New band videos! Part 4 - "Shut Your Eyes"

For the fourth installment of this video series... here we get a mostly good performance of Snow Patrol's "Shut Your Eyes," which drummer Barry chose. Aside from the end, I think it was one of our best performances as a band. We got the laid back feel of the rhythm down well, and the vocals were pretty tight (just plug your ears during my parts at the end). I never paid much attention to Snow Patrol, and the first time I heard them I was not impressed. But this song is alright, I'll give 'em that.

New band videos! Part 3 - "Somewhere Across Forever"

The good thing about spreading these videos out one post at a time is that, if I forget to mention a relevant factoid one day, I have another chance to remember later. In this case, I wanted to mention that our drummer, Barry, was the one who came up with the band's name - "Lost The Plot." Factor in yesterday's little blurb on the band and I'm sure you'll agree it was an apt name.

The song performed in today's video had, in Spooner's words, a "lame ending." In spite of his criticism, which irked Julie considerably, we kept it as it was and it got a good response. I had never heard this song or the band that originally recorded it, stellastar*, until I signed up for this workshop. This was another of Julie's picks. She sang the lead, and Djuna and I supplied backing vocals and shared some indie-riffic lead guitar lines during the instrumental break.

The laugh here for me is this: before the show, Barry took me aside and asked me to set the tempo at an easier pace than I had been during rehearsals, as he found it difficult at times to maintain the tempo at the pace I was setting. Imagine my surprise when, after strumming the intro at the requested laid-back pace... well, watch and see for yourself what happened:

New band videos! Part 2 - "The View"

Before we look at the next video, a little background on the band and yesterday's video:

This is the fourth band workshop I've played in since I began frequenting the Blue Bear School of Music, and the third I've played in with Bill Spooner as band leader. There were five of us rehearsing together for ten weeks -- myself on guitar and occasional vocals, Christina on bass, Barry on drums, Djuna on guitar and vocals, and Julie on keyboards and vocals. Christina and I had the idea of playing in a workshop together when we started dating, so we signed up together. Julie I had played with before in my last workshop, and we're also co-workers and friends. The three of us all knew each other already, and had played with Spooner before on separate occasions, so we all got along well. Barry and Julie did not mix, however, and Barry occasionally butted heads with Spooner as well. Suffice to say, it was an interesting group that had its fair share of drama, drunkenness and sexual tension. In other words, it was a true rock n' roll experience. Only things we lacked were hard drugs, a tour van and paychecks.

Anyway, yesterday's song was a tough one for Christina going in, but in the end she pulled it off rather well. It was the coolest sounding bass line in all the songs we played, and a song chosen by Julie.

Today, we get "The View" by Modest Mouse. I chose this one. Nobody in the band cared much for it right away, but after a while, everyone warmed up to it and it became a favorite. I take the lead vocals here, and I'll let you be the judge of their quality.



And before I forget to mention, the same guy who filmed the videos of my last workshop did these as well -- Damon Molloy of Dirksen-Molloy Productions.

New band videos! Part 1 - "Texarkana"

On June 28, a little pay-to-play rock band called Lost The Plot took the stage at San Francisco's Red Devil Lounge and made some enthusiastic drunks get all crazy with rock n' roll convulsions. Or we just soundtracked their inebriation. In any case, I was there, playing a barely audible guitar and groovin' hard.

Yes, it was yet another Blue Bear School of Music rock band workshop, focusing mostly on the music of "contemporary" bands (though R.E.M., Prince and U2 are all "classic" by now... but they're alive, so whatever).

I'm going to share five videos from our eleven-song set with you. First up -- our version of R.E.M.'s "Texarkana."



More video (and more text) in the coming days...

New Bullz-Eye review: Their Satanic Majesties Request

Since that Slayer interview got published over at Bullz-Eye last month (are you sick of the regular Slayer mentions in this blog yet? It's not over -- I have uncovered my 'lost' 1998 interview!), I've officially become a "regular contributor" to the site. Hooray! It's a great entertainment site targeting manly men, i.e. the types who read old-fashioned paper magazines like FHM and Blender... the type depicted by Charlie Sheen in "Two And A Half Men"... the type epitomized by Howard Stern. The types who frequent Hooters for those great hot wings... you get the picture. About 5 million unique monthly visitors get the picture too.

Anyway, hop on over to Bullz Eye to check out the Summer Of Love feature that just went live today. In particular, pay attention to the three-star review of The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request, penned by you know who, among the 14 "essential" rock albums of 1967 spotlighted in this very cool feature.

"The Complete Idiot's Guide to Slayer" cited on Wikipedia

Every once in a while it's fun to google your name and see what comes up. Yesterday I did just that for the first time in months, and found this little surprise:

A Wikipedia noticeboard on "reliable sources" was re-posted on a site called Thinking Australia. The first issue of debate on the noticeboard is whether citing my reference to the backwards "join us" chanting in Slayer's "Hell Awaits," as written in my "Idiot's Guide" on jefitoblog.com, in Wikipedia's Backmasking article was appropriate under Wikipedia's guidelines. The debate was whether a weblog is a "reliable source," no matter how "well-written and credible" the weblog is.

In the end, the citation stuck, as a footnote (number 39) in the backmasking article with two other sources to back it up.

And that was my giddy simple pleasure on a sunny Saturday. Giddy! My inner geek is coming out...

A Beautiful Wreck

When you're sitting alone in an airport, having shown up extra early to get the mandatory (in)security strip search over with, waiting to board that big bus with wings, you have a lot of time to think. Or read. Or listen to your preferred portable music device.

In my case, the last occasion in which I had the honor of experiencing air travel in the 21st century, I did some of each. Now, if I was smart, I would have bought myself a laptop computer so I could chronicle my thoughts as they arrive (much earlier than the plane I'm waiting for), then I wouldn't have to force myself to extract something from my brain that I stuck way on its back shelves weeks ago. You know what happens to thoughts when you do that? Same thing as the food you forget about in your refrigerator -- they ROT. Or they ferment and take on a richer flavor, if you prefer the vintage wine perspective.

Actually, it's probably safer to go with the fermentation explanation here. Because, you see, I don't like to air my thoughts before they're ready. It's not always easy to know when "ready" is, and many times you just have to take comfort in the idea of a late expression being far superior to no expression at all.

Which brings me to the reason I'm writing tonight. Marvin Gaye. I had just acquired the "Expanded Love Man Edition" (more on what this means later) of Marvin's 1981 album In Our Lifetime, the record that turned out to be his last for Motown, and it was getting some serious play on the old (2 years old this month and still going strong!) iRiver. Now, this is a serious record with a very interesting story, even without the extra 90+ minutes of music. And it was cause for some serious thinking while sitting in the airport.

See, Marvin's method of creative madness was much, much different from mine. Whereas I tend to work things out in my head and try to spit out my words and thoughts fully formed so that there are as few mistakes as possible to go back and correct, Marvin took an equally inefficient route. He would, rather than write words out long-hand (or even short-hand) and be ready to sing something, he would waltz into the studio with nothing, and just improvise over and over until he came up with something he liked. With the kind of money he was making in the '70s, he could well afford the extra studio time to make this happen. Except by the time he got around to making what became In Our Lifetime, he had unfortunately tried the patience of Motown a bit too much.

Marvin started the album in early 1979, and had intended on calling it Love Man. It was to be a return to commercial, get-down-and-get-it-on music following the fascinating but commercially disastrous Here My Dear, which chronicled the breakdown of his first marriage. In spite of his intentions, the first song Marvin finished and released as a single was a philosophical, self-deprecating, and not-very-popular song titled "Ego Tripping Out." He started off the song with a pseudo rap boasting of what we'd refer to now as his "bling" (are we still calling it that? or am I five years behind the curve here?) and his sexual prowess (an irony in light of biographer David Ritz's revelation that Marvin suffered from, uh, "performance issues"). From there, Marvin goes on to take down the pimpin' party state of mind, declaring that "the toot and the smoke won't fulfill the need." Of course he couldn't heed his own advice, but he at least had the decency to warn the rest of us.

Even though "Ego Tripping Out" stiffed (no pun intended) as a single, Marvin nevertheless felt that the Love Man album he started and never completed was "jive" and sought to re-write the lyrics of all the songs to reflect his more philosophical state of mind. Good thing he kept the music mostly unchanged, because those Frank Blair bass lines are all priceless. They jump out of the floorboards and dance alongside you, whether you decide to shake your booty or not.

So, with a perfect set of funky, danceable, irresistible grooves -- perhaps the finest tracks in Marvin's entire catalog -- the master went about converting his Love Man album into the daddy of 1999. Marvin, who was once known as the prince of Motown, was a bit peeved that another R&B superstar was in the making in '79, simply called Prince. "I'm the prince!" is what Marvin thought, and he also recorded "In Our Lifetime" before Prince recorded his big hit with the same theme -- that the nuclear holocaust is probably going to wipe us out "in our lifetime," so let's get down and get funky while we still have the chance. Problem was, Marvin's song, while funkier than a motherfucker, was a) lacking a memorable hook, b) too long, and c) didn't even aspire to be a hit. He had earned the right to eschew blatant hitmaking in favor of high-minded funk, but that choice came with a price. Prince and Rick James stole his thunder (Prince even mined Marvin's oft-used sex vs. sanctity theme to great effect in later years), and In Our Lifetime would lose that battle whether it came out the way Marvin wanted it or not.

And it didn't come out the way he wanted, because Motown grew impatient after waiting two years for him to deliver a final record (two years! How long has Axl Rose been keeping the new Guns N' Roses album under wraps? Ten?), the tapes were secretly taken from Marvin and released without his final approval. In the process, an unfinished piece found its way into the marketplace not only as an album track, but as a b-side to the "Heavy Love Affair" 45. "Far Cry" gave us a view of Marvin's improv composition method -- many of the lyrics were mumbled and almost unintelligible, and sung without much confidence. It's the one song on that album that makes little sense, and this pissed Marvin off so much that he left Motown for CBS (which we now know as Sony-BMG).

Now, we get to hear not only "Far Cry," but all those Love Man outtakes where Marvin sings all those "jive" lyrics he tossed aside. Go backwards from "Heavy Love Affair" to "Life's a Game of Give and Take." Devolve from "In Our Lifetime" to "I Offer You Nothing But Love." Fall from the heights of the morality tale that is "Love Me Now Or Leave Me Later" to a half-hearted come-on, "Just Because You're So Pretty." The A-B comparison between the In Our Lifetime and Love Man versions is striking, and certainly makes a good case for Marvin's decision to re-write the record (dig the off-kilter scatting in "Just Because You're So Pretty" if you dare).

So in effect, we now have two full discs of sessions that never were deemed "ready" by the artist. And in his case, the plane took off while he was still preparing to board. Someone at Motown had the good sense to realize that it was going to crash anyway, so why delay the inevitable? In Our Lifetime is still a beautiful wreck. And if you don't agree, you can at least agree that saving Marvin from what could have easily become his SMiLE was probably a big favor for him -- one that drove him to a new label and, ultimately, "Sexual Healing."