HBO Films: Phil Spector Trailer

I'm no longer really a fan of Al Pacino's work in cinema. Everything up to and including Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way and I'm in, Carlito's Way especially, as I feel it is a modern crime masterpiece, a tear-jerking love story and it features outstanding performances by not only Mr. Pacino but Sean Penn as well. It is a shame though, that the Carlito Brigante character has slightly been ruined for me by the fact that it became Pacino's ONLY persona after that. Some have corrected me and said that Al put a slight mod on Carlito for Scent of a Woman and that is in fact the character he's been in EVERY movie since. Either way, it's wore out its welcome. The one exception to this is HBO's 2010 movie You Don't Know Jack where Pacino turned in a fantastic role performance as Jack Kevorkian. Honestly up to that point I didn't think I'd ever see another great Pacino performance again.

Now HBO is giving us the above - a film where Pacino portrays enigmatic looney tune Phil Spector, possibly the greatest record producer in human history (which he reminds up of in the trailer) and convicted murderer. I gotta say, I'm excited again. From what we see in this trailer I'm thinking we're not going to get another fine-tuned, wonderfully-nuanced performance out of Mr. Pacino, but honestly in this case I don't care. Spector fascinates the hell out of me, and to have someone who can get all HOO-HA bugfuck crazy at the drop of a hate playing him makes me even more excited (as long as we don't actually have to hear him yell Hoo-Ha that is). There's a documentary about Spector on my Netflix cue - it's been there for a few years and last I checked it still hadn't been released, so this will have to do for now. Besides, I've a feeling the whole story is probably so disturbing that it'll be good to break the ice with some larger-than-life fiction before getting into the real nooks and crannies of the story.

Wherever you fall in the Spector polarization, let's not forgot what he did give us, before he started taking things away from people.



Hot damn that's a fine song and one of my favorite recordings. Ever.

The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

BIG pull back to The Smiths lately. Rounding out my (hopefully) last night of feverish delusion (oh who am I kidding? The fevers been gone since yesterday and I'll always be delusional) with a huge Smiths bender complimented perfectly by beginning to re-read Neil Gaiman's Sandman in anticipation of next fall's new Sandman series.

(and in the still for this video, doesn't Morrissey look kinda like David Patrick Kelly, best known as Jerry Horne in Twin Peaks? LOVE IT)

The C-Building Kids - PTA Gangbang

Okay, in the high school that Mr. Brown and I went to there were, at the time, three buildings. It was all one big structure, but they'd been adding onto it over the years I guess, connecting each new building via long hallways that looking back on it now were more than a little reminiscent of airports. If you've ever been to the Phoenix, AZ airport you will no doubt know what I'm talking about. A building was purely academic, B building was a continuation of that with something else thrown in, I don't remember exactly, and C Building was for the stoners and special ed students (one and the same in some cases - and I'm saying this as a graduate of that school's stoner program).

Anyway...

About two years out of high school Mr. Brown and I were in a band called Wink Lombardi and the Constellations. We weren't twenty-one and at that time I was really more of a pothead, so we spent most of our spare time in our practice space, recording with every available instrument, microphone and concept our drug-addled brains could come up with. This past time was not limited to just the five of us in the band* but most of our friends. One of those friends was the now-departed Jake. The dude was awesome, but he was a fucking hurricane of insanity waiting to blow free at any given moment. Jake had no musical ability per se - although he sure could sing - but that made his contributions that much more heartfelt and unique.

And insane.

Brown and I decided to start a band with the three of us and whoever else - something where we'd just set up stuff and play and see what happened. Usually for these sessions I played bass, Mr. Brown did some form of vox or keys and Jake did everything we could think of that he didn't know how to play but that might benefit from his fresh approach. He'd play guitars run through five different types of distortion pedals. He'd play drums (again - for being untrained, not bad). He sing. He'd read bizarre passages from his or Mr. Brown's high school notebooks, he'd play a keymonica. Whatever. Our main method of recording at the time was a Tascam 464 - hey this was 1996, there wasn't any home digital equipment yet. No youtube, nothing. So anyway, we decided to call this band - what else - The C-Building Kids. Now you can appreciate the reference.

Most of those tracks sat on moldering casette tapes for a few years until circa 2002 when I was in the band The Yellow House and the singer and I bought a Pro Tools rig. Not the super professional one, but a Digi001. We were recording our debut album and that was how we'd chosen to do it. In the downtime from recording that band - and because for years I clearly did NOTHING exception become inebriated and make music (not a bad thing) - Mr. Brown and I spent many a long night going through those old C Blding tapes, transferring the material track by track. Jake had passed away a few years between the original project and this re-mastering so it was important to us.

Still is.

We managed to make one album out of the most usable of that material. Pro Tools is a non-destructive, digital recording environment and it enables you to have a hell of a lot more tracks than a Tascam 464 does. After transferring all those old songs we added tons of stuff to link all the tracks and basically make the whole thing flow like one giant, diseased clusterfuck of a record. We named it The C-Building Kids: Shitting in the Urinal and never released it because... well, again, there was no youtube still at this time and just who were we gonna send this to?

The above track actually doesn't even have Jake on it. Most of it is one single track - I remember the night perfectly, Sonny and I walking up into the old practice space during the Wink days, seeing Brown sitting there with a small Casio keyboard in his hand, plugged into the Tascam. He played us what he had just created - again on ONE TRACK - and we were just like whoah. I never knew how to add anything to it, when we transferred it I strapped on my guitar and running it through my handy-dandy effects pedal and did some crazy, off-the-cuff hoo-doo that really actually worked. Then we added our roommate Two Foot making some weird humping noises inspired by the title (which Mr. Brown had recorded the initial track based on) and the rest... well, while it might not be history, it's certainly our story.




......................

*Mr. Brown, myself, Sonny D., JFK and fifth member that rotated between several different people, none of which were Abe Vigoda but one of which carried the unusual surname of Crackrockski. Polish?

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Cocks 'n' Asses

Great B-side I re-discovered while going through my listening preparations for Push the Sky Away. Reminds me a little bit of "Three" on Seventeen Seconds by The Cure. Has what I always think of as the "Vertigo Comics Vibe". I need to post a list of other stuff with that vibe and an explanation - I think it's an interesting theory.

Alice In Chains - Sea of Sorrow

The summer of '91 I attended my second concert ever: Operation Rock and Roll!!! Now I ask you, with a moniker like that, how could it be anything but awesome? It was, if I can do this from memory - Metal Church, Dangerous Toys, Motorhead, Judas Priest (Painkilllllllleeeeerrrrr tour no less) and Alice Fucking Cooper. Holy Old Crow, right? My buddy Zak lived a stone's throw from the (then) World Music Theatre in Tinley Park, IL. He had the obligatory cool uncle who chaperoned us because he himself was a fan of Mr. Cooper. So we had a good old time.

Anyway... On the way out that night they were handing out a casette. Just a simple thing in a cardboard slip-sleeve with a canon on the cover and one song by all the band's that had played the show and a bunch that hadn't. Alice In Chain's Sea of Sorrow was, I think, the third song on the first side. It was the first time I'd ever heard Alice In Chains. You may have noticed, I've been a fan ever since.

I've always liked this song because the use of the piano makes it stand slightly apart from the rest of their catalogue, but without really deviating from their "sound". That sound largely being made up of Cantrell's dark and lush songwriting and the unique harmonies that resulted from his voice with Layne Staley's. Even though Layne died I do believe Cantrell has cracked the code a second time and in a respectful way with what he has going now as Alice In Chains. I don't really care too much for the group's newer video, which I posted and talked a bit about here, but I love the song and can't wait for the record (which, as far as I've been able to ascertain, still does not have a definitive release date).

I also don't care for a lot of the elements of the above video for Sea of Sorrow. I've said before, videos where the band 'plays' irritate me. I get it, why it's done, but THEY'RE NOT PLAYING so it just seems dumb. Be that as it may, in the 90's you couldn't throw a frog without hitting a video with the band playing, unless maybe that frog was aimed at TOOL. Regardless, I love the song, love some of the B&W imagery, and LOVE seeing a young, healthy, LIVING Layne Staley.

DAYWALT HORROR: Jack

Kudos to my friend Tori for turning me on to this. Lots of cool stuff here from The Daywalt Fear Factory

Pulp - Seductive Barry

Probably the next most seductive song (of course, check the title mate). Both on the same album!