There aren't many acts that were big when I was in college that are still making relevant music, likely for the same reason I'm not headed out to clubs much these days to hear their successors: Life (and age) gets in the way. So it was a surprise to hear Secrets of the New Explorers from Glen Phillips. While I was an eager listener in the earliest days of his band Toad the Wet Sprocket --the band's debut, Bread and Circus was issued the summer after my freshman year, and was on the playlist of every sensitive indie rocker that fall semester -- I outgrew Toad about the time grunge took hold.

I knew Phillips had embarked on a solo career, but didn't pay him much mind until this EP showed up in the mailbox. The premise is intriguing: The son of two scientists, he and collaborator John Askew discussed ideas while recording that led to a batch of songs about space. Three songs were completed, with Phillips recording an additional three solo. The result is a clever, catchy EP.

It sounds like Phillips if you know what you're listening for, but I was surprised at the maturity of his sound. Credit the fact that he started with Toad while still a teenager, and is now a guy in his mid 30s. I wish more of my favorites from way back had stayed in the game in this fashion. Too many give up or put together years-in-the-making albums that fall flat. Phillips had an idea, came up with an EP's worth of songs and put it out. Simple, and the kind of experiment that more artists would do well to emulate.

The disc is surprisingly diverse given its quick completion and its brevity. "They'll Find Me" and "Return to Me" seem the most Toadlike, while "Solar Flare" seems like a sweet lullaby about, um, radiation poisoning. "Space Elevator," with a faux funky vibe is one I could take or leave, but everything else is pleasant and compelling.

In just 20 short minutes, Phillips reasserts himself as someone for me to watch, with a model that ought to be emulated by any creative artists with access to a home studio and some ideas to explore.

MP3: Solar Flare

Labels: music, TuesdayTuneup

When I worked for my college newspaper years and years ago, I had the idea of tagging along when a friend’s band went on tour. I’d ride in the van, help them load in and out and generally see what it’s like to be a touring musician. As the date of the tour approached, my friend worked to convince me that this wasn’t a good idea. I don’t recall his specific argument, but it amounted to “you’ll be bored out of your mind.”

He was probably right; his argument was strong enough that I decided not to go. But now I have Dean Wareham’s memoir, Black Postcards in hand, and it makes me wish I’d gone. Sure, you don’t populate a book with the boring parts, so his account of his years with Galaxie 500 and Luna is a bit skewed in favor of the exciting bits, but it still captures the romance of the road, and makes me wish I’d been a bit more adventurous in my youth.

For fans of what evolved from college rock to alternative to indie to whatever it’s called today, the book is a mother lode of information and backstage gossip. Wareham is most focused on his own bands, of course, but the two groups came into contact with a wide swath of the indie-rock world, and Wareham doesn’t hold back when sharing his thoughts – good and bad – about his peers.

For those of us who were fans of his bands, the book serves as the dream liner notes to a career. Why did Galaxie 500 split? Why was this song on this album? Why did this member quit? It’s all here, and in surprisingly crisp detail. Wareham is a smart guy who obviously has thought about his vocation to a high degree, and his thoughts are amusing, illuminating and somewhat sobering in spots.

The hook for the book – as evidenced by the subtitle, “A Rock ’n’ Roll Romance” – is the fact that Wareham fell in love with his bass player, left his wife and toddler son, broke up his band and embarked on a new personal and professional relationship. It’s a sad story that could probably be applied to hundreds of touring musicians with only an altered detail or two, but one with a hopeful ending in the form of a creative rebirth with Dean & Britta. It gives what could have been a standard rock memoir and/or tour diary a bit of emotional heft. This isn’t exactly “Behind the Music,” but it does make the story more worthy of publication by a big house than it might have otherwise.

Wareham took the time to answer a few questions about the book, his bands and the future.

TIRBD: Do you find it strange that a major reason Luna broke up was the inability to ever move to the next level careerwise, yet a major publisher is willing to sink money into publishing and promoting a book that is at least partially about that lack of commercial success?

DW: The publishing world is new to me, but I have to think they know what they are doing. As for the record business, on one level you could argue that Luna suffered from a lack of commercial success, because we never had a multi-platinum hit album, and that is what all major labels are looking for. But if you broke down the numbers from our years at Elektra, you would find that even as the band sank slowly into a pit of "debt,” we were selling hundreds of thousands of compact discs, and with licensing money on top of that the Warner Music Group did just fine with Luna. But the expectations are so different in the music business than in book publishing. 100,000 books would make your book a bestseller, but 100,000 copies of our second CD was considered promising, but not exactly a success.

Given the level of detail in some of your tour recollections, I assume you kept a pretty detailed tour journal. What was the motivation for that, and if at any time that motivation involved a project like this, did that have an affect on what you chose to record?

I kept a detailed journal in my late teens and early twenties, from my years at Harvard through the time in Galaxie 500. I'm not sure why I was did that (because I was lonely?), but I was sure glad to find those diaries in a box when I started writing the book. Then there was a period of five years, covering the first three Luna albums, where I didn't keep a regular journal -- all I had was tour itineraries and the music, and my own recollections. So I skipped through those years pretty quickly (to the chagrin of certain fans who have complained that I don't talk enough about the making of the second Luna album, or what it was like to meet Tom Verlaine). With the advent of the Internet revolution we launched a Luna website, fuzzywuzzy.com, and I started posting tour diaries on the site - I was writing again. But the official tour diaries were sanitized - there were incidents that were not fit for public consumption, indeed, things that I wouldn't even mention in my own private journal.

I kept waiting for the moment when you put down the drugs and talked about getting clean and sober and healthy (just like seemingly every other performer with a tale like this to tell), but it never came. Any thoughts about that, or better yet, second thoughts about that thread being simply one of many that make up the fabric of the story rather than a sort of through-line cautionary tale?

Maybe it appears from the book that I was ingesting vast quantities of drugs, because those nights made for some funny stories. Sure, I might have done a line or two of cocaine if someone offered it to me after a show (a fan perhaps, or someone from the record company, or management), and I certainly had a few drinks every night while on tour, but we didn't not travel around the country with a bus full of liquor and drugs, nor did we take drugs while we were in the studio -- we were there to make music, not to party.

So I don't feel like I have to apologize for having a good time once in a while (though certainly I saw other people very close to me whose lives were derailed by drug use). For the cautionary drug stories, I recommend the recent rock memoirs by Slash, Nikki Sixx, and Eric Clapton -- former junkies all. I was a mere dabbler.

There seems to be no love lost between you and dozens of your peers. I lost count of the number of people who are dismissed with a cutting remark, from bandmates to tourmates to casual acquaintances. It's one thing to feel this way, it's another to express those feelings so publicly and permanently. Any trepidation about that? Any backlash?

With respect to my peers, perhaps I was opinionated, but it's just music we're talking about -- and I don't have to pretend that I liked Lenny Kravitz or Bono. I don't imagine they would care too much what I think anyway. I was more concerned about my ex-bandmates. But being in a rock and roll band is about conflict. You push and shove, and argue about small things and large ones - that is an essential part of the experience. I made an effort be as fair and objective as I could, but I wanted to go into the conflict in some detail, to bring out the humor and the drama, not just gloss over it while citing the standard "musical and personal differences." At any rate, if I made cutting remarks, I made them about myself also.

Looking back on your career like this, do you see any points at which you wonder about the path not taken and where you might be otherwise? If so, where did these occur and what do you imagine might have been the ultimate destination of those alternate paths?

I could spend days trying to answer this question. I guess I could have taken a job working in the trading department at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1986, and my life might have turned out very differently indeed. But I didn't.

Spending this much time analyzing your own songwriting, recording and performing, will you approach future endeavors in all three arenas any differently?

Since I'm not in a rock band anymore, and I am no longer signed to a seven-record deal, I can take my time making records. I am no longer on an annual cycle of writing songs, making a new record, touring to support it, and then starting all over again. And with the changes in technology, I do more of the recording at home, on my own time. Songwriting does not get any easier, but with the two Dean & Britta albums I've chosen to record half original material and half covers, and it is easier to write six new songs than twelve, so I think I may stick with this formula - which is what everyone did before the Beatles started writing all their own material.

It isn't clear from your recounting of your earliest days as a musician whether you always wanted to be a professional musician or if it just became what you did because other people responded to it. What that your career goal coming out of high school or college, or did you have other plans? Was there ever a real long-term fall-back position?

I thought about going to grad school after graduating college, studying anthropology - but when I read Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss, and he talked about bees crawling up his nose while he slept by the banks of the Amazon, I changed my mind. I didn't dare to think that I could be a professional musician - this notion would have seemed absurd in America in 1986 (though perhaps not so ridiculous in England). And anyway, I could barely play the guitar at that point, how could I be a professional musician? But then you learn (and perhaps this is the lesson of punk rock) that you don't have to be amazing players to cook up something beautiful. Still, I think in Galaxie 500 we were surprised every step of the way: surprised that we recorded a seven-inch single that sounded so perfect, and an album that we were really proud of, surprised when the record was played on college radio, amazed that Slash Records and Rough Trade wanted to sign the band.

Do you have a favorite rock 'n' roll and/or tour memoir other than your own?

I really liked Dee Dee Ramone's memoir, Lobotomy, and Dylan's Chronicles. And White Bicycles by folk producer Joe Boyd. But my favorite book about a rock star is Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo, which is of course a work of fiction.

Labels: books, Monday Interview, music

It's not a complete condemnation of Steve Earle's performance here Saturday night to say that I fell asleep during the second half of his set. Blame the 5:45 wake-up call from our 3-month-old son for a good portion of that. But suffice to say, had the show been more riveting, I would have had more success fighting off the Zzzzzzs.

The show was exactly what I expected from something billed as Earle solo acoustic. The set was heavy with slower story songs, and, thanks to the fact that he is on tour in support of Washington Square Serenade, a lot of tracks from that album. I'll admit I hadn't thought much about the show until the moment I entered the theater, but if I had crafted a dream set list, there would be little overlap between it and what I heard last night.

After an opening set by Earle's latest wife, Allison Moorer, that captivated thanks to her theater-filling vocals, Earle opened with a set of older songs that were a pleasant surprise. The first handful included three favorites from his first album, Guitar Town: "Someday," "Goodbye's All We Got Left" and "My Old Friend the Blues." The slick hooks of those two-decade old recordings has been replaced by a world-weariness that makes them resonate more than they did when Earle was simply inhabiting a character. After all he's been through, it's easy to believe when he rasps about his friend the blues.

After about 40 minutes, a guy came out and stood behind what looked like two turntables and a microphone. He punched a button, filling the room with a drum machine beat and Earle launched into tunes from Washington Street Serenade with "Tennessee Blues:" "Bound for New York City and I won’t be back no more... boys won’t see me around, goodbye guitar town," he sang. Literally, he left Tennessee for for New York, but he also left behind that sound to embrace a new, beat-driven template with a Dust Brother at the boards. The album is an admirable if flawed experiment. Live, the songs gave the show some energy and heft, but it felt like watching someone do karaoke of their own material.

There were highlights, though they mainly came from reinterpretations of older tracks like "CCKMP" and "Transcendental Blues" that found him adding complementary beats to songs that were sympathetic to that presentation. The drum machine left - as Moorer joined him for "Days Aren't Long Enough" - and returned - for the cloyingly obvious "City of Immigrants." The obligatory sing-along, "Steve's Hammer (For Pete)" was nice, and his plodding cover of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole" (used in the fourth and final season of "The Wire") seemed less, well, plodding.

Pleasant surprises continued throughout the set. A spirited "Copperhead Road" and a sweet "The Galway Girl" among them. But in the end, this felt like the performance of someone who had done this for so long that even the injection of a drum machine couldn't adequately spice things up. The crowd loved it, acting as if it had been starved for a big, quality show (and come to think of it...), but this felt like either the kind of thing Earle is going to do until they plant him in the ground, or, hopefully, something he looks back on as a transitory moment.

Labels: music

The beauty of the Hard Case Crime series is that it is shining a light on a lot of great work by a lot of authors who have toiled in the dark -- if they're still with us at all -- for a long time. Case in point: Robert Bloch. I'd seen the name, mostly because his stuff is shelved very near personal favorite Lawrence Block on the library shelves, but had never read him. Thanks to Hard Case, I've read enough to want to see out more.The imprint put out a double book, back-to-back in paperback, just like in the old days of classic pulp. The books -- Shooting Star and Spiderweb -- are two of the five books he wrote before the one for which he'll be remembered: Psycho. I tackled Shooting Star first and liked it a great deal. It's dated -- marijuana is written about as a great societal evil in a way that makes "Reefer Madness" seem well reasoned -- but it has a gripping plot and Bloch's way with words is spellbinding.

His excellence seems to come so easily that it is at times lost in its casual deployment. In the space of five pages, he drops the term “brachycephalic,” describes the lights of Los Angeles as “that gaudy old whore of a city, (who) was putting on her jewels for a big night,” references Orpheus and Eurydice, slips in the phrase “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” and offers this sharp line about a comely actress: “Polly Foster in the flesh was quite something else again. Nor is that ‘in the flesh’ merely a figure of speech. The figure she cut had nothing to do with speech.”

In the story, former agent Mark Clayburn, a man who has turned to private eye work after losing an eye in an accident. Sure, that sounds a little hamfisted, the one-eyed man as private eye, but it isn't obtrusive. He's asked by a producer who just bought a batch of films to clear the name of the recently deceased star, a man caught up in talk of drugs and death.

The second book, Spiderweb, deals with charlatan mystics and mediums, and is also set in Hollywood. Tackling my second Bloch book of the month, I've fallen behind, eager to read the new one, The Murderer's Vine by Shepard Rifkin that just showed up in the mailbox. The story, loosely based on the real-life incidents that inspired the film "Mississippi Burning" feels weightier than most Hard Case fare, and I'm curious to see how Rifkin weaves the real violence surrounding the civil rights struggle together with a crime tale.

Labels: crime fiction

It's nice to see the Replacements back in (the very edge of the) spotlight thanks to the reissue of the band's first four albums. Rhino is giving the discs the deluxe treatment, with remastering and generous bonus tracks. While most of those tracks are familiar to fans that have had 20-plus years to track them down on singles and bootlegs, it'll be nice to have high-fidelity versions of everything in one place.

Billboard offers a nice, short Q&A with Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson, where they reveal the now widely quoted news that they considered -- then rejected -- recent offers to reunite for summer festivals. No surprise; I just don't see Westerberg caring enough to rehash something he has clearly left behind. He alludes to that here with the least-cranky response I've seen yet:

"I don't think I could physically get up there and bellow these 18 songs (from) that first record. That's just sheer youth there. I can't find that in a bottle or a pill. I'm just too creaky for that."

Meanwhile, putting the band's early magic into perspective, he talks about what drove the two older members: the realization that anything else would suck in comparison.

"Bob (Stinson) and I at least understood that this was the only road up and out. We had no skill -- he was a cook, I was a janitor -- and it was like, "We make it in rock 'n' roll or we die trying."

Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash; Stink; Hootenanny and Let it Be arrive Tuesday.

Labels: music, The Replacements

Thus ends Big Dipper Week, where I've taken a look at each phase of the band's career. We end with Very Loud Array, the disc of unreleased songs that closes the new Supercluster 3-CD anthology on Merge Records.

After Slam, Big Dipper seemed to disappear. In those pre-Internet days, there were really only four ways a band like Big Dipper could stay on the radar: Tour, college radio, music magazines and, only rarely, a brief mention on MTV. The band resurfaced with a two-song 7” single on Feel Good All Over in 1991, giving fans like me hope that they’d land back in indie-land where they belonged and pick up where they left off with Craps. It was not to be. By that time, Steve Michener and Jeff Oliphant had left their posts on bass and drums, respectively, and only Bill Goffrier and Gary Waleik remained from the original lineup.

Bill Goffrier: I kept going when Gary left, but we agreed that that was where the line was to be drawn on the name “Big Dipper,” so the remaining three of us played and recorded as, eventually “Saucer.”

Gary Waleik: It was too difficult for us to continue on past 1992 for a bunch of reasons. We didn’t have a label or an audience… two pretty important things, I think. Also, I don’t think that any of us felt like we had to be limited to careers in rock. Bill’s a painter and a teacher. Steve has a nursing degree and runs a new wine business in Walla Walla. I had a radio career to fall back on. Jeff is using his considerable charm and talent to make his mark in the world of high finance. And we’re all family men. So there were bigger and sometimes more interesting fish to fry.

They did leave behind an impressive batch of unreleased music, however. The two songs from that single – “Approach of a Human Being” and “The Beast” – were among several tracks that should have been released long before now. They weren’t, and that’s to Merge Records benefit now, for the cream of the crop constitutes the third disc of its three-disc anthology, Supercluster. That disc, dubbed Very Loud Array, constitutes a great lost Big Dipper Album. It’s a strong batch of songs that feels at times like a more logical follow-up to Craps than Slam. Where the band’s major label bow and swan song continues the crunchy pop of Craps, the songs on Very Loud Array are more organic, sounding less like an in vain stretch for the big time and more like four friends playing incredibly catchy songs for the entertainment of themselves and a small cadre of friends and fans.

There are clear winners here. “Wake Up the King” kicks things off with a blast of pop energy, while “Lifetime Achievement Award” shows how skillfully the band is able to conjure smart hooks with stripped-down instrumentation. Like the rest of the band’s catalog, the disc contains a few tracks that fall short of their best, but nothing here would have sullied the band’s reputation, then or now.

“Big Dipper recorded the new tunes sensibly and faithfully, a practice we had temporarily abandoned while making Slam,” Waleik writes in the Supercluster liner notes.

Steve Michener: If you listen to Very Loud Array you hear that, musically, they were a much better band. I think they missed out on my creative voice in the band though since the bass players after me were mostly just talented musicians but not much else. That's how it seems. It’s nice to hear some of the outtakes and oddities. Merge did a fantastic job and Gary deserves the credit for putting this together.

Bill Goffrier: The concept only took shape when we considered compiling the lost recordings from the post-Slam years. A working title was Lost in the Stars, and there were other recordings included, depending on whether you heard Gary’s or my sequence. I am glad that Gary took the ball and ran with it, because his preferences probably best present the range that was the sound of Big Dipper.

The four original members have been back together of late, rehearsing for three live shows next week on the East Coast to celebrate the anthology’s release: April 24 at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, April 25 at Southpaw in Brooklyn and April 26 at Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge.

For us fans stuck in the Midwest, there is some hope. Waleik says that if these three shows go well, some summer dates in larger cities like Chicago might follow. As for whether the Very Loud Array songs will show up in the set list, or, hope against hope, a new record might result from all of this, well, it depends who you ask.

Bill Goffrier: There is a great deal of material we could record. It is a matter of making time, or having time, as facilitated by the support people like those at Merge Records.

Gary Waleik: Yes, I hope to do as many new songs as we can (probably 3-4).

Steve Michener: If we had more time to practice I'm sure that some new stuff would come out, but given the time constraints we will probably be lucky to re-learn the old stuff. There might be one or two in the live set but don't hold your breath for recording. We could do Internet recording but for me Big Dipper is sitting in a room bouncing ideas.

Jeff Oliphant: I would love to write some songs, and record the band again. I hope we get the opportunity to do it. We could put out a great CD. Again I would write the hit songs! We could write about how our bodies are breaking down, or how important is to invest. I could write a whole album about investing in the financial markets!

Monday: Band interview
Tuesday: Boo-Boo/Heavens
Wednesday: Craps
Thursday: Slam

Labels: Big Dipper Week, music

Each day of Big Dipper Week, I'm taking a look at a phase of the band's career. Next up: The Slam LP, the only part of the band's catalog not included on the new Supercluster 3-CD anthology on Merge Records. It can be had, however, for cheap at most online retailers.

If there can be controversy in the life of a moderately successful college rock band with a six-year career, then Slam is it for Big Dipper. As I recall, it was a shock when Big Dipper was swept up in the wave of major label signings as any indie-rock band with a decent record under its belt moved up to the big leagues. It’s not that Dipper wasn’t worthy – if anything, as one of the best bands with the most pop potential of its peers, it was tailor-made for the big time. On the surface, at least. As the one-and-done success of bands like Fountains of Wayne have shown, a novelty hit is about the best most clever bands with great hooks can expect.

Steve Michener: There were a lot of expectations, I think, from fans, and signing to Epic was not one of them. A lot of the criticism directed toward the album was meant for us 'selling out' or whatever.

Big Dipper didn’t even see that level of success, and the band members seem more than willing to dissect the album looking for fault. No love is lost for producer Steve Haigler, who is declared a poor fit, and the band turns the finger of blame back on itself, citing a batch of songs not quite ready for prime time and a watering down of the Big Dipper sound. And that cover… ugh. If the creative department at Epic spent more than 30 minutes on, shame should be the least of their punishments.

Gary Waleik: I don’t think that Slam has been unfairly maligned, but I also think that some people who rejected it out of hand perhaps weren’t disposed to give it a fair listen. My personal feeling is that many of the songs are very good and even among our best, but that the production and performance of those songs did not do them justice.

Bill Goffrier: I was so immersed in the process of making Slam, I was convinced we were making a masterpiece. Being in the band and working on Slam was pretty much my whole life. Perhaps that is not a healthy way to live. It was waayyy too serious. My biggest regret with that album is that we let strangers make decisions for us, like designing the cover. I think if we redid the packaging it would suggest a whole new perspective on the music within.

Perhaps the new perspective Goffrier hopes for can be found through little more than the passing of time. I had left Slam on my shelf for years, allowing it to collect dust. But pulling it out shortly after I heard about the imminent arrival of Supercluster, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it held up. Sure, the production is overly slick and some of the songs find the band’s reach exceeding its grasp, but overall it’s a good album, and a fairly logical progression from Craps. Oh, and that cover of Mott the Hoople's "All the Way From Memphis"? Well, let's just say it's a spirited run through a great song that would have made a better B-side (like the band's blazing cover of Husker Du's "Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill" found on the "Love Barge" single).

Jeff Oliphant: I love the songs on Slam! I listen to the CD quite often, my wife say’s it her favorite CD.

Steve Michener: I think this is a good record. Not our best, but we were blinded by visions of a successful career in music and lost sight of our original vision. Our first mistake was choosing Steve Haigler to produce it. He had nothing to do with our sound and I didn't really like him that much. We had other choices, like the Jayhawks producer and John Croslin, but we should have been thinking outside of the box. I really liked the idea of getting out of town to record so we could focus completely on the recording.

The lack of success of Slam signaled the beginning of the end for Big Dipper. Michener exited, followed some time later by Oliphant, leaving Goffrier and Waleik to carry on. At the time, as I recall, the typical desire to try other things was cited as the reason for the departures, but Michener shares now that there was more to it than that.

Steve Michener: It was during the recording of Slam that the rest of the band started to get down on me for my lack of bass-playing chops. I always knew that I wasn't a musician and had been skating by for years but when the major label came into the picture this became an issue. Not sure why it always does with us borderline musicians when the majors show up. Anyway, there was a lot of tension that started around Slam and continued into the tour that summer that eventually pushed me out of the band. It was very mutual, I was ready to split. I'd been tired of being in a band with the toll it took on my personal life.

Frustration with the changes brought by a major label contract – Epic signed the band to an improbable eight album deal – are aired even within this disc. It’s full of plenty of the trademark Big Dipper guitar-crunch-fueled whimsy, but from the first line of the opening song, Goffrier’s “Love Barge” – “I once thought that I stood on solid ground/but the earth has moved and I’ve been turned around. And the only thing left to hold onto is myself, and myself alone” – it seems clear that the band is dealing with a shifting landscape that feels out of its control. Waleik’s “Blood Pact” is the most overt. Foreshadowing the band’s failure to dent the charts, he sings “Always reeling, never feeling that we had a chance in hell,” going on to say, “Waiting for our chance to meet the Boss, four nervous guys armed with but wit, then in his evil presence stood, offered us a deal, WE TOOK IT!!!”

Steve Michener: That CD embittered the band because it accelerated a lot of tension that ended up driving us apart. I think the songs stand on their own. They are not on (Supercluster) because Epic still owns it until the 12th of never and it would be a hassle to deal with them, I'm sure. I'd love to reissue that CD remixed with the guitars turned up and all the studio shit removed. That would make a great EP. We could call it All the Way from Charlotte. Gary can do that; he has lots of free time.

Labels: Big Dipper Week, music