Now I’m in Chris’s punk rock house in Olympia, the one where the main dance party Saturday night took place…the one the cops came by and shone a spotlight three times on all the sweaty dancers afterhours, Tobi Vail dressed in disguise (as Tobi Vail) the one with Dexys and Saints and girl group sounds.
I’m so tired and wired and slowly becoming paranoid because of sleep deprivation: no reason, cos I recorded about a dozen songs with the Shady Ladies at Al’s a couple of hours ago, Eric on vaccuum cleaner, the Yao sisters on screams and chants of “Ms True” and “We don’t even care”, and percussion, five great versions of ‘Primary Music/Primary Emotion’ recorded and of course the new Olympia smash hit, ‘ Mystery 45′ (the chant coming from the party at Tobi’s last night, along with screams of ‘hate sex - I’m so over that’ and ‘we’re gonna jump your bones’). I just hope that the already renowned ‘water bongos’ happen tomorrow as mooted, and that rides to the airport don’t take precedence. Perhaps I should quit drinking so much of Al Larsen’s coffee already, but you kinda have to.
The weather veers from full-on rain storms (wherein we ate our burritos) to glorious sun: the main change in this city isn’t relative affluence, quite the opposite. Way more homeless people crowded into the doorways of the State Capital Theatre etc downtown, and way more cars for no reason.
Last night was another riot of drinking and dancing, one boy racing up and down the side of walls on 4th, Maggie Vail leading the entire crowd at the Brotherhood onto their feet, and refusing to quit bopping. Asses were waggled and tail-feathers shaken. Then it was over to the gay bar for a quick last order’s, before Tobi’s battery-powered toy record player took over and we played our mighty ‘Mystery 45′ game. I’d hold a record up, dim in the light, and go, “Maggie! What’s this I’m holding in my hand?!” And then the room would explode into a frenzy of chanting and percussion, until it was deemed sufficiently excited for Chris to flip the record on - Rachel Sweet, Black Flag (which turned the room immediately male), Patrik Fitzgerald, Judy Nylon, Bangs. Yeah, it was the Bangs final show, too - headlining at the Yeah! fest, and much embraces were shared and floors pounded, as they continued to refuse to let go. Earlier, we’d suggested Bangs karaoke (Maggie sings all Sarah’s songs and vice versa) but that didn’t happen.
Caught one song by Al Larsen, wherein he looped a guitar pattern and told a sweet story, missed all the rest (and Die Monitr Bats) due to an impressively awesome Calvin Johnson live set, one song lasting 20 minutes and his new camp demeanour only cracking momentarily when he asked me to name the opening line to ‘Train To Kansas City’. I couldn’t. He sung it a cappella anyway, and amazing. Humour AND irony so straight it ceases to be such.
Another favourite: the impassioned, chaotic, wired and loveable screaming of The Shady Ladies - hey dude, I have the tape, you don’t - and being asked if I knew Stephen Drennan. Although it’s got to be said, hanging with the Ladies is perhaps more insane good fun entertainment then such soirees should be. Another favourite: Tobi’s Spider And The Webs, which was like the bluesy garage blast of 13th Floor Elevators mixed in with (very) old school Olympia mixed in with the cute magic of Melody Dog mixed in with the purest indie rock I have witnessed since…hmmm…The Legend! Yeah! Now I begin to understand why purists call The Go Team (Calvin and Tobi’s old band) the finest Olympian band ever. (Look. I sang with them. I never saw them play live. So how would I have known before?)
That’s enough. Time to socialise. Or perhaps sleep.
Both would be nice.

Posted by Everett True on Tuesday, September 14th, 2004
(4 Comments)

It happened last issue too. The week the magazine comes out, I suddenly hate music, or at least I can’t be bothered with it. It only lasts a few days, this state, but it’s unsettling, regarding my shelves of CDs like they’re stacks of old newspapers or something. Like they’re just plastic boxes filled with people’s dreams that they can’t quite communicate to me right now.

Mark Hollis’ record from 1998, then, breaks this spell and tugs at my heart and whispers to me that I’ll like musc again in, oh, about two days probably. Maybe by the weekend, or by tomorrow when you’re gonna do some recording. And it makes me sad too, this record, in an entirely righteous and pleasurable way.

It came out in 1998 and I don’t remember it coming out. What was I listening to back then? I can’t remember, NeuCanKraftwerkFaust, Godspeed, Steve Reich, Trans Am maybe, Acid Mothers, Flying Lizards, Buffalo Daughter, Accelerator by the Royal Trux, Ruins, Stereolab, I Hear a New World by Joe Meek. Stuff like that. I didn’t know who this man was, or who Talk Talk were, and probably didn’t care, and if I’d heard this record then I know I wouldn’t have appreciated it. It wouldn’t have touched the right reference points for me, and that was what I cared about when I was younger - recognition, references; also, music that shocked me, music that I could lose it to, logic and noise. But that doesn’t matter, because you hear a record when you’re meant to, sometimes.

And this one, I did. The first time I heard it, it was the last record we listened to together before a friend of mine left London. It was the last thing we talked about, quietly and sparingly, feeling the spaces between the chords and the sudden surges in the vocals and the lovely slowness of everything. It was the right record to say goodbye to, because it went over and under and around sentimentality. It held a kind of sorrow that was something much purer and more universal than just two friends saying goodbye to each other. And it means that when I listen to it, I think of nothing. I think of no-one. I just think of music, which is how I want it to be sometimes.

It’s an album of songs arranged for piano, guitars, some drums, some hand percussion steadily jingling, and almost a whole wind section, who never allow themselves to indulge the flashy potential of their instruments but instead provide grave interludes and delicate punctuation. Sometimes it sounds as if each instrument is gently chasing each other around some still, silent central point, dancing around it and never touching. Even when they all mesh together there’s something so graceful and instinctive about it, like flowers springing in all directions from the same plants, their stems intertwining, but all facing the sun.

Despite reading the lyrics and knowing that this is a single-minded project and vision like few others, I never feel the ’solo’-ness of this record. I never feel that annoying, needling feeling that a musician’s trying to tell you something, push some point home. This music is weightless. It doesn’t demand you to be sideways and angry, or to be happy or maudlin, or to dance or move or sleep or anything. It doesn’t demand anything, yet it’s demanding. That little emotional steering is demanding. But while your intellect follows the notes and your body breathes with the pauses, your sadness, ignored, untangles itself and quietly dissolves, walks away while you weren’t looking.

It could be the saddest music in the world, but that’s only because it, kind of, for me, spoils sad music a little. It’s what’s left after sad. When you’ve done all your crying along to something else and you’re ready to be clear-eyed again.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Tuesday, September 14th, 2004
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Also: watching The Shady Ladies work out their tortured, four-part, righteous and humorous harmonies on the stairwell: a bridge overlooking the freeway by the local army base, just outside Olympia, covered with flag-waving ‘patriots’: a discussion with Sarah Bangs about how you can pick up laryngitis from dirty microphones while on tour: Tobi spotting the Patrik Fitzgerald steal of “Hello/I’m a reject” during practice: the incredible peppermint latte from the drive-through coffee shop just outside the club: wandering the streets at 9am, basking in familiarity and sunshine: The Mae Shi mentioning the same drinking well in the parking lot that I once wrote a song around: Charlotte being able to describe the view from the Ramada Hotel (out over the main square by the Greyhound terminal): snowball fights: composing an entire 30-minute set during a bath in my hotel room (the idea being to take the first couple of lines of ‘Crazy’ and gently mutate them, shaping them and repeating them, entirely vocal, over and over - and at the end of the set, wander around the audience showing them a photo of Charlotte)…

Maybe I should go find a coffee.

Posted by Everett True on Sunday, September 12th, 2004
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So everyone’s seated on the floor, lights turned off, banging water bottles in accompaniment to the chantsong from Al, Tobi and Amy on ’stage’, myself squat-legged in the middle of the audience sometimes breaking into a fresh verse of the old gospel spiritual, room stunned into silence and - gradually - more and more voices joining in with the sombre tones of the chant. “There’s a man going round taking names/There’s a man going round taking names/He’s taken my father’s name/And he’s left me crying in vain/There’s a man going round taking names”.
Tobi and Amy’s voices swell and fade in the current of emotion, my voice cracking, my eyes downcast, people coming in at the back of the room looking in vain for the music’s source. I wander whether I should lie fully-stretched out on the floor like I did 15 minutes before, prior to an entirely new version of ‘The Void’ where I change the line “It’s five in the morning and I wanna get fucked up” to “It’s five in the morning and I wanna get some sleep”, but decide against. My voice soars once more through the disharmonic groundswell of emotion as I come in with the line, “Death is the name of that man/Death is the name of that man…”.

…………

Later, there’s me and Eric and Tobi and Sarah and Maggi and Chris and Joey dancing to The Saints’ ‘I’m Stranded’ and Dexys’ ‘Let’s Make This Precious’ and girl group sounds, half the room doing the limbo and the other half a cross between the mashed potato and the pogo, and I’m reminded of exactly why I love this damn city Olympia so much. I can’t sleep all night, too wired and excited and exhilarated by the energy emanating from those around me.
Nikki and her husband with their baby in a papoose drop by the venue - 60 bands playing or something - to say hi, and everything becomes crushed into one fine whole…Beth from The Gossip promising to duet with me on Tuesday; Joey Casio dancing the manic dance to his twisted dope-smoking 80s drum machine; The Mae Shi fending off questions about bicycle accidents and embarrassment in that one-dollar beer bar downtown (everything’s downtown in Olympia); Dave from Numbers so friendly and smiling; me and Maggi knocking back cheap bourbon and warm beer; tea with the Bangs; watching Mae Shi pass all off their instruments off the stage and into the audience so they can partake in the joyous explosion of sound and frenzy, ah so inspirational; Al Larsen smiling and hidden in shadows…
Mirah and Anna Oxygen casting oblique and bouncy shadows in the ballroom upstairs; shadows in the bar of the Eagle’s Hall; Slim Moon all supportive and alive; Tobi; all the musicians coming up to me after the set congratulating me on my voice; the weird San Francisco vibe of Amps For Christ and their sitar and multi-coloured beard and cute hippie chicks…Nathan shouting out for ‘Rockaway Beach’ during The Legend! set, and me not obliging, explaining that I don’t ‘do’ punk I only ‘do’ Legend!, and insteadripping into a rant about Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the centre of ‘Spokane’ (the songtitle and the YYYs rant garnishing the biggest applause of the set), Tobi dressed in wig and shades incognito…
And now I’ve really got to find some sleep. Honest.

Posted by Everett True on Sunday, September 12th, 2004
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Seattle doesn’t change.
I still spend afternoons in the Elysian, waiting for friends to call. Still wander along Capital Hill, Broadway, thinking that there’s no one left in town that I know. Still get that lump in my throat when I see Mount Rainer looming ahead of the plane through the clouds, when we’re driving down the freeway and the Emerald City looms into view over the horizon. (Although, of course, there’s long since been another way to drive into town from SeaTac.) Peter Bagge still has a shit-eating laugh, Joanne Bagge is still uber-hospitable, Steve Fisk still looks ’separated at birth’ from myself (although he now has a shock of hair). I still can’t recall anything except for shots of Maker’s Mark and how beautiful the view, across the city and over to the mountains, from Pine and 13th is. People laugh heartily and often. On the bus into town yesterday I nearly witness a fully-fledged street fight but everyone makes up and jests “only in America” in time. Man, I hate that phrase. Only in America could those idiot Democrats put up that mongoloid right winger Kerry as a representative of ‘liberals’. Only in America can they fingerprint travellers and humiliate citizens on a regular basis. Whatever.
Conspiracy theories are discussed.
I trade stories with Eric Erlandson about girls being smashed in the face by famous widows, and phone Mr Fisk to ask if it’s OK to bring along my pal to the Bagge’s dinner party. (The dinner party featured excellent Mexican food and ribs, as prepared by Joanne, plus vast amounts of baseball trivia, courtesy of Peter and his belligerent neighbour.) “Yeah, he’s fine by me,” Steve laughs. “He never phoned me up and threatened to kill me, unlike some of my friends in Olympia. The 90s were pretty good to me.”
Eric denies the charge. “I might have told Slim Moon his farts were stinky one time…” he suggests.
The Bagges are suitably impressed with how sweet Eric is and, after he leaves, posit the same query that people always posit. “How did he manage to put up with C for so long…?”
Peter shows me some comics he’s done recently: one for Weekly World News - a publication that has gone insane ever since its advertisers decided spamming every email account in the world 20 times a day was a far more lucatrive way to reach potential weight-loss and erectile dysfunctional consumers. Eric and Rhea behave as sweetly as ever, and ask after Charlotte. Everyone asks after Charlotte. A nice lady tells me she thinks my weblog is very gentle, far removed from the cynicism of average music critics. Ah, I don’t do ‘criticism’ any more.

Today, I take a ride into God’s own country - Olympia, Washington - and try to find fresh ways of expressing myself.
Wish me luck. I’m very jetlagged.

Posted by Everett True on Saturday, September 11th, 2004
(No Comments)

…it’s really amazing. So is Jennifer.

Posted by Sarah Bowles on Thursday, September 9th, 2004
(8 Comments)

it did work really, i was just playing for laffs.

it even works on its side, which helps, because it won’t fit anywhere if i put it flat.

Posted by Andrew Clare on Wednesday, September 8th, 2004
(2 Comments)

this entry has been removed because it contained coarse language

Posted by Andrew Clare on Wednesday, September 8th, 2004
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My wife’s making a late-night moussaka and I am ‘helping’, ie drunkenly entertaining her with theories and stories, and prowling haphazardly around the kitchen eating bits of everything.

“MEAT MUNCHIES!” I exclaim excitedly, scavenging fingerfuls of the nice mince and tomatoes she has lovingly cooked up (I still get that ex-vegetarian forbidden-fruit transgressive buzz around meat sometimes). “RARRRR AUBERGINES!” I cry, grabbing a slice of said vegetable, which is all grilled and brown and mmmmm.

My wife frowns at me, so I repair to the fridge and get the sundried tomatoes. When she looks round, she sees me eating one straight from the jar, licking tomatoey oil of my fingers and chuckling in satisfaction.

“DUDE!” she says. “I wondered where all the tomatoes went….”

“Yeah, this is what I do when you’re out at work all day, eat sundried tomatoes out the jar. With my fingers. MMMM!’

She gives me a look which I can only describe as ‘prim’.

“You’re going feral, she says, disapprovingly.

I try to protest, but my mouth is full of tomato. Then she goes to get the nice hard St Helen’s goats cheese and says, “Look, you’ve been taking bites out of this! There are toothmarks, look!”

It’s true. That cheese is fucking great though. And I get hungry, not talking to anyone all day, having panic attacks in the park, listening to doom metal at lunchtime, proofreading in a vintage aqua petticoat - y’know, the usual working at home stuff.

Then she delivers the killer line:

“That’s single person behaviour. If you had a boyfriend you wouldn’t do that.”

Then she says, “now get out of the kitchen! Go away!”

I shamble off to listen to Mississippi Fred McDowell and discuss the differences between juju and high-life with Mr Nite, who’s visiting us for the evening. We did come to some conclusion vis a vis the high-life and the juju, but I can’t recall exactly what it was. Something about basslines.

My wife, she is firm but fair. She bought me an ashtray with the shipping forecast on it, and I spent most of Saturday designing a special self-help programme for her, which, if it works, I am patenting and making my fortune with - well, c’mon, I’m not gonna make a fortune writing about music, am I. Our looking after each other is tempered with some gentle criticism, as it should be, so at the time I’m not overly upset by her evaluation of me as an unlovable, gluttonous, feral beast with no table manners. It’s actually very funny and almost the truth.

Today though, her comments are haunting me a little, and I have kept my fingers well away from the tomato jar. I don’t think I’m feral; I’m just freelance. Is that, maybe, the same thing? I’m sure I used to feel feral as fuck when I had an office job, only it was feral in a repressed scary way, like any minute I was gonna rip my face off and expose my wolf face, thus getting me sacked from the publishing industry for all time. Now it’s more like a stoopid, happy kind of feral, like one of those scrawny but elegant fluffy stray cats that comes and sits in your kitchen randomly for a few weeks and stares at you with retarded, inbred eyes, fleas jumping off it, sure, but kind of cute. Nice feral. But even so, that comment about the cheese really rankled.

Point being, maybe we should have an editorial meeting soon, just to save me from myself and those damn tomatoes.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Wednesday, September 8th, 2004
(13 Comments)

Naivety isn’t thrilling me today; instead it’s giving me a headache, all these shaggy-haired ex-indie boys running wild, rummaging in the blues cupboard, little cracked voices lifting up to heaven above, recording in the backyard, levels all over the place, how sweet….whatever. The rest of the time: I love you, you are my brethren. Today: whatever. Away with you all. Come back tonight when I’m holed up watching that Emmylou Harris documentary, and we can all hang out and talk about Sonny Terry.

But for now though

maybe it’s this weather, and oh this weather is just damn lovely. It’s cold in the mornings, cold enough for the special socks, but warm enough at lunchtime for vests and bare arms. The swallows’ frenzied peeping and wheeling has been replaced by a hardy greenfinch colony that means business, I can tell you; and the muggy hot-city haze is finally dispersing. I miss the swallows, ’cause they summed up my summer like no other summer I ever had - dipping, darting and flitting from one thing to the next, going round in circles; sometimes the circles spiralled around someone so tightly that I thought surely I must’ve garotted them a few times, or at least cut off their circulation, but of course they didn’t even notice. That’s swallows for you. They only have a few months over here, and they’ve a lot to get done, but after the first happiness at seeing one, you forget they’re there and all that swooping and cheeping just becomes like so many gnats to swat with your hand, and all that constant action just looks nuts and pointless. God, but I love the way they fly though. There’s absolutely nothing like it, watching swallows fly, and the few times I’ve stayed still enough to have one swoop right over me it sounded just like an ARP Odyssey only better.

But yeah

So I’ll let Entrance carry on til the end of the song, because he is lovely, and I’ll think some more about Ariel Pink and the way he sounds like a radio broadcast heard in a faraway car while you lie in the hot meadow grass phased on wine or numbed on prescription painkillers. And tonight I’ll be back on the old songs like that’s my drug, my treat, my dinner, and maybe digging the new Panda Bear album. But just to celebrate the new, sharp edges of Autumntime, I pad over to the disordered CD piles and shuffle about a bit and make a hello autumn playlist of Bach, Pan Sonic (CD2 of Kesto is ACE), Cluster, Reverbaphon, and some Raster-Noton bits and pieces. And wish that I had some Basic Channel stuff to listen to right now. The new DJ/Rupture CD just came through the post too. That’ll keep me going until night-time. Hey autumn, I am so glad you’re back.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Friday, September 3rd, 2004
(4 Comments)