SEEING GREEN

By Gabe Dixon

For me it all starts by trying to stay conscious of how my habits impact the environment.  A few years ago, I ran into an old friend at the YMCA. That friend, Stephen Moseley, and his colleague Sam Davidson had just started an organization called Cool People Care which focused on the little things that busy people can do to lead socially and environmentally reponsible lives (a.k.a. "Save the World"). Their philosophy is that "there's no such thing as not enough time."  The idea appealed to me, so I checked out their website and signed up for their daily "5 Minutes Of Caring" emails: 99-word articles that offer practical tips and motivation on how to make a positive impact each and every day. These e-mails are a great daily reminder that help keep me focused.

The band has since worked with Cool People Care by contributing the exclusive song "New Day Revolution" to their book of the same name, and by performing at their birthday celebration and at recent book signings. Cool People Care had a small beginning in Nashville, but they now have partners in 44 U.S. cities and they have started a spin-off site for moms: CoolMomsCare.org. I think Cool People Care is a good analogy for how, by starting with small habits, we can grow them into a larger more impactful way of life.

As for "walking the walk," again, for me it's about trying to stay conscious and take steps in the right direction. When my wife sold her car last year, we made the decision to only use one car instead of buying another. At first it was inconvenient, but it feels normal now. She and I have recently moved closer to town, partially to reduce the amount of fuel we consume and to take advantage of public transportation. We use only non-toxic cleaners and detergents, we used only zero-VOC (volatile organic compounds) paint to paint the bedroom and the back room in our house, and we compost. I am a vegetarian, in large part for environmental reasons:

(1) To produce meat for a meat-centered diet (versus a vegetable-based diet) it requires using 50 times the amount of fossil fuels.

(2) In the U.S., more than half of all water is used for livestock production. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat. On the other hand it takes 2,500 pounds of water to produce a pound of meat

(3) Eating a meat-centered diet contributes to deforestation. In the United States we have cleared over 260 million acres of forest to produce meat. In every quarter pounder we eat, an average of 55 square feet of tropical rainforest is consumed as well, which has obvious effects on animal life.  

I also belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)--I pay a farm at the beginning of the growing season and I meet them at the farmers market every other week to pick up what they are growing on their farm just outside of Nashville.

The band all recycle; we have sworn off little plastic water bottles, bring our own bags to the grocery store, and our own coffee mugs to the coffee shop. I get that it can seem like a lot. Most of us are not scientists or politicians, but I believe that individual actions add up. We all cannot afford a "green" house or a hybrid car, but every day brings opportunities for sustainable living and a chance to develop new habits that will soon become a normal way of life. I'm not perfect, but I do try and take steps in the right direction. It's an ongoing process.

Gabe Dixon Band's self-titled LP is available now on Fantasy/Concord.

Here's what's been keeping me company as of late: Lizzie Grant, Gramma SparkalerTrailerHeaven [sic]. Who is this girl? Un-freaking-believable. Don't let the bad graphics scare you away [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

HAGLER VS. SUGAR RAY, BIDEN VS. PALIN

Don't give her any more room to dance.

Near as I can glean from YouTube, The Marvin Hagler/Sugar Ray Leonard fight took place on April 6th, 1987. No one I knew at that time could believe the outcome. It was supposed to be a bloodbath. Leonard was supposed to do the bleeding.  Hagler had over fifty KO's under his Middle Weight belt. Leonard, a pumped up Welter Weight, had twenty three. Somehow, Leonard won on points.

 A couple of months later, June nineteenth, or Juneteenth , as they say in Texas, anniversary of the day in 1865 that the Texas slaves were finally told they were free, I was hanging out backstage at the Navasota Blues Festival . My lady friend, at that time, was a real good interviewer and had secured an interview with Johnny Clyde Copeland, the headliner at that festival. She and I constituted two of the four white people in attendance. Navasota is a black town in a black East Texas county. Turned out, Copeland's manager made most of his money managing boxers out of Houston. The ranch on which the festival was held was owned by a boxing promoter. The talk back stage went from music to reefer to boxing. Johnny and his guys ribbed me for not being much into pot. I remember Johnny saying, "You got fifteen dollars, you need a hair cut and some reefer, which one you gonna buy? I know which one I'm gonna buy." None of them were at all surprised by the outcome of the Leonard/ Hagler fight. They knew how it had gone down. Johnny's manager explained it very slowly. Hagler's handlers had lost the fight for him long before the first bell. They had rolled over to the Leonard camp's requests for a larger ring and heavier gloves, thus giving more room for Leonard to dance, and taking the sting out of Hagler's punch.

And now the Democrats have agreed to treat Sarah Palin with heavier, softer gloves. The Vice Presidential debates are to be question/answer, not debates at all. YOU MORONS. Palin is deadly when she has a script. Without a script, she's a Valley girl on St. Joseph's Baby Acid, unable to put together a sentence even worthy of Dubya. Had you "vetted" her any better than McCain did, you would have known this long before Katie Couric chased her back into the shadows from which she will only emerge, fleetingly, trout like, to snatch the occasional choice fly off the surface before the election. You are afraid to be accused of roughing up a woman. She's not a woman, you idiots, she's a candidate, and a very dangerous one. She's dangerous because she so . . . so . . . stupid, and she will be President if McCain is elected. McCain is about a million years old and has had four malignant melanomas, the most dangerous type of cancer. It will recur and it will kill him. The stress of the oval office would not be likely to postpone the inevitable.

I can't say I know Palin's personal beliefs, but fundamentalist Christians tend not to differentiate between acts of man and acts of God. They tend to see acts of man as acts of God through man. Man made global warming is just God's plan.  This world doesn't matter anyway. Jews are to be resettled in Israel, so they can die. Democrats are willing to let Palin get her hands on the Armageddon switch rather than risk being seen as bullies. YOU MORONS.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.

"Dude, Have You Been to Berlin Yet?!"
Episode Zwei

YEAR LONG DISASTER

What do Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Mick Taylor, Malcom and Angus Young, Dee Dee Ramone, Phil Lynott and Johnny Thunders have in common? Ax innovators, all, but that's not where I'm going here. Ask any boy or girl and they'll tell you right away: damage and charm. When it comes to rock and roll, we can lock step behind a tight riff, player sight unseen. But to burn our interest even brighter, visual hints of damage and charm are required. Daniel Davies, descended from the stellar Sixties lineage of the brothers Davies of The Kinks, and at only twenty-six years of age, can already riff heavy, rip a solo, and groove live with the unselfconscious command of his collective musical forefathers. 

In support of their debut album on Volcom Records, Year Long Disaster—with Brad Hargreaves on drums and Rich Mullins on bass—has toured the US several times, playing stadium rock arenas with the Foo Fighters and massive venues with Motorhead, The Misfits and label brothers Turbonegro and Valiant Thorr. Recently, they swum the seas to Europe and hit the summer festival and small club circuits. 

See www.yearlongdisaster.com for more details.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 7^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

GOOPS "One Kiss Left"/"Build Me Up Buttercup" (Blackout!, 1994)

The picture sleeve's front cover looks like some kinda Big Daddy Roth Garbage Pail Kid Wacky Pack, with four cartoon band members (three crazy guys, one hot girl) racing along in their flaming monster truck with the license plate "KILL," brandishing baseball bats and barbecue forks, chasing a squirrel so scared its feet have turned into wheels. Back cover has the band all naked (with naughty bits peeking out) on a polka-dot couch, puking and slavering as a gigantic furry rodent splats from the sky and spills its sticky guts all over the room. Six-page black-and-white comic book inside has the Goops "On The Road," driving from party to party and town to town and batting more squirrels around and bathing together and covering obscene Avengers songs on stage while (again) wearing no clothes. Yet even their penises and vaginas manage to seem funny, not gross or prurient. And oh yeah, there's also music! Catchy St. Mark's Place-style middle-class fake-punk garage trash (from back when St. Mark's  Place was still trashy) with gal-singing and guy-guitaring better than passable; in the ‘90s, NYC and L.A. both coughed up a bunch of such bands, while critics ignored them -- maybe because they sang like they wanted a hit, and therefore weren't deemed hip enough. Here, the A-side is a lust song with some semblance of a beat: "C'mon baby, don'cha be that way/I'll do anything you say." But the B-side's the keeper: A kicking cover of the Foundations' 1969 garage-soul classic about being led on by a fickle tease. The Goops build it up, and don't let us down.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=152991456

CLAY HARPER "Prayin' Hands"/"Church On The Corner" (Casino Royale, 1996)

More excellent cover graphics: The front has a colorfully dressed guy, with five-o'clock shadow and his tiger-striped shirt unbuttoned too low, posing just like Roland Bell on the LP cover of The Harder They Come; there's a city and church behind him, and when you flip the sleeve over, you see said house of worship close up, with hands folding in prayer on each side. It's not the only picture-sleeve 45 I've got on my shelf from Clay Harper -- a guy who used to sing for the Coolies, an Atlanta band whose less than 15 minutes of fame had come from putting out an album full of silly Simon & Garfunkel covers in 1986, the same year Paul Simon put out Graceland. A decade later, in 1996, Harper apparently put out one 45 on Casino Royale every month or close to it; I've got 11 of the things, and they're beautiful - soldiers and strippers and factories and devils and sleazy dames with guns and lurkers in the shadows and Blaxploitation movie posters and Kung Fu movie posters and ominous urchins from the street. Most of them credit Art Direction to one Kosmo Vinyl and Art Production to guys named Kerry Hadaway and Brian Joyner. I haven't played them in years, but as I recall, they mostly sound good, too. But I'm singling out the single that came out in June of that year, for the way its two titles are conceptually linked, and because its cover is my favorite. "Prayin' Hands" has The Harder They Come in its sound, too: The rhythm is ‘70s soul-reggae, with a horn break seemingly referencing "007 (Shanty Town)" by Desmond Dekker. Harper has a gruff Dixie white-soul voice - more "pub-rock" than "roots-rock" or "Southern rock," I'd say, by which I mean amiable and energetic but not particularly stodgy or redneck-macho. He sings about a little girl with a crappy life who prays the world her soul to keep and winds up in a better place, which I suppose mean she dies; details beyond that are hard to make out. "Church on the Corner" brackets itself with church organ (credited to "Reverend Oliver Wells"), but Clay confesses that he never liked churches, that he just passes them by without entering, and he's not sure where his antipathy comes from. But a wedding, or maybe that same little girl, wind up changing his mind. A gospel backup singer helps.

http://www.casinomusic.com/vinyl/index.html

HELLA "Stephen Hawking Has A Posse"/FOURTET "Both When I Am Alone And We Both Are" (Ache, 2003)

Hella are a noisy Cali duo whose 2002 debut album likeably reminded me of the very early (hardcore-era) Meat Puppets, but I lost the plot soon after; their track here has a gradual keyboardish opening (played on guitar maybe) giving way to blurry belches of distortion and apocalyptic clangs like tin cans repeatedly toppling off a high shelf. The title suggests theoretical physics might be an inspiration as well. Fourtet is London "post-rock" electronic guy Kieran Hebden, and his cut has more space - e.g., little brush strokes. What they have in common: clattery beat, fuzzy effects, vagueness. And the scratched-up collage on the 45 sleeve is just as blurry, blotchy, and amorphous.

http://www.myspace.com/hellaband

http://www.myspace.com/fourtetkieranhebden

THE HOT ROLLERS Uncornucopia (Flotation, 2007)

A three-song seven-inch EP on nail-polish-white vinyl from three badass ladies, dressed like they're ready to join the Shangri-Las' gang. So: Ratted-hair rock, maybe Seattle's answer to (Detroit's) Gore Gore Girls. "You Don't Satisfy" rides the slime oozing out from beneath the garage door of some service station on a dead-end street; opens with a riff from the Monkees' "Steppin' Stone," drummer Starr Harris screams like the Sonics' Gerry Rosalie, and Lori Campion lets loose black clouds of guitar smoke as her vengeful vemom shoplifts a lyric or two from "Steppin' Stone" itself, then turns into talking as she chides some bad-in-bed clutz that he can't do the deed like some other fella. "Heard About Him" rocks up a ‘65 B-side by British bird Sandie Shaw, ending on a high note out of "Wimoweh"/"The Lion Sleeps Tonight." And raunchy fuzztones blanket everything, including three-part harmonies and (I think) a cowbell, in the raunchier, dirtier, heavier "Outta Control" - about a mean chick from a northern galaxy who has cherry-red lips and bloodshot eyes. She's running wild tonight, she's gonna fuss and fight, and I'm pretty sure Girlschool would be impressed.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=2663461

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Guest post this week from one of my closest pals, musician, painter, fashionista, and all-around wickedly wonderful guy, Karl Mullen: Dear Kate, Thanks for the request to be a guest blogger. This is my first .... though back in the late 70's early 80's as an illegal alien I played in the punk band Carsickness under the nom de guerre ‘Joe Bloggs'. But that was old schooling blogging,....... ‘banging and shouting like a kid gone wrong' ....remember Patrik Fitzgerald? I had his record which was LP size so we used play it at 33 speed until some sober [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists. 

Perhaps it's inherently American, this idea that you CAN have it your way, an innate sense of entitlement --- even arrogance --- that, on the one hand, has its merits (the very foundation of our constitution, for example). A preemptory bumption perpetuated by Democracy. Capitalism. The American Dream. Liberal Arts degrees. Starbucks, among other things. So that on the other hand, it's this very country-born hubris/desire which induces the most insipid sort of denial, known to induce fabricated reworkings of reality from weapons of mass destruction to bedtime [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists. 

Folks, I'm slackin' on you this week. Truth be told, I'm neck-deep in writing a business model and let's just say that crunching numbers: not my favorite. So instead of the usual musings, I'll be following my own <advice. Here goes: "Before any of you start a band, or join a band, or aid or abet a band, it is better by far that you pump gas for sub-sub-minimum wage, fish pennies out [<...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of <Outlandos Music, a new music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists. 

Sonic Reducer: The Undertow of the 90s.
For the second edition of Sonic Reducer we continue to mine the undertow of the 90s (with one exception from 2004) for quality releases worth seeking out. Again, they were all originally released on CD, this time around between 1993 and 2004. Most of these acts have other recordings out, several with records every bit as good as the ones fawned over below. Disclaimer: I worked for two of these labels (Tim/Kerr and Schizophonic) with two of these bands (Pigpen and 44 Long) back in the mid 90s. 

Coyle & Sharpe, On The Loose (1995, 2 13 61 Records): Coyle & Sharpe, the original prankster duo, ran amazingly surreal routines on innocent passers-by in the streets of San Francisco in the late 1950s, recording them with a tape machine hidden in a briefcase. They talked people (or tried to) into robbing banks, turning themselves into human leeches, herding "foot apples" and invented their own language ("Bulgravian"). These outrageously funny recordings are also snapshots of the times, a more innocent (gullible?) time (despite cold war fears) where strangers could approach strangers on the street with wacky ideas and not get automatically brushed off. For better or worse, it's hard to imagine them getting the same responses today. 

Duke McVinnie, Bugs (1992, Action Box): Bugs gets the nod over McVinnie's several other records because it's the only one I've heard. Channeling an art damaged version of seedy Los Angeles with  great humor, chaos, heartbreak and the ace poetic eye of a intelligent wastrel outsider, McVinnie hangs on the dirty boulevards with Chandler, Ellroy, Bukowski and Waits. Smokey Hormel plays guitar, Exene Cervenka co-wrote the self-explanatory "Drinking About You" and they mix in oboe, ocarina (?), low-fi tweaks and cut-ups with their stream of  bush-whacked jazz, gutter blues and downer folk. The whole beautiful thing was recorded straight to two track and sounds better than decades of digital disasters.

Mylab self-titled (2004, Terminus): super producer/engineer and drummer/percussionist Tucker Martine and super jazzbo keyboard whiz Wayne Horvitz and a whole bunch of their mega-talented pals gang up for a light-hearted, boundary expanding experimental project. Those pals include Bill Frisell, Robin Holcomb, Bobby Previte, Eyvind Kang and Keith Lowe. Google them. They throw just about anything with strings, keys, skins, knobs, reeds or mouthpieces into the mix and sit back and let it cook. This is "jazz" only because there's not really anything else to call it; you can just call it fun and get right to it.  Horvitz is also up to his neck in...

Pigpen, Miss Ann (1993, Tim/Kerr): Wayne Horvitz was the fulcrum around which the rest of Pigpen spun. This Seattle combo also featured progressive jazz hot-heads sax-man Briggan Krauss, drummer Mike Stone and bass player extrordinaire Fred Chalenor. They  specialized in hot, funky jazz that was both challenging and accessible. Their debut CD,Miss Ann, has seven Horvitz originals and covers by Eric Dolphy and John Zorn. They also put out a couple more full CDs, and EP and a live CD. Chalenor was also a huge part of...

Boodlers self titled (1995, Cavity Search): experimental guitar heavy-hitter Elliott Sharp leads a trio of brave souls through an effects-tweaked mine-field of twisted fret terrorism and saxophone abuse.  Cut, pasted, tortured, turned inside out and outside in in the mix, the six tracks range from short, furious pulverizations to longer, mind-bending ones that were once described (as I remember it) as sounding "like nuclei circling the head of a pin." Chalenor and drummer Henry Franzoni more than hold their own with Sharp, everyone playing like a trio of miners working their ways towards the center of the earth, one calamity at time. They released a second terrific album, Counter Fit, in 1997. 

44 Long, Collect Them All (1997, Schizophonic): sometimes something previously done to death is done so well that it simply makes it all sound fresh again. Such is the case with the debut CD by 44 Long, the first of several fine rocking-pop CDs that 44 Long main-man Brian Berg has produced since then. Berg is an almost-hidden treasure and a multi-talent; not only can he seriously play guitar with the best of them and produce a fine record, but he's got that voice: nasally, piercing and emotive. Naturally these are all beautifully crafted, catchy songs that slide from straight up pop to rock to more country and roots flavors, all with Berg's distinctive twang in voice and guitar both. Small flourishes in the production (chimes, autoharp, maracas, whistling) can make all the difference, and Collect Them All has just enough to keep it surprising and new. Fans of well-crafted roots pop and tasteful but still dangerous electric guitar look no further. 

Hashisheen: The End of Law (1998, Sub Rosa import); words by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), music compiled by Bill Laswell. A living breathing cut-up spoken word ambient world dub other dimensional trip into the fantastical world of Hasan i Sabbah. Sabbah was the 11th century Persian mystic, heretic, revolutionary, hashish mind-control originator and founder of the "Cult of the Assassins," Marco Polo's "old man of the mountain," sending out his devotees to wreck havoc on Islam and Christianity alike from his mountain top fortress, Alamut, in central Persia. That's Iran, ya'll, a country that had an incredibly rich cultural history when European's were living in caves and hitting each other over the heads with sticks. Steeped in myth, legend and psychological sorcery, the story of The Assassins is related by William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Genesis P. Orridge, Ira Cohen, a frankly out-of-place sounding Iggy Pop and many others. Let Hasan i Sabbah have the final word: "Nothing is true -  everything is permitted." 

One can not order a glass of wine with one's meal on a Sunday evening in Tuscaloosa Alabama. Well, one could order a glass of wine, but the wine would not be served because it is illegal, in Tuscaloosa, for a restaurant to serve alcoholic beverages on Sunday. We drove up from New Orleans this afternoon, stopping in Tuscaloosa in the hope that we might have a fine lunch tomorrow at Chuck's Fish, a world class restaurant, before proceeding on to Birmingham. Chuck's Fish is not open on Sunday, but this evening I ventured downtown in search of a passable supper and a decent glass of wine. I was stunned to learn that I would not be served any wine, due to an archaic law of a type, referred to in my childhood, as a "blue law", a most barbaric form of legislation, designed to remind us that, despite all the freedom of religion rhetoric spewed out by most of our elected officials, we actually do have a state religion, Protestant Christianity(I say Protestant,because I've never known Catholics to care when or where one drinks). These laws make a big deal about the sabbath, but only the Christian sabbath, Jews and Muslims can defile their sabbath, Saturday, perfectly legally.

I Googled blue law and came up with an article by one David J. Hanson Ph.D. Hanson claims that the first blue law in the American colonies was enacted in Virginia in 1617. The law required church attendance and authorized the militia to force colonists to attend church services. Later, laws were enacted to regulate what one could or could not do at home on Sunday. One could not wear lace or precious metals or engage in recreation. (It's still illegal to hunt on Sunday in Virginia. So I guess Jesus was an anti hunter. Go tell the Republicans!). Sexual intercourse on the Sabbath was also banned, and since Puritans held the belief that a child was born on the same day of the week on which it was conceived, parents of children born on Sunday were often punished for violating the blue law nine months before. At some point, the main focus of the blue laws shifted to alcohol.
 
In Texas, we have dry counties, where one can't purchase alcohol on any day of the week, but they are usually pretty far out in the sticks, where anyone accustomed to a fine Barbera is not likely to be ordering a meal in a public place. Compared to these places, Tuscaloosa is Paris. It's a major college town, home to the University of Alabama, with at least one fine restaurant, yoga classes, all the trappings of reasonably refined modern culture, but it is still under the thumb of the nine hundred foot Jesus. I suppose it's not the end of the world that I couldn't get my wine, but I surely hate being denied something in order that others might get to continue to believe they're going to heaven. 

We now have a Vice Presidential candidate who, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, inquired of the librarian of the Wasilla Public Library, how to go about getting certain books that offended the mayor's Christian sensibilities pulled from the shelves. Here's my suggestion to Sarah Palin, and anyone else who likes to legislate the morality of their fellow humans. Move to the dry county of your choice and live your life as you see fit. Refrain from activities that you think Jesus wouldn't allow. Let the rest of us drink and read what we want in merry anticipation of fire and brimstone, if you believe in that sort of thing.