Across the Universe via the Brown Line

Yesterday evening's run was a misery. The Chicago chill left my hands and forearms numb, and the more I sweated the more the wind cut into my skin. Though it's technically spring, it's still winter here, with most days climaxing at a shiver-inducing, spirit-crumpling 37 Fahrenheit. The only comfort I had in the five miles between work and home was that the day before it was worse--it rained. Despite it all, I choose to run in my summertime clothes, as if I believe the weather will somehow take pity on me.

I poured warm water over my arms when I got home, until I received full mobility, and then fed the cats before I crammed two bowls of split pea into my mouth while standing over the counter, with a bottle of Goose Island Summertime to warm the old bones. I couldn't hang out at the old home for long--I had to catch Terry's graduation performance at the Armitage location of The Old Town School of Folk Music.

As Old Town's curriculum is structured into 3 levels (each with a sub or "rep" level) of guitar playing ability, the graduation performance began with the with first class strumming slow and easy and march-like to Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally." Everyone up on stage was so concentrated on their chord-shapes and up-strums and sheet music that I wanted to give each one of them, whose ages ranged from about 19 to 75, a big hug. When that last chord hung in the air, and relief mixed with a sense of victory clashed over the students' faces, I couldn't help but get out of my seat and cheer.

The next group followed with a sweet, folk-orchestral version of the Who's "The Kids Are Alright," which reminded me that the best song that Pete Townshend ever wrote was one that came from their first record. There were a few missteps, and I think the teacher (all of the instructors play with their students at the graduation performance) tried to overcompensate by playing a wicked solo over the performers. It seemed like a pretty bullshit move--if you're the teacher, should you really show the crowd how much better you are?

After that, the rest of the classes pretty much fell into a Beatles groove, starting off with "Norwegian Wood" (second class, first level) in which the players (I keep wanting to call them kids, but more than a few of them were older than me) transposed the sitar riff onto the six string, in (pretty much) sync. Not bad. Second class (point five) followed suit with "I'm Only Sleeping," and this time it was the vocals that were impressive--their teacher has reinterpreted the vocal melody line, which made it more compelling, with its off kilter vocals and chorus of acoustic guitars, than I've felt for some years. Unfortunately, this vocal acuity didn't carry over into the next class, who sang "I Will" as if they were a sedated college fraternity.

And Terry's class, the big cheeses of the bunch, closed the show with "Across the Universe," which was, according to their instructor, given a rearranged ending in honor of the date being 4/20 and all. A flawless intro, a great singalong to some of the best Beatles lyrics, and a droning, free fall through space and time at the end, the cosmic sounds of high strings plucked in multi-rhythmic harmony until the human ear could no longer perceive the traveling of the sound.

If you have a friend enrolled, please see these sweet souls and all their musical innocence on display. It makes you remember how totally total music is to everyone.

"We carried you in our arms, on International Record Store Day..."

April 15-16, 2011

1808: I'm on a Union Pacific West train from Chicago's Ogilvie station to Geneva, Illinois, to help/hang out at Steve Warrenfeltz's Kiss the Sky music store for International Record Store Day. Accompanying me on the ride is what will be my final listen of the new Destroyer album for some time, two master cylinders of Miller Lite, and Jonathan Franzen's latest New Yorker piece on Robinson Crusoe, the evolution of the novel in English, his travels to a near inhospitable island outside of Chile, and the ashes of David Foster Wallace. The article's erudition and emotional intelligence compel me to put it down at intervals and look at the window. After all, I got records on the brain.

1930: Eating a modest assortment of nigiri and maki at Matsuri with Jamee, just a few steps away from the Spice House, where Jamee works. The hamachi is so good I get an extra double order for the the both of us.

2035: Kiss the Sky in preparation for the midnight opening in honor of International Record Store Day. We hear from Steve that the last shipment of exclusive RSD releases didn't come through, because of some miscommunication or mis-distribution between warehouse and retail outlet (my comprehension of the situation is admittedly limited). Environment is intense, but when I look at the racks stocked with Syd Barrett-Pink Floyd and late-era Velvet Underground singles, I see that there is definitely some stuff here, some good stuff. Jamee and I break down boxes of RSD promos, get a swag system together for easy passing along to customers, move things into the back. I pull boxes of the Steve Warrenfeltz Made in Aurora LP out of his RAV-4 while Jamee hangs a canvas poster above the MIA display. And I eat cookies and muffin pieces in secret while Jamee blocks off the back of the house with a sun tapestry.

2200: We stop in at Bistro Thai for the RSD celebratory concert, packed to the gills with fans and family members. Complimentary appetizers were supposed to have been placed out for visitors, but no space--no space for sitting, hardly for standing. A sign of the night to come. Jamee and I go two doors down to the Ale House, she venting while I cram my mouth full of homemade potato chips (food-wise, I was on a rather disgusting roll). Mat and Al stop buy, and we talk running while I'm in the process of eating myself to death.

2345: Last minute tweaks before the doors open at Kiss the Sky. My job as it turns out, is to keep the Made in Aurora shelf stocked and to talk with people as they wait in line. Speaking of lines, the queue outside the door goes down the block, and every so often someone will sneak in through the front door as if they don't know what's going on.

2400: Though these days it seems inappropriate to use "tsunami" as a basis for comparison, a wave of people flood the narrow aisles (well, they seem narrow if crowded with 25 customers) of Kiss the Sky. Some know what they want and flow right from the product to the register--the serious folks browse, talk story, and pick up different things just because they love them. Steve works like a beast checking folks out, while Jamee computes prices at his side.

0100: The Made in Aurora LP is going fast. I stock one row, and the other disappears. Someone requests Fela Kuti. Another learns that the Ryan Adams release sold out 55 minutes ago.

0230: I'm in line with a young woman picking up a single by the hip-hop artist Self, I think as a gag. Eventually talk turns to the nature of good and evil. The fact that I can have a comprehensive, in-depth conversation with someone illustrates how long the line is at this point. I consider lying down in one of the boxes in the back.

0330: Everything I thought I wanted has been bought--all that's left are a few 45's by Peter, Bjorn and John, Black Angels, and a surprising amount of Michael Jackson (whose estate released something for Record Store for some reason). The last few customers reluctantly leave the store with either what they wanted or their back ups. I fall asleep in the car on the ride home.

0730: Everyone up again, Jamee to work at the Spice House, Steve to put in another Record Store Day for the customers who didn't hear about the midnight opening. Turns out Kiss the Sky nearly did as well the second shift. I stop by Kiss the Sky for my own customer experience, walk away with my own copy of Made in Aurora, the new Stokes LP and and Iron and Wine single I bought just because I felt like I had to. It wasn't that good. A mad dash for the 0830 train, a long commute back into the rainy city, and a day spent on the couch eating chips and listening to public radio, which puts me to sleep for the rest of the day.

The Little Band That Couldn't: Part 2

This is a call from my lungs
I've been in exactly two official bands in my whole life, and both of them have suffered untimely demises. Whereas the reasons for littlejeans' slow death were abstract and vague (see below) I confidently place full blame the break up of the now tragically defunct rock band Oh the Possibilities on the rhythm section, good as they may have been.

The band started humbly enough--three guys in shorts and slippers (one with a hat) met at an apartment in Makiki shortly after New Year's 2008. The Oh the Possibilities sound was founded upon acoustic guitars played in living rooms and in public parks on Saturday mornings. We would pick up yogurts and pastries, sometimes coffee or chai, and share a park bench for several hours while we worked out arrangements to songs. Usually the weather was just right--in those winter/early spring months the climate was breezy and cool. Someone up there wanted this band to succeed. Everyone, in fact, wanted the band to succeed--except for the rhythm section, who had other, more insidious plans.

The folky manifestation of Oh the Possibilities lasted several months while we searched in vain for a drummer, until it finally occurred to someone that the bass player was married to one of the sickest drummers in Hawai'i. The lineup expanded, and briefly included a keyboard player who vanished, some time in April, without explanation. The sound of Oh the Possibilities grew more darker, heavier, the bass player and the drummer worked as well together as if they were soul mates, and the guitar players kept doing their thing, trying to write songs that might significantly alter the global (or "glocal") paradigm. Practices became more fulfilling, shows began to materialize, records were made...and then the bass player and drummer split, moved to Maryland to have a baby.

Though my life was poisoned with bitterness for months after the sundering of this small, beautiful thing, I've come to appreciate the lessons I've learned with the band: that Russ is as good making Japanese food as he is making Mexican, and as good a bass player as he is with the guitar; that Janie's beats are machine-like in their precision, yet stunningly human in their groove; that Chris's songs never stop getting better. I was afraid he'd never top his Bunkbed stuff, and then he came out with his Buford Brixton/Summatyme Playerrz--I was afraid there wouldn't be another "Happy Ending," and then he wrote "Lula." Personally, I was probably as good as I'm ever gonna get with Oh the Possibilites, both on the guitar (I was actually forced to play lead in a couple songs, something I thought I'd never do) and in terms of songwriting. It'll be hard to generate that same kind of spirit again, but I'm not averse to getting back to work.

I've included a widget with an Oh the Possibilities playlist for your listening pleasure. Just take a look to your right.

Ah, those early days of 2008. Who would've known then that a heart would be so irrecovably broken?

The Little Band That Couldn't

Aside from a high school experiment in which why had electric instruments and drums--but no amplifiers--littlejeans was my first band. And when I say "my band," I don't mean to take sole possession of its triumphs and failures. I simply mean I was in littlejeans. Or I was half in littlejeans, in retrospect.

I was involved with a girl at the time and more often than I would like to admit, I made up excuses to get out of band practice so that I could go to the movies or make lasagna at her house. Nevertheless I played, like everyone else in the band, guitar, drums, bass, keyboards, accordion, pennywhistle, pan flute, spoons, forks, bowl of mash potatoes and maracas--all equally badly, though keyboards was the worst. I also sang, like the other guys, and if you ever went to one of the five or six littlejeans shows you know that half of our playing time was spent taking guitars off, strapping guitars back on, crawling over drum kits, tripping over wires and power cords, moving dissected corpses from the stage to the floor, resuscitating drowning victims, delivering babies and adjusting keyboard levels into the P.A.

When I think back on the band and its relatively long life, three questions come to mind: 1) whatever happened to all of those great shirts I used to own? 2) what went wrong? and 3) are stars made of fire? Although the first and third questions will forever remain a mystery, my own theory concerning the second question is built upon a faulty demo released in our name. Of course there were other factors involved--clashing relationships, people moving away from Hawaii, the sax player drowning in a puddle of his own fecal matter, a general feeling of existential distress, the erosion of family values, the rising political fortunes of Hugo Chavez, the Hubble telescope, Jewel's third record, the continuing debate of whether we would sound like Alkaline Trio or like Pavement or like Anita Baker (this debate was never vocalized but I was firmly of the Anita Baker camp).

But that demo cast a pall on everything we did afterwards. Though it may have been released by a semi-famous record label it was nothing any of us could be proud of. And though we begged for the opportunity to re-record the record, the label went ahead and released it anyway. What should have been an occasion for celebration became a big disappointment, and our first experience with a record company was a burn.

I have a lot of fond memories of our time together, and I'm thankful that most of us are still friends. For a band of such talented people (of which I was perhaps the least talented) the interactions were astonishingly ego-free, and everyone worked their hardest to get the most out of the songs while discreetly acknowledging the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, should an unstable governement have access to atomic weaponry. littlejeans can never happen again because I will never be that young again, because I will never be that hungry again (both literally and metaphorically), and because the other guys are now making even better music. You can find that demo EP on I-Tunes. Don't check it out, and for god's sake don't buy it.

Music from My Friends 4: Linus the Band

So what, I don't care
The first time I heard Linus the Band was about two hours before I was supposed to play a gig with them. Back then I was guitarist / vocalist / keyboardist / bassist / tambourinist / drummer in a band that shall remain nameless--and I was feeling flush with confidence, cocky even, that I was in the best band in Hawaii. We had just gotten a pseudo-recording deal with a specialty label in California, despite having only played about three gigs (two of them at what used to be called King's Crab, in Waikiki). So yeah, even though I was a pretty lousy guitar player, and a worse singer, I was feeling good about being in Hawaii's best band. Although no one else thought of us in the same way, and no one ever would.

The show we had that night was at Cafe Ground Zero, which everyone now knows as Mercury Bar, just across the street from Mark's Garage. I was over at the drummer / guitarist / bassist / keyboardist's apartment just tuning up my guitar or whatever, and he was playing Linus's first EP over his computer. I couldn't help but listen--even though they'd recorded it at Junk studios live, it sounded great. "This is who we're playing with tonight," he told me.

I put down my guitar. "We gotta play with these fucking guys?"

"They're pretty good, right?"

Obviously I didn't feel as confident walking into that show.

When we got there we found out we had to play after Linus, which made us--or me, particularly--even more nervous. I think Nik was wearing a T-shirt, and Dave was playing a Danelectro then, torquoise-colored. Danmerle and Sandeep were still in the band. While I sat and watched their set I felt myself grow pale. Their songs were catchy, sometimes danceable, sometimes moshable, sometimes spooky in a very good way. These were the days of "The Construction," "Sad to Say" and "Girlfriend." One of us said he didn't want to do the song he usually did. I said I hardly wanted to do the show at all. We ended up doing okay, I guess, though I never felt so ridiculous playing the Rhythm King drum machine as I did that night. After their show I paid five bucks for the EP (the one with the rhino on it) and spent the next week listening to it and seething with envy.

Since then I've played shows with Linus a couple of times, and seen them less often than I would like. But every time I go to their show I have fun, whether I end up dancing or simply digging their music while sitting down. The bottom line is, you can't fuck with Linus, For They Are Better Than You. They play a better guitar, they have a better rhythm section. As an audience member I'm always torn between dancing to their groove or listening to their music, because almost every song inspires you to do both.

I've included sound clips of Dave--the band's lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter--from a solo live performance on KTUH's Monday Night Live. I wish I could have also included tracks from the band as well, but 1) the widget I use, which I detest, would not allow me to use the format of song file in which I have my Linus recordings; 2) these songs are great and should be checked out; 3) you can get a sense of some Linus tracks possibly coming up in the future, which you haven't heard before. Enjoy.

To stay abreast of the latest Linus news, you can check out Dave's blog here:

http://blog.myspace.com/linusthebanddotcom

Music From My Friends 3: lovehandles

Shine your light
Formerly of littlejeans, the BunkBeds, the Haunted Pines, and Kitty Hawk, lovehandles has played music all over this land, from Mililani to San Francisco to Arlington to Portland. I first met the personage who would become lovehandles in an undergraduate screenwriting class, where he had me listen to a cassette of his acoustic multi-tracked cover of the Beatles' "Real Love" on his Walkman. Ever since that moment, lovehandles has consistently flipped my wig with the breadth of his talent and taste.

Following the music career of the artist formerly known as Tommy for the past seven or eight years--as both a collaborator and a fan--has delivered one revelation after the other. His first cassette complilations were what I might call, if I chose to wear the shit-stained music reviewer's hat, "ad hoc indie folk guitar pop," but lovehandles is not the kind of artist that should be judged by the crippled measurements so commonly used to classify guitar-based songs. In fact, lovehandles is a different kind of artist altogether.

Whereas many musicians exploit their lives as material to create an artificial statement of their feelings, lovehandles' life is his music. His songs are not abstract and miserable musings on the injustice of existence; rather, they are vibrant photographs of a particular moment when he felt a particular thing particularly. Each lovehandles song celebrates a moment and feeling in all of its wonder, and the immensity of his output is testament to the limitless number of transcendent moments, the chasms and the pinnacles, a person can experience from one day to the next.

You can check out the newest lovehandles recordings on his myspace page here:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=20292258

And you can also see videos for his "skeleton smiles" and "yesyesyes" here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG2Ip805wgc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rDZGWOXy6s

Music From My Friends 2: Chris Claxton

You're riding so low but you're riding solo

Music From My Friends presents Chris Claxton, nee Buford Brixton, nee Summatyme Playerrz, formerly of littlejeans, the Bunkbeds, and Oh the Possibilities. Mr. Claxton hails from Maryland, paid his dues on the rough streets of Mililani, and is currently keeping it real in Makiki with his wife. It always struck me how parallel Chris and Russ's (see Music From My Friends 1) lives are: Chris came from Maryland, Russ went to Maryland. Chris plays bass, Russ plays bass. They both are married. Both of their first names end in "s," which is a pain when you consider writing their names in the possessive form. They both write ill songs. And they both like taking pictures in front of architecture, apparently (see Russ's photo in a blog below). The songs you are experiencing come from two sources: 1) Chris's project "Summatyme Playerrz," which Tommy sent to me when I was in Ukraine and which made incredibly cold Ukrainian winter (the coldest, it seems, in 100 years) warm; 2) Chris's recent performance on KTUH's Monday Night Live. To put it simply, one of the best singers/guitarists/bassists/songwriters I know. For more information about Mr. Claxton, you can check out nothing. Unlike Russ, who has the gift of foresight, Chris has not created a website with which to showcase his music.