Rodriguez: Cold Fact

My friend at Saint Cleveland turned me on to this re-released gem from 1970. Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was a full-time factory worker and a part-time freak-folkie from Detroit. His music, a blend of the fading idealism of the 1960s and his own stark vision of the future, reflects the sense of dismay coming over many rust belt residents. While the social unrest and urban decay of Rodriguez’s home city weigh heavily on his songwriting, he ably combines elements of beat poetry, psychedelic rock and funky pop to great effect. The loping strut of “Hate Street Dialogue” calls to mind another Motor City fixture, only this street-walking cheetah has a heart full of worry, not napalm. The heavy-handed “Only Good For Conversation” is part “Smoke on the Water,” part “Big Bottom” – so much so that I can almost see Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls on the double bass when I close my eyes.

Actually, the most glaring influence on Cold Fact is Donovan: “Sugar Man” and “Crucify Your Mind” are both so Donovan-esque, with mystic hippie statements like “silver magic ships, you carry…sweet Mary Jane” over languid guitar strumming, that it’d be safe to call Rodriguez the Detroit Donovan. Conversely, “I Wonder” is straight-up doo-wop-pop with an infectious bass line and a counterculture bent.

The entire album is colored by a serious feeling of disillusion, made clearer with a pointed frustration not unlike Dylan’s. The second to last track on side two, “Gomorrah (A Nursery Rhyme),” is a haunting blues with a choir of ghosts singing “America the Beautiful” on the fadeout. The song details the seamy underbelly of not only his city (“the ladies on my street aren’t there for their health”) but “your city.” Observing Detroit as a place of poverty, squalor and depravity, Rodriguez applies his thinking to the rest of the country, commenting on the sad state of the union. Though I’m sure he wasn’t alone in his disenchantment, his record didn’t sell for shit. Here’s hoping that the recent reissue can reach a new generation of the pissed-off and bummed-out, if only so the music can be heard.

Don't hate.

Robert Leo Heilman, an Oregonian, contributed a critical piece to the University of Oregon’s magazine, Oregon Quarterly, about irrational people (specifically the far right-wingers). I thought it was a tad smug, a little presumptuous, but overall, pretty thoughtful. An excerpt that I think rings especially true:

I have known a great many people over the years—nice people, decent people—who cling to harmful and repugnant beliefs that are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, or politically intolerant. What they all have had in common is their high levels of frustration and fear. Each has felt insecure and cheated somehow, denied their fair share of power, ignored and disrespected. Many (though not all) have been economic losers, bitter about their failure to succeed. Some have been emotional cripples, unable to sustain loving relationships and unable to tolerate ambiguity. Many have had their lives fall apart due to compulsive boozing or drug abuse or gambling. Others have simply been crushed repeatedly by an indifferent and impersonal system of things that exploits them because it is profitable to do so. Some are people who blame themselves for having suffered terrible blows that came for no good reason at all. All became, in one way or another, shell-shocked veterans of life itself.
What is there to cling to when, by your own doing or by others or by cold fate, you have lost everything? Stripped of dignity, mired in failure, caged in by tough circumstances and uncontrollable forces, what is left to people but to embrace comforting nonsense and to rage against perceived injustice?

Click here for the full piece.

Watch where you point that thing.

Last Friday night Roy Messenger crashed his car into a utility pole, knocking it down and ending up in a ditch. Miraculously, the 50-year-old Elma, Washington man was uninjured. He climbed out of his car and called a relative to help him get it out of the ditch. But when his family finally made it to the scene, Messenger was dead.

So what happened? A deputy with the Grays Harbor County Sheriff's office says that Messenger must have relieved himself in the ditch while waiting for his family. He likely died after urinating on the live power line he’d downed. Though an official autopsy will confirm the cause of death, it’s apparently clear that the burn marks show where and how the electricity entered Messenger's body.

Pretty shitty way to go, if you ask me.

The T.A.M.I. Show

David Fricke is a Senior Writer with Rolling Stone magazine. He’s apparently valuable enough to the famed publication that he’s allowed to choose his own assignments, writing features on the old dudes, interviewing legends and reviewing only the tastiest new albums. My favorite contribution of his to the mag is “Fricke’s Picks,” a column that gives him space to write about under-the-radar bands, reissues of forgotten records and other music minutiae.

In the latest issue, Fricke talks about “The Greatest Rock Concert Movie Ever.” I couldn’t agree more with his choice. He writes:

All that is dull and predictable in modern rock-show films – caffeinated-jitter edits, hagiographic close-ups, the cheesy melodrama backstage – can be traced to this fact: The best example of how to do it right, The T.A.M.I. Show – a 12-act revue topped by James Brown and the Rolling Stones, shot live in Los Angeles with a delirious audience on October 29th, 1964 – has been officially unavailable, in its entirety, for more than four decades. The T.A.M.I. Show: Collector’s Edition (Shout! Factory) is the movie’s first release on DVD. Class starts now.

The first lesson: Get to the music, immediately. After breezy opening scenes of the artists heading to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium – Smokey Robinson and the Miracles in a limo, hosts Jan and Dean on skateboards – director Steve Binder (who later directed Elvis Presley’s 1968 TV special) jumps to a sly, bracing zigzag of Fifties roots and Liverpool cheek, Chuck Berry alternating hits with Gerry and the Pacemakers. Everything follows at the same velocity – Marvin Gaye’s manly lust into Lesley Gore’s vengeful-schoolgirl sugar; the proto-garage rock of the Barbarians.

There are also long, magnetic highs, when a single camera finds a thrill and stays there. When the Beach Boys (with a smiling Brian Wilson on bass) leap into “Dance, Dance, Dance” like the Ramones with tans, you see Dennis Wilson racing at the drums like Keith Moon during all of Carl Wilson’s guitar solo. In “Prisoner of Love,” Brown’s face slowly fills the lens as he staggers offstage, in his cape, before spinning back to the mike for more spectacular agony.

The Stones follow Brown’s set (the first time many white teens saw such black fire) with a prophetic mettle. The extended leaping-devil shots of Mick Jagger capture him sharpening the sex and danger in his own R&B choreography. Note the glimpses of a cocky, grinning Brian Jones and, too, the way Keith Richards plays guitar while facing drummer Charlie Watts. Some things, even in rock-concert films, never change.I’m glad the movie is finally hitting shelves. I remember reading about the legendary show a few years ago (T.A.M.I. stands for Teenage Awards Music International) and, as a serious Stones fan, being seriously intrigued. The film being officially unavailable, I ended up finding a bootleg on eBay and having it shipped from Brazil. It did not disappoint. In addition to publishing and distribution disputes way back when, I think that some of the artists held up its official release for whatever reason. Though my version has performances by the Ronettes and Ray Charles, they don’t appear on the version now available. Either way, the movie is a must-see, must-hear if only for JB and the Stones. You buy!

the games

The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver officially ended last night with the closing ceremony. It was an eventful affair to say the least, with the tragic death of a young luger, a high-stakes skiing competition, and a nail-biting men's hockey final all making for over two weeks of exciting thrills and spills. When it was all said and done, the United States had been awarded 37 medals, the highest total count. Germany was second with 30 and Canada was third, finishing with 26. Canada did however earn 14 gold medals, the most any host-country has ever received and a record that any other nation would be proud to set.

I'm reminded of something I wrote about national pride during the summer games of 2008: http://gimdang.blogspot.com/2008/08/pride.html.