Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Amii Stewart

Amii Stewart may have one of the most recognizable smash hits of the Disco Era era to her name, but her career as a stateside Dancing Queen (or even Pop Singer) was a very short-lived affair.

Musically inclined from childhood, Stewart initially made a career for herself in the arena of dance/theater. Having taken dancing lessons after being taught to play the piano by her father, Stewart enrolled in "workshop" programs to hone her talents while still attending high school in her native Washington D.C.. Shortly after starting college, Stewart left school to work full-time with the D.C. Repertory Dance Company.

Working with the D.C.R.D.C. eventually let to other breaks, and Stewart began to make a name for herself internationally through her work as lead actress (and ultimately assistant director/choreographer) in the play Bubbling Brown Sugar which she performed in Miami, London and New York, followed by a role in the New York-staged Toby Time.

It was while in London working on Bubbling Brown Sugar, that Stewart laid down a few tracks on a lark with producer Barry Leng. Even though Stewart was a bit under the weather while auditioning, her powerful vocals must have convinced Leng that there was potential and she was offered a contract with Hansa Records. A handful of tracks were eventually recorded for future album release after her first single "You Really Touched My Heart" generated sufficient interest from the label for more material. Ariola Records, desperate for a lifesaving hit, optioned the release of Stewart's music in the American market, which at the time was fully in the sway of Disco Fever.

Working with another writer named Simon May (whose 1976 U.K. Top 10 single "Summer Of My Life" had also been a Leng production), Leng created some original songs for Stewart to sing, and began rearranging a smattering of oldie covers in a more contemporary musical vein. The first (and by far the most successful) of these covers selected for release was a rendition of Eddie Floyd's 1966 R&B classic "Knock On Wood."

While it's fair to say that Stewart's striking vocals would probably have drawn attention to this song no matter what the production style, this production was designed from the ground up to grab attention, which is exactly what it did. While Floyd's "Knock On Wood" was a midtempo bluesy number that simmered on the radio like a sultry July evening, the Leng-produced Amii Stewart version moved like a relentless freight train, indiscriminately mowing down everything in its path. Most importantly, "Knock On Wood" just sounded incredibly huge in a dance club, with its thundering beat, oddly-creaking synthesizer lines, laser-bright horn sections, insistent percussion effects, and ominous underlying bass hum all compressed together into an explosive mix that Jeff Lynne himself would have killed to create.

Released to radio in January of 1979, "Knock On Wood" went down a storm, ultimately reaching the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for one week that April, and selling an estimated 8 million copies internationally, not to mention powering its attendant (and wisely similarly-titled) gold full-length album into the Top 20.

Seeking to capitalize on the runaway success of "Knock On Wood," another cover song from Stewart’s London sessions was selected to be the follow-up single. In retrospect, perhaps this was an ill-advised choice as the rocket-like momentum of Stewart's career vanished almost immediately when her cover of the seminal Doors smash "Light My Fire" (paired with a new song titled, er, "137 Disco Heaven" to create a medley, in effect) not only failed to match the success of its predecessor, but fell way short of the Top 40 as well, sputtering to #69 that summer. That being said, it bears mentioning that "Light My Fire/137 Disco Heaven" did far better overseas: in fact, it actually placed a slot higher in the U.K. tallies than "Knock On Wood."

Things slipped even farther when Stewart's follow-up album, Paradise Bird failed to reach the Billboard's Top 200 album chart that Christmas, instead "peaking" at #207 on the magazine's Bubbling Under list. Despite the same production team and formula of orginal songs with a few re-imagined oldies as before, there were also no hits or even almost-hits from Paradise Bird, a lot of which was blamed on the impending collapse of Ariola Records, though it should also be pointed out in fairness to them that Hansa version of Paradise Bird wasn't exactly setting the surveys afire over in the U.K., either.

I'm Gonna Get Your Love (produced by noted cheese-dancepop maestro Narada Michael Walden) nearly got Stewart's career back on the upward track again, but ultimately could only generate one song of any impact whatsoever in the hybrid duet (think "prehistoric mash-up") of "My Guy / My Girl," recorded with the recently-late Johnny Bristol. While the two singers alternated songs in the "verses" and "choruses" to cute effect, the rest was a rather horrifically-overcooked mess and the song eventually became Stewart's second (and last) U.S. chart dud, barely cracking the Top 60 in the waning summer of 1980.

From that point onwards, Stewart never returned to the U.S. music charts, though she eventually found herself popular enough overseas that she was able to keep a career going on that level alone. Within a couple of years, she had reached the point that her Georgio Moroder-produced 1986 album Amii never even saw the light of day on these shores (nor have any of its follow-up projects with such luminaries as Ennio Morricone, for that matter). With the writing on the wall now too big to ignore, Stewart eventually left the United States for the rolling landscapes of Italy where her multi-faceted singing talents have yielded her an ongoing career that extends to the present day.


Buy The Best Of Amii Stewart: Knock On Wood here.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: The Korgis

James Warren and Andy Davis first worked together as members of the Beatle-esque U.K. cult outfit Stackridge -- one of those bands that seem to promise incredible things but only winds up in miserable debt from being too clever by half. Remarkably, while Stackridge never managed to chart in their homeland, a 1974 compilation album Pinafore Days managed to briefly surface at the bottom end of the Billboard albums chart in early 1975, "peaking" at #191.

Bassist Warren and drummer Davis had drifted apart even before the inglorious demise of Stackridge, and it took the ascension of the new wave movement four years later to get the Warren's creative energies sufficiently fired up to the point where he decided to contact his old band mate Davis by mail to discuss if a new collaboration was possible. Davis was interested in the idea, and the reunited duo began writing and recording in early 1979 under the name The Korgis (the lineup of which would eventually expand to include guitar player Stuart Gordon and keyboardist Phil Harrison).

The terms "new wave" and "quirky" have always gone hand-in-hand, but right from the release of their charmingly offbeat first single "Young 'N Russian," The Korgis initially seemed hell-bent on raising the bar in the oddball songwriting department. Furthering this tendency, the whole of their self-titled debut album played like a strange tug-of-war between two bands: one captivated by breezy, 60's pop-indebted harmonies straight out of The Hollies with a modern, synth-lined production sheen not unlike that of Supertramp (see "Dirty Postcards") and another interested in the fractured influences and slightly-screwy lyrical stylings of new wave.

What eventually gave The Korgis a commercial leg up on their competition at the time (hello, New Musik!) was Warren's multi-tracked, pop-friendly vocals (as heard on songs like "I Just Can't Help It") and retro-flavored songwriting style, which could be as unashamedly pop-leaning as any “mainstream” act of the time period when the occasion called. With that in mind, it didn't take long for success to start coming the way of The Korgis as the band's first hit single, the summery, sugar-sweet "If I Had You," made the Top 20 of the UK singles chart in the summer of 1979 (this track, incidentally, featured the accompaniment of future Depeche Mode / Recoil member Alan Wilder). Encouraged, The Korgis immediately set about work on their follow-up release, which appeared in shops the following year.

Dumb Waiters saw The Korgis in a far-more explicitly pop vein than their first album; with the band's more riskier tendencies pushed aside for the time being (though tracks like "Intimate" and "Silent Running" kept that tendency on a low simmer). The emphasis on accessible songwriting worked wonders on the band's career, as the album managed to break the UK Top 40 in the late summer. Ratcheting upwards the sweet quotient with such confections as "It's No Good Unless You Love Me," "If It's Alright With You Baby" and "Love Ain't Too Far Away" (not to mention the dancefloor-aimed "Drawn And Quartered"), The Korgis made a play for the public’s heartstrings and finally cooked up a worthy smash with the ballad "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime."

The centerpiece of Dumb Waiters' success, and the song that The Korgis will always be remembered for, "Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime" is one of those songs that exists outside of the standard pop plane: it sounds more like a four-minute contemplative swoon than anyone’s idea of a hit single. Floating almost lighter than air on delicate beds of shimmering synths like a highly-polished revision of 10cc's "I'm Not In Love," "Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime" propelled The Korgis into the Top 5 on their homeland's hit parade, while also giving them their one-and-only charted record in the U.S., as it reached the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 right at Christmas, 1980 (Dumb Waiters performed much more modestly on these shores, reaching #113 right around the same time).

Having finally tasted real success at last, The Korgis then found out just how quickly fortunes can turn around in the music business. "If It's Alright With You Baby" was chosen as the follow-up single to "Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime" and quickly crashed and burned at #56 later that summer, stopping their momentum on a dime. A third album, 1981’s Sticky George, which leaned more towards the 60's influences and away from the synth textures (without completely forsaking them), disappeared virtually on release, and ended The Korgis’ tenure with their label, Rialto Records. The band broke up soon afterwards with little fanfare.

Following the utter apathy that greeted the release of his 1986 solo album Burning Question (I guess he might as well have reformed Stackridge), James Warren elected to give The Korgis one more shot. With Davis back on board, “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” was re-recorded and released again in 1990 to hardly any notice at all outside of the nostalgia circuit, which is also the same response awarded to their reunion album, 1992’s This World’s For Everyone. Following that debacle, The Korgis disbanded again, this time apparently for good.

Buy The Best Of The Korgis from Amazon.com.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Furnace St.

On the occasions when I profiled local music during my short-lived stint as a professional writer, I always sought to be as encouraging to whatever bands I was covering as possible, whether I actually enjoyed their music or not (invariably, it was almost always "not"). It was towards the end of this writing career that I was presented with the debut CD by a local duo called Furnace St. and had a kind of instantaneous "YES!!" reaction to hearing it for the first time that was all-too rare to my jaded sensibilities back then.

It's difficult now to convey just how much of a joyous rush listening to Furnace St.'s music gave me back in October of 1998, since synthpop was stone-cold dead and much of the electronica movement that I had been fully swept up in over the last couple of years had begun to stagnate under the weight of bandwagon-jumping and jazz-leaning, epic pretentions. Thus, it was with great excitement that I heard in this band's work the sound of two people whose musical tastes practically mirrored my own and were just as keenly interested in the sounds of old analog synthesizers and despairing, yet undeniably pretty melodies.

Interviewing the duo for a short feature a couple of weeks later was a pleasure, as was seeing them perform live at a sparsely-attended weeknight show at Peabody's Down Under in February of 1999. Sadly, the eventual intrusion of (and massive changes brought forth by) life after my Scene / Spot period caused me to lose touch with the band (not to mention track of their career), though that irreplaceable debut CD has made many trips into my CD player in the years since.

It was while researching this post to see what Furnace St. has been up to over the last few years that I became aware that life had intruded on their plans as well: an announcement of the duo now being in a state of "indefinite hiatus" was a sad surprise, indeed. With that in mind, this post has become a tribute to these two people who have created some of the most interesting synth-pop/rock I've had the pleasure of hearing in the last decade.

The musical partnershhip that ultimately became Furnace St. started in earnest around 1994, shortly after Adam Boose and Lisa Jorgensen met while attending high school. The two young musicians shared a common musical interest in the dark, atmospheric sounds of such U.K. proto-Darkwave titans as New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, and Ultravox. These influences were quite apparent in Furnace St.'s musical palette, which combined forbidding, goth-like bass-guitar lines, evocative old-school synthesizers, pre-programmed rhythms, whispered vocals seemingly phoned in from another plane, and fiery, distorted guitar textures.

The first release to the public of any Furnace St. material was 1998's Neuromantic -- the same album I was talking about back in the opening paragraph. By turns hypnotic, beautiful, and abrasive, this was a "work in progress" collection of lean, feral demos bristling with future promise that had me ensnared right from the first play. Beautifully fusing the anguished self-loathing of then-modern industrial rock with the striking, eerie beauty of darkwave and the doomy ambience of early 80’s U.K. synthpop, Neuromantic was initially available on an extremely limited basis before being given a full-on release (in remastered and slightly-expanded form) in the spring of 2001.

Early in 2000, Furnace St. released their first "finished" album, Ladykiller. While not as immediately seductive to me as Neuromantic, Ladykiller sported a rougher, more muscular sound from the duo as Boose's guitars ate up more of the sonic picture and moved Jorgenson's synths more to the background. Ladykiller was also sonically fleshed out by a more detailed and professional studio gloss, giving the album far more impact on a visceral level than its comparatively-understated predecessor. The slam dunk track here for me was the simmering "Oceanview": a delicious slice of pure, simmering menace.

A third Furnace St. album, Headmusic, appeared in the summer of 2002, further ratcheting-up the power chords while still retaining the songwriting sensibilities of their two releases. Headmusic was then followed by People -- a collection of album tracks remixed by friends and colleagues of the duo just before Christmas of 2003.

Since the stopgap release of People, Furnace St. continued playing live shows through at least last summer, including a gig in Belfort, France (which is pretty amazing for a completely-unsigned Midwestern U.S. act when you think about it). When not playing various venues in Ohio and surrounding states, the duo spent their downtime working on their fourth album, Extroversion.

The plan initially had been for Furnace St. to release their surprisingly more pop-accessible (though no less challenging) new album on CD, as had been the case with their previous works. However, when the decision was made to take the band off the road and effectively out of existence for the time being, the duo elected to make Extroversion available in its entirety as a free download from their recently redesigned website, which also features some additional mp3s and a couple of performance videos (including a rather surprising cover of an old 80's Top 40 chestnut) from the band's 2002 incarnation which featured bassist/guitarist/vocalist and occasional co-writer Brian D. Taylor.

For those headed over to check out the band's site or their new album, please take a couple of minutes to drop Adam or Lisa a message and let 'em know what you think of their music. Here's hoping this indefinite hiatus doesn't necessarily spell the end of a talented partnership.

Disillusion

As perhaps the most widely-covered news event in four decades, September 11, 2001 was looked at endlessly and from nearly every conceivable angle as round-the-clock news coverage at all major networks literally stretched onwards for days. Once that 4-5 day period of nonstop coverage ended, I remember watching the news wrap-ups on CNN every night and listening to NPR in the car and in the computer room at home for a month or so afterwards as the political and cultural fallout of that day continued to drop from the skies (I should note here that this was also the last time to the present day that I have listened to the radio on anything approaching a regular basis).

With so many books, DVDs, and TV programming aimed at re-living or re-experiencing the event through one thematic lens or another, everyone remembers or observes September 11 differently. For me, this reflection has already changed considerably over the last four years. Initially, as I'm sure was (and still is) the case with many others, I remembered the surreal horror of the day, watching videos that re-created that disorienting sense of freefall and exponentially-rising anger that I felt watching the World Trade Center disintegrate and the Pentagon burn, then the intense sorrow at the stories of senseless loss and despair from the multitudes affected by it all.

Over time, though, my thoughts of September 11 began to focus instead on the weeks after instead of that day itself. It feels extremely weird to say it now, but I look back on that fearful, paranoid, shaken, uncertain span of months with a sense of bitter nostalgia for the way things were. No, I'm not talking about everyone being utterly freaked out and seeing Al Qaeda operatives everywhere they looked, but rather I find myself pining for the short time after September 11 when this country was not divided into two screaming halves, each one trying to force a sock in the mouth of the other once and for all. This was the last time, for better or worse, that we really were a nation united behind anything or anyone.

I realize that I tend to speak in sweeping numbers when talking about this subject, but there was a palpable change in individual people as well. Yes, there was outrage and sorrow in nearly every face, and the crackpots had (and continue to have) a field day with all of the grandiose conspiratorial opportunities offered up by the scale of these attacks, but there was also a new tendency at the store of people suddenly looking each other in the eyes when they spoke, with a note of warmth or concern that felt weirdly alien and yet unmistakably comforting. Without us ever having discussed doing so, Greg and I replaced the ubiquitous "have a good day" farewell with a more personalized "take care" and it seemed like everyone was more polite and considerate and kind to each other all at once. Hell, even MTV found itself a voice of compassion and care for one day, setting aside the mindless anomie and bling-bling in lieu of music of compassion and hope. Yes, all of this happened for all the wrong reasons, but it was a beautiful thing while it lasted.

So, what happened to this wonderful time when we actually all got along? In effect, we blew it. Or someone blew it, depending on your outlook ...

There is no denying whatsoever that the events of September 11 were anything less than an act of war: this was a conclusion that no one disagreed with. Despite being pandered to with one of the lamest, most stilted, most uncomforting speeches from our leadership later that evening, the nation rallied around the President to an extent unseen since at least the Gulf War in 1991, and probably even as far back as World War II. It helped immensely that after this faltering start, dear old W. set about earning his leadership stripes. Finally drawing up the kind of gravitas and stone-faced resolve the country sorely needed, W. pulled off the impossible and started to talk and act like "my President." It didn't hurt that he had a Cabinet full of veterans of previous administrations (read: the Gulf War), which certainly made me feel at the time like we were headed down the correct course.

Not knowing what was going to happen next, but grateful that someone had stepped in to take the steering wheel, America gave the President a political blank check: in effect, allowing him to do whatever he had to do, and we waited to be asked for whatever sacrifice was needed to accomplish the new goals of our new War On Terror ... and what's heartbreaking to remember is that at the time, we would have gladly made it. There was a lot of bloodlust and a shared thirst for revenge, to be certain, but on the other hand there was also a real desire to help out, as evidenced by the enormous amount of volunteers and monies collected for whatever relief fund asked for them. This time, to me, was the golden opportunity for the United States to really move forward together and take on this problem by the horns (neverminding that it was just about as useful a war as that against drugs or crime or whatever intangible Enemy Of Goodness you wish to insert here), look into alternate ways of obtaining energy, and show the world how strong and resolute we could be when the time came ... but that time never arrived.

Instead of being asked to do anything that involved any kind of shared sacrifice or effort whatsoever, we were told to shop and spend. I realize that no politician anywhere wants to be the one to say "hey, you need to cut back on your gasoline consumption, America. How about it?" but this was the one unprecedented chance W. would have had to do exactly that and not face a firestorm of scorn or cries for his head on a platter. But, I suppose, this was never going to happen in a country utterly beholden to gargantuan "special interests" and lobbies.

Don't worry about this problem, W. said with a pat on our collective noggins, we're taking care of it. It is not of your concern. Go back to your lives. Take an airplane flight. Go shopping. Go to sleep. Let me sign this Patriot Act to protect you from this ever happening again. Oh, and God bless America.

Right from the instant the above became the default war plan as far as the American Public was concerned, little alarm bells started to ring in my head. I knew that, in a sense, W. was absolutely right to beseech everyone to not to stop the American economy on a dime (domestic consumer spending powers a surprisingly large portion of this country's growth), but this compounded with the idea that life as we know it was going to keep on chugging along as if nothing at all had happened somehow felt all wrong. This new war was going to be background noise while we pressed on with our existence, and it was going to go on for months, years, decades, depending on you talked to about it. I won't even mention what book this instantly reminded me of, but I know I wasn't the only one wondering months later if the new creepily-monikered
"Homeland Security Department" shouldn't have instead been called the "Ministry Of Peace."

I had forgiven W. for that godawful speech on the evening of the 11th, (since Rudolph Giuliani was doing a far better job of playing Head Cheese that day), but being told in effect that it was my patriotic duty to whip out my credit card and get a plasma TV or an SUV and who knows what else felt perverse and insultingly condescending (I won't even get into the additional tax cuts offered shortly afterward as well). It also, I believe, began to dissipate that aura of "we're all in this together," though the true political/ideological battle lines wouldn't begin to show up until a year later when the saber rattling and preparations for the invasion of Iraq (under the disguise of waiting for diplomacy) began in earnest. By that point, we had come full circle again, not only with each other in this country, but with the rest of the world as well. That sense of loss, almost moreso than the loss of life on that awful day, has become for me the most haunting aspect of September 11.

As hopelessly simplistic, childish, and dramatic as it sounds, I want my old country back.

That Morning

Being the habitual late riser that I am, I was utterly dead to the world until I heard the news. I would have slept right on into the early afternoon and awakened to one hell of a surprise since I'd never have heard the phone ringing down the hall in the old apartment. However, Sarah had just come back from classes sometime around 10 A.M. and tried to rouse me from my slumber by telling me with great understatement: "hey....you might want to wake up. Some really weird things are happening."

That didn't exactly get me going. I barely moved, and mumbled a toneless "uhhh like what" out of the corner of my mouth.

"Well...someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center."

Groggily, all I could muster was a noncommittal reply. "Huh. That sucks."

"Well...a few minutes later, another plane crashed into the other tower."

I didn't see that one coming. I opened my eyes and squinted at her in the bright light of morning. "What?"

Sarah then told me of the (erroneous, as it turned out) rumor of a car bombing at the State Department, then hit me with the haymaker punch: "And then, someone crashed another plane into the Pentagon."

That news did the trick, affecting me like someone had just dumped a bucket of ice cold water onto the bed. We'd just gone from "terrorism" to out-and-out war. I sat up fast and aimed an unbelieving, incredulous stare at her. "WHAT?"

A bleary-eyed hustle down the hall from the bedroom to the living room followed, and I flipped around from CBS to NBC to ABC to Fox and to CNN ... all of them showing the twin towers steaming blackly away like giant steel chimneys, alternating with views of the stoved-in side of the Pentagon. It struck me at that instant that the Pentagon looked to be in far worse shape than the Trade Center, which I think was due to my having been in close proximity to the place during a weekend trip to Washington D.C. in 1994. In contrast, I haven't been in New York City since I was a kid, and I have very few memories of the place, and thus I had no real sense of scale to apply to what I was looking at in those pictures. My initial thought was that the Trade Center towers had been broadsided by a Cessna packed with C-4.

A few minutes later, whatever network I was watching at the time flipped to a rerun of the second plane going into the tower. I don't think my eyes bugged that wide or my jaw went that slack since the morning of the Challenger explosion. It wasn't the spectacular fireball that made my stomach feel like it had just dropped into my lap, but instead it was seeing the object that caused the explosion -- certainly not a Cessna or a Lear Jet.

"Holy shit..."

A couple of minutes later, the first tower went down right in front of my eyes. Like so many others, it was at first impossible to grasp that what I was seeing something happening in the Real World and not some summer action movie -- the scale of this just completely poleaxed me.

I think it was at some point in the utter fucking pandemonium after the first tower had come down that my brain suddenly kicked on again and began to process what I had just seen, and I heard myself splutter out: "Jesus Christ! Were there passengers on those planes?!"

As it turns out ... yes, there were.

Crisis Mismanagement

All of the music-related posts I once had archived here in I Am A Bug, were mirrored columns: all of them are actually intended for 45RPM, the mp3 blog run by my old friend and ex-Den co-worker Mike Beaumont. I mirrored these Sunday Synthpop Brunch posts in this forum merely to keep I Am A Bug active in the frequent times when I’m not in the mood to write outside of the 45RPM framework.

Crescent City Blues briefly explained why I was not submitting a regular column for this weekend (or the next, for that matter), but I deliberately shied away from going any further into the subject with my personal thoughts since 45RPM isn’t the place for them. This blog, however, is.

I try very hard not to let myself rant on politics, but it gets harder to avoid outrage lately, either due to the slow onset of fogeydom or perhaps the current cast of jokers inhabiting the White House. I am not a professional pundit and no one’s idea of an expert in this field, and so I try to avoid inflicting pure, annoyed venting on people. Making it even more frustrating to vent on this subject is that while I may not like The Way Things Are, I also have no constructive answers to these problems. Thus, I tend to look upon these rants as empty, self-indulgent wanks that do nothing but add to the already-deafening background noise of the internet.



Then along came the events of the last week, and … well, it’s pretty hard to find the words, isn’t it? I’m going to give it a try, regardless.

I haven't been this worked-up over the state of the U.S. gub'mint since that dreary, awful, soul-killing morning after Election Day last year. That was a pretty fucking terrible day, but even that had no comparison to the epic, needless suffering experienced by the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I'm not just talking about the shame of New Orleans, either ... plenty of equally enraging stories of neglect and half-assed bureaucratic effort have come from Mississippi and Alabama as well, and I am pretty goddamned angry right now thinking about it (I think "downright furious" covers it better, actually). I am also embarrassed, ashamed, stunned, and (best of all for the intents of this post) increasingly vitriolic at the absolute clusterfuck that marked the official world premiere demonstration of the power of our wonderfully-integrated Department Of Homeland Security and FEMA. I gotta save some shout-outs for the Senate, and the White House too, since they worked with DHS and FEMA to create a "perfect storm" of haplessness in the face of a natural disaster that was the most gobsmacking display of organizational pratfalls, shameless, childlike deflection-of-blame and sheer clueless bungling that I have seen from this government in my lifetime.

What happened in New Orleans last week was "the anti-9/11," as coined by New York Times columnist David Brooks, in every possible fashion:

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.

The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.

Jesus, what if this had happened instead to Manhattan? Norfolk? Washington D.C.? Kennebunkport? I can't be the only person who feels that if any of these places been hit instead of New Orleans, the level and speed of response would have been a very different story indeed. We already know what would have been the case had the damage been as terrible in Florida: FEMA (and even Our Fearless Leader) were on the scene the instant the storm(s) had finished passing through, walking the streets, cutting checks, helping Americans out, showing how much their government cared about their well-being. Of course, that was during an election year, in a state run by Our Leader's brother, and a territory that he absolutely, positively had to win in order to get re-elected, but I digress ...

I have long since grown calloused and immune to hearing out man's inhumanity to his fellow man, but when this extends to the government of the United States, I can't help but be staggered by it all. As if there was any doubt whatsoever with whom the priorities of this administration lay (re-election at all costs followed by the fortunes of the upper class, all other priorities rescinded), last week cleared them up beyond all doubt.

Much as it pains me to admit, you cannot lay the all of the blame for last week at the feet of the President. There, I said it. No, this was a failure on nearly every level of government from the Oval Office all the way down to the city of New Orleans itself. For a disaster that had been talked about for years (and over which Michael Brown, the absolutely-useless head of FEMA tells us that they had just practiced for last year), the various bureaucracies were behaving like freshly-guillotined chickens. Exactly what is the point of declaring an statewide emergency in multiple states a day and change before the hurricane makes landfall if nothing happens for days afterwards?

Listening to the likes of Trent Lott and Mary Landrieu prattle on during interviews like they had just won a fucking Oscar was absolutely fucking unreal (and thank God for anchors like Anderson Cooper who have cut these sanctimonious fucks off at the knees with a cold splash of reality when the occasion arose). Exactly where in the hell does this Government fly to when the city of Washington D.C. shuts down every August? New Zealand? Tahiti? Ganymede? Nowhere in this reality, apparently. For chrissakes, when even the likes of Shephard Smith at Fox News is left nearly speechless on-air wondering what in the samhell is going on (not to mention deliciously handing a slice of de-politicized reality to such putrid, insulated minor Antichrists as O'Reilly and Hannity), you know that things have gone terribly, terribly wrong.

To her credit, Landrieu recently issued a press release indicating that Bush's arrival at a levee repair site in New Orleans was a sham. A fucking photo-op. Nothing more. What a surprise. Also, how very convenient that his arrival was on the very same day that the REAL help finally began to arrive in New Orleans at last. Coincidence, I'm sure.

So, the city of New Orleans and a giant swath of the Gulf Coast is effectively no more as I type this, and one wonders if this region will ever be what it once was. The question also remains of what will happen to the displaced and nearly-entirely destitute population which seemingly now inhabits every domed facility in the Deep South at this hour. Is there another patented Magic Bush Tax Cut in the offing to somehow make all of the reconstruction and the strain on the social services of states hosting the refugees come together?

If there is to be any silver lining in this whatsoever, it's that the opportunity exists at amazing cost to correct the mistakes of the past in rebuilding New Orleans, but an unbelievably, incalculaby huge cleanup will come first. The scale of this is just beyond me: The Big O, The Crescent City, The Big Easy, whatever you may call it is nothing more than a dessicated, filth-ridden, waterlogged city of the dead.

From the inactions and miscues we have seen all last week, it has become glaringly apparent that we have achieved absolutely nothing since September 11 in the areas of security and disaster relief. We can have aircraft carriers off of Banda Aceh in a day or so after a tsunami erases half of the city, but we can't shoehorn any National Guard troops in a major urban area in this country for 4-5 days after a hurricane that everyone saw coming two days before it hit. And how about this for a cherry on the sundae: we are more vulnerable to societal/administrative decay (and resultant anarchy) than we ever knew.

Happy Labor Day.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Baltimora

Like nearly all diabolical dancepop singles from Europe, "Tarzan Boy" is a tune that gets stuck in your head on infinite repeat as soon as you hear it, whether you like it or not. This singularly catchy/annoying quality created a worldwide sensation that not only charted in multiple territories, but also helped promote a couple of ultra-lame Hollywood movies, hawk mouthwash and even sell a gay-aimed energy drink. Not too shabby for a one-hit flash-in-the-pan, eh?

While most people watching the very cheaply-done "Tarzan Boy" video clip might have figured that Northern Ireland-born Jimmy McShane was in fact Baltimora, it turns out that McShane was actually a hired "face" lip-syncing the words: the actual singing (not to mention songwriting and production) was instead handled by noted Italo-disco figure Maurizio Bassi.

Sounding like some kind of weird fusion of A-Ha and The Tokens, Baltimora swept over Europe during the summer of 1985 before finding release stateside via EMI Records. The time it took for EMI to finally break "Tarzan Boy" in America resulted in the song earning a six month stay on the Hot 100, ultimately peaking at #13 in the early spring of 1986.

While "Tarzan Boy" might be an unapologetically vapid pop confection, it pales in silliness and sheer goofiness next to the similarly-styled (not to mention equally suggestive) "Woody Boogie," which was chosen as the follow-up single in Europe. While "Woody Boogie" somehow managed to make some waves overseas, the American market was instead serviced with Living In The Background's rather unmemorable title cut instead, which only managed a paltry 4 weeks on the Hot 100, peaking at #87 in April of 1986. A follow-up album, Key Key Karimba, was released a year later and managed to sell pretty well in Italy and nowhere else. Thus endeth Baltimora...until Hollywood intervened a few years later.

Considering how quintessentially 1980s the song sounded by that point, it's incredible that "Tarzan Boy" made a second run up the Hot 100 in the spring of 1993, climbing to back up to #51 thanks to its appearance in the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. No such resurgence occured when the song appeared again in a movie a few years later: this time in the best-forgotten 1997 Chris Farley caper Beverly Hills Ninja.

Having successfully gone Hollywood, Baltimora took to Madison Avenue next as the seemingly deathless "Tarzan Boy" managed to make millions of impressions nationwide one more time thanks it its use in a popular Listerine commercial, which featured the song playing (sans lead vocals) while a sprightly, computer-animated bottle of green minty mouthwash swung around on vines in some colorful digital jungle. Awesome.

In a much lesser known product campaign, "Tarzan Boy" also became the "official theme song" for an energy drink called Gay Fuel. To the best of my understanding, Gay Fuel is roughly analogous to Red Bull, only with far more aphrodisiac properties (it is supposedly fortified with natural herbal stimulants and immune system boosters) and the concoction is colored pink instead of yellow. No, I am not making this shit up.

Hardly any information is available anywhere (at least in un-mauled English) as to what Maurizio Bassi has been up to since his studio creation briefly took over the world. It is known that Bassi has since worked with megastar Eros Ramazzotti and the Italian disco groups Silver Pozzoli and Passengers (no relation to the U2/Brian Eno project of the same name), but aside from these projects, his life and fortunes remain a mystery.

Sadly, this is not the case for Baltimora's "face": Jimmy McShane died of AIDS on March 28, 1995. He was 37 years old.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Die Warzau

Made up of guitarist/synthesist/singer Van Christie and drummer/vocalist Jim Marcus, the Chicago synthwave act Die Warzau was initially signed to Fiction Records (longtime home to The Cure and distributed stateside via Mercury Records in this instance) largely on their envelope-pushing live reputation as a performance art group and also since their sound seemed to mesh with the sensibilities of the underground industrial scene starting to stir around in the clubs of the Windy City.

Following 1988's Disco Rigido, Die Warzau next surfaced on Atlantic Records in 1991 with Big Electric Metal Bass Face, a more streamlined release that found the duo moving away from the classic "industrial" sound towards a more dance-friendly and melodic sound, equal parts dance, funk, and pop with a "rock" lean to the sound and occasional interesting blasts of atmospherics in the mix. One could almost say that Die Warzau were set up to serve as the "bridge" between the industrial underground and the pop/rock mainstream. Alas, their timing wasn't quite right, and their album managed to find an underground audience over time but never broke beyond that level.

This intoxicating, sample-heavy formula was then perfected on the band's third album, Engine, which found a release on Chicago's world-famous Wax Trax! label in 1995, long after ex-label darlings Trent Reznor and Al Jourgensen had managed to bring industrial music into the mainstream at the major label level. For Die Warzau, Engine may not have been a platinum payday, but it definitely felt like they had come home: following their twin major label efforts, which were pretty much at total odds with the rest of the mainstream pack around them, Engine was a natural fit for a label like Wax Trax!, whose catalog almost certainly inspired a fair amount of the duo's earlier works.

It probably didn't hurt the finished product that the duo had also accrued a lot of production experience in the intervening years since Big Electric Metal Bass Face. For a while, the name Die Warzau became more synonymous with "remixing" and "special thanks to" credits than for their original music as they worked with such grassroots-level electro-rock luminaries as Sister Machine Gun, Machines Of Loving Grace, Pigface, Revenge, Gravity Kills and KMFDM (not to mention some even higher profile remix work for Björk).

Engine also contained what many consider to be Die Warzau's shining achievement: the hazy techno-rocker "All Good Girls," which became a remarkable success for the band at college radio and dance clubs. A great snapshot of the duo's rich palette of influences, "All Good Girls" was also prominently featured (along with a bevy of other Wax Trax! heavyweights) in the Jeff Goldblum horror film Hideaway, which didn't wind up being that much of a career break as the film failed to take flight with audiences despite rather eerie depictions of damnation and torment that set up the supernatural basis of the thriller.

Following nine years in the scrap pile of disbanded acts fed up with the record industry, Die Warzau suddenly reformed as a quartet (featuring new members Abel Garibaldi and Dan Evans) and issued a new album on a different Chicago label called Pulseblack Records in October of last year. Titled Convenience, the new album finds Die Warzau moving even farther away from their not-quite-industrial roots towards a sound more reminscent of Depeche Mode. There is also a revisitation of "All Good Girls" in the new album's closing track, "Shine," though no word as of yet as to whether it measures up to the original (Sadly, I don't have any mp3s available from this new album at the time of writing this article, though a song from this release is available for streaming at their MySpace page).

Life Can Be So Nice

A rare full-weekend off (complete with rawkin' thunderstorm line that marched through here as I started to write this) affords me the opportunity to say "HI!!!!" to everyone out there in the internets and also update this thing on recent life and stuff like that. A welcoming shout-out is also holla'd out to Mike Oberstar, whom I haven't seen in a looong time and who stopped in at the store over the last week for a nice chat.

First things first, the accursed car is running fine and dandy, thank you very much. That being said, there is one new issue to be reported as it now appears that the rear brakes may be in need of imminent maintenance (though not to the same degree as the front set). We'll just see about that. Really.

Thanks to said car, I'm still in "save money and pay off debts for a couple of months" mode, and I'll be tackling some sundry projects here and there to keep myself occupied for a bit. First and foremost of these new projects is the final relocation of all these goddamn boxes that have been sitting in this office since the day we moved in this condo (which is about a week and change short of a year ago now).

There is also the pressing need I feel to back up about 90 gigs worth of data from this computer as well, just in case of some catastrophic system failure that would leave me pretty well fucked if it happened, say, tomorrow. Backing up on that scale is, of course, a monstrously tedious task which is not made any easier by the never-ending stream of new stuff I keep grabbing off usenet (and lately courtesy of that amazing technological creation called Bit Torrent, though I've been having some system stability issues with that lately) not to mention my weekly sweeps of a few dozen mp3 blogs.

Another project that I'd like to tackle as I get some spare time is picking up some additional HTML skillz. Y'all might have noticed the explosion of pictures on this blog over the last couple of months, and I'm starting to get the hang of some other tricks of the trade here and there which, ultimately, points towards me joining the rest of the late Twentieth Century and creating an actual website with links and pictures and Goat knows what else. As of right now, this is all that I've put together...but I'll let y'all know if and when that changes.

While we're on that tip, I wouldn't mind tarting up this blog a bit as well since I think I'm starting to tire a bit with this template and a distinct lack of handy accoutrements that I have not figured out how to add to this page yet (i.e., links to other blogs and friends and et cetera). I'd also be interested someday in setting up a Google homepage ... but this all much farther down the line.

Last Sunday was a pretty good day all around as we headed downtown and spent a few hours in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame with an old 'net friend, the one and only Dave Lynch (no, not the damned movie director), who was in town visiting. We hadn't seen Dave since we met for lunch at Hopkins Airport (with a swing over to Tower City for the "food" part) a couple of years ago easy, and we haven't been in the Rock Hall since the summer of 2001.

It was a blast to hang out with Dave again (though I wish the weather had been slightly more agreeable on that day) and it was fun to see some new displays and presentations at the Hall (though I can't say I was overly thrilled to see that the featured attraction this year is devoted to freakin' Tommy of all things). I really need sometime to just get down there at opening time and spend the entire day in the place, checking out everything as thoroughlly as possible and not feeling like time is running low (for whatever reason, we always seem to wind up being in a rush for one reason or another when we are down there and I keep thinking we missed something somewhere).

In an amusing new development, despite being neutered almost as soon as we brought him home, it looks like little Moe has discovered the joys of dry-humping Ghidorah's back. Even better yet, his preferred place for engaging in this happens to be in the bay window in full view of anyone who happens to be walking, driving or biking by. Beautiful.

Otherwise, things are going pretty fairly here during the times we aren't hosting amateur performances of Behind The Green Curtain for the neighbors. My job continues to go well, with this month looking so far like it'll be a bit more helpful towards attaining our new best-year-ever figure than July or June (which were rather flat). Sarah has a new job at Case which she started this past week and involves lab mice in many aspects -- not limited to working with them, monitoring them, breeding them, and eventually performing surgery on them. Insert "eewww" face here.

Speaking of my job, my friend (and ex Record Den co-worker) Dave Makatura has started hosting a whole bunch of Record Den pictures of varying vintage on the Other Pages section of his long-running website for the enjoyment of those interested. Some of these date back as far as 1982, and a few of them had me blanching in horror at clothes I only distantly recall and a haircut that I must have blocked from my memory for a decade...

Alright, it's off for now to enjoy the rest of my Saturday in one form or another. I think I might busy myself with one of the projects I mentioned above...or perhaps we may hang out with friends, or there are a couple of video games that I've picked up over the last couple of YEARS that I still haven't found the time to play, maybe some catching up on DVDs or the rest of the books I have yet to read...

Gads. Where did all the free time go?

NP Our Daughter's Wedding Digital Cowboy

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Eurythmics

The story goes that struggling musician David A. Stewart met Annie Lennox while she was waitressing in a London cafe in 1976 and was so immediately taken with her that the first words out of his mouth were "will you marry me?"

At the time, Lennox had already performed in various jazz and cabaret combos after dropping out of London's Royal Academy of Music, where she had been studying classical music. As a romance between the two quickly blossomed (despite Lennox refusing Stewart's marriage offer), Stewart decided to break up Longdancer, the folk act he had been involved with, and start up a new pop trio with his new girlfriend and fellow ex-Longdancer, guitarist Peet Coombes. While Lennox possessed a keening, evocative voice with a naturally soaring quality, she split her vocals in the new band with Coombes (the band's primary songwriter) and played some keyboards on the side. Calling themselves Catch, the trio issued a single in 1977 before beefing up their ranks by adding a bass player and drummer and then rechristened themselves as The Tourists.

The story of The Tourists isn't that dissimilar from that of many bands who taste success but can't quite make that jump to the next level of popularity for whatever reason. For The Tourists, success was earned over the course of their first albums and a fistful of singles chart incursions, most notably the twin top 10 songs: "So Good To Be Back Home Again" and a cover of the old Dusty Springfield chestnut "I Only Wanna Be With You" (a rather canny cover choice as the band tended to wear their overwhelmingly sixties pop/folk influence on their sleeves).

Following this breakthrough, however, things went downhill rather quickly when the third Tourists album (Luminous Basement ) failed to sell. Those ever-popular "creative tensions" surfaced between Stewart and Coombes, mainly over the direction of the band's music, which had taken a distinct turn away from the 60's pop aesthetic and towards a more modern, electronics-dusted sound. If the power struggle between Stewart and Coombes wasn't bad enough news, a myriad of external issues concerning everything from the band's management to record label woes to the tender mercies of the acid-blooded U.K. music press combined to bring about the end of the band in a matter of months. Perhaps worst of all, Lennox and Stewart's relationship fell apart at around this same time, though the ex-lovers (perhaps sensing they were onto something special) continued working together as a creative team after their romantic breakup.

Unsurprisingly, considering the direction flirted with on the last Tourists album, the new material recorded by Stewart and Lennox was far more experimental and far less "pop" in nature than that of their previous band. Most of the experimental nature of this work derived from Stewart's increasing fascination with synthesizers as the means to an end in lieu of guitars and "standard" pop instrumentation. RCA Records, who had picked up The Tourists just before their second album, was interested in the potential of the new duo (now called Eurythmics after a method of music instruction first demonstrated by Swiss educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in 1906), and kept them under contract, remaining their business home throughout the rest of their recording career, together and apart.

The first Eurythmics album, In The Garden, was released in the fall of 1981. Recorded by legendary producer Conny Plank (probably the pre-eminent experimental/"Krautrock" studio figure, best known for his work with pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Ultravox, Devo, Neu!, and had also supervised the final Tourists sessions), In The Garden was stark, rather charmless debut that offered up an interesting mix of styles and influences in a more avant-garde sound than The Tourists, but with no real breakout potential in any of the tracks, save for the single "Never Gonna Cry Again," which had slinked as "high" as No. 63 in the charts over the summer.

With In The Garden a no-show in the album rankings, Eurythmics hit the road in an attempt to get some kind of momentum happening. While a few backing musicians had been utilized in the studio to create the album, Stewart and Lennox performed strictly as a duo on this trek, with an extensive use of backing tapes and synthesizers (which I believe was the first time this kind of performance set-up with a duo had ever been attempted as this was a full year before the existence of the next great electropop duo, Yaz).

More songwriting followed quickly thereafter, though all three singles the duo released in 1982 failed to break the Top 50 (two of them never made the charts at all). About the only good news with these records was that they were all recorded at Stewart's own home studio which he had built to help keep down production costs (as ponying up continually for professional studio time would only compound the duo's worsening financial stituation). Despite the promise and quality of the new material, this was not a happy time for Eurythmics: the stresses of trying to make a living (and failing at each attempt) while trying to keep RCA from dropping them in the process was taking a tangible physical and psychological toll on the duo, with both members laid low at various times out of sheer exhaustion and frustration.

In February of 1983, however, the hard work and emotional toil invested in the second Eurythmics album began to pay off quite handsomely: in fact, that album became the work that changed their lives and fortunes forever. While Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) was on the surface a more polished and colder-sounding album than it's predecessor, this time around there were a handful of songs present that resonated strongly with the record-buying public. Timing was certainly a mitigating factor as well, as the "experimental" sounds Stewart had been working with over the previous couple of years had now become the hot new sound in pop music. Almost overnight, Eurythmics had achieved a critical mass, and their new album exploded worldwide over that synthpop-dominated summer.

While it would be doing a disservice to the arrestingly unique sound of the album's title cut to simply state that MTV airplay is what powered the song to the top of the U.S. singles charts, the influence of the channel on the band's immediate success in America cannot be denied. The surreal, bovine-filled videoclip for "Sweet Dreams" was a huge MTV favorite over that summer, and Lennox cut a stunning figure on TV, lip-syncing the song's lyrics while dressed in a pinstripe suit and tie, her close-cropped hair dyed brilliant orange/red (Stewart was content to sit on the sidelines, emotionlessly tapping away at a computer keyboard or playing a cello in a field). The "Sweet Dreams" video also kick-started a year long Bowie-esque flirtation with gender-bending on Lennox's part, as the singer used wigs and makeup to look almost completely different (and in one case, almost passably male) in all of the band's early videos.

It's worth noting that the million-selling "Sweet Dreams" was also the first of only two synthpop singles to top the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983, the other being Michael Sembello's equally-robotronic fluke smash "Maniac" (which, funnily enough, was the song that succeeded Eurythmics at the summit). A follow-up single, "Love Is A Stranger" (one of the band's failed U.K. singles in late 1982), fell just shy of the U.S. Top 20 a couple of months later, a real shame since that song's sleek, dark, insistent pulse was just as unique-sounding on the radio as its predecessor.

While the duo's singles were winding down their chart runs, MTV aired Eurythmics: Live From Heaven, a concert shot at the London nightclub of the same name that showed the duo performing selections from Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) and In The Garden along with 3-piece backing band (and a troika of 80's-coiffed backing singers). A couple of promo videos appeared midway through the set in the form of "Love Is A Stranger" and a jaw-dropping, gospel-inflected rearrangement of "This City Never Sleeps" that knocks me off my feet to this day. I'd only had a beat-up VHS copy of this show to watch for years, and thus I was delighted recently to find out that this concert has been issued on DVD. Energetic, effortlessly cool and stuffed with songs that often sound superior to the studio versions, Live From Heaven cannot be recommended highly enough for anyone into the duo's early work. Fantastic stuff.

In the faster-paced release market that existed before the 1990s, the only way to follow a breakout year was to outdo yourself the following year, and Eurythmics proved themselves up to the task as the band's third album Touch appeared in early 1984. An instantaneous success, Touch gave the duo their first Top 10 placing in the Billboard album charts and sold over a million copies, buoyed by a trio of dizzyingly eclectic synthpop classics: the giddy, artifcial tropicalia of "Right By Your Side," the digitized torch song "Who's That Girl" and the breathtaking epic "Here Comes The Rain Again" (which remains one of the most beautiful singles in the electropop canon).

Since these were still the days when Billboard allowed what were essentially overpriced 12" singles to appear on their album charts, a Eurythmics dance EP (creatively titled Touchdance, wouldn't you know) surfaced in July of that year, containing vocal remixes and extended instrumentals of a couple of Touch album cuts, ostensibly for club play.

Even with their new album still riding the charts, Eurythmics kept to a punishing work ethic of touring, writing and recording with hardly any breaks -- trying to strike whilst the proverbial iron was still hot, perhaps. Even then, it came as a total surprise to fans when the announcement of a fourth Eurythmics album was made in the fall of 1984. A largely instrumental work that now sounds years ahead of its time, this new album was the intended soundtrack for Michael Radford's recreation of George Orwell's classic novel 1984 and instead became one of the great "lost albums" of that decade.

In an embarrasing turn of events, hardly any of the music on the album 1984 (For The Love Of Big Brother) made it into the finished film. Apparently, Eurythmics were asked by Virgin Records (the movie's financier) to craft the soundtrack without Radford's consent or knowledge, and the director was furious when informed of the move since he had already commissioned a film score by composer Dominic Muldowney. Pronouncing the 1984 soundtrack album "too contemporary" to be used in his film, Radford ended up rejecting roughly 90% of the work and stuck with Muldowney's more traditional score instead. Ouch.

Making matters worse was that RCA didn't consider the soundtrack album a "proper" Eurythmics release and therefore didn't bother to give the record anywhere near the level of promotion enjoyed by Touch or Sweet Dreams. While enough diehard Eurythmics fans became aware of 1984 to drive it briefly into the bottom reaches of the Top 100 of the U.S. albums chart over the winter, the album didn't hang around very long afterward and was virtually forgotten by the general public within months.

That's not to say that RCA didn't at least try: two singles from 1984 were issued to radio, and both ran straight into a brick wall. The first, an uptempo pop-funk number called "Sexcrime" had some serious problems gaining airplay at pop stations thanks to its title and the word "sex" being machine-gunned at the listener throughout the song's running time (oh, heavens!). Edited versions of the song (which merely chopped off the opening few seconds of the track) were serviced to radio and MTV to alleviate the strain on delicate ears, but it was to no avail.

The haunting second single from 1984, "Julia," seemed to glide slowly by like an ocean liner and was quite possibly the doomiest sounding major label single released in 1985. It was a gorgeous track, comprised of little more than Lennox's vocoder-treated singing against a sparse, celestial bed of electronics, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing pradio rogrammers could easily sandwich between Wham! and Madonna. Oh well, it was their loss.

Following this commercial misfire, Eurythmics came back firing on all cylinders in the late spring of 1985 with their fifth album, Be Yourself Tonight. Representing the popular peak of the band as far as sales and singles were concerned, Be Yourself Tonight was also a big surprise for many people as the sound of the duo had changed dramatically in the short downtime between releases.

Save for Lennox's instantly identifiable vocals, the production aspects of the single "Would I Lie To You?" were different enough to make you wonder if this was indeed the same band that had just released "Julia" six months before. Rather than the expected icy washes of synthesizers and programmed percussion, Stewart and Lennox were now leaning strongly towards classic R&B as guitars, bass, live drums, and even a horn section took a far more prominent role in the band's sound.

The synths weren't all gone, though: the album's radiant follow-up hit "There Must Be An Angel" and the seductive fourth single "It's Alright" were both imbued with a more familiar electronic pulse, but from this point forward, the synth-heavy vestiges of the band's work disappeared from the airwaves (and largely from their albums as well). By the time album number six (Revenge) appeared in the summer of 1986, the guitars had pretty much taken over for good, and the duo had become one with the rock-fixated mainstream.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Delete Yourself!

During a tumultuous 8 years of existence, German techno-thrash trio Atari Teenage Riot became one of those rare bands whose very name perfectly summed up their sound without any outside explanation.

Formed in 1992 by Alec Empire, a talented and prolific solo artist in his own right who has released a plethora of solo albums covering a wide array of electronic and rock textures (either released under his own name or ECP and Jaguar) and featuring backup vocalist Hanin Elias and rapper Carl Crack (whose drug-related suicide in 2001 effectively spelled the end of the band), Atari Teenage Riot aimed straight for the jugular with their groundbreaking fusion of hardcore punk attitude and feral speed-techno beats.

After having made a name for themselves in their homeland with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop, Atari Teenage Riot managed to swindle themselves up a record label using a record company advance to do so. Utilizing the very aptly-named Digital Hardcore Records as a base of operations, Empire and Co. lured together a stable of similar-minded artists (EC8OR, Shizuo, Bomb 20, Speed Freak) in an attempt to politicize the youth of Germany into action to fight against the recent shift to the Right in European politics (and hey, what better way to get the kids sold on the idea radically Left-of-center ideals than lashing them with Euro-techno on steroids?).

Correctly figuring that the best way to cut through the background noise of everyday life was to make a godawful racket, Atari Teenage Riot's debut full-length release, 1996's Delete Yourself! was designed from the ground up as a sonic letterbomb that was supposed to scare the living hell out of anyone over the age of 30. By screaming at the tops of their lungs over lightning-fast breaks and power-chord-sounding synth patches (in effect, sounding like a KMFDM record played at 78 speed), Empire, Elias and Crack sought to proclaim that the German youth of 1996 were wising up to what was going on in the halls of power and weren't too happy about it.

In reality, however, listening to what was actually being shouted throughout such unintentionally hilarious Delete Yourself! tracks as "Kids Are United!," "Start The Riot," "Raverbashing," "Midijunkies" and "Cyberpunks Are Dead!" tended to undermine the intended effect of the record. Despite the amount of compressed righteous fury and coruscating sonics in their music, Atari Teenage Riot seemed just as interested in repeatedly and obnoxiously proclaiming their own bad-assed greatness than actually, you know, setting up an exchange of political ideas with the Powers That Be. Ahh, youth...

The Final Conflict

Sarah and I left to pick up my from Conrad's just before 9 A.M. this morning (Wednesday), stopping first at her bank so she could float me a loan, and then at my own bank so I could deposit the money.

Once the check was written and accepted and the keys back in my hands, it was immediately back to the E-check station for me in order to get this shit over with once and for all. Upon my arrival, I was pleased to see no one in line and was waved right into the garage. I was just about to step out of the car and head to the waiting area when one of the kid employees yells the name of the guy taking care of my paperwork while pointing straight at the front of my car, where wisps of smoke were emanating from beneath the hood. My stomach immediately dropped about 20 floors. Jesus Christ, NOW what?

Incredulous, I popped the hood. Sure enough, more smoke was looming up from exactly the same place as before, only this time in much smaller amounts. For a stunned second or two, I was ready to charge back over to Conrad's with a tire iron in hand until I realized that what I was seeing had to be leftover steering fluid that had sprayed around from last week and now freshly reheated on the pipes and engine casing. The E-check guy taking care of me (the same one who had been there Friday when this thing was really smoking) agreed. Phew. False alarm.

I went inside the waiting area (which looks and feels like you are walking into an air conditioned trailer standing in the middle of a warehouse) to await the test results, confident that this was about to end at long last. However, the slowly-dissipating bad karma of the last week wasn't quite through with me yet: a couple of moments later, I was told that the car cannot be tested because it was overheating.

I just about flew into pieces right on the spot, but managed to not raise my voice at the manager as I explained that the car may run a little hot for their tastes, perhaps, but it does not overheat. I didn't mention that the car had been idling in ninety degree early morning heat without their movable fan running on it for about ten minutes while we sorted the smoke situation and paperwork out ... that might have made me sound a bit snarky. Anyway, it's not a problem, really. Scout's honor. Can we just test the fucker, please?

Request denied.

I looked quickly down at the floor, about to splutter a "JESUS CHRIST, MAN," and took a breath. I then switched tactics and started in on my intended fall back gambit: the repair waiver. I laid out the story y'all read the other day (in abbreviated form) to no effect at all. See, while I did indeed spend an amazing amount of money that I do not have on car repairs, only about $100 of that money was actually for emissions-related repairs (nevermind that the entire reason the last thousand and a half dollars was spent so that these clowns would look at my car in the first fucking place), and therefore I was well short of the $300 threshold to try this stunt without an E-check.

"Look," I said, keeping my voice steady with great effort, "the exhaust system on that car is new. The cleaning job done on the engine last week was done in order to get me to pass this test, which I flunked by a few hundredths of a percentage point on the nitrogen count. I have had two places tell me in the last week that there is nothing wrong with the emissions system on this car at all. And now you are telling me that, in order to get all of this over with, I now have to go out and spend a couple hundred more dollars to have someone fix something that isn't broken in the first place?"

"Well ... yeah, that is one way of doing it."

Well, damn, what the hell can I say to that?

"Look, how about I just park it for a while and cool it down so we can do this again?"

"That's fine, but if it overhea-..."

I wasn't really listening to the rest as I walked away and drove the car to the side of the testing facility. It seemed futile to attempt a "cool down" in the rapidly-warming blast furnace of a day we were already having, but I was up against the wall now. I let about forty minutes tick on by before I started the car up again and drove back around the building where I was faced with four or five vehicles lined up in front of me. I took a place in line, waited for a few minutes, and quickly calculated that by the time I reached the garage I would likely be "overheating" again. This wasn't going to work.

I then drove home, seriously wondering how in the hell I was going to scrape up a couple hundred more dollars to buy myself out of this unending nightmare. Once I was at my desk, I stewed for a bit, cooling off in the AC, asked Moe if had any ideas (he did not, but instead flipped out for a while in Sarah's chair), and tried to dig up a receipt for the exhaust system repairs I had done back in the spring as a possible way to meet the repair waiver total.

Sarah called a few minutes later and suggested I take the car to a different E-check facility. This entailed heading out to the other side of Lake County: an idea I wasn't very hip to for a handful of reasons, but I told her I'd consider the suggestion. I then called the 1-800 number shown on the E-check brochure to speak with one of their Customer Service people about what was acceptable for a repair waiver claim. There was nothing but bad news on that front: all repair jobs submitted for a waiver had to be done within a 60 day period before the E-check test. God damn it.

I talked with the rep for a few minutes about this complete pinch that I was in, and while going over some options, the CS rep mentioned "release forms" while talking about testing a car that was prone to overheating. Hey, I was never offered that option! When I told the CS rep that this I never even told of this possibility by the facility manager, the CS rep suggested (as Sarah had), that I try a different location to have the car tested instead. OK, then, what did I have to lose?

Back onto the freeway I went, this time for a lengthy cruise to the other side of Painesville (i.e., the borderline between civilization and BumbleFuck). Once there, I parked at a convenience store near the E-check facility in a doomed attempt to cool the now rather-hot engine down a bit. By now it was positively blazing out, and after a few minutes of sitting around in the heat, I realized there wasn't going to be an awful lot I could do unless I felt like sitting there for another couple of hours. Since that was not an option, I started the engine again and noted that the TEMP gauge was holding steady at about 3/4 of the way up.

Well, this has to be Good Enough for now. Let's do it.

A couple of minutes later, I pulled into the Painesville Township E-check station which, while looking identical to the Willoughby location from the outside, was populated by a cast of people straight out of Hooterville. I asked for a release form when I handed over my paperwork and explained why. The manager was called over, and I explained my situation once again. He looked doubtful, saying basically "well, if the car is overheating, then we can't test it, and that is that."

I gave the manager my very best sales pitch. "Listen, this car is NOT OVERHEATING. I just drove out here from Willowick, so it looks kinda hot but I am telling you and signing this form saying that it's GOING TO BE FINE. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE PLEASE TEST IT." (These weren't my exact words, but instead the thrust of my pitch).

"Alright, son ... but if that needle starts to crawl up, I have to stop the test."

Fine. I give up. "Do what you have to do, then."

I stepped out of the car and into the waiting area, watching anxiously as the workers moved it into place on those roller thingies and started their test program up.

That E-check was over FAST, really fast. Far more so than in Willoughby, where it seemed to drag on for a couple of minutes of 3000 RPM torture. This time, it was all over in less than a minute ... and what do you know? It passed!

An enormous weight just vanished from my shoulders in a dizzy rush. I could have kissed them all. Maybe even some tongue too.

So, I figure I'm only in debt up to my eyeballs until sometime around Halloween. That's no picnic, but I've been there and done that. However, I am also mobile, legal, and absolutely giddy with relief. The worst two weeks of this whole fucking year are now an archived memory, nothing more. Praise Dog.

Shafts Of Murky Light

Well, the black curtain has started to lift...just a bit.

The car is now finished. Will be getting it from Conrad's early tomorrow morning and then it's off to get it E-checked again and then (assuming even one goddamned thing goes right this week) it's off to finally get a new sticker and be legal and driving again. So, the nightmare is almost halfway over. The "paying back of loans" parts starts up in earnest next week and continues for as long as it takes to do and also keep my own bills and rent and etc. afloat. Wheee.

Anyway, I've been treasuring the laughs when I get them these past few days, and Doonesbury has been really stepping up to the plate lately in that regard. Here is a series of strips that ran last week that caused me much amusement...

1

2

3

4

5

6

Ok, off to bed. Here's hoping tomorrow goes without incident...

NP U2 Vertigo Tour Los Angeles (4.6.05)

The Downward Spiral

"When a man stares into the abyss and sees nothing but darkness, this is the time that he finds his character. And it is his character that keeps him from falling into the abyss."

That's right, folks, I am peering intently into the abyss right now and it's quite a sight: a big yawning bleak chasm of absolute darkness that seems without end. Of course, there is an end down there somewhere, but it sure feels bottomless today...

A lot of the following sad, stupid, amazingly shit-luck story has been alluded to in a recent post, but as it turns out, that was only the tip of the iceberg, kids! Life, which was merely being a pain in the ass at the time I wrote that linked entry, took a razor-sharp hairpin turn for the "horrid" late last week, and finally reached the level of "blackly comic" earlier this afternoon. And it may not even be over yet -- as I write this, there is the small chance of things somehow getting even worse tomorrow, but I'm currently of the mind that the bottom has at last been touched...it's time to resurface, take some slow deep breaths, and recount just how in the Hell I got into my current predicament.

About two weeks ago, I noticed that my driver's side rear tire was pretty low on air. A refilling solved the problem temporarily, but less than a week later on a Friday night, it was back to low again. That Saturday, I dropped the car off at Conrad's (local Good Year place on Euclid Avenue), and I was informed that there was a nail in the tire, but repairing it seemed kinda silly as both that and the opposite tire were wearing down considerably. Thus, I authorized their replacement and threw in an oil change and lube since it had been a little longer than four months since the last one had been done and it seemed a good idea at the time. That was about $200 after all expenses.

A few days later, I believe it was Wednesday, it was time to get the car E-checked. Granted, I went into this a bit cocky since the exhaust system on this car was only replaced this past March (a surprise repair that caught me unawares monetarily and SHOULD have been a sign of things to come back then, but I always sucked at reading tea leaves), and it was to my amazement, that the car failed the test.

A slight bit annoyed, I headed back home to set up an appointment to get whatever problem I had taken care of as soon as possible. Upon pulling into my parking spot, I noticed some steam under the car hood, which surprised me, but didn't trouble me since this car has a long history of steaming slightly when hot. Figuring this was a side effect of E-check running up the RPM around 3000 or so (to, uh, simulate 25 mph driving conditions, I am told...though I wonder exactly what kind of cars sound like that at 25 mph), I paid the fumes no mind.

That night, I drove the car back to the place that installed the exhaust system in the first place to have them find what was causing my NO emissions to read higher than they should (said establishment being Giles Marathon on Route 306 near Lakeland Communit College in Kirtland). When parking my car in the lot next to the building, I noticed the steam again, only this time the car had only been running for a few minutes. Frowning, I popped the hood open and looked around. There was quite a bit of smoke, not steam, and it was certainly not cooking engine coolant. It smelled like oil, and seemed to be emanating from the center of the engine. It wasn't a frightening amount, perhaps some leftover spilled oil from the change, I thought. In any case, I mentioned this in a note I left for the mechanics the next day, wondering if that might be the source of my problems.

Thursday comes around, and Giles calls me to say that there is nothing outwardly wrong with the car. They noted (correctly) that i must have just failed the E-check, since everything was running properly. Just to make sure, they went ahead and did a lot of engine cleaning (fuel injectors, lines, etc.) in order to give the car the cleanest possible exhaust. They reccommended that I run the engine a bit hot to cook off any residual gunk and then it should pass with flying colors. I then asked about the steam/smoke, which they blew off, saying that there appeared to be a small leak of fluid all right, not sure if it was transmission or oil, but that it was of no consequence to the test. Relieved, I plunked down $100 and drove home, confident that all was well once again.

That feeling of confidence wore off really fast when I got off the freeway and pulled into a Wendy's for a bite to eat, however. The car was steaming again, and this time it was a pretty considerable amount, roughly that of what an overheating radiator looks like. The gauges all read fine, and after a few minutes of worrying me, the smoke just vanished and did not recur the entire drive home.

Bright and early Friday morning, with a bit of unease, I took the car onto the freeway and then up and down Lost Nation road, heating it up nice for it's second E-check. I pulled into an adjacent building and the car was steaming away again. Hoping it would do the same as the previous night, I let it idle and waited for the steam to disperse so it wouldn't prove a distraction to the servicekids at E-check. To my rising concern, the steam didn't stop. At all. With a sigh of resignation, I pulled over to the E-check facility and my fears are justified when the manager of the place refuses outright to test the car. A couple of the kids look under the hood and tell me that I have a pretty good sized oil leak going, and the rules clearly state that they will not test a car that is leaking or smoking anything at all.

E-check was in the right to do that, but I was infuriated nonetheless. I backed the car out of the building and then floored it down the driveway and laid down some additional rubber on Lost Nation Road in a fit of mounting anger. Now I am in a real pinch with the tags expiring in two days and only one shot left to get the car fixed and passed before then.

Steaming, I roared back to the condo, watched my car throw off some more smoke from under the hood and wheel wells, and told Sarah the situation. I then attempted to contact the mechanic who fixed my car at Giles Marathon. Ah, he was off that day and wouldn't be back until Saturday. No dice there. So, I immediately set up an appointment at Conrad's, told them what was wrong and that I had to get this car passable by early Saturday morning or I would be pretty well screwed (ha ha...I had no idea what that word meant at the time).

Off to work I went, wondering offhandedly what in the hell I did to bring all of this jumping through numerous hoops upon myself. A couple of hours later, Conrad's called and said that they could find no leak or smoke coming from the engine whatsover. They even did some kind of expensive degrease-and-dye test of the oil system and found no breaches or leaks anywhere.

What. The. Fuck.

Wondering if I had stumbled into some new episode of Candid Camera, I asked them how much it will be to pick the car up on Saturday morning and was told that the charge was just south of $90 for all services rendered. I hung up the phone, not at all reassured, and getting increasingly exasperated. I was now just around $400 spent on this car in the last seven days, and becoming increasingly certain as time passed that something was being missed.

After thinking about it a few minutes, I called Conrad's back and talked directly to the mechanic who worked on the car, verifying once again that there was no leak, no smoke, nada. Verified. Stymied, I then asked how long the car was running when it was being examined and was told roughly 20 minutes. Figuring it was worth a try for my peace of mind, I asked that he start the car again and just let it run.

30 minutes later, the mechanic called back and said they had found the problem. I was not leaking and burning oil at all, but rather power steering fluid, and quite a bit of it at that. In fact, the whole rack-and-pinion system was shot. When totaled out, these repairs would be about $840...over twice what I had just put into this thing. I balked immediately and decided to think about it overnight.

I spent a lot of time weighing my options that evening and into Saturday morning. It was a tough call almost any way I cut it. A brand new car is out of the question for me, and even making payments on a new used car wouldn't kill me, but the insurance premiums until I could pay it off certainly would.

My first inclination was to just fire this aging car out of a cannon and into Lake Erie, but after already flushing $400 down the toilet, that option stung, and it stung hard. This car, until now, had been a very good car for me. It was free (a gift from Sarah), so the maintenance and repairs I have put into it have been the price of the car...and considering that, it's still not a terrible deal except for the "all at once" part. The car is still in good shape, too -- I use it only almost exclusively for work transportation and little else. If i can get another 2 years or so out of it, great, and these repairs certainly bode well for that being the case. Also, thanks to a little caveat in the E-check program, I will probably not need to worry if the car passes an emissions test or not, since if you can show documentation that you have spent at least $200 having the car worked on in order to pass the E-check, then they would in effect say "good enough" and pass you for your labors.

In the end, the above made up my mind for me. While there was an option to wait until Sarah upgraded from her current car to a new one, that waiting period would be a few months and the price I would pay to get rid of the leftover payments was a couple hundred dollars more than I would spend fixing this car up once and for all. So, once I had figured out a way to make this work around my finances, I made the call Saturday afternoon and green-lighted the rack-and-pinion work. This was gonna hurt a bit, yes, but I figured it was the right choice to make.

Wellllllll, it wasn't...in fact, that call just went down as the most galactically stupid move I've made in this new century.

This afternoon while getting ready for work, Conrad's called. I figured it was them saying that the car was ready and all, but the mechanic on the other end of the phone had a tone in his speaking that chilled my blood the second I realized what it was: that voice had "Err, I don't know how to tell you this..." written all over it.

It turns out that the mechanics were pulling off or putting on my tires to get at the steering system and realized that my front braking system (not just my front brakes, but the whole fucking system) was hosed. Calipers, shoes, rotors, the works. I started to giggle in a completely humorless, doomed fashion.

So, uh, how much for this work now? Oh, another $500...

I felt like I had just been kicked square in the stomach. Making a last, desperate, pathetic attempt for a sane ending to this farce, I asked (already knowing the answer) if the work on the rack-and-pinion steering had already been completed, hoping for some way to avoid going into spectacular amounts of debt in a real big hurry.

Silly me. Of course it had.

What else was there to do? I am already sunk for a now-$950 repair bill (boy, that went up since the estimate) and throwing on another $500 for something I can't drive safely without was a quick and easy "oh, what the hell, I'm completely fucked already, why not" decision. I didn't know whether to laugh like the damned, weep like an 8 year old, or simply self-combust in my chair. I opted for the former. Oh, that was cathartic.

So, we are now, what, somewhere south of $1900 on this car since last Saturday? You know, I'd rather not find out for sure. I borrowed some money from Greg and from Sarah to get all of this shit done, and it may or may not be enough, and I'm not sure I even care one way or the other and I'm about two steps from absolute rabid insanity.

Yeah, things can only get better, and I know they eventually will. Life is a bitch. Everybody hurts. When a man stares into the abyss and sees nothing but darkness, this is the time that he finds his character, et cetera.

Ten bucks says I get the car back on Wednesday morning and it still fails E-check.