Jon Solomon’s Holiday Marathon Broadcast 25th Anniversary #wprbxmas

At around the 23rd hour, fatigue can make you wander into a field.

At 4PM CST, WPRB’s musicologist extraordinaire Jon Solomon will take the mike again…and not let go until a full 25 hours of holiday tunes and stories hit the air right along with a certain Mr. Kringle. It takes industrial-strength merriment and a music library of astonishing depth to pull this marathon off each season — but this year it takes even more. It’s the 25th anniversary of the usually 24-hour Marathon, and that means Jon is devoting an extra 25th hour to the twin foundations of the holiday season: sleep deprivation and nervous exhaustion. Do not miss.

 

Twist Again (And Again And Again And Again)

Just in case anybody was laboring under the mistaken belief that rap music invented or was first to lionize the blatant, direct repackaging of musical material, enjoy the following screenshot from my digital music collection in its Duane Eddy section.

The million-selling twang guitarist’s 1962 record “Twistin’ With Duane Eddy”, itself an echo of the 1960 Chubby Checker hit, inspired Duane and his handlers to produce many more market-squeezing twist-themed also-ran tracks, not even all of which are in this collection.  Nonetheless, the long string of lame twists-on-the-twist titles is impressive.

Also funny: whoever assembled the running order must have had a sense of humor, as the theme is brought, at track 11, to an abrupt end, Wil E. Coyote style.

The Jesus Lizard Book: Now Shipping

Shipping now from Akashic Books: The Jesus Lizard “Book”, a biography of Chicago’s greatest postpunk band, suitable for coffee tables everywhere.  Included is a section I wrote on the band’s early days at a show at the original Behind The Lookingglass space on South Michigan Avenue.  Also included are contributions from Greg Dunlap, Doug McCombs, Steve Albini, Andy Gill, Mike Watt, Bob Nastanovich, Alexander Hacke, Steve Gullick, Rebecca Gates, Hank Williams III, Sasha Frere-Jones, and the incomparable Bernie Bahrmasel.

San Andreas Fault Onstage At Redmoon’s Winter Pageant

Sold Out Opening Night at Redmoon’s 2013 Winter Pageant. Photo: Al Zayed

Last night was opening night for Redmoon Theater’s 2013 Winter Pageant. I wrote the original music for this indescribable show and my surf-noir band San Andreas Fault performs on stage as the proceedings unfold.   Dozens of dancers, improbable and massive machinery, mind-roasting visual spectacle, mythmaking and birds.  Oh man. The birds.

Opening night sold out; only nine shows left over two weekends.

Hats off to my brothers in the Fault, without whose power and commitment none of this music happens. Thymme Jones, John Cwiok and original gangsta Pete Muschong: thank you.

Radkey: Romance Dawn

What is it about siblings in rock bands?  There’s something musically cool and unified that I’ve never been able to put my finger on about the work of people who undertake rock music having come from the same parents.  Is it an upbringing steeped in a common record collection and listening habits?  Is it physiological?  Do the tendons and muscles and structures of the limbs or bodies of siblings allow for highly similar attacks/approaches on instruments or for highly similar / complementary mechanical understandings of rhythm?

I don’t know.  But ever since DEVO, I’ve noticed this.  Scott and Ron Asheton in the Stooges, too, plus the Youngs in AC/DC. Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson.  The Butler brothers in the Psychedelic Furs. The effect even shows up in not-that-great bands such as those Italian dudes whose names I forget from Stone Temple Pilots.

There’s an unmistakeable unity to the sound, almost as if one consciousness was driving two bodies. All the more remarkable in an era when we’re lucky if any single body gets an entire consciousness to itself.

So now, from the metro St. Louis area comes the pretty great Radkey, three brothers clustered around a flavor of rock that recalls in this reporter the eternal shout-alongs of The Misfits and Naked Raygun. Brought to my attention when guitarist and bandmate in San Andreas Fault Pete Machine passed it along after his bandmate, Scott Lucas (Local H, Married Men) encountered Radkey on the road during a recent Local H tour.   They’ve got that one-voice-many-limbed thing going on.

Mouthbreather Bar Misremembers War

History Is Bunk (To Brahs)

Call me a stickler, but when Murphy’s Bleachers in Wrigleyville decided to infamously promote its drink specials on Pearl Harbor Day, it wasn’t the cheap marketing I found galling. If not for cheap marketing, the backward-hatted morons who frequent places like Murphy’s would have no idea what to do with themselves, and everybody needs guidance in a confusing world, especially our dumbest bros.

What irritated me about the sign wasn’t the pimping of the 72nd birthday of our country’s sadly eternal military-industrial complex.  It was the predictably boneheaded bungling of the underlying history itself.

See, brah, you can’t commemorate Pearl Harbor by buying a Kamikaze cocktail.  It’s impossible, for the same reason that you can’t commemorate the 1990 Iraq War by buying a 9/11 t-shirt with a crying eagle on it.

Because there were no Kamikazes — aka suicide pilots — at Pearl Harbor, nor fighting anywhere else in Japan’s military for years following.  Suicide attack is a tactic born of desperation.  On December 7, 1941 the Japanese were anything but desperate.

The Imperial Navy and its aviators, having sunk most of the US Pacific fleet on Dec. 7th were left on Dec 8th as the dominant force in the war in the Pacific.  For six months, the US was unquestionably losing World War 2.  It wasn’t until June, 1942 that the US Navy’s aircraft carriers engaged in the Battle of Midway the same Japanese carriers that so successfully attacked Pearl Harbor.

Midway was the beginning of the end for Japanese ambitions in the Pacific, as three of its aircraft carriers were sunk and most of the pilots and aircraft that won the day at Pearl Harbor were killed.

When your A team is wiped out, you’re left with the B and C teams.  Soon after, Japan lost even those, as US manufacturing power poured ships and planes into the Pacific in the following years, mounting an inexorable island-hopping march toward the Japanese mainland.

It was desperation, years after Pearl Harbor that brought forward the Kamikazes in late 1944.

See, brah, things have dates.  Events occur in order of time. Dumbing history down to high-five-engendering drink specials is no way to go through life.

Here’s a hint, broseph.  Just down the street from Murphy’s, there’s a tavern where you can bet your sandals and fannypack they won’t get these details wrong.  It’s called Nisei Lounge. 

Nisei, you may be surprised to learn, is not the name of a cocktail.  It is the name given to the Japanese-American citizens who, despite having their families rounded up and shipped to concentration camps in remote locations across 18 US states, signed up to fight for the US in WWII.  If you head over there to learn something, good for you.

Just remember: you can’t listen while you’re flapping your Miller Lite-hole. Smarten up and quiet down.