Hey, Check Out This Song!

by Jacob Sunderlin

I love winter because winter is a free pass to sleep and read another book about serial killers and listen to Miles Davis and (almost) lose my shit. Seasonal affective disorder is some kind of conspiracy (Illuminati). Winter makes me feel like some kind of psychic spelunker. It’s great. Like that John Prine song I tried to stare my bowl of oatmeal down, and won. It’s maybe not the healthiest thing, but only if you count misanthropy and eating lots of soup as unhealthy things. When it’s nice outside, I feel like a guilty scumbag. Like I should be doing something important. When it’s shitty, it’s a great excuse to drink a bunch of...coffee...and listen to the Bitches Brew bootlegs.

One winter during college I worked in this coffee shop kitchen that I had to open at 5:30 in the morning. I lived twenty minutes away, and this was Indianapolis, so I was slamming the alarm at 4:55 every morning and jumping straight into my gnarly work shirt that smelled like onions and pancake batter and driving to work with a bunch of Christians in a town called Zionsville. Zionsville is like whatever the opposite of a hippie town is, ironically. Everyone was stressed out and lived in giant houses and watched a lot of reality television.

When my shift slinging breakfast burritos ended, the sun would be up and I would scrape the ice off my car for the second time that morning, smoke a couple cigarettes, and drive to 20^th Century French Philosophy where we talked about deconstruction. One morning, the girl next to me said, “This room always smells weird, like a restaurant bathroom.” I made a concerned face and shrugged. “Huh,” I said. And when THAT bullshit was over, I went to my other job tutoring people at the Writing Center on campus. “Tutoring” means that booze-sweating frat boys would come to me and complain about how their “bitch of an English teacher” gave their racist paper about immigration a C- and I was supposed to help them fix it.

Anyway, this was the time in my life that I got super-heavy into electric-era Miles Davis. On the Corner is the only record that made any sense for me to listen to while driving down W. 10^th St. toward the trailer parks in the Speedway neighborhood of Indianapolis where my apartment was. It’s all frog-leg chicken shacks and burnt-out gas stations. This era of Miles, from the complete session boxes of Tribute to Jack Johnson, Bitches Brew, and On the Corner, is like battery acid jazz. It goes hard and stays raunchy. It’s all right there in the exchange at the beginning of “Corrado”—an unreleased jam from the Bitches sessions—when the engineer interrupts the song to ask what they’re playing: “This is gonna be part nine—what difference does it make, motherfucker?” Miles spits back, with his couch syrup voice.

Forget Stagger Lee and that dude from Braveheart—Miles Davis is the baddest dude to ever walk the face of the earth. I’ve heard one story about him kidnapping a drummer during one of the Jack Johnson sessions and driving him around in his Ferrari, going ninety everywhere, with Axis: Bold as Love by Hendrix turned up to eleven on the speakers. Drummer shouts, “So...you want me to play more like that?” Miles turns and stares at him through his alien caterpillar shades, and says nothing.

And that’s what you hear when you listen to these tracks. Miles plays and arranges like the kind of dude who, given the choice between “getting to know someone” and “not” would choose “not” ninety-eight percent of the time, and would tell you to your face, unless you either knew how to blow or had some.

Lester Bangs calls On the Corner a record of place—that the inhuman-sounding squerks and bloops that tweak in and out of the channels, that disappear only to return eight or nine minutes later, are like characters you’d see after getting blasted and walking around a shitty neighborhood in search of a cheap bar. It’s Taxi Driver jazz. It’s half-repulsive, it’s nauseated, it’s human.

Still unconvinced? Consider this: Of the tasty slab I’ve presented below, four of the six jams were unreleased until Columbia decided to do some archival box-set exploitation in the last ten years. That means that Miles organized a band, went into the studio, arranged the music (most of which were little more than a half-scribbled theme or some triad clusters written on the back of a paper bag), then plays his horn like he’s trying to blast off the face of the planet and kick Shiva in the scrote, listened back to the rough mix and said, “Eh.”

AND THEN IT WENT INTO THE GARBAGE FOR THIRTY YEARS.

And it’s the best stuff I’ve ever heard. Desert island go...

Episode #34: More Hits From The Prohibition Era. Enjoy.

Track listing:
1) Bob Wills – Rosetta
2) Cannon’s Jug Stompers – Last Chance Blues
3) Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five – Save It, Pretty Mama
4) The Hokum Boys – Hokum Blues
5) Johnson/Nelson/Porkchop – G. Burns Is Gonna Rise Again
6) The Virginia Rounders – I Like Bananas (Because They Have No Bone)
7) Memphis Jug Band – You Got Me Rollin
8) Robert Wilkins – That’s No Way To Get Along
9) Sleepy John Estes – Government Money
10) Norridge Mayhams & His Blue Chips – Nobody’s Darling But Mine
11) Derwood Brown & His Musical Brownies – Louise, Louise Blues
12) The Prairie Ramblers – Never Say Never Again
13) Sol Hoopii – Alekoki
14) Django Reinhardt – Blues Chair
15) Johnny Dodds’ Black Bottom Stompers – Melencholy
16) Eddie Lang & Joe Venuti – Pink Elephants
17) Norman Phelps – On A Road That Winds Down To The Sea

Play Here!!!
https://heycheckoutthissong.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/34a.mp3

Go to iTunes and search – Hey Check Out This Song!, for this show and all other programs we’ve done.

by Jacob Sunderlin

Turns out the number one google search that results in people clicking on this site is “Kama Sutra Indiana.”

WHAT UP.

No long preamble here, I’ve just got some head-splitters to share: https://heycheckoutthissong.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/split-your-head.m4a

Collected some songs after thinking about two recent conversations: one with Joshua Diamond about patience and the music that tests yours (we were talking about the new Swans record The Seer, which is both dope and really long) and one with Jimmy Frezza (of TV GHOST) about the Canadian band Women.

So, here are some tasty freakout jams. Feed them into your ears.

PLAYLIST

1. Chemirocha–Unknown Kenyan folk musician

2. Raga Called Pat Pt. IV–John Fahey

3. Sun Ray Harvester–Jackie O-Motherfucker

4. Luxury Travel–Oneida

5. Lawncare–Women

6. Ossezaaddans–Sylvester Anfang II

7. An Absurd Laceration–TV Ghost

8. Solar Anus–Skullflower

9. Inner Circle–The Cosmic Dead

10. The Manifestation–Six Organs of Admittance

11. Feedback/And We Bid You Good Night–Grateful Dead

by Jacob Sunderlin

There are blue whale-sized portions of America that seem to have no people in them at all. Whole tracts of North Dakota, Idaho, Ohio, Pennsylvania go like this: highway, sky, expanse, fence, Dairy Queen, expanse, shrubbery, deer, deer, cow, expanse, sky, fence, dead skunk, for hundreds upon hundreds of acres in any direction. It’s quite lovely with the right company and soundtrack.

I drove through some of these places recently on my way to the Wawawai Canyon, near the Snake River, to live with my ladyfriend Rosalie’s family and sleep in their winery–working days pruning grape vines and training tomatoes and cutting down thistles the size of a person, and slingin’ baked goods and greens at the farmers market in Moscow, ID, and getting bitten by some kind of spider and having my leg turn purple and green, and doing innumerable other farm-related things and eating the best vegetables of my life.

Then, just recently, I went the other way to Provincetown, Massachusetts for a writing fellowship I was lucky enough to nab at the Fine Arts Work Center. Not quite coast-to-coast, but close. Now, I’m staring down the barrel of some serious solitude, which is the theme of this particular group of songs, and the theme of some recent Dust-to-Digital projects I’ve been meaning to give some lip service: the Steve Roden-curated music/book project ...i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces, the wonderful archival document Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM and Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You: The Fonotone Years 1958-1965, a five-disc collection of John Fahey’s rarest and rawest material, recorded in Joe Bussard’s basement.

To get this out of the way quickly: if you’re interested in any of these, listen to the wind is the one to drop coin on, if there are any left. It’s fucking great. More on it to come. But to say that isn’t to talk the others—there’s fantastic stuff on both—but OP has some pretty sonically-challenging North African vocal/bowed string recordings (driving around southern Indiana, I popped in the first disc and my friend James skunked up, turned it off, and said “Have fun with that one by yourself...”) and the Fahey set is most definitely “for the diehards” (Read: disc two features Fahey playing 12-string, blasted off his gourd, and singing (!) made-up blues of varying degrees of insensitivity, like “I’m goin’ down to her seashore / Get me some craaaaaaaabs...”).

Having just shit-talked the others like I said I wouldn’t (Seriously–check them out, and have a listen, because they deserve more than I’m giving them here), I have to say that these complaints are ONLY a product of these projects comprehensive spirit, and the transcendental moments of greatness included here—The Kiko Kids paean to their record company “Tom-Tom,” Josaye Hedebe’s revelatory vocal trills on “Yina Wena Funa” and Fahey’s earliest-recorded fumblings through “In Christ There is No East or West”—are tracks that give me nothing less than hope for humanity.

Which is what permeates the whole of Steve Roden’s awe-inspiring listen to the wind. It is—put simply, two CD’s worth of music transferred from his collection of 78 RPM records, and a bunch of old photographs of people holding instruments—but the project moves with an emotional impact usually reserved for great poetry. Partially, of course, this requires you to be the sort of person, like Roden, for whom the idea of an analog audio recording of someone walking across ice in 1936 is irresistible (this is included). If you are, there’s more untamed control in Roden’s presentation of photographs and music, its crashing together of prose and image, more sense of style and subtlety than in most contemporary verse Wave Books puts out in a year.

Roden salts the book with quotations throughout, and one from James Agee highlights what’s so great about this book:

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of B...

by Jacob Sunderlin

When Ryan Puetz’s CD book got stolen from his truck the summer we were driving from the celery bog to Otterbein every morning to work with his cousin laying brick, we only had what was in the stereo: Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which is a record about outer space by some European guy. Every day for the next three months we listened to that album from start to finish. Try and imagine that for a second—two hungover teenagers tearassing to work in a shit-hot Indiana cornfield listening to a dude in makeup singing “Five years / My brain hurts a lot! / Five years / That’s all we’ve got!” and you’ll have some idea of where Tigerfox is coming from.

I could tell you lots of stories about Ryan Puetz. Full disclosure: I think his new band Tigerfox, and their record No More Style, is great. Sounds like Television on future pills. I don’t know what that means, future pills, but it makes me think of partying in suits. It’s what we’ll eat in the future, instead of food: future pills. Except, instead of “future pills,” we’ll probably just call them “food” anyway, which is stupid.

Anyway.

I haven’t posted recently because I’m getting ready to bounce the Hoosier state for a while, so I’m glad I got the chance to sit down with one of my oldest friends before I did. We played in a band together when we were in high school, called Tokyo Magnum. I think Ryan’s an interesting dude, and you should too. Buy No More Style here: http://tigerfox.bandcamp.com/album/no-more-style

INTERVIEW WITH RYAN PUETZ OF TIGERFOX

JACOB SUNDERLIN: What sounds influenced the Tigerfox songs? I hear some Bowie in there, maybe just because I know you and I know you like David Bowie.

RYAN PUETZ: I love David Bowie. I think the Modern Lovers, too. I’ve been way into Brian Eno, Roxy Music. Drew Davis bought me a Roxy Music record probably two years ago. I’d had the idea for Tigerfox for probably five years but I just couldn’t find the right people. Coincidentally, I think when I sobered up I just thought, “Well, I’m going to do this.” Around that same time, he bought me the first Roxy Music record—he bought me that and Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets—and it just blew my mind. The sounds that came from it and the way it was recorded. It’s really cool synthesizer sounds, tracked beautifully, everything cascading in and out from left to right. It’s just really cool. I didn’t know music could be played like that. That was probably the biggest influence on me.

SUNDERLIN: You say you had an idea for Tigerfox for a while—how would you describe that idea?

PUETZ: Well, I’ve always been a kind of grandiose thinker when it comes to music, because I think that’s the only way you should play music. If you don’t have a big idea about what it is you’re doing, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Otherwise you’re just everybody else.

SUNDERLIN: There are enough hacks.

PUETZ: Yeah, there are enough people with guitars. There are enough coffee shops for everybody to do the same thing. I was drinking a lot at the time, too, and it’s really easy to come up with big ideas when you’re drinking and doing drugs. But that’s when you’re at your most fragile state, so you’re always scared to do anything. So, I don’t think it was a coincidence that when I quit drinking I thought—“You know what, I just don’t fucking care, everything’s going to be so new to me.” I drank for so long, that’s I was like, I’m just going to do this.

I wanted to play with people that I’d never played with before, but I also—I think I can be difficult to be in a band with, because I demand a lot. Because I think I can produce a lot with people. I brought Shawn Mullins in—he and Aaron Zernack, who’s really good with electronic sounds, and understands them. I had already played in a band with them. Shawn’s such a savant with instruments, and they knew how to handle me. They always know that I’m not attacking anybody, I just feel really passionate about stuff. So they were able to translate that to the new people. I’ve always just really liked Todd and Zech. Zech’s just an amazing guitar player. It just worked out, I don’t know.

At the same time, I was starting to hear all these things in my head for vocal melodies that were new to me. Just from listening to people, talking with different people around town who I’d met. Hearing the way that different people sing. Even people who sing terribly have such an interesting way of trying to pull it off. ...