their career is always the best time to see them. DBT has been on an amazing streak for some time (since 2001, they've released 5 records, all of them great) , but they've recently been through a slight reinvention. When Jason Isbell left a couple of years ago (and took some of the Trucker's best known songs with him), they used to change as an opportunity to rethink the "bigges, baddest, loudest mutherfucking band on the planet" approach they'd been using since Southern Rock Opera in favor of a more varied approach that is informed by soul music (Pattersoh Hood is from Muscle Shoals and his dad played bass there) and country music. The stuff they've done since Isbell left has almost miraculously been the best of their career.

I'm a big fan of Ibell's solo records, and an even bigger fan of Isbell's live show. I think this was a case of peope just needing their own space. Isbell took his loud ass guitar and started his own party, and everybody discovered that they suddenly had a lot more room to breathe. I'll keep seeing Ibell and the DBT whenever I can.


As a way to gush about how great the truckers are, I'll write a little review of their most recent release, the "Live at Austin City Limits" CD/DVD set and throw in a few links to videos. . . .

This performance is a pretty great way to get introduced, or re-introduced, to the the Drive By Truckers. Because of their somewhat goofy name and somewhat scraggly appearance, these guys (and girl) don't seem like they'd be capable of the kind of subtle, literary performances that they are. While their reputation for giving pedal to the metal, rocked out, drunk ass performances has endeared them to their fans (me included), people forget that these guys are the among the greatest songwriters in rock music. They've been compared to Flannery O'Connor more than once, and while I'm not sure that fits (The Handsome Family are the musical heirs to Flannery, if anybody is.), that oughta tell you something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FthiOls0w4I

As if to make the point, they start the set with a couple of Mike Cooley's cleverest songs, "Perfect Timing" and "A Ghost to Most" (interrupted by Patterson Hood's almost equally brilliant "Heathens.") The first lines Cooley sings during the show "There I am again/ perfect timing/ the strings are ringing and the words are rhyming/ I used to hate the fool in me, but only in the morning/ now I tolerate him all day long," pretty much sums up a lot of what's special about the Trucker's songs. It's a song about growing into wisdom-- Cooley's essentially saying "I used to be a fuck up, but I've learned to have the patience to be a grown up." There's a little tinge of disappointment there, but a lot of pride. It's a wry, comfortable sentiment that's a lot more substantial and hard won than it first appears. Later Cooley sings "I though I was too cool to give a damn."

So far I've written a whole paragraph and I'm a few seconds into the album. . . .

We'll pick up the pace a bit. . . come to think of it, "picking up the pace a bit" is pretty much what DBT does throughout the show, which is why it's a great show. Condensing the unweildy marathons that the Truckers routinely deliver onstage into an 80 minute show required the band to be really smart about how they did their business. They start with some clever alt country tunes and gradually inject more and more rock until Patterson Hood is screaming like a crazy man and the band is in full roar. It doesn't have the woolly unpredicatbility or the sing along atmosphere of the band in a regular concert setting where Patterson can decide to play the second half of "Southern Rock Opera" as an encore, but it does provide a better paced, tighter show that throws into sharp releif all the different things that the band does so well. All killer no filler.

A couple of moments deserve special attention:

The "Puttin' People on the Moon"/ "Space City" sequence is brilliant. "Puttin' People on The Moon," one of Patterson's angriest songs, is about the underclass in Alabama who live within driving distance of the big NASA facility in Huntsville. They spend billions to shoot rockets into space while people in the next county deal drugs because they can't get jobs and die of cancer because they can't get health insurance. "Space City" (one of Cooley's) is a sadder, more reflective meditation on mortality and rockets. Cooley's narrator complains about how empty his house has become since his wife died, and he thinks that it's ironic that only an hour down the road is a place that's as close to heaven as anybody could ever get. Where Patterson is bitter and accusatory ("And all the politicians, they're all lyin' sacks of shit!"), Cooley thinks about his own shortcomings ("I'm not ashamed of anything these hands have ever done, but sometimes my words were as hard as my fists"). Playing them back to back give them all kinds of interesting thematic ressonance that they wouldn't have othewise. A real highpoint. And the quiet stoicism of Cooley's song really makes its point after watching Patterson scream for five minutes. It's like watching debris float down after an explosion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEZ-bIfeM4E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAVK7eqlm8o

Another high point is a staggering version "The Living Bubba." Probably the first really good DBT song, "The Living Bubba" is an amazing statement of perseverance. It's about Gregory Dean Smalley, and important mentor for Patterson. Smalley died of AIDS in the mid ninties, and in the year before he died, he played over 100 shows. The point of this song is basically "Fuck death." The grungy ambiance of the original record is here replaced by the more nuanced approach of a more seasoned band, but the song still builds to a climax where Patterson is basially yelling at the top of his lungs. Best lines: "I got no message for the youth of America/ except wear a rubber/ and be careful who you screw/ I can't die now/ cause I got another show to do." Great stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INHrzNtzTi4

I'd write something about the amazing eleven minute version of "Eighteen Wheels of Love," but you have to hear it yourself. Its the story of Patterson's Mom and her second husband, "the biggest meanest trucker" who checked in at the truck stop where she worked. (Nobody's posted a vid of the "Austin City Limits" version, which is the money shot. Sorry.)

In any event, this is about as good as an 80 minute live document of the DBT could be. Because they are "on the clock" here, they don't stretch out to reveal all of their idiosyncratic glories, but as a concise statement of what they are and what they can do, this is about perfect. There are quite a few iconic songs that aren't here, including "Sinkhole" (which is THE DBT song for a lot of people), "The Man I Shot," "Carl Perkin's Cadallac," "Three Alabama Icons," and "Sounds Better in the Song," but the tradeoff is that we get a brilliantly programmed set that flows almost perfectly. This isn't quite the definitive live DBT album, but it's a triumph just the same.

I'm looking forward to seeing them live again. I've seen them a couple of times, and they were amazing. From watching this DVD, it appears they've only gotten better.

Bon Jovi

The original:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyqeWtxGbls&feature=related

and the cover version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zGYASktc7k&feature=related

FAIL.


Know your limits John. For the love of God. I know you're from New Jersey, but please. Bruce can get away with this, but you're not Bruce. I wonder how many people in the audience know who Tom Waits is.

Here's something to get that out of your system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkUFzkYybKo&feature=related

I saw a great show last night. Jonathan Richman in a small club in De Moines. Amaaaaazing stuff. I've been aware of him for years, but hadn't "gotten around" to getting any of his records. That's just how it is sometimes, I suppose.

If you don't know who he is, he's probably most famous (outside of the music geek world) as the guy playing the musical interludes during the movie "There's Something About Mary," but he's a much bigger deal than being "the guy playing the guitar in the tree when Ben Stiller's doing that funny crying scene." He was an important forerunner to punk rock. His early band, The Modern Lovers, played really simple sounding pop songs that were totally bizzare at the time, but now sound a lot like the music that hundreds of indie rock bands play. Well, it sounds kinda like that. He had this really weird and awkward personna, and the band's music sounds almost like it was written for little kids.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6KSt1u_UE0


They are mostly remembered for this song, which is something of an underground classic (mostly cause everybody copied the Sex Pistol's cover):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPCHU-cBWwk


In the late seventies he switched his style up and started playing weirdo lo fi pop that was influenced by European pop music and by Latin Music. That's the style he's been working in since then, and that's what I saw last night. He is one of those mesmerizing performers who seem like they just ARE. Plus he's a brilliant guitarist. He managed to make the audience laugh at his goofy antics while being glued to him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjFU98mEem4&feature=related&pos=3

It's really a strange balancing act he pulls off, and completely compelling.

For his first encore he played a song called "When We refuse to Suffer," which was particularly articulate version of the old "carpe diem" theme, if only because his goofy vulnerability really made the sentiment seem substantial. Then for his last encore was a song called "As My Mother Lay Dying," which had the audience in tears. I've never heard a bar get so quiet. It wasn't sentimental or melodramatic; it was just a really direct expression of an important memory. It wasn't cheap. I've not had quite that experience before at a concert. This was really different.

It was almost embarrasing. The lights go up and there's a room full of people deliberately not looking at each other.

The amazing was how those last two songs cast a new light on the rest of the show. A lot of his music is delivered in that "childlike" mode, but with that ending, he really changed what the whole thing meant. The "statement" he makes with his goofy stage personna became much more serious all of the sudden. This guy fucking means it. It was an amazing show really.

I'd post a link to a clip of those two songsI described, but nobody's put a vid of them on the youtubes. Here's another song from his latest record. This is what the first hour and a half of the show was like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yORR9d8hYZE&feature=related&pos=5

It was a pretty astonishing show, and I'd recommend that anyone reading this go see Jonathan whenever he comes near you. He's pretty special.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqQznJtTz3o&feature=related&pos=6

I'm finally posting on this damn thing.

This is probably the third blog I started and abandoned, but I'll try to actually use this son of a gun. I rediscovered it through Ashli's profile. I forgot it existed until right now.

So anyway, I figure I'd start with a list of my favorite movies, followed by a list of my favorite musical artists. I figure I'll start with the cliche and then go from there. I'm obviously bored.

Today I'll do the Movies and soon I'll do the music:


1. "Mullholand Drive." Because it's surreal and sad, because it's all about the eroticism and intangibility of popular culture and because it's got a scene where Naomi Watts and Laura Harring make out. It's pretty much an extended fantasy about the way that we project our identities and sexual desires through pop culture archtypes. Nancy Drew falls in love with Rita Hayworth, but then it all falls apart. I love David Lynch. (The song in this clip is a Roy Orbison song. This scene is reason enough to watch the movie. It's hardly the only reason.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oddg6dCB7FE


2. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." (The original. Don't be stupid.) Because it's balls to the wall crazy, and it has no sense of propriety or common sense at all. It's completely disiguisting and humiating, but it's funny as hell. It's a brilliant satire (as most great horror films are), and it's much smarter than it seems like it is, not only in the way it's carefully constructed, but also in the way that there are interesting little thematic elements that are carried through the movie. And it's got a scene where a nearly catotonic old man sucks blood from a girl's finger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=285ImXTYdsg


3. "Come Drink With Me." A classic kung fu flick from the sixties. Actually, its a movie that helped to invent the genre (along with One Armed Swordsman, which is also great). It's one of very few films that King Hu made with the Shaw Brothers, and its a damn shame they didn't give him more room to work. It's pretty much a film about filmmaking, with lots of leisurely compositions and carefully coregraphed movement. It doesn't add up to much more than an entertianment, but it's such a deliberate, artful film that you can't stop looking at it. It's kind of like the Wizard of Oz or something. But not really.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kJ9lxnvOxk


4. "Invincible Pole Fighter." One of the definitive kung fu movies of all time. It's got Gordon Lu being completely amazing. It's usually thought of as a kind of also-ran behind 36 Chambers of Shaolin, which is generally regarded as the definitive Shaolin Temple flick, but this one's got more interesting thematic tensions, plus the uneven, slightly disjointed story actually builds a bizaare momentum. The movie was originally going to be a vehicle for Fu Sheng (one of the Venoms) one ofwho died in a car accident during the production. They restructured the film to be a Gordon Lu Shaolin picture. The end result is a movie that strangly works, and it generates some surprisingly intense moments. This isn't Lau Gar Leung's usual playfulness (although there are some amazingly audacious and goofy moments in a couple of fight scenes). It's probably his "heaviest" picture. Plus its Gordon Lu being directed by Lau Gar Leung. I mean, what do you want? These guys are serious Martial Artists, serious Buddists, and serioius filmmakers. This is a thoughful, emotional film disguised as pulp cinema.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dd0YQJjCkg


5. "The Big Lebowski." 'm an achiever. Probably not the best movie ever made, but certainly the most perfect movie ever made. It's amazing. You could spend days just analyzing all the little linguistic allusions in there. I've seen it literally dozens of times, and I always see something new. The Cohen brothers are clearly insane control freaks. It works for them though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED4VL7W6VdQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydTIHmvUAyk&feature=PlayList&p=42996DF37C44692C&index=25&playnext=3&playnext_from=PL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TVqttHIuo&feature=PlayList&p=42996DF37C44692C&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=23


6. "Irreversible." A surpreme examples of a certain kind of extreme experience that I really love in movies. I really think that sometimes we need extreme nihilism in art. Not candy pants genre bullshit, but outright clausterphobic despair. The kind of thoughtful, cathartic state you can reach if you watch that kind of film in the right mindset is an experience that's rare in art. "Irreversable" is mostly notorious for a long rape scene that some viewers report being unable to watch. (It's a ten minute scene done in one shot. It's probably the most disturbing piece of film ever made. I almost can't watch it. Anyone who knows me will tell you that that opinion means something. If I can't watch it, nobody can watch it!) The scenes in the movie play in reverse order (a la "Memento), so you watch a horrific revenge scene, a bizarre chase scene, a more horrific rape scene, then some nice young people at a party, then the nice young people going to the party, then . . . The result is that you watch their happy life knowing what's going to happen. The last scenes is of a happy couple being comfortably firty with each other after waking up from a post ciotal nap. In any other context it'd be a warmly erotic scene. In this movie it makes you want to die.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9QgckVsgCQ&feature=related

Be careful with that one. I'm not kidding. (The clip up there is fine. It's an artsy music mashup thing.)


7. "A Touch of Evil." Orson Well's best movie. It's totally awesome. It's sometimes thought of a second tier Orson Wells movie because it's a genre movie. Forget that nonesense. Wells was an audacious stylist. That's his schtick. This nasty little film nior is a great way to get your hands on some Wells. Plus it's got Janet Leigh. And some weird creepy villans. And Charlton Heston playing a Mexican. It's a kick. And it's got more interesting racial politics than it seems. Although the leering gangsters might be seem as a bit problematic. But the Americans don't come out too good either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl8kj8mAA84&feature=PlayList&p=AB5087275CA96E37&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3


8. "Plan 9 From Outer Space." Frequently called out as "the worst movie ever made," but that's balony. Oh it's terrible alright, but Ed Wood had a cockeyed niave enthsiasm and just enough ability to make his movies really compelling. One suspects that if with a little coaching, he could have made a living directing unremarkable B movies. We should be grateful that nobody ever corrupted him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xes0F36eTJA


9. "Taxi Driver." I feel just like that guy sometimes. Fortunately I've got deeper emotional resources than he does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzPBUGUM7KQ

And this is why Hollywood sucks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb3FepZtVxA


10. "The Seven Samurai." Probably the best action movie ever made. It's a big unweildy, especially compared with some of Kurosawa's later, better movies (Sanjuro is great), but it's awfully good. That unweildiness is a part of what's so great about it. It's one of those movies with a bit of everything. Plus Toshiro Mifune overacting with all the passion of a punk rocker. Japanese film is great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uu40a3ANFw



The following directors have produced "bodies of work" that mean a lot to me, but no individual films that stand out enough for the list. At least not today. Tomorrow the list might look different. These things are arbitrary and just for fun anyway, right?

Takashi Miike. I almost put "Audition" (which I sincerely believe to be one of the sweetest films ever made once you get past all the torture) on the list. I also love "Ichi The Killer," "Dead or Alive," and "Visitor Q." I own about 30 Takashi Miike films. (No Exagerration. Because he has worked in the Japanese OAV market, he's directed about 80 films last time I checked.) He's only about middle aged now. He's a maniac and a genius. He's a little too undisciplined to make many GREAT movies, but his work is fascinating.

From "Audition":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9GlqG_831Q&feature=PlayList&p=07141A1A28D1A2AD&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1

From "Dead of Alive":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvQWvDLTlUM

From "Deady Outlaw Rieka":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fb8DW11Xak



John Waters. The king of bad taste. Actually, he's a brilliant satirist and a kind of derranged moralist. He's all about celebrating divesity. And about serial killers. Go figure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl4f7wK67Uw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og_85XJTOac&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5PwYOPrZh4



Warner Herzog. Cause he has a moral sensibility very much like my own, and because he a genius. Also because of the fascination of his weirdo relationship to Klaus Kinsky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hepXYNI3Cy0

This is the second greatest interview ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ugQrfDrcq4

This is the greatest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uE5F0WXic&feature=related



And last, but not least, Eril Morris. Perhaps the greatest documentary filmaker ever. His films are basically interviews with artful editing and reinactments. But holy crap does he know how to get people to talk.

Here's a part of the story of a pilot who went up to the cockpit to help crash land a plane in distress. It's probably the best peice of storytelling ever filmed. The little bits of personality that come through here really flesh this out. It's a great piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyiV3uGIYnE


Here's a bit of the story of the guards at Abu Girab (almost everybody in the photos appears in the film):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTqgIW8J86U


And then there's THIS asshole:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niBw8JakaFg&feature=PlayList&p=E38AB84BEA509806&index=11


Thus concludes this segment.