So, yeah.... It's not Tuesday anymore. See, what had happened wuz.....
Of the three Cover-Tastic Tuesday posts so far, only one has actually made it to the site on a Tuesday. BtB is nothing, if not a well-oiled, interweb savvy, blog-o-spheric, 1's & 0's-spittin' machine. Go team! We'll try harder, I promise. In my defense, we (The Train Wrecks) played in Charleston, SC, last nite @ The Pour House, which rawked, and then hauled arse back to Savannah to play at 10:30AM (like, in the morning... ouch) for the B-I-G HUGE announcement that Rock & Run will be comin' to town next year. Mayor Otis was there, we've got pictures comin' in the Savannah Morning News (ed. - scroll through the pics on the rock & run link), the people from the big, talkin' picture box were there to get some video footage of us, and a suprisingly large number of SAV's movers & shakers were there. In suits & ties (& pant-suits for the power ladies. I like-a dat look for some reason.... Meeee-ow!), all sweatin' like Sarah Palin during a vocabulary test. (Palin - "I can see Russia from my house, and I can make up entire new words on a whim") Heat index was around 115 degrees. Ugh. And now it's nap time, for reals....
But let's take on the latest cover tune before I pass out:
The Fountains - "Talks American"
I first heard this song back when I was livin' in Clemson, SC (Go Tigers? Bein' a Clemson sports fan is brutal). It's a pretty sleepy college town, with not much in the way of a history of notable musical exports. Perhaps the one exception were the gentlemen from Sunbrain. They were the most successful, if not arguably the best, out of a crop of melodic punk-ish indie groups that sprang up in and around the Clemson area during the grunge-alternative bakesale that was goin' on in the 90's. (Everybody gets a contract! Everybody gets airplay!!) They toured a good bit regionally, recorded a bad-ass debut LP, and got snapped up by the newly formed Grass Records. (Quick aside: Grass Records eventually turned into Wind-Up Records, which unleashed Creed on the world, so fuck them, but anyway....) Grass Records had a pretty fantastic roster of high-quality, probably-not-made-for-the-mainstream bands (The Wrens, FTW!), which also included a very young band out of Omaha named Commander Venus, fronted by a precocious kid named Conor Oberst. Today, known mainly as Bright Eyes, he commands huge audiences, beds models & actresses, and moistens the panties of indie/hipster kids the world 'round. Well, he was obviously taking copious notes while listening to and performing with Sunbrain, cause his quivering vibrato that the kids swoon to (because emotion?) are a total rip of the quivering vibrato of Sunbrain's singer David Dondero (because EMOTION!) Oberst even admits it in a June 2004 Spin article naming Sunbrain's Perfection Lies one of the albums that had the most influence on him. Dondero, a criminally underexposed and underappreciated (ed. - sroll down to #10) singer-songwriter now based out of San Francisco, continues to put out beautiful, thoughtful music that, in a more perfect world, would allow him the fame & fortune to be sipping Cristal on a bed littered w/ sweaty, satisfied starlets, while Conor would (should?) be drinkin' OE 800 and eatin' bologna sandwiches outta the back of a 1987 Chevy Astro. I could go on an Oberst-hatin', what-are-you-kids -thinkin' jag forever, but I guess I'll go ahead and digress. Deep breath... In with the good air, out with the bad....
All this lovin' & hatin' leads to the song in the spotlight today. Sunbrain's guitarist Russ Halluer formed Ghostmeat Records in Clemson, SC, before the demise of the band, then picked up his tent and moved to Athens, GA, while things within the group slowly fell apart. A good deal of Ghostmeat's musical output came in the form of numerous, varied, and typically excellent compilation discs featuring bands from the Clemson/Athens area, as well as friends from far afield that they had met while on tour. Of the many standouts scattered across these mixes is "Talks American", by Athens, GA's, The Fountains. A protest song of sorts against the conservative governmental and religious values brought to the forefront during the Reagan era (ed.- totally not dating myself there, right? i turn 76 yrs. old next may. yay social security!!!) , the band sets surreal situations (with The Messiah in a starring role, played by various actors) into exaggerated dogmatic, and sometimes very real, societal norms of the time. It's funny and poignant at the same time, and certainly damning as well, and it's all put to a bluegrass-indebted acoustic guitar figure that ramps up to a full-on rock & roll stomp by the song's end. I don't really know what ultimately happened to the band, and it's just another example of an artist with a really fantastic product that, through financial concerns, personal issues, or just plain bad fuckin' luck, got lost in the shuffle and faded into obscurity. It's a bullshit business, fo' sho', but hopefully a little light will shine on these guys and this wonderful song.
On a related side-note, the last line of this song goes:
Well, when Jesus Christ returns to earth, she's gonna be a five-foot-three Samoan...
She'll speak some words of wisdom, man, but noone here will understand....
'Cause they'll expect to see a man, who hates the queers and talks American.
Prop 8 got overturned in California yesterday calling the ban of gay marriage unconstitutional. Although me, myself, am not necessarily a marriage fan in general (I'm a cynic... It seems like a really shitty contract that doesn't matter if you truly love somebody), I just don't understand the institutional hatred and repression of gay & lesbian people. I could go on another, completely different jag about how useless and vile and, in the end, what a wasted emotion homophobia (or racism, or misogyny) is, but the courts finally got one right, for now at least. If two hypothetical dudes or dudettes wanna get married, go for it! I imagine a gay wedding would be the most fan-tabulous thing evah! But seriously, quit hatin' for no good reason, people. It'll burn you up inside.
Stream "Talks American" by The Fountains here. (ed. - crap. the link isn't really workin' for me on my Apple. if you have real media installed, you may fare better. i'll track down an mp3)
Stream my version on my myspace page here.
No mo' rants today! *steps off of soapbox, falls, breaks hip*
XOXO
Marquez
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