Something affected him down in the desert

I knew it'd be a great weekend when Mike Piazza connected for a long three-run homer in the first inning of the Oakland Athletics' Friday afternoon spring training game against the Padres. After an inexpensive but turbulent flight down through Arizona's nastiest thunderstorm in months, it was the first highlight in a long weekend of pleasures in the desert.

Some others:
∙ The walkoff victory Friday, courtesy of Donnie Murphy.
∙ Bobby Crosby's liner over the advertisements beyond the left-field wall. I assume the ball is still rolling.
∙ Travis Buck's moonshot Saturday, at the Rangers' park in Surprise, Ariz.
∙ The pre-game tailgate Saturday. (The sluglike items in the photo are bacon-wrapped pork tenderloins, from a wonderful, magical animal.)
∙ The ninth-inning rally Sunday, despite the eventual outcome.
∙ Good times with my gracious hosts and friends, at home and out on the town. We spent some fine time at Four Peaks in the older part of Tempe, and at T.T.'s Roadhouse, a seemingly rebellious little joint in Scottsdale. (The Horse & Hound, maybe less so. Damn Red Sox paraphernalia....)

A few more photos are here. I'd share more of them, but as it turns out, I'm an awful photographer.


FMFM: Seven Steps To Heaven and My Funny Valentine, a pair of Miles Davis albums I'd skipped until now. Both are largely downtempo and ballad-heavy, but feature the roiling Ron Carter/Tony Williams rhythm section that adds tension to the proceedings. (Only the absence of Wayne Shorter keeps these from being considered part of Davis's "second classic quintet" period of the mid-1960s, with the estimable George Coleman doing tenor duty instead.) Where Davis frequently draws meaning from long notes, Carter, Williams and Herbie Hancock find a way to accent and subtly propel the music forward without undermining the leader's laconic statements or distracting from his very pure expression. Two very nice records that don't get much talk, but very much pointed the way toward his great quintet's future.

The longer and shorter of it

Per "The long and short of it", here's Exhibit A.

"Hendrix's, Clapton's, Bonham's, and even Van Halen's solos go beyond the masturbatory level."

Boy, Jimi really stretched it out on Axis: Bold As Love. Just thirteen songs in 38:49. If he'd added another eleven seconds of that ubiquitous wanking, his songs would average a whole three minutes apiece. (And "even Van Halen"!)

"And as for bands like Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, and Stereolab, critics tend to be divided between those who hear something profound and personal in their sprawling, instrumental-passage-heavy records, and those who can't get past the heavy aroma of pretension."

Wow. Instrumental passages. How pretentious of people to make music without singing for a little while. God forbid.

"Isn't Donald Fagen just taking us on a journey inside his head, which happens to be filled with complicated horn charts and lounge-lizard misogyny? Even if his head's in a different place from yours, couldn't you grow to appreciate what comes out of it for what it is?"

Oh no! They're doing something complicated! This cannot stand! Everyone should sound like the Ramones, or else they're making music wrong!

"J. Mascis soloed for what felt like an eternity in every song, which completely bored me. And though I'm a Sonic Youth fan, I have a low tolerance for its noisy self-indulgence."

There's that word again, "self-indulgence", dropped by a rock critic. Do people use that word anywhere else but rock critic circles? ("You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.")

*

Stop me here, or else I'll have to rebut this absurd piece in the SFWeekly. Suffice to say, the author could have written it in any year, with different band names. And how does she figure that David Byrne isn't "gutsy", but Sufjan Stevens is somehow engaged in the quest for rebellion?

1983!

One more signal that Bob Mould is really Nostradamus.

The third verse, we've known about for awhile. Now the second one's coming true too. Please, let's not have the fourth one.

We had some lusty little crushes. We had those all-ages hardcore matinée shows.

A little fun on the baseball diamond, a walk in the park with my amiga and her pooch, a Mediterranean lunch beneath a eucalyptus tree, and then a four-band NoisePop matinée at the Bottom of the Hill. That's a good long day of fun, and it all happened before dusk.

Due to the rapidly growing, blog-endorsed popularity of Midlake, the BotH had sold out weeks earlier, and was nearly stuffed with people when we arrived as the second band, Ester Drang, was finishing up. I preferred them to the next act, Minipop, which I wanted to like but found sadly monochromatic and familiar. (This one sounded like "Fake Plastic Trees," that one like "The Sweater Song," none like Minipop. We went outside for some air.) The main event, judging by the sheer amount of gear involved and the attention of the crowd, was the still-mysterious Midlake: an oversized panther head, a projector flashing weird images, a concept album's worth of not-very-comprehensible songs, a whole freaking recording studio on the stage.

I understand the five Midlakers were all jazz students at some point, though their music currently features little improvisation. There are vestigial traits -- careful mastery of multiple instruments, an affinity for long melodies -- but Midlake seemed to draw far more from the pop canon, including various flakes of 1970s AM gold, the obvious Fleetwood Mac nick in "Roscoe", and maybe late-period Byrds. As easy as it might be to say they're derivative, I somehow felt convinced that Midlake was onto its own thing, and not merely walking through a series of references to past rock glories. It was as though they simply made music they'd want to listen to, whatever the consequences.

I appreciated their incredibly economic flexibility onstage, which included handing off instruments midsong, placing two people on the same keyboard for one piece, and at least three different people playing tambourine with one hand and something else with the other, at various points. It must be so easy for things to go wrong; it sure can't be easy to take a request. As a result, though, the band seemed a little fussy and not at all spontaneous. There were fairly few moments where everything came to a head, and there were times when it all seemed like a recital. (My amigo used the word "clinical", and I can't really say he's wrong.) There was an antiseptic Pablo Cruise/Orleans feel to some things, and a few turns of phrase and drum fills that seemed obvious to me. I felt like I connected emotionally with a moderate fraction of the material -- the yearning chorus of "Balloon Maker" improved on the studio take, for one example -- and the enigmatic "Roscoe," played early, was perfect.

I wouldn't say this about many bands, but here goes: I'd like to hear Midlake make an expensive record, a super hi-fi one that allows them to take advantage of everything sonically beautiful about them. Though I own neither, it's obvious from what I've heard that The Trials of Van Occupanther was a major step forward from Bamnan and Slivercork in terms of sound quality and fidelity, and I'd like to hear that trend continue. (Except, the iTunes revolution is starting to make it clear that no one really cares about sound quality anymore, and it'd be a total waste of money to go the extra mile.) As much as their show could have come off as a collection of retro-isms, it's possible that Midlake is simply a band out of their own times, one more suited to the era that produced "Long Train Running," when deft musicianship was fashionable in rock'n'roll. At times facile, at times committed, Midlake's show was ultimately satisfying enough. See you next year.


FMFM: McCoy Tyner's Sahara, a damn interesting dollar-bin score. Four intensely chorded pieces on side one, with a solo piano excursion as track two; then a twenty-three-minute monster on the flip. I'm most impressed with the lengthy title track, which incorporates flute and tambourine noises mimicking animals (more like jungle birds than desert critters to my ears, but never mind) or bazaar scenes, a rapid-fire bass solo and wild drum solo, a couple of placid moments, and aggressive periods of crashing skronk. Awesomely powerful at high volume.

What's that I hear? The sound of marching feet?

I'll trade you three peace marches for one Ted Leo ticket. He and his band attracted a fired-up NoisePop crowd to the Great American Music Hall last evening, and delivered the goods, despite his alleged jetlag and some sort of norovirus he claimed was slowing him down. We couldn't tell. Leo's righteous anger and despair at the state of national affairs are infectious, and his personal emotional investment in his own work is paramount.

We skipped the first two acts in favor of Mangosteen and Ha-Ra. I liked third act Georgie James just fine. It seemed like the drummer was driving the bus; the keyboard player had enough charisma to hold my interest, even if she was no Dusty Springfield at the mic.

Leo hit the ground running with "Little Dawn," launching into over-the-top choruses and extending the coda with a crazed chant as the band vamped. (They brought along second guitarist James Canty, restoring the quartet setup that preceded Shake the Sheets.) Though it peppered the set list with new songs, the band drew heavily from Sheets, leading to the curious spectacle of fist-pumping during "Me and Mia," a song that addresses eating disorders. (It took me awhile to catch on too.)

Drummer Chris Wilson brings remarkable technique to the table, adding elements of reggae and swing to the otherwise chugging rhythms (and deploying a nifty move where he somehow flips the stick over his right wrist). It says a lot that couples danced to Leo's songs; I guess people dance to Joe Jackson's first couple of records too. The tempo shifts and tricky on-off elemental arrangements keep things interesting, but it's really Leo's commitment to the material that makes the Pharmacists a great band. Toward the end of the night, there he was, tearing busted strings off his guitar, neck muscles still bulging, eyes still full of fire. They hit the stage like a hurricane, and finished like a tornado, wrapping up with an obscurity from Chumbawamba. (Check that Wikipedia entry. Who knew?)

Leo's aggressively political music doesn't seem belabored or forced. The entire presentation was equal parts rally and party, but it seemed like everyone had a good time. Stuff like this can be so much more convincing than taking to the streets, but I'll also grant that there's still a whole lot of walking to do.

Mind/body problem

It was one of my all-time impulse buys. Last Sunday morning, full of coffee, I decided it would be a good idea to trawl Craigslist for musical instruments. Two hours, a trip across the Bay Bridge, and $200 later, a Danelectro baritone guitar was mine. (Look: I could've paid $350.)

It's a late 90s reissue, but vintage-toned. Not really expert craftsmanship, but more than adequate for my purposes -- an extra, wider paintbrush for home recordings and maybe some gigs. It's also a workout for the fingers, because you have to stretch to reach the wide-spaced frets. (Compare this regular-sized guitar with my long-necked axe.) It doesn't play fast, but it's not supposed to. Mostly, it's about finding new chord voicings and hearing bright, growly bass strings without feeling like you're playing bass. Love it.

But strangest of all, it's a trick for the mind. Your hands are playing A... why do you hear E? You finger a G chord... and D comes out. It was hard enough trying to learn mandolin (tuned in fifths) after eight or ten years of guitar (tuned in fourths, mostly). But it's much trickier to use the same fingerings as a regular guitar and expect certain sounds, but hear others instead. The curse of having good pitch!