Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 9.20.2019
PLAYING ROCK AND ROLL LIVE IN CONCERT EDITION
Hey and welcome. It’s another edition of the Dr Frank Weakly Reader, wherein I produce an edited, augmented, illustrated guide to the week that was in hopes that the materials encompassed will not fade and perish. It’s the PLAYING ROCK AND ROLL LIVE IN CONCERT EDITION because there are LIVE SHOWS this weekend, MTX / Kepi / and Motorcycle in Sacramento, MTX and around a thousand other bands at the Punk the Burbs Fest in Lisle, IL, and Dr Frank solo in Minneapolis. As of press time there are still a few tickets left for these shows, so if you want to come, you still can.
Details are directly below, on the FRONT BURNER.
FRONT BURNER
— SHOWS: Yep, as mentioned, it’s all happening this weekend: Sacramento, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Come and watch us sing and play.
Here’s the full list:
— Friday September 20: MTX with Kepi and Motorcycle, at The Blue Lamp 1400 Alhambra Blvd Sacramento, CA 95816. Get tickets here.
— Saturday September 21: MTX at Punk the Burbs Fest 3, Basecamp Pub, 5750 Lakeside Dr. Lisle, IL 60532. Get tickets here.
— Sunday September 22: Dr Frank solo, with the Straight As and Robosapien. Palmer’s Bar 500 Cedar Avenue Minneapolis, MN 55454. Get tickets here. Facebook event page here.
— Saturday October 19: MTX, Sicko, and the Pathogens at the Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th Street (17th @ Missouri) San Francisco, CA 94107. Tix here.
— 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.
We’ll see you there, yeah?
THE HAPPENIN’ HAPPENING: MTX
— The missing “Love American Style”: In which I discover that the song was snipped out of the seven inch reel and spliced into the Side B Milk Milk Lemonade reel. Presumably it was.
— Alcatraz re-assement: just a snip. More to come on that, I’m sure.
— In love with something I said in a prayer: via Cydne, “Tomorrow Is a Harsh Mistress” lyrics graffiti in Seattle, WA.
— MTX Songs about Girls xTM pins are in at Sounds Rad (and they do enamel right.) It was part of a limited “pop up” shirt offer that is long over, so if you missed it, you missed it, and you’ll have to wait for the next one. If you don’t want to miss the next one, you can sign up for the mailing list here.
— So Long Sucker seven inch: Brian’s, on Instagram: “No tour through my 7” collection would be complete w/o the greatest pop punk band to ever release a record besides the @ramones!”
Aw, shucks.
— It started with a Facebook group: local news (Daily Herald) covers the Punk the Burbs Fest 3. We’ll be there.
— UC Out of People’s Park Spring Equinox Celebration with Mr T Experience, Blue Vulva Underground, Neurosis and movies on People’s Park + El Salvador: an old flier — I think I remember doing some Food Not Bombs thing in People’s Park and maybe this was it. There will always be hippies.
— Euro MTX HQ: Ryan found it, near Manchester.
— MTX Shards, vol. 1 & 2: Shaun got his, and posted a sort of review. Thanks, Shaun. You can get yours here.
— Start erasing… now! Seen on twitter:
I don’t think pop punk would exist if Tinder was around. Like just erase it all starting with The Descendents, the entire Lookout! Records catalog and even up past The Get Up Kids into Saves the Day. Please RT.
and
This tweet is a direct response to Sicko and Mr. T Experience playing in BKN next month
I RT’d. Just doing my part, you know.
— Translated from Japanese by Google: via twitter:
— MTX 1992 Euro-tour T shirt: Someone’s still wearing it. Like new, too.
— And speaking of ’92: STE Collective, the Southampton UK outfit that put on our Southampton show on the 1992 tour in England, posted the flier from it, plus some reminiscinces.
This happened to be the show captured on video, with which people who have followed the Song for Odin™ series will be well familiar. Here it is again, that video I mean.
— Song for Odin: The Mr T Experience — “Semi-OK” live at Gilman Street, Berkeley, May 27, 1995. Video on YouTube. “Minor secrets” write-up here. More video of this ilk may be found on my YouTube channel.
— … and your Friday morning “Hitler”: yet another, found on YouTube.…And on the covers playlist it goes:
Any time an objectionable or unpopular person is reported to be romantically involved with someone in the news, this song gets a lot of linkage, and that seems to have happened this week, some politician dating some other politician or something like that. Thanks for the links and have fun with the song, folks!
DR FRANK IS A ROCK
— The New Ramone’s: a dream that has stayed with me.
— How College Radio, Dr Demento, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus Turned Me into a Punk Rock Antiquarian: an old essay re-posted in lieu of a new post, because reasons.
— Milestone: reached 1000 subscribers on minds.com. I use minds as a sort of main base for my posts (and you’ll notice most of these links are to my minds page.) If you’d like to join up, use this link. It’s fun.
— oh and happy birthday eve to me
OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC
— Good morning world: Mel does “Crazy Train”; The State of Micky and Tommy — “I Know What I Would Do”
PICTURE BOOK
— Behold: dame with heater; lucky 13; Agnolo Gaddi’s Triumph of the Cross; Death and the maiden and some cats; Our Lady of Sorrows; The Billion Dollar Brain; Bruce Gilden — Mafia Funeral, Queens; El Greco — Stigmata of St Francis; that photo of Hendrix, a hairdresser, and MAD magazine; a levitating clergyman, in honor of St Joseph of Cuptertino; How wonderful: it talks!; Our Lady of la Salette; Bronson; no idea; a reliquary of St Eustace
— Unsafe and oh so mature (don’t click): the view from behind on a Sunday; a window.
— … and finally:
IN THE NEWS
— Were there disc jockeys 12,000 years ago? Only the Chinese scientists know for sure.
— News you can use: they “field-tested” 100 notebooks.
— “Missing” woman mystery solved: an existential parable for our time.
— The strange history of The Game of Life: Been thinking about board games a lot recently for reasons that will become clear (Mtx forever) and googling around — I had no idea that The Game of Life is 150 years old, nor that its original form was such a severe exercise in scolding everyone for moral impropriety.
More here.
— Some comedian got hired/fired from Saturday Night Live in the space of 72 hours because of bad stuff he said on a podcast and I said:
Hm, well, it seems to me that if a comedian has told offensive “edgy” jokes, and you’d like him to stop doing that and switch to more anodyne certified a-okay no problem material, putting him on the cast of SNL rather neatly achieves that goal at a stroke.
What I was getting at is that, had this guy taken his place on the SNL cast, he would have been destined to do little more thenceforward than celebrity impressions with interminable re-iterations of some supremely dumb catch-phrase read from well-vetted cue cards, rather than whatever it was he was saying on the podcast. (Something about Chinese food, I gather.) In other words, if you want to turn a comedian pedestrian, harmless, and unobjectionable, running him through the SNL anodynizing filter seems like a great way to do it. It’s a comedy wars solution, if you like.
I don’t like “cancel culture” and recreational outrage as you may have noticed, and this certainly seems to be an example of it. Or rather, it’s an example of how easy it can be for one SNL-obsessed crackpot with a vendetta to activate its mobs via tweet. That dynamic, qua dynamic, certainly does worry me. I’d prefer a world with less public shaming, struggle session-ing, ritual outraging, and vituperative mobbing.
It’s hard to get too worked up over it here though. If SNL wants to subject its cast to purity tests guided by random tweet flare-ups, well, it’s going to subject its cast to purity tests guided by random tweet flare-ups. Much as I dislike purity tests and the inevitable “purity spiral” and eating one’s own that follows, it’s nothing to do with me. And I quite literally could not care less about who is and who is not on the cast of SNL. The show is painfully, not to say offensively, tedious and unfunny and life’s too short to waste any time paying attention to it. It is rather funny, though, how people have come to regard this tedious, unwatchable “comedy” show as an Important American Institution, membership on the cast of which is akin to a sacred office, open only to the true and the pure and the virtuous. We live in a silly, silly world.
In related news, the deeply unimpressive and indeed quite silly Canadian Prime Minister is in hot water over recently “surfaced” pictures of long past fancy dress costumes in which he darkened his face with make-up. As he would likely have been in the forefront of the mob calling for himself to be excommunicated from the human race had he been someone else (if you get my meaning) it’s arguably a case of being hoist on his own petard, and many seem to have responded with that combination of grim and eager delight that always characterizes such episodes (and, indeed, characterizes our era, such as it is.) As with the comedian, I don’t particularly care about the Prime Minister’s fate (which is ultimately up to the voters, if I understand Canadian politics, which I may not.) It’s the “grim and eager delight” of the pile-ons that discomfits me, from whatever “side” it comes. It’s simply human nature to behave in this way, I know that, but that just makes it worse really, since it means we can’t escape it.
— Edison Electric Institute Presents: Young Man’s Fancy. Whatever you do, make sure it’s electric.
— Ric Ocasek died. I posted the customary photo. RIP and all that.
And that’ll about wrap it up for this week’s Weakly Reader. But for those who have made it all the way down to the end of the page, here’s a picture of what looks to be a NM or at least EX+ copy of the Shirley Temple Tells the Story of Walt Disney’s Dumbo (also the Tootlepipers’ Circus) LP on the RCA Camden label (CAL 1026):
Next week, then? I’ll be here.
