A quick thought on a windy day...

...does the guy who wrote that "You Had A Bad Day" song sit atop a pile of money (I'm picturing gold coins, priceless jewels, dubloons even) like Smaug the Dragon? Either that, or I'm betting he has his own automated Seinfeld-ish check printer in his house that spits out a check for a hundred bucks every ten minutes or so...

AVG now shows this site as a safe one with no active threats in a google search. Hopefully badstuff is squashed. Lemme know if you get any popups, malware, or other tomfoolery when visiting though.

Housekeeping..

So yeah, somewhere this page picked up some nasty malware. I haven't the foggiest where it's from (and if you have ideas, send me an email!); there was originally something that I'm pretty sure was related to a dead link I had on the links section. A buddy let his blog expire and a pretty intrusive domain squatter grabbed it.

At any rate, I've cleared out *all* the links on the template. I've also nuked about 95% of all the files I had hosted, so mp3 files from back when are probably dead links now. Stuff of recent vintage I deleted, ran the original through ESET Nod32, and then re-uploaded, just to be safe.

Hopefully this kills the intrusive spammy malware dead. If not, I'll figure something else out.

Finally, hope everyone had a great holiday, whichever holiday you celebrate. Mine was pretty great, actually. I'm home now, and back to work on a top 10 records of 2008!

Listen Up, Ebenezer! (Christmas Mix 2008)

Listen Up Ebenezer!(Christmas Mix 2008) <--------click me to download

Track list: (c'mon, peeking before you listen through it once is like opening your presents on the 23rd!)

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1. "Velvet Santa" Divide & Kreate (with The Velvet Underground & Jackson 5)
2. "Purple Snowflakes" Marvin Gaye
3. "Champagne Of Christmas" The Fleshtones
4. "Sleigh Ride" The Ronettes
5. "Winter Wonderland" Liz Phair
6. "Welcome Christmas" The Clumsy Lovers
7. "Winter On Victoria Street" The Clientele
8. "Back Door Santa" The Black Crowes
9. "Presents For Christmas" Solomon Burke
10. "(Another Rainy Day) December Blues" The Americans feat. The Dap Kings Horns
11. "It's Christmastime Ebenezer" The Len Price 3
12. "Egg Nog" Luna
13. "A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" Glasvegas
14. "Christmas With The Snow" Marah Featuring Felicia Navidad
15. "Your Christmas Whiskey" The Minus 5
16. "Christmas Train" The Bellrays
17. "Home For The Holidays" The dB's
18. "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Fantasy" John Fahey
19. "Wintertime In Hollywood" The Lovetones
20. "Baby It's Cold Outside" Dean Martin w/ Martina McBride
21. "Man In The Santa Suit" The Fountains Of Wayne
22. "Blue Christmas" Chris Isaak
23. "Let It Snow" Los Straitjackets
24. "Soul Christmas" James Brown
25. "Waking On Christmas" The Smithereens
26. "O Little Town Of Bethlehem" The Young Fresh Fellows
27. "Christmas Time is Here" Ivy
28. "Fairytale Of New York" The Pogues

Happy Holidays Everyone! I'll try to get around to getting individual tracks posted soon!

Merry flippin' Christmas

Mix is done, and mailed.

If I can work up the desire, I'll post it here eventually. Right now though I'm just sick and tired of being called an asshole by people, so there's that.

Addendum: Hell is other people. Thank God I'm off for the next two days.

Hosed by history.

So tonight I watched the George C. Scott 1984 version of "A Christmas Carol" with some fine folks to get me in the proper mood to finish off this albatross of a Christmas mix in time for the holidays. It worked, mostly. But at some point as Ebenezer bounded down the street to see his nephew Fred, an odd thought popped into my head:

Ebenezer Scrooge has been demolished and utterly screwed over by history.

Think about it: if I say that someone is a "scrooge", you immediately think of a person who is grouchy, stingy, self-centered, and downright mean. Grinchy, even (and hey, that Grinch got hosed, too!) Yep, Scrooge has come to be synonymous with the cynics and haters at Christmas time...which is a total sham, if you're Ebenezer Scrooge's press agent.

Check out the end of Dickens' immortal story:

"Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world...and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge."

So yeah, you're Ebenezer Scrooge, and you're rehabbed, baby. Your life has turned a 180, and people dig you and dig your scene and nobody is more generous and happy than you...and yet your name is in the thesaurus for "stingy" and "miserly". Is that a raw deal or what? Apparently his ability to keep Christmas wasn't always said of him at all, or if it was, it's been forgotten.

I probably shouldn't post under the influence of cold meds and lack of sleep.

Listus Interruptus, and more David Werner.

Hey all, just a note that I'm putting the list on a hiatus of a couple of days. I really, really, REALLY need to finish up my Christmas Mix, and that's not happening while I'm working on a top 20. So I'm changing focus for a bit. Listing will return in a day or so, mostly because the longer I think on it, the more excited I am about the top 2 artists on my list. That comment about things being weak compared to other years I made when I started? Yeah, throw that out the window once we get to the top 5 or 8 or so, and the top two are records that have, over the last week or two, really hit me like a ton of bricks. Haven't seen much buzz about either, so I'm kinda stoked to pimp them out.

At any rate, if you were reading this over the summer, maybe you remember me doing a post on David Werner, who cut a couple of never-on-cd-or-digital albums back in the 1970's that sound absolutely incredible when given a fair listen today. I was on vacation visiting family back in Missouri when Steve posted an excellent comment. I missed it then. Thankfully, an anonymous commenter just also commented on that post about David Werner, and I finally saw Steve's comment as well. Both fellows wrote some really excellent things, and I'm going to post their comments in full right here. First up, Steve, who has been playing in bands and selling records for decades around St. Louis. Take it, Skitch:

Kid,
Was very happy to read your post on Mr. Werner. Whizz Kid remains the best known of his three albums, probably because everyone who ever owned it during it's day never paid more than a dollar or two tops for it. Whizz Kidd was one of the most golden of all cut-outs during The Golden Age Of Cut-Outs 1972-1980. EVERY greater cut-out bin across the country, whether it be a record store, a K-Mart, or your corner drug store, ALWAYS had plenty of copies of Whizz Kid.

But as great and classic a record as Whizz Kid is, David Werner's true artistic triumph and masterpiece is his second album, Imagination Quota. I've always felt that IQ was the great post-Ziggy pre-Berlin trilogy record Bowie WISHED he could have made. After the failure of the much-hyped by RCA first album, Werner and incredible partner/guitarist Mark Doyle (who a crazy old rock critic friend of mine once described as "A baroque Jeff Beck...")knew the success they were promised was not going to materialize, so they just went for it and made the record THEY wanted to make. And the results were so amazing. The lone audio offering from IQ on David's myspace page is thankfully it's crowning achievement: "Cold Shivers." The best damn song he ever wrote. For me no other song has ever come close to capturing what it felt like to be a suburban teenager in 1975 locked in his room night after night, listening to records and reading CREEM and Melody Maker and Phonograph Record Magazine cover to cover. Yep, that was me, and you bet I felt every last one of the words of "Cold Shivers"--DEEPLY! Werner totally nailed what it felt like back then to be a fan of the more out of the mainstream rock of the day. I had always automatically assumed the song was Werner's fan letter to Bowie, but when I met Werner in 1980 (more on that in a minute) he told me it was about Mick Jagger.

Imagination Quota easily stands shoulder to shoulder with every great recognized classic album from the '70's. Trust me whizz kids, it really is THAT GREAT. The only problem with the record is so very few people heard it then when it came out, and even fewer people have heard over the 30+ years since. Even by the more generous and sympathetic commercial and marketplace '70's standards, IQ died an astonsihing quick death. It was obvious RCA had given up on it even before they released it, so they pressed very few copies and gave it no support. So unlike the label hyped Whizz Kid, IQ was never really out there from the beginning, many Werner fans didn't even know it was out, and unlike Whizz Kid as well, scant few copies made their way to the cut-out bins for post failure discovery by curious shoppers. A true rock tragedy. So needless to say, Imagination Quota forever remains at the top of my list of records I'd love to see on cd someday.

But hey, self-titled album #3 brought renewed hope for us Werner fans. At the height of the put-a-skinny-tie-on-it-and-call-it-nu-wave era, Werner was back with a big sounding hard rocking record (the heavy noise-gated sound of Bob Clearmountain and his Power Station studio, who after making his reputation on Springsteen's The River album, was quickly becoming the hippest American record producer at the time) and a big label (Epic) giving it a big push. Oh Epic worked the album like hell, got it a lot of radio airplay, and even got Werner an appearance on American Bandstand. But in the end the record was just a little too heavy and hard rocking for the nu-wavers, and a little too pop for the hard rockers, so it never found a large audience. It was definitely different from his first two records, and he was clearly trying to make as commercial for the times a record as he could, which of course led to a lot of his original fans not liking it, but I loved it! I was working at Streetside Records at the time, and I went to great lengths trying to put the record into the purchasing arms of as many customers as I could---often succeeding. :)

And if you ever came to town/You'd probably never wanna come around

Well unlike those classic lyrics from "Cold Shivers," David Werner DID come to town!!! Yep, he played the old Mississippi Nights here in St. Louis on his tour for the third record. On the afternoon of the show, the local Columbia rep brought him by the store to meet the retail folks, as was the practice back in that day. My boss, bless his heart, knew what a fanatic I was, so he let me leave the sales floor so I could hang with Werner. And then it was just me & Werner in my boss' office, where for the next hour I turned into total nerd fanboy as David patiently answered every fanboy question I had stored up over the years for him. :) He was a sweetheart and a total class act.

And the show that night was fucking PHENOMENAL! He played every last song every fanatic in the crowd wanted to hear---including a version of "Cold Shivers" that had me in tears. And Doyle was fantastic too, every bit as great an onstage foil for Werner as Ronson was for Bowie. Such a shame that Doyle spent the rest of the '80's in Meatloaf's touring band, he deserved better. The show that night not only exceeded any and all expectations, but dig the total icing on the cake: The drummer in Werner's band that night was none other than His Majesty Thom Mooney from THE NAZZ!!! That's right---Thom fucking Mooney! Yeah baby!

Then "Anonymous" chimes in today with:

Actually Werner was from Pittsburgh, he hated LA, thought it was "plasticland." As Steve S. noted, IMAGINATION QUOTA remains a great lost LP of the 70s. Those of us "who knew" did what we could--when I worked in LA record stores we used to put that LP on the box all the time, got the manager to keep ordering it until the meagre supplies were gone from the rack-jobbers, etc. Maybe 100 more people found out about it that way. Definitely needs to be released on CD.

Have to disagree about the best stuff on the LP, though. Title track is much meatier, and gives Mark Doyle some room for an awesome closing solo; no such room on "Cold Shivers," a good song but paint-by-numbers. Virtually everyone who we turned onto it in 76-77-78 thought the second side was the bomb--Talk, Starlight's Gone, Aggravation, Body & Soul--incredibly versatile songwriting and arranging, four different styles flowing together seamlessly.

It's worth the $20 or so on eBay. Just buy it, you'll thank me later.

I'm pretty sure I still like Whizz Kid more than Imagination Quota, but yeah, that means I've listened to both. (And while I first kinda dismissed the title track from IQ for pretty obviously stealing the melody line from "No More Mr. Nice Guy", now that I listen to it again, I think I hear what Anonymous was talking about; that said, "Cold Shivers" is still my favorite track on the second album.) Thanks to the efforts of PopCat at Vinyl Treasures, I'm thinking it's early Christmas present time for 'Narc readers. Just as he did with the first disc, PopCat did an absolutely incredible job ripping Imagination Quota from the vinyl. I think the source vinyl here was in a little worse shape than the source lp for his Whizz Kid rip, but hell, the occasional hiss and pop just adds to the charm here.

First off, a couple of sample tracks:

"Cold Shivers"
"Imagination Quota"

And finally, thanks to PopCat's excellent rip, here's the whole album, in a .zip file.

Enjoy! I'm gonna go try to find some more Christmas toonz.

Best of 2008, 13-15....

15. Why?, Alopecia

Why?, the vehicle for Oakland free spirit Yoni Wolf is the kind of band that drives folks who need their music pigeonholed by genre to distraction. Is what they do rap or hiphop? They record for the avant-hop label Anticon, and Wolf is an inventive if vulgar rhymer...but especially now on Alopecia Why? is essentially a sort of indie rock band, with Wolf mostly singing with a his laconic, John Flansburg-ish nasal voice.

Alopecia definitely presents Why? as a rock band. These are songs that won't be too unfamiliar to any indie rock fan...and Why? carries it off with deep beats and grooves that wend slyly through the proceedings. The result is a terrific mashup of genres that, while having been tried before, probably haven't been blended this well since the first Basehead album almost 20 years ago. Things tend to wander around a bit, but Wolf is a wonderful ring master for what could become chaos but doesn't. He's right on top of things with his inventive if frequently crude (Wolf can make you squirm) lyrics and wordplay.

The danger for Why? (and frankly, for too many folks on the Anticon label) is getting too tied up in the intellectual/artistic statement part of what they do. What makes Alopecia special is that while it is a wholly-satisfying intellectual work of art, it also just sounds damned good.

"The Vowels, Pt. 2"
"The Hollows"
"These Few Presidents"

14. Skipping Girl Vinegar, Sift The Noise.

If you describe an album as uplifting or ascribe to it the cardinal rock sin of happiness, it evokes a sort of effervescent giddiness, so I want to be careful in how I praise this wonderful, gloriously charming debut from Melbourne's SGV. Is it a happy record? Well, yes. Sort of. See, it isn't the "happiness without strings" happy of early Beach Boys. Rather there's a certain lingering sadness and weariness lingering at the edges of Sift The Noise that seem to evidence that this record--which sounds effortless--probably took years and years and years and years to make. The "happiness" of it is more the happiness of a guy on a life-raft who's weathered some terrible storms (which he'd rather not talk about, thanks) to finally find rescue.

And so with that in mind, I will state that the title track here is one of the most gloriously ebullient songs you'll ever hear. SGV tends to veer towards more acoustic material on the rest of the disc, but even there lead singer/songwriter Mark Lang is able to carry things off. What helps immeasurably is his ability to channel a vocal sound not at all unlike a young Peter Case (see "River Road" especially; that song could be an outtake from Case's first solo album). If the middle of Sift The Noise is quiet and acoustic and pastoral, they find a sweet blue-eyed soul groove again on "Sinking", before finishing with two lovely songs, "Drove For Miles" and the meditative "The Passing". SGV won't change the world, but it might change yours, or at least your mood for a few hours. They're the kind of band for whom it's easy to root for, and one hopes the success they've found in Australia eventually becomes a worldwide thing.

"One Chance" (Seriously, that could be Peter Case singing...
"Sift The Noise"

13. Novillero, A Little Tradition

Let me get this out of the way first: Novillero's Aim Right For The Holes In Their Lives, which came out in 2005, was not only my favorite record of that year, it might be my favorite record of the 2000's. It showed a raucous, gritty side along with an ability to carry off songs with surpassingly brilliant melodies and topical, on-target socio-political lyrics. Waiting three years for a followup probably had me placing unattainable expectations on A Little Tradition. So what do we have here? Well, we have a good disc, one that, if you're just discovering Novillero, might sound like one of the year's best. For me it was a bit disappointing, as the Memphis/Muscle Shoals soulful moves of the previous disc seem much more muted here. I could take up this capsule review by talking about what Tradition didn't do for me, but that wouldn't be the point here.

What it does have, then, are some of the best songs of the year. The one-two punch of "Life In Parentheses" and the title track are wonderful, especially the reggae syncopation of the latter. If things sag a little in the middle, "Plastic Flag" does yeoman work propping them back up. "Paco Rabanne" is a terrific instrumental, and the record closes strong with "The Printed Word (Sucks For Inflection)" and "Far From Too Far", the latter song possessing one of the great piano hooks Rod Slaughter's ever written. I'll be very interested to see how Novillero carries forward. They recently saw their bassist and occasional singer and songwriter Grant Johnson left the group right after after the disc came out. Fellow Winnipegger Rej Ricard from the wonderful Telepathic Butterflies joined Novillero to tour, but I suppose it's an open question on whether he'll contribute actively to future recorded output. I'd like to see it, that's for sure.

"A Little Tradition"
"The Printed Word (Sucks For Inflection)"
"How Far Is Too Far"

Top 20 Records of 2008 Countdown

Well, I suppose it's time for a list, huh?

Lemme preface by saying that 2008 was kind of a crappy year for music. For me it was full of disappointments (musically, I should say); favorites of mine like Marah and Louis XIV put out laughably dreadful records, and folks like The Hold Steady, Paul Weller and Jeff Hanson put out discs that seemed rather uninspired or unexciting. There were a bunch of discs that had a handful of good songs, but failed to deliver even enough kicks to put the album on this list. New Radiant Storm King, Elvis Costello, The Maybes, Airborne Toxic Event...I'm talkin' boutchoo.

I can't help but think as I look over my list for this year that only perhaps a handful of the discs on it would crack the top 20 from previous years. Perhaps they would, and I'm just a grumpy old man, which lies as a distinct possibility.

Before proceeding, I once again offer the caveat that these are my favorite discs of the year, the ones that I personally think are the best. You may disagree, and you probably should. I will also this year mention that since my days as a college radio DJ and record store flunky, I've always maintained that I am not a music fan. I am a rock and soul fan, and music is a much broader category that includes genres (like folk, opera, and most classical stuff) that just doesn't interest me much. This year had at least two big releases that seem to be on every critic's year-end list: Bon Iver's "For Emma Forever Ago" and Fleet Foxes' debut disc. Both are very nice records and do what they set out to do very well. I think they're both folk albums, and both honestly lie so far outside my personal taste that rather than try to shoehorn them into a list here, and rather than try to figure out where they belong, I've left them off. Those are lovely records, but for me they have as much to do with rock as Rachmaninoff. You kids get off my lawn, too.

Now that I've pissed everyone off right from the get-go, here's 20 through 16. Mea culpa.

20. The Weather Machines--"Bones & Brains" EP.

I'll kick this list off with a piece of music I had no idea how to categorize. I hate to set the precedent of putting a non-longplaying record into this list, but by the same token, the Weather Machines EP is probably the most coherent start-to-finish rock and roll record to come out this year.

We've had some great, historical EP's in the past: The Grifters "Eureka" EP stands as perhaps the single greatest indie rock testament ever released, a perfect encapsulation of the best of what 1990's lofi could do. U2's "Under A Blood Red Sky" was a stirring live document of a band on the cusp of massive superstardom. So here's the thing: I'd put "Bones & Brains" in that same exclusive company. It shows The Weather Machines (who seem to be now just Jason Ward and whomever he enlists as musical help) to be an artist with the potential to be an all-timer.

I always wonder how a band with a stunning debut (and the Weather Machines' Sounds Of Pseudoscience was fantastic) will follow that up. The first record is always the easiest, you see--you get all sorts of time to plan it out, play songs live and see which ones work the best in front of audiences, critics, and friends. The songs on a debut album are usually the 10-20% best songs a band has written in the time getting the first record out...and then suddenly they've got another record to do, and there's no time and all sorts of pressure. Jason Ward responded to those factors with "Bones & Brains" by firing off five songs that pull some sort of crazy magic trick. They show an artistic growth and maturity beyond anything I thought the Weather Machines capable of. To put it another way, this EP is clearly as much Jason Ward as the debut album, but it also sounds like that band covering someone else. I think I'm babbling, so I'll try to make some sense: the first three tracks on "Bones & Brains" are the best 1-2-3-4 punch on any record that came out this year, and things don't go far astray with the closer, either. If Jason Ward is able to deliver a full album of songs like this, we're looking at one of the most important rock and roll finds to come down the pike in recent memory.

You can hear very quiet samples of the entire EP here; sign up for a no-fuss free account (really, you should, it brings new meaning to "no hassle") and you can download the entire thing for free.

You can hear these songs as well at the Weather Machines Myspace page:
http://myspace.com/theweathermachines (The new songs there are the first three on the EP: "Parts Of Speech", "202", and "New Soft Archetype". That last song is just un-freaking-believably good--when that guitar lick comes in after the second chorus (1:47 or so), it might be my favorite rock and roll moment of the year. The song just defies you to NOT dance around the room to it.)

19. Black Bunny S/T

What was it I was saying before about records that have only a few good songs on them? That sort of applies to the debut album from Brooklyn's Black Bunny, but doesn't exactly fit. See, it isn't that there are bad songs on this album, just that there aren't any that live up to the stunning opener, a song called "Hero" that somehow manages to sound like "Creep"-era Radiohead covering Calexico or Ennio Morricone. Black Bunny features singer/songwriter Brandon Wilde, who had a stab at the brass ring years ago with a fairly un-noteworthy band called Thisway; he's scaled things back and clearly developed as an artist.

For one thing, he's abandoned the strict tenets of his power-pop origins. In addition to the Morricone-flourishes on "Hero", he's able to record the best Wilco song Wilco never wrote on "This Is Nowhere", and he gives "Survival" and "My Time" a gravitas that wasn't present at any other point in his work. It makes the whole album worthwhile, even if "Hello" is a little bit obvious (try getting that "Getting Better All The Time" hook out of your head, though!) and "Digital Bystander" doesn't work as well as it might. You'll keep going back for "Hero" though. That song is one of the best tunes of 2008, a song that just builds and builds and builds to a climax that delivers one of the best goosepimple/hair-on-end moments of the year...and then goes back again on the coda to do it again. Keep an eye on Brandon Wilde and Black Bunny.

"Hero"
The lovely, countrified "Love Unknown"
"This Is Nowhere"

18. Glasvegas, S/T

I'm breaking one of my own rules this year to fill up the top 20 with 20 good records and putting some import-only discs into the mix. Fear not, fellow Yanks--one criteria of mine for this was that the imports in question had to at least be easily available for digital purchase and download. Such is the case with Scotland's Glasvegas, who have a US label (Sony/Columbia/BMG) who seem determined to botch the domestic release next year of a record that has exploded on the British charts.

What Glasvegas does seems so stupidly obvious that you wonder why they're the ones with the massive buzz: they draw on inspirations from rock's classic period--Presley, Spector, Buddy Holly--and then bring the whole thing up to date with a wall of loud guitars that aren't just fuzzy (like Jesus & Mary Chain) but also jaggedy and challenging. The result is a completely winning debut, a self-assured and timeless bit of rock music that's built around the same old basic building blocks, but then blasted into a new universe by deft songwriting and challenging arrangements. If the wonderful "Geraldine" sounds like something a number of bands could've managed, "Go Square Go" has an all-over-the-place careen to it that shouldn't work but does, and that's all Glasvegas.

"Go Square Go"
"Geraldine"
"Daddy's Gone"

17. Magnolia Summer, Lines From The Frame

So let's say you're a fan of the Jayhawks, who managed two or three of the best rustic rock albums of the last dozen years or so until they finally petered out after edging to close to the blandest sins of Crosby, Stills & Nash or the Eagles. If you're a fan, perhaps it was exciting that this year former Jayhawks Gary Louris and Mark Olsen put out a record together. That disc is pretty good. What I'm here to tell you is that Lines From The Frame by Magnolia Summer is better, and will scratch that Hollywood Town Hall itch better than the originals will.

MagSummer is the vehicle for Undertow Records label manager Chris Grabau; material I've heard from him in the past has sounded good, but really didn't stick with me. Grabau has a wonderful tenor voice like a cool Missouri wind blowing through one of those endless fields along highway 70, and that's always been an asset for him. On this new record though, he does a very smart thing: he enlists some new blood into the band and brings them front and center. As a result, Kevin Buckley's strings take over a few songs in breathtaking fashion ("Diminished Returns", and the glorious final two minutes of "By Your Side"). Kelly Kneiser of Glossary adds some backing vocals (she turns "Birds On A Wire" into a de-facto duet by matching up perfectly with Grabau's heartfelt vocals over Dave Anderson's mournful pedal steel). There's also the indelible stamp of Finn's Motel frontman Joe Thebeau (who plays guitar in Magnolia Summer and got co-producer credit on this record), who gently urges Grabau to the best hooks he's ever written. Lines From The Frame is easily the best country-tinged rock album of 2008.

Hear the whole thing here, for free.

16. Hysterics S/T

The hook here is obvious--Hysterics are/were a bunch of guys barely out of high school who'd been playing as a band together since before they could drive. Oliver Ignatius and Charlie Klarsfeld played guitar, wrote, and sang these songs which actually got them a ton of buzz back in 2005 or so....

...and then what? The band got this disc done in 2007 to distribute at shows, but didn't get it out to the public until 2008, and by that time it seems as if the moment has passed. The band did a little bit of touring and then went on what seems like an indefinite hiatus, with Klarsfeld spending most of his time with the wondeful blue-eyed soul stirrings of The Americans (keep an eye on them!), while Ignatius seems to be working on new songs in relative privacy.

So what do we have here? We've still got a wonderful pop album that shows off some amazing talent and chops, no matter the ages of those involved. "Radical Chic" is still one of the best songs you'll hear this year, and "Mostly Untitled", "You Tell Yourself It's Easy", and "What Swallows A Waterfall" are almost as good. I can't think that we've heard the last of the talented lads from Hysterics, even if it'll be in other incarnations in the future. Still, grab this worthy document of where they started before they eventually arrive.

"Radical Chic"
"Mostly Untitled"
"What Swallows A Rainbow"

The Life And Hard Times Of Guy Terrifico

You there. You like the Flying Burrito Brothers or "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"-era Byrds? Listen up, yo!

Way, way, way back in the 1960's, a Canadian prairie kid named Jim Jablowski had two pieces of luck hit him--one good, one bad. He won the largest lottery sum every awarded in Canada at that point (almost $8m). Jablowski had wanted to use the money to get a musical career started (he'd written and recorded a few songs of questionable quality, only one of which, a bizarre tune called "Perogie Moon" survives), but at a party at one of many parties to celebrate his good fortune Jablowski was kicked in the head by a rented horse (don't ask) and nearly killed. Waking up from a coma and seemingly newly-inspired, he decided to continue his music career under the name Guy Terrifico.

Forgive me for referring to Terrifico as Canada's answer to Gram Parsons, because that isn't exactly accurate. Sure, Terrifico blended rock and country idioms and sang in a wonderful high lonesome tenor...but Parsons for all his messed-up ways seemed to have his life in better order than Guy Terrifico. Terrifico was a legendary drunk on the order of Hank Williams Sr, showing up for TV shows (like the nationally broadcast Horton Family Jamboree from Nashville) drunk and behaving erratically. Terrifico recruited an ace band including Donnie Fritts, who'd go on to play keys with Dylan, Ray Charles, and most famously Kris Kristofferson, and Ronnie Hawkins, but managed only a handful of singles before a disastrous performance at the Isle Of Wight festival in 1970 sent him into obscurity. Tragically, as Terrifico was launching a comeback a few years later, he was shot dead onstage at a small club in Vancouver...and that should've been the end of the story.

...except people began to discover Terrifico's music posthumously, and a few badly compiled collections sold reasonably well. Fans have rumored for years that Terrifico staged his own death and that he was living comfortably off his remaining lottery jackpot winnings somewhere. A few years ago a demo tape recorded by someone called "Senor Fantastico" started making the rounds of some of the former band members of Terrifico's old entourage, and the music from "Fantastico" featured a familiar-sounding voice. No word on whether that demo will ever be released or have anything done with it (the demo has been extensively bootlegged at this point), but it did inspire the first comprehensive compilation of Guy Terrifico's erratic and short-lived music career, and the results are stunning. Here, check out a song:

"Going To The Country"

Yeah, right? Drunken idiot or not, Guy Terrifico had "something" going on. There's almost a Nick Drake quality to the song, but you can also hear the Gram Parsons thing happening, too (this is the "folkiest" Terrifico track; on others the pedal steel and piano really bring the Parsons/Burrito Brother comparisons to the forefront.) It'd be no stretch to call the remastered rediscovery of Guy Terrifico's career one of the great treasure finds in country-rock/outlaw country music history. In fact, you could say it loud and clear...if any of the stuff I had just written was true.

It isn't. The paragraphs above are a brief intro into a Canadian indie-cinema film called "The Life And Hard Times Of Guy Terrifico", a Spinal Tap-ish mockumentary that does indeed feature folks like Fritts, Ronnie Hawkins, Levon Helm of The Band, Kris Kristofferson, and the legendary Merle Haggard in wonderfully droll cameos. If you've no interest in the music or time, a lot of the insider jokes (which are basically, one assumes, people telling stories where "Guy Terrifico" is actually doing something Kristofferson or Haggard or Parsons or Hank Jr. really did back in the day) may leave you scratching your head, but the film has a winning goofiness. At the center of the movie is Guy Terrifico himself, played by former Flashing Lights frontman Matt Murphy (those of you with loooong memories will recall that the Flashing Lights debut album "Where The Change Is" as my favorite of 2000, and I still think it to be one of the best records of the last 10 years). Murphy wrote and recorded a bunch of the music for the film, and the stunning thing is....the music isn't just good, it's VERY good. Damn good in fact. Murphy actually plays it pretty straight with the music, leaving the broad humor for the film itself. The soundtrack of the movie has 16 of the best country-rock songs you're gonna hear this year (ok, it came out in 2007), and I can't recommend it enough.

More music sample-age:

http://www.myspace.com/guyterrifico

The movie trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHng9OXKtg0

The soundtrack is available at Emusic or also as an mp3 download from Amazon. Highly recommended!

Sorry for the absence, we're back!

Sorry for taking a month off, but sometimes life (wonderfully) gets in the way. Life is good, basically.

At any rate, I'm hard at work for the annual Pop Narcotic Christmas Mix, which should be coming your way in the next week or so. Also of course is the annual Narc top 20 albums of the year, and I'm working on that.

The Christmas mix is as fun as ever to do. That's relatively easy.

The top 20 albums though? Not so easy, not this year. Maybe I'm finally an old geezer, but 2008 is the first year in a long time--maybe since 1998 or so--that I've really had a rough time coming up with 20 albums that I'd call superlative. I've made a trial list, and can't help feel that perhaps any of the records from last year's list would top all but a handful on this year's list. Hmm.

One thing I'm waiting on, kind of. Yesterday I happened to visit the myspace page for The Living Blue, about whom I wrote back in April. At the top of their page they've got a blurb with album art for their star-crossed second album "Walk Talk Rhythm Roam" that promises a "Coming Soon!" self-release through iTunes, Emusic, Rhapsody, Amazon mp3, etc. Here's the thing: if this sucker makes it out in 2008, it's probably numero uno, or at least in the top 5. I'm sort of dawdling on my list to see whether I can call this a 2008 release or not, or whether instead 2009 kicks off with a bang from these guys.

At any rate, that's what's up in Popnarcoticland. We'll be around more, I promise.