Little Drop Of Poison

Sometimes you go to a kids movie and get blown away by the music selection. To me, that happened back in 2004, when I went to see Shrek 2. There was a piano in a dark alley bar, and the voice was unmistakeable - it was Tom Waits. And the song was Little Drop of Poison, which I did not know at the time. I finally picked it up on an album when I picked up his Orphans box set - and I thought it would be great to finish the working week up with a Little Drop of Poison...

2017 - October 23 - Dirt In The Ground

It's October. It's rainy. The leaves that had a pretty color have all fallen to the ground and are turning brown. I think this is a perfect day for a reminder from Tom Waits. Dirt In The Ground is from his 1992 Grammy winning album Bone Machine, and it is the perfect fall song.

2017 - July 30 - Jockey Full Of Bourbon

Some days I feel like picking a song just because... This is one of those days. I have played some Tom Waits before, and today I am revisiting Rain Dogs from 1985. The song is following a mambo rhythm, played in 4/4, but counted 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2 for the 8th notes, giving a really cool syncopated rhythm that always has appealed to me. Marc Ribot's guitar is all over the song - his tone is as good as any signature - and Tom Waits sings about what I always have interpreted as a drunken night on the town. Please enjoy Jockey Full Of Bourbon!

August 31 - Downtown Train

After having been somewhat sinister, I think it is time to get poetic. Tom Waits' Rain Dogs album is a great collection of songs, but most of them are building up to punchlines and climactic moments. However, the song Downtown Train is a notable exception to this, as it opens up with a pretty nice image of the moon at night:

"Outside another yellow moon

Punched a hole in the nighttime"

I know many may have heard Rod Stewart's version, but I still prefer the original gritty version.

August 13 - Rain Dogs

I remember reading newspaper reviews and best album of the year and decade lists in the 80s, and one name would come back, over and over again: Tom Waits. From 1983-1987 he released a trio of albums that are widely considered to make up a trilogy, which makes sense if you take into consideration that they represented the completion of a stylistic change for Tom Waits - and that the third album is named for a song from the first album of the three. In the middle of the trilogy, sandwiched in between Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years, we find Rain Dogs from 1985. It is my favorite album of the trilogy - it is melodic and percussive all at once, and it has quite a few brilliant songs on it. And there, smack dab in the middle of the middle album of the trilogy, we find the song Rain Dogs. Tom Waits has always had his eyes towards the ones not fitting in with society - society's strays, if you will - and that is the subject of the trilogy - and very clearly reflected in the song Rain Dogs.

March 20 - Heartattack and Vine

Tom Waits came into my life very gradually. I read about him before I heard him, and I tried liking him before I liked him. My first real encounter was when Frode Lauareid mad a mixtape for me. Frode was a very good guy that I encountered in my work for DNTU, which I have talked about before. His musical taste was very eclectic as well, and the tape had a lot of very interesting music on it, including the song 16 Shells From A Thirty Ought Six by Tom Waits, which was the first song I heard and really liked of his. I had seen his albums Rain Dogs and Swordfishtrombones (which is where the song was from) figuring highly on music critics' lists of best albums of the 80s, but I didn't quite get him. That is until I listened to the mixtape and things started to make sense to me.

Following his career is very interesting as well. He started out in a jazzy piano sense, with a gravelly voice that still had a lot of good and round tone to it and wrote great songs, like Old 55, The Heart of Saturday Night, and I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You, but a dramatic change started with the album Heartattack and Vine from 1980. The gravel in his voice was cultivated into little rocks, and he sounded more and more like a town crier. This in turn was augmented by a change in instrumentation from a very heavy reliance on piano to harder percussive instruments, such as marimbas - and with more of a percussive use of the piano as well. His band in the 80s also included Marc Ribot, who has a guitar tone that fit his music perfectly.

The thing with Tom Waits is that even when his voice sounds like a barking sea lion, it really fits the overall musical picture he is painting. He is a true artist with a very clear vision, and that vision started crystallizing with Heartattack and Vine, a song that was covered by Screaming Jay Hawkins and used in a Levi's commercial - yet nothing surpasses the original.

One of the clever lines in the lyrics of Heartattack and Vine is "Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when He's drunk." In my late teens and early twenties, I was a lot more militant about my lack of religious belief, and liking this quote, I decided that it would make a nice signature line for my email. That was all fine and dandy, but I also was trying to do some fundraising for the teetotaler children's organization at that point - and I made the mistake of using my personal email. Needless to say, my signature line backfired. I got a response from someone who first politely informed me that they didn't have any funds available - then made an equally polite note of my signature line and informing me that even if they had money available, the quote was so offensive that they wouldn't have let us have any grant money regardless. To me, that was a very humbling moment - and it has become one that I do use to stress the importance of professionalism.

But enough talk (although I had to make up for yesterday) - here is Heartattack and Vine.

March 19 - Yesterday Is Here

Sometimes I really can't wait for yesterday to get here.

Radio Days: Resurrection

My last stint in radio was another spectacularly great one - at least for me. In 1995, I finally packed my bags and record collection and left Hustad Leir (see earlier blogposts here and here for more about that time) for Bergen, where I joined Studentradioen i Bergen. I started as an engineer mainly for the shows Skumma Kultur hosted by Svein Tore Bergestuen, Høydepunktum, and Plog. Three very different shows with very different demands: Skumma Kultur was a cultural program in a magazine format, but with Svein Tore, they covered quite a bit of breaking news, and he had high technical standards, which in turn made me a better engineer. Høydepunktum was probably my favorite show to work on - a highlight show of the week that was. As an engineer, I was challenged in reediting a lot of the pieces so they were shorter and fit a new flow. This was also in the days of reel-to-reel tape editing, so I had to physically manipulate the tapes. I loved every minute of it. And I had the fortune of working with great young women (they would probably say girls at that time): Line Hegna, Tonje Aursland, Kathrine Synnes, and, I believe, Vibecke Spjeld. Some of them have gone on to careers in NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Company. The last show, Plog, was the music magazine dedicated to "roots" music, artists like The Louvin Brothers, Tom Waits, and Richard Thompson were among Thomas Ekrene's favorites, and he was the host of the show. Johan Ludvig Brattås was also involved, and he brought his eclectic taste for international traditional music to the show as well. I was introduced to Mongolian throat singing and Finnish traditional music - and I actually started liking it.

While Mongolian throat singing surely is interesting, I have to confess that Hedningarna is higher on my list of favorites. I got a chance to see them live in 1999, not too long before I moved to the US. They are a Finnish/Swedish band, and their last studio album, Karelia Visa, explores traditional music from Karelia, a historical Finnish region that largely now is part of Russia following the Winter War of 1940. The liner notes are extremely interesting - describing their experiences researching this music in a region that appears not to have changed much at all. The following song, Mitä Minä, is from Karelia Visa (Karelian Songs).

However, I started getting restless being in the control room at all times, so I asked if there was any chance that I could start a show of my own. I had a name and a concept for it that I really liked. The name was Undertoner (undertones), and it was about all the unsung heroes of music - the producers and session musicians. The people in charge liked the concept and I got my half-hour time slot. I remember shows about Rick Rubin, Daniel Lanois, Tessa Niles, and Tony Levin. However, I also remember being chastised for having one half-hour show featuring one song only, with my voice in the intro and in the middle, hovering over the effects. The song was Echoes by Pink Floyd. It was and remains my favorite Pink Floyd composition, and it showcases so many of the elements I like in music. It is droning, it is dissonant at times, yet it has dreamy, ethereal beauty in the vocal harmonies, it is slow building, and it uses dynamics effectively. "And I am you and what I see is me." However, playing one song for close to 30 minutes is not the most radio friendly thing to do...

I worked in Studentradioen until I left Bergen in 1996, then again from fall of 1997 until I left Bergen in the fall of 1998; however, I had one final ambitious project: I wanted to create a series about the history of rock music. Coda was the name of the series, and I had close to 30 parts, each at about 30 minutes (I have to check the number of episodes, but it was scheduled for the full year). When I left Bergen, I was around week 10 or so of the series, so the final 20 episodes or so were made at a high pace, trying to get it all wrapped up so they could keep broadcasting the show. It was a great project for me, and while I wish that I could have spent more time on the last episodes, I am incredibly proud that I did create it. I tried making copies of the show for myself when I recorded all of them onto DATs (they had been recorded on a computer workstation at this point - we finally had one), but I messed up a few of them - but I believe I have them on MiniDisc still.

When I left Bergen for the second time, I also left my radio days behind. However, I met a lot of great people that way, both in Radio Ung and in Studentradioen. I learned a lot about sound and music, and my musical tastes were significantly expanded. The final song this time is one that I believe I played during the Undertoner show about Tony Levin, a spectacular bass player, here with King Crimson. This six-piece version of King Crimson was spectacular - and the use of Midi with Adrian Belew's guitar is interesting. But listen to Tony Levin's deep bass singing (he is the bald bass player with a mustache) and pay attention to his bass. Robert Fripp's tritonus is creating a spectacular dissonance throughout the song, and having two drummers in Bill Bruford and Pat Mastelotto and then Trey Gunn on the Chapman stick (which also really is Tony Levin's instrument)... The double trio created very interesting music!

Karaim

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!). 

Part 1:

Part 2: