Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 01.04.2019
Welcome back to another weakly reader, all the stuff you missed, aggregated so you can fail to miss it the second time if you like and so it can be findable later on if that ever becomes necessary, plus some news, commentary, etc. etc.
I keep waiting for someone to come up with a solution to this “indexing” problem — surely I can’t be the only person for whom the scattered internet and its perniciously engineered gaps and suppressions and dischronology and lack of order and findability have become a problem? But, maybe I am indeed the only one who cares. Nothing matters, you’re all saying to your selves, so if we can’t find something we wrote on a platform somewhere a year later, so what? As though what we have to say at any particular time is so important that anyone would ever want to review it. Nothing’s that important. We’re all dust anyway, and the sooner we and our works disappear the better and no one will weep for us, least of all us. Whatever facebook decides to throw up on our screen is good enough for us, they didn’t become a multi-billion dollar company by not knowing what’s best for us and if we miss something we most likely deserved to miss it, because we are worthless scum in the final analysis.
Jeez, you guys are a real bummer, you know that? Anyway, this is my solution, imperfect though it may be. If you’re in the small cohort of people interested in me and my stuff, this is where to go to find it.
Anyhoo: still on the front burner:
— Mtx forever: the comp. To wit, Sounds Radical is still putting out a “retrospective” MTX compilation, ’85–2004 and we’re still soliciting input as to what songs should be on it. The voting still remains open while we figure this stuff out. Full detail here.)
— Shows: We’ve still got MTX in Indianapolis and St. Louis coming. Details are here, and see you there. Scroll down for more. There’s a “low ticket alert” for Indianapolis.
Mtx forever
— Twelve mixes of “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba” on DAT. We decided that transferring and reviewing all the out-take mix reels was beyond the scope of this project — it would have been quite expensive (something like seven reels each for Love Is Dead and Revenge) and would have added a level of confusion to the task that we didn’t need. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll examine that stuff. In the interim, I did do a transfer of this because it happened to be on DAT and I was curious. I like the “TV mix” a lot and I think we may use it for the comp, but we’ll see. There are FB comments here.
— comments. I’ve been posting some of the comments we’ve received with the voting forms, and answering them where appropriate. I’ll probably post an aggregate of them at some point soon, but till then here are comments from Steve and Mouse; Chrispy; Harrison; Andy; Reece; Johnny Cheddar; and really swell one from Dana.
— The Dummy Room podcast guys devote their latest episode to filling out the Mtx forever form, which is a cool idea, and I thank them for the attention and for giving it all serious thought. They’re definitely “pop punk” guys, which for MTX means basically 94–97; they’re certainly not alone, and I get it. My perspective on this stuff is a little different as you might imagine (I’m not, strictly speaking a “pop punk” guy, and never have been) though I’m sure I share some of their criticisms, maybe more than you’d think. It’s a spotty, uneven history. But for what it’s worth, the “Gun Crazy” songs couldn’t have happened without Making Things with Light and Milk Milk Lemonade happening first, and those couldn’t have happened without Big Black Bugs and so on. One of the big surprises here for me has been how many fans of those early records and songs there are, but they’re not for everyone. We were young and inexperienced, especially me, and we were just, you know, figuring it out as we went along. Sometimes it worked out pretty well, but sometimes it didn’t.
I’ve outlined my reasons for doing this project the way we’re doing it here. Four sides of 95–97 would please a lot of people I’m sure, but it would also make subsequent re-issue of the four sides of LID and RISasAY a bit redundant. And it would make the whole thing a bit less challenging, a bit less interesting, a bit less embarrassing and, I don’t know, a bit less honest, perhaps. Anyway, we’re doing the best we can with what little we’ve got which isn’t a bad plan.
— Top Ten: it’s not particularly meaningful, as the context and sequence is what matters most, but for what it’s worth here’s an updated top ten, the tracks that have gotten the most votes:
- Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend
- Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba
- More Than Toast
- Dumb Little Band
- I’m Like Yeah, But She’s All No
- Here She Comes
- I Wrote A Book About Rock and Roll
- Swallow Everything
- Velveeta
- Book of Revelation
This is virtually unchanged since last time we checked (“Book of Revelation” replaces “I Fell for You”) and I suppose that’s a pretty good indication that these are the favorite songs among those who have participated so far. That pool is basically: my facebook “friends.” It’s kind of interesting to speculate how it might change if any wider public than that were to weigh in. Maybe it wouldn’t change that much. Maybe there is no one outside of a dedicated subset of these 5,000 people for whom this whole thing would be comprehensible, or worth spending any time on. I dunno. Obscurity is its own reward.
SHOWS
— As of Wednesday, there were 20 tickets left for MTX / the Putz / Covert Flops in Indianapolis, Jan. 11. Here’s the Event Brite page, if you’d like to grab one.
— St. Louis, Jan. 12 at Delmar Hall, is a free show but you need to pick up free tickets at local places. Details and a list of pick-up locations may be found here.
DON’T YOU KNOW YOU’RE RIDING ON THE MTX EXPRESS?
—Hey, wait a minute, that’s my riff… Linus of Nerf Herder brought this to my attention, a Japanese band called the Sharona whose song “Oh My Girl” uses the exact same signature drum/guitar figure as MTX’s “…and I Will Be with You.” No idea if it’s an ironic “quotation”, or an inadvertant appropriation (like, they heard it somewhere and didn’t realize they didn’t write it themselves — this happens sometimes.) Or what. It’s surreal, at any rate. Pretty good song though.
— Song for Odin™ returns, with the Mr T Experience — “Pig Latin”, live, Southampton UK, Summer of ’92. And the “minor secrets” thereof.
— “I am going to learn to play the bass guitar”: a 12/31/86 New Year’s resolution from Last Will, anticipating auditioning to succeed Byron as the MTX bass player. What might have been…
— Your Friday morning “You Today”, from Sethifus. More of this sort of thing may be found on this playlist on my YouTube channel.
from the desk of DR FRANK
— “All My Vinyl, part iv, Christmas edition”: my recent minds.com Vinyl Collector posts of Christmas records, aggregated in a Medium post.
— A petulant, befuddled, possibly confused 1991 Dr Frank wished you a happy new year.
— Letting go of my duplicate copy of The Treasure of Mystery Island. (Btw, I did leave in a local “little library” and the following day it was gone. Born free, free as the wind blows. I hope it found a good home.)
OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC
— Harry Roy — “My Girl’s Pussy” (posted by Lauren.) I’ve been known to cover this from time to time, if I get drunk enough. And a little known fact: this was going to be song Tom Henderson learns to finger-pick in King Dork Approximately, until I decided to change it to “O’Brien Is Tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.”)
— Plus: George Harrison — “Wah Wah”.
— and it’s goodbye to Daryl Dragon and Ray Sawyer.
PICTURE BOOK
— Let’s have a beatnik party; jazz; Mont Saint-Michel; Happy New Year; the evils of drink; certain key words; uncaged; Genevieve and Atilla; Helmut Newton, Père Lachaise.
IN THE NEWS
— The trouble with “woke comedy”.
