iJamming.net

We’re away on a sort of vacation for the rest of the week. Going no further than the Jersey Shore where we’ll have the mother-in-law’s empty house before it’s officially sold. (She’s moved into a smaller place already.) Packing books and music galore. I’ve been catching up big time on my pop culture of late, especially on the music front, where I’ve been listening to my deceased uncle’s superb old jazz albums I brought back from the UK; to the old vinyl I bought on my last trip to NYC; to the 80% discounted new(ish) CDs I bought at the Virgin Megastore’s close-out sale; and to the many new albums I no longer get in the post but rather by snail mail. Here’s some of what’s been on either the turntables, the CD player or the iPod of late (click on the covers for more information):

…And here are some of the dozen or more books I’ve been rotating by my bedside (click on the covers for more information):

In an ideal world, I’d get to offer reviews/observations of all the above, but time seems to be more of the essence than ever right now. If you’re familiar with any of the above works, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. I’ll post again next week.

…Of why the Stonewall Rebellion was so important:

Homosexuality was not illegal in New York City in the 1960s; it just seemed that way. The New York State Liquor Authority had long insisted that merely by serving drinks to homosexuals a bar was maintaining a “disorderly house,” which the SLA could (and would) then close; it embarked upon a particularly aggressive series of such license revocations from 1959 through the mid-1960s. Only in 1967, after constant agitation by a handful of openly gay campaigners, were New York bars allowed to knowingly serve homosexuals without prosecution. When, the next year, a State judge decreed that same-sex couples dancing together were not breaking the law, it may have seemed as if the tide was finally turning. Yet the New York Police Department continued to enforce an arcane and degrading law that required people to wear at least three items of gender-specific clothing in public. In addition, the police policy of entrapment extended beyond the solicitation of gay prostitutes on the street and frequently involved the arrest of young men on the dancefloor.

This discrimination and victimization did not deter gay nightlife. Rather, it sent its potentially lucrative custom into the clutches of the people who knew how best to profit from it: the Mafia. In Greenwich Village, always Manhattan’s prime gay neighborhood, the scene’s clubs and bars were divided almost equally between the Gambino family (the Washington Square, Purple Onion, and Tony Pastor’s), and the Genovese family (the Tenth of Always, the Bon Soir, and the Stonewall Inn). Few of these venues ever had all the correct licenses, but the police were known to turn a blind eye in exchange for regular payoffs. To keep up appearances, the Sixth Precinct would launch token raids, typically tipping off the club owners in advance. After the routine demanding of ID (partially to degrade and arrest patrons who had dressed as members of the opposite sex), and a bout of homophobic name-calling, the police would leave, and the bar-club would resume its activities. Neither the police nor the club owners ever expected the patrons to protest: where else, after all, were “queers,” “faggots,” or “faeries” – as they were most commonly referred to in public – permitted to flaunt their lifestyle?

From All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 (Chapter 13: The Apple Stretching), to be published by W.W. Norton on October 26.

WHO: 22 year-old Detroit native Randolph Chabot and his band (named for G.I. Joe villain Destro, deliberately mis-spelled to avoid legal complications) release either first or second album (depending how you count these things in the digital age) on the pioneering Ghostly International.

WHAT: A post-modern mass of rapid-fire electronic rhythms, vast sweeping synthesizer sound-scapes, and Chabot’s occasionally elegant, but most frequently urgent vocals. Electronically-based acts frequently suffer for lack of cohesion (see review of Freeland album Cope here), but Deastro sounds like a proper band making a proper album throughout.

You can get Moondagger through the Ghostly label’s own store, for a limited time, as an 180 gram vinyl LP, a CD and a 320kbps DRM-free download, ALL for just $14. Or you can get the MP3 version now for $7.99. Don’t you love not getting ripped off by major labels anymore?

WHY: From what I can tell via his considerable Internet presence and the live show I caught at the Mercury Lounge the other week, Chabot is full of almost irrepressible energy and a surprising amount of self-doubt. “I’m always questioning myself,” he told the Real Detroit Weekly, which nonetheless named him Artist of the Year. “Do I believe in what I’m really doing? Is it really the best thing I could be doing with my time? I feel like it is right now… I really believe that it is.” Christ, was there something else he had up his sleeve that he felt he could be doing better? Gardening, perhaps? Come on, dude, you’re making amazing music. Accept it.

WINNERS: I love the big fat songs, the ones that almost collapse under the weight of their ambitious arrangements. “Parallelogram” is one. The single “Vermillion Plaza,” with its low-slung 80s-era-gothic verses followed by its high-pitched, MIDI-synth-dripped chorus, is another. The CD Bonus track “The Shaded Forests” is far too good to be a throwaway, full of classical descending synth lines, Bunnymen-like angst, and a melody that absolutely brings something wonderful to mind but, because I can’t quite place it, I’ll credit to Chabot’s own mind. Plus, “Daniel Johnston Was Stabbed In The Heart With The Moondagger By The King Of Darkness And His Ghost Is Writing This Song As A Warning To All Of Us” is more than just an amazing song title; it’s a marvelously grandiose piece of music.

There were times at the Mercury Lounge when Deastro came across as any other 4-piece indie rock band. (Love the cover of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U.”)

WORDS: Wish I could make more of them out, to be honest. Chabot has a good voice but he deliberately hides it behind his wall of electronic sound. I want to know exactly what he’s saying about Daniel Johnston other than “we’re gonna build this town, we’re gonna build it right.” Elsewhere, “Can you tell me what I feel, is it real, is it right?” on “Day of Wonder” conjures up images of Trent Reznor on his knees a couple of decades ago, though Chabot’s exuberant stage presence at the Mercury Lounge suggests he’s not so much angst-ridden as merely antsy.

WHINE: The aforementioned lack of clarity. The self-produced band is a positive by-product of the digital age, and Moondagger is surely all the better for not having a major label’s hired mix-master softening all the rough edges. So I’ll take the occasional muddiness and hyperactive overload of hyper-creative ideas, and allow that, somewhere in the future, if Deastro sticks with it and the natural course of events follows on, then the act will find itself drawn to make a clearly stated, synth-pop masterpiece.

And then there were times it was apparent that they were being driven by Chabot’s electrics.

WEB: Deastro are poster children for the blogosphere, with EPs, singles, videos, downloads and studio sessions dotted all over the web. I linked to several of these in a previous post about Deastro, here. Since then, Limewire has released an exclusive online EP, and BaebleMusic has put up a video of Deastro playing live at their “apartment” – covering the Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” no less, one of the most influential of all vocal rhythm & blues songs from the 1950s. Additional kudos for such a brave choice.

WINE: Deastro is so jumped-up, so all-over-the-place, so much a product of the 21st Century, that I can only recommend a post-modern blend, one of those low-budget, have-at-it combinations of grapes that are designed both to challenge the status quo and yet also to provide instant enjoyment. Try the Shinn Estate Coalescence 2008, which, as I wrote in my recent round-up of Long Island whites, mixes up Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier and a relative rarity, Merlot Blanc, for an impressive wine that offers up a seriously alluring tropical nose of tropical fruits, and yet a nice easy finish. You should be able to find this wine for under $15 a bottle – but if you can’t find it at all, go for Sokol-Blosser’s multiple-white-grape blend Evolution, which puts even more grapes into the bottle, at much the same price – and clearly has fun doing so.

“Conventional wisdom has it that second albums pose a problem, especially for those acts whose debut releases have enjoyed unanticipated success. But R.E.M. were never much concerned with following convention, and Reckoning, their 1984 follow-up to Murmur, served both to reinforce that record’s remarkable sense of promise and to confound expectations.”

Today, June 23rd, sees the release of the Deluxe Edition of R.E.M.’s superb 1984, second studio album, Reckoning. It would appear, then, to be a good day for me to alert readers to the fact that I wrote the sleeve notes for this re-issue. It was an honor to be hired for the task, and I had a lot of fun doing them. I’m not entirely convinced that R.E.M. devotees will glean anything new from them, but I trust that both the casual and committed fan will at least glean the context within which the album was recorded, and perhaps something more. The Reckoning deluxe edition comes with “a bonus disc of a previously unreleased concert recorded during the band’s Little America tour at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom on July 7, 1984.”

And both Reckoning and R.E.M.’s 1983 debut Murmur are being re-issued today in “180 Gram audiophile vinyl and original packaging.” This is, apparently, “the first time these two albums have been available on vinyl in decades” – unless,of course, you got a copy first time round, in which case they’ve been available whenever you felt like playing them. (You did keep your turntables, right?) On a less frivolous note, Reckoning has been re-mastered, as was Murmur last year for its own Deluxe Edition CD, and though the effect is not as dramatic as in that case, the sound is still notably improved from the previous set of CD masters. More about R.E.M. at iJamming! here.

R.E.M.’s Reckoning re-issued in Deluxe Edition today. More info at R.E.M. HQ

And if today is June 23rd, that means that yesterday, June 22nd, Basement Jaxx released their new single “Raindrops” – in the UK (only) – and promptly made the entire remix package available online as an embedable player that I have included at the bottom of this post. The stream-it-now-hope-people-buy-it-later concept seems to be especially common in dance music right now (you can stream the new Freeland album via iJamming! here; Moby’s new album Wait For Me is available for advance airing at NPR’s First Listen, and so on), but what I especially like about the Jaxx embedded player is the “play-with-it” option. Click that button and the various remixes come at you in Cubase/ProTools/regular software style fashion, and you can jump from one to the other with a click of the button; the software does an excellent job of smoothing over any unseemly transitions. I’ve fallen out of touch with the Jaxx over the years, which may be a reflection on my own life(style), or their own musical output, or simply the fact that their most recent records have not been seeing American release. It’s nice to remake their acquaintance… And while you can hear “Raindrops” for free, here and now, until you get sick of it, the purchase price – £5 for CD, 12″ and bonus download mix – seems more than fair. I love the new paradigm.

(Fond memories of Basement Jaxx as post 9/11 uplift here.)

The Catskill 45s made their debut Saturday night, chez nous, for our (belated) joint 45th birthday party, in which all the music was from 1964, and all guests were asked to dress from the era. A full house (literally, a full house) bore witness to myself, Josh Roy Brown, Robert Warren (a.k.a. Uncle Rock), Mark Lerner and Nancy Howell, drummers Ric Dragon and Eric Parker, and token NYC resident Patrick Carmosino work our way through You Really Got Me, It’s All Over Now, Gloria, House of the Rising Sun, World Without Love, Can’t Explain, A Hard Day’s Night, My Boy Lollipop, Glad All Over – and a rather desperate attempt at Surfin’ Bird for an encore. Anyone who remembers how badly I sung in Apocalypse might be relieved not to have borne witness to “Glad All Over,” the Crystal Palace FC anthem, but as for the rest of it, I haven’t had so much fun with a covers band since my wedding. Who can ask for a better birthday than the chance to play Rickenbacker on “I Can’t Explain” and Hammond B-3 on “House of the Rising Sun?”

Robert on the Hammond, myself on the marimbas, Mark on bass, Nancy on vocals (and Patrick’s 12-string Rickenbacker at front of shot) – that would be “World Without Love” then…

For the DJ portion of the night, I drew from the eight hours of music I’d ripped onto iTunes, plus quite a bit of vinyl, and seem to recall playing the following and many many more: Leader of the Pack, Barb-B-Q, Dancing In the Street, Break-A-Way, Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Do I Love You, I Feel Fine, Don’t Ever Leave Me, Don’t Worry Baby, I Can’t Stand It, Do You Remember, Fun Fun Fun, Oh Pretty Woman, Shout, No Particular Place To Go, Sha La La, The Shoop Shoop Song, Tainted Love, The In Crowd, The Way You do The Things You Do, Leavin’ Here, My Girl, My Guy, Baby I Need Your Loving, Wolfman, Needles and Pins, you’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, Dream Baby, Dream Boy, Baby Love, Bullwinkle and Bull Dog. (Thanks to Patrick for taking over the iTunes for a while.) Anyone who can name the artists for all of those songs, I’ll send you the extra souvenir CD I burned for the party.

Getting old can have its drawbacks, but for as long as we can still find it in us to have nights like these, I don’t mind. And 45 is a golden age for any fan of pop music – especially, as the above (excerpted) setlist hopefully make clear, for those of us born in 1964.

Josh’s kids Jamieson and Waylon always bring their own guitars to jam with their dad. Cue ‘the kids are alright’ pun….

Kudos to Holly and Michelle who, independently of each other, dug out sequined dresses – and stormed the “stage” during “A Hard Day’s Night” to scream at the faux Beatles. And total props to Mark and Nancy for digging up such suitably sixties clothes – and recommending “My Boy Lollipop” for the setlist. I’d never have imagined that prototype ska anthem as being from as far back as 1964.