I’ve been boozing up a lot lately. Too much in fact. If this keeps going I might have to check back into the Lynx Head Recovery Centre. I kicked the deep fried lentil snacks habit, but this is something else.

It was that damned trip to New Orleans that did it. My capacity for alchohol was doubled in five days. I knew it was going to be an ACM kind of town when I was in Houston, waiting to board the connecting flight. A woman walked up to me, beer in hand, asking in a magnificent twang of an accent whether our section of the plane was boarding yet. En route, a 737 full of Texans heading to the Crescent City to see the Longhorns play Tulane got sauced in 48 minutes.

I headed out to the French Quarter that night, and found it to be a drinkers’ Disneyland. A liquour store practically every block. I tried to find some good southern bourbon for Smash but found the stores to be curiously well-stocked in Canadian whiskey instead, especially Crown Royal. There were people selling you pints of good beer (they’ve got some cool indie breweries down there) from the side of the road for a buck fifty U.S. You take the plastic cupfull and walk along, sticking your head onto the open doors and windows of various bars, soaking up the music.

I’ve been back for a month, but like a big bagful of Hallowe’en candy, the booze habit has lingered. It’s not all bad, though. When I have a drink or two by myself at home, I find I slip into a familiar habit.

I listen to Klagg.

More specifically, I listen to ‘This is Klagg.’

It is probably the best record I’ve ever been involved with. The first Klagg album was, as Leacock-winner Howard White once said of my editing skills, ‘a bit rough.’ There is of course the Stoke record, but though it has received accolades from California to Fredericton to Iceland, it is almost too Alec. It’s blackness and dry heaviness weighs it down like one of those thick Quebec beers. It’s tasty, but do you really want to drink a six pack of the stuff?

Decline had it’s moments, but never released an album (hey Rob, you’ll have to play ‘Please Don’t Kiss in Public’ in your Formula Vee show, though it suits me more than you now). The Huxley album comes close (I might have something to say about that soon). The glorious Boring Holmgrens contributed the lo-fi punk masterpiece ‘Blood in Bombay,’ as well as the insane ‘Silly Carnival,’ but neither stack up to ‘This is Klagg.’

I’m very pleased with my own contribution to the record. Bullishly so. I did not offer up a single riff to start, but was so inspired by some of Ian’s (aka JR Muc’s) bass lines that I took a few of them and started running. ‘Orange Cat,’ ‘Varispeed’ and ‘White Trash’ are the most obvious results. I also weighed in with riffs or words on ‘Sumuru,’ ‘Cordova Nova,’ ‘Glass Apple,’ and even for the middle eight (yes, my recollection of events is that anal) on ‘She’s A Curler.’ The guitar playing, if I may say so, is excellent, in a retro kind of way. My favorite guitar parts are all of ‘Cordova Nova,’ the whole iditiotic grandiosity of the last half of ‘Radio Central,’ and the stripped down six string economy of ‘Suitcase Pimp’ (some of which, to give credit where it’s due, is the Mule’s).

And what of the Mule? On the first Klagg record, he was the running back, taking the ball and carrying it for touchdowns. I watched with some awe as he would take snippets that I figured were useless and, in the words of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song ‘certainly made it all seem worthwhile.’ On ‘This is Klagg,’ he was less available to oversee the proceedings, leaving Ian and I to pick up some slack. I think the Mule presence on the record is a bit less pervasive than on the first record, but as a result the parts where he takes over all the more pronounced. Instrumentally, he raised the bar; the drumming is tight, with lots of Stoke-like bashing.

The Mule has become a master of many styles over the years, and some of his offererings on the record are so evocative of this or that era that it makes your head shake. On ‘Radio Central,’ he gives you something that could’ve been off of Kiss’ first album. On ‘Racing to a Red Light’ we get some Black Flag-like punk (at least Rob says it’s like Black Flag; I have no idea what the hell they sound like). Heading over to another part of the 1980’s, he takes an Ian progression and turns it into ‘Swinging Ronnie,’ the best song the Smiths never recorded.

The ‘Sumuru’ riff makes me think a bit of Nirvana. ‘Suitcase Pimp,’ arguably the best tune on the disc, is like a blend of Gilby Clarke and Billy Corgan, pushed over the top by JR’s lunatic vocals. (Speaking of which, I remember Rob walking out in disgust when we were recording the vocals on the chorus. “They sound nothing like the ‘Destroyer’ album,” he lamented. After he left, Ian and I stripped them apart and re-did them, and the results, I think, are not bad).

Of course, comparisons to all these bands are pointless once they get to be so varied. They serve mainly to illustrate the disparate building blocks upon which the Mule’s own singular yet catholic style has been built.

And then there is ‘She’s a Curler.’ I tuned into XFM on the evenining of September 10th, 2001, and heard the song on the air. The idea of Rob singing a pop song on the radio filled me with glee. Those lyrics, and the Ric Ocasek delivery. Ha ha ha ha ha!! I practically skipped to work the next day, still on a high. Then the grim era of nine-eleven descended. Fittingly, though much to JR’s irritation, the song never got played on the radio again.

It is Ian who deserves the most accolades for the record. He doesn’t play the bass as much as he binges on it. He soaks up the contents of his record collection like Malcolm Lowry drinking booze in a Mexican cantina, then he sweats it all out in fits of riffing and wailing.

“Get out of the box!” Rob would yell at JR as he generated riff after riff around the same basic scale. But if the box works, it works. We’ve pinched a couple of the tunes for Stoke shows, and they’re inevitably favorites.

What I particularly like, though, is how Ian finishes some of the songs off. Like Bob Guccione during the making of ‘Caligula,’ he would often sneak back into the studio to work on things (sans Pets, of course). This kind of behavior caused ulcers in the Decline years, but this time he got it right. Most of his secret work came in the form of vocals, the best example being ‘Glass Apple,’ a perfectly excellent tune that can kick the shit out of most of what you’ve heard on FM radio over the past five years.

The production is the musical equivalent of dressing well out of a second hand shop; you can tell not a lot of money was spent, but it’s the right look. The guitar sounds Ian got are cool. After fighting in Trebas for the better part of a year to get a Marshall to sound like a Marshall, I’m more appreciative than ever of what Ian does. And what exactly is it that he does? Let’s see, he puts a mic up to an amp and presses record. What a great idea!!

He used up most of the eight tracks he had to work with on each song, insisting that it was better to have too much than too little. Then he would ride the faders to just the right mix. He would demand that I lay down entire tracks of guitar feedback, causing me much irritation, yet when I listen to it now (‘Varispeed,’ or ‘In a Shell,’ for instance) it sounds beautiful. He is a basement George Martin.

There is something in ‘This is Klagg’ that reminds me of the movie ‘Withnail and I.’ The key characters are at the end of an era in a way, mired in their various dysfunctions. I’m not sure that I’ll be part of something similar again. Pieces of a potential new Stoke record are scattered over various disks and DATs like the bottles and cans in my house. Whether the will or wherewithall exists to gather them up and cash them in is not completely clear. Another Klagg record is possible, but can it match the same ambitious abandon as ‘This is Klagg?’

This is a pretty long piece. It could have been longer. It’s possible that these ramblings are my own desperate self-delusions. But I don’t think so. Maybe you’ve never heard the record, and doubt it can be as good as I say. Maybe you’ve heard it, and think my objectivity is skewed. Maybe you just think that a little record, made in a basement and heard by only a few people, can’t really be worth noting at all.

Well, as the bass player for Stoke would put it:

“Fuck you, you’re wrong.”




stoke_acm@yahoo.co.uk

Why can't your average 'rock journalist' in this town write a review without it consisting mostly of a summary of their alcohol comsumption, financial status, co-workers & friends' idiosyncracies, shitty living quarters, high-school recollections etc. etc. You think you're getting a review of a record or band, and what you get is a fucking mini-autobiography. Half the writers around here spend more time reviewing themselves than they do the music they're supposedly reporting on.

Many of these scribes wear an unfading punk rock pose on their sleeve, yet they do more wanking in one article than the various members of Yes have managed to do in thirty fucking years.

I got some advice for these people: If you're gonna be so self-absorbed, pick up a guitar and join a fucking band like the rest of us.