The Danny Partridge Problem
The Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 10.25.2019
You’re squeezing my duck, sir… Hello and welcome to another Dr Frank Weakly Reader, basically a recap of the week’s posts with some added stuff. You can read about the Danny Partridge Problem, which is basically an Mtx forever update, below. (tl;dr: release has been delayed once again.)
First, though, thanks to everyone who came out to see us play with Sicko and the Pathogens over the weekend. Sicko sounded 100 per cent exactly like they did in 1995, which is really something considering how fast that means they had to play. And I loved the Pathogens and hope to do more shows with them some time (though I‘m’ quite disappointed not to have had the opportunity to see the Jesse Luscious version while it lasted.) It was a great time. There are a few more shows to come to round the year out, Philadelphia, NYC, Austin, and Dallas (see details below.)
And now let’s move on to the…
FRONT BURNER
— Mtx forever update: if you saw my post called “Danny Partridge Got Busted” Got Busted you’ll know that we hit another snag just this week, when the pressing plant refused to press disc 1 of the Mtx forever compilation album because of the audio clip at the beginning of the song “Danny Partridge.” We called around and couldn’t find any other plant that would do it. And unfortunately, we’d already mastered the audio, cut the lacquer, and manufactured the metal parts so addressing this issue is a major undertaking. It will be both expensive and time consuming. So the release date of this compilation has been pushed back yet a third time. We’re shooting for a February release, but there’s still a lot to sort out so it may well wind up being later.
As I said in my post, it seems like it’s pretty clearly fair use. But that doesn’t matter. We’re not arguing before a court, but rather before the person at the desk at the pressing plant and their policy is “no” so, no it is, regardless of any argument we might make. I was completely blindsided by this, though probably I shouldn’t have been. It seems really, really stupid that we can’t release a track that has been released and very much out there in the world for nearly thirty-five years, and indeed remains so, but that is the reality. Short of setting up our own pressing plant, there just doesn’t seem to be any way to get that bit of audio featuring Danny Bonaduce talking about growing up scratched into vinyl.
Some have suggested we try to get a letter or waiver from Danny, or from whichever local news outfit it was that broadcast the piece from which the audio was snipped so many years ago. The latter would be the way to do it, I suppose, but then we’d be looking at even further and longer and, most likely, more expensive delays while we try, with no guarantee of success. It’s not the hill I want Mtx forever to die on. So we’re snipping off the front of the track, for the vinyl release at least. The other formats, I’m sure, will present no such problems — the only reason for changing the track on those would be for consistency among formats for this release… still haven’t decided on that matter. If we’re still doing this by the time we reach DR-001 / LK-39 (Everybody’s Entitled to Their Own Opinion) in the projected re-issue program, it’s something we may try to address. If and when the time comes to re-issue a record that includes “Sex Offender” (probably some variety of Shards, vol 3) we’ll face a similar issue, though the Blondie sample, while funny, isn’t crucial and also perhaps is not quite as defensible as fair use (though I think it is, arguably.) Not sure on that one. One idea I had on that last night was to replace that bit with someone funny doing the Debbie Harry intro, a gruff-voiced elderly man or a little kid… we’ll see.
Anyhow, it’s a shame but, the show must go on. It may take a little longer but we’ll get there in the end. And when we get there, it will be beautiful. Just you wait.
SHOWS
Still to come are:
— Friday November 22: MTX with the Mikey Erg Band, at Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., Philadelphia, PA 19122. Get tix here.
— Saturday November 23: MTX with the Mikey Erg Band, at the St Vitus, 1120 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222. Get tix here.
— Friday December 6: MTX with the Queers and the Capitalist Kids, at Three Links, 2704 Elm St, Dallas, TX, 75226. Get tix here.
— Saturday December 7: MTX with the Queers and the Capitalist Kids, at the Barracuda, 611 East 7th Street, Austin, TX 78701. Tix here.
See you there?
MTX FILES
— Odin™: this week’s song for Odin™ was MTX live at Gilman in May 1995 covering Sweet Baby’s “Pathetic”:
Extensive “minor secrets” here, about me and Dallas and the early Sweet Baby Jesus days, mostly.
By the way, there’s now a Song for Odin playlist on YouTube, wherein may be found the videos in the series, in the order posted, with links to the “minor secrets” essays in the descriptions. I do this on Wodnesdæg, regular. Please subscribe, like, share, comment, etc.
— And throwing you back even further, Aaron posted this flyer from an MTX / Green Day show at the Berkeley Square which must have been early ‘90s.
— …and your Friday morning “Disconnection,” from a guy named Matt on Soundcloud:
Here’s my write-up for the song when it came up as a Song for Odin. Snip:
The moral of the story is, it’s the song that matters, and good, solidly-conceived song can withstand and survive almost any ill-treatment by inept musicians, misguided producers, or even its own writer.
As this is not on YouTube, I can’t add it to my YouTube covers playlist obviously, but if you’d like to hear other such covers found on the internet you can follow that link and find some.
THE UNSPEAKABLE DR FRANK
— Soul Butcher Meets the Duckhead Buddha: an old story.
— “You You You”: one of those Facebook “memory” things:
“You You You” has a pretty good melody, though it’s almost entirely traditional/conventional. It’s the 6th and maj7 notes that keep coming back on the IV and the fact that that echos the 6th note on the I that gives it a “direction” that makes it work as a melody, I think (also making it slightly counter-intuitive to sing and play.) If I’m saying that right.
And then…
— Domestic dialog: Nixon, me, and the women who love us.
— King Dork Speaks: well not really but here’s an interview I did three years ago with Reason’s Nick Gillespie in the early days of the Reason podcast. (He reposted it as a #tbt memory type thing.)
I haven’t listened to it again, but as I recall this was around the time I was writing the song “Age of Intolerance” and I believe some of the lyrics kind of crept in there.
To wit (any excuse):
— And speaking of podcasts, I spent some time talking to those Dummy Room guys this week. It was a fun time. I think it’s going to be up on Hallowe’en so click on the thing you click on at the appropriate time to click on it.
OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC
— Ensemble PAN — “Puisque je suis fumeux”. When I need to calm myself, this otherwordly music usually works, but it also spooks me a bit too.
PICTURE BOOK
— Roman Calendar: Peter of Alcántara; Mater Admirabilis; Dominique Papety’s NSFW Temptation of St Hilarion (safe for museums, not for the internet evidently); Niccolò dell’Arca’s Mary Salome; San Giovanni da Capistrano; Archangel Raphael; Chrysanthus and Daria
— Unsafe for work if you have a job, or depending on the kind of job you have, or just, you know, if you’re a prude or a social media company: a classic Frank Horvat photograph of a scene that includes a naked woman
— Halloweenies: a very, very Ted Nugent Hallowe’en; the leader’s guitar looks like a skull; this witch is actually genuinely a bit scary; a girl and her flaming haunted house piano; he married a witch
— Hot Halloweenies (super mature and dangerous and “unsafe”): Sacrifice; just a blonde in a graveyard; used this one to test whether Facebook was working and /or censoring
— …and, from Eye of the Devil:
IN THE NEWS
— I hear ya, Nick: Nick Cave Says He’s “Repelled” by Self-Righteous Woke Culture:
Living in a state of enquiry, neutrality and uncertainty, beyond dogma and grand conviction, is good for the business of songwriting, and for my life in general. This is the reason I tend to become uncomfortable around all ideologies that brand themselves as ‘the truth’ or ‘the way.
This not only includes most religions, but also atheism, radical bi-partisan politics or any system of thought, including ‘woke’ culture, that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.
— Naomi: I keep up with Naomi Wolf news because we are linked by a song and because I find her ever-increasing nuttiness rather charming. The latest is that her US publisher has finally, after a lengthy delay, cancelled the book that got her into the most embarrassing radio interview I’ve ever heard. I don’t see how she gets it published now, as she says she plans to do, but I wish her well.
That said, it does seem like a dreadful book, or rather, kindly, a large mistake made up of a great many smaller mistakes. And I wonder what happens to her doctorate from Oxford, upon the dissertation of which the book was based. Probably nothing, the way of the world being what it is, but this dissertation, like the book from which it was derived, does seem, after all, to have been based in large part on a lazy, or perhaps willful, misunderstanding of the meaning of a legal term and it should be a bit embarrassing that it took a radio journalist to notice after the examining committee (or whatever the body is called) did not. You’d think they’d want to (seem like they) have more stringent standards at Oxford than they have at Houghton Mifflin but I’m not at all sure that’s the case.
EPILOGUE
That’s about it for the Weakly Reader this week, but for those who’ve read this far down the page, here’s a girl in a batman costume:
See you next week.
