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April 30, 2005

Verbal Battles with Ian Williams

If I had to rattle off some of my favorite new music-makers from the past 4 years, both Prefuse 73 and Battles would be up there near the top of the list. So in my book, tonight's Local 506 show is almost an embarrassment of riches. I've already written a bit about Battles' music, so here are some non-serious questions to ponder before the show: How will all of that gear fit in the club's limited backstage area? And given that Local 506 installed wireless Internet service a few months back, will either Scott Herren or one of the members of Battles try to check their email via one of those on-stage laptops?

When I first purchased this tubafrenzy.org domain many years ago, I was planning on using it to electronically publish the old issues of Tuba Frenzy. That goal sorta fell by the wayside, but I still hope to eventually get some of my favorite pieces posted online where Google can find them. Especially the 99 Records article since some very nice folks from other countries have recently been asking about it. That 99 article is really long, though, and I need to start small. So in honor of Battles' show in Chapel Hill tonight, I dug up the 1998 email interview that AC Lee and I did with Ian Williams (the Don Caballero/Storm and Stress guitarist pictured at right, not the former Pink House resident and Daily Tar Heel columnist renowned for hating Duke and being a Gen X spokesman).

Sometime later this year I will try and supplement this interview with the original photos, discography, and related record reviews. But in the meantime, if anyone would like an actual print copy of Tuba Frenzy #4, it is the only issue of Tuba Frenzy that is still available. If you live in the USA, email your street address to tubacity AT gmail.com and I'll send you a free copy via Media Mail. If you live outside the USA, send me $5.00 via Paypal to that same email address and I'll ship it however I can.

Ian Williams intro and interview down below....

Ian Williams interview, originally published in TF #4, 1998

It was a stiflingly hot August 1995. Some friends and I were stranded in New York City and in desperate need of some cheap yet quality entertainment to pass away the time. A trip out to Coney Island hadn't exactly been at the tops of anyone's priority list, but a "Sideshows by the Seashore" ad in the Village Voice quickly changed all of that. Scheduled to open up for Jon Fine's post-Bitch Magnet unit Vineland and Matador Records boring artists the Flying Nuns was a band named "The Storm and Stress" (sic), parenthetically and beguilingly described as "ex-Don Caballero". Hmmm...Don Caballero, eh? It'd been well over a year since I'd seen or heard the slightest peep from Pittsburgh's heaviest progcore instrumentalists. Attendance was, of course, mandatory, so we took the endless subway ride down to Coney Island, home of cotton candy, the bearded lady, and those impossible-to-win midway contests. Our destination turned out to be a not-so-big-top tent smack in the midst of the rest of the carnival sideshows, and after entering it, I witnessed three relatively normal-looking freaks making some of the most powerfully stirring racket that I'd heard in quite some time. As it turned out, guitarist Ian Williams was the only Storm and Stresser to have done time in Don Caballero. Storm and Stress was obviously a much different beast than Don Caballero was (had been?), and yet hearing Ian's unconventional no-limit guitar treatments that night probably helped prepare me for the lengthy outward bound pleasures of Don Caballero 2, the supposed Don Cab swan-song that was released a month later.

Fast forward two years to August 1997. Storm and Stress had finally translated their compelling sturm und drang onto round plastic objects and Don Caballero had come all the way back from the hiatus-grave, complete with original bassist Pat Morris in tow. AC Lee and I realized that it was high time we started mailbombing Ian Williams with e-queries about his musical projects and personal history; in response, Mr. Williams sporadically but throughly typed circles (or ellipses, rather) around both of us. The printed "interview" that follows is a somewhat two-dimensional flattening of the actual conversation-maze that transpired. Quoted in a much more direct and wholesale fashion is the Storm and Stress press kit, which we have reprinted on the preceding page for your reading pleasure. I know it's the cardinal sin of music journalism to echo the promo sheet verbatim, but really, there was no way we could have not printed it in its entirety. Even at its most abstract, Ian’s prose reveals more than a hundred straightforward answers to "What were Don Caballero's influences?" questions ever could. So on that note.... (Tim Ross)

Bold type = Tuba Frenzy (Tim Ross, AC Lee), Regular type = Ian Williams

First off, tell us about your youth...some of your favorite bands or mindblowing musical experiences...

I think one of the most boring things is a person's taste. Its exposition is usually someone's pathetic appeal, asking "Am I OK?" It's nothing I find that interesting and usually don't talk about, just because I feel weird assuming strangers would want to read about it. But I guess the premise of doing an interview with me is that, yes, I am interesting. So...I'll try.

When I was fifteen someone took me to a Cro-Mags/Half Life show at the Electric Banana in Pittsburgh, which was a really good introduction for me. I can't really describe how hard of a break from all my known realities that was and how exciting it felt. All of the glitz of mohawks, tattoos, and slamdancing really hooked me. Its easy to see how "grassroots hardcore scenes" that still exist are such good farming leagues for people that are avid music listeners. It gets a young kid’s attention, asks for a thorough dedication to a different lifestyle, etc. Funny thing about the Half Life show was that [Don Caballero drummer] Damon Che was playing drums for them though I didn't meet him until a few years later.

What kind of stuff did you listen to before you got introduced to that world of underground music and "punk" ideals?

My story is pretty common and I don't know how revealing. Kiss from 1st to about 6th grade, mostly for the maximization of flash. Kids like the circus, so. But there was a large period of time that I lived in Malawi, so the influences came from two sources: Pennsylvanian working class steel workers' kids and British expatriate kids whose parents really belonged to this weird community of government workers and college professors that went from one Third World country to another on contracts for their whole lives. A weird melange of international types. It would only be proper to say they were British, but the way you would say a Mexican restaurant in the U.S. is Mexican. There was a weird compensation for being detached from one's homeland, and you tended to be a weird exaggeration of it. Like pictures of the Taj Mahal in Indian restaurants. So that was probably the measurement of British influence. When I got back to the U.S. in the middle of the 6th grade, people no longer liked fire breathing clowns in make-up and instead liked girls and music you could dance to with girls. They'd say things like, "We don't listen to AM anymore. It's FM." I'm speaking from the boy's perspective here, but then you probably could at this point...pursuit of music was pretty much a boy thing. So there was some confusion for me. I began trying to reclaim flash in music, but through other means. Maybe towards a slighty higher pedigree of metal. And I remember the extra-musical issue that hot girls in junior high dug top-40, which always had to be dealt with. But I can't really be sure. People always remember themselves as having been involved in a lot of things that they really weren't and only see nostalgia films years later, claiming, "It was just like that for me!" I think I listened to rap. At least it seems like I sure did when I hear the Beastie Boys.

When did you start playing in Sludgehammer? I loved the "Dynamite Lady" seven-inch when it came out...

Karl [Hendricks] and I were in Sludgehammer when we were 18 and 19. I played drums when Karl and I couldn't find a drummer. I couldn't really play. I just faked it. Now and then, I had moments of greatness, but I never knew how to duplicate it consistently. A learning experience for both of us.

Were there any other bands before Sludgehammer?

No, that was pretty much a first band experience. I remember the feeling of, wow, I can play a whole song! Then, wow, I can play on stage and people will watch. Then, wow, I can make a record. A discovery of various forms of existence. All necessary first steps for me before I could imagine going about making music with a critical perspective.

How did you meet up with the Don Caballero guys? Tell us about the inception and early days of Don Cab...

In ‘91 Don Cab started playing, though it was just a three piece, without me. At the same time, I started Rocco Raco, played one show, then the drummer quit, and I asked Damon [Che] to play, which he did. We practiced for a few months together. Now Don Cab and Rocco Raco were both playing on similar terrain, but DonCab was more established (and also better), so they just asked me to play with them and I became a fourth member. No one in Pittsburgh liked them at first anyway, so it seemed natural that I, their roadie, would join. It's at this point that I'd like to say mean things about people in Pittsburgh, but I don't think I have the sufficient energy for it to sound mean enough.

What about people in Chicago [where Ian now lives] or New York [where Storm and Stress drummer Kevin Shea lives]?

There are certain towns where self-consciousness seems to be at such an extremely low level, and that's where "types" come from. Whether that type is an intellectual, an artist, a music critic, a graffiti writer, or advertising executive. In Chicago, with its detached midwestern sobriety, graffiti tags often get the response on bathroom walls of someone writing, "ooh, a tag!" to make fun. In New York, it's perfectly reasonable to expect to meet a 42-year-old with 3 kids who tells you he's recently become a graffiti artist. I like both towns for both of those reasons.

How did Storm and Stress come about and what did you have in mind when putting the band together?

Storm and Stress started playing in 1994. I saw Kevin playing with his improv outfit fortystories.

fortystories is Kevin's band with Micah Gaugh?

Yes, they play together still. They usually go under the name Gaugh now. My friend said something about this terrible band playing at a party, but within about one minute of them beginning, I think I thought about music a little differently. I was ripe from DonCab touring and in a reactionary phase to all of the rock band stickers on smelly bathroom walls that assault the senses and make you plan your tour around using the bathroom at Denny’s so that you wont have to use the one at Jim’s RocknRoll Palace. I asked Kevin to play with me right there. Storm and Stress was quite a low profile project for a long time. I don't think many people in Pittsburgh even knew about us. We actually played with bar bands in white trash bars so that no one would know about it. I forget their name now, but we did a little tour with one cover band playing Whitesnake, etc. - just around Pittsburgh working class neighborhoods. I really wanted a band upside down from Don Cab. From being a band that got along with each other, to playing quietly through a full stack of amps, to never knowing what the time signature was. We didn't actually play a real show until DonCab stopped playing. I ended up using Storm and Stress riffs on DonCab 2 because DC was making a record and S&S was really just in laboratory phase.

I had to find another reason to play music because Don Cab was relatively successful for an instrumental band at the time, but I wasn't very happy. Surely we could have had more success, but it felt like it was only a matter of degree and nothing would have been substantially different.

Storm and Stress did a lot of concept shows at first, like not playing music, etc. Just trying to frustrate people. Well, not trying to frustrate people, but it seemed we always did. Our first show where people came to see us, we put all of the amps in front of the stage while we stood behind them, so of course we couldn't hear what we were doing. Things became more serious as we decided we wanted to make a record, and it's a problem a lot of people on the more improv end of the scale talk about: a recording becomes a permanent version of something that is never set. So realizing that the music on the recording wouldn't be able to evolve any further, we set music as songs that became the record on Touch and Go.

I didn't want to sing, but to be in another instrumental band would be like I was becoming a "type" of musician or something, so some singing was needed. The closest I'll ever come to using the horrendous term "post" is to admit that the singing isn't really my idea of singing, but maybe my idea of other people’s ideas of singing. I wasn't really interested in singing, but it seemed like a prerequisite for being in a band in the classic sense, so imitation seemed appropriate. I was really interested in having the band have all appearances of normalcy, in hopes that it would be taken normally. Experimental music is a really powerful concept that can control where a band is placed. -- My god, what are they doing onstage? They're just experimenting. Oh, ok, everything is alright then.-- It somehow can take the artist out of the total space they're interested in working in. It's marginalizing. Not that I really imitate particular people, but I think I use general styles. There's maybe a little bit of, "what if this was Steve Malkmus singing?"...and certainly "what if this was Stephin Merritt?". Those are a few archetypes of 90s style singing. The girl is more vulnerable and beautiful and the gorilla more of a giant beast when King Kong holds the girl in its hand. It's about the distance between grace and shit and how important they are for each other.

The rock guy/electronic girl lyric is a good example of it. The planned outrageous line on the record, right? Isn't that, in the end, how most quotable lines end up being made? I wanted a record that you really couldn't conceptualize, at least easily. So it avoids, "oh yeah! I like ambient, spacey" and automatically you can predict each successive noise with little surprise. I don't think experimental records are supposed to have that tone of voice. So I put a logic alien to the song in the midst of it, just to keep things kind of honest. You can't just react, "oooh, noise improv!" One of the most alluring things about pop music is how fragile it seems, and how vulnerable, because it exposes itself so simply, and is so easily understood, that it's practically inviting you to come and invade it. Destroy it. Totally sexy. So sure, it’s fucking a style and hopefully raping a generation and all the hopes and dreams it ever attached to its collection of 45s. But it's not that I'm a bad person for wanting to do this. The form itself asks to have it done. It's exercised in other ways. More familiarly, any pop/punk song with the a/b pretty part/heavy part. That kind of prop-it-up-then-take-it-away tease is even evident on the intro to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, pre distortion pedal and post. Two dramatic ways of thinking about music today, pop and fey vs. earnest and important, actually dislike each other so much they hurt when juxtaposed. So that was the idea, hurting those ways of thinking. It’s funny how the rock guy line actually served as a hook in the pop sense, in that it seems something people comment on all the time. It fulfilled all its duties.

It makes sense to me that some of the riffs on Don Caballero 2 are actually Storm and Stress-derived. Let's go ahead and delve right into Guitar Player-style interviewing: could you talk about how your guitar style/technique has evolved/changed over the years and how it differs between the two groups? Along those same lines, how would you further compare/contrast each group's overall "sound" and internal dynamics.

Don Cab uses machine logic, even if we try to program the machine to behave in ways that would make you think it must not be a machine. So the guitar has to be pretty functional and cog-like in relation to the other parts. Behave in meters, follow a rational blueprint of a functioning structure. And its development has pretty much followed the development of computer chips - get quicker and smaller. We take what we have and then try to figure out how to fit more in. But this is where it gets interesting. Parts - riffs and rhythms - become more recognizable as patterns as you get further away from them, the way the block your house is on looks less like where you live and instead part of a design when you look at it from an aerial photograph. So as the riffs and meters shrink from your viewpoint, the individual units matter less. It's like those infamous modernist apartment building designs, where each apartment looks really drab, but when you step back and consider the whole thing where windows and balconies just make up a pattern, you see a really well composed whole. But, man, the individual is neglected...they live in this alienating place. The riffs, if considered as individuals, only serve to comprise a picture of the whole. By downplaying the individual, personality is also reduced. There's not as much emoting going on. The New York City skyline has a million windows, but you don't care if the person in one particular window is crying because they are only a dot.

But there's a plus to all of this. Seeing patterns reveals underlying structures of control and explains why Presidents are shot and why my grandmother goes to Florida every winter. The music includes everyone like sociology. It's an umbrella for all of the possible human interest stories that could happen. Its really a beautiful tear-jerking experience, like a slow-motion summary with "Nobody Does It Better" playing to absolutely everything that has ever happened to people.

Because the Storm and Stress sound is less dense, the guitar is about the space around the notes as much as the notes. You can hear their attack and decay. You can almost feel them as objects around you that you could reach out, touch, and move around because they're not screwed into the ground. They're not showgirls lined up on stage performing for you, kicking their legs together, distant and untouchable. It's definitely, in keeping with the German schtick in the band's name, an exposition of the Subject. Emoting and saying, I am.

But Storm and Stress is a contemporary version. Balanced with the attempt at emotion is a lack of feelings. Basically like a character in any Brett Easton Ellis novel. So it's a tension between those poles: old and new, retro kitsch and hating those sorts of punk rock sticker in the bathroom games.

More typical pop music invites you in, says, "Let me tell you a story. I have a personality and am very knowable. We can be friends and you can hum me." S&S music is still a person, but a person frozen over, turned into a photograph. Comparing it to the Don Cab model, the notes are not those people packed into buildings that are controlled by planning. They're the people walking around you on the sidewalk. Unknowable except for your ability to generalize them into types. They're just sort of posters for the life you imagine that person to have. This person probably thought George Bush was evil. That person is probably in the mob.

If you use the ground to represent silence, Don Cab is leaning forward with its head leading the feet, being pulled by a momentum that would make it fall down if it didn't keep going. That's a pretty rock stance. Storm & Stress is the opposite of that. It leads with its feet, able to stop at any moment. Remaining planted in silence makes the lack of sound play a really big role in each sound. A bad S&S show is one where the sound gets away from us because the room is too booming and loud, and we lose that control where we can stand still on the ground.

Is there such a thing as "rock without a beat"?

I guess we're saying there is.

Is rock as a genre/style defined by formal/musical elements (i.e. a beat), or by other extra-musical elements, whether aesthetic, cultural, political, socio-demographic, or some of all?

I think more the latter. As for the former, rock's definitely a thing because lines in the sand have been drawn, but like the car advertisement that said its car was like punk rock a few years ago shows, the sanctity of anyone's definitions will be laughed at soon enough.

In the press kit you refer to late 50s modal jazz and Euro serialism - how much was Storm and Stress influenced by such things? Or was this a connection you made after the S&S sound became manifest? I seem to remember you saying you were not all that familiar with those musics and that they weren't conscious influences on S&S's formative development.

I wasn't trying to say either of those things were present in our music or an inspiration (though I'm a fan of some of both). I was only guessing, with words I doubt Miles Davis or Arnold Schönberg would have used, that part of their necessity to create their music was an anti-corny impulse (which were different reactions for both of them because of their different situtations). Of course, the drive for the new was big in modernism and also with someone associated so closely with the word "cool". My words are more of a sitting in Taco Bell with my friends and..."Oh look, gas at the Amoco across the street is only a dollar nineteen!" That's how people think today.

Could you talk a little bit more about why you think that what S&S does "seems like the only honest way to play music right now, without being hokey"?

I'm not sure. It might have something to do with grunge and the victory of the loud guitar. There are pretty diminishing returns now with playing loud rock in a 200 capacity club when Bush or whoever does it on MTV to millions. Those claims of being more authentic bore people after a while and they start staying home to watch The X Files or go to rockabilly shows which obviously could care less about being real. It’s hard to get that feeling of pushing against something or resistance when that thing has gone to the top. If you stay in that arena, you've automatically failed at that genre unless you have several A&R reps from major labels courting you. Only then does the dizzying, anything-could-happen potential come back into the music. "These guys could be huge!" But it's obviously a different kind of genre now, because the name of the game is fame, and not those more interesting and strange goals that exist in between the typical worn categories. I guess it’s an attempt to achieve the dizzying, anything-could-happen potential again, without the sides of the dice consisting of buzz clip, Letterman appearance, or commercial failure.

Continuing with the press kit angle, can you be more specific about S&S's "innocence" and its problematic relationship to "intention"? Is this another way of saying that you are looking for some sort of musical "freedom", in the same way many so-called free improvisers are looking for it?

A majority of the melody on the record is sort of cold and unemotional, but done in a very live, soupy, human way. So it's a tension of those two opposites, which gets back to the joke of the pre-modern romantic and current day man done up with a Gary Numan outlook. So the emotion you get is the kind of emotion you receive from a person in a photograph. It has a melancholy and distant nostalgia because it's visible but unreachable. The lack of intention in the music is actually tied to the frozen personality of the music.

Am I OK in assuming that you equate S&S's mission with "the past 20 years or so of punk rock" and "what the Ramones were about in the 70s" for the reasons we already discussed, i.e. doing violence to pop form, etc.?

I just meant that it was for the people.

You went into detail about the psychology and reaction-against-DonCab reasons for wanting to play with Kevin. I'm curious...when you started jamming with Kevin, did you already have any of the musical seeds of Storm and Stress in your head or did those just sort of flow unto you "in progress", while jamming?

I think Kevin really influenced the way I saw the music. Crashing, unstable, quiet to loud.

How did you actually go about turning the Storm and Stress set into composed "songs" and how did that modify (if at all) the original style of the band and the way that you create music?

Sort of written like a picture would be drawn with a blindfold on. It's still thought, but blurred. Less conscious analysis and manipulation, un-DonCab. You know, like back when everything was natural, simple and life was just less complicated and we were all free.

This might sound ridiculous, but to me, the interplay between you and Kevin slightly recalls the wild spiritual tumult of Coltrane and Rashied Ali on Interstellar Space and in my head I can hear Storm and Stress working really well as a duo. What made you want to bring another musical voice into that equation?

Well, there was always a bass there from day one, so there was never a question. If there wasn't a bass, it might be easier to make that comparison (though I still wouldn't). But I think satisfying that expectation gives us a much more familiar rock feel, which I sort of want to give the impression of. The bass gives us context. If you scat sang, someone might say, oh, they're scat singing. But if you were the President of the United States and scat sang during détente discussions between the Israelis and Palestinians, people would have a lot more to deal with, in terms of your scat singing. Eric, you know, really gives us that extra edge.

Now that I've accidentally brought up the dreaded "jazz" subject, could you talk a bit more about Storm and Stress' odd relationship with "jazz"/"improv" and who you think your audience is?

That's been interesting. There is no jazz "scene", and unfortunately those people and shows are more defined by a lack of regular infrastructure than one. Or maybe that's a good thing in some respects. Things regaling in their freedom might not want regularity. But I bet if you asked a lot of people if there should be more Knitting Factories, they'd say yes. I consider S&S pretty lucky to be able to fit into the branches of rock. One nice thing about S&S is that the audience is made up of such a weird group of people of all styles.

One surpising genre in our audience is "hardcore." The word seems to have been revised. The record labels that rose right around the time the phrase "Indie Rock" gained currency, which I'd date from '88 to '91, have solidified and institutionalized with the currently dominant notion being that music today is either post-rock/electronica or americana (that which is country, blues, garage, folk-based, etc.). But that neat split has left a lot of youngsters disinterested and a whole new realm is opening up to fill a demand for fresh guitar rock in the cracks and crevices below. It's not surprising that it's rising from channels that we can only vaguely recognize as hardcore and DIY, which were the same words to describe the one-two-three-four hardcore thrash beat from its older incarnation. The rise and fall of alternative music is only a remote influence on the way 18-year-olds think today.

Technically you guys don't improvise and only Kevin has a real "jazz background". And yet the record could almost be considered "jazz" and would without a doubt appeal to many jazz/avant-garde fans if only they could hear it. But after all, it's been released on one of the premier punk/postpunk record labels of the last two decades. I don't really find this at all strange in '97, I'm just curious to hear what else you have to say regarding this sort of thing, the marketplace, how "genres" work/fail/etc...

Of course by wearing the wrong kind of dress to a party, you're acknowledging dress codes and also saying you don't care about them. You need rules and people's expectations to be able to find what comes across as rebellion or freedom. You needed the strict parents in the 50s for James Dean to sell posters. The nineties have really perpetuated the feeling of newness and rulebreaking by combining unlikely genres. Afro-pop with Irish jig music. Jungle and Egyptian music. Beer and coffee beans. IBM workers and casual dress requirements.

So how did Don Caballero get back together again after an almost two year hiatus?

‘Cause you know, it's the end of history and Fukuyama was right about communism being over and capitalism having won so buy a mutual fund and a cigar because markets don't crash anymore and computers are kind of cool ‘cause they've increased the GNP and my songwriting abilities by at least 3% a year plus there's really nothing to be mad about anymore so music should sound like a Microsoft Windows 95 cloud and a rave t-shirt design reminiscent of heaven, the way angels and other debris float sonically unattached, "After you follow the rules down there, you come up here and there are none. You just float around! Knock down the walls!" Which, getting back to the first thing I said, is kind of like the end, you know, but that doesn't mean it's over, it means it's forever, like anti-oxidants and music should be a part that comes back again and again like a big flat plane that goes on forever and the prophet asked, "but where is the fiery flame from which you came?" And we said, "hey my man, what burns never returns."

Posted by Tim at 06:49 PM | Comments (2)

April 25, 2005

In The Future, Everyone Will DJ For 15 Minutes

I'm still gonna try to write my, um, "coming soon" After-Chill 2005 wrapup at some point in the next week or two, but last week was a little too action-packed and this week isn't looking any different. More about that in a minute. First, so that I can clear my blogging palate, here's a brief rundown of last week's "extracurricular activities that I will never get around to posting about in more detail":

I've often used this weblog as a means to promote various nights/parties at which I'm DJ-ing. And actually, I will briefly do it again right now....'cause I would love to see a big turnout at the combination dance party/Kerbloki show that's going down this Thursday April 28th at Wetlands Dancehall (formerly The Treehouse). Please come out and help me establish a new DJ-ing foothold in The Wetlands!

UPDATE: Here's a cool Kerbloki mp3 (2.75 MB) that I found on the Bifocal Media site. It's an instrumental and not at all similar to Kerbloki's hilariously awesome live show, but way worth listening to nonetheless...

But the rest of this post is not me blathering on and on in an attempt to get people to come out to one of my own DJ appearances, but rather the complete inverse: an open invitation to anyone in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill metro area to load up their MP3 player and come be an MP3J in front of a live audience. This Tuesday night at The Federal, we're doing the second local installment of noWax Night, a growing worldwide phenomenon in which the iPod-bearing masses are invited to take over selector duties in small bite-sized increments.

If you want to participate in this mass democratization of DJing, simply load up your iPod (or Jukebox/Zen/Shuffle/whatever) with enough choice cuts for a 15 minute set. Bring it to The Federal this Tuesday night. Sign-up begins at 9:30, and once you sign up for a time slot, you're good to go. The audience will help determine the best sets, and the winners will be getting some pretty choice prizes: Federal gift certificates, expensive iPod accessories from Digital Lifestyle Outfitters, good stuff like that.

Anyone who likes music and has an MP3 player can join in (and if you don't have an MP3 player, I heard you can get a free Shuffle pretty easily). Duke's infamously iPod-blessed Class of 2008 will be finishing up classes the very next day, so hopefully a few of them will come out and "spin" instead of sitting at home getting oh-so-psyched up to see Collective Soul play Duke's annual LDOC concert the next day (no, I'm not kidding, click the link!). If they don't, and if we somehow don't wind up with enough people to fill up all the slots, I'm going to have to break out my new Shuffle and just let it take over with some randomness. And trust me, I think The Federal could probably use a break from me and my tunes...

Posted by Tim at 12:46 PM | Comments (5)

April 17, 2005

Our Band Could Still Be Your Life

This is a reunited Dinosaur Jr. performing on last Friday's episode of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. The trio played a pretty blistering version of "The Lung" from one of the greatest albums ever recorded, You're Living All Over Me (SST, 1987). And despite what some of us may have been jokingly predicting, the band members did not actually "live all over" each other on stage. There were no fistfights or displays of passive-aggressive behavior. No one called anyone else an asshole. And J. Mascis never tried to hit Lou Barlow with his guitar.

By this point in 2005, I shouldn't really be surprised at any rock reunion, overground or underground. And yet the Dinosaur Jr reunion still strikes me as just weirder than weird, given the band's acrimonious split and all those Mascis-hating Sebadoh songs that Barlow wound up writing. I guess time can heal the deepest of wounds. Er, maybe time and a good booking agent. Dinosaur will be touring the US in July, hitting the Cat's Cradle on Sunday, July 10th. In May 1991 I was extremely thrilled about getting to see a Dinosaur Jr./Finger bill at the old BW3 Cradle....but that was a post-Barlow Dinosaur, performing a pretty Green Mind-centric set. I'm guessing that the 2005 Dinosaur simulacrum will stay very focused on the first three Dinosaur albums, which have just been reissued by local label Merge Records.

I'm probably a bit of a sucker for buying these Dinosaur albums for the 2nd and 3rd times, but once I saw that they were remastered and that there was a $33 package deal, I couldn't resist plunking down the cash. From a bonus cut/rarity standpoint, there's very little extra audio to be had. And even though it makes total sense in terms of quality control, the chronological completist in me is somewhat troubled by the fact that the hilariously bad cover of Peter Frampton's "Show Me The Way" was dropped from the You're Living All Over Me disc in favor of the far-superior-but-released-after-Bug cover of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven". Oh, and that Last Rights tune from the "Just Like Heaven" EP? Forget it! In all seriousness, Merge did a great job with these reissues and the B-side questions are a very minor nitpick. I'm guessing that Mascis and company probably chose what B-sides they did and did not want people to hear in 2005, and that was that.

The real draw of these reissues is the amazing music from the original albums, but there are some nice non-audio extras included. Byron Coley wrote some extensive liner notes for all 3 discs, and the Bug and You're Living All Over Me discs each have two Quicktime music videos apiece. If you've never seen the classic "Just Like Heaven" video featuring stuffed animals hilariously rocking out and bowing down to the sludge-rock breakdown, well, now's your chance. Oscar the Grouch in a Deep Wound shirt, can't front on that!

Posted by Tim at 05:40 PM | Comments (5)

April 14, 2005

In My White Light Blue Tee

The Carolina blue "Dynasty" tees can now be easily mail-ordered for $17.00 postpaid via this Paypal form on the newly created thanksrashad.com are no longer available, but this is what thanksrashad.com used to look like. For every T-shirt sold (whether online or at Schoolkids), we will be donating $5.00 to The Inter-Faith Council, an Orange County charity that does a great job of providing food and shelter and other services to local people in need. I felt like we should do this once it became clear that the shirts would wind up making a pretty decent profit. Because my motivations for making this T-shirt had everything to do with design aesthetics and Carolina pride and the simple fact that I wanted to wear one....and not some sort of desire to capitalize on the recent NCAA Championship. I guess the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of goods are often one and the same. At any rate, you can now buy a swank light blue tee as a parting tribute to the NBA-bound Rashad McCants and simultaneously feel good about the five bucks that you just sent towards people who are much less fortunate than Rashad.

While I'm talking about Carolina-related tees printed up by The Merch, it should be noted that Jackie Manuel not only has a posse, but the defensive standout is now giving shout-outs to his posse. During a very gracious and eloquent "senior speech" at the end of Tuesday night's UNC 2004-05 Basketball Awards Ceremony, Manuel thanked the fans and went on to say, "I also want to give a shout-out to my posse". Thanks, Jackie! It was definitely an honor to be a part of your posse. Good luck as a pro player for some lucky basketball team somewhere. Here's a RealPlayer stream of Manuel's speech...the sound quality isn't so great, but the posse shout-out is around the 2:44 mark. The "Jackie Manuel Has a Posse" tees are still available at Schoolkids and hopefully they'll be up on The Merch web site very soon. Get 'em now before Jackie graduates!

This will hopefully be my last basketball-related post....well, at least for the next six months.

Posted by Tim at 08:19 PM | Comments (2)

April 11, 2005

What's Up With Dante, 1 for 8?

It's been exactly one whole week since Carolina beat Illinois for the NCAA Championship, but I'm still not quite ready to get off the cloud, so to speak. As a ball bearing salesman named Stan once said, "We're just floating over here". Mr. Rawls just tipped me to an entertaining Carolina basketball-themed interview that fakejazz.com recently did with longtime UNC fan and stringed instrument enthusiast Dave Brylawski (Polvo, Idyll Swords, Black Taj).

As Polvo fans surely remember, Brylawski was often quite vocal in his support for UNC hoops during shows, sometimes going so far as to dedicate songs to various players and the like. My favorite story about Brylawski's Carolina fervor dates back to February 5th, 1992. #1 Duke was playing #9 UNC at the Dean Dome on the exact same night that Polvo (Chapel Hill's top-ranked band at the time, at least in my poll) was returning the home/away favor by playing an "away" show over at Under The Street in Durham. While watching the extremely close game at Under The Street, Brylawski proclaimed to everybody that Polvo wasn't going to play if Carolina lost. Luckily, this threat never had to be acted upon. UNC beat the defending/future national champs 75-73 and the rock show went on. I imagine that it was probably a really great Polvo set, but I can't say for sure, since I opted to stay at home and watch the basketball game instead. I'm sure Dave would've understood such truancy, especially since I never missed another local Polvo show after that one.

Really glad to see Fake Jazz writer Jim Steed dig deep and mention the basketball-themed track that Brylawski recorded for the Cognitive Mapping Volume II compilation that my Friction Media cohorts and I put together a whole decade ago. The CD is long out of print, so below is an MP3 of a song that references both Dante Calabria's poor shooting in the 1995 Final Four (actually 1 for 10, even worse than 1 for 8!) and the early exits that Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace made for the NBA after that same season.

Dave Brylawski - "Fairweather Fan" [1.89 MB]

As one of my friends pointed out, UNC's blistering second half during the Michigan State game nine days ago helped vanquish many of those Final Four Saturday demons that consistently plagued UNC from 1995 through 2000. Demons that come up in the Brylawski interview. Now that the Heels have finally won it all again, maybe Brylawski will be inspired to pen some basketball-themed lyrics for a triumphant rock anthem instead of sad words for a melancholy Oriental-tinged folk song. I plan on finding out on Saturday June 4th, when Black Taj comes back from what seemed like a grave to play Local 506. If you live in NYC, you can actually find out much sooner - the Taj is playing with The Fucking Champs at The Knitting Factory on April 22nd. The F'n Champs (now featuring Phil Manley of Trans Am fame) will also be rocking Kings in Raleigh on Tuesday April 19th. It's a little hard to pass up an Out Hud/Hella show at 506 on that same night, but I don't think The Champs have come through NC since 2002. And that band name is just sounding especially appropriate right now.

Posted by Tim at 11:51 PM | Comments (5)

April 08, 2005

Change The Game

Like every other Carolina fan, I am ecstatic about the fact that The University of North Carolina Tar Heels are the 2005 National Champions in Men's Basketball after having defeated Illinois by a score of 75-70 in the NCAA Tournament Championship Game that took place on April 4, 2005. But I'll be damned if I'm going to wear a poorly designed white t-shirt that has a bunch of those phrases and words and numbers densely cluttered around an orange basketball and one or more UNC logos. I was glad to see via via this newspaper photo that Carolina Pride had at least one t-shirt that was decidedly more subtle and tasteful than most, but let's face it - a lot of those championship tees flying out of UNC Student Stores and the Franklin Street T-shirt shops are pretty damn ugly. In spite of the sheer beauty of the facts printed on them.

My pals at The Merch and I were lamenting this aesthetic tragedy a couple of days ago. So we decided to press forward with an idea that I had for a very different t-shirt. One that doesn't mention anything about the score or the game or even the championship itself. One that makes no mention of a certain university that happens to have some very strict licensing policies. One that will always remind me of the countless Carolina fans who were throwin' their diamonds up on Franklin Street after Monday night's championship game. And one that serves as somewhat of a farewell tribute to passionate Jay-Z fan and NBA-draft-bound baller Rashad McCants, whose "I Will Not Lose" swagger and "ballin' repeatedly, highlights on Sportscenter" hoop game will be sorely missed next year, no matter what all the haters say.

So here it is, our "Dynasty Sign" tee, in that perfect shade of championship blue:

Those UNC Mexican wrestling masks were just a limited edition not-for-sale deal that we made for ourselves, but this latest Tuba City/Merch collabo is now available for the public to purchase. Get 'em at the Schoolkids Records on Franklin Street for $15 plus tax, or if mail order is more your game, you can choose a size (YL, S, M, L, XL) and Paypal me $18 at tubacity AT gmail.com and I'll promptly ship one out to you via U.S. Priority Mail. Any of you Tar Heels living outside the USA, get at me and we'll work something out.

Throw ya diamonds up in the Carolina blue sky, y'all!

Posted by Tim at 07:08 PM | Comments (3)

April 06, 2005

8 Years of Hell

Hard to believe that one of Chapel Hill's coolest bars is turning 8 years old. I'm not sure that anybody, not even Hell's employees or owners, seriously expected the place to last so long in such a transient town. And yet Hell is still here in 2005...and it's still red-hot. If you don't believe me, listen to the lustful hedonists at Maxim, who declared Hell their "Bar of the Month" in January 2004. Or revisit the poignant Hell testimonial that Dave Thomas penned for a 2001 issue of The Independent. It's only a few paragraphs but it manages to capture the essence of what so many of us love about Hell.

The "Hell of a Month" anniversary events are already kicking into full gear. I won't mention them all here, but you can visit Hell's under-construction web site for a detailed schedule. This coming Saturday (April 9th) is the big 8th Anniversary dance party, and legal whiz T.I. and I are already charging up the Bueno Love Baller Soundsystem in preparation for 5+ hours of non-stop party jamz. Maybe it's just the amazing spring weather that we're currently having, or the fact that everyone in town still seems to be on a huge high from Monday night, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be the biggest Hell dance party ever. Doors open at 9pm, so get there early and be ready to bring the party!!

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the traditional 8th anniversary gift is bronze. Someone really oughtta tip those bartenders with a medal...

Posted by Tim at 10:05 PM | Comments (1)

April 05, 2005

North Carolina, Raise Up!!!

I didn't take my shirt off, but I did bring a Petey Pablo CD-R for Hell to rock once the championship belonged to NORTH CAROLINA!!! I didn't twist anything 'round my hand or spin anything like a helicopter, but I did throw that dynasty sign several hundred times while walking down Franklin Street, urging all my Carolina fam to throw their diamonds up. Dynasty, baby!!

While I was on Franklin Street I wore the mask, slapped high-fives with practically everyone I saw, and even jumped over one of the bonfires. It was awesome.

In 1982 I was just a little kid who felt fortunate to be able to stay up really late and watch that magical game. In 1993 I was a college kid living in Morrison dorm....and after that false time-out and the subsequent free-throws, it was all about the crazy cross-campus run to Franklin. 2005 is gonna be my favorite of the three, though....a bunch of my favorite people in Hell both during and after the game, nothing but celebratory good vibes and non-violent pandemonium on Franklin Street, and the thrill of watching those seniors come all the way from 8-20 three years ago to THAT #1 SPOT.

Hey sportswriters, can we now come clean and admit that despite your lazy analysis, teamwork and talent are not always mutually exclusive?!? Go Heels!

Posted by Tim at 03:30 AM | Comments (5)