Why God Put A REPEAT Button On Your CD Player.

I guess most big-time record geeks have an album or two that they play the crap out of on a regular basis. Something that stays on the turntable or in the CD player for days (or weeks) on end, much to the dismay of anybody within earshot. My best friend used to play Bowie's "Diamond Dogs" for what seemed like months. Lucky for me, I love that album. Another friend drove his Toyota pickup from L.A. to Raleigh armed with only a cassette of "Nashville Skyline." (When you figure that thing lasts less than half an hour, and the United States is over 2,000 miles long, that's a lot of "Lay Lady Lay.")*

Here's one I occasionally play over and over till everyone wishes I was dead: "Field Day" by Marshall Crenshaw, from 1983. His second LP.

I was a freshman at North Carolina State when this thing came out, and it hit my heavy rotation almost immediately. I was struck right away by how Powerful it was, a pop record that really pounded out of the speakers, something I don't think I'd heard before. Power Pop people like Matthew Sweet and Sloan and stuff became real good at this later, but I'm gonna say MC was the first--and he took all the heat for it.

You see, while I was spending the Summer of '83 in absolute Power Pop bliss, thanks to this record, a lot of people were most certainly NOT grooving on it. You heard a lot of bad stuff. Muddy. Drums too loud. Over-produced. And all about the oft-mentioned, really stupid "sophomore jinx." We record collectors are such losers.

But as I said then, to anybody that gave a rat's ass (and come to think of it, that would've been, uh, NOBODY), this record is great. Marshall's lyrics are a little darker than on his debut from the year before. His vocals seem a little more world-weary (and that's a good thing), probably the result of a year of massive touring. And his guitar's crunchier--which is always a good thing, unless you're Joan Baez or something. All of these things, as far as I'm concerned, were improvements on the sound of his first. (Please don't think I'm dissing "Marshall Crenshaw.")

Response to the record's production (by Steve Lillywhite, giving it a sound much like he did on XTC's "Black Sea") was such that a few songs were remixed and released as an import EP. Basically, they tried to make this second record sound more like the first one that everyone loved so much. It didn't really help, though it gave me another import 12-inch to search for (there are now two copies in my collection; why, I don't know).

Anyway, I love this record. I even love the cover, which everyone (including MC) will tell you is awful. It's one of the few records from the Eighties that I still really appreciate as a whole.

I'd like to see it get the deluxe re-issue treatment Marshall's first album got (loaded with B-sides and demos and junk), to perhaps spur a tiny reappraisal of it. I ain't holding my breath. So, I'll go on pulling my old copy out every six months or so and playing it non-stop for about a week. Or until I decide to play "Fun House" by The Stooges non-stop for about a week, followed by the same treatment with "(The) Ventures In Space" and "Blonde On Blonde."

By the way, James, when was the last time you listened to "Diamond Dogs?"

* On a similar note, I once drove straight from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Knoxville, Tennessee, with "Everywhere At Once" by The Plimsouls playing the whole time. My other CDs were in the back of the car and I didn't feel like digging for them.

Just Thinking About It Makes Me Sick.

My family and I were riding around yesterday. Typical Saturday: breakfast, church sales, thrift stores, whatever. Along the way, my wife wanted a Pepsi. So, I pulled into the nearest convenience store.

This is the Triangle. (We were in Apex, to be precise.) Here, almost everything is shiny and new. Because everything that isn't shiny and new--anything with character or personality or history--has been bulldozed to make room for more shiny and new. Welcome to Stepford, North Carolina.

Back to the Pepsi. Like I said, I pulled into a convenience store. Not your good ol' bait shop, Toastchee, Natural Light, NASCAR collectible kinda convenience store, but the newer, friendlier fresh fruit/flavored coffee variety. Some people like 'em.

I walk in, and almost immediately I'm punched in the face--no, make that pummelled--by the reak of urine (with just a hint of bleach). It's like I walked into one of those rest areas along I-95 in Maryland. Nasty.

Had a toilet overflowed? Was the guy behind the counter (who seemed perfectly nice) a rancid mutant freak with a hygiene problem? These were questions I wasn't gonna take the time to answer. Leave!

Wait a minute. How long does it take to snag a Pepsi, a bottled water for my little girl and a Coke for myself? I can do this.

The drinks secured, I pay. With cash. Exact change. Anything to vacate me from the House Of Stench a second or two sooner. The register drawer shuts. I'm done. I made it!

Turning to leave, I remember that my wife prefers to drink with a straw. Grappling with The Stink, I'd completely forgotten. Quickly scanning the place, I locate the fountain drink/hot dog area. A box of paper-wrapped straws awaits. By this time, I'm taking deep breaths and holding them as long as possible. I grab a straw, take a quick breath to begin my dash for the door, the outdoors and aeromatic sanctuary.

It was then that it got worse. Much worse.

I hate ketchup. Hate the way it smells. Hate its taste. Really hate getting it on me. And here I am, a few feet from one of those condiment pump things like you see in sports areas. And the filthy stink of urine has been supplemented by maybe the only thing that could be worse: the horrid stench of ketchup.

The Hunts factory could not possibly smell any stronger of ketchup than this corner of this convenience store did.

Straw in hand, I flee, never to return.

No matter how much my spouse may crave the taste born in the Carolinas, no matter how parched my five-year-old may be, they can't get me back in that shiny, convenient Hell.

As I'm typing this, a wave of nausea comes over me. It's faint, but it's there.

The scars run deep.

"They Say I've Got Brains, But They Ain't Doin' Me No Good."

Saw on Yahoo yesterday that the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" 45 came out 40 years ago (on October 10). Wow. Go listen to it. Right now. I'll wait.

What this means is that everyone who endeavors to put music onto a piece of tape, or turn it into a string of zeroes and ones, has been trying like hell to top Brian Wilson's masterpiece for 14,600 days. And I don't think they've done it yet. (I'd hate to toil away under such a long, dark shadow as that.)

After spinning "Good Vibrations" a few times yesterday, I put on the "Pet Sounds" album in all its monophonic glory. And I told myself I was gonna get up this morning and write something about Brian and what an inspiration his music, his life, his creativity have been to me.

But I quickly realized that people have been trying to capture Brian and his work in words for decades. Most of them weren't, and I'm not, up to the task.


So I'll just leave it at this: Brain, I love you. And thanks from the bottom of my heart for every single note you've ever played.

Now I'm gonna listen to "Pet Sounds" for the 637th time this afternoon.

One of the greats: Seven Men From Now

I read someplace recently that you should never trust a freak’s opinion, especially when that freak is spouting off about the particular subject they’re a freak about.

So, don’t say you weren’t warned.

I grew up in the Seventies, with a film collector for a dad--this was in the pre-video days. So while other kids were playing with Barbie dolls or pretending to be Joe Namath, I was sitting in the dark, soaking up the works of John Ford, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel and the like.

Early on, I developed an affinity for Fifties Westerns. My dad loved ‘em, so there were lots of them around. They were typically darker than the Westerns of previous decades. (After all, audiences had been through Word War II—they knew what death looked like, and that the good-guy, bad-guy thing didn’t correspond to the color of your Stetson.) They had great actors in them like Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea and Audie Murphy. And they looked cool, especially the black and white CinemaScope ones. What’s more, they were short and had plenty of action. I could thread one up in the Bell & Howell right after school and still get my homework done before dinner. (During this period, my best friend James Graham and I binge-watched “Pit And The Pendulum” at least once a day for weeks, but that’s another story.)

One I never got to see, simply because it was nowhere to be seen, was “Seven Men From Now” (1956), directed by Budd Boetticher, written by Burt Kennedy and starring Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin. I heard about it into adulthood and it quickly rose to the top of my wanna-see list.


Well, I must’ve been living right all those years. Because now, it sits in the middle of my DVD collection. And what a wonderful thing it is. You see, "Seven Men From Now" was produced by John Wayne's Batjac production company, and most of their stuff has been unavailable for years. And while the works of Beotticher and Kennedy were being rediscovered and worshipped by critics and movie geeks worldwide, "Seven Men" was conspicuously absent. Everybody talked about how great it was, the best of Budd and Burt's films together, one of the greatest Westerns ever made, and on and on. I figured it was in the same way your long lost prom date was the most beautiful girl in school.

Well, in this case, turns out she was quite a looker after all.

What amazes me about this movie--and about most of the Kennedy/Boetticher/Scott films--is how much stuff gets packed into just 70-80 minutes. If you look at this thing strictly as an example of getting a story on film, it's without peer. The plot is deceptivly simple: Randy's wife was killed in a holdup; he's going after the men that did it. Within that story, there's backstory, there's character development for almost every character, there's a real sense of place (it was shot in Lone Pine, California) and there's plenty of great action scenes. And you're done in an hour and 18 minutes!

Anymore, a lot of people don't care for Westerns. And I can certainly see why. They made so many of them, and lots of them were either programmers or out-and-out junk. Same can be said for old horror movies. Because of that, it's so much sweeter when you come across a really good one.

Check it out. And see what a Western CAN be. You can spare 78 minutes, can't you?

I've made two huge mistakes in my life involving this movie. Several years ago, a restored print of the film was shown at a festival in New York. Boetticher spoke and answered questions and just generally soaked up a lot of people really digging his films. My friend James--the "Pit And The Pendulum" guy I mentioned above--invited me up. I didn't go. Around the same time, my mom and dad went to a film festival in Lone Pine, where they feature movies shot among their beautiful hills. Again, "Seven Men" was shown, along with other Boetticher/Kennedy/Scott pictures, and I didn't go. I can be so stupid.