Two years has passed since I submitted this article at the request of a popular cyber-magazine, and I am coming to recognize that the article has fallen through the cyber-cracks.
I am sorry about the lack of mp3, but I don't know how to do that yet.



Daddy's Hands-

http://popsheep.com/2006/11/daddys-hands.html (read the words and listen to at least one of the songs from each period)
http://www.myspace.com/daddy39shands

Dave Wenger was the voice and brain of this band. He was hit by a car in
November of 2006. He was hyper-intelligent and in his various bands he made amazing
music. Daddy's Hands was his best band. He was at times maybe misanthropic, and at times maybe a beast, but his lover and band-mate Emily told me once that "misanthropes are like that" because they are "actually idealistic and the world repeatedly betrays them."

She was talking about Bill Murray.

When Emily died, the band dissolved for a time, or at least stopped being a cohesive
unit, and though I was nowhere near Dave, I think it is fair to say that things went really bad for him.

The band recovered and made a new record.

I didn't like their new record at first, but maybe I had been used to living in a world where Wenger was a ghost, and a memory, or some such vain shit. Now I think that the record declared some great ummm "return to form". By this I mean that I always feared the shadow.

When I think of Dave I sometimes think of this archetypal and doomed
officer from a World War II novel. A sensitive alcoholic, a "lost soul":
Fitzgerald in an elegant gin trench. Of Time and the River covered in cigarette butts. Larry Darrell, Maugham's protagonist in The Razor's Edge. A role that Bill Murray starred in. Dave could be funny, even Stripes or Ghostbusters funny, but mostly he had this focused and searching melancholy that cannot in our age be dispelled by a trip to India. That door is sealed shut.

I am being romantic. The saddest part about Hamlet is not that everyone
dies. It's that everyone dies and Horatio keeps sailing on.
Great drums. Great great great towering songs. I love them.



Elyse Weinberg- Houses/If Death Don't Overtake Me

It is that immutably and ever-pressing point of "sailing on" that warms me to
Elyse's record. I hear her tromping around in a mytho-poetic lotus-hazed
Los Angeles. Her band sounds warm, and nice, but also "laced" or "dosed"
by an undefined peril--this peril is of course acid. And there is humour in her rasp, an almost Falstaffian guffaw at the mutability of things.

She lives in Ashland, Oregon. I think they have a big Shakespeare festival there. I wonder what she thinks when Ophelia walks on the stage.

The universe would be too tipped in my favour to imagine her playing Ophelia in that tender and yet tough shit-kicked rasp.


Fela Kuti and Ginger Baker-Let's Start

Intermission from the bummer times, and hear the "Riders on the
Storm" Rhodes break. Zeus is always mixing those jars.
I think this was recorded live. The precision and dexterity of the playing demands a military-like ranking system for the term "Musician": (Karen Dalton: Admiral. Fela Kuti: General. Mercer: Soup Cook).


Exuma- Dambala

I have tried for hours to write about this song. I have tried to write
about Dante and the architectonics of our spiritual universe. I have
tried the Caliban angle and what Shakespeare might have thought if he
heard this. And the jingles and the coral-shanties of Ariel. And crazy
Prospero. And slavers and slaves. And even his friend Ritchie Havens.
I have tried to write about a historical character named Plato the
Wizard, a Jamaican practitioner of Obeah (hear also "Obeah Woman", and remember
that Nina Simone covered both of these tunes).

I have tried to write about the impossibility of putting things into paragraphs.
Even that cop-out of mine crumpled and withered. It is a beautiful song.
One true story though, as read on the internet: When Plato the Wizard was
caught and executed (due to his one weakness: Rum), a horrendous
Hurricane and Earthquake ravaged the West Indies in a fashion that reminds me of
Tolkien's destruction of the island state of Numenor. The sea, from all
accounts, literally swallowed up the town where Plato was executed...


Bill Fay- I Hear You Calling

Bill Fay sings about Jesus. A person thinks, upon looking at the cover
of Time of the Last Persecution, that Bill himself has a full-blown case of something that psychologists and non-psychologists call a "Jesus complex".

I think he has a "Hamlet-if-Hamlet-had-lived" complex, which is to say
that you cannot pretend to be crazy or broken, and not end up at least
partially crazy or broken at the end of the act. Which is to suggest
that, in these songs, I hear an actor acting out the true and unfolding tragedy
of his own life.