Okay, what the hell ever happened ...

to the Ass Ponys?

Granted, I don't listen to WOXY's stream anymore, and they were kind of favorites at 97X. Still, I wonder. LOhio wasn't bad. I mean, there was no 'Earth To Grandma' on it, but I didn't really like it all that much, anyway.

Tell you a little secret -- I'm a couple of years older than Chuck Cleaver, the guitarist/vocalist (and, I gather, at least co-songwriter) of Ass Ponys. I grew up somewhere around ten miles from where he grew up. We probably had some mutual acquaintances.

One Ass Ponys song stands out as an ear-grabber for me, having grown up around there. It's a song off LOhio called 'Fire In The Hole.' This verse, one of only two, sums up the last two years I was in high school:

Pop the clutch and holler rabbits feet
Roll the windows down
Take a drink to find the strength you need
Then pass the bottle ’round

Well, except for the fact I didn't really learn to drive a stick until I was in my early twenties. Other than that, the whole song pretty much describes what it was like to grow up in the quirky, dirty, anally-retentive shithole where I performed that particular feat of magic. And didn't grow up dirty and anally-retentive, at any rate -- which is the true miracle.

Not to take anything away from 'Baby In A Jar' -- but I don't, in fact, remember where my mood ring is. I may have left it on the sink, but it was a quarter of a century ago, now, and hell if I remember which sink it might have been.

'Astronaut' is good, too. Just not quite as incisive -- I swear, 'Fire In The Hole' gives me serious flashbacks. To places Chuck Cleaver likely remembers about as well as I do, and probably through the same haze of warm beer and fogged up car windows.

I'm so glad I don't live there now. I'd stick a freakin' fork in my eyeball.

It's like my dad used to say.

Not much to post, just had this float up in my head again. Sometimes, I'll use this phrase and people will look at me like I recited the preamble to the Constitution in Mandarin:

"I guess you just didn't hold your mouth right."

My old man used to use that phrase -- it just means "who the hell knows why it didn't work?" Mom still does. I'm old, y'all, but I've had people almost as old as my mother look at me like I had fishhooks strung through my eyebrows when I used that phrase. It's perfect to encapsulate the mystery and sheer bastard-mindedness of machines. I like to use it when something doesn't work on the computer, or something fails one time out of ten, usually when you need it most. It's so good, I won't give it up even if people don't understand what it means.

Y'know what that means?

That means I grew up a hick.

I grew up in a little town with only about 900 people in it. The high school was so small, it was decided in the late 60s it would no longer field a football team because they couldn't both field a football team -- with all the risks of injury that entails -- and also cut, strip and hang tobacco at the requisite times. Basketball was okay -- you had to be a real dingus to get hurt playing basketall. No football -- and they still don't have a team, even now that nobody who lives there grows anything but bitter, anymore.

There are other phrases like that, though of course as soon as I opened up this window I couldn't think of a single one.

This isn't a rural expression, but my dad used to say Dicky Nixon was so crooked he bet he had to screw his pants on in the morning. Hunter S. Thompson also used this phrase for Nixon, I believe, but my dad never read any Hunter S. Thompson. He did grow up along the same river, though. Maybe it was something in the water.

It shows, though, if you grew up in a rural area. For one thing, you don't panic and set your hair on fire every time it snows. If it's not that bad, you still have to get where you're going; if it's pretty bad, nobody's going there. We were thirty miles from anything. We drove a lot of front-wheel or four-wheel drive cars.

I don't know, I doubt much of anybody will grow up in the kind of isolation I did, anymore -- between satellite TV and cable, every kid in every nook and cranny of the U.S. will be exposed to millions of hours of more or less homogenous music, bland situation comedy, dumbed-down news and advertising practically from the moment it shoots out of the uterus. That kid in Manhattan sees the same commercial for nutritionally questionable breakfast cereal that the kid in Podunk does, and also the same misogynistic sitcom and the same bullshit newscast. Local news is all about scaring people into going to Walgreen's to buy something to cure them of diseases they won't get, or convincing them the coming snowstorm will be the worst ever in the history of televised news, so stock up on everything before we all DIE!!!

Feh. I'm not sorry I grew up listening to cats screw outside my window at night, hearing a barge tooting down on the river five miles south-southwest and down the hill. Knowing both my grandmothers -- having them live within two blocks of our house. I don't know if my parents liked that quite so much, though it did leave them plenty of places to dump us if they wanted to go somewhere. I remember playing Flinch with my ancient former-school-principal maternal grandmother, who always smelled of stale White Shoulders, and who wore a dress and stockings (not panty hose) every day of her life, right up to the day she died. Yes, she died in a dress and stockings.

My maternal grandmother, bless her, never could drive worth a damn, though. My uncle loved to tell a story on her, of when he tried to teach her to drive. He said that actually, she could drive okay -- she got to where she could shift and use the clutch and all -- she just didn't know how to stop. He said she just didn't ever put on the brakes -- she used to roll up to a wall and let the wall stop her.

Then there was another joke my dad and another uncle used to tell on his mother. My grandfather loved that old joke with the punch line, "wrecked 'im? It damned near killed 'im!"
Once they explained the joke to my grandmother, she couldn't bring herself to deliver the punch line -- not only was 'rectum' (the real punch line) a word she wasn't comfortable with, she wouldn't say 'damned near,' either. So she's just say "bus' him all up!" I hope she never understood that the reason we all laughed so hard was because she couldn't bring herself to deliver the punch line of the joke properly because she felt it was vulgar. My dad and uncle thought it was the funniest thing to ask her to tell it at family gatherings, though.

Nobody has a grandmother like that, either. Dad's mother raised three kids through the Great Depression in an even dinkier little river town than the one I grew up in. My grandfather was half-ant, half-grasshopper -- he'd work all summer doing odd jobs, painting and doing plastering and drywall, then sit in his chair all winter with his spittoon on one side and an old tube radio on the other while my grandmother took in sewing and kept food on the table in winter. The woman fell apart, eventually. Not that she slowed down for five minutes until she had a stroke in her early eighties -- she used to make sauerkraut every late summer, she had an old grater that was about three feet long that she'd stand in a galvanized metal washtub and grate the cabbage in. Never occurred to me until long after she was gone -- they rented a house that didn't have a bathtub. She also bathed in that tub she grated the cabbage in. I got sick on kraut the first time I ever ate it, so I don't have to go around for two or three days feeling like I have a cat hair in the back of my throat from thinking about that. Small favors.

Adieu -- just felt like dropping this in here. If I think of any more 'you know you grew up a hick if ...' expressions. I'm sure there are more of them lurking in my head.

The totally random "next five" on my ITunes

Just for the hell of it:

1. Dandy Warhols, Get Off

I fell for it hook, line and sinker, about the third time I heard Bohemian Like You -- even though by the time I had the CD in the player, I was already so sick of that single I could vomit. It was okay, though -- I also liked Horse Pills and Get Off. That one just happened to be the one that came up on the random setting in ITunes in my 'big directory of stuff I like that I own or have paid for through ITunes.' Seriously -- I'm a Girl Scout like that, especially since I know if they felt like it, anybody could probably exploit some MicroShaft backdoor and figure out what I had that wasn't legal.

2. Bruce Springsteen, For You

Oh, holy shit -- I could (and, in the future, may) write an entire blogorrhea entry about this song, alone. Suffice to say I was young enough -- and isolated enough by shitty radio where I lived, in the boondocks outside a small Midwestern city full of anally-retentive white people -- the only version I knew of this song, for many years, was Mannfred Mann's cover version. I liked it well enough that when I heard Springsteen's version on the radio somewhere considerably less stultifying a few years later -- don't ask me where, 'cuz I don't remember -- I was absolutely flattened. I (paid for) downloaded a version off ITunes, and I have to say even when it comes up randomly in the playlist, I stop whatever I'm doing and listen. I'm not entirely sure this isn't the best song Springsteen ever wrote, and I've heard a few Springsteen songs.

3. Cheap Trick, Downed

I'll repeat the sentiment from the last line -- I'm not so sure this isn't the best Cheap Trick song Rick Nielsen ever wrote. It's not as profound or verbose as The Boss was on For You, but seriously -- it's a power pop gem, one of the best of the best of the genre. And on their second album, too. Go figure. One of a half-dozen Cheap Trick tunes that really works for me, no matter how many times I hear it. I love the 'sounds like a Leslie' lead guitar on this one, but there's no fault I can find in any of it, really. It's one of those Zen pop songs -- pared down to what the song wanted, no extras. The lyrics are suitably non sequitur, the vocals are perfect for the work, the song hits it, hurts it and gets out in four minutes. It shimmers, the harmonies sweep and swell. It may not be the best power pop ever, but I think it's among the best power pop Cheap Trick ever managed.

4. Dire Straits, In The Gallery

It's a long song, as these things go, though not especially long by Knopfler standards -- six minutes and change, as compared to the really lengthy disquisitions on 'Love Over Gold,' one side of which is comprised mostly of the single song Telegraph Road (clocks in at well over fourteen minutes). That being said, a good many bitter-enders in the arts community likely nodded and felt at least somewhat mollified when they heard the bridge:

Some people have got to paint and draw
Harry had to work in clay and stone
Like the waves coming to the shore
It was in his blood and in his bones
Ignored by all the trendy boys in London, yes and in Leeds
He might as well have been making toys or strings of beads
He could not be in the gallery

Well, you know -- most of us won't ever be in whatever passes for 'the gallery' -- Knopfler may well have thought he'd never make it there, and I always thought it was kind of sad that, after putting together some really nice, vitriolic songs about love, life, London and the arts community, Dire Straits is famous for Money For Nothing and the album 'Brothers In Arms,' a string of 'trying too hard' pop songs which bored me from the get-go. Personal opinion -- worth exactly what you paid to read it.

And finally, the last random selection ...

5. Max Webster, Blowing The Blues Away

There's a bottle of wine in the kitchen
if you feel like hanging around
we can watch the rain on the window
We can burn your blues to the ground
Blowin' the blues away ...

Pye Dubois wrote some seriously amazing lyrics. They never meant a goddamned thing, but hey -- it was the seventies. Max Webster slots, for a lot of Canadians, around the same place as, oh, say ... well, I ain't a Canuck, so I don't exactly know. For some of the Canadians I've met, Kim Mitchell (MW's singer and guitarist) sort of qualifies as almost a Canadian Springsteen. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, you could run into people whose ages ranged from fifteen to fifty at Kim Mitchell's shows (he performed as a solo artist from the time Max Webster broke up, around 198o or 1981 until he semi-retired in the late nineties, but who knows. I think he may never really be done until he's completely gone). Personal friction has separated one of the best songwriting duos in power pop/rock history, unfortunately -- Mitchell and DuBois stopped collaborating around the early nineties for reasons that have been explained numerous ways by different people -- but this one was a real star.


Wow -- what luck. Not that I make a habit of putting songs I consider crap on my ITunes directory, mind you ... but that amounted to five winners. I know it ain't all that good. I'll have a go at it again sometime when I feel a burning desire to post and don't have much material.

By the way -- happened to pull up the WOXY Internet streaming link on ITunes last night and, in the brief period I listened, I heard the new Bob Pollard single, Love Is Stronger Than Witchcraft (FYI, if you don't know, Pollard was the songwriter, vocalist and modus operandi of indie gods Guided By Voices), off his first post-GBV solo album, 'From A Compound Eye,' which either is just out or soon to be released. I have to say I though it was pretty damned good. As good as anything since Everywhere With Helicopter off 'Universal Truths and Cycles,' anyhow. If you didn't like Helicopter, I'm guessing you won't like the new single, but then if you know enough about GBV and Pollard to understand what I just said, you'll know there's probably a pretty wide swing of styles on the album. Like southern Ohio weather, if you don't like it, just wait a few minutes -- it's sure to change.

And if you're a big Pollard-head, you don't care if you like the single because you buy all of it anyway. I like Pollard, don't get me wrong, but I ain't such a big fan I'd buy it all. Where the bloody hell would I put it?

Pollard also scored a Soderbergh movie that's supposed to come out soon. Keep an eye on that, if you're a fan.