Lemonheads “Skulls”

So here’s the fun Halloween-themed post that I aimed for and thoroughly botched this morning. Evan Dando, king of the alt-rock covers, gives the solo acoustic treatment to a Misfits classic, off 1991 EP Favorite Spanish Dishes.

Take your pick from the irony bin: the natural tension of gruesome lyrics about a serial killer sung prettily; or “hack the heads off little girls/and put ‘em on my wall” after this morning’s debacle.

The Lemonheads were never my pick of the hometown homestate scene, but Dando acquits himself well here. Then again, “Skulls” is a killer pop tune, so it’d be tough to fuck it up.

Now, the NKOTB cover off the same EP–there’s some horror for you.

[Favorite Spanish Dishes is out of print.]

Sebadoh “Vampire”
Helium “Baby Vampire Made Me” “Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby”

Today, three songs about the undead, all alt-rock from the Commonwealth. But it’s turned into fair warning (to me) that when you pick songs by title you can blunder into deeper, more harrowing waters than you intended.

The vampire in Sebadoh’s “Vampire,” off 1992’s Rocking The Forest, is needy and grasping, playing passive-aggressive games, sucking the life out of the relationship and the air out of the room. Somehow they managed to even produce a passive-aggressive arrangement. Stinging guitar work through amps distorted to the verge of failure, often tuned down in the mix, are set against mellow vocals and thrumming indie guitar swing.

Mary Timony and co. shoehorned the off-kilter rhythms of the Fall and My Bloody Valentine’s gauzy guitarscapes into a uniquely fractured, doomy style on their early work. Helium’s A/B burners “Baby Vampire Made Me” and “Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby” from 1994 EP Pirate Prude exploits this heavy trip to go real dark–diving into the real-life horror of an unwanted pregnancy and abortion.

In “Baby Vampire Made Me,” the vampire is in the womb, not a gift but a parasite, and it threatens to turn the woman into a vampire as well, latched on to a would-be father the verses address. Around 4:40 the song coalesces into an almost-bluesy riff and the words turns elegaicly to the child never born.

“Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby” gets a lighter, prettier musical treatment, but cutting through the mystery of what it’s telling is tough–it seems that in the aftermath, the previous song’s speaker feels at once haunted and watched-over, thinking of an afterlife where she joins that never-born baby.

This post was hard for me to write–something intended as just-this-side-of-jocular turned heartbreaking and confusing. Which actually gets at something I love about Helium’s work before they turned prog. There was this bizarre mix of fanciful, little-girl imagery and just the most pitch-black ruminations on women abused, feeling like whores, feeling dirty inside. It would be a women’s-study thesis if it weren’t so vividly, deeply felt, so forceful.

I use the word mystery above. As much as I feel that essentialism is a trap, I’m also reminded at times like this that there’s a well of sadness that, as a man, I can’t possibly know in this life.

Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock (U.S. CD with “Vampire”) at Newbury Comics.
Pirate Prude is out of print, but at the moment is gettable cheap via Amazon.

,or Defenestrating Credibility

Sebadoh “Skull (Remix)”
Lou Barlow “Skull (Live at WMBR)”

This, one of my favorite Lou Barlow songs, came up on the old shuffle recently.

It’s on Sebadoh’s 1994 record, Bakesale, but presented here in solo acoustic version via MIT’s radio station, as well as the shorter, possibly superior take that appeared on the Hotel Massachusetts comp.

(I guess I should warn here that I’m one of the last living Sebadoh devotees, and I may dedicate virtual ink now and then to some sort of futile advocacy campaign on the group’s behalf. Lou and Jake were raised around where I was raised, and that hometown pride may be part of the appeal, but it’s mostly the plain-spoken/heartbroken lyrical bent and great melodies I think.

It feels like they’ve been long overshadowed by Pavement, who were sort of their homeboys/indie rock opposite numbers during the 90s, if anyone remembers that far back. Not sure if that’s smugness trumping sincerity or the triumph of the oblique over the straightforward.)

If it’s not embarrassing enough of an admission that I’m a Sebadoh fan, there’s something else around this song that leaves me sorta red-faced.

“Skull” was among the reasons I fell in love with Sebadoh as a freshman stranded on the West Coast, homesick for my familiar Western Mass stomping grounds.

The ebb and flow of the mood, the feeling of silvery chrome to the sonics, the creeping howl of carefully-deployed distortion, those lyrics about “chasing dragons through the snow” and the invitation to “gently take my skull for a ride”… Speaking of false nostalgia, in my sunny new home, I came to associate the song with home, and with some idealized scenario of the very start of falling in love, the promise of snowbound adventure; all the stuff I wasn’t experiencing in L.A.

I was pretty damn naïve at 19 I guess. I heard a rumor that made sense, years later, that “Skull” is about doing speedballs with Evan Dando. Still love the song, but every time I hear it I get that wave of false nostalgia followed by a tinge of embarrassment.

Funny what a song can do to you.

Hotel Massachusetts at Gemm.
Pipeline! Live Boston Rock from WMBR at Newbury Comics.
Bakesale at Newbury Comics.

Modern Lovers “Dignified And Old”
Sloan “Dignified And Old”

I’m writing this entry from the 15 North fast lane and hoping to actually post it from Vegas. It’s been a pretty busy last couple days, thus the late post. I thought I’d just rattle off a little something about road music.

We’re relying on the little lady’s nano, a Chrismukkah gift from her bro that I helped load up with tunes.

One of the gifts yielded up from this road trip approach was hearing, within an hour, both the original version of “Dignified And Old” by the Modern Lovers and the Sloan cover.

I wish I could remember the exact quote, but there’s something that explains an anomaly like Jonathan Richman. Something about how punks in cities built on a grid, like NYC and L.A., tend to have a very simple us vs. them worldview, while cities with more arcane and circular layouts, like Boston and D.C., breed punkers who can do the rebel thing and be home for dinner with grandma.

Not saying I buy it 100%. I mean, all generalizations are bad, in general. But there’s something attractive about it.

So Jonathan Richman, the frontman for 70s prepunk geek rockers the Modern Lovers, could idolize Lou Reed but channel the art rockismo into his own lovelorn, wonderfully naïve teenage view of the world. He doesn’t buy the rockunroll credo to live fast, die young, etc.—one day he’ll be dignified and old. Pretty damn classic.

The cover by Sloan, Canada’s foremost purveyors of brainy classic pop, is stripped down and faithful. Sorta makes you miss the cool organ line from the Lovers version. It’s taken from their fake live EP, which was packaged, I think, with the 1998 original American pressing of 1996 minor classic One Chord to Another. (Don’t ask.)

Grab a brew and dig it. We’ll see you on the other side of the state line.

[Both the Modern Lovers’ debut album and the 2-CD One Chord to Another are out of print.]

New Radiant Storm King “Phone Call”

Sometimes I feel kind of stuck in the 90s. I don’t want to go into a long diatribe on the topic, but it seems to me that to a certain extent a lot of indie rock/pop is as well.

On the theme of 90s nostalgia, I dug back to the ‘94 compilation Hotel Massachusetts, a snapshot of my native Western Mass local scene at the time, mas o menos.

I dug back, specifically, to a beautiful acoustic strummer by New Radiant Storm King. This Sonic Youth-inspired combo’s still technically extant today, although long plagued by bad, bad luck of the type that’s unfortunately sorta mundane in the biz.

For your consideration, that gentle fake nostalgia for good (or bad) times you never knew. In a few simple verses, NRSK set the scene (”Are you enjoying all your classes?”), provide a viewpoint (”Not talking to anyone who doesn’t know you/’cause they don’t know what you’ve been through”) and even do that neat thing where they flip a lyric from the first verse the second time around (”sitting in the front row in brand new glasses” turns into “running around the woods on too much acid”).

I have to imagine that they nailed the Five Colleges life–imagine because my West Coast undergrad years were nothing like this. It makes me wonder about the me that went to school in-state, even makes me miss the past I never had. It’s all hopelessly naive and wistful, maybe too precious, but pushes the right buttons every time.

As for being stuck in the last decade, I’ll probably be picking up the next Pernice Brothers album, Live a Little, on realease day tomorrow. It features none other than NRSK’s Peyton Pinkerton on lead guitar.

Hotel Massachusetts on Gemm.com.