"it took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, nightlife. most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom." -charles mingus
"she had a chihuahua named carlos that had some kind of skin disease and was totally blind." -tom waits
"he had a huge room with nothing in it except this huge vast hammond organ, right next door to the police." -david bowie
"he's got a mind like a sewer, and a heart like a fridge" -elvis costello
"you can't hold the hand of a rock 'n' roll man." -joni mitchell
"lou's jukebox spun for love and many other things, too: beauty, pain, history, courage, mystery" -laurie anderson
"hey there, hey now, well, you can make a pacemaker blink, easy thing, make a man's heart go bibbity boom. -john cale
"i've still got things inside me, sad things, happy things, that people don't know about." -loretta lynn
"to try to maximize the relationship of listening to a record through promotion is like experiencing driving a car by reading about stimulus programs." -bonnie 'prince' billy
"too much cheesecake too soon! old money's better than new" -roxy music
"my mother used to tell me about vibrations. to think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death." -brian wilson
"i could even find it in my heart to love mike love." -belle & sebastian
"i'm going to boogie my scruples away." -lowell george
"i'm a lunatic, and you are so super cool." - george jones
"i'm good and i'm bad and i'm happy and i'm sad and i'm lazy" -willie nelson
"i drive a rolls-royce, cause it's good for my voice." -t.rex
"i mean every letter in the words in the sentences of my quotes." -lil' wayne
"lyrics choochoo from my mouth like locomotion." - pato banton
"i'm dealing in rock and roll. i'm not a bonafide human being." -phil spector
"phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the revolver into my neck and said, 'leonard, i love you.' i said, 'i hope you do, phil.'" -leonard cohen
"they'd whisper at each other and look at phil and whisper at each other. finally this lady, tanked, comes over to phil and says, 'alright, sonny, what's your problem?' and he said, 'premature ejaculation, what's yours?'" -tom wolfe
"i bite my nails and if that fails i go get myself stoned, but when i do i think of you and head myself back home." -gram parsons
"i would say groucho marx, to name one thing, and willie mays, and the second movement of the jupiter symphony, and louis armstrong's recording of potatohead blues, swedish movies, naturally. sentimental education by flaubert, marlon brando, frank sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by cezanne, the crabs at sam wo's, tracy's face." -woody allen
brian eno songs that will make good book titles for my 10-volume memoir, in order: here he comes, baby's on fire, golden hours, brutal ardour, taking tiger mountain, events in dense fog, through hollow lands, some of them are old, everything merges with the night, dead finks don't talk
ry cooder albums that every man should own: into the purple valley, boomer's story, paradise and lunch
"really, we don't want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff." -radiohead
"i love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. and mother. and god." -johnny cash
"the moon is clear, the sky is bright, i'm happy as the horse's shite." -the pogues
"i hope that you all out there, young, old, tall, short, fat or thin, quick or slow, no matter what kind or color or shape or person you are, if you like to make music, why, go ahead. -pete seeger
"chuck berry isn't merely the greatest of the rock and rollers, or rather, there's nothing mere about it. say rather that unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports chuck berry as well as it does marcel proust, we might as well trash it." -robert christgau
mashable says about us: "expect the unexpected with this awesome gem. groovy." and 33 1/3: "nice to have someone steer me in a worthwhile direction"
#1169: gillian welch & david rawlings - ralph stanley’s bluegrass festival (c. 2001)
if you were going to twist my arm, like really yank it while rotating sharply, and make me pick some music videos to take with me to someplace far away, someplace without any music videos, except of course for the ones i have to pick, i would really be in a jam. in some moods i might say al green singing about jesus with a broken arm, or leonard cohen on the beach in black and white, or even neil young and his mustached friends singing down by the river. sometimes i would choose the staple singers covering the talking heads. if you asked me last week, i would have said pavement at the turn of the century, or maybe the world’s most important elvis cover, or even emmylou harris as my ideal woman and ricky scaggs’ mustache as my ideal mustache. but don’t forget about roy orbison in 1965 or aretha franklin in 1967! plus a cowboy song by randy newman, ry cooder and linda rondstadt in 1983 and also lee “scratch” perry in a studio by himself one year before that. last year i would have said kool a.d.’s hickory. tomorrow, i might choose uncle tupelo singing the louvin brothers in a bar, or pearl jam and yo la tengo singing in a record store. and what about shirtless fugazi or berry and toots in suits? today i tell you it’s a young and nervous looking gillian welch singing with her partner david rawlings at a festival put on by ralph stanley in what seems to me to be about 2001. their harmonies sound like god singing with herself.
while i was writing a story last week, through some fluke i had to get in touch with bob nastanovich, the fifth member of pavement. and bob nastanovich wrote back, and turned out to be incredibly helpful. he is living in des moines. but honestly you would think that everyone from pavement would be really nice: even in this video for their last song on their last album, they look like kindergarteners on their first day.
#959: pavement - shady lane (1997, dir. spike jonze)
you and me and the whole wide beautiful world are better off not knowing that spike jonze is a billionaire direct marketing catalogue business heir from maryland named adam spiegel. don’t even look it up, just forget you read this, it’s better that way. here’s something to distract you: i cried twice during where the wild things are.
any common genius can include christmas-in-the-title christmas songs on his or her christmas mix (i.e. child’s christmas in wales by john cale, remember (christmas) by harry nilsson, in the hot sun of a christmas day by caetano veloso, merry christmas baby by chuck berry, christmas party by the walkmen, et al).
but it takes a special someone to include major leagues–the pretty song pavement made just as it was dying–on account of the line “magic christians chew the rind,” which really sounds like “magic christmas so sublime” if you’re not paying attention.
#406: pavement - father to a sister of thought (1995)
every slightly-mustached, acne-plagued, voice-cracked adolescent with relatively good taste in music and relatively bad self esteem should be gifted copies of pavement’s mid-90s albums, which proved that gangly awkwardness isn’t always uncool. even though father to a sister of thought has a second-rate mall rat’s voice singing third-rate barfly lyrics (“i’m just a man/ you see who i am”), the pimply song’s as pretty as after the gold rushand american as american beauty.
i have this theory that anything involving a group of adults in yellow rain jackets dancing jigs to stoned 90s indie rock songs with lyrics like “hey little boy, would you like to know what’s in my pocket or not?” is probably going to be pretty okay.
the first (or maybe second?) thing i look for in a lady is a heartfelt appreciation of men with sub-par singing voices. bob dylan? tom waits? pavement’s stephen malkmus? they all made classic music, but god knows none weren’t blessed with pretty pipes at birth.
pavement is the favorite band of anyone who went to college in 1994, but i myself was 10 years old then, so the truth is i’m not completely crazy about the band. (still, i’ve always though slanted and enchanted and crooked rain, crooked rain were really top-notch album titles).
but this song, crooked rain’s twangy, mumbly, stoned indie-country gem, is hard to resist. especially the falsetto chorus! and the video tells us everything we always wanted to know about being an alt-rock superstar during the first clinton administration.
