232. "London's Burning" by The Clash

Requested by Ken Ostrander.

This probably set a new 39-40 record for briefest period between track selection and posting of the final recording. And it's still within the Sickbed Suite... in fact I did the randomized selection of the tune just a minute or two after posting the Radiohead song, and upon seeing what it was, thought I might be able to pull it off pretty damned quickly. I decided, in fact, to go for a real purist first-taker... not only the first recording, but a recording of my first attempt at even playing the song, the kind of thing I can only attempt with material I know as well as this one. I came close. This is actually the third time through. The first one featured some oddly reversed lyrics with which I was willing to live until I blew another chord; the second one got all the way to the end at which point I got the modulated chord sequence in the solo section confused with the regular one, and then the third one came out like this.

Now I appear to be caught up with all the time I missed during the sick days, which is both more than I expected and a very good thing, because the next month or so is going to be very busy with a couple of other big recording projects that aren't going to leave much time for these daily covers, so this may be as good as it gets for a while.

Personnel: Rex

"London's Burning" performed by The Clash

"London's Burning" performed by Rex Broome

231. "Just" by Radiohead

Requested by Ken Ostrander.

Second in the Autumn Sickness Cycle on 39-40, I did attempt to use my voice on this one, after a fashion. What I couldn't get to happen was the overall mastery of the structure, chords, and performance of a song that's completely unfamiliar to me. Which, I know, I know, and I thought about writing about it here but I really just feel to ill to delve into it, but hey, no, I don't know from Radiohead albums. In my life as indie whatever hipster douchebagge retro alterative postpunker dude guy, I am constantly surrounded by Radiohead and so have never felt compelled to own any. But that's not the point... the point is that I had real trouble physically mastering the playing of the thing, and it ain't that hard, and furthermore if I've proven anything with this enterprise it's that I can learn how to play even kind of weird songs really quickly when I'm healthy, so that's how lousy I feel.

Anyway, instead I produced this weird-sounding thing, which hopefully Radiohead would appreciate at least in concept because I hear they're all experimental and cutting-edge and shit. It may sound like I'm playing random nonsense here, but I am not; the acoustic guitar is playing what I guess I'd call "cypher chords": every chord stands in for a specific chord in the real chord sequence of the song. The bass is playing the root notes of the real chords in the song, and the vocal cues off of that. The part at the beginning of the bridge is the only bit where the guitar plays the real chords, too, and that's because the online tab I looked up when I was trying to work out the parts was totally wrong in that part, so I figured it out for myself, and even though I abandoned the playing of the actual chords I felt that I'd put in too much sick-time on that working that bit up to let it go to waste, and I also thought it might be kind of interesting to have a suddend shift into musical agreement between the instruments right when the vocal went away. I doubt I was right about that.

Personnel: Rex

"Just" performed by Radiohead

"Just" performed by Rex Broome

230. "Hoover Dam" by Sugar

Requested by Michael Wells.

I wish I were well enough to do this one properly, but I'm not. Basically confined to bed and sweating off a fever for a couple of days, I'm basically scared of what might happen if I even tried to sing at this point. At least the discography of Hüsker Dü and its offshoots have been well-served by 39-40 up to this point: I believe I've done two songs by the Dü proper, and at least one apiece by Bob Mould and Grant Hart solo, and now one by Sugar. Up until this point I'd been fairly proud of all of them.

A few long-time readers / listeners of 39-40 will recall that in the early days, when I was sick or sometimes just for the lulz, I would often call upon my homegirl Anjali to provide vocals in my stead. Luckily, I was able to find her just where I left her and talked her into doing this one as well. It's been a long time, Anjali, but you haven't missed a step.

Sadly, as delirious as I am right now, I might well occasionally believe that Anjali is real. Look, there are MANY COPIES, bitches... amirite?

Personnel:

Anjali ~ vocals

Rex ~ other poop

"Hoover Dam" performed by Sugar

"Hoover Dam" performed by Anjali

229. "I Have Been to Heaven and Back" by The Mekons

Requested by Ken Ostrander.

Going for a little bit of the old Billy Bragg attack on this most political of days here in the US. And also seeming to be getting ill... from what the kids have had lately, I think, although I don't completely discount the possibility that the election results are to blame.

My voice probably couldn't have done another take of the lead vocal. As it was, I had to scrape choral the harmonies that I was planning for the instrumental sections, and then I literally wandered around the house for a few minutes, feeling the fever kick in and trying to think of something we had just lying around that might make an interesting noise and that I hadn't used to death already on 39-40. I ended up making my scrapy debut on Eden's viola (in case you're wondering what the hell that is). In the final analysis, the cover probably falls a little short eve of its modest ambitions, but it was a crappy day and I really don't feel so good.

Personnel: Rex

"I Have Been to Heaven and Back" performed by The Mekons

"I Have Been to Heaven and Back" performed by Rex Broome

228. "4'33"" by John Cage

Some of you will consider this self-evident and others will have little idea what I'm talking about, but if any piece of music other than "Free Bird" has been implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) conceptually, conversationally psychically linked to this project since its very inception, it's this one. If you're not familiar with Cage's composition, I'd suggest you google it; that should clear up why it's a hotly anticipated or joked-about proposition in any instance where a great deal of cover songs are required in a hurry. Understandably but not entirely appropriately, it's taken on a life as a sort of intellectual joke... usually not a cruel one (it's not well-known enough to the general public to be kicked around as non-art like, say, Pollock's paintings or Warhol's Sleep sometimes are), but more of an acknowledgment of its conceptual power. You really can't make reference to another piece for doing what this one does: I could write a piece that's 16 seconds longer but otherwise identical and call it "4'49"" and pretty much guarantee nobody's going to be talking about it in 57 years.

It's almost certainly discussed more than it's actually heard (inasmuch as the term applies), so I wanted my cover to reflect the actual experience of not only hearing it, but also, for my part, the experience of performing it. And I did perform it; you'll need to listen to the recording all the way through to confirm that, but if you do it should be clear to you that I did more than just set up an empty session in Audacity, drag the end out to the appropriate run time, and export it to the hard drive.

Personnel: Rex

"4'33"" performed by John Cage

"4'33"" performed by Rex Broome

227. "In the Absence of Christmas" by Charlie McDonnell

Eden requested this one just about every day in October, and I promised her that if the randomizer didn't pick it by Halloween, I'd do it then. So here it is.

Actually a pretty disturbing song, chilly and stark in its original incarnation, I tried to make it even starker and chillier at the same time as expanding its arrangement. I thought that would be difficult, but it flowed pretty naturally and it gets pretty convincingly crazed at about the point where it should. I usually don't place much emphasis on the sound effects in songs-- in fact, as a rule I tend to dislike them rather intensely, but I've spent so much time on elaborate Halloween mix tapes over the decades that I tend to make an exception for one month and one milieu-- but I like how, on this one, the wind at the beginning reads (to me) like a spooky haunted house exterior type of thing, but by the end, coupled with the sleigh bells, it's clearly something from the depths of winter itself. The pounding drums toward the end and on the fadeout are indeed jacked from Peter Gabriel's "Intruder", as disturbing a portrait of a deranged individual as you could ever want, and it feels appropriate. Santa comes off as a bit of a sociopath, and the overprotective parents are their own kind of monsters... Gabriel in his prime would have been proud.

Personnel:

Rex ~ Everything except

Eden ~ Backing vocals

"In the Absence of Christmas" performed by Charlie McDonnell

"In the Absence of Christmas" performed by Rex Broome

226. "Boris the Spider" by The Who

Requested by the Broome family. Requests are going to be a little dicey for the next few days while I work through some obligations... don't worry, it's not forever.

This is in fact the very first Who song to be covered on 39-40, and, oddly, it's not a Pete Townshend composition. Both of these facts are only slightly less weird than the fact that yesterday's cover was the very first Bowie song I'd done. There are only a few more bizarrely unrepresented core artists out there; it'll be interesting to see if chance brings any of their songs my way.

There hasn't been a Braine recording for a while, and this seemed like a good one: Miranda already knew the bass part; Eden sang the song with Wye last Halloween at one of their very first gigs, and Ridley was incredibly enthusiastic about coming up with terrifying ways to utter the title phrase at the appropriate points in the song. Not to spoil anything, the new lyrical additions were written by Eden and their inclusion was her idea to begin with.

Happy Halloween, dear listeners.

Personnel:

BRAINE

Miranda Broome ~ Bass, backing vocals

Eden Hain ~ Lead vocals, additional lyrics

Ridley Broome ~ Backing vocals

(with Rex on additional guitar)

"Boris the Spider" performed by The Who

"Boris the Spider" performed by Braine

225. "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" by David Bowie

Requested by Eden Hain. Sort of.

So the funny thing is that this wasn't really supposed to be a cover of "Scary Monsters". At all. See, like, there was only one online request, and Eden and I started demoing a song, you'd never guess the title of this song, Tickle Me Pink ( it's Eden's favorite CRAYOLA crayon). And The even more hilarious part is that it's actually made out of I am the Walrus. Which all mixes together quite well I should say. Girly song title, scary song premise, John Lennon on LSD.

(Okay, the above was actually written by Eden, in character as me, but now it's really me again. OR IS IT?)

Anyhow, yeah, it was a crazy day running back and forth between schools, recording kids in classrooms, and ultimately delivering Eden to her gig with Wye. But along the way, driving around, Eden put in the second request, which was to finish a demo of this song "Tickle Me Pink" and then have me cover it, so that's what we set out to do. But we ran out of time before her show, and then she got invited to dinner by her dad and his family, so rather abruptly I started rearranging the sequencing I'd started for her song (which, yes, does include some recycled "Walrus" guts from "Free Bird") into "Scary Monsters", which was another cover she'd almost requested (and she did win the randomized 50/50 lottery fair and square). She did get home in time to provide the vocal and uke part on the coda. It's not surprising that this thing turned out a little bit weird, but in fact it's probably even artier than you'd expect, but when things get as hurried and by definition Frankensteinian as this recording already was, you lose a lot of shyness about excising near-random hunks of the mix or deliberately singing out of time or ditching the real end of the song in favor of some way-whack fake tropicalia. Or at least I do, and Eden lets me get away with it. Okay, who am I kidding... she came up with some of the most bizarre stuff herself.

Personnel:

Eden Hain ~ Vocals, ukulele

Rex Broome ~ Backing vocals, guitar, bass, other weird arty stuff

"Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" performed by David Bowie

"Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" performed by Eden Hain & Rex Broome

224. "O Death" by Ralph Stanley

Requested by Ken Ostrander.

Ken didn't actually specify which version of this song he was thinking of, so I had to decide for myself. I went with the Ralph Stanley version from a very popular film soundtrack of recent years, because, although it's probably far and away the best known rendition of the song to modern audiences, it actually relates better to my rendition than most, being a capella. However, most of my phrasing and specific lyrics come from an only slightly older and even more modern take on the song, the one that appears on Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart LP. That was one of my favorite records at a very early time in my listening career, a point when I had perhaps 20 or 30 albums to my name, and it was one of my very favorites, so the CVB version remains the one I've heard the most in spite of my years of subsequent roots music immersion.

I didn't intend it, but the unique approach I took to this song results in a surprisingly palpable Beefheart feel. The instrument that crops up a time or two and takes a sort of solo is not, as it seems to be, some kind of analogue synth or amplified xylophone... it's my mandolin, rendered that way by the ultracompressive vagaries of the method of its transmission. If I liked to believe I was cooler than I really do (or am), I would make some kind of connection between this and the way McGuinn achieved that crazy sitar sound on "Why?" by playing his 12-string through a walkie talkie speaker, but I don't so I won't.

Personnel: Rex

"O Death" performed by Ralph Stanley

"O Death" performed by Rex Broome

223. "Halloween" by The Dream Syndicate

Requested by Miles Goosens (among several others in recent weeks).

Not long ago, in the course of discussing a band (not The Dream Syndicate) whose output seemed to us to have gone substantially downhill at a certain point, a group of friends and I were noting that the band seemed to have spent several recent albums trying very deliberately to not do several of the things they were best known for. And one can understand that creative impulse in an artist who's quite a few years into a career and doesn't want to make the same record over and over again... but, as one of the participants in the discussion noted, there's a difference between relying on stylistic and formalistic crutches and simply playing to one's strengths.

I mention this because I had a few ideas for this one which were on the artistic curveball side of things... I was considering flying in a psychedelic sample interlude featuring soundbites from some of the many songs which share this one's title, layering many more and more sophisticated Halloween sound effects, and possibly making it into an extension of the recording of "Needle-In-A-Haystack Girls", the end of had me playing practically the same riff in the same key as the beginning of this song. But as I sat down to work on it, the idea of playing to one's strengths came back to me, partly because I had to dump a big bunch of guitar playing that I did late at night through amp simulators (so the kids could sleep) and which just didn't sound right to me. I had to wait an extra day in order to be able to fire up the real amps and do what I needed to do, and at that point I decided to call a spade a spade and admit that if I can be said to have a "strength" as a musician, it may well be replicating the sound of a buzzy/jangly band that's often thought to be highly influenced by the Velvets and/or Crazy Horse, if not Velvets and/or Crazy Horse themselves. Add to that the fact that nobody actually gives enough of a shit about me as an artist for me to have any kind of expectations to be running away from, and it seemed a pretty good argument for 8+ minutes of ringing guitar noise.

Two other quick notes, one being that the artwork for this recording represents the second time in my limited graphic design career that I've re-created the super-iconic cover for The Days of Wine and Roses, the first being for the compilation No White Light: Buried in the Eighties assembled by myself and Charlie Eckstrom some years ago. The second is that I'd be really curious to know what any guitarists or gear freaks would guess to be the type of guitar I played the lead track on (the 6-string; the 13-string is obviously my trusty Rick 610-12).

Personnel: Rex

Sound effects from the cassette A Night in the Graveyard by The Haunted House Music Co.

"Halloween" performed by The Dream Syndicate

"Halloween" performed by Rex Broome

222. "Demons" by Super Furry Animals

Requested by Ed Poole, who now joins Jeff Norman in the Two Consecutive Requests Performed Club Organization Guild.

Well, this wasn't ideal, but I'd been waiting all month for a song that I could recast as a sinister evil-guy rhymey monologue backed with some vintage Halloween background tapes (of which, as I've alluded several times, I'm a bit of a fan). The perfect candidate would've been a little more straight-up verse, but I was willing to entertain something a bit more abstract and potentially puzzling to the listener. The lyrics to this song came as close as I'm likely to get, given the scant days remaining before Halloween, so I decided to roll with it while I could.

The way I broke it down, it drifted a little farther from Zacherle territory than I'd anticipated, but settled into a groove that wasn't too far off the mark of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion "Ghost Host", particularly in the "stretching room" monologue, so I rolled with that and simulated the stereo ping-ponging from that bit, and that made it almost totally okay with me. The vocal repitching helped, too. It can be a bit harder for me to feel like I did a decent job doing over-the-top dialogue than over-the-top singing, but with the funky effect it was fairly easy to camp it up. We all need a crutch or two, don't we?

Personnel: Rex

Sound effects from Horror Sounds of the Night (Topstone Audio) and Scary Sounds (manufacturer unknown).

"Demons" performed by Super Furry Animals

"Demons" performed by Rex Broome

221. "Magick Power" by Opal

Requested by Ed Poole.

Oh, the fun we can have! This was a crazy mad day. I had to get up outstandingly early to pack up all my recording gear to drive across town and set up in my daughter Miranda's classroom to record her class singing a song we've written together about math. This was a one-man operation, in, as it turns out, the rain. It had to be done in less than an hour, and, at least in terms of what strictly needed to happen, it was, although the one student not present was Miranda, owing to what a total class act my ex-wife is. Still, I did have the forethought to randomize the Monday requests before I left, and, when this song came up, I thought it might be a nice and potentially terrifying touch to have a room full of fourth graders chanting along, so I had them do so as a sound check.

The rest of the day was not rainy at all; in fact, it was one of those perfect LA autumn days the kind of which we haven't gotten enough this year. Clear and windy... dead leaves skittering everywhere on the roads, choppy water on the reservoir, exactly what you hope for on Halloween itself. It was a mood lifter, but throughout the rest of the day I kept running into mentally ill people. More than usual, even. Somewhere in the middle of those encounters I got into a elevator with a random disheveled elderly man I'd never seen before. During the one floor descent, he looked at me and said, "Y'know, Rex, Morgan got dropped by the Times today." This creeped me the hell out. Fortunately we reached my floor right away; I got out of the elevator and he didn't, which was odd, because it was the bottom floor. And then I realized that he hadn't so much psychically hijacked my name as he'd been expressing his frustration that the LA Times had stopped running the comic strip Rex Morgan MD, and I was doubtless one of many people he'd felt obliged to inform about it.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Lead and harmony vocals, bass, keyboards, guitar, nonsense sounds

Ms. Wong's Fourth Grade Class ~ Backing vocals

Eden Hain ~ Marcelline the Vampire Queen

Sound effects from the album Halloween Night

"Magick Power" performed by Opal

"Magick Power" performed by Rex Broome

220. "Needle-In-A-Haystack Girls" by The Bye Bye Blackbirds

Requested by Jeff Norman. Yeah, I know, but that's how it rolls.

I wish I'd had more time with this one! And frankly I feel sort of ripped off by fate; I was going to get to record this one with Skates & Rays, but the rehearsal got scrapped at the last minute... that would've been cool, and it would've let me play around the guitar interplay a lot more; I sure do like listening to it on the original. But the way this recording unfolded was gratifying in its own way. I have no idea if anyone else in the world will enjoy listening to it, but I do, and that's gotta count for something. Hearing it back, it seems to me as if it unfolded within a dream or something, like there are overtones in there I neither intended nor recall.

There's also the fact that the entire second half of the performance just happened. Obviously I went back in and complemented it with a few overdubs, but basically what was intended to be the playout, probably a fadeout, turned spontaneously into something else. I may have been back in the Skates & Rays mindset, because during our brief two-guitar lineup with the estimable Charlie Eckstrom we would do a variation on this exact thing, sounding kind of like Galaxie 500 and New Order playing at the same time. I always liked it quite a good deal and it bothers me a little that no recording exists.

Personnel: Rex

"Needle-In-A-Haystack Girls" performed by The Bye Bye Blackbirds

"Needle-In-A-Haystack Girls" performed by Rex Broome

219. "10538 Overture" by Electric Light Orchestra

Requested by Jeffrey Norman, who won the privilege by correctly identifying my backward-masked singing of "Revolution Part 2" by The Butthole Surfers during the bridge to "Something in the Air".

(Also, maybe it should be "The" Electric Light Orchestra per the single's artwork at left; this remains unclear.)

Due to the unusual nature of this cover, I'm going to highly recommend that you listen to the piece before reading my comments. To aid in this process, I'll put the links to the original and my cover right here so you can download them now, and return to find out what the hell you've just heard afterwards.

"10538 Overture" performed by (The) Electric Light Orchestra

"10538 Overture" performed by The Chiggers

Okay, so the odd story here:

I have a very time-consuming recording project to tackle this weekend, so my time for 39-40 is a bit limited. But the idea of doing this song as an acoustic number seemed ludicrous to me. I mean, it would actually be possible and maybe an interesting challenge, but I think it was proposed by Jeff hoping that I'd do something differently interesting with it, and I was hoping to do so without breaking the time bank.

It occurred to me that I'd recorded an unreleased cover of a different ELO song, "Do Ya", with The Chiggers three years ago. The Chiggers were an interesting project, masterminded by Ms. Nigel Cox, who'd played keyboards in Skates & Rays (and is on our album You Are My Home) and was a vehicle for her original songs and some unusual covers in a stripped-down country-ish style. The core members were Nigel ("Tammy Chigger"), her boyfriend Patrick ("Slim Chigger"), and myself ("Waylon Chigger"). The band existed simultaneously with a very busy period for Skates & Rays and my schedule was really stretched trying to do rehearsals, shows and recording with both groups, but it was all worthwhile. Eventually Nigel & Patrick moved out of California before the recordings were really completed or released, and the project sort of faded away. Remembering it, I thought it was a shame that it never reached an audience, and that maybe it could in this context.

But I thought that just switching ELO tunes was a little too cheap, so there would have to be some pretext. My idea was, I'd record it as if a band was trying to play "10538 Overture" and struggling with it; after the take in question fell apart, they'd give up and decide to do "Do Ya" instead, which would be the cue for the Chiggers track. For the ruse to be even slightly successful, though, the false start of "10538" would have to sound like something more than a pisstake; it would have to sound like I'd made a real commitment to nailing the tune.

So-- and yeah, I appreciate that this is all nuts, but I think Jeff of all people might appreciate it-- I got pretty exacting about creating my fake band falling into a nonexistent chaotic shambles. I figured there had to be a fairly expansive arrangement, showing evidence of a decent amount of multitracking and programming and re-thinking of the song, all of which would seem to require more effort than anyone would reasonably put into something that was just going to die after less than a minute and a half. In fact, it ought to sound pretty damned good. And then there was the actual part where the song fell apart itself... that had to actually sound fairly convincing, at least the first time a listener heard it. So that took a bit of time, too.

So you kind of get a bunch of stuff all rolled into one. I hope at least some of it strikes you as groovy.

Personnel, "10538" intro:

Rex Broome ~ Piano and strings programming, guitars, bass, mandolin, harmonica, vocals

Personnel, "Do Ya":

THE CHIGGERS:

Nigel Cox ~ Piano & lead vocal

Patrick Morrison ~ Drums

Rex Broome ~ Guitars, bass, backing vocals

218. "Motion Pictures" by Neil Young

Requested by Miles Goosens.

I'd have thought that if I were to cover a tune from Neil Young's mighty but still somewhat obscure On the Beach LP at this time of year, it'd be "Vampire Blues", but you really can't go wrong with this record... there's not a bad song on it. In fact, there's not a single "just okay" song on it. Some days it's my favorite Neil record, and that ain't easy.

My library actually already contains two exemplary covers of this song: one by Mercury Rev, which emphasizes the atmospherics, and one by The V-Roys, who add a bit of rock drama to it. I love both of those recordings and thought I had to go in a radically different direction with mine, so I did. What's really surprising about this is how easy it was. A few of the things that I just thought might work in my head actually did work in real life, and you can't always count on that, and then in a few instances I just got lucky and got things right the first time. Rather pleased with it, I think.

Personnel: Rex

"Motion Pictures" performed by Neil Young

"Motion Pictures" performed by Rex Broome

217. "Something I Learned Today" by Hüsker Dü

Requested by Bill Rodeheaver.

Interestingly, this is the second cover in a row begining with the letters "SOMETHING I". Possibly the subconscious at work here, and not just on Bill's request: Chris Huff requested Sean Cassidy's version of "Da Doo Ron Ron", and it clicked in my head-- I think because I remember my dad learning the lyrics to the Cassidy version when it was a hit-- that in that cover, Sean sings "Somebody tolde me that her name was Jill" in order to masculinize the lyric, and I wondered if that was in any way related to my just having covered "Ask for Jill". Huff would neither confirm nor deny. In any case, it's always a pleasure to have a go at a Bob Mould tune... or a Grant Hart one, since, also coincidentally, Grant's wonderful solo tune "2541" was requested today.

This is unquestionably the rawest recording I have ever posted to 39-40. Well, maybe some of those sickbed straight-to-condenser mic things were rougher, but I haven't done anything like that for a long time. The guitar and vocal are one-take deals, with, and this is very rare, no processing whatsoever on them, no trims at the beginning and end, nothing. The "second" guitar track is just a copy of the first, basically doused in lighter fluid and set ablaze. The weird little tag at the end was my response to Eden, who is upstairs playing and singing that song over and over again, trying out harmonies, maybe recording it, I don't know, and as weird as it is, I have to admit that it's cool, and accept that it's surely me who has made that seem like a normal thing to do around the house, and that, too, strikes me as cool.

Personnel: Rex

"Something I Learned Today" performed by Hüsker Dü

"Something I Learned Today" performed by Rex Broome

216. "Something In The Air" by Thunderclap Newman

Requested by Roger Newlin.

Actually, Roger requested "Something by Thunderclap Newman", so I figured just add "In The Air" and I was pretty close to doing exactly what he asked for. It's sort of the obvious cover, and there are a couple of other interesting ones I could've picked-- "Accidents" for instance-- and then there's the mysterious question of why the Newman (I don't know if anyone really ever called them "the Newman", I'm just kind of riffing on how Buffalo Springfield was called "the Springfield") never recorded Speedy Keene's awesome "Armenia City in the Sky" as done by The Who, but this song is really too good to pass up.

Actually, I briefly had this song in my acoustic set. And I must have just made up my own version at the time, because I did it in G, and lo and behold it's totally in E. Further irony comes from the fact that when I did it in G, it kind of bombed because that turned out to be a lousy register for me to sing it in. E is only slightly better, so this one ended up in C. It's sort of surprising how rarely I transpose tunes for 39-40... it's often because I start working out the guitar parts by playing along with the recording and I develop pet voicings pretty quickly; as long as there's a way for me to sing it, I'll probably stick with the original key. Anyway, my favorite part of this is the bass... it's really high and yet has a sort of rubbery dubby sound, and I felt like I was channeling Naomi from Galaxie 500.

The first person to identify what I'm singing on the bridge part of this one gets a free request with no randomized competition. Go!

Personnel: Rex

"Something In The Air" performed by Thunderclap Newman

"Something In The Air" performed by Rex Broome

215: "Ask For Jill" by The dB's

Requested by Bradley Skaught.

Now this is a cool song. And it was fun to do until I lost a big chunk of what I'd recorded in an application crash. Until then, it was a blast. The basis of my take on it was the insane see-saw riff that runs, and I'm not kidding, all the way through the original tune. I wanted to play that thing up, but there were some other changes that were going to have to go along with that. In the original, the chord sequence is pretty much only suggested by the bassline and a few keyboard stabs here and there. I wanted to make it a little more propulsive, so I was going to base it around a very strummy acoustic guitar and a massively simplified, maybe even lobotimized bass part. But I whipped up my version of that riff first, trying to broaden it out by having a whole ton of different instruments playing it at once. I did that really quickly and just looped all of them (why not?), but the first time I listened to it with the drum part I'd borrowed from The Fall's "Bremen Nacht", which had a similar rhythmic signature to the dB's song but a lot more snarl than I'd realized, it hit me as such a massive wall of noise, almost a "Needles in the Camel's Eye" kind of thing, that I laughed out loud, and that forced a bit of a change of direction.

Personnel: Rex

"Ask For Jill" performed by The dB's

"Ask For Jill" performed by Rex Broome

214. "Surrender" by Cheap Trick

Requested by Genevieve Broome.

Gen requested this one knowing it was one of my most frequently performed covers, but she didn't know about my ace in the hole: having the basic tracks of Midlife Crisis performing a version of it back in August. Still took a bit of work, but it's always nice to have an excuse to post stuff where I'm playing with other musicians, to say nothing of an actual band.

That this song is so regularly covered by me is a little odd, considering that I didn't really get into Cheap Trick-- yet again one of those bands popular in my younger days whose hits I never heard-- until relatively recently, in 2000, when I picked up a budget box of their first three albums in, of all places, London, alongside a bunch of budget Jam stuff and the requisite rare Magazine CDs &c. By that time I knew them by reputation and was aware of "I Want You to Want Me", but I did't expect to be quite as taken as I was. "Surrender", which I hadn't even known was a single, leapt out at me as a song that I really wanted to learn to perform, which was a rarity in those days: I was barely performing at all and still three years away from starting to posit myself as a rock singer/frontman/occasional solo performer. I was just really fascinated by the bigness of the chord and the strangeness of the verses butting up against the anthemic choruses. I've recently heard someone cite the lyric as "bad", which bowls me over... I think it's flat-out brilliant, and the standby explanation of it being about a kid whose parents are cooler than he is doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.

Some strange things happen during this recording... the band was bum-rushed by a dog at one point, and my extemporaneous ad-libs don't go as far as they normally would, although I'm glad I was captured singing "got my Thunderhill records out". I almost never actually sing "KISS records", partly because I'm not overly fond of KISS but usually to namedrop another bad on the bill or a family concern (Eden's band Wye has taken the place of honor a few times as well).

Personnel:

MIDLIFE CRISIS

Rex Broome ~ lead vocal, guitar

Tom Heckman ~ bass, harmony vocal

Chris Dixon ~ drums

Recorded live in The Barage, Hooker Hollow Road, Keyser, WV, August 2010 by Tom

Mixed and edited by Rex, Minco Records, Silver Lake, CA, October 2010

"Surrender" performed by Cheap Trick

"Surrender" performed by Midlife Crisis

213. "Manic Depression" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Requested by Miranda Broome.

Miranda requested this one because it's been her big project in her bass lessons for a while. Little did she suspect that I would therefore ask her to play it, and add only the whooshiest, thinnest and least guitarry parts to it in order to feature her playing. Ha! Actually, she gave me a brilliant excuse for not playing any guitar on this. Jimi's guitar playing remains among the most purely expressive things ever to feature in rock and roll, but when ever anyone else tries to play like him, no matter how well they do at it, the only thing they ever really seem to be expressing is "Damn, do I wish I was Jimi Hendrix".

The thing that comes in after the first chorus and sounds kind of like a guitar is actually Miranda's bass part, copied and raised two octaves with some fuzz stuff applied to it.

Peronnel:

Miranda Broome: Bass

Rex Broome: Mandolin, vocal

"Manic Depression" performed by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

"Manic Depression" performed by Miranda Broome