Geek Weekly #9

both of us (GG got paid by ROIR, I got to stand on stage while a naked man threw his own feces at a terrified audience), that further gigs and records were to follow.

Sadly, this awesome partnership was short-lived. Frustrated with my musical incompetence, GG fired me and I was replaced by a man with one-arm and a big pin through his face. I became frustrated with GG's physical incontinence and fired him from his massive Homestead contract and replaced him with a Simon & Garfunkel-esque duo from Milwauke known as the Frogs.

When Mets games are on in the UK at 1am do you tape them or stay up?

Since England's Channel 5 is the only outlet for live baseball coverage, my options are rather limited. Ch. 5 (also the home of many exciting films starring Suzanne Pleshette) features whatever ESPN's Sunday or Wednesday night game happens to be, and as you might guess, the Yankees tend to be featured more often than the Mets. I stay up when I can, but must confess that on more than one occasion I've gone to snoozyland and had to watch the tape the following morning. All of the games can be heard via the Internet, though perhaps some of them shouldn't be.

Were you one to start fistfights as a kid?

No. I was one to lose fistfights as a kid, but through the use of various props over the years (spectacles, crutches, iron lung), I've managed to look sympathetic enough that few people feel comfortable hitting me. In public, at least.

Fondest Craig Koon memory:

You make it sound like he's dead! Surely Craig's finest moments are still ahead of him?

How has Internet fan culture changed the nature of independent music?

I get the impression that there's a better exchange of information (if not ideas) and if you're hooked up internet-wise, you don't need to be nearly so dependent on payola-controlled radio, plugger-controlled print media, co-op ruled retail, etc. Not that they haven't made their way online, too.

Is having Bush in office going to produce better music?

I don't know, what does he sound like? He couldn't be any worse a recording artist than Roger Clinton.

Does anyone ever call you "The Coz?"

Not if they want me to keep putting out their records.

What about just "Coz?"

See above.

How come you didn't like the Replacements?

I liked them just fine until they started sucking.

What is your favorite football logo?

Old-style New England/Boston Patriots logo with the goofy guy with the tri-corner hat. One of the ugliest logos in all of professional sports and if they brough it back, it would be a massive improvement over the one they've got

26 Geek Weekly #9

now.

Do you ever post anonymously to the Matador bulletin board?

No.

Under what conditions would you consider hiring Jim Fouratt?

I wasn't aware he was looking for a job. Jim's a very good person, we just have different ideas about art.

How many years does Matador have left?

Probably a few more than Geek Weekly.

What has surprised you most about adapting to British life?

I'm not sure I've adapted, but the bit about dogs being allowed to drive was a major shock.

What is a band that you really wanted to sign but that you were unable to (a band you tried to sign)?

Well, Matador recently came out on the short end of a long negotiation with Anti Pop Consortium. We were also unsuccessful in our attempts to sign Clinic a few years ago. Beyond that, it hasn't happened too often. I figure this has as much to do with out habit of picking artists that other labels aren't yet familiar with, as much as it does our ability to make a compelling case for signing your life away.

Is it true Matador wanted to sign Cibo Matto?

Yes. Sadly for Matador, the group already had a tight relationship with a person who did A&R for Warner Bros. and we were left in the dust.

Did you have a run-in with Tim Stegall at some point? I noticed there was a reference to him on the back of one of those Matador Texxass Jamm shirts but I never knew what the story was.

I prefer to think of this as a tribute to one of the Lone Star State's great thinkers rather than something as juvenile as a "run in".

How many fights have you seen since moving to England?

I saw Lennox Lewis knock out Francois Botha in the first round at the Docklands Arena. This wasn't much of a fight, but Francois Botha isn't much of a fighter.

Are you getting a British accent?

Britt, do you think I'm getting a British accent? Considering I have to repeat myself endlessly every time I get in a cab, chances are, I'm in no danger of affecting a British accent. Then again, I had to do the same thing in New York, maybe I just need to enunciate properly.

Did you read the Walter Payton biography, and was it as good as George Jones'?

I've only started the former, never read the latter.

Why don't you get contacts?

Why doesn't Teddy Pendergrass buy a NordicTrack?

Spring 2001 27

The Transmigration of Blind Joe Death Brian Berger

This is about and around, of and sometimes by sound, vibrations, noise. (Some dare call it music.) Which is considered a bad thing to write about only by those can't hear past the surface of something or things that they don't even recognize to begin with, what it (this/that record, bird song, guitar or banjo in lap) in fact (or at least thought of in the moment) is. Might be, at least, in the moment, if not necessarily upon further reflection.

Which doesn't mean that we (excuse the cat hair) can't dig it. Jump and down and whoop it up and take off your clothes (stockings last, please, tho' it's more than okay if you want to leave 'em on), have another beer, two, get in the car and gone. Like I wouldn't be here and neither would you if it didn't mean, it didn't feel more, more and more. But more what?

...

I am not, and never was, primarily interested in, you know, the rest of it (except for the stockings). But the playing (whether it's lute, harp and psaltery accompanying late 11th and 12th century songs of the trouveres or the terror in certain pages of Alexander Scriabin's piano sonatas), that's what drives us onwards and back, with all odd stumbles and circlings along the way. (That's what drives us nuts.) Which is to say that it's fun too and while I don't believe in mere entertainment, it can be engaging to see and hear, touch if possible (fragments of a your own untrue cross) and compare what was contemporaneous with what is out-of-timeless: that which y'all diggeth the most remains (the rest is dross).

From before (Fall 1988) and during my time in Austin (1992-1997), that would have been a band called the Texas Instruments. I imagine many of those reading this might ask "who?" Well, more about that some other time but it's some kind of indictment that, even within parameters enjoyed and even indulged by both the local and media and a far part of the audience of people for whom "rock" (or "roots" or "singer/songwriter" or whatever) music is a foregrounded part of their lives did not- hell, probably even could not- recognize TI as the one of the very few groups ever touched by what you gotta say was both talent and sustained inspiration. You'd certainly hope that this was the case, given that they covered the Minutemen and Dylan on their first wholly superior 12n effort, Sun Tunnels (Rabid Cat Ip, 1988); the funny thing was that David Woody's own songs were at least as good and that, for three more albums (Crammed Into Infinity; 1991; magnetic Home, 1993; Speed of Sound, 1994; the last two being perfect) over the next six years, they only got better.

28 Geek Weekly #9

That said, it's okay (maybe) not to care- for all the goddamn dullness and rapacity in the world, there are still many other interesting other words and lives and places to care for- but if the proverbial you do (or did then or might later) care, then remember there are many depths left to the digging. The real-time documentation of and attentiveness to the thing as-it-happens is rarely enough (there being, conversely, many examples where the attentions- bought and paid for with no greater intent than to sell their sorry ass- are far too fucking much... but I bitterly digress.) and even a fraction of the original creative gush (flow) spent it listening (researching), is likely to reveal more than a few discrete moments and gestures (perhaps later seen as patterns) of revelation, transcendence, inspiration, poetry, a little leg (a little more), you-tell-me: choose your passion, sister.

...

13 February 1928: the Paul Whiteman Orchestra records "Monday Morning" in New York for the Victor label (BVE 41689-3); they'd re-record it fifteen days later and it's second of the two surviving takes from that session that was chosen as the master. You can argue the respective of merits of each of 'em, and received wisdom tells us that the primary interest of all is the blowing of Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke, Whiteman's 24-year-old star cornet player from Davenport, Iowa. The more you listen, however, the more you begin to realize that, far from being merely Bix plus alot of wheezing nostalgic pop claptrap, like much of the Whiteman band's too often derided work, every one of these performances is at least a half-mad and as much again brilliant amalgam of... stuff. Weird stuff. So in the three minutes or so a 78 rpm record allows we get, in sequence: a sickly intro from Sweet Vocal Trio leading into a similarly jive but very short solo vocal; some hot shit loop-de-loop ba-di-ba-ba scatting by The Rhythm Boys; an incredible Bix Beiderbecke solo over orchestra; an excellent Bing Crosby vocal with more curlicue Rhythm Boy harmonies backing; a surprisingly hot fiddle break; and Bix leading a very hard driving ensemble out until a brief return of the strings, now in syrupy reflection of the tune's sorta putridbeginning. Listen to all three takes 25-30 times each and still can't quite figure any 'em out. (It stands, man!) And there's Bix and still that sound.

14 February 1928: A Negro laborer from Carroll County in northwest Mississippi named John Hurt records "Frankie" and "Nobody's Dirty Business" in Memphis, Tennessee for the Okeh label. Released as OK 8560, the record does well enough that Hurt is invited to the Okeh studios in New York City where on December 21 of the same year he cuts four sides and, a week later, seven more. The third tune Hurt cut on this trip was titled "Avalon Blues," the lyrics of which would fortuitously lead to the septuagenarian Hurt's rediscovery in 1963. (Tho' I like its "New York's a good town but it's not for mine" even more right now.) I'll put the introduction of "Frankie" up against almost any burst of you-name-it solo brilliance: Earl Hines, Bill Monroe, John Coltrane. (Almost: even in a virtuoso music, Charlie Parker is still off the map as techni-

Spring 2001 29

cian, artist, cipher.) In his notes to the Smithsonian reissue of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music (AAFM), John Fahey wrote "Frankie is one the best vocal & guitar pieces ever, probably the best guitar recording ever," which words I probably would have quoted even I were not still mourning the death their author. (Thursday 22 February in Salem, Oregon, of major complications following heart bypass surgery the previous Monday.)

Cold a week as I write (Friday March 1; he would have turned 62 yesterday) and what do you say? Lots of great old jazz guys have passed (J.J. Johnson and Buddy Tate most recently) and will continueto do so- but at least they were old. (Never old: Jimmy Blanton, Charlie Christian, Clifford Brown, Booker Little: gone at 23, 25, 25, and 23: two tuberculosis, one car accident, one uremia.) And, as individual as the finest jazzmen are, there was something deeply special about Fahey, as guitarist and composer and writer. Off the top of my bean, I'd place him- why not?- with two other incorrigible (unbreakable, bless 'em) individualists, Thelonious Monk and Lester Young.

No analogy is really adequate (pressed I'll suggest that, of his peers, only Bob Dylan has shown as keen and expansive a sense of the invention possibleand, I might argue, implicitly demanded by- the American folk music tradition). Things are what they are and best seen as such. The excitement, beauty and terror, stateliness and longing, lamentations and reveries of his music is one of the unexplainable (it's just too much and no tablature or poetic meditation can adequately approach: it's one of the greatest things that we've got the records) glories of our time.

And for all his reputation as a contrarian, Fahey gave a lot of himself and guided anyone who'd listen towards his diverse sources of inspiration. Read, reread and read again his excellent liner notes to the AAFM, AAFM Vol. 4, and American Primitive: Raw Pre-War Gospel (the last two on his own Revenant label). More importantly, listen to the records, the ones he loves and the ones he made, which serve as both an encyclopedia and a private compendium of syncretic wonders. If you have a steel string acoustic guitar, try and learn to play some of 'em. It's pretty fun, even if you're a hack, to feel the music move under your own fingers. "On The Sunny Side of the Ocean," "Some Summer Day," "Orinda-Moraga", "The Death of the Clayton Peacock", "The Great San Bernadino Birthday Party," "Tell Her To Come Back Home; with Richard Ruskin on the second guitar, "Medley: Silver Bell/Cheyenne" always makes me smile. It oughta make anyone smile.

Selected Compact Disc Discography

Proensa, Paul Hillier voice, ECM New Series 1368. An excellent collection of 11th and 12th c. troubadour songs; it is obviously a conjectural performance, in terms you'd recognize say folky, dark... Bert Jansch, Leonard, Nick Cave (maybe even Nick Drake) fans shouldn't flinch. A bit later and wilder,

Alexander Skrjabin, Die 10 Sonates & Fantasie, Igor Shukow piano

30 Geek Weekly #9