I listened to Chunklet’s entire 45-minute assemblage of Fugazi stage patter. It seems to be drawn mostly from the Fugazi shows available to download from archive.org, but it has most of the classic bits, wrapping up, of course, with “ice cream-eating motherfucker.”

Things that it made me think:

• Fugazi has long been dogged by the notion that the band’s music is secondary to the band’s ethos and/or politics. The band is partly to blame for this, particularly thanks to MacKaye’s longstanding (and, I think, disingenuous) insistence that he’s a “communicator” not a “musician.” But I don’t think audiences would have put up with the most egregious Fugazi stage harangues if they hadn’t been one of the best touring bands on the planet. And although the intensity of their performances had something to do with that, ultimately I think the quality of the songwriting was much more important.
• In a perverse way, by singling out stage-divers and moshers, Fugazi rewarded the behavior they were trying to curtail. I bet there were a lot of people going around the day after a Fugazi show proud that MacKaye or Picciotto had called them an “asshole.”
• There’s very little music in the patter assemblage, but you do hear Fugazi tune up a lot, and they don’t stray much from standard tuning. And man, did listening to them talk ever make we want to hear them play.

For boring reasons, I spent most of the week isolated from my actual Fugazi compact discs, so I spent the most of the week listening to most of the aforesaid recordings available from archive.org. From which I learned the following:

• Fugazi wasn’t a perfect performance unit. If you listen to enough live takes, you eventually hear a few things that actually qualify as mistakes.
• Even early on, they didn’t make mistakes often.

I’ve been seeing a lot of best of decade lists flying around lately, but it’s a teeny bit hard for me to take one seriously if it doesn’t have The Argument on it.

I blame this on my going on a Voivod kick a few weeks back, I think I saw the Voice of the Beehive discs, and the thought of wanting to hear them gradually wormed into the brain, with the the idea of answering two questions:

1. Was the first record (Let It Bee) as good as I remembered? Maybe even better. I intermittently became aware that I was overlooking production fillips I’m not fond of coz the songs were pushing my nostalgia buttons hard, but the songwriting on that record seems remarkably consistent — a cut above the self-penned Bangles and and Go-Gos tunes, maybe even prefiguring the sort of cynical relationship dissection that Amie Mann and Sleeper’s Louise Wener would later specialize in. And I still can’t count out the rhythm of “Trust Me,” without thinking about it a bit; there’s a smidge of complexity in the mostly simple, catchy pop-rock.
2. Was the final album, Sex and Misery really as bad as I remembered? Maybe not, but it’s not very good, either.

Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.

So maybe the most useful thing I can about “Mom and Dad Play Rock’n'Roll” is that listening to it makes tears well up in my eyes more than anything I can remember since Wilco’s Being There. I do think the song has ample quality in non-subjective terms. The lyric examines the plight of gracelessly aging amateur rockers with an odd mix of precision and compassion. The arrangement is masterful — I’m especially fond of the way the bass comes in at 1:11, right before “move the boxes, find the Gibson, dusty rust along the strings,” and the Cheap Trick-ish doubling of the last word of “your neighbors come to watch the house, and New York’s just two hours away.” I even learned to love the (thematically appropriate) fade out/fade back in and ramshackle finale.

It’s painfullly obvious to me, though, that part why this song cranks up my waterworks is because I, personally, have been wondering lately if I’ve already played my last show. The lyrics are all about the possibility of putting a band together again — but the chord progression knows that the possibility will remain forever unfulfilled.

It’s also worth mentioning that the album this song is from, Class Dismissed also features “Outbored Motor Boys,” the single best Bob Pollard pastiche I’ve ever heard.

Hat tip to Brian Block for hipping me to Krieger to start with.

“Salivating” was the first thing I heard from The Broken Family Band, but they’ve been around for a handful of years/albums, and I’m gradually exploring their back catalogue. They apparently started out as a sort of British take on Americana, with some identifiably country-ish traits, but now they’re producing straightforward rock with no particular genre signifiers. “Salivating,” with its bouncy bassline, simple-but-hooky verse riff, and energetically strummed chorus, sounds a little like a distant cousin of The Godfathers circa Birth, School, Work, Death.

Please and Thank You has several more strong songs, and a quarter of the way through 2009, it’s my current candidate for year’s best album.

At the moment you can listen to Salivating at The Broken Family Band’s official website.

You can check out “Witches vs. Wolves” at New York Night Train Recordings, and there are more links from there. S-S-S-Spectres EP Sea Potentia Divina is also available from eMusic and iTunes.

I’m way late to the party with this one. All the hip Brooklyn music blogs cooed over this back in 2007, and the band has already broken up. Sigh.

I have gone all completist about S-S-S-Spectres, and there’s evidence on the Internets that people have listened to tracks — notably “Magic Mountain Reference” and “Your Hands Are Missing Mine” — that I haven’t yet been able to track down. If you can help me listen to those, please get in touch.

Hitchcock’s voice is holding up quite well. You can hear a bit more strain at the top of his register, but not much. Rock-solid timing has never been his strong suit, and the one-two punch of “no drummer” and “lots of frantic strumming” led to several noticable gaffes. Hitchcock, who seemed relaxed and in good humor throughout, joked that we were getting the “organic” version of the show, from which the mistakes would subsequently be excised by the professional film crew.

Since there was a professional film crew (one could imagine that there might be some sort of 25th-anniversary hoopla for I Often Dream of Trains in the works for next year…) quite a lot of attention was paid to visual presentation, with Robyn taking the stage as a backlit, top-hatted silhouette, and wearing a black-and-white polka-dotted shirt against which his black-and-white polka-dotted electric guitar almost disappeared.

Highlights for me included the haunting, weird, and beautiful “Flavour of Night,” and “I Used to Say I Love You,” one of Hitchcock’s most straightforward, sad, and incisive songs (I think its lines “But you were reluctant/Although I was so hot/Now I understand it/But back then I did not” is genius). The barbershop trio arrangement of “Uncorrected Personality Traits” was outstanding, as were the three-part harmonies on faux-country “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” (with lyrics updated from Cold War anxieties to Global Warmng anxieites). (Hitchcock also revised “This Could Be the Day” to make it slightly less un-PC, or perhaps he just mumbled. Either way, I can’t say I blame him.)

My favorite of Hitchcock’s trademark loopy anecdotes involved the recent colonization of Boston, and the construction of Logan airport after several hundred planes had landed there. The introduction to “This Could Be the Day,” was also memorable, casting the song’s narrator as one of the “Mojave Shrimp,” waking to fornicate (with a passel of synonyms) after the arrival of the once-in-several-decades deluge.

But if they pull a “Mission of Burma”-style return to active duty (and I hope they do), I would love to see/hear them again when they have another few shows under their belt, hopefully in a better-sounding room, and when I’ve had a chance to rein in my own unrealistic expectations a bit.

Damn, I’m prescient. Original bassist Steve Michener was missed, especially on “Ron Klaus Wrecked His House,” “Hey! Mr. Liconoln,” and “Faith Healer,” tunes to which generally capable fill-in man Tommie could not quite bring the required subtlety. But on the whole September 2008 Dipper seemed more sure-footed than April 2008 Dipper. Bill Goffrier had a little trouble pacing his voice through the set, but saved plenty of vim and vigor for the encore (”You’re Not Patsy”). And, most promisingly, there was a new tune (”Joke,” according to Bill’s shirt) with the typical Dipper earmark: just when you think you’ve got it pinned down, it takes a sharp left turn without becoming an iota less catchy. As an added bonus, after all these years, I’m finally clear on who is Bill and who is Gary Waliek. Bill is on the left:

Big Dipper seemed to feel constrained by their set time, so we didn’t get to hear two of the songs on Bill’s shirt, “Meet the Witch” and “Guitar Named Desire.”

We did, however, get to hear: Mr. Woods, She’s Fetching, Loch Ness Monster, Wake Up the King, Lunar Module, “Joke,” Edith, Bony Knees of Nothing [Gary: Here's one from our bad album. Bill: He's cute, he's real cute], Hey! Mr. Lincoln, Ron Klaus Wrecked His House, All Going Out Together, Younger Bums, and a rousing earned-encore rendition of You’re Not Patsy:

Bill says “Oh, yeah!!”

I do, too.

Also, Bill said a word to me! It was “Hi.” I was struck dumb.

*

Boston Spaceships were really friggin’ good. It’s a little scary sometimes to watch Pollard: at times, he seemed like the incoherent rambling man you’d want not to sit next to on the bus. But he can still sing. And the band, critically, stayed a little less soused. There was a hellalotta beer on stage, but there was also some vitamin water.

Tommy Keene brought much rock and gave great guitar cord:

Jason Narducy brought much rock. But do not throw a beer at this man! He does not like it when you do that.

Chris Slusarenko and John Moen brought much rock too, but I didn’t manage to photograph them doing it very well. This is maybe a good time to mention that “Rat Trap” rocked so hard and so well I didn’t even recognize it.

Selected bits of Bob Pollard’s wisdom:

“I remember playing the ‘rat back in 1978″ (much laughter).

Much love was expressed for Dipper and Bill Goffrier’s moves, in particular “the circle,” but I didn’t capture it verbatim.

“That was fucking prog rock [mumble] Peter Gabriel. It moved me. I don’t give a shit what it did to you, but it moved me.”

“Drunk and tight — if you can do that, you’ve got it made.” Which is a good point to get heretical: I saw Guided by Voices only twice, and neither was a typical GbV experience; one was an outdoor festival with the classic lineup, and one was the co-headlining tour with Cheap Trick. But Boston Spaceships might be a better band than GbV. Moen’s an awesome drummer, Narducy kept up with him, and the guitar onslaught of Slusarenko and Keene was nigh onstoppable. So I felt a bit bad about this:

People were pretty much going apeshit all night, but the end of the first encore was “Game of Pricks” and everybody went really apeshit. (Incidentally, I do believe the club did not want the band to play a second encore — one of the few times I’ve seen the house lights go back down after coming all the way up.*) From there on out it was all GbV: A Salty Salute, Motor Away, [I think I forgot something here], Cut-Out Witch, and Tractor Rape Chain. And this band and this band’s material deserved better than to get the biggest response of the night for the other band’s songs. But here’s why I was going apeshit, in especial particular: because I could feel just how much Chris Slusarenko had dreamed of playing these very songs and how much he love playing them, and because I know how very much fun most of those songs are to play myself. So there’s that.

* It’s gotta be a bit of a double-edged sword to book Pollard into your club. You know your drink sales are gonna be a New Year’s Eve levels, but so are your cleanup requirements.

143 artists, 455 tracks.