Staying Alive, or, Vinnie Barbarino In Leg Warmers

I've made the following statement before, but because I really don't think this sentiment of mine can be adequately driven home by anything less than regular, dedicated haranguing, I'll say it again:

"JOHN TRAVOLTA" is the most badass name anyone, anywhere has ever had the honor of writing on a "Hello, My Name Is" sticker. Yes, I've said this before, yes, I will probably say it again, yes, you may disagree, yes, I find that odd, but the name simply sounds like a black 1976 Corvette with a crimson lightning bolt painted on the hood. Real Badass.

But the Cosmos simply aren't satisfied with John Travolta existing as a real person with a real badass name. The Cosmos take it further, out of reality, out of the confines of Mother Earth and Brother Sky and Father Time and Third Cousin Space-Age Polymer straight to the Schermo D'argento, gifting J.T. with the role of a movie character whose name also happens to sound like pure midnight electric turbocharging.

Tony Manero. 

Believe you me, "Tony Manero" sounds exactly like the name of a man who would strut down the street in a white, three-piece dancin' tux and woo you with his perfect pomp, his flashing eyes, and dynamite smile. Oh, and his moves. What moves! Mr. Manero, hardware store employee, son, brother, lover, friend, had it all. He slinked, he slunk, he pulsed and swayed. He turned the noun "hips" into some other part of speech we pundits of linguistics have yet to define! And he did it all with lungs swelled by cigarette smoke, veins coursing with strong cocktails, and a bellyfull of spaghetti. Man-o-man.

But let us not forget the Tony Manero of five years later... The Tony Manero who danced his way out of the mean streets of Brooklyn and into the emotional war zone of Manhattan... The Tony Manero who had once been carefree, egotistical, living-for-the-glowing-squares-of-colored-discofloor ecstasy and who had learned to care (in all fairness, the old Tony cared about nice old ladies buying paint), left a bit of the ego behind, and began to live for the colorless and oftentimes lonely floor of the Broadway audition stage.

The Tony Manero of Staying Alive.

Look in his eyes. Feel his pain. Feel his longing. Feel his bone structure. It's five years later, the dancing has morphed into something beyond classification, he was Danny Zuko, Vinnie Barbarino (another badass name), and some fake cowboy named Bud in some parallel world, and Tony Manero has emerged a man. A man torn between the woman who loves him and the bitchy, quasi-british chick who gets the lead dance parts, a man who tortures himself in search of the true dancer inside, a man whose goal in life is to impress Red from That 70's Show, who apparently was a dance instructor in another life. Oh, and a cop killer.

But don't let Kurtwood Smith's beautiful face make you forget about the names. The names that were forged by Vulcan in the fires below Mount Etna, pounded out of the metals of ancient mines formed by the cleaving of rock by thunderbolt, hardened in the cold waters of the Atlantic and embraced by Lady Liberty as she welcomed these names to the New World: Manero, Barbarino, Zuko...

TRAVOLTA.

All heralded unto our shores by the angelic choir of these dudes:

DYNAMITE.

Hey, Rocky! In Staying Alive! In a fur cape! Pure TNT!

In Case You Forgot: A Retrospective on the Magic That Was Chris Gaines

Where were you the first time you saw this face?

Chris Gaines' face, that is, not Garth Brooks. Just remember—that is not Garth Brooks! That is Chris Gaines! Australian-born, LA-raised, pooh-poohed-his-family's-dreams-of-him-as-an-Olympic-swimmer-so-he-could-become-a-tortured-rock-star CHRIS EFFING GAINES!!!

Just wanted to be clear on who we're talking about here. 

I was working in a Border's Bookstore in Cerritos, CA, when I was first ensnared by the magical gaze of this powerhouse of a performer, this necromancer of song, this puma of a man.

I was terribly confused. I had no idea what on earth Garth was doing. It took me some time to understand the whole concept. Unfortunately, by the time I understood his plan, it was all over. Chris Gaines had disappeared. All we were left with was a memory and a whiff of perfume.

I wonder what the music sounded like.

Lucky Punk

Box boys in grocery stores are the personal whipping boys of everyone else in the store. New box boys are the personal whipping boys of all the other box boys who have been there longer.

When I was sixteen I took my first job, a box boy at the local Lucky supermarket up the street. My neighbor next door was one of the managers of the place, and I think he must have pulled for me when my application came up. I was excited to have become a working man and jumped into my job full bore, busting ass to push more carts than anyone else, bag groceries more efficiently, safely, and speedily than all the others, and keep the store sparkling clean.

Moron.

What did I get for all my efforts? I wasn't allowed to accept tips, I was the one who was always given the job of cleaning up the broken bottles of gefilte fish and the busted bags of rotten vegetables and butcher offal in the back, and I was, more than once, the butt of a pretty serious practical joke. Sadly, one of those practical jokes led to an ill-conceived and poorly executed rebuttal on my part, which subsequently led to my near death inside a shopping cart, speeding down a loading ramp and into a crowded parking lot.

That's all I have to say about that.

The Happen-Ins, or, The Best Damned Band in Town

Earlier today I found myself sitting in the filth and mire of the kind of disappointment that can only be brought on by one thing... Finding out that you were mistaken when you thought your favorite band in town was playing the next night.

It had been four days (count 'em!) since I last saw the Happen-Ins tear the stage apart at Emo's, and yes, I was already jonesin' for the greazy, slithering, and sometimes very pretty songs being pumped out by these four extremely talented cats.

Why? Simply put: THE HAPPEN-INS ARE THE BEST DAMNED BAND I'VE SEEN IN THIS TOWN.

Seriously, these guys rule. Apart from the groovy, perfectly pocketed bass lines (John Michael Schoepf  is like a Slinky wrapped in vintage furs, dipped in motor oil, and plugged right into the back side of a Victrola; all groove and no filler), the trash-canny, Charlie Wattsy, spot-on timing of Falcon Valdez's drumming, the intricate and finely balanced vocal and instrumental interplay between guitar guys Ricky Ray Jackson and Sean Faires (whose frenetic playing sounds like lost Stones or Faces tracks), there are the songs.

Oh, the songs! It's been a long time since I've found a band that plays an entire set of songs that I love. I won't waste a lot of digital ink here detailing the minutia of each one... I will leave it up to you to get off your ass, come see these guys, and learn to love the songs (writing duties are shared by Faires and Jackson) on your own. But I promise you, if you have anything in you that needs to shake, needs to shimmie, needs to drink, or needs to... well, you know... these songs will get inside you, rattle your bones, and boil your blood.

Honestly, when was the last time you heard a singer tell you to "go on and do it," and you really felt compelled to go on and do it, whatever "it" may be?

The eponymous album hits the shelves of Waterloo Records, 6th and Lamar, tomorrow, March 4, 2010. They'll be throwin' down at the Scoot Inn, 1308 East 4th Street, on March 12th to release the record on wax, and I'll be picking one up, just to see how killer they sound scratched over "Paul's Boutique." Maybe I'll pick up two copies. I'm pretty terrible at scratching.  

The Feeling

Recently, the heaviest stuff in the world to me has come from the unmatchable talents of Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. I won't go into length on the obvious connections between these three artists, rather, I would like to pinpoint a few of the things that actually do run common through them on a musical level. I know there are many more factors that go into making these three acts as badass as they are, but I'm just gonna have to go with they all had great production, they all had wonderful voices, and they all had incredible bands. Three songs recorded by Franklin, Ross, and Knight that just feel so right to me are, respectively, "I Ain't Never Loved a Man the way that I Love You," "Someday We'll Be Together," and "Midnight Train to Georgia."


Lately, "Midnight Train..." has really been talking to me. Maybe it's the perfect melding of driving rhythm and laid-back, smoky room contemplation of bygone (or impending) sadness. If you've ever sat in the upper room (sans communion or tongues of flame) at Spaceland in LA, you may know the feeling I'm referring to. Perhaps it's knowing that the subject of the song realized that it wasn't going to happen (dreams don't always come true... uh-uh, no, uh-uh...), and the awful reality of that stings just long enough before the wonderful truth of his lady's unconditional love usurps the pain of those sun-shriveled raisins of deferred dreams. Maybe I just love it because it was on a tape my Dad bought for me at a gas station right before a trip when I was eleven.

It's gotta be that voice. Just like the other aforementioned goddesses of soul, Knight's voice just makes me feel so good. I could go on and on with adjectives and comparisons and metaphors, but if you've ever really listened, you know the only way to truly describe what happens when you hear that voice, or those voices, is that it just makes you feel so damned good.

In the end, it doesn't matter what it is about the song that makes me feel it so deeply. Feeling it so deeply is what matters. I hope you know the feeling.

So maybe I strayed a bit from my intention of detaining for you what these three acts share. I'm okay with that. Once again, I was derailed by The Feeling.

Mark Kurlansky, or How I Stopped Reading and Learned to Soak In It.

If you know the name Mark Kurlansky, kudos to you. If you've even read his books, please take a moment to high-five your screen.


Ever been completely engrossed in a book that was totally devoted to the history of one breed of fish? I have.

 

I can't recommend this book enough. It's been about a year since I last read it, but I liked it so much I'm constantly talking about it to friends, who, I'm sure, think I'm a moron for getting all pumped up on Gorton's Fisherman. At any rate, my enjoyment of this work truly speaks to the talent of Kurlansky, who has the wondrous ability to take the histories of seemingly mundane subjects and create page-turners out of them. Passages like the following somehow put me on the edge of my seat:

  

The Basques were getting richer every Friday. But where was all this cod coming from? The Basques, who had never even said where they came from, kept their secret.

Kurlansky has my head filled with images when I read something like that. Dark men in dark clothes in dark boats, nurturing a secret commerce and winking to each other when their less-than-successful market-stall neighbors grumbled about the Basques' mysterious source of product. The last fish to truly stoke my imagination in this manner was this guy:

Although I was surprised by many of the things I learned about cod, I was not at all surprised by the fact that there was so much to learn. Kurlansky had done a fine job of prepping me for that by writing this book, which I had read prior to reading Cod:

 

Yep, you guessed it. It's about salt. And it's one hell of a story. Kurlansky, through the tale of the only rock we eat, even turned me on to the language and poetry of the Basque people (who factor in largely to this fish story) to the extent that I had a poem by Basque poet Gabriel Aresti tattooed on me, and my wife and I have plans to have another of his poems done together. There's blood and ink and pain and love all bound together in those little white crystals. 

Next on the Kurlansky list? 

 

If he can turn a fish and some flavor into two of my favorite reads, I can't wait to see what he does with this.

Read Kurlansky, and I promise you, you'll never look at this little guy the same...

Mad ups to my old buddy Jeff Zielinsky for giving Salt to me for my birthday several years ago. Thanks Crazy JZ!

The Bee Gees, or: How I Stopped Worrying About Life and Learned to Love Disco

Monsters of Folk? Seriously? You guys are monsters of nothing but putting me to sleep. So, I guess, now that I think about it, the name works.

Jimi Hendrix was a monster guitar player. So was Stevie Ray Vaughn and so is Slash. Ginger Baker is a monster drummer. So was Keith Moon. AC/DC is a monster rock band. Kool and the Gang was a monster funk band.

And the BeeGees were the Monsters of Disco. Man, those dudes were out of their heads with weird ideas and talents. And check out those smiles:


Dynamite.

"Nights on Broadway" is my fave, and "Stayin' Alive" is simply one of the best-sounding songs of all time! It's so freakin' tight and slinky and sexy. You can just see Travolta in that suit and that dumb-ass grin on his face STRUTTING down the street.

Seriously, I love the Bee Gees. Even the weird early folkie-Ren-faire stuff like "I Started a Joke" and "Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You" is killer, but songs like "Jive Talkin'," "More Than a Woman," "Stayin' Alive," and "Night Fever"... Dude. So good. So hot.

The Friggin' Bee Gees, man.