The Steve Reynolds Program - Checking In
Newsletter Subscribers!
This is the first issue for some of you. Welcome! Hope this didn't go to spam and you never see this. What a loss for you.
I love newsletters. I subscribe to two that just give out recommendations for stuff. There is a great difference, though, in one has recommendations from old tech nerds in California and the other has recs from way-too-cool-kids in Brooklyn.
So the first one from Cali will read something like:
Ctrl-Cmd-1 + F9 + arrow down - I love this keyboard shortcut that converts Unix to Javascript for DNS apps that involve but don't exolve nesting loops
Chingaou Hair Scrunchie 1000 pack - I found these hair bands on Amazon for $4.39 and use them to organize dongles and mark where on the handle I stopped when I whittle wooden spoons
The second from Brooklyn will be like:
Azure Static (2019) - I usually don't like old movies but this one is cool, plus my roommate stars in it as a lonely person who meets an alien being on Tinder
Morning Molly - this was an accident but someone handed me MDMA at Cashbar last night and I was too skeeved to take it then. When I woke up I found it in my sock so I took it and wrote three songs on my synth that already have 1.8M hits on YouTube!
All right. On to song ELEVEN of my list of A HUNNERT
Song #11
Checking In
by The Folk Implosion
In the early aughts, I saw The New Folk Implosion play at our local microvenue. Lou Barlow, original Dinosaur Juniorian and founder of weird and weepy Sebadoh, opened off the show by meekly approaching the mic and saying in the voice of a yoga instructor during cooldown, “Um, there seems to be a lot of, uh, pollen or allergens in the air here so I took a Claritin. My head is a little fuzzy right now. Forgive me.”
ROCK AND FUCKING ROLL!
An old punk buddy bragged to me about seeing G.G. Allin play in Chicago. “Dude, he shit on the floor and then threw his feces at the audience!” I shook my hear at this sad attempt to impress me.
"Whatevs. I saw Lou Barlow take an antihistamine and become slightly drowsy."
Barlow is easy to mock because he is so open with his feelings. The fact he’s usually bewailing being at the mercy of someone else, be it J. Mascis, a girlfriend or mean ol’ society in general, adds a pathos to his music. In the best/worst timing ever, Sebadoh’s Bubble & Scrape came out the same week my college girlfriend broke up with me. Does a goofball drinking Rolling Rocks and sob-singing along to “I think our love is coming to an end” played at top volume while on the floor in boxers paint a picture for you?
Barlow’s project with fellow Bay Stater John Davis, The Folk Implosion (a very 90’s joke of a name – the bizarro version of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), was more catchy and dancy than his solo stuff or Sebadoh. Their first lp (recommended) was still as lo-fi. A slicker blend of funk and indie showed up on their contributions to the Kids soundtrack in 1995 including “Natural One,” an earworm that got airplay and actually charted.
The next full-length was 1997’s Dare To Be Surprised. Reviews and record store clerks called it a back-to-basics album, a step backwards. That’s a bunch of bull larbow,* I tell you what. It could the most underrated album of the 90’s. It flows, has great instrumentation and has some of Barlow’s best songs ever: Burning Paper, Insinuation, Wide Web all do what Folk Implosion does best: give a sweet and smart groove behind Barlow’s intense and honest lyrics.
“Checking In” begins like so many songs on this album, with a drumbeat. It almost feels like the gimmick INXS used on Kick, using the same beat in between the songs. Soon joined by a bass and then the guitars and Lou’s singing evenly on a beat. What puts it over the other songs, are the almost-jazz triads played on the upstroke in the chorus that stick in my head.
The lyrics vaguely imply a stalker/detective’s point of view following the object of their hunt to a fleabag hotel
Pair of drunken derelicts
Passed out in the stairway
Rumble in the rafters
Signs from the subway
But the person is not there (for the best)
Left another message
Something tells me you're not lonely
Run away to find you
There's nothing that you owe me
No wonder Barlow has covered Bryan Adams’s Run To You. The pursuit, the complications and the inevitable end of entanglements are subjects he returns to again and again in all his projects. He's the Captain Ahab of indie breakups.
*I just submitted the spooneristic term "bull larbow" - (unfounded opinions and scurrilous rumors about the ex-bassist of Dinosaur Jr.. and frontman for Sebadoh and Folk Implosion.) to Urban Dictionary
Addenda
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is Ry Cooder by Tortoise, my first post-rock song I loved.
Anyone have a Britbox password I could borrow? It's just for seven episodes of a show.