soon we load, roll, unload. soon we panic-attack at random toll-plazas. soon we glory in empty carbohydrates, fuel additives and sticky carpeted monitors. soon we bring it to the kids and marvel at the myriad ways that parents break their children.  soon we strum, pluck, smash, scrape and holler.  soon we sleep like the dead in airtight sarcophagi, next to the interstate where the air-brakes growl…

beneath february and its awful bluster, we gussied up the jamspace and played the song through.

while howard tracked it to 8-track reel-to-reel, nadia made a red-hand mobile out of twigs and cellophane and sweet li’l nina disco-danced with yellow earmuffs on.

invited attendees= hrair, matana, mischa, j.d., wilke, juliet, glen, heistek, corri-lynn, peter.  everybody looks be-gloomed ’cause it’s mid-winter, and sometimes in montreal we just roll that way naturally.

bird on the t.v. is a cockatiel in a wind tunnel.  poor fella.

march 16     bristol, GB  the fleece

march 17   birmingham, GB   asylum

march 18   dublin, ireland   the button factory

march 19   glasgow, scotland   the arts school

march 21   manchester, GB   academy3

march 22   leeds, GB   tj’s woodhouse social club

march 23   london, GB   electric ballroom

march 24   nottingham, GB   rescue rooms

march 25   sheffield, GB   corporation

march 26   oxford, GB   the regal

march 27   brighton, GB   st. george’s church

march 30   rennes, FR   ubu

march 31   paris, FR   alhambra

april 1        reims, FR   cartonnerie

april 2        bruxelles, BE   botanique

april 3        zottegem, BE   dunkfestival

april 4        munich, DE   feierwerk

april 6        padova, IT   unwound

april 7        roma, IT   circolo degli artisti

april 8        bologna, IT   locomotive

april 9        turino, IT   spazio 211

april 10      arezzo, IT   karemaski

april 11       varese, IT   twiggy

april 13       toulouse, FR   le bikini

april 14       marseille, FR   espace julien

april 15        nice, FR   theatre lino ventura

april 16        montpelier   la taf

april 17         lousanne, CH   impetus festival

april 18         luzern, CH   schurr

april 20        zurich, CH   rotefabrik

april 21         lyon, FR   grrnd zero

april 23         lille, FR   le splendid

april 24         groningen, NL   vera

april 25         amsterdam, NL   paradiso

and sorry, but no thing to say for awhile, just grief and fever, and a snowsqualling wind blowing through the streets like wolves let loose and running…

did a bunch of interviews last week, shipwrecked in bed with pneumonia, like trying to wrestle goldfish in a bathtub full of motor oil, the words kept slipping out of reach and into the fog, blinking forlornly…

good news= tours are starting to take shape.  will post all the dates once they’re confirmed.

right now europe is march/april= france, UK, ireland, belgium, switzerland, italy, holland.  (germany’s looking bleak, but maybe munich.)

we’re trying to book another tour in august/september= eastern europe, and russia if we can.

U!S!A! U!S!A! U!S!A!———> (short one for now, but more in the fall.)  this is us in may= boston, nyc, philadelphia, baltimore, d.c., asheville, chapel hill, atlanta, nashville, louisville, chicago, detroit.

that’s all for now.  but a lot more later…

no words.

———>pert’nent infos here…

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(share or embed as you please:)

there’s a haitian church across the road, where they abandoned a dismantled organ just before snowfall.  pastor’s name= “wilfrid estimable”.  on weekends they tear the roof off with joyous noise, and i linger in the alley with my ear to the window like a perv.

last night i dreamt that i dragged their abandoned organ into the basement and put it back together again. except when i went to go play it there was honey all over the keys and a smell like rotting bees.

]]> http://www.tra-la-la-band.com/297/feed/ http://www.tra-la-la-band.com/old-thundrous-mixtape-1/ http://www.tra-la-la-band.com/old-thundrous-mixtape-1/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:53:10 +0000 efrim http://www.tra-la-la-band.com/torched/?p=204 i know, with a terrible certainty, that one day my son will turn to me and ask, “why are they called mix-tapes? huh what’s a tape? why isn’t it called a ‘mix-file’?”, and like a melancholy robot, overcome with nostalgia for the lost tactility of certain dead technologies, and keenly aware that me too i’m a dead technology, i’ll put my dumb arms around him and weep like a motherless child.

“OLD THUND’ROUS-VOLUME ONE“

tracklisting:

• 1- shirts off- billy childish + armitage shanks
• 2- MRA- chris mcgregor’s brotherhood of breath
• 3- love henry- judy henske
• 4- delia- blind willie mctell
• 5- prove it (demo 1975)- television
• 6- wheels- the flying burrito brothers
• 7- our lord and savior- soul messengers
• 8- babylon- swan arcade
• 9- the bass line generator- raymond scott
• 10- you’ve got big hands- crass
• 11- borderline- mc5
• 12- i forgot to be your lover- william bell
• 13- it’s all over- ben e. king
• 14- sommarlåten / the summer song- international harvester
• 15- prizadujumal- kletka red
• 16- everything must change (live 1977)- nina simone
• 17- brahms violin sonata No.1 in G major, Op.78: I. vivace ma non troppo- itzhak perlman & vladimir ashkenazy
• 18- six white horses- waylon jennings
• 19- la messe ethiopienne: litanies de la veillee de l’assomption- l’eglise orthodoxe ethiopienne de jerusalem

———————–—————->L!I!N!K!<—————————————

this long-playing record, like all long-playing records, has a backstory=

Mick Mars of Motley Crue, alone in his unfinished condominium- the sun is setting, and there’s half an inch of rain lapping at his soles; i say “mickey, what’s with the state of your miserable digs?”; he says, “they ran out of money when the bottom fell out, couldn’t pay to put the glass in the fucking window-holes.”  “but mick, couldn’t you live in one of your other ones?”,  “i could yes i sure could but this one feels a little truer, and some mornings the birds just fly right in here and murmur to me with gentle coos and leave their downy feathers in my grim hair.”

a little later on, he plays me his legendary demos- and though the moment itself is awkward, and fraught with a clumsy sort of intimacy, the tunes passenger across the distance between us like wandering thunderclouds shot through with miniature fingers of gold, heavy as a drowned freezer, poignant as the beating of a squirrel’s heart, but ultimately (and tragically) square.  coughing into my sleeve, i scan the room, looking for exits.

eventually the silence lifts, and Mick Mars tells me the story about the time he strangled an english booking agent in the elevator of a midtown boutique hotel- “he had the type of potbelly that makes one think of pale weak lieutenants sending innocent boys to slaughter, like dull gluttony wed to lazy power.”, “but they all have potbellies like that.”, “yes, but this one had blonde streaks in his hair like a cruel teenage girl, and a dry clattering mouth that released foul-smelling winds.”  and then mick says, out of the blue, like a train bursting out of a tunnel somewhere quiet, with trees the only witnesses, just like that he says,  “goddamn, it’s hard to earn an honest living these days..”, and me, with my own wonderments and depressions in tow, i say “for reals, Mick Mars, for reals…”

soon’ll be 5 foot ice-drifts, tender trucks of fallen snow, and the bones of trees with their necks bent into the wind.

the mt. zion band, post-recording, is still up on blocks. come january we’ll crawl down under there with worklights and hammer at the rusted differential!  (and am longing to be back in the middle of jamspace-reek, summoning the anxious squall…)

rough tour-plans=europe mid-march to may.  eastern america=mid-may to june.

we’ve got 2 new songs on the go, unfinished leftover’s from the last bout.  one of them’s a bonehead-riff, circa 1974, and the other one’s just a dozen words repeated over five bass notes.  other tasks at hand= have to retool the arrangements on two of the songs from the new record, and get up on a few of the older tunes that we haven’t played in years. possible covers this time around- “death of a clown” by the kinks, and a slo-mo cover of “manimal” by the germs.

best/worst interview question anybody ever asked me= swiss radio, after “horses in the sky”- the goyishe radio-dude tells me that the record reminds him of the history of the jewish people, wandering the earth searching for a home.

what i told him= everybody in the band has an apartment.  20/20 hindsight= should’ve hit him up for some hidden nazi gold.