Christmas arrived a little early… Thank you, Target. Thank you, Darker My Love.
http://www.youtube.com/v/w4Prt9T4-nk&hl&hd=1&fs=1
BTW — it will become very clear very soon why Tulip Frenzy finds a holiday song from this band to be very special to post this year…
Leica M9, 21mm Summilux
There’s no question that the remastered Exile On Main Street, with its incredible unearthing of songs long presumed buried in Villefranche-sur-Mer, was the album we most anticipated, and it’s possible that “Plundered My Soul” was the best song released by any band other than Chappo. It may well have been the music event of 2010. And with those new tracks, it could even qualify as a “new” album.
But two years ago, when Dylan’s magisterial Tell Tale Signs was released with a few “new” songs but mostly rearrangements of songs that had been released earlier, we were moved to declare it #1 on Tulip Frenzy’s Top Ten List for 2008. After all, we reckoned, when the history of 2008 is written, the release of Tell Tale Signs will be considered its landmark musical achievement. And yet, in so doing, we screwed others. We specifically screwed Kelley Stoltz, whose Circular Sounds, but for Dylan’s re-release, would have captured the top slot, going away.
And so we take this stand: we won’t list Exile as 2010’s top album, because in actuality it was 1972’s top album, and would have been so designated then by Tulip Frenzy if the gang hadn’t been more concerned with, like, passing Algebra 1 than publishing a blog. This will offer justice to those young pups who deserve to be known as the makers of the Tulip Frenzy #1 Top Album of 2010. We know who they are. They are, for the record, younger than Mick’n’Keith, who while not quite needing walkers, certainly don’t need any more accolades than they get already.
Birds galore, but why take photos of animate objects when you have mysteries like this before you?
Leica M9, Noctilux f/0.95
That’s the Empire State Building behind the thistle. Leica M9, Noctilux @ f/0.95.
I don’t know about you, but when the BJM’s “Straight Up And Down” plays as the theme song for Boardwalk Empire, my pulse quickens. It seems simultaneously to reaffirm Martin Scorsese’s hipster credentials and the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s greatness. Not that either were ever in doubt.
But then last night, I watched Dig! for the first time in a while, and it was a reminder of just how tenuous Anton Newcomb’s hold on — what? everything: his music, his life, his sanity, his work — was for so many years there. As he spirals down, as the band flounders, you could forget, for maybe a moment, just how extraordinary is the BJM’s contribution to the rock’n’roll canon.
(The most telling two lines in the movie come when a) Courtney Taylor-Taylor, having been brutal to Anton for much of the movie, states that just when he thinks he/the Dandy’s have caught up, he hears something new by the BJM and it takes his breath away, b) Anton, in one of his typical ego riffs states, quite accurately as it were, that when they started out, Pearl Jam was the biggest band in music, but how many PJ imitators are there now, versus how many BJM imitators? Brilliant insight.)
The whole film is a reminder of what was, and we can compare it to the live output of the past two, three years. We don’t much care for the Icelandic recording sessions that have found their way to the public, but having seen BJM three times since the Summer of 2008, it’s clear that Anton has found some measure of stability, and surely the band today is a glorious machine, as Anton hangs on and just plays one great song after another.
And so we gear up to watch another episode of Boardwalk Empire, knowing that “Straight Up And Down” is as oddly well matched to be the intro theme as “Gimme Shelter” was to be the soundtrack to Casino’s denouement. Knowing just how great it is, and how close things came to Anton’s never having survived to hear his music reach this level of popular culture acceptance and veneration, is one of today’s many reasons for gratitude.
Leica M9, Noctilux @ f/0.95
A correspondent who has just had an unusually exciting week of live music attendance writes in:
“After the glorious spectacle that was the Sufjan Stevens’ concert at New York’s Beacon Theater, it was hard to imagine that the music I was in for the rest of the week could keep up with that quality and level of talent. But the second Hallelujah Chorus came in the form of Fistful of Mercy at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in DC, a location that did not go unnoticed or unappreciated by the musicians performing on the synagogue’s bimah Tuesday night. It doesn’t seem appropriate to call this performance a concert. It was more a high holy week jam session with some amazing musicians — Dhani Harrison, Joseph Arthur, Ben Harper and Jessy Greene. From what I could see, they had 13 guitars, a keyboard, bongos. The three guitarists were augmented by Green on her violin against the stained glass backdrop. The show was actually better than I expected, for while the song “Fistful of Mercy” instantly grabbed me when I heard it on the radio, I found the rest of As I Called You Down disappointing. There was nothing disappointing about this live show. From start to finish it was a rousing and spiritual experience unfolding in in the sanctuary. “Fistful of Mercy” was a tour de force rising all the way up to the domed roof. Lest you think the evening was all solemn and pious, the musicians filled the time between songs exchanging quips and jokes including one extended riff on becoming a heavy metal band. The final song of the encore, “With Whom You Belong” was performed, unplugged, at the edge of the stage/bimah, and the band then wade into the crowd, Fleshtones style.
“The culmination of musical high holy week was a night of pure rock’n’roll at the another music mecca — the 9:30 Club. It was a night of smart, creative, interesting rock’n’roll that you get from Brendan Benson, backed by the Posies. I love Brendan Benson’s songs because his music is so full of surprises with melodies taking fabulous twists and turns across a song. On his albums, those twists come across as precise movements but can sometimes border on being too neat’n’clean. Nothing neat and clean about the ruckus raised by Benson and the Posies Wednesday night. On every song, the talent and quality of the musicians was on display and the twists and turns taken through the Brendan Benson classics were all present and accounted for. Benson was the reserved and bemused straight man to the playful Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer. Benson and the gang closed their encore and my musical high holy week with an homage to Alex Chilton and a superb rendition of ‘September Gurls.'”
Leica M9, Noctilux @f/0.95, with ND filter
There is no truth to the rumor that Tulip Frenzy World HQ has been shut down whilst the gang finished Life. It is however true that those moments not taken up by the vagaries and jaggedness of ends-meeting in the business world have, in part, been given over to the remarkably informative Keith Richards, whose autobiography is for the rock’n’roll set what Speak, Memory was to fans of Nabokov.
What have we learned from Life that we didn’t previously know? The depth of Keith’s contempt for Brian Jones. Exactly how his discovery of open tuning led to the great riffs of the ’70s. How not just “Street Fighting Man” but also “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was recorded with Keith on acoustic into a little cassette recorder, the tape of which played in the studio somehow gained its “electric” sound. How the title Exile on Main Street referred to the nautical ties between the Italian and French Riviera. Let’s see, how innocent that Mars bar was. The extent to which Britain’s policy on providing heroin to addicts led to Keith becoming one. (And — who knew? — how they used to give out cocaine to heroin addicts to keep them from nodding off, thus providing Keef with access to the pure flake.) So much more… An excellent book. When you think about it, this has been an incredible year for Stones’ fans — starting with the 40th anniversary box of Ya-Yas, Ethan Russell’s great book of photos from the era, Let It Bleed, the Exile reissue with new songs, the release of Ladies and Gentlemen on DVD, and now Keith’s book. Whew. Best year since…’72?
We never posted about the excellent Black Angels/Black Mountain show at 930. The Black Angels were pretty mindblowing. Yes, it would take a fraction of a second for the Shazam algorithm-decoder to determine a song is by the Black Angels, as for the most part they all have the same number-of-words-in-a-lyric/number-of-beats-in-a-chorus formula. But who knew that voice came out of a guy hidden between his beard and his hat? Or that the drummer was a woman? Or that the guitarist looked like he might have been playing for Big Brother and the Holding Company? Or that over the course of the evening, four different people would play bass? Black Mountain got into a groove — fascinating how all the songs from In The Future seemed to be on a loop. They were tight to the point of metronomic regularity, but still exciting. Amber Weber seemed to pick up strength as the set wore on. Stephen McBean seemed downright frisky. Methinks the next time Black Mountain come round these parts, they’ll be opening at the Verizon Center for some band you don’t really want to see… You know, the next rung up from headlining clubs. We have mixed emotions about this, but do root for them, given their manifest excellence as musicians and sonic adventurers.
We read Jon Pareles’ review of the Sufjan Stevens shows at the Beacon and, having been there Sunday night, found ourselves for once not wanting to strangle the Chief Music Correspondent Of The New York Times, or whatever is the position of authority through which Pareles has for far too long helped destroy our enjoyment of music. Though where Pareles sees Sufjan’s near-closing extravaganza of “Impossible Soul” as almost Lady Gaga-like — given its raw theatricality — another analogue came to our mind: we saw Max in Where The Wild Things Are, rumbling with those wild things and emerging with his crown askew. Now we’ll admit, this was that rare show where what we most loved was what rocked the least — Sufjan as folky was far more interesting than Sufjan as David Byrne circa True Stories. Although truth be told, one of the things most remarkable about Sufjan in his Age of Adz phase is precisely the extent to which he is sui generis, with no antecedents, not even himself. I think that album would be better, and his music stronger, if he had the time, fortitude, and resources to construct his elaborate music around an orchestra — a real orchestra, not just the thirteen other musicians who accompanied him — rather than electronica. (Yes, we understand that performing The BQE with a symphony was a ball-buster, in his mind, apparently, a failure. We don’t care; we’d rather hear strings than synth.) The theatricality of what he does is probably closer to Laurie Anderson than Lady Gaga. And at its core is a young genius with a beautiful voice and a heartbreaking sense of melody, even though right now he seems hell-bent on encapsulating it all in something mechanical and able to withstand reentry from space. And we know he is ready to rumble with the wild things.
Tulip Frenzy 