Tuesday Tuneage
Hanoi Rocks - "Self Destruction Blues"
1982

Hanoi Rocks were a group of Finns influenced by the New York Dolls (bassist Sami Yaffa is in the Dolls' latest incarnation), and never lived up to their sleaze-rock promise. Bob Ezrin - who had worked wonders with Alice Cooper and Kiss - couldn't even get them up and running at full raunch when he produced their Two Steps From The Move album. Though to be fair, they were crucial in the development of Guns n' Roses, at least looks-wise.

I tried to like 'em, I really did. Kinda felt I had to, with them being my fellow suomalainen and all. I bought three of their albums, one of them on vinyl even. But I never listen to them these days. At least I managed to fit a reference to them in a fantasy I wrote about opening a Finnish bar.

As for this tune, why does the narrator make breakfast for two? He had already said that his gal had left him the prior Monday. Is it some leftover instinct - unaffected by heartbreak, he went ahead and made breakfast for the two of them? Maybe he just had a big appetite. Self-destruction can make a guy hungry, that's why I hesitate to keep potato chips on hand in my pantry.

Tuesday Tuneage
ZZ Top - "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide"
1979

A beer project is loosely defined as any project that is mundane enough that you can have a beer or two while doing it to make it a little more enjoyable. “Beer project” was coined by my good friend Bjerk, I believe the first time he used it around me was when we were repairing the windshield on his Glastron speedboat. And by “we,” I mean that I held the windshield in place while he drilled new holes. (I'd write something self-deprecating about how little I did during this project, but come to think of it ... it was a lot more than your typical second on a UND dorm maintenance project.)

It is while up north at the cabin that the beer project takes a special place. You don’t want to take too much time or have to drive into town for supplies because your ultimate goal is to get back on the water, so improvisation becomes key. This is how my brother and I constructed a “Mayor Country” sign (this was during a time of anti-mayor strife and my brother and I are of the mayor’s “vote early, vote often” constituency ... well, we would be if we had elections up there) from an Old Style Draft box, a magic marker, and some garden stakes. During that same era, I fixed the opening latch on my classic Schmidt cooler - one of those big aluminum ones with a padded cover for sitting and a bottle opener attached - with a latch designed for a window. It was while constructing a landing outside the garage that my Dad uttered the classic line: “We’re going to do something. It might be the wrong thing, but we’re going to do something.” (That landing actually wasn’t a beer project and Dad designed it rather well, but that quote sums up the Beer Project Mentality perfectly.)

So with Bjerk’s Glastron and the windshield ... This was in the days before the worldwide web, the iTunes Store, YouTube etc. freed singular songs from their album constraints. And I really had a hankering to hear ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.” I never heard it on Twin Cities radio, it wasn’t one of the three songs by them that KQRS played, and we didn’t have a hard rock station in the Twin Cities. So I called Bjerk up during the week and asked if he had the ZZ Top album with “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” on it. The next weekend he brought a cassette of ZZ Top's Deguello, a boombox, and some cans of Stroh's Light down to his dock. And that was our soundtrack as we fixed that windshield. A well-executed beer project on a sunny summer afternoon.

Tuesday Tuneage
James Gang - "The Bomber"
1970

When I was in my mid-teens, I bought a couple of small paperbacks at the B. Dalton store in Grand Forks. They were short rock biographies published by Tempo Books and both were authored by John Swenson. One was about The Who, the other was about The Eagles. The Who went on to become my obsession in high school, ignored through much of my twenties and thirties, and now once again one of my all-time faves. The Eagles? Well I tried selling the Eagles book last time I moved but the bookstore wouldn’t buy it and now I’m glad I kept it because it has a photo of John Belushi wearing a Vikings windbreaker in it. The Eagles book also doubles as a bio of Joe Walsh and his original version of the James Gang. Swenson wrote that the James Gang blew away Pete Towhnshend when they opened for the The Who circa 1970 and this was enough for me to seek out James Gang LPs in high school. Swenson's descriptions of them - as I recall, and it's been thirty years or so - seemed to place the James Gang in a high tier of the great also-rans in American rock history. They were a homer-or-strikeout band to me, but when they went deep it was brilliant hard rock.

For instance, their second album, James Gang Rides Again, featured a tune called “The Bomber.” which was a montage of:
1) A killer proto-heavy metal piece called "Closet Queen" (Closet what??) (Which makes me wonder what these lines exactly mean ... "So I began to notice some things I hadn't seen before/That's what's brought me here knockin' on your back door");
2) Maurice Ravel's "Bolero"; and
3) Vince Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate To The Wind."

The inclusion of “Bolero” was no doubt influenced by “Beck’s Bolero” from a few years earlier. But Ravel’s estate forced the band to delete it from future pressings, so only the first 10,000 copies of Rides Again LPs featured "Bolero." Of course, the only reason I was aware of this "Bolero" controvery was because had I read that Eagles book - which described the Ravel estate's legal action - right around the same time as the movie 10 was popular and "Bolero" was a significant part of that movie. But I'm not sure I ever even saw that movie, it starred that tiny British guy with kinda long hair who I understand some people thought was funny and it also starred Ursula Andress Linda Evans Bo Derek.

I had mentally misplaced all this "The Bomber" stuff until the other night when for some reason I remembered it while listening to “Beck’s Bolero” in the dark on headphones. This lead me to YouTube, which featured The James Gang’s version of “The Bomber,” complete with the controversial "Bolero" excerpt fully intact. This made that YouTube moment A PROTO-METAL HOLY GRAIL! I hadn't been this excited over a proto-metal finding since: 1) Discovering a copy of the Stooges' quasi-bootleg Metallic K.O. in the racks at Let It Be in the mid-nineties. (Note, the album is not titled Punk K.O.); and 2) Hearing some of Rocket From The Tombs' recordings - officially released as the album The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs - at Treehouse Records early last decade. I bought it on CD and came to find out that it was made up of recordings from various RFTT bootleggs. (One of those bootlegs was titled A Night Of Heavy Music - note, not titled A Night Of Punk Music.)

So what, you say, a minute-and-a-half of some Ohio band's interpretation of a tune was missing and now you found it. Big deal. Well here's another story, maybe it'll clear things up as to my state of mind, maybe it won't: As a teen, I bought a Canadian version of The MC5's Kick Out The Jams LP hoping as an import it would have the REAL intro to the title track. But I was bummed that it had the cleaned-up "brothers and sisters" intro to the title track. Imagine my joy when I bought the album on CD in the nineties and got my long-promised, never-heard "motherfuckers" version ... ANOTHER PROTO-METAL HOLY GRAIL ...

Tuesday Tuneage
Thunderclap Newman - "Something In The Air"
1969

This tune from the late sixties is a dreamy, well-constructed song that is a power pop parallel to The Who’s anthemic efforts from the same period. Unsurprisingly, Pete Townshend played bass for Thunderclap Newman and produced their only (brilliant) album, on which this appears. What is surprising - to me at least, and I’ve been hearing this song for years - most famously in the Almost Famous trailer - is that this tune calls for armed revolution. But lyrics have always been my blind spot.

Tuesday Tuneage
Neil Diamond - "Solitary Man"
1966

'Nuff said.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Shins - "Sphagnum Esplanade"
2002

What to make of this song ... fuzztone bass line, a guitar and piano picking out single notes, the vocals are mostly in falsetto, no drums, a synthesizer solo (I think), and a solo by another instrument that I can’t quite identify. If had never heard it and read that description, I would have scoffed. Plus I can’t decipher the words. But I realize googling those lyrics would take most of the fun out of the listen anyway.

Reminds me of early last decade when I first heard tracks from Pink Floyd’s first two albums and said: “Now I see where the Shins got that sound from.”

Conclusion? This song haunts, oh how it haunts.

Bourbon And Water

Until recently, my choice of mixed drink was rye and ginger. The way the ginger ale brought out the peppery taste of Old Overcoat was brilliant. Those went down sooooo good. Problem is with ginger ale though, it’s got about 50 calories per dose as a mixer. When you’re a middle-aged drinker who needs to focus on not putting the pounds on (for good health, for lower blood pressure, because I have flat feet which don’t need the extra poundage and pounding, because cardio workouts go so much easier when I’m lighter), it’s preferable to imbibe a whiskey drink neat or with a no-calorie mixer. Why not drink light beer instead of regular beer to reduce your drinking calories, you say. Please, I say. You’re not talking about eliminating Surly Bender or Summit India Pale Ale from my diet instead of ginger ale? You must be kidding.

So with rye and ginger out of the mix, what did I go with as preferred cocktail this summer? Well, I started with scotch (White Horse) and soda and then moved on to Glen Moray on the rocks. (It’s been on sale at my favorite neighborhood liquor store.) But buying a bottle of Evan Williams on a trip up north last month became a tipping point. At my parents, I started drinking it neat in a Dixie cup (an odd ritual, Old Fashioned glasses were available) while writing nightly on my laptop. I was turned on to Evan Williams by David Wondrich in Esquire a couple of years ago when he reviewed “best cheap booze” and immediately fell in severe like with it. It’s just as good as Jim Beam in my book and a lot lighter on the checkbook. Not to mention I saw John Munch pour from a bottle of it in an episode of Homicide. Sold!

Eventually what happened mid-summer was that I found myself in the mood for Evan Williams here at home. And since I didn’t have any Dixie cups, I started to pour myself some bourbon and waters on the rocks in an Old Fashioned glass, thereby reviving a fave drink of mine from the early part of the last decade. Sipping this drink is a favorite ritual while I write my eight hundred words a day (typically written at night), a task I set myself to do the rest of this summer for some unknown but noble reason back in early July. I'm generally not a good summer writer and most of what I end up writing is crap or at best middling writing practice. But it keeps the writing mind active and my fingers love it when I actually do tune into something that I genuinely want to write about. In such good times, I thank Evan Williams and whatever music is playing as I type. In bad times? I only have myself to blame. And I’m sure I’ll pour another drink in order to try to get over it.

Tuesday Tuneage
Steam - "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye"
1969

Dedicated to the now-dead presidential ambitions of Tim Pawenty, who had been running for the White House for oh-so-many years. May he run for dogcatcher somewhere, sometime. Maybe then he might move above fourteen percent in the polls (which he recently couldn't do with Iowa Republicans) and perhaps even win a majority of the votes (which he never did statewide in Minnesota.) I've even got a catchy nickname for him if he does win that job of catching dogs: "TPaw."

Tuesday Tuneage
The Fatback Band - "(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop"
1976

I recently got rid of my car as I realized: 1) I barely drive while in town, 2) Half my miles were driving up north to see my folks, 3) Most things I need in my day-to-day life are within six blocks of my apartment, 4) The two clients I still travel to (the rest are all handled via telecommuting) are on easy, thirty-minute bus commutes. So now I bike to the close things and bus to the further things. No big hassles so far, and the one time I decided I needed a car, I went with my HourCar option to fill the void. Biking around the neighborhood is relatively easy, I avoid major traffic areas and tend to favor coasting, to nobody's surprise. Bussing has been the revelation, the drivers have been ever-friendly and helpful, it's where I get a ton of reading done and it's where I start to think, and think a lot (too much?) I'm sure it has something to do with the bus stop waiting and the passivity of the bus riding experience. My notes:

At the bus stop:
- If there is time between transfers, look for a coffee shop - this is Minneapolis, one should be within a stone's throw - and caffeine up.
- If there is bar near your transfer stop (this is on the ride home), ponder what exactly is important that you have to do today/tonight or tomorrow for that matter.
- Check Twitter on your mobile phone, you know you want/have to.
- Mentally citizen arrest all the drivers who drive by and are texting.
- Nod at the cyclists when they pass you.
- Drink from your flask (optional).

On the bus:
- Read a newspaper.
- Read a book.
- Find any songs on your iPod that relate to busses: “Kiss Me On The Bus”, “Bus Rider”, “The Load-Out”, “Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street”, and of course “(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop.”
- Check Twitter on your mobile phone, you know you want/have to.
- Always say “thank you” to the driver. Because as governor, Tim Pawlenty treated the drivers like some sort of bogeymen and boasts about it during his presidential campaign, means they have earned our courtesy and respect. Power to the unions, power to the workers. Speaking of our former (yet currently) pandering, whiteboy governor, I can’t wait for TFraud to drop out of the GOP race due to the extreme boredom he has inflicted on Republicans nationwide ... and/or due to his topping off at five percent in the polls ... and/or due to his coming off like a conservative version of Michael Dukakis: a wimp and a bore. Because if Dukakis had never done that tank photo-op, you just know that TClown’s people would have been calling around the country, looking for a friendly tank factory in an effort to shore up his foreign policy creds. The morning after “TPaw” (this is why I call him “whiteboy” only a true dork would allow himself to be called “TPaw”) drops out of the Republican race, I will have a hangover the size of Iowa and New Hampshire combined. Don't worry Timmy, you still have a future: I hear Sears is looking for a middle-aged man to model the men's version of Mom jeans ad in their weekly circular.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Surfaris - “Surfer Joe”
1963

The things you find out while surfing (pun not intended) the Internet. Like that “Surfer Joe”, an okay song most notable for its protagonist showing up in others’ songs - we’ll get to that later, was an A-side and its B-side was The Surfaris’ biggest hit “Wipe-Out.” The B-side went to number two on the charts, and the A-side went only to number sixty-two. This makes sense as “Wipe-Out” is eternal rock ‘n’ roll genius, all noise and laughter and rhythm and further proof that it was more often than not that it was the little one-hit-wonder instrumental bands that made the best surf music.

“Surfer Joe” on the other hand, is tenative and features an awkward white guy singing, it's kind of proto-indie rock. Surfer Joe gets drafted and with this being 1963 it means the Gulf of Tonkin incident was about a year away and Joe likely got shipped off to Vietnam war with LBJ’s escalation. Poor Joe, indeed. Though this does lead me to believe that Surfer Joe was in part the inspiration for the Lance Johnson surfer character in Apocalypse Now. (And I gotta point out that Lance’s middle initial was “B”, which made him an “LBJ” ha ha Coppola that’s a good one, as good as naming Harrison Ford’s character “Lucas.”)

So “Surfer Joe” is middling music, a kinda-interesting story, and a grade-A musical history footnote as nobody would guess it was an A-side to golden oldies smash. But it gets interesting when Joe starting popping up in other people’s songs. The first I know of was when Neil Young featured him in “Surfer Joe and Moe The Sleaze” from his underrated 1981 Re-ac-tor album. It’s my favorite Young album ever, it features killer hard rock and keeps me interested at least seventy-five percent of the time during a listen, a win in my book for Young. But I’m not part of the Neil Young cult and can't be trusted, as when I delve into his albums I find them - aside from Tonight's The Night and Time Fades Away - not living up to the acclaims.

In 1990, Paul Westerberg referenced Surfer Joe in the Replacements’ “I’ll Be You”: Well, I laughed half the way to Tokyo / I dreamt I was Surfer Joe /And what that means, I don't know. “Half the way to Tokyo” has Pacific Rim written all over it, which indicates Westerberg definitely had Joe’s Vietnam fate on his mind while he slept. Neil Young, on the other hand, hints that we might able to see Joe surf again in the early eighties. It'll never get hailed as a Major Achievement, but I find it somewhat comforting to see such highly-regarded songwriters attempting to make a cult figure out of someone who otherwise would have ended up an obscure folk hero. Next stop, Cooperstown.

Tuesday Tuneage
Funkadelic - “Funky Dollar Bill”
1970

A certain circle of friends of mine sometimes call me “Dolla Bill.” (Because I’m an accountant, get it? Ha ha.) This is as whiteboy a nickname as “TPaw”, but in my own defense I am not a bore like Tim Pawlenty is, plus I support and genuinely like the Metro Transit bus drivers, while TPaw’s constituency is middle-aged white guys who are pissed that a Metro Transit bus is in HIS way on HIS road and HIS car can’t pass it! TPaw also Tpanders to evangelical voters (also always white, but not always middle-aged or male) who live in far-flung suburbs and exburbs where they don’t always have great bus service, or don’t have busses altogether, and in many cases don’t even have sidewalks. So that’s TFraud’s base: metro road-ragers and suburban holy rollers. Don’t bike near these people, even if you’re wearing a helmet.

Anyway - in my case, “Dollar Bill” would work better than "Dolla Bill", it doesn’t have that faux hip-hop flavor (I like hip-hop just fine, but I’m a middle-aged white guy and can’t pull off hip-hop) and is the name featured in Chank Diesel’s portrait of me that hangs in my living room (thanks Steve.) Also don’t forget that Dollar Bill was a minor character in Watchmen.

But to this week’s song ... “Funky Dollar Bill” is Exhibit A of what Jimi Hendrix, an artist every bit as inventive and daring as the Beatles, The Roling Stones, and Bob Dylan were in the sixties, wrought. Brilliant guitar in both the rhythm and effects area, a beat that’s just off-and-on enough to kinda reflect America’s War With Itself in that era, plus grade-A vocals (lead and harmony), and an odd keyboard that seems to prophesize Sly’s breakdown a few short year hence. Funkadelic at its prime was hard-hitting, chilling, and weird weird weird.

Oh, and the album that’s it’s on? The song before it references my birthday in the song title. As the Russian kid said to Curtis Jackson in the Russians-are-coming episode of The White Shadow: "Funk-a-what?"

Tuesday Tuneage
The Shys - "Never Gonna Die"
2006

A glorious ode to debauchery. This isn’t Merle Haggard’s “Swinging Doors” or the Replacements’ “Here Comes A Regular,” this is akin to Ray Charles “Let’s Go Get Stoned” or Van Halen’s “Bottoms Up!” ... a tribute to ending up face first on the futon after a night of drinking.

Something in the lyrics makes me think it’s about a small-town kids who have realized they’re never getting out of that place, but what the hell it’s Friday night so pass the bottle around and get another twelver, don’t have to be anywhere until Monday morning at seven. Years down the road, they’ll be the ones listening to “Swinging Doors” on the jukebox after work and won’t use words like “wasted” or “never gonna die,” instead it will be words like “a taste” and “decent buzz” and “these heaters are gonna kill me.” And they will laugh with each other at the bar about when they were young and indestructible and stole drinks and cruised around the county like they owned it.

Index Cards

A couple of years ago I bought a laptop and it changed the way I go about the process of writing. I used to do all my writing - the jotting of notes, rough drafts, ramblings - in a Mead Five Star notebook. But once I got the laptop, I switched to doing most of my writing - practice, ramblings, drafts - on it. Around this same time, I took to the habit of always keeping a small stack of index cards with me, next to my writing desk, in my Mead notebook, in my bookbag. The intent with these cards was to have a handy place to write down the short notes that zapped into my brain from time-to-time. I used to write these in the Mead notebook, but now with laptop writing that is usually out of reach. Another inspiration for the use of index cards was reading the late Rick Johnson a few years back. He was hilarious, and I remembered in Jim DeRogatis's Lester Bang biography, Let It Blurt, he wrote that Johnson: "walked around with a stack of index cards, jotting down weird phrases and quips whenever he heard them, then shuffling through the deck while writing his reviews until he found the appropriate one-liners." (Johnson wrote this blog post's featured photo above.)

Last week I went through the stacks of used index cards that were on my writing desk in order to sort them and help me figure out where my writing mind is (and was.) Some of them were notes on a novel I'm writing, some were ideas for my Tuesday Tuneage series, and some were just weird, random things I had written down. For instance:

"How many mainland Americans live above Grand Forks latitude-wise?"

"And then I'll get out of what's left of your hair." - I think Dark Star said this on Channel 23's Sunday night Sports Show, probably to Sid Hartman, though Sid still has lots of hair up top so maybe Dark targeted somebody else.

"Fake Bud Grant" - a never-created Twitter account whose intent was to make fun of the Vikings and their choking-dog ways. Would have been fun in last years 6-10 season.

"The manageable, pleasant winters are the reward for the humid, brutal months of summer with oppressive sunlight for hours on end" - Written in response to the get-outside dorks who think Minneapolis winters are tough and that summer is paradise. I hate the heat of summer, don't think Minneapolis winters are that tough, and love the gray skies, cool temps, and early darkness of fall and winter here.

"He'll be right back after a word from his sponsor."
"Shakes for breakfast."
- Alcoholism is a disease, Tuomala! Geez! (I am not proud.)

"Family is permanent, friends I hang with, former coworkers are meant to fade." - I was invited to join former coworkers last month, I stayed home and paid my estimated taxes.

"Henry Paulson" - This led to writing a prose poem where I imagined Paulson heeding his true calling as a college basketball coach.

"Make him a hero because he's the best failure we've got." - Paul Nelson on Rod Stewart. Pretty confident this is from the Stewart biography Nelson wrote with Lester Bangs.

"There aren't many Special Export drinkers left." - Overheard a bartender say this.

So if you're a writer who is plagued/blessed with random mind intrusions and don't know how to quite handle them, consider the Index Card Gambit. I even put up a bulletin board in my writing office to tack some of my used index cards to. Almost makes the so-called system official in some way.

Tuesday Tuneage
Run Westy Run - "David's Drum"
1995

In which Minneapolis heroes combine funk rhythm, wah-wah guitar, vocals spoken more than sung, and a righteously anthemic chorus into a heady mix of rock 'n' roll. When scrappy little hometown heroes pull off something this glorious, release it on a three-song EP, and get a little local airplay to boot ... it's just another reason so many of us rave about the Minneapolis music scene.

And needless to say, but I'll say it anyway: Their live show was great also.

Tuesday Tuneage
Kings Of The Sun - "Drop The Gun"
1990

Don't fall in like with Kings Of The Sun, this song is a hard rock gem, but the rest of the album it comes from is sub-that-era-Aerosmith and I seem to recall a lot of creepy lyrics about stalking women on it. First heard this one on Q98 late summer 1991 while my buddy talked to an apartment building caretaker about a potenial lease in Fergus Falls, the other memory from that sweaty afternoon (no AC in the car) was a six pack of Special Export Light on ice in a little cooler to enjoy on that Highway 59 roadtrip through Otter Tail County. Don't know how the hell I ever tracked down this band in my pre-Internet days, but I was known as a resourceful lad even before I was the Silver Surfer.

So enjoy this, Australian guitar rock served up fine: Kinda interesting outlaw story, biting guitars, singalong chorus ... what more could you ask for? Drop the gun, boy.