Monthly Archives: May 2009

I Bring You: Death

Once upon a time, in the magical era of 1975, there was a band called "Death", in a city called "Detroit". And Death was a punk band.

Now obviously, Death didn't look like what many people today think punk rockers looked like; anybody too young to have experienced it as it happened has been taught, by 20 years of 42-minute retrospectives on VH1 which endlessly recycle footage of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, that punk was the music of angry, fashion-minded, white kids from New York and London. But that's certainly not the whole story. And Death certainly played the music that we now call punk. Take a listen:

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Punk, right?

Drag City has just released a CD of Death's 7-song album ...For The Whole World To See. I grabbed a copy out of curiosity, and sadly, it didn't grab me back - frankly, it's just not fantastic stuff. But it is interesting. You can hear bits of Hendrixy-psychedelic guitar, a touch of funk maybe here and there, and lots of that rough, loud proto-punk of the MC5 in the songs. And it's all rough and unpolished and DIY, and it was played by three guys who couldn't look any less the stereotype. Which is pretty cool all by itself.

The Red Menace

Get a piece of wood, 1.75" x .75" x 2'.

Nikon D90, 18-28mm

Call this the "neck". I used poplar, next time I won't. You might be better off with a hardwood like oak or maple. You can get poplar or oak at any big-box hardware store. It's really cheap. Poplar cuts like butter, which is great if you're using hand tools.

Get some more wood, 1.75" x .25", build a box. For the back, use a .25" x 5.5" (?) board - I forget the exact dimensions of these boards - but they're the thin and wide boards, obviously. Cut the back first and use it as a template to build the sides. Don't attach the back yet though.

Nikon D90, 18-28mm

Make some cut-aways on the ends, roughly .5" deep x 1.75" wide. The neck is going to fit into these.

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More Gil & Dave

Here are a few more songs from that David Rawlings Machine show:

I Pity The Poor Immigrant :

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A Dylan cover.

To Be Young :

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This is a song David Rawlings wrote with Ryan Adams. It appearns on Adams' first solo record, "Heartbreaker" (as does the short track "Argument with David Rawlings Concerning Morrissey").

Elvis Presley Blues :

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Gillian Welsh usually sings this. But, IIRC, David Rawlings said he was the original singer.

Luminous Rose

Here's Gillian Welch and David Rawlings (performing as The David Rawlings Machine) doing Robyn Hitchcock's "Luminous Rose", Feb '07.

Sony P7
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OK, looks like this audio thingy works. Yay!

T-Rex of Suburbia

P.Z. Myers strokes his inner mad scientist, as he talks about persuading chickens to let him manipulate their embryos in hopes of reproducing a dinosaur:

As for respecting the chickens themselves, what can be grander and more respectful than this project? I would whisper to my chickens, "With these experiments, I will take your children's children's children, and give them great ripping claws like scythes, and razor-sharp serrate fangs like daggers, and I will turn them into multi-story towers of muscle and bone that will be able to trample KFC restaurants as if they were matchboxes." And their eyes would light up with a feral gleam of primeval ambition, and they would offer me their ovaries willingly.

...

But I have a dream, too. Of a day when biotechnology is ubiquitous, and middle-class kids everywhere will have a cheap DNA sequencer and synthesizer in their garages, and a freezer with handy vectors and enzymes for directed insertional mutagenesis. And one day, Mom will come home with a box of fresh guaranteed organic free range chicken eggs, and Junior's eyes will glitter with a germ of a cunning plan, fed by a little book he found in the library…and 30-foot-tall fanged chickens will triumphantly stride the cul-de-sacs of suburbia, and the roar of the dinosaur will be heard once again.

Sweet! I hope I live to see the day... and the day after.