I've got a new album! And forgive me for saying this, but it's pretty great. 33 tracks of pointy jangled sharp pop music. Yours for either free at Internet Archive or, in a new development, $1 at this little website called Bandqlamp.
This ostensibly concludes my 99-track CD, and I've distributed some proto copies to the world, but I'll probably end up severely editing things and going with 75 tracks or so. It's better that way.
Go get it!
Were there punchcards involved? Minicomputers? The internet is surprisingly silent.
The only real hit on the less creepy search engine (aside from long-link-deathed "lists of weird jobs" from the 00s) was from someone who happened to mention that she worked as a solfeggist before or during her career as an adult actress. Details are scant. Clearly she has underestimated the huge potential audience of weirdos reading early-80s music industry magazines and asking themselves "what was that all about?"
Every so often I get a Three Berry Icecream song stuck in my head (usually "Fine Day") and I search to see if they've done anything. Lo and behold there's a "quarantine session" on the YouTube. Totally charming as always, and bonus points for matching stripes!
In a better world "Fine Day" would be a standard. It has a lovely melody and a sweet arrangement and it speaks to the universal desire to hang out inside and listen to records and read picture books and look at lovely things that one has collected - wait, that's NOT a universal human desire? FINE. I'll wait for a better world, I guess. This sweet and twee little number has gotten me through multiple weird moments of sadness and anxiety and I wish more people knew about it.
I saw them in 2000 or so in the last few months of my ill-fated California experiment. I was burned out and young but not so young, and I was feeling hope for the first time in a long time after some extremely dire romantic entanglements burned themselves out. 3BI played in some venue in the Inland Empire with the Fairways. There were glockenspiels and everything in the world was shiny and beautiful for a brief moment.
The Yips' The Blue Flannel Bathrobe Butterfly is one of those albums I come back to every year or so. I like how it breaks rules: the first line on the album starts mid-word, the scuzz-and-crash guitar-drum duo 90s sound conflicts strongly with the occasional poetic lyrics, said poetic lyrics conflict strongly with highly matter-of-fact lyrics elsewhere, did they just namedrop gnostic manuscripts on a punk album and then go along to play a single chord for multiple minutes?! and two songs clock in at 7 and 10 minutes respectively. Currently selling for $3 or so on even overpriced online marketplaces because CDs and late-90s scuzz-and-crash sounds are both unfashionable at the moment.
They print lyrics for some of the more interesting songs but not all of them. Alas.
I searched for the album and came up with this Chickfactor interview, in which singer/guitarist Gilmore Tamny provides a quote for the ages:
I realized playing guitar was a perfect mid-point between doing the bills and watching t.v.
On the way home from the old-timey tractor festival, we stopped in Woodburn. We got tacos and stopped by a thrift store. At the thrift store, I flip through the LPs. Like a cranky old man, I complain to myself that the thrift-store LPs are two bucks each, but they have some pretty cool ranchero/norteño LPs on record labels that I recognize from previous garage sale finds, so I grab a few, along with copies of Big Bird Sings! and Ernie's Hits!
When I get home, I play the LP by El Palomo y el Gorrión. Of course it is great. I look for more of their stuff online. Lots of it is, including the wonderfully titled Tragedias de Mujeres Infieles. Down the rabbit hole I go.
Some of their 45s appear to be up on a YouTube page called Frontera Collection. OK, whoa - there's an entire Arhoolie archive at UCLA dedicated to this stuff? And there are what, 11,000 records so far at their parent archive?
Anyway, serious serious rabbit hole stuff. If you have any fondness for this sort of thing (or for Peruvian huaynos or what have you), it's a good place to get lost for a long time. If you're not fond of this sort of thing, go watch Chulas Fronteras and come back.
There's a lot to dislike about Amazoomer Billionaire Space Phallus Thrusters, but one of the few small pleasures they offer is that they have my old addresses on file, dating back through every dodgy apartment or shared house I ever had. All the way back to when I was in grad student housing, somehow ordering Krazy & Ignatz books on my Mac Classic, probably paying with a postal money order. Kind of crazy to think that I've been involved in internet commerce for nearly thirty years now. But I digress.
One of the things to dislike about Amazoomer is that they keep all your old addresses on file. My wife was ordering a few little trinkets for the boy, and somehow she ended up sending them to a house where we haven't lived in fourteen years. I pointed this out to her and we both gasped. "It's OK," I said. "I'll drop by there on the bike with the boy tomorrow. It's not that far out of the way."
So yesterday I'm riding home with the boy (he does not care for the unannounced detour AT ALL) and I stop by the old house. Weird to be there, right? I walk up to the door and there's package 1 of 2 with her name on it. I ring the doorbell and wait. I notice the "Protected by ADT" sticker on their window. I knock. No answer. I look in my bike bag for paper and pen. The only paper that I have that is at all usable is one eighth of an old church bulletin, so I tear that off. Sweating, I write a little message and my phone number and wedge it in between the handle and deadbolt. On the way out, I grab our package and I feel like a total criminal.
Today I get a call from the current resident of the house, and he says to swing by after 7. I ride my bike over, and on the way there I get a message saying that he's going to be late. No problem. I pick blackberries by the side of the trail, ride up some trails on Powell Butte, ride around the old streets, largely unchanged. It is awesome.
I head over to the house once he says he's home. I knock on the door, he opens, I pick up the package, and I resist the temptation to look past him into the nondescript ranch house where I lived for two years and where I nearly died once. I know what it looks like. You always remember the places where you nearly die, right?
Somehow I wedge the package onto my bike rack and I head back home into blinding sun.
