J Church & Honey Bear – Still raining – Knut!!!

HEALTH
I guess I haven’t gone into much detail about my health situation in the last few newsletters. Here’s a brief version of what’s been going on:

First of all, I am no longer on hemo-dialysis. I’ve made the switch to peritoneal and it’s made my life a lot better. I no longer have to get up in the morning and go to the clinic. I just do my bags from home. Instead of four hours a session three times a week, I do this version four times a day, but it’s only 15 minutes total and I can do it while I’m watching TV or sitting at the computer. In the long term, if I never get the transplant I need I can have a much longer life expectancy on peritoneal as it’s much easier on my system. I’m not draining and cleaning all of my blood three times a week AND because I do it so often, it’s a better clean anyway. Most importantly, no more needles. The needles were starting to really freak me out and getting stuck several times a week was super painful. None of that anymore. It’s been really great overall.

I do, believe it or not, sort of miss the old dialysis. It was a little nice lying somewhere for four hours with other people taking care of me, not having to really think about anything. I also liked a lot of the staff at the dialysis place I was going to. I sort of miss them.

The new dialysis makes travel more possible as well though I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Even if I was in top health, I wouldn’t want to hit the road before we recorded a new album.

One of the biggest benefits I’ve been noticing has been with my shrink. Seems like changing my dialysis has helped break me out of some of the depression and anxiety I float back and forth between. There are still LOADS of problems and post-traumatic stress isn’t something that’s got a quick cure. We’ve been working for a year now and it feels like there’s a long way to go. I won’t go into the depressing details, but my shrink helps a lot and home dialysis seems to make me feel more positive (even if the new schedule sometimes has me up until 5:00 AM watching X-Files re-runs).

Finances are really screwy at the moment. I lost my main insurance through Humana, but found out that Medicare is actually better in some areas. Two of my major surgery bills are in collections at the moment and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m not thinking about it, which might be stupid. But I can’t deal with that stress right now. I don’t have any money, so I don’t know what I could do about it anyway. I needed the surgery.

The one major benefit of Medicare over Humana is I can work on getting a kidney transplant here in Austin. Humana wouldn’t cover me to have it done here, and I was going to have to start commuting to San Antonio (as one friend called it, “a hive of scum and villainy”). Now that I’ve lost my insurance, I can do all the testing here in Austin. No traveling.

I’m waiting to hear back about my first test for the transplant. Then I’ve got to find a kidney. I’m also getting my sleep apnea machine in the next few days. I feel more and more like a PKD short story every day. It’s weird. It’s cyber. I DO feel paranoid. 700 pages of declassified CIA docs aren’t helping. Don’t think for a minute I didn’t read through them the moment they went on-line.

KNUT
This cracks me up: http://www.zoo-berlin.de/en/experience/young-animals/ice-bear-knut.html

ROLLING STONES BULLSHIT COMPILATIONS
A long time ago I read something that Lester Bangs’ wrote. I think it was a review of “Sucking in the Seventies”, the most cynical of all Rolling Stones collections. He said that he thought that possibly they were purposely putting really terrible, disposable or unnecessary tracks on their comps to make them bad. It was as if the really bad tracks would make the average tracks seem amazing. Maybe it was to see how far they could push their cult status, a cult bigger than the Krishnas and Scientologists combined.

The Rolling Stones started their secret history of compilations innocently enough. “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” was not untypical of the era where not only were singles emphasized over LPs, but home cassette recording was non-existent much less digital technology. You couldn’t just piece together your Stones best of compilation. “Big Hits” collects some of their most popular moments from ’64 to ’66. For most people, this is really all you need of early Stones with “Satisfaction”, “Time Is on My Side”, “The Last Time”, “19th Nervous Breakdown” and my favorite Stones track from the early period, “Get Off Of My Cloud”. It’s a solid LP and since all of those early albums were mish-mashes or different sessions, a best of didn’t seem too bad as far as breaking any sort of continuity.

The sequel, “Through The Past, Darkly (Big Hits 2)” is a bit more cynical. Actually if it weren’t for the death of Brian Jones and the morbid epitaph and the timing of its release, this record can now be seen as a logical follow-up with no less integrity than its predecessor. Summarizing the years between ’66 and ’69 the record is once again flush with hits like “Paint It Black”, “Mother’s Little Helper”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Street Fighting Man”. The album also contains two of my all-time favorites from the Stones that aren’t thought of as the classic rock staples; “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows” and “2000 Light Years from Home”. But the fact remains that the record came out as a way for the Stones to regain control over the flock. Jones’s death was controversial. “Honky Tonk Woman” was a hit single that the group had to capitalize one and there was no new music in the previous 10 months. Great as it is, “Through the Past, Darkly” was the Stones’ first undeniably cynical release.

What followed was a two year period where the band just said “fuck it” and released a river of musically excellent but utterly pointless compilations. Before the year was up the group released “Greatest Hits” and “Rolling Stones Songbook”. In 1970, “30 Great Hits” came out on ABC. 1971 saw “Milestones”, “Stone Age” and “Gimme Shelter (Live)”, a record that had nothing to do with the film of the same name and was in fact tracks from “Got Live If You Want It” and more previously released studio material.

Of course, there has been a lot written about these records and how they were retaliation for the group switching labels (most were released by Decca). But the more you know about the Stones and the more you know about Jagger, they were sinister to the point of fascination… like the mob or snuff films. They’re on the dark side but ultimately, robbery (as opposed to liberation or re-appropriation) is often a capitalist venture. For all their public outrage about those early Decca collections, a decade later the group was sanctioning equally cynical compilations even on their own label. It would be naïve to assume the group definitely had no idea that Decca would release a series of compilations after the label change. The Stones still profited off of each horrible record.

If there was any wonder about the band’s cynicism, they went ahead and double dipped the next year with an officially sanctioned double LP, “Hot Rocks 1964 – 1971”. You subtract a few lesser known early singles and replace them with “Sympathy For The Devil”, “Brown Sugar” and a few more and you still are collecting the best moments of the two “Big Hits” LPs. Giving the band the total benefit of the doubt, it is worth taking into consideration that back in the old days, records would go out of print. It’s not like today where you just go online and shop away, you spoiled, spoiled child. So assuming that the “Bit Hits” records weren’t completely available (though I remember being able to find them years later even in Hawaii) and that the group were trying to reclaim their hits and not merely doubly profit off of their back catalog, it’s an amazing double LP. Sure, you don’t need it. But it was so impressive to have “Satisfaction”, “Get Off Of My Cloud”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Brown Sugar” all in one place. This is the kind of fun that makes normal fans obsessive and obsessed fans pathological.

The Rolling Stones and their evil plan worked so well that before the year was over, they pushed their luck even further and got away with it! “More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies)” came out later that year! It was the same year! The fucking nerve of them! But it is a great record. The lesser hits, more album tracks and a smattering of what at the time seemed like rarities; this record is in some ways superior to its predecessor if only because there’s larger amount of adventurous tracks like “2000 Light Years from Home”, “She’s A Rainbow”, “Dandelion” and the very unusual “We Love You”.

By 1975, shit, everything was fucked. Bands were so unreliable; the Stones were practically warning their fans of their impending irrelevance. It’s probably too much to call it a betrayal of their core fans, as they don’t really owe anyone anything. But the albums “Made in the Shade” and “Metamorphosis” should have been a clear indication that the lifestyle that Jagger had grown accustomed to was more important the body of work fans were accumulating.
“Made in the Shade” is the follow-up to “Hot Rocks” with all the hits from ’71 to ’75 leaving off their cover of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” (allegedly so Jagger and Richards wouldn’t have to share a dime of the publishing). It’s the Mick Taylor era of the group which for people like me was the band’s greatest period. It makes this whole record seem pointless. How do you grab what you think is a hit off of “Exile on Main Street”? Plus, there IS some crossover with “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” popping up again.

Despite the timing of when “Metamorphosis” was released (the record was a stop gap while they were auditioning Taylor’s replacement) this unusual collection of rarities and outtakes is the only compilation from the Stones that is completely worthwhile even today. The collection includes maybe half a dozen songs covered by other artists of the time as well as the Stones covering Chuck Berry and Stevie Wonder. “Out Of Time” starts things off and is worth the price of admission.

In the meantime, these dreadful Decca comps kept coming out and kept selling in the thousands. I don’t think any of them ever even reached Gold status. But with no real cost, the records were making money and the machine that was the Rolling Stones rolled on. For the remainder of the ‘70s, Decca pumped them out with “Rock ‘n’ Rollin’ Stones”, “No Stone Unturned”, “Rolled Gold”, “Around and Around”, “Solid Rock” and finally “Slow Rollers”. By then, Decca were following the King’s lead making sure there was usually at least one gem or rarity that was a must have to for the serious Stones fan / devotee. The rest of the material would be 10th generation obvious rehash that in its repetition killed any of energy or mystique that originally made them so important. Italian language tracks, instrumentals, rare b-sides, there was usually at least one disposable item on each comp.

In the meantime, the German label licensing some of the early Stones material made a couple completely unimaginative records (which is giving the Decca comps way more credit than they are due). Teldec first released “Stone Age” and “Got Live If You Want It” as a double LP. If that doesn’t seem like a strange and thoughtless enough pairing of albums, they followed it up with a random Stones collection titled “Rolling Stones”.

By the end of the ‘70s, shitty Stones comps were popping up everywhere. The TV advertising label Arcade released “Get Stoned” almost identical to “Hot Rocks”. “Time Waits for No One” was a ‘70s collection dressed up to look like a punk record, ransom note style. Finally, London in Japan ended the ‘70s with “Heartbreakers 14 Rock And Shake” and “Heartbreakers 14 Love Ballads” both records mostly worth looking for because of A) the obi is cool and B) they both come with lyric sheets entirely created by Japanese translators.

This brings us back to “Sucking In the ‘70s”, the last Rolling Stones compilation I ever bought. Yeah, I’m that guy. I’ve gone down that road and I can’t deny that most of these records are nothing but the capitalist commodities that all of us formerly young rebels have been in denial about. Supposedly starting where “Made in the Shade” ended, this ultimately cynical record once again is lying with “Time Waits for No One” going back to 1974. I think the record is an admission not only of the group’s poor material from the late ‘70s but also of what these compilations mean from them. In fact, it’s a celebration of that indignity. They’re reveling in pig shit with a best of compilation that effectively avoids their most critical and commercial successes of the era. Nowhere is “Miss You” and “Beast of Burden” is a radio edit. There ain’t no “Emotional Rescue” or “She’s So Cold”. I wanted to believe so badly that when this record came out I really thought it meant that they were sucking IN the ‘70s as in taking it all in. Now I know that they just fucked off for half a decade and didn’t give a shit. This record was coming out no matter what the quality of material the band was actually producing at the time. Still, it’s a cult. It’s like heroin. I’ve gotta hear “If I Was a Dancer (Dance, Pt. 2)”.

IN THE J CHURCH LISTENING ROOM
FRIENDS OF DISTINCTION “Best Of…” CD
Man, I love that late ‘60s and ‘70s soul. Friends of Distinction get written off at times as a lame pop group. But I love them. Their take on Hugh Masakela’s “Grazin’ in the Grass” is worthy of the original masterpiece.

Formed by Harry Elston and Floyd Butler, two former Ray Charles players who cut their teeth with the Hi-Fi’s (Charles’s backing band that at times also included Marilyn McCoo). Teaming up with Jessica Cleaves and Barbara Jean Love, the group became the pop soul group Friends of Distinction.
I love this era of music because it’s so much like punk for collectors in that there was a real emphasis on singles. There were a lot of great LPs. But you really think of the singles and Friends of Distinction are a good example of that. I was never really blown away by their LPs. But those hits are amazing making this collection much more worthy than some record label trying to cull a “greatest hits” out of John Coltrane or the Clash.
The aforementioned “Grazin’” starts off this collection on a high. But the darker, moody “Going In Circles” is my favorite of the group’s three major hits. Great string arrangement with the descending bass creates a melancholy feel on this waltz ballad.

Completely switching gear, the group’s third major single, “Love or Let Me Be Lonely” is a pop classic with hints of some of the best Dion Warwick / Burt Bacharach collaborations. A lesser hit, “Time Waits for No One” has similar pop soul feel with a closer relationship to the Philly sound maybe like a rawer version of the Spinners.

Over twenty tracks, the group knows what works and none of the songs go on longer than necessary. This is a collection of very precise elements in soul and pop, usually mixing both. Sometimes the group is described as jazz and soul but I think that has more to do with resumes as jazz doesn’t really have much to do with this simple but exhilarating pop music.
(RCA)

MECHT MENSCH / TAR BABIES split cassette
MECHT MENSCH “Acceptance” EP
Both Mecht Mensch and the Tar Babies started life as great Midwestern hardcore bands, uniquely American in sound, with something of an East Coast early ‘80s sound to them (not especially melodic but not exactly tuneless). I don’t really know the whole story about why both groups were connected at the hip, but I get the impression they maybe shared members from time to time. Either way, they were pretty close and though very distinctly separate in character, had similar approaches to writing hardcore.

I’ve never heard the first Mecht Mensch demo tape, but their second release, a split with the Tar Babies includes several tracks I assume rerecorded including the Faith-like thrash of “Zoned Out” and “Wasted Youth”. It could just be me looking for these things. But the singer has something of an Alec MacKaye quality to his voice. The Tar Babies tracks are also crazy, spastic hardcore like a high speed version of the Angry Samoans. It’s noisy and the songs structurally have little resemblance to rock and roll (both bands). It’s fast as hell and super tight. Both of those fuzzy guitars sound great. Like a little amp way too loud with a shitty fuzz box.

Both bands wound up on a couple of amazing compilations. Mecht Mensch found their way onto the “Barefoot and Pregnant” cassette released by Reflex (Husker Du’s label) featuring five tracks still in the hardcore vein alongside Husker Du, the Replacements and others. Both groups appeared on the “Meathouse” compilation put out by seminal ‘80s Mid West label Version Sound (who put out the first Die Kreuzen) along with the Minutemen, Sin 34 and more.

All released in 1982, Mecht Mensch also released their one and only 7”, “Acceptance”. Five tracks of raw punk and hardcore, the group was already starting to evolve with some interesting slower material. It’s all pretty intense still with the group getting more and more into dissonant guitar chords which is always a good thing.

In 1983 both groups wound up on a few classic compilation records like the second Master Tapes (with Zero Boys, Violent Apathy, etc.) and the first “We Got Power” album (with just about everyone else in the world).

I sort of lost track of the Tar Babies. I vaguely remember seeing them (or did Cringer play with them in LA?) once or twice and immediately knowing where they fit in that second generation of SST bands. I dunno. I might like it more now if I were to go back and give it another chance. Mecht Mensch split up. I wonder if anyone will ever get all of their material together for a CD release. If you asked me that ten years ago I would have thought it impossible. But who knows? There is a new hardcore revivalist market today.
(Bone Air)