Shake Some Action Psychotic Reaction No Satisfaction Sky Pilot Sky Saxon

She might have deceived my friends...

It was no longer summer. The hot rains of August were long gone as the nights turned colder.

I was still in Providence. And she was still in Providence. But we might have been living thousands of miles away from each other.

And the rain was pouring down. Cold rain that got into your bones and made you long for a roaring fire. Or a bottle of whiskey.

But there was no fire. And no whiskey.

Just the rain.

And a song came on the radio. A song we both had loved. Staring into the night, watching streetlights prism the raindrops, I remembered.

And wished I could forget.


All I could do was turn off the radio.

I couldn't even leave. Not for another five months. And she'd stay there for the next two years (possibly just to spite me although I'm sure she'd tell you different).

Every step on every street was filled with memories. And every memory involved her.

A thousand dreams of her -- both happy dreams and nightmares. And what's worse, the happy dreams that seemed nightmarish when I woke up and she was gone.

Until...

... that night. With the cold rain.

When the phone rang. And like an idiot, I picked up.

Against all odds it was her.

I shouldn't have talked to her. I should have done anything else... I should've fought the dinosaurs in this video.

But...

I didn't.

Hoodoo Gurus - I Want You Back

I Could Spend My Life with a Factory Girl 'Cause A Factory Girl's My Type....

There ain't nothing made here in this country anymore...

Debbie's father owned a factory. She hated that he owned the factory, but loved sneaking in there on holidays and weekends.

"It smelled amazing," she said. "Vague chemicals and sawdust."

They made furniture. With machines, but also with a fair amount of hand craftsmanship. Smooth, polished, beautiful pieces of wood that would last several generations.

I didn't appreciate the furniture back then. Hell, I thought a futon with a frame was the height of luxury.

And Debbie fancied herself a hippie chick. Fringe jackets, long hair, and a thrift-store wardrobe.

And, like most of my friends, she loved obscure music. But she had a specialty that was weird even by the standards set by my friends. She collected solo albums by people from famous bands. So she'd never buy a Faces album, but she had everything Ronnie Lane released. She wouldn't buy a Rolling Stones album, but she had all the Ron Wood records. And she loved the Who, but she only owned the solo albums by Pete Townsend, Roger Daltry, and especially John Entwistle.

She took perverse pleasure in the fact that many of these records were inconsistent (and sometimes not good at all). "The good stuff is always there," she'd say. "When I'm ready, I'll go back and get it."

The day after she turned 19, her dad told her he was closing the factory. It was cheaper to build the furniture in South America and ship it back to the U.S. He kept the company for another 5 years, then sold it to a large company. The South American furniture was better than what you'd get from Ikea, but it wasn't smooth and polished. And it wouldn't last for generations.

The factory closed. The windows were all broken within a few years. The walls sagged and the building was eventually torn down. A Wal-Mart would later be built on the spot, but it wouldn't sell the furniture from South America. By that time, everything Wal-Mart sold came from China.

And Debbie? She went home for the summer the year after the factory closed. And she gave away all the solo albums. "I decided I really want the good stuff," she told me.

But she saved one record: Rigor Mortis Sets in by John Entwistle.

"To remind you of the factory closing?" I asked.

"No. Because the record has a fold-out sleeve. Which comes in handy whenever I roll a joint."

I did mention that Debbie thought of herself as a hippie chick, didn't I? (Link for Gmail subscribers.)

No Future?

Bam!

Apparently, Woxy.com, the former 97X, has stopped broadcasting.

And I'm not feeling so great myself.


The former Cincinnati rock station, which billed itself as "the future of rock and roll," survived the end of its over-the-air broadcast, reinvented itself as one of the few viable internet radio stations, went bust, was rescued by LaLa.com, was sold, moved to Austin, and now apparently went bust again.

Barely Awake in Frog Pajamas has more...

The Conversation About Tone Poems

Skateboards? I almost made them respectable.



"I've been reading it," she said. "And I like it."

Great.

"But. I don't understand."

There's not much to understand. It is what it is.

"Yeah. But what is it?"

Well...

I think of it as a series of tone poems.

"But it's not. I don't think you even know what a tone poem is."

Sure I do. It's a short piece of prose designed to evoke a certain feeling or emotion.

"No. A tone poem is a single-movement symphony that tells the story of a poem or painting. That thing you're talking about? It doesn't even exist."

Oh.

Well that's how I think of it.

And that's what 'tone poem' should mean.

"This is your problem," she said. "It's always been your problem."

And I stared at her, wondering why she became so rigid and so literal. I knew then what I'd never known before -- how lucky I was that we didn't wind up together. And I couldn't get this song (a perfect modern tone poem as far as I'm concerned) out of my head:


And she shook her head sadly and said "When are you going to learn that you can't just make shit up?"

Not yet.

Not just yet.

It's Propeller Time...

Peter Gabriel, eat your heart out.

Remember when you were a kid and every inanimate object was a toy. You'd invent stories about the salt shaker having a blood feud with the candlestick and various utensils would root for their favorites.

Robyn Hitchcock does.



Times like these make me wish MTV still played videos. This one would be in heavy rotation for sure.

The Lost Bubblegum Album

And they said "We Don't Understand."

Just before XTC went on strike against Virgin records, Andy Partridge pitched an off-kilter wild idea. XTC would record an album that would be marketed (with a nudge and a wink) as a collection of hit bubblegum songs from the late 60s and early 70s. Virgin would announce that they'd acquired the rights to the imaginary label Zither and release an album of Zither's hits from bands with names like The Lemon Dukes, Sopwith Caramel, The Twelve Flavours of Hercules, Anonymous Bosch, The Brighton Peers, The Lollipopes, Cake's Progress, The Piccadilly Circus Tent Rip Repair Company, etc. All these "bands" would really be XTC and XTC fans would recognize this (in the same way they recognized the Dukes of Stratosphear as XTC).

The songs were all classic bubblegum numbers -- sweet and seemingly innocent but filled with double entendres that would rank them among the filthiest songs ever recorded.

Partridge and Colin Moulding even had demos for a dozen or so of the bubblegum songs. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Virgin didn't get it. They wanted XTC on Top of the Pops. Failing that, they wanted to hire young bands to dress up in period costumes and perform the songs on TV.

A couple of these songs leaked out on compilations over the years and more surfaced on Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles demo series.

It could've, should've, would've been amazing. In an alternate universe, it would have knocked Nirvana and all the grunge bands off the radio and out of the stores. We might even have been spared the boy-band craze of the mid-90s and American Idol.


But then again, Virgin never knew what to do with XTC (and XTC didn't have the desire or clout to do anything to resolve their situation with Virgin).

So the album remains lost, unfinished... and legendary.

RIP Alex Chilton

Shit.

Alex Chilton, who had a worldwide number-one hit at the age of 16 singing "The Letter" with the Box Tops, died yesterday of an apparent heart attack. He was 59.


After the Box Tops split up, Chilton and Chris Bell formed Big Star, a band cursed with being infinitely influential and unappreciated.


When Big Star broke up, Chilton moved to New York, where he dabbled in punk and played with Chris Stamey (from the dBs) and Richard Lloyd (from Television). His solo career never quite took off and he never achieved the commercial success of the Box Tops (or the influence of Big Star). But he did inspire my favorite song by the Replacements.


I'm sorry I never got a chance to see him live... or tell him how much his music meant to me.

"Children by the millions wait for Alex Chilton to come around..."