THE WYMAN WEEKLY

Underemployed. Unattached. Unimpressed.

Issue 31 November 13,1996

 

 

                                                                  

Open letter to the fortune cookie company: I get done with my Kung Pao Chicken last week at lunch and crack open my fortune cookie and here’s what I get: A product is merely a physical representation of an idea. What the? I work a whole morning with the distant promise of some Chinese takeout festering in my head and part of the total experience of this meal is the fortune cookie. The key word there is “fortune.” A PRODUCT IS MERELY A PHYSICAL REPRESENTATION OF AN IDEA IS NOT A FORTUNE!! Don’t you understand? It doesn’t concern me. I wanna know if I’m gonna be rich, or crush my enemies, or meet up with a leggy blonde bombshell, or achieve eternal happiness...hell, I’ll settle for one of those non-fortunes that just says that people like me! What I don’t want is something that looks like the resident corporate ass-kissing, ladder-climbing yahoo would have framed on his wall as part of a nature scene or teambuilding print! Your product sucked, and I’d boycott it in the future, but it’s free.

 

I HATE MUSIC

 

Driving home from Target last Sunday and looking forward to that Sunday afternoon nap. Mellencamp’s new tune “Just Another Day” comes on the radio. I love this song, musically it’s kinda a combination of the Who’s “Slip Kid” and Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”, plus the lyrics spin a cool little picture. This tune guided me to the Electric Fetus.

 

Back when I first got into buying music, I used to frequent Mother’s Records on the north side of Grand Forks, North Dakota. The place wasn’t lit the greatest, and it seemed to have a smell like maybe somebody had a keg party there the night before. I would go there every Friday either after school or late on a Friday. At one point a clerk yelled at me “So whatya wanna hear?” and I felt much more important than I have ever felt wearing a goddamn tie. So Mother’s was my first love (insert Freudian analysis here) and any music-buying experience always is looked at in that light. Or lack of light, because a very important requirement of a record store is that it cannot be brightly lit. So when I moved down here, I was attracted to dingy, independent stores like Northern Lights, Let It Be, and Down in the Valley, which was my major source for stuff back in the old days. The old store (they have since moved across the road into a strip mall) in Golden Valley was almost Mother’s redux. In fact, I was in there late one Saturday night buying the Replacements’ Let It Be - should have bought at the store named Let It Be, which is, come to think of it, named after the Replacements’ album and not the Beatles’ (I know because I asked the owner to settle a bet) - and the clerk was playing a Michael Hedges tape and drinking a LaBatt’s as he rang me up. The last time I saw him he was at their Richfield location, which I seem to recall being dumpier and darker - hence better - than their others.

 

The Electric Fetus does not have bright obnoxious lighting. I cruised the aisles in my element, bobbing, weaving, ducking, speeding up, slowing down, busting moves and uncomfortably mouthing my motto: “there is no music budget.” What I ended up buying was the following:

 

Being There, Wilco - I heard a good number of these songs played last July 3 at Wilco’s show at First Avenue. Which begs the question: what does a live rock ‘n’ roll band owe you? Should they just play their songs so that you can clink your beers with your friends and lamely sing along? Or should they sing their new songs (if they’ve written ‘em) and hope you like ‘em? Most bands opt for the former and play the songs you know. If they’re daring they’ll throw in a new one or two and hope you like it. So it took Jeff Tweedy (Wilco’s songwriter/singer/guitarist/ bandleader) some big ones to come out and play almost all new songs. In July, he didn’t exactly play much that was “old” (and their debut album was just over a year old at that point.) They did six songs off of their debut, with “Casino Queen” reinterpreted as a honky tonk (done straight up later in the show, too) and “Box Full of Letters” redone as a waltz.

 

This collection is actually a two-disc set, but they could have fit it onto one disc. Many of the songs on these discs will remind you of songs you’ve heard in the past, in fact Tweedy goes ahead and names one tune “Someone Else’s Song.” There are reminders here of Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and seventies AOR bands galore. But Tweedy is a better songwriter than any of the current cut-and-paste stylists majoring in Retro 101. (He won’t make you think of Foghat like Lenny Kravitz does.) In “The Lonely 1”, Tweedy sings of the fan who goes to his hero’s shows by himself, comes home, and checks the answering machine. There are no messages, so he listens to yesterday’s messages. He then listens to his hero’s songs about loneliness. In “Kingpin”, Tweedy manages to rhyme “Dimetapp” with “spinal tap” in a ploy to win over victims of allergies. Most of these songs have an easy, jaunty, flow to them. It’s hard to say how this will hold up over time - all I know is that in the first track Tweedy sings you still love rock ‘n’ roll. Yes, we do.

 

Greatest Hits, Buddy Holly - As a result of being raised in a society where baby boomers control the pop culture outlets (think KQRS, who considers Supertramp “classic”), for years I was convinced that the Beatles invented rock ‘n’ roll and imported it to our country as an act of kindness. But my non-boomer parents informed me that there was a time called “the fifties” where true giants like the Killer, the King, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly walked the earth. “Rock ‘n’ roll was the child of country western and the blues,” they told me, “and it’s your birthright.” Then mom whispered that the Beatles and the Stones were actually influenced by previous artists, and the secret meaning of the title of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home was that he was reclaiming rock ‘n’ roll from the Brits. She also pointed out the greatness of Creedence Clearwater Revival, in that they played away like the British Invasion never happened. Anyway, the disc by this Buddy Holly guy brings you back to the salad days of the fifties. To hear Jerry Allison’s drumming on “Peggy Sue” is worth the purchase price alone. The rest of the disc is a collection of breathtaking songwriting (the Beatles were groundbreakers because they wrote their own songs? Gimme a break!), playing, and production that is pure genius.

 

‘74 Jailbreak, AC/DC - First off, let me ‘fess up: I’m not normal. Well, you knew that already. But what I’m trying to say is that I like AC/DC more and more the older I get. So laugh and poke fun all you want, these guys still put out great singles and the sheer simple tastiness of their bloozy tunes of the seventies still holds up twenty years later. The title cut starts off this five-song EP. A typically great (i.e. Malcolm Young playing open chords, why he wasn’t one of Musician’s 100 greatest guitarists of all time when they named ‘em a few years back is beyond me) riff kicks in and then Bon Scott states “there was a friend of mine on murder” and you have the feeling that you and Bon don’t run in the same circles. In “You Ain’t Got a Hold on Me” Bon’s calling the shots with his woman, in “Soul Stripper” she’s calling the shots with him. In “Show Business”, Bon and the boys work their asses off, but the businessmen get all the money and other fine things. Stupid capitalists. Bon gets the girl at the end but he’s too tired from working to have any fun. This disc ends with yet another version of “Baby Please Don’t Go” where Angus speeds through the blues and the rhythm section never lets up.

 

When I went to have these purchases rang up, I got out my REV card, as you can get a discount at the Fetus with it. “Does this do anything for me?” I asked. (Note: when in a hip place like this store I act nonchalant with my status symbol. If I was someplace where I would be considered decidedly left of center, I would be dropping REV references left and right.) The clerk (and the clerks at the Fetus are friendly and knowledgeable, which is another reason this store rules) informed me that if you buy three or more discs at a time, you automatically get a 10% discount. This was something I didn’t need to know. I know damn well that the best I can usually do is to limit myself to two discs per stop, and from now on I might as well make the move up to the three minimum in order to get the discount. MasterCard, my first born is yours.