On Vacation

No update this week, I was away in Los Angeles visiting Flying Houses.

Aw jeez, I gotta give you something to do, don’t I? Well, how about you take a listen to my music page? I have a new song posted (*cough*shameless plug*cough*)

Tecumseh Valley #30

aka Road Trip 2008
aka On The Road 2: On The Roader
aka Raisin’ A Ruckus In A Red Ford Fuckus!
aka Super Happy Fun Road Trip Blog (With Pictures!)

Well due to popular demand and the fact that I don’t feel like writing about music this week I present to you the story of the move out West. I’ve been on the fence about jotting it down partly because the first draft I wrote went on forever. That was 3 weeks ago when I first arrived and every detail seemed to be of the utmost significance. Hopefully the time between now and then has given me the benefit of better hindsight to present to you a leaner story without an extensive discourse happening every time a Man Asses and Dumb Fries joke is made (more on this later).

Currently I’m in my bedroom in Tucson which is more than twice the size of my old bedroom in NYC. As of last weekend, I have all of my new furniture but I’m still waiting on a delivery for my last purchase of a new desk. I’m in love with the landscape and the weather. I arrived at the peak of summer a few days before the monsoon season began. On the rainy days it’s around 99 degrees and humid and the desert blooms to spectacular reds and yellows with lush greenery that exists only a couple of months out of the year. On the dryer days, the temperature gets into the 110s and you stay inside as much as you can. I live in East Tucson about a mile away from the University of Arizona campus. I go running in the mornings with a breathtaking view of the Catalina mountains 30 miles out of town.

I bought a Ford Focus to come here. It’s a 2-door coupe that somehow fit most of my life in the trunk and backseats. I had to shed some things I wasn’t too crazy about losing, but I’m happy to be a car owner again. I missed driving so much. It remained at my parents’ house in Maryland until the weekend before the move when I brought it up to NYC to load it up and go. I managed to squeeze one more solo show that Sunday which I narrowly avoided arriving late for due to driving my car through her first massive hailstorm somewhere in New Jersey. I barely spent the week at home because of work and random farewells. Thursday June 26 I was up until 4 AM loading up. I came in for my last day of work the following day exhausted but excited. After an emotional 2 hours of best wishes, I went to get my car and took off into the night. I got to the house and passed out immediately

The next day was the first real driving day. I spent the morning saying more goodbyes to my family, got in my car, and drove off. I stopped by Dulles International Airport to pick up Toothbrush, who was my road trip companion for the next 4 days. This is where we began taking pictures. Here is what a highway in Virginia looks like:

It must be noted that we missed an opportunity to snap a really awesome first picture. On our way through the DC metro area we saw an exit sign for Manassas and Dumfries. Well this was too much for us. We HAD to get a picture of the sign leading to man asses and dumb fries. I slowed down to about 30 mph while Toothbrush got the camera ready but alas we were too little too late. This did not stop us from using the sign as a running gag for the rest of the trip.

We drove for 7 or 8 hours through Virginia. It seriously got painful after a while expecially due to the state’s over the top highway patrol. We would hit stretches where every couple of miles we’d find a trooper with a radar gun staked out behind some trees. Oh and the other notable thing about Virginia was we passed a sign about 50 miles north of Roanoke that said ENTERING VIRGINIA’S TECHNOLOGY CORRIDOR where we saw a couple of farms. We finally hit Tennessee which made me unbelievably excited. We found bluegrass stations on FM radio! The drive was mostly through the Appalachian mountains which were absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately we weren’t able to snap any pictures of the most scenic stretch because we drove through a severe thunderstorm that slowed us to a crawl for an hour. This was the first of many.

We arrived in Nashville at around 8 or 9 in the evening. We stayed with Toothbrush’s cousin and her husband. We were too late to take in the sights but we did go bowling and then dancing. The DJ played Michael Jackson and a bunch of folks with thick Southern accents knew all the words. It was sweet.

The next day of driving was on a Sunday. We stopped at a Shoney’s on the way out of Nashville and got to see the Sunday Best crowd on full display. However, it didn’t register with us how deep in the South we were until the following exchange occured between Toothbrush and the waitress:

(Scene: Toothbrush and Tecumseh Valley are sitting in the booth of a Shoney’s letting the approximately 54,897 fried calories of the breakfast buffet do what they will and waiting for the WASP-y looking waitress to bring the check. Enter Waitress)

W: Here’s your bill. (Pauses and looks at Toothbrush for a moment) Say, are you hiss-pan-ick?

TB: Uh, yeah, I am.

W: Let me ask you, where are you from originally?

TB: Uh, well I was born in the US. My dad is from Guatemala and my mom is from Peru.

W: Oh that is so nice! I’m half hiss-pan-ick myself. (TB and TV look at each other) You know, I don’t like it how everyone thinks you’re a Mexican if you’re hiss-pan-ick.

TB: Um…

W: It’s just ignorant is all. There’s a lot of hiss-pan-ick countries out there and everyone calls them all Mexicans.

We drove on through Alabama. We stopped at a gas station where I pissed off the elderly lady at the counter by trying on all the pairs of sunglasses on display in a quest to find the most ridiculous looking pair. We got caught in two more severe thunderstorms, each one longer than the other. Also while passing through Birmingham we saw a banner covering the entire side of a two story house saying END ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION NOW!

Then we arrived in Mississippi. This was my favorite part of the drive. The landscape shifted from mountains and forests to swampy jungles. The Gulf Coast air added a sweetness to the perpetual moisture. The buildings were saturated with it, to the point that they felt like they grew naturally out of the ground. It was also around this time that I realized we were almost through the Deep South and I had yet to stop at a Stuckey’s! Y’see, weeks prior when I was talking over the trip with a friend of mine from Georgia, he said one of the things I HAVE to do while down South is stop at a Stuckey’s and try one of their pecan logs. Thus one of the objectives for the trip was to snap a picture of me eating said pecan log. We blinded around a couple of small towns in search of this elusive Stuckey’s and Mississippi continued to display herself at her most picturesque:

This old train is so cool looking

The sign on the shingle says "Oakland Heights Beauty Salon"

Until at last success!!

And did I mention that Mississippi is absolutely beautiful?

Our stop that night was in New Orleans. Due to all the Stuckey’s detours and thunderstorm-related delays we didn’t arrive until just after nightfall. We took the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway into town. It was too dark and foggy to get any decent pictures but those were also the ideal conditions for a mystical drive. After driving through 1500 miles of totally landlocked country it was a thrill to be close to water again. The fog and the length of the Causeway made it seem like we were completely surrounded by water on all sides and we took it in good faith that the road in front of us led anywhere at all. Meanwhile the lights of New Orleans flamed together and burned bigger and brighter the closer we came to the other bank. I had never been out there before and it made for an impressive entrance.

Now here’s where things got complicated. We had no accomodations set up for the night and zero plans other than, “Let’s stop in New Orleans, it’ll be a blast!” Moreover, we had no idea how to get anywhere in town or even where the downtown area was exactly. I called up a friend that had just visited the area on vacation and got the name of a major avenue and a good hotel so we headed in some vague direction. This was intensely difficult as New Orleans is still badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina 3 years later. Major roadways are shoddy and disorganized with offramps that exit onto other offramps that exit onto split streets that travel side by side to very different places. Local roads are completely ravaged and filled with cracks and potholes. At least one house on every block that we saw was either abandoned or uninhabitable and had the family living in a trailer on the lawn in the shadow of their old home. Most disturbing of all were all the homeless people with no place to go living in large tent communities in parks and under bridges. Toothbrush, who did some post-Katrina cleanup work a couple of years ago, said it was much, much worse in the part of town below sea level. Combined with our being lost in an unfamiliar city, this was a disconcerting and deeply affecting part of the drive.

After about an hour or so which included calling our other roommate for help in looking up a map of the city online and giving us directions, we arrived in the completely reconstructed downtown area. Here’s where we have the best stroke of luck of the entire trip – Toothbrush’s dad, who is a hotel employee, helped us get an absurdly cheap room on the 43rd floor of the Sheraton on Canal St. We were less than a block away from Bourbon Street and right in the middle of the French Quarter. Plus we had the most killer view EVVaR.

We ate some Cajun food which included alligator (it was delicious) and went out until dawn. It was a Sunday night but there were still plenty of people around. The French Quarter has no laws against public drinking so we would get a drink and go out into the street. Bourbon Street itself is like a frat party from hell (we heard a Bon Jovi cover band at one point). However all the other blocks are quite wonderful. We wandered into a couple of clubs for some roots rock and classic R&B then we wandered back down to the area of our hotel. Being young drunken males of the heterosexual persuasion, we partook in some of the striptease establishments. One was a little sleazy with some pretty unattractive dancers, the other was exciting with some real knockouts. The best part was since it was 3 am on a Sunday and we were two of the few patrons that night, the dancers chatted with us all night long. I try to keep this blog PG-13 so I won’t say too much more other than I spent an absurd amount of money on lap dances that night. I woke up the next morning hungover but feeling excellent.

The third day was the shortest drive. It took about six hours to get to Houston which was nothing compared to the previous couple of days. Passing through southern Louisianna was another amazing experience. The highways passed over swamps and lakes, so they were raised on stilts with stretches of no possible turnoffs. We were out of the food we brought with us so we stopped at a run down truck stop for lunch. We ordered the worst fried chicken in the world, undercooked fries, and flat cola. We could only stomach a couple of bites which was enough to put our appetites off until Houston.

We spent a relaxing evening catching up with old friends. I was tricked into believing we ate armadillo for dinner that night. I was very disappointed to find out it was only buffalo.

We got up early in the morning for the most grueling part of our trip – a 17 hour drive between Houston and Tucson. The landscape changed so many times. We started in the Gulf Coast area, drove on through prairies, then mountains, then the desert, then the farming valleys around El Paso and the Rio Grande river, then more mountains, then more desert. Toothbrush found out he has a creek named after him.

We also went down the stretch of road with the highest posted speed limit in the nation.

Here are some other pictures from one of the loneliest highways in the world.

In West Texas, even the roads are segregated

And at last!

We saw very few cars, but there were a lot of really buggy stretches. This is what the front of my car looked like when we stopped in New Mexico.

And once we were past El Paso we started seeing regular signs of civilization again, such as this giant metal roadrunner built by the side of the road.

And this house on a truck.

We were stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint at one point. They waved us through although we were too scared to snap any pictures.

We made it home between 8 and 9 Arizona time.

I didn’t drive again for 2 days.

~THE~END~

Washington Phillips

Witnesses, both extended family and friends, still differ on the description of what exactly Washington Phillips played, with layman terminology descriptive of anything from a “home-made banjo” laid flat, to an organ or a contraption made from “the insides of a piano”.
–Pat Conte, from the liner notes of the 2005 Yazoo Records release, The Key To The Kingdom

In 1927, 47 year old George Washington Phillips entered a Dallas recording studio with a couple of mysterious homemade instruments, recorded 16 cuts, and proceeded to baffle musicologists for the next 80 years. The sound on record was warm and angelic. Phillips’ articulate and friendly voice quilts around an instrumental body that at once resembles a harp, a banjo, and a toy piano while sounding nothing like any of those. The debate is exacerbated by the lack of evidence surrounding the player in question. Aside from the tracks recorded that day and a couple of photographs, the best facts deduced have been that Phillips was a rural Texan that came from a musical family. He spent his youth in a string band with his brothers and at one point a young Blind Lemon Jefferson. His unique take on gospel music caught the ear of Columbia Records A&R man Frank Walker, who rushed Phillips into a studio for a run through of some reworked standards, some original numbers, and some sermons with musical accompaniment. The songs were released on a run of 78s that were marketed as “Gospel music with ‘Novelty’ accompaniment” and sold rather well. While never attaining legendary status, Phillips did retire to his farm where he lived until his death in 1954. His music even has a handful of admirers – Gillian Welch, Will Oldham, and most notably Ry Cooder all did their part in proliferating Phillips’ influence to subsequent generations.

Like any good early 20th century recordings, all other related information is based on hearsay and red herrings. Roots music powerhouse Yazoo Records even went as far as to write about the wrong Washington Phillips on their first reissue of his complete discography! Yet his wonderfully friendly take on Christianity, pleasant voice, and especially his still unidentified instrumentation continue to inspire curiosity decades after their recording. To speculate on the identity of his instrument is to explore a world of antiquated futurism and forgotten crazes of new instrument technology. The celestaphon, the phonoharp, the dolceola, and the fretless zither are all potential candidates, each equally as likely and unlikely to be making the sounds in question. In writing the liner notes for the most recent Yazoo reissue of Phillips’ music, Pat Conte makes a strong case that we’re hearing a pair of modified dolceolas. Yet while researching this entry, I came across this article which specifically cites the impossibility of this being true and attributes the instrumentation to a pair of common fretless zithers. There is consensus that Phillips played a pair of instruments that he modified somehow, maybe with an extended bridge and restrung with strings taken from an entirely different source. These were laid flat in front of him on a tabletop and he proceeded to fingerpick with one hand on each instrument. The ingenuity continues down to his picking style – Phillips would hit as many as a dozen notes at once to weave a rich but surprisingly uncluttered tapestry. Simply put, the sound is heavenly. The Key To The Kingdom is a testament to the beauty of selfless, loving faith - an absolute rarity in its sincerity and pureness.

Washington Phillips remains relatively unknown outside the roots and gospel communities which is a bit of a shame. His recordings display a true original in action and come off as strikingly sublime even today. Fortunately, I was able to find some clips of his songs on YouTube. The visuals are a bit garish, but it’s the music that matters. Enjoy!

What Are They Doing In Heaven Today

Train Your Child

Denomination Blues – Part 1

Greetings from Arizona…

…where the weather is a mild 110 degrees in the afternoon and you drink fluids constantly regardless of thirst. It’s gorgeous and bright. I have lizards and cacti in my backyard. There’s also a fire pit where we have occasional cookouts, but we have to be careful about where we get the branches. We have oleander bushes growing in our backyard and that shit is toxic. Just like the band of the same name.

For the curious ones among you the trip west was a blast. It took about five days with stops in DC, Nashville, New Orleans, and Houston. It’s a big country! I’d love to do it again sometime.

Anyway, I’ll start off the Tucson chapters of this blog with an entry about the favorite sons of the area, Calexico.

I’ll admit I didn’t think to check these guys out until I started preparing for the move. For a long time, they’ve been on my mind as a vaguely alt-country-ish act that tended to get favorable reviews. I didn’t know too many folks that were into them so I didn’t have too many points of reference. More than once I confused them with Califone, who are pretty good themselves although quite different. Anyway, I decided a few weeks ago to head down to the local record store where I arbitrarily picked out their third album, 2000’s Hot Rail

Maybe it was the wishful thinking over the move, but this one registered with me from the first listen. The guys shift flawlessly over many different moods which is always a huge plus for me. They cover a lot of ground from airy barely-there meditations to epic tone poems to mariachi to tango ballads, along with a couple of straight-ahead songs that complement their context and stand up on their own rather well. The mix of influences is balanced and seldom kitschy. Even when it does veer to the too-quirky-for-it’s-own-good side I give it points for tackling some relatively obscure genres, such as Ballad of Cable Hogue - a traditional country story-song with lyrics in two languages.

The guys really shine with lush yet understated arrangements that unfold over repeated listens as the subtleties of the relationships between clashing instruments and musical motives become more familiar and obvious. My personal fave, Sonic Wind, centers around an acoustic hook built on a couple of off-beat 8th notes that is introduced, then buried in the arrangement, then thrust to the forefront as the other instruments suddenly match it. The effect comes on the chorus and makes for a pretty thrilling and deceptively epic song. Similarly, Fade, presents itself as an ominous lounge jazz number before expertly setting up a cacophanous twist. It gives me chills, it does. Not many things give me chills with the desert life and all.

More than anything, I think I’m in love with the sound and arrangements. I’m not very knowledgable about Southwestern music, but the clear influence I hear is Ennio Morricone and spaghetti western soundtracks. I shudder a bit at saying so because the music is clearly sophisticated and comes from composers with rich tastes in styles I’m only vaguely aware of. This still sounds pretty otherworldly to me and I look forward to exploring their catalogue.