Loony Tunes: Songs from the Rubber Room

I wrote the following piece for the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger in 2002. At the time, I was obsessed with musical outsiders, lunatics and eccentric oddballs--almost anyone who had a slippery grasp on reality but the wherewithal to shout into a microphone or concoct mind-boggling symphonies to God. Perhaps in a future posting, I'll expand the list: Loose screws are everywhere.

Hearing Voices
Music by the Ill and the Eccentric

Boredom drove me to the lunatic fringe. New music had gotten stale, the cutting-edge, dull. Eager to explore new frontiers, I immersed myself in the fascinating world of music made by artists with varying degrees of mental illness or eccentric behavior, music truly on the edge (and often, a few steps over). Whether they're crazy, troubled, or confused, these artists produce songs, no matter how crude, that are heartfelt, soulful, unpredictable, and often unaffected by outside influence. What follows is a short list of artists who rock my record collection.

Syd Barrett
The Madcap Laughs
(Capitol)
Barrett was the genius behind Pink Floyd until his Herculean intake of acid had him tripping right out of reality, never to return. In and out of lucidity, Barrett made this fantastic document of someone dangling over the threshold of sanity. As brilliant as it is, it's also upsetting when considering the future that Barrett dosed away.

Hasil Adkins
Poultry in Motion
(Norton)
The boogieman of Boone County, West Virginia, Adkins has been knocking out primitive rockabilly records from a shack since the '50s. Among his muses: chicken. Be it a dance craze ("Chicken Walk") or a culinary delight ("Cookin' Chicken 1999"), Adkins has built an impressive body of work clucking in the chicken coop.

Larry "Wild Man" Fischer
"Music Business Shark," The Fischer King
(Rhino Handmade)
A true raving loony, Wild Man Fischer was discovered by Frank Zappa, who produced Fischer's debut in 1968 (but apparently never paid him). Fischer could neither sing nor play an instrument, but he could improvise lyrics (with varying degrees of success) and bark them (like an angry, horny sea lion), which is what earned him people's pocket change on L.A.'s streets. This 1980s recording broaches a recurring theme in the life of Fischer: Having felt he was robbed by "music business sharks" (Zappa), he was ever paranoid of not getting paid for his "talents."

Daniel Johnston
"Walking the Cow," Continued Story
(Homestead)
The most heartbreaking and sublimely melodic pop song ever put to tape. Johnston, an obese manic-depressive man-child, penned this number in 1985 and it's still his best.

Crispin Hellion Glover
"These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," The Big Problem
(Restless)
Everyone saw this actor lose it on Letterman when he demonstrated his martial artistry and nearly grazed Dave with a kick. On Nancy Sinatra's "Boots," he totally unhinged. Glover doesn't sing the lyrics as Nancy would; rather, he sobs, wails, and screams them like one whose boots are marching straight toward a padded cell.

Wesley Willis
Greatest Hits Vol. 2
(Alternative Tentacles)
A chronic schizophrenic, Willis uses a canned synth track as the foundation of his songs. Predictable as the music is, what spills out of his mouth is anything but. Greatest Hits Vol. 2 is, so far, the definitive Willis collection, featuring a wealth of songs highlighting the tuneless singer's social commentary on street violence ("Birdman Kicked My Ass"), fashion ("Cut the Mullet"), and thuggery ("I Broke out Your Windshield").

T. Valentine
"Hello Lucille, Are You a Lesbian?"
Hello Lucille, Are You a Lesbian?
(Norton)
If a bloodline could be traced from Wesley Willis, it would lead straight to this R&B catastrophe, who in 1982 dedicated this song to his wife after she came out of the closet. "I hate all lesbians," T. Valentine emotes with a pronounced lisp (hmmm).

Beach Boys
"Fall Breaks and Back to Winter,"
Smiley Smile
(Capitol)
One can only wonder what was coursing through the troubled, drug-addled mind of Brian Wilson when he composed this strange instrumental. Alternating between haunted (the ghostly Beach Boys harmonies) and downright cuckoo (when "The Woody Woodpecker Song" chimes in), "Fall Breaks" was derived from the spooky Smile number "Fire."

Richard Peterson
"New Young Fresh Fellows Theme"
(PopLlama, 7-inch single)
You've probably seen the large-statured Peterson around town, blowing his trumpet with one hand, shaking a bucket of change with the other. Peterson, who should have played the lead in Sling Blade, has recorded four albums of off-kilter easy listening, as well as this 1992 single, in which he wrote and arranged a new theme for YFF (which is musically brilliant), insisting in the lyrics that YFF should add Peterson to the fold.

Joe Meek
It's Hard to Believe: The Amazing World of Joe Meek
(Razor & Tie)
Meek was the British equivalent of Phil Spector in the '50s and '60s, a producer who crammed more into a four-track than just a meager wall of sound. Sadly, the sexually frustrated creator of "Telstar" ended his brilliant career by shooting his landlord and himself in 1967.

Honorable mentions: Jandek, Tiny Tim, Lucia Pamela, Kids of Widney High, Roky Erickson, Skip Spence, Congresswoman Malinda Jackson Parker, Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

From the Nov 21 – Nov 27, 2002 issue of The Stranger

Meet Your Makers II

This Makers cover shot comes from the defunct Seattle music magazine I edited, The Rocket. Design by Rocket art director Stewart A. Williams, the photo of Mike and Don snapped by Robin Laananen. This particular article, written by Seattle writer Kevan Roberts, appeared in the spring of 2000, a few months before The Rocket went defunct. At the time, the Makers had just released their Sub Pop debut Rock Star God, their most ambitious recording to date and a concept album, no less. Despite drawing a four-star review from Rolling Stone's David Fricke, the album failed to excite the indie landscape and further alienated the band's original garage rock fanbase. Their loss.... But what a cover!

All You Need Is Love

I have to be honest: there's no reason to post this dusty old record review of a CD reissue I wrote for a defunct magazine six years ago other than the fact that I just love this album and have been spinning it quite a lot lately. The thing about Love's Forever Changes is that it's one of those rare albums you could call timeless. Forever Changes is often held in the same esteem as the great psychedelic albums that captivated the young ears and minds in 1966 and 1967: The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced?, The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But to me, it's more than just a pinnacle of psych rock. To me, Forever Changes transcends genre--as well as time and space Tell me Sgt. Pepper's doesn't sound a bit dated. No, like Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited or Bringing It All Back Home, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On or Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew (among many others), Forever Changes is a true classic. But unlike those records, which were all critical and commercial successes, Forever Changes struggled to an audience. But find an audience it did; it just took aI'm glad its troubled creator Arthur Lee, who succumbed to Leukemia a couple years ago, lived to see his master work get its well-deserved recognition.

Love
Forever Changes
(Elektra/Rhino CD)

When Love entered the studio in 1967, they would summon all their strengths, talents, even demons for what would be their third album for Elektra Records. On the back of the proto-punk hit "Seven and Seven Is,"from the band's 1966 album, Da Capo, Love had enjoyed minor commercial success, and there were high hopes that this new LP would be their breakthough. And when the band finally emerged with an album titled Forever Changes, they managed to produce one of the great innovative records of not only 1967 (the year which brought radical rock from Pink Floyd with Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Beatles with Sgt. Pepper’s, the Mothers of Invention with We’re Only in It for the Money, and Tim Buckley with Goodbye and Hello, among others), but the entire 1960s. It was an album that would forever change not just the band itself, but everyone who got tangled in its web of splendor and sorrows. A blockbuster release it was not.

Love's road to Forever Changes was rocky. When the psychedelic folk band convened at an L.A. studio to record it, it was just waking from a long stint of dormancy. The band -- composed of vocalist/guitarist Arthur Lee, guitarist Johnny Echols, guitarist/vocalist Bryan Maclean, bassist Ken Forssi and drummer Michael Stewart -- were lethargic, rusty, out-of-sync -- hardly up to the task of making record, much less a masterpiece. Lee, seemingly the only glue keeping Love together, wasn’t about to let his project crumble. He took control of the sessions (much like Brian Wilson) and became a relentless taskmaster, whipping the band into shape, coaxing some truly amazing work from his mates and thus realizing the brilliance to which this album and its songs aspired.

But there’s a darkness that haunts Forever Changes. The album radiates with beautiful, mostly acoustic instrumentation, glorious string arrangements and evocative vocal stylings, but ominous shadows loom over songs, like big black clouds threatening grassy meadows on a spring day.

Much of the gloom stemmed from Lee, whose existential dread in a climate fraught with socio-political and racial tensions and empty hippie idealism forced him into seclusion deep in the Hollywood Hills. And while Lee was a youthful 22 when he began working on the album, he had already resolved that he would be dead by 26. (It never happened, of course.) Naturally, sadness, longing, dread, paranoia, heartache, madness and death infect his songs like a deadly virus. This is particularly felt on the hauntingly gorgeous “The Red Telephone” whose lyrics read: “Sitting on the hillside, watching all the people die, I’ll feel much better when I’m on the other side.” It’s a bad trip, all right, and there are more bad vibes ahead on this compelling work. Other black beauties include “A House Is Not a Motel,” “The Daily Planet,” “Bummer in the Summer” and “Live and Let Live.”

Lee wasn’t the album’s sole visionary. Brian Maclean, Love's most underrated member, brought two of his own songs to the sessions, “Alone Again Or” and “Old Man.” He sang both, casting them in fragile, evocative tenor, rendering sublime melancholy to an album that was already spectacularly sad and emotionally sweeping.

Considering the circumstances into which Forever Changes was born, it’s amazing just how together Love sounds on this album. It’s a stunning document created by the most unheralded band of the 1960s, and it perfectly captures the mood of the times, while offering a portrait of a band on the verge of collapse.

--Joe Ehrbar
Originally published in Backfire, July 2001

Where There's Smoke There's Flaming Lips

Flaming Lips, Paramount Theatre, Seattle, September 20, 2007

Prior to tonight's show, I never would have guessed that I was allergic to smoke. Not cannabis or tobacco smoke. No, smoke exhaled by the Flaming Lips' mighty arsenal of smoke machines (Fog Hogs). Never in my 15 years of covering music have I ever been subjected to such an onslaught. So thick was the haze that it swallowed up the band's entire spectacle. Not even the laser lights could penetrate the vaporous wall of fog. As soon as the fog enveloped the Paramount's balcony section, my eyes began to water and itch, my nose started to twitch and drip. On several occasions, when the veil dissipated, ringleader Wayne Coyne hoisted his hand-held smoker and filled the holes. My nose wept with snot.

The night wasn't about smoke and tears, though. There were also dozens of giant balloons launched into audience, massive explosions of confetti, an enormous video screen projecting strange films and close-ups of Wayne's nostrils, dancing Santas and aliens and giant inflatables. It was as if some crazed psychedelic band had joyously ransacked the local party supply shop.

As for the music? Well it was pretty great, transcendental even, in that the Flaming Lips didn't need the big-top spectacle. Nor did they need Wayne's folksy, aw-shucks between-song banter. All those balloons, all that confetti, all that gimmickry—totally unnecessary (though enormously amusing). The music stands on its own two feet, and that's what's important. It's also something that couldn't be said about a Flaming Lips performance a few years ago—back when they opted for a drum machine instead of real-life drummer machine named Kliph. Back when they were unable to render live the greatness and splendor of their recorded psychedelic suites. Back when they were transitioning from a madcap noise-rock band to a psymphonic tour de force. Not so anymore. Initially, Wayne's vocals were a little rough, not quite hitting the high notes in the opening song, "Race for the Prize" (thank God for confetti and balloons). But that wasn't all that surprising considering he sings well above his natural register. What's more, instead of warming up backstage, Wayne spent the half-hour prior to the band's set actually on stage, preparing the set and testing equipment right alongside the roadies. (His hands-on approach—uncharacteristic of shows at this level—was as mind-blowing as any of the Lips' songs.)

Back to the music. The Flaming Lips seek to deliver their audience from all that ails it. They offer an uplifting experience that is part religious revival, part carnival, part arena rock revue. And on this night, you had to be pretty jaded not to feel touched by the cosmic joy and energy projected by their music. Sure, songs like "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" and "Free Radicals" focal points of the band's latest album, At War with the Mystics, are bogged down by trite political rants. And yet, live these songs radiated with undeniable immediacy and conviction—you couldn't help shaking your ass and singing along. (Honestly, I changed my tune about "Yeah Yeah Yeah" and "Radicals" after experiencing them live.) The highlight of the show was the closer, "Do You Realize," the catchy, bittersweet anthem about savoring the moment, loving one another, enjoying small triumphs—celebrating life. It served as a poignant reminder: Before we know it, the surprise party of death will greet us, and we don't know if we'll be showered with confetti or swallowed into a smoky abyss.

Melvins Bulldoze the Showbox

Melvins, The Showbox, Seattle, September 19, 2007 The Melvins have gotten a little rounder and a bit grayer (OK, Buzz’s gravity-defying mane is A LOT grayer). Middle age has indeed settled in and made itself at home. Sonically speaking, however, the Melvins haven’t gone soft. How could they? They’ve been bulldozing the rock landscape for more than 20 years—and bulldozers don’t tread lightly. If anything, their inimitable sound is nimbler and more muscular. Credit the recent addition of bassist/vocalist Jared Warren and second drummer Coady Willis (both of Big Business). The Melvins’ appearance at Seattle’s Showbox Sept. 18, the kick-off of their fall 2007 U.S. tour, left no question as to the band’s vitality. On this night, they stormed the stage like a pack of mal-tempered pachyderms, trampling their admirers beneath the overwhelming blunt force of their heavy metal stomp. For 90 minutes, a sold-out crowd absorbed the cataclysmic tremors and serrated shockwaves—and delighted in the menacing punishment. So mighty were their swells of sound, so severe were their wallops that one could have easily overlooked the genius of their song architecture, which is often unpredictable and deceptively complex. And yet it was this underlying brilliance that ultimately heightened the impact of their physicality. As reflected by the new lineup, much of Tuesday’s set focused on material from A Senile Animal—the first album to feature this latest Melvins incarnation. “Civilized Worm,” “A History of Bad Men” and “Rat Faced Granny” highlighted the band’s time-honored signatures (bottom-end bombast, syncopated rhythms, slow-tempo drones, King Buzzo’s snarling vocals, Dale Crover’s percussive wallop) but were augmented by newly acquired strengths—Jared’s shrieking, higher-octave wails and harmonies and the violent, tenacious thrashing of the Crover and Willis tandem. The Melvins are showing their age, all right. But they aren’t old.

Melvins Unleashed and on Tour!

The following is a short piece I penned for the Seattle P-I, in which I interviewed Melvins co-founder and traps pounder Dale Crover. At the time, the Melvins were still a trio--it would be a few years before the enlistment Big Business partners bassist/shouter Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis. The latest Melvins incarnation is again making a menace of itself in U.S. clubs through the fall. If you haven't had the pleasure of subjecting yourself to the savage splendor of the Melvins' latest LP, A Senile Animal, well, then what are you waiting for? Look for a lengthy Q&A with King Buzzo from 2000 (previously printed in The Rocket) in the coming weeks.

Club Beat: No Energy Crisis for the Melvins
Friday, January 26, 2001

By JOE EHRBAR
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

"We're just lucky, I guess."

That's one way Melvins drummer Dale Crover explains his band's remarkable longevity of 17 years. And he's right, they are lucky. The Melvins, who, in Aberdeen, forged grunge by crossing metal (Sabbath) with punk (Flipper) and slowed the whole thing to a sludgy crawl, and who acted as a catalyst in the formation of Nirvana, remain standing, still aspiring toward new artistic heights, and showing no signs of fatigue. A mighty achievement for a band that only haunts the fringes of the mainstream.

The Melvins—Crover, guitarist/vocalist Buzz Osborne (a.k.a. King Buzzo) and bassist Kevin Rutmanis—perform tonight in the Sky Church at EMP, the museum their formidable sound helped build (8 p.m., $5). (But don’t call them a museum piece.)

"We've had our ups and downs, but we really enjoy playing with each other," says Crover, whose soft-spoken manner belies his bombastic drumming. "I still really like all the songs that Buzz writes. It's exciting, challenging, worth doing."

The Melvins, now based in Los Angeles, have survived in a hostile music industry largely because of the strong bond that exists between Osborne and Crover and their fierce devotion to the band's independence and craft. Even when they were signed to Atlantic for three albums (1993's Houdini, 1994's Stoner Witch and 1996's Stag), they maintained that integrity.
If anything, they grew more adventurous—not to mention dissonant—during their major-label stay and allowed their metallic mountain-moving sound to wander freely into more experimental realms.

By eluding convention the Melvins have kept things interesting for themselves. In doing so, they've befuddled their fan base, something in which the band undoubtedly takes great delight.
For instance, during 1999 and 2000 the trio released a trilogy of albums, The Maggot, The Bootlicker and The Crybaby (Ipecac), each bearing little similarity to the other. Maggot stomped around familiar Melvins noise-metal territory; Bootlicker delved into psychedelic madness and creepy ambiance; while Crybaby kicked and screamed through a disjointed mess of unusual collaborations with likes of Hank Williams III, former teen idol Leif Garrett, among others.

The Melvins' next wave of releases is equally perplexing. First up will be Electroretard (Man’s Ruin), an EP of covers and reworked—or mutated—versions of old songs, in February, followed by a live album of scalding-hot white noise titled Colossus of Destiny, in April. Crover calls Colossus "our Metal Machine Music album," referring to Lou Reed's infamous noise recording from 1975.

"We never know what to expect with our band," Crover admits. "So it's even a surprise to us."

While anything's possible at tonight's show, count on the Melvins not to consign themselves to EMP's permanent collection.

Go see the Melvins (tour dates): http://www.ipecac.com/calendar.php