Sonic Slab Review Revue The Fifth

Green Lake Branch Edition. I'm Ballard4Lyfe but I'm driving alot less these days so the GL SPL is gonna be my official home branch. They open at one everyday so after I get my java from the lovely ladies at cafe LuLu I usually cruise over there and check on my holds and whatever other gems I can find. Today was a huge score!

Eccentric Soul: Mighty Mike Lenaburg Got another Eccentric Soul release from Numero Group Records: Mighty Mike Lenaburg, and all I can really say is fuck yes. Mike Lenaburg was a producer of soul music in Phoenix Arizona in the 60's and 70's and this disc is a compilation of some of the rad shit that he produced. Like many of the groups showcased in Witchata's Smart's Palace scene, you probably haven't heard of any of these artists, which is kind of what the Eccentric series is all about: documenting a relatively obscure place and time of a particular genre's musical history. One of my favorite things about thinking/talking about music is realizing a sound's geographical influence. Phoenix Arizona? Are you shitting me? Mike Lenaburg was not. Smooth and raw (like sex--soul music always reminds me of sex which I think is often its very intention), listening to this record transports the listener to the desert, stuck in between the paradigms of Los Angeles and Detroit. The recordings definitely have an intense analog aesthetic. To hear them remastered would only detract from their charm. The album plays through more like a mixtape, with most tracks just sort of fading out, which would be my only complaint. I want more! Haven't heard a shabby release yet and I sincerely hope that these dudes continue to unearth these obscure cuts.
Eminem-The Marshall Mathers LP Obviously this is a ridiculous CD to "review" in 2013 but I'm goin' for it for a couple of reasons. #1: every "rock writer" has had his/her shot at writing about Eminem and I thought I'd give it a go. #2: I fucked up and got the edited version which is damn near impossible to listen to. A very large portion of the lyrical content is literally missing. It's quite jarring. Especially when you've been listening to this shit for twelve years like I'm sure most of us have. Or maybe you haven't. Maybe you don't like rap or you find Eminem offensive. I find the edited version of this album offensive. So now that I have the censored chip off my shoulder I should empty the hot gas from my brain and say what thousands of others have written before me: this record changed the fucking game. Marketing ploy or not, Em brought his take on the ghetto to the burbs, beach and frat parties with a flair and honesty that has yet to be replicated. It was socially polarizing in the music biz, the true hiphop world, and many other subcultures (I remember being at a warped tour in 99 and seeing a tattooed mohegian "punk" throwing water bottles and middle fingers at Mr. Mathers like Em had just shit down his throat. The dude was so bummed, and what's more punk than bumming out the punx?) And apart from all the controversy, Eminem could and can shut your favorite rapper down in a freestyle cypher as well as the studio booth. A true wordsmith, (no matter how corny and/or hellacious he may be at times) I'm convinced that if Marshall Mathers were not Eminem he could've been Tom Robbins.

Radiohead-The King Of Limbs This samplespastic Radiohead EP is also a bit older (2011) but I'm not exactly pitchfork.com nor do I care to be. These are reviews of CD's that I find at the Seattle Public Library, if anyone's paying attention... I like this shit. It's trippy and weird and is propelled by interesting rhythms that I haven't heard anywhere else. For me alot of it almost translates to jungle music, but with that sensitive depressing British twist. Self-released (and partially recorded at Drew Barrymore's house?) King of Limbs walks the line of overtly obscure and garishly mainstream. I dig what they're up to, but admittedly can't listen to this stuff everyday, kinda like I don't want to get stoned and watch Gattaca on the reg.
"What's your bloody number...?"

Mini Horse Weirdout

Sometimes things just fall right into your lap. I was chilling in Maudsley State Park last summer with my friends Mike, Joacha and their wonderful pooch, Parker. I've always thought of Maudsley as a universe unto itself and on this particular today it was obliged to unleash the weird. Having lived around the corner from each other in Brooklyn, NY we just weren't accustomed to seeing things like this around our way...

Skate Or Die

Getting slammed off the bat when you ride the bus for an hour and haven't eaten yet and you are heartbroken and in legal and financial trouble on the anniversary of your friend's death, sucks. Today was a rough one. But you know what? Still skated. No matter how weird life gets skateboarding holds me down, and I would like to say thanks. Still the coolest thing on the planet. The love of my life. Jewel in my crown. Thorn in my side. It's pretty hard to express how I feel about this activity. I am so grateful to still be rolling in 2013. My hip, heart and head hurt and today was the first day I skated without the scram bracelet in about four months and without the sweetleaf in probably a decade with literally a handful of exceptions. I felt wonky and out of it and I'm sure all my tricks looked like garbage, but I still skated. Didn't watch TV, didn't play fantasy football, didn't collect any stamps, didn't do the Harlem Shake, didn't smoke any dope or drink a beer, didn't work or fuck or fight. I rode my skateboard, and because of that nothing will top today. Except for tomorrow.

'Til Infinity

Proof That My Homie Loves Me

Scientific Proof

Jeff Strykowski sent me a package in the mail. I knew what it was before it arrived because he sent me a photograph of himself wearing what was inside, and asked me if I liked the article for myself. I speak of Proof Sunglasses. The company was founded in Eagle, Idaho, and the model that Jeff ended up sending me is made from re-purposed Canadian maple skateboard decks! Going green and reusing shit within the skate community has become as popular as it is practical, lately, with a bit of a cottage industry made up of artists, enthusiasts and collectors buying, selling, trading and collecting all kinds of cool shit that was once skated.
The shades Jeff sent me are called the Bud model (we're buds and buds get smoked from time to time--just sayin') and the color scheme is known as USA (red white and blue). They kinda have an old school 3D glasses vibe to them, which I have always had an affinity for.

Stoked

As stated on the Proof website, "extreme attention to detail is placed in each frame Proof makes. Each pair has laser engraved logos and a quote on the inside arm." The quote on the pair I got says "Sk8 or Die". Hype! They also donate a portion of the proceeds to people in India with cataracts, which I think is very nice. Proof shades come with a balsa wood little stash box and a sexy cloth/carrying case pouch thingy.
Jeff said mine were an early birthday present, and I gotta say this is by far the coolest gift I've gotten in awhile. Way too expensive and fancy for a dude like me, I am so grateful (they are a bit fragile so I'll have to be careful!) and feel a little bit bad that homie dropped coin on such a frivolous whim. Love you, bro. There is nothing like the feeling of a friend reaching out, and this is just amazing.

More Beacon...

Beaconcrew

Last week I posted a night shot of the bowl at Beacon. Today I got one of the young homies hanging out. I'm on it because The Stranger came out today and they have the same bowl on their cover. I just can't figure out why. There doesn't seem to be any story on Jefferson Skatepark or skateboarding anywhere on the pages within. Weird. It made me pick up a rag that I usually dismiss as grossly liberalized, left-wing bigotry and propaganda. So was this photo a mistake? Did it get slipt in right before printing by a stoked Stranger staffer? Or is the Stranger's editorial staff trying to remind us that spring has sprung in SeaTown? Can I expect in the next few weeks to see droves of hipsters trying to learn feebles at one of my favorite parks? What gives...

Random Unexplained Skatepark Cover

 

Character Sketchy

Found this old shit on my computer as I'm deleting and backing stuff up. Not sure what to do with it right now. Here ya go, Internet

One night, while laying in bed, he felt absolutely compelled to write about something that was neither  music nor skateboarding. He didn’t know why. As he was drifting off to sleep, exhausted and perfectly comfortable to let any and all thoughts wash over him, a strange and entirely unassociated sentence popped into his brain. Nothing had triggered it. No thought caused him to think of what he thought. Truthfully the fist thing he thought of as he lay in bed next to his girlfriend’s intense body heat, was a forest. For whatever reason, he thought of a cool, dark forest, lush and green like a Pacific Northwest thicket in the midst of a hearty March rain.
Fair enough. This vision of random forestry was certainly unique but not that uncommon of a thought in the unsolicited imagery and ideas constantly cascading through his strange brain, almost to the point where he could often swear he was losing his mind or at the very least someday would. A looming vivid and serene dimentia.
But this time he knew he had to get out of bed and obey the thought because it came in sentence form; not just an image or an idea but a sentence that rang out in his head, over and over again. Whenever a sentence and not an image or an idea haunted him, he hopped out of bed in a flash and attempted to write it down, immediately. It didn’t happen very often, and, it was so much easier to lay there and contentedly drift off to sleep, but he knew that when he awoke, that sentence would be gone forever. And so it commanded him. And on the night that he strangely thought of that lush forest, for whatever reason, the sentence that gripped his brain was the following, and this is what he wrote:

His name was Edgar. He wore a reddish brown worn in leather jacket with a huge seventies style collar, the John Travolta disco pimp look. Edgar had black hair that was now all but gray, him being in his early forties and having lived pretty hard. His face showed it. His skin was rough and battered, but there was a shine in his eye that was undeniable. A certain smirk-like quality to his presence that charmed him from one scenario to the next, chain smoking out of his mouth full of stained, crooked teeth, with the exception of one gold crown that nearly sizzled when his mouth was rarely free of a butt. A paisley polyester shirt unbuttoned enough to expose a bushy mass of wild curly gray chest hair, though underneath the bad fashion, his forearms still had their black hair.
An immigrant who had worked his entire life since arriving in the USA some twenty five years ago as a house painter, now found himself in the above described Northwest forest in the “writer’s” head, hunched under a giant tree, bleeding profusely into paisley polyester.

Sonic Slab Review Revue Part 4

From the Douglas Branch of the Seattle Public Library System, I got some new (to me) discs to flap gum 'bout.

Wiz Khalifa-Rolling Papers So lately as time goes on I'm more and more obsessed with rap music, particularly of the "trashy" variety. When I say trashy I guess I mean flamboyant and glitzy rap rather than gritty and raw hiphop. I just like the ridiculous opulence of the trashy rap. And I'm really into 808 drops. So imagine my disappointment when I gave this Wiz Khalifa disc a spin. These beats is candy yo. Trashy yes, but Rolling Papers (that is the beats, Wiz's voice and personality in general) lacks a certain bombastic flair to make me take its ridiculousness seriously. I guess the guy grew up in North Dakota and the music reflects that. It's got a countrified wannabe urban vibe to it. I picture a bunch of dudes in the sticks trying to tune in the hip hop show from the college radio station in Bismarck, desperately trying to connect with the culture of rap music and reject the cowboy society that surrounds them, a la White Boyz. I don't care how many tattoos this guy's got or how many joints he smoked, he ain't no thug, but I do like that one song with Too Short.

Eccentric Soul: Smart's Palace  This is a great record. I've actually been listening to it for a while now (I didn't recognize the cover art at Douglas and thought it might have been another edition). Smart's Palace was a dive bar in Witchita Kansas during the late sixties that featured live music, particularly apparantly some very heavy hitting soul music. Totally underground. Off the radar. Big fish in a small pond. If these dudes had been located in Detroit and not Witchita during that time, names like Chocolate Snow and Tim Jacob might be of the house hold variety along with Otis Redding or the Temptations. But the music on this disc ain't glossy. It's raw and often live recordings of no name soulsters at their best infamous glory. You can feel the sweat, beer and polyester when you listen to this shit. Very highly recommended for fans of classic soul and/or the BK neo soul revival.

Bedouin Soundclash-Street Gospels Meh. I want to like this, I just don't I'm really not feeling Jamaican roots as marketing tactics to sell suburban punk kids mediocre records. The dude's voice is too pretty. I'm not saying I'm some bad shotta, but I get the feeling if these dudes went to JA they wouldn't get past the gates of Club Med, yet there are photos soundsystems and Orange Street dancehalls throughout. And the music itself is very light. For a band with the word "soundclash" in their name they sure could use a little boom in their sound. I'm not trying to hate but if I'm gonna listen to hipsters undertake Jamaican riddims I'll take the Aggrolites, Slackers, Westbound Train, or any number of dope acts. Bedouin Soundclash just don't seem to Catch a Fire. Rat in mi Kitchen...

If You Want Blood You Got It

Ft. Collins, Colorado

Beaconview

The fool on the hill sees the sun going down

Scram Skating

So without getting into a whole bunch of ish right here, I've been legally binded (haha binded) to wear an ankle bracelet for about the past 4 months or so (a quarter of a year, gnarly). It sucks, lemme tell ya. It's a big clunky thing that doesn't ever come off. It hurts like a bastard and gets hella raw, literally to the bone. So when this first happened (I had no idea how long it would be on) I resolved to not skate. The anklet is worth about $3000 or so and I didn't want to fuck it up with a runaway-would-be shinner-torpedo-skateboard or some such shit, so I didn't skate. Then, eventually I fucking snapped. I had to skate in order to maintain what little scrap of sanity I had left and also because like so many rednecks before me have said (and I paraphrase here), if I don't ride my skateboard, then the terrorists have already won.
No, but seriously folks, skateboarding to me and so many countless others represents freedom among many other noble virtues, and as a skateboarder, American and citizen of the world it is my freedom, honor, privilege and duty to skate as frequently as I deem appropriate. America, Fuck Yeah!
And with that, from my video soapbox, I give you Scram Skating...

 

Filmed at Holman Rd. by Ollie D

Filmed at Marginal Way by C. Hoff I included this one because I was wearing shorts that day, and because honestly I was pretty fucking stoked to get something on that wall, even if it was just a bitty scratch

--fuck dudes, i'm gonna go do some scram skating right now  later---

To Get The Fuck Out Of The Way Of The Car

The other morning I was getting coffee and I came upon a chicken (rooster?) in the middle of Latona Ave. I of course immediately implemented a video investigation to answer the age old question and lame joke opener...

The dude in the INFINITI was nowhere near as amused as me (what else is new?)

"That Guy At The Show Filiming The Band On His Phone" Episode 4: Ska!!

About a week and a half ago a fairly large, diverse and yet unified group of friends of mine went out to see a show. I love jamming people together from different areas of my life, and see what happens. What happened was we all went out and saw the Slackers at the Crocodile Lounge. The shit was phenomenal. Some guy got butt hurt right off the bat because I was dancing (a familiar thread in my show reviews, admittedly) but then my new friend Mon from Lynn, MA bought him a beer and he chilled the fuck out. Then the band covered "Attitude" by the Misfits. We all knew the song was directed at him. It sounds like a review cliche, but the Slackers never really disappoint. Some dude proposed to his girl on stage and she said yes. Ah, young punx in love. Speaking of, here's a quick clip of "Married Girl" I grabbed while I wasn't busy gettin' weird on the dancefloor... Kinda wish I had filmed a little more because I am particularly impressed with the sound quality, although I can't say the same of my not-so-steady hand. Do the rock steady not the film steady!
Like a month before this my friend Alyssa and I got really baked and wandered down to see the Toasters, more of an NYCSKA relic than the ever-relevant Slackers. Whatever, I'm not here to judge but the scene at that show was very weird. El Corazon was sparsely attended that evening and Bucket seemed like a dick to me, but here's a clip of "History Book" a la 2013...

So there you have it rude boys and girls. Keep skanking. Keep wanking.

Judkins Park Park

The crews are still there putting the finishing touches on landscaping, but the park is open. Watch out for the bog. My board went in there. It was lame.

Judkins Park park is done! It rips. I don't have much for photos because I was busy skating, duh. But I was talking with this dude at the park about the park. I was telling him how I thought Grindline really nailed it with this one. They seem to have their finger on the pulse of what's going on with skateboarding. Judkins is hip city and I notice alot more people are doing proper airs rather than going to disaster these days. I predict that this park will be incredibly popular this summer and that I will be there alot in the morning. Seattle rips. In my mind I'm still eleven years old boardsliding the bench in front of SuperCuts in the Port Plaza--I get a boner when I see a mini ramp. Sometimes I have to pinch myself and make sure I'm not dreaming and that I actually get to skate all this epic concrete on the reg, because I grew up skating curbs. Let's, see. Yep, it's real. Get some.

Street.Tranny.Bog.

"That Guy At The Show Filming The Band On His Phone" Episode 3: Random Bagpiper

Unlike most, I felt zero urge to smash

Well this one's not actually from a show, although I suppose the night it was captured could certainly be considered a shitshow by most accounts. I found myself at a pumpkin festival in Keene, NH home of Keene State College and that night, to frat-flooded and pumpkin-smashed streets. Keene hits pretty heavy in the pumpkin game but what's weird is at the end of the night the cops just stand by and let all these drunken frat boys and juggalos smash up all these rad jack-o-lanterns...

Anyway at one point I was in a parking lot waiting for someone to buy cigarettes in a gas station when a "pied piper" cruised through the parking lot, playing bagpipes and leading around a gaggle of enraptured fratty types. Who was I not to film and follow?....

"That Guy At The Show Filming The Band On His Phone" Episode 2: Lenny Lashley

More music captured from a telephone...

Lenny Lashley's Gang Of One at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom. I rolled my ankle...
It was cool to hear some Darkbuster and Piss Poor Boys in the flesh and in a unique style. Here's some clips I've been meaning to post (i know theyre kinda wonky)...

"London Town"

 

"Two Robbers"

Do You Like The Times That I Promised You

Alright so I'm still playing catchup. I gots hella stuff to share with you guys... I saw my friend Sam play music at the Grog quite a bit over the past summer (most Wednesdays).

"Angelfuck" w/ Randy V on the bongos for flair