SINGLES AGAIN / Chuck Eddy

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 9^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

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JEFFREY LEWIS "The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song" (Rough Trade, 2001)

Basically, a Craig's List Missed Connection ad as a shaggy dog story: Slacker nebbish with ponytail and backpack (you can tell from the comic strip tucked inside the record sleeve), born of the same East Village "anti-folk" scene that coughed up Kimya Dawson, walks along Manhattan's West 23^rd Street towards the Chelsea Hotel, "where Nancy and Sid and my friend Dave once dwelled." He overhears a cute tattooed girl with glasses behind him walking with a couple gay male friends and remembering some song where somebody got a blowjob there. He gets "uncharacteristically courageous," and turns around and tells her "Leonard Cohen." They wind up having a five-minute conversation in which she confesses that Leonard's song inspires naughty thoughts, but timid little twerp that he is (a fact he's going to passive-aggressively pound into our heads with every last little self-aggrandizing bone in his undernourished body if it's the last thing he does), he never gets her phone number. "I'm a schmuck, don't you doubt it/All I did was write this stupid song about it," when they could have been giving each other head in the bed that Leonard Cohen once used. "You may think it's sad, you may think it's pathetic/that I'll sing this song and she'll never hear it." He's telling us all this, of course, in the most monotonous sing-song diction, accompanied by only an acoustic guitar which he barely strums, and his voice cracks like zits popping all the way through. The girl probably thought it was adorable; we're sure supposed to. Personally, it makes me want to wring his pencil neck. Have to admit, though, I kind of like the song anyway. The actual physical object - music on only one side of the single, "33rpm" and song info rubber-stamped on its plain white label - is almost as unadorned. And the enclosed miniature graphic-novel is about how Rough Trade heard the song, which becomes "the top-selling single in the entire world," and 50 years later poor Jeffrey plays it on stage and the girl is in the audience, and they live happily ever after, except she tosses out all his music and comic books. For now, though, he's apparently half-moved to Portland, in order to badly cover Crass songs. (www.myspace.com/jefflewisband)

THE LIVE ONES "Dirtweed"/"Don't Look Down" (Slow Gold Zebra, 2008)

Muffled hard rock from a totally anachronistic - heck, already totally anachronistic if this was ten or even 20 years ago - NYC sleaze-punk trio, led by two scraggly Connecticut-born Czekaj brothers. Yeah, dirtweeds for sure. They're trying to sound like Detroit in the late ‘60s, or maybe Seattle in the late ‘80s, and they know how to look the part. Singer-who-drums Mike Czekaj slimes high and threatening through his bloody adenoids about how you're gonna get beat when you walk down the street. The beat, naturally, sounds like walking down the street. Toward the end, he starts "woooo!"-ing and "waaagh!"-ing. In "Don't Look Down" the band slows down, shooting for a black hole of Funhouse emotion, and Mike's voice gets deeper and more self-destructive: "Please take me home/I can't stay here feeling this way." He starts howling more, quoting BÖC's "This Ain't The Summer of Love," and the sound builds to a decently noisy spurt of a drone, and there's an actual guitar solo. Almost four decades after the first Stooges album, this particular brand of rock yields constantly diminishing returns. But there's something still left in it. (www.myspace.com/theliveones)

LOOKER "After My Divorce"/"Master's Gone Away" (Serious Business, 2007)

Yet another young urban bohemian snapshot that already seems somewhat dated, given the bedbug plague and all: Newly unmarried woman moves to the Big Apple from Paris (or Venice, or Pittsburgh - depends which verse you're hearing, kind of like "Gone Country" by Alan Jackson backwards), digs a chair and table out of the trash and sweater out of the hallway to make it through the autumn. Well okay, that plot conflates both songs, but they do seem related. Looker are three pretty gals and a guy drummer, and in mid-decade they put a small, steady pile of good EPs, CD-Rs, and one album along with this 7-inch, and were one of my favorite local live bands in New York. "Master's Gone Away" has a rhythm that flirts with ska, and lyrics that quote the old blackface minstrel tune "Jimmy Crack Corn," which is also where the title (and the song's last line) comes from. "After My Divorce," post-Byrds Anglophile jangle with sweet triple-girl harmonies and a taut beat turning martial, references Morrissey and Poe in consecutive lines; this charming man reads the divorcée's tell-tale heart. Toward the end, the Lookers repeat "Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La" - the Shangri-Las being one influence they list on MySpace, along with the Clash, Adverts, Talking Heads, Shirelles, Blondie, Pretenders, and Kinks. Though not the Primitives or Waitresses or Jam, all of whom probably belong there too. (www.myspace.com/looker)

LOS ABANDONED "Office Xmas Party"/"Electric Dad" (Vapor, 2006) More friendly female vocals, this time from the opposite coast - Van Nuys, L.A., Cali.  In the seasonal though not especially seasonal-sounding A-side, a working woman (like the one in, say, Martha and the Muffins' "Echo Beach" maybe) ill-advisedly hooks up with a co-worker at the annual holiday bash, beneath decorations while other attendees fall face-first into the spiked fruit punch, and as you'd expect things get awkward when the pair confront each other again in the coffee room Monday morning. The beat is skiffly with a slight lilt, though probably not quite enough of one to justify the middle part of Los Abandoned's "new wave/Latin/indie" designation on MySpace. Eventually, horns take over. "Electric Dad" does in fact seem to be recited in Spanish, but its music is just an emaciated indie-pop approximation of synth-pop: which is to say, the synth seems lazily stuck on just one setting, too unambitious and not half funky enough to have passed for synth-pop on ‘80s MTV.  Though the band does appear to dress colorfully enough to pass for new wave. (www.myspace.com/losabandoned)

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.