ODIN XXIII — yet still more minor secrets of the Mr T Experience
Well, now, here we have the twenty-third illustrated aggregation of Song for Odin posts for the past few weeks. For those who want to keep track, we are up to 121 entries covering 101 songs. There’s a YouTube playlist of all the Songs for Odin posted so far, with their write-ups linked in the description space of each respective video. It’s grown into quite an archive.
There are six Song for Odin entries in the collation, plus a couple of songs in an “etc” section at the end — these last being songs written about or posted but not as part of the “series” proper.
If you’re confused because you haven’t been following along for the past couple of years (and why would you?): this is something I’ve been doing each Wednesday, posting a video of a song and writing up some commentary on it. Then every month or so I’ll compile them into an edited illustrated compilation so they don’t get lost and unfindable in the great big pile of trash that is our internet. And it’s called Song for Odin because it occurs on Wednesday, the day dedicated to Woden, the Anglo-Saxon cognate of the Norse god Odin.
Details about how and why I started doing this can be found in the intro to the first installment; and the Odin conceit is explained, somewhat, in the intro to the second. The subsequent installments may be found here: three; four; five; six; seven; eight; nine; ten; eleven; twelve; thirteen; fourteen; fifteen; sixteen; seventeen; eighteen; nineteen; twenty; twenty-one; twenty-two.
[links in preceding paragraph updated, 12.29.2020 — ed.]
Table of contents: “I Don’t Need You Now”; “More than Toast”; “I Wrote a Book about Rock and Roll”; “Dumb Little Band”; “A Song about a Girl Who Went Shopping”; “Ska-nic Reducer”; plus “Thinking of You” and “Love American Style.”
And now….
1 Dr Frank — “I Don’t Need You Now”
Breaking in my broken heart…: Well now, here we are again. Wodnesdæg, I mean. Song for Odin time. We took the last couple of weeks off for the holidays — and we hope you all had good ones — but now is the time we come roaring back. And what we have here is “I Don’t Need You Now” performed in an Italian cemetery/park, ca. June 2006.
I was there because the friends of Beppe, a longtime fan, had chipped in to bring me out there to play at his wedding reception as a surprise gift. He was very surprised. I walked up to his table and played “You Today” and then we did “King Dork” as a duet. We’ve all (Beppe et al.) become good friends since. You may have seen this or that Italian popping up here and there in my web “flow,” and when that happens it’s more likely than not one or more of them.
This video captures a “secret” show the night before the wedding. (The location is the old cemetery of Redona in Bergamo, precisely where the Edone Club is now.) It was a very memorable night, in quite a beautiful setting — the video was shot by Paolo Proserpio and is a work of art unto itself. I love everything about this video, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it in future. It really captures the essence of the experience. Good, good times.
As for the song, well, it’s one of the most requested and consistently popular of all my songs, and I think it’s among the best-written of them as well. When people say, as many have, that Revenge Is Sweet and So Are You is the ultimate break-up album, that it helped them through their divorce, etc., this song is usually the focal point. There are some rather good lyrical moments… “moving to the bottom of a pretty, long list”, “all of these apologies that I don’t owe you now” and this couplet:
what was pulling us and me apart was only breaking in my broken heart / now it’s controlled again, on hold again, and more broken in than it’s ever been
I wish I could say all my lines were this deft and condensed, yet natural, lyrically and conceptually.
The song itself is at least as old as Love Is Dead, because I remember playing it for Joe King in Portsmouth when we were staying at his house along with all the other Love Is Dead songs (we were sharing our “new stuff” with each other) and him saying something like “good tune, you should sing it with a girl.”
Obviously it didn’t get sung with a girl. In fact, the recording of it was thrown together as a last-minute insertion to the Revenge Is Sweet album, to replace “You Alone” (which is still on the extant master reel.)
I can’t remember the specifics of how that came about, but I’m glad it did, as it is a couple of minutes of sonic diversity amid all those similar-sounding guitar and drum tracks but also because it really does round out the conceptual flow, the “argument,” if you will, of the production. (But the sonic diversity is important and comes in very handy when trying to sequence an album, as it certainly did on Mtx forever. That’s a “reveal” by the way, 1/24th of the Mtx forever tracklist for those who are curious.)
It might have been fun to do it with a girl, as most things are. Sometimes, when I indulge in the fantasy of imagining this album done theatrically as part of some “show” narrative (I know it’s stupid preposterous, but this is a fantasy) I can see it as a duet, first verse guy, second verse girl, bridge and third verse unison… But it’s definitely more fitting, in reality, for it to be delivered by a single, slightly confused and unconfident, resigned, wavery voice — fortunately I was just the guy for the job.
I have grown rather fond of the sloppiness and quirkiness of the performance on the recording over the years, but I’d had a tighter execution in mind. The arrangement is a vague nod to bossa-nova pastiche, but it certainly could have been done more competently and effectively per se. Had it not wound up on RISASAY, it probably would have been on the subsequent solo album, where i probably would have been able to present it with more precision, but I’m not sure it would have been an improvement. At any rate, it is, as so many things are, what it is.
And I like this performance a lot. The audience whistling in the break is great.
So there you have it. Like. Share. Comment. Subscribe. And stay tuned for more Songs for Odin to come (Wednesday regular, barring any holiday interference.) Got some interesting stuff planned.
notes:
— Revenge Is Sweet recording on YouTube
— a recent post about “You Alone” and “I Don’t Need You Now” and the RISASAY master tape.
— original post on minds.com.
2 “More than Toast”
Clear is the color of my true love’s tears… Hail and well met, or words to that effect. It’s Wodnesdæg and time for Song for Odin, and what we’ve got today is the newly re-mastered “More than Toast” from the forthcoming “greatest hits” double LP Mtx forever. (RAD-009!) Seriously:
First off, this “littlest pet shop” video was made by Madeline Brownley on her dad’s phone. I cannot imagine a better visual depiction of this song. So thanks Maddy!
Second, as you may have seen, Sounds Rad is releasing this song as a postcard “single” for Valentine’s Day. It’s one of those cards with grooves and artwork on one side — like the Archies and Banana Splits ones we used to cut out of cereal boxes, those of us who are old enough to have done that. And there’s a convenient checklist on the back to help you express your deepest, most complex and delicate emotions. i.e., it’s effectively an “audio Valentine” you can send to people if you like. (RAD-PR-001!) There’s also a limited Toast > You > Staplegun shirt, and one of those sweet Sounds Rad custom boxes that people like so much. Seems like it’d make a pretty good gift for that special someone, so to speak. There are limited quantities, so this is a “while they last” situation. [The box link order is here: it’s well past VD now but as of press time there were a still a few more available — ed.]
Note about the design concept: Arifa Khursheed came up with it many, many years ago and sent me a mock — I always liked it, and now we’re running with it, now that we have the opportunity.Thanks Arifa!
Third: the Mtx forever release date is March 13, 2020. “Dibs” for the first super limited deluxe 180 gram pressing (only 300!) will begin on Valentine’s Day Feb 14 — those who get on the list will receive the record before the street date. More here. [The “dibs” list filled up pretty quickly, as as of press time the ordering processing is still underway. Here’s the schedule — ed.]
This release has been a long time coming with many complications and challenges along the way, and I have to admit it’s rather strange that it is actually happening. I first started talking about doing it as far back as 2004 …and revisited the idea from time to time along the way, but nothing ever came of it. And I got used to nothing ever coming of it, as one does. But now it’s upon us and I find myself at a bit of a loss.
Well, just, you know, buy it and listen to it I guess. It’s a first step toward bringing everything back into “print,” and a little taste of what that will sound like. Anyway, a whole lot had to happen between thinking of it and realizing it, far more than I imagined when I first started proposing it. More on that whole situation here, if you’re interested.
Speaking of “More than Toast”: by pretty much any measure it’s the most popular MTX song, and by a wide margin. This was the case when I first started asking that question back in 2004 and remained solidly so in the most recent round of “taking the temperature” of the MTX-aware public, such as it is, when we asked people to submit their proposed tracklists. And you can tell when we play it live, People dig it. It’s on everybody’s list, including mine.
But despite its popularity and the fact that it turned up on several different Lookout releases, it was actually quite challenging to find a good source from which to master the song. That era of tapes is in disarray, as I’ve noted before. All flat purely analog mixes from the Our Bodies Our Selves period have disappeared without trace. Some of the better mixes of this track, even in secondary form are missing as well, and a lot of what remained was damaged or deteriorated. In the end we ended up pulling the track from the PCM 1630 format tape cartridge for the Our Bodies Our Selves album vinyl master which itself wasn’t in great shape… Jessica Thompson did some careful reconstruction in the transfer and Justin Perkins mastered the hell out of it. I think it sounds amazing, which is lucky considering it is such a prominent track.
Anyway, suffice it to say, this process isn’t as easy and straightforward as you probably think it is. It sure wasn’t as easy as I naively assumed it would be way back when. “More than Toast” was a Song for Odin once before, one of the early ones in December 2017, the video resource being a clip from that 1998 Seattle show that started the whole thing. Here.
There’s more at the link but here’s a snip:
The kernel of this song was just the idea of playing around with metaphors for love and loss and such, and it evolved into an unstated hypothesis that you can plug just about anything (e.g. “staplegun”) into these kinds of statements with no erosion of emotional meaning for all their absurdity. Eh, it’s hard to explain. It’s never a good idea to try to explain a song: just listen to it (if you want.)
I’ll only add had this song hung around unrecorded till the later 90s, which could certainly have happened, I’d have tightened it up considerably, fine-tuning the rhymes and making them cross-reference each other and making those mismatched color metaphors really bounce off one another… if you’re familiar with the Revenge Is Sweet lyrical approach, you’ll know what I’m talking about. But there’s something valuable in the fuzzy “poetic” quality of the extant iteration, something that I doubt I could have engineered deliberately. This song just happened to “hit” at a point in time where I was figuring out how to do that stuff but hadn’t buttoned it down all the way yet. Kind of a happy accident, which could well have gone awry but in fact didn’t.
A final note: even though cardboard record technology has improved considerably since the days of the Archies, I’m told that the sonic fidelity of this format still falls short of the grand, magestic ideal — you’ll have to wait for the actual vinyl for that. But coolness is worth a bit of sacrifice and this format is — well, the only way it could be cooler is if it were on an actual cereal box. But, one battle at a time, yeah? And that’ll wrap it up. Have fun with it, if you can.
The original post on minds.com is here.
3 Dr Frank — “I Wrote a Book about Rock and Roll”
Rock and roll is wonderful… David Gasten, a music pro and vintage music enthusiast I met through minds.com and who has become a friend, has requested that I do a write-up of the song “I Wrote a Book about Rock and Roll,” and he even sent a “tip” in the form of tokens (that’s how minds works, a token economy, flowing through “wires”.) Well, as that’s very kind of him to be interested, and as I haven’t “done” this one before, I decided to take him up on it and do it as a Song for Odin.
So, let’s begin. This live solo video is from that “secret” show in Bergamo, Italy from which I posted “I Don’t Need You Now” a couple weeks back.
This song is one of the most straight-forward ones I’ve written, but it may bear some explanation because — well, if you’ll recall, one sub-theme of this “series” has been songs with obsolete or dead references and what it takes to make them work when the punchlines no longer land as resoundingly as they once may have done. (“Alternative Is Here to Stay,” “Hello Kitty Menendez,” “Ask Beth,” are a few recent examples.) And it occurs to me that “I Wrote a Book about Rock and Roll” arguably falls in that category too, a bit.
Because there once was a time, not all that long ago, when quite a lot of people actually had paid jobs as music critics and journalists, and every town had one or more regular rock writers, from national magazines, to the local newspaper, to various independent alternative publications as well. I repeat: they used to pay these people actual money to do this writing. (Newspapers were these floppy things made of folded up sheets of printed paper that your phone has largely replaced. They used to pay people money to write articles in them, which you now get for free, except they’re not as good — which is not rocket science, I suppose.)
In addition, people used to buy music on discs instead of getting it for free on their phones. These discs and the music on them had actual cash value, when sold by musicians and their labels, and resale value when re-sold by the writers to whom they were given as promotional item in hopes of getting coverage. People used to have big collections of these “CDs” and were often quite proud of them, displaying them in their homes in special, dedicated cubby hole shelving units you could buy at discount furniture stores.
Local bands and these music writers often came into conflict because they (or rather we, the bands) wanted them (the writers) to write about us and our records, while they… did not want to write about us and our records. There was a built-in adversarial relationship, though in retrospect it can be seen that both camps had basically the same objective, which was to use each other (or not as the case may be) to get noticed and remunerated by the wider world. Moreover, a lot of these music writers tended to be rather arrogant, silly, and pretentious.
The scenario was ripe for satire.
And while I certainly wasn’t the first or only guy to write a satirical treatment of the subject, I’m not aware of any other that did it from this angle, as a first-person narrative a la the Rolling Stones’ “Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man.”
(But speaking of which, why wasn’t my song on this list? Get it together AV Club, or I may be tempted to taunt you a second time.)
This song was meant as a general lampoon of pretentious arrogant rock critics everywhere. It was a noticeable, well-known and well-ridiculed type, nation-wide. But anyone from the Bay Area would have had no trouble identifying the local variant of this national species. “Crappy local bands” was something like her signature slogan; she would do things like beginning a column about how cute Paul Westerberg was with sentences like “I’m beginning to think Schopenhauer was right…” Like I said, ripe for satire, though I concede, and the song implicitly acknowledges, that in the bigger picture such complaints were and are just as silly.
And now, of course, no one gets paid at all, for anything, by anyone, so it’s basically moot. Rock critics may be just as pretentious, but they tend to be more humble these days, as they must, like the local bands they once might have trashed or ignored. We’re all in the same boat, with equally dubious claims to justification for our existence.
When the Alcatraz album, on which this song was the lead-off track, was released, and we sent the usual round of promo copies to journalists, the Lookout Records publicist and I imagined we’d get finally get some sort of response from the critics who had scrupulously ignored us and our ilk for all those years. It was a song about them after all. I was actually bracing for some blowback, naif that I was. When that didn’t happen, we emailed the lyrics to the song, hoping to provoke a reaction. The result was a barrage of requests for another promo from all the writers who, presumably, had already sold their copies without bothering to listen to them. Ah, irony. Or rather, not irony. Rather, the pure one-to-one correspondence between a purported satire and actual human behavior, which I think is slightly different. There’s probably a Greek word for that, but I don’t know it.
It’s all water under the bridge now, and it’s still a good song that I flatter myself to think still holds up twenty years later despite its being situated in a largely vanished world. We grumbled about it a lot at the time, but that world (of music being worth more than zero and people getting paid for art and writing about art) was in some respects a better world than what we’ve got now, despite everything being “free.” Or so I would maintain.
David, I’m not sure if that was what you were looking for (and if not, I’ll gladly refund your tokens, just let me know.)
Anyway, here’s the studio recording, and here’s that album on discogs. And here’s that “I Don’t Need You Now” minor secrets post containing some detail about the show and how it came about. And here’s a minds.com referral link if you want to get in on that minds action.
Share, like, comment, subscribe, etc. We here at Song for Odin love you all, and we’re looking forward to seeing you next week, should it arrive.
Original post on minds.com is here.
4 “Dumb Little Band”
Nobody’s gonna hear, or understand… What’s up, ladies, gentlemen, and other? We’ve all been warped in wildly different ways by our disparate backgrounds, experiences, and congenital psychoses I’m sure, but there’s one thing, if only one, that we share, and that is that it is Wednesday. For all of us. So let’s cling to that bit of common ground, our shared Wednesday, and dedicate a song to the god for whom our progenitors named it. Odin, I mean. Song for Odin. That’s what we’re doing here.
I gotta admit to being possibly a bit off my Odin game today. We’re in the midst of the Noir City film festival and as usual attempting to see all the films is quite strenuous, logistically, physically, emotionally. Last night’s Czech films were… well really something. Viewing …and the Fifth Horseman Is Fear was one of the most jarring, unpleasant, yet weirdly compelling experiences of my life — like nothing I’ve ever seen. (Best so far has been The Housemaid, from Korea. Now that’s a wild ride.) But (boy do) I (ever) digress… Back to the subj., what we’ve got here is my dumb little band, playing “Dumb Little Band” for an audience of around 18,000 Italians, in Rome.
This is of course from that strange truncated European tour we did with Green Day in 1996.
I’ve posted a few songs from this set before in this series with commentary explaining the circumstances and trying to get at the surreal sublimely ridiculous madness of the whole situation (see below in the notes.) But nothing, perhaps, portrays its manifold ironies as much as this particular song. I’ll quote from a previous spiel:
I think the germ of it was an actual incident, depicted in the song, the first time anyone ever said “you guys kind of remind me of Green Day” rather than the other way around (which up till a certain point had been the more usual construction.) People used to say they were like our “little brothers.” Anyway, we don’t remind me of each other, much, however you slice it. But the rest is history.
Subsequently, things got dumber and dumber as you may remember. I’ve been thinking about this song a lot lately because of Mtx forever. It captures a certain something. Of course, the audience, who didn’t know us from Adam, and wouldn’t have been able to discern too much of anything about the song from hearing it performed that one time, was not in on the joke. (That’s been another consistent feature of this “career” — the inside jokes destined to remain so, in the scheme of things, forever.) They seemed to like it alright, though. Just a dumb little band, plopped down momentarily in the big time through no particular merit of our own. Nevertheless, the crowd did roar, and it was pretty cool when all’s said and done.
Well I, that is to say, we did it. It’s back to watching weird obscure movies for me. See you next time, space friends.
notes:
— studio recording, on Youtube.
— minor secrets of “You Today” live at the PalaEUR; of “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba” live at the PalaEUR; of “Can I Do the Thing?” live at the PalaEUR
— previous write-up on “Dumb Little Band”
5 “A Song about a Girl Who Went Shopping”
Doctor and Carol and Jimmy and Alice: Well, hello. Happy Wodnesdæg. Time for some rock and roll, sort of. What I mean is, the Mr T Experience doing “A Song about a Girl Who Went Shopping” at the Stortebeker Club in Hamburg Germany in July of 1992.
I dug this one out, initially, because of the Brady Bunch sub-theme in the recent write-ups on “Itching Powder in the Sleeping Bags” and “Time to Change” (an actual Brady Bunch song, from this same set.) And the reason this performance fits is because of the bit at the end of the solo where the Brady Bunch theme tune appears as a sort of “cadenza”. I seem to recall doing it for far longer and more floridly sometimes, but this was the one instance I could find on video.
This is the sort of thing that seemed really, really funny in those days; and now it’s funny in a different way, I suppose. It is obviously a stab at irony, sarcastically appropriating a staple trope of rock performance and bringing it from its allegedly sublime heights to the lowest level possible, i.e. the level of the TV theme song. Take that Jimmy Page, I guess it’s sort saying, this is what you’d be like if you were one of us, and isn’t the whole thing absurd and laughable in the end whether or not it’s Brady Bunch based?
It was all very much in line with the whole spirit of this band, obviously. But… why? I’m not about to try to “unpack” the Brady Bunch obsession for my cultural cohort, the kids who grew up on it. For some reason that show loomed quite large as an ironic touchstone. And boy was this appreciation ever ironic, like so ironic it comes all the way out the other side. I’m not aware of ever having straightforwardly liked The Brady Bunch on its own terms. It was, from the beginning, at least for me, simply an opportunity to wallow in ridiculousness and absurdity. Which seemed like a very, very good idea at the time. It was, rather inexplicably from the perspective of now, fun and meaningful, as well as a perverse kind of “liking.”
And of course this wallowing in ridiculousness and absurdity extended to the “art” and the rock and roll itself. As so often with these pop culture references, it felt like it was making some kind of statement, sort of, but what that statement was specifically is hard to pin down and I doubt it really was much of a statement. Statements are hard to come by, while the appearance of having made one is can be ginned up rather cheaply.
And after all that straining for irony and despite the mockery, there I was playing “rock god” solos on my Les Paul Custom. Hi, Jimmy. Where did Alice live, by the way? Have you looked at the plan of the house? It’s just impossible!
Of course, as I’ve pointed out before in write-ups about songs from this set, irony, ironically, becomes something wholly other when the audience is unaware of the elements, as this audience surely was.
No one in Hamburg 1992 was in a position to say “achtung ha ha, zees American fellow ees playing zee Brady Bunch theme song as sort of cadenza und eet ees funny for zum inarticulable reason!” Actually, no one ever said that, German or otherwise. I know that, really.
Well, it was just a bit of fun and that’s what matters anyway. An absurd song, from an absurd band, in which an absurd guitarist plays an absurd cadenza to an absurd solo in an absurd situation. Fitting, yes, but also arguably riding the absurdity knob a bit harder than it needed to be ridden. All that said, that solo does have its moments.
There’s one further song (that I can think of now) in this Brady-referencing category, which I’ll get to one of these days. I know you can’t wait.
This was a Song for Odin last year, a rather more shambolic from a 1988 Gilman show. Snip:
…the idea was, I suppose, to present a pedestrian, inconsequential tiny slice of life narrative (a girl buys some records and a cooking pot) and and just blow it up into a deadpan epic beyond all reason, as a sort of, I don’t know, inane celebration of entropy, or the absurdity of our stupid little lives, or something. Along the lines of Queneau’s Exercises de Style (yeah that’s the kind of thing I used to think about — I was a very silly person); but the musical-conceptual model, if there was one, was the Television Personalities’ song “Smashing Time” which obviously did it a whole lot better and lovelier. If it did it. I don’t know, whether or not it was worth doing, it was done…
It was, indeed, done. And so are we, it appears. See you next week.
notes:
— Big Black Bugs Bleed Blue Blood on discogs.
— that Gilman 1988 write-up.
— original post on minds.com
6 “Ska-nic Reducer”
Appeasement and Mockery: Well, now, ’tis Wednesday once again, if ’tis is the word I want, and it’s time for another Song for Odin. (The 101st song and 121st entry in the series, for any who are interested in keeping track.)
I’m on some deadlines and am juggling a few things, so this’ll have to be short… that’s partly why I chose this particular song, because there’s not too much to say about it except that I find it faintly embarrassing but still maybe kind of funny. Behold, a fake ska cover of the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer”, live at Emo’s in Austin, November, 1995.
I've posted one song from this set previously (“My Stupid Life”) and as I explained there, this show was, I believe, on one of several short runs we did with the Dickies in that period, while we were still feeling our way towards turning into the band we turned into in this era. Love Is Dead, the record that would prove to define the era inadvertently, had been recorded but not yet released (and I think there was still some last-minute mixing that happened after this date as well.) The audience was slightly engaged but not particularly interested, and included quite a few very clearly self-advertised “old school” punks (or revivalist LARPers) which may have been partly why we pulled this weird monstrosity out of our asses. You know, as appeasement and mockery rolled into one, one of those “stupid MTX tricks” that only we were in on.
We had started doing it when playing with ska bands in the same spirit, and I guess it worked the other way round, too? The chorus is still faintly funny to me.
In truth, this song meant a great deal to me growing up, and I’d have much preferred to do a proper cover of it, if we were going to do it. This take was just an ad hoc goof, but Jim really liked playing it so it popped up in more sets than I’d have liked. (Careful with your goofs, my friends.) I don’t remember playing it all that often — though we did dust it off for encores at those Reel Big Fish shows a few years later. No one noticed it in particular then either. Anyway, like I said I’m still a bit embarrassed by the whole thing, somehow more than by many other arguably far more embarrassing things I’ve been involved in. But, it’s what happened.
See you all next week, should one occur.
notes:
— original song by the Dead Boys on YouTube.
— original post on minds.com.
Et cetera
— “Thinking of You”: Tossing you off for Tuesday, over the weekend for the entertainment/talent interlude after our Second Christmas dinner, I dug out my old Country Twangin’ Micro Jammer and attempted a live rendition of the song “Thinking of You.”
I managed to do it tolerably well. But it’s a very difficult instrument to play. The “guitar” samples are played by pressing buttons on the neck, but there’s a slight delay after pushing the button, so you have to anticipate the beat a bit, but not so much as to cut off the previous chord too early. Moreover, the contacts don’t seem to be perfectly aligned so you don’t always get the sample you want. The useful ones are the I — IV — V that you hear on the recording, but there are also some “lead” bits, a kind of chicken scratching one and a sort of “Hot Rod Lincoln” type riff that sometimes play instead of the Travis picking IV chord intended, which is pretty annoying. And it’s hard to counter-act… you just need to go with it when it happens. It seems to matter how squarely you press the button (firmly but slightly emphasizing the left side of the IV chord button has the best results) but it’s still unpredictable and you have to hope for the best and barrel through when you get the annoying “lead” instead of the chord.
Which is what I did Sunday night. The audience, Mrs. Dr Frank, Grim Deeds, and G. K. Chesterton (hiding somewhere) didn’t seem to mind all that much. The stakes are rather low in the Second Christmas entertainment/talent interlude, at least they are at my house. In fact, I’ve never managed to get through the whole song without mishap, which is one reason I stopped trying to play it live. Mainly though, it was because I misplaced the Country Twangin’ Micro Jammer, only happening on it recently when I was looking for something else. The version on the record is edited, bits of tape spliced together, studio gimmickry. (Now you know.) I intend to do a video rendition of it one day (possibly for the re-issue of Show Business Is My Life, should it happen. I’ll probably have to do a hundred takes or so. We’ll see. And here’s that recording, if you don’t know it:
Original post on minds is here.
— I wanna tie you to a post: also, I put up a video of the Mtx forever test pressing, track A1 “Love American Style” because “dibs” went live.
