You're So Serious

You're So Serious:


Ah, the garage rock!  Who among us does not love it?  Even if, in this case, it's actually garage rock with a bit of psychedelia thrown in.  It's a classic combination-- two great tastes (or one great one and one OK one) that taste great together. For those of you who are "lumpers" and not "splitters", as we call 'em in the pathology biz, the fine points of rock music categorization are probably a snooze, but us geeks find them fun and sort of useful.  Admittedly, that's "useful" in that "turning-off-the-ladies-and-causing-their-eyes-to-glaze-over-until-their-patience-runs-out-and-the-irritation-takes-over" way, but also in that inside baseball way.  Shorthand.  Like "fuzzed-out, overdriven R&B revival with odd retro techno touches"

The garage rock, anyway, has one of the deepest pedigrees out there-- It's snotty and unpolished music, though generally not angry, and usually it's loud and sloppy enough that you indeed might want to banish it to whatever outbuilding you had handy.  Having played in several garages in my time, there's something about the smell of trash and gasoline, and the tools and junk and storage, and the way the cacophony bouncing off the concrete surfaces that's pretty darned appealing.  But what made me post this particular song and rant it that I'd been thinking of a quote from Lester Bangs, our quintissential development-arrested, self-destructive slop-rock critic, on the Troggs' "Wild Thing", one of the cornerstones of garage rock.   From his essay "James Taylor Marked for Death", 1971:

"It's that kind of a song, 'cause it's about you when you had a good time and went mad for real and reared for release 'cause you were too young and naive to know any better. .... if kids are really too smart and cool to just loon about anymore, if first day of summer means rolling one after another from new lid and plopping hour on hour in front of television or record player instead of tearing into the street and hunting out buddies and leaping and yupping till at least some of the scholastic poison accumulating like belladonna ever since September is plain crazied out of your soul, if all of that's a pipe dream and I'm just an old fart now-- cranking out complaints about the New Generation regular as TB spittle-- if all that's true, then THE LESSON OF "WILD THING" WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID #%$@^-ERS sometime between the rise of Cream and the fall of the Stooges, and rock n' roll may turn into a chamber art yet or at the very least a system of Environments."

So there!

Note: As summer's getting short and the pile of "hit rekkids" is undiminished, next week we start two-a-days, so take heart, have patience, get some rest and drink plenty of fluids.

More Scruffy

As with his Mum's post, Doc once again perfectly captures the scene and what it felt like to get happily steamrolled by Scruffy.  But he soft-pedaled the many interactions that Buttsteak (the band) had with those fellows.  I fondly remember crashing at a house on St. Paul St. with Stephen and, Burns maybe?, after the Glass Pav show.  Stephen couldn't sleep and quietly sat reading the white pages of the Baltimore phone book.  Earlier that evening, we opened up for them, performing our own Scruffy min-set/tribute. It's been reported by several reliable witnesses that Stephen didn't recognize our "disco" version of their song Blue Russian. 

Of all the music I've performed or seen live, Scruffy set the high water mark at what must have been a low point for them. I'm speaking, of course, about the show at the DU house. That was the return wing of their last tour and if they hadn't decided to throw in the towel up until then, I'm pretty sure me standing on a speaker screaming "Buck Naked" probably pushed them over the edge.  Sorry folks. 

But even in those trying circumstances, they were consummate professionals.  They set up, loaded in, no sound checks, no flirting with willing young ladies, no extensive tuning and mic checks.  They just turned on and played a blistering set... one of those chapter room events where the floor bounced and even the ceiling was sweaty.  I've never seen any band come close to that show before or since.

-RK

You and Randall Lee

Hey friends-- Here's the song link up top this time, 'cause I might go on a while:

You and Randall Lee


Randall Lee Gibson IV, that is.  Fantastic drummer, and one of my faves.  Typical of that lot--- Stay in the pocket... don't mess with the flashy stuff... just drive that goddarn song, and MEAN IT...   Anyway, once when he was in Baltimore on one of those Scruffy tours, I saw him walking up 30th St. in Baltimore with a young lady.  The song came to me a decade later, and now we're another ten or so down the line.

You've already seen how much I love to try and dissect these songs and whatever primordial soup they may have arisen.  But I can promise you that I'm responsible for few more direct acts of musical tribute/ thievery/ pale imitation than the attached song-- It's a straight-up, 100% testimony to the impact that music, and a band, and a place in time can leave.  For a bunch of liquored-up, college kids in often bo-ring uptown Baltimore as the 80s were winding down, that band was Boston's Scruffy the Cat.

I recall the review of "Tiny Days" in the Baltimore City Paper: "Another Boston bar band quietly kicks ass."   My first show at the 8x10 Club sealed the deal.  Soon enough we were off a-shoutin' and a-baptizin', picking up steam and picking up converts.  This was IT!-- This was ROCK and ROLL!-- Or some kinda freewheeling hybrid of rock n' roll, honky-tonk, punk, R&B and lord knows what that was somehow hard-wired to our young rock n' roll souls. We'd read tea leaves, magazines and the CP listings for any sign of shows in Baltimore or DC, or maybe even Boston, NYC, Northampton, Port Chester or lord knows where.  Finally we realized we could just put Klausner on the case and just pay the band to play a gig for our own entertainment.  Huzzah!  And this despite the crimes that the Buttsteak and the Haggises 5 band routinely committed against "Mybaby..." and "Moons'" and "Betty" and "Rat" and "Russian".  (Hell, Fitz and I just sang, and probably once again ruined, "2day, 2morrow,4ever" across a campfire just this past weekend...)

Yep-- the Scruffy gigs were So Damned Good and the third LP was Going to Be #$%^'in Amazing.  But that was that.  Band breaks up, college is done.  Move it along, son.  Put it behind you.

Well, I was lucky enough to live in Boston after that, and saw a lot of Charlie Chesterman with the Harmony Rockets, and solo, and I dunno how many times with the Legendary Motorbikes, plugging away.  Plans sadly fell through to have the Motorbikes play at the Wack-Keating Belated Wedding Event/ Premature 2nd Anniversary Party a couple years back.  After that, I kept an eye out for Charlie gigs, hoping to catch up, but... nothing....  for many months....  strange....  Until, card-carrying stalker that I still must be, I happened to go to Charlie's ever-neglected and run-down website for the first time in a long while and...?  What the $%^&??  Cancer?  Benefit?  What the #%^#??

Well, more on all that business shortly.  In the meantime, this one goes out with eternal gratitude to Charlie and Randall and Stephen and Burns and Mac....

Honey Pie

Hey friends-

I have not much of note to prattle on about to accompany it, but I did manage to turn up a song to post: a companion piece to last week's bar-room rocker, recorded at the same time as that one.  The chassis was similarly lifted from the Stones-Faces design book, with maybe an additional nod to AC/DC along the way.  Thematically, though, it was spun off Beatle George's "Savoy Truffle" from the White Album.  Just another in a long line of Imaginary Foodstuff Rock Songs.... (insert Dessert Island Disc joke here.) 

Bonus Fun Fact That I Just Learned: Did you know that sometimes when blues and rock songs refer to sugar, candy, jelly rolls and other foodstuffs, sometimes they're always not speaking literally?  Sometimes they are.  Discuss among yourselves.

Aaaaanyhoo:

Honey Pie:

Mum's the Word

Doc's post on Mum's has it right. For a while, there was a choice to be made: Tio Loco's or Mum's? Actually, there were lots of choices to be made back then. Crazy Lil's, Sudsucker's, the original Captain Larry's and, if you were on a date or something, Sisson's or Bandaloops. The neighborhood was filled with shot-and-a-beer places that have slowly faded away to the point where it's hard to find a decent shufflebowl table anymore.

Management issues pushed Tio's into oblivion and shifted the focus to Mum's. Below is one of the relics that made the transition along with Brian and the rest of us:

Dillo and subsequent bands played Mum's with some frequency, the now-covered fireplace blazing away the skin from this drummer's back. There were plenty of sets with the Glenmont Popes, and that glorious holiday show with Dr. Tasty. And, who else... Splittsville, maybe? It's all a little hazy.

-RK

Down at the Crown

With the good ol' days of late-'90's Baltimore on the mind as a result of last week's post, here's one for you-- "Down at the Crown".  The song is a mash-up of sorts, taking it's name from the first practice space the Dillo band ever had, in the wonderfully decrepit and spacious Crown Industrial Park along the Highlandtown-Greektown border on Baltimore's east side.    The compound is one of those great holdovers from its industrial heyday that Baltimore specializes in.  Our room was huge and lit by a wall-full of frosted windows.   It was a pretty quiet/ sparsely populated facility.  There wasn't a lot of noise bleed.  Load-ins/ outs were a snap.    Assuming you didn't get inadvertently locked in the Crown compound, blocked in by a slow-rolling or (even worse) stopped freight train, you could still make the quick hop up the road to Samos for some fine Greek vittles, and maybe stop by Fell's Point for a cool beverage if it were late enough and you were taking the crosstown route back to Federal Hill.  The Crown was (and is) also the home to Invisible Sound Studios, where Dave Nachodsky recorded a couple batches of "hit rekkids" for us (including "South of Lombard"), somehow making us sound quite nifty in the process.  Perhaps more on that later.

Content-wise, though, "Down at the Crown" is fully sprung from the fetid loins of Mum's on S. Hanover St., which at the time and for several years thereafter was the center of social, musical and alcoholic operations in our Fed'l Hill/ South Baltimore world.  If you've not stepped foot inside Mum's, it's not hard to get the picture of the way it was back in the day: a dark, impossibly smoke-infused "Cheers" for a broad swath of white-/ blue-/ no-collar locals, post-shift tradesmen, barkeeps and restaurant workers, tattooed punkers and artists, sundry humanity and foolish youth overflowing from the Cross St. Market, O's games, street fairs and other downtown adventures.  The jukebox was good, live music was present on the weekends with fair frequency, the pool table had a pronounced warp but was playable...

The song itself dates back to '02 or so.  Like many of 'em, I've tried to nail it down a few times.  This version is probably the closest to true, even if it lacks the handclaps and "Exile On Main St."-era Stones horns that I hear in my head, and even if the tuning on one of the guitars is tenuous.   It's a solo affair, this particular attempt, so quality control is more likely to suffer.

"Down at the Crown":

South of Lombard

Yep, here we are, already into July.  It appears that time continues to fly.  But having posted a summery, quasi-4th-of-July song last week, we've got something completely different for your Independence Day weekend-- a cheerful kiss-off song, called "South of Lombard" (the "Lombard" in question being a main east-west thoroughfare in downtown Bawlmer).

During last August's recording session here at the Harpswell Estate, the RK and BS co-op delved deep into our Charm City past and came up with the bones of this re-do of the song we used to play with our band "Dillo".  That band, named after one Paul R. Cardillo, scholar and gentleman, was comprised of the two of us, plus Goff Brown, Johnny "Rock" Marsh and eventually also Paulie Bonanos.  An irascible thing was the Dillo band, but great fun while it lasted.  Sadly I have no photo to post right now, but will eventually scare one up.  Those were the pre-digital days...  But they were certainly not the pre-rock days, as we brought quite a punked-up pop/ twang-tinged racket. 

Songs are funny things-- This one actually started out in a restrained, Richard Thompson-like acoustic vein, and in the hands of the Dillo band was much more a a crunchy runaway speedball than this version.  Our post-Dillo band Honcho (RK, BS and PB) slowed it down and sort of lounged it up.  I thought that exposing you to all four of those would be just too much love, but here's the new one:

South of Lombard:


/jk

Better late than never, that post gave me some Joe-mentum to get my mitts on a scanner and use it.  So here for your viewing pleasure, Dillo (the band), at he '98 Fells Point Festival: