Cookie Problems

Just got home from the Kria Brekkan/High Places/Gang Gang Dance show and oh merciful fates I think Gang Gang made the perfect music tonight. I super love the other bands (missed Kria's set but saw her open the Black Dice show the other night [wherein I actually fell asleep during Psychic Ills and had a dream that I went home and listened to Kiss' "Destroyer" record, hand to god] and it was super amazing, slightly unnerving and remotely like being a baby with a stomach ache being lulled to sleep by a mad mother wolf ; aka great) but something about seeing their set tonight was like having had a splinter in your side all day and remembering what it felt like before you had the splinter. Was something wrong? There wasn't, but then there was and then you didn't notice it getting wrong, but now it's right again and now everything is open. SO FUCKING GOOD.

Then me and Rachel both did a line (ie each ate an entire row of a three-rowed package of cookies, "hint of mint" Neuman-O's to be exact) on the way to the train and something is wrong again, but I feel better for the entire experience. I also think that if I'd been thinking about living in NYC four years ago, I might have imagined myself going to Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance shows all the time and eating cookies on the subway. Kind of hilarious and not sure if it should make me feel stupid or not.

Here is a new song:
City Center "Whatever It Took"

Never Had A Byte So Bad.......

The idea is basically without saying words to communicate an understanding, or maybe that the understanding is in the lack of understanding. Thinking about culture, control and insecurity. Would I do this thing all the time if I hadn't always enjoyed some sort of idea of attention or validation? But there can be positive results from what could seem like negative or potentially holding-us-back style beginnings. Or; When we refuse to suffer do we always ultimately suffer more? And then there's also the mixed-up unslept version where everything is slap-happy and the corners tuck into themselves, and if someone makes a book that a lot of people buy and every page is an inside joke just because they want to laugh themselves to death every time someone says "I can really relate to the main character Cjellian and her conflicting feelings about Precambrian pomp in the ragtime era"?

City Center "Bad Bight"

Public Apology

City Center "Public Apology"

Upcoming NYC Shows

TONIGHT! APRIL 21: Fred, Chris Bathgate, Drunken Barn Dance & The Library Is On Fire. Knitting Factory Tap Bar space. 7PM, $10. ALL AGES!

SUNDAY APRIL 27: City Center & Yer Sweet Chimneys at Goodbye Blue Monday, in Bushwick. 8PM, Free ALL AGES!

Wednesday, April 30: Fred, Faten, Silver Haunches & Drew Victor at Cake Shop. 152 Ludlow on Lower East Side. $7, not all ages sadly.

May 1st at Cake Shop (again!): City Center, Gardens, Faith Delphi and Lenaya Lynch & The Lion Cubs. Detroit reunion night!!! $7, and not all ages. Boo. But yay.

May 2nd at Knitting Factory, Tap Bar space (again!): City Center, Grouper from Portland & Ethan and Avi's new band Silk Flowers. 8PM, $8.00 ALL AGES. This should be a fantastic night.

May 10th at Union Pool: Fred opening for Chris Mills record release show. 484 Union Ave. at Meeker Ave. in Brooklyn. $10. I play first at 9:30. 21+.....

Saturday Looks Good To Me will be touring Europe from May 21-June 14th. I will put those dates up sometime too.

Post-Scripted

The show in Albany on Friday was totally great. I somehow lost my sampler (did I leave it in Michigan? Son, is it at your house? Whoops...) and my backing-tracks got frozen on the train ride up from NYC, but I just raw-dogged it and had a percussion-heavy/let's-try-this kind of jam and it was fantastic. I played a couple new songs, and hopefully soon I'll have a recording of the show to put up here. All the kids I met and talked to that night were so supportive and positive, and the rad Albany contingency has managed to post more stoked comments on the last post than any in the history of this humble, ship-shod blog, so big thanks and love to everyone who checked out the show, liked it, hated it, bought a 7", said hi, checked out this blog or otherwise made the experience so wonderful. You rule.


Oh, P.S. Part I: Deerhoof (above) are amazing. I forgot a.) how great their music is b.) especially live c.)especially in the springtime and d.) how they are the nicest, most generous and down-to-earth people alive. John even gave me his leftover Vietnamese food when I was complaining about being hungry after the show. I love them. More. Again.


And The P.S. Part II: The venue "The Linda" was also full of awesome people, and they put me up in one of the nicest hotels I've ever slept in. The bathroom was actually bigger than my room in Brooklyn.
Back in NYC this weekend I got to participate in a series of filmed interviews about the Michigan music scene, see Brendan's show in Manhattan (seek out the virtual drama about his piece in the show that calls out AIDS Wolf and Jay Reatard for having unacceptable band names and in some cases actually being assholes. That shit is amazing.) and peer over people's heads to see a slightly confrontational BARR show, get lost in Chinatown with Rachel & Megan and then get found and bug everyone out at dinner by saying "Oh man, I totally dreamed all of this before. We were all here at this exact restaurant and then something really bad happened."

More songs this week. Lots more shows coming up. Thanks for reading this.

Albermore Station

Playing show #6 tomorrow in Albany with Deerhoof. I don't know if anyone reading this blog lives there, but if you do, it would be great to see you. I have a bunch of upcoming NYC shows, which I will post this weekend, and hopefully some new music as well........

Breaking/Blinking

City Center "Blinking/Breaking"

When We Die There Will Be More

About two years ago I went on a really brief tour of the Northwest. More an excuse to hang out with Ethan in Portland and record a little bit at Dub Narcotic. I wasn't working with K yet, just kinda friendly with some of their artists and occasionally stopping through Olympia. Two days were set aside where just me and Calvin did some tracking, and eventually more people came through and added some voices and instruments. In the end we recorded (but didn't mix) two songs, "When We Die There Will Be More" and a super-unfinished version of "Wet As A Cloud" that had a three-minute droney intro. They were going to be a 7" someday, but the 8 track broke and they never made it past the rough mixes stage. Elan reminded me of this song and wondered where it could be found, so here it is...

Saturday Looks Good To Me "When We Die There Will Be More"
Recorded April 2006 at Dub Narcotic by Calvin Johnson.
I sang and played all instruments except for violin, played by Jacob Danziger. Chorus of voices and clapping at the end is Jacob, Phoebe, Ethan, Calvin, Jeremy Jay, Rachel Neverfailed, the entire band of Rademacher from Fresno, California, and a few other people who's names I had written down but can't find now. Saturday plays this song live a lot these days in our four-piece embodiment, and a version is gonna be on a live LP coming out in Australia sometime this summer. But since all of that is kind of obscure and complicated, hope you enjoy this song now.

Clouds Enter

Been working a lot lately, and it's cutting in on creativity and morale somewhat. I recorded four songs today, all of which were garbage except for this one. I'm not shy about posting pretty much whatever the fuck, either, so you must realize these were pretty bad. Stoked for next Friday's show but I gotta get in gear. The first person who can identify the sample in this song gets an amazing prize, probably consisting at least in part of half-eaten cookies.

City Center "Cloud Center"

Impersonal Doorknobs

I wanted to make a post because I haven't figured out the best way to respond to individual comments here. To everyone who commented about wanting some of the new stuff I've been making, I saved you all copies of everything. If you're reading this blog, you probably live in Ann Arbor or did at some point, so you should know Encore has a few copies of everything, too. But if you're still interested, you can just go ahead and send me your address and paypal to:
westsideaudio (at) gmail (dot) com.

I have exactly 82 copies of the City Center 7", about 50 copies left of "Old News" CDR, and a ton of the Everyone "Desperate Times" CD left. The 7" is $6.00 PPD in the US, the CDs/CDRs are $10 PPD in the US and all three together are $23.00. If you're outside of the states write me and we'll figure it all out.

Sorry for the completely impersonal dickitage of using this as a forum to sell my shit. Let me make it up to you with......
BUMMER CLOUDS MIX
A weird variety of sad songs/teen drama jams for the cruelest month. Hope you enjoy it.

Judee Sill "That's The Spirit"
The muppet angel born-again junkie early death perfect being. A studio demo Lolo turned me on to years ago.
Moby Grape "I Am Not Willing"
In 2003, Dan & Liz from Ida made me a series of mix CDs to catch the vibe for what they were trying to pull off with their new sounds. This song was on every single mix. It's pretty amazing. I originally listed it as an Unknown artist, but Ben & Brett both hipped me to it's origins. This song was on the Moby Grape record "69", and I gotta track it down, cause apparently the entire thing is as awesome as this track, and it's got Brett's favorite Skip Spence song, too.
Linda Perhacs "Chimacum Rain" (Home Demo)
The album "Parallelograms" was a pretty intense private-pressing masterpiece, and this song was the first track. Cool mic bumping and stony self-harmonizing here.
Sibylle Baier "Forgett"
Thanksgiving "Nowhere"
Silver Jews "Pretty Eyes"
Love "Willow Willow"
On and off, Love is my favorite band ever. Especially the fucked post-Forever Changes stuff like this.
Evie Sands "I'll Hold Out My Hand"
Evie Sands had a few major smash hits in the girl-group era, and then in the early 70's made a fuzz-folk record along the lines of barn rock, but she couldn't quite escape the girl group essence. I think the guy from Small Faces co-wrote a lot of these songs.
The Cookies "I Never Dreamed"
Hands down the most amazing and least renowned girl group. The Cookies had a bunch of semi-hits that all sounded really different, including Eliza's jam "Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys Do" and "Chains Of Love". This song encapsulates the weird tragedy of songs written by men about the mindset of obsessive teenage girls in a really unique way.
Cindy Williams "They Talk About Us"
My jam all year in 2002. The ultimate morning-after booty call "it's so unfair!" jam.
Linda Scott "I've Told Every Little Star"
The Primettes "Tears Of Sorrow"
Super obscure sub-Motown Detroit girl group. Sonic trash in the best way.
Sylvan "We Don't Belong"
Super-tragic world won't let us love girl group song. Could be a Romeo & Juliet thing, but does anyone else sense it's more of a Juliet & Juliet? Seems like a pretty heavily hidden innuendo to forbidden gay love in the 1960's.
My Bloody Valentine "Lose My Breath"
Closest to teen tragedy that shoegaze got somehow.
Ride "Dreams Burn Down"
If only for the drum sound in the first six seconds.

Total Running Time: 48min 0sec. Download the mix here.

World Sings

More unearthed/kinda iffy stuff from the storage space. This jam was late 2005 or early 2006. I remember having some sort of non-nervous breakdown after a summer euro tour with Saturday that year. A very calm falling apart. I was listening to Mount Eerie exclusively, right after "No Flashlight" came out, and obsessively piecing together the song lyrics and meanings like someone might have tried to disassemble the symbolism and deeper message from a Pink Floyd record in the 70's. Thinking about the Mt. Eerie take on "the world", and one's personal connection to nature, becoming part of everything around you, listening to the sounds of the world and hearing yourself, and a bunch of other existential questions, all of which led only to more questions. The breakdown part came when I thought I'd reached some sort of conclusion or endpoint with it, and I really believed for a few months that there was nothing else for me to think about or try for. Not even in a negative or despondent way, just a very zen-like lack of ambition or even trying to think about anything mattering outside of this nebulous relationship that every person alive had with their insides and the world all around them, and the complete inextricability of the two from each other.

Yeah, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking... Like maybe there's a little more to life than being really, really, really into the Microphones or camping. But regardless, this song got made in that state, and there's some pretty awful/awesome tape-manipulation and wind-blown gustery happening, in spite of the confused and lost human being making the sounds.

"The World Sings Inside You" (2006)

Courtesy Was The Case That They Gave Me

Best moment of tour? Hard to call, but envisioning a world where Snoop Dogg was the most positive figure of our time was up there. (Rolling down the street, making friends yo! Sippin' on some Hi-C, with my mind on my buddies and my buddies on my mind.) Back in NY working on new stuff, but getting some shit out of storage in Michigan revealed about a four hundred cassettes and 250 CDs of unmixed, unreleased half-assed jams. So much of it is unlistenable, but some is both unlistenable and fun.
WTF Beat From 2002

Spent all my time in New York so far fascinated with the movie "Slacker", a super low-budget pre-90's youth-as-dumbass-culture/ stream-of-annoyingness piece set in Austin Texas. Something about it. More soon.