American Music Club “Firefly”
Mark Eitzel “Firefly” (Live)

On their now out-of-print 1988 album California, bad-luck alt-rock critic’s darlings American Music Club put an ironically upbeat, mellow spin on “Firefly.” It is, after all, a song of transience. It’s an ode to the few moments we’re allotted with the beautiful things in life, a theme that naturally carries an undertow of sadness.

And then the Club’s frontman, Mark Eitzel, was writing as a gay man in late 80s San Francisco– devoting a portion of that record to laments at his friends wasting away, eulogies for his friends who died. To be fair, the group pretty much denies pigeonholing, and it’s not my intent to belittle with a label. It just is what it is.

So there’s a bit of that old whistling-through-the-graveyard feeling as the mandolin plunks away and the steel guitar does as much freewheeling as keening beneath the rock arrangement. But then again, what better tribute than to turn mourning into mellow pop gold?

On the other hand, the solo acoustic take that opens Mark Eitzel’s 1991 Songs of Love Live is much more in touch with that place of loss. Stripped to the raw, direct marrow of the song, this “Firefly” bares all. Eitzel puts us right at the core of that moment when the inevitability of goodbye overcomes the comfort of the now. Even the wry chuckle as he muffs the guitar part around 1:50 seems tinged with sadness.

Well, you know I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I can remember picking this disc up in February of 2000. I had recently discovered that the previous year’s tax bill was going to be financially crippling, and so swore off music purchases as a way to tighten the belt. But, ah, temptation: one spin of “Firefly” at a Hear Music listening station, and I made my only exception to that policy up through April 15, overpaying even.

Another part of me sort of wonders if I don’t go to this kind of unalloyed sad-sack, beautiful-loser jive as some sort of emotional porn. The liner notes to Songs of Love contain a show review apparently taken from one Brit music rag or another, which pointedly mentions that Eitzel breaks down into tears at one point during this set.

There goes my internal monologue: Sad equals deep, happy is frivolous. But the world is fucked up enough; I don’t need to seek out more reasons to cry. No, wait. The world is wonderful, and seeking out reasons to cry is a waste of time.

I guess I’m a little conflicted on this front.

In the end though, “Firefly” is a wonderful song, in any form. The trick is to find the comfort and catharsis in this secondhand sadness. Or just to enjoy the tune.

Eitzel on Eitzel, from elsewhere in the Songs of Love liner notes: “what the hell, and when my life is finally summed up in a collection of four letter words this is what they’ll refer to most often.”

Mark Eitzel (w/ members of American Music Club) (?) played Silverlake Lounge Nov. 28.
California at GEMM and at Amazon.
Songs of Love Live at Newbury Comics.

The Thermals “Here’s Your Future”
Hutch & Kathy “Infinite Loop”

The Body, The Blood, The Machine, this year’s release from Portland punks the Thermals, is easily one of my favorite records of 2006, maybe the best the band has produced. While this is something like the billionth blog to big up these guys, I guess I’ll go ahead and share the opener off that disc, part one in a prolonged paranoid nightmare about America as a theocracy.

(That’ll never happen now, right?)

“Here’s Your Future” takes a couple Bible stories, Noah building the ark and Jesus headed to the cross, and remixes them–humanizing and somehow modernizing the characters. As doubts and fears spin out, we’re presented the typical biblical scene, G-d addresses folks directly and asks them to do crazy things, and confronted with its implications in today’s world.

(What happens when an influential voting bloc thinks it has a direct line to the higher power? When our leaders do?)

The vocals’ insistent rant, the fury of the three-piece rock delivery, they amplify the weary, questioning spirit of this tune.

(I wasn’t surprised to discover that the Thermals, like me, are disenchanted products of a Catholic education.)

I wanted to go somewhere else with this, though. Or maybe back to an earlier point–the fleshing out of these mythic personae. Singer/guitarist Hutch Harris imbues cowed Noah, tortured Jesus, with real feelings, mixed feelings, the stuff of humanity.

I’ve posited before the importance of The Moment in pop songs. There are certain galvanizing parts in certain songs where everything comes together. These are usually dramatic shifts or points of extreme release, like a sonic analog to the sun bursting through clouds.

(This might tip my hand as a singer-songwriter-loving fuddy-duddy, but the examples that most readily come to mind are the part in Neil Young’s “Old Man” when James Taylor’s banjo playing ambles through the mix, and the onslaught of the reverbed Drumz of God against the swirling mellotron in “Everything Means Nothing To Me” by Elliott Smith.)

Which is the long way of getting to the spot around 1:40 into “Here’s Your Future” where Harris gives voice to a reluctant Messiah answering his dad’s call: “I will, but Dad, I’m afraid!” The extreme empathy in this line, intersecting with a rhythm section drop-out and some flaying guitar work… I call that The Moment.

(This is the part where the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end for a fraction of a second every time I listen to the song. Heavy stuff, no?)

To either accentuate, or give you a break from, the heavitude of theme and performance in Thermals 06, I thought it’d be nice to also share a snapshot of cuter days from the band’s principals. “Infinite Loop” is a shining example of indie pop, off the 2002 self-titled record from Harris’ and Thermals bassist Kathy Foster’s earlier team incarnation (…wait for it…), Hutch & Kathy.

The song’s a cupid arrow connecting with my music geek heart. You’ve got strummy acoustics and boy-gurl vox risking hyperbole in praise of love. Here the road of a relationship is like the highways to a touring band, and being together is a sweet labor of love that requires practice, like the song you play over and over.

The line about “yr spine showing through yr sweater” always pops out, both for the wink at an old school indie rock signifier and as a treat for those of us who worship at the Church of the Small But Telling Detail. Then the writing of the song is referenced in the song, a po-mo wrecking ball through the fourth wall.

(Not bad for an unassuming little pop ditty.)

TBTBTM at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
H&K at Newbury Comics.

Eric B. & Rakim “Juice (Know The Ledge)”
Big Daddy Kane “Nuff’ Respect”

Way back when, there was a time when the best hip hop samplers came in the form of movie soundtracks. Sure, there were some bum tracks–in particular, R&B tracks to go with love scenes could be tireless when they weren’t awesome–but you have a couple stone-cold classics like New Jack City, Juice, I think even Menace II Society. Ricochet had a hot title track and of course Snoop Dogg’s debut for most of us was teaming up with Dr. Dre for the title track to Deep Cover.

I could argue that artist recruitment back then for this kind of project was based more on aesthetics than marketing, but that might be another example of a bygone era’s rosy sheen in the eyes of an old fart.

But back to 1991’s Juice soundtrack, a find on a recent trip to Amoeba. I’m gonna call this the last gasp of hip hop’s Golden Age, something sorta close to me olde heart. Here you have two amazing tracks by the era’s Kings of New York, Kane and Rakim, just before they would both release the weakest albums of their careers, with tracks by members the era’s most revolutionary production team, the Bomb Squad (Public Enemy’s silent partners).

“Juice (Know The Ledge),” the movie’s theme, rides a tight one-bar drum loop and ominous jazz bass sample, as Rakim flips ferocious verses, part plot summary–really and already kind of pat stuff for the urban drama genre–and part expertly-rendered braggodocio. What’s pretty amazing about this track is that as much as R tears it up on the verse, you find yrself anxious for him to come around to the “let’s see if I know the ledge” refrain and segue to Eric B.’s turntable wizardry on the chorus.

Big Daddy Kane’s “Nuff’ Respect” ups the ante for the kind of dark, brutal, claustrophobic funk we came to love on P.E.’s work. I don’t know if the points get too expensive nowadays when sampling James Brown and his proteges, but the incredible catchiness of the “hey-hey” chant that punctuates each bar of this song makes me want to mount a Bring Back Bobby Byrd campaign.

Kane has the advantage over R, given the freedom to drop a straight-up boast rap. Once you get past the misplaced apostrophe in the title (there, I’ve satisfied my smitty OCD), you have the man in top form, doing what he does best. OK, I have some reservations about the “yr found on a woman/and my penis goes in you” diss, but there’s half a dozen other money lines, spit at hyperspeed.

Juice soundtrack at Newbury Comics.

Daniel Johnston “I Had Lost My Mind” “Living Life” “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience”

Last weekend the little lady and I netflix’d The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a marvelous and heartbreaking biography of the troubled Austin artist, singer-songwriter and pioneering home recordist who’s been a touchstone for a couple generations of indie rockers. The filmmakers truly do justice to a life that is the stuff of tall tales.

Picking up the strand from Lindayism like a month ago, I’d highly recommended this DVD to pretty much everybody. It has moments of hope and is full of beauty, although it’s ultimately harrowing in its depiction of Johnston’s psychosis. It’s amazing how much archival stuff they were able to use–audio tapes of family arguments, Super 8 films of the crush that became a lifelong muse, video of some of his most disastrous performances.

The film demonstrates how the urge to document, to tell stories, has been intimately intertwined with Johnston’s creative play since his teens. It also shows those who fetishize, and even seem to goad along, his illness to be as ill-equipped as his family and friends when it’s time to actually face the ugly results.

It was amazing to see how shrewd and self-conscious Johnston could be even in his disconnected moments–a stark contrast to his image as an inspired naif. And his illness aside, the man’s music has never shone as incandescently as when paired with the imagery in The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Here’s one case in point:

Oh, so I’m not going to front like I’m a D. Johnston expert. I’m not.

I just want to share a couple tracks originally from 1980’s Songs of Pain, but taken from last year’s The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered. This double-disc comp presents Johnston originals and covers of the same songs by various alt-rock luminaries.

And I want to tell you what I love about his music.

“Living Life” is rough-hewn but plaintive. Johnston’s childlike voice shuffles through yearning, hope, joy and sadness beyond his years at the time. The tape warble on his vocals and the basement acoustics reverb around the piano lend the proceedings a timeless but distant warmth, like a yellowing photograph whose exact age or era you can’t quite place.

He’s singing about the span and scope of life here, but highlights a basic conflict that anticipated his later struggles, like the little rumbles before the Big One: What do you do with the artist? Not to be too precious about it, but how does someone who feels so deeply, devotes his waking hours and his dreams to a basically impractical pursuit, deal with the dulling concerns of the workaday world? Johnston evades pretension in tackling this pretty Big Issue (I fear I haven’t) by being plainspoken, bleeding honesty onto a magnetic reel.

If I have the story straight after watching the film, “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience” comes from a time when the only instrument Johnston had access to was a chord organ, a fan-powered keyboard that’s a cousin to the accordion. So he pumps away, channeling his loneliness and his anger at limitation into a letter to himself, a mini-sermon against loneliness, limitation and anger.

For better or worse, he’s never alone when he has his quixotic ambition, his outsized imagination. During a closing breakdown/vamp of the chorus starting about 2:28, he leads the audience in a singalong. Thus the exile, jury-rigging a studio from scraps in his brother’s garage, conjures a stadium of fans to keep him company.

The Late Great Daniel Johnston at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston at Target.