Buttsweat And Tears-Well Worth the Wait

It's been over 3 or so years since Chicago band The Lawrence Arms released Oh!Calcutta! so as you can imagine, this was a great breath of new material for the fans. Buttsweat and Tears is the first "digital" release for the group, (they also released it on vinyl). This morning I grabbed my laptop and headed to Panera to use their free wi-fi to download this new gem while enjoying a tasty bagel and O.J.
The first song is Spit Shining S**t. It's very catchy, upbeat with some Oh!Calcutta! style. "The Slowest Drink At the Saddest Bar On The Snowiest Day in the Greatest City" is a fast song sung by Chris (opposed to Brendan singing the first one). "Demons" is defiantly my favourite song at the moment. It's got a little Falcon (Brendan & Neil's side project) in it as far as tempo is going and it's super catchy as well. If you're a fan of them, I'd pick it up. $3.99 for 5 songs are well worth it. Especially because I had an iTunes gift card left over. HA! I look forward to a new album in the hopeful near-future.

Madrid @ Racine's McAullife's Pub

Last week Saturday, my band Madrid. played our 2nd show ever, & our first show in Racine at McAullife's. The night looked grim when we walked into an album empty bar. "This can't be good" I told Nick, our front man. We arrived around 8. People were watching college football. How exciting!! We immediately set up my drum kit. It's been quite some time since I brought it to a live show, since it's not that great, but the sound crew mic'd it and it sounded pretty good and loud. The opening band (that originally was going to headline) was called Before Dawn. They were an electro-dance-pop group on tour and stopped out in Racine for a very small crowd...They were very enjoyable. Nick kept telling me "I just love these guys!" They were influenced by The Killers, Talking Heads and that sort of music....
Around 11:20, we went on. We opened the set with "Everyone Again", which is kind of a hard song to play for me. It's crucial not to lose time on it, and since the vocals weren't coming in too well on my monitor, it was even harder. Somehow I nailed it. It was actually more fun for me to play the song on my kit. Second song of the night was "So Real", which follows up well to the first one because it's more mellow for me to play on drums. Pat was actually singing the falsetto parts too, which gives the song more in my opinion.
We ended up doing the song me and Nick didn't plan on doing. "Modern World", but instrumental. It worked out okay because Pat played the melody on guitar. It also went straight into "Eyes and Butterflies"

Without going too far into every song, the night went quite well. Even though the monitors weren't giving us much, and I am low on sticks since I busted one at the show, AND my wife and I got lost on the long way home, we still had a great show. We actually had some people digging the music and looking for some CD's. Drat.

Need a shot of pop-punk back when it was good?

Milwaukee had some really great bands "back in the day" (TM).

In the mid to late 1990s, a show at the Rave Bar or Globe featured some opening bands that did not suck.

One show, I saw a band called Slurr. I don't remember much about them. I knew they had a tall singer and that a GF's roommate was dating the drummer.

Well, thanks to the archive at http://www.mkepunk.com, one can listen to them and discover them for themselves.

I recommend No Jon.

attaching value

I don't have it with me, but in "Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer," Joe makes a comment about how all contemporary rock music is crap and you have to dig deep to find the good stuff. Which makes the good stuff have a much-higher value.

How very true.

Rock music has devolved back to the over-produced, over-stylized crap sung by the prettiest boys (and sometimes girls; would Paramore be famous if not for their jailbait singer?).

Same with punk rock, these days. It's all image. It's all about self-loathing and screaming about it.

Gone are the days (for me, the mid nineties) when GOOD punk bands came out of the woodwork.

Now, we are having to search them out. I'm 31. I don't have the bloody time to browse myspace, while being bombarded by the movie ads.

I'm going back into my library and listening to the bands I've loved many years. And going with a few of the bands that have been around for a while.

That said, here are my top-10 still-active bands:

1. Less Than Jake

2. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists

3. (The International) Noise Conspiracy

4. The Bouncing Souls

5. Decibully

6. Maritime

7. NOFX

8. Alkaline Trio

9. The Offspring

10. Green Day

Monday, Aug. 24, 2009

On Monday, Aug. 24 I had the pleasure to see one of my all-time favorite artists, songwriters and bands at San Francisco's best live music venue.

(Bottom of the Hill - 17th Street, San Francisco)

I discovered Ted Leo & The Pharmacists mostly by word of mouth. I've heard his name a bit and finally saw the "Me & Mia" video on HavocTV.

Naturally, that x-mas, I had to have "Shake the Sheets".

Fast-forward to last summer. I see TL is playing with Against Me! at the Warfield in San Francisco. I ordered a pair of tickets at $30+ each from Ticketscammer. The day of the bleeding show, Ted announces his show is cancelled due to a personal emergency. My appeals to Ticketscammer were nil, since he wasn't the headliner.

So, round June, I discover he's coming to SF for two shows at the BOTH and I immediately buy a pair of tickets for the show.

I'd not be disappointed. It was easily the best show I've ever seen. Even my friend - a Ted Leo neophyte - agreed that the energy was unmatched. From the moment he hit the stage playing "Little Dawn" to the 90 minutes later when he played "CIA" he was still playing at the same intensity.

Ted, I should mention, will be 39 next month.

From Bullying the Jukebox

(bass player... no idea of his name, maybe Marty Key? "Jason?")

Ted played most of his best-known, best-written songs along with a slate of new ones, which all were really, really good.

I was disappointed that there was no performance of "Sons of Cain," "High Party," or "Ballad of the Sin-Eater." However, the surprise of songs like "The One Who Got Us Out," "Heart Problems," "Under The Hedge" and "CIA" totally worked.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how the place exploded when he played "Counting Down the Hours" and "Biomusicology." "Me & Mia" brought a wave of "hey, I know this song" from the crowd.

He played until about midnight and that included THREE encores. For the first one, he didn't even leave the stage. He set his guitar down, then turned around and said "you guys aren't going anywhere, huh?"

The band took a break so drummer, Chris Wilson could get a bandage and Ted played a cover of a recently passed "punk pioneer" (sorry, can't remember the name!) song.

He kicked into "Timorous Me" and the rest of the band joined him for a couple more songs before they closed with new song "Last Days."

Right around the time when I thought it was time to leave, the band jumped back onto the stage to play one more song which was a request. Suitably - since there's all kinds of news regarding the CIA's torture program - he played "CIA:"

And when we were late in getting in,

We couldn't say where we'd been.

But maybe you knew,

Like you sometimes do -I've got no need to pretend.

But C.I.A.,Only you
know what you've done.

(the only photo I got of Ted himself, that looks like a person.)

Farm Fest 2009 Featuring Madrid.

It's rare that I get the opportunity to review my very own show. But here I go! August 15th was a very sticky and warm day. My band members and I met out in Franklin, WI around 11:30 to set up the drum kit, mics, amps and monitors. We also did a quick sound check too to get the correct levels on everything. Our bass player's kit came with his piccolo snare which is fine for our practice sessions, but it wasn't near loud enough for this outdoor venue. So my new Mapex 14 x4 snare was the perfect solution.
After running through a few songs, I was already pretty sweaty. How am I going to blast through 30 songs in this 92 degree heat!? Luckily, when it started to get slightly darker, the heat died down a little and a light breeze swept Farm Fest.

The opening band was Mohr. Ave. They started later then they were supposed to, but it wasn't too big of a deal. A good buddy of mine arrived for our set just before we were starting so he would have missed just about everything. Mohr. Ave played a few covers along with their originals. We played second. The mosquitos were horrendous and feasted on all of us throughout the night. It was extremely difficult to keep time on a drum set while the bugs were draining whatever blood they could find in the back of my ear! During our first song "Everyone Again", the hi-hats started acting fishy and I couldn't open them towards the end of the song. Luckily, I fixed it in time for our ska number "Modern World". This song started well, but on the outro, I accidental counted incorrectly and slowed it down, but luckily, I kept the time and the song ended decently. "So Real" was the next one I believe. No problems there. Everything sounded good. "When The Glitter Fades" followed that. That's our song resembling "Why Did We Ever Meet?" by The Promise Ring. Thankfully, it worked out quite well. It's also one of my wife's favourite songs. Along with our originals, we also tackled Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army". Unfortunately, Pat, our second guitar player's mic wasn't turned up very much so the crowd had a rough time hearing him. Of ALL songs!! I haven't seen the video tape my sister made of the night yet, but I imagine he's hard to hear. The last few songs went alright. The Lobster Boys followed us. They played jam-style songs, Phish covers etc. etc.

So overall, our first show went alright. I think if the bugs were out of the picture, the night would have been a little better. I look forward to the next show we play, and working on adjusting the ska song.

Les Paul

I was going to blog about how important Les Paul is to modern music.

But it's so easy to just post photos of some of the most well-known guitarists with LPs.

And it's even easier for me to look at this from a punk-rock angle and post photos of some of the most influential punk guitarists - from top-4o pop punk, to hardcore - with Les Pauls.

These are in random order:

Kris Roe from the Ataris is left-handed, so he plays an upside-down Les Paul.

Steve Jones - Sex Pistols
Mick Jones - The Clash
Nate Albert while with the Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Bille Joe Armstrong - Green Day

Brett Gurewitz - Bad Religion

Lyle Preslar - Minor Threat