Greetings, earthlings and welcome to the Detholz! Mp3 Blog!
This week an extended, convoluted morass of a post– so much going on!
So we’ll do the bad news first:
I. SAVE! ANDREW! SOLE!
A week ago, Detholz! beloved drummer, Andrew Sole, had a herniated disk in his back flare up that has taken him completely out of commission for at least a month. We had to cancel a much-anticipated show at Bottom Lounge (Chicago) on 3/28– it was to be the re-premiere of our new/old keyboardist, Rick Franklin, as well as the debut of a lot of new material. (Note: Baby Teeth’s still on, as well as a new incarnation of Redwalls called “Sleeptalkers” — an excellent bill we are sorry to miss, so y’all come!)
Anyway, here’s the skinny from Andrew himself:
“I went to the back center this past Thursday because I was having some left leg pain coming from my lower spine, something I haven’t had in 6 years since they treated me. As I suspected the diagnosis was a disk problem. So they put me on the VAX-D table right away to start treatment. I’ll be going in every day 5 days a week for the next 2 weeks, possibly more if I need it. Then after that is recovery and Physical Therapy time. Not sure for how long.
My restrictions are, I can’t lift more than 10lbs. I should try not to sit or stand for more than 1/2 hour. I’ve not been playing drums for now except for lessons if I have to demonstrate a simple rhythm for a student.
Any prayers are welcomed and appreciated. “
If any of you know Andrew, you know drums are his life– he makes his living teaching drums and playing professionally. This is a crushing blow for him, physically and financially. To boot, the disk decided to act up just in time for taxes!
So, in the spirit of “Save The Awesome Cool Dudes” a few years ago when our friends from Austin had all of their equipment stolen, I’ve set up a “Save! Andrew! Sole!” fund that will be active for the next month or so. Musicians are ALWAYS getting the short end of the stick financially– most of us pay for our own benefits & get paid very little to ply our trade. Andrew’s expenses as a result of his herniated disk are punishing, to say the least.
If you can spare a little or if you can spare a lot, it will help a good-hearted musician in need. Visit the link below to donate:
SAVE! ANDREW! SOLE!
To be clear: these funds will go to my personal Paypal account, which I will then transfer to Andrew directly. I’m not going through official band channels so the gift won’t be taxed to him as income.
Any amount– no matter how big or small– will help. And your help is appreciated, folks. On behalf of Andrew, thanks.
Now, onto somewhat better news:
2. NEW DETHOLZ! (VICTORIA’S?) SECRET TRACK
Everyone loves a secret, right?
I recorded the first new DH! demo in many months last week. Problem is, owing to the subject matter, I can’t post it on a public forum. If you’d like to hear it, email me at “hallameat at gmail dot com” with the subject “Victor, Victoria” and I will send it to you special.
But after that, shhh!
3. Top 25 Albums
This is the latest viral Facebook fad and since I’m attracted to fads like a moth to flame (+ I spent so much @#$%@in’ time on it), I’m posting it here. Thought it might be interesting for DH! followers to see what went into the sauce:
All right, all right. I’m adopting Peter Beyer’s rules here: Think as much as you want and say as much as you want. More information here than you’ll probably care to read, but this was a fun, productive exercise. “Favorite” here for me = most influential.
Jim’s Top 25 Albums, in no particular order:
1. The Residents – Duck Stab
A jarring, bizarre, sometimes terrifying, sometimes ridiculous collection of music concrete and early electronica by what I’d have to admit at this point is my “favorite” band. Added bonus: the greatest record cover of all time. When my older brother introduced me to The Residents in high school, he unwittingly created a monster—I have been obsessively following them ever since & their albums have completely changed the way I think about music.
2. Nation of Ulysses – 13 Point Program to Destroy America
When I was a teenager, I was captivated by the portentious mythos Ian Svenonius spun around NOU, eagerly devouring all of his silly “manifestos” wherein a pajama’d army of disgruntled kids would rise up against the Boomer Generation that produced them, hypnotizing them with their “anti-parent culture sound.” One of the highlights of my music “career” thus far was meeting the personable and friendly Ian on a tour in Norway in ‘04 (then again later in Chicago) and comparing notes. Also, NOU holds the distinction of playing the loudest show I’ve ever seen/heard. All I could make out was white noise and my ears rung for days after.
3. Circus Lupus – Super Genius
Another school bus staple from the early ’90’s. The angular, jarring meters topped with Chris Thompson’s pissy sneering filtered through very lo-fi and loud production makes this a classic for any frustrated high school music geek. I still return to this record for sustenance regularly – “Cyclone Billy” has what in my opinion is the *perfect* bass tone (and a thrillingly acrobatic bass line!).
4. Shudder To Think – Get Your Goat
This record single-handedly opened all kinds of new doors for me musically. It’s far from perfect — the lyrics get vaunted, pretentious and downright silly in places — but there are some truly gorgeous moments. It shares a lot of qualities with “Super Genius” & other early-90’s DC music with its shifting meters, dissonant chords, angular rhythms, etc. but Craig Wedren’s beautiful voice swooping effortlessly around amongst the musical morass makes this experiment a lot prettier to listen to. Their later album “Pony Express Record” is the pinnacle of Shudder to Think’s output and is a far more coherent & better record but this one remains nearer and dearer. I had a “rock star moment” when I was able to meet Craig outside one of their reunion shows in Chicago last year and express my appreciation to him personally.
3. Igor Stravinsky – Mass for mixed chorus and double wind quintet
I got this record at the same time as “Get Your Goat,” and view them as two parts of the same equation. Stravinsky wrote this piece as a natural act of piety. He reputedly wanted to compose “very cold music, absolutely cold, that will appeal directly to the spirit.” There is no more perfect description of this work – stark, dissonant and unadorned. This restrained devotional music resonates in a deep spiritual cave for me that I am usually uncomfortable accessing.
4. Thelonious Monk – The Thelonious Monk Orchestra At Town Hall (1959)
This was required listening in music history class my freshman year of college. I hadn’t spent any time listening to jazz before I went to music school (unfortunately). At the time, I viewed Monk’s command of dissonance and pointillism in jazz as akin to Stravinsky’s approach to the same in the classical realm. I’m not sure I’d say that now, but I remember listening to this album over and over again with pure astonishment in the listening carrel at the library. Another “I didn’t know music could sound like this!” moment.
5. Ornette Coleman – Live at Town Hall (1962)
I have my friend Ben Miranda to thank for introducing me to this record. It contains perhaps my favorite jazz track of all time, “Sadness,” which, to my mind, is an absolutely breathtaking performance. Ornette’s “melody leads, everything else follows” approach gives his music a primitive wildness at once alien and fascinating. Jumbo yet shrimp.
6. Public Enemy – Fear of a Black Planet
I know, I know. It’s an obvious choice. When it comes to rap and hip-hop, I’m afraid I’m a white man’s white man; all thumbs and stuck somewhere in 1990. But this record really helped out during the hot summer afternoons my dad made me mow his large suburban lawn. I felt like a real badass behind the mower with Chuck D barking in my ‘phones: “Welcome to the Terrordome!”
7. The Beatles Anthology – Volume I
This was much-hyped when it was released, owing to the “new” Beatles tracks, which Paul, George and Ringo overdubbed on top of restored Lennon piano demos. Those songs are decidedly Wilbury-esque, owing to Jeff Lynne’s porcelain production style and are the least interesting part of this hodge-podge of outtakes, snippets, live recordings and other rarities. It gives you a glimpse into the Beatles process, which I found fascinating during my music studies. So much so that I listened almost exclusive to the Beatles for an entire year. As one reviewer said, the Anthology “humanizes” the Beatles and brings them back down to earth where they belong, among us mere mortals.
8. Deerhoof – Milk Man
In my opinion, the best rock album of 2004, if you can call this hyper-controlled chaos “rock music.” I had never heard of Deerhoof, then got to meet them by chance when a band in which I played bass at the time opened for them at a show in a dingy warehouse in Oakland (security was run by a bunch of rowdy bikers, so naturally conditions devolved & someone got clocked on the head with a glass bottle). Their performance was totally mind-blowing, even in that tawdry atmosphere, and Milk Man is, for me, the closest thing in indie rock to bona fide chamber music. I tried unsuccessfully to emulate their approach in my own songwriting at that time. It’s harder than it sounds!
9. Fela Kuti – Zombie
“Afrobeat pioneer,” “the Nigerian Bob Marley,” “one of the top 100 most influential musicians of the 20th Century,” etc., etc. I chafe a little at the Bob Marley comparison since Fela is so much more pissed off and, frankly, I find his music to be far more compelling and interesting than ol’ Bob’s. His repetitive, antiphonal “call-and-response” song form is one I borrow from liberally these days. Of all of his many records, this one is my favorite. It’s so devastatingly sardonic, it’s almost a punk record. But far, far better.
10. Bela Bartok – String Quartet #4
This was a piece my composition professor required me to pick apart in school as a prime example of “motivic” composition, where a composer takes a small gesture or “motive” (in this case, 7 notes ascending and descending) & stretches it, turns it upside down, reverses it, pulls panty hose over its head, gives it a swirly, etc. to create an entire piece of music. The result in this case is this tortured, gory quartet, the best recorded performance of which is, in my opinion, the 1988 Deutsche Gramophone release by the Emerson String Quartet. A lot of Bartok’s music is visceral and very violent, which greatly appeals to my inner vampire. Another prime example of this is his pantomime ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin- a grisly and truly savage piece of music.
11. Jean Claude Vannier — L’Enfant Assasin des Mouches (“The Child Killer of the Flies”)
I have my friend Bobby to thank for introducing me to Jean-Claude Vannier, an arranger who collaborated with the “dirty old man of pop music,” Serge Gainsbourg in the 60’s and 70’s. Orchestration is one of the great loves of my life, and this record contains some of the most bizarre couplings of genres and instruments that I’ve ever heard. All Music Guide puts it well: “This [suite] is the terrain where soundtrack music, classical music, gauche pop, hard rock, French café music, Middle Eastern modal music, vanguard musical iconoclasty, and sound effects collide, stroke, and ultimately come into union with one another — often in a single cut.” This record has a truly surreal sound, owing mostly to the massive amount of string overdubs – over 1,000! If you’ve never heard this record and have a taste for the bizarre, it is a classic. Highly rec’d.
12. Pink Floyd – Piper at the Gates of Dawn
This was a college staple, first introduced to me by my older brother, then re-introduced by my good friend and songwriting colleague, Peter Beyer years later. The perfect expression of a fractured, schizoid mind, culminating in the last cut on the record (and my favorite), “Bike.” I have a collection of Syd Barrett solo material as well (Opel), but it’s nowhere nearly as effective and screwy as this album.
13. Frank Black – Frank Black
Though his work with the Pixies will probably stand the test of time, I still have a great love for this admittedly “90’s” sounding record (another argument that I’m stuck somewhere in 1990). The lyrics are less Grand Guignol and more non sequitur than The Pixies, like his oblique tribute to the Ramones, “I Heard Ramona Sing” (“I had so many problems / then I got me a Walkman / I really liked it a lot and / they walked right in and they solved them”) but, as one fan puts it, “he not writing what he knows, he’s writing what he DREAMS.” Musically, his courageous harmonic leaps had a huge impact on me in school. It was rumored he only knew how to play barre chords on a guitar & I borrowed liberally from that approach in the early years of Detholz!. Also, I’ll never forget blasting “Los Angeles” from my battered Chevy hatchback (which contained all of my earthly possessions at the time) as I descended into L.A. after a solitary cross-country drive in 1997.
14. Pete Beyer – Ten Songs
Part of the magic of being a musician is observing and learning from other musicians as they ply their trade. My good friend Pete has always been one of the finest songwriters I’ve ever heard (and was the inspiration behind this note). Playing his songs in college as the bass player in his band was hugely instructive to me – to this day, my bandmates who know him will say, “wow, that sounds a lot like a Pete Beyer song” when I present a demo to them. So let me say here, officially, on the record: thanks Pete! Visit his blog and benefit from his musical wisdom: www.peterbeyer.com Pete also has the distinction of writing one of two songs that caused me to spontaneously burst into tears (not something I’m wont to do, as my wife will tell you, unless I’ve had too many glasses of wine), his restrained and poignant song chronicling his reaction to the attacks on 9/11 called “In the Wake.” Hopefully we will finally finish his damned record we’ve been working on for over 8 years this summer. Right, Pete?
15. John Carpenter – Soundtrack to Escape from New York
…or Halloween or The Fog or Assualt on Precinct 13 , etc. Carpenter’s simple synthesizer scores are forever seared into my brain as the way horror movie music should sound after sneaking in Halloween as a kid at a sleepover. Escape From New York is my personal favorite of the lot & is one of my favorite albums to drive to. I also used to annoy my friends as a kid by incessantly playing the theme song on my mother’s piano.
16. Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express
Speaking of music to drive to, Kraftwerk makes for a great driving and/or housecleaning soundtrack. Nothing like dorky German synth-pop to inspire you to dust the corners of your bookcase, bureau and/or rolltop desk. Their choruses are amusingly underwhelming: “Fun, fun, fun on ze Autobahn” und “I’m ze operator mit my pocket calculator.” Great to mop to!
17. Einsturzende Neubauten – Faustmusik
Speaking of crazy Germans, this little-known gem by the storied industrial monoliths, Einsturzende Neubauten, is one that’s gotten a lot of spin over the years when I’ve been in a dark frame of mind. It’s mostly narration with a stripped-down ensemble providing a soundtrack – there are no “songs” per se. The language is too dense for my high-school pidgin German, but this record creates an atmosphere that’s far scarier and menacing than others of their releases I’ve heard. Blixa Bargeld’s syrupy whispering makes for convincing Devil-ese.
18. Dan Deacon – Silly Hat vs. Eagle Hat
A few years ago we played a show with then-unknown Dan Deacon at a tiny hole-in-the-wall in DC & if anyone deserves the full weight of the indie hype machine, it’s Dan. His frenetic mad-science-gizmo acrobatics are incredible to watch in a live setting. I played with him again last year in another outfit and his show had developed to a nearly cultish pitch. At one point, he had a sold-out club full of people climbing all over each other through some sort of weird, frenetic square dance at his command. I’ve never seen crowd control like that.
“Silly Hat” is my favorite of his records—Dan is kind of a genius and the scope of his facility with electronics, pop, jazz and even atonal classical composition are recklessly displayed here. A great album to Photoshop to. Dan said he’d be taking some time off of his solo electronics to focus on classical composition this year. I’m greatly anticipating his next record.
19. Sparks – Kimono My House
I should thank my friend Colby for introducing me to Sparks and especially to “Kimono My House,” by far their best album. It’s an almost irritatingly catchy glam-pop album with a lot of quirky twists and turns, lyrically and musically. I guess if there’s such a thing as “progressive glam,” this is it. I had been told that the Detholz! sound is pretty close to Sparks and after hearing this, I definitely saw the connection. High praise, indeed.
20. Captain Beefheart – Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Possibly the least touted of Captain Beefheart’s records, this is by far the most accessible with, in my opinion, some of his best songs. I agree with All Music Guide: “’Tropical Hot Dog Night’ that sounds like what happened when Beefheart encountered a Miami disco and decided to make something of it.” The lyrics are obtuse, sometimes silly, sometimes wistful, other times menacing – the usual growly Beefheart fare: “When I See Mommy, I Feel Like a Mummy,” etc. Another example of tightly controlled chaos, his Magic Band is in top form on this record, delivering some truly mind-bending dissonant hooks.
21. Frank Zappa – Apostrophe
I guess I can’t mention Captain Beefheart without mentioning the music of Frank Zappa which, as my friend James describes it, is like all of the songs of the 70’s crumpled into a ball and injected with acid. “Apostrophe” is his most famous record, and for good reason. The musicianship on this album is flawless, as usual, with a burning white-hot xylophone solo in “St. Alfonso’s Pancake Breakfast” that will make your head spin. This is a usual complaint about Zappa—that he was a genius-level musician who chose to be the clown over the “serious artist,” writing bawdy songs with titles like “G-Spot Tornado” and “Half a Dozen Provocative Squats.” This precisely what makes him so great and so inspiring to me—and to many others, apparently. The number of posthumous awards he receives continues to mount.
22. Louvin Brothers – Satan is Real
Despite the now-infamous cover picturing Charlie and Ira Louvin in a rock quarry littered with burning tires in front of a 12-foot paint-on-plywood Satan, this record remains my favorite country gospel album. I have deep sense of connection to traditional gospel country because of my background, and though I don’t agree with most of what the Louvins are saying, the authenticity of the message and the pure intention for its audience moves me deeply. It also helps that the Louvins were reputedly hard-drinking, violent men. That a couple of hardened country boys could have such beautiful voices singing this fire-and-brimstone stuff, sincere or not, is profoundly poetic, at least to me.
23. Bernard Herrmann – Soundtrack to Psycho
…or The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) or Cape Fear or classic Twilight Zone TV series or any of the other films he scored. Herrmann broke all kinds of new ground in film scoring (and music in general – he was a sort of proto-minimalist) and his undulating, restless music makes full use of various extended performance techniques in the orchestra, almost phrase-by-phrase. Very dense, complex orchestrations here. It’s funny to think how much he resented being a film composer because he was so clearly the best, perhaps ever. Film music rarely makes such an impression on the cultural collective consciousness, but the screeches from “Psycho,” or the tritonal “Twilight Zone” guitar ostinato are unmistakable, even to a nonmusical joe.
24. Fugazi – Repeater
“Repeater” was the first compact disc I bought with my own money as a kid—even saved up for it. I remember opening it and showing it off to a friend who mused with wonder, “Man…. This will never wear out!”
In early 1988, the very first show I attended as a shrimpy pubescent 13-year old was a Fugazi show at a bombed out movie theater in Frederick, MD. This was before their first record so it was up close and personal. Definitely a benchmark moment for a music-smitten teenager. In retrospect, it could have been any band and I probably would have gone goo-goo eyed, but Fugazi was such a live juggernaut— so acrobatic and fun to watch as they played their special brand of fist-pumping slogan-core. I saw them as many times as I possibly could after that. “Repeater” was always my favorite record of theirs. I stopped following them after 1991’s “Steady Diet of Nothing,” but that first show was forever burned onto my brain as the apotheosis of live music.
A few months ago, I experienced a mild thrill when I played through Joe Lally’s old GK bass head at a Baby Teeth show.
25. Bobby Conn – Llovesongs EP
Though I am fortunate to count Bobby as a friend now, I started out as and continue to be a big fan. Playing in his band for a few years was like being a kid in a candy store. It was also a crash-course for me (sometimes literally) in stage- and song-craft. Though I think the most crystalline channelings of the Bobby Conn persona are captured on “Rise Up!” & “The Golden Age,” which even caught the great David Bowie’s attention, “Llovesongs” is my favorite Bobby Conn album because it contains two of my favorite songs of his, “Maria B” and, if you’re lucky enough to have the Japanese import, “Language of Love.”
There’s a lyric in “Language of Love” I had wrong for over a year:
“You want to touch it, man, well…/ Gonna let you down.”
I thought he was singing:
“You want to touch it, Manuel… / Gonna let you down.”
This dawned on me in the car as I was listening to this EP on a road trip. Sorry, Manuel!
Thanks for reading– see you next week!
