The Steve Barman Show

Sometimes people think of things that would be nice to do. Steve Barman is one of those people. He's done oodles of interviews, reviews, and articles pertaining mostly to the music scene in and directly surrounding Detroit. My band's first gig was a show he put on so he could get higher-quality equipment to do such things with. It was recorded on VHS, as though to prove a point. Aw, how cute we were. Barman has been co-running the music blog MotorCityRocks for a while now, documenting the city's events and ideas. It's wise of Barman to use the opportunity he has in Detroit DIY talk-show history to bring in voices from various aspects of Detroit metro culture. By widening the scope of interests covered, he can help localized groups step away from this inversion that so plagues them (us). It also, conveniently, makes it so there are much more possibilities for upcoming episodes, seeing as it's just a baby right now. I'd like to see it come into almost a themed talk show, where the content is always as diverse as it is now, but loosely centered around a topic or word or person. The bridging aspect of the project is important; as they say, "commitment to fostering the link between contemporary art and contemporary society" is key in Detroit's growth.

The third taping for The Steve Barman Show is coming up this Sunday, so you should go if you can. It features family band Woodman, activist, professor and writer Shea Howell, and artist Mary Beth Carolan.

Here's the sneak peak for episode two.

You can watch the pilot and find out more here.

A Personal Account of New Year 2011 at the Stick

(Midnight and On)

I'm behind the stage at the Magic Stick. The walls are finally all black in here in an effort, I guess, to make it harder to scrawl over them. Three eighteen year old boys giggle as they paint "Silverghost Marco Polio New Years" or something like it across them anyway in broad red strokes. Scottie throws the door open and yells inside.

"C'mon, come on stage with me! It's almost midnight, babe." Half worried about leaving the whole bottle of acrylic red paint with the punks, I still turn my attention to the countdown. I hop up two steps and every light on the platform is on. All the headliners are there, too, in their various paints and decor. I can't really see much, but a lot of my friends, both babyfaced and bruised, are out there on the dark floor eagerly following the projected timer behind us that looks more like a bomb display than a celebration. May as well be, some are probably saying to themselves.

"Can we play one more after the ball drops?" Sean asks Del.

"Yeah, sure! Not like a one ten-minute-long song or anything," and they both laugh.

"Haha, yeah, of course not."

We all count backwards in unison like some huge, drunk kindergarten class until I get to smother Scottie's face with mine, several times and passionately, thoughtlessly. That's it for my fame this night, and I go out to find Steven while the band ends with a ten-minute-long song. I need to paint Steve's body. Feeling creative, I brush his exposed skin with calligraphic and ceremonial lines, circles, dots and boxes, red, red, red. Then I search for Jaye and he tells me something sincere while we get ready to become a parade whale, Chinese New Year style. A beat starts.

Umbrellas broken and raised, we pump them like Jersey Shore stars under the whale body canopy and snake our way up to the the stage before surrendering the costume to the greedy, euphoric crowd. Time to dance. Everyone is fixated on Steven's hypnotic, pentecostal frenzy while on stage Michael and Kyle face off in a battle of synth, guitar and two-step, while Scottie, true to form, rips into his kit without hardly moving his long and already bare torso. After this point my memory gets lazy, due in equal parts to relaxation, Labatt, and my fair-weather friend Mary. There's music for some time, then the switch to Marcie and Del's act, from which I am constantly distracted. There is an hour of conversation with various Lisas, Chrises, Wendys and Pierces, but I don't remember it.

All of a sudden it's 3am and there's barely anyone there, but the bar still serves. Wendy and I decide we should do shots and I'm in Ferndale mode so I think it's a really good idea to buy four shots of Jameson. It is not a good financial decision. But it does go down easy and there's never anything wrong with having whiskey at the end of a night, right?

Steve is at the helm of our often trio, guiding the organization of most things Marco Polio into one trunk. We get home in decent shape, spouting philosophical nightdreams and whining as we wave goodbye. Partly covered in confetti, I slumber in peaceful denial of the anvil of dawn. Denial works as voodoo in this situation, and I wake up at 9 with a case of the missing hangover.

Local Humans and the Things they Do with their Faces, Feet and Hands

Here's some stuff about records.

Pewter Cub is pretty alright in my book (see page 78, rethink.d: The Early Years) and they had a party at Smalls some months ago for their LP, The Door Opened; You Got In. I enjoy the appropriate use of the semicolon in their title. I also enjoy the tracks, which range from the very Black Angels-ish opening song "As You Were" to the noisy pop of "Surface", though they linger toward more the former, black psychadelia. I find the recordings to be very good, however I don't feel that the band is quite as moody as this EP implies. When I've seen them live they've been more flippant/fun/raucus, or at least have presented themselves in that way. Perhaps in the recordings they showed more the reality of their lyrics? Drum-heavy and deep, the tracks have a vast spacial resonance, with vocals that shine but lack the same depth as the other instruments. Regan, Dave and Scott have quite beautifully fitted talents, though, and the dirty guitar melds with the syrup-sweet voice and booming toms in an unexpectedly full-sounding 8 song album.

Here is an awesome video of the aforementioned "Surface". It's really great because 1. The director did a wonderful job; and 2. It hearkens to the less dark (at least musically and performatively) aspects of the band.

Macrame Tiger was all a-buzz around these parts this summer and into fall. I work with 2 of their members, so I get an exclusive inside scoop and I'm going to tell you all the juicy details of their torrid affairs (devastate the details, get it? Ha... ha... hm). Just kidding. But I do know that they are ready to move forward with a ton of new songs; it seems they were over their EP as soon as it was released. No one else has been dismissing it as much as the band themselves, whose final track "Lucy Sue" was named the #1 local song of the year by the respected Jeff Milo. The consensus seems to be that the record is awesome, though from what I hear from Pedro and Kerry, all of the new material is far more comprehensive and involves Marilu and Kerry in more integral ways. Each of the tracks on the EP is a solid single, yet a single idea they do not make. Somewhat disjointed, they dance between spacey prog-y post-punk bars andfolkey honkey-tonk campfires. Both styles are executed well and sound fantastic on their own. Together, they can become a little patchy. And what's with the super-Frank Zappa feel of "Sparklewood Friendship Society Club"? I'm not complaining about any of it individually--all the songs are catchy and smart--I simply hope they weren't trying for continuity. This EP is, to me anyway, a show of power, to say, "Not only can we do this, but this and this too! So watch out, motherfuckers." And I do love those weird and layered vocals and shimmery effects; it's as if Animal Collective was a band I liked. I'll be on the look-out for Macrame's new stuff.

Fur just recently released another EP. In the same fashion as their debut EP, they released it online and you can get it for free. This one is called Devastate the Details and has a similar sound to the first, though longer. After listening to the EP twice, I felt like I knew the songs from somewhere else--their hooks are brilliant enough. I've said before that this band has a great way of fusing the same ol' garage rock with a heavier and darker pallet. However, it has the opposite problem that Macrame Tiger's does, in that its tracks sit in a small margin of sound. Each song becomes similar to the next when the mood of cathartic anger prevails. There's nothing wrong specifically with the songs; they just could use some variance to avoid loss of interest. I'm looking forward to more of the unconventional way that Ryan plays with vocals. He really does see his voice as an instrument within each song, and yet he doesn't draw attention away from the equal amazingness that is happening with the other three members of the band. Johanna (keys) is featured more on the album, and I really like it, though my Killers-saturated mind keeps hearing "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" everywhere. Drum sound is fantastic, with Zach's organic breakbeats rich and dynamic, and Mike's stellar work on bass is more prominent this time around than it was on the debut. With all the fuzz cutting through the songs, there is a slight expectation that the formats and lengths will devitate, but they are all under 5 minutes. The last track seems to me to be the best single and also the most standard, forcefully energetic and a great last impression. The use of guitar effects could be played with in terms of integration with songwriting; I think that might be a good step for the sound to go in.

So there's my triple review. I hope I still have friends.

Things that would be really cool if they happen in 2011

Let's play time vault! It's where I am ambitious near the demarcated end of the calender year, and so I imagine 2010 as a really bad crabcore band (let's say for shits and giggles this one) that has taken over my apartment and forced me to drop anything productive and, how do you say, good to clean up after said spoiled 17-year-olds, but they made a drinking game of it (beverage of choice is Sparks, bro, mind you) that every time I scrub a glob of hair gel from the wall they each take a crap on the floor. And then I imagine 2011 as the symphonic punk band that runs in (unbeknownst to the brats, known to me) in the middle of the night, overturns the couches and tables they are sleeping on, and stabs them repeatedly with violin bows, strangles them with guitar strings, electrocutes them with huge bass amps, stuffs them into kick drums, and then hands me a nice, cold beer. And then I look at this list in a year and see if I did this stuff and then cradle my head and cry.

That was fun. Now, concrete things I would be pretty okay with happening this coming year.

• I get a freaking car already
• The apocalypse (surprise, motherfuckers! Early bird consumes the Earth!)
• The best song ever in the world ever is written
• I get a record player (a thousand friends sneer and guffaw, "you don't have a record player?")
• Two words: Road trip
• Two words: Professional massage
• Two words: Free beer
• Something that involves Pomeranian cats, space helmets, and Medieval iron swords.
• Release a solo record
• Release an Eleanora record
• Reverb, distortion, looping.
• Poof! I'm a freshman in art school again
• I get out of this fucking state for the first time in 2 years

What are your hopes/cynical projections for the big 11? What is your best personification for 2010? What are you getting me for Chrimbus? What do you want for Chrimbus? What band sucked the worst this year? What extremely genius and secretive tool do you want me to employ in my solo album?

Top 8 Things That Have Happened This Year So Far

I have one of the worst memories of anyone I know. But who knows, there could be a herd of amnesiacs wandering around that I have forgotten about (get it?). In any case, I figure I should record some of the things that happened this year. In personal history, this one was pretty "meh" on the forgettable scale. More super exciting end of year listing things to come!

No order here, order's for people who make money.

3. Playing with Forget at the Ferndale Library. So good, this one.

4. Being able to walk and ride bikes everywhere from April to October. (I still have to walk, it just sucks a lot more during winter.)

8. Eleanora's first show. We were cute little babies then, and now we've got enough material for 2 full length albums.

1. The moment my boss at Sakana decided that club music might not be superior to indie for a sushi bar.

6. I rediscovered Thee Silver Mt. Zion, after hearing them (and cringing) first 5 years ago. And I saw them, and my ears were kissed by glorious choirs of horses in the sky.

5. When I found out that the oil that was pumped into the Gulf Coast was really just chocolate and the problem could be solved by everyone taking turns licking pelicans and drinking the ocean like a malted milkshake through striped straws.

2. No one close to me died.

7. My show at North End Studios, and the party that followed. I like the way it turned out, and I love my friends, and I love roofs.

Boy, that was actually stretching it. Here's to waaaay more excitement next year!

Picking Confetti out of My Belly Button

Saturday night there were a lot of shows going on. A lot of big shows. Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas performed at the Bakery Loft for a CD release, Silverghost released their first LP at The Magic Bag, and Marco Polio and the New Vaccines recorded a live record and DVD at the Belmont. I went to the Marco Polio show. It was a lot of fun, beyond the craziness I always experience at their performances, because I helped my little sis document it on video and interview people before and after the show. The final product(s) will be unimaginably Imaginatronable.

Humpday just so happens to be Hanukah, and it also happens to be Duendsday at Club Bart. Which is where I will be, because I have a band, and we are playing there. Here is the flyer.

Post-Post

I'm focusing more on music now. That little college-educated snot inside my head sneers and says, "Join the club, you idiot. Have you seen Detroit?" I know, I'm pretty sure at least 70% of people in the Detroit/Hamtramck/Ferndale trifecta "play an instrument" or are "in a band" or "play" an "instrument" or are "in" a "band". I've been on that list for a little while now, but for once I'm making it more of my focus.

Hey, have you heard Eamon McGrath? He's pretty cool. He had nothing to do with Detroit, I just like his music. Here's a video. I thought he was way older, I love his voice. He's written and released 26 albums in 4 years.

EAMON MCGRATH - Dark End of The Street from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.

What is with me and my love affair with the Canadians lately?

Also, go to my show on Wednesday, at Club Bart. We have new songs!