The highest level of celestial heaven

If you're following this story with some interest:

I can recommend the riveting book Under The Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer (Into The Wild, Into Thin Air):

It's a well-researched, well-told, controversial look into the Mormon splinter groups that practice polygamy in remote areas of the American West, and their roots throughout history of that religion. I was drawn into this book and devoured it over one short weekend about two years ago; but hey even after reading it . . . why any man would want to deal with more than one wife still remains beyond me. Ha. In any case, it's a fascinating exploration into a topic we may have never thought would intrigue us, as one can always expect from Krakauer.

Monday Music Roundup

You might be surprised to hear it, but I am reading a really interesting book about zombies. Heck, I'm surprised that I'm reading a book about zombies. But it was an unexpected gift and I'm not one to look a gift book in the mouth, so I dove in.

World War Z is rivetingly creepy, an impeccably-constructed fictional history of our modern world seeing an unknown outbreak in rural China that causes people to become undead, their blood congealed into a black ooze, with a shuffling gait and a low moan. Oh, and a bloodthirsty need to bite the living (like, break into your house in suburbia and feast on your family). Sounds all Halloween, but it's more like Outbreak. The book traces the procession of the outbreak, the coverups, the panic, the turning point in the war, and then the reconstruction of the entire planet -- entirely through short, well-crafted first person accounts of those who "lived through it." It's very believable and globally creative. I like freaking myself out with well-written scares. I recommend this title and am glad I gave it a shot.


Music I am listening to this fine first week of Spring:

Katherine
Boyracer
This starts like bubblegum with a fresh sweetness and pop, but quickly you get the fuzz and hear the punky influences of Boyracer. Originally from Britain and now in Arizona, this band has gone through over 40 members in the almost two decades they've been making music. Currently the lineup consists of original member Stewart Anderson and two rockin' gals, one of whom he is married to. As my friend who recommended them said, "the killer melodies really come through after a few listens," and I agree -- the overtones are sweetly gratifying, but with enough distortion to balance it so well. They could be from any decade of the last 40 years.

The Satisfier
Eli Reed
Here's another out-of-nowhere 24 year old who channels James Brown here with a red-hot yowl and big brass soul. I originally read about Eli "Paperboy" Reed & The True Loves over on the Bag of Songs blog and as soon as I started listening to the track, I had to go back and doublecheck who this kid was and from which era. Originally from Allston, MA, he honed his musical chops after he up & moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi at age 18 -- in the North Mississippi Delta, and one of the birthplaces of the blues. Holy mackerel. Go stream some stuff on this kid's MySpace; album Roll With You is out April 29th on Q Division.


I The Kite
Centro-Matic
If you were Texas musican Will Johnson and found yourself sometimes tugged in different directions with your music, you might --if you were especially prolific-- form two bands. And in 2008, you might release a double album with both of your bands on it. Centro-matic often explores the loose and beautiful, but slightly more rockin' side of Johnson's persona, where South San Gabriel is a bit more twilight dusk than burnished afternoon. Hazy but stunning, like a landscape from a Cormac McCarthy novel. According to the guys themselves, "what is distinctive about the release of Dual Hawks is that we get the chance to hear side-by-side the various ways in which Centro-matic and South San Gabriel complement and play off of each other—sort of the full-length equivalent of a split single." Very cool idea, with gorgeous interplay.

Magic
The Blakes
A friend has been urging me for months to write something about The Blakes after he saw them randomly on a Friday night in a small club and wrote that "they were awesome…like fuck yeah spirit of rock n roll awesome -- they sort of rip off The Strokes but they do it in a good way, like it is still 2002 and garage rock will rock forever and it isn’t 2008." So yeah, I'll take a listen. This song was originally part of the Sound of Color ad campaign, and finds this Seattle trio taking a bit of a departure from the garage vibe found on excellent tracks like "Modern Man" or "Commit" (on their MySpace) crossing over to a sunnier Kinks/Beatles vibe that evokes nicely their assigned color of blue. Or maybe a cheery aquamarine.


Heron Blue
Sun Kil Moon
Mark Kozelak's music gives up its melancholy layers slowly, over repeated late-night listens. Therefore I cannot claim to have plumbed the depths of the new Sun Kil Moon album after only having streaming access to it for a few short days via their MySpace. But this one we managed to capture is bewitching. Like one particularly incisive lyric here, "Her hair it twists 'round her necklace / constricts and chokes like ruthless vine," this song is near-eight minutes of ominous impending beauty. The new album April comes out the first day of that month and features guest vocals from Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) and Ben Gibbard.

Fools rush in (where angels fear to tread)

During the hellishness of living in a war zone, what can music possibly bring to the equation? Through its primal power, can it be a hand to reach out and pull us away?

When the Bosnian War and the siege of the city of Sarajevo was unfolding in the early Nineties, I never could wrap my mind around the ethnic cleansing, the infighting, the murders of civilians under the auspices of war. It all seemed so very far removed from my world (despite my grandmother being full-blooded Yugoslavian).

After just finishing Bill Carter's book Fools Rush In, it still doesn't make full sense to me what was causing the bombing and sniping and destruction between neighbors Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Bosnian-Serbs, Bosnian-Croats, Bosnian Muslims - like one of those spin-the-wheels color combination games -- how many combos can we come up with that can kill each other? Then again I don't know how much sense it made to anyone involved, inside the city or outside looking in (or outside ignoring it).

Bill Carter is a twenty-something from the West Coast who begins his journey into the Bosnia region as a man unmoored. From his earliest memories of abuse at the hands of a terrifying, nauseating, damaged father, he begins his book by telling of his lifelong gravitational pull to places half a world away. He remembers getting a map of the world in National Geographic magazine as a child growing up in California's Central Valley:

"I stuck the world, measuring three feet by five, on the wall next to my bed with a few strips of tape. At night, on the top bunk, I would secretly stretch out across the world. If I extended fully I could put my toes in the jungles of Sumatra, my navel at the tip of Argentina and my head in the Indian Ocean. Most nights I would place an ear against the the map, my hot flushed cheek touching the imaginary cool deep waters of the Pacific Ocean. I think I was listening for the sound of breaking waves. Instead most nights sounded the same."

When he reaches his early twenties, he finds a temporary harbor of amazing intensity in Santa Cruz in the arms of a girl named Corrina who fills exactly one year of his life with fervor and heat, understanding and laughter. His writing about his relationship with her held my nerve endings up against a white-hot flame, reminiscent of how Rob Sheffield wrote about Renee in Love Is A Mix Tape only with more grit and sexual honesty.

After losing Corrina, Carter's trajectory spins him to a war zone on a humanitarian mission. I felt like he was searching to numb the pain inside of him by immersing himself in even greater pain around him. Life in the seven-mile-by-one-mile oval of land in the heart of Sarajevo is under siege -- a killing zone from snipers in the hills and in the tall buildings, shooting at anything that dares to move. But Carter finds that people do dare to move; they dare to play blues music and rock 'n' roll in clubs where you have to duck your head and run from the incoming shrapnel to get in the dusty side door. They dare to hold art gallery openings and go dancing. They share meals in their homes (away from the vulnerability of the glass windows), they laugh, they make love -- and live in the moment because tomorrow may actually never come.

As Carter says in an interview on Dutch television, "When I got there, it didn't take very long for me to realize that this place was ... timeless. When you entered Sarajevo, in that war, you entered a time zone. There was no past, no future. The past is gone, it's obliterated. The future is how much longer I have to sit here with you before a bomb comes in the window. So what we have is right now. I was living right in the moment, which was a huge relief for me."

Carter fills his days with distributing food through a French group called The Serious Road Trip, lives in a bombed-out office tower in the center of Sarajevo, and they occupy many nights sitting around drinking cheap Eastern European vodka mixed with powdered lemonade, trying to make some sense of what is going on all around them. Carter's journey in this book is honest, and reeling, and confessional. All the foreigners in this story seem, to some degree, to be trying to find a home and a purpose and a community on the other side of the world.

Carter's hesitation mixes with the brashness that we are so prone to in our twenties; the hubris pressed hot against the earnestness, with the passions all bleeding red into our uncertainty. One other Serious Road Trip member remarks to Carter one night, "I am beginning to believe the worst part of being here is knowing this might be the best thing I ever do in my life. I mean I'm only twenty-six. What am I supposed to do for the rest of it?"

Dealing with the death all around them, Carter appraises his own pale flesh in the mirror one night and writes, "Sometimes I think it is easy to forget we have blood in us until it starts to leak out." He loses friends and acquaintances to the war, and in between his humanitarian work he photographs the people he meets and the horrors (and joys) that he sees each day.

Then one night he arrives upon a whim that can only be described as ludicrous, but that plays out into a surreal reality. Carter wants the world to know what is going on in this strip of land that seems to have been forgotten by the international community, rendered invisible by the political double-speak and the obscurity of another war, another country. Not my problem. For some reason he thinks of U2. He thinks that U2 might understand and sympathize with what is happening in Sarajevo because of the parallels between their own Irish history and their passion for social justice. And amazingly enough, Carter calls it right.

A big part of this story then also becomes the relationship he forms with U2 from the center of this bombed-out city, and the way he is ultimately able to connect the Sarajevans and their stories with hundreds of thousands of European concertgoers attending the ZooTV Tour in 1993 via live satellite. The Edge and then Bono relate with what Carter is experiencing and filming, and the result becomes the award-winning documentary Miss Sarajevo, for which U2 pens a song by the same name. The double-edged sword of pop celebrity here becomes an asset through which people begin to take notice of the slaughter, setting into motion a chain of awareness and events that seem to ultimately help quell the horror in Sarajevo through NATO action.

Carter's book is about a quest for redemption; for a people, for a city, for himself. It's a riveting read on so many levels, saturated with feelings and uncertainties that I could absolutely relate to even though I've never lived in something like he describes. I was encouraged how one confused, passionate, grieving, flawed twenty-something started a rumble about an injustice in this world, even as he struggled with so many things. He captures a rare joy in this story. And plus, the book mentions Pearl Jam two times, so you know, it's clearly worth it for that alone. Pick it up here and read a U2-related excerpt here.

Sunday Bloody Sunday (live in Sarajevo) - U2
The Sarajevans invite U2 to play Sarajevo and Bono seems ready to go in immediately, but is reined in through the obvious security concerns. It takes four years, but they eventually come to Sarajevo in 1997 on the PopMart tour

Miss Sarajevo (live in Milano) - U2
Bono sings the Italian lyrics here instead of Pavarotti; a gorgeous song with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights read over the ending

Angel - Pearl Jam
This is just a Heather-addition, a song not mentioned anywhere in the book but one that fits this story as perfectly as if it were part of the official soundtrack, on so many levels. Listen to it as accompaniment to reading, and tell me I'm not crazy


[all photos credit Bill Carter]

I now walk into the wild

This past weekend, Into The Wild finally trickled down to those of us not located in big glamorous cities. I promise not to wreck it for you if you haven't read the book or seen the movie, these are just a few of my thoughts after having done both this past week.

Components of McCandless' grand Alaskan adventure tug relentlessly and almost perniciously at some loose threads inside me. I suspect that elements of following your passion with such unbridled drive and joy touch many of us on some level, which is why the book sold so well, and why the movie was made. I was glad I had read the book first, shading the characters, the motivations, filling in the missing chunks, but the movie was very faithful to the book.

The movie review in our local paper said that McCandless was "sanctimonious and arrogant," and that sat so wrong with me. I surely didn't know McCandless, and it's easy to forget after the book and the film and a big-name soundtrack that he was actually a real person. But more than anything to me, he seemed sincere, even if the misguided optimism about his odds of success in the wild ended up fatal.

As one interviewee in the book named Sleight said, while relating Chris with another wilderness wanderer who was profiled named Everett Ruess: "Everett was strange, kind of different. But him and and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That was what was great about them. They tried. Not many do." That, for me, was the core of the story.

I noticed that McCandless seemed to deeply affect everyone whose lives he came into, like a bolt of lightning. Everyone interviewed for the book remembered him well, much better than your standard vagrant who enters your life for a few hours or days, for a meal or a ride. But you know, I found myself empathizing with the people that McCandless left behind at every stop along the way, after he took what he needed from them -- be it conversation, a father figure, travel advice, a laugh, a discussion of literature, the bouncing off of ideas and philosophical concepts. Like a blue-green bolt of ephemeral electricity he lit up their skies for a moment. But very soon, the wanderlust inside him compelled him to travel on. Everyone seemed to feel a gaping void there after Chris left, something you see especially vividly in the movie. Maybe he's one of those shooting stars that you almost wish you'd never crossed paths with at all because everything seems dimmer in their absence, the afterglow they leave behind radiating off the otherwise dull grey walls around you.

How does the music complement the film? Very well, as I suspected. Vedder's scoring is bittersweet and powerful, especially a memorable scene with "The Wolf," where Vedder sounds his barbaric yawp over the roofs of this world (or actually the treeline of the Alaskan wilderness) as McCandless stands with arms outstretched on top of his bus-home, feeling the pull and glory of the wilderness. Vedder's unselfconscious animal cries made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

One specific lyric on the soundtrack that I keep rolling around in my mind is found in the song "Guaranteed." Vedder sings "Circles they grow and they swallow people whole..." I keep thinking of what he may have meant by this line. I come up with more than one circle. Anyone who has ever found a certain idea hard to leave behind knows the exhaustion that comes with continuing to revisit it, as it soaks up the attention and the circle gets stronger in our minds. I wonder if McCandless escaped the beige circles of mediocre daily living, only to find himself pursuing a more savage circle of Alaskan wilderness. Both will swallow you whole.

Which one is worse?

Guaranteed - Eddie Vedder


Now that I am done reading Into the Wild, I have moved on to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and it is currently scaring the absolute bejesus out of me with its incinerated post-apocalyptic vision. More on that later but sheesh.

Summer reading: Best Music Writing series (Da Capo Press)

I have an admittedly short attention span on planes. Usually I zone out with music, taking advantage of the silent hours to explore the inevitable backlog of new tunes on my iPod. If I do read, it's often the guilty indulgence of People magazine that I only buy in airport bookshops or --even better-- Reader's Digest. On this latest trip, I found something much better.

Da Capo Music Press is one of the finest purveyors of music books out there. They asked me if there was anything in their (superb) current catalog that I'd be interested in checking out, and the first book I've cracked of the box they sent is the anthology Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006. The seventh year in the series, I found a lot to love here from a variety of sources last year ranging from traditional print media, online journals, and even (yay!) music blogs. The commentary varies from straight up album/song reviews to artist profiles and in-depth theoretical pieces on serious topics loosely related to music as a foundation.

The introduction by editor Mary Gaitskill explains the vibe of the anthology: "I put these pieces together like a mix tape of sounds a person might hear in life -- get up in the morning, put on an old T. Rex song, go outside, hear "Gold Digger" coming out of somebody's car, nameless electronica coming out of someone else's. A guy walks through the parking lot whistling an aria from Bizet's Carmen; something high and haunting leaks out of a passing boy's iPod. Go into a store and there's a faux cowgirl on the sound system singing some artifically sweetened blues. All day songs fly past; some get lost in traffic noise, some enter your imagination and take strange dream-shapes that get inside your thoughts and feelings and make them different."

I loved that because she expresses exactly how the world sounds to me. People will ask me "where do you get all your ideas for posting?" And my answer is this: Once you start paying attention to the music around you, you hear it everywhere. There's no shortage of things to listen to, experience, and write about. It's why I love writing this blog, and it's why I enjoy reading collections like this one.

Here are three snippets from the book to give you an idea of why you should pick it up for some good summer readin'. Guaranteed to enrich your brain 437% more than People.

CRAZY IS AS CRAZY DOES
by Ann Powers
What I've noticed about "crazy" rock musicians is that ones whose music offers the most insight into the turmoil of emotion tend to be women, and that these crazies tend to receive less hero worship than their male counterparts. . . [t]heir inner demons are in constant dialogue with a world that already demonizes anything less than neat that emanates from the feminine realm. A male artist getting crazy can come off as threatening, but he's also often greeted as a prophet or, conversely, an endearing holy fool. A woman artist getting crazy is a different kind of mess--one that raises the general discomfort level by raising the specter of uncontrolled sexuality, irresponsible motherhood, violence done to or by the secred "gentler sex" -- all elements of our common consciousness that have haunted us since Medea's time and have never been resolved.

Your Ghost - Kristin Hersh (featuring Michael Stipe)
The rest of this interesting piece looks at those who have struggled with demons, like Hersh, Daniel Johnston, Lisa Germano, Nick Drake, or Mary Margaret O'Hara.


THE BEATLES--"Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine"
(Reached No. 1 on 20th August 1966)
by Tom Ewing
Part of a series to write on all UK #1 hit singles
The brisk orchestral arrangement of "Eleanor Rigby" is tense and fussy, with something of Eleanor's spinsterish neatness: the strings bring to mind sewing, or sweeping the steps, one of those little daily things you do unthinkingly, or instead of thinking. They also sound a little like a horror film soundtrack, and Eleanor Rigby is cinematic, and it is about horror. It's Paul McCartney taking one of pop's smooth-rubbed words --"lonely"-- thinking it through and recoiling.

"Eleanor Rigby" remains neat to its end, so neat you might forget that this question of the lonely people hasn't remotely been answered. For that you need the other side of the single, "Yellow Submarine."

Intentionally or not, "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine" make a perfect pair. Crushing isolation as the flip of a song that values limitless community -- "And my friends are all aboard / Many more of them live next door." The one set in a drably recognizable town, the other in a fantasy utopia. Recital and singalong.

Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles
Yellow Submarine - The Beatles


A VERY SPECIAL CONCERT:
The Enduring Bond Between Huey Lewis and the Developmentally Disabled
by Katy St. Clair
. . . The band recently celebrated its 25th anniversary by performing at this year's Marin County Fair on a cool summer night a few weeks back. This was Huey Lewis & the News' stomping ground, where they began two decades earlier, playing around San Rafael and Mill Valley. Suffice it to say, this show was something all my clients were looking forward to.

There are a lot of stereotypes about retarded people and most of them are false . . . [t]here is however one stereotype about retarded people that is true, one broad brushstroke that one can make about them all: Good gosh a'mighty, retarded people love them some Huey Lewis. Part of the reason is that Huey is apparently a sweetheart who does a lot of volunteer work with people who have developmental disabilities. But another big part is the music.

A bunch of people from a group home had set up camp on the opposite side of the stage, laying out blankets and picnic food. Bobbi recognized some of her friends and waved. "Huuuuueyyyy!" they all yelled back. It was just like people who yell "Bruuuce!" at a Springsteen concert, only more retarded. In fact, Huey Lewis is a retarded version of Bruce Springsteen. Think about it.

[Please read the full and wonderful article here]
Back In Time - Huey Lewis

Monday Music Roundup

I had a hard weekend. But notably, there were some new releases and musical gems that made me happy, and I also (frickin finally) finished Bill Bryson's dry and uproarious book about Britain, Notes From A Small Island. I enjoyed it so much that it almost feels wrong. I'm talking 'bout laughing (really, kinda chortling) out loud on every other page, plus really enjoying reading about places I'd visited in the UK that I hadn't thought about in 5 years; places like this little gem, or here. I wrote a few thoughts about the book for Bruce's Some Velvet Blog, part of a series on summer reads, and that's up now.


Hollywood Bass Player
Josh Rouse
After releasing a charmingly laid-back EP with his Spanish novia, She's Spanish, I'm American, Josh Rouse will be back in solo long form with a new album called Country Mouse City House (out July 31 on his own imprint Bedroom Classics). This track is toe-tappingly catchy with a fittingly strutty bass line -- and for some reason it made me want to sing "My Life" by Billy Joel (aka the Bosom Buddies theme song) all weekend. If you preorder the new disc now, you also get a bonus CD with some cool demos and unreleased songs.

A Long Time Away
Howie Payne
Lead singer of the now-defunct Liverpool band The Stands, Howie Payne is set to release his first solo LP this year, and has posted 4 new tracks on his MySpace page for your streaming pleasure. What I've heard of The Stands has quite a bit more rollicking sound, hailing from the same scene as neighbors The Coral and The Zutons, but these new songs are precisely some of the aforementioned things that made me happy this weekend. They are a bit more wistful and shaded, with a bit of blowing-through-the-jasmine-in-my-mind reminiscence for me.


The National Side
Romantica
This next tune from Minneapolis band Romantica is different but I like it a lot. A fellow Ryan Adams fan recommended this to me, saying it was a tune that "you absolutely must check out" and guaranteed that it would be one of my favorite songs of the summer. All I can liken it to would be -- okay, so Evan Dando moves to North Carolina and finds a backing band of mariachi dudes to play with. Then there's also some great "buh-bah-buh-dah-dah-dah..."s which you really just can't go wrong with in most circumstances. I like it. It's from their forthcoming album America, out on 2024 Records.

Kingston Advice (Clash cover)
Camper Van Beethoven
Since we've already established an abiding fondness on my part for the output of David Lowery, it should come as no surprise that this track is one of my favorites off the new Clash tribute album The Sandinista! Project (out last month on the Megaforce label). As with all tribute albums, there are some questionable stylistic choices amisdt the 36 tracks, but this band is one with the cred to believably cover The Clash in a trippy, inventive way. Maybe I could have done without the fife, but otherwise I dig this.


Staggolee
Pacific Gas & Electric
I am in love with the quirky weirdness of the new soundtrack from Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, full of hidden gems mostly from the '60s and '70s. I just got the soundtrack this weekend, and no surprises - we all know Quentin is a genius at this stuff. I'd love to hang out with Quentin and talk music someday. The man strikes me as borderline crazy, but he's one of the best soundtrackers out there. This cut is a swampy electric blues harp romp, but the other songs on the album range from campy girl groups, atmospheric Italian film scores, the swagger of T. Rex, and the British Invasion sound of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. Fantastic off-kilter kitsch.

"Love Is A Mix Tape" mix tape

Love Is A Mix Tape just absolutely knocked my socks off.

I devoured this book in one weekend and enjoyed every single page, heartily. This is ostensibly a book about mix tapes, and looking back at a life spent seeing the world in a series of 45-minute vignettes (then, of course, you flip the tape over). Rob Sheffield has penned an honest (yet wildly entertaining) book that affected me more deeply than any book I've read in recent memory, woven throughout with a genuine and bleeding love for music. It's electric.

The meta-theme of the book is great love, great loss, and the soundtrack: his relationship and marriage to Renee, a girl who he says was "in the middle of everything, living her big, messy, epic life, and none of us who loved her will ever catch up with her." Rob loved Renee, and chronicles that here beautifully from their first meeting to her sudden death at 31.

Parts of the book are evisceratingly intimate. Sometimes I felt almost too close to his darkest and most intimate moments, and it's hard to phrase this right but -- because I knew so much of the music that weaves throughout their stories, I almost felt like I had a personal stake. I kept thinking that it was surprising to find a story so real and honest and intimate when I initially picked this up because, duh, it's about mix tapes.

If you don't like reading about other people's love stories, you should still 100% read this book. Renee was his muse, but his passion (and hers) is thoroughly and unabashedly music -- and there is some absolutely fantastic stuff in here. He writes of their relationship, "We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together." They were both music writers and radio DJs, they fell in love hard and married young. They made lots and lots of fabulous mix tapes, and each chapter begins with a reprinted tracklist from one cassette from that era in their lives.

This is a man after my own heart. How could I do anything but love a man who starts chapter 14 with: "Every time I have a crush on a woman, I have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo." He goes on to elaborate how she is in the front ("tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker"), stealing the show and he is hidden in the back behind his Roland JP8000 keyboard, "lavishing all my computer blue love on her."He even lists all the best band names he's come up with for their synth-pop duo: Metropolitan Floors, Indulgence, Angela Dust.

And you should hear him wax poetic about mix tapes. Be still my heart. Rob writes, "There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one." He then gives his examples:
The Party Tape
I Want You
We're Doing It? Awesome!
You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going To Be Friends
You Broke My Heart And Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It
The Road Trip
Good Songs From Bad Albums I Never Want To Play Again

. . . and many more. "There are millions of songs in the world," he writes, "and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan." The book starts with Sheffield pulling out a box of old tapes and all throughout the book --from his childhood school dance recollections, to the first mixes he can remember making for Renee, to the ones that accompanied him in the dark days and months following her death-- the mix tapes and the songs are as much characters in this story as the actual people are.

Since each of us have our own completely sovereign and self-focused memories surrounding our favorite bands and favorite songs (the unique feelings, smells, companions, activities associated with them), there is something that I just find so ebullient about "seeing" all these bands and songs through the unique rubric of their lives.

Take this amazing passage about their first Pavement concert (summer 1991):

The night of the show, the floor was abuzz with anticipation. None of us in the crowd knew what Pavement looked like, or even who was in the band. They put out mysterious seven-inch singles without any band info or photos, just credits for instruments like "guitar slug," "psued-piano gritt-gitt," "keybored," "chime scheme," and "last crash simbiosis." We assumed that they were manly and jaded, that they would stare at the floor and make abstract boy noise. That would be a good night out.

Royal Trux went on a few hours late, which I'm sure had nothing to do with buying drugs in Richmond. They were great, like a scuzz-rock Katrina and the Waves. The peroxide girl in the football jersey jumped around and screamed while the boy with the scary home-cut bangs played his guitar and tried to stay out of her way. She threw a cymbal at him. We wanted to take them home for a bath, a hot meal, and a blood change.

But Pavement was nothing at all like we pictured them. They were a bunch of foxy dudes, and they were into it. As soon as they hit the stage, you could hear all the girls in the crowd ovulate in unison. There were five or six of them up there, some banging on guitars, some just clapping their hands or singing along. They did not stare at the floor. They were there to make some noise and have some fun. They had fuzz and feedback and unironically beautiful sha-la-la melodies. The bassist looked just like Renee's high school boyfriend. Stephen Malkmus leaned into the mike, furrowed his brows, and sang lyrics like, "I only really want you for your rock and roll" or "When I fuck you once it's never enough / When I fuck you two times it's always too much." The songs were all either fast or sad, because all songs should either be fast or sad. Some of the fast ones were sad, too.

Afterward, we staggered to the parking lot in total silence. When we got to the car, Renee spoke up in a mournful voice: "I don't think The Feelies are ever gonna be good enough again."

Our friend Joe in New York sent us a tape, a third-generation dub of the Pavement album Slanted and Enchanted. Renee and I decided this was our favorite tape of all time. The guitars were all boyish ache and shiver. The vocals were funny bad poetry sung through a Burger World drive-through mike. The melodies were full of surfer-boy serenity, dreaming through a haze of tape hiss and mysterious amp noise. This was the greatest band ever, obviously. And they didn't live twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or even five years ago. They were right now. They were ours.

I think about those days, and I think about a motto etched onto the sleeve of one of those Pavement singles: I AM MADE OF BLUE SKY AND HARD ROCK AND I WILL LIVE THIS WAY FOREVER.

--------------------------------------------------------------
I know this is getting long (who cares) but as I read this passage on that recent sunny Sunday afternoon, I was mightily moved by the gorgeousness and the raw emotion that I think we all can relate to. Or at least . . . that we all wish we could relate to.

Renee and I spent a lot of time that fall driving in her Chrysler, the kind of mile wide ride southern daddies like their girls to drive around in. She would look out the window and say, "It's sunny, let's go driving" -- and then we'd actually do it. She loved to hit the highway and would say things like, "Let's open 'er up." Or we would just drive aimlessly in the Blue Ridge mountains. She loved to take sharp corners, something her grandpa had taught her back in West Virginia. He could steer with just one index finger on the wheel. I would start to feel a little dizzy as the roads started to twist at funny angles, but Renee would just accelerate and cackle, "We're shittin' in tall cotton now!"

We would always sing along to the radio. I was eager to be her full-time Pip, but I had a lot to learn about harmony. Whenever we tried "California Dreamin'," I could never remember whether I was the Mamas or the Papas. I had never sung duets before. She did her best to whip me into shape.

"They could never be!"
"What she was!"
"Was!"
"Was!"
"To!"
"To!"
"To!"
"No, no, damn it! I'm Oates!"
"I thought I was Oates."
"You started as Hall. You have to stay Hall."

We never resolved that dispute. We both always wanted to be Oates. Believe me, you don't want to hear the fights we had over England Dan and John Ford Coley.

Have you ever been in a car with a southern girl blasting through South Carolina when Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Call Me The Breeze" comes on the radio? Sunday afternoon, sun out, windows down, nowhere to hurry back to? I never had. I was twenty-three. Renee turned up the radio and began screaming along. Renee was driving. She always preferred driving, since she said I drove like an old Irish lady. I thought to myself, Well, I have wasted my whole life up to this moment. Any other car I've ever been in was just to get me here, any road I've ever been on was just to get me here. Any other passenger seat I've ever sat on, I was just riding here. I barely recognized this girl sitting next to me, screaming along to the piano solo.

I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I've always wanted to see New Zealand, but I'd still rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I'd rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl's hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.



LOVE IS A MIX TAPE - MIX TAPE
I am heading off to San Diego this weekend so I'll leave you guys with this, and I'll be listening to it too. Some new stuff, some old friends -- all these songs are assembled from the tapes listed in the book. Thanks to Rob for opening the vaults.

Call Me The Breeze - Lynyrd Skynyrd
Coax Me - Sloan
Slow Dog - Belly
Thirteen - Big Star
What You're Doing - The Beatles
Your Favorite Thing - Sugar
Fall On Me - R.E.M.
Debris Slide - Pavement
Supernova - Liz Phair
She's Gone - Hall & Oates
Sister Havana - Urge Overkill
God Knows It's True - Teenage Fanclub
Rougher - Lois (with Elliott Smith)
Houses In Motion - Talking Heads
Midnight Train To Georgia - Gladys Knight and The Pips
You Don't Love Me Yet - Roky Erickson
Gold Star For Robot Boy - Guided By Voices
Freezing Point - Archers of Loaf
Bang A Gong (Get It On) - T Rex
Questioningly - The Ramones
Waiting On A Friend - Rolling Stones

LOVE IS A ZIP FILE

33 1/3 Series: The Stone Roses

I am in love with a pocket-sized novella. We don't know yet where we'll live but we are sure that we will be very happy together.

Several months back I received a copy of Alex Green's contribution to The 33 1/3 Series, The Stone Roses. For those uninitiated into this fantastic little series, it is essentially the zenith of musical dorkitude: entire books that look song-by-song at a seminal album. I had not yet found spare time to crack open Green's mini-tome on the messiahs from Manchester, but finally when I settled into my seat on the airplane to go to San Francisco (very close to a large neighbor in 12E who was seat-dancing to Arabic music, complete with hand motions) I pulled it out of my bag and settled in.

By the third paragraph, I was hooked -- already laughing out loud at the flawless way that Green captures the everyday and crystallizes it into something fabulous. His ardor and undying passion for The Stone Roses and their 1989 self-titled debut album is evident in each chapter, on every page.

With his permission, here is the first few pages of introduction. And it only gets better from here, folks. This is an absolute must-read (even if you have no idea who The Stone Roses were or why they were important):


PROLOGUE
The Stone Roses, by Alex Green

"Sometimes I fantasize..."

When I was in seventh grade, my favorite conversations came at the bus stop. While my friends and I waited for the bus, which was driven by a drowsy-looking guy named Lenny who would only play Styx's Paradise Theatre, we would energetically cover a range of topics: which girls were hot, what the best song was on Def Leppard's Pyromania, or how Han Solo could still be alive after being submerged in such a deep and heartbreaking freeze for all that time.

But what we were best at were pop culture hypotheticals, wildly imagined scenarios whose possibilities were so intriguing that the next day we'd continue the conversation right where we left off without missing a beat, without even first saying hello. We'd wonder who would win if Bruce Lee fought Heavyweight champ Larry Holmes; what would happen if the shark from Jaws somehow got in the community swimming pool through the metal drain at the bottom of the deep end; how awesome it would be if Christie Brinkley was our babysitter; or if the rumor was true that Bon Scott was not dead at all, but bearded and sad and rotting away in a Mexican prison, and if it was, maybe we should head down there and do something about it.

The bus stop was like a bar but without any of the drinks, though conversations we had did prefigure the kind of drunken musings we would have years later as college students. Of course we knew our endless combinations of preposterous pop culture pairings and bizarre, almost supernatural wishes ("And then Jim Morrison would jump down from the sky right on stage with wings made of snakes and be like, 'I was never dead'") were never going to come true, but they were so inspired, so sublimely hallucinogenic, they made us glow with excitement because they felt like the newest and best ideas on the planet. And as outrageous and illogical as they were, they felt real enough to happen and that's what made them so seductive.

But the fact was, Bruce Lee was dead, and even if he wasn't, it was doubtful he'd come out of retirement and jump both sports and weight classes to fight Larry Holmes; the metal drain at the bottom of the pool was too small for even a baby barracuda to get in; my babysitter was Lisa Gates, a girl who didn't even look to be in the same species as Christie Brinkley; and if Bon Scott really was in a Mexican prison, and five seventh graders from California somehow slipped under the parental radar and made their way down to Tijuana on a school day, what could they really do once they got there?

Reality, however, has not dampened my desire, even into my thirties, to think of the world in the same terms I did when I was a kid at the bus stop. But instead of dreaming up things that fancifully mutate reality, I have now become obsessed with reality itself, and what might have happened if it hadn't gotten in the way. For example, if River Phoenix hadn't died of a drug overdose; if the Smiths hadn't broken up; or if Björn Berg hadn't retired from tennis at twenty-six. Of course these are all great artists and athletes who left their marks with deep indentations on popular culture, but the mind just takes off when it thinks about what more they could have done: Phoenix was deepening as an actor and his body of work seemed to only scratch the surface of what he was really capable of; the Smiths' last studio album Strangeways Here We Come was their most accessible yet; and Borg had eleven Grand Slam titles when he walked away from the sport, which at the time was only two shy of Roy Emerson's record.

As for me, an ardent music addict with far too many arcane facts easily accessed by the right question and with a music collection so absurdly sizable I can listen to a different album every day for the next fifty-five years, for me what hurts most is the story of the Stone Roses [footnote 1: I'm still waiting for a party where the beautiful girl asks me the name of the drummer on Jazz Butcher Conspiracy's Distressed Gentlefolk. I've rehearsed this so much that if I'm sure if it ever happens I'll blow it and instead of saying, "Kevin Haskins," I'll say the name of the guy who played keyboards in Curiosity Killed The Cat.]

On the strength of their self-titled debut album, the Stone Roses should not only have ruled the world, they should still be ruling it. Shrugging off time and history and the constantly evolving musical curves of the pop universe, the Stone Roses' harmonious blend of melodic six-string pop and psychedelic rock and roll still remains, after all these years, both fresh and vital. Whether it's the slithering, narcissistic arrogance of "I Wanna Be Adored," the soaring chorus of "She Bangs The Drums," or the funky workout of "Elephant Stone," The Stone Roses has more highlights than a David Beckham career retrospective. But more than that, it's a cohesive album, an album not Frankensteined together with one hit single and an array of scraps disguised as songs, but an album whose seamlessly sequenced song cycle begins by devilishly taunting, "I don't have to sell my soul / He's already in me," and then nervily ends with the self-obsessed and deliciously arrogant declaration, "I am the Resurrection and I am the Light." True to the words of its bookends, the entire album is pompous and defiant, each song crackling with ambition and hunger.

The Stone Roses' debut finds that lone, peerless groove occupied in temporary installments by precious few superstars, that groove where everything clicks and hums and snaps into place, and even the mistakes look good. In other words, when you've got it, you've got it big and it was here that the Stone Roses had it.

*****fin*****

The entire chapter on "Elizabeth My Dear" is available in pdf here and Amazon has several pages from the first chapter (on "I Wanna Be Adored") as well.

Elizabeth My Dear - The Stone Roses
I Wanna Be Adored - The Stone Roses

As usual, Largehearted Boy already has a fantastic playlist from the author here. For the love of all things holy and pure, BUY THIS BOOK. It's heartening to see a love for music in such unadulterated form.

Gift book idea for the cool kid on your list: Every Day Is Saturday

Here's something my coffee table lacks this Christmas: A new book of photography by San Francisco's Peter Ellenby called Every Day is Saturday, documenting the meteorical rise and rocking shows of many artists within the "indie rock scene." Considering it is accompanied by a mix CD (with folks like Grandaddy, Death Cab for Cutie, American Music Club, Rogue Wave, The Wedding Present, and many of the other bands featured in the book) it's available for a mere pittance at $17.

I mentioned Ellenby a few months ago because of his fine photographic coverage of the Rogue Wave benefit concert in SF that you may remember me talking up, and I like what I've seen of his work -- his eye for a good shot. I love rock photography, and how could I personally not adore a rock photographer who says that "his favorite places in the world are the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco"?

Some of the folks he's photographed that appear in this book are: Beastie Boys, Bob Mould, Bright Eyes, The Donnas, Earlimart, The Fastbacks, The Flaming Lips, The Foo Fighters, Ivy, John Lee Hooker, John Vanderslice (bottom), Les Claypool, Matt Nathanson, Mike Watt (left), Modest Mouse, Nada Surf, Neko Case, Red House Painters, Sebadoh and more . . .

Also contributing to the book were John Doe (from the band X) and Tim Scanlin (remember Addicted To Noise?), and a fine SF writer named Christopher Slater. When I first read it I thought it said Christian Slater and I was gonna get excited and go all Pump Up The Volume on you. But it's actually not him. Worthy nonetheless.

BUY THE BOOK

BE FRIENDS WITH THE BOOK

"This is Chuck Klosterman you are making a mix for, not some random person you want to make out with"

I laughed and laughed at this recent piece from What Would Jesus Blog, which walks you through the process of how one would go about making a mix tape for pop culture essayist/music lover Chuck Klosterman, should you ever find yourself needing to do so.

Since I could literally, literally sit for hours and talk about perfect song placement, the tour de force closing track and that achingly perfect little ballad to slide in the middle of any given mix, I loved this "conversation." I've even used some of these little suggestions he has without even knowing that it was divinely approved (like a Back To The Future soundclip for the opening track on a driving mix. Come on! It's just too perfect).

For example, under the section about choosing Track 4 ("Hit Chuck Klosterman with a not too cheesy novelty song") --

"Your best bet here would be to foreign language cover of a song that he already knows. For example, ''We’re Not Going To Take It' is not a smart move, but 'Nosotros No Lo Tomaremos' would be genius."

I just kind of cackled out loud again cutting and pasting that.


Incidentally, it gets even better in the comments when LargeHearted Boy linked to the actual mix tapes that Chuck Klosterman made for him and his readers:

Mix Tape One
(to go with his book Killing Yourself To Live: 85% Of A True Story)

Mix Tape Two
(to go with his book Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade Of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas)

It's a soundtrack to your reading-time, and I love it. Every author worth his salt should do this. It would make me read a lot more than I already do, that's for sure and certain.

New Pearl Jam photo book (5x1) FINALLY available

I love it when Pearl Jam reads my mind. Just yesterday it occured to me that there was a book of live Pearl Jam photographs (5x1, by Seattle photographer and long-time friend of the band Lance Mercer) that was supposed to come out this past Spring, but that I never heard a peep about it following the initial announcement. I went trolling the web to no avail.

Then just today I was alerted that the book is now (finally) available. It's 180 pages of concert and tour photos, like the Place/Date book (1998) which I own and love to leaf through. The price is a bit steep ($40!) but it's got commentary from Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Gloria Steinem, Howard Zinn, Cameron Crowe, Kelly Slater and more, so I will more likely than not end up coughing up the dough to buy it.

I'm just a girl who can't say no when it comes to Pearl Jam.

Check it out here.


PearlJamOnline.it is a supercool Italian fansite with great downloads. Check out the rar/zip file of the best of the European 2006 tour. It'll be on this page with the link that says "File zippato." I love Italian.

And I've got two cool posts coming later today once EZArchive stops balking at doing its uploading duty. Same old, same old, I know. See you later.

The lovely intersection of literature and listening

This week's Contrast Podcast is such a lovely topic, combining two of my favorite things in this life: music and books. The topic for the podcast this time around was to pick a favorite book and a song to soundtrack that book. I know, cool, right?

Once you start thinking about this topic, you realize that there are endless options if you love to read as much as I do (you know, growing up, if you ever read The Babysitters' Club? I was Mary Ann - total bookworm. Yet somehow also effortlessly cool -- or so my mom told me as she trimmed my hair into a modified feathered mullet).

Anyways, the book & song I finally ended up with is Nick Hornby's Songbook (also called 31 Songs in the UK edition), which you eagle-eyes will recognize from the quote over there ---> on stage right. The song is The Beach Boys' "Add Some Music To Your Day" from their Sunflower album -- an absolutely wonderful gem of a song celebrating all the music in the world and how once you start listening, you hear it everywhere.

There's no way that I could call Songbook my favorite book, but it is one that I greatly enjoy and it lent itself so well to the song choice. If I were to sit myself down by my tall shelves there in the living room and go through all my books, I would surely find about 20 more favorites and with enough thought would greatly enjoy soundtracking them as well.

LISTEN: The easiest way to listen to it is to head over to Tim's Contrast Podcast page and click the little play button to stream it in a seamless burst of loveliness.

You can also download the podcast as one big ole mp3 here, so you can listen to it later on your iPod or whatever.


And if you are in a commenting mood today, I'd love to talk more about what songs complement your favorite book. Comment link at the very bottom of this post.

PLAYLIST

(00:00) The Smiths - William It Was Really Nothing
Book: Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

Tim from The Face of Today

(02:37) The Buff Medways - Troubled Mind
Book: Notebooks of a Naked Youth by Billy Childish

FiL from Pogoagogo

(06:09) The Beach Boys - Add Some Music To Your Day
Book: 31 Songs/Songbook by Nick Hornby

Heather from I AM FUEL, YOU ARE FRIENDS

(10:38) Van Halen - I Am The One
Book: Crazy from the Heat by David Lee Roth

Chris from Culturebully

(14:52) d_rradio - Never Slept Better
Book: Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Mike from Nothing But Green Lights

(19:27) LN - It Don’t Matter If You Bleed
Book: Vârt behov av tröst by Stig Dagerman

ZB from So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away

(24:40) Spaceman 3 - Revolution
Book: Karl Marx: Selected Writings edited by David McLellan

Colin from Let’s Kiss and Make Up

(31:29) Serge Gainsbourg - Sorry Angel
Book: Les liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos

Marianne Dissard

(35:35) The Cure - Killing an Arab
Book: L’Etranger by Albert Camus

Simon from You Can Call Me Betty

(38:36) Golden Smog - Fear of Falling
Book: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Natalie from Mini-Obs

(42:44) The Decemberists - Los Angeles, I’m Yours
Book: The Replacements “Let It Be” (33 1/3 Series) by Colin Meloy

Bethanne from CTASLS

(47:53) Susan Cagle - Shakespere
Book: Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde

Jamie from Squirrelfood.net

(52:35) Manic Street Preachers - The Intense Humming of Evil
Book: The work of Primo Levi

Jamie from The Run Out Groove

(58:24) Mr Bungle - Squeeze Me Macaroni
Book: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Brian from The Rant

(01:04:15) Leonard Cohen - Came So Far For Beauty
Book: The Favourite Game by Leonard Cohen

Charlie from Nerdlitter

Don't it make you wanna head to the library?

God bless Dave Eggers

Thanks to Eric over at Marathonpacks for this link to Dave Eggers' (author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) reflections on the World Cup over on Slate:

"It was, by most accounts, 1986 when the residents of the United States became aware of the thing called the World Cup. Isolated reports came from foreign correspondents, and we were frightened by these reports, worried about domino effects, and wondered aloud if the trend was something we could stop by placing a certain number of military advisers in Cologne or Marseilles. Then, in 1990, we realized that the World Cup might happen every four years, with or without us."

Read the whole thing here.

Plus, Eggers assigns one fictional character in his essay the name of Fakey McChumpland, which alone is reason enough to read it. This piece comes from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, an anthology edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey and published this month. It also includes a piece from Nick Hornby, so you know it's good.


I LOVE Dave Eggers; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was one of the best books I read last year (and it has gone missing from me, I think I'd best just buy a replacement). I welcome any links that you wish to send me from other Dave Eggers articles on the web that you find funny. The man is comic genius.

By the way, I am still rocking the suburbs on the World Cup bloggers pool, which is surprising even to me. Don't worry guys, I am sure to lose soon! (but in the meantime, call me Prognosticator of Prognosticators)

"A Short List of Records My Father Threatened to Break Over My Head If I Played Them One More Time"

One of the most enjoyable books I've ever come across is A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel. I tore through it, often laughing OUT LOUD in inopportune public places (you know, when you are reading something funny and you kind of guffaw and then catch yourself, stifle the laugh, and look around to see if anyone is watching?).

It's hard to explain what it is about, because it is really just what the subtitle says: "Growing Up Small In Mooreland, Indiana." It's an autobiographical collection of impressions, moments, memories, funny stories, dares, characters, struggles, and ephemera from the childhood of a unique & hilarious girl (nicknamed Zippy) as she goes about her days in the late '60s/early '70s in a very small town. Sounds like a totally touchy-feely Babysitters' Club premise for a book, right? But it is intelligent, well-written (she really captures the voice and the perception of herself at 7 or 8), emphatically NOT-schmaltzy, and funny as all get out. And also shreddingly poignant at times when you least expect it.

I am currently ripping through her follow-up novel, She Got Up Off The Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana, and laughing just as much. I recommend both very highly - after I read Zippy, I bought like 7 copies and gave them out like manna from Heaven to my friends and family. Here is an excerpt from She Got Up Off The Couch.

I love lists, especially lists about music:


A Short List of Records My Father Threatened to Break Over My Head If I Played Them One More Time

1. "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," by Paul Simon.
You need only to listen to this song once to realize it is the greatest work of genius since "Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler)"; by The Playmates. Also it provides a person with the bonus of rewriting the chorus 700 times a day. For instance, a girl might say, "I'm ridin' my bike, Mike," or "I'm goin' to my sister's, Mister." She could also string together many sentences, as in, "I'm feelin' sad, Dad. Maybe you could get me some candy, Randy. Don't be such a slob, Bob, just listen to me."

2. "Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler)," by The Playmates.
A morality tale about a little car, a Cadillac, and a transmission problem. This song brilliantly gains momentum, and is sung faster and faster right up to the hysterical ending. Could be sung in the truck so frantically the father in question would sometimes have to stick his head out the window while praying aloud.

3. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," by Elton John.
I understand only one line of this song: "And butterflies are free to fly, fly away." The rest is completely lost on me. I assumed the British did not speak English, which was a puzzle as they were sometimes referred to as the English. Not understanding the lyrics required me to listen to the song hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, filling in with nonsense words, which my sister said made me look oxygen deprived and sad.

4. "Somewhere They Can't Find Me," by Simon & Garfunkel.
In addition to "50 Ways To Leave your Lover," this was probably my most obvious theme song. It could have been written for me. The singer has done something terrible and now his only option is to sneak away: "Before they come to get me I'll be gone, somewhere they can't find me." Oh, indeed. How very, very true.

5. "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" by the Osmonds, featuring Donny Osmond.
A lie, as anyone who knew my brother could attest. But if it was sung by Donny Osmond I could try to believe. I wanted to believe. This was a favorite to play not at top volume in my bedroom, but downstairs on the stereo that was shaped, improbably, like a Colonial desk. I liked to sing along with Donny (we had the same voice) while simultaneously pretending to draft a version of the Bill of Rights, using a fake quill pen. (In truth, a turkey feather.) This was a combination of activities my father found interesting, blasphemous, and wrong.

6. "Along Comes Mary," by The Association.
A wordy song. A wordy, psychedelic song, the meaning of which has never been determined by humans. Tailor-made for me. From the beginning, the song's just one long puzzle. "Every time I think that I'm the one who's lonely someone calls on me." Who? (Mary, my sister would explain through clenched teeth. Yes, but Mary who?) What follows is so unusual it doesn't bear repeating, although I most assuredly could.

7. "I Started A Joke," by The Bee Gees.
Again, a world-class head-scratcher. He started a joke, and it started the whole world crying. I sensed astonishing depth in the Bee Gees' lyrics, and also were they all boys? Including the one with the Bugs Bunny teeth? Was she truly never funny and that's why the world wept? I knew people like that. Later in the song one of them, a Bee or a Gee, begins to cry and gets the whole world laughing, so everything turns out fine in the end. (An additional work of genius is "The Lights Went Out In Massachusetts." Massachusetts: A state? A prison? Dad was silent on the issue.)

*************************************************
Buy A Girl Named Zippy here and She Got Up Off The Couch here, or visit your local library. (Ooh! I feel so Reading Rainbow! LeVar Burton would be proud - These are books you might enjoy, but you don't have to take MY word for it!).