Don't Bother to Wrap It; I'll Eat it Here

A Halloween Gift For You.

There's an often-repeated story about New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams that he would periodically lose his mind and have to be institutionalized. Luckily (according to the story), there was a sign that he was about to go down the rabbit hole: he would draw a cartoon showing a ghoul in a maternity ward talking to the nurse wrapping his new offspring in swaddling clothes. The caption? "Don't bother to wrap it; I'll eat it here."

And whenever Addams would turn in this cartoon, the higher-ups at the New Yorker would phone Bellevue and have him taken away until he was sane enough to continue his regular life.

I love this story. Now there's no evidence that it's true (the cartoon in question doesn't exist, which would be odd if Addams redrew it many times) and Addams himself is just perverse enough to have come up with this story himself (in any event, he delighted when people retold it).


This makes me love the story even more.

And, ultimately isn't that what Halloween is all about? A chance to move between worlds -- shifting phase between fantasy and reality, between earthly and unearthly, between the dead and the undead?

So... as a token of the season, Amy Engelhardt (aka Mrs. Clicks and Pops) has a Halloween gift for you: Head over to her MySpace page for a free download of "Are You Dead or Are You Undead" from her album Not Gonna Be Pretty.

Listen to This, Go Here, Read That

What Got My Attention This Week...

It used to mean something when a record made the charts. These days? Not so much.
NPR's "On the Media" explains the charts -- then and now.



Holly Hughes over at The Song in My Head Today tackles Eighties Cheese all week, but has particularly great posts on Modern English and Bonnie Tyler. (But shouldn't that type of cheese be spelled "cheez"?)

Marcello Carlin over at Then Play Long has been reviewing every British Number 1 album from 1956 on. He's up to December 1968 and The Beatles (aka The White Album, which gets the usual comprehensive treatment.

Peter over at Peter's Power Pop celebrates the most unique (and perhaps embarassing) song in David Bowie's oevre.

Jim Bartlett over on the WNEW.com blog has the definitive look at "The Monster Mash." Jim also blogs at The Hits Keep Coming -- which is always a good read. (By the way, you can hear "The Monster Mash" here, among other places.)


And, to stretch the Halloween theme a bit, dreams can always be a little spooky. Connie over at W. Va. Fur and Root has had a recurring dream for years -- pop over there and help her interpret it!

With My Partner in Crime

She is looking at me as if I'm something she owns.

She always knew what she wanted -- to become a psychologist.

But she had little interest in people or what made them tick.

No, she wanted to study apes. Chimps, orangutans, miscellaneous monkeys. She wanted to study them and understand how they thought.

She had no patience for human foibles and was constantly confused by the pettiness and meanness of the people she knew.

She worshipped Jane Goodall and imagined a life of deep meditation in the jungles. (Which, I'm pretty sure, would look a lot like this.)

She was one of the skinniest people I'd ever met and every woman I'd ever met thought she was unspeakably gorgeous.

Her interest in apes was a secret and I was one of the few people who knew. This made me feel great. I had secrets too, but I didn't share them with her. I don't know how this made her feel.

Then she spent a semester overseas. In the jungle. Living with the great apes. And came back a changed woman.

"They made music," she told me. But the music wasn't the beautiful sound she'd imagined; it was discordant, violent, and terrifying.

The changes in her were immediate. Her smug seriousness and certainty vanished, replaced by a lightness. She suddenly developed a sense of humor and the absurdities of daily life amused her instead of depressing her.

And she started listening to music. And dancing.

She gained a little weight, started going to bars, and became interested in people. Even when they were mean. Or petty. Or terrifying. Or making music.

Then she got a boyfriend (not me). And another one (also not me). And a third, whom she completely loved (again not me). She told them her secrets (not me) and by the time I was ready to tell her my secrets she was long gone.

And, yeah, she eventually did become a psychologist -- but she specializes in people, not apes. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)

The Scary Song and the Creepy Coincidence

"I've never gone up in a tower and shot people, but I know what it's like to be scared and angry."
-- Harry Chapin

I had nearly constant insomnia growing up and would frequently listen to the radio in the middle of the night.

Sometimes it was Larry King's old radio show, a rambling, middle-of-the-night combination of interesting interviews, conspiracy theories, and the rantings of weirdos up after 3 am.

But one night, I got tired of hearing yet another Frank Sinatra story from Larry King, I tuned to one of the many college radio stations in the area.

And there I heard something amazing: a nearly ten-minute folky song that took you inside the mind of someone who climbed a clock tower with a rifle and started shooting at passing college students. It was riveting and terrifying all at the same time. And I had no idea what the song was or who sang it.

These days, you'd just go to the radio station website and find out (or google some line from the lyrics), but this was much earlier. I thought of going out to the phone, calling the radio station and asking the DJ, but I knew that would have woken my entire family (who definitely wouldn't have understood why I needed to know this particular piece of information at 3:25 am).

None of my music savvy friends knew what song I was talking about (although several people suggested I must be talking about "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats, which was a shorter, poppier, and less scary approach to similar material).

Years later, someone told me it was a Harry Chapin song and I couldn't believe the guy who sang "Taxi" or "Cat's in the Cradle" would have a song this dark and twisted. But I had no idea what the song might be called... so I started buying up Harry Chapin albums at my local used record stores. Most of his albums were uneven -- a few great songs with some interesting experiments and some songs that seemed half-finished. (His live albums, on the other hand, were exuberant, and amazing.) So my collection of Harry Chapin records grew, but I couldn't find that song.

And after a while, I began to wonder if I'd misremembered the song -- maybe someone else sang it or maybe I'd dreamed the whole thing. Surely something that dangerous and weird, filled with bad moods, ill intent, and a heady portion of madness didn't come from the "Taxi" guy.

Then, one summer, while looking for a used Elvis Costello record, I found a Harry Chapin album called Sniper and Other Love Songs. Surely this had to be it. I plunked down my $1.25 ($1.31 with tax, I think), brought it home, and immediately confirmed that the song "Sniper" was the scary song from the middle of the night.

Between when I heard the song on the radio and when I bought the album, I'd learned that Chapin started out as a documentary filmmaker before he became a full-time singer/songwriter, that he wrote a Broadway musical called The Night That Made America Famous which closed after six weeks but was nominated for two Tony Awards, that he toured constantly, performing in 150-200 benefits per year (mostly for an organization he founded to fight world hunger). His songs were a mixed bag -- the best were brilliant slices of life, but some of them seemed lazy and badly in need of editing and polishing. Critics mostly hated him (Rolling Stone eviscerated Sniper and Other Love Songs, starting by saying "No singer/songwriter, not even Rod McKuen, apotheosizes romantic self-pity with such shameless vulgarity," and going on from there).

So that night, I listened to the song "Sniper" three or four times on bulky red headphones that made the clicks and pops on the record sound like they were hard-wired in my brain. Later, Larry King told a story about growing up in Brooklyn and I fell into a fitful sleep.

The next day, Harry Chapin got into a fight with his wife, drove off to perform at a benefit concert, got into an accident on the Long Island Expressway, and died at the age of 38. I knew it was just a coincidence. But it was a creepy coincidence, so I put the record away and didn't listen to it for more than 25 years.

Then, this morning, YouTube said right now someone was watching this video and I knew I had to watch it, too:


RIP, Harry.

For more on this song, click here.

This Post is Just Six Words Long

By all accounts, George Harrison was done by the mid-80s.

It must be hell to be a great songwriter in a band with two of the best songwriters in history. No matter what, you have to fight to get your one or two songs per record. And after years and years, you finally get the A-side of a single, but most people dismiss you and your spirituality and obsession with Indian music.

After nearly ten years of this, George Harrison had accumulated a huge backlog of songs that never made it onto Beatle albums. So when the Beatles broke up, Harrison decided to put them all out, releasing the triple-record masterpiece All Things Must Pass. And for the next few years, Harrison's albums were enjoyable and each had one or two great songs. But by the early 80s (and the horrible Gone Troppo), Harrison was considered done, washed-up, and ready for the golden-oldies tours of State Fairs. (And he seemed to have moved on as well, establishing Handmade Films to fund Monty Python's Life of Brian, then parlaying that movies success into a string of profitable small movies including The Missionary, Mona Lisa, Withnail and I, and a handful of Python-related movies.

No one expected Cloud Nine, a strong Jeff Lynne-produced album with songs about right-wing religious radio, John Lennon, and a cheery remake of the old gospel song "Got My Mind Set on You."

And no one expected George, the "quiet one," to be so cheerful and funny. He even smiled. Plus, because MTV still played videos back then, Harrison made not one, but two videos for "Got My Mind Set on You." The first one, a pedestrian video featuring teenagers flirting in an arcade (with Harrison playing with a band in what looked like the cog-filled inside of a watch), wasn't bad (but was very safe and traditional).


But the second one was the amazing one. The one where the clock, swords, book, and every other inaminate object and small animals dance along. The one with the stunt double doing the back flip and dancing like the hell-spawn of Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson.


Best of all, Harrison is in great vocal form here. The single went to number one in January 1988 (when it still meant something to have a number one single). And if it didn't usher in a new era of musical world domination, it freed Harrison to have more fun, led directly to the Traveling Wilbury's, and provided Weird Al Yankovic with what may be his most insightful relyric ever.

It also was one of the first four albums I ever owned on CD.

(Word count approximate.)

Top Five Psychedelic Rock Songs

As my cat would say: did you ever really look at your paw?

When I was growing up, just before corporations bought up every last radio station on earth and programmed it to within an inch of its life, I used to listen to a DJ named Peter Cole on a station out of Hartford.

Every Friday afternoon, he'd play a long set of psychedelic rock (even though that type of music was never heard on the radio station at any other time). I wanted to be Peter Cole when I grew up.

But instead, decades later, I'll settle for a semi-random Top 5 that were regularly featured in those Friday afternoon sets:

5. Count Five -- Psychotic Reaction


4. The Amboy Dukes (with Ted Nugent) -- Journey to the Center of Your Mind


3. Small Faces -- Itchykoo Park


2. Strawberry Alarm Clock -- Incense and Peppermints


and number 1: The Electric Prunes -- I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)
Later covered by Stiv Bators in his brief punky power pop period (which unfortuntely came right before his long dead period).


Feel free to argue and suggest alternatives.

Dress Cool

Like your life depended on it.

When I was in college, all my friends worshipped David Letterman. He was quick, he was funny, he was snarky before anyone knew the word snarky.

As for me, I was fascinated by the band: Sure, Paul Schaffer was cool, but the band (dubbed "the World's Most Dangerous Band") were all at least as cool: Hiram Bullock (who played guitar barefoot), Steve Jordan (who'd go on to form the X-Pensive Winos for Keith Richards and bring a sense of pop structure to Richards' two solo albums from the late 80s and early 90s), Will Lee (who probably could slay dragons with his bass if he put his mind to it), Jordan's replacement Anton Fig (who looked like a community college professor who was secretly a superhero), and Bullock's replacement Sid McGuinnis looked like the guy your parents would love (who'd somehow always wind up knocking up your sister).

I should've been in that band -- and if it weren't for my complete lack of musical talent, I probably would've been.

In any case, I got this great job in the 1990s which (at the time) I thought was the best job anyone in the world could ever get.

A coworker from the job I was leaving gave me a piece of advice: the best way to stand out in your new job is to dress like no one else. You can completely redefine your identity with some new clothes. She suggested I start wearing Zoot Suits, then everyone would remember me as the Zoot Suit Guy.

But I didn't want to be the Zoot Suit Guy. Thinking about what I wanted to be in this new job, I kept flashing back to something I'd seen exactly once on Late Night with David Letterman. Because what I really wanted was to dress like one of these guys:


(In a more just world, this song would've topped the charts or at least gotten some decent radio play. I saw a copy of the record once for 75 cents in a used record store in Los Angeles, but didn't buy it. When I came back for it the next week, it was gone.)

Oddly enough, this was right after HBO had made the movie version of The Late Shift and I went to a wardrobe sale where they were unloading a lot of the clothes from that movie. I never quite got to be the Zoot Suit Guy, but I did wear a suit that "David Letterman" wore in the movie.

Years later, I realize I've fallen into my own style of dress, a timeless anti-fashion statement unconcerned with the latest trends (or with ironing). But every once in a while, I still put on "Letterman's" suit.

And I still look really cool in it.