Friday, October 29, 2010

Why Should You Care Now? -- Fire Town.


By Peter Blackstock

I really can't give you a good reason why you should still care about Fire Town. They existed for a brief period somewhere inbetween 1985 and 1990, and primarily occupy the historical gap between the obscure Midwestern band Spooner (who played at the wedding of one of my best friends) and the relatively well-known band Garbage (who had honest-to-god Hits You Care About and all that). Butch Vig is the big name here, mostly because he produced Nirvana's Nevermind, although I'll swear till my dying day that the Seattle record of that era he produced which really counted was the Young Fresh Fellows' Electric Bird Digest. (I'll bet Vig even agrees, or at the very least chuckles at the recollection.)

Vig's bandmates were... a couple of guys whose names I'm too lazy to even bother to look up. They were in some band before that, and probably some band after. I don't mean to slight those guys, just trying to make a point. And the point is: Why should you care what their names are? I don't.

But, damn, I care about Fire Town. I don't know why, exactly. They're akin to the BoDeans, or Mellencamp, or the Rave-Ups. (Who'll probably get their own entry in this series soon enough.) They weren't that good. They couldn't have been, could they?

Then why did I listen to Side A of In The Heart Of The Heart Country about a zillion times in the summer that I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1987, a few thousand miles from everything I loved and cared about?

OK, now we're getting somewhere. This one's about time and place for me. And about exile. A continent away from home, I latched on to things that offered a sense of closeness to what was so far away.

That's not entirely it, though. Fire Town was from Wisconsin. I was from Texas. Listening to Fire Town, I wasn't pining for memories of seeing them play at the Continental Club or Hole in the Wall. In fact, I never did see this band play live.

And yet, a couple weeks ago, when I won a $5 Amazon gift-certificate for guessing the winner of the Redskins-Texans game in a Yale Statistics survey (true story!), I spent that $5 on "Places To Run," "Carry The Torch," "Secret Heart," and "Rain On You" -- the entirety of Side A of that old Fire Town record from 1987.

Why would I do that? Why should I care now? I'm having a hard time answering this one myself. And yet there's something here that calls to me.

OK, first off, these are really good melodies. It's anthemic stuff, probably along the lines of what my old friend Rob Thomas loved about The Alarm, but in a more Americanized way. Instead of faux-political "Spirit of '76" anthemics, it's faux-romantic "Secret Heart" anthemics.

"Faux" in that the lyrics only go so deep. Which is to say, not very. But frankly, it doesn't matter. There is something brilliant about what they do on "Secret Heart," and very few other songs I've ever heard have pulled it off. It's kind of like a melodic perpetual-motion machine. You know how sometimes an artist will change the key of a song for dramatic effect? Apparently it's called "modulation." (I only learned this term upon exiting the stage of the Hole in the Wall one night, having just performed Barry Manilow's "Mandy", after which Rich Brotherton remarked, "Wow, you even did the modulation!" ... To which I responded, "I did the what now?")

So, on "Secret Heart," Fire Town does this modulation thing, and I'm pretty sure they do it again, and then maybe back down again before they go back up, but I swear that by the end of the song, they've created some sort of cycle where they keep lifting the key to where they can build on it for dramatic effect, and it just keeps feeding on itself. "Your secret heart..... WILL TURN ON YOU!", they exclaim, and it hits with far more emotion than they should be able to get away with.

Somehow it just keeps building. And building. And building. They're fading out the song at almost 5 minutes, and it's still ascending to another round of more intensely burning secret-heart turning. If you think that doesn't have a lasting impact, then you've never spent a few dollars of NFL-pick prize-money on an Amazon MP3 purchase.

The other songs on that side were decent enough -- "Rain On You" (perhaps slightly reminiscent of the True Believers' "The Rain Won't Help You When It's Over") and the somewhat more forgettable leadoff track "Places To Run" -- but it's actually "Carry The Torch" that stuck with me more than any of the other songs (even more than "Secret Heart"). This is a hopeless romantic tune if there ever was one: "You can leave but I'll believe / I'll carry the torch for you." And that's just the opening line. Heck, at 21, I was a sucker for that crap. So we'll chalk this one up to nostalgia, mostly.

Except.

There's a great guitar lead here. Played by one of the guys not named Butch Vig, presumably. It's a simple, straightforward melody. But it's GREAT. You can hear this thing and still remember it two decades later, even having not heard it in the interim. I can personally vouch for this.

And then there's that kicker of a line in the middle: It's really simple, and yet it's evocative:

"I'll be walkin' tonight, I'll be walkin' tonight."

Walking where? What for? To whom? Why should I care now?

I don't know. But I do.

Still.



Postscript, from the friend at whose wedding Spooner played:

"key to fire town and spooner was doug erikson, one of the best unknown singer-songwriters ever to come from the midwest. he fronted both, and was kinda the tom petty of wisconsin. he morphed into "duke" erikson in garbage, the band's bassist. and has recently played bass in freedy johnston's touring band (they also have a cover band with butch).

thing is, in both spooner and fire town, doug was the heart and soul. butch was the drummer. he didn't even produce the early spooner stuff (gary klebe from shoes did). and when bands started working with butch, it wasn't to get his sound, it was because smart studios in madison was cheap.

more than you wanted to know, but you started it. and i love those guys."


Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Why Should You Care Now? -- Doctors' Mob.


By Peter Blackstock


OK, so the intent here is a series. Along the lines of "Where Are They Now?", I suppose, except it really doesn't matter where these folks are now. It's about what thy did at some point, something that mattered. Something that has been pretty well forgotten, left for dead and gone. And yet....


The series has to start with Doctors' Mob, because it's their song title that's the inspiration for the series. "Why Should You Care Now?" was the next-to-last ("penultimate," if you're more literate than Doctors' Mob cared you to be) song on the band's 1985 record Headache Machine. Here's an odd admission about that song:


In the chorus, singer Steve Collier repeatedly asks, "Why should you care now?", and then finally answers the question at the end. "We do!" ... or, wait, is it "We don't?"


http://www.amazon.com/gp/recsradio/radio/B00000JN8B/ref=pd_krex_dp_001_011?ie=UTF8&track=011&disc=001


Doctors' Mob was kind of a loud band, see. The words weren't really supposed to matter, except that they did, because Collier was pretty sharp. I mean, fer chrissakes, he named one of his songs after an editor of Details magazine. So as much as they were all about showing up drunk, showing up late, or not showing up at all (their official motto), these guys actually had some pretty good words to their songs. (Witness that when folks called out in the encore for "The Cage," typically the stress was on "The" rather than "Cage." The audience clearly cared about the words.)


And so, back to the question at hand. Why should you care now? It's been about 25 years now that I've wondered whether Doctors' Mob cared, or didn't care. Frankly, at this point, I really don't wanna know what the actual line is there. I prefer to believe that Collier screamed out something different each time, depending upon what he felt at any given moment. It could be "WE DO!", it could be "WE DON'T!" -- either would fit the band's identity, I think. "We do" if they were buying into the "New Sincerity" tag that was put upon them and their peers in the mid-'80s Austin scene; after all, what could be more sincere than caring? And "We don't" if you figured these guys thought that whole New Sincerity deal was just a crock of shit.


This summer I saw Doctors' Mob play for the first time in about 15 years, at a reunion gig. They played "Why Should You Care Now?", and each time the chorus came around, I joined in. I shouted "We Do!" ... or maybe "We Don't!". It doesn't really matter. I sang it at the top of my lungs, and that was all that mattered.


When the mood strikes me, I'll write about some other stuff long since dead and gone, and why you should care about it now. Or shouldn't.


Friday, October 15, 2010

Mike & Ruthy's "End Of Time"

By Peter Blackstock


With some songs -- not many, but when they're really something pretty special -- you distinctly remember the first time you heard them. Not so much the time or the place, but what you thought about it when you first heard it, the way it struck you, the way it made you feel. If music is important to you, I expect you know what I mean.


Bits and pieces of such encounters float among the edges of my memory. Some are "big" songs, some are a blip on the pop-culture radar. Scruffy The Cat's "Land of 1,000 Girls" in a record store in 1986, infectious enough that I bought the record on the spot. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," having just put the disc in the CD player in the fall of '91 shortly after moving to Seattle. A slow, brooding ballad called "I Knew" by a band named Zeitgeist from the stage of Liberty Lunch in the spring of '85. Springsteen's "Born To Run" on American Top 40 radio in the fall of '75. The 10,000 Maniacs song "Hey Jack Kerouac" in the car deck driving across the streets of Anchorage in the summer of '87, having just bought the last cassette copy from the city's only cool record store. Slipping a tape labeled "Jay Farrar" off the shelves of the SXSW office in the spring of '95, hitting play, and hearing "Windfall."


So here's another one. It comes to mind mainly because I keep playing the song on my iTunes tonight, but my first encounter with it was actually more than a year ago, at a funky little club in Brooklyn called Jalopy. I'd gone to see Mike & Ruthy, the husband-wife duo of Mike Merenda and Ruthy Ungar, who I'd gotten to know from their years in a band called the Mammals. Mike's got a real talent for songwriting -- they work in a rootsy place, but he brings in a lot of stuff from outside that realm which makes it more interesting -- and Ruthy just has a presence, a charm, a vibrant soulfulness that can manufacture magic out of thin air.


They got through their set playing some older stuff, some newer stuff, probably some Mammals songs and some covers, I forget what all exactly. But I remember the song they closed with. I can't say quite what it was about that song -- it had a sort of repetitive feel to it, not in a bad way but in a sense that it seemed like you'd instantly remember this song once you heard it, a trait of many of the best pop singles. (Ah, singles.) I didn't really catch the words, I just heard the way they sang it together -- harmonizing, but not in a typical woman's-voice-floating-above-the-man's kind of way. Ruthy sang the melody, Mike sang slightly underneath; without listening closely, you might have thought they were singing in unison, even.


Regardless, something about it was mesmerizing, and electric. I just remember thinking, now THAT is a song. And I recall talking with them briefly about it afterward, mentioning that they really had something there, something that was beyond the roots/traditional realm that tends to be their domain. I think they already knew, but they seemed to appreciate the feedback.


Fast-forward to sometime this summer. Mike & Ruthy's new disc Million To One arrives in the mail. I put it in, and, sure enough, that song is the very first track on the disc. It's called "End Of Time" and their recording does justice to my memory of that night, probably even improves on it. The appeal is immediate, again. The arrangement is really more rock than folk, though pedal steel plays a big part. That probably sounds confusing, but in a way, that's good; it means this song has its own identity.


Somehow I got sidetracked from it for awhile (happens too much these days, I'm afraid, with attention pulled in various other directions), but this week I was drawn back in. (I forget exactly how, but I'm grateful for whatever the impetus was.) Struck again by how good this song is, I put it in my "Best of 2010" iTunes folder, and played it several more times. And finally started getting a bit more curious about the lyrics. Which might seem backwards or atypical, but really, it's the music that draws me in first the vast majority of the time. (I suspect that's true for most folks, actually; otherwise, it might as well just be spoken-word stuff, or reading poetry on a printed page.)


Come to find that not only are the lyrics admirably well-written (this is no surprise, as both Mike & Ruthy are super-literate and smart as a whip), but it's something that speaks pretty directly to some tough things going on in my family's own existence these days. "One minute I'm fine, one minute I'm free / Then another I'm blind, and crippled in need," they sing in the chorus. I'd gotten bits and pieces of those lines previously, but it hadn't quite sunk in. Now it has. And the song means that much more, as a result.


They do some nice things with the arrangement. It builds modestly as they go along, but then when they get to the final chorus, most of the accompaniment drops away, and they let those lines stand out in relief. At the end, they forsake words and just let Ruthy's voice carry the emotion above the strums and swings of the sticks and strings. And the whole thing is almost exactly 3 minutes long. (Ah, singles.)


"Signal fire out on the plain / Suddenly clouds and a pouring rain." That's how the song begins. A great opening line, for a song, and for an entire record. You kinda know what you're in for after that. They sum it all up in the back end of the chorus, from whence the song's title arises:


"One minute I'm born, one minute I die. In the middle I'm yours till the end of time."