Lubomyr Melnyk portrait by Alex Kozobolis

A few years ago a friend of mine emailed me a YouTube link to the Ukrainian-Canadian pianist Lubomyr Melnyk playing for a rapt audience in Germany. His message said only:

“This guy is a fucking genius.”

He was right, and I was a fan within minutes of pressing play on that clip (see below) and experiencing the overwhelming numinosity of Melnyk’s music, which is both spiritual, and yet highly physical, and not unlike Sufi whirling dervish dancing in the concentration it would require. (It came as no surprise when he mentioned P.D. Ouspensky, the disciple of Gurdjieff, as one of his primary influences during the interview.) His playing can be a blur of passion, laser-like intention, and above all speed. His remarkable FLOOD of sound and cascading harmonics is unlike anything you are ever likely to have heard a piano sound like. Melnyk is considered the world’s fastest pianist, and has been timed playing nineteen and a half notes per second with each hand. The human ear cannot entirely take that much information in and make perfect sense of it, and so the music starts to twinkle and BREATHE and zen you out like a mantra. Although he admits to being influenced by Terry Riley and Steve Reich, he’s the exact opposite of a minimalist. The succinct opening paragraph in Melnyk’s Wikipedia entry reads:

Melnyk is noted for his continuous music, a piano technique based on extremely rapid notes and complex note-series, usually with the sustain pedal held down to generate harmonic overtones and sympathetic resonances. These overtones blend or clash according to harmonic changes. Most of his music is for piano, but he has also composed chamber and orchestral works. His piano music requires a special technique, closely related to the martial arts, and is too complex and difficult for any concert pianists to play. Because of his lifelong devotion to the piano, he has been called “the prophet of the piano.”

Melnyk told one interviewer:

What I do on a piano, nobody did before me. Because it is impossible to do it physically. It is something like a miracle. I don’t boast, God gave me this possibility. It is not me, it is not me who did it. I don’t wear a special royal dress and say that “I am the piano king because I do it.” No, it is all a gift from God. And I do it. People don’t understand that it all – from my spirit to fingers on keys and those sounds – is a whole life.

After this astonishing new musical discovery, I raced off to Discogs immediately to grab whatever I could find of Lubomyr Melnyk on vinyl. Solo piano sounds so amazing on wax, but the problem was one of scarcity. What existed on vinyl went for top dollar and some of it was only ever issued privately on cassette in the first place, so good luck finding those (most of his releases have zero for sale on Discogs). In recent years as interest in Melnyk’s fascinating music has risen around the world, his work has been issued by the Erased Tapes label and is becoming much easier to find. His latest release, Fallen Trees, was inspired by travelling Europe by train. Riding through a dark forest full of recently felled trees, this sad sight was his muse: “They were glorious,” he says. “Even though they’d been killed, they weren’t dead. There was something sorrowful there, but also hopeful.”

On January 24, celebrating his 70th birthday (which will be on December 20th), Lubomyr Melnyk will play a concert at London’s EartH venue in Hackney, with special guests Peter Broderick and Hatis Noit. (Get tickets here.)

I asked the maestro a few questions via email.

Richard Metzger: Where did you first “hear” your music? In the sense that you will often hear musicians say that a repetitive rhythm might come from having worked for a time in a factory. Captain Beefheart famously found a “floppy” drumbeat in his car’s windshield wiper. Your piano style is so distinctly your very own music, that once someone has heard you play, you could never be mistaken for anyone else. Where did you first “hear” it? What made it possible?

Lubomyr Melnyk: It is funny you mention these things because I have been told by close friends that I am in fact a true drummer!  The beats are just pouring out from my mind and my fingers. The origins of Continuous Music are indeed drumming with various rhythms appearing and various harmonics and upper frequencies. All my life I have heard the phenomenal sounds of melodic rhythms in machinery, what wonderful wonderful sounds they are! And this has been a secret source of my music. But only in a secret dimension kind of way. Without the power of drumming in my body and mind, this music would never have been born.

How do you define your “Continuous Music”?

You might as well ask me to define time and all five dimensions (there are more by the way, I just said five for now because it points us in the right direction…) In other words, it is transdimensional and metaphysical ability, similar to kung fu or Tai chi, for example; it’s not possible to separate the music from the technique, like you can not separate the “sound of the sword” from the body of the master. They are one and so is Continuous Music one with the being of the pianist. This might not explain it very well, but it is really quite impossible to describe. Continuous Music is a vast river flowing inside your soul and this river contains the four winds and it contains ice and it contains water and it turns to stone when you so wish.
 

Portrait of the artist as a young man

I’ve read that one formative aspect of your career was accompanying a dance troupe. How did playing for bodies in motion influence your style?

This is a super important element in the birth of Continuous Music. The master dancer Carolyn Carlsson was the inspiration for these dancers and the basic fundamental and pervading aspect of the classes was transcendent. They strove to transcend all time and all space and they inspired me to travel with them. You can not imagine how it was a special bubble of existence we experienced there, in 1972, in the attic of the Paris Opera high above the city, with huge windows and old old wooden floors with a grand piano. Me and these magnificent beings, the dancers.

This brings to mind John Cage, of course. You seem like someone who would take John Cage very seriously. Are you a student of his work and of his thought?

I loved John Cage and everything he did and created and wrote.  His books were of great importance to my musical thinking and in fact, it was John Cage who, at our tea-meeting at his home in New York, pointed me into the direction of a certain German transcendental composer of the 1930s whose musical language became the foundation of Continuous Music… the constant maintaining of harmonies and changing them very slowly so yes, he had an enormous effect on my pianistic development and of course, his interest in Zen thinking was another great influence.

What, or who else, has been an influence on your work?

Ah, what a list this would be! Let’s start with hippiedom and then of course, all the books the hippies read. My university studies of philosophy because, in fact, I wondered why intelligent professors ran to the hills when they had to confront Zeno’s paradoxes. And then musicians like Ravi Shankar, John McLaughlin, Jimi Hendrix who was on the guitar what Carolyn Carlson was to dance, and Ouspensky the philosopher. The list to goes on and in fact, it never ends. Continuous Music is a wonderful physical activity that never stops to grow and the beauty of the piano never ends. Never!

I enjoy watching your performances on YouTube where you can catch a glimpse of the audience—like your performance of “Illorium Nr. 03B” on German TV—and they seem to have been led into meditative states by your playing. It’s interesting to note that people react similarly to La Monte Young’s piano, and yet he and you are doing the exact opposite thing musically—obviously there is nary an arpeggio in his repertoire—and yet the end result on the listener is one that leaves one deep in thought, and unavoidably so. You are a sort of wizard. Your method of charging the atmosphere and the air around you is remarkable. What is your aim, in a magical sense, to impart to your audiences?

I want the river of sound to carry people along a world of beauty and deeper thought, a time where time stops, a place that has no space, a world that is more real than this world upon which we walk so that their souls will be strengthened and find a meaning in their life that is good and beautiful. Music exists to lift us up, up from the miserable mud of our hardships. It is a great gift and we should be grateful every minute of every day that we can hear music. It is really not so easy to hear it actually.
 
Much more Melnyk, after the jump…

 
David Lynch’s second solo album, The Big Dream, seems to have made less of a splash than its predecessor, Crazy Clown Time. I have no empirical evidence to support this claim, just the practiced eye of a former record store clerk and lifelong cheapskate.

The Big Dream should not be overlooked, because it includes David Lynch’s reading of “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” by Bob Dylan. You may prefer the Stooges’, the Neville Brothers’, Nina Simone’s, or perhaps even Entombed’s version of Dylan’s take on “Pretty Polly,” but I’m partial to the particular feeling of emptiness Lynch summons.

In the movie David Lynch: The Art Life, the director tells a story about walking out of a Bob Dylan show as an art school freshman in 1964, leading to a bust-up with his roommate Peter Wolf, future singer of the J. Geils Band. As Lynch tells it, back in their room after the concert, Wolf scolded him—“Nobody walks out on Dylan!”—and Lynch responded “I walk out on Dylan—get the fuck outta here!”
 

David Lynch and Scotland’s answer to Bob Dylan, Donovan (via Pinterest)
 
Bob doesn’t appear to have played “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” that night in Boston, but the song, released earlier that year on The Times They Are a-Changin’, is a murder ballad about a man who kills his five children and his wife before turning the shotgun on himself—Dylan’s “Frankie Teardrop.” I suspect Lynch was drawn to “Hollis Brown” as much by the violence in the song and the blankness of the singer’s persona as by the cosmic perspective that appears in the last verse. It’s worth considering that this move to a God’s-eye view of the Wheel of Birth and Death isn’t necessarily redemptive. I take it to mean that a murder–suicide is as natural as the weather.
 
Listen after the jump…

 
It isn’t discussed all that much, but actor Robert De Niro and director Brian De Palma—both Hollywood titans—worked together at the start of their careers, when both were unknowns. De Niro appeared in the first three De Palma films, which have been recently restored and packaged together for an upcoming boxed set. Dangerous Minds has a preview.

Brian De Palma produced, directed, and edited his first film, which would be called The Wedding Party. Shooting began in 1963, but the movie wasn’t completed until 1966. Three more years would pass before it was released. The Wedding Party is about a man facing doubts about his imminent marriage. Shot in black and white, De Palma’s film is a comedy that is, at times, experimental.

Robert De Niro first heard about the production via an ad in the casting weekly, Show Business, and went to De Palma’s studio to audition. The director noticed De Niro was shy, but was subsequently blown away by his acting chops. When De Niro received the call that he got the part of groomsman, he was so excited that he misheard what his compensation would be. He thought he’d be getting $50 a week, but it was actually $50, total, for the role. Still, De Niro was thrilled. It was the first time he’d be paid for acting. He was nineteen.
 

 
This was also the debut for another future star, Jill Clayburgh, who’s the bride-to-be. The other groomsman is played by quirky character actor William Finley, who is surely memorable to many of our readers as Winslow/the Phantom in De Palma’s awesome cult classic, Phantom of the Paradise (1974).

Four months before The Wedding Party was released in April 1969, another De Palma movie, Greetings, hit theaters. Greetings, a satirical picture, was the first film to receive an X rating.
 
Much more after the jump…

’Torture Garden’ (UK, 1967)
 
Every year around this time, Westgate Gallery‘s poster concierge extraordinaire Christian McLaughlin drastically cuts prices for his annual Black Xmas 50% Off Sale. Why it’s almost half off, even…

Anyway, my pal McLaughlin, a novelist and TV/movie writer and producer based in Los Angeles, is the maven of mavens when it comes to this sort of thing. You couldn’t even begin to stock a store like his if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for in the first place, and if you want a quick (not to mention rather visceral) idea of his level of deep expertise—and what a great eye he’s got—then take a gander at his world-beating selection of Italian giallo posters. Christian is what I call a “sophisticate.”

He’s got a carefully curated cult poster collection on offer that is second to none. His home is a shrine to lurid giallo, 70s XXX and any and every midnight movie classic you can shake a stick at. But why would you want to shake a stick at a bunch of movie posters to begin with? That would be pointless. And stupid.

The Westgate Gallery’s Black Christmas 50% off sale sees every item in stock at—you guessed it—50% off the (already reasonable) normal price. All you have to do is enter the discount code “BlackXmas2018” at checkout and your tab will be magically cut in half.

The selection below is only a very tiny sliver of what’s for sale at Westgategallery.com.
 

‘Multiple Maniacs’ poster on sale at Westgate Gallery
 

’Grave of the Vampire’ aka ‘Seed of Terror’  (USA, 1972)
 

’The Pit’ aka ‘Teddy’ (Canada, 1981)
 

‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 

Rare Japanese ‘Sisters’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 
Many, many, more marvellous movie posters, after the jump…

 
Freddie Mercury had many loves in his life. One of his big passions was his love of cats. Mercury so loved cats he was once described as “rock’s greatest lover of cats.” According to his last partner (and the man he called his “husband”) Jim Hutton, Mercury “treated cats like his own children.”

He would constantly fuss over them, and if any of them came to any harm when Freddie was away, heaven help us. During the day the cats had the run of the house and grounds, and at night one of us would round them up and bring them inside.

When on tour, or away recording, Mercury regularly phoned home to speak to his beloved felines. During his lifetime, Mercury had ten cats starting in the seventies with Tom and Jerry (who he shared with the woman Mercury described as his “common-law wife” Mary Austin), Tiffany (a present from Austin), and then a cluster of cats (Delilah, Dorothy, Goliath, Lily, Miko, Oscar and Romeo) who he shared with Hutton at their home in Garden Lodge, Logan Mews, London. As Hutton later wrote in his memoir Mercury and Me, Mercury’s favorite feline was his calico cat named Delilah:

Of all the cats at Garden Lodge, Delilah was Freddie’s favourite and the one he’d pick up and stroke the most often. When Freddie went to bed, it was Delilah he brought with us. She’d sleep at the foot of the bed, before slipping out for a night-time prowl around Garden Lodge.

Delilah was a spoilt cat and depended on Freddie for everything, even protection from the other cats. They would gang up on her and she would run into our bedroom—it was a cat sanctuary, In many ways the cats were Freddie’s children, and we all thought of them that way. The slightest feline sneeze or twitch and he’d send them off to the vet for a check-up. And we were old-fashioned when it came to having to have sex in total privacy. Whenever Freddie and I jumped in the bedroom to make love, he would always ensure that none of the cats were watching.

Mercury dedicated his solo album Mr. Bad Guy (1985) “to my cat Jerry—also Tom, Oscar, and Tiffany, and all the cat lovers across the universe—screw everybody else!” and so loved Delilah that he wrote a song about her on Queen’s Innuendo album in 1991:

Delilah, Delilah, oh my, oh my, oh my - you’re irresistible
You make me smile when I’m just about to cry
You bring me hope, you make me laugh - and I like it
You get away with murder, so innocent
But when you throw a moody you’re all claws and you bite

Delilah once peed all over Mercury’s Chippendale suite—something that apparently happened quite often with all of the cats on other fixtures and furnishings. Not everyone in Queen was so enamored by Mercury’s song to a cat, drummer Roger Taylor claimed he “hated it.”

Before he died in 1991, Mercury told one journalist he planned to leave everything to “Mary and the cats.” And here are some of those little darlings who outlived Freddie and inherited his wealth.
 

Jerry.
 

Romeo.
 

Oscar.
 
More of Freddie’s furry feline friends, after the jump…
 

 
The calendar says December, so that means that somewhere within a thirty-mile radius of where I am right now, “Wonderful Christmastime” is ruining someone’s day. On the bright side, it’s also seasonally appropriate to insert Bad Santa references into your repartee (especially if you work in an office).

It’s also a fine moment to pass along an unusual gift idea—an amusing painting about rock music painted by an actual rock star!

For a few years now, you see, the highly amusing Eddie Argos, frontman of the British rock combo known as Art Brut, has been offering actual painted creations for sale on his website Lo-Fi Punk Motherfucker. Most of the paintings Argos does are of album covers. He does Art Brut album covers, of course—you can buy a painting of Art Brut’s third album Art Brut Vs. Satan or It’s a Bit Complicated if you want one. He also has a series of Pulp album covers (Different Class, Intro: The Gift Recordings, Separations, and His ‘n’ Hers).

He also has a few typically unpretentious canvases dedicated to coffee and tea and ones about mix tapes.
 

 
The most intriguing category, for my money, is the “submit your own” one, which invites you to name your favorite album. Eddie will paint the album cover while listening to the album and then submit a hard-copy review of the same album along with the finished painting. The whole deal costs £70 for the small (15 cm) and £100 for the large (30 cm)—shipping included! He will perform this service for any album you name—even the Stone Roses. (It says that, “even the Stone Roses.”)

Last year I sent Eddie the requisite cash and title (The Meadowlands, by the Wrens) and he duly reciprocated by sending me the artwork pictured above. I’m very happy with it, and it now occupies a special section of my bathroom wall (this is true).

Eddie’s love affair with the painterly life stretches back at least as far as Art Brut’s first album, which featured a song in which Argos crooned about David Hockney and Henri Matisse.

Eddie’s Instagram page consists mostly of his album cover paintings, and they’re worth a look. Often he will append a brief comment about the album, in which you learn that he had not listened to Minutemen before (??!) and also, apparently, the Beatles, much. His comment on Soul Mining by The The is an absolute must-read.

At some point a few months ago Eddie made it known that he was no longer doing the favorite album series but a mysterious confrontation involving a spectre and a tombstone has apparently softened his heart and he has made it known via Twitter that he is “still making album paintings ... if you are looking for a Christmas present for someone.”

Much like Eddie and accepting album cover requests, Art Brut has similarly resumed an activity, namely that of releasing record albums. Earlier this year they put out a stimulating exercise in punky Sprechgesang called Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! and you should certainly buy it.
 

 

  
More after the jump…

 
A few weeks ago—I recall the date exactly, as it was my birthday, so October 25th—I went downstairs at Shake It Records in Cincinnati, to their vinyl section, known as “Billy’s Basement.” A song had just started on the stereo: a slinky Latin-tinged psychedelic soul cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.” As it went on, and on—it’s 7:35—I fell deeper and deeper under its jammy hypnotic conga drum-led spell. Not to imply any sort of improvisational looseness to the proceedings. The musicians were clearly professionals, the music was well-rehearsed and it was entirely planned out, not spontaneous in any true sense. It wasn’t like some hacky sack hippie jam band covering the Stones, but it wasn’t entirely obvious what it was. Or what vintage it was either.

“WOW! WHAT IS THIS?” I asked of Billy.
 

 
“It’s something called Music from “Lil Brown” by a group called Africa” he explained. “It’s obviously some sort of goofy reference to Music from Big Pink. Look at the album art.” He held up the cover and indeed on the front cover was a direct homage to the (Milton Glaser-designed) back cover of The Band’s album. On the back was a child’s drawing that echoed Bob Dylan’s Big Pink cover painting. The gatefold featured a group shot of assorted friends and family members labeled “Next of Kin” (another Band reference) and as if all that wasn’t crystal clear enough already, in tiny text at the bottom it read:

“Any similarity to any other album package was purely calculated and our thanks to all those concerned. Be sure and listen to the Band SKAO2955.”

Ahem…
 

 
The next song was a cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” The first song on side two was a medley of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe” and “Louie, Louie” by the Kingsmen!!!

WHAT IS THIS?!?

The record was still sealed—he’d been listening to it on YouTube trying to figure out what it was so he could put a price on it—and he priced it at $50. Normally I try to keep a lid on my vinyl purchases and cap it at $30 per record (a two-record set can sell for $60 and I can still justify the expenditure in my fevered, Gollum-esque brain) but this was actually a bargain for this sucker—$50 and up for a decent copy on Discogs and this was sealed and IT WAS MY FREAKING BIRTHDAY so yes, that record—MY PRECIOUS—is now MINE ALL MINE…

I didn’t care how much it cost, frankly.

Africa was comprised of some musicians who had longed worked together, mostly as performers in various Los Angeles-based doo-wop groups, with names like the Valiants, the Electras, the Alley Cats, the Del-Mars, the Ring-A-Dings and the Untouchables. Brice Coefield, Chester Pipkin, Ed Wallace, Freddie Wills, Gary Pipkin were aided in their music making by Mamas and the Papas producer Lou Adler (who would, of course, go on to release records by Cheech & Chong and produce Carole King’s Tapestry and The Rocky Horror Picture Show) who brought in a mobile recording unit to their little brown rehearsal space in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

There isn’t much more information out there about Africa, but the following was found on Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks:

“Finally, in late 1968, they all became the soul group Africa, recording for Lou Adler’s Ode label (a subsidiary of Columbia). Africa consisted of (in various combinations): Billy Storm, Brice Coefield, Rip Spencer, Chester Pipkin, Gary Pipkin, Ed Wallace, Billy Mann, and Freddie Willis (second tenor/baritone).

The recording group, however, consisted of Brice Coefield (who does all the leads), Chester Pipkin (who also did the arrangements), Gary Pipkin, Ed Wallace, Freddie Willis, and Billy Storm, who shares the lead on “Here I Stand” (a song he wrote), They recorded eight sides for Ode, which were released on an album. “We used to rehearse at Gary Pipkin’s house and he had this little brown shack, a playhouse in the backyard, for his kids.” So, probably as a tribute to The Band’s recent album, Music From Big Pink, they decided to name the album Music From ‘Lil Brown’. (Strangely, Africa’s name didn’t appear anywhere on the outside of the album.) Lou Adler got a mobile recording studio, and the tracks were mostly recorded at Gary’s house. A large mural of Africa’s photo was painted on the outside of the Whiskey à Go Go on the Sunset Strip in order to promote the album; it remained there for several months.

Five years later, Africa recorded ten more tracks for MGM, but all remain unreleased.

Music from “Lil Brown” has never been (legally) released on CD. It should be. In the meantime the wax needs to be in the collection of every self-respecting DJ, stat.

Have a listen for yourself after the jump…

 
You don’t have to be a child to appreciate the genius of Stephen Hillenburg. I think that’s why his passing especially hurts. I still watch Spongebob and Rocko’s Modern Life regularly. And I’m pretty sure both are even better as an adult.
 
Before he was an animator, Stephen Hillenburg taught marine biology. As a visual aid to his course curriculum, Hillenburg wrote and designed an informative comic book titled The Intertidal Zone. It was about anthropomorphic tide-pool animals and featured a particular sea sponge - one who would go on to warm the hearts of millions. As the story goes, the educational comic eventually developed into the fifth longest-running animated series in American history - Spongebob Squarepants.
 

 
Hillenburg always had a passion for the arts. When he was in third grade, in 1970 and during the Vietnam War, his teacher commended him for an illustration that he did featuring “a bunch of army men… kissing and hugging instead of fighting.” It was at that moment that Stephen’s creative talent (and potential) was first recognized. After getting the nautical comic book idea turned down by publishers (it still is unpublished), Hillenburg followed his artistic ambitions and enrolled in animation school at CalArts.
 

‘The Green Beret’
 
Stephen Hillenburg created two animated shorts while at CalArts, both in 1992. The first was The Green Beret. It was about a Girl Scout with enormous fists who toppled homes while trying to sell cookies. Rife with political satire (George Washington in the war trenches) and a hint of farce directed at American excess and television culture, the short contained the same tongue-in-cheek humor that made Hillenburg’s later works so satisfying. The Green Beret kind of reminds me of Meet the Fat Heads, the absurd in-universe cartoon program that had several cameos in Rocko’s Modern Life.
 

The only online evidence of ‘Wormholes’
 
Hillenburg’s thesis film was a seven-minute animation titled Wormholes. It was based on the theory of relativity and while the short does not exist anywhere on the web, Hillenburg has been quoted as describing it as “a poetic animated film based on relativistic phenomena.” The film was shown at several international film festivals, including the 1992 Ottawa Film Festival, where Hillenburg met Joe Murray, creator of Rocko’s Modern Life. After seeing Wormholes, Murray offered Stephen the directorial role on his new cartoon for Nickelodeon. And the rest was history.
 
It is without a doubt that Stephen Hillenburg has inspired something special within us all. May he rest in peace.
 
Watch Hillenburg’s first animated short film ‘The Green Beret,’ after the jump…

 
David Lee Roth’s preferred method of warming up his larynx in the recording studio or the dressing room is singing along with the O’Jays’ hit “Love Train,” and bless him, he does a credible job. The careers of lesser talents have been irreparably wrecked by lines like “All of you brothers over in Africa,” not a welcome series of words in a white pop star’s mouth; it doesn’t take much imagination to see how things could go terribly, terribly wrong. But somehow, with the alchemical mixture of guilelessness and chutzpah that makes a David Lee Roth performance so wondrous to behold, he pulls it off. Nor is it a fluke. Below, like an expert skipper, DLR pilots the S.S. Fair Warning by the tune’s parlous shoals no fewer than 50 times. 

Six years ago, around the time Van Halen released their first new LP with Roth singing since 1984, the singer presented this gift to the fans: a two-and-a-half-hour video of his “Love Train” warmup routine called 50 Rides on the Love Train. On screen, Roth dances, manically, to “Love Train,” in full, on 50 separate occasions; on the soundtrack, he sings along with the O’Jays’ hymn to a comity of peoples 50 different times. Each version is the same, and each version is different. If you start to feel like you’re going insane around, say, the one-hour mark, focus on the counter in the bottom right corner of the frame and breathe deeply.

For me, 50 Rides on the Love Train completes the trilogy begun with 1986’s triple-LP radio show David Lee Roth’s 4th of July Bar-B-Que and continued on 2002’s vidstravaganza No Holds Bar-B-Que. I hope it helps you reach closure, too.
 

H/T Jessica Espeleta

 
Back in February, we told you about the fantastic post-punk/no wave record by Chandra. The band was named after its singer, Chandra Oppenheim, who, at the time of the 1980 release of their EP, Transportation, had yet to reach her teenage years. In that article, I mentioned she is the daughter of conceptual artist, Dennis Oppenheim. Chandra’s father, who died in 2011, often included his young daughter in pieces that are still quite provocative (here’s one). He treated Chandra like a peer and encouraged her to pursue who own art, which lead to his approval of her working with Eugenie Diserio and Steve Alexander of the group Model Citizens, who became her bandmates in Chandra. One of the post-Transportation tunes they collaborated on, “A Day Without Success,” features lyrics that were meant as a message from Chandra to her father. The track, taped when Chandra was around fifteen years old, has remained in the can for decades. But it’s about to come out on a newly expanded edition of Transportation.

Dangerous Minds is thrilled to have the premiere of “A Day Without Success.”

When asked if she could provide us with a quote or two related to the song, Chandra gave us a detailed account of how the track came together, as well as a revealing analysis of her very personal lyrics.

This song was recorded on a 4-track cassette recorder, which was pretty much brand new technology in the early ‘80s (at least in terms of being consumer accessible, if you had a spare $400 – could it be that they were that much?? That’s what I remember). We recorded this in 1983. Chandra, the band, no longer existed but Eugenie, Steve, and I met up every so often for songwriting and recording sessions in their apartment in Chelsea. Steve programmed the drum machine (back then probably not a simple task) and Eugenie played the keyboard parts. I would come with lyrics and a melody, start singing, and they would form the music around that, as we had always done. Only now, instead of doing it with a full band, we did it with just the three of us. The new technology allowed us to flesh out multi-track demos. From there my thought was that we would put together another group of songs to record in the studio and to perform. That never happened. Now after over 30 years they are seeing the light of day.

I wrote this song about my father. It was a message to him, a warning, to not get caught up in the emptiness of fame and to not to buy into one’s value being tied to one’s work, which would make him vulnerable to depression should he ever experience a failure. “Can you handle a day without the people? Can you live through a day of all seclusion?” I warned against living an extravagant lifestyle, and to instead consider conserving his resources should he need them if his success ran out. “Do you wonder what you’ll do in the future? Do you have all your winnings to spare?” The lyrics also suggest that he doesn’t know himself, that he is losing himself in the adulation of others, and that it is only through his work that he can be introspective, communicate, connect, and have successful relationships. “Will you invent some kind, some kind of machine, to figure out just what you mean?” Also, this song is a standard plea from a daughter for paternal attention. From my perspective a day without success would be a good thing, because then he would have time to tune in, take care of himself, and also to spend more time with me. The song reveals that I felt I was in competition with my father’s drive to constantly create art. It also reveals that the only way I was willing to communicate this to him, was through art, just like my father taught me.

 

 
The Transportation reissue will be made available on December 7th. It’s a joint release between Telephone Explosion and Chandra’s own label, Rain Boots Records. In addition to the original EP, there’s a second slab of vinyl with four songs recorded by the Chandra Dimension band in 1982, as well as two previously unreleased demos from 1983, “They’re All Alike” and “A Day Without Success.”

Pre-order the definitive version of Transportation via Telephone Explosion or Amazon. If you happen to live in or around New York City, Chandra and her group will be appearing at Rough Trade Records in Williamsburg on December 2nd for an in-store performance and signing, and will also be playing later that night at Alphaville in Brooklyn.