Spending $12

As an itinerant writer and copyeditor, I’m not always rolling in the cabbage. Not that I’m complaining—you think I’m complaining? You think I want to go back to my old cubicle and turn gray under florescent lights while invisible demons eat my soul? No! I’m aspiring to live like Beaumarchais!


Of course, right now I’m copyediting an 800 page book on Romanian farm collectivization, meaning that my life actually resembles Kafka’s Das Schloss starring Henny Youngman, but that’s the price of endeavor, and I can do naught but cast my gaze towards the ineffable rewards that will someday be mine. Sure, things are tough without a steady paycheck, but do you think Gomez Addams came by his fortune through normal channels? No! And when the biography of Gomez Addams is written, I bet they’ll skip over his “lean years” and devote the bulk of the text to Gomez’s knife-throwing, tango dancing, and alligator farming. So it is with me. Above my desk, Dear Reader, I have two cross-stitched samplers: one reads “An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A copyeditor spends his life getting into tense situations,” and the other reads “The life of a freelance writer is always intense.” Those are words to live by.

This is all a roundabout way of admitting that I’ve been totally fucking broke lately, especially during my recent visit to NYC. I don’t know when I’m gonna be able to get out west to see people, or when I’m going to be able to pick up that Times New Viking Present the Paisley Reich record I’ve been wanting to get—or any record, for that matter. In fact, if it weren’t for good friends, I would have gone without food and housing.

While in NYC, I was bound and determined to see music. Specifically, I was determined to see Om, who were playing a show with Daniel Higgs. That’s a good lineup right there.


Daniel Higgs is the main guy in this band Lungfish, and now makes these strange albums of solo banjo and jew’s harp improvisations. I’m a big fan of his recent Metempsychotic Melodies album, made up of long banjo-based compositions plus the odd string of stentorian intonations about love.


Higgs music is sprawling, and it sounds like he’s channeling awfully weird forces when he plays. (My friend Matty, who has launched a one-man humanitarian mission to make sure that I stay tethered to the world of fine music, introduced me to Daniel Higgs’ stuff. Thanks, Matty.) Besides Metemphychotic Melodies, I’d recommend his album Atomic Yggrasil Tarot, which you can get with a little hardbound book of Higgs’ paintings and written text. All of the Daniel Higgs solo releases are good, though.

Om, on the other hand, is a band made up of the bass player and drummer of Sleep, a band that broke up in the 90s. Sleep started out sounding kinda like Black Sabbath, and ended up trying to deliver an album to their record company that was an hour-long weed anthem. One song—one hour. This album is the legendary Dopesmoker, available at fine record shoppes everywhere.

Needless to say, a 60 minute marijuana metal monolith isn’t gonna move units in the way that 90s alterna-hits of the day did. The record company wasn’t pleased, and the band split amidst tensions. The guitarist guy formed High On Fire, which is a metal band that has songs about Pharisees and yetis and shit. (Check the sample lyric: Abominable nomad/The ancient monks know his clan/The time of yeti will rise/Because his ways have been wise.) The other two guys in Sleep, bassist-singer Al Cisnros and drummer Chris Haikus, became Om.


Om is just bass, drums, and singing. Their music really couldn't be simpler, but by making long, repetitive songs that undergo slight variations over time, the band creates something totally compelling, and rewards your listening effort. They do songs with names like Rays of the Sun/To the Shrinebuilder—songs that take up the entire side of an LP, and keep going and going until your mind is all stretched out. Now, I’m not a big heavy metal fan, but I do like psych music and dub reggae. A long, psych-stoner-doom rock dub sounding anthem thing? About a shrinebuilder? I’ll buy that for a dollar.

This kind of music doesn’t just drop out of the sky—if you’re going to be in a bass and drums combo that does hypnotic 20 minute long songs with only one part, well, that’s dedication right there. That’s the kind of band that springs from the fertile soil of a previous band’s decomposing remains . . . a lot of things had to happen for a band like Om to exist.

Seeing as how I was in New York for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t gonna miss these guys for anything. This took some planning—you see, I really was broke, and not at all sure I was going to have the $12 (or whatever) it would cost to see them by the time they played. I had to buy things like food and subway fares.

So I squirreled away $12 at the beginning of my trip, figuring that I could make up the remainder of the ticket price by changing the assorted foreign currencies in my wallet. Let me tell you: not dipping into that $12 was a lot of work. I won’t go into some of the more embarrassing details.

And as I wandered around NYC, seeing friends and eating their food, I began thinking about why I liked Om (or, say, Akron/Family) more than, say, certain other kinds of modern-day psych-y bands that play shows all over These United States. Because they’re out there, you know.

One train of thought led to another, and I ended up finding myself thinking about this Jorge Luis Borges story called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”


In this story, the narrator talks about his friend Pierre Menard, who is a writer. He lists Menard’s works, which are all pretty interesting, but pale in comparison to Menard’s real work, which was to try and write Don Quixote:

The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know he attained a fairly accurate command of seventeenth-century Spanish) but discarded it as too easy. Rather as impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and, consequently, less interesting--than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.

So the story continues onward in this interesting manner. When Menand finally produces his fragments of the Quixote, the narrator compares it to Cervantes’ Quixote. Now, the two texts are identical. And comparing identical passages, the narrator finds Menand’s Quixote to be “almost infinitely richer.” Even though both texts contain the same words, one was written in the 17th century, and the other was written in the present day. Therefore, they are judged differently and they contain different meanings.

Bands like Om and Daniel Higgs seem familiar at first. Before I even heard them I'd heard about them, and figured that they just made drugged out, boring hippie nonsense. I resisted listening to them for a long time: I didn't necessarily want to listen to some guy making banjo drone-folk, and while I liked Om on paper, it seemed like they'd be tedious in practice. When I finally took the time to actually listen, I was hooked. It’s hard to say what these guys are tapping into. but the stuff they’re playing is entirely new, and nothing if not contemporary.

I'm always hearing how people are supposed to have low attention spans because we live in a media landscape of soundbites and blah blah blah, but it would seem that a whole lot of popular music these days embraces dynamics, experimentation, and active listening. OM and Daniel Higgs (along with a number of other artists) are making these kind of sounds that demand that everything else be pushed away. It's meditative, but not necessarily peaceful. I'm reminded of . . . I don't know . . . I mean, don't most world religions or spiritual thingies have a moment when someone, like a priest or a magic warlock guy or whatever, performs some kind of an action to prepare a space for religion stuff? Like how priests say prayers and wave around that incense burner, or how a magic warlock guy might light candles and place them around the sacred ritual pentagram? They're purifying the space, right? Purifying the space, or creating a void in the secular world, or something. This is an ages-old practice, but its done differently by different people from different religions in different parts of the world. Despite all these differences, it accomplishes the same thing.

It’s 2008, and the music industry is collapsing like a preternaturally old man-monster who lived for 200 years by sucking the blood from the young and innocent, until his tick-like, swollen body became too heavy for his spindly little osteoporosis-inflicted legs to support, so they snapped like dry branches while, shrieking like a falsetto air raid siren, while his repulsive, claw-like hands dragged down anyone within reach. Meanwhile music just keeps getting more and more innovative: things are expanding rather than contracting, and new vistas are opening up for brave listeners the world around.

At any rate, you can imagine my disappointment when I found out that Om split up and the show was cancelled.

I bought tacos and beer with my $12.

Metapost: It's a Virtue

Dear Readers: I've been travelling a lot recently, and having too much fun to provide you with the quality content you've come to expect from The Little Black Egg.

Now, I've got so much quality content stuck in my head that it looks like I have hydropcephalus, and I can't wait to get home so's I can stick a shunt in my head and drain that quality content out for consumption by you, my beloved audience. I know that you are all possessed of that virtue that is patience, and are not annoyed at the time that elapses between posts. When my new content appears here, for free, I know that you'll be here with hands outstretched, ready to recieve it. Thank you and thank you kindly.


This can be assembled.

It's Monk Time

Dave Day, the banjo player from the Monks, died the other day. That's him on the far right.


Over forty years ago, some American GIs stationed in Germany decided to form a band after getting out of the army. They got cowls, wore nooses around their necks, and shaved their hair into monk tonsures. The Monks played weird, distorted, rhythmic, sarcastic sing-along music, and released one album, Black Monk Time, in 1965.


I first heard this band when I was 19 or so and my friend Jackie loaned me a CD of their stuff (which I lost like a jerk—sorry about that, Jackie). I liked them immediately—it's hard not to. They're like some wondrous mythical animal that has the science community scratching their heads, while cryptozoologists hammer away at keyboards, trying to concoct a thesis that will convince the world at large that this impossible creature actually exists.

I don't have any fascinating insights to offer about the Monks; I just think they were light years ahead of their time, and I'm sorry Dave Day is dead.

Thanks to magic of the internets, the existing footage of the Monks, originally broadcast on German TV, is available for anyone to see. Way back when I first heard this band, I never could have dreamed that I'd ever actually get to see a recording of them. They are hilarious: let's watch some television.


This clip contains Monk Chant and How to Do Now. Check out the guitar abuse in the former and the Dave Day's psychotic banjo wrangling in the later.


Boys are Boys. Dance to it, you Germans!


Here is Complication, probably my favorite Monks tune. It was compiled on the famous Nuggets comp, and woulda been a big hit if there was any justice in this world.

The Monks reunited in 1999 for Cavestomp, and then stayed quiet for a while. A book was written on them, a tribute album was recorded, and a documentary, Trans-Atlantic Feedback, was made. So forty years after Black Monk Time was released, they were persuaded to play some shows. Here they are, after all that time, still bringing it.


This song is called Higgle-dy Piggle-dy. Click here to see Mark E. Smith stagger out onto stage with the Monks while they play this song at another date. He does a funny little dance and then abruptly leaves.


Black Monk Time.

Rest in Peace, Dave.

2007 is Over

Recently, my friend Matty send me some clippings from The Wire magazine, along with a couple of CDs he burned. He kindly sent this package from Boston to Hungary just to be a nice guy—it was a mercy mission.

You see, dear Reader, I’ve been living in Budapest for about a year and a half now. And during this time I’ve understandably fallen a bit behind on the killer new sounds pouring out of the USA. Were it not for the internets, WFMU, and music purveying pals like Matty, I’d be trapped in 2006 forever . . . and ever, and ever.

Unfortunately, the rock and roll scene in Budapest isn’t really my cup of tea (except for the band Büdösök, who sound sorta like Cop Shoot Cop, but with better songs and a trumpet player. Stay tuned for a future feature on this band—I finally tracked down a guy who knows them, so hopefully I can actually get their CDs. See, I go into stores and ask for them by name, and that name is a bitch to pronounce. The store owner guys just laugh at me, because the name Büdösök means “We Are the Stink People” or something. Now, besides the fact it’s a funny name, if I mispronounce it—and there are three other possible pronunciations for each of those vowels that only Hungarian ears are properly attuned to—I end up saying something like “we are smelling stinky,” or even “we are a shit-octopus.” It’s embarrassing, man). If I were a metalhead, I’m sure I’d be having a blast watching Magyar metal bands like Watch My Dying and Graveyard at Maximum. But I’m not. So I end up seeing folk music and traditional stuff and various permutations thereof.

A year and change passes with me seeing these kinda shows, when Matty’s package full of clippings and CDs shows up in my mailbox. So imagine my surprise when, tucked in the envelope was a one-page “Global Ear” section on Budapest from the Wire, penned by the guy from A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

It was really weird to read this. I go to these places! I’ve seen all these bands! It’s like the Wire is shaking my hand, saying “Congratulations son, some invisible British music nerds recognize that you are totally with it.”

But enough patting myself on the back for seeing music in places that other, actually cool people told me about. The point is that, out of everything in that little article, the most important thing is that Sirály, my favoritist place in the city, is finally getting the props it deserves.

Sirály is a three-floor bar/café/bookstore/performance space in downtown Budapest, which is also a squat (probably the only one in the city) and a Jewish cultural center (probably the only cool one in the city). The people running it do a great job, and a ton of cool shit goes down there, and it’s usually for free. They just do it for fun. You wanna see Moroccan dance-rock motherfuckers Chalaban? It’s free. You wanna see Eastern European Jewish party songs played by ass-kicking trad Klezmer band Di Naye Kapelye? It’s free. Also, they’re on the same bill, and the place is packed, and everyone is getting down. Seriously, if that place didn’t exist, my experience here would be about 300% less fun.

There have been a couple articles on Sirály—a hi-gloss “lifestyle” kind of piece in the LA Times, and an extremely poorly researched thing in some German paper, which had some factual errors and also totally missed the point of the space. But whatever. We were here when Síraly first opened up, and it’s been consistently kicking ass, the people who run it are providing a service to humanity, and I’m glad to see it get recognized.

I had been planning on writing a sort of year-end rundown of my favorite music shit from 2007, but soon realized that I’m outta touch when it comes to the cool releases that came out. I guess that the song “Vomiting Mirrors” by Clockcleaner became my 2007 Funtime Jam—but really, I haven’t been able to hear most of what came out this year, as I have neither the money to pay for imports or the patience/strength of will to download them all from the internets. Anyway, downloading new releases isn’t very sporting, don’t you think? (Not to diminish the glory of “Vomiting Mirrors,” which is a great big steaming pile of wonderful.)

The best music thing I saw, however, was Frank London playing with Boban Markovic (part I) and then the beautiful audio dogpile of the Síraly afterparty (part II). Now, I know many of you might be rolling your eyes, thinking “Blah blah blah, Boban Markovic, I’ve real miles of print about Boban and I know the score.” But the plot thickens—dear Reader, read on.

Part I: The Show

Here is a shitty picture of the stage

On paper, it was already a good concert. There was Boban Markovic, the megastar Serbian trumpet great who is universally loved in the Balkans and the world around, and who deserves every piece of hyperbole that music journalists invent to try and describe his playing. With Boban, you also get his Orkestar, which is made up of the cream of the crop of Serbian brass band guys, and his son Marko, who is being groomed for excellence. Then there’s Frank London, who recently won a Grammy (!!!) with his band the Klezmatics. From what I understand, Frank is a New York music vet who plays, you know, the cool kind of Klezmer stuff that comes out of New York. Despite his Grammy award, his music doesn’t make concessions to . . . I don’t know, whoever hands out Grammies. You know what I’m trying to say.

Both of these guys did an album together at some point, and they were playing together at the Sportarena. I hadn’t seen an arena show since I had just turned 16 and drove my deathtrap 1972 Plymouth Valiant (which went to internal combustion Valhalla after two guys bought it from me and drove it to a violent end in a demolition derby) two hours through the ice and snow to the Pepsi Arena in Albany. But I digress.

I’ve seen Boban about . . . I think I’ve seen him three times now. I’ve heard a lot of his albums, and I’ve seen him in Underground, obviously, and I have to say, it would have been better to catch Boban a couple of years ago. Because each time I’ve seen him he’s kind of phoned it in. That’s probably understandable—his band plays a lot, and most audiences seem to want the same 15 songs from the standard brass band repetoire, and he’s played them a hundred zillion times and no longer has anything to prove. Of course, he’s not always like this—Sarah saw him in New York, and he happily pulled out all the stops for the ex-Yugoslav expats there. And I’ve never managed to see him in Serbia. The last time I saw the Boban Orkestar was at this place West Balkan not too far from my apartment: the band has kicked ass, Marko kicked ass, and Boban sort of wandered the stage, leaving the soloing to his son, smoking and yelling at the sound guy.

The Main Event worked like this—Boban’s group played some songs, and Frank’s group played some songs, and then, for the exciting part of the evening, they both played some songs. And Boban was pumped up. He was exhorting his band to play better, and his solos traveled through the Sportarena’s stale air to melt my eyes out of my skull. It was the Boban show I felt like I’d always wanted to see, but had never gotten the chance to.

Here they are, playing together. I don't know what this song is, but check out the insane tuba battle halfway through.

When they played together, though, that was when the real shit happened. First of all, it was clear that Boban and Frank had no little amount of mutual admiration, and their playing was fucking intense. Second of all, I learned that I’d been horribly underestimating Marko. He kills it on the trumpet, and when given the opportunity to call the first song of the combined set, do you know what he called? “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaata.

You know “Planet Rock,” right? That song that samples Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”? Well, my mind folded five ways and inverted the minute I understood that I was watching the Boban Markovic Orkestar play an Afrika Bambaata tune. That little snatch of electro-tunage went from Germany to New York to Serbia: how cool is that? Kraftwerk, man—you can’t stop the funk.

Here is 90% of Planet Rock: sorry that I missed the beginning of this song. They kind of mess around with it for a minute, and then it returns to melody at the end.

I came away from this show a fan of Frank London, my faith in Boban Markovic renewed, and a convert to Marko’s playing. I’d pay to see Marko sans his Pops any day of the week.

Part II: The Party After the Show
Sirály was doing something every night of the week for Hanukah, so we headed there after the show figuring that all of our friends would be there. And they were! It was great.

See, there was a giant, unstructured music thing going on in the basement of the club. It started at 8, and we got there around 10:30. How was it? I dunno. I mean, it was great, but it was a real mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For instance, there was a diminutive Hungarian Hip hop girl who assumed that everyone was there to back up her rapping. They kept turning off her mic, much to the amusement of the crowd. I don’t know much Hungarian, but even a foreigner like me could tell that this MC was, as we say in the US, “wack.” Here, let me do an impression of her for you:

Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash
Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash
Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash
Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash.

Rinse and repeat. What is this, 1982? Watching her rap was like watching the Bizarro version of Superman try to fight crime. Seriously, she’s the kind of person who they used to drag off the stage with one of those big shepherd’s crooks in the vaudeville days.

There was a Hungarian jazz band that hadn’t played in some time and were having a reunion gig of sorts, and they were the main music nucleus for a while. Their massive piano player had no piano, and engaged in some scatting that—you know what? I’ve never actually seen scatting with my own two eyes, and while I sort of wish he hadn’t done it, the guy managed to come off as ballsy rather than retarded. He also got the fuck offa the stage after dropping his scat. Well played, piano guy.

Then some other guy tried to scat. Horrible. Fuck that guy. Two people scatting is one and a half too many.

It should be said that during this time, a number of drummers had begun showing up to play drums. Most importantly, there were these two elder drum wizards. They just played straight through the whole thing. They didn’t get up to take a leak, get a drink, have a cigarette, scratch an itch—nothing. They just sat there, playing conga drums. They weren’t flashy, either. They just sort of played this beat. I didn’t know who they were. The Sirály folks didn’t know who they were. No one there knew who they were. I still don’t know. In this photo, a young guy who they seemed to know sat down between them and joined in. Mysteries within mysteries.


Accordian player David Yengebarian dipped in and out of the proceedings. He’s played at Sirály a number of times, and he’s fucking fantastic. Also, might I add, a lot of stage presence for an accordian player. The guy sort of looks likes the Somnabulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Yengebarian seemed a lot, shall we say, looser than he usually does during his actual gigs, and it was cool. He eventually got up and wandered off.


Frank London’s appearance around midnight went nearly unnoticed. Several members of his All Star band showed up as well, and they killed. They didn’t actually play a proper show or anything, but occasionally a few of them would dip into the general weirdness. They were very generous, giving local musicians more than their fair chance in the spotlight and taking it in stride when their solos were cut short by, say, flailing belly dancers, an enthusiastic whitey-fro’d yeti youth squealing a yeti love call through his clarinet, the aforementioned MC Vashty-Vash, or etcetera.

And so the night wore on into the wee hours of the AM. Although his combined stage time probably amounted to about fifteen minutes, Frank and his All Star band really did music scene of Budapest a solid by showing up. He didn’t have to—I mean, he is Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London.

“Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London.” That has a nice ring to it, right? I certainly thought so, and continued to refer to him as such throughout the night. For instance, I might say “Whos that? Why, that’s Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London,” or “Hey Greg, did you enjoy seeing Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London play fifteen seconds of free jazz before that dipshit with the clarinet barged in and started shrieked out a 300 decibel yeti call?” Or maybe I’d say “There was a fight outside? A knife fight? Between who and who? Did they both have knives? Only one guy had a knife? Is anyone hurt? Not really? What? ‘It’s all good?’ What the fuck does that mean? What the fuck. You mean to tell me that I’ve been wasting my time standing around down here, drinking beer, waiting to see if Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London was going to get up there and play something, when I could have been upstairs, drinking beer, watching a knife fight out on the street? Oh man.”

Anyway, Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London seems like a cool guy, but he wasn’t the coolest guy in the room. Not by a long shot. The coolest guy in the room was approximately 138 years old. He had a long beard, and a wool hat, and looked sort of like a homeless longshoreman. Or maybe a sailor who has been cursed to walk the earth forever and ever after angering the sea gods. He was another guy who no one knew, and was just randomly wandering around downstairs, like he didn’t know or care where he was. He kept picking up stuff, examining it, and then gently setting it back down again. At one point he wandered into the middle of where everyone was playing music, looking bored, then checked his watch and gradually wandered off. Like he had somewhere better to be! Maybe he did. I don’t know.

Around 3 AM, we wandered off as well, exhausted. On the way home, I was thinking about this time I went to go see a show at the Stone in NYC that was a celebration of John Coltrane. It was on his birthday, and there was this incredible band assembled playing Coltrane songs. There was Rashid Ali and Reggie Workman, who were Coltrane’s rhythm section after things got too weird for the original guys. Fuck, I feel like an asshole, but I can’t remember the other guys who were playing, but they were awesome, and my mind was blown. So, I had this realization that these guys weren’t a tribute band or something, but that they were channeling music that was every bit as vital today as it was forty years ago. And that there was all this room in the music for people to express themselves, and it was never played the same way twice. The music I was hearing only existed in the present, and I’d never hear it again.

That looks pretty fucking corny now that I’ve typed it out, but it was a big deal for me to really understand this. It was like learning how to swim or something.

Now, a couple years later and a few thousand miles away, I’m seeing this other musical improv event in Budapest. There are a lot of crucial differences, but that’s all right. There isn’t another venue in the city for this kind of thing, so everyone came to Sirály. Everyone who had the night free and wanted to throw down threw down, from Grammy Award Winning Recording Artists to total beginners with a chip on their shoulder. Good. I’m glad they did, all of them, even Scat Guy II and MC Vashty-Vash. Because that isn’t going to happen again, and I’m glad I had the chance to see it.


Dear Readers, I hope that each and every one of you had a good 2007. And if you didn’t, well, that’s all right too. It’s already gone, and we’re never going to see it again.

Printhead

A little over a year ago, I was hanging out with my friend Dave. (These days, Dave is probably better known as Davey Oil, but I knew him before that appellation came into being, so I still call him Dave.) He was in town from Seattle, and we were sitting around, listening to music, and shooting the shit. You know, as you do.

Anyway, we were looking at this book my girlfriend bought me this book for my birthday. It was all the William Blake poems as he published them, i.e. as multi-colored engravings. It was pretty impressive collection, and reading those poems as engravings was a much different experience than reading them in a Viking Portable paperback edition.


At the time, Dave was the director of the Seattle zine library. At least, I think he was. See, it might have been a consensus-based, anarchist kind of thing, with no hierarchy—if so, Dave would be annoyed to be called its director. He explained the whole structure of the thing to me, but the passage of time has erased the truth out of my brain. The important thing to know is that Dave is both a charismatic mofo and a bottomless well of knowledge about zines and comics and self-publishing and all that. He was excited that I was reading William Blake, and told me that Blake may well have been the first real self-published zine guy.

And you know what? I think he's right. Blake was an engraver and a printmaker, and self-published all his own works. Other people have self-published, but he actually did his own design and layout and printing.

The other night, I was flipping through the little William Blake paperback I brought out here, which has his collected works and letters and stuff. It includes a couple of bombastic advertisement he'd written for himself. Dear Reader, I submit them to you—does this count as the world's firt-ever zine ad? From October 10, 1793:

The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.

This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.

If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.

Mr. Blake's powers of invention very early engaged the attention of many persons of eminence and fortune; by whose means he has been reguarly enabled to bring before the Public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age or country . . .

. . and so on. Then follows a list of every "issue" of Blake's poetry. For example:

America, a Prophecy, in Illuminated Printing. Folio, with 8 designs: price 10s. 6d.

The ad spiel ends with:

No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked, for none are wanted; but the Author will produce his works, and offer them to sale at a fair price.

Is William Blake the first zinester guy? Do each of these quartos count as a zine? And if so, has there ever been a better zine than his? Besides Shark Fear, Shark Awareness, obviously.

I don't know. But I have to say, I'm more than a little impressed with the tone he sets with self promotion. It's clear where he stands, and I think others would do well to follow his lead. In 1809, a printed advertisement for an exhibition of his concluded with:

There cannot be more than two or three great Painters or Poets in any Age or Country; and these, in a corrupt state of Society, are easily excluded, but not so easily obstructed. They have ex[c]luded Water-colours; it is therefore become necessary that I should exhibit to the Public, in an Exhibition of my own, my Designs, Painted in Water-colours. If Italy is enriched and made great by RAPHAEL, if MICHAEL ANGELO is its supreme glory, if Art is the glory of a Nation, if Genius and Inspiration are the great Origin and Bond of Society, the distinction my Works have obtained from those who best understand such things, calls for my Exhibition as the greatest of Duties to my Country.


Wm. Blake: Independent publisher.

Reptilian Psych From the Center of the Earth

Over the past few years, we here at The Little Black Egg have been sucked ever further downward into the vortex that is psychedelic music. It feels as though we’ve digested thousands of hours of psych at this point, if not aeons of psych, but it's still only at the tip of the iceberg.

As a young man, I was surprised to discover that psych music could be a howling pit of lysergic paranoia and general rock and roll awesomeness. I didn’t know that. See, I’d been led astray by boring crap like post-Syd Pink Floyd. That shit is boring, right? It is indeed. It’s very, very, boring. If you don’t do the research, you’d never know that, at the same time Pink Floyd was beginning on their odyssey of pandering to boring people the world around, Roky Erickson was emanating schizo LSD R&B out of his third eye. Do you know how much reading I had to do to divine that fact? Goddammit, in the United States of America, it shouldn’t be so hard to find the real shit. I don’t care if repeated listens will hunch your spine, destroy your chromosomes, and cause pink tentacles to grow outta your face.

However: at the end of the day, this is an cruel world where charlatans and Salieris abound, full of hard luck stories and Van Goghs cutting of their ears and all that, and some things remain unjustly hidden from the audience that would revere them.

There are many stories of heroism in the annals of record collecting, and I’m afraid that my discovery of the rarely-seen Cold Sun record is not one of them. No, I just stumbled across it, really. I think I acquired it because it was a psych record, from Texas, and the name of the band was Cold Sun (but also known as Dark Shadows), and it had never been released commercially at the time of its recording, which was 1970. It’s been released since, in small batches, thanks to Rockadelic.

Cold Sun had a lot of things going for them. They were from Austin, TX in the 1960s, and hung out with Roky Erickson and the Elevators. They had an electric autoharp, which sounds sort of like three 12-string Rickenbackers being played at once with a velvet pick. My first couple times through this album, I couldn’t figure out what the shit was making that noise.


Billy Miller, singer and authoharpist, would later be in Roky's band.

Cold Sun clearly took a lot of hallucinogenic drugs, which went well with the fact that they had a real thing for reptiles. Whoever wrote the lyrics really liked snakes and lizards and other scaly things, and sang about them in songs. For instance, check out this snatch of verse from their song “Ra-Ma,” which (I guess) is largely concerned with the goings on of the past, present, and future, and a tortoise:

The tortoise before you
Saw da Gama
As he landed . . .
We can make a life in a temple of stone
It took an age or two to get home
Now see the tree and how it has grown
It was a seed in my hand when the tortoise was born

Ha ha ha, word! Ra-Ma is over eleven minutes long, by the way. It starts of with all sorts of (actually very pretty) autoharp craziness before growing into a tower of mystical verbiage.

(On the mystical verbiage front, the good people at Lysergia have an excellent article on Cold Sun, where it is revealed the album was made to be the exact length of a Johnny Winter album, because a certain member of the band had a real thing for numerology, and as a result songs like Ra-Ma had to be made longer.)

It’s hard to describe the Cold Sun sound—maybe if you could imagine the 13th Floor Elevators, and then make that image very, very blurry, and at times aimless, and add a weird, dreamy autoharp . . . that’s sort of it. Or, maybe more accurately, it sounds like humanoid-reptilian beings living inside of a hollow earth picked up on radio transmissions from Texas in 1966, and attempted to pay tribute to them in their own band. As biology would have it, their reptilian ears and brains couldn’t quite process how rock and roll worked, so they came up with their best approximation of it via their evil reptile music. Also, they’ve never seen the sun. Or maybe the sun is cold in there. I don't know.

Some of the melodies are a little same-y, but that's all right. Each song is still an amazing psych revelation. “See What You Cause” has, out of the blue, a screaming 10 second-long guitar solo right near the end of the song that sounds like Helios Creed briefly materialized in the middle of the recording studio before blinking out of existence once again. “South Texas” is a nitemare seasick creepy-crawler that ends, weirdly, with a snatch of blissful, come-hither cooing. “For Ever” states the fact that how your future lies is written on your hand, then ends with a horrible guitar squall of white noise, followed by a cleanly played little guitar and harp flourish, which stabilizes the proceedings for the album closer, “Fall.” I say album closer, but there is no definitive track listing. There are other tracks, too, and you can put them in any order you like.

This album is rare, and it’s weird, and it has a cool link to Roky, but that’s not why I’m writing about it. No sir, I’m writing about it because it’s the kind of music that I didn’t know I needed to hear until I heard it. Then I thought, I’ve been waiting to hear something like this forever and ever. How did I ever get along without it? It sounds like its been around since ancient times, like the coelacanth. Yeah, it's like coelacanth of psych. People thought it was long dead, but it’s still around, and it’s eating things.

Godstar

I know this probably goes without saying, but the Stones made a big mistake when they kicked Brian Jones out of the band.


Is Their Satanic Majesties Request the best Rolling Stones album? We here at The Little Black Egg are starting to think it is.