While we wait to complete the instrumental tracks on the All That Jaws album, Brian Descheneaux and I decided to form a band that would be impervious to studio delays, musicians' schedules, and mountain road closures in that it would consist of ourselves.
We chose the name Fogelfoot, an abbreviation of Croce Dan and Seals Bread Fogelfoot, to pay tribute to the earnest 70's songwriting traditions of Jim Croce, Bread, Seals & Crofts, Gordon Lightfoot, Dan Fogelberg, and England Dan And John Ford Coley.
And because the name "Cormorant" was already taken, inexplicably, by a San Francisco metal band.
So each week we set ourselves a task. This week I wanted to pay homage to every 70's song that used the word "Lady" and write a story a la "Brandy" about an inaccessible love interest with a past. Because the past involved a Mexican soldier, I wanted the song to be reminiscent of Jose Feliciano's "Chico and the Man" and to incorporate as many 70's props as possible, including a creepy narrator, amulets, and cocaine. Finally, the narrator needed to solve all his love interest's problems by telling her that she was pretty.
The song is called "Lady And the Man," Brian did all the music, and it is available on the Flight of the Mavervorl podcast. Subscribe now!
Lady is a lady Long-legged sultry lady She sways her hips for the gentlemen On the lonely side of town
When it's midnight in the city I go to see my Lady And I bring her gifts of sweet white wine And spices from the East
She tells me, "I would like to make sweet love to you By the torrid Tampiquena Sea But you cannot catch The Cormorant, can you? It's only when she's dancing that she's free."
There's a sadness in my Lady So I feed her rails of cocaine But the rain it falls like honey in the snow
OK!
'twas a horseman named Felipe Not a word could she comprende But she understood his urgency 'fore he marched off to the West
And I'm dancing with my Lady And she has something to tell me She shows to me the amulet That dangles 'twixt her breasts
And when the letter came one chilly Friday Saying that he'd been et by ants She knew of nothing else to serve his mem'ry Than to love him through her dance
So if you see my Lady Just tell her that she's pretty That's all a lovely lady Needs to know
If you were to enter a conversation late on the line "...he should be dead," chances are you would assume the topic was Keith Richards.
That is why I listen when he tells me what food I should avoid; because what scares Keith Richards scares me.
The miracle of pharmacology Rolling Stones guitarist said in an interview with GQ that he will not eat cheese. He said this while guzzling a 16-oz. Solo cup filled with Ketel One at 4 in the afternoon. Therefore, I will stop eating cheese.
"Cheese is very wrong," he said. "Fermented milk is not the ideal choice for everyday eating."
He also said the story about the daily blood transfusions is an untrue rumor. But he was pretty clear about the cheese.
To keep myself from going insane, I allow 15 minutes a day for Internet goof-off time. So this morning I tracked down Jay Ferguson's "Thunder Island," which I'd been thinking of recently as a great example of 70's Southern California use of the word "Lady" in songwriting.
"Sha la la la la la My Lady," sings Ferguson. In fact, he says "M'Lady," which is even better.
"Thunder Island" is from one of Ferguson's solo albums. Prior to this, he had been in Jo Jo Gunne and Spirit, famous for the song "Nature's Way."
Not necessarily a one-hit wonder, Ferguson has instead worked steadily since the 60's. You just never knew you were listening to his work.
Ferguson's animated performance of "Thunder Island" in this video made me think of the backup singer from Sniff 'n' the Tears, whose 1978 song "Driver's Seat" is one of the most satisfying songs ever recorded.
But it appears that the powers that be didn't think lead singer Paul "Sniff" Roberts was interesting enough in the video, so the camera focused instead on backup singer Noel "'n'" McCalla, whose energy exceeded the requirements of the song.
Not knowing anything about the band, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Noel just showed up off the street that day and the band was too polite to tell him to leave.
"We were one of the first bands to tour post-Franco Spain," stated Paul Roberts on the band's website.
"I think Franco-American Spaghetti-O's smell like vomit," I stated on my website.
Recently I went out of a Saturday evening in Hollywood and returned to find my car plastered with show fliers. I wondered: Are people driving Honda products with Red Sox fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror the target demographic for Marilyn Manson's promotions organization?
Yes.
Marilyn Manson is reaching out to Honda drivers in particular. Next he will focus on RV parks, children's burn units, and the AARP. I take some comfort in knowing that Manson is growing older with me and that we are taking this journey together.
I was touring this high-end (for me, anyway) apartment complex near a golf course and had the following keyword-laden conversation with the rental agent. I mentioned I lived in Glendale.
"I grew up here and Glendale used to be a lot different," she said.
"Oh yeah?"
"A certain population moved in. Really inconsiderate drivers," she said, not mentioning any names. "They wear a lot of cologne."
She said "cologne" and "drivers" with such vehemence that I'm sure a passing Amnesty International observer would have deemed the terms hate speech on the spot.
I'm not going to move there, but not because of that exchange. It's just that, before I leave Los Angeles, I want to live somewhere without beige carpeting.
She asked me what I did for a living and I told her I was the drummer for System of a Down.
While Bob Dylan has done just fine without relying on my opinion, I am worried about his legacy as reflected in a section of lyrics that has always made me want to pop an aneurysm.
Dylan's beautiful love song "Sara", from his 1976 album "Desire" (which includes "Hurricane") is his second most well known song about his ex-wife. He name-checks the first in "Sara" in a self-referential move worthy of rappers:
I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells, I'd taken the cure and had just gotten through, Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.
Here's the line that bothers me. It comes near the end of the song:
Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore. You always responded when I needed your help, You gimme a map and a key to your door.
I think the most important lines are the last two, but he painted himself into a corner by falling in love with "when I needed your help", because what does one rhyme with help?
If I asked you who was at the restaurant, for example, and you said, "No one but the bar towels," I would punch you. Don't get cute with me, pal. Life is too short. Kelp.
When you say that something is deserted, you mean that it is devoid of humans or living things. So you could say that a house is deserted except for some mice. By mistakenly introducing kelp, Dylan became responsible to list every other non-living thing on that beach, and should have also said:
Now the beach is deserted, except for some kelp, sand, crabs, lobster parts, Pepsi cans, french fries someone forgot about, a Butterfinger wrapper, a murder of cormorants And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore.
If Dylan could have just let go of "help", he could have been faithful to the beach imagery throughout the song and maintained the integrity of the powerful final lines of that quatrain. Here's a dazzling substitution:
Up to the sandbar, the cormorants WADE And gaze at the PEPSI CANS that lie on the shore You always responded when I needed your AID, You gimme a map and a key to your door.
or, just as powerful but not employing the kelp logical fallacy:
Out in the harbor, the musk seals doth YELP About how ST. FRANCIS would give to the POOR You always responded when I needed your help, You gimme a map and a key to your door.
Not only are these suggestions lyrically sound, but they also impress the listener with a deeper understanding of the song, as well as of the desires of cormorants. You might have an issue with "doth yelp", pointing out that it would be better to have said "yelped", but as my "All That Jaws" collaborator Brian Descheneaux has observed, there is a precedent in Dylan's lyrics for padding the verb:
Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat DID GROWL
I encourage you to submit your own versions of the kelp stanza, and I will present these worthy alternates to Dylan the next time I see him.
I traveled 55.2 miles to the wastes of Ventura this evening to see a sneak preview of "Razor", an interstitial Battlestar Galactica episode.
Why did I consume 3.5 gallons of expensive gasoline to see a TV show on a movie screen when I could have watched it on television on November 24? Because I cancelled cable after The Sopranos ended. Most days I don't regret it.
I and about 300 other educated, thoughtful people gathered for this special screening at a movie theatre. None of us was dressed as a Cylon. No one quoted BSG dialogue in line. None of us appeared to be living with our parents. Most of us were drinking.
The two-hour episode, which fills in certain gaps in the story and sets up Season Four of the Sci Fi Network show, dealt with events on the Battlestar Pegasus following the Cylon obliteration of the 12 colonies.
I am pushing my glasses up my nose.
Told with flashbacks and centered around the story of Kiwi colonist Kendra Shaw, "Razor" details the methods of the knife-wielding and ruthless Admiral Cain and how being unlucky in love is a really bad thing in space. We are reunited with the vintage Cylons familiar to people who watched the 80/20 hokey/thought-provoking 70's TV show and are treated to a significant scene featuring a being lying in a lighted tub of goop.
The episode was fantastic. People cheered. But Sci Fi has apparently sold its soul to the Xbox game "Mass Effect", and several commercials placed in and around the movie effectively torpedoed any interest this audience would have had in the game.
More than anything, "Razor" was a "Mists of Avalon" to Battlestar Galactica's Knights of the Round Table story; the actions of the lesbian battlestar commander and the sad fate of herself and the woman who loved her seemed like the producers' commentary on the perils of that lifestyle. At one point, Commander Adama mused that he might have made similarly brutal decisions as his counterpart but he "had a family".
That the treacherous Caprica Six enters the series as a network administrator also shines a light on where the producers' prejudices lie.
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival
The American Cinematheque at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre is a good place to see a movie. The audiences are of varied ages, and not so relentlessly young and hipsterish that I think I'm living in the land of Logan's Run.
The lady who sold me popcorn was older and sullen, rather than young and sullen, and looked a little like Janice from The Muppets. I felt like I was in Cambridge.
Recently I saw a double feature of documentaries presented by director Murray Lerner: The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, and Festival, which still spent a lot of time with Dylan but which also focused on Odetta, Johnny Cash, and dozens of other acts from the festivals of 1963-'65.
I enjoyed the first movie, released this year, because I hadn't seen a lot of the footage before. While the climax was obviously Dylan's "going electric" with "Maggie's Farm" in 1965, footage of the younger Dylan with Joan Baez tuning his guitar for him (no wonder they broke up), Dylan actually smiling, and Dylan interacting - albeit minimally - with the audience were fun to see.
The myth is that Dylan surprised the crowd with electrification in '65, and that he was booed. While we can hear boos from the audience, and while his acoustic encore is greeted with almost palpable relief, there were no cries of "Judas!" like he got when he took the act to England.
Director Lerner spoke between the movies.
"Remember, I was there," he said in response to the mythology that has been generated by Dylan's final performance at Newport, "and people swear to me that it was the audience booing or the journalists booing or people behind the stage booing. There were selected people booing, and it came mostly from the journalists."
Festival, released in 1967, was by comparison a much better movie. It was edited with audience and band interviews, and was more reminiscent of the Maysles Brothers' later Woodstock film than the raw presentation of chronological Dylan footage that made up Other Side of the Mirror.
My favorite parts of Festival were Odetta's performances. She brought the house down. And Peter, Paul, and Mary (especially Mary Travers) put on a great show, while Peter Yarrow seemed a little toolish and Joan Baez seemed in love with her voice to the detriment of the music. When I am an old man, I want to dress like Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, on alternate days.
Festival also featured cloggers, a jug band, and the Georgia Island Sea Singers. I can imagine that none of them knew what to make of Dylan, and Donovan, and Baez. Still, everyone seemed clean cut.
The biggest letdown for me was that Phil Ochs was not included. He was a Newport mainstay but was always overshadowed by Dylan. Very little footage of him exists.
I am looking forward to the release of Roy Karch's "Underground Tonight Show", a New York City cable access show from the 70's. It featured a drunken performance by Ochs in his decline that was still very good. The rights are still up in the air, so I am not holding my breath.
Researchers have determined that infants who view "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby"-type videos are less verbally adept than their peers whose parents substituted TV time for actually talking with them.
I believe watching these videos, with their vivid colors, morphing shapes, and absence of words are the equivalent of cats watching an aquarium. Can my cat talk? No she cannot.
More than 1,000 parents took part in an assessment of their children's skills as judged by the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI).
Among infants (age 8 to 16 months), each hour per day of viewing baby DVDs/videos was associated with a 16.99-point decrement in CDI score...
...some children could not identify the word "cookie", indicating that parents hoarded all the sweets while they parked their children in front of the TV.
This is why we only let our daughter watch Baby Geddy videos. I asked Marisol what she thought of this.
"One likes to believe in the freedom of music," she said. "But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity, yeah."
"That doesn't make any goddamn sense," I said, enunciating each word clearly so she understood. "You are a horrible disappointment."
Sooner or Later, We All Make the Little Flowers Grow: Lee Hazlewood
Lee Hazlewood died this weekend at age 78. Like Roger Miller and Harry Nillson, he was a singer-songwriter who couldn't easily be categorized.
Most famous for the songs he wrote for Nancy Sinatra, like "These Boots Are Made for Walking" and "Some Velvet Morning", Hazlewood was reluctant to be in the spotlight until Sinatra insisted. After that, his solo work became even harder to define, but was always striking.
His music began to attract renewed interest after his career slowed down in the 70's and 80's, and he released an acclaimed album, "Cake or Death?" last year, after discovering he had kidney cancer. He was a cool dude.
Not to take anything away from Joe Walsh, founder of the James Gang, replacement guitarist in the Eagles, solo act, road warrior, Cleveland booster, but I was still surprised to see someone with a Joe Walsh bumper sticker.
I called my friend Brian, the only person other than you who would've cared.
"Who has a Joe Walsh bumper sticker?" I asked, noting that there was no "Hotel California" or "Ordinary Average Guy" iconography (though the driver also had Twinkies and Devo stickers).
"Maybe it's Joe Walsh," he said.
Joe Walsh doesn't seeem to be a sticker-inspiring person, despite his talent and many contributions, such as "Funk #49". I would be just as surprised to see a Bryan Ferry, Blossom Dearie, Sarah Brightman, John Entwistle, or Duff McKagan bumper sticker.
The Sentra turned on Silverlake Blvd. and was gone. I probably spooked him. No doubt he locked the doors in case of attack.
Spam constitutes 83 percent of my incoming mail (and nearly all of my outgoing mail, as I earn my living from manufacturing college diplomas and cooking up male enhancement pills in my lab) and I am usually adept at spotting it.
I have always been impressed and interested by new forms of spam. First were things like mass e-mailed Neiman Marcus cookie recipes, followed by messages disseminated in the days before people knew how to use Blind Carbon Copy, necessitating the invention of opt-in lists and the word "netiquette", that dictated not swiping someone's e-mail list and writing in all caps.
Now, while I still get nostalgia-inducing spams that begin this way:
This is an urgent and very confidential I am MICKY BULO, Investment Manager of Safe Deposit Bank Zambia currently on a short Banking programme here in United Kingdom (UK).On March 6,1998, a Foreign Oil consultant/contractor with the National Petroleum Corporation, Mr.Gerald Welsh made a numbered time(Fixed) Deposit for twelve calendar months, valued at US$5,500,000.00,(Five Million, five hundred thousand Dollars)in my branch. Upon maturity,I sent a routine notification to his forwarding address but got no reply. After a month,we sent a reminder and finally we discovered from his contract employers, the National Petroleum Corporation that Mr.Gerald Welsh died in a plane crash along with his wife on the 31st October 1999 in an Egyptian airline 990 with other passenger on board. On further investigation,I found out that he died without making a WILL, and all attempts to trace his next of kin was fruitless. I therefore made further investigation and discovered that Mr.Gerald Welsh did not declare any kin or relations in all his official documents,including his Bank Deposit paperwork in my Bank. This sum of US$5,500,000.00 has carefully been fixed in my bank for safekeeping.No one will ever come forward to claim it.
and:
I am a staff of NatWest Bank London. I am writing following an oppurtunity in my office that will be of benefit to both of us and the needy. In my department we discovered a floating account with twenty Six million,five hundred thousand British Pounds in an account belonging to one of our customers,Mr. Morris Thompson(now late),an American who died in the plane crash of Alaska Airline Flight 261 which crashed on January 31st,2000 with both his wife and only daughter.
I also get spams that evade filters by having so much discontiguous information in them that they are fun to read just so I can feel what it must be like to have had a stroke, like:
my father served on the uss nevada during the pearl harbor attack unfortunately he is blind but loved to hear of this it brought back many memories thank you. the vast majority of material that are just initials- eva edpm etc are all synthetic rubber latex foam products - no natural rubber. was another member of the figaro family who played football at notre dame and was a football head coach at vermillion catholic church in abbeville. hey my whole english class came to this site lots of info nice job and ill catch u on the flip side. you are a great person and a great friend i am very glad that i have gotten the chance to talk to you i hope that your guestbook finally likes me.
and:
it was and still is the custom of spanish speaking countries to keep the surname of the father as the middle name and the surname of the mother as the last name in marriage.
In fact, it seems my friend Gaby might have a future in writing spam, as her stories are often indistinguishable from it.
Here are some recent spam subject lines that avoid problem words by just being weird:
But cordele be calipatria
Is turgid whichever mach
Be my vestal
by to lordsburg
There are also baiting subject lines, leading one to believe the sender is someone you know:
What Karen said about you
Sorry about last night
She's thinking of leaving
Don't worry about it - this time (I clicked on this immediately. It was about mortgages)
The file I promised
Today I got:
You like entice fishwife with big? (I misread this as "You like big Entwife with fish?" because I am dyslexic. I suppose I do.)
My favorite new spam pops up on YouTube. It hearkens back to snail-mail chain letters. I found the following when I was searching for "Cult of Snap":
PLEASE DON'T READ THIS. You will get kissed on the nearest possible Friday by the love of your life. Tomorrow will be the best day of your life. However, if you don't post this comment to at least 3 videos, you will die within 2 days. Copy and paste this, to be saved.
I suppose I could invest in a better spam filter, but spam really seems to be the way literature is headed, and how am I going to cash in if I'm not up on it?
Some day I will write the Great American Novel and it will consist entirely of spam, because books are only what we know already. I will call it "Base easy my cumquat".
The Grand Funk Railroad (on Naboo, Grand Moff Railroad) song "We're an American Band" has once again fallen under the white-hot laser focus of critical scrutiny.
The song details the band's exploits on the road, particularly in hotels in Little Rock and Omaha.
"These fine ladies," GFR drummer Don Brewer sings, "They had a plan. They was out to meet the boys in the band."
Two vocal camps have different interpretations of the following line, describing revels after a performance.
"Feelin' good, feelin' right; it's Saturday night. The hotel detective - he was outta sight!"
Theory One is that the hotel detective was "outta sight", meaning good, exceeding expectations, or of particular usefulness to the band. Adherents believe that the hotel detective might have chosen to look the other way while debauchery ensued in the Railroad's lodgings, perhaps because of a bribe of money, substances, groupie services, or a promise to thank him on later albums.
Theory Two is that the hotel detective was literally nowhere to be found, thus "out of sight."
Some conflict-avoidant scholars argue that the results would be the same either way. Whether the hotel detective was complicit in the shenanigans or was physically absent is meaningless since drummer Brewer, guitarist Mark Farmer, bassist Mel Schacher, and keyboard player Craig Frost all got to join in on the hotel tearing-down proceedings.
Proponents of the first theory contend that if the detective were actually not visible then the band could have substituted the line "The hotel dick was nowhere in sight", a line that would have scanned nicely.
Theory Two fans say that listeners might naturally wonder where the hotel detective was during the rendezvous with the "chiquitas from Omaha" and that the line explains he was gone.
Brewer himself is no help, but he does explain the line about Freddie King ("I've got to tell you, poker's his thing"):
"Freddie King was the opening act for us, the great Blues guitar player from Texas. It always struck me as funny that he would make his band play poker with him every night. We used to sit in on some of the poker games, and that's where that line came from. His band, he'd pay them, and then he'd go win all the money back so they were broke and they'd have to keep playing for him - it was a great deal. A lot of people don't understand the Freddie King part because they don't know who Freddie King is. Anybody who knows about Freddie King immediately picks it up. People who don't say, 'What are you saying, that Focus can't sing?'"
One thing that can't be argued is "American Band"'s rightful place, along with Mountain's "Mississippi Queen", in the Cowbell Pantheon.
A Google search for "Yoko hatred" returned with 133,000 results ("Linda hatred" resulted in three, with none of those referring to Linda McCartney. Both "Linda Eastman hatred" and "Linda McCartney hatred" netted zero, which surprised me).
If anti-Yoko sentiment took hold shortly after John Lennon met her in November, 1966, reached a fever pitch when the Beatles broke up in 1970, and tapered off to the tune of 133,000 Google hits today, what would 1FABFAN make of the fact that gas prices have gone up over 700 percent since their November, 1966 average of .32?
While we wait to complete the instrumental tracks on the All That Jaws album, Brian Descheneaux and I decided to form a band that would be impervious to studio delays, musicians' schedules, and mountain road closures in that it would consist of ourselves.
