Motley Tunes #10

Motley Tunes is a weekly segment featuring an assortment of 2-4 songs I find worth sharing.

It's holiday time for me, and that means listening to more music. I've been digging in to (and exhausting the discography of) bands like Weezer, the White Stripes and Pixies for sometime now, and am trying to learn Neutral Milk Hotel and Nirvana songs on my guitar; besides I haven't posted a Motley Tunes post in quite some time now - so yeah, long story short, this post will feature 5 songs instead! Yay!

1. Debaser by Pixies

The Pixies were the godfathers of alternative rock. Their jarring songs, incongruous lyrics and noisy purgative music gave them a massive underground appeal. Debaser, driven by a relentless bassline, jarring guitars and surreal lyrics (slicin' up eyeballs / I want you to know) delivered in anguish, is quintessential Pixies. Watch out for Francis Black screaming "I am un chien Andalusia" (lyrics inspired by a silent surrealist 1929 movie) on this one. 

2. Hello Operator by the White Stripes

Raw, stream-of-consciousness delivery with a pounding guitar playing against a wailing guitar and a middle section consisting of nothing but clicking noises which imitate an operator pressing buttons - Hello Operator is perhaps the White Stripes' most thought-out song. 

3. Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson

Probably the sexiest Jack Johnson song. So laid-back it'll make you fall out of your chairs. I wanna sing out these lyrics to someone someday :)

"Waking up too early
maybe we could sleep in 
making banana pancakes 
pretend like it's the weekend."

4. History Lesson - Part II by Minutemen

Uncompromising punk rock stalwarts Minutemen leave their trademark brutality and incoherence aside to give us this nostalgic autobiographical song that opens with the legendary line "Our band could be your life." 

5. El Scorcho by Weezer

The most slapstick Weezer song. Loose, self-deprecating and gauche, the song offers a cool twist to Weezer's favorite theme of earnest-geek-yearning-for-love (singing 'I think I'll be good for me if you'll be good for me'). The music video is weirdly funny too!

Favourite lyrics:

"But that's just a stupid dream that I won't realise
Cuz I can't even look in your eyes
Without shaking, and I ain't fakin',
I'll bring home the turkey if you'll bring home the bacon."

Crazy Elephant Blues

Recounting my virgin experience at Singapore's Rock n' Roll Blues haven Crazy Elephant, at its twentieth anniversary celebrations held on 07/12/14. 

Surrounded by formidable high-rise offices of the Central Business District, Clarke Quay, in contrast, is home to low-lying restaurants, bars, nightclubs. One active in the day, the other, abuzz with night owls. Nestled in one corner of the Quay, The Crazy Elephant Rock n' Roll Blues bar takes blues/rock aficionados on a nostalgic trip back in time.

I was privileged to go to the Elephant for their 20th anniversary celebrations with my buds Karan (who got us in, thanks to his, ahem, connections) and Dev. Being minors, we went there for the blues, not the booze (wink wink). Karan told me that this place had once hosted Deep Purple, that the in-house band covered Voodoo Chile every other time, that they had open jam sessions every Sunday - in short, I had high expectations of this place. Turns out they were going to be more than met.

Being its 20th anniversary, the alfresco area was flooded with people (most of them regulars apparently). We got our invitee's stickers and got in, and were given the best darn table the place had - right in front of the performers. The Elephant's interior is worth mentioning: wooden furnishing decorated with graffiti and dim yellow lighting, cramped, haphazard but warm, nostalgic; like an authentic recreation of a 60s garage band's jam den. The graffiti - ranging from simple tags such as 'XX was here' to song lyrics to drunken slurs (gibberish and profound) to an impressive psychedelic mural of a Crazy Elephant (pictured below) - added to the DIY ethic and the free-spiritedness of the Elephant.

The impressive psychedelic graffiti mural and the performing area

After we sat down a remarkable thing happened. A photographer asked us to pose, and this tall dude with long, blonde surfer-hair and a rockstar persona came by and photobombed us. The photo was printed onto these cards (pictured below), and I coyly went up to the dude later and gave one to him.

He turned out to be Claude Hay, the first performer of the night.

Claude's band includes a grand total of one person: himself. Besides being a one-man-band blues machine, he makes his own instruments (out of household articles as preposterous as a baking tray) and names them (Louise is made from a scrap bin lid, Stella from a baking tray). He plays the rhythm parts on a loop, has customized his guitars to sound like banjos, pianos and I even heard a bit of Sitar, rocks with the energy of a five-man band, and is totally phenomenal. Check him out below!

Most of all, he's extremely modest and to have him casually photobomb us like that was so, so cool of him.

Next up, we had another Australian band called the G. Nunan Band, who were equally hard rocking and talented - their frontman (Greg Nunan, duhh) even snapping a string or two while dishing out his blues. Oh, we had some food as well, which was tasty and all, but we were hungry for more music. We saw three more bands perform before we called it a long night. These bands were jam bands, some formed then and there, impromptu, made of bar regulars who did not want to be left behind in the festivities.

My friends asked me to watch out for the resident bassist Kamal and guitarist John Chee. They were awesome, Kamal with his slick groovy basslines and a very reserved John Chee playing sparely, giving other guest performers the limelight (check the two cover Voodoo Chile sometime in 2013 below: eargasmic).

For one, these jam bands surely turned up the volume. It got louder, looser - it was the alcohol doing the trick for them, probably. What was fascinating was that these were rather old people, who were minutes ago busy drinking and looking dull, but on strapping on their guitars gained an exuberance that spread infectiously through the sweet noise they made. Just looking at the facial contortions of this particular guy below who was super loud and made his guitar squeal and shred and shriek like a boss shows the passion and feeling these people played with. I'd like to have this passion for music when and if I get old :)

In the midst of the gaiety and the music, we met few people who were bizarrely impressed that three 17 year-olds were sitting through music that belonged to their grandparents' generation. One of them, a biker dude, showed us his prized tattoos featuring Anthrax, Slayer, Metallica and invited us to visit a metal themed biker bar nearby (we accepted his invitation with mild curiosity and fear). The other was a 47 year-old investment banker who called himself "the biggest Rolling Stones fan in the world", and said, with alcohol lingering in his breath, that he'd been to 14 of their concerts all over the world. In a fit of drunken profundity, he declared "The electronic bullshit teens listen to these days - It's all fucking bullshit" and we nodded our heads in agreement. He kept repeating how impressed he was, which told us how nice and how totally inebriated he was.

What a night! And just as we were about to leave, I saw a piece of graffiti on a shelf, which minted in chalk the final lines of the epic Stairway To Heaven - "To be a rock and not to roll." To its left was a shiny blue electric and a star within a star (a Hollywood walk of fame star maybe?) and together with the vintage wood, the whole setup seemed profound to me. A call to save, treasure and spread the holy music tradition of a bygone era. All I wanted to do was pick up the blue electric, plug it in, and play with what little proficiency I possess the ethereal intro of that song whose concluding lyrics said so much to me.

Perhaps the alcohol dispersed in the air in that clammy place had gotten into me. I was intoxicated, and it felt fabulous.

| TO BE A ROCK AND NOT TO ROLL |