Rituals For Agnostics

After thirty years, I recently switched from using an electric razor to shaving with a manual razor and shaving cream. What happened was that one morning I put my bifocals on after shaving and with my readers part of the lenses saw I wasn't getting the clean, close shave I thought I had been getting. I hated shaving anyway - a few years back I moved to shaving only every other day as appearances aren't important with my employment situation. To see that I wasn't getting the job done properly drove me nuts. I've never had the desire to grow a beard (though a Nick Blackburn/Matt Guerrier-like moustache is under consideration), so shaving suddently became a major concern.

After doing some research online, I went with a Gillette razor. My other option was something from the Schick line. In fact, I like saying "Schick" more than I like saying "Gillette", so at times I pretend I bought the other brand. And after shaving once the old-fashioned way, I was hooked. Now instead of hating shaving, I love it. I love filling the sink up halfway with hot water, I love covering my face with shaving cream, I love rinsing the razor after a few strokes. And once I don those bifocals ... ahhhhh, sure "Schick" is fun to say - but so is "Gillette Mach 3 Turbo." So now I have a new favorite ritual.

And "ritual" is the key word here. As I get older and find ways to manage the various anxieties, worries, and day-to-day hassles that ultimately don't add up to anything major but a confused mind ... I find that it's the little rituals that calm me down, make me feel in control, and ready to face the day or long night.

Grinding whole bean coffee, pouring water into the coffee maker and hitting the "on" button. Reading the newspaper during commercial breaks during the Twins game. Mixing a martini, Rob Roy, or simple scotch and soda - my move last year to add cocktails to my liquid diet was no doubt influenced by the non-ritual of opening a beer. Cleaning the vinyl LP, cleaning the needle (all vinyl junkies know the importance of using clean needles), dropping the stylus on the outer rim of the album or single.

Rituals. The simple little things that keep me from saying "the way of the future" over and over again.

Tuesday Tuneage
Black Sabbath - "Snowblind"
1972

I pretty much hate summer. I was trying to decide if I "hate" summer or if I merely "dislike" it. But words like "detest" and "loathe" kept popping up in my mental thesaurus, so "hate" it is. I hear my fellow Twin Cities residents tell us that summer is our reward for our brutal winters, but I look at it the other way: Our winters are relatively mild (spend a winter a couple of hundred miles or more further north and you'll know what I mean) and I look at our falls and winters as being a reward for days where draining heat and humidity drown out any attempt I have at enjoying a day. Plus summer features lots of sunshine, which I find boring. Nighttime? Darkness? Much more fun, much more to dream about and write about in the dark hours.

Today the heat index in Minneapolis hit over 100 degrees. I spent most of the day in my apartment with my window air conditioning unit going, along with ceiling fans and a fan blowing here in my writing office. It wasn't cool enough to chill beer, but it was comfortable. I have recently been reading some nonsense about how we need to put our home air conditioning units aside. Something about how if we don't chill ourselves at home, we'll go outside and socialize with our neighbors. Then because folks are outside a lot after work, our streets will be safer. I assume that the anti-air conditioner lobby thinks that once this "Open Windows, Use Fans" strategy eliminates crime, it will soon bring us world peace.

Which brings me to Black Sabbath's "Snowblind." As I prefer winter to summer, when the heat index is around or over 100 degrees, I love to blast this tune on headphones and pretend it's January (even though the song isn't really about snow.) I crank up the air conditioning and celebrate that via its blasting loud technology it trumps all of that hippie commune "let's live together as one" bullshit. Just like Black Sabbath did.

Tuesday Tuneage
Point Blank - "Nicole"
1981

My one memory of this song when it was popular (it hit #39 on the Billboard Hot 100 when I was in high school) is hearing it while driving down Washington Avenue/Highway 81 South in Grand Forks on my way home from school. In fact, that is my only Point Blank memory. Curious, I checked my Rolling Stone Record Guide (original red one) to see what they had to say about the band. John Swenson: Pointless late-Seventies formula hard rock. Nice pun, Swenson. Allmusic.com doesn't give the band any kind of overview or bio, but their always-friendly album reviews tend to back up Swenson's "formula" claim, tending to refer only diehard fans of the group or Southern rock afficiandos to certain albums.

"Nicole" is from an LP titled American Exce$$. If you're someone who admires their use of dollar signs there, well they previously had an album pointedly - pun intended, Swenson got me going - aimed at getting some attention titled Airplay. Allmusic.com describes American Exce$$ as: "more Toto than ZZ Top." That hurts. More interesting in this review is the fact that prior to this album, Point Blank fired their original lead vocalist and brought in a guy named Bubba (yes!) Keith.

Rather than calling "Nicole" something as harsh as "formula", I'll call it "competent hard rock" and a helluva lot better than most stuff playing on Grand Forks' Top 40 station back in '81. It's about a guy who returns to his hometown to find the sweet little thing he had a fling or romance with has turned into a bad girl.

She's "hanging around with strangers" and "looking like a burnout."

But in the end, he admits he kinda likes his girl gone wrong, and not just because burnout girls wear the tightest jeans:

You started looking kind of spaced-out
You drive a man stark raving wild

Of course she drives you wild, she's a hot girl and your name is Bubba. Nicole will never settle down with you but she'll let you buy a box of Miller High Life for her and her friends Friday night.

Tuesday Tuneage
Blue Oyster Cult - "Black Blade"
1980

The lyrics for this song were written in collaboration with science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, and it's all about his hero Elric - the protagonist of a bunch of sword and sorcery books. I admit I had the misfortune of reading some of them as a teen. Not only were they not "hard sci-fi" but they were fantasy, which is bullshit. (Tip of the pen to Roman from Party Down Catering.) (Moorcock did write Behold The Man, which as far as I can remember is some great sci-fi. To keep all of this in perspective though, none of this stuff is exactly Play It As It Lays.)

But Blue Oyster Cult's sci-fi/fantasy/paranormal/S&M/kitchen-sink shtick holds up so well over time because their tongues were always planted firmly in cheek. And BOC's music also holds up because it is up there with the very finest of seventies metal: Riffing guitars, rock-solid rhythm section, and hooks hooks hooks. At the end of this tune you get some some sort of robotic voice talking sinister-like at the end. He's the voice of the Black Blade sword and he's asserting his control over his would-be owner. It's as scary as the kids who show up on your doorstep on Halloween in monster costumes. And "Black Blade" is as much fun as handing out treats to those kids and chuckling while you sip on a beer. Help yourself to some candy.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Del Fuegos - "Don't Run Wild"
1985
A big deal to some in the mid-eighties was the so-called "roots rock" movement. The logic, I think, went like this: Rock in the first half of the eighties got too overproduced and glossy. Roots rock was part of the counterattack, with band emphasizing "roots" such a country and old-time (think fifties) rock 'n' roll. Hence the likes of The Blasters, The True Believers, Rank and File, Jason and the Scorchers, The BoDeans, The Beat Farmers, Lone Justice, The Long Ryders, and The Del Fuegos. And just like pretty much every rock 'n' roll genre ... Some of it was great while much of it forgettable. (This description sums up The Long Ryders' State Of Our Union LP: Opening song "Looking For Lewis and Clark" is a classic while the rest of the album is unbelievably mediocre.)

Anyway, The Del Fuegos put out "Don't Run Wild" in '85. I had never seen the linked video until tonight, but now I know what Patrick Dempsey was up to before Can't Buy Me Love. I first heard the tune on Q98 out of Fargo and loved it. Still do, with its mysterious sound and catchy chorus it's a late-night-under-headphones fave. Problem is, the album they put it on is called Boston, Mass. When rock 'n' roll fans think of Boston, they think of the awesome J. Geils Band, who did their own version of roots rock (soul, R&B, Stonesy swagger) in the seventies and easily beat all the above-listed bands. "We are gonna ... blow ... your ... face ... out!"

Tuesday Tuneage
The Faces - "Too Bad"
1971

This tune is an underdog story where our boys are sent to a gig at some posh place but are deemed to scruffy to take the stage. It all has to do with the English class system, which is typically a yawner as a subject (or else confusing: You have to hit rewind on the DVD remote, and then scroll around to get the subtitles working), but this is The Faces and we trust them to tell a story in under three minutes thirty seconds and then let us go. And through the song Rod Stewart lets us know why the club wouldn't let them play, and accents and class has a lot to do with it:

"We just don't have the right accent."

"I didn't have the old school tie."

"My regional tongue gave us away again."

Oh, and they had to take the bus home. Too bad. Musically, it's one of their finest rockers with the band blazing through it and Stewart whooping along. Not only do we get to hear the legendary Glynn Johns at the beginning, the tune also contains one of the all-time great rock 'n' roll pauses in the song too. I'm guessing this is a cinch as the greatest song ever about regional accents.

And if you're wondering why I'm intrigued by regional accents ... a not-so-small part of it is being at a party in the mid-nineties and having somebody wonder aloud if I started talking like I do after seeing the movie Fargo. And then being at later parties and telling people I was an accent consultant for that movie and sometimes getting away with it. Or the most fun: Having my accented-but-less Minneapolis friends relish/laugh at how I say: "I'm goin' home."

Tuesday Tuneage
Pat Benatar - "You Better Run"
1980

In a lunch room scene in 1982's Fast Times At Ridgemont High, the greatest teen comedy ever made, Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) says to Linda (Phoebe Cates): "That girl looks just like Pat Benatar!" To which Linda responds that Ridgemont High in fact has three girls who have cultivated the Pat Benatar look. Eighteen years later I was in the Entry with my friend Jim, we were checking out The Phones, a Fargo-Moorhead band who had a Minneapolis scene heyday back in the eighties. The crowd was largely (all?) people our age, folks in their mid-thirties and up. You had the sense that there were a few married couples who had hired a Friday night babysitter so that they could go out and relive a slice of their twenties. Nothing wrong with that, The Phones were blasting dance-y music and the crowd was eating it up. At one point Jim pointed to a gal wearing tights and a headband dancing on the floor and said: "That girl looks just like Pat Benatar!"

So anyway ... in case you had forgotten ... Here is the classic Pat Benatar look: Short hair with bangs and ears exposed, high cheekbones, a top with horizontal stripes that shows a lot of shoulder and the upper back, a totally unneccessary belt (how did she get those pants on?), and boots. The Rascals did this tune first and best, but once again: How did she get those pants on??

Tuesday Tuneage
Soul Asylum - "James At 16 Medley"
1988

This is a medley of the type that Soul Asylum was known to pull off in the late eighties in their club shows. (According to the Enter The Soul Asylum website, it was recorded in June of 1988 at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. (Thanks also to this website for identifying the Bootsy Collins tune in the medley ... I had no clue on that one.) Why Soul Asylum gave such a title to this live track, I don't know. James At 16 was a TV show that my sister liked in the late seventies. I didn't like it. I don't remember why, I probably decided not to like it just to annoy my sister.

Here are the songs that Soul Aslyum triumphantly run through (if only in portions):

"The Cross" - Prince
"For What It's Worth" - Buffalo Springfield
"I'm Waiting For The Man" - The Velvet Underground
"Birth, School, Work, Death" - The Godfathers
"Damaged Goods" - Gang of Four
"Play That Funky Music" - Wild Cherry
"Free-For-All" - Ted Nugent
"I Don't Believe You Want To Get Up And Dance (Oops!)" - The Gap Band
"Body Slam" - Bootsy Collins
"Stayin' Alive" - Bee Gees
"Wishing Well" - Terence Trent D'Arby
"Get Down Tonight" - KC and the Sunshine Band
"Peaceful Easy Feeling" - Eagles

Except it's not a bunch of ironic slackers shrugging and smirking their way through these songs. This was something they would do after yet another mind-blowing show. As I've written before, Soul Asylum were the best live band of my generation. C'mon, the medley list has you intrigued. Give it a listen. If the medley isn't pitch-perfect, well ... it's four garage rockers serving up a nightcap after a solid set of brilliance.

TV Dramas Are Becoming My New Reality

Last weekend I watched Street Fight, a documentary about the 2002 mayoral campaign in Newark, New Jersey. I loved it and gave it five stars in my Netflix rating, but found myself thinking strange thoughts during it. These thoughts were all about television series.

In recent years, I have watched The Wire and The Sopranos in their entirety on DVD. These HBO series are easily among contenders for The Greatest Television Drama of all time. I hold The Wire among my favorite TV show ever, and can't stop thinking about The Sopranos months after watching the final episode. So while watching Street Fight, early on I was thinking: "This reminds me of Season Four of The Wire", which also dealt with a mayoral race in a crime-ridden, majority-black city. Then I had to remind myself that Street Fight is real, and The Wire wasn't. (Another brilliant TV drama I have watched in recent years, Homicide: Life On The Street, came from the same real-life Baltimore source material as The Wire. Though in my mind at times I think of Homicide as fiction and The Wire as "real", even though both shows are fictional. I think it has to do with The Wire being more documentary-like.)

Later, during my viewing of Street Fight, I started to wonder what Newark-area resident Tony Soprano thought of this mayoral race. Here I was cleary in tongue-in-cheek territory, though I admit I thought it through and figured out that Tony would favor the sixteen-year incumbent - obviously if the mayor had been in power that long, Tony would have "his guys" within the administration. And when the documentary mentioned controversies that arose because of visits to a Newark strip club, I thought: Geez, they should of went to the Bada Bing! For the right price, Silvio would have made sure that things were kept hush-hush.

When I was about to scold myself for thinking about televison dramas all through the viewing of a political documentary, I remembered that The Wire and The Sopranos are great, engaging, entertaining art. And they're far superior to the crap that is shown on so-called reality TV. Of course, my great taste in television doesn't mean that I shouldn't maybe still go out there and get a reality of my own. Oh well.

Tuesday Tuneage
Heart - "Even It Up"
1980
The killer riff and the surging horns make this sound like something off of Sticky Fingers. Except the vocals don't match up as that ain't Mick on vocals, it's Ann Wilson. And on this one she's having a hell of a lot of fun. I've never been a huge Heart fan, but Ann is a blast to listen to on this tune. Sure - it goes on too long, but you can spend that extra time gazing at the album cover. Sigh.

Cool Stuff I Bought On The Internet This Week

This week would have been a bore if it weren't for the Stanley Cup finals and these two things I bought online:

1) An awesome painting of Lester Bangs by Chicago artist Alice DuBois.

Bangs OD'd on prescription drugs while listening to The Human League, and I have (tongue-in-cheek, maybe) claimed that it was the band and not the drugs that killed him.

2) Dwight Twilley Band's second LP on vinyl.

As Martin Aston writes in the June issued of Mojo: Sincerely (their debut album) and 1977's Twilley Don't Mind are of a kind with Big Star's first two or Tom Petty: divine Anglo-Dixie guitar-pop, in Twilley's case injected with post-American Graffiti teen angst.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Hotrats - "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)
2010

Supergrass is a UK band I know little about. Why? They're British and recent, so you know ... why bother? I do know that two of the dudes from Supergrass went and formed (became?) The Hotrats and released an album of covers, one of which is this Beastie Boys tune as interpreted by The Who with Jack Bruce from Cream guesting on lead vocals, circa 1968.

Weird as hell on the first listen, then lots of fun during all the listens after. Bravo.

Tuesday Tuneage
Bulletboys - "Hang On St. Christopher"
1991

I first heard "Hang On St. Christopher" on Z-Rock back in '91. A great groove, neat riff, cool background singing ... it was a funky break from the other (often-righteously awesome) metal being played on that AM syndicated station. I went out and bought the album and got burned as there was only one other decent song on it. Oh well. The Bulletboys were quickly forgotten, though I did dig out the CD every once in a while over the years to play this one song.

Then about ten years ago I was driving in my car and listening to Radio K, another AM station I have great memories with. "Hang On St. Christopher" came on, but it didn't sound like the Bulletboys at all. Though it was still a great song. I found out that Tom Waits was singing it. I'm smart enough to know that obviously it was originally a Waits song that the Bulletboys covered.

See, one of my many music blindspots (deafspots?) is Songwriters. And "Songwriters" is probably a dumb term to use as every song I love was written by a songwriter or songwriters (even the public domain ones), so maybe I should amend it to Highly Revered Songwriters. For every Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen I dig; there are a bunch of John Hiatts, Elvis Costellos, John Prines, Ryan Adams, and Conor Obersts that I either don't dig, merely tolerate, or have never bothered to listen to. I'm not sure why this is, I just know saying "He writes great lyrics" is not a way to convince me to listen to somebody. Tom Waits is another Highly Revered Songwriter in my deafspot. I got nothing against the guy, but outside of hearing him on various alternative radio stations, all I pretty much know about him is that he wrote "Jersey Girl" which Springsteen covered live and I first heard as the B-side to "Cover Me" back in '84. Oh, and his voice bugs me. Some of his vocals sound like those black metal Cookie Monster singers.

So yes, I didn't know that this tune was a Waits composition. I just checked the CD case and no songwriter credits are listed. (Not that printed credits would have helped me: I owned the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Smash Hits LP for a couple of months before I saw that Dylan wrote "All Along The Watchtower", and vinyl credits are a lot easier to see and read.) But now I go forward with the knowledge that if I ever do grow up and acquire an appreciation of Highly Revered Songwriters, there's a Tom Waits album with "Hang On St. Christopher" on it waiting for me.

Get Bloviated

Twin Cities media has been bombarded in recent weeks by ads promoting the Get Motivated! Business Seminar happening next week at the Target Center. I've received two mailers recently promoting it and they were addressed to me personally, not "occupant." There's been lots of ads in the Strib, and Rudy Giuliani has been in frequently-airing ads on KFAN plugging for it. Giuliani is appearing at Target Center, along with other famous folks such as Brett Favre, Sarah Palin, Ron Gardenhire, and Colin Powell.

The seminar is only $4.95 to attend or you can send your entire office for only $19. Which begs the question: Who is stupid enough to even shell out five bucks for this nonsense? You know who: Lazy bosses and managers who see the $19 price tag and figure it will help shape up their department; thereby forcing their workers to miss a day of work and falling further behind in their paperwork, and worse - subjecting their workers to this motivational drivel.

The lineup speaking at this seminar cracks me up, especially when matched with the wordage on the latest mailer I received:

Sarah Palin on "achievement" - What could the Paris Hilton of politics possibly have to share? How to quit your job halfway through your contract?

Colin Powell on "leadership" - Yeah, lie for your boss to the United Nations and help lead your country into an unneccessary war. My, how the mighty have fallen.

Ron Gardenhire on "competitiveness" - As long as the New York Yankees don't show up at Target Center, Gardy might have some insights.

Rudy Giuliani on "perseverance" - This joker wouldn't even leave Florida to go campaign in Iowa. It must be tough to persevere in the Sunshine State during those winter months!

Brett Favre "on teamwork"- What's Favre have to teach you on teamwork except how to show up at the last possible moment for your job while your other team members have been working in the sun for weeks? But I guess Favre is better than other Purple prospects. Adrian Peterson? "How to recover at work after repeatedly dropping the ball." Brad Childress? "How to face your peers after inviting an extra, unneeded person to a meeting."

And to nobody's surprise, it turns out that the Get Motivated! seminar is ultimately trying to lure its attendees into buying questionable products. While moonlighting from his day job as Twins third baseman/fans punching bag, Nick Pinto writes about the Get Motivated! scam factor in City Pages this week. $4.95 is about five bucks too much for this motivational nonsense. My condolences to anybody whose boss makes them attend.

Tuesday Tuneage
Kingdom Come - "Get It On"
1988

Of all the Led Zeppelin borrowings/homages/ripoffs to come down the pipe since Zep hung up their Valhalla helmets after the death of John Bonham, this tune by Kingdom Come stands above the rest. Above Coverdale and Page, PJ Harvey, The Cult, various Robert Plant solo offerings, Plant reuniting with Page, Jason Bonham, and even better than Zebra! (It took a recount, a Swiss Time check, and instant replay, but KC won.)

Here is all you need to know about this song: It sounds a lot like Led Zeppelin. Sure, a tad more glossy, but back in '88 on FM radio it sounded much more like Zep than it does on headphones as I type this and actually contemplate the tune. Here's all you need to know about Kingdom Come: This is their only song to hit the US Hot 100 and all they will be remembered for is that they sounded a lot like Led Zeppelin. If you want to go rock history footnote: They were an opening act (i.e. crappy sound from the board, not that the headliners sounded great at Metrodome anyway) for the likes of Scorpions, Van Hagar, and Metallica.

But I will always be fond of this song, it provided an early Lester Bangs moment for me. I had gotten his Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung book for Christmas in 1987, absorbed it, and realized he was a kindred spirit in rock 'n' roll appreciation. And like Lester Bangs at first hating The Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" in part because the freak-out riff break was a complete rip-off of The Yardbirds' one in "I'm a Man"; but then coming to love the song ("One day I was driving down the road stoned and it came on and I clapped my noggin: 'What the fuck am I thinking of? That's a great song!'"), I was driving to my first real job one day in early 1988, "Get It On" comes on KJ104 and getting ready to flip the dial I for some reason kept listening. Then I also thought: "What the fuck am I thinking of? That's a great song!" Except I wasn't stoned like Bangs, though it would turn out that you would have to be high beyond belief to want to work at the company I worked for at the time.

Sensing that they were to be a one-hit wonder as their second tune had come out, sucked, and didn't sound like Zep so much; a few months later in the summer, I asked a buddy who was really into Scorpions, Van Hagar, AC/DC and the more commercially-successful hard rock/metal acts of the time what he thought of Kingdom Come. My friend, twenty years of age, shrugged his shoulders and said: "I'm sure they're big with the high schoolers."