Category: Music

1996. I had just started a record label/mail order house called No-Fi and I quickly needed some stuff to fill out the catalog as I was running out of unwanted CDs in my collection to sell off. There was a guy in Philadelphia named Jason who posted to the DroneOn list. He had a 7″ single label called Doorstep Vinyl and was discontinuing it to concentrate on his band The Azusa Plane and a new label called Colorful Clouds.

I sent him $50 bucks for a few things, but in return he sent me a GIANT BOX of singles, probably everything he had. I didn’t get a chance to thank him until a year or so later at Terrastock II in San Francisco. I babbled at him about how much I liked Azusa Plane’s set (“as loud and final as an asteroid strike!” or something) but he was frustrated and kept apologizing for the rushed set because the time was changed at the last minute and really, they were rushing so they wouldn’t miss Roy Montgomery. I don’t believe he made it out to the west coast after that. I think that last time I heard from him was in 2001 when I contacted him to get hold of The Highway’s Jammed With Broken Heroes which I think was his last release.

Last year, I was driving at night through a snowstorm in Oklahoma and a track from Tycho Magnetic Anomaly… came on shuffle play. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate, compelling, and well unnerving track to listen to then. I always wondered what he was up to.

Today this message showed up on DroneOn:

Subject: [DroneOn] woah – Jason/Azusa Plane dies
Date: November 1, 2006 12:59:46 PM PST
To: droneon@lists.quartzcity.net

Just heard on another list Jason DiEmilio of Azusa Plane died recently. He had some severe medical problems that, among other things, basically left him unable to listen to music so he ended his life.

In the later 90’s I listened to a lot of AP and played AP on my radio show. I was just looking at the chunk of split 7″ers in my singles boxes a few weeks ago. Didn’t he used to post here way back? Jason provided a soundtrack to many hours of my life. I hope he’s someplace where he can listen to tunes again.

How many times do people say “I wish we’d kept in touch” after tragedy? Way too goddamned much.

*sigh* R.I.P.

I honestly don’t remember the last time I bought a record (for sake of discussion here, I’ll denote all possible audio delivery media systems as “records”) at Tower Records. Cynics and self-professed new media experts will naturally suggest that was the problem with the “Records” part of Tower: Tower didn’t establish a 21st century identity, Tower’s business was too archaic, Tower closed it’s eyes and pretended that it would all go away, Tower was the stereotype guy-lost-in-desert with the vultures of iTunes and Amoeba circling overhead, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

As with everyone else that’s blogging about Tower this week, I spent GDP-sized cash at Tower and contributed mightily to altering the earth’s rotation from the movement of vinyl from Tower to home. My home base from 1981 through 1986 was Tower Records in El Toro – not the new one near Laguna Hills Mall, but the old store in the Rockfield/El Toro Blvd. strip mall. If El Toro was sold out of something then another one (Brea, West Covina, Sunset Blvd. were my favorite substitutes) might have it and after all – they are all open until midnight!

I’m not bemoaning the loss of Tower, but it’s worth a blog post because Tower was one of the last remnants of 1970s rock-and-roll culture. Despite all attempts to modernize (remember “Tower Alternative?”), that bright yellow bag with the narrow fonts was as iconic of that era as Licorice Pizza, priority ticket wrist bands, giant wall-sized airbrushed album art, the movies FM and Roadie, satin tour jackets, and giant KMET-sized “Whoo-Yas.” Hell, I remember when Tower El Toro still had a head shop (hidden behind a curtain, as if it was porn or something). Other things I remember fondly about Tower are:

• Finding an original copy of Pink Floyd’s “Point Me At The Sky” 7″ for $3.
• The secret parking lot behind Tower El Toro, where much closer parking spaces were available.
• Random in-store concerts: The Dream Syndicate (see below) and the Meat Puppets were my faves.
• Whoever it was that kept playing Roxy Music’s Avalon at twenty minutes until closing time.
• Whoever it was that kept playing Roxy Music’s Avalon at twenty minutes until closing time.
• The day when Rush’s Hold Your Fire and Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason were released on the same day. Every loner rocker in South O.C. was in Tower that morning.
• The outstanding zine selection in most every Tower.

The last time I bought something at a Tower was a copy of Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up And Start Again, which is basically a catalog of everything that I bought at Tower Records twenty-five years ago. “What goes around” I suppose…

Photo of The Dream Syndicate playing at Tower Records El Toro in 1982. If memory serves, I’m standing somewhere behind and to the left the cameraman. I had no idea this was even filmed until I ran across the DVD at Fingerprints a couple weeks ago. Gotta love those prices back then.

Scrubbles goes through his iTunes library looking for “the indestructibles” – songs that have been done by at least three different artists and hold up enough that folks keep them around. Looking through my library, I find:

“Alone Again Or” (Love, The Damned, Calexico)
“As Tears Go By” (The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Nancy Sinatra)
“Codeine” (Buffy Saint-Marie, Gram Parsons, The Barracudas, Spiritualized)
“Goldfinger” (Billy Strange, Shirley Bassey, Man… Or Astroman?)
“It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” (Bob Dylan, Kooper/Bloomfield/Stills, Robyn Hitchcock)
“Misirlou” (The Cardinals, Freddy Martin, Harold Grant, John “Bucky” Wilkins, Woody Herman, Dick Dale)
“More Than This” (Roxy Music, Robyn Hitchcock, 10,000 Maniacs)
“Ode To Billie Joe” (Bobbie Gentry, Lee Hazlewood, Popdefect)
“When The Levee Breaks” (Memphis Minnie, Led Zeppelin, Kristin Hersh)

(I’ll spare you the obvious “Radios Reappear” title, since I’m sure the LA Weekly will fall for it)

You never know what to expect with these sorts of things. Near-legendary, ahead-of-its-time band from the fog of misplaced history gets a quorum of members back together and lets fly. Cognitive dissonance is a funny thing: at best you know you’re ultimately going to be disappointed yet you still find yourself making the most dubious justifications. Really, how bad could it be having Evan Dando fronting the MC5?

About the best you can expect is a lot of haze and a brief clearing where everything lines up and you hear what all the fuss was about, but that’s extraordinarily rare. I can think of only one exception and not surprisingly at all, it goes by the first name of Iggy and the last name of Stooge.

The advantage to Radio Birdman is that they’re the most shadowy of cult bands. Last night at the Wiltern was their first US show ever – no expectations to live up to, no disaffected Amoeba-denizen in the back crossing his arms and harumphing about how so much better they were back in the day. And really, no time to think about any of that because they simply tore through their set at 200mph, pausing only to replace a cranky guitar amp. Rob Younger’s (himself an odd mix of Julian Cope and Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror) vocals aren’t quite up there yet, but the rest of the band packed a tremendous wallop. The star of course is Deniz Tek: bona fide Guitar Hero and Buckaroo Banzai incarnate (no joke – after Birdman broke up the first time he became a jet fighter pilot and a surgeon). I wish LA was the last show of the tour, I can only imagine what they would be like un-jet lagged.

(Blurry photo courtesy my new camera phone, there’s a significantly better set of recent Birdman photos on Karena Hoyer’s Flickr stream)

Matt Maxwell (who provided the cover art for the album) interviewed Karl for the Ptolemaic Terrascope back in the day and the full interview never made it into the mag but Matt posted the complete text on his blog. Read here for a macroscopic discussion on The Drone, the psychology of people who want to be in a band, and the dog biscuit factory.

K: Not exactly. That just seems the inevitable objective analysis. Simply because, when I started trying to play rock years ago, I wanted to be in the [Rock] tradition. I wanted money and girls and fame. For about a minute.

M: Say it isn’t so…

K: Oh, well. When you’re 16, things look pretty bleak on the other side of that Pink Floyd album cover. You start thinking about ways to re-invent things. But that lasts for about a second until punk rock comes along and blows things away. And then the lifelong project to destroy all music…(laughter)…starts to take form.

I was just contemplating this question of just what LDOM does. And I cannot conceive of it exactly in terms of tradition. Certainly there are going to be people who can listen to it and say “indeed this is in the tradition of free music.” But it seems to me what we’re actually doing particularly, is a very singular thing. But LDOM is not consciously avant-garde. We’re not pushing the theoretical limit of art. We’re not trying to stretch a conceptual boundary, or to challenge a listener in any way.

M: You’re not bemoaning “the tyranny of the 4:4 beat.”

K: Hell, no. We like that. The only reason that makes it worth listening to is that it rocks out. That’s the problem that Rock has, is that stuff that rocks out is really rare. Lots of people plod and some of them thud. A few of them swing a little.

M: But very few rock?

K: Actually, a lot of people rock, but it’s pretty predetermined. That is, you’re not too often surprised. And generally, audiences don’t want to be surprised.

Visit mysterious cabbages on the Last Days Of May web site.

There’s a bucketload of obituaries on the net and I wager that at least 90% of them contain the phrase “drug addled” or some sort of variation. I know I shouldn’t be surprised by that, but that casual dismissal grates on me. Yes I know that Syd was(is) It Guy Number One for the psychedelic phase of Swinging London and yes, part of the price paid for being that icon is a heroic consumption of drugs of all variations. And OK sure, drugs played a part in exacerbating his already erratic behavior. We all know the stories and Syd’s life is as fundamental to the rock-and-roll bedrock as Brian Wilson’s sandbox or Keith Moon’s hotel room. My objection to the cautionary tale of “creative genius takes drugs, never creates again” is the implied passive-aggressive outrage. As if there’s some kind of creator/consumer trade deficit. How dare this guy check out of being a pop star, after all we’ve done for him!

I think all of us were secretly hoping or even expecting that Syd would have eventually returned. Maybe not a gig, but probably a public “thank you for all your support” or something. There’s precedent too: Peter Green showed up after years in the wilderness and after all kinds of improbabilities, Brian Wilson finished and performed Smile. I remember back in the 90s there was a rumor that R.E.M. had offered a million dollars to Syd if he would enter a recording studio again, even if nothing was released. Just a couple years ago, after years of non-recognition and acknowledgement, reclusive painter Roger Barrett signed a book of vintage-era photographs of himself as “Syd.”

A return would have been just too neat of an ending and ultimately Syd left us with no answers at all – only questions encoded into a couple hours’ worth of music. Still, what a catalog: top pop songs, ultra-experimental abstractness, furious garage rock, children’s lullabies – enough rocket fuel not just for Pink Floyd, but the countless others that plugged into it. No wonder McCartney was sniffing around the door of Abbey Road during the recording of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Yesterday, I listened to “See Emily Play” and after 1.23E+11 listens I’m still hearing new things in it (just how loud is that electric guitar in the break before the last chorus?). Even b-side “Candy And A Currant Bun” would be enough to be the centerpiece of an entire album of Nuggets material.

Ultimately though, once you get past the songs you bonk up against the same questions that dog analysts of any artist who’s critical breakthrough runs concurrent with mental breakdown. Which drives which? Syd himself was the closest on-scene narrator despite layers of unreliability. There’s not much in the way of spiritual narratives, quests for enlightenment, or an occasional door of perception. Syd wrote about himself and how he perceived the world, each time adding some layer of unreality to it like Louis Wain’s famous progression of increasing psychotic cat paintings. Hmmm… Syd wrote a song about a cat too.

Being a pop star isn’t exactly congruent with undiagnosed acute schizophrenia though and it seems like the deck was stacked against Syd from the beginning. To address the annoying “acid casualty” phrase again, I can’t help but wonder if Syd was really trying to chemically address a reality that was rapidly slipping through his fingers. He seems sad in this clip, or maybe just annoyed from having to answer such hostile questions.

I’m not quite sad, but maybe melancholy. There’s always the records and they still mean as much to be now as they did twenty-six years ago when I plunked the needle down on “Astronomy Domine” and shouted “WHATTHEHELLISTHAT!?” I’m angy at the thought of knowing that there are some twats out there who are saying “Dude, let’s do shrooms on Syd’s grave!” I hope that he found some sort of peace and equilibrium with the world and it’s the world’s duty to let him enjoy it. In the meantime there’s a wonderful set of puzzles left behind. RIP.

Good grief, I feel like I’ve discovered that some part of my brain has been miswired. I’ve owned this album since it was released and only now did I notice the connection between it

and this

Some video from The Lovetones show at SXSW has shown up on YouTube…

From the Tee Pee Records showcase on March 17:

And a day later with Anton from BJM:

I can’t recommend their new album highly enough!