We Can Be Weirdos 3: Wrapped in a Flag, Carrying a Cross

Reality Can Go F*ck Itself:

In a time when those who are described as successful - media moguls and tech titans among them - line up to kiss the ring all in the name of making a buck, I prefer to stick with those strange folk over in the corner who don't dress well, and pass the time by making things they like regardless of what other people think.

Let's face it. What passes for normal these days is appalling. I'd prefer the company of those who, simply by being and creating, reject it all out of hand. None of these folks come out and say so, I'll admit. But I'd like to think so.

So let's all raise a finger to this new class of rich idiots playing with guns, while the powerless  - as usual - pay the price.

Thanks, Johnny! Thanks, Neil!

Musically speaking, we will move on from Ambient, to where things quickly get out of hand. 

Fishmans: Long Season (1996)

Thirty-five minutes long, built on a simple synth melody riffed on by guitar, bass, and piano. With vocals in Japanese, of course. 

It's more upfront than the records that follow below, in that it has an easy loping beat and a simple direction. It takes its time to get to its destination, which is nowhere in particular. Quite accessible and kind of laid back.

In other words, short and sweet. At first a bit strange but in the end, what's not to like?

WTFITS Score: 4.5

A-

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)

Not ambient. It just seems that way because it takes its sweet time getting started. But unlike Fishmans, it's got places to go and people to see, and damn if it doesn't get to each and every one of them.

But that takes some time so this is over 80 minutes long. Just four cuts, each about twenty minutes long. So if you were patient enough for Stars of the Lid and not going anywhere for an hour and a half, you will probably be fine with the buildup, digressions, and somewhat anti-climactic, um, climax. Because the peaks - and there are many - are worth it. 

The word "symphonic" comes to mind. But not in that fatal way of sounding like classical music - it's a rock band after all - but more in how it develops themes and brings them to their logical conclusions. And it's not overly dependent upon keyboards, like typical prog rock. The guitars are front and center and stay there unless there's a mysterious digression to spoken/overheard words.

Quite daunting at first, but unlike many efforts, I keep coming back to it, and each time it sounds better and better. 

WTFITS Score: 7.0

A-

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Safe As Milk (1967)

Remember the Summer of Love? Well, this has nothing to do with that. It's Captain Beefheart's first album, and let's just say it wasn't in harmony with the times. 

It's not exactly like the Captain just stomped out onto the world stage fully formed and took it by storm. In reality, this is the Captain before his vision comes fully into focus. It's a solid rock record - consisting of admirable takes on blues-based rock n' roll, with the occasional foray into pop and soul - that the record company wasn't going to let get too weird. And as usually happens in such cases, everyone pretty much ignored it. 

Some '60s cliches pop up here and there, and that might tempt one to dismiss this record. But I have to give it to the band, which is very tight. Excellent lead guitar and drums throughout. A young Ry Cooder helps out on the bluesier cuts, but the other guitarist Alex Snouffer is no slouch, either. And drummer John French gives even the wilder stuff some structure.  The only outright strange element is the vocals - a combination of Howlin' Wolf and Wolfman Jack - which are there from the start. Even then the twenty-six-year-old Captain had a downright scary growl.

My version has some bonus cuts taken from sessions for what would be his second album. And here is where the Captain and the Magic Band start to sound like who they would become. The songs are longer, the lyrics odder and the signature slide guitar sounds like it's being played on a rocking boat. Even John French risks losing his way. 

A mere two years later, with the help of producer Frank Zappa, the facade falls away completely and the Captain and Band are on full display on Trout Mask Replica. I tried to play my vinyl the other day, and by the time I got to Side 3 my turntable died/refused to play it/committed suicide. Hard to tell. But with CB it's hard to tell when the record player is on the fritz to begin with. Lucky for me, unlike the Captain himself, turntables can be replaced.

But Safe as Milk is where it all starts.  It could have been a runner-up for my "Most Work But Not Necessarily Worth It" award, but I guess I played it one too many times and was converted.

A-

WTFITS Score: 7.5

Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca (2009)

They are youthful, arty, pretentious, and precious, with a lead singer/songwriter who sounds like a cult leader. In all, annoying as f*ck. Upon my first listen I was tempted to fling the disc into the wall. 

It's my fault, really. I try to take in everything at once and end up hearing nothing at all. At least not the core of the songs. I hear the distractions only, and it first appears that this is made up entirely of distractions. 

Here's how my first few listens went:

First Listen: Grade: D,   WTFITS Score: 9.5 Utter loathing.

Second:        Grade: C,   WTFITS Score: 8.5 Arty, but with good musicianship

Third:           Grade: B-,  WTFITS Score: 7.5 That first song is actually good.

Fourth:         Grade: B,    WTFITS Score: 7.0 The fourth one is very pretty. 

So you see what's going on here? It's wearing me down. Just like this weird shit always does. Goddamn it. It's the old Jaybee shuffle. I go from hate to like/admiration/love and when I recommend it everyone thinks I've lost my mind and I know they're right.

WTFITS Score: 6.5

B+

Pere Ubu: The Tenement Year (1988)

Remember this Jack Benny skit?

A bandit points a gun at Jack Benny.

Bandit: Your money or your life.

Silence.

Bandit: Well??

JB: I'm thinking! I'm thinking!

That's how it was when I thought about buying another Pere Ubu album. Their album Dub Housing remains a 10/10 WTFITS score to this day. And no amount of replays or increased familiarity is going to change that.

But after forty-odd years, I'm in a strong f*ck you kind of mood, so I decided to give them another try.

In one respect they're weirder than ever. That is if you think matching David Thomas' "quirky" vocals with straightforward rock 'n roll, with the synth acting as glue is weird. If not, I take it all back. But otherwise, you might think you're listening to two different records playing at the same time. Maybe three.

But the rock and rock is very, very good. And David Thomas is, well, himself, but more "sociable" than before.

Who knows? You might even like it...

WTFITS: 8.0

B+

Ornette Coleman: The Complete Albums Collection 1958-62

After Of Human Feeling (WTFITS Score 9.0), Song X (9.0), and The Shape of Jazz to Come (8.5) I'm no closer to understanding this man's music than I was forty years ago when I started to try. So I didn't know what getting this set would do other than shorten my life, but that has taken care of itself and I've taken the plunge.

This collection brings together all of Coleman's first eight albums, all of them controversial to one degree or another. Most jazz enthusiasts found it to be an attack on jazz itself, or at least its foundations. My experience (see above) seemed to confirm that view. So I was afraid I was getting an endless barrage of unstructured, atonal, screech. 

And yet given the overall mood I've been in lately, I was attracted to the idea of that barrage. In that respect, it's sad to report that, over these eight albums, the barrage only occurs once. And even that isn't so bad. In fact, it's all really quite good. 

What is here is fast, hard, melodically intricate jazz. I'm just not hearing what's so strange about it. I guess you had to be there then.

And since The Shape of Jazz to Come is here, too, I'm getting to hear it - and enjoy it more - in this new context.

All in all, the news of Ornette's weirdness has been somewhat exaggerated.

WTFITS Score: 7.0

A-

All in all, there's nothing here to really piss people off. I do have a Cecil Taylor CD I can play with the car windows down, though, if needed. 

Nonetheless, all of this music will help me immensely during the farce that is about to commence.

In the meantime, hang onto your humanity.

And your weirdness.

The collection

"My Music":

So what do I mean by this? I don't create music, I only consume it, so when I say "my music" I'm referring to any album, EP, or single I've purchased or received as a gift (or borrowed and never gave back. Sorry, about Pearl and After the Goldrush late Friend Billy Mac!). 

But, as I get older, it’s getting harder and harder to determine what "my music" is. 

In case you didn't know, when you buy an album you don't own the music. The record company or whoever still owns the publishing rights does. (In a perfect world that would be the artist but here we are.) Without getting into the legal terms, the record you bought is just the means by which you can hear the music when you please. So at the risk of nitpicking, you own a single copy of the record, but not the music itself.

But it was still something. 

Books/Records/Space/Time, or The Sanctity of the Collection:

When reading books, I tell people that the ones I buy are too hard to get to because I'm busy reading the ones I got from the library - the ones I have to give back.

With music, it's kind of the opposite - mainly because you only need to read a book once. With music, you should be able to listen to it over and over. In order to do that you probably shouldn't have too much (a relative term, I admit) of it. Just enough to listen to enough.

And I like it that way. That's the type of relationship I want to have with music. I don't want to date it, I want to marry it. I want to take it home and get to know it. So the act of buying it implies a level of commitment - of money and time - you can't have when there's a whole world of music right at your fingertips. 

Some people own a few records. Others have complete, encyclopedic Collections. I occupy the middle ground of having more records than the average person but less than the fanatics. My collection has a small c. I don't just Hoover up anything I see. It's not about size. It's about quality. Or that's at least what men keep telling themselves.

But in this case, it's true. I'd rather have one excellent record than five pretty good ones. I don't need every Neil Young album. Just the great ones. That's plenty.

 
I first realized the importance of this when I sent in for an offer of 25 albums for $15 (plus shipping!). And it was almost exclusively garbage. I threw away all but three. But why throw away anything, you might ask? Isn't it better to have them than not? Won't I get to know and like these records more? I, who previously would have answered Yes, now realized it wasn't true. Bad music takes up too much time, and bad music on vinyl or CD takes up too much space.

Thus you might think I'd welcome downloads. Well...

The Thing:

For the longest time, in order to deliberately play specific music - ie. avoiding the happenstance of the radio - you would use a physical object to do so. And whatever you may hear these days, those things were cool. A vinyl album has liner notes and cover art. The former for us nerds who love the music enough to want to know who contributed to it in some way. The latter for everyone, which itself could be a work of art. (And yes, CDs have them as well, but have you ever tried to read those 6-pt font liner notes? Or hung a CD cover on your wall? Not bloody likely.)

And you had to take care of the physical object. Protect it from harm. But as long as you did you could play it whenever you wanted.

The thing itself has changed over the years. Wax cylinder, Vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette, 8 track tape, DAT, CD. 

And each medium pulled us further and further away from the physical action of music creation and re-creation. There was a time when artists would record a performance directly onto vinyl. And when you played it, if you listen without the speaker on, you could hear the needle extracting the music from the grooves. 

I remember once hearing a song from a record that was rotating on a portable turntable but without the needle on it. And the song I was hearing wasn't even on the side that was facing up! Turns out a piece of plastic with a sharp (enough) point was rubbing it from below. It wasn't playing through the speaker but I could hear it very well.

With cassettes, the action took place between the tape and the tape head. You could see the tape move over the head but there was nothing you could hear without a speaker. Same with 8 Tracks, although if it was poorly made, much like my record above, you could hear phantom music from a track that wasn't supposed to be playing.

And forget about CDs. You popped those in a magic box and out came the music. And when they skipped good luck finding the smudge that caused it.

Not THE Thing, Exactly:

Even home taping or CD burning still involved having a copy of the thing. I won't go into the differences between the original vs. the copy because you still had a thing, if not the thing. Not great but it would do in a pinch. And you could dry out your ink cartridges for the privilege of printing out a crappy version of the cover art. 

But these copies never make it to my record shelves - because I never really believed I had them - and end up gathering dust in my basement.

Not A Thing, Exactly:

Then came downloading and just playing it from your hard drive.

Then take the next step of buying an album and not bothering to download it at all. It's just up there in the cloud, at the mercy of an old iTunes account whose ID you forgot. Do you own it or don't you? Sorry Mr. Jaybee but that account is no longer active. 

Thanks, Amazon?

On the other hand, I am finding albums by Lightning Hopkins, Nina Simone, Lester Young, and many others that I don't remember ever buying. 

One might this that was cool, too. Just ending up with a bunch of records without even asking for them.

And even though my "research" indicates that the Lester Young record I didn't buy is probably the best one to get by, I'm not playing it, because I haven't (yet) embraced it as "mine"! After all, what if it's a mistake? Will Amazon - which gives itself the power to control and define what is"my music" now - delete all these records when they realize they made an error?

Then where will I be? Yes, I know I could just buy the ones I liked but the whole thing makes me feel less in control, which is important when you're blogging about the sanctity of your collection.

Not A Thing, a Service:

With services such as Amazon Music and Apple Music, for a low monthly fee, you can listen to just about anything you want. And Youtube where you can just look an album up and play it. Sounds great, doesn't it? 

I want no part of it. 

I like knowing what's in the collection and what's not, and having an opinion on it. And I don't want to merge it into a larger Matrix-like musical universe where everything is kind of okay and I don't really know any of it.

If you can hear almost everything, are you really listening to anything? You would hear something once and decide it's boring, never knowing that another listen was all it would take for it to click with you.
When you get to that point you become that despised (by me) person who gets to say such edgy things like "I like all kinds of music", when I know what you really mean is that you don't love any of it.

In the seventies, Philip Roth compared Checkoslovakia to America, saying that in the former nothing is allowed and everything matters, and in the latter, everything is allowed and nothing matters.

I want my music to matter. To me, at least.

The End of the Collection:

And yet it will go away. It will survive me by a little bit but then it'll be gone, too. Yes, a record collection was not only finite but temporary. 

When I'm gone this large and varied set of music that reflects the Uniqueness of Jaybee - is just another person's pile of crap. I mean, Mrs. Jaybee does her best to put up with a lot of it, but when I'm gone, we (well, you) will know what she really thinks of Pere Ubu and Captain Beefheart!

I used to think about this when it wasn’t a real thing. I fantasized about who would get dibs on these amazing records. It went something like this:
Mrs. Jaybee
Brother Pat
Friend Mike

But now that I'm 63, and it is a real thing, I'd have to add a few more names, like my kids.

And each person would take what they wanted and then pass on the rest. I'm SURE there'd be none left after all that, right?

But let's say, no one goes for that Joanna Newsom record (or two or three hundred others). I guess it becomes the stuff of garage sales and used record stores, where a record hopefully becomes part of someone else’s collection.

I've heard it said that everyone dies three times: First, when you physically die, second when your name is uttered for the last time, and then third when someone has the very last memory of you.

For the record collection, it's pretty similar, One is still when you die, but two is when your family, friends, and record collectors take what they want. Three is when the record dealer tosses what he can't sell.

So after I - and my collection - die, do we disperse into the universe like Caesar's last breath? Maybe it doesn't matter. Thanks to mass production, it's not like I have the single, existing copy of anything. Those same records are out there somewhere, part of other people's collections, and live on.

Unlike me.

Right In the Back!

So, for once, country didn’t disappoint me. Emboldened, I took another chance.

Or to put it another way, a 2-CD set of well regarded but quite edgy music I nearly bought for $20 on last year’s record store day, suddenly became available as an mp3 on amazon for $5. I can get pretty adventurous at that price! Yeah, that’s me (in the corner). Livin in the fast lane…

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (2013)

The Knife are a brother sister duo from Sweden, and I can just see you now imagining a young blonde couple smiling in their white turtleneck sweaters while perched atop a snowbank. A Swedish Donnie and Marie, if you will.

Or, at worst, two earnest young people with black turtlenecks, right out of an Ingmar Bergman movie (black and white, of course), looking off into a cold, desolate landscape, reading poetry and contemplating suicide.

You should be so lucky.  These two - who look almost as weird as their music sounds - make Daft Punk look like the Beverly Hillbillies.

See?

And...

Frankly, I find the second one scarier.

I hate to sound so damned ignorant about their appearance, but I wanted to prepare you for the music.

Guaranteed to elicit a reaction of what the f*ck from your friends and neighbors, this is unabashedly weird music. Mixing trance/ambient/dance/electronica with wails, shouts and, well I just don’t know, it’s more “foreign” than any third world record I’ve ever gotten (although not the weirdest. Thank you Pere Ubu and Captain Beefheart!).

It’s also long - 100 minutes worth of music - in that let’s get really lost kind of way, with a 19 minute trance number plopped down right in the middle of it, just in case you were having too good a time. It's a beat-y equivalent of Sonic Youth’s A Thousand Leaves. In other words, something strange with big wide open spaces and sudden jarring changes.

The first time I heard this Mrs. Jaybee and I were stuck in the house on a cold Saturday in January. We would have been looking out onto the desolate landscape but we had chores. So I put this on and it fit our mood perfectly.  

Which gave me high hopes that I would come to love this. And I may still. But the vocals remind me too much of Ruth Buzzi. It's hard to contemplate suicide when you're giggling. 

But it’s just so freaking DAUNTING that I keep coming back to it.

This is very apt for those times when you're feeling disconnected from the outside world. As an experiment I tried it again in the Spring when I was in the backyard potting some plants. I guess I wanted to annoy the neighbors and scare their children. But by then I had gotten used to it. It was no longer weird enough.

In any case, it’s pretty enjoyable if you’re up for a 100 minute trip to god knows where, but maybe not striking enough to really impress (or scar) you.  B+

When to play it: January 15th

When to not play it: At the beach.

"Without You My Life Would Be Boring"