Jawbox

Sources close to the band say that Jawbox will reunite on a late-night TV show to coincide with the reissue of the band’s third and finest LP, For Your Own Special Sweetheart. This is not a prelude to a tour, the same people say. I spoke to J Robbins last week, and he didn’t mention anything about this, but he did admit that a few one-off shows weren’t totally outside the realm of possibility. “We’ve entertained the notion of playing some shows, but that’s as far as its gotten,” said Robbins. “It’s conceivable, but only remotely, that we could play some shows.”

But playing on somebody else’s show? Looks like that’s a little more of a possibility.

Update: According to Billboard, Jawbox will appear Dec. 8 on NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

“Savory” video after the jump:

Way back in 1989, when DC was still more of an all-hardcore-all-the-time kind of place, Slumberland Records took a chance and pressed its first 7″, What Kind of Heaven Do You Want, a compilation featuring DC-based indie-pop bands Velocity Girl, Black Tambourine, and Powder Burns. Since then the label has become one of the most beloved purveyors of twee and fuzzy music, releasing a slate of well-loved records by Stereolab, Rocketship, and, more recently, Crystal Stilts, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

The anniversary concert will feature performances by label artists both new (Crystal Stilts) and old (The Ropers, Nord Express). Lineup details after the jump.

Slumberland 20th Anniversary Concert

Friday, Nov .13
The Black Cat

Crystal Stilts
Brown Recluse
Pants Yell!
Frankie Rose and The Outs
The Ropers
Nord Express
Lorelei

Might as well post the details for the Brooklyn show, too:

Saturday, Nov. 14
Brooklyn, NY
The Bell House

Crystal Stilts
Brown Recluse
Pants Yell!
Frankie Rose and The Outs
The Ropers
Nord Express
Lorelei
Special Surprise Guest

Anyway, that was the birth of my long-running Sonic Youth fanboy-ism, which culminated earlier this week in my purchase of the band’s new album, The Eternal, through Matador’s Buy Early Get Now program.

Instead of holding out for a promo, or stealing it via leak, I figured I would suck it up and honor the band by, you know, paying for its music. This was not cheap: The double LP, plus bonus LP package, cost me a little more than $40. There’s a bunch of bonus stuff, though, including an early stream of the record and mp3 outtakes. Also, I bought the most expensive version available, so I really only have myself to blame.

But purchasing The Eternal has reintroduced me to a record-buying behavior that I experienced frequently in ‘95, but had forgotten as of late: trying hard.

During the ’90s, when CDs cost up to $18 a piece, buying music was not an entirely frivolous investment. If you were a pre-teen at the time, like I was, that sum represented a lot of time logged raking leaves and chopping back pyracantha bushes. And if you didn’t immediately enjoy that record–be it Naked City’s self-titled record or White Zombie’s La Sexorcisto–you just had to listen to it over and over again until you enjoyed it. It was, after all, on your dime. In the Mp3 era, when music can be obtained quickly, easily, and cheaply, there’s no financial incentive to trust anything but your initial impressions of a record. You can just throw it in the virtual trash can and move on to the next band.

When I streamed The Eternal for the first time yesterday, I was kind of disappointed. As Sonic Youth albums go, it’s in the Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star vein–not bad, but sort of stuck in a holding-pattern. Maybe I was just in a bad mood. It’s better than that Grizzly Bear record, for sure. At any rate, I just dropped $50 on this thing, so rather than snarking it on this blog, I’m going to listen to that audio-stream as many times as it takes for me to start enjoying it. By the time the physical product shows up in my mailbox, on-or-before June 9, hopefully I’ll have converted myself.

And if not, well, at least there’s that live bonus-LP.

For those unfamiliar with BMG, when you signed up you got to pick 12 or so free CDs out of its catalog so long as you agreed to purchase one. This all played out over the course of a couple of months. After that was all over BMG would continue to mail you its CD of the month unless you sent them a card declining the offer. This CD was usually terrible and never free, which caused a little bit of household friction if you were too absent minded to keep up with the correspondence and wound up owing $16 for an unwanted copy of Eric Clapton’s Pilgrim.

Initially I was shocked that BMG had even made it this far into the new millennium. Twelve-for-one is a pretty good deal, but not as good a deal as the internet’s rather popular as-much-music-as-you-want-for-free counter offer.

But I gotta say, I feel a pang of grief at the institution’s passing. During high school 12 CDs deal gave me a chance to experiment with some records that wound up being very important for me, but I probably wouldn’t have bought at full price–Naked City’s first album, Talking Heads 77, Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine. Full disclosure, these were the only good CDs that I ordered. That leaves 9 more records and as I paw through the storage bin I realize that there was a reason that the cute punk rock girl in high school wasn’t into me and it probably had something to do with this copy of Phish’s Picture of Nectar, or this copy of Rusted Root’s When I Woke. Depressingly enough, hindsight indicates that BMG’s CD of the month–which included The Cars’ first record–was often way cooler than the hippie drivel that I was selecting myself.

Thanks BMG. I’ll miss you.

While reading Washington Post pop critic Josh DuLac’s recent profile on Rucker I was surprised to find that the front man seems to hold his multi-platinum selling group’s contributions to popular culture in about the same esteem as I do– a low one. He’s put the group on hiatus and during DuLac’s profile Rucker makes several subtle attempts to distance himself from the band’s insidious pro-shop rock, dropping low key disses along the lines of the “I loved Hootie…but.”

Here he cops to the lightweight nature of the band’s music :

“We were a bar band that got lucky,” Rucker says with a shrug. “We were just in the right place at the right time with the right record. People were tired of being depressed; they wanted to be happy. We told them to ‘hold my hand’ and we sold 16 million records.” We still believe that nobody does what we do better than us. But . . . we knew we hadn’t made ‘Abbey Road.’ “

Here he explains that a life of idly strumming “I only want to be with you” to an audience of shrieking middle-aged yuppies was not all that he had dreamed:

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been this happy. I’m so ecstatic about all of this. I just want to play. I want. To. Play. After being in a band for a long time, playing the same songs, I mean, yeah, I’ll play ‘em. But it feels great to want to play again.”

Finally, Rucker acknowledges that, yes, Hootie was way uncool:

“I didn’t think anybody would give me a record deal,” he says. “Hootie had run its course. We still had great touring lives, but nobody was buying Hootie & the Blowfish records. And there’s a stigma about being in Hootie. I thought that would be a liability.”

Yeah, that isn’t exactly a smackdown, but it subtly suggests that Rucker is aware that his old band sucked and that, you know, maybe he needs a little space right now. Some of the article’s other sources were a little less gentle. For instance Capitol Nashville president Mike Dungan had this to say about The Blowfish:

“But every time I’d see those guys on TV, I thought the black guy sounded like a country singer. I couldn’t even remember his name, and I was really disinterested in those records.”

Ooph!

And The New York Times‘ Jon Caramanica couldn’t help but lead his positive review of Rucker’s album with a slap at the Blowfish.

“No pop star has ever needed rescuing from his reputation more than Darius Rucker, frontman of Hootie & the Blowfish, perhaps the least consequential successful band ever.”

Served!

How about it Dean Felber, Jim Sonefeld, and Mark Bryan? Are you going to take this laying down? Defend your legacy! Sure, Cracked Rear View was some of the most odious music of the ’90s, but it was also the 15th best selling of all time! Are you going to let them push you around like NBA basketball players Alonzo Mourning, Alex English, Walt Williams, Muggsy Bogues, and Charles Smith pushed you around in your own music video?

But I also recognize that Murmur is accountable for a great deal sorrow in all of our lives. This is the album that, in a very real way, gave birth to some of the most insidious singers of the 1990s. Whenever a shirtless dude with a Hare Krishna hairdo and scads of eyeliner climbs on stage and proceeds to weep openly in front of a plain-jane hard rock band, it’s all kind of Michael Stipe’s fault.

REM’s stroke of genius was that they were arty, but never too arty. They looked and sounded relatively benign, but seemed mysterious because they had a modestly freaky and pretentious front man, that being Stipe.

In 1983 bassist Mike Mills looked like a high school math teacher. Stipe, on the other hand, was all brooding, deep, and poetic. He mumbled incoherently and cavorted around the stage. He wrote lyrics on the inside of matchbooks and, later on at least, started to dress kind of like an alien. All of this, in addition to the band’s fresh and jangly sound, made REM seem really deep.

This excerpt from REM’s 1990 concert movie Tourfilm illustrates what I’m trying to explain.

Here Stipe is sporting a mohawk and eyeliner. He mutters some terrible poetry before commencing to flail madly about the stage with his rat-tail whipping to-and-fro. All the while he’s taking himself super duper seriously. Meanwhile, guitarist Peter Buck could easily pass for a lesser member of NRBQ.

Arguably, there were a few good bands that followed this lead into their own thing. You know, Radiohead, and possibly Grant Lee Buffalo. But many more would tragically blunder. For a while it seemed like any group of mandolin strumming chuckleheads could get on MTV so long as some dude was willing to stand up front and add a dash of “alternative” spirit to the proceedings. And their ranks grew irritatingly thicker as the ’90s stretched onward.

Let’s examine a few of the worst offenders:

Blind Melon

Gonzo lead singer Shannon Hoon was basically all that Blind Melon had to differentiate the band from say, The New Bohemians. See him here hamming it up on David Letterman. I can’t help but wonder what the question mark on his forehead is supposed to signify? The nature of entertainment? The ponderous depths of a cranium unspooled? Maybe he had seen Eddie Vedder scrawl “pro-choice” on his arm during Pearl Jam’s Unplugged appearance and felt the need to do something, anything, similar. Jeez, he even calls out Kurt Cobain at the end.

Live

As far as Stipe-syndrome goes, Ed Kowalczyk is basically public enemy No.1. Watch him close his eyes and snap his fingers and then gesticulate toward the sky. He has the eyeliner covered. He even has the rat-tail. If any body ever stole a lock of Michael Stipe’s hair and placed it in an improvised bedroom relicary, it was probably this dude in 1990.

Toad the Wet Sprocket

Worst band name ever. Even worse than Buffalo Tom, which was pretty bad. I guess Toad aren’t the worst offenders, but Glen Phillips has a certain folk-diva squirreliness about him.

The Tragically Hip

It really kills me to put these guys up here, because I really love The Tragically Hip. But Gordon Downie–with his mid-song poetry slams, oblique lyrics, tucked-in-shirt, and hip swiveling–is about a perfect example as I could ask for. You have to hand it to The Tragically Hip though, they really sold this steez, at least to their fellow Canadians. Gordon Downie is the Rimbaud of the hockey rink and Dan Akroyd agrees with me.