Transmutation

As Above, So Below; So Below, As Above. The old principle of correspondence, Dear Reader. You can see it in everyday life through the ages if you look. Newton’s third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sabbat dances as recorded were reversals of liturgical rituals. Demonologies and reversed tarot cards, the right- and left-hand path, the visible and invisible world. The Self and the Shadow Self. Changes in the visible world affect the invisible world, and vice-versa.

And listen: the idea of a middle ground, a balance point, is no more than a comforting fiction.  There is no middle ground.  In reality, there is just one thing, or the other.

Which brings me to CW McCall, a man in the great tradition of phony blue-collar heroes (c.f. Larry the Cable Guy, Tim Allen, and whatever that Duck Dynasty shit is).

McCall’s real name was Bill Fries: he was an advertising man by who recorded a bunch of novelty C&W songs.  One of these, “Convoy,” piggy-backed onto America’s inexplicable, never-to-be-revisited trucker obsession. As soon as this single dropped (1975), a movie based on its plot trundled into existence, emerging years later (1978).

The song “Convoy” describes a bunch of truckers who are driving around, you know, vroom vroom. And I guess truckers don’t like to stop at weigh stations? Anyway, these truckers don’t, and pretty soon they have a giant convoy of vehicles heading across the country. A lot probably burly dudes in big trucks, and a few hangers-on, including some “long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus.”

The trucker fad was short-lived—a couple years and then everyone realized that they were glorifying a bunch of corpulent idiots sitting on hemorrhoid donuts as they trundled on down a black stripe of tedium, now and again enjoying the dubious erotic favors of rest stop lot lizards. By 1980, all that trucker shit was done, son.

But—one year before the demise of our love affair with America’s long-haulin’ highway desperados, and one year after Convoy made it to theaters, the band Redd Kross formed in LA. The nucleus of the band was Jeff McDonald, 16, and Steven McDonald, 12. Although members of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks passed through their ranks, Redd Kross weren’t really a hardcore band. It’s hard to say what they were. Glam-ish, funny, sprouting like neon fungus from a soup of 1970s pap pop, they are widely believed to have reached their apex with 1984’s Neurotica.

An important thing about Redd Kross that I can’t overstate: they were/are fucking fantastic.

Now the first song on Neurotica, called “Neurotica,” contains the following verse “Long haired friends of Jesus/In a chartreuse microbus/Come on lose your mind/Now you're one of us.”

Now, you could say this or that about Redd Kross using this line, that it’s an answer song, or an appropriation, or an homage, or who cares it’s not any of those things. This is a small, nearly unnoticeable act of alchemy.

Just like that, something is transmuted, its nature irrevocably altered.

It doesn’t take much.  It doesn’t take secret knowledge, or obscure instructions.  It’s as simple as holding a thing in your hand and willing it to be different, to focus on it and will the entire world around it to change. So remember that, and good luck.

She Was So Pretty

Although it got off to a horrifying start, 2011 ended up treating us pretty well—good enough, in fact, that we're going to indulge in some uncharacteristic optimism. So in a few hours, with a glass of cheap champagne in hand and Dick Clark's slack, dead face on the television, we here at The Little Black Egg will resolve to wriggle like a fucking eel in 2012.

Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about the above 7", which after years of looking I finally scored for a reasonable price. I tend to shy away from collecting olden punk singles for the simple reasons that they are usually extraordinarily expensive, and I am not of the financial posture to drop over a hundred bucks on a piece of plastic. My copy of this thing is pretty ragged, however, and the previous owner appears to have added up a restaurant bill on the back in blue ballpoint pen; thusly, even a miser like me could throw down for it.

Pekinška Patka were one of the first punk bands in Serbia, and were fronted by a high school teacher named Nebojša Čonkić. Their early singles and first album are great—although like too many of their ilk, once money and recognition hit these guys they transformed into something else by their second album (in this case, palatable postpunks). Some people like their postpunk stuff, but as far as I'm concerned, the early singles and 1st LP are what count here. In their prime, Pekinška Patka were catchy playful without being annoying, and their songs are undeniably infectious—they're like the super-fun friend who everyone invites to their parties. Bila je Tako Lijepa was their third single, a cover of a smooth Euro crooner number rendered in frantic basso profundo glory by Čonkić, who has a ridiculous set of pipes. This masterpiece is backed with Buba Rumba, an ersatz-ska number with a weird spoken intro, multiple interjections of "olé," and a brief thrash breakdown. The whole affair is extraordinarily charming.

The thing I really like about this record—and the rest of the pre-81 Patka oeuvre—is how on it is for it's time and place. It's enough to wish that I was in a situation were someone was wondering aloud "Hey I wonder if first-wave Serbian punk was any good" so I could whip this puppy out and be like "Bang fucking bang, the mighty Pekinška Patka! Put this in your ear, son." No one, and I mean no one, did the thing they did any better.

This kind of perfection is part natural skill and craftiness, part cosmic alignment of interplanetary bodies, and while it can't be sustained we live in an age where anyone can get a copy of the document in one form or another. Everything goes downhill eventually, you know? If anything good remains, I think it's a victory over Vishnu in his many-armed universal form.

All Hail the Maharajah

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. [ . . . ] By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself . . . A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable off revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

—Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane



James Booker was a New Orleans piano prodigy who was difficult to work with, so he ended up playing solo piano gigs. There’s a recording of a solo gig he played realeased as the album Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah, which is one of the best things ever captured by magnetic tape.

Over two sides, medleys of whatever comes into his head sprawl through a series of unbelievable piano acrobatics, stop for digressions into classical runs, and mutate into paranoid tunes about how the CIA is after everyone. It’s an insane, baroque mess spilling all over the place, an admixture of the history of New Orleans piano as presented by a hierophant whose connections have been swapped and resoldered. By all accounts, Booker was a genius—the liner notes of this album detail an incident when he tells a headlining musician that he’d hit a bum note in his solo, then proceeds to play the headliner’s entire solo from memory, and then play the whole thing again, backwards.

By the time I’d heard of James Booker he was dead and interred, and only crossed paths with his music because one Friday I was walking home from work and I stopped in the liquor store, where I ran into an acquaintance. Actually, that’s too generous a term—I’d met the guy once at a bar. We had mutual friends. He was a writer and from the South and was wearing a cream-colored blazer, which was enough to seem fairly exotic to me at that time. Bleary-eyed, two bottles of gin in hand, he didn’t recognize me when I said hi, but asked me to come back to his apartment and talk about writing—it turned out we lived about 2 blocks from each other.

His apartment was fantastic and there were these plots of dirt out back where he was doing gardening, supposedly, although nothing was growing there. He poured gin into a pint glass and added a splash of soda. I opted for whisky, and was given my own pint. “This is a sipping drink,” he explained.

There wasn’t really much in the apartment except for alcohol, some furniture, and CD racks lining the walls. The guy clearly had money coming in from somewhere, On closer inspection, it was all blues and jazz stuff—a really impressive collection. So we were talking about music for a while, and he knew everything. It was like talking to what’s his face, Alan Lomax. Like a gin-soaked Alan Lomax with a totally dead garden. Our conversation moved to writing, which is always more awkward for me (and I don’t know why, that’s probably something worth examining but who has the time). He was going to be reading some of his stuff later that night, and showed me a really good poem he’d written.

I finally had to go because I had to meet my lady, at which point my host began demanding to know about her. I told him a thing or two—she used to work for the circus, she like experimental theatre, she was from Oakland—and he began scrambling along the CDs, chuckling to himself. “Oh shit my friend, you are in luck, you are gonna get laid tonight friend, oh shit.”

He thrust a copy of Bayou Maharajah in my hand and I crept out the door, shitfaced and happy. He made it clear that this was an important album, and I thanked him and promised to return it, which I never did. I never hung out with the guy again. I have no idea what happened to him.

I was weightless as I climbed up to my fourth-floor walkup. Sarah was eating a Mango and listening to Hot 97, which was the usual Friday routine. I put on the James Booker CD and it unfolded into the room, a weird angular buzzing cloud that that sparkled. We tried to talk about our plans but instead hunched around the apartment singing Boney Maroney. The world was rife with possibility, and we vowed to have great adventures together.

In the weeks to come, that album never left our stereo. We still listen to it all the time—it feels like the apotheosis of New Orleans R&B and about 13 other strains of American music. You can hear the audience on this recording, they’re loving it—Booker had a residency at this club, and I don’t know how this show stacks up to his other performances, but this is the one that got recorded and the one I listened to. It’s still around and still means things, and as long as humanity is still crawling along the face of the earth, it’s still going to resonate within a small circle from one generation to the next.


There are a lot of non-fiction books that trace the origins of cultural phenomena. The root of a certain religious practice, the evolution of political theories, technology. Music fanatics like to trace the pedigree of certain bands or artists. Someone could probably write a tome on James Booker, who seems to effortlessly channel the entire history of New Orleans music. It's hard to articulate what this means to me. I'm reduced to thrusting this album at other people and telling them that it's the real shit. I'm not sure why I can never say why this particular album is important, whenever I try I just feel like I'm somehow pointing my finger at centuries worth of music and saying "it's all that, because of all that."

Also he had an eyepatch with a star on it, which is nothing if not classy.

Listen Loudest!: An Interview with Zdenko Franjic

Dear Reader, as you all know, we here at The Little Black Egg think that punk rock (and other music) from the ex-Yugoslavia is among best stuff ever made. Starting out in 1987, Croatian record label Slusaj Najglasnije! (or Listen Loudest!) documented many of Croatia’s greatest bands, including Madjke, Hali Gali Halid, Satan Panonski, Bambi Molestors, and many others.

Over time, Listen Loudest! evolved, and today releases music from artists the world around. The mastermind behind Listen Loudest, Zdenko Franjic, has been kept his label/life mission together for over thirty years without a break. His Bombardiranje New Yorka album is one of the all-time great punk comps, and has spawned multiple sequels. Zdenko is also a DJ and performer, and has published numerous books.

Hi Zdenko. What are you up to these days?

I just got back from Vinkovci and Novi Sad where I’ve been with my stall with books and my digital records. In Novi Sad we (“Iggy Onemanband and his Harp Explosion” and me as Lutajuci JD Zdena, or “Wanderin’ DJ Zdena) did a show in Nublu cafe/bookstore. Also, I’m preparing a little tour of east and south Serbia and Macedonia and I will play at “InMusic” biggest Croatian festival with my band Babilonci (The Babylonians).

When did you start DJing?

I’m a DJ from the late seventies. I like funky music.

How did you get into singing on top of other songs?

Well, I have been forced to do that. I remained without musicians and I use instrumental music to talk/scream my words over it.

I was reading interviews with you and you mentioned that what got you into music was this guy in your town who dressed all in black and wandered around with a violin, and the neighborhood kids all yelled stuff at him. Is this true? It sounds like Fiddler on the Roof.

My mother bought me a record player and a few records when I was a kid and there was that guy in my village. It was early sixties and he looked like he came from another planet to me. He died a few years later on a railway. A train hit him.

How did you end up gravitating towards rock and punk?

First I started to listen to glam and pub rock music and later came punk and all other kinds of music. I’m listening everything.

What led up to your starting a record label in 1987? Were there a lot of independent labels in Croatia at the time, or was it like just Jugoton, Dallas Records, and you?

I think there was another one in Slovenia, but I’m not sure. I used to mail order records from England and U.S. and I wanted to try to do it by myself. It was difficult of course but I think it’s worth it. Now I’m doing 10 albums a month, but selling is not going very well. : )

Do you find that people keep on discovering the bands on Listen Loudest! year after year? For instance, I know that Satan Panonski and Hali Gali Halid continue to have a cult fanbase in the USA—everyone I play that HGH record for loves it.

Yes, I sell some of my stuff abroad, too. I also have some US bands on my label: The Humpers, The Morlocks, Al Perry, The Suicide Kings, etc.

Satan Panonski and Hali Gali Halid are just the tip of the iceberg because here we have a lot more to offer, not just punk and rock bands, there’re also more progressive and different and great bands and artists.

Was there a reason why Bare didn’t continue with HGH?

Hali Gali Halid started as a joke and Bare’s project. He played all instruments and everything else on that EP. There’s a rumor that Bare will play one gig as “Hali Gali Halid” in the near future. So, who knows, maybe there’re will be a new release too.


Did you get to see Anti-Nowhere League when they recorded their Live in Yugoslavia album? I’ve heard some funny stories about those guys.

Yes, I went to that concert, which was part of a two-day festival in early eighties. Laibach also played on that festival and some other foreign groups. Anti-Nowhere League also made a Return to Yugoslavia album but that one is boring fart.

What was it like organizing a two-day festival during the war?

We were lucky because the guy which run a place where was a concert had a brother which was working at police so we get a permission for concert. At that time (middle of war and bombings of Zagreb) there were no concerts at all.

There are a lot of stories about Satan Panonski: that he killed a guy, he was in the institution, he cut himself when he played shows, he died mysteriously. But when I talk to my friend from Rijeka, who is a writer, he never mentions any of that stuff. Instead, he’s always talking about what great lyrics Satan wrote, and how important they were to him and his friends. Was Satan Pannonian an inspirational figure in Croatia at that time, or was he just seen as a madman, or both?

Satan Panonski was a band and Ivica Culjak was the leader of the band and he made a legend out of himself all by himself and without help of media. We first did his 8 song demo in 1989, and after that an album called Nuklearne olimpijske igre (Nuclear Olympic Games) in 1990. He chose to record for my label because my label gave him all the freedom he wanted.

For me Ivica was a great artist, a renaissance man I can add. He was a painter, a poet, a performer, an actor, he made even his clothes and everything he did with a great perfection.

The songs he did with the band are not his best. His best poems can be found in his book called Prijatelj (A Friend).

Ivica was an inspirational figure for me and a lot of my friends in Croatia and wider. Some saw him as a madman and were afraid of him, and when I sell my stuff at my stall everybody has something to say about him.


Was it hard to get him out to play shows?

No, on contrary, he enjoyed shows very much and there was a show before and after the show because he was also a great entertainer. Recording sessions are also big great fun because of him.

How did people take Satan Panonski’s Kako Je Panker Branio Hrvatsku album? Were people offended by the more nationalist songs, or did it capture the spirit of the times?

Yes, on that album there are two “nationalist” songs which perfectly capture the spirit of the times. He was on a first line of the front during the war, and they played those songs over the radio to his enemies.

Did Satan have a steady band over time, or was it more just random people? I’d read that a couple of his bandmates were killed in the fighting, but I don’t know if that is true or not.

Everyone who knew how to play also know how to play Satan Panonski songs in Vinkovci, his hometown. He never had a steady band and a lot of people played with him so it is possible that some of them were killed in the fighting, or from drug overdose, or from jealous woman etc. : )

How did you begin corresponding with John Trubee? He’s infamous for his song Blind Man’s Penis, and for generally just being a fascinating human.

I met John Trubee through “Real Life (in the Big City)” fanzine from LA. I think John is a great poet and musician. I did his book Electric Prong From Hell.

You’ve got loads of Bombardiranje New Yorka compilations. The first is obviously a super-famous punk compilation that sort of introduced people outside of Croatia to Satan Panonski, Majke, etc. You’ve kept doing them, however, going from vinyl to mp3, and the comps feature more international artists. What kind of stuff are you excited about nowadays?

Yes, I made the first one in 1989. I made a cover from two pictures, one picture of old NYC, and another of a plane dropping bombs from “Search and Destroy” fanzine. I was compiling Volumes 5 and 6 when real bombing was happening in a real NYC. It looked like pictures from a sci-fi movie when I saw it on TV.

Now I’m on Volume 14. The 13th Volume was on a DVD in mp3 format, both audio and video. Over 55 hours of music. Artists from all over the world. I don’t know that anybody ever did such a deed. It is a compilation to listen for a years to come. There was just one review of that compilation by Vladimir Horvat Horvi on Terapija Magazine on the net. I send my stuff to Roctober zine and KZSU radio, and some others, and they review and play my stuff, but nobody noticed or recognized that compilation.


What question do you never get asked during interviews that you wish people asked?

How about “why bother?” Sometimes I feel like a character from a sci-fi novel/movie by Ray Bradbury: Faranheit 451 for sure.

Anything else that you want to say to the people, sir?

All my releases can be downloaded through Soulseek. User name: franticz

So there you have it, readers. Slusaj Najglasnije! is still very much alive and kicking, and you can contact Zdenko directly to order any of the amazing records and books he puts out. There's shirts for sale, there's all kinds of stuff. Go there, fer chrissakes, and get some stuff. You won't be disappointed—there are a million record labels out there, but few present such a solid, unified body of work. It's worth your time.

* * *

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of "facts" they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

You Can't Escape Your Biology

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

—H.P. Lovecraft

The object of desire, the object which stokes one’s passions and ignites the senses; that which lay at the center of the best time in one’s life. The subject of sighs of regret, memories of one’s halcyon days. The thing you didn’t try hard enough to keep, you fucked up, and now you’re left to contemplate a life of solitude, breathing in and out in a gray and exhausting world that grows dimmer and dimmer until you lay down and die.

In my case, the one that got away was a copy of the soundtrack to the movie Rollerball; it happened last week, and I’m still thinking about it.

Last weekend I flew up to Maine, for a day, because my niece was graduating from college. Also I was thinking, I'm tired of New York, I’m sick of all the garbage I have to wade through here, I hate all the people, I hate all the places, and when I start feeling like this I have to hit the reset button or else I’m going to crawl underneath the furniture and hide for weeks. What could be better than a weekend in sunny Maine, with my niece and nephew and eldest brother and eldest sister-in-law, checking out her cool art stuff and wandering around Portland, which couldn’t be any worse than the other Portland in the Pacific Northwest at the very least.

The other thing was, going to Maine would give me a chance to get on an airplane, which I’m really good at. I’m good at packing just the right amount of stuff, I know which terminal any given airline is in at JFK, I like to wait for things, and I really enjoy sleeping in anything that moves. It turned out that Portland was full of hippies, freezing cold, and it rained all the time.

One thing you should know about me, Dear Reader, is that I have a somewhat difficult time connecting with people. I’m good at being friendly—but secretly, I’m just doing a modified impersonation of David Letterman. I have funny things I say, I prompt people to talk about themselves, and I keep the conversation moving along. But really, it’s all learned behavior. I spent a good chunk of my childhood catching snakes and frogs in the middle of nowhere; with human relations, I am usually vague and distant. I tend to go to shows alone, not socialize, and then just leave, which seems reasonable enough. What am I gonna do, talk to a bunch of people? Jesus.

The point is, I’m good at travel. If I could figure out some way to be mobile and have a tiny income, I’d just go all over the place and never ever stick around anywhere, never have to see the same people and do the same things.

The hotel I was staying in was in the middle of town and was seriously underbooked, with old ornate elevators and the odd Mainer stumbling around. It occurred to me that, just like H.P. Lovecraft sez, you can’t escape your biology. I was soon among my people, drinking beer and listening to my nephew tell a pretty great story, which went like this:

So I was at this fuckin party at this house and the fuckin cops came and I was like oh fuck so I jumped out a second story window and just ate shit and when I stood up and some fuckin kid lands on me, and this fuckin cop shines his, uh, his flashlight at us and was like stand still but I was like fuck that and I fuckin took off into the woods and ran into this tree, but then I got up and no one was around so I went back to see what the fuck was goin on and the cop saw me and was like don’t fuckin move so I started bookin into the woods, runnin into trees, fuckin running through brambles, eatin shit right and left, I lost my fuckin shoes, and the cop was behind me but I jumped a stone wall and tripped and fell into an electrified cow fence which fuckin wrapped all around me and was stuck to my skin and shit so I couldn’t get free, and I was shoeless and gettin fuckin electrocuted, but I heard this fuckin cop and got free and took the fuck off and got home. Then I remembered fuck, I need to find my fuckin shoes.

My niece, meanwhile, has been making hundreds of tiny florescent trees out of paper, and they are fantastic. The motivation behind her art is fantastic. People were bugging out looking at her stuff in the gallery.

The secret plan the whole time I was there, was for me and my brother to go record shopping. Portland has three record stores, and my mind was swimming with the unlimited treasures that might be found. “There’s no way that these lumberjack schmucks understand the potential of the sick-ass vinyl in this town,” I was thinking to myself.

Quietly, my brother and I formulated a plan to sneak away at every opportunity to check out the record stores. It was pouring rain and we had no umbrellas, so we ran giggling from one place to another. He picked up a shitload of Allman brother records, I got the Shangri-Las and a sound effects record. And at one store, which we snuck into 5 minutes before closing. My brother began making a pile of Kansas records, I found a pretty good copy of Metallic K.O. for $4, passed on a totally fucked Bo Diddley record, and out of boredom (while my brother examined the grooves of a Little Feat LP), I started perusing the soundtracks section, and came across the soundtrack to the movie Rollerball.

And I’ll say this right off—if you don’t like this movie, you don't deserve to be human.

James Caan plays the Michael Jordan of a mega-violent futuristic sport designed to control the masses. [GROOVY, right?] The fascist government of this world decides that James Caan is too revolutionary and wields a dangerous amount of power, so they attempt to bring about his demise.

It should be mentioned that the sport of Rollerball is basically a lethal version of roller derby, with motorcycles, and this weird chrome ball that the participants have to throw into a tiny goal.

There is all this really intense classical music, crummy computer fonts from the olden-timey days of Atari and that kind of thing. James Caan revolts, however, and kills everyone else in the game to stick it to the man, a lone gladiator, his future uncertain: will he be liquidated, or will he stride out into the world, triumphant in a pair of tight polyester slacks? You never really know whether Caan will don slacks again at the end, because them’s the brakes when it comes to these kinds of movies, movies where grown men do karate on rollerskates. Why is he fighting? Mostly it seems that it’s because he misses his family, who were forcibly removed or killed or something by the overlords of Rollerball.

There’s no resolution to this; there’s just a bunch of death, which although dramatically unsatisfying is true to life. Individually we’re just these bags of cells and fluid that run down and die.

So I was in the store, looking at this copy of the Rollerball soundtrack, priced at $5, it was pouring rain, and for some reason I didn’t want to get it. I really should have; granted, I was a little low on cash, but I’d set aside some folding money for the trip. I was either going to get this record, or later, get drinks in the lounge on the roof of the hotel, which looked creepy and isolated.

I said to Scott, “I want to buy this record, but I also want to have drinks in the hotel lounge because it will be like the Shining.”

“There’s some beer in our dad’s room,” he said.

“Stealing beer from dad is not like the Shining AT ALL,” I said.

“Dude, get the Rollerball soundtrack. That movie is awesome.”

I should mention that my brother gave me all sorts of music on tape as a kid, lots of mixes or just tapes of Beatles albums. His beat-to-shit copy of the Rollin Stones’ Get Your Ya-Yas Out was one of my favorite tapes when I was a little kid; it played too slow and was muddy and stretchy and distorted, like it was coming from a reversed magnetic death planet far off in the cosmos. I was disappointed when I heard how the record was supposed to sound. My brother once built me a bicycle from spare parts (he’s amazing at building and fixing bikes), when I could barely walk I watched him make a giant rabbit out of snow. He trained his dog to fetch anything. He can basically conjure wonder out of random materials; I took a very different path in life, where I am always hunched over paragraphs of text both at work and at home, worrying about copyediting and proofreading, making sure that paragraphs are kerned correctly, poring over typesetting specs, and in general just destroying my vision. I think about fonts. There was a time, though, when I was a little kid, watching a wobbly video of Rollerball in my parents’ living room, and thinking about how the future was doomed. It was just going to be ominous electronic music and people in spiked gloves smashing each other in the face, or something. My future was definitely doomed. I was always sure of this.

“Forget it, man. Do I really need the Rollerball soundtrack? I have so much stuff I don’t need.”

We had to get back to the hotel. The rest of the day passed. There was graduation, I shot the shit with my parents, hung out with my niece and nephew, and ate horrible pizza. Back at the hotel, by myself, I packed my luggage and sat on the bed, exhausted.

I’m terrible at going to sleep anywhere which isn't a moving vehicle. Once I’m asleep, I’ll sleep forever, but getting there is impossible. Anxieties eat at me all the time. I worry about death. Sometimes I read about totalitarianism when I need to sleep, and I had a Victor Serge novel with me for just that purpose, but I felt disgusted by looking at all the letters all lined up. I know that language is supposed to be the force that gives me meaning, but sometimes it just gives me a headache and makes me nervous. The words don’t always cooperate. The room had a TV, but I'm not really a huge TV fan.

I crept upstairs to the bar and got a drink and sat at a table near the window so I could look over the city, which spread out indeterminately below. Somehow, it was still raining, so everything was blurry. I had to get up in four hours to fly back to NYC and go right back to work, and then I had other writing projects, and I was supposed to edit something. I'd barely slept. I wish I’d gotten that Rollerball soundtrack so I could go home and put it on the turntable and turn it up, really loud, and maybe then I could drift off to sleep. I was exhausted.

Black Stalin

Since we here at The Little Black Egg live in a Carribean neighborhood, we're doing our best to learn about music from that part of the world. And while we have only just begun acquainting ourselves with Calypso and Soca stuff, we are pretty sure that no one has a cooler name than Black Stalin. The question is, can we option the movie rights to this guy's name?

Oh Joyous Funeral

Here is the Sandy Lopicic Orkestar:

Probably the best song about killing a spouse, really.

The Charismatic Croatian Caliphate of Crazed Caprice

Dear Reader, throw all that Erkin Koray shit out the window because the future of Turkish music is here, and it's from Croatia in 1991. That's the year that the Slusaj Najglasnije! (or "Listen Loudest!") label released the Vo-zdra EP by Hali Gali Halid, AKA a Mr. Goran Bare from Vinckovci, Croatia.


Now I first came across Hali Gali Halid courtesy of the excellent (if now-defunct) Static Party blog. Hali Gali Halid was the brain child of Croatian RNR mench Goran Bare, frontman/mastermind of Majke and all-around debonaire man-about-town. When Majke went on hiatus, Bare formed Hali Gali Halid to make fun of the Turkish pop craze sweeping Croatia.

This shit is far out. Honestly though, this is more than the sum of its parts, and its parts are fucking awesome. Besides Vo-zdra, there is a Hali Gali Halid tape floating around, which is a little rougher around the edges and sick as hell. Nothing else sounds like this—I crawl through dusty boxes of vinyl and around the internets and through estate sales like some cruddy Count of Monte Cristo looking for audio splendor that will help me exact my revenge on boredom and the dull etceteras of virtually everything, and then suddenly here it is, 20 years old and with cheerful cover art of a rocket ship flying through eyes. I know that this is supposed to be a satirical album, but I don't know enough to get the joke and I can't speak the language, but I know a thing or two about a thing or two and this thing is killer.


Hali Gali Halid lasted for a couple of years and then fell apart, Majke started back up and that was that. Luckily, the tape was rolling when these guys were kicking it.

Büdösök Kills, Eats

As far as I'm concerned, Büdösök is the greatest thing to come out of Europe since defenestration (and/or Tesco brand beer). If you peer into the background at 3:08, you can see me hunched over and lurking.

More about Büdösök here.

Tyvek: Nothing Fits

I liked all the previous Tyvek stuff a lot, but when I put this platter on the turntable a bunch of exclamation points appeared over my head and I hollered “Gadzooks!” I didn’t even know what side I was listening to because the record didn’t have a sticker on it. "4312” kicks off side 1 and it’s sick, the first chord hits and it's a brushback pitch so pay attention. The guitars sound like crummy magnetized metal hulks grinding together; I'm guessing that someone took a soldering iron and circuitbent Detroit’s municipal power grid to get this tone. Unlike some of today's rickety garage/punk/moustachekrieg/etcetera breed that use noise and shitty recording techniques to obscure what's going on, the lo-res sonic maelstrom on Nothing Fits is on-point and ecstatic, catchy without being poppy or pedantic or anything.

Tyvek writes brilliant songs that don’t go where I think they’re going to, except sometimes they do which is weirdly comforting. Have you ever had really strong déjà vu and felt creepy but in a good way? “Kid Tut” and “This One or That One” offa side 2 sound really familiar, like I’ve heard them before but I know that I haven’t because if I had I would have taken out a post-it note and borrowed a pen and said “what band is playing this song, let me write it down and stick it to my refrigerator or somewhere that I’m bound to see it tomorrow morning when I wake up, this way I can go to the record shoppe and throw some cash down on the counter and say ‘sirs please provide me with the newest record by the band written on this post-it note I have taken out of my pocket and handed to you, I need to change my life and start doing things differently right now.’” Finally someone put the first couple Meat Puppets records in the cyclotron along with the Swell Maps' Jane From Occupied Europe and hit the button that will make them smash together. Now we're in the future.

These are tunes that aren't going away, like that fucking monolith in 2001. Frankly, this album crushes heads with a human femur. It's a step forward for the human race.

(Also, “Frustration Rock” is still the jam.)

JANG JANG GRXDZANK (Fin.)

And with a simple trip to Amoeba records in Berkeley, CA, I became the proud owner of the final A Frames record, 333, which is three albums (!) of demos, unreleased stuff, singles and EPs, and all sorts of good stuff. Since this is the A Frames, it's all good stuff. Then I accidently left it behind in the house I was staying at, and Sarah's mother mailed it to me but then I wasn't home to pick it up and the USPS dude didn't leave a note so it was returned to her, so I had to download this fucking album illegally and listen to it until I finally made it back to CA to retrieve my records and take them on their third trip across the continental divide.


Anyway this is amazing and all the songs are the best. I saw these guys play at the Cake Shop a few months ago and it was the best. The A Frames were the best! You wanna argue with that? Well then I'll tell you directly: they were the best, you schmuck. Now they aren't really together anymore. So someone else needs to step up and assume the mantle of righteousness. I don't know who that's gonna be but they had better get it together already. I don't have the rest of my life to wait for another band to like as much as I like these guys.

Anyway this triple record is probably the best final, you know, final thing or whatever that there could possibly be for this band. I came back and threw this thing on the turntable and turned it up and listened to it go "JANG JANG JANG" for three sides, then I made this spaghetti and watched part of this Alice Cooper DVD, then I went back to listening to the other three sides. (As an aside, that Alice Cooper DVD had like a lot more interpretive dance than I'd really counted on. It was like some weird community theater production.)

You can order this amazing audio codex by going to SS Records, the fine people putting this thing out. Put this shit on and study it, because it's the foremost codex of the 00s. This is at least as important to us guys as the Code of Hammurabi was to the ancient Babylonians.

And there is Audio

Today I went to a record sale at the Archive of Contemporary Music and made a killing. Yeah, a KILLING, Dear Reader. I got so many good records, you wouldn't even know.

These records make me feel vaguely better about everything.

Phantasmagoria

The best American movie ever made is Don Coscarelli's Phantasm. It asks important philosophical questions, such as how one deals with the knowledge one's deceased parents have been stolen from their tomb, placed into armored cannisters, and shrunk down to dwarf size because they are forced into indentured servitude on a barren desert planet with higher gravity than ours.


Also, it features chrome spheres with spikes that drill into people's heads, and an undertaker who is very frightening because he's always weirdly taller than anyone else in the room. There is no way to be able to predict the direction the movie is taking because I'm fairly sure that the script was being written in parallel with the actual shooting. I've seen it hundreds of times and it's always different, and I am always surprised by the outcome of the film.

What most people don't know is, Don Coscarelli also made the best music video in the history of the world. It is for Ronnie James Dio's song "Last in Line." It's about how "we're" the last in line. What does that mean? Well, it seems to mean that everyone who is last in line has metal shit coming out of their head for starters I guess.



Why is there a weird space tentacle? What was in the package that guy was delivering? Who needed it delivered? Or was is just a ruse to lure messengers into this place where they're the last in line? Why is the drummer a cave man? Whose side is Dio on? Etcetera.

Thinking about Phantasm and this weird music video made me revisit heavy metal. It seemed like it was time, since I've never really been the hugest fan of metal, Dear Reader, and as a genre it might be my biggest musical blindspot. I'm sick of not knowing about stuff, even if I don't like the stuff I'm ignorant about. So I got some metal, and have recently been listening to the Ukrainian black metal band Drudkh.

A favorite Sunday afternoon activity is to load some Drudkh on the iPod, get some Caribbean food from one of the numerous takeout joints in the neighborhood, and try to think about the future. I can barely see into the future at all anymore. This is embarrassing, really—I'm used to being able to see around corners and detect the tidal movements of the invisible world. Now my senses have been blunted, and I feel helpless.


Really, the thing I'm most worried about is the chance that my powers of perception will recede like an outgoing tide, dropping below the level of the present, and I won't know what the meaning of anything is anymore.

March of the Hierophants

Dear Reader, I hope that you have your thinking cap on, because we have to figure this shit out together. So sit back in your weird ‘70s egg chair, pour yourself a vodka and blood orange spritzer thing, take a bite out of a 7 grain toast with raspberry jam on it, and check the creases in your slacks because now it’s time to get down to business.

I started this online publication when I was living in Budapest, trying to figure out what the shit I was doing, and when I wrote stuff for The Little Black Egg, I was reaching out across the ocean, nay, across the world, trying to connect to fellow bad-smelling nerds all over the place who might be vibrating at the same wavelength. Now that I’ve been back in New York, my zone of operation, it’s a different story. We here at The Little Black Egg find that we’re shrinking backwards, being inexorably drawn away from The Little Black Egg and into the void.

Thusly, Dear Reader, we here at The Little Black Egg are marshaling our forces, unleashing our hounds, sounding the trumpet, and throwing the severed body parts of the Egyptian god Set into the sun. It’s time to annihilate the outer cosmos where the Elder Gods lurk; to smash the Skriker, portent of evil, ancient and damaged, in the face with brass knuckles; to heave a copy of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood at a scurrying cockroach; and to generally get it together.

We've always hated solitude.


The Utter Failure Which Was Responsible For Recent Radio Silence
Most recently, I tried and failed to put together an article about three awesome Jewish/Guido rock bands from NY: ManOwar, The Dicators, and Twisted Sister. The idea being that these groups sort of represented the Jungian take on the ages of man. Early in life, during The Dictators phase, man is turned inward, concerned with simply satisfying base desires, selfish, really. Then, as an adult, man turns outwards into the world (the ManOwar stage), conquering life and showing no mercy. This is the stage when life is lived. Then, man turns inwards again, Twisted Sister-style, in a garish adult pantomime of youth, trying to once again address the needs of one’s Self.

Working on this article was like dropping quarters into a fucked pinball machine that’s permanently on TILT. I couldn't finish it. That article was dead as dead.

I struggle with my failures. I crawled around on the floor, moaning and frothing.


Slightly Less Anonymous
Just so it’s clear, I am not a very cool guy, you know? This can be surmised from the fact that I have a blog, in the first place. But I am the kind of guy who eats toast and peruses the Chicago Manual of Style whilst listening to (but not watching) a DVD of The Fly with Jeff Goldblum. (Fuckin’ Brudlefly, amiright?!) I go to the grocery store and think to myself, “do I have what it takes to invent an awesome sandwich?” I drink seltzer a lot, alone. In the dark.

When I go see music, 9 times out of 10 I do so by myself, hanging out in the back, shifting from foot to foot on account of the fact that I can’t stand still ever. What tempts a man to lurk in the corner of a dank shithole, watching a bunch of jerks feeding back onstage? The answer can be traced, I guess, to early isolation, and several fortuitous events that shaped my early childhood:

1. My brother Scott making me a Beatles mixtape
2. My brother Scott making a second mixtape with songs like “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” and “Quinn the Eskimo” on it
3. My parents buying me Heartland Music’s “Fun Rock” 4 LP set after weeks of agonized begging on my part
4. Finding my brother Scott’s fucked up, zillionth generation tape of The Rolling Stones’ “Get Your Ya-Yas Out”
5. Discovering the Beach Boys
6. Seeing my cousin Wayne, who was a punk
   

My cousin Wayne was a punk rocker from Long Island in the mid-80s. He saw the Circle Jerks, the DKs, the Ramones, Marginal Man, all that stuff. Just seeing my cousin was totally off the hook for me as a kid. It was like seeing a superhero—he looked like a cross between Wattie from the Exploited and Lord Humongous from Mad Max: The Road Warrior. Orange mohawk, leather jacket with studs, fingerless leather gloves, chains, engineer boots, the whole thing. He looked like an extra from Death Wish 3 Nowadays, he and his wife Jen (another former punkeroo) have an awesome kid and live the high life in the country where they are visited by loads of cool friends and farm chickens and drink cocktails and live a very solid life.


I Was a Teenage Viscount
Here’s the other thing to understand: I grew up in a very, very small town, pre-Internet, where mountains blocked most outside radio reception, pre-satellite TV, a town so small that no cable companies would run a line to it because it wouldn’t be profitable enough, not even if everyone in town subscribed. It used to be hard to acquire media, is what I'm saying. I hungered for RNR and punk rock, but I had little exposure to it. I used to put stickers on my face, like those star stickers that teachers put on test papers. I’d put these stars all over my face and I’d tell everyone in the grocery store I was a punk rocker and that I knew how to breakdance. Then I’d spend my allowance on a Charleston Chew and pretend to fight off ninjas with it. I was one of the weirdest, dorkiest little kids in this dairy farming community.

It wasn’t until I was older, a social retard wearing weird blue slacks and buying LPs, that I figured out which way was up, and finally actually heard punk rock, which didn’t disappoint. Actually, some of it really did disappoint, especially some of the goofier British stuff.

Still, each album acquired made me feel that I was ascending to an elevated realm of greater perspective, a perch from when I could see the history of the world more clearly, like the member of a royal court.


Allies in the Final Conflict
Dear Reader, I ask you—who among has not had close friends who give them important shit to listen to? Me, I have a couple. First off, there’s my wife, who I pretended to like jazz for, and then actually ended up liking jazz—a proposition that initially seemed unphysiologically fucking impossible. Then I got my friend Matty, my friend Tom, some other people, and most recently, my friend Nate. The people you know are windows into other dimensions.

Nate (I won’t use his last name) is the main dude of a jazz combo called The Nathan Clevenger Group. They are a really good band. Everyone in the band are titans of music. Imagine the Founding Fathers descending from Mount Olympus with tentacle arms gripping inky quills, preparing to legislate. Actually, that's a little off. It's more like this: have you ever gotten a foreign film that maybe you weren’t sure about, but then it ripped your face off, and it was the coolest thing you ever saw, and it somehow synthesized straight-up literary frumpiness with avant-gardeness and unexpected twists and you were at the edge of your seat the whole time but then, afterwards, you couldn’t find anyone else who had ever heard of it? That’s pretty much what their music is like.

Anyway, it was my birthday recently, and Nate gave me a gift certificate to Amoeba Recrods in the Bay Area. This was really cool, since I am poor (hey, anyone need a freelance writer/editor/copy editor?), and I haven’t been able to buy records in a long while.

So’s I had this gift certificate and I bought a clean copy of Billion Dollar Babies by Alice Cooper and 333 by the A Frames, my favorite ever band (in the last 10 years). I am still aglow from Nate’s act of kindness. So much of my music time is spent turned towards magazines and music blogs, trying to peer through the general blur and discern where the music is that will keep me from dematerializing. To be given this music as a gift is miraculous.


And Scene
One of the reasons that The Little Black Egg isn't all full of music reviews is because I’m not a scientist, and I can’t analyze anything objectively. I hurtle through life, an itchy bundle of anxious flesh, happy for the few moments where the world seems even vaguely human. I don't understand anything. The greatest illuminations were passed to me by others, fragments of sound and information that brought the world into focus.

It's hard for me to see clearly because I stand so close to everything. I have hope for us in the future, though, Dear Reader. I really do. Together, we have the technology.

The Drummer Has a Rubik's Cube For a Head

And the band's name is just a question mark. Like the dude who fronts the Mysterians.

Siberian Hunchback Punk

Оргазм Нострадамуса were from Siberia, and they sounded like what I always imagined crust punk ought to sound like. I grabbed all their albums from Puke Skywalker. From Puke:

Tragically, the band's mission was cut short in 2003, with the murder of its guitarist Arkhip (again, details are spotty, though there are claims "he was poisoned by unknown envious skinhead-person") and the death of Ugol some months later by a combination of alcohol, pills, and choking on his own vomit.

I'm thinking about learning Russian just to understand the lyrics, that's how much I like this band. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I could understand the lyrics to this song, I'd appreciate Richard III even more than I do right now.

The Magyar Scott Walker?

Máté Péter brings the pathos.

The Space Monster Never Sleeps

In this amazing photograph, Neil Young looks like a space monster.

Guerilla Radio

Dear Reader, if you are at all a fan of the writings found in this fine publication, you are no doubt wondering: “Rick, why in the world haven’t you yet reviewed any books about punk rock from the former Yugoslavia? You seem to like music from there so much, and are always boring people to tears with little anecdotes and facts you’ve learned about the people who made it, so why don’t you etcetera?”

Etcetera indeed, Dear Reader.

Although we here at the Little Black Egg don’t like to actually review things, we are happy to strenuously recommend that our readers purchase a particular product. And for those of you who have felt the pull of Balkan rock music but have been unable to find out any information on any of the bands short of that which appears on blogs, wiki entries, or indescipherable online translations of articles in Serbian and Croatian, I would like to recommend that you pick up Guerrilla Radio: Rock’n’Roll Radio and Serbia’s Underground Resistance by Matthew Collin.


Now, Guerilla Radio isn’t a book on punk rock from the former Yugoslavia, because that book doesn’t exist in English. This is better. Collin’s book examines B92, the Belgrade radio station that was the voice of anti-Milosevic Serbia in the 1990s. It’s totally fascinating, and if you’ve got any interest in YU-Rock, or radio stations, or music, or the Balkans at all, you ought to get a copy. I think I got mine from Amazon for like $1.50 or something unfair and insane like that.

As someone with a keen if amateur interest in this part of the world, I was surprised how little I actually knew about B92 and the resistance it fostered. The huge anti-war, anti-Milosevic movement that rose up in Serbia didn’t exactly have a huge amount of ink spilled about it the Western press. Huge demonstrations that took place against Milosevic occurred in Belgrade, and B92 was a key component of setting the stage for people to feel free to voice their discontent.

Amidst state run media organs, B92 basically stood alone as the de facto voice against the regime. It was shut down, its people threatened, and its offices ransacked. The Milosevic regime thought that this tiny radio station posed a threat to their power over the country. They were right. Huge street protests against the government enveloped Belgrade, ultimately causing the Serbian army to send tanks into the streets of the city to disperse the protestors.


Collin uses B92 as the lens through which to focus the reader’s attention on the events at this time. This book is succinct rather than exhaustive, which works to its advantage. Collin reported from Belgrade in the mid-nineties, and a lot of the material in this book comes from first-hand interviews conducted with the people who were a part of the events described. I’m no expert, but I haven’t read a better book about this period of time in Serbia’s history. Guerrilla Radio avoids sensationalism and hyperbole completely; instead, it’s a very human, very compassionate look at a handful of extraordinarily brave radio misfits who became, well, heroes.


We here at The Little Black Egg suggest you acquire a copy immediately.