Aaron Tap

The Middle Seat, 6:30 a.m.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately. A. Lot.  And it’s going to be one more exhausting week before things finally start to settle down.  In the meantime, some brief updates.  Having just finished playing a, shall we say, trying show in or near Kansas City, KS I can safely say that things are looking up from here on out.  Tomorrow morning we fly to San Francisco for what ought to be a cool show.  We’re playing in Golden Gate Park, for starters, which was a real thrill last summer at the Outside Lands Festival.  This show is a little less of a big affair, but, hell, we’ve got Sugar Ray on before us and Gavin Rossdale after, so I’m thinking we should don our finest flannel shirts and ripped jeans and plow through an earnest homage to Temple of the Dog.  Or something.

Monday I’ll be back in Los Angeles to continue the work I started with Matt MacKelkan.  We’ve been prepping songs for his upcoming album and we’re going to hit the studio on Tuesday for a dip of the toe as it were in to the recording process.  But Monday night Matt has a show at Room 5 and I’m going to join him on electric guitar, and perhaps vocals.  Room 5 is always a good hang and Matt is a great performer, so I recommend you be there.

Then, Tuesday night I take the red-eye to Buffalo, NY for one more Matt Nathanson show before what is for us a lengthy break — all of 6 days.  Gonna try to post some new music in and around that time.  And I’ll be back with some Songs of the Week and all that good stuff.  Rock on!

As promised, here’s the link for the Weisstronauts In Memphis EP.  Get a handful of excellent instro-tunes for under $4!

Randy Newman has written some brutally great songs in the course of his long career and one of his finest interpreters was Dusty Springfield.  Her version of I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today is achingly beautiful.  Her vocal is, of course, impeccable, but the arrangement is just killer, shifting between a huge solo piano and a gorgeous orchestra.  It’s an unusual song to begin with, and of all versions I’ve heard, hers captures that oddness best.  

You can check it out here, along with a bizarre 1970s video.

And then there’s Neil Diamond’s version:

And Bud Dashiell’s appealingly spare and creepy take on it:

This doesn't even come close to doing it justice.

There is a different kind of green in the south.  I’ve been noticing this lately, and yet it is a familiar observation, as if I’ve noticed it before.  Could be it struck me on those yearly trips to the Apple Blossom Festival with my family as a child.  I just wouldn’t have yet had the faculty to truly appreciate it at the time, wrapped up as I was in Star Wars comic books and the anticipation of my first sip of the only iced tea I could ever stand to drink, made by my great-grandmother Chloe.  We’d sit on the front porch, pouring tall glasses from a pitcher.  Of course I learned years later why I liked that iced tea and hated the iced tea we had in New England: Lots and lots of sugar.

But the green.  It goes beyond verdant.  It’s like the trees and grass are one solid green mass and the clear blue sky only emphasizes their virescence.  This weekend, as my flights into Norfolk and Atlanta descended, I could only stare out the window, transfixed by the pure green canvas below.  I’m a sucker for some good, healthy nature.

Steven, by Doug Allen

Continuing on with the nostalgia, I decided that with the myriad options out there for self-releasing albums, it was high time I threw a Best of Betty Goo into the world.  I’m immensely proud of the music we four made together over the course of our five or six years, and while our last album gooicide is really the pinnacle of all that, there were one or two tracks from before and after that I felt deserved to be revisited.  So, with the help of Chad, Doug, and Jeff, I pulled together 15 songs that give a pretty good, broad overview of the band (though diligently ignored are the tinny, whimpering acoustic songs of the very early days — blechh).  In all, the set is more coherent and, in all likelihood more listenable, than our limited-edition rarities album Post-Pop Mortem and features references to Palmolive’s Madge, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Morrissey, so, really, what more could you want?  Side note: he album’s title is nicked from the excellent misanthropic comic strip, Steven.

The album is available on Amie Street, a new(ish) download-only store with an interesting concept: songs start out free, then as people download/purchase them, the price increases gradually with a maximum of $0.98.  That means that you can currently buy the entire record for a mere $2.13!  What are you waiting for?

Nothing Was Proven, Nobody Cared

I’m sort of cheating this week, in that this is more of an Album of the Week post.  I recently bought the album Viva Dead Ponies for the 4th or 5th time while on tour a) so I could listen to it right then and there, and b) because the used copy I found included an ancient newspaper interview with the man behind the band, Cathal Coughlan.  It was good timing, as it had been a while since I’d listened to this particular album and I am thrilled to be reminded of how powerful, terrifying, unusual, and enduring a record it is.  The opening track, Angel’s Delight, is perhaps the fiercest manifestation of quiet/loud/quiet ever committed to tape -made all the more effective by the killer fake-out of the gentle analog synth intro - and the lyrics are numbing.  The rest of the album hardly lets up, despite the beauty of The Door to Door Inspector and Broken Radio #1.  

Viva Dead Ponies had a huge impact on me back in the early 1990s.  For one thing, it made me yearn to be smarter.  Coughlan’s lyrics are political, metaphorical, and often just plain obscure.  For another, it got me interested in synthesizers again which was a welcome revisitation at the time, as I was deeply into loud guitars and needed some perspective.  The next full album after this is Fatima Mansions’ dark masterpiece, Valhalla Avenue, and beyond that they put out the mixed offering of Lost in the Former West, but they never really equalled the demented majesty of Viva Dead Ponies.  Definitely one of my top 20 albums of all time.  That said, Coughlan went on to an impressive solo career, his debut being another one of my favorite albums, and he continues to perform in ever more diverse areas (opera, spoken word, mixed media…).

• Watch Only Losers Take The Bus
• Special bonus: first to write a comment will get this (out of print) CD free, from me!

CD cover for The Weisstronauts in Memphis

As I’ve stated in the past, one of the small number of non-family-related things I miss about Boston is playing and recording with triple (and sometimes quadruple)-guitar ensemble The Weisstronauts.  Pete Weiss founded the band around the turn of the millennium, after The Pete Weiss Rock Band called it quits.  I joined up shortly after and was with them through a couple albums before my move to the West Coast.  We had a ton of fun.  There was no stated limit to what we would do, but as the group developed it became a pretty intense exploration of the limits of (mostly) instrumental guitar music.  I’m still waiting for the day when we follow through on our idea to do a show with every effect pedal we own on the floor at the front of the stage, randomly wired to each guitarist’s amp, with the concept being that nobody would know whose tone would be affected when they stomped on a box.

However, my involvement with the band of late has been to record tracks here at Deedling Quail and digitally ship them across the country to Pete.  I haven’t played a show with the band since their 2007 holiday Jamboree, when I drove to Toad after playing a set with Matt Nathanson in Providence or some shit.  Now, THAT was rock and roll.  The ‘Nauts recorded their latest EP, if you haven’t already inferred, in Memphis, TN.  They stopped by the legendary Ardent Studios (Big Star, R.E.M., Afghan Whigs among many others) during their latest tour and banged out this brief set of new songs and one cover all live in the studio.  The sound is magnificent and the performances are stellar.  I greatly wish I could have been there.  But true to concept, Pete endeavored to have me be involved in some capacity and asked if I would take a stab at the cover art.  I long ago realized that design is not my greatest strength, but I had an idea and decided to give it a try.  Lo and behold, I turned out something that I’m pretty proud of!  Check it out above and order a copy of the album for yourself someday.  I’ll post a link when they get its hot off the presses ass online.

I took a bike ride along the L.A. River today and was I ever rewarded!  I saw no fewer than 5 mallard families with newly-hatched ducklings.  These guys were so tiny, they couldn’t have been more than 2 days old.  Each duck pair had about 10 chicks, so somewhere around 45 total (!), and they were all paddling around in the river snapping up food like it was no big deal.  I was transfixed, but my journey was just beginning.  I saw more great blue herons than I’ve ever seen in one day - four - and two different ones were hanging out in the water with an egret mother and youngling.  And as a result of standing on the bike path staring at the ducklings like a kiddy kindergardener, I also spied a breed I’d never seen before, the green heron!  It was a good looking, smaller bird (for a heron) and a fine end to the day’s sightings.

In all, an excellent day of avifaunery.

• Green Heron
• Great Blue Heron
• Great Egret
• Mallards

I am an admitted sucker / apologist for Manic Street Preachers.  I still buy all their albums and have genuinely still found at least a handful of songs worth the price of admission on each one.  Their new album, out this week in Europe, is a risky venture.  They’ve decided to write songs from previously unused lyrics written by their long-disappeared (went missing in Feb 1995, presumed dead) lyricist Richey James Edwards.  While one might think that he would have wanted them to continue to collaborate with him even after he admitted defeat in this life, it’s a tough proposition, using someone’s work when they aren’t around to contribute, to edit, to rethink their ideas.  And then there’s the whole, “they’re doing it to get attention or to try to capture the spark of their glory days” argument.  Regarding attention, well, that’s their job, innit?  And while I at first bristled at the idea of them trying to remake the Holy Bible, I have since rethought it.  Who but a band themselves should have the right to attempt to revisit a past that represents a high-water mark in their career.  I get a little nostalgic from time to time, and it’s only natural to want to play that out.  So, is the resulting album a work of staggering genius?  I don’t think so, but after two listens it’s definitely making an impression, despite their full on relapse into beastly mispronunciation to fit his awkward lyrics into the songs (was always a problem, that, but I guess I forgive them due to the lyrical content being difficult and often unique).  I’ve got about three favorite tracks right now and This Joke Sport Severed is the tops this week.  Listen to it on the YouTubes.

I am never one to claim that I am the most talented member of my family, and here’s further proof. PK concocted a plan - in fact she concocted TWO plans - on Sunday and I was her willing foil. Witness the majesty.

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