263. "If I Had a Boat" by Lyle Lovett

I wish I'd cooked up a more inventive way to present this song, which has been in my repertoire since before I could really be said to have had one, but at least there is now a version of it without the phrase "kiss my ass" in it. The "ass" line is actually a superb moment in the original, but the thing is that this song is so great for kids-- I mean, what could better symbolize childish longing and the purity/absurdity thereof than riding a pony around on a boat?-- that it's hard not to want them to be able to enjoy it without fretting about the raised eyebrows of parents perhaps more restrictive than oneself.

My library does, in fact, contain a "clean" edit of Lyle's version that I constructed myself for inclusion on Miranda's iPod (she and Ridley knew the song from the bowlderized version I'd sung for them many times, occasionally subbing out the pony for a unicorn or some other unconveniently multisyllabic equie variation). It is lame. I didn't want a gap or a bleep in there, but the best I could do in terms a vocal edit was to create the nonsensical line "kiss my boat, I bought a boat" with an improbably leap in both the vocal and steel guitar lines accompanying the first "boat".

At this point, most of my kids are in grades during which I personally recall hearing more (and more bizarre and/or physically impossible) profanity and innuendo from my classmates than I have from anybody anywhere at any time since, so I don't worry so much about this kind of stuff. I do still have a nutso ex-wife who will occasionally and with little warning and no internal logic trot out made-up or garbled-at-best accusations about my parenting, so, you know, I don't get crazy or anything... but the kids basically know the score at this stage.

As a side note, I'm not sure how the guitar on this recording got slightly out of phase with itself between the mic on the guitar and the bleedover onto the vocal mic, but it sounds like it's got some intentional chorus on it. I have a sort of allergy to chorus as an effect treatment, so I just wanted to point out that it's an accident.

Personnel: Rex

"If I Had A Boat" performed by Lyle Lovett

"If I Had A Boat" performed by Rex Broome

262. "Cortez the Killer" by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Another rehearsal recording from Skates & Rays, and honestly not a very good one, several of the guitar solos being veritable clambakes worthy of an Elvis movie. I did make some progress in increasing the sophistication of my live band recording capabilities, although they can't really be detected on this recording. The band really is just now getting back up to speed, and I didn't want to spend too much time nailing an arrangement of this song down-- I had other priorities for the session-- so this is as good as it gets for now. File under "Stopgap Measures"... I just need warm-blooded, audible recordings to get me up to date so I can move on. I can guarantee a few actual decent Skates & Rays tracks before the end of the month... festive, seasonal ones even. Until then, a shambolic lurch through this lovely epic of genocide will have to suffice.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome: Guitar & vocal

Clifford Ulrich: Bass & vocal

Derek Hanna: Drums

"Cortez the Killer" performed by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

"Cortez the Killer" performed by Skates & Rays

261. "See No Evil" by Television

Whilst on the topic of things that strike me as statistically unlikely despite my having no empirical or even vague, theoretical reason for feeling that way, I find it hard to believe I have not, until today, done a cover of a Tom Verlaine composition for 39-40. I know I've mentioned him, and god knows a lot of stuff I've posted contains feeble musical attempts by me to emulate one facet or another of his artistry, of which I am a fervent admirer, but this right here is my first recorded actual cover of anything by the man. The imaginary statistical part reaches back the early, randomized days of the blog... I was certain that The Machine would shuffle a Television or Verlaine song my way in rapid order since my library contains ridiculously disproportionate amounts of them. I certainly have more bootlegs and quasi-legal recordings by Verlaine and his band than by any other artist, and that's saying something since the only other artists for who I collect such things at all are far more prolific than Verlaine, and thirty or so Fall or Neil Young bootlegs are basically a drop in the ocean of what's available.

I bashed this out as a sort of swinging acoustic number. Among the aforementioned Verlaine bootlegs in my possession are a few documents of Tom's very rare acoustic performances. Nothing on them sounds even slightly like this recording.

Personnel: Rex

"See No Evil" performed by Television

"See No Evil" performed by Rex Broome

260. "Rhapsody in Pink" by Pere Ubu

Odd story here. In an attempt to get back to the random nature of the early days of 39-40, and also to crank out a whole bunch of songs in a short period of time, I decided to final deploy a tactic that I've almost used a couple of times but never quite did as intended: singing the lyrics of one song over the karaoke backing track of another one. So I let The Machine randomize my library, and took the first song with lyrics that it offered up (surprising the first Ubu song I've tackled) and then the first song for which a karaoke track was available. That turned out to be "Walk Like an Egyptian".

Now, that was odd. Because I've only ever possessed five or six karaoke tracks in my life, almost all of them purchased via the iTunes store for 39-40 purposes. Howwever, the very first such track I ever purchased was, in fact, "Walk Like an Egyptian", quite a few years ago as a backing track for a talent show performance by Eden and some of her friends back when she was in (I believe) third grade. I kept it around in my music library for years, and assumed I still had it. I don't, for some reason... I must have actually taken the very rare-for-me step of deleting it, assuming I would never need it again. So, like, in my face.

In any case, I consider this to be an extremely unlikely coincidence. I don't ascribe much (if any) meaning to such alleged synchronicity, and I can't think of anything that I might think the universe was trying to tell my through this bizarre omen-if-it-were-one, but it is definitely odd enough to bear mentioning. It's a bit of a struggle to say why, though. I mean, what am I supposed to do with this other than mention it to the 15 or so people who may read this?

My wife sort of inadvertantly said something that made me feel like the whole idea behind this recording was stupid to the max, but, after almost giving up on it completely, I'm actually pleased with how it turned out. Despite its obvious Bangly origins, it reminds me, for some odd reason, of Shriekback... the hypothethical Shriekback collaboration with Eugene Chadbourne, perhaps.

Personnel:

Rex: Vocal, uke-guitar, mandolin

ProSound Karaoke: backing track

"Rhapsody in Pink" performed by Pere Ubu

"Rhapsody in Pink" performed by Rex Broome

259. "Sugar Mountain" by Neil Young

This is the belated fulfilling of a request by Bill Rodeheaver on the occasion of his 40th birthday, which seems altogether more than appropriate given the whole point of my blog, and completely natural given that Mr. R. was my classmate at Keyser High School. I've known this song for a long time, but I was slightly surprised to learn that the original recording was played with a guitar tuned down a whole step from standard (in retrospect I should have realized this, because it really does sound that way). Singing along with the record came a lot more naturally than singing it along with my standard-tuning guitar, so I was about to tune it down when it occurred to me that my 12-string acoustic, like many such instruments, is actually tuned a whole step down at all times and semi-permanently capoed on the second fret. So all I had to do was pop off the capo and I had it. The side effect of playing it on the 12-string was that my final recording much more closely resembles the live version of the song on Live Rust than the original presented here. You either totally already knew that and are annoyed that I felt the need to point it out, or you didn't, don't care either way, and are probably irritated that I've wasted your time.

Personnel: Rex

"Sugar Mountain" performed by Neil Young

"Sugar Mountain" performed by Rex Broome

258. "I Eat With Gusto, Damn! You Bet" by Jonathan Richman

Jonathan Richman's self-titled 1989 record was the first recording I ever heard of his, by a slim margin... the Rhino CD release of The Modern Lovers was issued around that same time, and as soon as I got ahold of that (one of the first CDs I was to own back when I was still buying cassettes) it rocketed into my personal Top 10 Albums list and has remained there ever since. But the eponymous record remains my favorite solo Jojo record. To some extent his solo output is fairly interchangeable, so it's not surprising that one would tend to favor the first Richman LP one hears, but I really do think this one's sort of special. It has barely any band tracks, and mostly features Jonathan accompanying himself on electric guitar. There are a few foreign-language numbers but it's not a whole record of them as he would later do, and a couple of lovely instrumentals, and some of his very best joi de vivre songs in my my estimation: "Fender Stratocaster", "Miracles Will Start to Happen", and "Action-Packed", just to name a few.

And then there's "I Eat With Gusto, Damn! You Bet". If you received a mix tape (or, eventually, mix CD) from me at any time during the nineties, you have almost certainly heard this, at least in part. I'm posting this first out of all the nine covers I've cranked out over recent days in order to catch up with my 39-40 schedule because it contains a "Happy Hanukah" at the end, and as the Festival of Lights has just concluded as of this writing, that's not going to get any more topical for quite some time.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ spoken word

Miranda & Ridley Broome ~ stunned audience

"I Eat With Gusto, Damn! You Bet" performed by one Jonathan Richman

"I Eat With Gusto, Damn! You Bet" performed by Rex Broome

257. "Frosty the Snowman" by Jimmy Durante

Rebooting after the longest layoff and deepest difficulty in seeing the light at the end of this here tunnel. November's tracks were largely bashed out in batches, and that led to nights and even weeks of me not doing a new tune. The effect of this was not so much me getting rusty, but more me getting incredibly embarrassed about the whole project. It just sounds awful to me right now, and I'm sort of scared to start singing again because I really don't like the way it's all turned out. At the moment.

I'm allowing myself to dodge that bullet at the moment by posting something I found by sheer chance over the weekend when the internet was down at our house for a really long time. My wife was trawling through some old video files and discovered a few artifacts of a December 19, 2007 gig at the now defunct Scene Bar in Glendale at which I did double duty in Skates & Rays and The Chiggers. Happily it includes evidence of what was probably the only live performance of my song "I Can't Even Hear Myself Drink", sung by Nigel, but more relevantly to the project at hand it also had a complete, albeit lo-fi performance of this bizarre arrangement of "Frosty the Snowman" cooked up by Nigel for this particular one-time-only expanded and accordion-drenched lineup of The Chiggers, which also included (inaudibly here) bass guitar support from Cliff of Skates & Rays.

Songwriting trivia: Walter E. "Jack" Rollins, the cowriter of "Frosty", was born and is buried in my home town of Keyser, West Virginia.

Personnel:

THE CHIGGERS

Nigel Cox ~ vocal

Patrick Morrisson ~ drums

Rex Broome ~ guitar

Lynnae Hitchcock ~ accordion

Clifford Ulrich ~ bass

"Frosty the Snowman" performed by Jimmy Durante

"Frosty the Snowman" performed by The Chiggers

256. "One More Cup of Coffee" by Bob Dylan

And here, for the first time, is a new Skates & Rays recording created specifically for 39-40. It's not all that could be hoped for, being a very much on-the-fly recording of our first rehearsal-- in fact the first time we've played together as a band-- in eight months or so, the longest delay between playing together in the history of the band in point of fact. It's a rough stereo recording captured by two mics in the room (erm, plumbing shop) in which we were playing, and the vocals are obviously way too low in the "mix"; that and the fact that it sounds like what it is, a first take at a half-remembered song by a really rusty band, make it a little hard on the ears. However, as many mistakes as all of us make, it does warm up as it goes along, maybe 2/3 of the way through I think you can get a feel for why we like being in a band together, and maybe why it's worthwhile for us to get back up to speed.

That Cliff is singing the lead on this song instead of me is for a number of reasons. He's always had the lead vocal on this song, just as I inherited all of the Crazy Horse guitar solos that didn't used to be there, and he sings it better than I could. Most of all, though, I wanted to get a cover recording out of the rehearsal for 39-40 purposes, and I just couldn't think of any covers we've ever done that I haven't already done on my own for the blog. Except for when we do "Heroes" with Derek singing the German lyrics, but he was getting over a cold and didn't do any singing that night anyway.

There should be more of these to come, and I should be able to get better at recording them. It'll be fun, especially once the request line gets back up and running.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Clifford Ulrich ~ Lead vocal, bass

Rex Broome ~ Guitar, backing vocal

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

"One More Cup of Coffee" performed by Bob Dylan

"One More Cup of Coffee" performed by Skates & Rays

255. "Take the Skinheads Bowling" by Camper Van Beethoven

Another one I learned, or rather just grew into the awareness that I already knew, quite some time ago. I played and sang this straight through, using Eden's old nylon string mini guitar to add a little sonic variety, and then in the course of mixing it realized that I was using the same session as I had for "Vapour Trail", and had in fact forgotten to erase the wacky electric guitar whammy-bar divebombing overdubs that came in halfway through that song. But they actually sounded kind of cool along with "Skinheads", so I just nudged them over less than an inch to give them a more dramatic entrance (into a little break that I just made up for my version of the song) and let them play out. So yes, the electric guitar part on this song is indeed the same part, and the same recording of the same performance, as the one on my version of "Vapour Trail". What of it?

Memo to the person posting the lyrics to this song on the intarwebs: "I get up and pray to John"... really? You're into CVB enough to be transcribing the words to their songs, but you can't recognize the most obvious reference to Rastafarianism imaginable? What, sir, aren't you smoking?

Personnel: Rex

"Take the Skinheads Bowling" performed by Camper Van Beethoven

"Take the Skinheads Bowling" performed by Rex Broome

254. "Visions of Johanna" by Bob Dylan

In addition to being simply one of my favorite songs of all time, "Visions of Johanna" was a major breakthrough for me in terms of performing songs all the way through, if for no other reason than learning to memorize lyrics. It was probably the centerpiece of all the songs I learned to sing for baby Miranda to help her go to sleep, and I took it on for her partly because it had so many verses. The idea was twofold. On the one hand, I thought that if I were going to start memorizing lyrics to sing, I ought to really, really memorized some lyrics to sing: if I could get this one down, I shouldn't have many problems with an average three-verse pop song. The other impetus behind it was a sort of odd responsibility I felt toward Miranda herself. She often needed a long stretch of singing and playing to get to sleep, and it seemed somehow just not good enough to sing the same two or three verses of something over and over again for her. That's just how it felt to me. So a long song was called for.

The other fun part was that it was an easy hop to substitute the name "Miranda" for "Johanna", and I imagined that would be comforting and identity-building for her. What she might make of the jelly-faced women and the ghost electricity were another matter entirely.

In a departure from the recent acoustic malaise, there are a few overdubs on this one. I quite like the deep dub sound on the bass bouncing off all of the wooden stuff around it... might do more of that in the future.

Personnel: Rex

"Visions of Johanna" performed by Bob Dylan

"Visions of Johanna" performed by Rex Broome

253. "Vapour Trail" by Ride

This is a song Trespassers William stole from Charles Manson, or somebody... maybe Marilyn Manson or just plain Mansun. I forget. Anyway, I'm stealin' it back.

Features only the second time I've ever recorded anything using a guitar with a whammy bar.

Personnel: Rex

"Vapour Trail" performed by Ride

"Vapour Trail" performed by Rex Broome

252. "Pink Moon" by Nick Drake

Another Lightning Round tossoff.

It's a stereotype (meaning in this case "something that is totally true") about "hipsters" that they are much concerned with making sure everyone knows that they were into something long before it became cool. I'm generally not concerned with such things, but in this case, because it concerns not just the artist but the specific song, I would like it to be clear that I wasn't introduced to this song by a television commercial. Not only was I a Nick Drake fan before the VW ad, before Norah Jones, before that guy who plays the seven hour version of "River Man" on the piano, and before the requisite inclusion of a Drake tune in every elegiac indie film released for three years in a row, I'd actually learned this song-- which I still find terrifying and spellbinding-- for my very own reasons and based on my own personal obsession. I stumbled on my version of it while developing the piece of music, in drop D tuning, that became Skates & Rays' Kristin's Blues, which is a pretty old tune itself by now. For a while, S&R did an extended version of "Pink Moon" at rehearsals, an extremely electric stomper which sounded sort of like a cross between Catherine Wheel's "Black Metallic" and Neil & Crazy Horse's "Change Your Mind". Its inclusion here is a bit of an accident: in the course of messing around with "Kohoutek" as described yesterday, I went into drop D, and towards the end of the experiment this song just naturally emerged.

The added verse is definitely an oddity requiring a brief explanation. Around the time I learned this song, I was playing around with songs based on found phrases, scribbling down a lot of same in notebooks for future assembly. One night my friend Nona and I were leaving the now-defunct Virgin Megastore on Sunset (which certainly dates this story) when we saw, in the parking garage, a beat-up red sedan with white spraypainted graffiti on its side. On instance read "POWERED BY ENGINE" with an arrow pointing to the hood; the other was "ANGRY DYKES ARE THE BORG". This all seemed strange and stuck with me, but for some reason, instead of making it into its own song, it became fused with "Pink Moon"... probably because the Skates & Rays version could go on for 15 minutes or so and there's only one verse to the song so I needed something else to sing. I hasten to point out that I didn't take the graffiti as homophobic or anti-gay at all (it was on the side of a car in Hollywood) and nor do I sing it as such. In fact it brings back memories of the Borg costumes a couple of my friends wore for Halloween around that same time: neither of them broke character all night. Amazing. Anyway, as I sang it, I realized I hadn't really worked out how the line was meant to end, and my eyes lit on the tinfoil Thoth sent to me by the late, great Gnatalie Jane, and that was instantly incorporated as well.

I think this is the first time I've included a false start on a posted 39-40 track, in spite of all the opportunities I've had before now. Why? Dunno. This one sounded kind of cool to me.

"Pink Moon" performed by Nick Drake

"Pink Moon" performed by Rex Broome

251. "She Comes in Colors" by Love

LIGHTNING ROUND CONTINUED.

This is going to be very old news to some, but it should be better known, so I'll repeat it before moving on: Madonna's song "Beautiful Stranger" is completely ripped off, part by part right down to the arrangement, from this song. That'd be fine if it were an homage or a loving tribute of some kind, but it ain't. It could have been, seeing as how the Madonna tune was made for inclusion in an Austin Powers soundtrack with all the groovy faux-'60s-ness that implies, but last time I checked, it was still being passed off as an original. I mention this because Madonna is, or at least generally has been, perfectly good at what she does, but I have yet to figure out why so many people keep expecting her to evince some kind of depth as a songwriter, or indeed insisting that she already has done so. In fact, I have no idea why songwriting sophistication is now routinely expected to develop in performers who have been made famous for every reason other than that. Honestly, what the hell is going to come out of insisting someone start expressing themselves in a meaningful way when their main concerns are that it's hard to have been made famous for every reason other than expressing themselves, and maybe Kanye is mean to them at award shows and the world at large attaches an immense amount of importance to same? Songwriting is its whole own thing, best left to those who feel called to it. Let entertainers be entertainers... we do need those, you know.

Completely apart from that, I learned this song a long time ago... can't remember whether it was before or after the Madonna song, honestly. The toughest thing about performing it is that there are parts where I feel compelled to sing it as close to Arthur Lee's vocal as possible, and other parts where I have no problem loosening up and singing it like myself. It took me a few takes to get a version which comfortably split the difference, and even now there's a certain schizoid quality to this version. The weird playout fade thing came about accidentally: I was a little surprised to have gotten all the way through the song and then fluffed a chord at the very very end, and sort of tripped over the last chord, as you can hear. Recovery meant keeping going for another measure or two, and it had already turned itself into a strange 3/4 time pattern by then, and I just kept repeating it over and over again like an appropriately psychedelic loop.

Da Capo is really an extraordinary record. Side 1 is really possibly one of the greatest LP sides ever recorded; Side 2 is of historical interest only as one of the earliest whole-side free form jams, and it's really not all that compelling even by the standards of such things. You always get some edgy duality with Arthur Lee... maybe this one's the most primal expression of just that.

Personnel: Rex

"She Comes in Colors" performed by Love

"She Comes in Colors" performed by Rex Broome

250. "Driver 8" by R.E.M.

To a certain segment of my readership, "Driver 8" is probably such a hoary, overplayed, and overcovered song that I shouldn't even be doing it. But there are also a lot of perfectly musically well-rounded people who consider "early R.E.M." to commence around "Shiny Happy People" and might well not recognize much on the first three IRS records. And for that reason, I doubt that "Driver 8" really is covered very much: your average cover band probably wouldn't dip into the R.E.M. songbook much deeper than "The One I Love", while all the indie bands most likely think that everything on Murmur, Reckoning and Fables is grossly overexposed and would be more likely to attempt a post-ironic take on... well, "Shiny Happy People" or something.

For my part, Fables is one of a handful of records I think I could play and sing in reasonably recognizable form from top to bottom without rehearsing. That's due to the fact that it's in the basic musical idiom in which I've worked since roughly the time it came out, and the frequency with which I listened to it in my most formative musical days. Those two things don't always go together... I listened to Peter Gabriel's melting face album almost as much, but my acoustic interpretation of that one would be a little more free-form.

Anyway, in true lightning-round form, immediately after finishing this performance, I decided to see how many Fables songs I really could do. The first one I tried was "Kohoutek", which I remember playing lo those many years ago in my bedroom back in Great Oak Valley, only to realize that while I somehow hadn't worked it out at the time, it was clearly played with a drop D tuning. That sorted, I looked up the lyrics online. Now, it stands to reason that the lyrical transcriptions of early Stipe lyrics might be dicey at best, but the lyrics to "Kohoutek" appearing on every site I checked are really weak: they just don't even bother to guess at a whole bunch of the lines, leaving you to guess at what line they're guessing at. I therefore ignored them and recorded a few takes of me mumble-moaning what I thought they sort of sounded like from memory. I got a little better each time, but ultimately it was too embarrassing to keep doing it over and over again, so I gave up, leaving me with a guitar in drop D... which is where we pick up the tale on Thursday.

Personnel: Rex

"Driver 8" performed by R.E.M.

"Driver 8" performed by Rex Broome

249. "I Walk the Line" by Johnny Cash

This was Gen's request for the 5th anniversary of our first date, which was a dinner and a movie thing when the film Walk the Line came out. Originally we'd been planning to see Pride & Prejudice, which we did on our second date and which Gen has watched countless times on DVD by now, but the chat before Walk the Line was especially interesting. We were talking about our own experiences with Johnny Cash's music and I told her a bit about doing the Cash medley with my dad in Thunderhill and so forth, and she told me that she had been really close friends with Carlene Carter (who was depicted in the movie as a young girl), and had the dress for Carlene's wedding to Nick Lowe, footage of which made up the video for "Cruel to Be Kind". So that happened. After a few years I started getting used to finding out she knew people I thought of as sort of unreachably cool, but that was pretty much the start of it.

I'm almost positive that somebody else before me has covered "I Walk the Line" interpolating, for obvious reasons, John Cale's "I Keep a Close Watch", but I have never personally heard it done, so I did it. I probably didn't take as much time working out the logistics of it as I should have. I basically pulled up a chord and lyric chart for the Cale song, noted that it was in D instead of E as the Cash tune was, and said to myself, okay, I'll go into this after the third verse of "I Walk the Line" and transpose all the chords up a whole step as I go... how hard can that be? And it wasn't too bad aside from the vocal leaping up a little more than I expected; the clunkiest part, really, is the transition back into the first tune. Not perfect, but now it exists for sure and I can sleep a little better at night.

"I Walk the Line" performed by Johnny Cash

"I Walk the Line" performed by Rex Broome

248. "Divine Hammer" by The Breeders

Early in the days of Skates & Rays, this song bubbled up from my subconscious as one of several originally female-sung songs I wanted to try to cover. I thought we'd probably come away with a slightly more garage-sounding version of it which would sit nicely alongside our original material. And over the years we have started to work on it a time or two, but never to the point of presentability. I have done it at a few acoustic gigs, sometimes as part of a medley (a tiny bit of which makes it into this recording) and it's come to be one of my acoustic standbys. The last time the band was looking to expand our covers repertoire I threw together a disc of the original versions and was surprised to find out I'd been playing it in a very different key from the recording. Usually I pluck the right key out of the air, but not this time.

"Divine Hammer" performed by The Breeders

"Divine Hammer" performed by Rex Broome

247. "Early Mornin' Rain" by The Kingston Trio

LIGHTNING ROUND DAY 12.

This song was written by Gordon Lightfoot, and I have a whole bunch of different versions of it, but this particular performance by the Kingston Trio is the one that made me fall in love with it. The Trio changed the chord structure from Lightfoot's original, and I follow their lead here (although I completely reinvented the instrumental passage to sound a little more troubled). Both versions have an unusual construction that's not immediately apparent. There's no proper chorus, just the refrain of the title, which isn't at all unusual in blues or folk tunes, but the structure of the verses themselves are an odd sort of chordal sandwhich: the first and fourth lines share a chord sequence starting with the relative minor chord, but the middle two lines are a more consonant I - V thing. The fact that the 4th line comes right off of the 3rd while the 1st is more of a cold opening make it sound quite different each time: the minor chord at the beginning has a the effect of creating tension while the one in the 4th line has the effect of a sigh of resignation.

The limbo of being alone at an airport is a special kind of haunted purgatory, and all the worse if you can't actually go anywhere... the lyric captures that perfectly, and I loved it so much that I eventually wrote a song based on the same rough idea, "Redeye" (which never quite found a place to live itself). I also strongly relate this song to Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings", another favorite. I guess it's just a setup that resonates with me. I once scrawled down a line in a notebook about "the poetry of unloved places"... I had in mind the nondescript patches of litterstrewn land next to an average interstate gas station, which has probably been the site of innumerable breakups, breakdowns, family dissolutions, crimes, epiphanies, sex acts and other emotionally supercharged incidents, but are, in the end celebrated by no one. Sometimes I believe that is "my" subject matter.

"Early Mornin' Rain" performed by The Kingston Trio

"Early Mornin' Rain" performed by Rex Broome

246. "All Tomorrow's Parties" by The Velvet Underground

LIGHTNING ROUND DAY 11.

Incredibly dicey performance even by the ever-plummeting standards in these parts these days. It's partly because, in my haste, I erased two better takes of this and got sick of trying to get it right... the vocal is just bad, and the sketchy timing on the guitar is definitely an artifact of impatience. I'm leaving it here just as a rough sketch of what I think is a kind of cool solo acoustic arrangement of the song.

If the vocal were better, it would be easier to tell that it's less of a tribute to Nico's on the original than to John Cale's powerful and immensely moving live version on the Live MCMXCIII reunion album, which has to rank as one of the most frustrating listening experience there is. Consistently on that record, Cale, Mo Tucker, and especially Sterling Morrisson kick all kinds of awe-inspiring and deeply-felt ass (if you will (and you will)). Lou is right there with them on guitar, but every time he takes a lead vocal, you can't help but ask yourself, Jesus, is he really pissing on us, to say nothing of the band and some of his very best songs, on purpose? I challenge you to make it through his vivisection of "Venus in Furs" without wanting to smack him around just a little bit.

Personnel: Rex

"All Tomorrow's Parties" performed by The Velvet Underground

"All Tomorrow's Parties" performed by Rex Broome

245. "Almost With You" by The Church

LIGHTNING ROUND DAY 10.

This song would almost certainly have to be one of the earliest tunes I figured out how to play on guitar with any sophistication beyond just following the chord sequence. Ironically, in this quickie performance I realized when I came to the bridge that I didn't remember how the chords went. For some reason what entered my head instead was the bridge for another Church song, "Tear It All Away". My mind managed to pull out of that while it was still able to attain escape velocity, but that didn't help me remember the real chords, so you'll hear me instead play the verse chords before going off on some kind of improvised tangent and then, none too soon, finding my way back into the song proper. Could've fixed it, but that wouldn't be Lightning Round.

The image on the cover this time just is what it is: the first non-Churchy image that came up in a Google image search on the words "almost with you". Yes, it looks more like the results of a search for "pwnt", but I'm being very hands-off about this whole process.

Personnel: Rex

"Almost With You" performed by The Church

"Almost With You" performed by Rex Broome

244. "Birdshead" by Robyn Hitchcock

A break from the Lightning Round to commemorate the 2/3 mark of the 39-40 project, I am here violating one of the primary tenets of the project by presenting a previously recorded track by myself. However, another primary tentpole of the enterprise is that I can do anything, however sketchy, to stay on track... so long as I only employ each cheeseball tactic once. So today's tactic is: post a previously recorded cover.

I have a couple of other reasons for doing so... one being to break up the monotony of the bare-bones acoustic torpor of the Lightning Round (which itself is a dicey strategy allowing me to focus on other big projects). Another is the disappointment that I've come this far into 39-40 without being able to present a single genuine new Skates & Rays track as my daily cover, when I'd honestly thought at the outset that I'd be doing so at least twice a month or so, but real life concerns for myself and especially our drummer Derek have made getting together very, very difficult this year. I'm sure we'll knock out a few covers before it's over, but I've felt a little diminished in my ability to present good stuff for you all because I haven't been able to utilize one of the key things I have to recommend myself as a musician: better musicians who are willing to collaborate with me.

This recording was created in 2008 for Bayard Catron's ongoing Glass Flesh series of tributes to Robyn Hitchcock. I had long since had the idea to do an expansive dream-rock version of the song (I still kind of hate the term "shoegaze") but hadn't developed the recording know-how to create anything vaguely listenable as a fake rhythm track, so I brought it in to a rehearsal and we knocked it out in a few hours, pretty much getting lucky that our hit-and-miss recording setup had a relatively hitty day. Then I took it home and did massive amounts of overdubs, basically doing everything in exactly the way that, two years and 243 39-40 recording later, I totally never would. Somewhat as an artifact of my intentions for the arrangement, it doesn't sound very much at all like Skates & Rays, who, as a relatively honest 3-piece rock band generally have a sonic approach closer to that of, say, The Jam or the earliest Go-Betweens records than My Bloody Valentine, but it seemed to have worked out decently at the time. So here it is.

As a bonus, you get Robyn's rarer live version of the song from the multi-artist Pave the Earth promo compilation, the first version of the song I ever heard and a more direct source of inspiration for my performance than the version that's surfaced on his own compilations.

Personnel: SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome: Guitars & vocals

Derek Hanna: Drums (and usually vocals but not on this one, so don't blame him)

Clifford Ulrich: Bass (and also usually better backing vocals than these)

"Birdshead" performed by Robyn Hitchcock

"Birdshead" performed by Skates & Rays