01.19.13
Anthemic
Open carry guitars rule. And they don’t threaten.
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01.16.13
WhiteManistan Rock (continued)
Unintentionally (or perhaps subversively, the opposite) hilarious.
“This gives me a freedom erection,” comments someone. “With my finger on the trigger of a loaded shotgun/There for the next time someone decides to come.”
Don’t take our guns. Plus, we’re broke, “so frickin’ broke.” Worth two Bluto Blutarskies.
01.08.13
Famous riffage
DD Band in Pasadena in November 2010. We often used the famous outro from Won’t Get Fooled Again by the Who as a sequed wrap up of a version of Young Man Blues.
The Pete Townshend sequencer line, which is the hook for Fooled, was done through the guitar in a Roger Linn Adrenalinn III. It always worked well.
Play loud for maximum effect. The audio is from a digital camera capture done by a member of the audience. The video part was so poorly shot it was useless except for a couple low res stills, so it was tossed and the raw audio given a faux stereo image in the digital studio. Caveats aside, the fragment still captures the essence of it.
We put on a good live show.
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01.06.13
Looked like a biker gang
From Classic Rock magazine, 2005:
The Highway Kings? Sounds like a biker gang. Looks like one, too. Sort of, yeah. In an era when ‘biker metal’ was more career choice than lifestyle (see Little Caesar, Two-Bit Thief, Junkyard, Tattoo Rodeo etc), Destiny and his filthy few actually lived like demented speedfreak outlaws in the junk belt of eastern Pennsylvania, playing their chariotchoogling motorcycle boogie mostly for third-stage alcoholics and lot lizards. More at home opening for downwardspiralling bloozesters – Robin Trower, Pat Travers et al – they often found themselves on freak-show double bills with strange bedfellows such as all-girl motor-metalmamas Cycle Sluts From Hell or spazzpoppers Ween, and the end result was frequently brawls, blood and spilled booze. Sometimes even on purpose.
Wait – did they just punch people, or were they an actual band? They were a band that punched people. Destiny was a smart-alecky writer and fledgling badass on a wild search for kicks in mid-80s Reagan America. He recruited a short-order cook with marital problems and an auto-body painter from the local trailer park to round out his vision of hard rock greaseball skullfuckery, and together they bashed out epics of manly fuzz rock, such as Arrogance (1986) and Brutality (1988), that sounded like the Nuge and the Godz kicking the guts out of Tyranny And Mutation -era Blue Öyster Cult.
Did anybody care (besides you)? Crazily, they got lots of hot press from unlikely publications such as Creem and Spin , and plenty of college radio airplay. Which did them no good, because they sounded like Blue fucking Öyster Cult.
Let me guess – they ran out of gas. The band finally dissolved in a haze of cigarette smoke and salty tears at a pancake house somewhere off Interstate 78, in late 1991. We don’t know if Jesus wept, but certainly a few ageing, floppytitted BÖC groupies did. Five years later, the chicken-wire rock dive that made them local legends, The 4G’s in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, ‘mysteriously’ burned to the ground, effectively dooming any chance of a reunion. Destiny rolls on, however, most recently as a caustic rock journalist for The Village Voice and as a founding member of Uncle Sam and the JDAMs, whose album Iraq ’N’ Roll should be available soon.
Actually, the idea was to look like the James Gang ca. Rides Again, which we did.
And if you listen to “China Toilet Blooz,” I still do the early Seventies heavy guitar rock trip.
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01.03.13
Live in Pasadena 2010
“China Toilet Blooz,” performed live in Pasadena in the arts/theater district just south of Colorado, fall of 2010.
Originally recorded as a video/audio capture on an audience member’s digital camera, I tossed the video. The recording was low fidelity, the camera’s video capability squelching everything above 5k in the audio spectrum to keep file size manageable. So I put it back into a digital replica of the room for a pseudo-stereo image and did a few other studio tricks to bring back some dynamic range and restore a better feel for what it sounded like. (I almost can do magic for the stuff others have ruined for you, too.)
Play loud. Yep, really loud folk rock gets heavy. Hey, dig the Mojo Hand made-in-China harmonica! Straight off Humble Pie’s Rockin’ the Fillmore. Well, no, but it’s where I nicked the licks.
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12.31.12
HNY: Pasadena 2012 Blues
Rock. Play loud. I mean it.
An idiosyncratic slow mo and photo look at my corner of the town, on any given sunny day in the year that’s almost gone.
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12.20.12
Geezer rock
Isn’t it appalling?
Although every bit of the stuff I do drips classic rock, I never watch geezer rock anymore. As with WhiteManistan, I’m embarrassed to be related, if only faintly, to the tribe.
When you’re old you oughta be able to rock. To be good at it you have to be willing to be taken for a fool. However, there’s no point in making it harder. And some things you must let go because they’ll sink your ship immediately. (It’s also why I never go out to hear middle and upper-middle aged white guys in blues bands.) Increasing entropy isn’t something money can opt you out of.
I was oblivious to the 12-12-12 concert but the New York Times does a good dissection of embarrassing-looking old rockers.
“I will donate $1,000 to #121212Concert if Roger Daltry buttons his shirt,??? tweeted Alan Zweibel, 62, a comedy writer …
With his shirt thrown open during a rousing rendition of “Baba O’Riley??? Mr. Daltrey — a specimen for his age, to be sure — unfortunately invited comparisons to his groupie-magnet self from the “Tommy??? era. In doing so, he violated an obvious dictum for seniors: keep your clothes on in public.
Then the piece gets to Iggy Pop, a tremendous physical specimen, endurance wise, at 65. He does not, as the New York Times piece insists, look like a Joffrey dancer.
For Raw Power he looked like this. That was in 1973.
Today, he still hasn’t an ounce of flab on him. Do Joffrey dancers now look like a couple twisted strands of gnawed cartilage and gristle, though?
You really don’t wanna see it.
Up close, a fine mesh of varicosity covers a shoulder.
And, often, he looks like he’s had a couple hernias repaired.
Study at risk of having to reach for the Tums.
Spare the style. Let the tunes and the imagination take the audience.
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12.08.12
Way back in the day
Here is an astonishingly good audio recording (for the setting — there are a couple moments of warble, one presumes a consequence of the aged analog tape) and better than fair video of the Highway Kings and me at the Four G’s Hotel in Bethlehem, ca. 89-91. Amusing, no? I still have the hat. (It was my father’s which probably makes it 60 or close to it.)
It was recorded and shot by Joe Hancaviz who made an amazing series of such recordings. They documented the independent music scene on the south side of Bethlehem, PA, from ’89-’91. The bands shot revolved around the Four G’s and you could often hear their records and tapes played by the community staff at Lehigh University’s radio station, WLVR, of which Joe was and is a member. It was grass roots modern rock, every bit as vital as what was going on in the big metropolitan centers of the country and Joe Hancaviz recorded the warp, woof and flavor of it. This was the CBGB’s of the Lehigh Valley in southeastern Pennsylvania.
I can only assume that for Joe it was a labor of love. He did it free of charge. Believe me, readers, it took time to set up and tend to during these evenings. And the patience needed to endure the unique atmosphere in the place? Well, let’s just say not everyone had it.
Years later Joe shouldered the job of restoring these old and deteriorated videotapes, digitizing them and uploading the results to YouTube, where they make an impressive archive.
On Facebook, he briefly described how he made the recordings back in the day:
I figured it out as I went along, using cheap equipment from Radio Shack. I did this one before I even had a proper mixer. I used a cheapo DJ mixer that only had two mic inputs. To get four more, I used the mic inputs on two cassette decks (set on record/pause) and ran them into the mixer through the RCA jacks. Necessity is the mother of invention!
I’d say!
Joe continues to shoot the locals in the Lehigh Valley, doing an extraordinary job.
The original studio version of Highway Patrol is here. By the time the video was shot we’d been playing it for four years and the live version had evolved into it’s own thing, distinct from the original.
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11.19.12
Song from WhiteManistan
“Let’s Ride,” one of the lead singles from Kid Rock’s new album, Rebel Soul, due on Black Friday.
Essentially, it made me want to punch his teeth in. The lyrics stink, the riff/melody is good but not great, and the white guy rocker/country artist doing his knee-jerk tribute to guns, the military and the American flag provokes nausea. Much worse, hang around, Rock actually takes time to explain it at the end. It’s his effort to make a song for the troops when they’re riding out on search and destroy missions, which he calls “doing their job.”
Admitting you like it is just like saying you enjoyed Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Beret” as a serious tune, not unintended awful camp.
It wraps up many things wrong in WhiteManistan, condensed into stale ol’ classic rock lassitude. There’s the reverence for endless war as long as they, or we, don’t have to fight it, working the guilt off in silly gifts, in this case a tune by a rock star, for soldiers dispensing with the enemy, always less expensively armed and of different color and religion, somewhere else, not here.
No rockers signed up to fight after 9/11. And none have since although there’s been a decade and ample opportunity to do so.
Yet these kinds of tunes have become routine for the audience in WhiteManistan. The celebrities in pop rock and country are very keen on saluting the soldiers in words and melodies. Keep fighting, we think of you, thanks for all that you do.
While Kid Rock no doubt means well (he really, really loves the city of Detroit, Seventies America and Bob Seger), it’s also reflexive pandering. These are the things the white audience wants to hear, not what it needs to. Wounded and just barely surviving modern America, they’re convinced the bottom has fallen out because it has. They need their cultural comfort food plus the symbolic assignment, in song, of three Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition in penance to get the blemishes off the souls before Communion, too.
It deserves ridicule. Reinstating the draft would fix this wagon, but good. And what’s at all like a “Rebel Soul” about it, anyway?
Hat tip to Chuck Eddy for reviewing the album at Rhapsody, tipping me to it.
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11.15.12
Psychedelic music for the teenage crowd
My considered analysis of the Petraeus affair.
Calling Paula Broadwell. Consider yourself the winner of a DD Blog No Prize if you’ve identified the song in 15 seconds.
Not necessarily safe for work. And if you’re not laughing, why are you here?
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