tom moody
View current page
4 matchs for gary+wilson:
"Back to Fairfax Circle" [reposted above under a new name]. This song is on the perky, upbeat tip, as opposed to the grungy, mock-doom-laden end of my musical production. I gave it a geographical place name in homage to Gary Wilson.
An addendum to two recent posts, the one on hippies and the one on Gary Wilson's Mary Had Brown Hair. Bill's comment reminded me that the Mothers of Invention's We're Only In It For the Money, which Wilson's record was compared to here, also contains "Flower Punk," a song ridiculing donning beads and moving to Haight (written in 1967!). That has nothing to do with Wilson--I was thinking in my comparison more of the mood of "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" and "Idiot Bastard Son" from the same LP* which are kind of wistful and hook-y in addition to having a sonic sculpture aspect (and being weird). "Flower Punk" offers solid proof, though, along with the more-sardonic-than-you-remember commune scene in Easy Rider, that not every baby-boomer bought (or buys) into the generational mythology--that the seeds of the present day critique of "codes of representation" vis a vis hippies, to the extent that's going on, were already well sprouted back in the day. Zappa preferred "freak"--sort of the wised-up, media-savvy, L.A. version of long haired non-conformism. Nevertheless, it's the earth mama and Neal Cassady dropping the hammer that we fondly eulogize, or recycle in the art world every ten years.
*The LP as opposed to Zappa's disastrous 80s CD remix. --music nerd
Quick take: Listened to Gary Wilson's Mary Had Brown Hair again last night, and am in awe of his music and art. I mean to do a proper review eventually, and posted some other people's thoughts here. I don't think he is "just a weirdo," I think his "loser mooning over old girlfriends" is a carefully thought out persona and his music as tight and smart as any I've heard. I would compare MHBH to the Mothers' We're Only In It for the Money, partly, obviously, because Wilson disguises his vocals by speeding them up the way Zappa did, but also for its intriguing combination of humor, poignancy, and Cagean noise aesthetics. Sped up or not, I love what the Dusted reviewer calls Wilson's "white soul bro" voice--the way he lapses from singing into just talking,or rambling, about those (fantasy?) femmes who won't stop circling around inside his brain.
Last night I caught a couple of musical performances at Siberia, a scummy, graffiti-scrawled punkoid club across from the Port Authority at 9th Ave. The Experimental Makeup has been described as "roots electronica"; they use a combination of hotwired analog equipment and heavily filtered digital sequencer loops. The result was a long, continuous (I would say) ambient piece that occasionally segued into dub. The dub parts were the best, with one of the players crooning dumb stuff like "let's go to the beach" in a Gary Wilson-meets-Damo Suzuki voice. The burps and sniggles emanating from the analog equipment were frequently ear-tickling (if that's the right word at these decibel-levels). Next was Makita, as in the drill, "from Berlin," which was much more rockin'. The singer and guitarist were respectively Wolfgang Mayer and Tom Früchtl, who I had just heard a couple weeks back as 2/5 of Discoteca Flaming Star. Also playing was laptop-and-keyboard percussionist Michael Schultze supplying a fast-thumping rhythm. Described by Früchtl as "powerbook deathmetal," the music consisted of revved-up metal tropes played very rapidly and proficiently, while Wolfgang shimmied his exposed midriff and sang lyrics like "This is the end of the society of fun" and "my blood is boiling" (I occasionally thought of Nitzer Ebb, plus a guitar). One song lyric consisted solely of numbers: "666-767, 666-767, 666-767..."