Happy holidays to all. As a special treat to you, dear readers, I have posted the fruit of another month or so of musical experimentation. I have uploaded 11 new songs, attached at the bottom of my music list on the right hand side of the page. They include new songs such as “You Define Me,” as well as a ballad I wrote 15 years ago called “Death in Venice,” and an experimental piece called “The Plane That Took Her To Heaven.” Enjoy! And merry Christmas!
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Merry Xmas
Posted in Holidays, Music, tagged Salon De La Guerre on December 26, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Happy Hanukkah, Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Listening
Posted in Music, tagged Hanukkah, Salon De La Guerre, Thanksgiving on November 28, 2013| 2 Comments »
I want to send warm wishes to any of my regular readers who likely have stopped coming by for irregular posts from me, their perfidious bastard host. I have not one but two excuses for my slack postings, but one of those things might have finally paid off for you, at least if you’re a fan of my music. Of course, fatherhood has kept me from being as engaged with both blogging and pop culture as I used to be. My son needs more from me as he gets older. It bears mentioning that our family lost a very young member this year (a second cousin of Xander’s) in an ATV accident and I realize even more now than ever (even more so, if possible than after my mom died) how precious this time is with my son. So I am sorry, my faithful readers, if you feel as if I have treated you as second class passengers.
When I do have spare time, I’ve had to use it wisely on the many art forms I dabble in, and this autumn, that has meant a return to music. The album I recorded, “The Mechanical Bean,” is now complete. OK, that’s a fairly big statement considering that some of the songs could use remastering and maybe even another pass at a vocal or two. But the bottom line is that I was racing to finish this album by next year, and instead I went through a highly edifying, fruitful period of arranging during some late night hours and lunch times over the last few months and my fervor to finish reached a torrid frenzy in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Last night, it happened. It’s ovah, as they say on Long Island.
The result is now on your right. The first 22 songs on my home page are all the songs from “The Mechanical Bean” in chronological order. Click through each in turn and this is how you are meant to experience the album. I tried to make the styles different enough that you could shuffle the album’s songs and still have fun listening to it, but you’ll have to wait until I get them on ITunes. That is, in fact, my next order of business.
The album mixes the silly and inane with the polished and serious. I think I’ve become a better singer, but it is part of my aesthetic (nay, it’s the very suggestion of my blog’s name) that amateurism, accidents, trial and error and first passes still have a place in art and that beauty is indeed imperfection. I worked hard to make “Test Tube She” sound polished. I worked hard to make “A Man With No Name” sound the opposite–so stupid that it still embarrasses me a bit. But if an artist isn’t willing to embarrass himself he’s probably not interested in the holy act of discovery and therefore doesn’t deserve the sobriquet “artist” in the first place.
I have more songs to record, but for a while I’ll likely just be fiddling with these or turning back to my literary endeavors. I should probably take one of these art forms more seriously, but then again, being unserious and capricious is sometimes one of the nicer things about being alive. And being alive is, still, what I’m most thankful for this year. That and my wife and my son.
And you, if you’re still reading.
The Hero In His Own Town
Posted in Music, tagged Salon De La Guerre, The Hero In His Own Town on November 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »
If you mix a lifelong love of John Fahey with a lifelong love of Joy Division, my feeling is that you’d get something like this. Maybe with a little ’70s sitcom music thrown in.
“The Hero In His Own Town”
By Salon De La Guerre
Copyright 2013
There was a fire
But we saved the town
Someone robbed a bank
But we stopped them cold
And we drove all the drug dealers away
The mayor came round
And threw us a parade
And now they hate us
The locals do not trust us
And our power
Now they conspire us
Every hour
And now they try to run us
Out of town
No one loves a hero
In his own town.
Sooner or later
They’re going to
Cut you down
Music by Eric R. Rasmussen (copyright 2013)
You Did Not Believe Me …
Posted in Music, tagged Garage Rock, Salon De La Guerre, Test Tube She, The Mechanical Bean on November 15, 2013| Leave a Comment »
… but yes, even newer music from Salon De La Guerre today. My newest attempt to fumble accidentally on purpose into a hit single. “Test Tube, She,” from my forthcoming album, The Mechanical Bean. I compressed this one all over the place. That’s a technical way of saying I’m trying not to hurt your ears with so many shearing guitar noises. Lemme know if it hurts.
New Music From Salon De La Guerre
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre on November 9, 2013| 1 Comment »
If you are a long-suffering fan of my music (and you can take that statement two ways) then you’ll be happy to know that you’re about to get a slew of new works from my project Salon De La Guerre. Within a few months, I hope to release a whole album’s worth of new material. Some of these pieces have already appeared on my home page in the past, but I’ve kicked up the production for the rest of the album into high gear, producing several new pieces in the last month and a half.
The work is a loose concept album called “The Mechanical Bean,” which follows the unhappy experiences of a farm family that develops superpowers after genetically modified corporate pollen blows onto their land. The album is a mix of garage rock and experimental noise stuff. My usual interests. My hope is that by the middle of next year I’ll have a total of 60 songs up on this Web site.
Though you might have already heard “The Mechancial Bean Part I,” I’m offering you now its follow up, called “Transformation Part 1.” Enjoy it here or here.
‘Guyville’ Turns 20
Posted in Music, tagged Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair, Spin on July 26, 2013| 4 Comments »
As many of you know, Liz Phair’s debut album Exile in Guyville, is turning 20. That one of my favorite albums ever has turned this corner is supposed to make me feel old. And it makes one ask the question: “When will the genius who made this album ever make a second one?”
Sorry for the snark, but one must occasionally torment his heroes, and after listening to subsequent outings by Phair, I feel like I’ve earned the right to be sarcastic. Oh sure, she’s shown flashes of brilliance here and there, but she was never again as focused as she was on this album, whose cohesive themes of relationships as politics, of female sexuality as a form of forced role play, remain so strongly observed that I still believe they are misunderstood to this day. When I read reviews of Guyville, even in this decade, I bristle when I hear such things as “This is the album where she was really being herself and playing from the heart.” It was obvious to me then and now that Phair was speaking through different female characters on the album, some showing extreme vulnerability, some showing brazen manipulative streaks, some showing the virtues of female sexual aggressiveness. It seemed as powerfully observed as experienced. Take the “Divorce Song,” a take on a doomed romance that tries to capture the pride of two lovers who don’t want to give up even though they should. Or the line from “Strange Loop,” “I always wanted you. I only wanted more than I knew,” which is probably the cruelest, saddest, most brutally honest observation one can make about the reasons many people part, even good ones, even people who really love each other. Despite her first-person treatments, Phair is always standing both inside and outside these observations. If you thought of her only as the girl who sang the dirty blow job lyrics, seems to me the prurience was all yours, not hers.
But she wasn’t without empathy. She let her insecurities hang out more than her boobs, and that’s why people fell in love with her. Furthermore, she couched this in the kind of guitar playing that I would call almost willfully naive, aggressively unknowing. She played chords no professional musician would play because they might have been called discordant at best or just plain wrong. Some of them are ingenious–a plagal cadence starts the album off on “6’1″” and is slyly completed in the album’s last song, “Strange Loop,” neatly allowing the musical and emotional promises of the album to come to fruition at the same time. There are also riffs I still can’t figure out after years of trying to deconstruct them on a guitar. “Dance of the Seven Veils,” one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard–ever–is a piece I’ve given up trying to figure out. It turns me into an infant, sends me back into my fetal dream state whenever it comes on.
For those reasons I haven’t been too concerned with Phair’s long and sometimes embarrassing post-Guyville decline. It seems the more she learned about the guitar, the worse she’s become. The critics who always disliked her (there were a few vocal ones 20 years ago) called her stuff self-indulgent and preconceived, and if they had heard anything other than Guyville, they were damn near right on the money. Her searching guitar chords became as aimless as her strange imagery: “six dick pimps” and “polyester brides” and lots of other confusing crap. It didn’t help that she was already walking a wobbly rail, trying to make rock music for adults, which people like Lou Reed might tell you is a treacherous way to make a living. Occasionally she hit a gold streak–the way she observes her son’s chance run-in with her new lover on the album Liz Phair (in the song “Little Digger.”) But her guileless approach seemed to work against her more than for her as the years went on and the suits came in and tried to save her career (making her work with the Matrix, known for working with acts like Avril Lavigne and Britney Spears–not the kind of people who are going to gently unravel the emotional nuances of sexually ravenous single moms). Phair’s own ambitions for “big sounds” also made it feel like she was being pulled in different directions artistically, and you can’t blame that on a record company.
Why do I not care? Because with one album, she had already done her share. Exile in Guyville isn’t an album. It’s a gift. A gift to the world. And I don’t feel old hearing it now, don’t feel any kind of cheap nostalgia–which is unfortunately the main reason a lot of people listen to music–because, like the brush marks on a gestural painting, the music and lyrics on Guyville still feel alive to the world, still address contemporary issues and will keep giving to the here and now. Compare anything on Alanis Morrisette’s first album, which ranges from ranting to coyness to cuteness and whose most famous song increasingly grates for its loud and repeated inaccurate use of the word “ironic.”
So yes, Liz, I’m waiting for you to make a (real) second album. But if you don’t, I promise I’ll never ask what have you done for me lately. Happy birthday, Guyville!
What Have We Learned On The Internet About The Mindy McCready Tragedy?
Posted in Music, Uncategorized, tagged Billy McKnight, country music, Mindy McCready, suicide, The View, YouTube on February 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Country star Mindy McCready died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound on February 17. What are we learning from Internet trolls about her life and music?
–*She was an angel.
–*No she wasn’t, she was a bad mom.
–*Yeah, she abandoned her kids.
–*No she didn’t, she tried to get them back.
–*Yeah, by kidnapping them. Drug addict!
–*Yeah, and her music blows.
–*This was a senseless tragedy.
–*If by “senseless” you mean everybody saw it coming a mile away.
–*You guys don’t know her pain. I know she kidnapped her son, did drugs, forged prescriptions for OxyContin, drove drunk, overdosed while pregnant, jumped bail, neglected her children and murdered a dog. But are those things worthy of judgment?
–*Rest in peace, Mindy.
–*Rot in hell, Mindy!
–*I don’t believe the hate I see on the Internet.
–*I don’t believe the hate I see on the Internet and I am only three years old.
–*Dean Cain is hot!
–*The church is very strict about suicide and she will not be saved. Love, Pope Benedict (ret)
–*The Second Amendment is the law and nobody can change that. Just try.
–*Look, Mindy never did anything to me personally, so I guess I’ll give her a pass.
–*I wish I could just hug those two children close to me, feel their little hearts beating against mine, fondle their hair, whisper to them, “It’s OK. It’s OK” while I explain to them that their mother was a drug-addled screw up.
–*Why does Roger Clemens get to be involved in EVERY scandal?
–*I don’t know. I trust Dr. Drew implicitly and I still think he can save her.
–*I do not trust the liberal media! Mindy is alive!
–*Whore whore whore!
–*You are an evil pig for saying that.
–*He’s just trying to get a rise out of you and her fans.
–*Don’t tell me who I can call evil.
–*Fuck you!
–*No, fuck you!
–*My sister looks like Mindy McCready.
–*Good, maybe your sister will kill herself.
–*You’ve got to be pretty messed up to make Tom Sizemore look good.
–*When I think of those poor children, it just gets me thinking about my own life and my OxyContin additions and the outstanding warrant I have and my constant fear that the police are going to break down my door any minute. And I just think of those poor, poor children.
–*When I got in an argument with my boyfriend about going out with the girls, I put on “Guys Do It All The Time” by Mindy to rub it in his face. And when we broke up and got back together, I had to play him “Ten Thousand Angels” to let him know I wouldn’t fall for it all again. And when we did get back together and broke up again I played “You’ll Never Know.”
–*Is there any question about why he left you?
–*I don’t know, I’m pretty smart about these things. I think this had something to do with the 9/11 conspiracy.
–*An ecclesiastical question: Is that dog going to hell?
–*I never met Mindy, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and blame myself for her death.
–*Death diminishes all of us. Even Mindy McCready’s death. I think.
–*Her Web site headline is “I’m Still Here.” Will somebody please do something about that?
–*Satin Satin Satin!
–*The spelling is “Satan” you dipshit.
–*Mindy, you were let down by so many people. Your mother, your father, BNA Records, the father of your first baby, the judges, Roger Clemens, the parole board, Dr. Drew, Vivid Entertainment, the father of your second baby, the Arizona police, the Tennessee police, Capitol Records, Dean Cain, Drake Berehowsky, The View, the makers of Darvocet. … So many people let you down.
–*You all need help! There is so much hate here.
–*I hate you.
–*I hope you rot in hell and Satan himself gives you a punji stick infection and drinks blood from your skull you impotent wuss. And I hope he pokes your eyes out and eats them like marshmallows that he roasts over licking hell flames before putting them down his gullet and then I hope you can still see with them as he shits them out into fire shit … We love you Mindy!
–*I hope for Mindy’s sake, comments are going to be disabled soon.
–*Comments disabled.
My Cousin Brad’s Music!
Posted in Music, tagged Brad Rasmussen, Chamberlin Birch, Jody Feeley on November 9, 2012| 1 Comment »
My cousin Brad Rasmussen has got the attention of some music bigwigs for his musical duo, Chamberlin Birch, which today released their debut album on iTunes, along with the video for their first video, “Falling In Love,” which you can see here:
Live Blogging the Grammys
Posted in Music, tagged Adele, Foo Fighters, Grammys, Jack Black, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, Pink, Whitney Houston on February 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »
–*Whitney Houston’s premature death casts a pall over the proceedings, and reminds us not only that a huge hunk of talent has left us, but that large amorphous, clumping chunks of mediocrity have not.
–*Pink, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Betty White are conspicuous by their absence.
–*Cross-genre power duets are kind of like the All Star Game. Why would we want to watch talented people perform badly just to titillate 13-year-olds?
–*Oh, yeah. This is the Grammys.
–*Suze Orman says variable annuities are a scam. Sorry, I changed the channel there.
–*Chris Brown makes mediocrity his bitch, slaps that mediocrity and rides it like the mediocre whore she is. You could say he rules the mediocrity.
–*Adele wins for best pop vocal for “Someone Like You.” You might remember that as the song that was great 10,000 listenings ago.
–*L.L. Cool J says a prayer for Whitney Houston and tries to turn the Grammys from a sad event into a celebration of music. Bruno Mars turns it back into a sad occasion.
–*How in the hell does Steve Van Zandt zip around the world to tour with the E. Street Band, shoot the show “Lilyhammer,” and still have time to serve humanitarian causes? I guess you really do have a lot of time on your hands if you refuse to play “Sun City.”
–*Student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, says Suze Orman. … Sorry, I really wasn’t into that Kelly Clarkson duet with what’s his name.
–*L.L. Cool J is so cool he can ably and confidently lead us through this emotionally confusing moment, when celebration meets loss, in a way that merits comparison with the modernist verse of a William Butler Yeats or the comforting, avuncular, telegenic presence of James Garner on “Eight Simple Rules …”
–*The ceremony of innocence is drowned. If we are lucky, it will drown out that Maroon 5 song about Mick Jagger.
–*Never underwrite anything, says Suze.
–*The Grammys has become expansive enough to include new categories including “Best Grunge,” “Best Gansta Rap,” “Best New Artist Who Is Likely To Die in a Drug Related Incident” and “The Best Bad Music.”
–*We can feel comfortable that even though Bruce Springsteen’s songs are starting to sound the same, at least his energetic performances are still giving him good cardio burn.
–*It’s probably good that Jay-Z is not here, since his bodyguards tend to keep people away from places it’s appropriate for them to be, whether it’s parents trying to get into the Lenox Hill neonatal care unit or Adele trying to get to her Grammy.
–*The Beach Boys’ reunion happens under a cloud–Whitney Houston’s death and Maroon 5’s continued existence.
–*You can’t argue with Adele’s outrageous success. And yet it keeps arguing with you, even after it has made its point, feeling the need to follow you into every grocery store, every Starbucks, every bank and even into your home and onto your television. This sore winner will not stop trying to win the argument.
–*”Beach Boys’ Marooned.” “Maroon 5 Beached.” The possibilities are endless.
–*This just in: Brian Wilson and Keith Richards still alive.
–*Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, with their odd costumes, bizarre technical difficulties and strange agitprop, remind people of Madonna, but increasingly ought to remind people of Andy Kaufman.
–*We all seem to forget that Amy Winehouse died this year, too. Thanks, Whitney, for upstaging Amy when it was her time to shine as the prematurely dead substance abuser of the moment. Does Winehouse get no respect even in death?
–*Taylor Swift is so elegant she belongs in a perfume ad. No, really. She belongs only in a perfume ad.
–*Justin Vernon of Bon Iver thanks everybody who has won a Grammy and people who will never win a Grammy, his agents, his mom and dad and the people his have worked with … . Barbers who shave themselves, barbers who do not shave themselves. Musicians who have never won and who will never be considered for winning. … You know if he just thanked everybody who drew breath, he’d probably cut down on this acceptance speech … but no, according to Godel’s incompleteness theorem, there are still people he will likely not have thanked… did he mention he didn’t think he deserved to be there?
–*The best thing about the Grammys, as we listen to a variety of rap, country, rock, soul and jazz, is that we can all get together in a relaxed atmosphere and agree that we hate each other’s music.
–*Who will win “Artist of the Year”? If you really love music, you could easily turn off the TV before hearing the answer to this misleading, irrelevant question.
–*On an extended version of the Beatles’ Abbey Road suite, Paul McCartney leads a star-studded jam session, including Bruce Springsteen, Joe Walsh, Dave Grohl, and others of a small handful of people the music industry hasn’t been awful to.
My New Sound Cloud Page
Posted in Music, tagged ER Salo Deguierre, Leaving Babylon, Salon De La Guerre, Time Traveling Humanist Mangled By Space Turbine on July 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »
As my regular readers/friends/family members/acquaintances/co-workers/fellow Masons known, I am not much of a self-promoter. Oklahomans, a group I sheepishly sometimes admit I once belonged to, don’t like boasting and are sometimes almost pathologically polite and self-deprecating. A sometimes nice quality that keeps us from being Texans–that and a lack of ambition. Anyway, that’s why I create so much material and generally suck at telling people about it. I have this self-defeating idea sometimes that people don’t want to have art shoved down their throat, they want to discover it themselves, which in a way makes it partly theirs. I ought to know that’s stupid, since people regularly take the stuff forced on them by radio as if it’s good when some of it is worthless. And yet shoving people against the wall and saying “Hey, look at my stuff!” always feels to me like I’m being obnoxious, coercive, self-centered and narcissistic. It’s worse when I run into a person who has no problem bragging about his novel in progress, which is going to send him to heights of Olympian glory any day now, and I’m too sheepish to admit that I’ve written a few of them
That’s one of the reasons I let Stephanie do most of the promotion on “The Retributioners,” our hysterically funny if currently moribund Web show. But unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury in my novel-writing career, where I am forced all by my lonesome to look for agents and publishers in squeaky, mousy-voiced little query letters that rarely if ever show the sum of my talents. I’ve started this process again recently after parting ways with my literary agent and I’m getting used to the rejections all over again. Do you remember the scene at the beginning of “Paradise Lost” where dogs are eating out the bowels of one of the fallen angels? That’s what it feels like trying to sell a novel, just in case you’ve never tried it. Every time I run into a little failure with my ventures, though, I do an honorable thing–I simply start a new project. A new song, a new book or a new screenplay–before the sting of the rejection can hit. Believe me, this shit is starting to pile up, and I’m starting to think that I’m going to drop dead with mountains of work that nobody will ever read or hear or see. That leads to a more self-defeating attitude: Well, maybe everybody will get it when I’m dead and in the meantime I’ll stay happily anonymous.
Stupid, I know.
So, in the interest of promoting myself again, I’m going to focus a bit on my music in this post. As far as I know from my odometer readings (?) on this here WordPress site, I get approximately ZERO hits on my music. Really! I count maybe five click-throughs in the past year total. Maybe the stats page doesn’t count right. Could that possibly be it?
My first reaction to this silence was that my music must suck so bad nobody is polite enough to tell me. I took it like I took all the rejection of the book world: I’ve failed to make an impression, time to move on. I know I can’t sing well and my production is off, and my time-keeping is also a little messy. I finally sent out one tune to some friends to get their reactions. I’d say I got four positive reactions and two lukewarm reactions.
Then earlier this year I played all my stuff for an actual musician who said that, barring my bad time-keeping on the drum machine (a pet peeve of his) my stuff was certainly worthy of hearing, if not nominating for a Grammy. Then another musician seconded that, and then a third. So I tried an experiment–listening to it from other people’s computers. Turns out, a lot of the time I couldn’t open the files, which required users to download QuickTime. Could it be that nobody even had a chance to reject my stuff?
So now I ponder: Do I dare ask you, my dear readers, who came here seeking comedy and or Republican-bashing, to listen to my music one more time? If you are willing to, then I’m making the journey easier for you: I’ve finally opened up an account with Sound Cloud. This player is meant not just to share music but to be interactive–it allows users to make comments on parts of the tracks they don’t like. But the best thing for me is, it doesn’t require you to download files to your computer. You can just press the big, candy-like button here:
Leaving Babylon
In the interest of space and a clean layout, I’ve moved all these Sound Cloud files to a new tab on my home page, which you can see at the top of the menu or which you can click on here. (You can also check out my Sound Cloud profile page, but I don’t like it as much because I can’t control the format or song order.) Not all my music is on Sound Cloud, just 13 of what I consider the best songs. If I start getting some decent hits, then I’ll upload more of the music, and if I get a lot of hits, I’m going to start going into promotion mode–sending out free MP3 files with my complete album “Time Traveling Humanist Mangled By Space Turbine” to anybody who requests it. Here’s a sample of the art work, created by my friend Corey Sanders:
Beauty is Imperfection 