My good friend NY John at work is always a bastion of interesting Rock'n Roll info and anecdotes. I miss talking to him on a daily basis, when he'd drop by my department at work to vent about corporate moronity and we'd eventually segue into talking about the Stones, Talking Heads, Television, etc. While in the office the other day, he told me to cue up Led Zeppelin's The Rain Song, and upon the intonation of that first, iconic note, he related that he'd read an interview with Jimmy Page where he said he took the chord from The Beatles (I'll let you determine which song). Anyway, hearing just that one chord made me want to hear the entire song, and hearing the entire song, I had to spin House of the Holy and Physical Graffiti in their entirety. I feel a Zeppelin jag coming on. Been a while, and I'm pretty eager to sink into it. Being that I bonded with the band's music at a pretty young, formative age, I feel as though those times when I'm under their spell, my brain works differently. It'll be nice to feel that old familiar "Led Zeppelin" brain again.
Also, this is probably my favorite song by the band (although on any given day I might give you an entirely different answer.
Fitting, this track, as it's been raining in LaLaLand more consistently than I'd seen in some years when I lived here.
Watch:
Monday and Tuesday of last week I was able to sneak in a couple of really cool LA theatre jaunts. When in Rome, right? First, courtesy of the always amazing Cinematic Void, my Horror Vision cohost Ray and I saw a pretty damn nice 35 mm print of Popcorn at the Los Feliz 3 Theatre:
This was fantastic, especially since A) Ray gifted me a Popcorn t-shirt and, B) I got to see Cinematic Void guru Jim Branscome interview Popcorn's star Jill Schoelen after the film.
Then last night, Ray and I got to attend Pi Day, 25th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky's landmark debut film Pi. Even better, before the film, Aronofsky, Star Sean Gullette, Producer Eric Watson, Cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Composer Clint Mansell and actor Stanley Herman (subway singer) spoke about the film at length. Talk about inspiring.
I haven't watched this one in a while despite the fact that I carry a very tangible love for it with me on an almost day-to-day basis. It's been at least 15 years since I last watched Pi, and I found I remembered it pretty much verbatim. Also, hearing Mansell's score now, I realize it was that which pushed me into really exploring electronic music back in the day. Everything about this one is iconic.
This song will never get old. One of the first Zeppelin songs I heard, back in high school when I discovered them, and still a favorite.
Watch:
I finally saw Kurtis David Harder's 2019 film Spiral yesterday on Shudder:
Really dug this one. Great flow; this film really makes you feel a mounting expectation for evil, and then delivers with a totally nihilistic ending.
Playlist:
Pixies - Trompe le Monde
The Kills - Midnight Boom
The Black Keys - Magic Potion
Prince and the Revolution - Purple Rain
The Fixx - Reach the Beach
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin I
Card:
Continuing a return to my original Thoth Deck:
With my Reddit Nosleep series starting today and a meet-up with an old friend wherein I may pitch a collaborative project just because I love working with the person and haven't in a looong time, I'm definitely starting some journeys.
Probably the second Led Zeppelin song I ever heard, and possibly the first one I heard while seeking out the band's music (oh so long ago now), I still have a huge crush on "Ozone Baby". I feel a huge Zep binge coming on and I welcome it with open arms.
Watch:
While I won't be watching Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead tonight - it's Joe Bob night, of course - I will be checking this out at some point this weekend. I'm hoping for big, dumb fun but not really expecting to get even that. I really hope I'm wrong.
Speaking of Netflix, here's a teaser the streaming giant just dropped for an upcoming flick that has me very intrigued. I hardly go to Netflix anymore for anything, however, that sometimes works against me. I have to try and remind myself that despite the ginormous size of the company and somewhat banal output, they did bring us flicks like Cam, Hold the Dark and even Stranger Things. So they are capable of really hitting the nail on the head.
Love that red!
Playlist:
Les Discrets - Prédateurs
Alice in Chains - Dirt
Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark
The Mothers of Invention - Freak Out!
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
White Lung - Eponymous
The Jesus Lizard - Liar
Jackie Wilson - Higher
Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild
Faith No More - The Real Thing
David Zinman, Dawn Upshaw & London Sinfonietta - Gorecki: Symphony No. 3
Dead Man's Bones - Eponymous
Led Zeppelin - Coda
Card:
And now for something completely different...
I hung out with my good friend Keller yesterday (we're both vaxxed), and at the crux of our evening, he pulled a spread for me with his Marseille Deck. My question pertained to K and I looking for a house, and his answer was extremely helpful, even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear.
This came on in the car last night as K and I were driving back from our time at the track, and despite hearing the song in its entirety, I immediately came home and threw Zeppelin IV on the old record player just to hear the song the way it was meant to be heard.
Glorious!
Is When the Levy Breaks the greatest rock song of all time? Well, a claim like that is an impossibility anyway. There is no 'greatest rock song.' Also, it would be hard to back up that claim when you think about all the other great songs just from the era of this album, alone, let alone before or after. That said, it's also a claim I would not contest if made in my presence. Because if Levy isn't the greatest, it's certainly one of them.
Watch:
The fact that Parmount dropped a GI JOE trailer this week is serendipitous because last week I actually bought a digital copy of GIJOE: Retaliation. I had not seen it since the theatre, and to quote a tweet I dropped during my re-watch:
#gijoeretaliation is a hot mess that has just enough fan service to make me not hate it, but enough contrivance to make me want to.
This was K's first GIJOE anything, and she liked it about as much as I do. Anyway, the fact that Retaliation came closer to making me happy than Cobra Rises did felt like a good sign at the time the film came out, and I held out hope that a part three might continue that trend. However, cinematic tie-in properties and shared universes have come a long way since then, and here we are with a reboot.
I suppose I should explain that GI JOE is hallowed ground to me. Or at least Larry Hama's 80s comic continuity is. Despite the usual dalliance with comics in my very earliest days - from which all I remember is Thor and Uncle Scrooge - Hama's GI JOE was the book that made me a comics kid. I still remember issue 49, published July 1986.
I wrote about this somewhere before, but I bought a tattered copy of this issue on the schoolyard from a total dick who actually charged me $0.25 over the cover price (!) while taking a summer school algebra class between 4th and 5th grade. I still have that copy. I must have read that comic 100 times, and when #50 came out, I began having my parents take me to the local comic shop every month so I could buy keep up. Then I began raiding back issue bins. My collection of what I'd consider Hama's essential run of Joe (issues 1-126, although by then the title was waning under the stress of Hasbro's demands that Hama help them save a sinking property) has never been complete, and I don't revisit them often. That said, because of all this, yeah, I want someone to adapt the book into a movie as good as Marvel has done with theirs.
Hopeless? Maybe, but despite my love of Hama's work, the version of Joe I think would adapt the best to the big screen is the understated reboot that Mike Costa and Christopher N. Gage did in the 00s for IDW, specifically the Cobra book. There has been talk of that series getting the TV show treatment, but in the meantime, we're left with what you see above. Which looks like it might be a better big-budget take on Joe than what we got with the previous two films. I mean, I'm not sure how you kick off a franchise with a single-character origin film, but regardless, this will put my ass in a seat.
Yo Joe!
Playlist:
The Jesus Lizard - Down
Balthazar - Fever
David Bowie - The Next Day
Dance with the Dead - B-Sides: Vol. 1
Christopher Young and Lustmord - The Empty Man OST
I messed this up and should have posted this yesterday, as September 25, 1980 is the day John Bonham passed away. 38 years... wow.
A week or two ago, the new Grady Hendrix book came out. Author of My Best Friend's Exorcism, Paperbacks from Hell, and Horrorstör, this guy has become a recent favorite of mine. Looking forward to this new one. Why?
Right up my alley. That said, I still have a lot of books to tackle before the year is over. My list of "To-Read" goes a little something like this:
Neil Gaimen - The Graveyard Book
Robert Payne Cabeen - Cold Cuts
Dead Reckoning - Dino Parenti
David Lynch - Room to Dream
Gemma Files - Experimental Film
That's not all of them, but it's the ones I really want to read before the end of the year.
Playlist from 9/25:
Bauhaus - In the Flat Field
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
Boy Harsher - Country Girl EP
Mad Love - White With Foam
Briqueville - II
Godflesh - Post Self
Card of the day:
As often as it appears in my daily pulls, I'm going to have to dig deeper on this card. I'm not getting a 'journey' vibe, literally or figuratively for today, so let's look at the Grimoire:
"Everything within. No external or obscured (The Moon) influences. Trust you gut. Materiality can point to eccentricity or folly."
Hmm. The materiality bit rings a bit true to some of my deep-rooted neuroses about money; I tend to buy to much stuff. Or this may be a resolution to a certain fatigue that has haunted me of late, making it more difficult than usual to walk down to my local coffeehouse and write (I drove yesterday, but only just convinced myself to go).
This song has seemed especially haunting to me lately. There's a cosmic reverie to the lead guitar that reminds me of Zeppelin at their most mysterious, and also sounds - if you'll pardon the purple - like an impossible gaze into the abyss.
Issue #1 of Batman: Damned blew my expectations out of the water. The story at this point, which is teaming Batman up with John Constantine, begins perfunctory enough. What really seals this one is the art and the format - it's the over-sized magazine size Brubaker and Phillips use for the Criminal Specials, and Lee Bermejo's renditions of everything, especially the design for Batman's suit and his dark depiction of Gotham, are absolutely gorgeous.
Playlist from 9/19:
M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
Type O Negative - Dead Again
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
Earth - Primitive and Deadly
Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me OST
Card of the day:
From the Grimoire: "Not knowing when to stop for the love of the "battle". Loud and clear.
Watched a couple great 80s horror flicks yesterday with K and my good friend John who is out visiting. First up:
I love both of the original Demons flicks by Lamberto Bava. The first would rank as my favorite, but mechanics of the horror in two is perhaps odder than the first, with the Demons coming through the television instead of the giant movie screen. In both films, I love the tone of the movie/show the audience is watching and how it kind of reflects their real world and kind of doesn't. There's a weird trans-meta element I can't quite explain, but it really works to make the entire thing creepier. And that's a lesson I often hear repeated - in horror, you don't have to explain everything. Sometimes that takes away from the story (I'm looking at you, Babadook).
Next:
Considerably more solid than you would think, I really enjoyed what I put on expecting a goof from.
Playlist from yesterday:
Secret Chiefs 3 - Book of Horizons
Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave - Phantasm OST
Alice in Chains - Rainier Fog
The Thirsty Crows - EP
Stellar Corpses - Hellbound Heart EP
Stellar Corpses - Respect the Dead EP
3:20 AM Thursday, May 18, 2017: I wake up sweating as the last of this damnable sickness that has stopped up K and my lives for the last week or so eeks its way from my pores. Unsure if it's near my alarm time I check my phone and see a message from Seth. I click it and read:
I find it hard to fall asleep again after this but eventually I do. This isn't world shattering like Bowie, but it's deeply terrible. And despite the sleep interruption I'm glad this is how I find out; just like when my friend Tori messaged me "David Bowie Died" early in the morning almost a year and a half ago now, seeing news of this magnitude while my brain is still halfway stuck in The Dreaming is a shock that helps cement the event as historical, i.e. I'll always remember where I was. All that said, the way in which I process this news is far more complex than I would have anticipated.
During their initial run Soundgarden was one of my favorite bands. This favor carried on well after their dissolution and although the feelings aren't quite as strong these days I wouldn't say they've waned so much as learned to share. They were one of four bands that Jake - my best friend in my late teens/early twenties - and I shared passionate attachment to the way late teens/early twenties friends often do. And there were layers to our love of these bands, Soundgarden in particular as it wasn't just Cornell as a frontman. They - along with these other bands* - were of the few where I learned to see how ever member of a group could bring something to the table to help construct such a staggering whole (for an example of this play the album version of Fourth of July really loud or on headphones). But Chris Cornell's voice - it defied description. I always 'got' why some people hated it, the sometimes grating, shrill ferocity of his attack. I loved it. Jesus Christ Pose remains a favorite and it's not annoyance I feel when Cornell hits those blistering high notes, it's a sense of joy as reality shreds around me.
I loved Badmotorfinger from the jump, managed to scoop it up in the original, limited release as a double disc with SOMMS, the re-release of which I was thrilled to pick up on vinyl during last November's Record Store Day. Their cover of Sabbath's Into the Void was arguably what also kickstarted my love of Sabbath, and as Jake and I fell into both bands we had a theory between us that SG was somehow the reincarnation of Sabbath in its perfect, original era. Sure other bands imitated the progenitors of metal, but SG didn't. They were of like-minds, the influence not so much blatant as inferred. And there were moments when Kim Thayil seemed to bleed Sabbath Volume 4 and Master of Reality through the pores on his fingertips...
I was a bit hesitant on Super Unknown at first. I still don't really care too much for Spoon Man, and Black Hole Sun took me years for me to come around to recognizing it for the odd, unsettling single that it is. But for years after its release I avoided the album; at the time I was young and probably just upset that all the jocks were suddenly into the same obscure band that I was. Ah youth and it's folly. Jake turned me around though, and he did so by drilling the rest of the album into my head, specifically Mailman, Limo Wreck, Fourth of July, Fresh Tendrils and Like Suicide. From there I really fell into the songs and production on Super Unknown hard; it was the first record I wanted to grab off my shelf this morning when I heard the news and goddamn the one of two people who stole it from me - it was Jake's copy that he gave to me shortly before he died on September 22nd, 1998. I've been hesitant to rebuy it since; Tommy wrote an excellent piece on the record last year for a Joup Friday Album and that almost sent it to my amazon cart but I hesitated, as if there was any chance in hell I'd be able to drive out to Joshua Tree and find my copy in a thrift store, where it most likely ended up after all the dust settled. Ravenous for it this morning I arrived at work and begrudgingly bought it from the iTunes store, 15 tracks of ones and zeros instead of a beautiful tactile fossil I'd touched and played and, honestly, snorted coke off of once or twice. Memories...
When Down on the Upside came out Jake and I had already been anticipating it for some time. He bought it first, on cassette, and I remember we smoked up and put it on and had a weird, 'umm, huh.' reaction to it. This nonplussed, sinking feeling lasted for a week or two, mostly because that first listen freaked us out so much we avoided the record. Then Jake took it on a fishing trip with his estranged father and returned a weekend later exclaiming its brilliance. He'd spent each night of the trip digesting the album through his headphones. This was the first time I figured out that sometimes you had to work for something great; sometimes passive listening lead to breakthroughs and sometimes it's one song that is the key to opening the rest of an album, like a flower. Again we smoked and sat down and he started the album at the beginning of the second side, with Apple Bite transitioning directly into the cyberpunk insanity of Never the Machine Forever. And from there I got it. I consumed the second side of Down on the Upside repeatedly and that eventually opened the first, more polished and 'accessible' side. For years it was my favorite SG album, might still be. Jake had a thing about lyrics; he would often latch onto the most bizarre and literary, or read interpretations into phrases that I would never have seen. Down's penultimate track, An Unkind has one I still think about on a regular basis.
"We lack the Moses, to look a Saint in the eyes."
And then Soundgarden broke up. I tried to like Chris Cornell's post-SG work but I just could not get into most of it. I loved "Seasons", his solo track on the Singles Soundtrack, but each of his subsequent three solo albums left me cold, as did his work in audioslave. That one's definitely not his fault; I'm not a RATM fan and the idea that those three meatheads basically just did exactly what they did with Dela Rocha at the helm behind a voice as amazing as Chris Cornell's... fucking travesty mate. The track used in Michael Mann's brilliant film Collateral is an exception, but otherwise I can't turn to any of this stuff to celebrate Cornell's life now because in my opinion it is indicative of the terribly sad fact that as an artist Cornell always seemed to shoot himself in the foot. A tragedy when he was as talented as he was and when he had already had such a great vehicle for that talent in his life. Soundgarden's break-up felt like they were frustrated and upset with their fans, with the industry and with themselves. They didn't see the forest for the trees. I once read Cornell refer to them as "Just a metal band" in a way that suggested it was Soundgarden holding him back. I've never understood that - from a fan's perspective they had continually evolved over the course of their career. That was what that whole A side of Down on the Upside was about, an evolution from a Sabbath to a Zeppelin, while the B side was darker and stranger than almost anything they'd done before (except maybe No Wrong No Right or 665). They could have done and been anything, could have made whatever music they wanted as they continued to evolve. But they felt expectations held them back. Maybe they were right; were their album sales tanking? Was A & M unhappy and manipulating them? As a band they were big enough that it didn't matter, they could have been the first Zeppelin of the new age of post-industry. Instead they all kind of disappeared and Cornell went on to search for himself publicly - NEVER a good thing. By the time that Timbaland produced monstrosity hit the shelves I was done. My ex-wife loved that record, but within an instant of hearing it my only reaction was, "Well, if this fails we'll have a Soundgarden reunion in short order."
And we did. And they gave us King Animal, which is okay, but in my opinion not worthy of their legacy. Who knows, maybe I just haven't given it the time to 'blossom' like I did with Down, but I don't think so. And their exorbitant pricing of live shows since reuniting has driven a 'Fuck You' wedge between the band and I so that I don't really want to give it a chance and I never got to see them live and honestly, do not regret NOT remedying that with the reunion at all.
All that said, here's footage of their last song, the last song of Cornell's life, last night at the Fox Theater in Detroit, MI. When I heard it was Zeppelin's In My Time of Dying I got chills.
Finally, whatever the reason for his death, this was the song that I wanted to hear immediately upon learning of Chris Cornell's death. May he rest in peace and know that he changed many, many peoples lives with his music. He certainly changed mine and Jake's.
............
* The others were Ozzy-era Sabbath, Type O Negative and Cypress Hill.
When I fall back into a Led Zeppelin jag I fall hard. I've been listening to Presence over and over again for the last few days - I love the band's entire catalogue - they're the one "classic" rock band that still flows in my blood daily*, probably because they were a large part of the soundtrack to my days in high school spent really feasting on music - learning about it and really just over dosing on it constantly. I could go on - in fact I've half a mind to turn this into an article for Joup. Maybe I will. In the meantime however, I submit for your consideration, Achilles Last Stand - the greatest rock song ever?
