I left myself too many loopholes in my last New Year's Resolution and ultimately undermined myself, in part with the help of an uncommon Ian Dury record that showed up at Red Cat, by Kilburn and the High Roads. What was I going to do, pass it up? It was the first record I bought without any real attempt to justify it by the terms I had set, and the first step in going off the wagon completely. I think that was in early March...
But I still want to break myself of the habit of buying stuff. I want to find a new way to engage with the world. In 2023, I have gained weight, spent my money, failed to climb out of any debt-holes, and generally been pretty slack.
So for 2024, I am swearing off all buying of records/ movies/ books except:
a) What I find at thrift stores (or other super-cheap dollar bins and the like)
b) Items purchased directly at the merch table of a band I am seeing, especially if I have a chance to get this item signed and/or am likely to never see it again
c) (Possibly) items sold or recorded by personal friends of mine. Facebook friends don't count, but if I have been to their home or they have been to mine, bets are off.
d) (Possibly) items I need for the purposes of research, for example if I have a big interview to do; but this should only be if absolutely necessary, since it could lead to my writing about bands for the purposes of acquiring their albums.
e) Gifts for friends. That doesn't count.
f) Anything underpriced to such an extent that I can flip it for three or four times as much.
The big grail for me was the Plugz' Better Luck, as pictured last year. Unbelievably, it came out on an Australian label and Red Cat was able to bring it in. So I have that now. There is very little else on my long-term must-have list, BUT I sure would like Too High to Die on vinyl. With London having surprised everyone (even the Meat Puppets) by reissuing Forbidden Places on vinyl, surely this is not so far behind?
Exceptions. Many of these are still on my list from last year. There are a few things I removed and a few things I added:
Meat Puppets - Too High to Die and/or Forbidden Places on vinyl, plus new editions of Rat Farm, Monsters, Huevos, and/or Live in Montana
The Fall: Dragnet and This Nations Saving Grace. I simply must have some more Fall in my collection. I can feel a plunge into The Fall coming. I will only have four records by them (on vinyl, that is) if I buy these. Four Fall records is reasonable, right?
Grateful Dead - Reckoning. The only live Dead album I've ever cared about, just a pristine C&W/ folk set, beautifully played, with lovely cover art. I lingered on buying a copy off the Sunrise Metrotown Wall for several months, then finally got up the resolve - I would LISTEN to this record! - to discover it was gone. Still don't have it
Mississippi John Hurt - Last Sessions PURCHASED AT RED CAT!
Lucinda Williams - Good Souls Better Angels (PURCHASED!) and Essence on vinyl, if it is ever issued thus
Don Cherry: Brown Rice, Italian version. Still one of my fave Cherrys, and the Italian version has an amazing cover by Moki, but I gave my last copy away to a friend with a deeper investment in Don than I have, because it had some damage to it -- the cover was great but the album didn't really play. I want a version that ticks both boxes.
Alex Chilton: Bach's Bottom. I got an album of demos from this but the original is actually kinda scarce now.
Camper van Beethoven ii and iii on vinyl, and maybe Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart on CD
Soft Boys: Invisible Hits and A Can of Bees, again on vinyl only. Had them both at different times, sold them, and regret it...
Art Bergmann by bev davies, Dec. 16, 2023 not to be reused without permission
(With thanks to Rob Wright, Bev Davies, and - making her first appearance on Alienated, one Andy Scheffler; also thanks to Mo and the rest of the Keithmas team)
At his first-ever Keithmas, this past Saturday at the Rickshaw, Art Bergmann quipped, before playing “Confessin’ the Blues,” that he’d swapped the gender references in the lyrics (“mama” becomes “daddy”) because the original was “so fuckin’ sexist it’s sick.”
Obviously some aspects of the Stones catalogue have
become, as they say, problematic. To leave aside entirely the question of
cultural appropriation, the sexual power dynamics in songs like “Under My Thumb” do not work well in
the current landscape. Even worse is “Brown Sugar,” which adds a morally horrifying element of racist history,
presented in a weirdly rollicking, good-time-rock-n’-roll format.
Hard to believe Little Richard once covered that latter tune, re-instating a line that Jagger himself would gloss over in live performances,
about hearing the “scarred old slaver… whip the women just around midnight.” He even amended "whip" to "whup," adding to the horrors. (There are people who defend the song, but there's a reason it has drawn controversy).
At a past Keithmas, staple co-headliners La Chinga lost points with some members of the audience by revitalizing that song, when even the Stones themselves have dropped it from recent sets. But considering the possibility that it might surface again this year, it was hard to get very worked up over “Confessin’ the Blues.”
Originally written by black artists Jay McShann and Walter Brown, it has a narrator macking somewhat desperately on a girl, posturing—“Baby don’t you want a man like me?”, which line apparently would later inspire Frank Zappa—while pleading (“if I can’t have you baby, I don’t want nobody else,” which you’d imagine the singer might pitch at a different girl every week). It’s horny, it’s het, it’s very male, and for the women the singer targets, probably a bit tedious, but… sexist?
Still, if it makes Art happy to swap “Mama” for
“Daddy,” to reverse the power dynamic and/or possibly queer the song, he should
go right ahead. All I want for Christmas is for Art Bergmann to have a happy
new year, y’know? (And I mean the whole year).
It wasn’t Art’s only poke at heteronormativity during the evening. Wearing lipstick and nail polish, the Vancouver punk veteran had also said of the silky feminine robe he wore that if Keith Richards would dress that way, too, “if he had the courage;” and later in the evening, during Rich Hope’s extended jam on “Midnight Rambler,” crept up behind Hope onstage, lay on his back at his feet, raised his legs in the air in an apparent offering.
Hope seemed momentarily a bit puzzled by what specific manner of debauchery Bergmann might have been inviting, but ended up placing his foot in Bergmann’s, uh, perineal area, with Bergmann laughing happily on the floor below him (he says just now on Facebook that he was being "the rapee." I guess in the absence of those other songs, "Midnight Rambler" becomes the most lyrically problematic tune of the night, and that Art's theatre was more deliberately, sneakily subversive than hilariously random; it's clever stuff). Hope may have contributed to the high spirits a bit, pouring for Art from the gigantic bottle of Jack Daniels that occupied center stage.
Most performers took a hit from that bottle, some more than one. At one point, near the end of the night, Hope was squatting on the stage margins right in front of me, selfsame bottle in hand, and, thinking of watching Shane McGowan pass whiskey into the audience at a Pogues show back in 1987, I was tempted to reach out—except whiskey mixes poorly with tongue cancer; I stuck to Phillips de-alcoholized Iota, happily now on tap at the Rickshaw, poorly advertised in a photo that Santa took of me with Mrs. Claus (don't ask, I have no idea, she just liked my Dead Bob shirt).
To be clear, it was delightful to see the 70-year-old Bergmann having such fun—and apparently abandoning his concerns over sexism by joining La Chinga in background vocals for a raucous, celebratory, unabashedly phallocentric “Honky Tonk Women,” later in the night. It is probably impossible to have a bacchanale that is totally politically correct, y’know?
If Bergmann easily won the prize for stage antics, Wait/Less
bassist (and Little Destroyer frontperson) Allie Sheldan, having changed from her leathers (?) into fake furs and sparkly tights,
came close for second place, sneering and grabbing at her crotch as she joined Hope
for a Dionysian rip-through of “When the Whip Comes Down” at the evening’s
ending. Also fun to see was Wait/Less vocalist Becca Buick proudly displaying the
stuffed package in the front of her bright red pants, during Wait/Less’s mid-show
main set, prior to launching into a swaggering “Emotional Rescue.”
Somewhat surprisingly, that was the most
contemporary Stones song that we heard that night, unless you count deep-diving
Mississippi-born bluesman Robert Connelly Farr’s version of “Rolling Stone Blues,” which appears on Hackney Diamonds, but was originally written by Muddy Waters in 1950,
adapting a still-earlier Delta blues song called “Catfish Blues”).
I was sad that Farr only got to do two songs; I liked what I heard. By the end
of the night, after a three hour musical orgy involving at least nine bands (JankyBungag appears not to have played), Farr’s contributions, and those of surf
instrumentalist Joe Rotundo, had faded a bit in memory -- Rotundo and the Interstellar Riders kicked off the night with a cover of "Paint It Black," but that's about all I can tell you. Still, there was not a weak
band on the bill, and Farr, with his deep, rich growl and sonorous guitar, is someone I’ll seek out again (he has an album release show in March). Leave
them wanting more!
As for period-appropriate costuming, with faded jeans, silky scarf and long blond hair, La Chinga vocalist Carl Spackler reminded me more of Robert Plant—perhaps as played by Wings Hauser –than he did his pseudonym’s namesake (Bill Murray’s character in Caddyshack). He looked like he’d time-travelled in from 1973 to lead covers of—what, was that “Turd on the Run” they started with? I was returning from accompanying veteran scene documenter Bev Davies to the bus stop, so I missed a bit, but I seem to recall hearing the lyric “I’ve lost a lot of love over you” blasting through the Rickshaw’s swinging doors, while proprietor Mo Tarmohamed mopped up a spilled beer on the stairs.
For sure, La Chinga did “Bitch,” “Wild Horses,” “Honky
Tonk Women” and “Sway.” Nick Jones of the Pointed Sticks, who had last played
Keithmas in 2017, had, a few bands earlier, invited the audience to really give
it up for La Chinga and Rich Hope: “They do this every year,” he quipped, “and
have to come up with new songs every time.”
The Sticks, by contrast, actually repeated one song
from their 2017 set, “Mother’s Little Helper,” but I think Nick just has fun singing “What
a drag it is getting old.”
Knowing that, in his capacity as a rock merchandiser, Jones has toured with the Stones and even been lent a hat by Keith Richards himself, I was keen to know where he’d got his cool tartan pants. Seeing one of my photos, my wife asked, “Are those pajama bottoms?”
There were
too many stellar takes on the Stones catalogue to do justice to all of them. Both
Bergmann and Colleen Rennison offered different flavours of “No Expectations,”
with Art bringing out the scorched emotional earth in the song, while Rennison
read it more harmoniously, as if making peace with a sad situation. To my embarrassment, I have only caught her
twice; her self-presentation the other night was vastly more demure than the raunchy gusto she brought to the stage with GRRL
Circus, a couple of years ago. Rennison apparently contains multitudes, which is a superb quality for any
performer (it was very odd passing her on the street the next day--not sure if she recognized me from Keithmas, but I recognized her).
And while noting outstanding performances, one must also tip the hat to Keithmas veteran Elliot C. Way, who did a stellar take on “Sweet Virginia” (a divisive song, but it’s always been my favourite song off Exile on Main St).
Mary Ancheta by Andy Scheffler, not to be reused without permission
The most transcendent performance of the night, though, was ultimately by Rich Hope, who offered an extended mega-jam on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” the spacy, drawn-out denouement of which prompted him to remark, some minutes after it was over, “Are you wondering if that song is still going? I fucking am! I’ll be ending that song in my dreams.” Particular credit should go to keyboardist Mary Ancheta – inexplicably decked-out in a furry Russian hat, which she kept on through both Bergmann and Hope’s sets, despite the considerable body heat warming the room— for evoking a stoned and expansive Ray Manzarek. Indeed, the song felt more like the Doors or Sri-Chinmoy-era Santana than the Stones. It was the climax, the veritable tantric orgasm, of the evening, even if it was not technically the last song (I believe that was "Happy").
By special request: Billy Butcher of La Chinga with Art Bergmann, during "Honky Tonk Women," by Andy Scheffler, not to be reused without permission
Hope was in great spirits, saying
something about how fun it was to “act like a bunch of jackasses and raise
money for the food bank.” I’m told that, while the final count is not yet in, between
the very reasonable admission price, raffle tickets, merch sales, and other
donations, “at least $22,500” was raised.
That’s an impressive amount--I've never done anything simultaneously so frivolous and productive--but the most touching story of the night came from Wait/Less’s second guitarist, James Gamble, whose name was provided me after the fact by event-co-organizer Rob Wright, of the Vicious Cycles MC (a band who were not actually on the bill, but present in spirit, with their guitarist Nick manning the merch table, where you could buy a new 7” featuring Gamble released for the occasion. While I bought my raffle tickets, Nick and I briefly chatted a bit about how Fergus of Emergency was on the first four Tranzmitors singles, including my favourite of theirs, “Look What You’re Doing to Me,” but had flown back across the pond before the first Tranzmitors LP came out. It was an itch I had wanted to scratch for awhile, but I didn’t get the chance at the Dead Bob show, where I last saw the Vicious Cycles play).
To get back to the story: just prior to Wait/Less launching into “Emotional
Rescue,” Gamble took the mic to tell the assembled crowd about how he’d just flown
in from attending his uncle Rick’s funeral, earlier that day. The Rolling
Stones were uncle Rick’s favourite band of all time, Gamble explained: “I had
to leave early to be here, but I know he would be so proud of me.”
James then raised
a glass, poured from that same bountiful bottle of Jack on the stage.
Here’s to
you, Uncle Rick. You’d have been proud indeed.
Being friends with David M. (founder and still frontman of NO FUN, the Beatles of Surrey) means that I have learned to appreciate a good Christmas-themed punk show. How can one not love (rude, funny) NO FUN originals like "Christmas is a Sad and Lonely Time," or their slightly altered seasonal covers, like the Subhumans' "Slave to My Dick" festively re-interpreted as "Slave to My Gifts"...?
But what are the odds that two distinct bands would have their own Christmas-themed version of that Vancouver punk classic? Check out "Slave to St. Nick," by Angry Snowmans, riffing on the same song. Fun, eh? (People in the dark about the Angry Snowmans' name are probably unaware that there is a punk band called Angry Samoans. The Samoans and the Snowmans have no other overlaps that I'm aware of; it's just another of the many Yuleish repurposings, or Christmasizations, if you will, of things punk that the Victoria-based Snowmans perpetrate).
Despite a week-long cold, presumably caught at that Dead Bob show, I was able to do some productive "local-level" music journalism in the run up to the show last night. For instance, it was to my great pleasure that I established that not only does David M. (pictured below) know the music of the Angry Snowmans, but that Ty Stranglehold, singer of the Angry Snowmans, knows and is a "huge fan" of NO FUN at Christmas (so he tells me on Facebook; and for the record, I do think that NO FUN at Christmas is among the punkest of things that M. does, even though David M. will purportedly safety pin you if you call him a punk, and NO FUN's music is usually not very punklike at all. But songs like "Folk Christmas," their re-seasoning FEAR's "Fuck Christmas" add to the punk spirit, and originals like "The Turkey Song" are punk in all important regards except the musical one).
I mean, it figures that Stranglehold and M. would have encountered each other, but I'm still pleased; I don't know if the connection has been officially made in public elsewise. Let it be done, now! A new fact of local music lore, unearthed and otherwise unremarked upon!
It is, in fact, one of two significant contributions I have made in the last year to the scholarship around NO FUN, the other being confirming a rumour (long heard and wondered at by David M) that Murray Action, of the Dayglo Abortions and Lummox (whose "Put the Cunt Back in Cuntry" was played as house music last night) used to cover NO FUN's "Mindless Aggression," one of their best-known, most-heard songs, since it appears on the esteemed Vancouver Complication, which is where Acton encountered it (again, he told me so on social media). This was actually in the days before the Dayglos, when Acton was helming a band whose name seems inconsistently given as the Sick Fucks or the Sickfucks, whom you can hear via Supreme Echo's essential All Your Ears Can Hear release. "I still love that song to this day," Murray told me. "I love the first Vancouver Complication comp in it's entirety. That album had a great deal of influence on my late teens and more or less put me on this road to ruin that I travel to this day."
As an aside, note that you can get "Mindless Aggression" and others of NO FUN's greatest hits on the album NO FUN's Greatest Hits, which is cheapest to purchase in digital form on NO FUN's first bandcamp page, but can also be purchased on vinyl via the US label Atomic Werewolf. It is not cheap, let it be known, but it is being made, I believe, on a print-on-demand basis and sent from Europe or something.
I have been hanging onto M's own sample copy until such a time as I could write about it. In point of fact, many of my favourite NO FUN songs are not on it, because I tend to go for M's more obscure gestures, like "Ambivalence (Gets Me)," off Snivel. I do love two of the songs that are on it with special fervour, namely "To Hell with the Past" and "Paisley Brainbolts of the Mind," about the apocalyptic inner life of a passive-aggressive, drug-usin' hippie, but many of the other songs on this album, by virtue of being concert staples at NO FUN shows, have been heard more by me a bit more frequently than by your average casual consumer of things NO FUN, and I have come to feel about them the same way as a deep diver might feel, when seeing the Blue Oyster Cult, about "Burning For You." I love "Burning For You" but would rather hear almost any other song off the BOC's first five studio albums played in its place in concert or representing them on a comp; I know they WILL play it, and I will enjoy it, but deep divers kind of have to grin and bear such concessions to necessity. Similarly, I have loved all the songs on NO FUN's Greatest Hits at one point or other, but by virtue of having heard them vastly more than most people, I could list a dozen NO FUN songs that I would rather hear than "Mindless Aggression," "Ream Me Like You Mean It," and "Me & Warren Beatty (and Mick Jagger)" (great though these songs may be). Songs I like better and would better have on vinyl would include the non-COVID-themed original version of "Oh To Be on Heroin," "Can I Please Take the Drugs Now?," "Groovy Daddy" and the aforesaid "Ambivalence (Gets Me)," all off Snivel: "Not in Your Town," "Snog," "No Orchestra Required," and "Jah Seh (Veni, Vidi, Vici)," off 1894; "These Are the Names of the Folks I Hate," "The Communist Boys" and "Allez Vite Les Twist" off The New Switcheroo, and especially "The Awful Truth" off Ghost Paper Boy in Robin's Gay Trailer Park. That last is probably the most significant omission from the LP, since it remains on M's sets and he clearly likes it plenty still; it gets played live a lot more than "It Came from Heaven" (an important song for NO FUN, but not as good as "The Awful Truth") or a few other songs on the album. I would bet other NO FUN associates (Pete Campbell, David Dedrick, Kent Lindsay, or even the late great Lester Interest, were he available for comment) would have their own ideas about the songs they'd most like, what their own version of NO FUN's Greatest Hits might look like. Hell, for me, all of 1894 and Snivel would suffice (may they see vinyl release eventually).
But the album isn't called "Allan's NO FUN Favourites." So to heck with me! The vinyl is impressively made, a labour of love, nice and thick, with a great cover photo, given a matte presentation, and with superior mastering compared to M's own 2015 digital version of the album. It also has a pleasing, unique smell, which I would go re-experience now that I might describe it, except I'm still a bit plugged up with this cold (but yes, I sometimes sniff my records, especially new ones, which habit I got into thanks to the unique stink of the ink on Crass Records, back in the day; I'm not sure if they still smell the same, but like the smell of the shitwater leaking down from the "old Cobalt" ceiling, it is a smell that, while not in itself normally what you would call "a good smell," has very pleasant associations for me. Note that there is nothing unpleasant about the smell of NO FUN's Greatest Hits. It does not smell like shitwater, even shitwater I grew fond of).
As for sonic matters, I'm not an audiophile, don't have audiophile equipment, and can offer no in-depth observations about the quality of these recordings, but I have now listened to the album from start to finish and can honestly report that it sounds great to me, given the limitations of my ears, brain, and stereo equipment. I am going to order a copy of it for myself as my Christmas gift to M... it's gonna cost something like $80 Cdn with the shipping, but I love the idea of buying something for Christmas, the act of doing which is the gift, while the ownership remains with me. And then I can give him his own copy back! Merry Christmas!
Anyhow, while M. remained un-Waldorfed last night, this added level of knowledge (that Ty Stranglehold is also a NO FUN fan) and a slight improvement in my cold (combined with six reassuringly negative COVID tests) made it essential that I get out to see the show myself. I wore a mask, and avoided getting near Wendy (who needs no further illness at the moment), save to offer her an extra hoodie that I'd packed (she was complaining on Facebook that she was cold, but by the time I showed up, hoodie in hand, had solved that problem, apparently borrowing some fake furs; she declined my offer). To think, when I first saw the announcement of the show, it was Night Court I was keen to see!
But that was before I realized that the Snowmans were fronted by Ty Stranglehold, whom I have some history with; we were writing about the Subhumans at the same time, at one point, and Chris Walter hilariously once mis-identified me at a show and inscribed a book that I was buying to Ty (which I then made him cross out and fix; it prompted some bemused conversation between Ty and myself, the next time I ran into him at the Cobalt: "We don't even look alike," Stranglehold observed, "except that we're both white and large.")
Sadly, the night proved a bit too much for me, in my depleted state. I was a bit worn out by the two opening acts, both offering different flavours of west coast punk, with Stale reminding me of muscular grunge served with a generous sprinkling of Afghan Whigs, and Paul is Dead ("It's Paul McCartney, dude, fuckin' Google it") reminding me more of South California punk by way of Grant Hart. Or something like that, I dunno. They were both decent bands, just more than I needed, and not quite as playful as either the Snowmans or Night Court (who ended their set on a cover of ABBA's "S.O.S.," as is heard on Humans; I shot some vid of their originals, here. I love that they have a bat-themed song that seems to intersect with the song David and I wrote together, but they did not play it last night, presumably because they want me to come see them again sometime; I guess I shall!).
Thanks to the un-announced addition of a fourth band, there was no way I would end up seeing the whole Angry Snowmans set, which indeed I did not, leaving, exhausted but happily satiated, after "Ebenezer Uber Alles," which I guess they played around 11:30, given that I got back to Metrotown after midnight. I would much have preferred the advertised three-band bill, or even just two bands, but... well, whatever. I guess the priority was to sell alcohol for as long as possible. And while I enjoyed the Snowmans immensely, the somewhat unruly crowd was shouting down Ty's between-song patter ("Shut up and play a song!"), which (the patter, not the shouting) I would actually have liked to hear more of. They seemed more interested in moshing enthusiastically to the band's estimable covers, like they couldn't have cared less about the inherent wit of the lyrics or the various seasonal alterations. Ah well. The high points, for me, were "Wrecked XMas" (a hilarious riff on X's "Los Angeles," off What We Do Is Festive, which the band actually had vintage vinyl of) and a nod to Victoria's own Nomeansno, "Eight Deer One Sleigh on One Run," which they played at full throttle and punctuated at the mid-song break with a complete performance of their very silly rewrite of Minor Threat's "Seeing Red." The band was tighter and faster than I thought they would be, based on various videos I had perused on Youtube, which don't entirely capture how solid they are live and in person. They're actually an estimable punk cover band; the wit is just a star atop the tree. By the way, Ty confirms that their material is all cover tunes; there were some songs didn't recognize, but that's just because they dive even deeper into punk than I do. If we look at my vid from last night, obviously "Bright Lights" is the Clash's "White Riot," but I had no idea that "Fruitcakes" was Agent Orange's "Bloodstains."
You have a few chances to see Angry Snowmans on the island this seasn -- in Nanaimo, tonight, and on December 16th in Victoria; go see NO FUN at Christmas on December 22nd at the Princeton. May there come a day when Ty Stranglehold, Murray Acton, and David M. share a stage somewhere! A consummation devoutly to be wished.
I have nothing further to say, but here is a whole whack of photographs that I took last night. I won't be blogging all that much between now and Christmas -- I have other trees to decorate. Maybe I'll see you at Keithmas or something? (But I'm gonna let myself off the hook for reporting about it; excited to see what Art Bergmann will do, but I'm going as a concert attendee, not as a writer, if I can help it). Or perhaps we'll cross paths at the Princeton on December 22nd, for NO FUN at Christmas? Either way... Merry Christmas!
