Dirty on Purpose

I don't know much about Dirty on Purpose. I know they come from Brooklyn. Their most recent album is called "Hallelujah Sirens." They are melodic, but with an interesting noise component and an aggressive, messy rhythm section that is much heavier than you would expect in a band that makes music this sweet. (It reminds me of a less doctrinaire Teenage Fanclub.)
I like this song because it makes me think about Texas.
Dirty on Purpose - Marfa Lights
"Hallelujah Sirens" is available on emusic.com.

Monsterbuck to play Lakeside Lounge in NYC

Ellen Willis

Ellen Willis died last week at the age of 64, from lung cancer. She was a feminist writer and social critic who wrote for a long time for the New York Review of Books and The Nation. However, I remember her as the rock music critic for the New Yorker in the late 60's and early '70's, before there was any serious rock criticism to speak of in mainstream journalism, and I was desperate to read anything I could find about music.
Ellen Willis turned me on to, among others, Big Star (long before they became critical faves) and Five Dollar Shoes, a band that created one of my top-five never-gonna-be-released-on-cd-unless-I-do-it lps.
At a time when most rock criticism seemed like it was written by ten year olds for ten year olds, Willis never patronized. She took the music seriously, she had good taste, and her writing was strong enough to stand alongside that of Pauline Kael, Roger Angell and John McPhee.

Tim Hardin

In September, 1971, I was a freshman at Windham College in Putney, VT. Not very happy, didn't really know anyone, was in the middle of a slow but painful break-up with my girlfriend.
One weekend, I got a call from my friend Michael, who worked for a company that supplied the sound equipment for most of the rock concerts that were produced in the New England area. He was coming to Windham to do the sound for a Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen concert and wanted to know if I would help him out. Which I was, of course, happy to do, since it meant I could hang oout backstage and act cool. (Even if it was a Commander Cody show, and I was definitely moving from a hippy, San Francisco/Allman Brothers thing to a Velvet Underground/Stooges/Alice Cooper thing.)
So Michael showed up Saturday afternoon in a big truck with the PA, and I met him and we unloaded the equipment into the student union, and then hung out while the Cody band sound checked. While that was going on, a slight wiry-haired guy wandered into the studen union with a battered guitar case and a little Fender VibraChamp amp. I asked Michael who that was and he said that it must be Tim Hardin, the opening act.
I had heard of Tim Hardin; I knew of him as a 2nd generation New York folkie, but I don't think I'd heard any of his songs. I knew he'd written "If I Were a Carpenter," which had been recorded by both Bobby Darin and Joan Baez. But I didn't know he also written "Reason to Believe," and "Misty Roses," and "How Can You Hang On to a Dream?" and "Black Sheep Boy" and "Lady Came from Baltimore" and "Red Balloon."
Hardin went and sat on a metal chair in the corner of the backstage space (which was just a curtained-off area to the side of the stage.) He kept his head down, didn't speak to anyone, just sat there. Even in the midst of the Commander Cody band's stoned vibe and hippy-commune antics, he remained completely isolated.
At the time I didn't know about Hardin's drug problems. I don't even know if he was high. All I remember thinking is that he was a very sad, lonely person. I remember being puzzled by that, because I thought of performers as incredibly cool and therefore incredibly lucky. But at the same time, I had had enough experience with both sadness and loneliness to feel a certain amount of empathy with him.
I don't really remember his performance, although I have the feeling it probably wasn't very good. (Turns out he suffered from stage fright.) It certainly didn't make me go out and buy a Tim Hardin album. But the image of him, isolated and miserable, haunted by demons I didn't know but could imagine, has stayed with me ever since.
It wasn't until 20 years later, when I bought a greatest hits compilation, and then a couple of years later a live album, that I began to appreciate his songwriting ability, and to make a connection between that small sad man sitting on a chair waiting to go play for an unappreciative audience and the performer who so profoundly expressed that sadness in his songs.
Tim Hardin's songs bridge the gap between folk music and its antecedents - blues and country - and American popular songwriting, with it's roots in jazz and European lieder. (It's no accident that the two most popular covers of "If I Were a Carpenter" were by the leading folksinger of the time - Joan Baez - and the 50's pop idol who most resembled a throwback to Frank Sinatra - Bobby Darin.) At the same time, they are entirely personal. Once you listen to his versions of his songs, it's impossible hear them as anything but Tim Hardin songs, no matter who sings them.
Tim Hardin - Misty Roses

Okkervil River released an album called "Black Sheep Boy" this year. The title song is a great cover of Tim Hardin's song.
Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy

Tim Hardin last released an album in 1973. He died of a drug overdose in 1980.

My apologies to anyone who has tried to download from my site lately. The web hosting site I was using underwent some changes, the end result being that it no longer supports MP3's. I'm in the process of finding a new site to store my MP3's.

Mister Loveless

A couple of years ago, I flew out to Walnut Creek, Cailfornia to visit my sister and her family, who I hadn't seen since I'd moved back to New York in 2002.
When I got to their house the first thing I heard was a deep, driving bass guitar tone coming from the garage.
"That's Robby's band," my sister said. I thought it was someone playing PIL's "Poptones" really loud. It sounded strange hearing that in this bucolic, tree-shrouded suburban neighborhood.
Robby Miller is my nephew. When I had last seen him, he was an 11-year old skate rat in Dayton, Ohio. Now he was a 17-year old singer, songwriter and guitarist in a band called Mister Loveless, with an incredibly sophisticated ability to express himself musically and impeccable tastes in influences. He and his bass player, Charlie Koliha, had immersed themselves in the sounds of 1979-1980 - Joy Division, Gang of Four, Echo and the Bunnymen, PIL.
It's very weird to meet your musical past 25 years later in your nephew's rock band. Weird but also great. All the stuff Robby and Charlie were listening to was stuff that I had listened to obsessively 25 years earlier, and still think of as some of the most exciting, profound music I've ever heard. (More so two years ago than now, I must admit. Hearing the Gang of Four in "Marie Antoinette" is a little like hearing "Lust for Life" in a cruise line commercial.)
Over the next year or so they continued to refine their sound. They also made a connection between post-punk and surf music, which seems obvious in hindsight but, to my knowledge hadn't been done since the Raybeats, the 70's New York no wave instrumental band.
It's great to have good taste. That will take you pretty far as a musician. But good taste alone doesn't make you great - it doesn't even give you the option of being great. Combining great taste with serious commitment to a vision does give you the option to be great. That's what I love about Mister Loveless. Everything about this band is life or death. The lyrics matter. The playing matters. The band's fans matter. I suppose you could make fun of that, but it's probably wiser to take them as seriously as they take their music.
Mister Loveless - Scatterplot.mp3

Mister Loveless' first album, "My Share of Losing," is available at the band's website: http://www.misterloveless.com/
You can check out other songs at their MySpace site:
www.myspace.com/misterloveless

Lost Pop Masterpieces #2: Andy Pratt - Resolution

Andy Pratt was from Boston, Massachusetts. In 1973, he had a minor hit with a song called "Avenging Annie." In 1976, he released an album called "Resolutions." It was obvious that someone at his record company thought this was a chance to present him as a slick, mature entertainer. The album was produced by Arif Mardin, who had been responsible for some of Atlantic Records' most sophisticated recordings, from Aretha Franklin to the BeeGees. (In 2001, he produced Norah Jones' first album. And in Jones, unlike Pratt, he found an artist who could blossom commercially as a result of his sophisticated touch.)
The song "Resolution" was not a hit. I don't know if it was even released as a single. The album it came from got great reviews but didn't sell terribly well.
I bought the album when it came out - and took a lot of shit from my punk rock friends for that - but there was no question in my mind that it was great. It supports my theory that, lost in the rush of new musical forms erupting out of the '60's and '70's, were a bunch of great American songwriters who could compare favorably with the classic songwriters of the '30's and '40's - the Cole Porters and the Irving Berlins.
Andy Pratt - Resolution

October, Welcome

In the future, I will write more about Jon Dee Graham, a singer-songwriter and philosopher from Austin, Texas for whom I have a great deal of respect and affection. For now, I just want to post his celebration of the month of October.

Jon Dee Graham - October.mp3

Lost Pop Masterpieces #1: Everyone's Gone to the Moon

Jonathan King wrote and recorded "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" in 1965 at the heighth of the Beatles frenzy. In America he was a one hit wonder, but in England he had a long career producing weird pop rip offs and cover versions of hit songs. I've always thought of him as the English Kim Fowley. (He was also the original producer of Rocky Horror Picture Show.)
The song is a great post-Beatles pop song with slightly surreal lyrics and a reverby guitar tone.
http://ezarchive.com/kingwinter/AlbumSpace/32YOFXNPAF/.m4p

Monsterbuck

I first heard about Monsterbuck when they were mentioned in an article in Esquire that discussed the great music to be found on MySpace. I checked them out because of the fact that they were from Upper Jay, NY., since I grew up in the Adirondacks and I was frankly surprised that anyone would think that a band from up there could be any good. Plus, the article spoke of their songs' "gorgeous melodies," and I'm a sucker for gorgeous melodies.

Not only are the songs great, but there are a couple of fascinating back stories going on with this band.

One is that these guys are not your typical Williamsburg indie-pop types. They've been around. Chris Kowanko, the singer and songwriter, first came to New York City in the mid 80's, and actually put out a Lenny Kaye-produced solo album in 1991. From then until he settled in Upper Jay a couple of years ago, he moved arounf the country a lot. Probably had a lot of jobs. But he never stopped writing songs. He put out another fine solo album a couple of years ago, produced by Seattle's Steve Fisk. He moved to Upper Jay with his wife and daughter because the bass player from his New York days, Scott Renderer, and his brother Byron (who happened to be a drummer) had moved there and opened an furniture upholstery business. When Chris arrived, they started Monsterbuck.

I've always admired songwriter/musicians who didn't know when to quit. It's part of that romantic idea that the music is so important that you would starve, you would neglect your family, you would give up everything as long as you could keep playing music. Kowanko seems like one of those guys. And the fact that the music he and the Renederer brothers is creating now is so cool just makes it that much more amazing. And in a town like Upper Jay, with a population of a couple of hundred people.

The other interesting backstory concerning Monsterbuck also concerns Upper Jay's most famous resident, Arto Monaco, who, in the '50's and '60's, was kind of the Walt Disney of the Adirondacks. He designed and built amusement parks, including Storytown, Gaslight Village, and his pride and joy, the Land of Make Believe, which he built in his backyard in Upper Jay. All these places were familiar to any kid growing up in the Adirondacks. Land of Make Believe was perhaps the most truly amazing. It combined fairy tales, and cowboys and pirates and other kid-centric fantasies and made them all come to life, often interracting with each other in ways that, in the real world, would have made no sense. (A cowboy saloon next door to a medieval castle, next to a paddle wheeler docked on the "Mississippi River.")

The members of Monsterbuck have adopted Arto Monaco as a spiritual forebear. The name of their ep and first album-to-be is "Land of Make Believers." And one of their best songs is called is "Arto Monaco."

The Land of Make Believe was destroyed by a flood in 1979, but you can still see the shells of some of the buildings in Upper Jay, along the banks of the Ausable River. Arto Monaco died in 2003, but his spirit lives on in Monsterbuck's quirky, beautiful songs.


Monsterbuck's first ep, "Land of Make Believers," is available at http://www.monsterbuck66.com/.

The song "Arto Monaco" isn't on the ep but you can download it:
Monsterbuck - Arto Monaco.mp3

CMT Crossroads: Steve Earle and Rosanne Cash

I've been Tivo-ing the CMT show "Crossroads" for two years, and I had never come across an episode that I thought was worth watching, until last night, when the two guests were Steve Earle and Roseanne Cash.
It was a perfect combination of artists - Earle was his usual gruff but sensitive self, and Cash was folkie-sincere and obviously really intelligent.
Cash gave Earle some shit about showing up stoned at a concert 20 years ago, and Earle, now famously sober, seemed a little chagrined. He, in turn told a funny story about hanging out with Johnny Cash right after he got out of jail.
They sang a bunch of songs together and to be honest I wasn't crazy about either Earle's or Cash's later stuff, but "Seven Year Ache," "Guitar Town," and especially "Goodbye," were sensational, and reminded me of why I used to listen to both of them a lot, and go to see them any time they were in New York.
I'm sure CMT will rerun the episode - it's definitely worth checking out.

I posted this on MySpace a month ago. I'm reposting it here because I need to fill up space and also because it's really the first of my rock and roll experiences.

Monday, August 07, 2006

RIP Arthur Lee Almost exactly 40 years ago, in the summer of 1966, my friend Mickey Leonard and i hitch hiked the ten miles from the small town we lived in, Warrensburg, NY to the equally-small but way more interesting tourist trap town of Lake George. I had just come back from a summer in Europe, courtesy of a camp-sponsored exchange program, and was two or three weeks away from going away to prep school. Mickey Leonard was my best friend from junior high school, kind of a fuck up, and the coolest guy i knew. A couple of miles outside of lake George, a beater of a car pulled up, smoke curling out of the exhaust pipe. We pried open the back door and got in. I remember we had to climb over a stack of lp's. In the front seat were two long-haired scary looking guys, unshaven and dressed in crazy shirts and vests. I had some guys who looked like that in Germany and France, but never this up-close. The driver, was dark and had kind of an Afro (I call it that in hindsight, because I'm pretty sure i had never heard the term before). He asked where we were going, then without waiting for an answer asked if we had 50 cents, because they had to get to NYC. Mickey and I scraped together 50 cents and handed it over the seat. Then Mickey asked if the two guys were in a band. One of them said yeah. Mickey said, "I saw your album in the drugstore. You're in Love, right?" The blond guy sitting in the passenger seat said yeah. It was Arthur Lee and Bryan McLean. I had been to Europe and knew who the Animals were and the Stones and the Kinks, but I had never heard of Love. And to be honest, even though I liked the Stones and knew all the lyrics to "Dirty Water" and "Psychotic Reaction", I was really a nerdy Herman's Hermits and Dave Clarke Five fan at heart. As nerdy as I might have been, I still knew that these two guys were the coolest guys I had ever met. I bought the first Love album as soon as I could, and fell in love with it. I even managed to find a place that sold the suede boots with fringe on the top that a couple of the band members were wearing on the cover of the album So I've been listening to Love for 40 years. I've been a Velvets fanatic, a Stooges fanatic, a NY Dolls fanatic, a Big Star fanatic, a Television fanatic, a Feelies fanatic. But my appreciation of Love has lasted longer and has been more profound. I'd have to say that their first three albums are maybe my favorite albums of all time. Even objectively, if you listen to "Forever Changes" now, it's hard to date it. The genre hopping is perfectly in tune with the kinds of stuff Calexico and Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire are doing. The sophisticated melodies and arrangements make it hard to believe that Love, in its heyday, was never really more than a struggling garage band making a living in clubs on Sunset Strip. I saw Arthur Lee in the early 90's at Trammps and he hadn't lost a thing. His voice was, if anything stronger than it was on the albums. The songs rang as true as they had 25 years earlier. I know Arthur Lee was fucked up in a lot of ways. (I also think he got treated like shit by just about the whole world.) But there's no question that may still be the coolest person I ever met. And probably the most brilliant.

My First Post

In the last year I discovered music blogs. It started with Brooklyn Vegan and spread as I clicked through the list of blogs that he referenced. Gorilla vs. Bear, Stereogum, My Old Kentucky Blog, Aquarian Drunkard, Fluxblog, Large Hearted Boy, Rich Girls Are Weeping and on and on. I wasn't that busy at work this summer, and I also don't sleep much, so I got to spend a lot of time reading blogs and downloading mp3's.
I think the thing that I like best about the blogs I read, and the editors and writers of those blogs, is that they exhibit the same kind of passion for the music that the writers at Creem and Fusion and Crawdaddy and NY Rocker and Trouser Press, and other magazines from the 70's. And the passion that my friends and I had. We were in bands, we worked in record stores, we haunted other record stores, we'd sit around each other's stereos and play music at each other. Reading all these blogs was like being with my friends, talking about and listening to music.
I have a couple of goals for Be Hear Be Now. One is to pass along stuff I hear that I really like. Another is to offer a forum for friends of mine who care as much about music as I do, but may have different tastes or interests or simply a different point of view. And finally I hope to write a series of sketches that I'm calling my rock and roll autobiography. Over the years my love of music has caused me to run into one experience or another, in a Forrest Gump sort of way, that I think might be interesting to share. The first one is actually something I posted on MySpace last month after Arthur Lee died.