Prick Tunes: Squeeze "Black Coffee In Bed"

I don't remember ever hearing this song until I caught it on an episode of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dylan kicked off the show with some vintage '40's tunes about coffee and in an odd leap from black and white to garish neon he played this:



For years after I began hearing the song everywhere.  I'd walk by a laundry mat and catch the chorus as someone walked out.  Flipping through channels it's there in the background on Cold Case or CSI or some damn thing. I became haunted by "Black Coffee in Bed."  I still wonder whether radio and tv programmers were that influenced by Dylan's TTRH or whether the song is always playing, a constant steady cosmic hum that can be tapped in and out of.

Brother Justin Crowe?

If you're at all surprised about the song's inclusion on TTRH, check this out.  It's kind of like Masked and Anonymous, but better plotted.

Prick Tunes: Drive-By Truckers and Megafaun "The Weight"

Artwork by Wes Freed

On the night that Levon Helm passed away, two of my favorite bands paid tribute to a man who work has clearly influenced both of their musical catalogs heavily. I could say more but there isn't much reason to say more than Megafaun join Drive-By Truckers on stage to close out the first encore of a show in Carrboro, North Carolina in a joyous and raucous way with "The Weight."


And here's Megafaun from a show in Norfolk earlier last week covering "I Shall Be Released," a Bob Dylan song first released by The Band on Music from the Big Pink. They first recorded it a year earlier with Dylan during The Basement Tapes session, but it wasn't released by Dylan until it made an appearance on Greatest Hits, Vol. II. I'm going to embed two versions. The first has an introduction. The second does not, but the audio is a bit crisper (though it does have more of the "talking dipshit factor" working against it).

With intro:


Slightly better audio clarity:

Prick Tunes: Levon Helm "Poor Old Dirt Farmer"

News came out yesterday that Levon Helm is about to succumb to cancer, a disease that has been a central part of his life since he first found that he'd gotten throat cancer in the 1990s. In recent years, it was assumed that he had beaten the throat cancer as he'd begun recording and touring again, putting out the two stellar proper albums Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt in 2007 and 2009 and the live hoot album Ramble at the Ryman in 2011. Robbie Robertson assumed the same, releasing this statement about his former bandmate:

Last week I was shocked and so saddened to hear that my old band mate, Levon, was in the final stages of his battle with cancer. It hit me really hard because I thought he had beaten throat cancer and had no idea that he was this ill. I spoke with his family and made arrangements to go and see him.
On Sunday I went to New York and visited him in the hospital. I sat with Levon for a good while, and thought of the incredible and beautiful times we had together. It was heartwarming to be greeted by his lovely daughter Amy, whom I have known since she was born. Amy’s mother, Libby Titus, and her husband, Donald Fagen, were so kind to help walk me through this terrible time of sadness. My thoughts and prayers are with his wife Sandy.
Levon is one of the most extraordinary talented people I’ve ever known and very much like an older brother to me.  I am so grateful I got to see him one last time and will miss him and love him forever.
Robbie Robertson
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/robbie-robertson-levon-helm-is-like-an-older-brother-to-me-20120418#ixzz1sVUPfppr

A couple years back, I got the chance to see Levon Helm. Under doctor's orders he wasn't allowed to sing, a fact that I definitely viewed as a red flag at the time, but seeing him at the time was still such a pleasure, as he still had such a luminary presence on stage.

I'm glad I got to see him when I did as he brought so much joy to the show. His work with Bob Dylan, The Band, and on his own goes down as some of the most impressive in the history of rock music. He will be missed.

A Eugoogly for a Friend

One of the things I love about music is that no matter what you’re feeling, or what you’re going through, you can find a song, album, band that speaks to you.

This post will come as a bit of change from what’s typically discussed here, and very probably will get longwinded, but I don’t care.

I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately that makes me think of death, mourning, remembering, etc., so I’m going to post a few videos throughout this post of stuff I’ve been listening to of late…

Untimely departures from this world have been discussed before, and I’m going to bring it up again because over the weekend, an old high school friend of mine, Elizabeth (Holman) Melde, passed away.

(The version I wanted I couldn't find...but this one is good, too)

Just to give a bit of a backstory, for those of you still reading, Liz got sick last fall, but it was just assumed to be one of those standard “I’m not feeling too hot, so I’m going to go the doctor” bits, but after a couple trips and numerous tests, she was diagnosed with late stage lung cancer. Now, for all intents and purposes, Liz was a healthy 25 years old. She didn't smoke, never really hung around smokers, and to my knowledge wasn’t exposed to anything that we would be believed to lead to lung cancer. So...it came as a complete shock to absolutely everyone.

She passed away this past weekend after a battling the disease for the last few months, but throughout the entire process, she kept up a relentlessly positive spirit. She carried herself as if nothing was going to keep her from beating this, and I think most everyone who’d followed her battle believed she was going to punch cancer in the face and have it scurrying home with its tail between its legs. From the get-go it was a fight the people knew wouldn’t be easy, but we still believed it could be conquered because how she was handling it...all the way to the end.

As I mentioned, Liz and I were pretty good friends in high school, and for a while after I graduated, but as with so many other friendships, you lose touch and are forced to follow each other’s lives from afar. That was the same with her battle. There were two different large benefits organized on her behalf – add it to my list of reasons for supporting nationalized healthcare – that I wasn’t able to attend, and I regret not getting to attend, but just hearing how many people went was amazing.

One thing that’s always bothered me when people die is the way they can be almost canonized. After word spread about Liz’s passing, people were posting on Facebook like crazy. But with all the things people were saying about her, what struck me was that everything that was said was 100% truth. A fellow high school friend mentioned the same sentiment about how he hadn’t kept in touch with her so he felt a little weird mentioning it on Facebook, but that’s what made her so incredible, and her battle and passing even harder a pill to digest. Anyone who was ever lucky enough to know her – even if they wouldn’t have had one more conversation with her in their life – will still miss Liz.

When I die, I’m sure people will glorify what I will have done with my life and the type of person I was, but remember this… I contribute to a blog called Inconsiderate Prick, and that’s not far off what my actual personality is like.

Liz will be remembered because she honestly was such an amazing person (and I don’t throw around statements like that). She was loved by an awesome family, had a loving and devoted husband, and countless friends who are very probably still trying to catch their breath after hearing of her passing.

I’m not a person who really has anything resembling emotions. My wife will attest to the fact that she’s seen me cry twice since we’ve been together (8 years), but Liz’s death has hit close to home.

When I was a freshmen in college, a fellow high school classmate was tragically killed. I took that pretty hard because Randy was such a great guy, and he was the first person I knew relatively well that died too early. Liz is in that same boat. But having been affected by both of their deaths, it’s hurt for different reasons.

Randy was killed in an accident. I can accept that.

One of my best friend’s mom passed away from cancer. As much as I miss Jean (she was like a second mother to me), I could accept her fate because she smoked for years. Liz got pretty much the same disease, but did nothing in her life to lead to that. No Surgeon General warnings…just one big shitty surprise.

Liz died fighting something no one ever would have expected a person like her to have to go through. Accepting that won't come nearly as easily for me.

I’ve been to a number of funerals/memorial services where attendees are told to keep their spirits up because [insert name] wouldn’t want you to be crying and depressed. I think it's safe to say that Liz would want the same. I’m sure she was cracking jokes and smiling up until the end. Because of that, I’ve been trying my best to not get too down about her passing, and deal with the how I think she would want all of us to handle it. But that's not an easy feat for us all.

The last song I’ll post here is “Bookends” because it’s a great song but unfairly short…

You'll be missed Liz...

Prick Tunes: Elliott Smith Lucky Three

Back in the early days of peer-to-peer filesharing, when one had already exhausted the depths of an artist's catalog from proper releases, he started searching far and wide for any other songs. Covers. Rarities. Demos. Alternate live versions. This was a largely frustrating experience, as downloading an entire user's shared catalog of The Kinks meant you were getting "Turning Japanese" or of Bob Dylan resulted in having a duplicate file of "Stuck in the Middle With You" as you had obviously already downloaded every Stealers Wheel song you could get your hands on.

Elliott Smith was an artist who got such a hold on the listener that it was impossible to sate that hunger for more material. His covers of "Harvest Moon," "Walk Away Renee," "Waterloo Sunset," "Because," and "Trouble" were so striking that they began to take over your memory of the original song, wiping it from your memory altogether and making each time you heard the original seem like they were covering him. There was perhaps no cover that accomplished this more completely than Elliott Smith's cover of Big Star's "Thirteen." This song was often labeled as being from Lucky Three, although to all but a few rabid fans, what Lucky Three was exactly was a bit of a mystery.

It's a short film shot in October of 1996 by Jem Cohen, who directed the Fugazi documentary, Instrumental, and the documentary about the frontman of Smoke, Benjamin Smoke. Seeing Lucky Three makes me sad as hell, as his death still sort of fucks me up.

Lucky Three: