Watching MrBeast and Drinking Ghost Energy Drinks

This

Is what

I imagine

New Year’s Eve

At age twelve 

Looks like

There is

Nothing quite

Like a new couch

It’s where life begins

I Somehow Weaseled An Essay Into The Detroit Free Press

If you would've told ten-year-old Ben Blackwell, daily devoted devourer of the Detroit Free Press, that a mere text message to the music editor of the paper, some 31 years later, would get my own writing into the newspaper...I would have asked you "What's a text message?"

Click the link below to read the whole shebang, I worked very hard on it and am very proud of it and I don't say that too often.

I'm Finding It Easier To Be A Gentleman -OR- Forever The Union 

To the city employees

On the brush clearing crew

Wearing hi vis vests

In the elementary school parking lot

Playing HORSE

With a children’s soccer ball

Just letting off steam

One of them legit dunks

And I’m happy this is where my taxes go

Young Losers “All Gone” b/w “Private Affair”

Young Losers 

 

All Gone b/w Private Affair 

scum stats: two variants, the "table sleeve" is the rarer one here 

Young, loud and snotty with hand-written labels, colored vinyl (blue) coupled with a black-and-white photocopied sleeve and Saints cover on the b-side...was there any other way for a punk single to exist in 1998? I feel on the verge of wistful when I consider that this "style" or "approach" may actually just kinda fade away. I don't see kids doing shit in this manner any more. Life is LONG but time is short. So soak it in. What feels omnipresent or indefatigable is always just a generation away from disappearing. Live it while you can.

 

Sponge "Molly (Sixteen Candles Down The Drain)"

Sponge

Molly b/w Cowboy Eyes

scum stats: limited edition numbered copies on marigold colored vinyl. It's unclear how "limited" it actually is. my copy is #2884

When this song was released as a single in 1995, I'm pretty sure I *liked* it. I don't recall anyone in my immediate social circle of 13-year-old boys LOVING it, but as it was played ad nauseam on the local rock radio stations, it penetrated enough so that you couldn't really even ignore it. At worst, you just had to accept it.

Sponge being from Detroit didn't even really seem to make any connection to us either. It's not like we knew them or saw them around. They still might as well had been from Mars for all we knew. My appreciation for local music was still a good 4-5 years away.

And once that appreciation for local music struck, in the form of the underground garage bands of the late 1990s, my proverbial about-face found me shit-talking Sponge. Like they were an after-thought response to the true rebel artistry of the Seattle bands preceding them.

I held on to that mindset for a good fifteen years.

Then without warning, on paternity leave back in 2016, driving home from Babies 'R' Us with a dresser/changing table in the back of the Flex, I caught "Molly" on the Lithium channel on satellite radio. 

The production still left something to be desired, but more than ever, the WORDS got to me. My understanding is that the song is inspired by a story of an ill-fated professor/student romance, capped off with a suicide attempt. 

Maybe it was colored by fatherhood, or just the warmth of the familiarity of the lyrics after so many years, but the song, despite all its affected guitar and bluster and edge, struck me as so melancholy, as heartfelt, as properly emotional.

I went on a rabbit hole looking through various live versions and acoustic renditions and the feeling not only remained, but intensified. While the attempted rhyming of "glass" and "vase" still irks me, I keep coming back to the vocal melody sung with the pair of lines "don't ask why" and "sixteen candles down the drain." 

The melody is heartbreaking, it is dour, but at the same time, there's a weird underlying glimmer of optimism to it all. I sing this to myself all the goddamned time.

At the time I made a note to myself that Third Man should reach out to whoever controlled the rights to the Rotting Pinata LP and we should do a big proper reissue of it. I slept on that note, someone else did the reissue and to placate myself I tracked down a 7-inch copy for less money that I spend on a single can of Ghost energy drink.

I've got a quasi-secret plan for this song, I'm not ready to let the cat out of the bag just yet, but assuming I can pull some shit together, it will have made it all incredibly worth it. Stay tuned.

(untitled)

i am throwing up

in a violent thunderstorm

singing “Our Secret”

Thank God For RADAR - How The White Stripes Began Recording All Of Their Live Performances

(originally published 2/17/23 on the Nugs.net blog)

https://2nu.gs/ws472003

Twenty years ago, give or take a couple of weeks, the White Stripes purchased a Random Access Digital Audio Recorder. RADAR for short. It cost $8000. When recently asked about the impetus behind the move, long-time Stripes manager Ian Montone said…

“Many artists I respected - musically and from a business standpoint - always recorded their shows. Frank Zappa specifically. We wanted to implement something similar given we already owned our studio master recordings. So it made sense to record and own everything the band (and Jack) did moving forward. Live shows included. Because every show was different. There was no setlist. Everything was special. We wanted to capture that for posterity’s sake - hence the RADAR.”

In terms of the archival footprint of the White Stripes, the importance of this decision cannot be overstated. Previously, sanctioned live recordings were largely limited to whenever I was there AND the club had a cassette deck wired to the soundboard. With the end result being a static two-channel board recording subject to the whims and preferences of a house sound engineer’s real-time mixing, it left a lot to be desired.

For example…my obligations as a mediocre Detroit college journalism student with a scholarship meant that for the entirety of 2002 (a year the Stripes played nearly 100 shows) I was present for a mere seven performances, two of which were purely coincidental as my band the Dirtbombs were slotted as the warm-up act. 

Thus, the number of proprietary live recordings from 2002 in the archive? Shit, barely any. I count one, give or take one.

But come 2003 the White Stripes would have the raw masters of their on-stage inputs digitally preserved. This gave the band the ability, after-the-fact, to have whomever they desired to properly and precisely mix every live show they performed, regardless of whether or not I was there to slide the sound guy a tape that night. This was $8000 well-spent.

Thank god for RADAR.

The April 7th, 2003 gig in Wolverhampton was the first show the White Stripes recorded with this digital system. More importantly, this show is the kick-off to the Elephant world tour, approximately 14 months of whirlwind travel, Whirlwind Heat, sold out shows, not sold out ethics, finger breakings, Grammy takings, global gallivanting and “oh oh oh oh oh ohhhh oh” chanting. 

The performance, shockingly, has not been heard in ANY form since the amps powered down that evening two decades ago. I guess no one in Wolverhampton was doing surreptitious audience recordings at the time. Photos of the gig? I found none. Concert poster? I’ve never seen one. Please, prove me wrong. I welcome it. Contemporaneous accounts of the evening? A dumb brief write-up from the NME, one slightly more informative from the Independent and that’s it. 

As Jack humbly tells the crowd that Elephant hit number 1 on the charts this day…the gig…you’d think there’d be more proof that it really existed. Things here feel big. They seem important. A chance whiff of greatness. The weight of it all is palpable on the recording.

So the wait to hear this show is most definitely worth it. The first-ever public outing of a clutch of songs off Elephant is the definition of historic. 

The fact that Meg switches to her snare hits late on the first verse of “Seven Nation Army”? I LOVE it. Perhaps the only time ever she didn’t 100% nail that song. Jack’s nerves evident on “In The Cold, Cold Night”? Endearing. The premature ending of “The Hardest Button To Button”? A combo of “wow” and “holy shit” said in wonderment. 

These are by no means the best versions of ANY of these songs. But they are precious for what they presage…the eventual enshrinement of said tunes in the bombastic canon of a band well on its way to their peak form.

Beyond that…the first time ever covering Public Nuisance’s “Small Faces.” What a moment! And the extra special treat of what we’ve titled here “Talking Pillow By My Side Blues.” An improvised song done in the “talking blues” style pioneered by Chris Bouchillon, appropriated by Woody Guthrie and yet further popularized by Bob Dylan, “Pillow” is one of the more realized extemporaneous songs to emerge from a White Stripes live show of any era. Which is fortunate to have been captured here, as it never shows up again, anywhere, ever.

Thank god for RADAR.

Though I must stress, the method was not perfect. As The White Stripes front of house engineer Matthew Kettle would say “Despite being the best thing we could get at the time, the RADAR was occasionally unreliable, and as we weren't carrying a sound desk everywhere at that point, not every show was recorded successfully.”

With that in mind, there’s a handful of songs that failed to be recorded in Wolverhampton. “Dead Leaves” and “Black Math” and “I Think I Smell A Rat” seem to be songs from the top of the set lost to the ether on this night. Which isn’t too bad in the grand scheme of things, considering there’s an entire WEEK where Kettle’s best efforts were thwarted by the finicky digital interface and thus, we’re left only with our imagination and collective recollection trying to discern what happened at half dozen shows in June of 2003.

Otherwise the RADAR material was immediately put to use…the accompanying audio to “Black Math” live vid from the Masonic Temple, the Berlin soundcheck b-side recording of “St. Ides of March” and the promo-only triple LP Live In Las Vegas are all proper public-facing mobilizations of these recordings. Third Man didn’t even attempt to crack these suckers open for another ten years until prepping the Nine Miles From The White City live LP included in Vault Package 16 from 2013.

At that point, upon handing mix engineer Vance Powell the necessary drives, he audibly winced. 

“What?” I asked him, perplexed and, let’s face it, ignorant.

“These drives have moving parts. Good luck getting anything off of them,” Vance replied.

To which point I said “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“No, I’m not,” he said. “These things are ten years old.”

I learned a very crucial lesson at that moment…that any digital format is only reliable for a couple years before it’s usurped by something more streamlined and less cumbersome - OR - it just stops working. The need to constantly update and re-archive digital files is downright maddening. There is no long-term, futureproof, failsafe digital carrier. Ever. It would be another five years before all drives were properly transferred to a relatively stable LTO format. And even then, not without RADAR drive “G” requiring a $1761.60 “clean room” recovery to save seven shows that would have otherwise just disappeared.

It sounds comical now, but wearing my “businessman” hat I broke out the calculator to amortize the proposal…deciding with an almost embarrassingly “duh” quickness that $251 per show was a reasonable enough fee to reclaim those ephemeral moments. Because there’s spirit in all these recordings. The unforeseen nostalgia of memories yet to be uncovered. Instances where the power of an assemblage of strangers in a room together can divine a psychically shared experience. Time that mattered to someone. Moments could now last forever, 

One of those moments, cast off with barely any consideration, a seconds-long thought formulated into action in a more simple manner, appeared when Jack White signed the venue guest book after the show. 

“Thanks Civic, you made my day and I shan't forget it.”

And because of a wise $8000 investment made nearly a generation ago, you won’t either.

Thank god for RADAR.

"It's A Holiday Inn Massacre..."

A few years back I worked an extended period in the Third Man Detroit offices. Through normal conversation, the "Fishbowl" single by Green Wall was brought up.

From my memory, the two folks who brought it up could not stop shitting on it. Just HATED the record. It was prominent on their radar when it came out of the Detroit suburbs in 1990, and in some regard, just the antithesis of what was good and worthwhile and noteworthy.

From my perch...I just loved it.

I sat back and waited for nearly three years now...multiple copies available on Discogs, but ALL of them overseas. I finally bit the bullet and spent more on shipping than for the actual record to get it from the UK.

Listening now...I think I love it even more. Swank popped his head in the door with that quizzical "What is this?" look on his face. I asked if he was curious because it was bad...or if he thought it was good. He said it appealed to his teenage "Rats Revenge" sensibilities and I get where he's coming from.

I find localized precedents along the lines of the Tulsa City Truckers and (maybe) the Rascal Reporters. But there's a little bit more adolescent naivete present here, bordering on art rock avant garde, that ups the ante in an impressive way.

Side note: only upon receiving this copy in the mail did I find out that one of the band members is John Tenney. I sat at the same table as this guy at a wedding like 15 years ago. I was told that he had taken over "Coast to Coast" radio after Art Bell passed, but my googling just now shows me that he's maybe only guested on the program. Anyway, Tenney is considered an esteemed paranormal researcher. Seems about right. 

"Holiday Inn Massacre" is my go-to here. Uncompromising, uncomparable, straight ahead, nonsensical. I can see how the shock of 90's nonsensical stupidity might turn off those who fully lived through it. But for those who didn't get to their first punk show until after Cobain kicked the bucket, there's a whiff of the "so close, I just missed it" grass-is-greener feels of what the cool kids were doing just before you walked through the door. 

These are the ephemeral, difficult to put into words moments I find myself searching out more and more. It brings me joy.

Star/Time “Like An Owl Exploding”

Star/Time

Like An Owl Exploding 

scum stats: I know this is limited. 250 copies? 300? the specifics escape me

There is a joy, a pure joy at listening to one of your most favorite instrumentalists.

Patrick Pantano, the drummer of Star/Time, is that joy for me.

For over a solid decade he sat behind a kit directly to my left as we commanded the backbeat across the globe with the Dirtbombs. He is tight and crisp. Me is sloppy and over-relying on the visual apparel of long blonde hair flying and swirling about to distract from the fact that I often had no idea what in the hell I was doing.

While Pat has always had other musical projects, the slow creep of age and his physical relocation to the southern hemisphere makes this all the more bittersweet. I feel like I'm listening to my phantom limb, calling out to be reunited with the rest of its body.

Specifically, "Cockroach Bikini" (GREAT title) repurposes the drum pattern that Pat and I had nailed in a syncopated manner whenever the Dirtbombs played "Granny's Little Chicken." Known amongst us simply as "Granny's," that song features a wholesale lift the hook from Ghostface Killah's "Daytona 500" which is just a straight sample of the indomitably funky "Nautilus" bass line by Bob James.

The repurposed borrowing of a steal of a sample leaves this guy here smiling and wistful. Artful with intention.

Most of these beats I've heard Pat play a thousand times before, he's definitely the groove and playing in the style and intensity that he wants. And doing so with flash.

The entire album gives a strong improvised feel and with that comes the bold statement that it really gives the impression that the drums are the lead instrument here.

And that's a-ok by me.

Skronks of horn here and there, jitty little guitar stabs, some ancillary kitchen sink percussion...this is a groovy, tastefully experimental slice with flashes of weight and sinister underpinnings. Experimental without clearing the room. Funky without sounding white. Atmospheric without seeming like someone just stepped on an effects pedal to make that happen.

The essence of soul here is the confidence and motivation for forward movement. It relieves as much as it causes pauses and invites debate. I need more records like this to magically appear in the world.

I highly recommend picking up this record. I feel like it is worth your time.

like an owl exploding by STAR/TIME</a></iframe>

Wolf Eyes "Difficult Messages" And How Favors Turn Into Obligations In The Best Way

Wolf Eyes played the Blue Room in Nashville a few months back. Was a good time catching up with the band, show was solid, vibes for days. 

Shortly thereafter, John Olson reached out and asked me if I'd do a write up for their new record. I happily agreed. From there on out delay after sickness after whatever other roadblock just blew up every damn deadline I was given.

By the time I finally tackled it, I maybe spent a half-hour on the write-up. I didn't even know what I was saying. I told John, upon delivering the document, that I wasn't even sure what the intended use was for the write-up. 

Ultimately, I thought I blew it and was just experiencing the quintessential polite Midwestern good graces from the Wolfs.

So imagine my shock when a rep from Wolf Eyes' label reached out to me saying that he'd pitched the piece to Talkhouse ("Talkhouse is writing and conversations about music and film, from the people who make them").

I'd admired the website from afar for some time, primarily inspired by Lou Reed's review of Kanye West's Yeezus. This was not expected. Furthermore, as my draft was only 300 some words, they were hoping that I could expand on it to get to their desired 800 word count.

And they'd pay me $150 for the privilege.

I was more than happy to finesse the piece even more, draw a lot more of my personality and real life into it, and ultimately, hope that I shine the light on Wolf Eyes in a manner that makes other folks wanna take a listen. Dig it.

https://www.talkhouse.com/wolf-eyes-difficult-messages-is-a-counter-to-boredom/

Spin Art Pizza

Yesterday I was at a party that had an assortment of pizzas as food for guests. Each one in a delivery box, the pizzas were labeled as one would expect…cheese, pepperoni, mushroom, vegan, etc. 

The box that really caught my eye said “spin art.”

I was immediately compelled by the genius (yet simple) idea. 

Take some flattened pizza dough, affix it to a sort of turntable with the ability to rotate at what I’d peg to be ~78rpm speed. Then much in the manner of the mid-20th century carnival art style (later appropriated and upsold by Damien Hirst in the 1990’s) apply different cheeses or toppings or dressings or sauces that without much effort will radiate out in a visually pleasing manner.

Dare I say it felt deceptively revolutionary and I was kicking myself for not having landed on the idea on my own.

I opened the box to lay eyes on the masterpiece and was immediately hit with the realization “Oh shit. It’s just spinach and artichoke.”

So…patent pending.