iJamming.net

“They’re lying to you. They want you to be ignorant, clueless and easily manipulated. They’ve spent millions of dollars to inoculate you with a dreadful consumer virus called “brand anxiety.” They act as if alternatives did not even exist and if you point them out they call them “off brands from inconsequential players.” They take your money and give it to shareholders, ad agencies and guys named Louie with pinky rings instead of putting it in the bottle where it belongs. Who are “they”? Industrial Champagne producers (usually owned and operated by either giant liquor empires and/or luxury goods consortiums) who want you to think of Champagne as a “branded lifestyle statement” instead of wine.”

From the Wine Expo Holiday 2006 Newsletter. I don’t know how I got on this Santa Monica store’s (snail) mailing list, but I’m glad they found me. This 32-page newsletter – packed with witty and informative descriptors for several hundred mainly small production wines – contains some of the most passionate, certainly the most argumentative wine writing I’ve come across in years. Yet the author (presumably someone at the store) doesn’t even offer us his by-line. That might just be for fear of a midnight mugging: in this one newsletter, Wine Expo takes issue not only with “industrial champagne producers” but also “giant holding companies like Brown Forman, owners of Korbel, Bolla and Fetzer,” “heavy metal wines at jacked-up, Diva-filed pricing,” “that rag” (the Wine Spectator), “ultra-conservatives who insist on absolutes,” “a new rep to the wine trade,” “One Note Charlie Fruit Bombus Exaggerarti” and, of course, Robert Parker.

Wine Expo prefers to compare the wines it likes (and stocks) to music, to which end the same newsletter references The Archies, Alex Chilton, Bob Marley, Hank Williams, Djavan, Robert Johnson, Britney Spears, Thelonious Monk, Wynton Marsalis, and Chrissie Hynde. Wow. If this sounds like your kind of newsletter, write them at wineexpo@earthlink.net and ask to get on their (digital?) mailing list.

“Woodstock, the force fields are down.”

So insisted Sammy James Junior to the audience in the Bearsville Theater bar last Saturday night shortly after his band The Mooney Suzuki took the floor. (There is no stage in the Bearsville bar.) The crowd, such as it was, had been hesitant to embrace the well-traveled New York City garage rockers during the opening instrumental and subsequent rabble-rousing anthem ‘Electric Sweat,’ and Sammy wasn’t going to stand for it. He wanted them in his face.

The Bearsville’s initial reticence should not have come as a surprise. Woodstock, as you surely don’t need telling, is the hippy headquarters of the American east coast. Jam bands and singer-songwriters rule the roost here, and audiences are accustomed either to groups that noodle all night long, or to soloists who demand rapt attention. So when the likes of The Mooney Suzuki come rolling into the village, bringing their voluminous take on the classic Who/Yardbirds/MC5/Dr. Feelgood/Sly-Stones/Sonics sound with them, you can understand people being taken somewhat aback.

The force field comes down. Sammy James Junior plays on the floor to a group of grooving girls.

But the rarity of seeing a (relatively) well-known, turbo-charged, proper rock’n’roll band in the cozy confines of a local laid-back bar ensured that Sammy got his wish. By night’s end, he and lead guitarist Graham Tyler were playing on the bar and a group of girls had worked up such a sweat in front of the microphones I’d almost taken them for the band’s stooges. The elegance of the Bearsville’s bar aside, this had been your classic down’n’dirty Saturday night American rock’n’roll gig, the kind you used to see in the movies. The kind Springsteen sings about. The kind you could near rightly assume don’t exist any more.

The irony is, The Mooney Suzuki should not have been here. Not if things had gone as planned. After the grass roots success of 2000’s debut album People Get Ready and 2002’s Electric Sweat, which coincided perfectly with both the New York City and garage rock revivals, The Mooney Suzuki were subject to a major label frenzy, and duly went with Columbia/Sony. What ensued was an almost predictable calamity: a band signed on the back of its own songs was sent to write with The Matrix (cf Avril Lavigne); a group that had recorded its successful albums in a week apiece now spent a solid four months in the studio. Though the resulting album Alive & Amplified had its (shamelessly commercial) moments, public reaction was muted to the point of silence, and The Mooney Suzuki were quietly dropped a few months later, another million dollar major label experiment gone to waste.

Electric Sweat: Ro, James, Rockwell-Scott and Tyler give it more than 99%.

Undeterred – they still had that live reputation – the group secured a fresh deal with V2, recorded their new album Have Mercy last spring (some of it in Woodstock), and prepared for a February release. Then, in December, V2 announced it would become a catalogue label, no longer in the disastrous business of financing new music. The Mooney Suzuki are once again “between labels” while lawyers attempt to extricate Have Mercy from the V2 vaults to see release on what will surely be an indie.

You might expect such experiences to weigh a man down. But Sammy James Junior told me after the Bearsville gig that “We’ve been really fortunate,” and he wasn’t putting me on. He seems genuinely grateful for the opportunities he’s had to put out records, play festivals, tour with bands he admires, and record music for TV commercials and movies (The Mooney Suzuki provided the theme song for Jack Black’s ‘School Of Rock’). Monday morning, a decade since they started, they were set to drive across country for a support tour with Albert Hammond, Jr., in venues they ought to be headlining. Call them simplistic, but don’t deny their positive attitude.

Onstage (or on the floor), Sammy James Junior is very much the focal point, but he’s far from the only attraction. Lead guitarist Graham Tyler does floor drops and bar hops effortlessly from behind his almost comically long fringe; new bassist Rono Ro has much of old Thunderfingers in his melodies, and drummer Will Rockwell-Scott is perfectly able at the back. At the Bearsville bar, the quartet focused heavily on Electric Sweat (title track, ‘Young Man’s Mind,’ ‘Oh Sweet Susanna’), threw in a couple of the more obvious numbers from Alive & Amplified (‘New York Girls’ and ‘Shake That Bush Again’) and introduced several songs from the new album.

Bar banned? Graham Tyler gets up close and personal.

Have Mercy (yes, I have a copy) is a deliberately more rootsy recording that simultaneously attempts to ratchet up the songwriting. It’s not totally successful: ‘First Comes Love’ means well, but the narrative is shop-worn, and as for naming a ballad ‘Rock’n’Roller Girl,’ you have to hope it was done tongue firmly in cheek. But then dry humor is clearly a part of The Mooney Suzuki’s appeal: the six-minute banjo-and-piano countrified ‘Good Ol’ Alcohol’ is a good-humored tribute to their adult drug of choice. (“I’ve become so much more civilized since moving on to spirits and beers.”)

And when they focus on the groove that made them popular to begin with – nuggets-punk gospel-infused R&B – they’re hard to beat. ‘99%,’ Have Mercy’s opening song, is a reaffirmation of ideals and enthusiasm set to a deliriously dumb “na-na-na” singalong, possibly their finest moment yet. (You can hear it at their myspace page.) But for the most part, The Mooney Suzuki’s albums serve as advertisements, a mere hint of what they deliver live, where the sheer force (field) of their presentation renders all the clichés redundant, and serves to remind that there’s a place in rock for everything – especially the good ol’ (alcohol-soaked) Saturday night bar gig.

My little review of the Feb 17 Melody Reunion generated a hefty amount of traffic and correspondence – which I would consider surprising except that it only confirms how much the now extinct bar-club meant to its regulars. (The traffic is also not unrelated to the link from the altrok radio site; coming right back atcha.)

Pete Santiago wrote to let me know I must have missed most of his DJ set, given that he opened the nightwith ‘Blue Monday’ and played two Wonder Stuff tracks – ‘Circle Square’ and ‘A Wish Away’ – back to back. He’s right: we did miss most of his DJ set. Having driven down from the Catskills and set Noel up with Campbell in our hotel room, we managed to head out without a bank card or more than a $20 bill between us. My wife’s assertion that the Loop Lounge would take credit cards proved to be inaccurate, which made for a fun 17th Anniversary argument and a round-trip back to the hotel for a bank card, so that we could get our own drinks in and not look like a couple of down-beats out on the scrounge. Thanks, Pete – I know that if Matt had shown up, we’d have heard those Wonder Stuff cuts again. As for ‘Blue Monday’ – best to get it out of the way early so that, while it’s been played for posterity, nobody has to go through the process of actually hearing it for the 1,000,000th time.

Frank Gibson, aka Stiffy Biceptz, corrected the date of my first visit to the Melody: the Echo & The Bunnymen show at Rutgers was in early 1988, not 1989. This makes sense, because I was living out of a suitcase in an unused elementary school on the fringes of Princeton at the time; the Bunnymen show was therefore more or less “local” for me. The concert almost did not take place: the band had had a fight coming off stage the previous night, and their management had to fly out from the west coast for a lengthy dressing room meeting before the group agreed to play together. Les Pattinson wore shades on stage to disguise the black eye he’d received 24 hours earlier but, as is often the case with bands that thrives on tension, the show was staggeringly brilliant. Anyway, on the recommendation of many local fans, Mac and I attended the Melody after the concert, where we were both blown away by the bar’s hipness (in the best sense of the word). After making friends with Matt at the end of the evening, I frequented the Melody many more times from Princeton before I moved up to the City. (Matt helped me make that move.) As it turned out, Posie was on the Melody dancefloor that night back in ’88 (I was too cool to shake a leg back then, or not a good enough dancer, or both), as she was on many of those subsequent visits. Somehow it took us two years of missed opportunities Melody to actually hook up. So much for love at first sight!

Frank Gibson collected an unbelievable number of photos and fliers from Melody days, and not only put them into a slideshow that was projected on the back wall for the Reunion, but archived that slide show on Photobucket. (It can be accessed from here under the Feb 24 post.) This picture brought back smiles and fond memories, though I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of the meal at which it was taken. (Blame the margheritas!) It was at a Mexican restaurant in Asbury Park in early 1991, prior to a Pop Will Eat Itself gig. The girl on the left is called Ciera (so the slide indicates); the girl on the right is Monica, Matt’s wife at the time. The girl in the middle, with the cute face under the purple hat, is Posie. As for the boy on the right, with the long hair and the sideburns (there may even have been a soul patch!), his son Campbell says he looks “weird.” Great days indeed.

Frank also felt duty bound to state that the photo of our friend Gary Kaplan and others was taken in Manhattan at a bar opposite The Ritz. That would be the Ritz that had moved into Studio 54 on 54th Street, not the one on 11th Street that is now Webster Hall. To go off on a healthy tangent, New York music fans of a certain age have only the fondest memories of the “original” Ritz, which hosted some of the best post-punk concerts the city ever saw (think Sunday night London Lyceum, several nights a week) in a room with fantastic acoustics and a great atmosphere. I only witnessed a few shows at that venue before it closed (The Ramones among them), but I saw plenty more at the “uptown” Ritz, and there was no reason to complain about that venue either. Some of the loudest shows I saw in my life took place at the old Studio 54 location: My Bloody Valentine, The Catherine Wheel, Lush and Bob Mould all come straight to mind. Patrick, who am I missing?

Pat Pierson, one of the Loop’s resident DJ who helped segue out of the Melody reunion night (with the only Bunnymen cut of the evening; how quickly people forget!) assures me that he was a regular at the Melody, “specifically between 1985-1986 and then 1988-1993,” but admits that he never DJ’d there, which is what I meant to imply when I mentioned him in that particular paragraph.

And Sean Carolan wrote several times and signed up at the iJamming! Pub to let us know that he had recorded all the DJ sets from the Reunion party and was broadcasting them via altrok radio this past week. I had fun listening back, noting all the other great acts that I didn’t mention in my original review (James, Ride, The KLF and the Dandelion Fire among them), but of course, it’s not the same hearing it on your computer as being there with all your middle-aged mates. The general conclusion among attendees and online habituees has been sadly but accurately contradictory; that while everyone would like to see more Melody reunions, doing so would only water them down, and that none will likely match the vibe of this first one. I concur.

You know how occasionally you hear a sample stops you dead in your tracks, leaves you asking, “Why did nobody ever think of using that song before?” That’s how I felt when listening to the latest Music That Matters Podcast from KEXP. The sample in question opens the track: “I get up, I get down” sung in a time-stretched high voice, which brought me straight back to dubious pre-pubescent years thinking I could be as serious a prog-rocker as all of the older long-haired kids in my neighborhood. In other words, if it’s not a sped-up sample of Jon Anderson fronting Yes on ‘Close To The Edge’ then it’s a damn good impersonation. Either way, it’s a genius use of a generally discredited song.

It would have been better – or at least more appropriate – had the high-pitched sample led into a typically hi-nrg techno track from the early 90s: the intro is reminiscent of ‘Out of Space’ by the Prodigy, or ‘I Need Your Loving’ by NRG. Instead, the Yes sample forms the basis for a new cut by west coast rapper Busdriver entitled ‘The Troglodyte Wins.’ As his name and song title suggest, Busdriver is a long-haul Greyhound route away from gansta chic or crunk; he’s a gravel-sounding, rapid-fire, LA-based word-player in the Busta Rhymes style, with a large sense of humor and a clear love of psychedelia. Roadkillovercoat, released in January, is his fifth album, and if the titles of its predecessors – Memoir of The Elephant Man, Temporary Forever, Cosmic Cleavage and Fear of a Black Tangent – don’t give you an idea of his politically poetic playfulness, then try some of the song titles: ‘Post Apocalyptic Rap Blues,’ ‘Kill Your Employer’ and ‘Pompous Posies! Your Party’s No Fun.’

Busdriver: come to take you on a journey to prog rock and back again.

After several years making his name in the rap underground, Roadkillovercoat marks Busdriver’s debut for the Anti-/Epitaph label, home to Tom Waits, Youth Group, The Aggrolites, The Coup and Neko Case to name just a few of its non-hardcore punk acts. But Anti-Epitaph has more than just good taste: it knows that in the modern music market, you gotta give to get. Hearing Busdriver on that KEXP podcast, I immediately Googled ‘The Troglodyte Wins’ and the first link that came up was for Epitaph’s free MP3 download of the track.

Over the last year and a half I’ve been working with a major label that has enacted a strict ‘No MP3’ policy across the board of its entire roster; that same label recently announced such a sharp drop in sales that it is in the process of laying off 20% of its 5,000 strong workforce, and just as high a percentage of its acts. You might know the company: the Sex Pistols wrote a song about them back in 1977.

A free MP3 here or there does not make or break a label, but it’s part of the bigger picture about how to entice people into a full album purchase, and it’s hard to believe that Epitaph’s free MP3 teaser for Busdriver is not paying instant dividends with my 500 words here. You can read more about Busdriver at the Epitaph website; you can hear four more of his tracks at his myspace page, where you can also view snippets of his many videos. His own website is a full year out of date, but it includes many free live MP3s if you still have a fear of commitment. Besides, he may have an excuse for not staying online: the guy is a touring fiend.

“I lament that I have become a serial-dater,” he states in his bio. “Even when I’m home and off tour, I find myself loading-in at random venuess at 6 o’clock sharp,(and) calling promoters that don’t exist.”

Busdriver: ‘The Troglodyte Wins’ MP3
here

I didn’t head to Mallorca with grape expectations. After all, I’ve been to its Balearic neighbor Ibiza, where commercial wine is not made. But I did depart for my weekend trip with Radio 4 in hope, my World Atlas Of Wine assuring me (admittedly in its final paragraph on Spain) of “Mallorcan pride in its wines and its native Manto Negro.”

Indeed, Mallorca has a thousand year history of wine production. Yet that peaked in the late 19th Century, when the phylloxera blight plagued France, and the isolated islands of Mallorca and Minorca planted excess vines to export back to the beleagured French. Through the middle of the 20th Century, as post-Civil War Spain expanded other forms of agriculture, the quality and reputation of Mallorcan wine sank even further and faster than that of the mainland.

This modernist map of Spain wine territory comes from the equally modernist Wines Of Spain web site. The Balearic islands are off in the Mediterranean in the east. Mallorca is the t-shaped one in the middle.

Now, as Spain joins the world of Modern (read International) wine at warp speed, Mallorca is playing an equally fast game of catch-up. Two Denominacione de Origens have been created: Binissalem, in 1990, and Plà i Llevant, in 2001. There is also at least one wine with an international reputation, Anima Negra, more of which later.

Anima Negre aside, modern Mallorcan wine producers appear to be following a relatively straightforward pattern. They have purchased, inherited or planted vineyards with the island’s indigenous grapes: Callet and Manto Negro for the reds, and Moll a.k.a. Prensal Blanc for the whites. These are obscurities even for an anorak like myself, and finding any proper information on them is a thankless task. The best I could do was an entry about Manto Negro on the official Spanish wine web site, which assures us that “it produces light, very well balanced wines,” and that “it has shown a tremendous potential for ageing” (though these don’t exactly sound like compatible qualities); and a note on Mallorcan wines in Hugh Johnson’s pocket wine book 2007 which states instead that Manto Negro and Callet are “rugged and prone to oxidize.”

No surprise then, that this new generation of wine-makers have supplemented these old grapes with the internationally recognized Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah and Chardonnay, and the everyday Spanish grapes Tempranillo, Monastrell, Moscadel and Macabeo. If there is a shock, it’s that they then tend to put just about everything into the same bottle. It’s not unusual to notice four, five, even six red grapes listed on the back label. Where and when Mallorcan producers do make a single-varietal cuvee, it’s almost always from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah or Chardonnay: these are wines for the export market, where Merlot needs less translation than Tempranillo. That said, these producers still have their work cut out for them. While an impressive 60% of wine drunk on Mallorca hails from Mallorca (the restaurant menus are filled with them, which I greatly appreciated), only 5% of Mallorcan wine makes it out of Spain.
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I did my bit by bringing three bottles home with me, purchased at Lodivino, a wine bar/bodega in Palma Old Town that I’d scouted online. We went there on our first night in town, where we were greeted by the thickest cloud of tobacco smoke I’ve ever encountered, even in Paris. We hacked our way through, past the occupied wooden tables, and up to the bar, where the tender was all set to pour us generic red wine until I spoke up for something specific: did they have Anima Negra?

Winemaker Francesc Grimalt with his Anima Negra, Mallorca’s wine curiosity.

Delighted to find proper wine enthusiasts in the room, our bartender Joân proved eager to practice his English and discuss Mallorcan wine. As his girlfriend and bartending partner opened two bottles of AN for our group, Joan told us, authoritatively, that Anima Negre may Mallorca’s most famous wine, but it was certainly not the best. Nor could it be pure Callet as publicly claimed, he insisted, because that grape is simply not good enough to produce a wine of international quality and cellaring potential. He may well have a point: Anima Negra wine-maker Francesc Grimalt opted out of Mallorca’s DO regulations (the wine is a simple Vi de la Terra Illes Balears, the Balearic equivalent of a vin de pays), which might make it easier for him to intimate that his wine is 100% Callet than to prove it, and the bottle itself, with a notable label that intimates high price, does not even list a grape. It’s purposefully sold as something of an enigma.

Joân’s cynicism aside, we were nonetheless impressed: “bright red with a slight herbal nose,” I noted of the Anima Negra 2004, 14% alcohol. “Good animal notes on front palate, some vegetal flavors, spice and body at back.” That’s not exactly poetry, but hey, we were hanging out in a dark room full of smoke getting our groove on. Put it this way: while it was expensive (€30 at the bar), it was also distinctive.

As it turned out, Joân works by day for one of the island’s premier wineries, Miquel Oliver from the Plà i Llevant DO, and before the night was done, he’d sold Radio 4 percussionist PJ O’Connor and myself a bottle each of what he insisted was Mallorca’s finest wine; the Miquel Oliver Aia 2003. Only upon returning to the States and unpacking did I realize it was 100% Merlot. I shouldn’t diss the wine based purely its grape, its seven months in French and American oak, or its high alcohol content; I will merely note that I like to taste local, rather than international, wines on my travels, and would love to have a bottle of Anima Negra on hand, for comparison, the day I sit down to hopefully enjoy the Aia. (That should not be impossible: Anima Negra is imported into the States by the massive Winebow company.)

Jaume Mesquida and Bini Grau make typically modern and delicious Mallorcan wines.

Juan also sold me two more typical Mallorcan wines, at lower prices, each of which I have opened since my return, and each of which I thoroughly loved. The Jaume Mesquida Negre 2004, also from the Plà i Llevant DO and priced around €15, blends Tempranilloo, Monastrell, Merlot, Callet and Manto Negro, for an impressively complex wine that the producers claim could age several years. “Very dark, almost black,” I wrote of it after a Saturday’s hard skiing. “Vanilla on nose, some hefty cedar elements, very brooding black fruits and then this almost tar-like finish, pure licorice. Chocolate too. Not so much tannin but plenty oak. You could see this wine going somewhere in several years, just not sure where.” You can certainly see the difference in my note-taking when I’m not distracted.

Yet even this was not as immediately enjoyable as the 2004 Binigrau ‘Obac,’ from the Binissalem DO. A blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Callet and Manto Negro, it was “Dark dark dark ruby purple bordering on black. A dusty tannic cholate flavor on palate with strong raspberry-blackberry finish. Seriously dusty flavors and good acidid bite to it. Medium body.” The Obac cost us all of about €10 Euros and was an absolute bargain. I wish I had more of it.

The following night found us sharing a wine for dinner that exceeded even the Jaume Mesquida for multiple grape content. The Son Bordils 2003 Negre is a Vi de la Terra Illes Balears that includes the requisite Callet and Manto Negre, the now familiar Spanish mainstrays Tempranillo and Monastrell, and not just Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, but Syrah too. (I’m surprised they didn’t throw some white grapes in there for the hell of it!) Though I didn’t make notes, I remember thinking that the wine was somewhat ordinary, and being surprised to subsequently learn that Son Bordils also produces one of the island’s more expensive wines; you wouldn’t know it from their primitive web site.

Son Bordils Negra, a kitchen sink blend

After that night’s concert we headed back to the old town and, somewhat unexpectedly, into La Vinya, a trendy but surprisingly quiet little joint. Our young male host, like Joân before him, was thrilled to find a customer on whom he could practice English and discuss his favorite subject. Turned out he formally owned a restaurant but tired of all the business and worry and downsized to this wine bar, which he opens and closes himself every day. This “man in the corner shop” considered La Vinya and Lodivino the two best wine bars in Palma, and he shared Joân’s rather dismissive view of Anima Negre, pronouncing it a triumph of marketing over substance. You want good local wine? he asked (rhetorically I trusted), and opened a bottle of the Macia Batle Crianza 2004. Weighing in at a hefty 14.5% alcohol, you can pretty much guess at its content: yes, Manto Negro and Callet, Cabernet Sauvignon and, in this particular case, what the winery calls Shiraz but which I insist on calling Syrah. The company’s flashy web site talks about “forest berries” and “balsamic mix”; I noted merely that it had a “smooth, chocolate finish.” My mental memory tells me that it was damn good and serious, a wine I would like to have brought home with me, but the important thing is, we emptied the bottle.

Macia Batle has been making wines since 1853. Judging by this one, they know what they’re doing.

Fact, we did better than that. Our host treated us to a lock-in, and he celebrated by opening (on the house), and pouring into an expensive decanter, what he considered to be a far superior wine: a Martín Verástegui 2001 from Castilla y Leon, around Ribera del Duero on the mainland. His generosity masked an evident inferiority complex: the sense that Mallorcan wines did not best represent Spain. Ultimately, he was right. The wines from Mallorca are but bit players even on the Spanish stage, barely register on the global radar and don’t have the complexity, body, aroma or texture to lay claim to international repute. But as I sank my teeth into the near tar that was this massively over-done Castilla y Leon, I memorized my fondness for Mallorcan all the same: they’re priced attractively, they can be enjoyed immediately, and they do have personality. Those that contain the indigenous grapes Manto Negra and Callet, in whatever unspecified quantity, are unique, and the two blended bottles I brought home with me were fine red wines for cold winter nights. Mallorca may soon become more than just a holiday isle, but a new destination on the wine traveler’s global map. Let’s just hope the island’s producers remember their roots and keep working those local vines.