Miss Piggy Lunchbox

One of the most underreported phenomena is why so many albums from the 60’s and 70’s, by which time recording technology and processes had reached a pretty good state (see Pink Floyd), sound so awful. Seriously, why does this album sound like dad farts, with its levels set way too high, creating distortion everywhere? How did these colleagues of Andy Warhol not have access to a good recording engineer? Or does the LP sound good and Polygram just handed off their catalog to monkeys when they converted this to CD? Or was their some aesthetic of the time where overdriving the levels all the time sounded good?

Still, despite the sonic shortcomings, this is quite good. I appreciate that it incorporates elements of contemporary “classical” music, enjoy the concordant marriage of minimalism and rock and roll, and cherish the snapshot of late-60’s high-art New York culture this album provides us.

But come on, rock critics and Alex Ross, this is hardly the leaves-you-with-wet-pants-and-gasping-for-breath masterpiece you make it out to be. Why do you guys always put me in the position of pointing out that the emperor’s dick is flapping in the breeze? I’m getting tired of it. An important moment in 20th century music’s history? Yes. Something worthy of repeated start-to-finish listening 40 years later? No. In fact, without “Heroin,” the only odd-numbered track worth keeping, this is still good, but only three lunchboxes.

Rating:

Mixers: “Heroin”
Keepers: “I’m Waiting For The Man,” “Venus In Furs,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “There She Goes Again,” “The Black Angel’s Death Song”
Filed Between: Velvet Revolver (Contraband) and Billy Vera & The Beaters (By Request)

10 nights over the course of five-and-a-half years. 13 sets. 2 audio CDs and one MP3 disc. 127 tracks. 10 hours, 12 minutes, and 32 seconds of audio. 7.5 pages of notes. There were times I considered just throwing up my hands and walking away from my collection. I must be masochistic, given my willingness to jump into this after Pearl Jam’s 2003 tour.

I came away from this much happier with Melvins than I came away from that tour with Pearl Jam. There are a number of reasons I’ll attribute this to. First of all, I just had a higher level of affection for Melvins going in. Second, 13 sets over 10 nights is not even close to 73 sets over 72 nights, nor do the length of any Melvins sets approach the length of the single shortest Pearl Jam concert. Finally, this represents five-and-a-half years of changing set lists, not five-and-a-half months of the same. Plus it’s Melvins vs. Minneapolis, for crying out loud. How can you go wrong with that combination? Boner-ness commence!

I’ll be honest with you, though. This sounds like ass. I’d love to tell you these were lovingly recorded, mastered, and compiled concerts—and they very may well have been done out of love: the non-Walker shows, which is also exactly the set of Grumpy’s shows, were “recorded from the audience by Jeff Sebastianelli” and sometimes with Geoffrey Nicholson and the box set is dedicated to Sebastianelli’s memory—but no amount of love is going to burnish a non-soundboard recording in a tiny bar.

Still, I enjoyed this immensely. As opposed to the Pearl Jam debacle, which emphasized how much I hate several songs of theirs and how even the ones I like can’t quite stand up to that amount of heavy rotation, this experience reinforced to me just how much I love the Melvins catalog. Be assured, this is for fans only. Newcomers who don’t already have a robust Melvins collection will be confounded and perturbed. But if you love Melvins, you’ll love the passionate performances and live energy that cut through the terrible sound quality.

Even I got something new out of it. They hearken back to their very early Pacific Northwest days by covering Malfunkshun’s “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)” from the legendary Deep Six compilation, which also featured four Melvins songs, and then they go right from that song into “Leeech,” a song that was given to them by or stolen from Green River, depending on who you ask. (This brings us all the way around because those were the two bands that merged to form Mother Love Bone, the predecessor of Temple Of The Dog and Pearl Jam.) Their covers of Alice Cooper’s “Halo Of Flies” are amazing; Melvins meets 1970’s glam-prog-rock? That’s such a fantastic combination I can’t believe it’s not a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. In fact, the performance of that track on 9/18/2000 might be the highlight of the collection if it’s not the Walker sessions where they do “Hung Bunny” and “Roman Dog Bird,” the first two songs on Lysol.

Still, my god, I’m not sure what’s better: Having this collection and listening to it intently several times, or finally allowing myself to move on through the rest of my unlistened-to collection.

Rating:

Mixers: None
Keepers: 3/20/04, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Night Goat,” “With Teeth,” “Black Stooges/It’s Shoved”; 3/24/06, Soo Visual Arts Center: “Intro by David Scott Stone”; 2/8/03, The Walker: “Hung Bunny/Roman Dog Bird”; 9/18/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 1): “Missing,” “Tipping The Lion,” “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)/Leeech,” “Halo Of Flies”; 9/18/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 2): “Revolve,” “AMAZON,” “Cherub,” “Youth Of America”; 9/19/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 2): “Youth Of America”; 10/15/01, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry/Halo Of Flies,” “At The Stake”‘; 10/16/06, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Intro/Oven,” “It’s Shoved”; 2/9/03, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Black Stooges (first half),” “Black Stooges (second half)”; 3/25/06, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Pigs Of The Roman Empire,” “Hooch,” “Happy Birthday/Black Stooges”
Filed Between: Melvins’ Nude With Boots and Melvins+Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)

Even a crappy phone picture of this wondrous chocolate fountain in Vegas is enough to give me a hard-on.

I had this post all drafted up about how we got a sleety, never-snowy type precipitation on Saturday night, but then came Sunday and we definitely got never-snow number seven.  Saturday night’s was close enough that I could probably count the two together as two different occurences, but I think it all pretty much came down in 24 hours so, again, I’ll be conservative, which still brings us up to number seven for the season.  Already.  And we’re barely halfway through winter…or fall/winter/spring…same thing here.

It’s the coldest week of the year, so if you were going to bank on never-snow it would be this week, and even the locals seemed able to shrug off a few flakes as a non-event.  Or maybe it was becaues the lack of accumulation made this never-snowfall pale in comparison to those of late December.

“Summer” is only five months away.

Pictures of me and My Baby taken in the ass of the mirror-paneled horse in the lobby of the Bellagio.

And only three weeks late on this one.  The next one…man, I don’t know when I’ll get that one published.

Anyway, every year KEXP asks its listeners to send in their top ten albums for the year and then lists the top 91 vote getters as it counts them down on the air.  Surprisingly, I actually reviewed more than 10 CDs from 2008 so I went over and voted.

It was a completely onerous process as their write-in functionality didn’t work very well and, despite them listing gobs and gobs and gobs of albums, I had to write in seven of my ten votes.  Come on, KEXP, aren’t you supposed to be diverse?  Okay, I’ll forgive you for not including Terramara, Tom Gabel, and the unreleased pre-master demos of Malfunkshun, but no Rick Springfield, Gutter Twins, or Chinese Democracy?  Get off your high horse, you ass munchers.

Anyway, choosing my top ten was easy because when I sorted the 2008 albums I had reviewed I found that exactly ten received (or would have received) four or more lunchboxes, so there was a nice cut-off there.

You can see KEXP’s list here.  I wouldn’t go look at it, though, as Gutter Twins don’t make the list entirely because they weren’t even on the ballot, I’m sure, because while I can see how they’d look down on such listenable enjoyment as Guns N’ Roses or Rick Springfield and would avoid visceral, no-indie-weenies-allowed rock like Melvins, Gutter Twins fits their sweet spot of huge among young people and obscure to adults that they seem to troll in.  How completely retarded.  Furthermore, KEXP’s #1, Fleet Foxes, doesn’t even break my top ten because it got 3.5 lunchboxes.

Anyway, here are my top ten CDs of 2008:

5 lunchboxes:
1) Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend (This was on the ballot and slots on KEXP’s list at number two.)

4.5 lunchboxes:
2) Rick Springfield: Venus In Overdrive

4 lunchboxes (or would have received at least 4 if I’d rated them) (in no particular order):
3) Terramara: Dust & Fiction
4) Melvins: Nude With Boots
5) Black Keys: Attack & Release (This was on the ballot and slots on KEXP’s list at number 34.)
6) Malfunkshun: Friendship Ring
7) The Gutter Twins: Saturnalia
8) Guns N’ Roses: Chinese Democracy
9) Tom Gabel: Heart Burns
10) Mudhoney: The Lucky Ones (I think this was on the ballot but didn’t make KEXP’s list.)

Buzzo’s shirts are back in stock.

I ordered a large and an extra-large, just in case.

I am a rock star. The most amazing thing to come out of watching this DVD is that one of my freaky attributes is shared by Fantômas lead singer Mike Patton. Apparently he has a “weird throat” and gets food stuck in it a lot. I get food stuck in my esophagus all the time, and have been required to take several trips to the ER to get it unstuck and have had several surgeries on it. The GI doc once described my esophagus as “very interesting,” a compliment I feature prominently at the top of my résumé.

That bit of info regarding Patton came out of this DVD’s audio commentary, featuring the Big Band’s booking agent, Dale and Buzzo from Melvins (and the Big Band), and Danny DeVito. Yes, that Danny DeVito…he never seems to be too far away from any given Ipecac project.

The Fantômas Melvins Big Band is, as you would guess, a combination of the two bands into one. Since Melvins was only a trio at the time (they may have even been a duo in between bassists) and King Buzzo serves duty in both bands, it really works out to be Fantômas (Mike Patton on vocals, Trevor Dunn from Mr. Bungle on bass, Buzzo on guitar, and Dave Lombardo from Slayer on drums) plus Melvins drummer Dale Crover plus a second guitarist, David Scott Stone, who has done some touring with Melvins in the past. The band has also released a CD of their New Year’s Eve 2000 show.

If 80 minutes of the combined bands performing each other’s songs sounds like 80 minutes of sheer awesomeness, you’re about 85-90% right. Unfortunately the band sabotages their own show right in the middle. The cool-down section most bands insist on putting in the middle of their shows rarely works as well as they think it does, and this is just tragic insanity as it’s almost 17 minutes comprised of Fantômas’ “Page 14” and “Pigs of the Roman Empire,” which Melvins did with Lustmord. “Page 14” contains several minutes of only very sparse hi-hat hits, and while “Pigs of the Roman Empire” picks up eventually, it starts off not much better than “Page 14.” “Page 14” is an interesting sonic experiment and fits fairly well on the band’s debut album, but why they thought these eight minutes were appropriate in a live setting is a mystery. I’ve got a deal for you, rock bands: how about if you insist on putting in these bathroom-break sections you announce when they start so that we can get headed off to the john right away? And if the lead singer feels the need to sit for three or four minutes, cut it.

After that, however, they pick it up and rock straight on through to the end in an 11-song sequence consisting of some of the bands’ best material (“The Omen,” “Hooch,” “Mombius Hibachi,” “Page 23,” “04/02/05 Saturday”) that I literally have difficulty turning off once it gets started.

One of the great mysteries of this concert is how Mike Patton knows the lyrics to the Melvins songs. Melvins’ lyrics are infamously obscure. They’re never printed in their CDs (the liner notes to Colossus of Destiny consisted of six panels but featured only alternating pictures of artichokes and rubber duckies), they’re difficult to decipher, and often don’t make sense when you can make them out.

For example, here’s “Hooch” from the Melvins wiki:

Cuz I can ford a red eed only street a wide a ree land.
Die-mond make a mid-evil bike a sake a like a ree caste.

I’m pretty sure those aren’t right, but I can’t do much better. But there Patton is, singing along on “Hooch,” so either he’s making s**t up like the rest of us or Buzzo has deigned to let him in on one of the great secrets of the universe.

Most of the footage is standard concert footage, sometimes intentionally grainy for effect, but when you’re least expecting it there are overlays of smoking cartoon animals, pieces of fire raining down, blood cells floating over everything, or a muppet making rock horms from the rafters. It doesn’t add a ton, but it’s a nice touch that keeps you on your toes and probably throws you for a pretty wild loop for a while if you’re watching stoned.

This video concert doesn’t blow me away the same way a Mike Patton concert in London, You Fat B**tards by Faith No More, did 20 years ago, but it’s still about 85% awesome and aptly highlights the involved bands’ careers.

Rating:

Filed Between: Faith No More (You Fat B**tards and Who Cares A Lot, Greatest Videos) and High Fidelity, The KEN Story in the DVD section.

So we’re pretty excited about Al Franken winning the recount of Minnesota’s Senate election by 225 votes. Of course, his asshole opponent Norm Coleman is tying things up in the courts, despite having no chance of winning, only to appease his higher-ups in DC, which is basically all he ever does anyway, so that there’s one less Democratic senator on key votes. Meanwhile, Minnesota goes unrepresented.

Still, we’re excited.

It’s been a couple of weeks, but here’s him gracefully declaring victory via TPM.

Daily Kos is kind enough to remind us that on November 5th when Coleman led by 215 votes (which, you’ll note, is fewer than the 225 he now trails by) he said that he would step aside if he were in Franken’s place and save the taxpayers the cost of a recount because he felt “the healing process [was] so impohtant.”

Of course, now that we’re on the other side of a thorough and transparent recount and he’s behind votes, he wants to deny Minnesota representation in the Senate because, as every blog entry on the subject will tell you, Minnesota law is unique in that they wait until legal challenges have run their course before the Secretary of State can sign the certificate to seat somebody.  And all just because his Republican overlords in Washington want one less Democratic vote for the proposals Obama’s got coming down the pipeline.  What a mensch.

Fivethirtyeight declares Coleman’s political career over.  In my favorite line about the whole thing they reference his loss to Jesse Ventura and the tragic pre-election death of Paul Wellstone (but not Ventura’s histrionics over the memorial service which handed the election to Coleman when Walter Mondale stepped in for Wellstone in the last week) (emphasis mine):

Let’s be frank: Norm Coleman doesn’t have much of a future in electoral politics. Defeated Presidential candidates sometimes have nine lives, but defeated Senatorial candidates rarely do, and in his career running for statewide office, Coleman has lost to a professional wrestler, beaten a dead guy, and then tied a comedian.

Then there’s the frivolity of Coleman’s lawsuit.  TPM analyzes it here…

The complaint ignores the existence of counter-evidence, employs one maneuver when it is self-benefiting and opposes the same maneuver when it goes against them….

Coleman claims that multiple precincts had “more votes than voters,” a potential irregularity if we understand that as being more ballots than people who signed in on the register. But Coleman has another definition: When the votes tallied in the recount were more than were counted on Election Night, with no reference to what was on the voter register. The whole point of a recount is to find votes that the machines failed to pick up at first.

…

Coleman says those Election Night numbers were bad, too, and wants even more votes for Franken thrown out from absentee ballots that he claims should never have been counted, based on errors on the envelopes. But the envelopes were separated from the enclosed ballots months ago, and he can’t prove whom these people voted for. He just wants to throw out Franken votes by fiat.

…

The Coleman complaint wants to force the review and inclusion of 654 absentee ballots that local officials in both blue and red counties say were properly rejected, and which come almost entirely from precincts that Coleman won. They also re-reject the 930 absentee ballots that were counted this past Saturday, which gave Franken a net gain of 176 votes, saying those ballots were wrongly deemed to be legal and erroneously opened.

But remember: Under the terms laid out by the state Supreme Court, the Coleman campaign is on the record saying that this past Saturday’s ballots were legal and should be counted. Now they want a do-over.

There’s much more and it’s all just as ridiculous.  Here Fivethirtyeight looks a bit deeper at those 654 rejected absentee ballots re-re-counted:

To review, these are absentee ballots that had already been deemed by the counties to be invalid — once on Election Night, and then a second time upon the court-ordered re-evaluation of absentees in December. It is not surprising that their minds haven’t been changed the third time around.

This thing is over and Coleman’s stall tactics are only hurting the people of Minnesota, who will eventually be proudly represented by the man seen here via TPM doing a spot on impression of Mick Jagger.

Ten years ago today.

Minnesota then drove to the Falcons 20-yard line, setting up a 38-yard field goal attempt for Anderson, who had not missed a field goal all season. Another successful kick would have all but wrapped up the NFC title for Minnesota, but Anderson’s kick sailed wide left, giving the ball back to Atlanta with 2:07 left and new life. Chandler then led his team down to the Vikings 16-yard line. Following a dropped interception by Minnesota LB Dwayne Rudd, Mathis’ 16-yard touchdown catch tied the game with 49 seconds left and sent it into overtime.

After the first 3 possessions of overtime ended in punts, Chandler, on a bad ankle, led his team 70 yards to set up Andersen’s 38-yard field goal with 3:08 remaining that put Atlanta in the Super Bowl for the first time in team history.

I can stlil hear the deafening silence from my friends and me in my apartment that day.  And I can still remember that the front page headline of the Star Tribune on Tuesday was about how bad Monday sucked.

I remember confidently telling my cousin in November, “Who’s going to beat them?” when she asked if I thought they would really make the Super Bowl.

I had broken my thumb breakdancing on New Year’s (seriously), and when they asked me what color to make my cast, I went with purple to celebrate the Vikings’ 15-1 season and imminent Super Bowl victory.  Sitting in my apartment that day with that purple cast, I wanted to cut my whole arm off.  When I got the cast off in mid-February, there was another man getting his purple cast off, too.  I said, “I hope you didn’t make yours purple for the same reason I made mine purple.”  He said, “Those assholes….”  I concurred.

It was easily, easily, the toughest loss I’ve endured as a sports fan.  I still haven’t forgiven them.