offmango

The Tattooed Man

There are better places to spend a Friday night than this, standing in the street between a Ford dealership and an exotic dance club called Cheetah’s. And there are certainly better people to spend it with.

I don’t know his name. I never asked. All I know is that for the last two weeks, he’s held my beloved Jeep hostage on the back of his truck, and that he has tattoos. And so, I’ve called him the Driver, also known as the Tattooed Man. And, for the last five days up until ten minutes ago, whenever I’ve called the Tattooed Man on his cell phone (because in this day and age, even the Tattooed Men have cell phones), I’ve gotten the distinct impression that I’ve interrupted him in mid-conversation with his copilot. Often, he attempts to carry on the conversation with his copilot and me at the same time. Which results, of course, in the miscommunications that can be expected when the person you’re talking to but cannot see is talking to two people, one that he cannot see, at the same time.

This is the man who has my car. And on this Friday evening, an hour before midnight, when I meet the Tattooed Man on this busy stretch between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, I’m mildly alarmed, but not in the least bit surprised, to discover that there was, in fact, never a copilot. That the Tattooed Man has spent the last five days and twenty-four-hundred miles apparently talking to himself.

Welcome to life in a David Lynch movie.

Here, you look this over, initial there, sign there, initial there, he says, handing me the clipboard, and taking six hundred dollars in nonsequential, unmarked bills. He crouches in the headlights of the eighteen-wheeler to count the bills, audibly. That’s one hundred, he says. That’s two hundred. Et cetera. I sign, I initial. This piece of business conducted, he hands me a receipt, sticks the money in his pocket. Best put this away before somebody rolls me, he says. But I got a big steel rod on me, and if they can outrun a nine miller-meter, more power to ‘em.

This is one of those rare comments that you’ll get in your life that defy any rational response whatsoever. I smile and nod, which seems like the best thing to do at the time.

In less time than it takes to tell, my Jeep is unloaded off the back of the truck and deposited on the street, as the Tattooed Man, clearly one who prides himself on delivering expert service, points out that one of my tires is running a bit low on air. At this point, with the car over two weeks late for delivery, and having for the last two days been driving a rented P.O.S with awkward rearview mirrors that couldn’t spot a rapidly approaching Mack truck in the fast lane and an instrument panel with red backlights that render such inessential details as the vehicle’s current speed and fuel capacity next to invisible when exposed to direct sunlight (which in Southern California is pretty much twelve hours out of the day), I’m just happy the thing still has wheels. The sound of the engine running is a choir of angels.

The Tattooed Man shakes my hand with a fingerless leather glove, then squints at his clipboard through his steel-rimmed, heavy-lensed glasses. You know the best way to get to 130th Street in Compton, he asks. I shake my head, telling him I’m new to the area myself. I don’t add that he ought to be happy he’s packing his nine if he’s heading into Compton, since I’m trying to keep the conversation on positive topics until I’m out of firing range. I do, however, recommend coming back to the Cheetah Exotic Lounge for some R&R after he finishes his last delivery.

Hell, I would, he says, but where the hell am I gonna park the truck? He points to a nearby sign that reads, Max 4500 Pounds, with an icon of a truck crossed out within a red circle, Ghostbusters-style, just to drive the point home. They got those fuckers all over, he says.

They’re not fans of trucks, I guess, I say.

Yeah, he says, ‘cause the forget everything they use COMES ON A TRUCK. This last bit is shouted at the sign, and to the entire truck-hating world as a whole, a lonely man crying out against the establishment that’s left him stranded and directionless on Sunset Boulevard, packing a pistol and talking to himself. And at this moment, even though I’ve spent the last five days cursing the name of the Tattooed Man, envisioning myself beating him with a tire iron for depriving me of my automobile, striking a vicious but ultimately justified blow for all of us who have been left stranded and at the mercy of the incompetent; even though I’ve spent the long hours before sleep of the last five nights imaging the torture and imprisonment of the Tattooed Man and the fiends who unleashed him on my life; even though I HATE the Tattooed Man; at this moment I feel sorry for him. And five days worth of hatred and anger just kind of blow away, and it leaves just two guys on a road.

He shakes my hand again, then starts to walk away. As I’m getting in my car, he turns and asks me what I’m doing here. Visiting, going to school, what? I moved here, I tell him. My wife works in movies. I fix computers. And I wouldn’t mind doing movies myself.

Not a bad deal, he says. Seems like you’re doing pretty well.

Not bad at all, I say. We’ll see how it goes.

All you can do, he says.

I drive away, feeling the softness in the Jeep’s tires, watching the truck parked by the side of the road shrink in my rearview mirror before in disappears completely as I make the turn onto Sunset.

Then the Tattooed Man is gone forever, and I drive on home.

Best of 09

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Here it is.  More than a day late, less than a dollar short: the Foreign Embassy’s Best of 2009.  My favorite songs of the year.  The stuff that kept me warm during a long, hard winter, and the stuff that kept me cool during a somewhat more bearable summer.  There’s a wide range here: artists that made their debut in 2009, and artists that have been kicking around since long before that.

An example of the latter: Dinosaur Jr., those 80’s alt-rock stalwarts, who just happened to have released one of their greatest albums, Farm, in 2009, 25 years after their debut.  They’ve got two tracks on here, and if I wanted to fill more than two CDs with this mix, there’d be more.  Farm is a fantastic album, one any current band would be proud of, and the fact that it came from the guys your big brother might have been listening to when you were in the seventh grade just makes it that much more of an achievement.

Another example: Built to Spill.  As I wistfully recall it, BtS popped my indie music cherry, behind a great record store on East 6th Street in New York City, down an alley from McSorley’s, whose name I can sadly no longer remember.  The year was 1999, and the album was Keep It Like a Secret, which I’d read about in the truly awesome music mag The Big Takeover (http://www.bigtakeover.com/), also purchased at said establishment.

[At this point, I should clarify: Built to Spill may have indoctrinated me into the love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name of loud, clangy indie rock, but I’d gone to at least second base before that.  If not third.  That dusky suitor went by the name of CMJ, which I’d started buying in college when it came in the size of a comic book and a comic book, in my financially starved eyes, was considered a major investment.  CMJ (I believe it stood, and still stands, for College Music Journal), taught me there was life beyond Dave Matthews and the Cure, and for that, I will be ever grateful.  But they didn’t introduce me to BtS, unless it was in some kind of subliminal fashion that I no longer remember.]

But I digress.  Built to Spill has also been around for fucking ages in indie terms, and also released a great album (There Is No Enemy) this year, and is also on this mix twice, for the same reason as Dinosaur Jr.: I simply couldn’t decide which was the better song.

[If you care—and I have to assume you don’t—”Aisle 13” wins by a nose, simply because it has the lyric

Everyday something strange

I can’t explain, happens to me

Often I am called by name

To clean up aisle 13 

which does exactly what an indie rock lyric is supposed to do, in which it presents to you an unusual, slightly weird scenario described by an odd and presumably unreliable narrator, who may be on all sorts of drugs while he toils away at his dead-end day job.  Which is what an indie rock lyric is supposed to do because it will resonate perfectly to the people who listen to indie rock.  Because, you know, that’s them. ]

Okay, let’s get to the rest of the mix.

“Home,” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, may be my favorite single track of the year, at very least simply because it takes a breath halfway through so the male vocal can regale the female vocal (and the audience) with the story of how he fell in love with her when she fell out of his window and broke her ass.  It’s that kind of song.  I’ve heard Arcade Fire comparisons, to which I have to say: the Arcade Fire, while they make great music, come off as a bunch of prissy ponces.  Ed and the MZs come off as the kind of guys who will ask to sleep on the floor of your living room on their way to Phoenix and end up drinking all your beer, repaint your kitchen so it looks like the interior of the Furthur bus, and leave you with vague memories of a night filled with debauchery and knee-slapping good tunes.

“Cone of Light,” by the Almighty Defenders.  A rocking and rollickingly good tune.  The kind that you might hear leaking through the doors of a nameless bar in Kansas City.  You pause.  Think, Wow, that sounds pretty good.  You start to leave, because you’re meeting a buddy for dinner.  But you can’t draw yourself away.  Two minutes later, you’re crouched by the bathrooms with your cell phone to your ear telling your buddy he has to meet you at this nameless bar as soon as humanly possible, with this tune playing deafeningly in the background.

“Easy,” by Deer Tick, is another rocking and rollickingly good tune.  Starting to notice a pattern here?  Deer Tick is from Providence, Rhode Island, but they sound like they clawed their way out of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon.  I mean that in the best possible way.

Personal confession time: I’ve got a major thing accents.  In women, the killer accent is Australian, or even better, New Zealand.  [I’m still at least one-third in love with the girl who lived in the house next to mine during my time in Sydney, Paula Wap, simply because she sang “Suicide is Painless” to me while walking through through the Royal Botanic Gardens after I took her to BRAVEHEART on a date.]  In indie rock bands, it’s Scottish.  Some might call We Were Promised Jetpacks the poor man’s Frightened Rabbit.  I call those people fucking idiots.

I’m hugely excited for Surfer Blood’s upcoming debut album, due solely to the greatness of “Swim.”  I’ve a profound weakness for hooky surfer guitar rock backed by echoey vocals.  This one pushes my buttons.

2009 was the year the Silversun Pickups made it to your radio and were nominated for a Grammy, after being on my Best Of mixes since 2005 (I gave the nod to “Kissing Families” after hearing these guys when the played a weeklong residency at Spaceland, a couple blocks from my house in L.A.).  2009 was also the year I shouted, “ABOUT FUCKING TIME!” to no one in particular.

Deerhunter’s been fawned over to death, but amazingly enough, it’s justified.  “Famous Last Words” is them trying to be My Bloody Valentine or something like that.  Somehow, they pull it off.  It’s almost frustrating how good they are.

“The Mountain,” by the Heartless Bastards.  A garage rock band from Cincinnati, Ohio, which makes them yet another whiskey-infused Southernish alt-rock band from nowhere near the actual American South.  It doesn’t matter.  This band soars.

Do you like horror movies?  Particularly, horror movies that kinda seem like the sort of movie you might have watched during a sleepover in fourth grade that scared the piss out of you and made you call home so your mom could pick you up?  Would you like once again to have that feeling you had while you were watching the movie, with your borrowed bedsheet pulled tight to your chest or over your eyes, in the moments before you realized your were scared shitless and needed to call your mom?  Drive around somewhere dark late at night listening to Dead Man’s Bones.

I know absolutely nothing about Elvis Perkins in Dearland.  I don’t need to.  “Shampoo” makes me want to invent them, a story about a guy making his way down a road towards an infinite horizon with his guitar on his back and his thumb outstretched.  I don’t need to know the truth.  The music is the truth.

Grizzly Bear, like Deerhunter, has been rightfully adored to death.  They were on David Letterman, for Christ’s sake.  DAVID LETTERMAN.  And they played “Two Weeks,” and they fucking NAILED it.  But “While You Wait for the Others” is better.

Sam Brisbee is on this mix three times.  Each time, he sounds different.  Each time, he sounds great.  I never heard of this guy until this year.  I’ll be hearing a lot more.

As I recall, I ordered The Mantles’ debut album unheard, on legendary NYC record store Other Music’s recommendation.  Except I got it on vinyl by mistake.  I don’t have a record player.  The album sat on my office book shelf, unopened, while I tried to figure out what the hell to do with it.  Sometimes I would stare at it and wonder what it might sound like.  One night, I opened it up and found a slip of paper inside offering the album for free download to people who bought the record.  And I discovered that it sounded even better than I’d imagined.

Yeah, Pearl Jam’s on here.  Yeah, Pearl Jam hasn’t really been considered “indie” or “alternative” or “cool” since high school.  “The Fixer” still rocks.  SUCK IT, INDIE SNOB.

In retrospect, I have to say I probably like the tune “Ticket Taker” off The Low Anthem’s excellent Oh My God, Charlie Darwin just slighty better than “To Ohio.”  Which doesn’t make “To Ohio” any less great of a song.  By the way, I’m from Ohio.  SUCK IT.

In one of my favorite movies of this past year (or the year before, or the year before that), THE HURT LOCKER, the lead has a box full of “stuff that almost killed me.”  That led me to buy the domain name killedbyfilm.com in the hopes of someday creating a website discussing movies that I truly love, movies that changed my life, that permanently altered my view, kicked me in the guts, tore me apart, left me for dead.  The Antlers’ “Kettering,” a quiet, atmospheric, unbearably sad lament that builds to a painful and inevitable crescendo, almost killed me.  There’s no higher praise.

Hey look, it’s The xx (make sure it’s lowercase!) with their album xx (remember, LOWERCASE!)  They’re English!  They’re indie!  They’re impossibly cool!  They wear all black and pout like Robert Smith after some asshole stole his pony!  Pitchfork named them the third best album of 2009!  Oh, wait, they’re actually really good!  FUCK!

Oh, look, it’s Sam Bisbee again.

Comet Gain is a cheat.  Comet Gain is a British rock band that’s been around since 1992 and hasn’t released a proper album since 2005.  I heard “Look At You Now (You’re Crying)” on Broken Record Prayers, a compilation album that was technically released in 2008 (though it didn’t get here until 2009).  Listen to the song, and you’ll realize why NONE OF THAT FUCKING MATTERS.

I need to stop cursing.

Here’s some Phoenix.  Unfortunately, at this point, you’ve probably heard Phoenix on everything from that stupid medical soap opera with the guy from the original CAN’T BUY ME LOVE to tampon commercials.  Sometimes, the good sell out.  Deal with it..

I think I first heard K’naan’s “Waving Flag” in the trailer for THE HANGOVER.  But that might have been T.I.  It’s still a good song.  If you watch World Cup soccer, prepare to have this song drilled into your brain until you bleed from your eyeballs.

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are one of those bands that could go wrong in so many ways.  They’re so damn close to being too…TOO.  Too cute.  Too young.  Too indie.  Too earnest.  But all they end up being is too good.  Somewhere in a Midwestern basement, there’s a sixteen year old kid who just saw the love of his life kissing the quarterback behind the bleachers that afternoon and is trying to kill the pain by blasting TPoBPAH while he does shots of Creme de Menthe and won’t even feel it when the soul of the dear departed John Hughes enters his body and compels him to take up the mantle of writing movies that really speak to the young and in love instead of just trying to rip off SUPERBAD.  And I, for one, can’t WAIT for those movies.

And now we enter the atmospheric section.  Signal Hill is very Explosions in the Sky, which certainly isn’t a bad thing.  Goes well with sunsets and crane shots of Texas high school football fields.  Also goes well with a long drive, a sit on a back porch with a beer and a good friend, and numerous other soul-healing pastimes.

Jonathan Kane goes well with midnight drives through the Everglades to dump the body of the guy you just accidentally killed behind the Piggly Wiggly after he tried to beat your best friend to death for hitting on his girlfriend Jolene at the gas pumps.

Telefon Tel Aviv was an electronica duo out of Chicago, half of which died of an overdose in January of 2009 two days after the release of the album that contains “You Are the Worst Thing in the World.”  Sad.

Okay, you know the rest.  I could have cut some of the repeat artists and maybe shortened this mix to one disc, but really, what’s the point?  It’s all good.  At least, I think it’s good.  Hopefully, you do too.

Anyway.

If you’ve read this far, and even if you haven’t, I hope you all have a good year, one filled with fun, friends, life, drama, uncertainty, excitement, a dash of remorse, a call to the wild, a hat thrown to the wind, and, last but certainly not least, music.

I’ll certainly try to do the same.