Wasted Years, the fourth album from the punk supergroup Off, will be released on April 8, 2014.
The group is comprised of Keith Morris (Black Flag/Circle Jerks), Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides), Mario Rubalcaba (Hot Snakes/Rocket From the Crypt/Earthless), and Steven McDonald (Redd Kross).
What’s equally cool is that their cover art (for this and other releases) is by the great Raymond Pettibon, who first came to my attention with his art for Black Flag flyers and records in the late ’70s.
Pettibon is now a highly regarded ‘fine’ artist, but he’s still in touch with his punk roots.
Below you can stream “Void You Out,” a track from Wasted Years.
“Void you Out” “pulls its anger from misleading historical revisionism,” according to Rolling Stone. Morris is quoted as saying:
“Who was here first? A bunch of uptight, always-right Caucasians with their heads buried up each other’s asses, trying to tell the rest of us how North American history went down and is going to be changed because of their intelligence or lack thereof. Thus: ‘Void You Out!'”
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Bob Dylan and Françoise Hardy backstage at l’Olympia, Paris, May 1966.
What to say about this classic Bob Dylan song?
It has such a beautiful melody for starters. And there’s that carnival rock ‘n’roll sound that Dylan dreamed up with Robbie Robertson and a bunch of Nashville cats. The song is so seductive at first, and Bob sings it straight, no sarcasm, so we think it’s a gentle love song.
But what kind of love song?
By the second verse this is no typical love song. No way, ’cause Dylan is putting this woman down. She’s the same woman (or all the women) he sang about in “Like A Rolling Stone,” and in that second verse we learn that she’s gonna find out she’s nothing special.
Nobody has to guess
That Baby can’t be blessed
Till she sees finally that she’s like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls
Then in the bridge we get a flashback. The singer telling us of the day they met.
It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
What’s really amazing is the final verse the roles reverse and the narrator, who up until then mostly comes across in the power position telling us about his lover, suddenly steps up and directly addresses her as he reveals that he was a mess when they first met and that she was way up above him. Dylan could now be taking the role of Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is The Night” after Diver has lost his moneyed but psychologically unstable wife Nicole, has blown it with his movie star girlfriend Rosemary and become an alcoholic. In the last verse we see the narrator as totally vulnerable, asking her to keep their secret, and his too.
I just can’t fit
Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit
When we meet again
Introduced as friends
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world
Dylan was writing on another plane back then. A novel condensed to a song.
Check out this cool live version of “Just Like A Woman” played May 16, 1966 at the Gaumont Theatre, Sheffield, England:
And this one from May 5, 1966 at the Adelphi Theatre, Dublin, Ireland:
Bob Dylan, “Just Like A Woman,” Live 1966:
Bob Dylan, “Justs Like A Woman,” Manchester Free Trade Hall, Manchester England, May 17, 1966:
Bob Dylan, “Just Like A Woman,” (from Blonde On Blonde):
And here’s a lo-fi version recorded by Dylan biographer Robert Shelton and played by Dylan with Robbie Robertson in a Denver hotel room March 13, 1966, five days after Dylan cut the version that would appear on Blonde On Blonde in Nashville:
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Kim Gordon’s collection of essays, “Is It My Body?: Selected Texts,” will be published by Sternberg Press later this month.
The book collects essays Gordon wrote for various publications including Artforum in the 1980s and early 1990s.
From the Sternberg Press website:
Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance.
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George “Shadow” Morton was the auteur producer behind the Shangri-Las. Their first record was their greatest: 1964′ “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand).” You can listen to it below and see the group, though the footage is not synced to the song.
Years later Morton produced the New York Dolls’ second album, Too Much Too Soon.
Morton died this year, and in today’s New York Times Magazine, Rob Hoerburger writes about him and that record.
What a strange record it was: a song about a girl who gets a Dear Jane letter, alternately wailed and whispered, with thudding piano chords and a choir of sea gulls. “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand),” released in mid-1964, did something that few pop songs had dared: It overflowed with messy details. There was pathos, passion, wistful reminiscence, the possibility of dire consequences, all conveyed in 2 minutes 18 seconds by four way-too-knowing teenagers from Queens called the Shangri-Las. And it sprang from the mind of a 22-year-old who had never published or produced a song in his life, who just weeks before the record came out was scooping ice cream.
In Sunday’s The Observer, Andrew Hussey offers a lengthy story about heroin’s role as artistic stimulant.
“I think the relationship between heroin and cities, or cityspace, is very interesting,” Will Self [a former heroin user] says. “It has more to do with spatiality, how the inner world of the user connects with the outside word of reality. And what we’re really talking about is the psychogeography of heroin. William Burroughs knew this when he wrote The Naked Lunch, the great heroin novel set in the Interzone of Tangier, and Lou Reed knew this. The first Velvet Underground album is essentially a day in the life of a heroin addict in New York City, and a map of where he goes and what he sees and what he feels. And the music sounds like heroin, with its drones and impatient feedback and stuttering words. It’s the perfect soundtrack to the junkie life. There is a heroin psychogeography – where to find it, where to buy it, where you can smell it.” He goes on: “The point is that heroin users occupy a certain negative space in the world, in society. Burroughs writes in The Naked Lunch how, strung out in Tangier, he could sit and look at his shoe for eight hours. Heroin users don’t need to do anything or go anywhere: they just are.”
For more of this fascinating article, head to The Observer.
The Velvet Underground, “Heroin”:
The Velvet Underground, “I´m Waiting For The Man”:
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When I want to listen to a truly beautiful Bob Dylan performance, I listen to this studio recording of “Blind Willie McTell. The song is in part a tribute to the bluesman Blind Willie McTell, and recorded in 1983. Dylan has referred to it as a demo.
In an interview with Rolling Stone he said: “I started playing it live because I heard The Band doing it. Most likely it was a demo, probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record. It’s like taking a painting by Monet or Picasso – goin’ to his house and lookin’ at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are ‘Picasso fans.'”
It was released in 1991 on the The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.
Dylan’s voice sounds fantastic. This is a very moving song.
Jim Fouratt shot video of the Lou Reed memorial and has been generous in posting many clips so that those of us who were not part of the inner circle could still experience what was a glorious tribute to an important artist.
Here is a clip that is not part of my previous post.
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Maria Alekhina (left) and Nadezhda Tolokonnikov. Photo via Earth First!
Russian lawmakers approved the final version of an amnesty today that will free Pussy Riot members Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who are both currently serving two-year sentences.
The State Duma, or lower house of parliament, made modifications to the amnesty, and then approved it. The law passed unanimously, according to the state news organization RIA Novosti.
Friday, December 13, the Green Ray festival in Lisbon, Portugal, curated by Animal Collective’s Panda Bear will take place. Below is his “Green Ray Mix,” which features music by artists playing the festival, including Actress, Gang Gang Dance’s Brian DeGraw as bEEdEEgEE, and Eric Copeland.
Tracks in the mix:
1. niagara — kraftor
2. eric copeland — a little tit
3. actress — the lords graffitti
4. ron morelli — no real reason
5. marcellus pittman — a mix
6. bEEdEEgEE — bricks
7. gala drop – drop
8. panda bear — ponytail
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
A painting made by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has surfaced in New Zealand, according to a report in The New Zealand Herald.
Richards painted it at a bed and breakfast while recuperating from an injury sustained in 2006 after falling out of a tree in Fiji. The paper says experts believe the painting to be worth several hundred thousand dollars.
He gave the painting to Gloria Poupard-Walbridge, owner of Cotter House, as a gift when he was leaving.
The painting — watercolor and pastels — has been in a drawer beneath some linen for the past seven years. Richards signed the painting with a thick black marker, and Poupard-Walbridge says that ruined it.
“It was a pretty good picture until he signed it with a felt pen and stuffed it up,” she told The New Zealand Herald.
News of the painting came to light after the Stones announced they would play a show at Auckland’s Mt Smart Stadium on Saturday April 5, 2014.
The New Zealand Herald describes the painting like this: “Painted over several days on a $3.95 canvas and a small table easel, the delicate pastel and watercolour depicts a water scene at sunset, with a steamship at full throttle. Seagulls soar above the ship, the smoke effect created by careful artistic smudging.”
No skull and crossbones, Keith?
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