Month: January 2006

You know who’s due for a critical revival? Caravan, the obscurist early ’70s wuss-prog band from the U.K. They mixed up elements of jazz and folk, but really, they ended up sounding like early Yes performed by a team of earnest hobbits.
(I make a strong mental connection between Caravan and little people. And not just because their songs feature lyrics like “As wandering minstrels play tunes of yesterday / When dragons roamed the land, knights in armour gold / Charged on horseback bold / The maids were saved, the dragons slayed.” I mean, come on! Does late-period psychedelic music get any cuter than that?)
I found their album In The Land Of Grey And Pink online somewhere, and it’s just plain charming. It’s like Jethro Tull without the fatal self-importance. I’m not sure I’d want to invite the band members to dinner — they’d probably stink of incense and slip some psilocybin in my iced tea — but their music is smile-inducing. (An MP3 of the title track is available in the Flash widget here.)
Some song and album titles: “Nine Feet Underground / Nigel Blows a Tune / Love’s a Friend / Make It 76 / Dan” (a 22-minute epic), “For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night,” “Dabsong Conshirto (Part 1: The Mad Dabsong; Part 2: Ben Karratt Rides Again),” and “The Fear and Loathing in Tollington Park.”
I nominate them for the soundtrack of the next Wes Anderson movie, assuming it features meadows, sun-dappled maidens, and little people.

What are you doing on Friday, February 10?
You won’t be watching the stupid Olympics opening ceremony from stupid Torino in stupid Italy. (Speaking of which: Since when did good ol’ Turin become Torino? If the games were a few hundred miles southeast, would we say it was taking place in Roma, not Rome? Were the last games in Athina instead of Athens? Who do these foreigners think they are, determining their own names for their cities? And do we have to rename the Shroud now?)
You will be sitting in front of a TV, tuned in to your local Fox affiliate, watching the final four episodes of Arrested Development, the best show on television.
When the two glorious hours are complete, you will go to your computer, fire up your email program of choice, and email me: “Dear Josh, Thank you very much for allowing me to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Arrested Development. All the best, [your name here].”

Having spent much of the last weekend in various states of intestinal distress, I feel confident about making the following proclamation:
Cherry-flavored Pepto-Bismol tastes like ass.
I mean, ewwww. Regular Pepto may not be something you’d want for breakfast every morning, but at least that chalky taste is associated with relief in our collective subconscious. But add some chemical-tasting alleged cherryness and man, that taste never leaves your mouth. Yecccch.

There’s a new Built to Spill song up on their Myspace.com site. It’s good — a little more propulsive and rockish than their poppier last album. Me likes. It’s been over a year since I complained about society’s need for a new Built to Spill album, and it’s good to see crabwalk.com finally getting some results.

As a song title, it ranks among the worst in modern musical history, but Jism by Tindersticks is one of the Best Songs Of All Time. Yes, capital letters. That moment about five minutes in when the violins start to shriek and pluck and the drummer lets go is almost, well, orgasmic. Dark, symphonic chamber pop that demands to be heard with the lights low and a whiskey in hand — a very English sort of repression, bursting out.
The original version on the first Tindersticks album is great. (Both their first and second albums are, confusingly, self-titled. And both are essential — I might even give the second a slight edge.)
But there’s an even better version on The Bloomsbury Theatre 12.3.95, a live album the band released in small numbers at their creative peak, just after the first two albums, complete with a 24-piece string section. Man, does that thing cook — I could listen to it all day, and have been, lately.
Here’s an MP3 of the track. And just for kicks, here’s another track El Diablo En El Ojo, where the vocals are a bit subpar, but the sense of theatricality and impending doom is great. (Dig that chaotic string swell at 1:45.) And here’s another, City Sickness, perhaps a bit more mainstreamy.
(The live album is not, to my knowledge, available in the U.S. any more. Best deal: Buy it from one of Amazon’s zShops as part of the remastered second album, which includes Bloomsbury as a bonus disc. Available for as low as $19.)
I should point out I’ve been told Tindersticks are an acquired taste. There are some bands I love that I try to turn on other people to with a near 100-percent success rate. Then there are bands like Tindersticks. I don’t get it, personally; unlike much of the music I loved in the mid-1990s, I’ve never tired of them. If it’s an acquired taste, go acquire it! But to each his/her own.

James Frey, asshole liar author, is on a different kind of rehab course — this time, he’s trying to rehab his image after being outed as a fraud whose “memoirs” are a tissue-thin (and abysmally written) pack of falsehoods.
He was on Larry King last night and spinning his talking points. I’m sure the PR consultants he has working for him are doing their best, but he’s still full of shit.
Frey: “I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has.”
Bullshit. If he hadn’t expected scrutiny, why did he go to the law-enforcement agencies that had arrested him and ask them to expunge the records, right when the book was hitting bookstore shelves? He very clearly knew the scrutiny was coming, and he tried to cover his ass.
Frey: “A memoir literally means my story, a memoir is a subjective retelling of events.”
Bullshit. Here’s where Frey is dangerous: He’s trying to conflate a subjective retelling of events with making shit up. Let’s say I had a birthday party when I was 12. Twenty years later, I might think back to that day and remember it differently than it really happened. Perhaps I’d forgotten key details and remember chocolate cake instead of coconut. Perhaps I’ll forget that little Suzie Jenkins was mean to me, or that I really wanted a G.I. Joe action figure but only got socks. That’s a subjective retelling of events — acknowledging that our memories might not be perfect, but trying our best to tell it like it was.
Inventing a three-month stint in jail — that’s not an accidental mistake. That’s making shit up.
(And, for the record, memoir literally means “memory,” not “my story.”)
Frey: “I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say I’ve conned anyone. The book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events is 18, which is less than five percent of the total book. You know, that falls comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir.”
Bullshit. Assuming for a moment his page counts are correct, the reason they’re the ones in dispute is because they’re the only ones that would have a paper trail to back them up. Did Frey really board a transatlantic flight high and soaking in his own blood, with a gory hole through his cheek? It sure seems doubtful that an airline would let such a character on, but there’s no way to check. He doesn’t say what airline it was, the number of the flight, or any of the other details that might let one confirm or refute his story. The only things that are checkable by publicly accessible records are his run-ins with law enforcement agencies, and it seems like he made up just about everything there.
As the Smoking Gun story points out, most of the juicy unbelievable stuff in the book happens only when he’s in the company of people who die during the book’s course. Were his stories about the addict Lilly correct? Did Lilly even exist? We’ll never know, because “Lilly” is dead.
One part of the Smoking Gun piece I found particularly damning is that Frey had clearly moved to a new level of coverup by convincing a professor friend to agree to be his emergency backup. This professor shows up as his felon-in-arms in Frey’s new book, and when the Smoking Gun started asking questions about the central arrest of the book, Frey suddenly remembered — contrary to even his book’s lies — that this professor buddy was in the car with him at the time and could vouch for him. That was before Frey knew TSG had a copy of the police report in question, which clearly said Frey was alone in the car. Suddenly the professor friend disappeared from the story.
Frey: “I mean, I’ve acknowledged that there were embellishments in the book, that I’ve changed things, that in certain cases things were toned up, in certain cases things were toned down, that names were changed, that identifying characteristics were changed.”
Bullshit. See, this is another part of the strategy: make it appear that the criticisms of the book are all about nitpicking things, like an incorrect name. It even makes him look like a hero — he was just changing someone’s name to protect them from prying eyes!
But again, he’s not accused of that. He’s accused of inventing his story wholecloth. He invents FBI investigations targeted on him, he invents brawls with police, he invents jail terms, he invents train wrecks that kill his friends. These are all made up. They are not toning things up or down.
Frey, on why he shopped the book to publishers as a novel: “I think of the book as working in sort of a tradition — a long tradition of what American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.”
Bullshit. Just because Jimmy Frey putting himself in the tradition of Hemingway and Fitzgerald is bullshit.
Frey, on why those heavyweights called their books novels instead of memoirs: “[A]t the time of their books being published, the genre of memoir didn’t exist. I mean, the genre of memoir is one that’s very new and the boundaries of it had not been established yet.”
Bullshit. Memoirs date back centuries. Hell, Ulysses S. Grant’s book — entitled “Memoirs,” published in 1885 — was one of the publishing phenomenons of the 19th century. Hemingway and Co. never wrote a truthful memoir and labeled it a novel. Their fiction has autobiographical elements, sure, but it’s tweaked to the needs of the story and labeled fiction.
Asshole. See, those of us in the business of writing facts hate guys like this. Every time someone like Frey comes along and says “Oh, I changed a little bit here and there, everybody does it,” it makes the rest of us look like Frey-level frauds. Once he gets exposed as a gutter rat, he tries to drag the rest of the profession down to his level. Well, there are plenty of people out there who manage to write nonfiction that isn’t based on lies, and Frey should be ashamed. His book would have gone nowhere as a novel — which is why 17 publishers rejected it as such and why 99.9% of the promotion at publication was on how this was A True Story.
Addendum: Seth Mnookin has a good take, based in part on his own rehab experiences. “[T]hese stock characters…are typical of the kind of cliché-ridden portraits that populate Frey’s book…If a novelist wrote a book run through with these kind of straight-from-Central-Casting chestnuts, he’d be politely told to try again…as Frey says he was, by 17 different publishers, before, Frey says, Doubleday’s Nan Talese said she’d publish his novel if he recast it as a memoir.” As I said earlier, I was amazed at how bad the writing is; it really reads like the third-best piece in an undistinguished high school literary magazine.

Does anyone have recommendations of a good RSS reader for Windows? I need to install something on my work computer and my Windows knowledge lags far behind my Mac knowledge. I have a strong bias in favor of free products, if that helps any.
(On the Mac, NetNewsWire is the way to go. I spend more time in NNW than I do in Safari.)

Here are some (mostly import) compilation CDs I’ve been listening to recently that may be worth your time. You’ll probably find several more cheaply at amazon.co.uk, even with international shipping. (Man, the Brits get all the best comps.)
– Come to the Sunshine, a smile-inducing collection of early ’70s psychedelic soft rock rarities.
– Somewhat related: Meridian 1970, a compilation of mellow sounds from the titular year.
– Love’s a Real Thing, a terrific Luaka Bop-issued bunch of West African soul numbers from the same era. (An era with which I’ve been musically obsessed lately.)
– The Now Sound Redesigned, a remix album of songs by The Free Design, a cotton-candy-sweet family act from the late ’60s that had some amazing harmonies and a great square-jawed groove. They went nowhere commercially the first time around, but (a la the David Axelrod records I posted about last week) they’ve been reclaimed by the cratediggers. This CD features remixes by members of Belle & Sebastian and Stereolab, Caribou, Danger Mouse, and a host of Stones Throw types like Koushik, Dudley Perkins, Peanut Butter Wolf, and Madlib.
– Le Beat Bespoke, maybe the best of the bunch. It’s a comp inspired by the mod revivalist movement in the U.K., which attempts to bring back the swinging-London vibe of the first few Who albums, with a smidge of northern soul. Lots of freakbeat and blue-eyed soul, but with a little more variety than you might imagine. Highly danceable.
– Gilles Peterson Digs America, Gilles Peterson in Brazil, and Gilles Peterson in Africa, three wonderful compilations by the terrific BBC DJ. (I’ll let you guess his name.) Peterson has terrific taste, the sort of catholic taste I aspire to. This isn’t Starbucks world music: This has groove, a sort of global funk/soul melange that I can assure will make you happy. (The America CD is a bunch of rare early ’70s R&B.)
– Sounds of Monsterism Island, a slightly weirder variant on the same period, focusing more of exotic sounds and general strangeness (“A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil” by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, for instance, and a track by crabwalk.com Official Strange Dude Eden Ahbez). Plus some more contemporary stuff like Dead Meadow.
– The “Girls in the Garage” compilations, all of which feature rare girl-group tracks from the 1960s. These aren’t the doo-wop bands of Motown; these are mostly suburban girls with guitars, amateurish in the best sense, playing with a mix of innocence, toughness, and naive ambition. No link to Amazon because these are clearly illegal bootlegs, issued only on vinyl and impossible to find. The track listings are haphazard, but the variety’s terrific — there are multiple albums in the series of just French go-go groups, and one (Vol. 9) of Singapore female-fronted hotel bands of the 1960s. As I said, you won’t find this in stores, but — while I would never be one to advocate the unauthorized download of music — you might find something of interest here.

Good for The Smoking Gun for outing as a liar that asshole James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces. He’s made many millions of dollars trading on his supposedly felonious past — a past that, it turns out, was almost 100 percent fiction.
I remember thinking he was a bullshit artist when I learned (NY Observer, 2/3/03, now offline) that he first shopped his “memoir” as fiction, only to see it rejected 17 times. And, if the excerpts in the Smoking Gun article are any judge, he’s a miserably bad writer. Should be interesting to see if he gets the public asskicking he should.

If Michael Bolton was gangsta.