This is Cliff "Devinoch" Hicks on the fly, rambling about whatever catches his fancy. He speaks, you read. Nothing is guaranteed; everything is caveat emptor. Welcome back, commander.
Catherine Wheel's song "Black Metallic" was a shot in the arm that made me start listening to music in an entirely new light.
This is another one of those "120 Minutes" discoveries, but man, "Black Metallic" was a song that absolutely haunted me. I remember listening to in on a Monday afternoon after school, and then going out to a Homer's Music (Nebraska's mini music chain) to pick up a copy of the album it was on, "Ferment," right after school on Tuesday.
"Ferment" is one of the albums I've bought the most over the years - a copy was in the collection of CDs I had stolen from my truck in 1997, a copy was in the collection of CDs I had stolen from my car in 1999, a copy was in the collection of CDs I had stolen from my car in 2002 and the album was reissued in 2010 with a bunch of new material. So I've given Catherine Wheel quite a bit of money for this album, and each and every time it's been absolutely worth it.
"Ferment" is gothic. It's not goth, but it's got a certain weightiness to it, a density you don't find on a lot of music. The very first song on the album, "Texture," is as advertised. You can practically feel the sheets of guitar work, shimmering like glittering steel in moonlight. This sort of sets the stage for what you're going to get on the album, something best listened to at night if you ask me. It's full of hefty melodies and epic sounds. They aren't quite shoegaze, but you can hear they aren't that far from it. The band didn't like being lumped into the shoegaze genre, but it's easy to see why a lot of critics lumped them into the field - the guitars are truly epic, and dwarf most of the other sounds. But Rob Dickinson's voice is just too prominent for them to be pure shoegaze, and the band constructs songs a bit more traditionally than often falls into the shoegaze wheelhouse.
On later albums, the band would move away from this sort of cathedral-of-guitar field and into a bit more traditional britpop/rock, which was a shame. It's not to say the latter albums aren't excellent, because they are, but "Ferment" (and the follow-up "Chrome") were moments that have yet to be replicated or matched. The band split up in 2000, and none of the projects they've taken up since then have been quite as remarkable as these, although Rob Dickinson's "Fresh Wine For The Horses" contains a number of good-to-great songs (and the special edition also includes a second disc of him doing a number of songs from his back catalog, including some of the best of Catherine Wheel, acoustically...)
There's nothing I can do to actually top hearing "Black Metallic" for the first time, so take seven-and-a-half minutes of your day and hear one of the most glorious epics ever released as a single... Aw man, the video's the short version, with only four and a half minutes...
Score! Here's them doing the song live on "120 Minutes" at the full length with a bit to grow on! Neither version is as perfect as the seven minute and twenty seconds you'll get on the album, but you can try each and see what connects best with you... Also, as I write this, "Ferment" is SIX BUCKS on iTunes... you're practically stealing it at that point. No reason you shouldn't get a copy...
When I was back in Nebraska over Christmas, I spent a bit of time hanging out with my oldest friend Topher, and we found ourselves talking about music we'd been listening to a lot when we were younger. Right around the time he and I became friends, back in 1989 (back in 7th grade, for those of you who are curious), he was heavily into one album in particular - Aerosmith's "Pump."
I was just starting to branch out into music past the stuff that my folks listened to - mostly older stuff like The Kingston Trio - and was struggling to find music that I liked that was mine. A lot of kids in school were listening to stuff like New Kids On The Block or Milli Vanilli, and I found that kind of stuff didn't appeal to me at all. There were also a bunch of people listening to Skid Row and Motley Crue, neither of which struck a chord in me at the time. (I've actually come to dig some of that weird sleazy hair metal as I've gotten older, but only in small doses.) My dad liked listening to a lot of musicals, and my mother was a die-hard Michael Bolton fan. Clearly, I needed to find something that was outside of the sphere of influence I had.
My first year of junior high, my homeroom had a number of people in it who kept mostly to themselves, but there was one kid who was always doodling on pieces of paper before class started. I remember I walked over to him and said I thought his drawings looked cool. He told me the one he was working on was crap, and he was embarrassed I saw it. So I asked him to show me some of his cooler stuff. And that was how I met Topher.
Topher's family was about as different from mine as I could imagine. He was the oldest of three kids; my baby brother had literally come along a year ago, when I was 11, with no siblings in between. His folks listened to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin; I'm not sure my dad knew who Led Zeppelin were. His family lived in North Omaha; my family lived in Central Omaha. (I know, many people are thinking - it's Omaha... how different can the regions be? Well, how different are Queens and Manhattan - they're both New York City, right? Yeah, Omaha regions have that kind of disparity too...) Hell, when Topher's mom came to pick him up from our house after his first sleepover, I thought she was his sister. But we were damn near the same age (he's eight days older than I am) and we got along like a gang of thieves.
He ended up being my roommate for much of college, although things soured when I moved out to California, for the more predictable of reasons. (Answer: A girl.) Despite the fact that Topher and I went through some rough patches, we made amends three or four years back, and I've made it a point to hang out with him every time I've been back in Omaha since. The last time I saw him, I hated to leave. The rat bastard really is probably one of my best friends in the world.
So, anyway, when we were just starting to become friends, I remember we were walking to his house after school one day, and I was bitching about all the horrible music that people were listening to, and he started telling me about Aerosmith's "Pump." I had vague recollections of hearing Aerosmith on a classic rock station, and asked him if it was the same band. It was, and when we got to his house, he put on his tape of "Pump" and we listened to the whole thing, start to finish.
"Pump" was one of Aerosmith's biggest hits, carried to mainstream success on the backs of two singles - "Love In An Elevator" and "Janie's Got A Gun." For those of you who are only familiar with Aerosmith from "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing," man, are you in for a surprise when you listen to their earlier stuff. Aerosmith was a dirty, sleazy rock band in the 1970s that had sort of fallen victim to its own excess, but the original lineup reunited in 1985 for the album "Done With Mirrors." That album didn't have much success, but then Run-D.M.C. covered "Walk This Way" and suddenly people were interested again, so the next album, "Permanent Vacation," brought them back into vogue. By the time "Pump" hit, the band was riding the high wave again.
"Love In An Elevator" was a smash hit. It had the perfect blend of gritty blues rock that the band was known for blended with just the right amount of pop-metal to get kids hooked. And just when it seemed like that song's time was passing, "Janie's Got A Gun" was released as the second single.
The song caught on, in no small part due to the gritty video that matched the dark and foreboding tone of the song. (Fun fact! The video was directed by a guy who's gone on to some renown since he turned his attention to feature films. David Fincher, who brought you Seven, The Social Network and the US version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, among others.)
By 1990, Aerosmith were everywhere. They were on Saturday Night Live (and on Wayne's World!) and MTV's Unplugged. Then in late 1991, they played MTV's 10th Anniversary, with perhaps one of the most epic of epics, their 1972 song "Dream On" done with an orchestra backing them, and Michael Kamen was leading that orchestra. (Kamen died WAY too early...) There's nothing more I can say to top this performance, but you should track down "Pump," and probably at least a Greatest Hits or two...
The year was 2002. I had just moved back from Las Vegas to the Bay Area, and NME magazine was dabbling with a radio broadcast online, playing bits of Radio 6, their "cutting edge" station on a stream free from their website.
It gave me something to listen to at work. A lot of it was crap. But every so often, something would stick and I'd find a new band. And once, just once, I'd heard a song that I became obsessed with.
That song was "American English" by Idlewild.
That silvery guitar comes ringing in the air like some long lost U2 song, and then Roddy Womble's trembling Scottish voice purrs into life over it. A few verses later, the steady base comes in, and just a bit past that, it all crashes together and the drums kick in. And as soon as the chorus kicks in, that arms-spread-wide, standing-on-the-edge-of-the-mountain, bathed-in-rain, grin-as-wide-as-the-day feeling swells over you. Or maybe that's just me.
Back then, in 2002, it wasn't easy to get music from England, and we were in a period where there was a lot of great music being put out in England. Thankfully, there was a record shop in Berkeley, next door to the comic book shop I visited then, Comic Relief, run by the irreplaceable Rory Root. The guy running the record shop imported a lot of CDs from England, and when I went in one day, he had two copies of "The Remote Part" by Idlewild, newly arrived. I grabbed one and must have had the biggest smile on my face when I went to pay for it.
"They any good?" the cashier asked me as he was ringing me up.
"If it's half as good as the single, it's fucking brilliant," I told him.
"Can you go grab me the other one?" he asked. So I did. He opened it up and popped it into the store's CD player immediately. "Huh. Pretty fuckin' good. I'll have to order more copies."
When I came back in two weeks later, they had five copies of the album in stock and it was in the "Employee Recommended" section. So I felt pretty good about that.
The rest of the album was, indeed, fucking brilliant. The first three songs were probably the strongest opening I'd ever heard on an album, starting with the intense energy of "You Held The World In Your Arms" and followed up by "A Modern Way Of Letting Go" before getting to "American English."
The album is filled with great songs, but the last song on the album, "In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction," is one of my absolute all-time favorite songs. The tail end of the song includes the poem "Scottish Fiction," read by its author Edwin Morgan, and was written specifically for the album. It's a marvelously grand bow for the album, and if it doesn't sell you on getting a copy, well, I don't know what will.
I don't have a lot of sad concert stories, despite the fact that I've seen over a hundred shows, but I've always been sad that Idlewild cancelled their last tour. I mean, I understand - Rod Jones, the band's guitarist, broke his collarbone - but I've never seen them live, and I truly want to. Then the band went on hiatus and it looked like they might be done for good. But I was happy to see the band reunited late last year and is working on recording a new album, and I truly hope they'll play the American dates they had to cancel on back in 2010, because they are one of the very few bands on my list of favorites I have yet to see live. So if they do tour the states, I'll see them, no matter where I need to get to.
I've never been quite sure what to make of Mercury Rev. I don't think anyone has been. Maybe that's part of the appeal. I'm not even sure you can even call Mercury Rev a group. More of an anarchic audiophile collective movement.
When talking about Mercury Rev, it's probably best to give people a touchstone, something even vaguely similar that people can latch onto. The best case scenario there is to talk about The Flaming Lips, which is to say, no help at all.
In the case of both bands, each album is a singular moment unto itself, fairly unlike both whatever preceded it and whatever will follow it. I actually jumped onto Mercury Rev from the beginning, when their first album, "Yerself Is Steam," was re-released, after their original distributor, Rough Trade, collapsed in the US just weeks after its release. The song "Car Wash Hair" was a sort of hazy epic that I was looking for. It reminded me of a lot of the shoegaze stuff I was getting into at the time - My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive - but it also had an insanely catchy hook, something most of the shoegazers never needed. They also had a flute! It also warmed up slowly, blossomed into light and a ton of random sounds, and then baked in the fading daylight. I used to listen to the song a lot when I'd watch the sun go down in the summer.
By the time their fourth album came around, the monumental "Deserter's Songs," in 1998, the band had gone through a bunch of changes, and a bevy of styles. They'd fired their original vocalist. The band's second album, "Boces," was similar to their first, but was getting more active. Their third album, "See You On The Other Side," was practically a full blown rock record, albeit with the flourishes the band was accustomed to. But I don't think anyone was quite ready for "Deserter's Songs."
"Deserter's Songs" is a collection of songs that seem like they would most befit a cabin somewhere up in the mountains, coming from a radio that's just barely on the edge of reception, transmitted from some time in the deep past. It's full of things you don't normally hear that much of any more - falsetto operatic choir voices, theremins, pipe organs, woodwinds... and yet, it's still a very modern record.
It was also supposed to be the band's swan song. They were going to put it out and then when it failed, they could walk away, knowing they had given it their last, best shot. And then, a funny thing happened. The album was a big hit. Oh, not here in the States, where it was an indie darling but didn't get that much airplay, but in the UK, NME magazine named it Album of the Year, and over there it spawned 3 Top 40 singles.
Since then, Mercury Rev have mostly followed their own path, and the albums since then have been fascinating, a blend of new and old sounds, and it's always been impossible to predict. Their last album was six year ago, 2008's "Strange Attractors," but apparently they're back in the studio now, which means we should get more amazing music from them in the near future.
The Afghan Whigs have put out a new album today and while it's too early for me to pass judgment on that, I want to talk about what I've always considered their finest album, "1965."
Now I know that my former boss Jeff Randall (who was the entertainment editor, among other things, for The Daily Nebraskan during my tenure) would argue that "Gentlemen" was their finest record, but here Jeff and I must simply agree to disagree. A lot of people put "Gentlemen" down as their favorite, but for me, "1965" focused all the things I loved about the band and left me with nothing but great songs. I hesitate to do the "top five desert island" albums thing that Rob Gordon would criticize but if I did only have five albums I could bring with me somewhere, "1965" would definitely be on that list, as it's an album I've listened to a lot over the years and never seem to get tired of. So that says something.
When The Afghan Whigs started, they were, well, they were certainly rough around the edges. The band formed in Cincinnati in the mid 1980s, and the idea was to blend garage rock with shades of R&B. The early recordings hinted at the R&B influences, but it wouldn't be until "Congregation," the band's 1992 album, that the shades of Motown would start to eek into the spotlight. This was also the time the band started getting well noticed, and moved from indie hero label Subpop and to Elektra, to record 1993's "Gentlemen."
"Gentlemen" got them a lot of attention, and is around the time I found them. I suspect I saw them on 120 Minutes. It's not an unreasonable thing to suspect. I remember picking up this album on cassette, and eventually CD, as well as the follow-up, "Black Love." Both albums had songs I liked, but it wasn't until 1998 when "1965" came out that I truly "got" what the band was doing.
"1965" is the R&B/rock hybrid record they'd always been flirting with. It's heavily steeped with New Orleans brass, and has an almost carnival-like glee to it. The album is both seductive and sleazy, both alluring and vaguely menacing. It's the perfect Afghan Whigs record, in my estimation.
From the opening bass slide of "Something Hot" to the final orgy-of-sound that is "The Vampire Lanois," "1965" is an album that purrs and croons. For the longest time, I had an Archos MP3 player that held TWENTY gigs of music. (Shut up. This is back when I was in college.) And I used to fall asleep listening to music on shuffle from that thing, and the first song on it was "66," and very rare was the night when I'd skip past that track.
There's a funny story about dada's first album, "puzzle," regarding my friend Topher. For the longest time, he insisted that the lyric "I just tossed a fifth of gin" was, in fact, "I just tossed at Village Inn." Even after correcting him, he insisted the misheard version was better. Who I am to argue with puking at a Village Inn? (They don't even have them in California. Man, okay, that's even funnier.)
Dada are a band from L.A. with a very distinct sound - lots of buzzy guitars with desert flavor mixed with high elements of psychedelia. They're sort of the perfect L.A. sound. You can imagine dada as a band playing under neon lights while there's a thunderstorm on the wind. "Puzzle" debuted in 1992 with the song "dizz knee land," which was something of an indie hit, a sort of us-against-them anthem that connected with a lot of people my age at the time. It got the band a good amount of attention, for better or worse.
There's something so wonderfully dizzy about dada's sound, those guitars from Calio that buzz and hum, hypnotic and yet rarely meditative. But it's not like that the only appeal - Gurley's bass work is solid and interwoven, and Leavett's drum work is complex while still approachable. But what really set dada apart was the fact that both Calio and Gurley take turns at vocal duties, and the two sound similar, but are still very distinct.
dada put outfour albums, broke up, got back together again, put out another album in 2004, and other than 20th anniversary tour in 2013, there hasn't been much from them, which is sad. I've always really liked the band. You should give them a listen.
Back in 1992, I got my first job. I was a carnival barker at Peony Park in Omaha. Unlikely, you say? Maybe. But true nonetheless. I worked in the midway at Peony Park, manning the darts game, the milk jugs, the skeeball machines and, my favorite, the ball toss. It was a crazy summer. I learned how to juggle. I found out the age of consent in the state of Nebraska. (No, not for me - my boss was dating one of my coworkers, and they needed to know it. They were within it.) I ended up seeing a few minutes of Primus, and a few minutes of The Smashing Pumpkins, both of whom were playing the Pavilion inside of the park. I overcame my fear of rollercoasters, by having to stick my arm and leg out of one near the top of the thing. (What? I'm still alive. And I was doing it on the orders of my boss, who was up there with me. We were attempting to get the car unstuck. We ended up doing this a dozen times. Yes, I'm aware how wildly unsafe this is now, but back then, I was young and invincible, at my first job, and scared shitless that if I didn't do what my boss told me to, I'd get fired.) I ended up not doing a whole lot and not getting paid a whole lot to do it, but it kept me busy for the summer.
But the guy who was my boss ended up lending me a tape from this band I'd never heard of called Buffalo Tom. The album was "Let Me Come Over." There were a number of great songs on "Let Me Come Over," including the song "Taillights Fade" which made it on one out of every four mix tapes I made until I was out of college, but the album had a number of songs on it that just didn't connect with me. That would all get fixed with "[big red letter day]," the follow-up album.
"Sodajerk" was the first single off of it, and apparently a lot of people ended up hearing it on the show "My So-Called Life," which I never watched. The album is a lot more varied than "Let Me Come Over," shifting from rock to melancholy and back. It was an album that was best listened to on summer evenings, right as the sun had disappeared beyond the horizon, but the orange glow was still lingering in the clouds overhead. It's an album where I love all the songs on it, and that's certainly saying something.
When I was in high school, I remember as a freshman I started getting into alternative music, and one of the bands I found early on was The Cure, mostly because of the song "Just Like Heaven" from "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me." But around that time, the album "Wish" was coming out. Now a lot of people wouldn't get on board with "Wish" until "Friday I'm In Love" was a single, but I was hooked from the moment I heard the buzzing, twinkly guitars of "High," the first single. And I was in gym class talking about it with a guy named Dustin Sudduth, who told me that "Wish" was a great album, but it didn't compare to their last album, "Disintegration." I hadn't heard "Disintegration," so I picked up a copy. And to this day, I'm still not sure which is better. But today I want to talk about "Disintegration" because a) it was The Cure's best selling album, and b) it had the single that almost everyone's heard, "Lovesong."
The Cure have been around a long time, with 13 studio albums under their belts. They've also had something of a revolving door membership, with singer/guitarist/songwriter Robert Smith the only permanent fixture, although a number of band members have left and come back. When "Disintegration" was released in 1989, their label thought it was probably career suicide. What they'd hoped for was something poppier, to build off of the fans that "Just Like Heaven" had drawn in. Instead, what they got was one of the most hallucinogenic albums ever to be unleashed on the mainstream.
Full of heavy synths, dreamlike guitars, wall-of-sound effects and a gloomy yet fascinating song, it was almost as if Smith decided to take all of the goth things about the band and ratchet them up to the point where they didn't make sense any more. From the opening lush daybreak of "Plainsong" to the closing slow walk goodbye of "Untitled," everything about "Disintegration" is in the state of falling apart, just like the name. But amidst all of this, there's some amazing pop songs dancing among the brush - "Lovesong," obviously, but also the almost unbearably wounded heartbreak of "Pictures of You" or the spidery strings of "Lullabye" or the hypnotic sheen of "Fascination Street."
You could argue what the best Cure album is, but in the end, that's a personal question. For me, "Wish" is still going to be my favorite from them, but when I lived in Nebraska, at the first rain of autumn, I would always put on "Disintegration" and sit and watch the rain come down.
Back in 1993, I was just a junior in high school, and my life was starting to get particularly complicated. The month was January, and I'd just gotten into my first real relationship, with a girl named Julie, who was a year younger than me. I'm not exactly sure how we met, but I think it was as part of one of the student plays. Before the school year ended, the relationship would be over and we would both go our separate ways. We wouldn't really talk much afterwards, and I've still been a bit unclear as to why the relationship ended, other than she wasn't happy. (To be fair, I was going through a number of personal problems myself, so it's entirely possible I was partially or even totally at fault. It was twenty years ago. I don't really know.) The last time I saw her was at my good friends' Chris and Kate's wedding a dozen or so years ago. I think we said all of a handful of words to each other. But Julie left three contributions in my life before we parted ways, and I want to talk about the first of them today. It's a band called The Samples.
The Samples are from Boulder, CO, and they've often been described as "the best band you've never heard of," but I like to think of them as the Midwestern band that just never moved much past the Midwest. Every region's got them - bands that are fantastic, but just never seem to gain a foothold in areas outside of their neck of the woods. West coast bands. East coast bands. Midwest bands. The Samples really are a sort of grass-roots band, not signing to a major label until they were on their fifth album (and they were summarily dropped from said label after that album). They've been compared to people like The Police, Blues Traveler and Phish, mostly because The Samples incorporate world beat and reggae influences into their folky guitar-pop.
In 1993, I was in the middle of listening to just about anything I could get my hands on, trying to find new things that I'd never heard of that I liked. It meant everything was fair game, and nothing should be discounted. Julie and I had been dating a few weeks when she handed me a CD and told me it was her favorite album. That album was "No Room." I asked her what she knew about the band, which wasn't a whole lot. They were from Colorado, she thought, and she loved the album. They were a pretty big eco-friendly band, and they toured endlessly. She wanted me to listen to it and see what I thought, so I did. It was definitely a different sound than much of what I'd heard before. I could see why people were making Police comparisons - the drumming was more jazz influenced, and the bass hopped along to beats that were akin to (but not derivative of) Sting's work in The Police. The lead singer was a bit more high pitched and nasally than I cared for, but there were a number of great standout songs on the album. I copied the whole thing to a tape then gave Julie back her CD. She was glad I liked it, although I think I tried to keep my criticisms to myself about the weaker songs on the CD, of which there were a few.
My favorite song on the album (and hers) was a song called "Nothing Lasts For Long," which I suppose should've been foreshadowing about her and I, but when you're young and in love, you don't tend to see that kind of writing on the wall. It's not a depressing song, more of a pensive one, asking about the value of holding onto things when there are no guarantees in life.
Of course, that wasn't the only great song on the CD. There were several others, like the much more energetic "When It's Raining," or "Taking Us Home," which always makes me think of a car ride home on a summer afternoon. The most rockish songs on the album are the kiss-off "Won't Be Back Again" or the borderline temper tantrum of "Seany Boy (Drop Out)."
The Samples have gone through some hard times as a band, with singer/guitarist Sean Kelly as the only member of the band who's been in every incarnation, losing members to solo projects, creative differences or even heroin addiction. There were a number of reports of bad financial troubles hitting Sean Kelly, who at one point was offering to play basically anywhere, as long as people were paying. For a long while, it looked like 2005's "Rehearsing For Life" was going to be the band's last album, which would've been a shame, because it wasn't a particularly strong album, certainly not compared to "No Room," the great follow ups "The Last Drag" and "Autopilot" or even their big label album "Outpost." In fact, when people sort of want a "best of," I generally recommend they pick up "Transmissions From The Sea of Tranquility," which is mostly a live concert recording. The Samples have always been a jam band, and so the live versions of songs often have more room to breathe, and let the musicians develop the songs a bit more. (There is an official best-of, but it only goes up to 1994, and neglects a lot of the great songs they did later.) Thankfully, this story does have a happy ending. When I was researching this article (getting dates right and finding links for the albums on iTunes), I found out that The Samples had put out a brand new album on New Year's Day this year called "America." It's too early for me to pass a verdict on it (I've literally only listened to the first three songs as I write this), but it's good to see the band's still going. Maybe someday they'll be back to their hayday of the early 90s. (One of their opening bands from that time period? The Dave Matthews Band.) Until then, you should pick up some of their stuff. Start with either "No Room" or "Transmissions From The Sea of Tranquility," although really, you'll find stuff to love on pretty much any of their albums.
When Lou Reed passed away last year, I have to admit I felt an intense moment of sadness. I'd been hoping to go and see him at The Warfield in San Francisco last summer, but the show was cancelled a month or so before the performance, so maybe I suspected there was something amiss, but I hoped that maybe he'd come back around the next year. But in October, he'd passed away and those chances were dashed on the rocks, and the poet laureate of the streets was taken from us forever. He was 71.
Funny enough, the first song I have any actual memory attached to is a Lou Reed song, the Velvet Underground's "Heroin." It must have been randomly on the car radio, which I still can't quite understand, but I remember that song being part of my life long before I remember all that much else. So when I heard the song again years later, it was like something resurrected from a past life, some skeleton in my closet I hadn't even known I'd had.
It was also weird that when Lou Reed died, I'd actually been listening to a lot of "Magic & Loss," his 1992 album, because it had been a little more than a year since someone I'd known in high school had passed away from ovarian cancer. "Magic & Loss" is very much an album about mortality, about death and, yes, even about cancer. Two of Lou Reed's friends had died from cancer in 1990, and so an album that originally been intended to be a concept piece about magicians turned into a meditation on the frailty of life, and so, for me it seemed only appropriate that I turn to it in memory of someone I once called a friend.
There was a brilliant yet rebellious girl named Tamara Minikus who was my ride to and from school for most of my junior year in high school, which would've been 1993-1994. She had a two-tone Ford Escort with a Seahawks bumper sticker and a dent in each fender. She also drove with a heavy lead foot, and yet, for as much she drove like a bat outta hell, she always seemed in complete control of the car. In early 1994, I started dating someone and instead of riding with 'Mara, I took the bus with that girl. That relationship didn't last, but 'Mara was dating someone at the time, and so she couldn't reliably give me lifts anymore. We drifted apart, but would talk now and again during senior year, at parties or hanging around the journalism classroom, or down at the theater. We were tangential to each other, but just didn't seem to connect any more. I was pretty awkward back then, and maybe still am. I'm not great at initiating contact with people. I always feel like I'm imposing just being around.
'Mara and I went on different paths in life, her going to college in Boston and me in Lincoln, NE. I hadn't seen her more than once or twice since high school (I think the last time was at Chris and Kate Wiig's wedding...) when randomly in 2009 a handful of us got together for drinks at a bar when we were all back in town for Christmas. She appeared to be on the mend at that point, and the cancer seemed to be in remission. They had taken one ovary out, and she was worried they might have to take the other, but the four of us must have sat and chatted for a few hours. It was the last time I'd see her. When she died, it was the first time I'd felt connected to someone who passed away who wasn't family, and far more senior than me. I barely knew her post high school and yet, somehow I still miss her. She was one of the first people I ever knew who told me it was okay to just be me, regardless of what anyone else thought. I never forgot that. I even gave her a mixtape at one point that had a song from "Magic & Loss" on it...
"Magic & Loss" isn't what anyone could call an "up" album, despite having a couple of upbeat songs on it. I mean, he eases you in gently, leading off with the wonderful "What's Good," which isn't that upbeat when you start to look at the lyrics, but it's certainly up-tempo and has a certain swing to it.
"Life's like a mayonnaise soda / And life's like space without room / And life's like bacon and ice cream / That's what life's like without you..." I mean, this is a song that ends with "What's good? / (Life's good) / But not fair at all..." It's not exactly what anyone could call chipper and optimistic, considering it's clearly talking about someone no longer with us, how the person gone "loved a life others throw away nightly" and that tells you everything you need to know right there. It's a song that wants to mourn, but knows it can't, and shouldn't, because that's not what the dead would want.
The next song on the album with even close to the same sort of faster rhythm is "Sword of Damocles," which is, god help us, a song about chemotherapy. How rough is that, when your more upbeat songs are tributes to the dead and odes to medicine that runs the risk of killing you? And this is Lou Reed, who was famous for writing about standing on a corner, waiting for a guy to bring drugs ("I'm Waiting For The Man"), who wrote about transexuals ("Walk On The Wild Side"), the NRA and the Native Americans ("Last Great American Whale")... this is a guy who's tackled heavy subjects before, but "Magic & Loss" is so dark and sparse, that's what makes it all so gripping.
The back half of the album takes the maudlin elements and drops more sturdy beats over them, so the weight doesn't overwhelm it, and it brings the album into a bit more rock territory, as if Lou knew that the first half would weigh heavily on the listener. Death is hard for anyone to deal with. That isn't to say the back half is entirely without weighty songs, and the narrative-driven "Harry's Circumcision" is such a bleak, weird and awkward story, it's impossible to resist, especially as Mike Rathke layers such amazing guitar work over the top of it.
"Magic & Loss" ends with the title track, a song about the last moments of life, where you're trying to figure out whether or not your life was enough. (Reed's answer - of course it was and it wasn't, but who are we to judge?) It's an album I revisit regularly, although I have to be honest and say that sometimes I try to stick to the less crushing songs, not because I don't appreciate them, but because that much of a meditation on death can be tough to take. Reed wrote a ton of unforgettable songs over his life, and "What's Good" never fails to make me smirk, just a little bit, in admiration. It's worth picking up, like most of Lou Reed's catalog. Just don't get me started on "Metal Machine Music."
INXS hold a rather personal significance for me. They were the first cassette tape I bought new and they were the first CD I bought. One of those two was "Kick," and the other was the wonderful album "X."
INXS was a six piece from Australia who'd worked very hard to climb up a bit at a time, only to see it all come tumbling down in 1997 when lead singer Michael Hutchence was found dead in a Sydney hotel room, having committed suicide. (There were reports that he'd died of auto-erotic asphyxiation but the coroner dismissed those for a lot of reasons. Not, honestly, that suicide is that much better.) The band's tried to come back a number of times, but Hutchence really was face of that band, and the other voices have always felt like they were just holding the chair for someone who isn't ever coming back.
"X" followed on the heels of the wildly successful "Kick." It's funny, when the band started recording "Kick," they set out to make an album where, according to Kirk Pengilly (guitar/saxophone) "every song could be a single." When they turned the album into Atlantic Records, the record company, reportedly, hated it. They said they'd never get it played on rock radio. According to INXS's manager, Atlantic claimed "it was suited for black radio." Despite their protests, they agreed to release "Kick" in 1987, and good thing they did. "Kick" went on to be six times platinum and had four top ten hits. It was the band's most successful album.
Three years later, "X" dropped, and it did well, but not as well as "Kick." It eventually ended up double platinum, which is nothing to sneeze at. It had two hit singles and two other singles that were relatively big. Critics were a little less kind, simply because they wanted it to be bigger than "Kick," and I'm not really sure that was possible. "Kick" was lightning in a bottle, and it's hard to capture that same kind of magic twice. The songs on "X" were in the same vein as "Kick," but were colored in a bit more, and yet, also a little less subtle.
"Suicide Blonde" opens the album with a squeal of harmonica and then a heavy guitar chord and a throbbing bass line. The song was written about pop star Kylie Minogue, who was Hutchence's girlfriend at the time. It's slinky and yet it chugs along like a machine. This was sort of the band's m.o. for the album - play into Hutchence's neo-Jim Morrison presence and back it with a blend of new wave and pub rock with just a bit of funk.
"X" also features my favorite INXS track, the more soft spoken "The Stairs." It wasn't even a single here, but it was the song that latched onto my psyche when I first heard it. I remember hanging outside of the church I was confirmed in (having to go through confirmation class - and no, before you ask, I don't believe in any of that, but the things we do for family) listening to the tape on my walkman, waiting for my ride home.
It seems like the song most people know from "X," though, is "Disappear," which was certainly the most new wave song on the album, even though new wave as a music movement was in its death knells by then. I think the song appeared in a few movies at the time, and it certainly got a lot of radio play in the midwest, where I grew up. And, really, any excuse to show you this video, which is so wonderfully late 1980s, just in 1990. Anyhow, "X" is a great album and INXS is still missed.
I remember back in 1996 when I started picking up CMJ New Music Monthly. I was so excited that someone was putting out a monthly magazine with a CD, so not only could you read reviews of bands you'd never heard of, you could also hear songs from the better ones of them. And it must have been 1999 or so when I first heard "Never Meant," by American Football, and I knew I was always going to be trying to get CMJ whenever I could. (They're still around as a website these days, I've just found out. I lost touch with them when the magazine became damn near impossible to find, and I didn't want to spring for the ridiculous amount a subscription cost.) "Never Meant" was a playful, dancing melody, elaborate guitar over a soft spoken singer talking about the process of falling out of love. It was complex, emotional and fragile. I remember listening to the song endlessly.
"Not to be Overly Dramatic I just think it's best 'Cause you can't miss what you forget"
Of course it was overly dramatic. That was the whole point of the song - that young relationships are always more intense than anyone can ever seem to describe, like no one else has ever known the pain you're feeling right then and there. I'd gone through a few breakups in college (on both sides of the equation, really) by that point, and the song spoke perfectly to the feelings I'd had then. I tracked down the album, and was delighted to find it was full of songs akin to "Never Meant." I was talking about it with one of the slightly older people at the Daily Nebraskan, the newspaper I worked at at the time, and he told me it was "math rock." I'd never heard the term before, so I did a little digging. It was a mostly Midwestern music movement focused around unusual time signatures, angular melodies and stop/start rhythms. I liked it, but I found quite a bit of the movement to be, well, tuneless.
American Football broke up after this album, and Mike Kinsella, the voice of the band, went on to found Owen, a mostly solo project that has echoes of American Football in it, but is a little less ornate. That isn't to say Owen hasn't done some amazing stuff over the years, but I find myself missing American Football now and again.
There is something intrinsically weird about Grosse Point Blank as a movie, and I think that's why it's wonderful. It was made during the second renaissance of John Cusack, where he did High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank almost back to back, both of which were projects that absolutely sailed, and for highly different reasons. We need to get this John Cusack back, the one who knows how to pick the smart projects.
The premise of the film is surreal to start with. A hitman is invited to his ten year high school reunion. Coincidentally enough, he also has a job there. And, on top of everything, he's dealing with an impeding assassins union struggle (no, really) and his therapist won't return his phone calls. The guy's a mess, but then again, who isn't around the time of their ten year high school reunion?
I didn't go to mine, because I wasn't invited, but my twenty year is coming up next year, and I'll probably go to that, and I expect it to be as strange and unusual as the one Cusack's character goes to here. (One of the lines in the movie is "It was like everyone had swelled.") But before he gets to the reunion, he's going to try and reconnect with his past - the best friend he left behind, the girl he left on prom night, the house he grew up in. Needless to say, none of this goes as planned.
Yesterday I was talking about ensemble casts, and Grosse Point Blank really is an embarrassment of riches in this regard. Dan Aykroyd plays the guy trying to talk Cusack into joining his little assassin's union, Alan Arkin is Cusack's reluctant therapist, Jeremy Pivens is the best friend who's trying to figure out what the hell is going on and Minnie Driver is the girl he left behind. Oh, and John's sister Joan is his assistant/partner-in-crime. Hell, even Hank Azaria's in the movie.
The film is filled with crackling dialogue and wonderful fish-out-of-water moments made even funnier by the fact that it's an assassin in suburbia. HIS suburbia, rather, or the one he grew up in. But while he's been gone for ten years, his hometown has changed, and more than he'd expected, from the girl he left behind (who's a radio DJ now) to the house he grew up in.
Grosse Point Blank is also flush with the best possible 1986 soundtrack you could put together, from the mainstream stuff like a-ha's "Take On Me" to the popular but somewhat indie stuff such as Echo & The Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon" or Faith No More's "We Care A Lot." The music for the film was so good they put out not one, but two soundtracks to it.
The star of the show is John Cusack, though, who plays the man adrift better than I even thought possible. This is a guy who's been trying to find himself for the last few years, after having lived a life doing some pretty bad things and telling himself he was doing it for the right reasons. He goes through so many different phases in this movie, it's kind of remarkable to watch, even as he's trying to see whether or not he can blend in with the life he left behind. He gets to play: frantic, subdued, tortured, ecstatic, nervous... in fact, it's a little like high school all over again. There's also an amazing thirty second scene where he's interacting with a baby, and it's almost like a capsule of the entire movie told purely through facial expressions.
We'll revisit Cusack a number of times in the deviations, but I can never believe when people tell me they haven't seen Grosse Point Blank. It's such a perfectly strange mix of pathos, humor and nostalgia, it's gotta be high school all over again...
There are two stories to tell here. The first is personal - I saw "Sneakers" for the first time at the end of November, 1992, with my friend Tristan Dalley, at a movie theater that showed films cheap near the very end of their time in theaters. I know this because of two reasons. First, I'd just gotten my driver's license, so Tristan and I were going out to a movie to celebrate. Second, we went into the movie theater with clouds overhead and came out a few hours later to a few inches of snow on the ground. That's right, the day I got my driver's license and I luck into a goddamn blizzard. We got home fine - it was Nebraska and I'd prepared for the eventuality of driving on snow. I just hadn't expected to run into it on my first day driving without supervision.
The second story is that "Sneakers" is absolutely one of my favorite films of all time, and is more relevant now than it was when it was made, which is saying something for a film about technology. It's a story about encryption, ethics, the role of computers in our lives, the nature of warfare in the modern age, crime, punishment, history and a whole lot more. It's a story about, as described in the film, guys who are " [hired] to break into people's places to make sure nobody can break into their places."
I love films about thieves, make no mistake about it, and "Sneakers" definitely has a heist vibe to it for the majority of its runtime. Breaking into banks, labs, companies... you get to see a lot of the odd work that is done by both sides, the white hats (the good guys) and the black hats (the bad guys). You get to see how people can find out things about your identity, your habits, your weaknesses and how all of that can be used against you. It's a film that rewards careful viewing, and pays very close attention to the details. Closer than you may even be expecting.
If you take a look at that poster, you'll also see it has one hell of a cast - Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, Sidney Poitier, David Strathairn and River Phoenix, in one of his last roles. Seriously, think of the sheer wattage of star power there. Not enough? Well, keep in mind the movie was written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson, who is best known for directing "Field Of Dreams." There's also a couple of other well known actors who make cameos, but I don't want to give away all of the surprises.
"Sneakers" is also, above all else, a comedy. This is a film where Dan Aykroyd says "We turn ourselves in now, they'll give us twenty years in the electric chair!" The writing is fun, the characters are distinct and well-developed and everyone has clear motivations, but most of all, the actors have a sense of genuine camaraderie, like a group that's been working together for years. There's a comfortableness there that's important. Martin Bishop (Redford) and his gang of misfits feel like they're (mostly) comfortable with each other, their habits, their foibles and shortcomings. They certainly don't know everything about each other, but they know enough, and they trust one another. And it's drawn from a real world kind of people - the people who've been poking and prodding at the systems of the world for years.
Like I said before, the film's only gotten better over the years. The idea of the government spying on us plays more truthfully now that we actually know they're doing it. And the idea of so much riding on encryption, well, we as an audience have a better understanding of what it actually is. Sure, some of the actual tech is way out of date - using a phone line to call up a computer? What is this, 1992? Oh, wait... But it's easy to look past those things and focus on the easy charms of the actors and the fun attitude of the writing.
It's also worth noting that the film was one of my earliest recollections of seeing San Francisco on film, and there's a bit of geography in the film that comes into play, which has always helped me remember the major bridges in the area, and little things that differentiate them. I didn't know it at the time, but the Bay Area would later become my home, and I'll always remember seeing Redford's character dumped at Hyde and Lombard.
Even the music is amazing, with a jazzy, slinky score that's apropos for the subject matter. You'll love it. Trust me on this one.
So I'm relaunching this blog, after several years of hiatus, with a new focus. I'm going to try and make it my mission to write something every day, seven days a week, although I make no guarantees as to what it will be, how long it will be, whether you will like it or even if it will happen. I'll probably queue a bunch of them up in the hopper and they'll just post every day. If you have an interest in these things, great. If not, well, there are plenty of places on the internet for you to go and get your kicks off Route 66.
Sometimes I'm going to write reviews of concerts. Sometimes I'm going to write odd diatribes about music that speaks to me. Sometimes I'll talk about film. Sometimes I'll talk about comic books. Sometimes I'll talk about TV. Sometimes I'll talk about games. Sometimes I'll write scrap fiction, so that I'm still pouring creatively out into the world. Sometimes I may write the odd bit of socio-political commentary or cultural rambling. Sometimes I may go down an endless rabbit hole of tangents. I may occasionally dabble with posting some of my photography. I may from time to time write autobiographical glimpses into memories I have, which are unreliable at best. I may even write travelogues or relate places I remember.
Who am I? My name's Cliff "Devinoch" Hicks. Over the last fifteen years, I've worked at game companies like Westwood Studios and Maxis Studios (both EA studios), I've worked at Gamespot and Gamecenter (both CNet, now CBS Interactive, companies), I've worked for startups like IMVU and Fierce Wombat Games. I'm originally from Nebraska and now make my home in Northern California. I've self-published my first novel, Escaping Heaven, and am probably going to be self-publishing another novel or two in the near future.
Why should you care? Well, I'm something of a cultural sponge. I tend to go off on tangents a lot, and get interested in a lot of things for brief periods of time, so it's probably best for me to write about that when it's happening. A lot of that sticks with me, a lot of it doesn't. I listen to a lot of music. A LOT of music. I read a lot (although not as much as I used to, I suppose because I'm writing a lot). I watch a good amount of TV. I love film, although what I love about film isn't always the same things that most people love about film. (Keep in mind, what's good and what's enjoyable are not always the same thing...) The world needs curators, people to filter through all of this stuff and let people know whether or not it's worth a bit of their time. I do that anyway, so why not write that all down and let people have a go at it.
I expect this blog to do a lot of evolution as I get back into the swing of things. I'm going to try and incorporate as much as I can in terms of video and audio, and the internet certainly helps with that, but it's been a while since I got my fingers dirty with any of this kind of stuff, so I can't be sure how well I'm going to do at it. I may eventually spawn a podcast out of this, assuming I wrangle up the tech, the interest and an audience. Writers can be egocentric little shits, so we need people to occasionally tell us when they're entertained.
To be honest, two people inspired me to start this project. The first is my friend Christy, who told me that I needed to put more of myself into the world. I think the fact that the novel I'm working on is taking longer than anticipated is getting people antsy that I'm not actually doing shit with it, which is a fair cop - writing long fiction tends to happen in odd spurts and sometimes hits roadblocks. I've learned to ride through that turbulence, but it's not for everyone.
The second is someone I haven't talked to probably 20 years, a guy I went to high school with named Dylan. Dylan and I often didn't get along well, but Dylan was a guy who had interesting music tastes, who was always hunting for new sounds and new bands, so I remember one day I walked up to him in a class we shared and handed him a blank cassette tape (I know, the days of cassette tapes - it truly was the dark ages) and asked him to just make a mix tape of things I'd never heard that he liked and/or thought I would. Sure enough, a few days later, he gave me the tape back, full of people I'd never heard of. To fair, about a third of it was stuff I didn't care for at all, and about a third of it was stuff that was okay, but didn't spark anything in me. But that last third opened my eyes to a ton of music I'd never heard, or sounded entirely different than what I was familiar with. I remember there was an Alice In Chains song on it called "Nutshell" and I remember asking Dylan, "Aren't these guys mostly a metal band?" He told me every band does all sorts of stuff, and I should never write a band off entirely because I didn't like one particular song. (Hilariously, I also remember Dylan ranting like a young Lester Bangs about how other bands, who shall remain nameless, were "shit and will never do anything good, ever!")
It was also around this time that I started watching an MTV show called "120 Minutes," or, rather, taping it and watching it later. It aired at 11 p.m. on Sunday night, and so I would set the VCR to record it, and watch it the next day. "120 Minutes" was an alternative show to the popular alternative music that was everywhere. A lot of bands graduated from 120M, but a lot of bands also didn't, and a lot of the bands that didn't were often better than the things that did. 120M exposed me to so much music I wouldn't have heard otherwise, and I want to try and do a bit of what 120M did for me for other people, a bit of what Dylan did for me for other people. I want to offer bits and pieces of things that caught my attention, tell you why, expose you to them and let you make up your own mind as to whether or not it's for you. I certainly don't expect everything I talk about to inspire people to go out and buy stuff, but I want to give a window into the culture that's imbued me over the years, that's helped define who I am and what I enjoy.
There's nothing wrong with coming to the party late - I didn't develop an appreciation for some things I hold dearly now until almost a decade after I'd been exposed to them. At some point over the next few weeks, I'll talk a bit about things like that, like how I didn't form an attachment to Led Zeppelin until I heard the song "Ramble On," or how the first time someone exposed me to Soul Coughing I thought they were kind of odd only to hear "Screenwriter's Blues" a few months later and loving it. (And how pissed my friend was that I didn't like them when she played them for me, but now I seemed to really like them...) I'll talk a bit about how fandom can be a great thing and it can be a curse. I'll talk about meeting your idols and why you should definitely do it, but be prepared to have accidentally made an ass of yourself the first time. I'll talk about bands that faded into obscurity, and movies that grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go. I'll talk about what videogames have burrowed into my very soul and why. I'll talk about revisiting things you may have written off long ago. I'll talk... well, I'll talk a lot.
We'll see what happens. Sometimes stuff like this drops out of me after a few weeks. Sometimes it turns into me losing 70 pounds and going to the gym 4-5 days a week. Who knows. I'll write. You read. We can figure it out together as we go along...
