CBEB’s

Here are two videos from Devo’s 1974 short film In The Beginning Was The End: The Truth About De-Evolution. To give you an idea of how fucked up this music must have seemed at the time, 1974 was the year Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” was a #1 hit. Filmed years before Devo released their debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!, this is a four man Devo line-up, featuring Mark Mothersbaugh (synth, vocals on “Jocko Homo”), Gerald V. Cassale (bass), Bob Mothersbaugh (guitar, vocals on “Secret Agent Man”) and Jim Mothersbaugh (drums). Drummers don’t get a lot of credit, but Jim Mothersbaugh’s drumming only underscores what a vital element his replacement, Alan Myers, was to Devo’s sound. In Jim’s defense, in these clips he is playing some extremely primitive electronic percussion - after he left Devo, he worked for Roland, developing MIDI technology.

First up is “Jocko Homo”. Below the fold is Devo’s cover of “Secret Agent Man”. Listen for the intro to “Smart Patrol” at the beginning of “Secret Agent Man”…

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Below the fold are two video clips of some legendary guitarists performing instrumental versions of the old Carter Family standard, “Wildwood Flower”. The first clip features Joe Maphis, Larry Collins and Merle Travis. The second clip features Chet Atkins. Enjoy!
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I often catch hell from fellow movie buffs because I’ve never seen Trainspotting. The truth is, if all goes well, I’ll go to my grave having never seen it.

I don’t own any John Prine albums. I hear he’s a brilliant songwriter, but I wouldn’t be able to name a song he’s written if my life depended on it.

My aversion to Trainspotting and John Prine is deeply rooted and closely connected.

South Texas is one of the major corridors for the trafficking of cocaine and heroin into the United States. I’ve never done heroin in my life, but I have known a disproportionate amount of junkies in my time. I used to live in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but I’ve never known as many junkies as I’ve known in South Texas.

Some of you may know where I’m going with this in regards to Trainspotting, but what the hell does it have to do with John Prine? Almost every junkie I’ve ever known has been a John Prine fan. Not “John Prine fan” as in they like all kinds of music, including John Prine, but “John Prine fan” as in everytime the subject of music comes up, John Prine is the first name that comes out of their mouths.

I’m generally annoyed by people who are overly fanatical about one particular artist. I knew a guy who was actually that way about Paul McCartney. Not The Beatles, but Paul fucking McCartney. He even referred to him as “Sir Paul McCartney”. I know another person who can’t talk about music without bringing up the alleged greatest band in the history of music, Urge Overkill. But these are merely anomalies; every single person I have ever met who has been a John Prine fanatic was also a heroin addict, and it’s created in me a Pavlovian response. I can’t think of John Prine without associating him with annoying fucking junkies. John Prine may very well be a talented singer and songwriter, but I’ll never know.

Because I’ve had the displeasure of knowing so many dope fiends, I don’t really enjoy movies about drug addiction. I liked The Man With the Golden Arm and Drugstore Cowboy, but I have no desire to see Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream. If I want to watch junkies, all I have to do is stick my head out the window.

Awhile back, For the Kids posted this atrocious video for “Beautiful One” by CCM singer Jeremy Camp at her echo chamber blog:

Since describing the video or giving any background info on the artist would have required FtK to conjure up an original thought or two, there’s nothing there but the video. Being the nice person that I am, I watched the video so that you don’t have to. I am now more qualified to critique this abortion than Michael Behe is to speak about the human immune system. Jeremy Camp’s song, “Beautiful One” exemplifies everything that is wrong with so-called “Contemporary Christian Music”. To paraphrase Voltaire, it’s neither contemporary nor Christian, and it’s not music, it’s Muzak. I think I heard one of the background singers say the word “Jesus” once, but for all we know, Jeremy Camp could be singing about a girlfriend. At least Faith + 1 weren’t afraid to say the word “Jesus”.

FtK’s BFF and partner in slime, Salvador Cordova, recently posted some idiotic crap about how “Darwinists” can’t appreciate music. Maybe, just maybe, if God was sitting in with Jeremy Camp and throwing down some nasty guitar licks, I might be able to appreciate the song a little more, but whether or not there is a god has absolutely no bearing on the mediocrity of “Beautiful One”.

Music is nothing more than a collection of sounds. The appreciation of music stems from many factors, all of them subjective. Though it’s the same notes on paper, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony will sound wildly different when played by the London Philharmonic or a high school orchestra, but it’s still going to be Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Should both be appreciated equally? A parent of a child in the high school orchestra might have a preference for their child’s version, for purely sentimental reasons.

There are people who genuinely appreciate The Shaggs because of their naive approach to music. I don’t count myself as a fan of The Shaggs, but I can understand where they’re coming from; I enjoy the songs of Wild Man Fischer. The majority of people find the music of both The Shaggs and Wild Man Fischer to be unlistenable… does that mean it’s not really music?

As I said earlier, the appreciation of music is based on many subjective criteria. Technical proficiency is important for jazz and classical music, but it can be a liability in a genre like punk or sub-genre such as lo-fi. There’s an old story about how Bob Wills used to be criticized by jazz musicians. Wills always hired crack instrumentalists for his band, but some musicians felt that playing popular music was slumming. When told that most serious jazz players considered his band a joke, Bob Wills responded with “yeah, nobody likes us but the people”.

To think that a belief in god is required before one can appreciate music is utterly ridiculous. Just as silly is the whole notion of “god-given talent”. If god gave people talent, there wouldn’t be any need for music schools. Talent comes from study and practice, not faith. This is part of the reason that the Contemporary Christian Music scene is infested with mediocre performers. If you’ve worked hard most of your life to be really good at what you do, you don’t want to squander it by playing inoffensive pabulum. Talent can be seen as a liability in the religious music world. After all, Christian musicians are supposed to inspire kids to pick up Bibles, not guitars. Even passion for one’s religious beliefs can work against a Christian artist. The few times I’ve listened to Christian radio, the only thing that gave it away as being Christian radio was the all-encompassing blandness of the songs. Programmers don’t want to alienate listeners over doctrinal differences, so an aggressively generic brand of Christianity is promoted. On the other hand, there are artists who sing about hellfire and The  Wrath of God and all that good stuff; Carman comes to mind. The fact that Carman is a recognizable name in the Christian Music industry is a good sign that talent is of little importance in the world of CCM.

Believe it or not, people actually listen to this and think it glorifies their god.

So… what the fuck am I doing writing about Christian music? I happen to - get this, Sal - appreciate it. Yesterday fellow AtBCer and FtK fan PTET sent me an awesome mp3 of Billy Joe Shaver’s “If You Don’t Love Jesus, Go To Hell”. This -  coupled with Sal’s magnificently stupid post about how only evolution deniers can appreciate music - got me thinking about the place gospel music has in the world of church burnin’ and ebola spreadin’.

Below the fold are eight songs dating from the late 1930s to the late 1990s - some gospel, some decidedly anti-gospel. Enjoy!
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Here’s a couple of videos of the Los Angeles punk band X. Both videos are guaranteed to be Chuck Norris-free. First up is “We’re Desperate”.

This is less of a music video and more of a photo montage, but there’s some great photos of the early West Coast punk scene. It’s a lot of fun seeing which faces you can recognize. For example, at 1:27, that looks like the same photo that was used for the back cover of the Let Them Eat Jellybeans comp. Is that Su Tissue from the Suburban Lawns @ 1:44? There were so many images I could have used for the frame grab, but that fake newspaper headline cracks me up.
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Below the fold is an honest-to-goodness video for “Johnny Hit & Run Pauline”
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Not that there’s any short supply of Tard at the moment, but I’ve been wanting to expand the focus of this blog a little bit and after writing about Sherry Shriner, Denyse O’Leary and Timothy Birdnow all in the space of less than a week, I could use a healthy diversion.

Here’s some random Top 5 lists for your reading enjoyment…

Top 5 Favorite Movies:

1. The Third Man
2. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
3. Robocop
4. Fritz Lang’s M
5. Goodfellas

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Yesterday over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars Ed Brayton had a huge post of videos from the US Festival. There was a pretty healthy selection, but Ed noted that the US Festival was where Motley Crüe frontman Vince Neil proclaimed the death of New Wave. Maybe Vince was right, but in my opinion, New Wave left a mighty fine looking corpse. Let’s commemorate the death of New Wave with a massive post of clips from Urgh! A Music War. This was a great movie - it sounds like they caught every single band on their best night. It’s a shame that this will probably never get an official DVD release, because according to Wikipedia, the filmmakers filmed three songs by each band, but it looks like we’ll never get to see the other songs.

Kicking things off is Skafish with a great song for church burnin’ and ebola spreadin’, “Sign of the Cross”.
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There’s 9 more videos below the fold.
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I’ve added a bunch of new videos, but not all of them are available for viewing at the moment. I’ve installed a new Flash video plugin - one that allows for full-screen playback - so I have to go back and re-enter the tags for the videos. In addition to the full-screen option, there’s also a preview image so that you’ll have a clue as to the video quality.

Among the videos I’ve added are several clips from the old Ranch Party TV show. The quality is pretty dubious, but they’re pretty obscure clips. For instance, there’s just not that much footage of vintage Wanda Jackson in existence, which is a shame. Here’s Wanda doing “Cool Love”:

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That was Joe Maphis playing guitar on “Cool Love” - Joe is all over these Ranch Party clips, playing banjo, fiddle and his double-neck Mosrite. Here’s Joe Maphis with 15 year-old Larry Collins playing “Under the Double Eagle”

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If you visit the Video pages and aren’t able to watch the videos, be patient; they should all be back online in the next 24 hours.

If you look up at the top of the page, you should see a “Video” link. I’ve added a video section so that I can update without spamming my front page with videos that some people might not care to watch. I’ll be categorizing the videos by genre and once or week or so, I’ll post an update letting everyone know what’s been added to the Video pages.

In addition to the videos that have already been posted here at CBEB’s, I added Devo’s Beautiful World video, The Minutemen’s This Ain’t No Picnic, and a couple of Hillbilly Music clips.

Like a freak storm of tornadoes wreaking havoc on trailer parks, a similar outbreak of Creationism “teach the controversy” has erupted in school boards across the state of Florida. The St. Petersburg Times is now reporting that David C. Gibbs III, the lawyer who represented Terri Schiavo and her parents, has jumped into the fray by writing a legal memo that claims, in a nutshell, that evolution is a religion. Wow! What a novel idea Mr. Gibbs! We’ve never heard that one before.

While Church Burnin’ Ebola Boys everywhere are hoping that there’s another “Waterloo in Dover” scenario (a scenario in which William Dembski actually testifies this time), I have another dream. The Terri Schiavo case brought out some Grade-A kooks *cough*Rick Santorum*cough*, but my all-time favorite byproduct of the Schiavo affair is Destination Dawn’s “They Killed You Terri!” song and music video. It’s the next best thing to having a Shaggs reunion. I’ll be closely watching Destination Dawn in the hopes that a soothing ballad detailing the heroics of Florida’s cdesign proponentsists is in the works.

Here’s Destination Dawn’s “They Killed You Terri!”, brought to you by Rosary Films.

Tip of the headgear to Jason Spaceman at After the Bar Closes