RIP Ron Asheton

Guitarist Ron Asheton was found dead this morning in his Ann Arbor home. He is best known for his work in the Stooges, making him a massively influential figure in the history of punk and rock 'n roll.

Don't expect to see another one of these. He broke the fucking mold.

RIP

Too Old for Best Of Lists

In blogs past, I've hoisted upon my readers "best of" lists for all the records I bought that came out during the passing year.  This year, I've purchased somewhere around 60 albums, only three of which came out in 2008 as original releases (that is, they're not re-issues; bought plenty of those!).  

This is an indicator that I'm simply getting old, and that I'm not cut out to count myself among the hordes of 30-something music bloggers who giddily and in most cases precariously sound the trumpets for the next Clash or the new Lou Reed or whatever.  I would never be so bold to make such statements, especially since I count the Velvet Underground and The Clash as inimitable, towering fixtures in the rock 'n roll canon that can never be touched.  

Do I sound like your dad yet?

All the shows I've attended this year except for two have been to see bands who have regrouped or have been around for at least ten years.  What are the kids listening to these days?  Definitely not Camper Van Beethoven or Will Oldham or Gang of Four.

However, I do want to praise a relatively new practice in record buying that is actually consumer friendly(!).  Over the past year and a half or so, record companies that produce vinyl have given those of us with our beloved turntables reasons to invest in mp3 players as well.  In the past, I've had to grapple with the option of either buying the vinyl or the CD.  I buy the vinyl because I have a decent stereo system that I take very good care of and in exchange, it continues to play kick ass music with the warmth and spaciousness that you can't get with a CD.  But, of course, you can't play a record in the car or on a walk around town.  

That's a big conundrum for someone who spends as much money on music as I do.  But 2008 has been a year with increasing access to both formats for the price of one.  Often, if you buy a new vinyl release, you get a download card so that you can have it in mp3 format as well.  

That's love.  That says, "Thanks for holding the vinyl torch high.  We take a hit because it's expensive to make, but we dig it too and we like that you're spinning our wax at home.  Here's a little something for buying our LP.  Now you can listen to our tunes on your fucking ipod or whatever.  Traitor.  I mean, half-traitor.  Gah!"  

Fact or fiction?: the first band to have a download code with their LP release was Against Me!'s "New Wave."  There's a bit of pop music trivia.  I'd put it on the wikipedia page, but I don't know if it's true.

Anyway, I wholly endorse this practice and I hope to see more of it in 2009 and beyond.  I'll be 40 in less than ten years.  That's horrifying.  

P.S.  Check out Hayes Carll's "Trouble in Mind", Deer Tick's "War Elephant", Vampire Weekend's "Vampire Weekend" and The Courteeners' "St. Jude" for 2008.  That's all I got.  Really.

  

Murder City Devils Regrouping

I'm not sure what constitutes a "reunion" tour, but the Murder City Devils have regrouped for a string of West Coast dates after only being broken up for about six years.  For those of you who aren't familiar with MCD, they were a stand out rock 'n roll group from the 90's and the first couple years of the 00's that played really well crafted songs about broken hearts, truckers, cowboys and painful devotions to hard drinking, mostly backed by a creepy organ that gives them a very effective, unmistakable sound.  If Bela Lugosi were to get into a bar fight, this is likely to be the band up on stage.  

The most recognizable member, I guess, is frontman Spencer Moody.  He looks kind of like some tech support guy or maybe that kid you pantsed in grade school after pwning him in tetherball.  But he's a pure showman with a voice that sounds like broken glass under a dusty boot, and he sings like a man who's just had a terrifying revelation.  I like MCD a lot, but at the moment, they're making me feel pretty old with their "reunion" tour.

I hereby declare a new rule: no "reunions" can occur unless the band has been broken up for a minimum of ten years.  Going to a "reunion" show of a band that I was gaga about the first time around makes me feel like I should be scrambling for a sitter and digging deep into the back of my closet for the clothes of my youth, long since traded in for fleece, khaki pants and Tevas that I insist on wearing with socks.  

Anyway, I'll be at the Great American Music Halll show for the 4:00 matinee on February 15 if any of my peeps want to get tickets and join me.  I'd go to the evening show but it's sold out and besides, if these folks still drink like they used to, they're liable to not even make it onstage for the second set.  

Oh, and the tour coincides with the a reissue of the band's entire catalog on scrumptious Sub Pop vinyl.  Word.

Yelp East Bay Review of the Day

So I woke up this morning to find my inbox filled with "new compliments" from fellow yelpers. I couldn't understand why until I visited the site. To my surprise, my review of Berkeley Bowl has won the auspicious "Review of the Day" award for the East Bay.

I really like Yelp. I find Yelp to be a valuable asset, and is in large part a reason I think the Internet can be used for good. I'm all for a site that promotes "amateur journalism" or media egalitarianism or whatever you want to call it. The truth is that I've found some paid columnists who write on food in the Bay Area to be full of shit, while I've found some Yelp reviews to be honest, balanced and accurate, touching on things that major media publications either can't or won't touch on. Yelp has provided some make or break information when I'm considering patronizing a business, or not. When three Yelpers who don't seem to know each other all give accounts of how they found a dirty sock in their split pea soup or whatever, I'm probably going to pass on it.

My own reviews on yelp aren't without some amount of flippancy (see my review of Hot Topic), but that's how I roll. Some peeps give me props, some peeps give me grief.

Beer I Like (Entry the 1st)

Here's another entry whereby I thrust upon you good people some of the highest achievements of mankind (if you missed the one on Leonard Nimoy's LP, do yourself and all your friends a favor by buying ten copies of it and giving nine of them away).

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I drink quite a bit of beer.  I don't drink it to get drunk, but I confess that's a "happy accident" if I'm in no mood to be reasonable and deal with the travails or even minor setbacks of life in a sober mindset.  Here's the part where I quote some genius of times past who all but credited beer for enabling them to trail blaze some new mode of human thought or invent something really functional that changed the world without fucking up the environment, but I'll spare you all the intellectual gymnastics because it's overkill when talking about something as awesome as beer.  Beer doesn't need it.  Beer--at least good beer--is a thing of variable complexity but the reason for its value couldn't be more simple: it tastes good and in the best cases, makes you feel good.  

So here's the first of what I hope will be many entries of beer I like.  And the winner is....

I was only recently turned on to Shiner Bock.  I went down to visit a friend in Austin, Texas where Shiner beers are kind of everywhere the way Sierra Nevada is here in California.  Only the company has been around much longer and though they don't seem to have major distribution, they seem to be popular in other states besides Texas.

According to the bottle, bock was brewed in Germany "to celebrate the arrival of spring," but I seem to remember reading that it was also brewed during winter solstice and Christmas.  I can see the reason for the seasonal versatility.  Though I haven't tasted a whole lot of bocks, Shiner's just as good on the cold nights here in the Bay Area as it was on the scorching days and nights in Texas over the summer.  

So here's the rundown:

The carbonation is pretty moderate and it has a really dry feel to it, making it kind of crisp.  If complexity is your thing, Shiner will probably bore you.  It's about a medium dark beer with a medium body, which is probably why it's so good on a cold night, but hints of caramel give it a sweetness that's damn good during the summer.  This is balanced out with some a delicious roasted malt flavor and a pretty sharp aftertaste. 

The biggest problem I've found with Shiner Bock is that though it doesn't contain a ton of alcohol (4.40% abv), it's so easily drinkable that a hangover is the next logical step, so watch it.  

It's not the best stuff in the world.  I like Shiner Bock a lot because of its quality for the price (around $6-$7) and because it doesn't give me that "beer coma" if I have one after work but before dinner.

Get some.

The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy

Here are the two sides of the "Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy" sleeve:
















Side one of the LP is written from the perspective of Spock, while side 2 is straight up 60's folk-pop with a couple standards popular at that time.

I have to admit that I've seen maybe a total of two episodes of Star Trek and probably just as many of the films, so I'm no trekkie. But I am occasionally drawn to some good, old fashion American camp and the fact is that a couple songs I've heard off of the album are pretty catchy even when unintentionally hilarious.

The track, "Highly Illogical" opens the album and can be heard on Leonard Nimoy's myspace page for anyone curious. It's basically a song written from the perspective of Spock, who is incredulous but calm as he outlines a number of observed contradictions in human behavior.

Need...

In Memoriam James Crumley

One of my favorite writers of hard boiled fiction--hell, one of my favorite writers in general--died almost two months ago and I've just learned about it now. It seems that James Crumley has passed away rather quietly, a direct contrast to the years of hard drinking, hard living and turbulence that preceded his death.

Crumley's novel, The Last Good Kiss, totally upended my naive, unfounded prejudice towards genre fiction and kick started a fascination with the sordidness, the betrayal and disillusionment coupled with an extraordinary command of language and sense of plot structure--in short, with all the best things that characterize kick ass Crime Fiction. His body of work will continue to occupy the highest precincts of the genre, and his novels had such an impact on me personally that I'm almost envious of the perhaps unsuspecting readers who continue to pick up his books for the first time.

Crumley's work is popularly characterized as a a Chandler-meets-Hunter S. Thompson, and I guess that's fair. He certainly shared HST's sardonic worldview in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, and traces of it are present up through the next three decades. His characters often masked the painful pasts of their lives with mistrust and sardonicism, but the memories of personal hell almost always manifest themselves somehow. Chandler's marvelously erratic characters are always humming away somewhere underneath, but unlike both Chandler and HST, Crumley himself managed to possess both unprecedented talent while being criminally overlooked by major book reviewers and critics. He has no bestsellers. He isn't celebrated much outside the peripheries of the genre in which he wrote, but I hope that someday he will be. Almost all of his books are in print here in the U.S, but as is the case of other outstanding American writers of Detective/Crime Fiction like Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Charles Willeford, Crumley has gained greater respect in France and the UK than he has in his own country.

Speaking even as someone who's read everything the man's ever published, it's no surprise that I've only learned of his passing now. He has no biographer, and I've come across only one printed interview in a very hard to find collection of short stories. Very little exists online except for a handful of book reviews and a couple of fan websites that haven't been updated in years.

Ever since becoming a fan of his work, I've entertained the notion of spending a week or so in Missoula, Montana hanging out at Charlie B's--a bar Crumley was known to have frequented--with the hope that he'd walk in for a drink. I'm sorry I never made the trip (Missoula is beautiful country anyway), but his books will be on my shelf until my time comes, and I have no doubt that I'll find new reasons to enjoy them for years to come.

RIP James Crumley