The Post-Rockist

It’s Halloween today, and that can only mean one thing: today is the one day in the year when most people choose to express themselves as individuals by means of over-the-top, clever costumes. For me, personally, the costume choice was a no-brainer: Senator Larry Craig (R-ID). After donning a poorly-made brown suit and a fake bald head from Walgreen’s, the costume only requires a few flourishes to make it a winner: Creepy old man glasses? Check. Toilet paper comically stuck to the bottom of one’s loafers? Check. GOP button? Check. Kinky handcuffs dangling from one wrist to really drive the point home for fellow party-goers who may be living under a rock? Bam! It’s golden! Now that I’m all gussied up with nowhere to go, all I need are a few good seasonal tunes to set my toes a-tap-tap-tappin’ and, who knows, if you’re lucky, you might catch me busting out into my famous Wide Stance Dance. (Hyuck, hyuck, I slay me! Oy vey. I hope you weren’t expecting anything serious with as punny as a title as this post shamefully features. Anyway, moving along now…)

Last year I attended a haunted house where the only three songs played by the establishment were Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” George Thorogood & The Destroyer’s “Bad to the Bone,” and that “Oh Yeah” song made popular by its usage in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and those Twix commercials from around the same time. These three songs were cycled on repeat while I waited in line for over an hour. Pure horror. While all three songs are good in their own right, and certainly deserving of placement in any respectable Monster Mash-up, here are 13 unlucky tunes sure to frighten away your guests:

(Continued)

(”podcast” is a noun and a verb now, right?)

Although everybody else seems to know about it, I’ve just discovered a great podcast called Coverville. Hosted by Brian Ibbott, Coverville is your place on the internet for smart and interesting theme shows featuring covers of your favorite artists by your favorite artists. I just listened to the “Leonard Cohen Cover Story II” podcast from October 25, 2007 and have uploaded onto the old iPod another five shows. Ibbott knows his stuff and has the love of an archivist, making the shows enjoyable and memorable. I’ve hypothesized the value of covers elsewhere and this show is just another example of the richness of meaning that results when creative interpretation meets appreciation.

–Posted by Scotter

R.I.P. Porter Wagoner.

It’s a lesson too late for the learnin’
Made of sand, made of sand
In the wink of an eye my soul is turnin’
In your hand, in your hand

Are you going away with no word of farewell
Will there be not a trace left behind
I could’ve loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind
You know that was the last thing on my mind

Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton - The Last Thing on My Mind
(from The Essential Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton)

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I was about 20-25 feet away from him when I got caught in his eyes. The group of fans around me–fidgeting and shouldering for position in the hopes of making advances toward the front–were also caught for a brief moment when Morrissey turned on his right heel in our direction. They were the bluest and deepest things I’ve ever seen. I was (we were) transfixed. Dumbfounded. And for a brief few seconds I think that the shouldering stopped. A momentary peace. A moment of recognition that this untouchable and unknowable stranger, who has meant so much to us through his words and his voice, is actually in our presence. (Continued)

Of Montreal, Wilco, and other musical acts in Milwaukee

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As a six-year-old, picturing myself at a rock concert, I would have imagined a concert hall, with a heavy red curtain and a crystal chandelier. With my six-year-old musical horizons limited to classical works, Motown, and Josie and the Pussycats, the band I imagined would come from that narrow world – they would be theatrical but light-hearted, catchy but musically deft. There would be flashbulbs, flooding lights, and everyone would be charged with the uncontainable, hyperkinetic energy that only six-year-olds can understand. A rock concert would be friendly, colorful – there might even be cartoons; six-year-olds love cartoons – but there would be a sense of danger, a pushing of boundaries, because rock concerts were a thing that little kids didn’t do, and those sorts of things usually involved trouble. And it would be the future – 2007, maybe (a year I would have called “twenty-oh-seven,” because at six years old, the nineteen-nineties would not have given way to the two-thousands), and the world would be streamlined, cordless, colored with glitter and silver.

Imagine me, then, at Milwaukee’s historic Pabst Theatre, an opera hall built by a beer baron in the 19th century. Now mostly a rock venue, the Pabst is plush – all white marble, gold leaf, and Austrian crystal. Imagine the curtain pulled back after two welcome-overstayed opening acts to reveal a costumed band – the keyboard player in ruffles, the bass player draped in a silver lame gown, wearing huge black wings – on tiered platforms that illuminated when the hook of the first chorus kicked in, bathing our astonished faces in bright white light. Three screens behind them looped psychedelic cartoon.

Imagine the awe of the six-year-old self, somehow incorporated into my confident, gratifying-job-holding, well-dressed, alcohol-consuming, sexually-realized adult being, that this was it, the rock concert of the future as seen from 1990, and it was Of Montreal.

A week later I saw Wilco in a smoky, delapidated ballroom in a poor part of the city (a neighborhood that Marquette University is slowly overtaking). The stage lights cut through the fog, the sloppy sound echoed. The band sounds so much rowdier live, so much fuller and so much more southern – like they belong in a barroom, not on reverential indie hit lists.

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There is nowhere to sit in the ballrooom, although there are scalloped balconies where people get close to the railing and dance. Wilco bothered with none of the misanthropic, reluctant-showmen affect that seems to define so many of the musicians I’ve seen live this fall. I think at one point Jeff Tweedy even said, “Keep cheering, because we’re not gonna stop.” He was wearing a cowboy hat, for God’s sake.

I think seeing Wilco was like seeing the rock concert I imagine to have existed in the past – maybe, 1978. Yeah – it was like seeing some cocky, sweaty, straight-shooting rock and roll band in 1978, the way we romanticize rock and roll bands to have been like once.

Tonight I’m seeing The New Pornographers, again at the Pabst. I wonder what sort of imagined times and spaces this show will bring to terra firma.

-Posted by Amy

Dear Khaela,

I’ve never actually written a fan letter before, let alone a letter destined not for the artist but for the small yet ardent readership of a music blog. However, after flying from Detroit to Washington, DC, to see you, The Blow, play at the Black Cat on October 4, I felt that I had to tell you how much I enjoyed the show.

My roommate Annie introduced me to your music and I’ve been a big fan ever since. Based on a bunch of bootlegs I’ve been downloading illegally lately, it seems as though you don’t like the song “Parentheses” anymore, that you play it begrudgingly, perhaps because the broken heart you talked about during the show was broken by the fellow for whom “Parentheses” was written. That sucks. But Khaela, that song is where we began, even though you didn’t know it. To be honest, I quickly moved on to the other songs on Paper Television, particularly “Eat Your Heart Up” and “Pardon Me” (thanks for playing those). And I know it sucks to have to play it over and over again because it’s everyone’s favorite. I hear that Manilow feels the same way about “Mandy.” But Khaela, “Mandy” is actually a pretty good song, and so is “Parentheses.”

One my favorite things about your performance and your personality is your sensuality. Your show was one of the sexiest shows I’ve ever been to. I think it’s your honesty and insight into life and relationships and bodies and feelings, because I think most of us get wrapped up in our defense mechanisms and aren’t able to express those repressed needs and wants and the disappointments that are part of life. But you were able to express all this so artfully and with good humor, but with truth as well. That was awesome. I bet Emily Dickinson would be really jealous of you. She could express so much, but in cloaked, disguised metaphor that probably made dudes just kind of shrug her off. She just wanted to be held, perhaps, but I wonder if she would have produced much if she had been held all the time. (Continued)

Iron and Wine-Carousel
(from The Shepherd’s Dog)

In the first ten seconds of the first track from The Shepherd’s Dog, you hear an up-tempo, far-off guitar and I can’t help but think of lyrics from my favorite Joni Mitchell song “All I want.” She sings, “Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive. I wanna wreak my stockings in some juke box dive.” By the time the drums come in, I’ve already transported myself into mismatched stockings that are racing down my calves, kicking up sawdust in some bohemian hideout in Laurel Canyon with my skirt pulled up to my knees. This type of musical quantum leap is not uncommon for me, or for anyone else I’m sure, but it rarely feels biographical. Usually, I let my music of the week lay out the characters and the scenes in front of me. But with The Shepherd’s Dog it’s different. It’s eerily familiar. I’m the character in these songs and I know where things are going. There are layers of instruments, vocals, and at times haunting drones that include everything from psychedelic guitar to saloon-style piano that for me feel…nostalgic. They create an atmosphere perfect for reminiscing. When listening, I’m allowed access into personal landscapes I can’t relive without the songs’ help. It’s gripping; it’s art. And that’s just the music. The lyrics give me plenty to work with, plenty to interpret how I will. For instance, my favorite song on the album currently is “Carousel.” From the first notes, I can feel how the music sounds. Then come the words: “Almost home…” God. Coming home. I’ve been coming and going a lot lately. I know how many ways that can feel. Coming home to family or the one you love, or to an empty apartment. And I feel it. The voices continue, “…and the perfect girls, by the pool…” and I’m off again, but now into a grainy old home video where I’m shielding my eyes from the sun and turn from my spot by the water to wave at the camera. I can’t say why these different sounds and textures feel so tailored to me, but I can say that I’m up to the challenge of discovering more about myself through this album. It’s like all music that is close to your heart: it feels intimate.

–Posted by Alisha