Sour Milk: The Nola.com Experience - June 12, 2012

My wife and I decided that if The Times-Picayune owners thought we didn't need the paper four days of the week, we probably didn't need it the other three and canceled our subscription. One regular feature of MySpiltMilk.com (which will be live tomorrow) is going to be documenting my efforts to stay informed through Nola.com. Today's post has a particularly painful backdrop as T-P staffers are learning their fates today. As of this point in the writing, I know that news writer Danny Monteverde won't be a part of the grand online experiment. 

On my iPhone, the top stories at 8:40 a.m. are an editorial suggesting that City Council put charter changes on the ballot and move on. News leads with Jefferson Parish school system's regional parent group on the way, the charter editorial, and a story about a visiting pet program orientation on Saturday. There's weather and entertainment news - local actors and artists pay tribute to the late Ray Bradbury, the story behind Chakula cha Jua's new one many play, and Bieber fever in Mexico City. I have to click to see more. Doug MacCash is a friend, so I click on the companion piece to his cha Jua story, a video of the playwright walking in his neighborhood - or so I gather from the headline. The video player doesn't show up on my phone. Additional entertainment news includes a Joy Behar story, the That's My Boy trailer, a David Arquette story, the Percy Jackson sequel will shoot in New Orleans, Gerard Butler will shoot in Shreveport, and a recap of the season opener for True Blood. I don't get Behar, Bieber or Arquette on a pared-down version of the website, but otherwise, good enough.

Following the News link, I find stories on the Algiers Charter Schools association making changes, the Jeff Parish school system story, the City Council editorial, the pet program story, an obituary, an op-ed piece from Stephanie Grace, a BP-related editorial, an anti-bullying session at a library, a judge voids a death sentence for an inmate convicted of a 1995 triple murder, and Jeff Parish school officials' plan to deal with the system's deficit. Based on Nola.com's smart phone presence, I can't even guess at what today's top story is, though I'd think the voided death sentence might be more significant that the pet program and the bullying story for starters.

The Nola.com app includes "Headlines" and "Top Stories" as menu options, so maybe I'll get a more coherent overview of the news there. Headlines: Tangipahoa Parish introduces oil, gas drilling, the Algiers charter school association changes, the Jeff Parish school system's parent ... thing (I can't summarize this one based on the headline), the City Council editorial, the pet program, the obituary, Grace's op-ed, and so on. This appears to more or less follow the news flow at Nola.mobi, and thankfully buried is the story of the dismembered woman, whose friends say she was a "good mom." Is that really a story? What else are they going to say? Also buried because it went online at 6:45 a.m. is the story of mosquitoes being out in record number, which seems more newsworthy to me.

"Top Stories" still follows a chronological order, though there seems to be some decision-making going on regarding what appears. I thought it might be shaped by the number of comments, but no comments - a strong plus for the Nola.com app. (Speaking of - how can Nola.com plan to be a website for the city when its commenters keep the air of racism palpable?) 

Finally, a visit to Nola.com, where for the first time I learn that the Hornets turned down a trade offer from the Cavs. The reassignment of Marlin Gusman is a fixture at the top of the page along with the story about the dismembered good mom (where the comments stream took a strongly moralistic turn). Below that: "Gov. Bobby Jindal has vetoed 12 bills so far this session," "Keep bugs at bay as metro New Orleans gets more rain: An editorial" and "In New Orleans, not even little girls are safe from violence" by Jarvis DeBerry, followed by stories I saw on the app and the mobi site.

To be fair, the news looks a lot more like the news at 8:40 than it did when I first looked at 6:45 this morning. Early risers may be facing mundane mornings if they try to read Nola.com with the morning coffee. Also, like the AnnArbor.com site, there is a menu of top stories in each section at the foot of the page. You've got to scroll to get to it, but you can see more of the stories without having to click into the menu bars at the top of the page. Still, the chronological news feed dominates the home page, forcing readers to work around the home page for a more focused presentation of the news. 

Finally, if people want to stop the proposed three-days-a -week printing schedule, someone's going to have to protest. Employees at the paper have said they don't want it, we don't want it, and advertisers have now said that they don't want it. But if we all keep our anger and frustration between ourselves, nothing will change the plans. Polite gatherings don't make the same statement as a big group more interested in results than commiseration. Since I started writing, Brett Anderson announced on Twitter that he's been let go.

This Week's Soundtrack: June 11, 2012

This week's soundtrack is seriously shaped by last week.
1. "The Coming Tide" - Luke Winslow-King: I've been listening to and enjoying Luke W-K's new album by the same name all week.
2. "Oh Susannah" - Neil Young & Crazy Horse: The lead track from Americana. By now, a collection of remakes of folk tunes is a little been-there/done-that, and his version of "Get a Job" doesn't change enough to be interesting. Still, I love Crazy Horse's native stomp, and spelling out "banjo" gives the song a sense of humor I hope I'll discover in some of the other tracks.
3. "Hey, Hey We're the Gories" - The Gories: The Detroit garage-punk band plays Saturday night at Siberia with the 3-D Invisibles.

4. "Face Down in the Gutter" - Quintron: A lot of this last week was spent at the Music Box, where Quintron conducted the final, improvised-within-a-framework shows. He mapped out the performance and signaled players in and out of the mix.
5. "Unforgettable Super Lady" - Javelin: The guys from Javelin were two of the performers at the Music Box.
6. "Armoire" - Curren$y with Young Roddy and Trademark: From The Stoned Immaculate. With Lil Wayne, I always felt like the mixtapes were the testing grounds for ideas that would take shape on Tha Carter II and III. With Curren$y, I wonder if the major label releases are the ads for mixtapes, which are where his music really lives.
7. "Crew Love" - Drake with The Weeknd: The Weeknd plays the House of Blues Tuesday.
8. "Street Parade" - Theresa Andersson: The title track from her most recent album. Part of the reporting for my story on Theresa in the current issue of OffBeat was done when she shot the video for this song at the Music Box.
9. "I Can't Make it Alone" - Continental Drifters" Susan Cowsill singing lead on the Dusty Springfield classic. Cowsill performed Dusty in Memphis in its entirety Saturday night at Carrollton Station.
10. "No Easy Way Down" - Dusty Springfield: If I'm going to play a Dusty cover ...
11. "Pacific Coast Highway" - The Beach Boys: From the new That's Why God Made the Radio. I wasn't eager for this album despite my love of The Beach Boys because of the sound of the title track and its nostalgia - usually my least-favorite of the band's modes. Most reviews agree that the last three songs give the album a reason to live; so far, this is my favorite of the three.
12. "Dreamer" - Dennis Wilson: From Pacific Ocean Blue. I think Beach Boys' obsessives overrate this album, but Dennis developed an authentic writing voice when Brian couldn't be counted on, and that gives his treatments of conventional subject matter life.
13. "Bells" - Quintron: Like "Face Down in the Gutter," this comes from his Sucre du Sauvage album, and it's more in keeping with the experimental nature of the Music Box performances. The ambient sounds were recorded in City Park during the time when Quintron installed himself as a museum exhibit at NOMA as part of his "Parallel Universe" show with Miss Pussycat.
14. "Little Boxes" - Teenage Head: A year ago Saturday, my friend Imants Krumins passed away. He kept seeing Teenage Head and giving them a chance way longer than anyone else did. I wish the original mix of Teenage Head's debut album could be found online instead of this artificially revved-up version, but since it's what we've got, it's what we go with.
15. "I Zimbra" (12" version) - Talking Heads: Right now I'm plowing through Jonathan Lethem's entry in the 33 1/3 series, Fear of Music. Lethem's wrestling with a lot of ideas starting with the question of how to address the album now while honoring his changing relationship to it over the years, and I wish he was handling that challenge with less circular writing. I've rarely moved so slowly through a 33 /13 book.
16. "Back.te.riality" (Magas remix) - Die-6, Magas: Chicago's Jim Magas was also among the performers at the Music Box this weekend.
17. "Express Yourself" - Diplo feat. Nicky Da B: From Diplo's new Express Yourself EP. This is one of the handful of non-New Orleans tracks to get bounce right.
18. "I've Got My Mind Set on You" - Luke Winslow-King: Also from The Coming Tide. Here he and Esther Rose cover George Harrison.
19. "Free State of Jones" - Cary Hudson: Blue Mountain's Cary Hudson periodically does a solo show on the House of Blues' patio, the Voodoo Garden. He'll be there as part of a songwriter's showcase Wednesday at 7 p.m.

World Cafe Comes the the Crescent City

The radio show "World Cafe" with David Dye will focus on New Orleans this week, starting today with a tuba summit at Preservation Hall with Ben Jaffe, Kirk Joseph and Philip Frazier. The week is part the show's "Sense of Place" series, and will feature Trombone Shorty on Tuesday, Ani DiFranco, the Roots of Music and Hurray for the Riff Raff Wednesday, the Treme on Thursday, and Dr. John shows New Orleans' spiritual side on Friday.

Hurray for the Riff Raff

Unfortunately, local NPR affiliate WWNO doesn't air "World Cafe," so you'll have to listen online at NPR.org.

The Last Nights of the Music Box

[Updated] The Music Box - the Bywater art installation/performance space/"Shantytown Sound Laboratory" - will play its final weekend of shows starting tonight at 7:15. Performers include Baby Dee, Rob Cambre, Donald Miller, Rosalie "Lady Tambourine" Washington, Javelin, MAGAS, Rotten Milk and more conducted by Quintron.

Advance tickets are sold out; if you want to take your chances at the door, good luck. If you can't make it, the shows will be streamed live at LiveMusicNOLA.com. Shows start around 7:30 and 8:45 tonight and tomorrow.

Updated at 5:33 p.m.
I've added the show times.

Valparaiso Men's Chorus Sails the Straits of St. Claude

Booking the Best of the Beat was one of the best parts of my time at OffBeat, and the Valparaiso Men's Chorus played one of its most contagious sets during my tenure. It was the end of the night and the Parish was thinning out, but everybody who was left stood as close to the stage as possible and sang along with woozy energy to the set of sea shanties. Their may have been 16 people onstage, but the line between band and audience had dissolved so that in fact, the Valparaiso Men's Chorus was 60 or so male and female drunken voices strong.

The Valparaiso Men's Chorus returns with its second album, The Straits of St. Claude, and it reaches through the speakers just as live they leave the stage. There are a few "subtleties" such as the shift in "John Kanaka," which shifts to a second line beat half-way through before closing at punk velocity, but the songs generally come straight at you. Alex McMurray leads the chorus with sensitivity to the songs, so his lead vocal on "Hanging Johnny" has moments of near-delicacy, but more often than not, he gives them an appropriately spirited yowl. The songs are all call-and-response, and he's answered by half of the Bywater music community, who holler as if they warmed up for a few hours in the Saturn Bar - the Chorus' live home on St. Claude Avenue - before the session.

For the most part, the band provides structure for the songs, keeping them moving without drawing attention to itself. The Tin Men are the core, and they're joined by a number of artists including Greg Schatz and Dave Rebeck on accordions, Carlo Nuccio on drums, and Joe Cabral, Rick Trolsen, Matt Rhody, Chris Lane and Janelle Perrine on horns, whistles and strings.  When they get a chance to show off on the familiar instrumental "The Sailor's Hornpipe," the sea and the second line once again meet without selling out either.

Because the Valparaisos sing sea shanties, the rough-and-tumble atmosphere not only works but is essential. The songs are bawdy drinking songs, and McMurray and Company keep them that way, favoring the more off-color lyrics. The communal, irreverent vibe is central to the band's appeal, and part of what makes it so inviting. If I have a complaint, it's that it's hard to hear The Straits of St. Claude and not want a beer.

Flaming Lips to Set Guinness World Record in New Orleans

[Updated] On June 28, the Flaming Lips will come to New Orleans to the House of Blues to break a Guinness World Record for the most live concerts in a 24-hour period in multiple cities. The eight-stop tour will begin in Memphis on June 27 and move through Clarksdale, Oxford, Jackson, Hattiesburg, Biloxi and Baton Rouge before concluding at a location yet to be determined in New Orleans. The official press release promises "a not-to-miss mini-set featuring many surprise collaborations and guests." Tickets for the shows go on sale tomorrow; here's the itinerary:


June 27 -- New Fumes  & the Flaming Lips  --  Memphis, TN @  Handy Park                                            
June 27 -- Gary Clark Jr & the Flaming Lips -- Clarksdale, MS @ Ground Zero Blues' Club            
June 27 -- Grace Potter & the Nocturnals & the Flaming Lips -- Oxford, MS @ The Lyric                                            
June 28 -- Neon Indian & the Flaming Lips -- Jackson, MS @ Duling Hall                                            
June 28 -- Hunter Hayes & the Flaming Lips --  Hattiesburg, MS @ Benny's Boom Boom Room      
June 28 -- TBD & the Flaming Lips -- Biloxi, MS @  Hard Rock Casino                
June 28 --  GIVERS & the Flaming Lips  --  Baton Rouge, LA @ Varsity                                              
June 28  -- Grimes & the Flaming Lips  -- New Orleans @ The House of Blues



 The shows coincide with the June 26 release of The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends - an album that includes collaborations with Ke$ha, Bon Iver, Neon Indian, Yoko Ono, Jim James, Erykah Badu and more - and the O Music Awards, a 24-hour online celebration of web excellence. The O webcast will follow the Flaming Lips on their attempt to break the record onstage and off.

 The track listing for The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends:
1.  "2012 (You Must Be Upgraded) "(w/ Ke$ha, Biz Markie & Hour Of The Time Majesty 12)
2. "Ashes In The Air" (Featuring Bon Iver)
3. "Helping The Retarded To Know God" (Featuring Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros)
4. "Supermoon Made Me Want To Pee" (Featuring Prefuse 73)
5. "Children Of The Moon" (Featuring Tame Impala)
6. "That Ain't My Trip" (Featuring Jim James of My Morning Jacket)
7. "You, Man? Human???" (Featuring Nick Cave)
8. "I'm Working At NASA On Acid" (Featuring Lightning Bolt)
9. "Do It!" (Featuring Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band)
10. "Is David Bowie Dying?" (Featuring Neon Indian)
11. "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" (Featuring Erykah Badu)
12. "Girl, You're So Weird" (Featuring New Fumes)
13. "Tasered And Maced" (Featuring Aaron Behrens of Ghostland Observatory)

My 2009 interview with the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, and my 2006 interview with Michael Ivins.

Updated 12:27 p.m.
Since this story was first posted, the House of Blues has been announced as the New Orleans venue. The text has been updated to reflect this.

Curren$y on Wiz, Pharrell and The Stoned Immaculate

Saying Curren$y's back seems wrong because he never goes away. The Stoned Immaculate is his second Warner Brothers release, and like Weekend at Burnie's, it presents Spitta at his most accessible. The beats are still luxurious and he still obviously enjoys his own languorous flow, but it's all slightly more precise, 15 percent less weedy (except for "Showdown" - he's post-verbal by the end of the track). As usual, he's chasing paper and smoking as much as breathing, but while the isolation that's implied in his rhymes is touched on here ("Privacy Glass"), guest spots by Estelle and Marsha Ambrosius particularly counter that remote vibe as women enter his musical world.

Unlike former runnin' pardner Lil Wayne, his major label releases don't seem like the things that the mixtapes were building to. Tha Carter II and III pulled together all of Weezy's musical and conceptual obsessions, while The Stoned Immaculate and Weekend at Burnie's feel like ads one more gambit in the Jets Life branding effort, and the truest expression of Jets Life comes on the mixtapes.

Check out The Stoned Immaculate on Spotify.

    

The Weeknd to the House of Blues

Toronto-based R&B artist The Weeknd - Abel Tesfaye - will play the House of Blues Tuesday, June 12. You can download his last three albums at his website. Like Frank Ocean and Nostalgia/Ultra, he's on the cutting edge of music-making, using mixtapes and free releases as a way of sampling tracks that otherwise couldn't be cleared. Echoes of Silence starts with the excellent "D.D.," which samples Michael Jackson's "Dirty Diana" in an obvious tribute that traffics on the buzz of the Jackson sample but stands on its own as a distinctive composition.

Like fellow Canadian Drake, his subject matter is how hard it is being a playa, and like Drake, he makes it work. Tickets go on sale Wednesday at 10 a.m.

 

The T-P Rally & America's Petri Dish

On Monday afternoon, New Orleans protested in New Orleans fashion. The Save the Times-Picayune Rally in the parking lot of the Rock 'n' Bowl featured beer, costumes - including Joan of Arc and an accompanying knight - and music. Kermit Ruffins joined the Lonely, Lonely Knights to wing a new song, "Do the Times-Picayune," and Allen Toussaint played a set of his classics backed by Rod Hodges and Rene Coman of the Iguanas with Carlo Nuccio on drums. Pianist Bob Andrews finished his set with a version of Smiley Lewis' "Shame Shame Shame," taking a tip from Treme and rewriting it for the moment as "Shame Shame Shame Times-Pic'yune."

As rallies go, the event was more a chance for past and present Times-Picayune employees and paper supporters to vent their frustrations at the decision by Newhouse to make Nola.com the focus and cut staff, salaries, and the daily paper down to three days a week. "This is not a part-time city; we don't deserve a part-time paper," organizer Michael Tisserand said from the stage. Many in the crowd wore T-shirts that read: "The Times-Picayune: We publish come hell and high water" - T-shirts that were given to the paper's staff after its coverage Hurricane Katrina - to remind Newhouse of the implicit promise that it had made to them. "This [promise] is being broken in ways we couldn't have imagined," said Lolis Eric Elie, who wrote at The Times-Picayune until he took the buy-out and left in 2009.

Frustrations ran high. Nobody likes the current state of Nola.com and its emphasis on the newest news, which at the moment of this writing is:

1. Police morale support group

2. Shrimpers meet in Plaquemines to hear federal turtle protection plans

3. A seat belts are for law enforcement officials too editorial

4. Olsen twins win fashion prize

5. An op-ed piece on Gregory Aymond's killing

6. Cissy Houston to write a Whitney Houston bio

7. Report on woody debris in West Bank levee delayed again

8. Independence woman dies in traffic accident near Tickfaw

9. Navy renews charter of civilian-owned, state-operated ship

10. Kenner Mayor Mike Yenni should have sought bids before renewing garbage contract editorial

If you read your iPad at 8:30 a.m., those would have been your headlines.

The uncertainty about the future of jobs and the future of journalism was conversation topic number one. Some took the delay in informing staffers of their futures with the paper/website as a sign that the outcry was having an effect, while others figured the postponed announcement had more to do with mundane, bureaucratic housework and that nothing had changed. 

A regular question was "Why us?" There are less newsworthy towns to experiment on and ones with less loyal readerships, and that's the heart of my anger at this situation. The daily paper has been a part of my life since I clipped the funnies out of the papers on one cross-country and made my own book of comic strips in a photo album. I still read the paper on my back porch with the dog first thing in the morning, but Newhouse is not responsible for my routines. I'll start my day another way, and it will continue to start. 

Ultimately, I'm also not sold on anti-Nola.com argument. It sucks but it's solvable, and AnnArbor.com has already solved some of them. I'm conscious of the act of reading a paper, so I'm aware of the way I can be drawn to a story I wouldn't have chosen based on its headline, but I suspect that the more time I spend reading on Nola.com, the more I'm going to become conscious of other forms of opportunity reading (for lack of a better term). Writing on the web can be as rich and in-depth as writing for print if not moreso because of the possibilities that links make available. The younger readers who interact with Nola.com first aren't less intelligent for doing so, and they probably have their own nuanced reading experience that we'll discover when it becomes our primary interface with the news. 

The question is will it? Will Newhouse continue to value the news-gathering work done by The Times-Picayune's reporters? Will it still take 20-plus paragraphs-long stories? Will it create a context that values and encourages such work? Based on what we've heard so far including the plans to move the staff into new office space in the CBD, it sounds like they have other priorities. And to sacrifice jobs and cut salaries for people who have succeeded in ways most newspapers envy is cruel. 

What upsets me most is that once again New Orleanians are the guinea pigs for an experiment. Since Katrina, we are America's petri dish. Want to test theories on education? New Orleans is broken - go there. Want to test theories on public housing? New Orleans' projects have been emptied - go there. Now Newhouse wants to test its ideas about 21st Century publishing on us, and in each case, the realities of our lives are taken for granted. Our children are test subjects, our poor are simply a demographic in mixed income neighborhoods, and we're potential clicks for a publishing house. In each case, our lives are devalued and our interests discounted. The people who will lose their jobs are not abstract entities or job titles; they have families and car payments and lives. Our traditions (more likely habits) are what they are, and they're part of the fabric of our lives. For Newhouse to dismiss our lives and the impacts the decision will have so summarily is a profoundly hostile act that will not be forgotten.

Manufactured Beef?

It's hard to feel the reality in the Young Money Cash Money/G.O.O.D. Records beef. The story trickles along, but almost everybody involved is trying to back away from it, offering endorsements of their side without taking hard swings at the other.

The flashpoint seems to be Drake's lines, "Good ain't good enough / yo hood aint hood enough” in "Amen," the Meek Mill track with guest verses by Drake and Jeremih. "Good" has been heard as a reference to Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Records imprint, and it prompted G.O.O.D. recording artist Pusha T to respond with "Exodus 23:1"



Pusha T fired back not at Drake but at the top of the Young Money Cash Money roster - Lil Wayne. "Throw your flag up / you're hot shit / taking half of everything you get," Pusha says. "Contract all fucked up / I guess that means you're all fucked up / you signed one n***a that's signed to another n***a that's signed to three n***as / that's bad luck."

Lil Wayne responded with the menacingly titled "Ghoulish," which starts, "Fuck Pusha T and anybody that love him."




Beefs often bring out the best of their combatants, and the 1:30 running time for the song is wittier and less forced than most of Tha Carter IV. Still, it's hard to feel like his heart's in the feud. After the aggressive first line, Lil Wayne fights fire with weirdness. Besides, it looks like he had other priorities because only days later he dropped "My Homies Still" with Big Sean from his upcoming album, I Am Not a Human Being 2. Young Money exec Mack Maine also tried to downplay the beef, but he couldn't do with without taking a backhanded swipe himself:

if a gnat or a fly keep flyin' around you, eventually you gonna swing and swat it and just get it out the way," Mack said, using an analogy in which Pusha would play the insect. "Sometimes you swat it and the gnat dies; sometimes it just go away. ... You can keep flyin', just fly somewhere else, though. We chillin'.


Big Sean has done his part to dismiss the conflict. He is on G.O.O.D. "I feel like we need to come together and put all that aside," he said. "Because I work too hard!" Elsewhere, he said:

I think beef is weak. Crack is wack. I don't encourage that. Yeah, I'm cool with Pusha T, I'm cool with everybody. The thing is, people gotta understand that we got no point in beefing. We got families to take care of, we got moms to take care of. I ain't about to be over here arguing with nobody. We all on the same team. We all young men, black men, black, white, it doesn't matter, but just entrepreneurs trying to get it.

Pusha T hasn't made peace, but he hasn't stoked the fires either. Last night he was asked about the beef at the Hot 97 Summer Jam in New Jersey, where he didn't talk about it in interviews or onstage.

Behind the scenes, it's hard to imagine that there isn't a long-standing sense of rivalry, but someone's going to have to feed this thing if it's going to get musically interesting.

This Week's Soundtrack: June 4. 2012

When Carrie Brownstein was blogging for NPR, she wrote a post expressing her displeasure with the iPod shuffle feature:

most of us don't like the notion of random, even when the choices presented to us are culled from our own collections. It's like if there were a robot randomly selecting what we wear each day. Sure, it's our own closet and our own clothing, but we don't want to wear sweaters on 80-degree days, or to put on some magenta silk top that only looked good in the dressing room. With music, it boils down to mood and context, as well. 

I've never understood looking to your iPod to know your mood, though I'm always fascinated by Scott Tennant's efforts at Pretty Goes with Pretty to coerce iTunes into giving him what he wants through a process of grading and categorizing that exhausts me to think about.

I like to see what my iPod has in store for me. The first four songs on this week's soundtrack popped up last week during a bike ride, and they were so perfect for setting a mood that I decided to start with them. Here's this week's soundtrack:

1. "East of the River Nile" - Augustus Pablo: Maybe the funkiest track of the dub master's career.
2. "Bob Hope Takes Risks" - Rip, Rig & Panic: This post-punk band led by the Pop Group's Mark Stewart features a young Neneh Cherry on vocals. I'm curious about her upcoming collaboration with The Thing on avante-garde jazz and rock covers including Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" and the Stooges' "Dirt."
3. "You Can't Beat Two People in Love" - James Brown feat. Lyn Collins: I'd dumped this James Brown comp on my iPod without listening to it, and I hadn't heard this track before it came up. Until I checked the title, I thought Collins was singing, "You can't be two people in love," which made the song my new favorite anti-schizophrenia anthem.
4. "Quasar" - Scientist: Dub producer Scientist was at his peak with a series of elaborately titled album, my favorite being Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampire. This comes from 1981's Scientist Meets the Space Invaders.
5. "Small Talk" - Sly Stone: Some days the baby annoys me; on others, we're good.
6. "Buddy X" - Neneh Cherry: One things leads to another.
7. "Haunted Jukebox" - Saint Etienne: I'm not sure why I've been so curious about a new Saint Etienne album since they were never more than a casual affection in the past. This has the charming unassuming quality that I always liked about them.
8. "Girl Like Me" - Ladyhawke: At The Guardian, Matthew Horton wondered what 2009's class of '80s-centric synth-pop musicians were going to do for an encore. Since Ladyhawke lasted for one song for me - "Magic" is in my iTunes, though I can't remember it - I was intrigued by the hopes someone had for her.
9. "Monster Mouth" - the Popinjays: All this female-centric UK pop brought this to mind. I wish their Tales from the Urban Prairie was on Spotify.
10. "Came Out a Lady" - Rubblebucket: This regrettably named Brooklyn-based band plays Tipitina's on Tuesday night.
11. "Good Old Desk" - Nilsson: Nilsson's dissolute legend and often-woozy catalogue can overshadow how talented he was at his peak. This perfectly odd track from Aerial Pandemonium Ballet is a great reminder.
12. "Fading Into Obscurity" - Sloan: From the aptly titled Never Hear the End of It. I've never failed to reach the end of an album I enjoyed more, but there are so many ideas in each song that I can't process that much music. This is a great example - check how many songs has the band crammed into 4:10.
13. "Solid Gold" - Keith Moon: Nilsson made me think of this. Tony Fletcher's Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend is great for its depiction of Moon, Harry Nilsson and John Lennon drunk and adrift in Los Angeles. They were among the first wave of musicians to discover how remarkably much money could be made through rock 'n' roll, and they were on the cutting edge of the corresponding indulgences. Rather than sounding sordid, their lives seemed pointless at that juncture.
14. "What the Hell I Got" - the Blue Shadows: I hoped to find this by Montreal's Michel Pagliaro, but Spotify says "non." Instead, I'll go with the rockabilly-ish version by Vancouver's Blue Shadows (which included . This is how the songs has generally been covered.
15. "Fiya Wata" - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros: From the new Here. I'm still waiting to here it as rousing as their set was when the Big Easy Express visited New Orleans in 2011, but I didn't hear that kind of excitement on the previous album either, so maybe it's a live thing.
16. "O.F.Y.C. Showcase" - The Fall: Another iPod special. I put Your Future Our Clutter on my iPod without hearing it, and each time it comes on, I'm ecstatic. The world almost always needs a four-to-five minute-long interruption by Mark E. Smith.
17. "5 a.m. in the Morning" - Hannibal Buress: Comedian Hannibal Buress plays the New Movement Theater Wednesday night, and this is the first time I've been really excited to see a comedian in a while. He's got a distinctive, authentic voice that anatomizes his interactions with the world in scientific detail.

(Coming soon: MySpiltMilk.com)

Down in the Treme: Maxim Runs a Wire Oral History

Not Treme news per se - The Wire news today. Maxim spaces out the photos of bikini girls this issue with an oral history of The Wire, including debates over the hows and whens of characters' deaths. Michael K. Williams talks about getting the news of Omar's fate:

I was hurt. But it wasn’t like I was surprised. I was glad that Marlo and Snoop and Chris never got to touch him. They couldn’t catch him slippin’ like that.

Dave Alvin: Alvin on Allen and the Road

"Are you okay?" I ask.

"I hope so?"

Dave Alvin has just had a road first after more than 30 years of touring. He stepped out of a Cracker Barrel outside Beaumont, Texas to talk on the phone, and he sat on a rock. Minutes into the interview, he's startled to see his boots are covered in ants and that the rock is next to an anthill. "This has never happened before."

Alvin plays the Rock 'n' Bowl Saturday night, and he has played the blues and rock 'n' roll since he was a young teen in Downey, California. He started touring California, the Southwest, Texas and Louisiana in 1980 with the Blasters.

"We played Tipitina's as a four-piece," he says. At that time, they were Alvin, his brother Phil on vocals, bassist John Bazz and drummer Bill Bateman. Their Slash Records' debut album in 1981 introduced them to the world and a larger lineup that included pianist Gene Taylor and the saxophone duo of Steve Berlin and J&M Studios stalwart Lee Allen.

"It was primarily a rockabilly crowd," Alvin says of his first night at Tip's. "We had a party afterward that got pretty wild."

The Alvins met Allen through Phil Alvin's manager, a West Coast jump blues singer named Mary Franklin. Her circle of friends included T-Bone Walker, Allen and a number of other Los Angeles-based R&B and blues men. "They were great teachers, and they wanted to teach somebody."

The Alvin brothers were always blues and R&B obsessives, and once they knew Allen, they started digging up everything they could find that he played on. "We could tell instantly," Alvin says. "He had a melodic sense that was clearly Lee Allen. They first bumped into South Louisiana's eccentricity when they quizzed him about a single they'd found - "Rich Woman" by "L'il Millay" - as they said it. 

"We figured you had to pronounce it French," Alvin says. He remembers Allen's response:

"L'il Millay? Nope. Never made a record with L'il Millay."

Dave and Phil insisted it had to be him on the single, but Allen couldn't remember it. After about five minutes, he said, "Oh, you mean L'il Millet. Yeah, that was me."

Alvin credits Allen for having eclectic tastes, and he showed the brothers how music is connected. Once he was in the band, they wrote the Longhair-flavored "Hollywood Bed" as a showpiece for Allen. He also influenced how Alvin thinks about soloing on the guitar. "When Lee played a solo, you always knew it was Lee, and there was a melodic aspect to it," he says. "I always approached soloing less like a guitar player and more like Lee Allen on sax. The Blasters stuff was geared around a short solo - make it melodic and get to the point. These days I'll meander, looking for things while I'm playing a lead, but you always want to get to the point. It may be a short point or a long point, but you want to get there." 

Most of the lessons they learned from Allen were bigger picture things. "He hipped us to things other younger bands had never heard of, like publishing," Alvin says. "An overall how to view the record industry. Perhaps a little cynically or guardedly, but those are good things to know when you're starting out." According to Alvin, Allen felt burned that his solos and the work of the bands played such a major role in the success of many New Orleans R&B hits, but they didn't share in the money. "But he kept playing, and that was another lesson we learned. You just keep playing. Bitterness wasn't his personality."

As a rockabilly and rockin' blues band out of Downey, the Blasters had a tough time getting a foothold in Los Angeles at first. "We couldn't get gigs in Hollywood because we weren't from Hollywood," he says. "We didn't know the people in Hollywood. We'd go around the southeast side of L.A. trying to get gigs and audition in bars and they,d say, 'You don't sound like Cheap Trick. The kids love Cheap Trick.' I like Cheap Trick, but it would have been ridiculous for us to try to sound like Cheap Trick." By the time of the release of the band's self-titled first album on Slash, they'd become big enough to play four nights a week in Los Angeles, and in a two-week stretch opened for Asleep at the Wheel, Queen, the Cramps and the Go-Gos.

"It was pretty cool," Alvin says. "We formed in springtime of 1979 and that came out in early 1981, and we all went from day jobs to having a record in Time Magazine's top 10 records of the year. That post-first album rush, that's the closest we got to being the Beatles." 

Today, Alvin is an Americana icon. He has approached American roots music with stoic grace and a poet's consciousness (He has written one book of poetry, Any Rough Times Are Behind You Now). On 1994's King of California, he slowed down the Blasters' "Border Radio" to draw attention to the heartbreak that got swept up in the energetic rush of the original. His deep voice is an apt instrument to document the loss that he's experienced over the years, but he does so without forcing or belaboring the drama. The title track from 2004's Ashgrove celebrates a blues bar that was important to his development, but it could also serve as a statement of purpose: "I'm going to play the blues tonight / because that's what I do."

On Eleven Eleven, Alvin's electric guitar returns to the forefront. His preference for the acoustic guitar on recent albums was largely a practical decision. "My voice tends to work better in an acoustic context," he says. "I'm not a singer like my brother is who can overpower a whole band with the majesty of his throat." The album has more in common with the rocking Ashgrove than 2009's Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women, and it closes on a charming note with "Two Lucky Bums," a duet with the late Chris Gaffney. Gaffney was a songwriter and singer on his own as well as a member of Alvin's road band and half of the Hacienda Brothers with Dave Gonzales.

"We thought if we ever make millions of dollars - so immediately we're entering fantasyland here - we were going to buy this little ghost town in New Mexico called Cuervo," Alvin says. Their ideas for the ghost town became a regular topic for discussion on long drives between gigs, and those plans grew more and more absurd. At one point, the decided they should make a Bob Hope and Big Crosby-like movie, The Road to Cuervo. 

"If we can't do all that, at least we should make a duet record, a thematic record of us buying this ghost town and fixing it up," Alvin says. They finished one song, "Two Lucky Bums" before Gaffney passed away from cancer in 2008. "I thought, 'This is how the record ends,'"

Eleven Eleven also includes an unexpected duet with Alvin's brother Phil. The two have had a famously strained relationship, so much so that Dave couldn't get escape talking about it. One night he was playing a club that had no bathroom in the dressing room. "Ten or 15 minutes before I went onstage, I went to the bathroom," he says. "I'm standing there and a guy comes up and says, 'Hey Dave, what's your brother up to?' After the show was over and people had had a chance to leave, he went back to the bathroom. "I'm standing in front of a urinal and another guy comes up to me and says, 'Hey Dave, what's up with your brother?'" Later that night, he wrote the first draft of the good-natured romp, "What's Up with Your Brother?" 

"You grab songs wherever you can," he says, even in the john and perhaps on an anthill outside of Beaumont.