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Grateful Dead - Mama Tried > Big River, Shoreline Amphitheatre 06/16/90
Today marks the anniversary of my first Grateful Dead concert, July 22, 1990. I had wanted to see them since around 1982 or so, but could never find anyone to go with me to a show. I didn't have the wherewithall just to go it alone. I attended 13 more shows over the next five years before Jerry Garcia's passing, and managed to see both Jerry and Bob solo shows in that time as well.
I got turned on to the Dead in an odd way: When I was 14, I was arrested three times over one summer; after the third time my parents had me under house arrest for nine months. No friends visiting, no television, no leaving the house other than school or the public library. I could listen to music, as I had paid for my stereo myself. It was at the library where I found a copy of Dead Set and checked it out. It wasn't a monumental listening experience in the way that, say, The Wall or Zen Arcade was; but it stuck with me and I often found myself listening to it, often noticing more and more nuances about their music that couldn't be found elsewhere.
Detractors will roll their eyes, or make some uninformed remark about how boring their music was at the mere mention of this band. Most people I've encountered with this mindset haven't even heard their music let alone seen a show, but at the same time there is a grain of truth to this: their records (aside from an exception or two, and officially released live recordings) come off as very uninspired. But their live shows were a whole other experience; that was where their musical strength was displayed, and they toured relentlessly for three decades. Through the eighties and early nineties, their live shows consisted of two sets. The first would be about an hour or so, mostly shorter tunes but would grow a little longer and spacier later in the set. They would play some of their own material, a blues tune or two, maybe a country tune and always a Bob Dylan cover in there. The second set was the showcase: a two-plus hour set of their longer tunes with plenty of jams in between, broken up by a percussion duet / improvised "space" segment mid set and concluding with another handful of their more rocking numbers (Sugar Magnolia comes to mind) and a ballad or two. The sets were always different from night to night, and they often mixed things up by opening their shows with songs usually reserved for the second set. I saw them three nights in a row and never heard the same song twice.
I could go on forever, espousing the varied talents of the band, the benchmark technical advances of their sound crew (best sounding live band ever, even in the most acoustically unfriendly venue) , sharing my own experiences and discussing the sociological phenomenon of their very loyal audience. But the truth is, if you weren't there you may not understand. The tunes attached are "Mama Tried, a Merle Haggard cover paired up with the Johnny Cash classic, "Big River" from their summer 1990 tour. Both were staples of the first set throughout their history, and this performance in particular is amazing. You can't help but think, "Damn, those guys could play."
Interesting fact: the Grateful Dead were the first band ever to perform live with stereophonic sound.
There are so many opportunities that allow me to feel like an abject failure. Some of them are brought upon myself. Others stem from extraneous circumstances. Fact of the matter is, I need to keep my shit together. I need to implement some degree of tunnel vision to keep focused on those things that keep me not necessarily happy, but at least content. Even if it's a half complete project, I should be doing something.It's been four months since the last posting. Summer is midway through at this point.
Skin Crawl is a sound manipulation project from a reclusive and antisocial 40 year old from the Chicago suburbs. In 2004, he started abusing Apple's GarageBand application, creating works by running instrumental loops through filters in a manner that they weren't intended. Equal parts dub, ambient and industrial, the songs are moody but at the same time have that tongue-in-cheek antagonism of someone who's been jaded by the indie elitism that almost destroyed what was regarded as "alternative" music in the early 90's. Think Big Black meets Brian Eno.
Skin Crawl - Rain Chamber
Skin Crawl - Piss Farm
Death In June - "Heaven Street", live Glasgow 1983 and "Fall Apart", live Belgium 2002I meant to post a bit more often, but a deathly cold February, subsequent illness, and an overall lack of desire to accomplish anything led to me shutting down for awhile.
Maybe not strangely enough, I listened to alot of Death In June's recorded output during this time. I've found this band both fascinating and annoying on a few different levels. The name has a creepy cool ring to it, earning stares of disbelief from anyone asking what I'm listening to. The militaristic / historic / ritualistic imagery of their cover art at times seems calculated (and what doesn't seem calculated years after the fact?), but often conveys a post World War 2 European feel to it. Alot of the cover art employs the use of statues, which are often symbolic of authority and power. I'm not going to address the accusations of Nazi imagery used on DIJ's records other than to mention that most of the icons that the Nazis used were appropriated from centuries old designs as well.
The music itself varies between folk, industrial and post punk , depending on which record you're listening to. While I'm sure it's not historically accurate, I always feel as if the songs are being discreetly sung by middle aged men on both sides of the wall in Berlin, hidden from the watchful eyes and ears of the KGB and their Western counterparts. Many of the songs convey an age of darkness, where people are living in cities of ruin, destroyed from within and bombed from above; all hope has been crippled, and one has to ask if there is a reason to go on.
It's great to be back.
postscript: Almost all of Death In June's recorded output is available through iTunes and eMusic. If you're interested, it's a good place to start and it supports the artist. That doesn't do much for us common folk who wish to actually have the CD in their possession (good luck finding certain titles at a reasonable price elsewhere), but reissues of back catalogue items are not uncommon.
God Bullies - 'Cemetary' and 'Shallow Grave', from the LP: Dog Show (1990)
I attended a school of art & design from 1990 -93. Hanging around with fellow students exposed me to a lot of music that I may have - and occasionally did- miss out on. I was turned on to the Kalamazoo, MI based God Bullies by a film student friend. Their creepy garage noise rock fit well within our musical tastes; and the low growling vocals, cut and paste audio samples, layered tribal drum rhythms and reverb effects-laden guitar work appealed to our mixed media art backgrounds. At the same time, we viewed it as a snickering reply to the whole goth industrial sampling thing that many of our school counterparts embraced. From the gravestone album art to the recurring song themes of religion and death, they had the dark thing nailed; so to speak. And in spite of it, the album pretty much rocked to high heaven. Maybe not as noisy and harsh as their earlier 7" releases, but still as powerful. Even as laughable as all the horror blasphemy guitar meltdown may seem in retrospect, there was an underlying creepiness to it at the time. Even upon recent listens, it still has it's unsettling moments.
Swans - 'Feel Happiness' & 'Hypogirl', live in Berlin, 1997
The truth is, I missed out on the Swans until about five years after they had disbanded; I had limited exposure to the them during their existence as a recording and performing unit. The first time hearing them was in a friend's apartment sometime in early 1987, a few months before the release of their Children Of God LP. Someone had loaned him a copy of the Young God EP, and one afternoon he played it for us. It was painfully slow. And percussive. I understood it as a work of art, A minimalistic yet bombastic sound assault. For all purposes, I told my friend, one could play this at the end of a party to get rid of unwanted guests. I never saw the record at his house after that, so I never gave it a serious listen. I moved away a few months later to go to college and Children Of God was released while I was there. Cash was limited and I couldn't justify dropping three days' worth of meals on a record I might not like. In 1989, I obtained a used copy of Holy Money. It had it's interesting moments, but hadn't really moved me. I ended up selling it, along with most of my vinyl to pay the rent. Fast forward 14 years to my late 30's: On a quest for something musically interesting, I buy Children Of God / World Of Skin on CD at the Virgin Megastore in Las Vegas, of all places. And while listening to it on a plane flying to Chicago, I wondered to myself why the desire to not go hungry kept me from buying this years back. I was floored by the combined beauty and intensity of the music, the unnerving hopelessness and futility, and just a shimmer of redemption held within their songs.
Continued searching for other titles over the years has net me most of discs, all of which have been unique listening experiences.Their final studio release, Soundtracks of The Blind is probably the most unsettling of their later period titles, pulling the listener into a thick liquid mesh of sonic landscapes and disturbing found tape recordings. It's an epic work, and like all of their recordings, somewhat of an endurance test. The live documentation, Swans Are Dead gives fans one disc of live recordings from their 1995 tour and one disc from their final tour in 1997; and as a live collection, it is very successful in capturing the power of their live shows if played at proper volume. As someone who never experienced a live performance of Swans, it certainly works in making me wish I had.
Unfortunately, M. Gira and Co. has not see fit to re-release the two 'bunny' albums (referred to as such for their Deryk Thomas cover art), White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity and Love Of Life. And I don't know if this is due to problems with record companies they were originally released on, or if it is the choice of the band to withhold these discs. It's too bad, as we're in the midst of a flood of "Deluxe Edition" releases, and those two albums are each deserving of such recognition. It's frustrating to a music enthusiast to continually see these two discs seeking 'collector' prices online. And that situation is even more so aggravating when one sees what the original limited "Bunny Box" ( a very nice boxed package which contained both albums and a cd single) sells for.
Postscript: Upon research, I did find that "White Light..." is available on both iTunes and eMusic. As are most of their other releases. You get the music but not the packaging.
Alice Cooper - Wish I Were Born In Beverly Hills, from the LP 'From The Inside' (1978)
In this era of disposable entertainment, where television programs exist that are dedicated to the celebrity meltdown - and even more so during the current Lindsay Britney relapse ambulance chase - I can't think of a more timely mention of this gem of a song.
This is from Alice Cooper's 1978 album, written about patients he met in a mental hospital while going through rehab for alcoholism himself. While I'm not sure how it came about, this album got hours of play among a couple of my friends in the early 80's. The answer to why, isn't so much in the standard late 70's hard rock therein, but in the characters of the songs themselves: the shellshocked Vietnam Vet, the bottomed out alcoholic, the compulsive gambler, the suicide failure, and of course the crash and burn socialite. They all have their stories, and they're lyrically written here well enough that you can't help but develop some empathy with them and understand what they've went through to end up in a mental health facility. Kind of like a rock and roll twelve step meeting.
Big Black - Hunter's Safety (Tommy Bartlett Dies In Pain) from WNUR's The Middle Of America Compilation (1984)
There are those days when climbing up to the top of a water tower with a twelve pack and a deer rifle sounds like a good idea.
What can be said that hasn't already been said about Big Black; you either like them or you don't. Sometimes they don't like themselves. I recall reading that guitarist / vocalist Steve Albini said that after listening to Atomizer nearly a decade after it's release, found most of it embarrassing. It's understandable that any artist is going to be far more critical of their own work than any fan or reviewer. But I have to argue that after twenty years, most of their music holds up pretty well. Of course I state this with a time biased opinion, having been exposed to Big Black in late 1985 just as I was starting to really expand my musical tastes. There was a sinister pleasure to playing their records to the uninitiated; it was a confrontation, if not an outright "up yours" to anyone who ascribed rules or guidelines to what music - punk rock, in particular - should be. Their music was the sonic equivalent of the skinny high school geek, fed up with being pushed around, justifiably beating the shit out of the varsity quarterback. There was a validation in listening to their records because damn it, they were that good.
Bonus points for having great liner notes.
