End of Summer I: Three Songs

Summers always end on a bittersweet note.

I just realized that I never had a typical "summer romance." But despite avoiding the awkward end-of-vacation goodbyes, I still felt the bittersweetness of the end of summer.

The feelings of freedom slipping away haunt me every August even though it's been years since I had to buy pens, notebooks, or lined paper in early September.

This year feels strange -- not just because seemingly all of Southern California is on fire (although that's disconcerting) and not just because Labor Day is unnaturally late (which made everyone I know feel like this week was just borrowed time), and not just because radio is dying (although... ).

If I had musical synaesthesia (and many of my friends will tell you I do), this feeling would owe a hat tip to the excellent I ♥ Icelandic Music blog and look a lot like the mesmerizing video for "Ljósið" by Ólafur Arnalds (whom I last mentioned here). As the colors rally, burst, and trail behind the cool of the evening, there's a slight echo of promises unkept and tasks unfinished. And the slow decay reminds me that the sunlight is vanishing, a few minutes a day, moving us closer to darkness even as we rush to find a way to keep that light glowing for just a few days more.

Ólafur Arnalds - Ljósið (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes.

And fall waits around the corner, like an overeager actor poised to jump onstage. The air crackles at night with newness chances, new opportunities, new beginnings. Dancers crowded around the edge of the dance floor, storing up their energy, waiting for the cowbell to bring them out, and hoping to hear something new with more than a little echo of the old, like Philly's Free Energy. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Bonus: Iceland's Gus Gus weighs in on healthcare reform. Or at least paints a synth-pop masterpiece with "Add This Song," which undoubtedly would have burned up the airwaves back in the early 80s. (No embed code, so click here.)

One Poor Correspondent Runs Out of Time

One of my favorite blogs is closing up shop.

In his 1,000th post, blogger Tom Nawrocki announced that he's ending his great blog One Poor Correspondent.

I discovered this blog recently and combed through most of his archived posts, wondering how I'd missed such a gem for so long. If you love music (and if you don't, why are you here?) and good writing, check out One Poor Correspondent.

The blog started as a general pop-culture blog, with short and snappy posts about music, movies, TV, news items, etc. Over time, the posts grew longer and some of the highlights have been stories about music and musicians and an ongoing series focusing on rock's one-hit wonders.

You can (and some of you will) spend days pouring over Tom's blog, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

Connecting Phil Spector with Leonard Cohen and the Partridge Family

The Best Album Titles of All Time

The Last Top 40 Hits for Artists in the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame

How the Guess Who got their Name

Morris Levy can't catch John Lennon (or can he?)

One Hit Wonders: Pilot

Thanks for the blog, Tom!

Should I Stay Or Should I Uke?

It's late August and it's about a million degrees out.

So I'm spending too much time on the Internets watching videos of blizzards, hoping they'll cool me off.

So far, it's not working.

Which brings me to the Department of Ukulele Clash Covers. How did it happen that there's an entire thriving subculture of Ukulele Clash covers? Let me tell ya:


33 years ago, the Clash played a gig in Islington, opening for the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten, noting that the Sex Pistols had opened for the Joe Strummer's band the 101'ers four months earlier, told Joe Strummer that his career was headed in the wrong direction and soon the only way Strummer's songs would be heard would be when someone played them on the ukulele. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Strummer dismissed this as the clear ravings of a lunatic whose band would self-destruct after a single tour of the U.S. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Joe Strummer may have had a point. But he ignored what we all now know: Johnny Rotten is the Nostradamus of Punk.

Sunshine After the Rain

A sad day.

RIP Ted Kennedy.


And songwriter Ellie Greenwich.

Losing My (Gluten-Free) Religion

I love Trader Joe's.

It's always just weird enough to be interesting, but not so weird that they don't have (some) semi-normal food.

But I think they must have some kind of machine in each of their parking lots that causes what I call The Trader Joe's Effect, which turns normal people into blithering idiots with no ability to make simple turns, drive ten feet further to an empty space, or anticipate what might happen five seconds in the future. (The machine might also temporarily make people unaware that anyone else in the world exists, but that could just be a side-effect of living in Los Angeles.)

And The Trader Joe's Effect usually extends into the store as well, where people routines leave their carts blocking entire aisles or just suddenly stop and refuse to move for 45 seconds while they contemplate gluten-free pot pies and look for products they've bought for years which vanish as if they were never for sale anywhere.

So when a new Trader Joe's opened a few blocks from Casa Clicks and Pops, I was thrilled that I could walk there and buy cheap semi-gourmet cheeses or mango chicken sausage while avoiding the slack-jawed insanity of a Trader Joe's parking lot.

The staff was lined up at the front in their Hawaiian shirts, handing out balloons. I entered the large, new building (with wide aisles and big windows) and noticed a huge display of Charles Shaw wine (aka "two-buck Chuck"), arranged to resemble the Getty Museum (with gourmet white chocolate bars set up as an edible Getty Museum monorail). And this was blasting from the store's sound system:


I asked a manager what the music was and he had no idea. "But it's vaguely sad, right?" he said. "And sad makes people buy cheap wine and free-range eggs."

So I wandered through the aisles, where people still acted like idiots and blocked my way (only in this store it was slightly easier to go around them). I guess the music served its purpose: by the time I left the store, they were down to the last dozen free-range eggs, the white chocolate monorail had been ripped from its tracks, and the Two-Buck Chuck Getty Museum looked more like a Two-Buck Chuck tribute to condo projects abandoned halfway through construction after the economy went south.

When I got home, I learned that the music in the store was the Vitamin String Quartet, a "group" that doesn't really exist. Vitamin Records has been using the name (and a shifting group of players) over the past few years to release dozens of albums that reinterpret various rock songs with string quartet instruments.

I was crushed. I hoped the "group" was the brainchild of some half-mad symphonic refugee who'd undergone a musical conversion at a sweaty punk club in some city's seediest section.

Sometimes, the truth is enough to make you lose your religion.


PS: To further disillusion you, there's no guy named "Trader Joe," either. (And the jury's still out on that Santa Claus guy...)

I Never Travel Far Without a Little Big Star

Name-checking basks you in the reflected glow of cool.

There's a certain thrill that goes with discovering that someone shares your musical passion. It's an immediate shortcut that establishes you as members of the same tribe.

And when songs name-check your musical obsessions, isn't that just a shortcut to cool?

They Might Be Giants may just be the kings of name-checking bands I love (the dBs, Young Fresh Fellows, XTC) in their songs. Which brings me to the Replacements.

I was late hearing the Replacements, although I'd been reading rave reviews of their records for years. But what drove me to finally seek out the Replacements was the song "We're the Replacements," by They Might Be Giants (the flip side of their "Don't Let's Start" single). The song celebrated the wretched sloppiness that characterized many live performances by the Replacements. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Early Replacements records were a bit too sloppy for my taste, but when they tightened things up a little, they were amazing. When their album Pleased to Meet Me came out, I thought the song "Alex Chilton" was amazing and I listened to it over and over again. The song -- an ode to Chilton, who sang "The Letter" for the Box Tops when he was only 16 and went on to form Big Star and release a series of idiosyncratic solo albums starting in the 1970s -- is a pure explosion of tribal joy set to a pounding beat (and an evocation of an alternate universe that loves good music enough that "children by the millions wait for Alex Chilton to come 'round"). (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Bonus: Yesterday, I was listening to the great Barenaked Ladies album Gordon, remembering how much I loved the song "Brian Wilson." In my mind, the song revels in Wilson's early genius and scratches its head over his long decline and involvement with Dr. Eugene Landy (the shrink who was accused of crossing ethical boundaries by moving in with Wilson and co-producing a Wilson solo album that included songs that credit Landy as co-writer).


(By the way, I have an astrophysicist friend who assures me that if Alex Chilton and Brian Wilson record a song together about They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies, that would bring about a musical singularity that could cause the entire universe to collapse. Luckily, that seems unlikely to happen.)

Bring on the Dancing Horses

Out of the fog.

It was cold. Colder than it had the right to be. Colder than the promise of August.

Years out of school, I still curse the back-to-school sales. "Not yet. A few weeks more. A few more chances for freedom."

And now at the beach. Absurdly cold. No one in the water.

But it's August. But not the East Coast August with the crowds desperate to get in a few rays of sunshine before Labor Day.

And not the California August where the beach is not so crowded because the weather after Labor Day will be exactly the same (although the post-Labor Day California beach will be strangely deserted).

No, this is much farther north. Where the tide fills sand bars in a huge bay, stretching out to a small island with bushes and brush. But don't get caught there when the tide comes in or you'll be swimming for shore.

And it's cold. How in the world did that happen?

They drive on the beach here. It's like another highway for four-wheel drive monsters and the occasional camper. I watch the gas guzzler speed by and in a moment it's gone.

And then the fog rolls in. Thick and heavy like a vengeful sea god, luring us to our deaths, to its depths. But we stay safely back in the cool sand. Watching. Until our view shrinks down to a few dozen feet.

And then, like something from a Fellini movie, distant horses break through the fog.

Beasts from another time, perhaps from another world.

Several pull a cart that's empty. Perhaps waiting for a Russian count. Or a damned soul being pulled off to a deep-sea hell.

And the horses dance past us. Shimmering. And dancing back through the veil of fog to whatever's waiting on the other side.

The few on the beach look to each other in astonishment. All of us wondering if we really saw them. If they were really here. And if we can somehow get them back.

Bring on the dancing horses. Wherever they may roam. (Link for Gmail subscribers -- with better video than what's embedded below.)