Unabashed

Trust me, Metallica has pissed me off plenty through the years, and never so much as they did with the utterly pathetic album “St. Anger,” which I shelled out the cash to buy as soon as it came out. Me, I suppose I’m one of the very, very few Metallica fans who bought their first stuff, loved it, and then continued to buy their music straight on through the “pop” phase, too (i.e. The Black Album). And though they seem to be a bunch of whiners, especially during the Napster debacle, I have continuously loved their music. When Load came out, I bought it almost as an afterthought, thinking by that time that they’d surely be washed up, but no, Load became one of my favorite Metallica albums of all time. I liked it a lot better than ReLoad, but then even ReLoad had some postives. The only album they’ve done that I didn’t go right out and buy was the one with all the cover tunes on it. I don’t do cover tune albums, even when it’s Metallica that does them. 

But then came St. Anger, and this time my suspicions were realized, just a few years later than I thought, post-Load, you might say. St. Anger was just washed up garbage. Hetfield sounded like he was trying way too hard to sound like the younger bands who are now imitating Metallica. Just garbage. The pom sound Ulrich’s snare drum made just made me cringe every time he hit it. But I bought it, and I guess in some way I knew then that if they ever made another album I’d buy it, too; because they’ve got a history of greatness behind them. It would take more than one crappy album to break me from Metallica.

Enter Death Magnetic. Today is a great day. I got the new Metallica, popped it in and cranked it up and now I am truly happy. My Metallica, the music I have loved for…God, over 20 years now, has made an album not only worth making, but it sounds like they’ve jumped right back into the style of Justice and Ride the Lightning, the style that turned my head in the first place. The first track got my heart thumping and I was hooked, from that moment on. Back to the grand old frantic, punishing, riff-style hammerhead metal that made Metallica Metallica. These songs aren’t 3:23 in duration, these songs blister you for 7 minutes plus. And what do you know, they rip your head off without doing a cheese-ass Cookie Monster voice. 

Here’s the best measuring stick, I guess; Amazon customer reviews. This is the customer review for St. Anger, which I would have rated 1 star (or worse, if I could get away with it).

4,182 Reviews 5 star:  (1,031) 4 star:  (667) 3 star:  (465) 2 star:  (458) 1 star:  (1,561)

And here’s the same measuring stick for Death Magnetic, which at this point I would give, yes, 5 stars:

334 Reviews 5 star:  (184) 4 star:  (87) 3 star:  (27) 2 star:  (14) 1 star:  (22)

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: ...And Justice For All, Album, Black, Death Magnetic, Load, Master of Puppets, Metallica, Napster, ReLoad, Ride the Lightning, St. Anger

It’s an Alabama kind of night. The Flower Moon is full as full can be, and I heard the season’s first whippoorwills right after sunset. The magnolia tree in my yard is in full bloom, and somewhere Jimmy Buffett is wondering where his salt shaker is.  Tonight I’m pondering whippoorwills and an old jazz standard.

Stars Fell on Alabama was written originally in 1934 and refers to the spectacular Leonid meteor shower of 1833. It’s been performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holliday and Alabama’s own Jimmy Buffett, among many, many others (the Buffett version is the local favorite, but sadly I can’t find a copy of it anywhere on the ‘net to share with you). The lyrics of that song have never felt more right than they feel tonight:

A feather from the Whippoorwill
That everlasting—sings!
Whose galleries—are Sunrise—
Whose Opera—the Springs—
Whose Emerald Nest the Ages spin
Of mellow—murmuring thread—
Whose Beryl Egg, what Schoolboys hunt
In “Recess”—Overhead!
           - Emily Dickinson

Many songs have been written about whippoorwills. They’re a melancholy set, a type of nightjar, rarely ever seen even when the season’s right. Some say they are the harbingers of death; the Iriquois believed they’d turned a frog into the moon. Here’s a YouTube video of the distinctive whippoorwill song:

There’s a reason people come here and stay, because in spite of its troubled past, it’s still a wonderful, beautiful place to live. Sometimes it’s downright magical.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Alabama, armstrong, buffett, ella, fitzgerald, hank, jimmy, louis, magnolia, moonlight, stars fell on alabama, whippoorwill, williams

My top ten songs ever. Disclaimer: For me, a song generally has to age before I’ll put it in my top ten. There are tons of newer songs that I love, and if you check back with me in ten years, some of them will be in my top ten. So. Most of my top ten are from ten+ years ago. Also: You’ll see a recurring theme among these songs. A lot of times they have horror elements involved, are about murder or serial killers or evil in general. This is “normal” for me ;-)

1. Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones: I loved this song the first time I heard it and still do.
2. Cochise, Audioslave: Sometimes a song is great because it has balls. This is one such song.
3. Twilight Zone, Golden Earring. Radar Love could have easily made this list, but just missed. Curiously these are the only two songs by GE that I even remotely like, and they are two of my all-time favorites.
4. Lunatic Fringe, Red Rider: Creepy, freaky tune that I’ve always loved.
5. Sun King/Fire Woman, The Cult: These two songs complement one another so perfectly that I almost consider them a single entity, despite the 3-second space between them. Powerful, dynamic.
6. Spoonman, Soundgarden: I don’t know anything about heroin or drugs in general, but I love this freaking song.
7. Plush, Stone Temple Pilots: Nobody really knows what this song is about, exactly, but whatever it is about is creepy, regardless.
8. Still of the Night, Whitesnake: Everybody likes a little cheese, right? Most people can’t stand Whitesnake, but I loved them back in the day, and this song, with it’s macabre solo in the middle (is that guy playing an electric guitar with a violin bow?) and wolves on the hunt is like manna for my ears.
9. Don’t Fear the Reaper, Blue Oyster Cult: Another band with only two songs that I like (the other is, of course, Burning For You), but those two I like intensely. Great lyrics that are imminently quotable in the horror novel of your choice.
10. No More Tears, Ozzy Osbourne: I’ve never been a big fan of Ozzy, not like some of my friends were in high school. I liked the Randy Rhodes stuff, Crazy Train and such, but none of it was what might be counted as my favorites. But for some reason, after I’d already given Ozzy up for washed-up, I bought No More Tears and discovered he still had one more album in him. Mr. Tinkertrain is great, too.
11. Honorable Mention: Orgasmatron, Motorhead: I don’t like many Motorhead songs, but the lyrics of Orgasmatron are brutal, wicked. This is the hardest rock song that ever was.

If my house was on fire, these are the records I would go back in to get. Picking my top ten albums of all time is a tough chore. For a record to even qualify I have to at least like every song on it, and that’s rare; very, very rare. Sometimes my favorite albums are compilations and soundtracks, for that reason. Here’s the list:

1. Alice In Chains, Dirt
2. Metallica, …And Justice For All
3. Motley Crue, Too Fast for Love
4. Metallica, Load/Re-Load
5. The Crow Soundtrack
6. The Matrix Soundtrack
7. Soundgarden, Superunknown
8. Boats, Beaches, Bars and Ballads, Jimmy Buffett
9. Led Zeppelin, Boxed Set
10. Bob Marley, Legend

And, lastly, my wife, who is a therapist, tells me that everyone should have a couple of personal theme songs for themselves (hers are “Dancing Queen” by Abba and “Walk Like a Camel” by Southern Culture on the Skids). Mine are:

Interstate Love Song by Stone Temple Pilots and Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue. Do you have a theme song?

written by Matt Mitchell

I’m basically a rock guy. I like my music up-tempo or just down right hard and fast. But, depending on the time of year I also love to venture out into other, more obscure, genres. Winter is the time for blues. In spring it’ll be zydeco, in summer, reggae. But ol’ man winter is a bluesman, and not just any ol’ blues, Delta blues, from the place where the genre was born.

It’s a genre that was bred from the depression of a people, and a struggle against hardship, and it’s a genre that hasn’t met with very much commercial success. For true commercial success you’d of course have to head on up to Chicago and St. Louis, where blues was performed in a more palatable style for the masses to enjoy rather than brood over. Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson are of course the most notable Delta blues musicians, but there’s a crop of new blood circulating lately, and one of them, known as T-Model Ford, is getting down and dirty with his interpretation of the blues.

T-Model Ford is a bluesman, a murderer, and admitedly can’t read or write, but he can sing with that gravelly voice that is sometimes focused with rage, sometimes softened with misery. His sessions sound like they were recorded in a closet, and generally his only accompanying instrument, other than his own guitar, is a snare drum. You’re not going to hear sappy gospel music from T-Model, his feelings about the church are evident in the song “Let the Church Roll On.” The whole “Bad Man” CD is highly recommended, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be hooked as soon as you hear the opening song, “Ask Her For Water.” Clearly he doesn’t have the downright genius of Robert Johnson, few do, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable modernization of a genre that’s fading fast.

From the Fat Possum website, where the CD is available for purchase, here is T-Model Ford’s bio, which is pretty good reading in itself (Bonus! They’re having an everything $10 sale!):

T-Model’s credentials are impeccable; if anything he’s over qualified. He was born James Lewis Carter Ford in Forrest, a small community in Scott County, Mississippi. T-Model thinks he’s seventy-five but isn’t sure. He was plowing a field behind a mule on his family’s farm by age eleven, and in his early teens he secured a job at a local sawmill. He excelled and was later recruited by a foreman from a bigger lumber company in the Delta, near Greenville, and eventually got promoted to truck driver. Between that and working in a log camp T-Model was sentenced to ten years on a chain-gang for murder. He lucked out and was released after serving two. He says, grinning, “I could really stomp some ass back then, stomp it good. I was a-sure-enough- dangerous man.”

Well, old times here are not forgotten. T-model is constantly arguing playfully with Stella, his girlfriend, about their more violent disagreements. When asked how many times he’d been to jail, T-Model responded, “I don’t know. How many?” He seemed to think it might be a trick question. Upon realizing it wasn’t, he answered to the best of his ability. “Every Saturday night there for awhile.”

As disheartening as this is, it’s also a refreshing reminder of how ridiculous the present image of a bluesman is. Nothing could be more twisted that the romanticized and picturesque standard; and old black man devoid of anger and rage happily strumming an acoustic guitar on the back porch of his shack “in that evening sun”. Three quarters of a century old, and with a dislocated hip, T-Model Ford is the only musician making his debut who could just as easily be starring in the most competitive branch of the National Wrestling Federation: The Cage Match.

Although Fat Possum makes it it’s business to trod some wild paths, the wildest yet has to be the one that T-Models drummer, Spam, lives on. We stopped en route to New York City just as Spam’s girlfriend walked out of the door dragging an oxygen tank and holding a cigarette in her other hand-a situation that could have been easily blown out her rib cage if not the entire block. Spam didn’t care about that, though. He was worried she might snip off the tips of his fingers with a box cutter again.

Tommy Lee Miles to the authorities, Spam to his friends, he has been T-Model’s A-number-one drummer for the past eight years. Sam Carr and Frank Frost, T-Model’s old friends, were brought in for one session. But the guest musician’s smiles gave way to scowls as T-Model’s constant refrain (”T-Model Ford is going to remember you sorry fuckers how it’s done”) became more and more emphatic. Seconds before “Been a Long Time” was recorded, Frank Frost felt compelled to sate, “I want everyone to know that I’m now playing against my will.”

T-Model and Spam are the only men still playing on Greenville’s Nelson Street. Most of the audience has scattered due to violence from the crack trade, and with the exception of T-Model, the street that once boasted Booba Barnes and others is dead. On a typical night Spam and T-Model will arrive at the club and unpack T-Model’s guitar and amp, and the bass drum and snare he allows Spam to use. When T-Model feels there are enough people, they start banging away in their own post-war Peavey-powered hill stomp. It’s nothing unusual for T-Model to play eight hours a night. They keep going until no one’s left standing. After his equipment’s packed up T-Model will coat himself with Outdoorsman Off and climb into his van to crash.

As an added note to Sirius: I know you have blues channels, but would it kill you to add a little Delta blues to your playlist?

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blues, bluesman, delta, delta blues, Fat Possum, Mississippi, T-Model Ford

I really liked the show Northern Exposure, particularly the Chris in the Morning radio bits. One of the primary reasons for this, of course, is because the show had really, really excellent writers, who were philosophers at heart. Wikipedia instructs us:

Northern Exposure’s flavor came from a combination of various influences. The show’s creators, Joshua Brand and John Falsey, were members of the Esalen Institute in California where an eclectically “spiritual” worldview was presented, best exemplified in the writings of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and American anthropologist/mythologist Joseph Campbell (whose works are frequently referenced in the series). There are also fantasy elements inherited from the works of Carlos Castaneda and the magical realism novels and stories of Latin American author Gabriel Garc’a M’rquez. Both creators were also conversant with classical Russian Literature. This characteristic is evident in the satirical elements from the show that are hallmarks of the Russian literary grotesque style of such authors as Gogol and Dostoevsky.

I won’t lie; I don’t know who half of those people are, but it still sounds cool, especially when you consider those are the influences on a (purely fiction) low-power AM morning radio program.

Now I’m also a Sirius radio subscriber, although I’m kind of wishing for better content there. Sure, I like a lot of the music channels, but I don’t listen to Howard Stern and I really don’t like the quality of today’s morning radio in general. I wonder that nobody emulates what the NEx writers did with the KBHR skits. It seems like a no-brainer to me, of course I can certainly understand that there aren’t many philosophers out there waiting in the wing to work on a morning radio program. I’m caught up in a morning radio funk, I guess. All the local channels are filled with guffawing idiots, Sirius is strictly music unless you like Stern or political talk (I don’t), and that leaves sports radio, which is fine sometimes but gets old after awhile (especially during the off season). I won’t go on about what a great idea it would be for Sirius to emulate Chris in the Morning radio show on Cicely, Alaska’s KBHR from the television program Northern Exposure… :-)

Maybe a podcast? I would love to find a quality podcast, but so far I’ve had zero luck with podcasting. Well, maybe not zero, because I do like Escape Pod. But that’s the only one so far. If anyone knows of any good podcasts or radio shows I might pick up on the internet, I’m listening.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Alaska, Chris, Cicely, Escape Pod, Exposure, KBHR, morning, NEx, Northern, Podcast, Radio, show

This music has balls. Think Molly Hatchet meets Soil. Good viking music to slay by. And to think these guys are from Toronto and play southern “doom” rock. I love it. More.

written by Matt Mitchell