Daydreamin'

Northern Calloway is best remembered as David, the affable denizen of Sesame Street, who blew off law school and took over the store when Mr. Hooper died. What many people did not know was Northern had a very tumultuous real life battle with mental illness, where daydreams became nightmares, and periods of make believe often began with assaulting hookers with rebar, and ended naked and bloody in a very tangible state hospital. Enjoy your day.

Dare to Dream

For My Wrathchild

Fatherhood has many joys. Seeing your child's first step, their first words, their first day at school. All of these milestones fill you with immense joy and pride. Recently my own little seven-year-old wrathchild, Ezra, discovered the sheer rocking rulocity of Iron Maiden, and he is hooked. And watching his tiny, unjaded ears hear the Maiden classics has reminded me of what excited me upon hearing them for the first time around 1982. All fathers have traditions they will pass on to their sons, some not so cool, but a love for one of the greatest heavy metal bands of all time is as valid and important as fishing, riding a bicycle, or sports, at least at my house it is. So I welcome and foster this obsession of Ezra's, giving him all my Maiden CDs and watching the Live After Death DVD with him as if it was Finding Nemo. Ezra has been bugging me to pay tribute to his favorite band here on the Hearse. So here is Iron Maiden's earliest recording known as The Soundhouse Tapes. You get primitive versions of "Iron Maiden," "Invasion," and "Prowler" (Ezra's favorite Maiden track.) Four songs were recorded, but there was not enough money to finish "Strange World." Weird to think that now they have their own jet (another detail that Ezra finds beyond cool.) So this is for you, little man, and for the band that brings both of us so much joy.

Up The Irons!

Happy Father's Day

No music today, leeches, just a big ass shout out to all my Punk Pops and Metal Thrashing Dads. Real men running shit and raising the next generation of muckrakers and ne'er do wells. This is for the masters of the daddyverse, the Yngwie Malmsteems of daddery. I'm talking about real motherfuckers like Mark Underground, Saul, Danny B, E. Bryers,El Sav Larry,Stevil, John Clancy, Robzub, Scott Kelly, Milos, Dave Clark, Scott Duncan, Jason Walton, Chewy, some newbs to the club like Dave "Lord D," Ron Nichols, and Slobodan Burgher, anyone I may have forgot, and all Dads who visit this site. Dads rule plain and simple. They bring the fun, the rough housing, the tough love and the not-so-tough love. Dads know neat little tricks like how to stop a nose bleed with a match book or how to make a hangman's noose. Dad's often know when to back the fuck off and let it go. Most importantly, Dads are wizards at just making shit up on the spot when faced with something they don't know about. Dad's may yell when they're at the end of their rope, and then turn around and laugh at a fart a second later. It's the enigma of fatherhood. This is your day, Daddio, lay about in your shit-stained tighty whites and bellow drunken incoherent epithets at the TV show of your choosing. I know I will.

Oh, and I am blowing off work to go see Angelcorpse, Ares Kingdom, and Gospel of The Horns tonight. So there!!!

Innocence & Despair

No album has successfully captured the vague sadness of childhood better than The Langley Schools Music Project's Innocence and Despair. Perhaps because it was made by children themselves, perhaps because all these children have now grown up and may well mourn the loss of innocence as adults tend to as they continue their slow crawl towards the grave. The inherent woe and fragility of childhood fills every fumbling nook and cranny of this album. It is painful and bittersweet like the death of summer, or a Judy Blume book. This album will simulteneously warm and break your heart.

Long before Jack Black or School of Rock there was Hans Louis Fenger, a typically broke Vancouver rocker who took a job at Belmont Elementary in rural Langley, British Columbia in 1971. He started teaching the kids pop songs of the time using no theory or sheet music, showing the kids just enough to get through the arrangements. The kids loved it. Four years later Fenger was teaching grades 4-7 at three different schools. Soon after, Fenger organized a giant concert in one of the school's gymnasiums with kids from all over BC to perform for parents and staff alike. The instrumentation was as follows:

• electric bass, featuring a girl plucking on open-tuned string with a Marshall amp bigger than she was.
  
• a stripped-down drum kit; a bass drum on a pedestal; and hand cymbals
  
• a 1940s-vintage National Steel laptop electric; wired through a tremolo
• Orff xylophones and metallophones
• hand percussion, eg., tambourines and claves
• acoustic rhythm guitar and piano (played by Fenger)

Fenger enlisted his friend Glen Finseth to help record the album. He brought his Revox 2-track deck to Glenwood Elementary and strategically placed two mics in the massive gymnasium. This attributes to the ghostly atmosphere of the record, it adds to the bizarre sense of melancholy of the performance. The kids recorded nine songs in one take. Fenger pooled up money from the parents and faculty and pressed a scant 300 LPs to give to those involved.

In 1977 Fenger was teaching at Wix-Brown Elementary in Langley. It was there that a second recording was made of 12 songs. Fenger estimates that 150 kids took part in these sessions, as well as a gymnastic performance set to Space Oddity. In 1979 Fenger returned to Vancouver where he still resides to this day teaching music.

One of the reasons Innocence and Despair works so well is the choice of songs. The delicate nature of Brian Wilson's compositions are best sang by children, and five of his songs represented here. But the clear winner is the haphazard and absolutely devastating version of Space Oddity. The Langley School's rendition of The Eagles ballad Desperado is another choice cut with 8-year-old Sheila Behman delivering the song with more vulnerability and longing than any adult could ever muster. This is precisely why Innocence & Despair is heavy without being loud, beautiful without being well-orchestrated, and absolutely moving without being overly concerned with being so. Innocence & Depair is the sound of the heartbreak of a fleeting childhood, the sound of a thousand scraped knees on the way to the numbing ennui of adulthood.
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Oops! There Comes Stupidity

Would you believe there are people in this world who think the universe was created by a single being, and this single being had a son with an Earth woman who grew up and could do things like turn bread into fish and walk on water? Would you double over with laughter if I told you they actually believe this son was killed and stuffed into a cave, but a few days later he rose from the dead and danced around? They also believe that by simply stating your love for this special man that all past transgressions are null and void, and you will get to spend eternity in a magical kingdom in the sky. Pretty nuts, huh? Well, what if I told you that there are well over 2,039,000,000 people worldwide who believe this? Still, this is not enough. There exists still a great number of people who think these notions are absurd, or know nothing of them at all, and some of them are children. Well in 1975, a couple of young forward-thinking evangelicals came up with a brilliant strategy for witnessing to the most malleable of Earth's beleaguered populace, the fucking kids. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had just started their own television ministry in North Carolina, the fledgling PTL network. It was here they first introduced two loveable characters, a borderline retarded Alligator named Ally (voiced by Jim) and a cloying pig named Sue (voiced by Tammy,) that looked suspiciously like Porky Pig in drag. See Jim and Tammy understood that lying to children is easier done with puppets, and ventriloquism is easier done on records. Hence the album bearing the gramatically stunted title, Oops! There Comes a Smile was born. Side one is a collection of some of the weirdest, most uncomfortable hymns to Jesus ever comitted to tape. When Sue sings of her love for JC it seems rather inappropriate. Take for instance the song Happiness Is to Know the Savior where Sue ecstatically sings "Jesus and me in close relations/Having a part in his salvation." I guess there's more than one way to feel the love of Christ come all over you. And this is hardly the most twisted song on the album, oh not by a long shot. There's the track God Is Watching You All the Time, which tells of an omnipotent creator who watches everything you do including extorting money from your ministry or banging your secretary, which Ally, I mean Jim, coincidentally did in 1987. And what about Heaven Is a Wonderful Place? In this song Sue sings of her eagerness to die and "see her saviour's face." Well, in 2007 Sue, I mean Tammy, got her wish when she died of lung cancer. Cancer was like her golden chariot that delivered her into Jesus' arms, cancer is a wonderful thing. Then a bit off topic is the cut I Wonder. It is here where Ally and Sue wrestle with their uncertain futures and wonder what career path they should choose. While Sue deliberates on whether to be a "nurse or a teacher or a mother of three,"Ally contemplates a future as a policeman, a firemen or a fisherman. Ultimately these two animals decide to not decide and let Jesus solve this conundrum by choosing for them. Nietzsche famously stated that god is dead, but Ally and Sue claim he isn't in the rollicking jam God's Not Dead. Who are you to believe, one of the most influential philosophers of western civilization or a pair of doltish animal puppets? I know, tough call. Side two has some bible stories told by Ally. I have never successfully made it through side two. There is no shortage of disturbing christian children's records collecting dust in the Goodwills of the red states, but the songs on Oops! There Comes a Smile are perhaps the most bizarre with their blatant message of subservience and forfeiture of mind. To the rest of us evangelical christians are fucking creepy, and Oops! There Comes a Smile does little to change this, but is it really possible that 2,039,000,000 people, an alligator, and a pig could be that fucking stupid?

Jesus!

You Are Now About To Witness The Strength of (Sesame) Street Knowledge

Sesame Street's '70s albums are a goldmine of great, catchy music probably due to the limitless talents of Children's Television Workshop's prolific music director, Joe Rapposo (he also penned the "Three's Company" theme). "My Name is Roosevelt Franklin" is easily the best Sesame Street album ever made and very possibly the weirdest funk album of the 1970s. Roosevelt Franklin was the angry militant black muppet of Sesame Street, barely out of elementary school and badder than James Carr and Huey P. Newton combined. Roosevelt sounds like a soulful mix of Gil Scott Heron and Mitch Hedburg as he lays down the cold hard truth about some serious shit like safety and numbers. Mobity Mosely's guest appearance on "Mobity Mosely's Months" absolutely seals the deal. And "Just Because," a weird ballad about senseless violence, could very well be the anti-war anthem of the 20th century. Roosevelt Franklin was voiced by Matt Robinson who also played Gordon. After the mid-'70s Roosevelt was phased out for being too black and too strong, Sesame Street had lost it's edge. So where is Roosevelt Franklin today? Well, In 2001, Roosevelt Franklin was sentenced to one to three years' imprisonment in New York State for cocaine possession. While out of jail in 2002, he appeared on the "Black Lincoln" album by hip-hop group The Ruffianz. He was released on parole in 2003. On July 5, 2006, Roosevelt Franklin was sentenced to two to four years in a New York State prison for violating a plea deal on a drug-possession charge by leaving a treatment center. Roosevelt Franklin said he is HIV-positive and claimed the in-patient rehabilitation center stopped giving him his medication. The prosecution countered that Roosevelt Franklin had once skipped out for an appearance with singer Alicia Keys. Roosevelt Franklin's sentence was to run until July 13, 2009. He was paroled on May 23, 2007. He has since begun performing live again, starting with a show at SOBs in New York on September 13, 2007. On stage, he stated that he and his musicians were working on a new album and that he had resumed writing a book titled "The Skin I'm In" (previously on long-term hiatus) about his turbulent life. Roosevelt Franklin was arrested October 10, the day before a second SOBs performance scheduled for October 11, 2007, on felony possession of cocaine charges. It would seem that the CTW dream factory was but a nightmare machine that chewed up and spit out Roosevelt Franklin.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=H3RZ50BD

Rock Jack

Okay, this is a vanity post due to the fact that Rock Jack was fronted by none other than Ezra Lux, my son. This was recorded back in 2004 when Ezra was just 3. Here's what Aquarius Records had to say about it: 

"So, what if we tell you that there's this band called Rock Jack that does songs with titles like "Belly Bones", "Goblin Talk", "Toilet Master" and "Darth Vader Is Mean"? And sound like some exuberantly drunken bar band fronted by a vocalist with an unusually high, childish voice, unusual enunciation (and pronunciation) and a gift for seeming stream-of-consciousness babble? Sounds like it might be one of those weird AQ faves already? Well then let us add the crucial fact that the singer for Rock Jack, one Erza Lux, is all of three and a half years old. That's right, he's a little boy, and (we know, 'cause we've met him) an exceptionally precocious, adorable, cute little boy indeed. Ezra Lux's dad some of you SF locals know as Aesop, drummer for Ludicra (and formerly, Hickey). Aesop sure has one cool kid. Whenever he brings him into the store, Ezra entertains us with his banter... we know he's really into music, heavy metal especially, 'cause he's told us about the various bands he's supposedly formed, our favorite being "Iron Potato". So when Aesop told us that Ezra had recorded his first cd-r release, we had to hear it. And although it's not the Iron Potato debut we still want to hear, Rock Jack is pretty cool too. With his Fisher-Price karaoke machine, Erza sing-speaks his own weird and funny lyrics (the lone exception being a Van Halen cover) over backing from members of Ludicra (Aesop, John and Ross), who crank out some some punked up, trashy rawk n' roll vamping with metal riffs and blues licks a lot older but no less energetic than Ezra. I think the way it worked is that the Ludicra guys made up a bunch of songs in their rehearsal space, gave the tape to Erza and he picked the ones he wanted to sing on. The results have got a whiff of The Shaggs, Motorhead, Great White, Reynols, Van Halen, Wesley Willis and Hanoi Rocks... We've noticed an "alternative children's music" trend lately, but Rock Jack is one of the few examples of music BY a child. Certainly irresistably cute, and really very strange. 18 and a half minutes, 8 tracks."

We made 200 copies of "Belly Bones" and they sold like hotcakes, Ezra swears he saw somebody pour syrup on one of them. It's gone gone gone, and it isn't coming back. Some of you may take comfort in knowing that Ezra has a new band called Disabled Elephant.

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