I am sticking with 1991, probably through this entire week as well - although that is not quite determined yet. But it was a really good year for music, and one of my favorite albums released that year didn't really click with me until a few years later. Mr. Bungle was by many seen as Mike Patton side project to the vastly more successful Faith No More; however, in looking at everything he has said, it is clear that he rather considered Faith No More his side project - he had been heavily invested in Mr. Bungle from his high school days.
Mr. Bungle is not easy music to listen to. I know that I, in my younger years, pretended to like and understand the music more than I did. As a matter of fact, when I purchased this album after listening to parts of it in the record store, I was convinced I was buying a shelf stuffer that would just be collecting dust. However, I took it out from time to time, and when I started working in Studentradioen i Bergen, people started playing the song Carousel often enough that it finally clicked. I found their second album, Disco Volante, in 1995, when I was back home in Trondheim, I think for Christmas break. I didn't know they had released a second album, so I still remember the excitement I had for the album - and how that was really difficult to listen to (even more so than the first). February 23, 1996, I went to see them in Oslo at Rockefeller Music Hall, and they barely played anything from the first album, which I knew well, and focused on Disco Volante and experimental interludes. Needless to say, I had a very different experience than I was hoping for - it would have been quite different today, 20 years later.
However, Mr. Bungle is well worth the time to listen to, so here is today's track: Carousel from their self-titled debut album released in 1991. Call it circus metal - call it what you will - I just call it good music.
It's taken a while... Although 11 days into the new year isn't really that long, I could have started earlier in 2015, but my #2 selection wasn't released until December 18... As usual, it is really hard to rank them individually, but I tried ranking my top 10. In reality, I am dead set on my favorite album being Chris Stapleton - and I think that #2-5 are better than #6-10, but I could easily change order within those groupings.
Chris Stapleton - Traveller
Baroness - Purple
Iron Maiden - The Book of Souls
Gavin Harrison - Cheating The Polygraph
Steven Wilson - Hand Cannot Erase
Motorpsycho - En Konsert for Folk
Flest
Faith No More - Sol Invictus
Torche - Restarter
Sunn O))) - Kannon
Kylesa - Exhausting Fire
After the first 10, there are 15 additional recordings that really deserve to be mentioned - they are all albums I really liked over the course of the year. I have listed them alphabetically - but there are no individual preferences here:
Alabama Shakes - Sound & Color
Chris Cornell - Higher Truth
Clutch - Psychic Warfare
Echolyn - I Heard You Listening
Steve Earle & The Dukes - Terraplane Elder - Lore
Elephant9 - Silver Mountain
Enslaved - In Times
Ghost BC - Meliora
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress
Robert Earl Keen - Happy Prisoner The Bluegrass Sessions
Otis Taylor - Hey Joe Opus Red Meat
Richard Thompson - Still
Steve Von Till - A Life Unto Itself
Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss
Since Chris Stapleton's Traveller reached the first place on my list, I really feel like I need to let him be represented again - and this is a very country country song, which he plays with in the lyrics. Here is Nobody To Blame.
I am still getting ready for Record Store Day on April 17 - and the next record store that was very important for me was...
Rockin' I think I first met Åge, who was the person who started Rockin' at Playtime. If I remember things correctly, he was one of the people running the main floor who actually let me in after they closed on a Friday afternoon so that I could pick up Manowar's newly released Fighting the World in time for our weekly radio show, which I believe might have been called Metal Rendez-Vous at that point (it was originally called Flazz, which is the Norwegian word for dandruff but with more evil spelling than the two S's that should be at the end, then it changed to Metal Rendez-Vous after the Krokus album before it sailed into the sunset as Madhouse after the Anthrax song). the interesting thing about Manowar is that I also decided that it would be nice to have a phone interview with one of their members, so I called up the international phone directory in Norway and wondered if they had a phone number for Joey deMaio. I knew what city he lived in, I believe it was somewhere in New England, and I was ecstatic when the lady on the other end of the line actually gave me his phone number.
I should add at this point that I started working in a local radio station when I was 13, so I would not have been much older than 13 or 14 when I tried this. Anyway, I was very mindful of the time difference, so one day at what I thought was the perfect time, I picked up my parents' old gray rotary phone and dialled what seemed like an endless string of numbers. The phone rang on the other line, with a different sound than I was used to. I was excited beyond words - and then... Someone picked up the phone. The voice on the other end said "Hello?" but it was not the voice I was expecting - rather it was the voice of a woman, and if I were to guess her age, I would guess at least the 50s. I stuttered out that I was calling from Norway - and this was at the time that I was speaking with the much more proper British accent than the American accent I currently mimic as much as I can - and wondered if I could talk to Joey deMaio to see if I could interview him for my local radio station. The lady was very nice in explaining to me that he was at work but that he would be home shortly. However, she was wondering why someone would want to interview her husband? My alarm bells went off and I almost panicked - but I managed to let her know that I wanted to talk about his music. At that point, she was catching on to what was going on, and she said that her husband was not the one in the band. Mortified I apologized for the inconvenience and hung up, trembling both because of my very naive assumption that there only would be one Joey deMaio and because I would have to explain the increased phone bill to my parents without triumphantly talking about the interview I was going to land...
Anyway, Rockin' was established as a record store towards the end of the 1980s when Åge opened a store in Prinsens Gate in Trondheim. It wasn't very big, but it had everything you could ask for in classic rock, hard rock, and the various genres of heavy metal (and please remember that the definition of the different genres has evolved a lot since then). Since my show, which I think by then had been renamed Madhouse, needed new music and the record companies didn't regard my station as important enough to get us very many promos, I needed a way to get new music to play on the radio. We were commercial-free, but we entered into a gentleman's agreement with Åge and Rockin' that we would let our listeners know where we got our records if he would let us borrow an album or two every week. It was absolutely fantastic. I got to listen to so many new artists that way that I wouldn't have found otherwise - and two of the bands I really remember discovering this way were Extreme - whose first album is a brilliant rocker in the Van Halen tradition - and Faith No More, whose The Real Thing album changed the way I looked at music forever. While I'll get back to Faith No More, Extreme warrants a brief interlude with Mutha (Don't wanna go to school today)
Rockin' ended up moving into the back room of a record store chain - Hysj Hysj - on Nordre Gate, and they were still keeping metal alive in Trondheim in the 90s, but my main relationship with the store was when they were in Prinsens Gate. Åge was one of the great guys - I believe he had a deep love for Deep Purple, but he also kept up with the newer music. I always felt welcome in his store as well, and I used to stop by just to look around quite frequently long after my radio show ended in 1990. Rockin' was always a more dingy store, with the smell of old cigarette smoke permeating the room unless it was covered by Åge lighting up a new one.
As I said, Faith No More's The Real Thing really changed the way I looked at music. It is a genre-hopping masterpiece that made me start looking for music that challenged me, music that defied conventions. I have followed Patton's career ever since 1990, and I got to see Mr. Bungle on their Disco Volante tour back in 1996, I believe. FNM toured Europe last year, and I have seen clips from their spectacular performances - I hope I get the chance to see them myself. If not - here is Epic, from The Real Thing. I know it is the single and that everybody knows it, but I simply fail to tire of this song! The first version is live from Brixton Academy, 1990, while they still were able to deal with Big Jim Martin on guitar:
The second version is from their reunion tour last year from the Lowlands festival. Mike Bordin on drums looks exactly the same still - although maybe a little grayer dreads...
It is meditation time. Karaim is a piece written by John Zorn as part of his Masada project, which apparently is him exploring his Jewish heritage in a jazz setting. My journey of discovery that landed me with John Zorn really started from two separate directions - and they actually converge here. In 1989, I was starting to explore music outside the realm of the hard rock I mainly had been listening to throughout most of the 80s. Actually, the term we used back then was heavy metal, but with the evolution of that term, most of the bands that used to be called heavy metal are not necessarily called that anymore.
Anyway, in 1989, I was exploring forms of music that were new to me - such as the brilliant genius Tom Waits. On his records, I started seeing a couple of names: Greg Cohen playing the bass and Marc Ribot on electric guitar. Throughout the 90s I listened over and over again to a tape of Big Time, the concert album - and I eventually got to watch the video as well. Once again, there were Greg Cohen and Marc Ribot. I fell in love with Marc Ribot's sound first and foremost, and I have never been disappointed in anything I have heard from him yet.
However, I was also still listening to my hard rock (and I still am, which will become more and more apparent as time goes on with this blog), and in 1989 I, along with the rest of the world, discovered Faith No More. Their album The Real Thing was like nothing I had ever heard before, mixing some rap influences with hard rock - but more than that it had an aggression as well as a heaviness that was unprecedented. From there, the road took me to Mr. Bungle, which was the singer Mike Patton's original band. Their eponymous debut album was produced by none other than John Zorn.
I kept an eye on John Zorn for a while, listening to his Naked City project, which I found to be part virtuoso and part unlistenable. Then, just a couple of years back, I was searching on YouTube, and I discovered both Masada and Electric Masada. Masada has John Zorn on saxophone, Greg Cohen on Bass, Joey Baron on drums, and Dave Douglas on trumpet. Electric Masada includes Trevor Dunn, who played bass for Mr. Bungle, and Marc Ribot as well as Ikue Mori, whom I had heard of through my love for Sonic Youth (check out SYR 5 for more information). Both these bands have performed versions of Karaim, which is a favorite of mine. I should probably warn you that I always have loved songs that stretch and stretch and appear to go on forever, and Karaim is no exception.
The central theme in Karaim is fairly straightforward, but it takes about a minute before it appears in the Masada version - and a little more than seven minutes before it appears on the Electric Masada version. The underlying chords are simple, and the scale used for the theme is pretty straightforward - but the directions they are able to take it in are stellar.
This is an excellent accoustic version. The interplay between Zorn and Douglas is excellent - and so is the rhythm section of Baron and Cohen. I like the sounds Baron gets out of his kit using his hands rather than sticks - it provides a softness, yet the edge comes through by the use of dynamics throughout the performance:
On another note, I still remember putting Electric Masada At The Mountains Of Madness in the car CD player and turning it up on a sunny spring day - I could have driven forever listening to it. In this clip, which is in the same vein as the At The Mountains Of Madness version, you can watch Zorn directing the group of musicians, controlling the dynamics - they rise, rise, rise and then - bang! - they take it all the way down again. The electric version is divided in two - make sure you listen to the second part as well - that's where Mark Ribot comes in (but Jamie Saft on keyboards has some extremely tasteful moments in the first half - and Zorn himself is on fire!).
