The Machine Stops

Having serious computer problems suddenly.

Hopefully it will be resolved -- or I'll be able to write and post from my previous, theoretically retired, laptop -- by Monday.

Pray for me.

Mary on Virtually Speaking

Tonight, I will be interviewed by Jay Ackroyd at Virtually Speaking, on Blogtalk Radio.  Tune in at 9.

You can listen here.

I'll be talking about Boys Don't Lie, reading a little, and answering questions.  I'll post the phone number to call in shortly.

UPDATE:  Call after 9pm EST:  (646) 200-344.0

Slacker Thursday

Taking a mental health break, so only light crappy blogging (yes, I stole the phrase from Atrios) until tomorrow.

In the meantime, from one of my favorite Nat Lamp albums, please enjoy Mr. Roberts (Christopher Guest) interviewing a bass player (Bill Murray).



People* always ask me "Steve, why did you ever decide to pick up the bass guitar?"

And when they do, I play them the above.













*defined as "sort of like Tom Friedman's cab drivers."

The New Number Whoever

Found these photos -- taken on the set of The Prisoner -- by accident yesterday, and for obvious reasons they blew my tiny mind.

Hey -- what the hell was I doing in there?

In any case, yes -- Patrick McGoohan really was the coolest guy who ever lived. And from 1982, here's Brit punks The Times with their ode to him.



Be seeing you!!!

When Great Art Happens By Bad People

This is a very sad story, so please -- try not to laugh.

Okay, so a while ago (possibly a year or two) I was hanging out over at a certain political blog I frequent (whose name I won't mention, but its initials are Eschaton) and I was, as was my wont, perhaps having an inordinate amount of fun at the expense of a certain egregiously stupid and offensive regular (whose name I won't mention, except perhaps to refer to him as Sparky).

In any event, I don't specifically recall what particularly egregiously stupid and offensive thing Sparky had claimed on this particular occasion, but whatever it was, I was moved to reply "As Gertrude Stein famously observed of something else, 'interesting if true.' "

Sparky responded (and I paraphrase absolutely accurately) "Gertrude Stein was a notorious apologist for Hitler and the Nazi regime and you ought to be ashamed of yourself blah blah blah" and I replied (and I paraphrase myself) "Hey, if Satan herself had something apt and amusing to say on the subject currently under discussion, I would feel absolutely no compunction about quoting that either, and now please to be pissing off."

Sparky, who amongst his other faults is the kind of person who really can't take a hint, kept throwing up my alleged love for Gertie, She-Wolf of the SS over the next several months, and finally I responded (and I paraphrase myself again)

"Shit, Sparky, there are scads and scads of artists over the span of human history who led less than exemplary lives.

"Why, in your own classical music field alone, Don Carlo Gesualdo -- composer of the most sublime madrigals of the late Renaissance -- was a well-known murderer (who killed his unfaithful wife and her lover in their bed); Opera biggie Richard (The Ring Cycle) Wagner was a notoriously virulent anti-Semite who influenced Hitler and the Holocaust; and in the 20th century, your favorite (boring) serial composer Arthur Berger was well known in academic music circles for having never picked up a check."

(That last allegation I totally made up, but it gave me enormous pleasure for obvious reasons).

In any case, shortly thereafter, Sparky retired from the Eschaton lists; today he posts his increasingly even more egregiously stupid and offensive opinions over at his own (barely noticed by any sentient mammals) blog, which I will not link to, but if you Google I, Sparky, Against All the Liars and Phonies in the World, you might be able to find it.

As I said, this was a very sad story, so please -- try not to laugh.

That noted, it occurs to me that we are still left to deal with the central theme of all of the above, which is that if we're going to decline to partake of the artistic endeavors of all of the artists over the centuries who have been real sons-of-bitches, then basically we're not gonna have much left to divert us of a cold winter's evening.

So let us conclude then with two recorded artifacts that kind of prove the point.

From sometime in the early '90s, please enjoy "On the Shoulders of Freaks," by brilliant comic songwriter Henry Philips...

...which addresses the subject rather explicitly ("Salvador Dali's surreal paintings were God sent/You'd never know he ate his own excrement.")

And even more pertinently, from 1967, here's currently incarcerated Phil Spector's insanely gorgeous production of the Ronettes' "I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine."

That Ronettes song, if memory serves, was unreleased until the Spector Back to Mono box set came out in the mid-70s.

And I remember that the first time I heard it, I thought it was one of the most uplifting things ever achieved by a human being.

And I will stipulate that, re-hearing it today, while knowing that Spector is in fact a killer by whatever definition you care to have, I have not changed my opinion of it one whit.

Not the Just The Greatest Thing From Carteret New Jersey Ever!

And speaking, as we were last Friday, of The Smithereens -- or more specifically, as one esteemed regular was speaking about how he had remained blissfully unaware of their work, for whatever reason.

A little perspective here, if you please.

From the 1986 debut album, please enjoy "Blood and Roses"

And from the 1988 Green Thoughts here's the astoundingly riff-laden "Only a Memory."

Frankly, if they'd done nothing beyond the two singles above, they'd deserve to be immortal. Fact is, though, they have scads more just as great.

Incidentally, their self-proclaimed template has always been "AC/DC meets the Beatles." I think they pull it off rather regularly.

Your Friday Moment of Self-Congratulatory Ego Tripping (An Occasional Series)

Long time and/or attentive readers (not to mention members of my immediate family) may be aware that Floor Your Love, the vanity CD I compiled by my early 80s skinny-tie band The Floor Models, has, perhaps inexplicably, been picked up for legitimate release later this year by a very cool Austraan indie label -- ZERO HOUR RECORDS.

I know, I know. This strikes me as moderately unbelievable too. Nonetheless, it's true.

In any event, by way of an update, I want to assure those of you who were irrepresible enough to download the earlier album at iTunes or Amazon (or purchase a physical copy at CDBaby) that those are now collector's items and will doubtless fetch top dollar at record fairs in the future. Probably on the Bizarro World, but still.

Also, the Zero Hour reissue will feature vastly improved sound quality -- thanks to a superb remastering job by my old chum Steve Schwartz -- and significantly slicker packaging.

My understanding is that the original cover -- art-directed by my brilliant/beautiful girlfriend (who works cheap) will be retained...

...but the CD label, done as an amusing homage to the Epic Records of the Sixties --

...will probably be jettisoned.

Hey, whatever my Australian mogul wants to do, I'm down with it. Seriously -- in case I haven't mentioned it, Zero Hour Records is the greatest record company in the world, and I have pledged them my eternal fealty.

Okay, all that said, please enjoy the reissue liner notes I recently penned at great expense to myself.

THE FLOOR MODELS: WORLD FAMOUS IN GREENWICH VILLAGE!!!

In everyone's life there's a Summer of '42...or so said the tag line in the ads for the movie of the same name. But in my case (self-indulgence alert!) such a summer lasted for almost two years, circa 1982-83 (metaphorically, of course). When The Floor Models, the 12-string pop band I played bass for, had a more or less uninterrupted weekend residency at the Other End Cafe on Bleecker Street in fabled Greenwich Village.

A little back story: The Floor Models got together in 1979, primarily as a result of seeing the (then unsigned) Smithereens countless times at Kenny's Castaways, a bigger club down the street from the Other End, and thinking -- hey, that looks like fun. Our initial template was sort of similar to what the 'Reens were doing -- i.e., short concise 60s influenced songs, with three part harmonies, a lot of jangle, and a mix of classic folk-rock with New Wave energy.

It should be noted, at this point, that when we started we became part of what was then being called the Bleecker Street Revival, which was a sort of parallel phenomenon to the punk thing happening further downtown on the Bowery at CBGBs (and indeed, several bands -- the aforementioned Smithereens, for example -- were known to migrate back and forth between the two scenes). The principal venues for the Bleecker Street Revival were the aforementioned Kenny's and a rejuvenated (by new and more receptive to contemporary rock management) Folk City, which was around the corner on West 3rd. There were a ridiculous number of ridiculously talented people on the scene; not all of them got famous -- in our case, for example, the Man With the Big Cigar conpicuously failed to offer to make us stars -- but the list of performers who got signed to major labels out of Kenny's and Folk City is pretty impressive: Willie NIle, Carolyn Mas, the aforementioned Smithereens, Chris Whitley, Patty Smyth (Scandal), Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin.

But back to the Floor Models saga.

The short version is that pretty much every Friday and Saturday night during that period we -- myself, singer/guitarist Gerry Devine, Rickenbacker 12-string ace Andy Pasternack, and fab gear drummer Glen "Bob" Allen -- would arrive at the Other End, which was a classic hole-in-the-wall dump, and bash out three hour-long sets (shows at 10pm, midnight and 2am). Essentially, it was our equivalent of The Cavern, and though the schedule was grueling, it never once felt like work, this due to the fact that a) the four of us enjoyed each other's company almost as much as the music we were playing; b) we were rather handsomely paid, if you can believe it; and c) thanks to the weekend traffic on Bleecker Street we almost always wound up performing for an elbow-jostling and appreciative crowd (around 200 well lubricated NYU kids and tourists crammed wall to wall on an average lively night) even when our friends were otherwise engaged.

It was a ridiculously ideal environment for a young band getting its shit together, and as I said, it never felt like work; I look back on the whole experience these days as pretty much the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on.

I should probably also mention that I lived across the street from the club, which meant that moving equipment was a breeze. And that between-set, uh, refreshments and after-hours carousing were rather ridiculously hassle-free as a result.

As I noted earlier, we used to do three hour-long sets an evening, which meant we necessarily had to do a fair number of covers; given that our idea had always been to do the songs that had inspired to us play in the first place (especially ones we'd never had a chance to essay in other bands) this was hardly an odious task, and so we'd bang out everything from The Monkees to Television. (Doing The Hollies "Bus Stop" -- and well, I think -- was something of a dream come true for me.) We also had a lot of musician friends from the neighborhood who'd help us out by dropping in for the late sets; we'd work up little guest spots for them and some of those occasioned among my absolute favorite moments during our run. Floor Your Love includes a live rendition of the Records "Hearts in Her Eyes," a song we did so often that everybody on Bleecker Street thought we wrote it.

We finally packed it in in the late 80s (although a different incarnation of the band carried on till the mid-90s) but I think the music holds up. In any case, Floor Your Love finally collects just about everything we ever recorded, in a variety of settings; it is, for all intents, The Album We Never Made. -- Steve Simels

P.S. You may have noticed that the opening song on the CD --"Spin Cycle" -- features personnel other than the classic Flo Mos lineup. In point of fact, although the song was written and performed (often) during the Floor Models original run, no recording of the song from that period has survived. However, given that three of the people playing and singing the late 80s version included here were, in fact, Floor Models (Gerry, Glen and me on keyboards) I've decided that it's a de facto Floor Models track despite the absence of Andy. In more or less in the same way that "The Ballad of John and Yoko" is a Beatles track despite the absence of George and Ringo.

P.P.S. If you go to YouTube and type in "The Floor Models," you'll find a very cool (complete) video , with fantastic sound, of a typical club set of ours from the period (1982). It was not, however, taped anywhere in the Village, but rather at an upper East Side industry dive/drug den called JPs. We played there a bunch of times, which was the closest we ever got to working out of town.

Incidentally, just because I love you guys, here's the aforementioned version of "Hearts in Her Eyes."



The remaster, of course, is much better, so you'll have to pay to hear it, bitches.

Yes, We Have No Bananas!

My old college chum Tony Jannelli -- and it was he you should be thanking for yesterday's Springsteen video -- passed this poster along to me the other day. It's from a 1965 rock show he attended at his old high school.

Note the second support act (the small type at the bottom).

From Ritchie Unterberger's book on the Velvets:

White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day:

1. Summit High School Auditorium, Summit, New Jersey, December 11, 1965: Commonly regarded as their first concert with Maureen Tucker on drums; possibly the first concert at which they were actually billed as the Velvet Underground; and probably the first at which they were actually paid, instigating the resignation of original drummer Angus MacLise, who didn't want to stand for anything as commercial as showing up at a scheduled time and accepting money for the performance. Supporting the Myddle Class (who feature future Carole King husband/collaborator Charles Larkey on bass and future Steely Dan singer Dave Palmer), they played three songs—"There She Goes Again," "Venus in Furs," and "Heroin"—to an almost wholly uncomprehending and unappreciative audience of adolescents. "The band just emptied that auditorium," says Sterling Morrison's wife, Martha.

In a word -- wow.

Incidentally, Tony -- who became a bigshot DP in the years since this show -- informs me he is making an animated short about it; as further details unfold, I'll be sharing them here.

P.S.: Here's the sort of regional hit single by the aforementioned Myddle Class.



As you'll doubtless notice, this was later appropriated to better effect by The Blues Project as "Wake Me, Shake Me."

Your Wednesday Moment of Hole E. Shit (An Occasional Series)

From sometime in 1973 or 1974, please behold in breathless wonder Bruce Springsteen and (the original) E-Street Band -- with, unless I am very much mistaken, Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez on drums and David Sancious on piano -- and an astounding live version of the widely bootlegged "Thundercrack."



Not too long after the above was taped, an engineer I knew who did some occasional work for Springsteen's then manager Mike Appell gave me a reel-to-reel of a whole bunch of unreleased Springsteen stuff, including "Thundercrack," and I practically wore the magnetic oxide off the thing over the next year or so.

In any case, when people -- and I'm one of them -- talk about seeing God when Springsteen played small clubs at the beginning of his career, this is the kind of thing they're talking about.

BTW, anybody recognize where this was shot? My first thought was Max's, but the more I look at it the less I think so.

[h/t Tony Jannelli]

Clinton Heylin is a Big Fat Idiot

So I picked up a copy of Brit rock scribe Clinton Heylin's history of the bootleg album biz (largely due to recommendations by a couple of folks here) the other day, with some trepidation.

I say trepidation because I'd read Heylin's From the Velvets to the Voidoids some years ago, and found it well-researched but otherwise insufferably pretentious and full of shit.

Anyway, like I said, I just started reading the Heylin bootleg book and I should have guessed it was going to irk me after the opening chapter began with a history of the various original pirated editions of Shakespeare's plays.

But even before that, when I got to page 8 of the intro (let me repeat that: page 8!!!) I found myself reading the following words (which were arranged sequentially, but I won't dignify them by calling them a sentence)...

"The Beatles excepted (and they essentially stank as a live band)..."

...and I immediately thought: Is it too early to start drinking?

Yeah. The Beatles. Lousy live band. Also: Ringo Starr -- worse than Hitler.

Jeebus, what a dope.

Anyway, here are The Fabs live at the Hollywood Bowl, blow-torching their way through "Long Tall Sally" in 1964.



To paraphrase Crow. T. Robot on MST3K: And in conclusion, Clinton Heylin -- bite me.