La Vie En Robe

I Think I'll Call It Mourning

Gil Scott-Heron died last Friday — which, in our no-attention-span, endless-news-cycle present, means that I'm way late to the funeral party. Everybody's already onto the next big piece of news, like the NBA finals, or that Facebook spam video thang wherein some woman "gives birth" to a grown man's head. A few folks, like Greg Tate of the Village Voice, have already penned some wonderful eulogies for a man who was one of the great poets and prophets of our time; countless others have hung two-paragraph obits upon such easily-digestible (if profoundly limiting) phrases like "godfather of rap" and "spoken-word artist." Why add one more voice to the chatter, this "late" in the game? Well, Gil Scott-Heron's music and message touched me deeply, and I've got a few things of my own to say about him.

But let's start with something someone else has already said. As Tate points out in his fine piece, "Gil knew he wasn't bigger than hip-hop—he knew he was just better. Like Jimi was better than heavy metal, Coltrane better than bebop, Malcolm better than the Nation of Islam, Marley better than the King James Bible. Better as in deeper—emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, politically, ancestrally, hell, probably even genetically." Which is why it tastes like spoiled milk every time I read some obit that calls Gil Scott-Heron a "spoken-word artist"; yes, the man had a gift for words, and he often delivered them with a profoundly resonant speaking voice, but he was also an incredibly soulful singer, songwriter and keyboard player, not to mention a (Tate again) "oracle, troubadour, poet, gadfly, muckraker, and grassroots shit-talker." Yeah, he's the guy who did the brilliantly incisive "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Whitey On The Moon," but to consign Gil Scott-Heron to the "spoken-word artist" box is like calling Curtis Mayfield a "soundtrack composer" — it was truly only one small facet of who he was and what he did.

To me, Gil's greatest gift — and perhaps ultimately his Achilles heel — was his humanity, his empathy for other human beings. For all his righteous anger, for all his intimidatingly-sharp intellect, for all his deft wordplay, for all his loose-limbed funk grooves, an open heart was his most important tool. Songs like "Home is Where the Hatred Is," "The Bottle" and "Angel Dust" stared unflinchingly at addiction, just like "No Knock," "Winter in America" and "Johannesburg" faced down The Man, but they were anything but dispassionate journalistic missives. You knew that Gil gave a shit about what was going down, on an emotional level as well as intellectual, and that it hurt him severely to see other people hurting, being exploited, being oppressed. But when you feel that much, when you care that deeply about the fate of your fellow man, when you make your art and your living by communicating those feelings and concerns to the rest of the world — and creating such nakedly emotional songs as "Save the Children," "Your Daddy Loves You" and "I Think I'll Call It Morning" — and you don't have a filter to shut off the hurt and despair...well, the process comes with an eventual price. Who can really blame him for his tragic, decades-long romance with the crack pipe? “Ten to fifteen minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” he said in last year's upsetting New Yorker profile, referring to his crack smoking. The pain he spoke of was from a spinal issue, but there had to be a great deal of psychic pain going on within him, as well.

Still, it's that same open-heartedness — as well as his clear-eyed anger — that has repeatedly drawn me back to Gil Scott-Heron's records over the years. I recall hearing his stuff for the first time in the late 70s, probably through one of my Mom's friends, and I seem to remember that 1984's "Re-Ron" — a typically scathing indictment of Ronald Reagan and those who wanted to re-elect him — got some decent airplay in Chicago at the time. But it wasn't until 1990, when I was a college grad trying to make sense of the world I'd graduated into, that I really started exploring his work, which thankfully started being reissued on CD in the early '90s. And in late 2000, when George W. Bush was handed the keys to the White House in the same way he'd been handed everything else in his life, I spent countless hours curled up with 1971's Pieces of a Man LP; though it was nearly three decades old, it was still the only album I could find at the time that fully articulated and validated my depression and anger, while simultaneously reminding me to live and love life to the fullest, as opposed to becoming fatally consumed by the despair I felt and the bad times that I knew were on the way.

Which is, unfortunately, much more than I can say about 2010's I'm New Here, his final studio album. A haunted, haphazard affair recorded after he was released from his second prison stint, the album lasts only 28 minutes and contains far more of Gil's parched-voiced reminiscences than actual new songs. While XL Recordings head honcho Richard Russell is to be commended for trying to get Gil back into the studio, the results are hard to listen to; though many buckets of critical jizz have been spilled over I'm New Here, Gil frankly sounds like a reluctant guest on his own album. “This is Richard’s CD,” he told the New Yorker. “My only knowledge when I got to the studio was how he seemed to have wanted this for a long time. You’re in a position to have somebody do something that they really want to do, and it was not something that would hurt me or damage me—why not? All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”

The Gil Scott-Heron who shows up in my dreams is the one of "Lady Day & John Coltrane," a song from Pieces of a Man that I have put on countless mix tapes for friends over the years. Quite possibly the best song ever written about the transcendent, transformative, healing and uplifting power of music, "Lady Day & John Coltrane" also manages to be remarkably healing and uplifting in its own right. It's a song that will stay with me for the rest of my life, both as a reminder of why I care so much about music, and as a reminder (and a means) to "let the sun shine through" and keep my heart open during those times when living all of my days in darkness seems an easier option. It's a complicated, maddening, fucked-up world we live in, and Gil saw that clearer than most; but he also communicated its beauty (and the beauty of existence) more effectively than most, and for that I will always be grateful.

Peace go with you, Brother. Thank you for helping to wash my troubles away.

Moby: Going To California

As with OMD, I'm not a big fan of Moby's work — don't hate it, but it just doesn't move me — and yet, I found the guy truly enjoyable to talk to. Definitely one of my favorite ShockHound interviews from this year's SXSW...

Moby: Going To California

Interview by Dan Epstein

One of the most ubiquitous and successful artists in electronic music over the past two decades, Moby has always seemed like a quintessentially New York individual: intellectual and introspective, yet also completely plugged into the night life. The romance of NYC has always been an important part of his musical and visual aesthetic, as well, which is why it came as something of a shock to learn — in the middle of this ShockHound interview — that he's recently upped stakes and relocated to Los Angeles, the very antithesis of everything New York City supposedly stands for.
      The idea of Moby ditching Manhattan for the City of Angels may be a bit jarring — but as with everything else in his life, the man born Richard Melville Hall has put a lot of thought into the move, and he lays out his reasons behind it in our interview, which also covers his forthcoming album and book project Destroyed, the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi, and the artistic inspiration that comes from emptiness. 

SHOCKHOUND: Destroyed is both a new album and a new photo book. How do the two relate to each other?

MOBY: The music was written on tour, and the book is a bunch of tour-based photographs, but it’s a really unconventional touring book; a lot of music touring books involve pictures of guitars, pictures of set lists, and grainy black and white shots of a musician on stage looking soulful. This is more about the disconcerting aspects of tour — hopefully from a fairly formal perspective, because I’ve been taking pictures since I was 10 years old. I finally have sort of worked up the courage to put out a photo book.
 
SHOCKHOUND: When you’re talking about more of the disconcerting aspects of tour, what are you referring to?

MOBY: When I was growing up, I never expected to have a career as a musician. I thought I’d probably teach community college somewhere in upstate New York and get a job at Kinko's. I never expected to have a career as a musician, and I certainly never expected to go on tour, so at first traveling was so exciting; the strange aspects of traveling just seemed glamorous and interesting. And then as time passes, you just realize there’s not a lot of glamour on tour, which is not the complaint. I have to be really clear: I vowed a long time ago never to be a complaining musician, because when a musician complains about the rigors of touring they’re just being a douchebag. If you wanna not be a touring musician you can quit, so I’m not complaining about it. But being on tour...I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences where you live in these environments that ostensibly look familiar, but they’re not. You check into a hotel room and it’s structured to be sort of reassuring and familiar, but it’s also the most anonymous place in the planet. You can have this odd juxtaposition of being backstage by yourself in a soulless empty room, and then all of a sudden you’re on stage in front of 50,000 people having this big emotional experience, then you’re back by yourself in this weird basement room. On a cognitive, neurochemical level, it does really strange things to you. I think that’s one reason why a lot of musicians turn to liquor and drugs, just to try and manage their neurochemistry and sort of offset the strangeness.
 
SHOCKHOUND: Not to mention the high from performing and the inevitable low that follows.

MOBY: For a lot of musicians, you’re on stage, you’re pouring your heart out, and it’s passionate, and the audience loves everything. And then you’re on the tour bus watching Arrested Development Season Two, which is fine; but even though the brain is pretty adaptive and intrepid, it’s just not built to process these extreme highs and extreme lows in such a short period of time.

SHOCKHOUND: Musically, how does Destroyer relate to that? Is the music redolent of those experiences, or is it built to take the edge off those experiences?

MOBY: The music on Destroyer is electronic music that’s made with broken down, old pieces of equipment because I really love old equipment. Not too sound too pretentious — I already do — but there’s this Japanese concept “wabi-sabi” which means, essentially, as things start to fall apart they become more interesting; an old bucket is more interesting than a new bucket, an old photograph is arguably more interesting than a new photograph, and it’s one of the reasons why I love old equipment. So all the instruments on the record are old synthesizers, old drum machines, old effects pedals, old microphones, to make an electronic music record that doesn’t sound like a very modern electronic music record. It’s more atmospheric and emotional; but because a lot of the music was written in hotel rooms when I have insomnia, it does have a slightly disconcerting quality to it. So even if it’s emotional, and hopefully warm and atmospheric, it’s still a little bit disconcerting. It’s an experience I have a lot, where it’s 4 o’clock in the morning, I haven’t slept in a long time, I have insomnia, I’m looking out the window...Some cities are awake at four in the morning, most cities are not, so you’re in your hotel room looking out the window, and you feel like the world has always been empty. That moment where you’re like, "The sun's never been up, it’s never going to come up again, there’s no other people on the planet," it’s like this odd solipsism. I think the album, at least from my perspective, is fueled by that.

SHOCKHOUND: Are you familiar with Giacometti's sculpture, The Palace At 4 A.M.? The moment you describe reminds me of the feeling I get from that piece.

MOBY: It’s funny you say that, because one of my favorite painters is Giorgio de Chirico; it’s a similar aesthetic, where it’s just a lot of emptiness and it’s not scary emptiness, not off-putting emptiness. Even Edward Hopper to an extent was just saying, "Oh, here’s the world at its emptiest, and it's beautiful but off-putting at the same time."

SHOCKHOUND: But New York, where you live, almost never feels empty...

MOBY: Oh, I live in LA now. Look. [Pulls out LA Dodgers cap.] I even got the hat.

SHOCKHOUND: When did you make the move to LA?

MOBY: Three months ago. I was born in New York and grew up in suburban Connecticut; moved back to New York in the mid-'80s because I always fetishized Manhattan and New York. It’s where the Velvet Underground were from, and where Dylan Thomas had lived, and Leonard Cohen wrote “Chelsea Hotel.” Like, New York to me was the epicenter of everything sort of crumbling and fantastic in art and music and literature. It just isn’t, anymore. My neighborhood, the Lower East Side — by day, it's now a shopping mall for hedge fund managers, and at night it’s where drunk Europeans and hedge fund managers can throw up on each other. I moved to LA because LA still has that crumbling strangeness to it. I’ve spent my entire life traveling, and I can say LA is the weirdest, ever. There’s places like Hong Kong are strange, but LA is strange in its strangeness. Like, New York in the '80s was strange and unrelentingly rough. LA is weird because where I live in Hollywood, you go one mile this way and there’s methadone clinics; you go one mile this way, it’s ten-million dollar houses; you go one mile this way, it’s cougars eating house cats; and you go one mile this way and it’s people drinking organic coffee, listening to KCRW. So the fact that one city, one little radius can incorporate and accommodate all this different weirdness, I’m fascinated by it. Going back to your question talking about how New York is not an empty city, I think that’s another reason why I moved. Being in LA there’s so much emptiness. For a city of 12 million people, you can find an awful lot of emptiness. Whether it’s being on the 101 at 3 o’clock in the morning, or up on Mulholland Drive at midnight on a Tuesday, it’s the same thing — there’s just this sense of entropic space which I really like. It freaks me out, but I really like it.
 
SHOCKHOUND: It’s interesting you say that, because I'm originally from New York, and I’ve lived in LA for seventeen years now and I’ve never gotten bored. There are always new things to discover.

MOBY: Yeah, I went to dinner the other night; it was the coolest dinner I think I’ve ever been to in my entire life. It was a dinner for Tadao Ando, the architect. He’s a Japanese architect; he’s almost like a sculptor who works with concrete — except he makes buildings, and they’re really empty. Really, really empty. So, it was a dinner in honor of him, and it was at this famous John Lautner house called the “Chemosphere,” the round one that Troy McClure lives in on the Simpsons. I was talking to this man who edited the Taschen book on Los Angeles, and he’s like the most renowned historian about Los Angeles’ strangeness. He knows the history of LA but he especially knows about the weirdness of it. We just sat there and talked and talked about how LA can be irritating, and how LA can drive you crazy, it’s never boring. And that is amazing, because I get bored pretty easily, and I have to say it’s one of the reasons I left New York: New York started to bore me. There’s too many rich people, and all they’re doing is spending money and throwing up on each other. It’s like spring break for entitled hedge fund managers.
 
SHOCKHOUND: Have you made any music in Los Angeles yet?

MOBY: Well, I moved into this crazy old house in Beachwood Canyon, and I’m building my studio right now. I play [Led Zeppelin's] "Going to California" on the acoustic guitar, but I haven’t actually been writing too much of my own music because the studio is under construction. It’s this weird old house that’s one of those legendary Hollywood houses. The Rolling Stones lived there when they made Cocksucker Blues. Marlon Brando lived there for a while. Weird stuff has just happened there...Not to keep rambling on about LA, but when you drive around the Hollywood Dell, or Beachwood Canyon, or Old Hollywood, it’s just so random. You see these houses, these big beautiful palaces next to weird mid-century houses and they’re inches apart from each other. I love the fact that every night when you go to sleep in LA, you’re not sure if it’s going to be there when you wake up. You just wonder how this city still exists. It’s barely functioning, especially Hollywood. The rest of it, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, they have good streets, they have stoplights that work; and Hollywood is like this crumbling disastrous mess that reinvents itself every day.

The Man With No Control

During my 17 years as a professional journalist, I've had the pleasure and good fortune to interview a number of my all-time heroes, including Bobby Womack, Smokey Robinson, the Isley Brothers, Roger McGuinn, Black Sabbath and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. And while I wouldn't exactly lump Eddie Money among those august personages, I've certainly enjoyed his music since I was a kid — and I would definitely include him among the most memorable interviews I've ever done. Since several friends of mine and I have been on a serious Mahoney kick as of late, both on and off Facebook, I thought I'd dig my lone interview with the Money Man out of the archives.

A little background: I did this interview in the spring of 1999, right as Money's workmanlike Ready Eddie album was released with an anchor by CMC International. The piece was supposed to be for an issue of BAM Magazine (the Bay Area-based mag that employed me as their LA editor at the time), but the publication suddenly closed its doors that summer before a considerably abridged version of the Q&A could run. I wound up giving the whole thing to my friend Jake Austen at Roctober; the fanzine typically covered far cooler and more obscure artists, but Jake could relate to my fascination with Eddie, and could understand why I wanted to share this interview with the world.

Ah yes, the interview. As the word doc of the transcript has been lost to the ages, and Jake never uploaded it to the Roctober online archives, the only way I can share it (short of re-typing the whole thing) is to upload the five pages that I scanned from the mag as a PDF file.

So why should you go through the minor trouble of downloading this? Well, not only will you get to read my critical reappraisal of Eddie as the musical embodiment of the Überschlub — a theory I still stand by a decade later — but you'll also read about him doing cocaine (with Andy Gibb, among others), the truth behind his rumored drug-induced "stroke," and blowing off a high-paying gig in order to watch his daughter's ballet recital, even though she's "really not that good." The phone interview was supposed to be 15 minutes long, but wound up running over an hour — partly because he kept breaking away from our call to argue with his wife, and partly because (as I quickly realized) he would answer any question I asked him...

But enough of my yakkin'. Download the following PDF, and spend a little quality time with "The Man With No Control."

Eddie Money Interview

 

Gettin' Rizzy With It

Back during the teenage summers I spent in NYC, I would often kill time (or grab some air-conditioning) during my architectural and historical strolls around Manhattan by stopping in at the Rizzoli store in midtown, where I would idly pore through one gorgeous, lavishly illustrated book on ancient Greece or Egypt after another.

Flash forward decades later, and — in a rather poetic turn of events — I've been invited to read from my not-so-lavishly illustrated book, Big Hair & Plastic Grass, at Rizzoli's midtown Manhattan store. You can click the invitation above for details, but I'll also spell 'em out here: The reading and signing takes place Thursday, May 27, from 5:30 to 7:00 pm at Rizzoli, which is located at 31 W. 57th Street (between 5th and 6th Aves). You are all invited to attend, and to pass this info on to anyone else who might pick up on what I'm layin' down.

This will certainly be a somewhat more sedate and dignified affair than the celebratory blow-out we're doing the night before at the Bell House in Brooklyn (to which you are all, of course, also invited), but come on out anyway and help me liven up the august joint. After all, I hear they're gonna be serving Cracker Jack...

Love To Love

I'm taking a "conscientious objector" stance towards Valentine's Day this year, for a variety of reasons — not least of which, as top playa Smoove B so eloquently puts it in the pages of The Onion, is the fact that the Valentine's industry has got the love holiday "so clogged with fools fumbling over their romantic overtures that it's next to impossible for those who can really make it happen to shine." Word, Smoove.

Plus, I'm too enmeshed in my current period of transition to have much time for any "mance" of the "Ro" variety. Still, incurable romantic that I am, my heart is never entirely immune to the charms of a really good love song. And this week, in the midst of yet another semi-annual rediscovery of UFO's '70s catalog, "Love to Love" came on and once again kicked me in the chest, reminding me of what a truly amazing love song it is. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and declare it the greatest "power ballad" ever recorded.

I started actively listening to hard rock in 1978, when I was a 7th grader in Ann Arbor, and my love for it grew during 1979 when I lived in Los Angeles. But for some reason, I never even heard of (much less heard) UFO until I moved to Chicago at the beginning of 1980. No Place To Run, the band's first studio release since the less-than-amicable departure of guitarist Michael Schenker, had just come out that January; but WLUP-FM (aka "The Loop — Where Chicago Rocks") remained fixated on the older material, regularly spinning the band's hard rock anthems like "Too Hot To Handle," "Doctor Doctor," "Rock Bottom," "Only You Can Rock Me," and of course the live version of "Lights Out," wherein Phil Mogg's final chorus shout-out of "Lights Out CHICAGO" causes the crowd at the old Amphitheater to go completely and utterly batshit.

Like I said, I'd never heard of these guys before I moved to Chicago, but I was immediately taken by the power, punch and general balls-out rocktacularness of UFO. The bruising swagger of their riffs, the sweaty immediacy of their choruses, and the street-wise suss of lead singer Phil Mogg weren't a million miles removed from the English punk rock I'd soon fall completely (if belatedly) in love with. And while they would occasionally stretch songs out past the 10-minute mark — usually to showcase Schenker's dramatic soloing — everything was very carefully structured for maximum impact; when it came to making music, at least, these guys clearly did not fuck around. Only much later would I learn that Mogg and bassist Pete Way had been profoundly influenced in their youth by the Who and the Small Faces, true masters of the well-crafted but hard-rocking pop song.

I can't pinpont the exact moment I first heard "Love To Love"; but in my earliest memory of listening to it, I'm sitting in my small and chilly bedroom in our Mies Van Der Rohe apartment on Lake Shore Drive, watching the inch-thick ice on the inside of my window being slowly melted by the heater underneath, and drifting off into a dreamy reverie about a girl in my 8th grade class that I had a crush on, as the song wafts out of my clock radio. (Several months later, the same girl would ask me to "go" with her, making this quite possibly the first moment of creative visualization I ever experienced.)

At seven minutes-plus, "Love To Love" is definitely a song you can get lost in. (For the record, I'm talking about the version from their 1977 classic Lights Out — the first UFO studio album I ever bought, and still my favorite — and not the live version from Strangers In The Night. Love that version, too, but the original studio waxing is the one that got under my skin first.) It opens with a wordless, multi-part vocal section that sounds like it was lifted from the intro of Queen's "Ogre Battle" and then dipped in liquid 'ludes. Keyboardist Paul Raymond comes in with a haunting, "Tubular Bells"-esque intro, and the band lumbers to life behind him, pounding its way slowly but deliberately forward like an army in winter. And then, at the 2:45 mark — a point at which most of my favorite songs are getting ready to end — the band falls back and cedes the spotlight to Phil Mogg.

With the possible exception of Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, there was no hard rock vocalist in the 1970s more soulful — or more capable of conveying heartache without massively wussing out — than Phil Mogg, and "Love To Love" is the proof. The song's lyrics, once you actually look at them on a page, are simple, brief and almost fragmentary, but Mogg's performance imbues them with such a deep and eloquent ache, there's no need to spell it out further. At the age of 13, I had only the vaguest notion of what "Oh it's been too many times and I can't go back/Night bars, guitars, rundown motels like shacks" even meant, and little clue as to the myriad ways that romantic relationships can sour ("Half the time it could seem funny/The other half is just too sad"). But I certainly already knew what it was like to be lonely and wanting to be loved, and this song (and Mogg's voice) hit that deeply ingrained sense of longing and melancholy like a heavy hammer.

Of course, you can't talk about a classic UFO song without mentioning Michael Schenker — and once again, it's his sense of dynamics and drama that holds the song together, and drives it through its many moods and changes. His first solo (which comes in around the 4:12 mark) is a beautifully restrained, sustain-fueled inversion of the verse melody — not unlike the solo David Gilmour would later lay down on Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," another "slow dance" song from my youth. Schenker finally cuts loose at the 6:45 mark (after Mogg pleads, "I've tried and I need you to stay"), kicking the door down with a massive power chord and unleashing a heart-exploding fusillade that says everything about love, joy, beauty and sadness than Mogg's lyrics can't. It's powerful, profound, and perfect. And you can enjoy the whole thing on the YouTube clip below.

Happy Valentine's Day, y'all.

 

Frontiers...and Beyond!

Longtime Robe readers may remember that, back in 2007, I posted something about Journey's "Faithfully" video, and the memorably humorous experience of seeing Jonathan Cain almost break down while introducing it on Friday Night Videos.

In the comments section of that post, some of my friends hipped me to the existence of a Journey tour documentary from the same period, called Journey: Frontiers and Beyond, which was produced and narrated by the same folks who produced NFL Films. Apparently, it's an absolute laff-riot, which includes footage of Neil Schon getting brained onstage by a bottle hurled at him by someone in the audience — and the narrator excitedly intoning, "Wow, that's gotta hurt!" And now... it's on YouTube, in its entirety!

I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but I thought I'd better pass the info along, just in case it gets yanked soon. Here's chapter 1, below...

Happy Birthday, Scott Walker!

Noel Scott Engle, aka the legendary Scott Walker, turns 67 today. I'm too busy packing boxes and clearing shit outta my yard today to go at length into the enigmatic gentleman's history, or to talk about what his remarkable music (especially his first four solo albums) means to me, but I didn't want let the day go by without acknowledging him.

Wish there was much, much more in the way of solo or Walker Brothers live footage floating around on the Tube of You, but I think this promo clip for the Walker Bros' 1965 hit "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More" nicely sums up Scott's overdramatic aesthetic. (My friend Eric once described him as "the intellectual Tom Jones," which he meant as a great compliment — though I'm not sure Scott would take it as such.)

It also brings back fond memories of the afternoon in 2002 when Lemmy and I were booted out of the West Hollywood hotel where I was interviewing him, unceremoniously expelled just because we felt drunkenly compelled to bellow this song from the balcony, complete with flamboyant hand gestures...

"A Soul Hootenanny — Me and the Bee Gees!"

I posted this video on my Facebook page yesterday, but it clearly deserves a re-post — not to mention a few more words of introduction.

As many of you know, I'm a big fan of rock covers by soul artists (almost always preferable to the other way 'round), and I consider Wilson Pickett's version of the Beatles' "Hey Jude" to be one of the greatest recordings by anybody, ever. Much as I love the Beatles, their original resides in the "Paul Songs I Never Need to Hear Again" file, along with "The Long and Winding Road," "Birthday," "Let It Be" and "When I'm 64." I never get tired of the Wicked Pickett's version, though; his impassioned vocal performance and Duane Allman's wild string-bending take the song somewhere far deeper and make it far more cathartic than McCartney could have ever hoped for.

And then there's this clip from an early 70s Midnight Special, which delivers the same soulful charge while adding something deeply bizarre: A duet of sorts between Pickett and Barry Gibb. I can safely say that "Soul Hootenanny" and "Bee Gees" are two phrases that have never even shared the same part of my brain at once, much less been in a sentence I've used, but the Wicked One invites them out for just that, and even steps aside a couple of times to let "Soul Brother" Barry do his thing on "Hey Jude". And while Barry doesn't exactly sound like the second coming of Otis Redding, he still acquits himself fairly admirably; his brothers, however...

Actually, Maurice looks like he's having a great time, and just seems happy to be able to watch the fireworks from such close proximity. Robin, though, is acting like a bored-out-of-his-mind six year-old, twirling in circles and waving his arms like he's pretending to be an airplane until the grown-ups start paying attention to him again. Seriously dude, WTF?!?

Still, the whole thing pretty much rules. And Pickett's backing band — the Midnight Movers — kick mightily. Enjoy!

Mid-Wilshire Nighttime Stroll

Put the finishing touches on the copy-edit manuscript for my '70s baseball book yesterday afternoon. They say Edward Gibbon took a stroll in his garden after finishing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; since I was staying in LA for the weekend, I had no garden to stroll through, so I took a celebratory nighttime walk down Wilshire Boulevard, between the post office on Detroit and the LA Country Museum of Art. And I took my camera with me...

Hookers, Brain Tacos and H1N1 Beer Pong

I ended last week in a pretty foul mood, the result of numerous work and book deadlines colliding with dawning awareness of the mega-hassles that the next major change in my life — i.e., selling the desert pad and moving back to L.A. — will entail. Saturday was beautiful, but the sunshine alone could not lift me out of my doldrums. I needed to smile. I needed to laugh. I needed to rock. I needed at least one really cold beer.

Thankfully, all of the above things were within my reach — for Wonker were playing on Saturday night. The retarded brainchild of one Bones Wonker, Wonker the band deliver the Misfits-esque punk-metal goods with little regard for things like eardrums, subtlety or dignity. Taking a break from their recording sessions for Too Dumb To Die, the long-awaited full-length debut that they've been working on since 1993, Wonker made a rare live appearance at Friar Tuck's Bar & Grille (I'm guessing the "e" has to do with the fact that the establishment was built to resemble a miniature medieval castle) in the no man's land between Claremont and Pomona. 909 reprazent!

Crowded together on the venue's tiny stage, the quintet cranked out one would-be hit after another — "Psycho Bitch," "Brain Taco," "Girls' Night In," etc. — in a cerebellum-shredding twin-guitar assault. They played a song about people who die while masturbating to internet porn and come back as zombies ("Gutbusters"). They played a song that courageously linked vegetarianism with the evils of pre-marital sex ("Eat Meat [But Not Mine Until We're Married]"). They played not one but two songs about hookers. They played an electric kazoo solo. They were fucking awesome.

All of which surely would have sufficed for an evening's entertainment in itself — and yea and verily, I smiled, laughed and banged my head more during Wonker's 25 minutes onstage than I had all week, and felt a million times better for it. But there was yet another treat to be had: Namely, the opportunity to watch some of the locals face off against each other in the most disgusting game of beer pong I've ever witnessed.

Well, truth be told, it's the only game of beer pong I've ever witnessed. It's been a long time since I've played drinking games or hung out with people who do; so while I'd certainly heard of beer pong before Saturday, I had no idea how it was played. For those of you similarly in the dark (or who just take your drinking too seriously to make a game out of it), the two teams set up a bowling pin-like formation of plastic beer cups (with beer in them) at opposite ends of a ping pong table, then try to toss a ping pong ball across the table into one of the other team's beers; if they succeed, their opponents have to chug the beer that the ball landed in.

In this case, both teams (a girl and a guy versus two girls) had cups of water at their respective ends of the table, ostensibly to rinse off the ping pong balls between shots. I say "ostensibly," because neither team seemed particularly vigilant about their ball hygeine, even when the balls bounced off the table and rolled around on the floor. This wasn't some highly polished, regularly swept wooden tavern floor, either; the table was situated in ye olde tavern's semi-enclosed beer garden/smoker's porch, whose pockmarked asphalt floor was covered with dirt, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, chewed gum, AIDS and H1N1 viruses, etc. My friends Rusty, William and I were so grossed out by the sight of the wet balls bouncing around in the filth, we refused to touch them even when they rolled to a stop at our feet. Instead, we'd just gently kick them back to the players, who'd pick them up, make (if they remembered) a half-hearted dunk in the rinsing cup, and then resume play. "Plop!" Drink up...

Somehow, the most poetic part of the whole thing was that the one guy who was playing — and who was clearly the ringleader of the whole beer pong tournament — was a beefy, fratty type sporting an Ed Hardy-esque t-shirt with "That's How I Roll" written across the gut, and a dice motif on the side seams. Just like Wonker, it was so deeply wrong, it was beautifully right.