Fluville Gazette Vol. 1 No. 1

I've been getting a little static lately from the readers of this blog about the lack of posting frequency here. This is a blog. It's not my job, but it feels like it. A few months ago I had to explain this to my son. He's kind of impressed at how many people actually read this (and I am too) but confused at how much time his Dad spends doing it. Today, on the phone, he asked me how to download the songs here.

So, rather than compose another one of my long winded and angular diatribes combining conspiracy theories of relativity with songs we love so much and the people who record them, I thought I might bring you all up to speed on some exciting new developments here at the Fluville Chamber of Commerce.

Well, not really. But that was fun to say.

Let's see.

Yesterday, I went to the dentist and left with one less tooth in my mouth. It's a drag, because I really liked that tooth. It reminded me of this song which I saw The Feelies perform last month, it was one the best shows I've seen by anyone in recent memory. It contains the following lines:

Next day I went to the dentist
He pulled some teeth
and I lost some blood

"Sedan Delivery" mp3
by Neil Young, 1979.
available on Rust Never Sleeps

"Sedan Delivery" mp3
by The Feelies, 1986.
from No One Knows EP
out of print

They also played a semi-obscure number by The Modern Lovers.

"I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms" mp3
by The Modern Lovers, 1976.
available on The Modern Lovers

When I got home, a little lighter in the jaw, I saw that I had received a package from the nice folks at Rhino containing the new batch of Replacements reissues. After you listen to these teaser tracks, just go and buy the damn things if you don't have them already. They are that good. I contributed a photograph to the Pleased to Meet Me reissue, and you can see and read all about it HERE and listen to one additional track.

"Waitress In The Sky" (alternate) mp3
by The Replacements, 1985.
available on Tim

"Tossin' and Turnin'" mp3
by The Replacements, 1987.
available on Pleased to Meet Me

"We Know the Night" (alternate) mp3
by The Replacements, 1989.
available on Don't Tell a Soul

"Attitude" (demo) mp3
by The Replacements, 1990.
available on All Shook Down

Okay, so then I went upstairs and and ate some very soft food in my very sore mouth, and watched the very excellent Johnny Cash's America on the A&E Biography Channel produced and directed by friends of Fluville, Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. You can buy the DVD next week HERE

In the meantime, enjoy this:

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" mp3
by Johnny Cash, 1975.
from John R. Cash
out of print

Oh, there are some very good interviews in the film by a number of artists including these people:

"Violin Bums" mp3
by James Luther Dickinson, 2006.
available on Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger

"Killing Him" mp3
by Amy LaVere, 2007.
available on Anchors & Anvils

"Marching To The City" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (Deluxe)

"In The Jailhouse Now" mp3
by Steve Earle & The V-Roys, 1996.
available on Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Tribute

Also featured in the film is 'Cowboy' Jack Clement. He wrote a lot of songs for Sun artists, and produced and engineered a lot of records recorded there.

Here's a few of the songs that he's written:

"I Like It" mp3
by Roy Orbison, 1956.
available on Rocker

"It'll Be Me" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1957.
available on All Killer, No Filler: The Anthology

"Guess Things Happen That Way" mp3
by Johnny Cash, 1958.
available on The Essential Johnny Cash 1955-1983

"Miller's Cave" mp3
by Gram Parsons & The International Submarine Band, 1967.
available on Safe at Home

This weekend, I'm going to the WFMU Record Fair. It's a lot of fun, but I'm going to try and practice some restraint and try not to buy too many records. My tooth is not the only thing I'm missing these days, and when I'm not sharing all this fabulous music with you folks, I've been out trying to find another more lucrative gig. You can direct any reasonable offers to me here.

Last year I picked up this one up at the fair:



"Susie-Q" mp3
by Dale Hawkins, 1956.
available on Oh! Suzy-Q: The Best of Dale Hawkins


In related webosphere news, I've been posting mp3's and some of my photographs at East of Bowery, a fantastic new blog that my good friend and writer Drew Hubner (that's pronounced Huebner) and I are collaborating on. Check it out. Drew is posting stories of his misspent early days in New York City. I didn't know him then, but it seems we were in the same place at the same time. Life is sweet.

Also on the Interweb, artist and fellow blogger Steve Roden graciously plugged the Boogie Woogie Flu, at the web version of The Wire magazine last week. You can see it HERE.

And recently, I recieved a letter from a reader who lives on an olive farm in Catalan, Spain, who was so excited by the music here on the Boogie Woogie Flu, that he decided to start a Boogie Woogie Flu listeners page on Last FM. I'm not sure how that thing works, and I'm a little over-saturated with this web stuff, but if you use Last FM, join him, his name is Pault and he goes by the tag r_seven. He's very nice.

Okay, that's it for now. Have a good weekend.



Photographs: Lincoln Barron by Ted Barron © 2008

The Feelies

There's a rather spirited discussion taking place over at Moistworks prompted by a post revolving around the notion of "indie rock" and what that is: an aesthetic, an idea, a model for artists to work outside of the corporate system, or another meaningless title. Within the comments Alex posted a link to WFMU's Beware of the Blog, featuring a TV special I remember seeing in 1985 called "The Hoboken Sound." It's funny to watch now. 1985 was a time when most of the rock music that mattered to discerning young listeners was below the radar of MTV (who at that time still promoted and played music) and was relegated to special programming like 120 minutes. I found out about stuff from searching record stores, zines, seeing bands, and word of mouth. Kids, the eighties in the mainstream were not as cool as you think. It was Ronald Reagan, Madonna, and aging baby-boomers thinking they had to make dance records to stay on top. Look no further than Starship or Stevie Nicks.

Today, everything "indie" or otherwise is supported by something that did not exist then - the very tool that you are reading this post on - the web. So whether it's myspace, Pitchfork, itunes or the Hype Machine, there has been a leveling and democratic effect created by the internet that in the end can be a double edged sword. Too much information and overstimulation. After a while everything starts to feel soulless, and meandering through the onslaught of "special new bands" leaves one feeling empty. That is one of the reasons I retreated to buying old records and posting them here. There are hundreds of blogs promoting whatever is new and it's a great place to hear things in the overcrowded music scene, but in the end, for me there's only two kinds of music: stuff I'm interested in and stuff I'm not. This is purely subjective, and while my taste may run all over the place and at times seem incongruous, it is what I like.

In the mid-nineties, during my brief tenure as a guitar player in bands, my proudest moment came when a ramshackle band called Sidesaddle that I had with my wife got our first gig (at a shithole Williamsburg bar that we took over) reviewed in NY Press by J.R. Taylor who likened our sound the Velvets, the Stones and The Allman Brothers all in one sentence. One of these things is not like the other, right? Wrong, it's all stuff we liked and actually we sounded like none of them, it was closer to a cross between X and the Heartbreakers playing country songs (badly) with some chiming Sterling Morrison rythym guitar. It was a sloppy mess, but a lot of fun. Sadly, I don't have any suitable recordings to present here - you'll just have to take my word for it. The reason I mention this is because in the Hoboken documentary there is some great footage of the Feelies, who for me, a music fan with wide reaching taste, always bridged that gap between The Allman Brothers and the Velvets as well as a handful of other guitar bands that I liked - hard rhythmic and floating guitar lines combined. It may seem preposterous to invoke the name of a biker Southern Rock band, when The Feelies probably had more in common with other Southern Rock bands of their own period (REM for instance) but I always heard something of the Allman Brothers in their sound. I don't know, I smoked a lot of pot back then. I don't anymore, but these records still sound good to me.

Here's a few from The Feelies.

Download:

"Slipping (Into Something)" mp3
by The Feelies, 1986.
available on The Good Earth

"The Good Earth" mp3
by The Feelies, 1986.
available on The Good Earth

"The High Road" mp3
by The Feelies, 1986.
available on The Good Earth

"It's Only Life" mp3
by The Feelies, 1988.
available on Only Life
***********************
BONUS: on the subject of "special new bands"

"Cut My Hair" mp3
by Pavement, 1994.
available on Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins