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.

"Planet Earth," or, How I Stopped Fearing Teeny-Tiny Cave Birds and Learned to Love Sir David Attenborough

So do any of you watch Planet Earth?





I do. A lot. Do you watch it when you’re not exactly "down to Planet Earth"? Yeah, I know that’s probably totally passé by now, but whatever. I totally love to do that. Because it’s so stupefying and mystical to me just how machine-like our world is. The bat-shit-eating beetles in a cave in the jungle affect the tides. Anyway, that’s fairly sophomoric thinking. Sorry. But I’m watching this portion right now about these millions of tiny, tiny birds called swifts that live in these deep, dark caves and that build itsy-bitsy nests on the cave walls. Each nest can hold one fat little birdie (they look just like those cartoony-traditional-sailor-jerry sparrow tattoos) and a teeny-tiny, microscopic (okay, not that small) egg. The kicker is this: The nests are made entirely of the hardened saliva of the owner. They look like porcelain. The concentric circles of the nest make it look like something Demi Moore and the ghost of Patrick Swayze (shiver) spun on a wheel just before he revealed his murderer’s identity and that poor son of a bitch got pulled down to hell by a shitload of really scary demons. Or something like that.

Human workers scale the walls on rugged ladders made of vines, a million feet above the floor, collecting the nests to sell as the main ingredient in bird’s nest soup, a commodity which keeps the nests competing with silver in value. The narrator tells us that as soon as a nest is removed, the bird builds a new one, keeping the colony perpetually alive. It all seems so symbiotic and organic and pure.

But what if those birds are pissed? What if they are pissed off as shit? I can only imagine just how goddamned frustrating it would be to have your home stolen every effing day so some businessman can eat some fancy soup that probably just tastes like chicken broth. I just looked this crap up (even I won’t pretend I knew shit about bird’s nest soup until just now), and apparently it’s a delicacy in China because of the gelatinous texture the nest provides once dissolved in hot water. Hot bird-loogie stew. Dude, gross. Who thinks this shit up?

Maybe world peace will never be achieved as long as we think it only has to occur between humans. I’m just saying, what if the birds were allowed to live a life that didn’t include a regular big-bad-wolfing of their homes? Would they spend more time chillin’ in their nests and less time deranged with anger and tortured by desires for revenge that could never be realized by such small and delicate creatures? Would that reduction in wing-flapping alter the course of global warming? Perhaps we’ll never know, because Mr. Businessman needs his gross Tweety-spit Campbell’s.

By the way, what's up with the American version of this? Yes, I was highly skeptical of the American version of my beloved The Office, but it proved to be its own entity with its own characters and stories. But Planet Earth? It's the same friggin' script! Who are these Americans who can't handle listening to a voice unlike their own for more than fifteen seconds? Boo.

The Zapruder Film: or, How I Got Over "Al Capone's Vault" and Learned to Love Geraldo Rivera

So, I do think I'm a little weird in one respect: I'm mildly obsessed with the assassination of President John Kennedy. I'm not crazy weird about it, but I do happen to know a lot about it.

Two weekends ago my lovely wife Sarah participated in, along with her mother, aunt, and cousin, a three-day, 60-mile walk to generate a fairly large chunk of money for the fight against breast cancer. It was pretty danged awesome, and it also happened to take place in and around Dallas, where I had never been. I was kinda stoked. I was finally able to visit the scene of what has seemed to me for a very long time to be the shadiest of all shady shit gone down. There in Dealey Plaza, manning a table of pamphlets, books, photo albums, and DVDs, was Robert Groden, the man who had written the book that first intrigued me and got me into reading about all the gnarly crap surrounding that moment. We chatted for a bit and I bought a DVD of his and he signed a glossy little photo-album book he throws in. In the DVD extras you can watch Groden introduce the first public airing of the Zapruder film on the show Good Night America.

All this to tell you that Geraldo Rivera, March 6 of 1975, was a total badass.



For starters, check out that dude's hair. It reminds me a lot of my buddy Ted Kamp's. Ted's is certainly more luxuriant and full than Geraldo's, but Gerry's is pretty dope. He's also got a pretty sweet stash and a bitchin' suit, and he's very poised. I like poise. Ted Kamp's pretty poised. But I digress. The above photo isn't from the particular episode of Rivera's Good Night America I'm referring to, but it's around the same era and gives you an idea of the badassness Mr. Rivera was exuding at the time. Maybe without the same amount of poise as on March 6 of 1975, but hey.

Now let me be clear: I say "March 6 of 1975" specifically because I don't want to get into Geraldo's politics, or motivation, or controversies. And even though I have always been pretty pumped on things like his ability to take a chair to the face and still tell a skinhead to sit down and shut up, I'm not presently prepared to endorse the man as a great figure of journalism. But if you watch the clip of his show on which he airs the Zapruder film for the first time, you see a young journalist who seems very sensitive to his audience, guests, and the subject matter, and who has no qualms about saying things like "That's the most disturbing thing I've ever seen," and using hip words like "heavy" to describe what's going to be shown. He just looks like someone who would have been extremely cool to rap with at the time. Besides, he hung out with this guy:



Wait, let's try that again without the creepy barnacle lady attached to John's back:



Much better! That reminds me... Am I the only one who thinks Double Fantasy would have been infinitely better had it been Single Fantasy instead? If you don't know what I'm talking about, go buy the album and get back to me after a good listen to the songs by both sides of that terribly unbalanced union of "talent."

But again, I digress.

I remember quite clearly sitting in front of the TV with my entire family for hours waiting for Geraldo to bust into Al Capone's vault. The entirety of my life since that night has been colored on some level by Geraldo's colossal failure. We all grew up believing in the monolithic and enduring buffoonery of a man whom we all thought "got his" in the end when the wall came down to reveal nothing more than an old stop sign and a couple of gin bottles.

But having watched the end of that show again, I've got to give it to him: he owns up and takes it like a man worthy of that warehouse-broom of a mustache. Geraldo, twenty-three years later, has proved to be pretty danged okay in my book. And as the world's most famous Puerto Rican Jew, I think we would all do well to acknowledge him as the inspiration for this guy:


"Hey, Charles Manson, I got a note!" Okay, so maybe I made that inspiration thing up, but you never know.

Man, who remembers Dynamite magazine? I used to order that through the Scholastic book club! Sweet! Thanks, Geraldo, for helping me relive my past. Capone and I are both feeling pretty warm and fuzzy right about now.

Amstel Light

I love it.

I really do love Amstel Light. I find more often than not that when hit in the face with an inordinately large selection of beers, Amstel Light is the go-to beer. Typically my troubles when it comes to ordering beer are a result of not knowing what type of beer I feel like drinking, not what brand.

It's interesting the common visibility level of the typical beer which enjoys a very loyal following. This beer is usually young enough to be considered still a scholarly insider's secret, but high-profile and rakish enough to let everyone know you were in on the scholarly insider's secret. Think Fat Tire. Think about it, frat boy. But I digress.

Amstel Light is a lager brewed in Holland and imported in White Plains, NY, one of those places that seem so romantically bleak and oddly rich in characters, as in Rodney Dangerfield and crew in Easy Money. Men who drink High Life out of the gold cans while driving their plumbing vans to the track and smoking cigarette after cigarette. These are men, men. Again, I digress. Amstel Light tastes great! Light beer or not, this is just one of my favorite beers to taste. It's crisp and refreshing, but not flavorless and thin like some bad Mexican beers or light American beers. It's got just the right amount of fizz and hoppiness. It's a Pilsner, so it's got a good amount of hops for me (it's no TAIX Pale Ale, but I could drink many more Amstels in a sitting than those—the TAIX PA is a pretty engaging experience), but, being Dutch, it's a little sweeter than a German Pils. Speaking of hops, I did try one of those too-good-to-be-this-unknown-and-I'm-gonna-make-sure-everybody-knows-it-beers, Dogfish Head or somesuch. It was mighty good. Very hoppy, as I like them. Something about how the beer is hopped for 90 minutes or so, which I thought was just an unnecessarily dramatic way of labeling your different brews by simple terms like mild, hoppy, the hoppiest! I also read that they use some starter yeast that's 1,000 years old or so. That would be odd. What do I know?

At any rate, I've been to Amsterdam, where they originally brewed this stuff. That town was groovy. Clean as hell, beautiful, interesting. Yeah, they're gonna make a good beer. Bier.

Anyway, it's a good beer. It's no Chimay, but hey, that's another post, right?

I'm eating pickles and drinking a Pilsner right now. It must be the Graff in me.

P.S. Can anyone in the Austin area tell me if I can find Amstel Lager (not Light) anywhere?