It was a long day, what with the 11-hours in a car running an errand (don’t ask.) But to be able to go for an after-dinner stroll more than made up for it.
The sun hung in the sky as long as it could, and when it finally relented, it cast golden light on everything to the east. Until finally, it came down behind the mountains, leaving a little bit of alpenglow on the peaks.
All images Leica M-240, 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph
It must be so much fun to be Ty Segall, to release album after album of high quality fuzz- toned garage rock and the occasional masterpiece (Twins, Manipulator.) But even if we’re not really grokking on Gogg, his new part-time band with the Swedish backslash through the O, we can only marvel at what a great record he produced by young L.A. band Feels. While released a few months ago, it only came to our attention as the air grew warm, but has now completely melted over our music player’s hard drive. Nothing else can stick, because Feels has claimed it, and our ears, and our heart.
This isn’t the first time an incredible young band has been brought to the world, essentially, through the agency of Mr. Segall. Wand was such a band two years ago, and they’ve now fought their way into the same sentence with Ty, White Fence, and Thee Oh Sees. Feels is a four-piece fronted by Laena Geronimo, and when you hear them roar on their eponymous debut, the mind starts gathering links to bands as disparate as Hole and 8 Eyed Spy. Feels is notable for how perfectly the drums are tuned, how hollow is the distortion on the guitar, the great harmonies, the way songs can go off on tangents and come galloping home like a filly that remembered something.
On “Close My Eyes,” we hear echoes of Ty’s own best work — it has hooks a stevedore would struggle to lift, which is one reason it has, for weeks now, hung from the tippy top of my brains. There is no respite from the tuneful sludge when they head into “Slippin’,” which just as soon as it seems is going to get stuck in the grunge, springs free with a kick and a “whoo hoo” as infectious as a Brazilian bug bite. Every so often, when the riff-making seems heavy, they break into a double-time trot that would make Exene and John Doe smile. And if you don’t believe me, go listen to “Tell Me,” the summer’s catchiest song.
So, it is good to be Ty, who appears to be having the time of his life, playing with whomever he chooses, whenever he wants. But every once in a while, when a band like Feels gets introduced to the world through his auspices, we are reminded what a force for good he is, how generous he can be, and why this decade is, past the mid-point, shaping up musically as stronger than even the ’90s.
Leica M, 35mm Summilux FLE, DC Pride Parade, June 11, 2016
Long ago, Spaceman 3 — one of the bands that most influenced Psychic Ills, New York’s finest purveyors of psychedelic drones and bluesy space rock — titled an album Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To. This sort of Ouroboros circularity is what greets us with Psychic Ills’ flat out astonishing Inner Journey Out: music that somehow showcases Texan transplants living on the Lower East Side sounding like Spaceman 3-descendants Spiritualized channeling original L.E.S drone rockers the Velvet Underground.
Weirdly, after the release of a pretty great debut album, Dins, we lost track of Psychic Ills. What a mistake. On Inner Journey Out, they’ve produced a gorgeous, transfixing batch of songs, finely crafted and meticulously recorded. The headline, we suppose, is that Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval backs up Tres Warren on “I Don’t Mind,” a collaboration which helps fix Psychic Ills’ coordinates: think of a set of songs played at Mazzy Star’s signature slowish tempo, containing both a second side of Exile On Main Street meets Alejandro Escovedo alt-rock sensibility, while still steeped in Jason Pierce’s unique, gospel-inflected take on Lou Reed. Fine company to keep. Did we mention that Inner Journey Out is astonishing?
So, there’s a bit too much of it: 14 songs when maybe 10 would do. And it could have used some of the Woods-ish rocking edge of 2013’s One Track Mind to accelerate the pace. But on Inner Journey Out, Tres Warren and Elizabeth Hart, backed up by a crackerjack combo of musicians, are going for a feeling, a mood, and don’t want to disturb the flow by varying the tempo. This works and doesn’t work — the album could stand to have been edited a bit, and to be a trace more varied. But we’re not complaining, because it is a truly great record.
Although the bands have different antecedents and don’t exactly sound alike, somehow this record makes us think of their Sacred Bones label mates, Damon McMahon’s Amen Dunes. And while Amen Dunes are for playing fairly quietly at 2:00 AM after a long evening out, Inner Journey Out is for playing when heading on a road trip to Big Bend, to Marfa, on that long thin ribbon of highway wending toward the West as the shimmering heat makes the cactus liquid. Amazing to think that transplanted Texans in New York produced this music. If gratitude is a driver of happiness, and it is, then this is what we’re grateful for this morning.
So the news this morning is about a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando. This is so terrible and outrageous, on every level, and particularly sad after the joyous spectacle staged in DC and elsewhere yesterday. Readers of Tulip Frenzy know we adore The D.C. Funk Parade and believe that each autumn’s High Heel Race is one of the most fun events in our city or anywhere else. But for sheer happiness, nothing can compete with the Capital Pride Parade, and in 2016, on a gorgeous, very hot day, it was sheer delight. Herewith some images. Click on any image for the slide show.
Every year, we go down to the National Mall over the Memorial Day weekend. It’s a fitting, and moving, visit to make, and a pretty amazing opportunity to capture a wide spectrum of humanity and emotions as thousands of veterans arrive, often on Harleys, and visit the Vietnam Memorial.
African Americans and rural whites come to the Memorial to reflect on loved ones lost. In fact, as we were there yesterday, the woman on the left below was saying to her friend that she comes here every year to mourn her father, but that even though he had to die in Vietnam, she wouldn’t want him to have lived if it meant someone else’s father had to die.
It’s not all mournful though. The motorcyclists come in force for their Rolling Thunder ride, which takes place today, in fact, and more on that in a moment.
It is, in its own way — and in recognition that this is a summer ritual, a three-day holiday weekend that kicks off summer — festive. People come to eat and see their friends and there is commerce on the edge of the Mall. As of course there is. ‘Murica.
But what makes this event each year so meaningful is the essential apolitical nature of people coming to Washington, motivated by a desire to celebrate their participation in our nation’s wars, by the desire to shine the light on POWs and MIAs. 
Which is why we found ourselves yesterday — and honestly, today — so disturbed by the notion that Donald Trump plans on coming to the Mall today to hold a rally with the Rolling Thunder riders. Forget for just a moment the notion of this proto-fascist on the National Mall, mere yards from the White House literally, and figuratively, revving up the crowd of Harley riders. No matter what he says, he will have spoiled what is essential about this weekend, here, each year. Which is the essential poignancy of those reflecting on a sacrifice he dodged, and the reminder of the consequences of those who would recklessly send young American men and women off to war.
All images Leica M-240 and 50mm Noctilux. To follow John Buckley on Twitter: @johnbuckley100. On Instagram: tulip_frenzy.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of motorcycles already gathering at the National Mall in advance of tomorrow’s annual Rolling Thunder commemoration of POWs and the MIA in Vietnam. Mixed emotions this year with the news that Trump, a draft-dodging bloviator, is speaking to the crowd. Wonder which way this guy will go.
Leica M, 50mm Noctilux, ND filter. Wide Open, ISO 200
Consider the case of Capsula, the Argentine exiles who now use Bilbao as their base for contra-European conquest, and who Tulip Frenzy once declared was the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. With three albums already recorded in Buenos Aires, and in Spanish, they leapt to our attention in 2006 with what still remains one of the 21st Century’s single greatest platters of tuneful punk rock, Song And Circuits. Five English-language albums later — one of them live, another a note-for-note rendition of Ziggy Stardust — in late April they released Santa Rosa, their best album in a decade. And yet — when Tulip Frenzy writes about certain of our favorite bands, there is always an “and yet” — the only way we found out about it is because we follow their Twitter feed.
The world of art is cruel, good novelists going unpublished, photographers like Vivian Mayer having their work discovered even as they lay dying, her death as much caused by poverty and neglect as blunt-force trauma. Our mind went to these depths because we heard Santa Rosa the same week Radiohead’s unquestionably gorgeous, if not grammatically titled A Moon Shaped Pool was released, and while the entire internet groaned from the peak-load strain of global downloading of that masterpiece, we think few others were probably as excited as we were to download this one.
For those who really want to learn about why Capsula is, in our estimation, as important a band as Radiohead, you can link here for full-on rhapsodic overkill. Now seriously, do. Or if you want just the capsule description of Capsula, try this one for size:
Capsula take all of the excitement of Under The Big Black Sun-era X, add to it a rockabilly twang showcasing how incredibly this ace trio swings, run it through the psychedelic soundboard of simpatico producers like Bowie’s Tony Visconti (2013’s Solar Secrets) or ex-Richard Hell and the Voidoids ace guitarist Ivan Julian (2009’s Rising Mountains), and out comes music that thrillingly plies a narrow line of punk rock skirting the coral along a pirate coast.
Santa Rosa is their best album since Song And Circuits because the songwriting is so exciting, because Martin Guevara plays guitar and sings with the revolutionary fervor of his father Che*, because Coni Duchess is a royally great bass player and singer, and because Ignacio Guantxe plays drums with the manic force of a Nadal backhand. We think it’s the first album they’ve produced since they moved to Spain that features both English and Spanish singing. We know that on songs like “Santa Rosa” and “Moving Mutant,” everything we hold dear in the world is expressed with melodic thunder.
As rock’n’roll fanatics, the team at Tulip Frenzy have long grown used to the two-city split between the successful and the great, with the former not always the latter, and too often the latter not the former. Why did the Police go on to earn fortunes when the Fleshtones, the band that each night on that 1980 tour blew them off the stage, are household names only among a special breed? When our son was very young, and his sense of what bands had achieved immortal status was based on what his parents played in the car, he was stunned to learn that the Ramones weren’t actually as big as the Beatles. Of course they should have been, but ponder that too long and you’ll go crazy.
Here’s an idea instead: just download the two Capsula songs mentioned above, then the whole of Santa Rosa, and then just keep downloading ’til collectively we make ’em bigger than Radiohead.
*Not his father. Though, hmm, both Guevara’s hail from B.A.
Lord knows, Washington, D.C. has its problems. But for an afternoon in May each year, they are all forgotten as the U Street corridor, from the newly gleaming, insta-neighborhood of North Shaw to the once-again de facto center of the city — 14th Street — becomes a carnival mixing young and old, African Americans and everyone else, straights and gays, families and singles. And that doesn’t even include the Funk Parade itself, which goes from the Howard Theater to Ben’s Chili Bowl. Just a few hours after the President gave the commencement address at Howard, and just a few hours before the Washington Capitals stayed alive by beating the Penguins at the Verizon Center, the city came together, as it does each year, in a reminder of why it’s great to live in cities, and not just cities per se, but the Nation’s Capital. Here are some photos that should give you a flavor of what the day was like. All images taken with a Leica Monochrom (type-246) and 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph.
Tulip Frenzy 