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Leah’s most-spinned records of 2011

I don’t pretend to have heard everything that came out this year; in fact, every year that passes, I hear a record that came out the year before or the year before that, totally awesome records that I didn’t know existed. That’s why best-of lists are unfair.

Also, I don’t have the most eclectic tastes. As this list illustrates, I have a soft spot for folk-rock and ambient although these days our home seems constantly filled with the Grateful Dead, free jazz, or increasingly obscure old blues records. But on the days I get my say, these are my go-to jams, and if you were sitting in our living room having a drink with us, I would want to play at least one of them for you (if, of course, you hadn’t already heard them—and maybe still if you already had):

A Winged Victory for the Sullen - s/t (Kranky)

Akron/Family - Akron/Family II (The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT) (Dead Oceans)

Cass McCombs - Humor Risk (Domino)

Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer (Merge)

Jasper TX - The Black Sun Transmissions (Fangbomb)

Jesse Sykes - Marble Son (Station Grey)

Lauderdale - Moving On (self-released)

Megafaun - s/t (Hometapes)

Southeast Engine - Canary (Misra)

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky)

Tom Waits - Bad as Me (Anti)

Wilco - The Whole Love (dBpm)

Wooden Wand & the Briarwood Virgins - Briarwood (Fire) (and yes, I’m biased, but so.)

Zomes - Earth Grid (Thrill Jockey)

And two records I wish I’d heard the year they came out (2010) but didn’t:

Mark Olson - Many Colored Kite (Ryko)

Scott Tuma - Dandelion (Digitalis)

Freak Folker Wooden Wand Releases another Whiskey-Soaked Treasure

Like a tree falling in the bourbon-tinged forest, New Weird America couch-sleeping troubadour James Jackson Toth has released yet another album most ears—sadly—will never hear. To make this record, the ever nomatic Toth, reeking of bourbon, has dragged his whiskey-stained blanket and hard-luck guitar to the land of cotton.

With no Giras or Fisks around to transform Toth’s diamonds in the rough into rough-and-tumble gems, the veteran freak folker turned his songs over to Bama-bred Les Nuby and Duquette Johnston, AA Bondy’s former partners in crime in Verbena. Into the woods with the Gum Creek Killers and a few other choice picks, and out with a whisky-addled record the Drive By Truckers Might have made. Or Uncle Tupelo.

“Scorpion Glow” is Toth’s bourbon-in-hand toast to drunk driving and fast living, and it’s sad that you’ll never hear it since it’s a masterpiece meant to never be heard. The voice- and-guitar counterpoint treasure “Good Time Man” features a drunken Toth, pen and paper in the bar, surprised by the rising sun. Finally there’s the slow burner “Motel Stationery,” an ode to sleeping, curled up with a bottle of bourbon, on the floor in a motel room, bleeding out melancholy love letters to a Detroit hooker.

On ‘Briarwood,’ the guitars are jangly and raw, and Toth brings rock rather than folk to the table, but the bleak, watery sky viewed through bourbon-soothed, somnambulist eyes is ever the staple reality of the seldom-enjoyed Wooden Wand record.

The end of tour—Oslo, Gothenberg, and Malmo

In the interest of closing out summer and beginning a new semester and a new year at school (year 3—where does the time go?), and, more to the point, procrastinating since I have a syllabus to write for a class I’ve never taught, I’m capping off the tour diary with my memories of the last dates, those Scandinavian dates.

That flight from Geneva to Oslo was the last in a long series of European international flights, and I was relieved that there would be three more nights before I would have to get on another stupid plane. Tour helped me conclude once and for all that I have moderate-severe flight anxiety that doesn’t go away, no matter how short the flight. My coping mechanisms: earplugs to muffle any “abnormal” flight sounds, feet off the floor so as not to feel so directly the plane’s vibrations, my iPad to work on these blog entries mid-flight, and for longer flights, Ambien and a glass of wine.

I’m not sure what I was expecting Oslo to look like, but I think I expected something other than what we encountered just because it’s probably the most expensive city in the world. We were there a little over a week before Anders Behring Breivik went on his tragic shooting rampage and were thinking at the time, “what a nice, safe-seeming place to visit.” James was naturally eager to learn all he could about the whereabouts of Darkthrone, but the city of Oslo itself was far more intrigued by the fact that Danzig was playing that night (this was confirmed by the fact that half the city was clothed in Danzig t-shirts the next day).

The Wooden Wand show, then, was sparsely attended, which meant I didn’t mind adding background vocals to a song or two. By the end of the tour I had joined James onstage at a handful of shows, usually the more intimate performances, for “Death Seat” and “Wither Away,” the latter of these a new song from the Briarwood LP that is destined to alienate the psych-folk crew (although I am convinced that it will be THE Wooden Wand song to appeal to women).

Fortunately for us, the good people at Mono provided us with plenty of food both that night and the next morning so that we didn’t have to spend too much of our own money there. We made a game out of seeing what we could buy with the few Norwegian coins we had in our pockets. We walked into a 7-11 and shamelessly asked the girl at the counter what we could buy for “this”: James uncurled his palm and displayed the equivalent of three American dollars. She looked at us dubiously and pointed to the candy counter. “The chocolate pieces,” she said thickly. It was Norway’s version of a Tootsie Roll. We bought it and went to the train station, where we sat for three hours waiting on an afternoon train. I remember pointing this out on Facebook or Twitter and getting replies encouraging us to go to this place and that, where we could do fun things for very little money, but it bears remarking how utterly exhausted we were by this point. Three days on the backside of an arduous month-long tour sustained by mostly junk food, the occasional princely meal, coffee (sometimes), and beer (always), we were far more eager to sit in the train station and stare at the tracks than to wander around Oslo trailed by our luggage.

We arrived in Gothenberg late that evening after a long day of trains and then buses. Our new friend Christian fed us, put us to sleep on a futon mattress on the floor of an early twentieth-century schoolhouse, and took us sight-seeing the next day.

The random lot of conditions one encounters on tour can be so wearying. Take, for example, the following:

Maia, Portugal - An air-conditioned hotel room, a comfortable bed, no breakfast, two and a half hours to sleep before an early flight.

Illa de San Simon, Spain - Beautiful island with a clean building for artists’ lodging, extremely hot temperatures with no air conditioning, plenty of breakfast and plenty of time to rest.

Copenhagen, Denmark - Small, uncomfortable beds in an un-air conditioned, hostel-like setting with bathrooms down the hall, no place to shower, privacy, plenty time for rest, constant revelry from the streets below.

You know you’re lucking out when you have completely positive combinations of factors. (Winterthur, Switzerland, for example, was the jackpot: huge, clean, air-conditioned hotel room within walking distance of the venue, plenty of time to rest, an unbelievable feast of what Americans call “a continental breakfast,” and reasonably priced internet access.) These situations are rare, though.

Christian pulled together a big crowd—under short notice, too—for the Wooden Wand show in Gothenberg. Two other acts were on the bill, one of which I’ve sadly forgotten, the other of which was a girl whose genre reminded me of Silje Nes without a full band. We enjoyed a relaxing day before that, having breakfast with Christian and his girlfriend and then seeing Gothenberg from a boat. Christian turned me on to Jasper TX, whose new record Black Sun Transmissions has gotten a great deal of play in this house since we’ve been back in the states.

The final show of the tour was in Malmo. We played with In Gowan Ring, met even more cool folks, and stole away from the free vegetarian offerings to find a place that served cheap, greasy doner kabobs and hummus.

My final thought here is not an all-encompassing one—I’m way too tired and feeble-minded for that, presently—but it’s a relevant one, I think. I’ve promoted enough shows to see that a million bands are “from” Brooklyn (or nowadays, Portland), are generally opposed to air-conditioning, and are socially fastidious vegetarians. Of course I’m being grossly insulting and overly general here, but the point I’m getting at involves food. For every promoter who crosses out the food rider and scrawls “per advance” in the margin, there are probably five who just assume bands want lentils and arugula. Yet one of my favorite meals from tour, in Copenhagen, included lentils and a hearty beef stew; James’s was a big steak with potatoes in Basel.

I guess this last bit is directed toward any promoters out there who may still be reading. I’ve said before that tour is a very humbling experience, and it’s one in which you learn to distinguish between wants and needs. The most important needs, as I can see them, are food and sleep. Feed your bands well—they encounter an unbelievable number of obstacles as they weave their way through your city—and please please please wash your blankets and sheets if you are putting them up. Nobody wants to sleep on a dirty mattress, even if Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy HAS once laid his head there. (especially if? ha!)

It maybe sucks to conclude with a moral of sorts, but I do wonder how often these things need to be said but aren’t.

With that, I have to get back to my own work. There’s a brief Wooden Wand tour next month with the Briarwood Virgins, but it’s unlikely I’ll be along for the ride. I’m back to long, daily stretches of reading, and now I’ll have class time to add to that. I wouldn’t call tour a vacation by any definition; if anything, it was a crazy-enough time to make me strangely glad to be back at home, sleeping in my own bed, preparing my own meals, and chaining myself to my desk for these long months of reading and studying.

Zurich, Basel and Geneva

The next few days of travel were comparably easy. No Ryanair, no trouble with tickets, no impossible-to-make train departures. I slept like a baby in our air-conditioned room in a hotel in Winterthur. James played for 30 minutes or so, and we got a nice room with a huge spread of a continental breakfast, much of which we stuffed in our pockets in anticipation of Scandinavia, which we knew to be even more expensive than Switzerland.

Some days—most days—this music biz thing feels wrong. Artists all too often give so much of themselves and get very little in return (little appreciation, little money, etc.). Unless you’re Wilco or DBT you’re STILL paying dues these days, even if you started paying them a decade ago.

But other days you can’t help feeling like you “got one over on ‘em.” That was how we felt about Witerthur after having gotten used to sometimes unpleasant accommodations and unappetizing (cold) meals. (I wish promoters would take the request for “a hot meal” on the rider seriously.) Enough to eat for dinner with plenty of beer to wash it down and a nice hotel room to catch up on sleep, that was Winterthur. We slept in a few hours, had plenty of breakfast downstairs, headed to Zurich.

I love Zurich. After a month of whirlwind travel, “Hey look, honey, it’s the St. Paul Cathedral!!!!!” becomes “Hey look, honey, generically beautiful European structure # 210.” One shouldn’t experience the world that way; it’s really nothing like vacation.

But then there are days when you wake up and see the beauty in a city so intensely that you are convinced it’s not the same place you rolled up to the day before, days unwashed and sleep-deprived, rocking and tilting this way and that in your boots because your body thinks it’s still on a train.

Zurich was that way for me. We got to the city from Winterthur in an easy 20 minutes and bought a trip to the Fluntern cemetery because I wanted to see where James Joyce was buried. I’ve already posted the photo here, I’m quite sure, yet the experience is worth writing about because we had such a nice morning.

In our dirty clothes we sprawled out like Americans in the back of tram #6 headed to Zurich Zoo / Friedhof Fluntern and imagined the lives of the impossibly beautiful thin girls and thought-burdened old ladies who hopped on and off along the way. We were pleased to see that the cemetery was less than 1/8 of a mile from the tram stop; we were lugging our bags, heavy with unsold merch and the extra records James picked up in Krefeld, up the hill.

Some cemetery workers got a laugh when they saw us and knew exactly why we’d come. “James Joyce’s grave?” one of them more stated than inquired. We smiled and said yes, and he pointed us on our way. Fluntern is a beautiful cemetery, very well kept and, though popular, fairly private. We found Joyce’s grave and sat on the bench in front of it.

For me there are weight and meaning in cemeteries that isn’t there in museums, which I have been known to visit and muse on what my brain guiltily calls “ancient pots” and “nice old paintings.” Terrible, I know. But visiting someone’s grave is moving, I think, and personal, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever see Joyce’s. James and I chatted for awhile, dredged up some Joyce quotes, and then headed back to the train station.

Basel was a short trip from Zurich, and we had a nice time chatting with the promoter and the sound engineer. As friendly and awesome as these folks are, I wish I could say the same about the show itself.

Anybody familiar with Wooden Wand music from any time would chuckle at the thought of its being performed in front of a good-time party crowd, and that’s just what this ROOFTOP gig was. I made a joke on Facebook about going down to coop to buy a beach ball. We ate delicious steaks with some kind of amazing Argentine dipping sauce and braced ourselves for what we knew was going to be the ultimate bummer gig.

Ladies were sunning themselves and twirling cocktail glasses through their fingers, and twenty-something boys who looked like teenagers rolled up on bicycles in droves. The ultimate nail in the casket was the amp, which had been turned down to ONE. I had to  stand off to the side of the stage in order to hear anything, and the highlight of the evening was when James yelled from stage “Hello, Basel! Are you ready for some country music?!” What a riot.

Geneva was much better even though the promoter promised us from the start that nobody was going to come. “It’s summer, you see, and there’s a free concert a five-minute walk away. David Grubbs played here last night, and it was very slow, very slow.” But it was actually pretty good—there WAS an audience, and they were quite attentive. A handful of folks made sure to speak to James and buy merch from us. I sang on “Wither Away” and “Death Seat,” which I wound up doing at about four of the shows.

The next day we had—thank goodness—our next-to-last flight, from Geneva to Oslo, where James played the same night as Danzig.

Home at last

I swear I’m not copping out; I very much intend to fill in the days between Tarcento and now, back home. We’ve been back home for a week now though we officially touched US soil last Monday. We had a direct flight from Copenhagen to Atlanta, where our friend Scotty Lee was waiting to drive us back to Birmingham. Jet-lagged or not, we were determined to hear Cass McCombs play at the Bottletree and to relax with friends, have a beer or two.

The next day Purvis drove us to Pelham, where my folks met us and, after an hour or two of ‘Barrelin’ (what we call visiting the Cracker Barrel, a Toth family favorite), drove us to where they live near the coast in south Alabama. We had to pick up Virgil and our car before we could make the 10-hour trek back to KY. So really, we left Kastrup aiport early Monday morning and didn’t technically get home until Wednesday.

We walked in relieved that we had cleaned up the house so fussily before leaving town because there was no mess and no bug infestation of any kind. Luckily, James and I worry about the same things.

Let me back up to Tarcento, which I’ve already noted was a tour highlight. The next day turned out to be pretty much the opposite.

A friend of the promoters drove us to the train station in Udine and helped us print our train tickets, which James’s booking agents had already purchased. Therein lay the trouble. Once we got to, I think, Milan, we had to print the next set of tickets, tickets that had us bound to Switzerland.

Well what they don’t tell you until you get to the train station with little time to spare is that you can’t print Swiss tickets in Italy. Imagine our shock and dismay. In its utter ridiculousness it reminded me of a time recently when I called a hotel back in the US in an attempt to extend our stay by one night and was told that I would first be charged a CANCELLATION fee—the total charge of the initial night + $50—and could THEN pay for both nights.

What they meant, of course, is that we should have printed our tickets when we were in Switzerland, but all of this was complicated by the fact that we hadn’t yet (or ever, at any point in the past) BEEN to Switzerland. The Italian train conductor, annoyed, ushered us onto the train anyway, and each Italian conductor who came up to us let us slide. We sat in the scorching dining car because, having no tickets, we didn’t know our seat numbers.

The trouble began when the Swiss conductors took over; when we explained the situation one conductor said, dryly, “That may have worked in Italy, but not here.” He had me texting our booking agents in an attempt to find scannable PDFs of our tickets even though we had in hand our receipt. (Thank God for the iPhone.) After harassing us the first three-and-a-half hours of our six hour train trip through the Swiss alps and onward to Zurich, he miraculously satisfied himself with the email version of our receipt.

Then we were late for our train from Zurich to Winterthur, where James had to play. After TWELVE HOURS of train travel, we made it to Winterthur only to discover that James had about 45 minutes to play because of recent noise complaints the venue’d had.

I scarfed down a piece of grilled chicken and a salad, and James played hungry. I remember sitting backstage, grateful for the curtains concealing me from the audience, and marveling at James’s ability to turn it on after the agonizing day of travel we’d had, catching a total of five trains from 8:30 a.m. to 8:40 p.m. with no chance to buy lunch in between. He’s a pro.

Next up, Basel and Geneva. xx