I Just Read About That…

 SOUNDTRACK: LES CLAYPOOL’S DUO DE TWANG-Four Foot Shack (2014).

After touring around for the then latest Primus album, Les Claypool and M.I.R.V. guitarist Bryan Kehoe.  They got together for a bluegrass festival and decided to keep going with it.

So this is just Les and Bryan each playing a resonator bass and resonator guitar and twanging up the songs (with extra mandolin and backing vocals on a few tracks by Wylie Woods).

The disc opens with the only new song, a 42 second bit that doesn’t quite prepare you for the nonsense inside.  Because this is really a fun record of covers (Primus songs, Les’ solo songs, and others).

I tend to like the proper Primus versions better, but I really enjoy the way he has transformed them in this format.  “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” totally fits in this format and I do like it (the yodel bit is perfect) I just happen to like the bass and guitar better in the original.

The covers include: “Amos Moses” which works fine in this format.  “The Bridge Came Tumblin Down” (by Stompin’ Tom Connors) sounds very Stompin’ Tom.  It’s quite a sad song (thanks Tom).  “Stayin’ Alive” is fantastic–it really works with that style and the “how how how” is funny without being mocking.  “Pipeline” is a surprisingly good surf song for these two instruments–they really rock it out.  Perhaps te second biggest surprise (after Stayin’ Alive) is “Man in the Box” from Alice in Chains.  It projects a “Rawhide” vibe, and works very well It’s also kinda funny with the lyrics: “for some reason I’m buried with my very own shit.”  “Battle of New Orleans,” sounds really familiar although I’m not sure where I know it from.

There are several songs from Les’ solo albums done in twang style.  “Red State Girl” works great in this format (although it makes me sad that we still know who Sarah Palin is).   “Boonville Stomp” I like this version better than any others I’ve heard–some great steel guitar soloing going on in the second half.  The intro to “Rumble of the Diesel” is funny where he says that Seattle people don’t know anything about fishing and they turn on him.  “Buzzards of Green Hill” works really well with the twang, as does “Hendershot” (although I like the way he says “Hendershot” in the original more).  “D’s Diner” is fun in this format, less weird (the original is pretty weird).  And I’d love some malted buttermilk pancakes all day long.

The final song is a cover of Primus’ “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver.”  It feels very different.  The guitar solos are fun–there’s a Benny Hill vibe before the solo for Jimi Hendrix’ “Third Stone from the Sun.”

So while the album is goofy, it’s done in good fun, and the impact is really strong–Les’s songs have always been about rhythm and they translate really well.

[READ: January 29, 2015] “Pink House”

Rebecca Curtis continues to be one of my favorite recent discoveries.  Strangely enough I bought a copy of her short story collection and then proceeded to lose it in my house. How is that possible?

This story comes from a different narrator than the other stories, although she is just as bristly and straightforward as Curtis’ other narrators.  And in the way of delightfully convoluted stories, this one has an unusual setting to get to what it wants to say.

The narrator is at an artist’s gathering . None of the seven people gathered around–a Korean American crime-noir novelist, a Lebanese fantasy writer, a Thai journalist and three Brazilian painters–knew each other.  A foundation had flown them out together to practice their arts for six weeks.  “None of them knew who’d selected them for the residency, or why.”  I love that.

So the narrator decides to tell them a story about a ghost.

She had been living in Manhattan, although she was originally from Maine.  She was barely scraping by but then she was accepted into the MFA program in Syracuse.  She asked them to secure housing for her and she accepted an apartment sight unseen.

Before she left, she decided to have one last fling with her boyfriend.  She makes a point of telling everyone that he is black (she pretty much exclusively dates black men), and there’s an awkward moment where she says that her boyfriend half comic half angry asks, “”You like black cock?”” The rest of this answer is out loud: “I hesitated.  To me the question seemed off, since it was evident that I did.  Who I wondered wouldn’t like such a good thing?”  Meanwhile, the journalist asks her, “This relates to the ghost story?”  She says that it does.

Albeit somewhat tangentially.  She wound up oversleeping on the night she was supposed to pack.  Her parents drove down from Maine to help her move and her father was super mad that she wasn’t ready (he had no intention of sleeping in a hotel in Syracuse).  The whole relationship with her family: her angry father and her mother who believes that she will be going to hell because of her premarital sex is very funny.  It also takes up a large chunk of the story but has little to do with the actual ghost part, well, except for one important thing.

They get to Syracuse and see the weird house she has agreed to live in.  A homeless looking man outside of the building tells her it is haunted. But he assures her that the ghost will only come if she invites it.  When she later runs into this neighbor, he talks about his old relationship back in Nebraska.  And how he hopes to get back to see her one day.

Curtis’ narrators can be so brutal that they make me laugh.  Like this part:

I had little interest in the Midwest, which I thought of as a wasteland of flat-faced, goiter-ridden people.

or

I’m interested in “how people develop emotions and make the absurd decision to spend their whole life with one probably actually disgusting and not very intelligent person.”

Her parents help clean the place and they find some quarters and a weird elephant ring.  Then she tells them about what the man said about the ghost.  The father immediately invites the ghost into the house.

Now the story jumps ahead–with no more mention of her family.  Rather, she starts settling into Syracuse (and has some very negative things to say about the city).  Then she says that she started dating a white man, Paul–completely not her type, but they enjoyed each other’s company and he was a writer as well.  After dating for a while, he asked her if they should get married.  She is horrified at the idea, but gave him that elephant ring as a sign of commitment (even though it meant nothing to her).

One night she went to the local bar where the bartender told her a story about the elephant ring (which she was wearing around her neck).  He said that the man who owned it had died, and we learn a lot about this very smart but weird guy.

She feels like she is floundering in her job and her love life.  She takes a tenure track job in Nebraska and she and Paul move out there.  She didn’t think that he would follow her out there but he did.  Once they got out there, he changed.  He got a full-time job, stopped writing and, strangely enough, started helping out an older woman in the neighborhood–raking her lawn, sweeping her driveway, just enjoying her company.

He also started drinking and getting abusive.  So they separated. He stayed in Nebraska and she moved to Brooklyn.

That is all set up for the ghost aspect of the story which is weird and very cool and wonderfully described.  It seems almost insignificant to herself, almost as if she was just a conduit.

I also loved that as the story, which is quite long, nears its end the narrator says, “the people at the table yawned.  They felt that the story was overlong, and unsatisfying.”

But I thought it was great and I hope the ghost hasn’t hidden her short story collection from me.