Something/Everything/Nothing

The leaves are falling all around, the Sox are in the World Series, I've got a beard, I'm trying to punch up my road trip memoir, I need to contact publishers about my children's book, I need to finish a short story for Jim Corrigan's latest anthology, I'm gonna look for work as a ghostwriter, I want to rock and roll all night and party every day, I wish I could run again, I have fantasies where I play pick-up ice hockey, and I also think about getting back into baseball, although my hip/groin/back tell me I'm a fool, I can't believe how quickly my kids (and your kids) are growing up but I wish they would go outside more, I'm reading Looking for Przybylski and enjoying it especially the parts about traveling through Texas and New Mexico because they line up amazingly well with my impressions about that desolate part of the country from my memoir-in-progress, I'm way behind on "Boardwalk Empire" and gave up on "Nashville" because it was too much soap and not enough opry,I recently added music by The Vibrators to iTunes, I need to recruit people for my other blog, The Backside of America, I'm resurrecting my old web site, DaveBrigham.com ("Where Dave Brigham Meets Dot Com") and am taking suggestions for how to make it awesome, I spent some quality time today at the National Archives in Waltham scanning in photos from U.S. Government chemical warfare manuals and brochures, I now know how to properly put on a gas mask, I'm free-forming....

UFO Playlist

My last post was all about UFO sightings and a research paper doubting that such crafts and their occupants were truly of extraterrestrial nature (see 11-28-12 "The Truth Is Out There?"). Today I wanted to present something a little more frivolous: a UFO playlist.

This list includes songs I have in my collection, as well as tunes compiled by the BlogCritics web site. It is by no means exhaustive.

So here, in no particular order, are some cool UFO songs. I've included a bunch of videos to make this more interesting. I hope you enjoy it.

Ass Ponys -- "Place Out There":

Man or Astro-man? -- "Interstellar Hard Drive"

Mr. Nogatco (aka Kool Keith) -- "Bionic Fuse":

Flaming Lips -- "Placebo Headwound"

Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men -- "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll":

Butthole Surfers -- "Who Was In My Room Last Night?":

Parliament -- "Mothership Connection"

Neil Young -- "After the Goldrush":

Camper van Beethoven -- "The History of Utah"

Suburban Lawns -- "Flying Saucer Safari"

Red Simpson -- "The Flying Saucer Man and the Truck Driver"

B-52's -- "Planet Claire":

The Carpenters -- "Calling All Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day)":

Kyuss -- "Spaceship Landing":

Ray Stevens -- "I Saw Elvis in a UFO":

Sell! Sell! Sell!

I've been thinking for a while about trying to make some money off all the pictures I've taken over the last few years. I'm not fooling myself; I know I'm not a great photographer, but I think I've got a few images that would look cool on certain products.

So I've begun building up my product line at Zazzle. For the past two years I've been selling 30 different t-shirts associated with my first book, (C)rock Stories: Million Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity. I bought one and awarded one or two others as prizes while promoting the book, but until recently hadn't sold any.

Out of the blue two weeks ago Zazzle sent me an email letting me know that I'd sold three shirts. I have no idea who bought them, but it put the idea back into my head that I should sell other stuff.

I'd uploaded some images a while ago but let them linger without doing anything. So today I started matching images to products. The process is very easy, but finding the right picture to go with the right product takes a bit of time.

The first one I made was a note card featuring a picture I'd taken on Cape Cod two years ago:

You can see it here.

The next one I did was a coaster featuring a shot of my electric blue guitar and amplifier. Check it out.

I've got no shortage of images to select from, but I have to be careful not to upload pictures with potential copyright issues. I tried to post one of an MBTA subway station, but it got bounced.

For now I'm just testing things out, but in the near future I'll add more images to more products, and see what works and what doesn't.

Now, for your viewing pleasure, the Butthole Surfers.

About My Lips

Regular readers know I love music, and that the Flaming Lips are my favorite band. "But how did that come about?" you ask. Well, I'm gonna tell you.

I'm a long-time subscriber to SPIN magazine, so long in fact that they actually pay me to read the thing, and every year on my birthday they throw me a giant party complete with food, beer, live music and a 12-month supply of Geritol.

I've stuck with the magazine through their new wave years, punk rock years, hip-hop years, indie rock years, the years where they wrote A LOT about AIDS, the years when they almost went out of business, the years when they've changed their look and format, desperately hoping to make it all work.

During the summer of 1988, after I'd returned from my four-month road trip from Connecticut to New Mexico and back, I read an issue of SPIN in which they mentioned a band called the Flaming Lips.

I don't recall specifics about the short article, but the writer must have mentioned psychedelia, punk rock, weirdness and possibly even Oklahoma. Something about the piece, and the band's name, struck a chord in my brain and I decided to buy one of their albums (read: cassette tapes).

In 1987, the band had released Oh My Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips. By the time I learned about the band, I'd moved to Dover, NH, with my buddy and fellow road-tripper Pete, and his friend Joe. I went to a record store in Portsmouth and bought the tape. The band's only other album at that time was their first, Hear It Is, which I subsequently bought, along with almost everything they've produced.

Oh My Gawd!!! was unlike anything I'd ever heard, because I was never into the Beatles or '60s psychedelic rock. The only psychedelic band I liked was the Butthole Surfers. My friend Ric, who I met when we worked at Webnoize together back in the Mesozoic Era, was baffled that I wasn't a Beatles fan, but that I seemed to have pretty good taste in music. Blame it on my older brother and sister, I said.

Until I started researching and writing this post, I didn't know that the spoken-word sample that starts the first track on Oh My Gawd!!! ("Take this brother, may it serve you well.") was from the Beatles' "Revolution 9." The final track, "Love Yer Brain," ends with a looped sample of "turn off your mind, relax" from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows." To my credit, I did recognize that sample.

The first track on Oh My Gawd!!! is "Everthing's Explodin'," which comes out roaring and never relents:

I was hooked. I remember listening to the song in my apartment, perhaps during a small party, and this girl who was dating one of the cool guys in town, a guy was in a band I liked called The Dorks, asked me, "How do you dance to this band?" She was used to slamming, I guess, and probably New Wave dancing.

I promptly demonstrated by doing some really awkward, goofy, herky-jerky moves around the living room. She was puzzled, but found it humorous.

The second song, "One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning," is far more epic. Building slowly with mellow guitars, light drumming and gently sung lyrics, the song clocks in at nine and a half minutes. This one is great with headphones. If you smoke pot, this is the time where you spark up.

The rest of the songs follow the pattern of odd samples, spoken word parts, raging psychedelia, ripsnortin' punk rock. And there are parts where the music is played backwards, yet another obvious tip of the hat to the Beatles.

Another of my favorite tracks is "Can't Stop the Spring":

As much as I loved the music, I was also into the lyrics, written and sung by Wayne Coyne, the band's co-founder and lead weirdo. On "Ode to C.C. Pt. 2," Coyne, over a simple acoustic guitar riff, sings:

This man came up to me, just the other day / asked me if I'd been born again

I told him I didn't think I had

That I had been rejected

But I think

Hell's got all the good bands, anyway

The album's closer, "Love Yer Brain," is another epic. It starts out with Wayne singing in his lovably scratchy voice over simple piano chords. About a minute and a half in, the drums kick in but the pace is still slow.

The final two and half minutes of the song are comprised of the sounds of the band smashing things and throwing things around, yelling a bit, and then the aforementioned Beatles sample comes in and things quiet down, with just a few random voices and things being slapped around.

Over the past 24 years, I've bought just about everything the band has put out. Most of it I love, especially the more hard-rockin' psychedelic punk rock from the first 10 years of their career.

There have been points in recent years where I've questioned what the Lips are doing initially, such as The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and At War with the Mystics, but for the most part I came around on those albums after several listenings.

As for the more recent Embryonic, I haven't gotten into it that much. And I didn't bother to buy the band's collaboration with Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins doing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

As for their most recent album, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, on which the band and guests including Erykah Badu, Kesha, Lightning Bolt and Prefuse 73 do both covers and originals, well I guess I should at least give it a listen.

I've seen the band live five times. The first time was in 1992 at a small club called TT the Bear's Place in Cambridge, Mass. The band filled the place with their smoke machine while they sawed away at songs from their most recent album at the time, Hit to Death In the Future Head, as well as the above-mentioned albums, and Telepathic Surgery.

I saw them a few years later at an outdoor venue in Gardner, Mass., during the day. The played on a bill with the Stone Temple Pilots (boo!) and the Butthole Surfers (yay!). Great show.

In more recent years, the Lips have toured regularly with quite a bombastic, colorful and wildly entertaining show. Here's a sample:

I've seen them do this schtick three times. And while I love it and always have a great time at these shows, I'm ready for them to move on and show me something different.

The band has sometimes confounded me (Zaireeka, which consists of four CD's designed to be played at the same time), and other times disappointed me (scattered tracks across their discography), but they've always given me hope that whatever they do will be adventurous, fun, challenging and, ultimately, uplifting.

I'm not sure what the Lips have in store for the future, but I'm sure it will make me say, "Oh my gawd!!!"

They're Dead to Me

Three days after publishing a post called "Fire On the Mountain?" on my other blog (see March 12, 2012 "Fire On the Mountain?") I can't get the Grateful Dead's "Fire On the Mountain" out of my head.

Unfortunate, I know. Unless you're a Deadhead, which I'm decidedly not.

Seems like every other person in my high school was a Deadhead. We're talking flipped-collar, wide wale cord, Docksider-wearing kids right out of "The Preppie Handbook." As well as assorted jocks, burnouts and, of course, hippies.

I didn't fit into any of those categories, but instead, like many other kids, wore Izod shirts, played a little baseball, smoked a little pot (oh wait, no I didn't) and wore the occasional tie-dye shirt (oh wait, no I didn't). And most of THOSE kids liked the Dead, too. Or so it seemed.

None of my friends were true Deadheads, but my buddy Andy was into them. Every once in a while we'd jam and he'd work a Dead song into the session.

But there's something about me, when so many people gush over something -- be it the Dead, or "Mad Men" or "Top Gun" -- I often turn the other way. I don't like getting caught up in hype; I'd rather discover my own thing, or at the very least, the thing that only a few people are whispering about.

I kept a close circle of friends in high school, and we spent a LOT of time ragging on other cliques, because, hey, that's what you do. Did I secretly wish I was on the baseball team? Or was rich and drove a Beemer? Or maybe, you know, talked to a girl? Sure.

So even though I didn't hate kids who were more popular, I pretended to, and by proxy, I had to hate the things they liked. Which included the Dead.

Of course, it's not just Deadheads that turned me off. I'm not a fan of the band's music, obviously. I can't get into their jammy vibe and hokey harmonies. Plenty of people I respect are into the Dead, so I know there is value in their music.

In high school, I also didn't like burnouts, which meant that I didn't, or couldn't, if you will, like Black Sabbath.

Eventually I came around on Sabbath. I discovered punk rock before graduating from high school, and there were a few bands that I liked who covered Sabbath songs. The Dickies, for instance, covered "Paranoid."

And the Butthole Surfers made lyrical changes to "Sweet Leaf" and called it "Sweat Loaf."

And after college I lived with some friends who were into Sabbath. I came to realize the awesomeness of the band's sludgy riffs and mystical lyrics.

But to this day, I can't understand the appeal of the Dead. And no, I'm not willing to listen to reason on this. Some things can be forever.