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Girls’ Christopher Owens: Cult of Personality
“Art is a legalized form of insanity, and I do it very well.”
– Stanley Marsh 3
It’s just past 11:30pm at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, and Christopher Owens is still onstage—locked in a tight embrace with Ryan Lynch, the pint-sized guitarist who agreed to step in last minute after (ex-band member) John Anderson quit unexpectedly. “Ryan saved us tonight, and we love him for it,” Owens explained, midway through the band’s set.
The house lights are up now and most of the sell-out crowd is heading for the doors—the music writers, the label guys, the beehive brunette in the bomber jacket who was chatting Owens up prior to the show… they’re all filing toward the exit.
Only Owens doesn’t seem to notice. Or, at the very least, he doesn’t seem to care. He’s much more consumed with the pint-sized guitarist who swooped in and saved his band tonight. This was, after all, the opening night of Girls’ first headlining US tour and the expectations couldn’t have been higher.
Talkin’ Townes-from-Texas Blues
Well, at the memorial service for old Mr. Van,
The vagrants, they sat, and the gods made to stand.
And the preacher did whisper in the lone usher’s ear,
“Gypsies up front, please. All press in the rear.”
And his mother, the mountain, she knelt down in prayer.
While his father, the sky, he cursed at the air.
And the preacher asked mercy for all Van had done wrong,
Sayin’, “He done it, my friends, for the sake of the song.”
Well, the press sought out quotes from all the right people,
And the church bells, they sang like birds from the steeple.
As Van’s best friend stood with his face all aglow,
Sayin’, “We should-a booked this gig more than 30 years ago.”
And the wind came a-howlin’ off that lone river line,
As the preacher took a belt of his sacrificial wine.
And he told all the mourners, “Take heed now. Be strong.
For here lies a man who would die for his song.”
Magpie to the Morning
It’s 6:42 in the morning and the sun is coming up over the East River.
It’s only the first week of September and already that old familiar chill of autumn is in the air. The breezes are shifting and so are the storefronts. All the neighborhood bars are taking their business indoors.
The summer’s gone now, and all along the East River Esplanade, so are the people.
Still, I enjoy the esplanade on mornings like this. I enjoy watching the barges as they roll their way upstream. I enjoy watching the planes as they descend into LaGuardia. I enjoy the fact that it’s work—and not alcohol—that’s kept me going through the night.
I enjoy a lot of things these days.
But Labor Day… Labor Day always makes me sad.
Unknown Legend
**Open Mic is a new column were Crawdaddy! writers can stretch out into music-related fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc. Enjoy.**
It was just past midnight on Saturday when I decided to call it quits. There was no point in going on, really. The words had stopped coming hours (or perhaps even months) ago. My senses had gone numb; my eyes bloodshot and bleary, blindly scanning the page for inspiration.
But inspiration never came.
So I’d guess… and then I’d second-guess… and then I’d delete entire blocks of text out of pure frustration. And in my weakest moments, I’d wonder whether it might be time to pack it all in—move to the suburbs, raise 2.5 kids, join the PTA.
But it’s late now and it’s summer and I have no time for thinking such thoughts.
Outside, the block’s alive with winers and diners and dealers down from Harlem. On every corner, local boys are forming into tightly-woven packs. They’re loud and they’re crass and they wander the streets like rabid jackals, loose and on the prowl. Tonight, I watch from my fourth-floor window as they move in on their prey—a scrawny Asian kid, with droopy eyes and matted hair.
Those Darlins: Oh, the Places They’ll Go
“In a nation of frightened dullards, there is always a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome.”– Hunter S. Thompson
This is a story about kindred spirits. It’s a story about small-town chicks with big-city dreams, a story about the evolution of a band, about grit and determination. It’s a story about campfire sing-alongs and beer-soaked jamborees. It’s a tale about strangers coming to town, about true believers embarking on a journey. This is an age-old tale with a modern twist… one that takes the grand tradition of country and folk and infuses it with rockabilly blues and backwoods swagger.
This is the story of Those Darlins, and it begins in Murfreesboro, Tennessee—home of the Southern Girls Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp—in the summer of 2003.
Pink Floyd: The Final Cut
Pink Floyd
The Final Cut
(Columbia/Capitol, 1983)
And now, it’s time for another edition of Point/Counterpoint, the online rock ‘n’ roll game that invites you, the reader, to play along at home. This week’s installment is brought to you by the good people at Fletcher Memorial Home, who would like to remind you that death—while tragic—is just another fact of life. And so, without any further adieu, Crawdaddy! is proud to present Point/Counterpoint:
Today’s topic: Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut (original US release date: April 2, 1983).
When Bad Things Happen to Great Writers
“Very few people have the balls to talk about ‘rock and roll’ anymore.”
Paul Williams, Crawdaddy!, May 1967
We’re all plagiarists these days—thieves in the night, stealing what we can off the fat of the land, then reducing it to a bite or a blurb or a blog post at best. The Twitterers, they tweet. And the Tumblrs, they text. And the world, it keeps spinning round at 160 characters per minute.
The days of free-form journalism are dead as the dog dirt, my friend. All the hip kids have packed up, moved on… sold their soul to tabloid journalism two graphs at a time.
Lissy Trullie: The Exploding Fantastic Inevitable
Every great artist eventually becomes either the beneficiary or the victim of the public’s fascination with them. Lissy Trullie is no exception to this rule. At 25, Trullie already possesses all the preordained paradoxes of a rock star waiting to happen. She is both spotlight performer and wayward drifter, Lower East Side elegant and Bowery chic, wildly popular with all the right people and so totally over it.
In less than two years time, Trullie’s gone from jamming with friends in a crammed rehearsal space to playing full-on gigs at New York City’s Mercury Lounge and Highline Ballroom. She’s been featured in The Village Voice, The New York Press, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Paste Magazine, Spin magazine, Venus magazine, and Paper magazine (which named Trullie one of its “Beautiful People 2008”). Courtney Love has taken to leaving public comments for her on the band’s MySpace page.
And by the time her debut EP, Self-Taught Learner, dropped this past February, there was already a sense that Trullie could be on the verge of next-big-thing status.
The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes
June 5th, 2007 – The Pipettes play a sold-out show at the Highline Ballroom in New York City. Eyes are transfixed, hormones aglow, as every twentysomething male in the house tries to determine which Pip to crush on—the four-eyed femme with the bookish good looks, the lone brunette with the tomboy charm, or the platinum blonde with legs up to her eyeballs.
And that—among other things—is what set that particular Pipettes line-up apart. There was something (or rather someone) for every swinging dick in the room, an undeniable chemistry combined with tremendous crossover appeal.
But with each passing rave and polka-dot photo op, it seemed only a matter of time before somebody (or several somebodies) started chirping in that platinum blonde’s ear, convincing her that she was the real draw, that Rosay and RiotBecki were just Pink Ladies to her Sandra Dee.
And So This Is Christmas
by: Bob Hill
Hanging on the wall just above my writing table is a framed copy of the Edward Hopper painting Gas. I’ve always dug Hopper because he was a Realist. He kept it Real. I’ve always dug Gas because it’s a reminder of the fact that everyone has something in their lives they’re consistently striving to perfect—whether it’s a family or a career or a two-pump gas station along the side of the road… everyone needs to have something.
I spent most of 2009 trying to figure out exactly what my something was. And at some point along the line, I came to the realization that life shouldn’t be what happens while you’re busy making other plans, that no one should have to spend the bulk of their best years jumping from one dress code to the next, completely losing track of the fact that it’s the distraction, not the dream, they’ve been chasing all along.
I spent the first six months of 2009 getting very drunk, then I spent the next six staying very sober. I met some new people, experienced new things. I gave my time to charitable causes. I committed to a long-term writing project. I found my way into relationships. Then I found my way out. I took long runs at sunrise and wrote straight through the night. I felt sharp and steady and sure.
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by: Bob Hill
published: December 28, 2009
in column: Open Mic
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