Nashville, May 3rd.

Well, I've flown into a disaster area. It's sad to come to a city for the first time and see it struggling with devastating floods. The locals on the plane were gasping as they looked out of the windows during landing.

It's dry and sunny today, and Nashville's continued health depends on whether the river continues to rise or not during the day. My heart goes out to the people mopping out after the flood and those who have lost loved ones.

Going to Nashville

Sea of Cowards has an awesome cover, doesn't it?



Oh wait, that's not it. This is it.




The first one is my version, painstakingly made out of pictures cut up with an X-Acto knife, like the original. Though of course the background is made by Photoshop's gradient tool like every other background in the world. This is a scan, obviously, as everything becomes digital when it goes on teh nets. It looks a bit cooler in real life as Dean's horns and his mask's horns aren't glued down giving a bit of a 3D effect, as does his white coat coming out of the frame. I think my Dean looks badass and I couldn't bear him to cover up that cute face with his mask, so he's not wearing his.

Little Jack looks pretty cool too.

Oh, and I didn't have any Dymo Tape so I used a free Dymo Tape maker I found on the web which had a pretty good imitation font.

The name Sea of Cowards refers to me, apparently. According to the interivew in this week's NME, Jack is still all ruffled by us anonymous bloggers. But I can give him my business card on Monday, because I won a chance to see The Dead Weather play at Third Man Records from The Vault!

Yes, I won a giveaway during the recent 24-hour Screaming Live Vinyl event (Sea of Cowards was played live, as in a camera watched the vinyl play and now and again people came in and turned it over. There was more to it than that, like this little competition. (Though of course, like my analog album cover, the vinyl didn't really stream. Digital bits streamed. Jack may hate the internet but he seems dependent on it. I've worked with APAs and CD-R vines and weeds and I know how long the mail takes. And how much it costs.))

Trouble is, winning a chance to see someone on Monday on Friday afternoon is kind of difficult to pull off for a Californian. We don't like to make plans. But I've managed to hook up with my friend from the Las Vegas gig (who also won) and another internet friend, book tickets and almost start packing.

Blogging could be sporadic for a few days.

Weedkiller

Listening to the Kills on the way to work is hazardous. They don't write songs, more like a collection of hooks with nothing in between. The guitar lick is always perfect and memorable (and there's usually only one) and the vocals are usually two or three lines repeated over and over. As a result, they stick in the mind like melodic, haunting barbs and you tend to sing them out loud without meaning to.



This is dangerous because despite the langorous post-orgasmic sigh of Alison's voice, they're mostly kinda non-senior management lines. "It's been a long time coming," you sing, "gonna stab your kissy, kissy mouth. It's been a long time coming." Or, you know, you could sing the hook from Fuck the People which goes, let's see if I can remember it...oh, yeah, "Hey! Fuck the people!" Or you can get lost in the absurdist repetitions of "The kids wanna fuck and fight in the basement. Got a rattlesnake on in the basement. The young snake's got my name."

Sometimes repeating a hook line can get wearing, even with Alison's voice behind it, though. In the car, listening to the one that goes "All I need, all I need, all I need is one drop of weedkiller" for about 40,000 years I turned to STB and said, slightly irritatedly, "I've forgotten why she needs the weedkiller."

STB developed a contemplative, theorizing look much like a medical student on rounds being asked by his professor to sum up the case in the bed before him. "I believe her boyfriend became an evil tree," he eventually said.

Oh, yeah. That's right. The song about roads having a conversation is sometimes fascinating and sometimes grating too. "Dead Road 7 is a bitch!" you find yourself singing. But why are the roads dissing each other? You have to listen again. And you still don't find out.



It's not just the Kills, of course. A friend of mine often finds himself in airport lounges or cafes singing along to If You Don't Want to Fuck Me, Fuck Off or Fuck Tha Police. But there really is something special, something extra hooky in Kills records. Can't wait for the next one.

Smoke and Water

The Water Board sent us a goodie bag for Earth Day, filed with flow limiters, aerators and a low-flow showerhead. They also sent a heavy duty plastic bag that was thick and creamy with plasticizers and not recyclable for a one-use task - checking the flow rate of the shower. I wonder how many hundreds of pounds of plastic they mailed out for Earth Day? Thanks, water board! The best bit is that my original shower had measured up at 3.1 gallons per minute and the new low-flow one comes out at, uh, 3.1 gallons per minute. It's worth keeping as it has, as STB put it 'three equally annoying settings' - fine spray, drenching spray and knocking you repeatedly on the head with pulses of water like a sort of automatic Donald Rumsfeld.

I may also use the bag as a chic purse for a while.

Sea of Cowards, the new Dead Weather album, hasn't been released yet and I'm already feeling bereaved as the band is drawing to a close. I doubt if they'll find the time to all of this again - I guess they almost didn't find the time to get this far, as touring before the album's release isn't usually something bands do pursposefully. Jack Lawrence is going back to the Greenhornes, Alison Mosshart is in the middle of a new Kills album (at least we've got that to look forward to - and possibly a tour!). Not sure what Dean's doing but Them Crooked Vultures will finish touring soon so Queens of the Stone Age may be back on the table. No idea what Jack is going to do. Both Jay Z and Tammy Wynette have been mentioned. Hey, to save time he could record with both of them at once! That'd be cool.

I've lost count of how many singles have been released from SOC so far, but the latest one is Gasoline - so new that the video seems to be a placeholder rather than a finished video. But who knows? It's certainly watchable enough to stand alone.

Making music: 360 deals

Via Lefsetz, here's Bob Donnelly on artists taking 360 deals.

Zermatt's last theorem

I don't particularly like my birthday being Earth Day, as it calls for me to be more self-righteous than I am. But once the birthday's out of the way, I can go for the rest of it.

For instance, today was E-waste day. Or possibly e-Waste Day. STB trucked about 800 pounds of old computers and printers for recycling to city hall. (Who also provided 2 bags of compost to anyone interested, which attracted such a crowd that the gas burned in collecting compost probably outweighed any green advantage in using it.) Possibly city hall was flabbergasted that we could unearth 800 pounds of e-Waste (is that capitalization right now?) in one year, but I guess we could. A couple of hopeless printers and two four year old desktop computers were the bulk of it. If one household can manage this, you can see how e-Waste might be a serious problem.

e-Waste out of the way, what else has been happening?

Well, I took Earth Day as an excuse to spring-clean. And I discovered a packaged fondue in the back of the cupboard that had expired in 2007. Being a biologist, I quickly ascertained that nothing could have possibly happened to a sealed packet of cheese with kirsch in it, so we had a lovely fondue for tea. Sample dialogue:

"Aren't there rituals involved with fondue? If you drop the bread into the fondue like a klutz, you have to drink the rest of the bottle of kirsch, except I don't have any. How about a bottle of vodka?"

"How about I have to eat the Sterno?"

"Ok, not as high class but that'll do."

Yes, we use Sterno for our fondue.

It turned out that being three years out of date didn't impact the fondue at all. As STB said, "they just put the sell-by on there to limit the period they have to re-test [for the FDA]".


Here is a beautiful photo spread and write up of the Dead Weather at Tulsa on my birthday. I still want to marry Baby Ruthless. [link now dead, alas]

Dead Weather at Las Vegas

Hang you from the heavens



Die by the Drop

Rocking Horse: Not embedable: link

A review.

Octopus gadget frenzy

Back to the world of living seafood. Here, an octopus and a free-diver meet. The octopus wants his camera. And octopuses are pretty strong, so he gets the camera. Diver offers his spear-gun instead and the octopus finds that acceptable.



I couldn't do negotiations with alien life forms even if I had oxygen tanks with me, so I don't know how this person manages to do all this outside his own atmosphere. But humans are amazing too, as well as octopuses. Between the two, it's a wonderful moment (from Gizmodo).

CA Smog: The air beneath my fingers

Here is a view looking west when entering California. This is taken in the same spot as the other photo, and so is on the smog-free(!) east side of the mountains. Therefore, this is the mildest possible smog. Hint: the orange line isn't a cable or a photo artifact. It's the top layer of smog. On the other side of the mountains, the orange line is hundreds if not thousands of feet thick.

Going to California

I caught this view of the mountains on my way back to California.



Going out of California you can't see the mountains until they're already higher than your car windows, as the smog blankets them. So this is the clearest I've ever seen. (The photo was taken at 4,500 feet, btw.)

It's weird to not see them with orange feet. I've lived in CA too long.

Pastry at the Wynn

Monday morning, post Dead Weather, we went to the Wynn for a much more reasonably priced $20 breakfast buffet. I’d been promised pastry rooms – that’s rooms, plural – and so this was a must see. I started off with a lovely congee and dim sum…mm congee…crab cakes, some fish dishes of some sort with a tasty remoulade. There was smoked salmon, of course, with the bagels, but overall not as much seafood as I expected. However, not to panic as the pastry rooms (that’s rooms plural folks) held all the magic you can expect. I was berated by my friend for not eating one of each, but there were about forty pastries there. Even I cannot eat one of each. And anyway, she ate fruit instead of bacon. Who is she to lecture me on insufficient pastry consumption? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas – except for the adipose tissue. I’m back on a vegetarian diet, now. But I don’t regret a thing.

I was so poisoned by the sugar that I started hallucinating about ostriches. (The Wynn’s walls are decorated in faux ostrich leather). As I imagined the birds being farmed for leather, I got them confused with peacocks and then had the vision of magnificent rideable birds with peacock tails running along in battle. Not a fitting end to a weekend in Vegas (which would be more like spending $20 on a points spread in a basketball game) but at least proof the city didn’t entirely deaden my brain.

Record store day

Saturday was Record Store Day, so of course we took off to the premier Las Vegas record store to browse the goodies. That would be Zia Record Exchange, who are so old-school their URL is not on their t shirt. My friend bought sufficient actual tangible records that I got a $1 t shirt as a bonus. It has a skull and is black and white and very rock and roll and I will treasure it.

City of shlubs

Las Vegas is truly a city of shlubs. Don’t get me wrong – the American shlub is a wonderful thing. More personable, reasonable and truly easy-going than the equivalent anywhere in the world, the average Vegas-goer cannot be disliked. But they can be fooled. The hotels build luxury resorts, and the people flock to them for some comfort and culture… but let’s look at that. If a hotel builds a billion dollar resort, and someone pays $79.99 for a room and say $100 for food and entertainment, they’ve bought 0.0000179 of the opulence. And that’s what it feels like.

When a king builds Amarna, or Versailles, it’s easy to see they own too much opulence and could never revel in it all. When you have less than a millionth of a Paris or a Luxor, you have nothing. You are really in Disney territory. A timeshare in fabulousness with less than a millionth in occupancy. Click here for my friend Kali Durga’s different but yet similar take on Vegas.

The Taxi Driver’s story

An only in Las Vegas story. On the way back to the timeshare after the Wynn buffet we got an ace cab driver. Sometimes cab drivers are the most boring creatures in the world, reiterating anything that’ll get them a tip. Some tell good stories. This was a new guy – 11 days on the job – with a great story. He’d lived in Los Angeles in the past, but he’d gone back to China for a couple of years. By the time he’d got back to LA, the economy had tanked and he couldn’t find a job. He was destitute. He was living with a friend of his who took him to Lancaster (hey, Dead Weather reference – the home of Captain Beefheart) who then drove him to Vegas without telling him which way he was going.

So, he’s unexpectedly in Vegas. He hadn’t brought any clothes. He has to borrow a suit – and underwear- from his friend, who has lined up interviews. My cabdriver aced the interviews and landed a job. In the meanwhile his friend was fronting him rent and basic Las Vegas gambling/drinking money.

So cabbie got a job – although the orientation traumatized him, being all about the terrible things that can happen to a cab driver which include rape, murder and a 90% higher chance of dying on the job than other occupations – and has been plying his trade ever since. Smartly, he bought a GPS for his cab. On his first day, he said, someone asked him for the Hard Rock and he had no clue. He drove around a bit and the passenger eventually said he’d pay him what was on the clock for the ride since it was the first day, but no tip. Hence, GPS, paid for personally, not by the firm.

He told us great tales. He has the 2am to 2pm shift, so he gets the real drunks. He told us of a cab full of women who were too weak to pull the unconscious member of their party out of the cab (cabbies are prohibited from touching passengers, so he couldn’t help). Of well-aimed vomit (i.e. outside of the cab). Of passengers who couldn’t remember what hotel they where staying in (like he’d know). Of drunks who hollered out of the cab, but never bothered the driver. Of one passenger who, on being informed Mr. Cabbie was new and had no idea how to get to the named destination, said, “It’s okay, I need a sightseeing tour. Drive all you like.”

I liked him. And I liked hearing about his amazing friend. We should all be so lucky to get such committed friends as that.

Crab Gumbo: Being a review of the Dead Weather in Las Vegas, among other things.

The Dead Weather was booked to play at the Palms, a Maloof hotel off the strip with a large concert theater called The Pearl. A 2,500 seater, it was clearly too large and too fancy for TDW, whose natural home in the land of Garth Brooks, Donnie and Marie Osmond and Cher would probably be a strip club in the Elvis Wedding Chapel end of town.



We got to the Palms early and rushed to the Blue Agave, a name for a virtual restaurant. You sit at the bar and Blue Agave comes to you. In our case, this was in the form of Crab Gumbo. It didn’t seem to have much gumboanity (I couldn’t taste or feel any gumbo file, or hot spices) but it was very tasty and loaded with more than a pound of crab meat, about 20 large shrimp and some kind of small, delicate scallop. I know Dave Barry has famously branded scallops as members of the Snot Family, but the little perfectly cooked ones are just amazing, and this gumbo had them. I was continually surprised by Las Vegas’ fresh seafood and this was just one more in a series of long pig-outs on crab this weekend.

My friend, along with nine others, won early entry from The Vault but even so we got there early and had a few from the closest bar which was probably called Bar None or some shit, and then followed the lady and gentlemen to a waiting area while the Ettes finished their soundcheck. As the screaming stomping sound of the rest of the audience echoed down the steps behind us we realized that our ‘early entry’ was actually 25 seconds earlier than the rest of the crowd, but it worked and we got to be front and center, arms on the metal barrier. We then got to watch ads for the Playboy club…and several other clubs… for an hour on the video screens beside the stage. I have never seen so many jiggling tits and asses in my life as I’ve seen on this trip. Correction: pixels of jiggling. I’ve been to New Orleans, city of total shlubs, so I’ve seen plenty of the real thing there. (And you know what? It’s better on TV. The real thing is less glitzy and you eventually realize they’re thinking about laundry or childcare while they’re doing it.)

The stage was huge and the Ettes’ gear was in front of the Dead Weather’s gear which for a moment led me to believe that every guitarist in the world has a Fender Twin Reverb like Dean Fertita. But the Ettes’ gear was some (other) old semi solid-state amplifiers that looked as though they’d spent the last forty years being thrashed by a Pilippino rock band in Manila or something. Maybe there’s an antiquing service for amplifiers as well as guitars…or maybe the amps really were that old. All of them played Fender guitars. Except the drummer. No idea what equipment she used as it’s impossible to tell with drums. The guitarist kept on drawing my attention as he looked (and sometimes played) like Dave Gilmour, but had long ginger hair and was strongly reminiscent of one of the Weasley twins in Harry Potter. Expected him to hand out candies that changed people into unicorns or something. Speaking of which, someone in the audience was smoking something…I’ve heard the word ‘skunk’ before but I think this person must have made a mistake and was smoking a real skunk…whoa.

The stage was huge and although I didn't think the acoustics were very good, it didn't matter as we were so close to the front we heard what the band heard, the PA being almost behind us. The Ettes impressed me no end. They played old time rock and roll (getting effortlessly into 80’s stadium band grooves as though it was that easy) and hitting several of my sweet spots along the way. The lead singer – I think she’s called Coco – wore black leggings and black mini-skirt, which reminded me of me way back when, but she had cooler boots than I ever had. They were also more into the Dead Weather than the Las Vegas crowd – she actually said so at one point – and some of them stayed to watch the headliners afterwards, which shows a lot of loyalty as you’d imagine a support band would grow to hate their headliners after about three shows into a tour. Not these guys. I’ll definitely check them out again.

At this point, I realized I’d have to get away from the barrier and buy a drink. Making some puzzling combat decisions (I’m not a natural for the draft) I pulled away from the primo position and forced my way back to the bar, eventually realizing I hadn’t brought either a ticket or sufficient funds. I had to rapidly negotiate with the barman, ending up with two Hypnotics(?) for twenty bucks (and the barman with no tip). No one checked my ticket going back in, but then I had to force my way back to the barrier with two glowing blue drinks in hand. I used the excuse me I belong here persona and it worked all the way through, back to my spot. Hypnotic turned out to be a radioactive ultraviolet drink made by somehow miniaturizing sugar so that four million tablespoons of it can be hidden in one shot of rather nasty drink. I won’t be doing that again, but I was desperate. I don’t think my friend liked hers either.

Jack breaks a string. It's de rigeur to say something like "and hedidn't miss a note!" but actually it slowed him down a lot. The endresult was a far more considered and beautiful solo. Maybe heshould just discard a random string before every show?

A few more hours, or did it just seem like hours?, before the behatted roadies oops I mean technicians arrived and began setting up the Dead Weather’s gear, handling their beautiful personalized white Gretsches with efficiency. My friend and I critiqued their sartorial elegance – there is a visible fashion hierarchy in the roadies even though they all wear black suits and hats. We dumped on the guy with the worst suit and made up little stories about how that put him at the bottom of the heap, task-wise. I love me a suited man, so this bit of a Jack White concert is always a treat, even though my feet by now were supernovae of hurt and I’d damaged a nerve by leaning on the metal barrier and my ring finger and little finger were numb. (Still are as I write this on Tuesday, in fact. I may sue.)




The Dead Weather arrived on stage to the usual strains of the good captain’s Sure Enough n Yes I Do. The band was on - no playacting or drinking or fighting tonight - and played an excellent set. Alison spent a lot of time on the monitors looming over us. At that range, she changes from sixty feet tall to being a petite woman on and off through the show depending on what role she's singing - it's amazing to watch. She really commands the stage and genuinely is one of the best frontmen/women I've ever seen. She has a lot of competition on stage as Dean has become a kinetic masterpiece as well as a riff monster, LJ continues to thrash around like a crazy man (with a crazy goatee) and of course Jack White is Jack White, so your eyes constantly go towards him. But Alison can remain a focus throughout all that. I wish I could have stood through it four times to be able to watch all of them.

The crowd sang along and was motionless but very screamy. Since the band dances to the beat all the time, I expected the crowd to react to it more, but maybe we all had sore feet from pounding the Las Vegas pavement. I’ve read a few reviews by locals, all of whom say the crowd sucked – I couldn’t see the crowd since I was at the front, but I’m willing to believe they did suck, as they certainly didn’t move at all, and the Dead Weather’s set was short (but scorching).

It occurred to me that the space between the barrier and the stage (that the cameraman for the video screens used - I wonder if he's bribable to release the tape) wasn't to protect the band from us, but more like a moat around a lion enclosure at the zoo, to keep Baby Ruthless from eating the audience. She tried a couple of times, but the mic lead got stuck and stopped her from coming after us both times. One time she ran from the front of stage right to the front of stage left, her microphone lead catching in the monitors as she ran, like a junkyard dog on a leash charging from threat to threat behind its chain mesh fence. She also played keyboard a couple of times, which was new and a real treat.

Introducing So Far From Your Weapon, Jack said he'd spent the day firing a Thompson submachine gun – “in your home town”, he added, with an unusually cheeky twinkle in his eye. I'd been thinking about going to the firing range and was a bit disappointed I'd decided not to, as I could have met Jack...

Jack wasn’t wearing what my friend and I call his best trousers, but he looked great – his hair is looking good, his t shirt tight, and he seemed happy and committed. Speaking of trousers, Alison was wearing a pair of tailored cotton pants rather than jeans. Perhaps the band shares a tailor – they looked exactly like LJ’s (when I saw them close up at the Roxy in June ) Hers were a little tighter than LJ’s though, so skinny that I’m not sure how she even gets them on. Since he was in my face all the time, I couldn’t help noticing that the cameraman in the lion moat did take a lot of shots of her crotch and ass as she flexed and bent, but the producer at the desk didn’t choose to display them, hurrah – he or she took the long-lens cameraman’s shots of the band over the T&A – very un-Vegas.

Setlist:

60 Feet Tall
HYFTH
You Just Can't Win (After song Jack says "That was a true story")
So Far From Your Weapon (Jack intros song by saying he went out and fired a machine gun today)
ICLAB (Jack killed it! Great version)
No Horse
Die By The Drop
Child of a Few Hours...
Hustle and Cuss (This song is so bad ass. Dean rules)
New Pony (This just in...Allison is super sexy and a great performer)
Will There Be Enough Water? (Jack breaks a string early on during first solo and still crushes this song. Similar to the Roxy performance)
Encore
Blue Blood Blues
Rocking Horse
TMLYM


(List provided by the lovely Ace, next to me on the barrier)

Excellent fucking show. Had a great time. This is really a band to watch – though if you’re new, I fear you’re too late as I think it’ll be over by September. I bought the show poster, which is irritatingly not signed or numbered, but I bought no other merch on the way out.

I reiterate that I love the Dead Weather.