Reoccurring realization today, again finding negativity in the Yahoo headlines...I HATE the term "stars". Sports, music, film, television, whatever, you are not a star, you are doing your fucking job. Your wealth and fame, your ups and downs, how much you spent on your mansion, whose dress you're wearing, nothing about your life interests me. Your job is to entertain me and if you do it well, I will watch you do whatever it is you do and ensure that you get paid too much to do it. The lady who everyday (except Sundays of course) down dusty, muddy, snowy, dirt roads, behind slow moving tractors, swerving to miss deer, faithfully delivers my mail, now she, is a "star" (and also my cousin...hahaha).
For you fellow coffee drinkers, maybe you can relate. I don't like those non drip coffee makers that allow you to fill your cup before the pot is completely done. All kinds of shit going on in the world and that's what bother's me...I know, I know. But the pot is a complete individual entity that has to go through it's full cycle to become the butterfly that it is. If you interrupt that cycle, if you mess with the cocoon so to speak, the pot is dead or at the very least you are left with a weak imitation of coffee. When I get after my wife for doing it, I call it taking the "nectar". Take the nectar and the flower is of no use to the bee. Know what I'm talking about, this is no bullshit and is a serious matter? You must maintain the integrity of the pot.
Raymond mentioned something I'd never heard, much less heard of, a Dave Grohl metal project called
Probot. I was never a big Dave Grohl fan, I guess for a rediculous reason, his bands are/were popular. Got into Nirvana after Cobain scrabbled his brain and actually what got me headed in that direction was the Pat Smear connection. Never gave Foo Fighters a chance but I might have to correct that. Anyway...Probot? Impressive, not in that blow your mind kind of way, but PDG (pretty damn good). The whole concept of having some of the greatest metal and crossover vocalists do your songs is cool. I doubt that any of those guys would respond to my invitation at a similar project...fame and fortune have their advantages. This guy had an interesting review over at his
365 Albums in 365 Days. My favorite tune off the album is also it's shortest, featuring Mike Dean of Corrosion of Conformity fame,
Probot - Access Babylon (ft. Mike Dean)
...and the in case that got your juices flowing,
the whole album!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JkfBTQokTY&w=560&h=315]
A band I'd shamefully never heard before. Proto-goth or proto-death rock from around 1983. Looked into picking up some of their records, there a 7" and a 12" EP, but both command out of this world prices on ebay (they have been re-released though).
Part 1 - Funeral Parade (7")
The search for "new to me" music is a never ending journey for me and really I've just scratched the surface of what is out there. The day you stop learning (searching) is the day you're dead. Found this one little hidden niche of music in the form of Peruvian Garage/Surf Rock of the mid 60's. Fucking 'eh there's some damn good shit in a some of those bands/tunes or as Cheech would say, "oh so too much".
Los Saicos - Demolicion (this song really blows me away, if you listen to one song on this post, make it this mid 60s rager)
Vincent Damon Furnier didn't grab my attention when I first heard him in the 70's. These days I suppose I realize how important he was as far as the development of rock and roll, extreme in his time. The songs that I'm familiar with are "I'm 18","School's Out" and "Billion Dollar Babies", but those have been playing on the radio regularly for the last 40 years. Incidentally it was/is his connection to radio as a DJ of his syndicated "Night With Alice Cooper", that airs on the "big" corporate owned, classic rock station here from 7-10 on the weeknights. What I like about his show is that he plays a much better variety than they do regularly on the station which suffers badly from "playing the same shit over and over again". Cooper throws in live cuts, alternate takes, and has a ton of stories about his own encounters with the bands. So I've started exploring his stuff a little bit more and picked up this single 2 or 3 years ago. Dig this song cuz it's got that definite AC almost snottiness, mixed with the new wave/punk thing that was going on when it was released in 1980. Still a relevant song title today.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ja9jTsGLSI&w=560&h=315]
My copy is a promo copy so it just has the mono version of Clones on the b-side. Tracked down the album this was off of, "Flush the Fashion" so here's the b-side,
Model Citizen
...on the same album the opening track is a good cover of Music Machine's...
Talk Talk
Never one to just send a few tunes out into the virtual netherworld and then quickly end a post (I'm not going to criticize myself for that anymore though because it's just my style...and I got style!). In my wanderings I came across this great picture of Alice and Suzi Quatro circa 1974. In honor of that, from the same year as the photo...
Suzi Quatro - Little Bitch Blue
...of course her best song though is 1981s
Lipstick
I don't know about where you live, but in my neck of the woods it has been straight the fuck HOT. All my years of physical labor and sweating for a living, the heat never bothered me, but being an office slut has made me pathetic. My son and I have spent a lot of time indoors, where my wife has the air conditioning running 24/7 and sucking what little money I have right outta my wallet (but I secretly appreciate the relief found in the cooler indoors). It's got me agitated as hell and it doesn't help making the startling transition from pleasant coolness to blazing heat just to have a smoke. Once things have cooled down a bit we go outside and throw the football around, so we're not completely sedentary.
My son Liam, like myself, is a music lover. His thing is rap, which I've dabbled in but I always liked the political, social change type bands (ie. Public Enemy, Criminal Minded, etc.). I can't get too into the whole "nigger", "bitch", "ho", materialistic worship of money, senseless violence thing, but I suppose somewhere in the variety of shit I do listen to, a person could find a lot to object to. Anyway, I've heard of Lil Wayne, never listened to him before, so Liam turned me on to a damn good tune. My computer doesn't do justice to the bass so a real stereo or good headphones is recommended. That booming bass, the mono tone stoned out vocals and the mix are a nice a little change of pace.
lil wayne - a milli
Have I tried before to get you to come to terms with your inner 5 year old with Spongebob bowling? Shit, 334 posts and I know I'm repeating myself. Not repeating myself with this next band though.
As promised, my old Humboldt buddy Sam Atakra came through with flying colors by sending me not one but two packages of Humboldt related music. I missed these guys and gal by a year during my 7 year tenure in Humboldt Kali (I was told I was not cool for calling California "Kali"), which is a real shame as they are one of the best bands to come out of the area. I think my last band Grout would have made a great combo to have shared a bill with them, and actually the band continued on after I left so maybe they did. Don't know too much about the band and a google search is useless because "Sake" with an accent on the "e" is spelled the same as "sake", so you get tons of entries like, "for Pete's sake". Other than this demo the only other recordings I know of is a 7", 10" and a split LP. My buddy Bat Guano weaves a tapestry of words at his Fugitive Equilibrium blog and did two Sake posts here and here. I really can't put this band into words anywhere near as poetically as he can. One place I did manage to find in a google search, by using song titles, "Eureka", "band", "music" and maybe a few other words to make the search more specific, was Mostly Blue Skies Above Us. Some good additional input and my impression is that all of Sake's vinyl is included in the zip. A fucking metric ton of thanx to Sam Atakra for sending me his second to last copy of this demo (he sent me a ton of other good shit including the Jolly Ho Ho's demo and their LP [his last copy]). You can find Sam at his Live Journal, a mountain of videos at his Youtube and his own killer website Atakra Productions. I was waiting for some more intel on the band as the bass player went on to be in The Hitch, which also featured two good old boys who were my former bandmates. Didn't get a response back and I'm itching to post something...so...anyway...
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD6TrfcAurg&w=560&h=315]
Speaking of Humboldt, another old college buddy of mine Alex who actually goes back to my Burbank High School days (there was three of us from BHS who ended up at HSU), dropped me a line via email the other day. He sent me a picture of this painting he had done on wood (click on the image because this small photo doesn't do it justice). In my reply to him I told him it was fucking "alive". Always been a fan of his work, in fact I've been meaning to get frames for some of the paintings/drawings he's done for me over the years. Really into this one and on top of that he included a poem that goes with the painting (awful nice of him to translate into English, my Spanish is a little rusty).
Off and on around here I've been dabbling or casually exploring the "garage rock" thing. For the most part looking backwards round here, even though I did review a few products of 2011 because they were at least good. Gotta say I get shitloads of requests for reviews and as far as I've seen 2011 is not a stellar year for music. Nothing wrong with learning about history and enjoying it's products. So as I said, "garage rock"...very interesting and makes for some damn good listening. Latest discovery is the 
What made this one stand out and say "buy me, put me with the rest of your records", when I saw it for cheap was the fact that you get Steve Jones (guitars) and Paul Cook (drums) of the Sex Pistols on this one, out of 1978. I did not know that 