Frequency Issues.

Not strictly music-related, but I just thought I’d draw your attention to this rather superb article that David Berman re-posted on his new weblog last week, dealing with the infamous 1986 incident that saw the American news anchorman Dan Rather menaced and beaten by two men who mystifyingly demanded to know “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?”

I was sorta distantly aware of these events already, but the article, by Paul Limbert Allman, is a beautiful piece of writing, and a great demonstration of the way that a few uncanny coincidences can so quickly build themselves into glorious webs of conspiratorial thinking. Well worth a read.

Of slightly more relevance to this blog, it has also served to remind me of the obvious R.E.M. song, which has subsequently been bouncing around my head all day, setting me off on a kind of unexpected nostalgia trip, back to the strange days of 1994.

I’m not a big R.E.M. fan, and rarely think about their stuff unless one of their hits happens to jump out of a passing radio at me. I don’t mind ‘em – they’ve done some good numbers, but.. y’know. Back when this tune came out though, the 12 year old me was sufficiently impressed that he went out and bought their album “Monster” (on tape, natch) on the day of release.

In retrospect, it seems like a pretty cheesy move for R.E.M. to suddenly adopt distorted guitars and big chord riffs in the post-Nirvana environment, and indeed I remember people saying as much at the time – god knows who, as I didn’t read any music press or newspapers, but I seem to have nonetheless got the impression from somewhere that the album was pretty widely panned – perhaps my first experience of actively liking something that was generally dismissed by others?

What is surprising though is how much I STILL like this song. Long after all the ‘90s mulch has faded away, it still sounds pretty good, full of rich, strange guitar sounds and borderline-indecipherable lyrics that work well to convey the song’s themes of (I guess?) garbled transmissions and mental illness and such.

Then as now, I can’t really make out much of what Stipe is going on about, beyond the title phrase, something about “violent friends”, and “you said that Arnie was the shackles of you”? Back then, I remember that the very idea of a song where you couldn’t hear what the singer was saying was an invitation to immediate ridicule from FM-rock addled teenage brains, but I liked the name of the song and found the whole mystery of it slightly fascinating.

By far the best thing about “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” though is the bizarrely dissonant guitar solo – a sort of morbidly slowed down (possible reversed?) anti-guitar solo really. There is nothing that can quite convey how strange and wrong that bit, and “Monster” as a whole, sounded to me at age 12. I loved the shiny, Butch Vig-tempered distortion on “Nevermind” to death, but this was something else entirely. In my ignorance, I assumed that this was why people didn’t like the album: because it sounded all shitty and fucked up and you couldn’t hear the words properly.

(Although it’s nearly 15 years since I listened to “Monster” in its entirety, after checking a few bits out online I’d hazard a guess that people probably didn’t like it because a lot of the songs on it are quite dull, and seem to lean on ‘weird’ guitar/production decisions to hide a certain lack of inspiration. You know that thing when you’re a kid and you hear a song that’s quite long and ponderous, but you don’t judge it as such, because you sorta think, well, this seems dull to me NOW, but these guys are grown-ups – presumably they know what they’re doing, maybe I’ll appreciate the true adult grandeur of this tune when I’m a bit older, etc. This is probably the same regrettable mind-set that lures so many youngsters into listening to latter-day Pink Floyd or Dire Straits or The Doors or whatever, incorrectly assuming that they’ll become a bit more sophisticated if they manage to fathom why the fuck this is supposed to be good…)

Anyway, after the weird guitar bit on “..Kenneth”, the extreme tremolo effect used on “Crush with Eyeliner” (track two on “Monster”) completely freaked me out. I remember hearing a radio interview with the band, where Peter Buck said something about how he’d used a broken old amplifier that he liked the sound of to record lots of stuff on the album. As someone who up until this point had had no gateway at all (besides “Nevermind”) into what iTunes insists is called “Alternative & punk”, this concept just plain blew my mind. To think that this guy who was in a huge rock band, who could presumably afford ALL THE HI-TECH EQUIPMENT IN THE WORLD, was dicking about with some busted old piece of crap that made weird noises, and putting them all over his new album… I just didn’t know what to make of it.

Then I saw the video for that song on Top of the Pops, which I remember had guys in bearsuits dancing in cages and bright flashing lights and all this weird, pseudo-transgressive ‘90s MTV stuff, and just thought “oh my god, this song is never going to be a hit, and this video just looks completely horrible – these people are crazy”.

Yeah, for a few minutes there, R.E.M. seemed really fucking far-out. Who’d have thought it?

Labels: 90s nostalgia outbursts, David Berman, R.E.M., weirdness

Moe Tucker Update.

A new interview with Maureen Tucker from the St Louis Riverfront Times.

As suspected, her current views are pretty much a dictionary definition of ‘cranky’, but far distant enough from dumbhead conservatism for us to let this one lie, I hope. If nothing else, hearing her let rip with a kinda scattergun attack on the entire world is pretty entertaining;

“To be honest, I never paid attention to what the hell was going on. My always voting Democrat was the result of that. My philosophy was and is all politicians are liars, bums and cheats. I make decisions on an issue by issue basis. I'm far more of an independent than a conservative or liberal. I don't agree with all of either side, and I think anyone who claims to is either a fool or a damn liar.”

I’ll go that far with ya Moe, and let’s agree to disagree on the Donkey Museum.

Labels: Maureen Tucker, politics, weirdness

Pierre Raph –
Jeunes Filles Impudiques 7” EP
(Finders Keepers)

Is this what it’s come to, Stereo Sanctity? Reviewing porn soundtracks?

Um, apparently.

As a teaser for their forthcoming extravaganza of Jean Rollin soundtrack reissues, Finders Keepers here present a 33rpm seven inch disc of music and sounds from 1974’s “Jeunes Filles Impudiques”, aka “Schoolgirl Hitchhikers”, the first of numerous ‘adult films’ made by Rollin under his Michel Gentil pseudonym to help pay the rent and finance his own, more personal films through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Composer Pierre Raph (who also worked with Rollin on “Requiem for a Vampire”, “Les Demoniaques” and “La Rose de Fer”) provides the music, whilst a lively cast and some English language dubbing artistes provide the, uh, other stuff.

Side A kicks off with “Gilda & Gunshots”, a giddy confection of double-speed rock drumming, distorted whip sound effects (I guess they’re supposed to be the gunshots?) and orgasmic gasps and shrieks, warming up into a startling runaway train prog excursion with the addition of muted trumpet and a sinister, minimal bass line. Play it daily, and let housemates/neighbours know you mean business.

Track two is a forgettable bit of ‘sensual’ renaissance faire guff, but I like how it’s warm and fuzzy and crackly as if it were taped straight off a battered mono film print (which I guess it quite possibly was).

“It’s time for you to know that Jackie and I have, let’s say, a very… intimate relationship, and act unblushingly when we are together”, says the voice of the same woman I’m sure I’ve heard dubbing the female leads in dozens of Euro horror movies at the start of side two. Fair enough. I act unblushingly when I hear the dreamy combination of ‘Sketches of Spain’ horns, owl hoots and an incessantly repeated Hank Marvin-style guitar phrase that follows. Things wrap up with a jolly tune that sounds like the theme from an uncharacteristically light-hearted Spaghetti Western in which bandits probably grin straight to camera and dance with old ladies a lot, and we’re out.

Bravo, Finders Keepers!

And if you like the sounda that, the full soundtrack album for one of my all-time favourite movies “Le Frisson des Vampires”, as performed by forgotten French acid-rock combo Acanthus, is in the shops now, and by my reckoning is more essential than food.

http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/

Labels: Finders Keepers, singles reviews, soundtracks, weirdness

Things of Interest # 1:
Delia Derbyshire Documentary on Radio 4.

“Sculptress of Sound: The Lost Works of Delia Derbyshire”, it’s called. I listened to it whilst having my tea this evening. Pretty great programme actually – tends to resort to a few generalisations and obvious observations etc, as you’d expect, but the bits where they break down the construction of the Dr. Who theme and “Blue Veils & Golden Sands” track by track is pretty mind-blowing, as are the brief extracts from unreleased tapes, bits of music presented in their original context as part of radio shows etc.

Available on the BBC iPlayer for another seven days here.

And while we're at it:

Labels: BBC, Delia Derbyshire, things of interest, videos, weirdness

Alex Chilton & The Box Tops on "Disc-o-Teen Halloween Special", 1967.



What can I say; I wish TV was like this 24 hours a day.

Labels: 1960s, Alex Chilton, halloween, the Box Tops, TV, videos, weirdness

Man, Do I Like Fridays!



Roy Esser – Can I Pawn My Teeth To You?
Roy Esser – Man, Do I Like Fridays

These tunes form the a and b side of a random-junk-shop-discovery type single I downloaded off the WFMU blog a while ago and rediscovered at random this week whilst browsing through my iTunes.

By and large, I am not one who much enjoys the pursuit of chortling over mystifying ‘Songs In The Key of Z’ type oddities recorded by forgotten lunatics and unfortunate misfits. As such, an inexplicable one-off single featuring a guy who sounds like a drunken pensioner hollering about being so poor he wants to pawn his teeth to get money for something to eat, backed by a low budget recreation of syrupy fifties pop strings, would not usually tend to be my cup of tea.

That though does not take into account the sheer enigma, the raw, unrefined genius of Roy Esser. Roy Esser did not write “Can I Pawn My Teeth To You?”. According to the scanned record label, that honour goes to messrs Kaye and Wilson. (surely not THAT Kaye or one of THOSE Wilsons?) Quite what inspired them to pen such a stupid song I can scarcely imagine, but boy howdy, did they ever find the right guy to sing it!

I would expect that most professional singers of the era, if presented with material like this, would treat it as a comedy number, singing it in a kinda gurning faux-hillbilly fashion over some lolloping, tongue in cheek country n’ western. Not so Roy Esser, who approaches the song with an earnest spirit of open-hearted joy in the face of adversity, with a sense of soaring, implacable faith in the righteousness of human endeavour, that must be heard to be believed. In doing so, he effortlessly transcends his place in the world of music, transforming a bizarre, grotesque parody into an inexplicably moving pop masterpiece, packing more complex, mixed up emotion into 100 seconds of old garbage than the most carefully-wrought of contemporary girl group melodramas. Appropriately, given the toothless theme, I can’t quite hear what he’s saying on the verse that begins “when I go to kiss my gal..”, but whatever it is, it almost makes me weep.

Maybe I’m giving it too much of a build up here. Just take a deep breath, turn this up loud, and let me know what you think.

The flip-side, “Man, Do I Like Fridays” is also well worth your time, exhibiting as it does that that same sense of implacable, universal optimism. If you were to commission a thousand songwriters to each compose a tune called “Man, Do I like Fridays” (perhaps with a ten minute time limit), chances are about 68% of the results would sound exactly like this one. And that would be a wonderful thing, because, MAN, we ALL like Fridays. And at some point mid-way through the twentieth century, Roy Esser approached a microphone with the intention of making sure we will never forget that simple truth.

Does he really sing “Oh I’m always goofing off on Fridays, they always tell me off on Fridays”? Roy Esser, we salute you through tears of joy.

Labels: Roy Esser, song reviews, weirdness

One Of These Days, These Days Will End

So, remember how I made the Silver Jews record my album of the year, and talked about what a great, positive, revitalised record it is, looking forward to grand things in store? Well turns out I may have spoken too soon, on the latter point at least.

According to a posting by David Berman on the Drag City forums, Silver Jews are no more:

“Silver Jews End-Lead Singer Bids his Well-Wishers Adieu

Hello, my friend.

Cassie and I went to the cave and it looks great. 58 degrees but the humidity makes it feel like 72.

I'm just going to play fifteen songs. My fifteen favorite ones.

A dollar per song. Plus Arnett Hollow. I don't

want to keep you underground for too long. Fall Creek Falls State Park State Lodge is great by the way.

Yes I cancelled the South American shows. I'll have to see the ABC Countries another way.

I guess I am moving over to another category. Screenwriting or Muckraking.

I've got to move on. Can't be like all the careerists doncha know.

I'm forty two and I know what to do.

I'm a writer, see?

Cassie is taking it the hardest. She's a fan and a player but she sees how happy i am with the decision.

I always said we would stop before we got bad. If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to Shiny Happy People.

What, you thought I was going to hang on to the bitter end like Marybeth Hamilton?

love david”

All of which is fair enough, and gracefully expressed. He’s not just packing it in because he’s bored though. Get a load of this second post:

“Now that the Joos are over I can tell you my gravest secret. Worse than suicide, worse than crack addiction:

My father.

You might be surprised to know he is famous, for terrible reasons.

My father is a despicable man. My father is a sort of human molestor.

An exploiter. A scoundrel. A world historical motherfucking son of a bitch. (sorry grandma)

You can read about him here.

www.bermanexposed.org

My life is so wierd. It's allegorical to the nth. My father went to college at Transylvania University.

You see what I'm saying.

A couple of years ago I demanded he stop his work. Close down his company or I would sever our relationship.

He refused. He has just gotten worse. More evil. More powerful. We've been "estranged" for over three years.

Even as a child I disliked him. We were opposites. I wanted to read. He wanted to play games.

He is a union buster.

When I got out of college I joined the Teamsters (the guards were union organized at the Whitney).

I went off to hide in art and academia.

I fled through this art portal for twenty years. In the mean time my Dad started a very very bad

company called Berman and Company.

He props up fast food/soda/factory farming/childhood obesity and diabetes/drunk driving/secondhand smoke.

He attacks animal lovers, ecologists, civil action attorneys, scientists, dieticians, doctors, teachers.

His clients include everyone from the makers of Agent Orange to the Tanning Salon Owners of America.

He helped ensure the minimum wage did not move a penny from 1997-2007!

The worst part for me as a writer is what he does with the english language.

Though vicious he is a doltish thinker

and his spurious editorials rely on doublethink and always with the Lashon Hara.

As I studied Judaism over the years, the shame and the shanda,

grew almost too much. my heart was constantly on fire for justice. I could find no relief.

This winter I decided that the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to

undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused. To you and everyone you know.

Literally, if you eat food or have a job, he is reaching you.

I've always hid this terrible shame from you, the fan. The SJs have always stood autonomous and clear.

Hopefully it won't contaminate your feelings about the work.

My life has been riddled with Ibsenism. In a way I am the son of a demon come to make good the damage.

Previously I thought, through songs and poems and drawings I could find and build a refuge away from his world.

But there is the matter of Justice.

And i'll tell you it's not just a metaphor. The desire for it actually burns.

It hurts.

There needs to be something more. I'll see what that might be.

DCB”

Jesus.

Many things that could be said about that spring to mind, but – I don’t know the situation; as the guy says, he’s a grown up, he knows his own mind.

Basically though, this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Ok, having an estranged father who’s an unrepentant bastard & evildoer of the worst stripe must suck pretty bad, but… is letting it derail your own creative career and publicly announcing that you’re going to plough your energies into some kind of quest for vengeance really a sensible response? This whole turn of events strikes me as dangerously melodramatic – the above missive reads like the kind of thing some screwed up character in a Wes Anderson movie would write.

BUT – not my business, not my place to comment. I shouldn’t have even written that last paragraph, only it bugs me so.

Between his songs, poems and prose, Berman can pretty much stake a claim as my favourite American writer of the past few decades. Here’s wishing him health and happiness, and I hope this latest development drives him toward something new that the world can enjoy/appreciate.

Thinking about it, Silver Jews have always specialised in perfectly pitched closing songs for their albums, so there are a few definitive “so long – the end” moments to choose from, but I think it’ll be a while before anyone beats this one, from their masterpiece “The Natural Bridge”:

Silver Jews – Pretty Eyes

Labels: bad news, David Berman, Silver Jews, weirdness

A Cavalcade of Wonders.

I haven’t had much writing-time this week I’m afraid (I’ve been busy in work, doing music at home, etc.), but thankfully, the internet keeps offering up wonders, like an unstoppable tide of reasons to go on living through the working week, so here’s a round-up of some stuff you should get down with if you’ve got a spare half hour.


1. “That’s no scarecrow, it’s a crucifix in a hat!”; declaring something “the most inexplicable comic book ever published” is inherently foolhardy given the bottomless barrel of strangeness that comprises the history of funny books, so I won’t say it. But, after reading this brief piece Steve Aylett wrote for Arthur, it’s safe to say that we have a contender. Jeff Lint is clearly set to become a new guru in my life, and I shall be seeking out copies of ‘The Caterer’ by any means necessary:

“Several dissertations have been published deconstructing the long, complicated rant in issue 6 about how goats have the skeletal system of chickens (the most incisive being 'That's no scarecrow, it's a crucifix in a hat! True Phantoms in The Caterer' by Alaine Carraze). The tirade, conducted over five dense pages after Marsden interrupts a school swim meet, has been interpreted as everything from a critique of Jimmy Carter's then-undisclosed connection to the Trilateral Commission, to a warning about genetic tampering, to homosexual panic (which would jibe with the mustache attacks). Certainly the Caterer's friends are bewildered (or understanding) enough to stand listening to this drivel. But when he tries to leave by riding on an unwilling dog, the cops arrive on the scene and Marsden goes into one of his frenzies. All credit is due to Pearl Comics for depicting the relatively static scene of the diatribe on the cover, rather than the explosive gun battle that follows.”

2.“Earn your prejudices, son!”; Characteristically thought-provoking stuff from Destination:Out, as they consider the legacy of much derided jazz reactionary Wynton Marsalis. It’s interesting to see his work being given a fair shake of the whip from a pro-free/avant perspective alongside discussion of his frankly absurd views on music, and mp3s of some of the cracking stuff he was missing out on during the ‘80s speak for themselves.


3. Chris Summerlin has a new weblog – which is good news! And on this weblog, he has posted a link to an extensive collection of photos from the Library of Congress. Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have expected the Library of Congress to be a fairly fusty institution that would limit access to their archives to serious researchers, get needlessly uptight about copyrights and so forth, but no! It seems the Library of Congress have started a Flickr account, just like you or I might do, on which they say friendly things like “Yes, we really are THE Library of Congress”, and “We invited your tags and comments and you responded, wow, did you respond!”. Thus far, they’ve uploaded literally thousands of historical photographs from their archives, grouped under such headings as “World War I panoramas” and “The 1930s-40s in Colour”, for anyone in the world to freely gaze upon / share / download. Library of Congress – you’re alright!


4. Excitable, science-illiterate types such as myself tend to throw around terms such as ‘cosmic’ and ‘mind-blowing’ at the drop of a hat, so it’s good sometimes to catch up on some TRULY mind-blowing goings on, courtesy of New Scientist (I copped the link from Doc40);

“For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

Readers, will you join me in clutching your heads as if in pain and exclaiming “whoa, hold on a minute – the WHAT?”...?


5. The notion of CHOOGLIN’ has long been close to my heart. I have however tended to consider a purely musical definition of the choogle, whilst aware on some level that any attempt at a wider, verbal clarification of the concept would do the unthinkable, and halt the choogle. If you have to ask, you’ll never know. Thanks therefore are due to Ami Tallman for her/his(?) wide-ranging and visionary exploration of chooglin’ in it’s wider context on the WFMU blog:

“But don't forget, the performer who's brought the word into existence is demanding that you, his listener, choogle. This strongly suggests that the choogle is not merely something to be executed musically, but something a mere man might do, and in fact, as Fogerty himself revealed first in "Born on the Bayou," a train can do it. To choogle is always, in addition to whatever else it might entail: to go, to drive, to progress, to continue, to persist, to keep on the move, to remain in motion.

The thing I love best about the choogle is its fundamental logical impossibility: for while it is en-choogle, it is definitionally unstoppable. But it will stop, though until the moment it does, it will have been impossible that it should. Yet this is perfectly suitable, for the ambition which set the choogle in motion to begin with was also impossible, for it is an ambition whose attainment can only be reached through the accomplishment of something the choogler couldn't even have imagined -- still can't, in fact, even at the moment of impact with success. The choogler who choogles to the absolute must rely entirely on his or her senses to even perceive the accomplishment, for absent from the choogler's mind is any abstract frame of reference with which to fill in those aspects of the experience that might have been taken for granted.”

6. Teleport City has long been one of my favourite places on the internet, home to a vast and ever-growing archive of lengthy, fascinating, idiosyncratic and consistently hilarious write-ups of all manner of trash/pulp/cult/weird/whatever cinema, their essential philosophy being summed up quite well I feel by this extract from a review of The Land That Time Forgot:

“Most children view films differently than adults. When a film is cheap and boring, the cheapness doesn’t really register (what do you have, at age six or seven, to even judge cheapness by) and the boring parts wash over you like water off a duck’s back. You tune out when it gets boring, and all you remember afterward are the cool parts. Thus, even really crummy movies can seem relatively enjoyable, because you don’t remember the dull bits; all you remember is the shrieking caveman being torn apart by a pterodactyl. Oh sure, I know some of you watched these movies with the keen eye of a wizened critic even at age six, and you turned your nose up at how juvenile they were even when you were juvenile. Well, I hope you had fun watching Kramer versus Kramer as a child, while the rest of us were watching dinosaurs fighting a submarine while Doug McClure punched cavemen in the face.”

My reason for bringing Teleport City to your attention now however is their current series on the murky world of Indian horror, which, even by the high standards of this site, is an absolute joy for all lovers of… this sort of thing. See Shaitani Dracula and Pyassa Shaitan, and go from there. Be warned though: if you’re internetting from work, you may soon find yourself without a job once you get stuck into Teleport City, probably rejoicing at all the free time your newfound destitution will give you to keep on reading about post-apocalyptic rollerskating nun movies. There but for the grace of god...


7. Last but not least: only halfway through January, and already some great new bands are skimming my radar, so say a big three chord YES PLEASE to The Rayographs and The Strange Boys, just for starters.

Labels: chooglin', comics, film, internet round-ups, jazz, photos, weirdness

Deathblog: Patrick McGoohan 1928 - 2009

I’m sure I don’t have to remind anyone reading this what a landmark of uncompromising, freethinking strangeness ‘The Prisoner’ was, and what a rare and unprecedented event it’s incursion into the sphere of mainstream British TV represented. Even if you’ve not actually watched the show (I made my way through the complete run a couple of years ago), its reputation, imagery and ideas have left an impression that extends across the whole spectrum of weird popular culture.

It’s worth remembering that as well as staring in the show (his piercing eyes, flying fists and single facial expression surely winning the nation's heart), McGoohan also devised the premise and complete plot outline for The Prisoner, scripted and directed several episodes and – allegedly – took the helm on many more via the use of pseudonyms.

I seem to remember reading some recollections somewhere of McGoohan sitting for days in his favourite pub, making voluminous notes charting out every conceivable idea he wanted to fit into The Prisoner, right down to details such as the invented martial art of Kosho.

Nothing before or since has beaten the explosion of hilarity and confusion in my household when, during a sombre viewing of the Prisoner episode ‘It’s Your Funeral’, there’s a scene in which a supporting character who’s having a disagreement with Number 6 shouts “I challenge you to a duel!” McGoohan barks “I accept!”, and then, with no explanation offered, we cut to this:



To this day, words fail me.

Sadly it seems that after the masterpiece of The Prisoner, McGoohan never again succeeded in bringing his clearly pretty unique take on things to public at large, spending the rest of his life working through a comfortable schedule of TV roles and movie bit-parts, although my brother, who takes rather more pleasure in daytime TV than I, has spoken in glowing terms of a few gloriously surreal episodes of ‘Columbo’ that McGoohan directed. You’ll have to ask him about them some time.

In the meantime, a spot-on and to the point obit from John Coulthart is can be found here.

And so, as all McGoohan obituaries are duty-bound to end: be seeing you.

Labels: 1960s, deathblog, Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner, TV, videos, weirdness

Michael Yonkers Band – Microminiature Love
(Recorded 1968 / Released by Sub-Pop, 2003)

Recorded by the exceptional Mr. Yonkers in 1968, and now available to the masses for the first time via the auspices of Sub-Pop, this is an album which pretty much exemplifies the narrative of the “lost underground freak-rock classic” archetype. I’m sure you can turn to google etc. if you want the full story.

The first thing that enters my head when I put this one on is the bit in the sleevenotes about how Sire records were planning to release the album and to try and market Yonkers as a ‘new Hendrix’ figure, but the deal fell through at the last minute. So I ponder that, and I listen to the sound emerging from my speakers, and I think, c’mon man, I don’t know who told what to whom when, but *no fucking way* would a major record label in the 1960s come within a thousand miles of releasing… THIS… even in the glory days of the cash-in psychedelia boom.

I’m still undecided as to whether ‘Microminiature Love’ is actually a good or bad record, or whether such terms even have any meaning with regard to an artefact this far off the accepted cultural map, but I am certain that it is genuinely deranged – as damaged a document of musical fucked-ness any connoisseur of such things could ever hope to find.

Yonkers is perhaps best known (amongst the kind of people likely to know of him at all) as the guy who combined his love for DIY electronics with rock n’ roll, sawing up his guitars and reassembling them as a weirdly tuned, doublenecked Frankenstein creation incorporating a theremin, at the same time as building his own fuzzboxes and echo units from scratch. Which all sounds pretty intriguing I’m sure you’ll agree, but it must be said that this sonic invention is certainly not as much in evidence on the LP as might be wished.

Yonkers and his band play a kind of nightmarish, claustrophobic garage-blues of a distinctly primitive caste, the guitar slowly navigating it’s way through wobbly, repetitive riffs that tend to sound like perverse variations on the Batman theme (so much for the new Hendrix!). Listening closer, it often sounds as if two or more guitars have been layered on top of each other, sometimes clean, echoed and jangly, sometimes deep, rumbling and fuzzed out, but always ever so slightly wonky and out of tempo/key, creating weird droning / overtone effects that hover in the background, occasionally emerging in the mix like rotor blades or croaking frogs. Interesting! Meanwhile, a rhythm section flounder around somewhere, stoned in the far background. Rendered in the kind of low fidelity you’d expect from a ‘60s basement tape, the whole thing has a weird Joe Meek kind of vibe about it, baked in wanton echo and reverb, and a certain, indefinable sense that nothing is quite the way it should be. The simplistic wrong-ness of the compositions, combined with the murk and slipshod violence of their execution, actually begins to sound quite post-punky after a while, perhaps recalling early stuff by The Fall or Butthole Surfers…. which I guess renders it ‘ahead of its time’ by default, by way of gloriously lolling in the same primordial waters of incompetence somewhere BEHIND everybody else’s musicianly time.

Yonkers’ nasal croon of a voice, utterly earnest and uncomfortably bellow-y at all times, is pushed to the forefront of the mix, where he proceeds to let rip on what some will consider a treasure trove of cracked outsider poetics, holding forth via cack-handed, childish rhyme schemes and lunatic repeated fragments on subjects such as depression, despair, escape from reality into odd personal dream worlds, and above all the horrors of war and governmental indoctrination. Songs such as ‘Smile Awhile’ seem almost obsessive in their bleakness, prefiguring the brute cosmic nihilism of Black Sabbath, whilst ‘Kill The Enemy’ sounds like a monotonous forced march straight to the cemetery, ending a blood-curdling shriek and disorientating tape echo.

Yonkers manages to sound deadly serious and deeply unhappy at all times, even then singing stuff like “Navigate your boat / keeping it afloat / round and round and round and round / round and round the moat”. You get the feeling that he has taken up the ‘60s counter-culture baton of free expression for all and naively run with it, although I suspect the San Fran tastemakers and hirsute folkies weren’t really counting on getting hit full in the face with the soul-baring of a paranoid, suburban shut-in like Yonkers when they told the world to let it all hang out.

Track 3, ‘Boy In The Sandbox’ is perhaps the album’s most astonishing moment, as Yonkers sings the story of a boy being indoctrinated from childhood into life as a soldier (fairly corny protest song stuff were it not for his insane delivery), slowly building up the tension and anger and culminating with the image of his young wife crying over the letter announcing his grisly death by bayonet in Vietnam as his baby son sits in the sandbox playing with toy soldiers. And only then does Yonkers let loose and deploy his homemade distortion pedal for the first time. You can actually hear the click of his foot hitting the switch, and then…. whoa! Holy hell! You can have a listen to the results below.

Modern day noise-freaks will relish this bit for sure, and patiently wait through the rest of the album for him to do it again, but in 1968 it must have knocked people out of their seats – a completely unprecedented flying leap into the jaws of oblivion.

So if all this sounds like your chosen pint of wine – well, it’s out there, go get it. Yonkers certainly lends a completely unique and genuine feeling to everything he does here, and I know I’ll be playing this at least a few more times trying to make sense of it all. But at the same time I wouldn’t blame you for reacting to this stuff the same way I suspect some bigwig at Sire probably did when faced with an eager young A&R brandishing a tape recorder: “Get the hell out of my office”.

Mp3> Boy In The Sandbox

Buy link> Amazon

Labels: 1960s, album reviews, Michael Yonkers Band, Proto-Punk, Psychedelia, weirdness