SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Clinton’s Tavern Toronto ON (October 20, 1990).
From the Rheostatics Live website:
Very good sounding show though a bit hot in places. I had to stitch it together from 2 tapes and a messed up order but I think I got it right. Interesting that back in 1990, before even Melville was recorded, they were playing such a large selection of songs from Whale Music and even Introducing Happiness plus a bunch of songs that didn’t end up on any album such as Fluffy, Seems Like, Woodstuck, Memorial Day etc. One of the only times they played all three Joey related songs in succession. Louis Melville guests as well as Jim Hughes of 13 Engines. I don’t believe this is the full show as they talk about to going into Edmund Fitzgerald but the tape ends.
I had planned to post about these Rheostatics live shows in order, but I’d somehow missed this one. Interestingly though, they play a bunch of songs that they would not record for several years–some of them are early incarnations of songs, too.
As the Daves introduce the band, the phrase one fell swoop comes up. And Bidini says that they are One Fell Swoop. Then Clark says we are One Swell Poop. Bidini continues: The Holmgren Brotehrs, Dave and Dave. That’s Frosty Flake on bass and Ken “The Rat” Linseman on the rat pedal. I gather that Bidini has a mustache (there’s a Freddy Mercury joke later in the show), but he says “The mods called me a rich kid on the street because of his mustache. They called me dude too. Which isn’t modish or contemporary.
After some noise and static Dave says the first song was supposed to start with a technological flourish of some kind. It’s “Jesus Was Once a Teenager Too” [Introducing Happiness] and it is sung by Dave and Dave (!) It sounds so strange and there’s no middle section at all. Midway through they call out Lewis Melville from Guelph Ontario to play the guitar.
They play they crazy noisy staccato intro to “When Winter Comes” [Melville] and the song rocks out. At the end Bidini says it is three songs rolled into one: Big Bear’s Birthday, When Winter Comes and Victoria. They play “Northern Wish” [Melville] and “Woodstuck.” Dave introduces “Seems Like” as written about a guy Martin met in Dublin who told the band they had no vision. It includes the line: “a sentimental flower child bawls me out for lacking vision…fuck you, dude.”
Then they introduce a song “about a great hockey player gone bad its called “Beer” [Would eventually be “Beerbash” on Whale Music].
Bidini says they are really the tragedy corner here–that was depressing so is this one (“Soul Glue”) [Whale Music] Tim says, “I thought you meant we were sucking.” There’s no Benjamin Hayward in the lyrics. And during the part about the police, someone chants “911 is a joke.”
Clark gives a bizarro story as an introduction to “Ditch Pigs”: he and Martin got into fisticuffs punch up in the Rockies. They stole policeman’s peanut butter and smeared it on each other and then fell into a ditch. None of that is true, someone points out.
Marty’s got a case of the bombastic flu–the four week flu. And so they play “Martin’s First Day of School” [never released] although they claim it is from their forthcoming album Rheostatics Cut Their Head Off and Go Swimming or form their triple CD retrospective Smelling a Dog on a Sunny Day.
They play “Memorial Day” which is also kind of a downer [never recorded]. And then a fun introduction to “Who” [Whale Music]:
Just back from Neil Young’s ranch in Topanga Canyon Mr Jim Hughes of 13 Engines. Then comes “Chanson les Ruelles” [Melville], “Sickening Song” [Whale Music] with lots of accordion that segues into “What’s Going On” [also Whale Music] with a nice solo at the end by Martin.
This leads into “Fluffy,” the only time it’s available live here. Martin hits some absurd high notes–I wonder if they ever intended to record it. Dave introduces a song called “Dealin at the 7-11” which would of course be Legal Age Life at Variety Store [Whale]. Then comes two songs from Melville: “Christopher” and “Horses.” “Horses” starts acoustic ad kind of slow, but it gets really loud with some interesting guitar solo sounds and a few changed lines.
Clark says after a minute (my-noot) break they will be back momentarily.
When they come back Dave Bidini congratulates the Cincinnati Reds for winning the world series “Big Bad Jose Canceco arriving there on the hook, you got what you deserve, you big asshole.” Yipes. Clark diffuses this but apologizing to all hockey fans for the baseball season hanging on so long. Long live hockey! Death to the fat mans’ sport. They Clark explains that they have challenged the Leafs to a fun game against their Rock and Roll Hacker Jets: Dave Tim and Dave on the front line and Rick “whomp um” Wamsley in goal.
Someone shouts that Judy quit her job. They seem excited and then when martin sings “Record Body Count” he sings–“Judy pulled herself to her feet.” Then they play “Joey 2” and “Joey 3.” It’s followed by great versions of Saskatchewan” & “Dope Fiends.”
There’s a fun green sprouts theme (with someone singing loudly and out of key) and then a surprising “Rain Rain Rain” [Whale] described as a quiet version with Clark cracking up at the end for unknown reasons. There’ s cool version of “Aliens” [Melville]. And then one of the last versions of “Good on the Uptake.” It’s really long with some hearty jamming.
We find out that it is almost 1AM, and then there’s a nice version of “Lyin’s Wrong” [Melville]. Dave gasps and says “Martin transformed into a gay librarian right before my eyes.” It’s clear that they are planning to play more songs. Indeed it seems like they have many more songs to go. Bidini says he’d love to play Edmund Fitzgerald tonight and then the tape cuts off.
For such an old tape, the sound quality is quite good and the song selection is really fascinating since they had barely released any of the songs.
[READ: August 17, 2016] “A Sigh and a Salute”
This is the second essay about an artist that Spiegelman had written for Harper’s in 2016. I wonder if it will become a regular thing?
This essay is about Si Lewen, an artist of whom I’ve never heard. It is actually from the introduction to Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey.
Spiegelman says he has one of Si Lewen’s “Ghosts” hanging in his studio. Lewen began the series of Ghosts in 2008 and has made over 200.
Spiegelman gives Lewen’s complex history: Born in Poland in 1918, his family moved to Berlin as World War I ended. They were trying to escape Polish antisemitism and found the German version. When Hitler became Chancellor, Si Lewen aged 14, decided to leave Germany. He and his brother left the family behind and went to Paris. There was some luck on his side. Si’s uncle in America had organized a fund-raiser for Admiral Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole. Byrd’s brother, a Senator, arranged for Si’s entire family to get Visas in America in 1935. But even America wasn’t great for Si. In 1936, while sitting in Central Park after visiting the Met, a policeman upon hearing his accent grabbed him, rowed him out to the island in the center of the lake, bludgeoned and robbed him. What the holy fuck?
He was severely depressed and tried to kill himself but failed. It was only when he met his future wife that the darkness lifted and he was able to talk about the incident.
In 1942 he joined the army, in order to get revenge on the Germans. His job was to travel the battlefields reciting messages in German to persuade the German soldiers to surrender. He arrived in Normandy and witnessed first hand the Buchenwald concentration camp. This trauma also stayed with him.
Despite all of the trauma he suffered, when he began painting in the Postwar period, he found himself drawn to color and a kind of cubism. This met with much success. But by 1950 his memories reasserted themselves and he made The Parade.
Spiegelman describes the panels of drawn pictures as beginning with “an exalted crowd of flag-waving parents and children who gather to cheer a military procession of soldiers that turns into an abstract engine of war.” The Grim Reaper transforms the children into helmeted goose-stepping cannon fodder. The horrors of war escalate throughout the panels into a “panoramic harvest of blood and death.”
He made another sequentially drawn book in the early 1960s called A Journey. And he followed these up with serial paintings called The Procession. They lack the narrative of the two “books.” But the mostly figurative twenty by forty canvases kept coming over the years and there are now more than 1800 panels. He also made Centipede, 36 by 48 inch panels which were intended as “one hundred feet in continuous panel by panel progression” It was eventual rechristened Millipede when it reached 3,000 feet of panels.
In 1985 he removed his art from galleries stating “Art is not a Commodity! Art is Priceless!” He continued to paint through wildly divergent styles: “looming tormented heads, to erotic panels of colorful biomorphic abstractions.” In 1994, he made a series called Eva painting a naked woman often doubled over in pain.
Si had been aware of the graphic novel format of course, he’d said “comic books don’t last, but a painting can be seen and appreciated forever, for centuries after it’s painted.”
Spiegelman says that even though Si’s paintings are not traditionally narrative he likes to think of them as “clues to the one direction that comics might explore now that they’ve begun to be embraced by galleries and museums…as allusive narrative works for intelligent adults looking at art made expressively for walls.”
Even the end of Si’s story is dramatic. Suffering from painful rheumatoid arthritis in his hands, he tried to cut off his right hand with the buzz saw he used for cutting canvases. They considered putting him in a mental institution but he said, “I’ll never do that again. I didn’t realize how hard bone is.”
He lost all feeling in his hand and began working as a sculptor, primarily making hands.
The pages are filled with his paintings and drawings–many of them creepy and otherworldly. I’m fairly certain I would not want them on my wall, but they are very powerful.
I Just Read About That... 
Leave a comment