Ooh, ooh, ah, ah
Ooh, ooh, yeah
Ooh, ooh, ah, ah
Ooh, ooh, yeah
Dennis Linde, “Hello, I Am Your Heart,” from Dennis Linde (Elektra, 1973)
I picked up this LP cheap at the Record Exchange a few weeks ago, and in the itinerant days that have followed it’s been my top pick for the portable turntable: lush folk-pop-rock from the man who produced two albums out of Mickey Newbury’s celebrated “trilogy” (now handsomely reissued by Drag City). This record is weird—on this song, I love the ka-pow percussion, the flute synthesizer, the fuzz guitar, everything played by Linde (1943–2006) himself—but although he’s been described as “a mystery man,” he wasn’t a total outsider. He wrote a raft of great songs for everyone from Roger Miller to John Denver to the Dixie Chicks (including the sweet revenge fantasy “Goodbye Earl,” the video of which stars Dennis Franz and Jane Krakowski) and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, alongside Don and Phil Everly. I consider this all pretty impressive for a guy who had to set up his studio in the woods.
Thunderegg at VCCA
Back from the Fletcher Tour, right in the middle of bringing the new record to the people, I’ve taken a quintessentially Eggish detour to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia, where until December 21 I’ll be working on still another facet of the Egg’s manifold rock plan: the Thunderegg History Lesson, formerly known as the Thunderbook.
1. New website
2. Release Platinum LP
3. Release Line Line4. Promote items 1–3
5. Bring the Egg to the people
6.ThunderbookThunderegg History Lesson
7. Thunderegg greatest-hits compilation (four-track era)
8. New batch of 14 tunes for February Album Writing Month
9. Blow everybody’s minds with the Line Line follow-up, C’mon Thunder (fall 2012)
Every working day, I’m sitting down at my desk and listening to the entire Thunderegg oeuvre (now 355 songs, not counting 102 outtakes) on shuffle. I write as I listen, trying to remember what things were like when each song was written. I think the song lyrics tell one part of the story, but there’s another narrative in there too, especially as the years go by. My job now is focusing on what, specifically, that larger narrative is. Personal definitions of success and failure? Finally not being a choirboy? The bittersweetness of missed connections, of losing people you love? Getting fucked up a lot? Whatever it is, soon there will be a new series of posts here. They’re going to be called Thunderegg History Lesson, and they’ll consist of an embedded Thunderegg song, drawn more or less at random from 1994 to 2011, along with some recollections. In time, these pieces will be stitched together to tell the stories of entire albums. Then I’m thinking that those larger stories can be stitched together to form a history of Thunderegg itself. That, of course, would be the Thunderbook. But I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. For now it’s just listening and remembering.
Filed under Egg, Thunderegg History Lesson
And so ends Retourty 2011.
“Retarty,” Victoria House, Beaumont, TX, 11/10/11. Tommy O’Brien, drums. Huge thank you to the Fletcher C. Johnson Band for taking me on the road with them for the past two weeks.
Thunderegg on No Pigeonholes Radio
Thunderegg on Don Campau’s No Pigeonholes Radio show
Tuesday nights throughout November, 8:00 P.M. PST
Don Campau is a legendary California DJ and musician who has been fighting for real underground music since 1969—his radio show on KKUP in Cupertino, begun in 1978 and named “No Pigeonholes” in 1985, was a hub of the cassette culture that flourished by word of mouth and through the mail in those days (and that certain hipsters today are eagerly attempting to resurrect, somewhat missing the point, by spending wads of cash on eBay for tapes of major-label albums). What’s even more cool is that for all his analog pedigree, Don has gone the high-tech route to continue to champion the weird, the lo-fi, the marginal, and the fiercely independent. His astonishing Living Archive of Underground Music, for instance, features loads of rips of otherwise absolutely unavailable 1980s and 1990s cassettes. Great stuff like this. And this. And this.
Along those lines, a version of No Pigeonholes is now broadcast every Tuesday at 8 P.M. PST through Berkeley’s underground-music stream LUVeR (that’s the Love Underground Visionary Revolution). And Thunderegg—whose first few albums were tapes, since CD-Rs weren’t readily available until The Envelope Pushes Back in 2000—is on the playlist throughout November. If you miss it this Tuesday, come back again next Tuesday. We’re proud to be a part of the show.
Filed under Egg
Verve (pre- “the”), 1992
Verve, “One Way to Go” (live, fall 1992)
During what I’ve come to realize must have been CMJ in fall 1992, Chris and I met up in the city for two nights of musical mayhem. Friday was the Fontana Records showcase at…was there once a place called the Academy? The bill included Ocean Colour Scene, Catherine Wheel, and House of Love, whose latest album at the time, Babe Rainbow, remains to my mind one of the lost classics of nineties rock. Not that I was able to enjoy the show completely, having smoked my first- and last-ever Winston red down to the bone, attempting to mask the waft of my doobage, and awakened moments later on my back in the men’s room with three bouncers leaning in on me. Chris swept in just in time, taking me out for some air (as he hoisted me up, I saw myself literally green in the bathroom mirror), and then finding us a nice spot in the balcony where I could ride out the rest of the show like a feeb.
Saturday night we caught Eugenius at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, but back when they were still called Captain America. It was a great show, and in most historic retellings would rate as a typical man-they-were-so-awesome-we-were-THERE experience. Except the problem was that afterward, as fast as we tried to get back to Manhattan, all we caught of the next item on our list, Verve at CBGB, was the last song: We got there and Richard Ashcroft was on his damn knees on the stage as Nick McCabe’s laser guitar shot the whole, mostly empty place up. “Gravity Grave.” They hadn’t even put out an album yet, nobody in the U.S. had heard of them, but all summer Chris and I had been obsessed with their single “Man Called Sun,” pumping it in whichever mom car we were able to cop, cruising around Princeton, back and forth from the video store and the bowling alley and the shore.
One song. One song was all we saw, all so we could catch Captain America/Eugenius first. Not to dis “Buttermilk,” which would make it onto a few mixtapes, but Verve—they hadn’t been forced to add the definite article in front of their name yet—was the point of the whole weekend and ended up being one of my guiding-star bands throughout college, and I’d always wonder what the rest of that short set had been like. Until this week, when I came across a bootleg at the Princeton Record Exchange that claims to feature tunes “Live in New York & London 1992.” No other information is provided. And if I am to believe it is true, none further, really, is needed. I was right about Nick McCabe’s laser beams. I can close my eyes and I’m there.
Sea Ray
Sea Ray (1997–2004) was a Brooklyn band at whose shows I could be counted upon to hoot out a “Whooo!” or two (and then to say, to whoever I was with, “You gotta go Whooo! every once in a while”). It was either that or clapping really loud while trying to hold your drink between your teeth, which by the end of the night would become challenging. That the six-piece group consisted of not just good friends but also my roommates (the family tree of 540 State Street will by necessity be the subject of a future post) was only half the story: They rocked. Not that it wasn’t fun to drink with them in the little curtained VIP area at the Bowery Ballroom after the show, but some of my most blissful moments with them came as I sat at the top of the basement stairs, listening to them practice on Sunday afternoons, when they didn’t know I was there. I miss Sea Ray. And so I was glad to see this video surface recently. Now I await the reunion.
New Thunderegg Pricing Plan
When we rolled out the new Egg music store, our board of directors spent countless sleepless nights debating the proper pricing plan. They finally came up with fifty cents per song, which they argued was a lot cheaper than iTunes, and then, considering that most of the albums have 20+ songs, they came up with the discount rate of $5 for a whole album. It seemed reasonable, the board took the model to the shareholders, I…I mean the shareholders voted, and on September 1, 2011, the plan went into action.
Now, after observing the standard 37-day review of practices, I have determined that the plan is inadequate. Free the Egg. The shareholders fired the board. I fired the shareholders. Everybody’s out of work. And we shall move forward with a pay-what-you-want system for high-quality digital downloads of complete albums, which I suspected was what we should’ve had in the first place. Physical copies, which are charming and rare and require postage, still will cost you—and everybody really ought to own Open Book—but starting today you can name your price for fourteen years of Thunderegg albums, from Larry to Where Are the Cars. (That includes $0.00, you cheap bastards.) Pow(d)er to the people!
Watching the playoffs with Matt Kemp
TheRealMattKemp Matt KempPizza man is broke down in the middle of the street!! Someone is gonna b mad!!
Filed under Baseball
Thank you, Das Klienicum
The Egg was featured in a long, amazing write-up on Germany’s das klienicum blog yesterday. Google Translate makes a complete hash of it, which is a shame because it appears that our homie Eike Klien’s style is both lyrical and highly pro-Thunderegg, hands-down my favorite kind of writing. For example, here’s the piece’s final sentence:
a hammer, a madness, until nothing here yet to have heard of this band. There is a lot to catch up. for you, for me, for everyone.
Damn straight! Thanks, Eike. More of Google Translate’s ruthlessly avant-garde prose after the jump.
Don Mattingly on the 2011 Dodgers
Thanks to Drew and Liesl for the sweet surprise gift.
Filed under Baseball
WRTC starting your Wednesday right
It brings me great pleasure to learn that the gospel of emergency hydration will be spread to the commuters of the greater Hartford area (and beyond) tomorrow morning. Our early-A.M. anthem “Glass of Water” plays on the Boris Show on WRTC at 9:30. You can listen online here. Or, if you’re in the area, tune in to 89.3 on your FM dial to hear the Egg cut through the real-live airwaves like
- a fat guy on a zipline
- a swiftly thrown Frisbee
- a frickin’ F-16
- a laser pointer directed straight at the word ROCK that was painted on the wall after you passed out
- a boomerang (if you e-mail Boris and tell him to play it again)
Filed under Egg
Talk Talk again again
I knew they believed in me. Until I picked this record up at a stoop sale yesterday, however, I did not know that they also do not believe in me. Mark Hollis can be so moody.
Magnolia Electric Co. could use a hand
I was sorry to read recently that Jason Molina, prolific songwriting leader of Magnolia Electric Co., one of my favorite head-nodding dual-guitar live bands, has been having a lot of health-related troubles over the past couple years. Apparently, and thankfully, he’s on the mend, but the whole ordeal has done a number on his finances. His people, trying to figure out ways to raise some money for him, have put up an excellent live show from 2007 that you can listen to here (the above picture comes from a show I went to at the old Knitting Factory in September 2006; Molina’s on the left, next to the guy who looks like me). If you can contribute a few bucks, you’ll get a download code. Here’s hoping it won’t be too long before Magnolia Electric is back up onstage doing its thing again—this show provides ample evidence that it did its thing extremely well.
Filed under Tunes
