Tag: music

Tonight’s Troubadour at D’s

John Joseph at Diedrich Coffee

He plays mostly sixties covers, as you’d expect from a guitarist of his age. He did cover Richard Thompson’s “From Galway to Graceland” which was a nice surprise. Turns out he idolizes Thompson. He told me his 16-year-old son shares his love for the RT and is trying to play in a similar style, and is “scary good” after just a few years. Won’t let the kid at his Chapman Stick because he’s afraid his son will outdo him and he’ll have to jump off the Pier.

He’s a good guitar player, but uses so much reverb and delay/loop stuff that you’re hearing what he picked last week. At times he stops playing for a bit and the music just goes on. My own theory is that he dropped, like, a POUND of acid in 1974 and the rest of the world sounds this way to him. And he thinks he’s playing like Richard Thompson on Small Town Romance while we all talk like we’re underwater.

Anyway he’s a very nice guy.

It’s not easy, making real friends.

Just got back from seeing genericus play with Crack Sunday at the infelicitously named Hogue Barmichael’s. This is the bar next to the airport where airline pilots have 8 Cuba Libres, sway across the street into the cockpit, and pass out at the controls on takeoff, augering into the Upper Newport Bay in a 757 full of Disneyland returnees. They also have live music there!

All the elements of the weeknight show at the local venue were there. High school kids in a messed up van with stuff written on it, and a PA through which they mumbled. Grumpy bartender. Decent turnout for a late evening weeknight like this. There was a wacky woman who kept demonstrating her belching technique.

The cast inside the bar was familiar too. Some friends of the band, some fans of the band, some totally random people. There were the two Ghost World girls who danced and had a good time and were fun and nice. It seems that there are two girls like that at every show. There was a very happy backwards-baseball-cap guy with bad teeth who said to me “There’s lots of girls here to see these guys. That’s good! Hey, maybe only 15 people here but ten are girls!” There was the silent ponytailed sound guy.

The music is prog rock with a lead keyboard, which is very much not my style; I like maybe 10 songs total in this style of which maybe 7 are early Peter Gabriel solo songs. (“White Shadow” and “On the Air” are examples.) Fortunately genericus knows and likes this music better and plays it well. I couldn’t hear the guitarist at all. There were a few songs I was able to roll with and enjoy, and I have to say it was because of the bassline more than anything. I have major problems with the singer in this band, and it’s been hard for me to get past this previously too. They got better as the night went on, though, as you’d expect from a band that hasn’t played live in a while.

At one point the cheesy fog machine vomited out a load of cheesy fog directly over genericus‘s head and he looked up and was struck down by fear and horror for about 5 seconds; it made me wish I’d brought in the camera.

I left a bit early because I have been working on and off in 4 hour shifts for the last 24 hours and I was burnt.

The television over the bar first gave us a show in which grinning people handed each other gigantic fish. This was followed by sickly yellow salesmen infomershing, and finally by the end of Rain Man.

Thanks for the pen.

I was talking to a friend tonight about her crap office job, and thinking that about half the people I read on the elljay have crap office jobs of one kind or another. They all work for neurotic incompetent failures who bully them, are paid badly and screwed on their benefits, and get impossible workloads followed by blame dumped on their heads.

This is because I know lots of people who are around 25, and if you’re a smart 25-year-old finding a career you end up being the slavey for 35-year-old failures who’ve topped out at the supervisor level. They may start out human, but quickly decay into little Napoleons in chinos. There’s a pompous, patronizing sadism this sort of toy emperor practices that’s just the thing for grinding down younger, smarter employees.

I used technical skills to get out of this mess quickly and only had a couple of jobs this bad. Most of my friends, though, spent the 1990s working in places like this: temp office gigs, entertainment companies, variants on Innotech. Greg worked in a mailroom at a movie company for a while. His supervisor was too old to be the mailroom supervisor and be going anywhere, but had delusions of a future. He dressed for success, combined over his bald spot, and lied to his bosses about his skill at cost-cutting and improving efficiency. He made sure that no one got raises or got to use their vacation time, and never paid overtime, to show that he was made for the corner office. Once, unbidden, he decided to let everyone in his domain know what he was destined to achieve: “I see myself, in ten years or so, in an executive position. Because that’s my goal, and I achieve my goals. I am going to have a mistress, and my own jet, and three houses”. The young musicians and artists and soon-to-be graduate students sat there as the 35-year-old single mailroom supervisor from Burbank told tales of his future empire.

Greg wrote a song for him that was recorded on the Ferdinand CD Demoted to Greeter, a record that more than any other tells the story of all of us 80s kids getting fucked by the 90s. Here it is:

Thanks for the Pen (mp3, 2.9 MB). It’s pretty loud and thrashy.

Let’s call it as it is
You don’t care
You won’t back me up
Thanks for the pen!
I got it right here…
Thanks for the pen
Gonna throw it right back at you

not the weakest links

Scratch and sniff WHAT?

Pay me out for my Nazi iconography, bitches!

The problem with productivity nowadays.

You can find out where the cellphone towers are near you and map them on a Google map.

There’s a documentary out about the Minutemen. They made life liveable for me in the first half of the 1980s, and miss them terribly. There’s a trailer on the site that catches a little of what turned me upside down at age 17.

Popery.

I just got The Pope‘s album in the mail today. Now I like them more than ever. Lots of screaming and smashing and loud guitars. Another thing they remind me of is the Three Johns. Or maybe if the Pixies got very, very, very, very wasted and turned up too high.

If you like noisy, exuberant music or if you just enjoy falling downstairs into the lawnmower, buy the damned thing

NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE

I really like The Pope.

I say this not because I’m friends with the one guy’s fiancĂ©e and met him a couple times, but because I just finally got the mp3-trola on myspace to work properly and listened to their music and it blasted my pants right off.

You’re supposed to mention at least two bands they sound like, old rock crit rule. So I pick Half Japanese and Mission of Burma. They have that “this entire record was recorded inside a coffee can” sound that I love from Half Japanese, and they’re anarchic and noisy as fuck. There’s an element of “Help, I am being kicked downstairs into the trash bin” listening to this stuff that really makes me warm and happy inside.

But they’ve got melody and guitar riffs, and the songs go from point A to point B instead of just being slices of noise. I can’t be down with the slices of noise thing; it puts me to sleep. This sound is more like giving a very talented and angry ADHD victim access to drums and guitars and asking him how he feels about his mother. BAM BAM RAAAR YEE HAW CLONK BLONK RRRROAR WHAMMEDY BLAM.

Oh yeah, and Flipper. A lot like Flipper. Anyway I just ordered their CD.