syd barrett, r.i.p.

Right after I post an early Pink Floyd video comes word that Syd Barrett — the band’s “troubled genius” — has died.
Syd was a strange character. For those who don’t know the history, he founded the band and wrote and sang nearly all of its early songs. But thanks to a potent admixture of schizophrenia and lysergic acid diethylamide, he lost his mind. The rest of the band gently eased him out and went on to global superstardom. For the last 30-plus years, Syd’d been a crazy man living alone in Cambridge, painting abstract canvases and living off Floyd royalties.
Because he’s gone private, Syd lived on primarily as an image — inspiring tribute songs like “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” Fans imagined him as a kindhearted child in need of protection, an injured songbird. His musical production consisted of only one good album and a bunch of unlistenable solo work, interspersed with occasional glimpses of sense. But from that body of work — and one extended exercise in mythmaking — developed a legend.
Here’s Joe Boyd, the band’s early promoter, on the Syd he knew; he makes the worthwhile and undernoted point that the band succeeded in part because Syd “was incredibly good looking: he had these dark eyes, and this curly black hair, and he was very, very appealing; girls loved him.”
(Today, that seems strange on a couple of levels. First, because the remaining band members post-Syd are, well, quite unattractive sorts; and second, because the post-Syd band and their fans are both so drearily self-conscious about how intellectual and profound they each are. When I was in eighth grade, liking Pink Floyd was a marker that I was a serious person, and it was the complete absence of fun post 1972 that eventually drove me away. So I really like the idea that the most “serious” of classic rock bands, the only one that would inspire Tom Stoppard plays, got an early edge because its lead singer was hot. On the other hand, it also gives his descent into crazy eyebrow-shaving fat man status in the 1970s a sort of awful resonance.)
I linked to a bunch of early Floyd videos a few months ago, and most of those links still work. But the best is this video of “Interstellar Overdrive” from the 1967 doc Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London.

mouth ulcers!

Columns I have no desire to read in my local newspaper:

I realize many of you get mouth ulcers, but after a little studying on my part, I learned that only a lucky chosen few get them regularly, and sometimes, in droves. I’m one of the lucky ones, and ohhhh, I get them everywhere. I get them on my lip, behind my lip, in that little spot where your top lip meets your bottom lip, on my gums, inside my gums, on my tongue, under my tongue, on the roof of my mouth and yes, oh yes, even inside my throat on occasion.

pink floyd on the bbc

Perhaps the most patronizing moment in early rock criticism: Pink Floyd appears on the BBC, May 14, 1967. Despite a pretty good (if poorly miked) rendition of “Astronomy Domine,” with Syd Barrett in full hippie regalia, they get savaged by the Viennese voice of establishment music, Hans Keller.

Syd and Roger Waters actually deal with the insulting questions (“Why has it all got to be so terribly loud? For me, frankly, it’s too loud. I just can’t bear it”) well, I thought. They seem rather amused.

MP3 Monday: July 10, 2006

I feel a bit guilty about all the musical love I dumped on Dallas a few weeks back. (Not that it did the Mavericks a damned bit of good in the NBA Finals.) There are, of course, other fine major metropolitan areas in the state of Texas, and they shouldn’t be ignored. As always, songs will stay on the server for one week’s time.
HOUSTON: “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” by ZZ Top. Recorded live at the Rockpalast in Essen, Germany, April 19, 1980. Originally on Tres Hombres (1973).
If you’re my age, you probably remember ZZ Top most for their 1980s MTV success, which was driven by videos showing dorky guys snagging hot girls with the band’s aid. (Said aid usually involved access to the band’s car, which looked like an early production model of the PT Cruiser.)
Now, I dig their razor-synth sound in that era — but to this Southern boy, it’s the pre-beard ZZ Top that rings most true. In the 1970s, ZZ Top delivered a Texas gut-bucket boogie that had humor, propulsion, and just a smidge of menace. (They also invented Metallica’s guitar tone a solid decade before James Hetfield.) I spent a fair amount of my childhood summers in Houston, and ZZ Top seemed like the coolest thing about that deeply uncool city.
This is from a German TV performance, of which videos apparently still exist. If you want an early ZZ Top album, Tres Hombres is definitely the one to grab.
SAN ANTONIO: “Football” by Mickey & the Soul Generation. From the album Iron Leg: The Complete Mickey and the Soul Generation (2002).
Texas was a surprising funk hotbed in the early 1970s, as a number of recent reissues have shown. But perhaps the most legendary act was Mickey & the Soul Generation — a San Antonio band whose brief career of shrinkwrap-tight soul would have been completely forgotten were it not for DJ Shadow.
In his endless cratedigging, Shadow came across an old 45 of theirs (“Football” was one of the B-sides) and became obsessed. He tracked down the former members, remastered their never-released tracks, and put out this great album. Some tracks (like “Football”) sound like a garage James Brown, but others mix in a little Latin flavor.
AUSTIN: “Loss Leaders” by Spoon. From the EP Soft Effects (1997).
Spoon is, of course, not just the greatest of contemporary Texas bands; they’re in a pantheon that stretches far beyond El Paso and Beaumont. Their later triumphs have been well chronicled. But this (almost-decade-old!) EP track shows they had their aesthetic together early: the sawing guitar riff, Britt Daniel’s penchant for backup self-harmonies, and the punchy Jim Eno drums.
Soft Effects was out of print for a while, but Merge Records is set to reissue it (with Spoon’s hit-and-miss first album Telephono) on July 25.

no money down in the housing market

Frightening news from the housing markets:

As housing prices soared last year, an eye-popping 43% of first-time home buyers purchased their homes with no-money-down loans, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Association of Realtors…

The median first-time home buyer scraped together a down payment of only 2% on a $150,000 home in 2005, the NAR found…

[Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research] and other economists are concerned that many lenders have pushed a series of creative but potentially dangerous loans to help more Americans afford a home.

That 43% number is just staggering to me.

gay rock, frankie goes to hollywood

A new term for me: “cottaging.” (Definition here.)
Speaking of gay pop (as the above linked article does), I remember in seventh grade reading, in my school library, a book on the history of rock and roll. (We’re talking 1987 or thereabouts.) The book had been published around 1984, and the author was British. In a section on “The Biggest Bands of All Time,” alongside The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the like was an extended paean to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I was a dumb little shit at the time, but even I thought that seemed like a reach. But I guess if you were in London in 1984, it made a sort of sense.
Here’s the famously banned video for their biggest hit, “Relax”:

FGTH is apparently still around, although sans lead singer Holly Johnson.
Finally, while I’m linking to over-the-top gay videos of the mid-1980s, I present the Village People’s “Sex Over the Phone.” (I linked to it obliquely earlier.) The truly astounding thing about this one: No matter how stuffed with homoeroticism the video is — and despite the fact it was shot in 1985, many years after America figured out these Village gentlemen may not all be heterosexual — at the 2:25 mark it completely switches gears and pretends its subject is the glory of straight phone sex. I wonder what the marketing thought behind that one was.

johnny paycheck

I’m not sure which is sadder:
1. That dead one-hit country wonder Johnny Paycheck, sometime in the 1990s, switched the capitalization of his last name to PayCheck; or
2. That his widow apparently goes by Sharon PayCheck and his son Jonathan PayCheck.
Best paragraph from his New York Times obit (not online, but by Ben Ratliff): “Though he made his first records in 1958, it was not until the mid-1970s that a movement came along that could accommodate his rowdy, jail-prone life. Suddenly, when certain country singers were marketed as Outlaws, it became acceptable for them to look like hippies and act like pirates.”

katherine gets skooled

My old Toronto buddy Katherine — a person I might have tagged, mere days ago, as Friend Least Likely To Appear On A Reality Television Program(me) — is in fact appearing on such a program(me). It’s called Skooled, apparently, and features a bunch of teenagers swapping roles with a bunch of teachers. (Katherine would be of that second group.) She’s blogging about it, too. Local newspaper story here.