I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE FEELIES-Crazy Rhythms (1980).

Not too many albums start out with clicking blocks and quiet guitars that build for a minute before the actual song kicks in.  Not too many albums sound like early Cure sung by Lou Reed and not too many albums are called Crazy Rhythms when the thing that’s crazy about them is their vocals and guitars.  But that’s what you get with The Feelies debut.

In addition to the blocks, the opening song also features some sh sh sh sounds as a rhythm (techniques used by The Cure on Seventeen Seconds, also 1980).  There’s two guitar solos, each one vying for top spot in different speakers and, yes, the rhythms are a little crazy.

The album feels like it is experimenting with tension–there’s two vocalists often singing at the same time, but not in harmony.  There are oftentimes two guitars solos at the same time, also not in harmony.  The snare drum is very sharp and there’s all manner of weird percussion (all four members are credited with playing percussion).

That early-Cure sound reigns on “Loveless Love” as well, a slow builder with that trebly guitar.  There’s a lot of tension, especially with the interesting percussion that plays in the background.  And there’s that whole Lou Reed vibe in some of the vocals.

But not every song sounds like that, “Fa Cé-La” is a punky upbeat song with two singers trying to out sing the other.  “Original Love” is another short song, it’s fast and frenetic and fairly simple. It’s as if they couldn’t decide if they were going to be The Velvet Underground or New Wave punks.

The next surprise comes from their choice of covers: “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey”).  It goes at breakneck speed with some surprising pace changes after the chorus.  And a wonderful ringing percussion that makes the song sound even more tense than it is.  “Moscow Nights” is a more traditional song (although the backing vocals seem very spartan.

“Raised Eyebrows” is almost an instrumental, until the last-minute when the seemingly random vocals kick in.  And the final track, “Crazy Rhythms” seems to combine the speed of the faster tracks with the insanity of the other tracks.  It’s a pretty amazing debut, really heralding an age of music.

  It’s a shame it took them 6 years to make another (very different sounding) record.

[READ: February 8, 2012] “To Reach Japan”

I love Alice Munro’s stories, but I found this one a bit confusing.  Now, I admit that i read this under poor circumstances (while I was supposed to be attending a company-wide presentation), so that may have led to my confusion. But it felt like there was some questionable juxtapositions of the timeline in this story.

It opens simply enough with Greta and her daughter Katy waving goodbye to Peter (the husband and father) as they pull away from the train station.

The story immediately jumps back to Peter’s mother and how she fled on foot from Soviet Czechoslovakia into Western Europe with baby Peter in tow.  Peter’s mother eventually landed in British Columbia,where she got a job teaching.

The second time jump comes a few paragraphs later.  It seems like we’re back in the present, but the section opens, “It’s hard to explain it to anybody now–the life of women at that time.”  This describes how it was easier for a woman if she was a “poetess” rather than a “poet.”  But I’m not exactly sure when that was.  Presumably when Greta (who is the poet) was younger, but how long ago was that?  In Toronto, even?

The story jumps back to the present to say why Greta and Katy are on the train and Peter isn’t.  They are going to housesit for a month in Toronto while Peter goes to Lund for a summer job.

Then it jumps back to when Greta was a poetess and actually had poems published.  The journal was based in Toronto, but there was a party in Vancouver for the editor.  So she went.  And she had a lousy  time among the local literati.  She gets drunk and sits in a room by herself, but soon enough a man approaches her and offers to take her home. There is the potential for something more to come of it but it never materializes.  But she never forgot the man’s name: Harris Bennett, journalist.

And yet, reading it again, it seems like she was with Peter during this time of this party, a time that seems quite long ago.  There’s also a line a little later about “awesome” being a new word, so maybe the “now” of the story is also quite some time ago.

On the train ride, Greta meets two actors who work with preschoolers.   They immediately warm to Katy.  And when the woman gets off the train, and it is clear that the actors are not “together,” Greta and the man, Greg, spend some time together while Katy slowly drifts to sleep.

Greta and Greg move their tryst to another berth so as not to be despicable in front of Greta’s sleeping daughter.  When she returns a little later Katy is gone.

Munro is not the kind of moralist who punishes women for indiscretions (thank goodness, because this would have been an awful story if she were).  Rather, the story shifts somewhat towards acknowledging the consciousness of Katy.  And so for the end of the story we think about Katy.  About how this whole experience (father leaving her at the train station, mother leaving her in the train) must be affecting her.  And Greta starts to feel bad about how she’s ignored her both on the train and in general.

And the ending (just a few paragraphs later) is quite a surprise!

So even though I was confused by the timeline of the story, I really enjoyed it.  In fact, although some of the details would have been lost, it probably could have done without the time shifting at all.  True, some of the information about Peter’s mother was useful in setting up Peter as a character, but I’m not sure it really paid off.  And just a word or two to give a frame of reference for the poetry party (during the party not after) would have been very helpful too.

Nevertheless, the entire ending sequence was incredibly powerful and lived up to everything that I know and like about Munro’s writing.

For ease of searching, I include: “Fa Ce-La”