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For UBM

R.I.P. Undercover Black Man

David Mills, a writer who was once on the staffs of both "NYPD Blue" and "ER," died of a brain aneurysm on Tuesday in New Orleans. He was 48. He was also on the staff of the upcoming HBO program "Treme," which is set in the city where he died.

I never met him, but because of his "Undercover Black Man" blog, I almost feel like I knew him. I read the blog every day, and one of my proudest moments as a blogger was when he added mine to his list of links. He also commented on my posts every once in a while, and I'd tell anyone who would listen, "hey, that guy used to write for NYPD Blue, and he just commented on my blog!"

To me, Undercover Black Man represents the very best that a blog can offer - on one day, pointed commentary about President Obama, on the next, a link to a video of a classic R&B tune, the day after that, a link to a totally ridiculous video that would fall under one of his categories: "Random Wrongness," "Random Hotness," even "Random Japaneseness."

I'll miss reading him, and send my condolences to his friends and family. A tribute from one of those friends - Alan Sepinwall - can be found here.

R.I.P.

Update: Another tribute, by Steven Rubio.

Update: Another tribute, at A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago, which includes a link to some of Mills' greatest posts.

Update: Another tribute, from his friend and colleague Shyonelung.

Spring Break Golf Outing

The par-3 3rd hole, Bradshaw Ranch Golf Course. A short 98-yard pitching wedge, across the water. I was just off the green, to the right.

Can You Get More Evil Than Nazi Zombies?

We watched a Norwegian film called "Dead Snow" last night, and despite my initial misgivings, I can heartily recommend it to anyone with a taste for well-made and clever horror movies.

The movie basically takes every horror-movie cliche that you've ever seen, and puts them all together in an original and highly entertaining mix. Good looking students? Check. Zombies? Check. Nazis? Check. Strange old man warning the kids about ancient evil? Check. Having sex in strange, inadvisable places? Check. Splitting up to increase the odds of survival? Check. Axes and chainsaws? Check.

That's about all you need to know. If any of those things interest you, then you should definitely check this one out.

Peter Gabriel Covers Up

A couple of years ago I slammed Patti Smith's covers album, Twelve, calling it "Karaoke Patti." I thought that she had done very little (barely even tried, in fact) to put her own stamp on the songs she was covering, and the songs she selected were so well known that they couldn't help but pale in comparison.

Peter Gabriel's new covers album, Scratch My Back, is also getting slammed in some quarters (most notably, Pitchfork), but I'd call it a success, because in most cases, Gabriel totally reimagines the songs, deconstructing them and recreating them in his own image. Now, whether you like what he's done with them is another matter entirely, and I can understand why some might have a distaste for the London Symphony Orchestra arrangements he surrounds the songs with.

A good example of the difference in approaches is with the album's first song, "Heroes." Whereas Smith probably would have faithfully recreated the original Bowie arrangement, Gabriel turns it into a song that you might not even recognize - much slower and methodical. But Gabriel's vocal carries the day, and the symphonic backing provides the drama. On Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble," Gabriel also slows the pace down, and in the process gives the song a whole new meaning - whereas on Graceland it was somewhat bubbly, here it is ominous, even dangerous.

I'm not familiar with Elbow's "Mirrorball," but I love Gabriel's version of the song. Also strong are his takes on Bon Iver's "Flume," Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going To Rain Today," and Neil Young's "Philadelphia." Interestingly, his cover of "The Book of Love" sounds lifeless in comparison to the version that played on the final episode of Scrubs a year ago, and he also sucks much of the power out of Talking Heads' "Listening Wind" and Arcade Fire's "My Body Is A Cage."

So it isn't a perfect album, by any stretch of the imagination. But it is a brave and worthy one.

You Can Run But You Can't Hide

State Capitol building, near sunset, March 27.

Drive-By Truckers Set The Bar For 2010

For the length of its first 8 songs, “The Big To-Do” is as good an album as I’ve heard in the past ten years. And even allowing for a finish that doesn’t quite match what came before it, it’s the album to beat in 2010.

It’s fair to say that I own a lot more albums than the average person, but the reason I keep on searching for new stuff is to find a band like the Drive-By Truckers. Somehow, despite positive reviews for over a decade and a pedigree that should have been right up my alley, I managed to miss them completely. Until just a couple of months ago, I’d never heard a single song (at least not knowingly). If it wasn’t for a colleague and friend where I work, I’d still be blissfully unaware of their existence. Thank you, Jean.

For those who haven’t been exposed to the band, they’re from Athens, GA (what is it about that town, anyway?) and the music they play…well, let’s just say that if they’d been around in the 1970s instead of now, they would have given Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers a run for their money in the competition for the title of “best Southern band.” Their musical approach is similar to Skynyrd’s, with a three-pronged guitar attack leading the way, augmented by keyboards and a rhythm section that keeps everything swinging.

On the new album, the band writes the music as a band, but as the lyric credits make clear, one of their strengths is that they’ve got three songwriters: Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Shonna Tucker. Hood gets the majority of the tunes, but the three styles complement each other perfectly. The band obviously takes their work very seriously, as evidenced by something Hood writes in the album’s liner notes:

“I grew up worshipping Rock and Roll like a religion. I know its shortcomings and strengths but have loved it unconditionally all the same since I was eight years old. I ran away and joined the circus and honestly, I’m still as obsessed as I was as a boy. I’m not a kid anymore but I still remember how it felt and it doesn’t really feel all that different to me now. I pay the price, but I get to get up there with my best friends and tell dirty and violent stories about desperate people in troubled circumstances. I get to turn it up loud,” and sometimes I even get to dance.”

You’d be hard-pressed to write a better description of the band’s music than “dirty and violent stories about desperate people in troubled circumstances.” The perfect example of that is the centerpiece of the new album, “The Wig He Made Her Wear.” With an ominous but subtle musical backing that just ratchets up the tension with each successive verse, the song sets its tone right from the beginning:

It was as open and shut as anything I have seen
He was a pillar of town his reputation was clean
It was right before Easter in the first week of spring
He didn’t show up for service that Wednesday night
The congregation knew something weren’t right
Blood on the bed when they opened the door
The preacher was dead on the bedroom floor

As you’ve probably already guessed, nothing is quite as it seems in a song like this:

He’d been shot in the back, a day before he was found
His wife and three kids were nowhere around
An Amber Alert was issued in town
Everyone was shocked at the scene of the crime
She’d taken the kids across two state lines
Found her in Orange Beach with the kids in the car
Sent back to Selmer to await her trial for first-degree murder

But then, in a twist worthy of the best episodes of “Law and Order” or “Perry Mason:”

Said, they were having a fight and the gun was a bluff
She didn’t pull the trigger it just went off
Said that he berated her about everything
Make her do things that made her feel so ashamed
Nobody at church would ever suspect
Made her dress up slutty before they had sex
In the courtroom that day there was an audible gasp
What they put up on display the locals couldn’t quite grasp
There was an audible gasp in the courtroom that day
When the defense pulled out and displayed
Them high-heeled shoes and the wig he made her wear

“Dirty and violent stories,” indeed. The fact that this one is based in fact doesn’t lessen its power.

But Hood is capable of great humor as he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and that’s clearly on display in “Drag The Lake Charlie,” in which a couple of losers actually hope to find their friend Lester drowned at the bottom the lake, because if it turns out that he just went into town for a night of carousing, there will be hell to pay for everyone, at the hands of Lester’s wife Wanda.

Mike Cooley only has three songs on the album, but two of them are absolute winners: “Birthday Boy,” which tells the story of a prostitute who would rather her client just not know her name, and “Get Downtown,” which approaches the same territory as Hood’s “This F*cking Job” but from the other side – a guy who’s out of work, with a wife who’s “too pretty” to do so. Shonna Turner also contributes an outstanding song, the deceptively simple “You Got Another,” which allows the album to showcase something you don’t hear much about anymore – perfect sequencing. Putting “The Wig He Made Her Wear,” “You Got Another,” and “This F*cking Job” in the order that they’re in may seem like a simple thing, but if you think about it, if those three were in any other order, each song would lose a little bit of its power.

Like I said before, the album does end a bit slowly, but I’m still hoping that the final four songs will grow on me as I continue to listen. And I will, I can promise you that.

Pau Gasol

There's a great article in this week's Sports Illustrated about Pau Gasol. It's not quite enough to make me root for the Lakers, but it does firmly establish Gasol as one of the good guys in modern sports.

An excerpt:

Pau Gasol walked out of class on Nov. 8, 1991, not sure where he was headed. It was recess at Escola Llor, the private school he attended in suburban Barcelona, and students were starting a soccer match. Gasol wandered the perimeter of the field as if in slow motion, neither playing nor watching, enveloped in a fog that was emanating from a foreign metropolis 6,000 miles to the west. He tried to comprehend the words and letters he had just heard in class: Magic Johnson and HIV. "I was deep in thought," Gasol says. "I was trying to figure out what it meant and what I should do. It was one of those moments that sticks in your mind and stays there your whole life."

For many of today's athletes, too young to have seen a president assassinated or remember a space shuttle falling from the sky, it was the first such moment. When the fog finally lifted, Gasol came to a conclusion about his future. He did not decide then that he would move to Los Angeles and play for the Lakers and lead them to a NBA championship.

He decided that he would become a doctor and try to cure AIDS. He was 11.

Read the whole thing - you won't be sorry.

American Top 40 Flashback - "Night Fever," Bee Gees

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:



"Night Fever," the #1 song this week in 1978. The Bee Gees were pretty damn close to being omnipresent that year, the year I graduated from high school.

And never mind wondering how Barry Gibb got his voice to do that. What I want to know is how he got his hair to do that!?

Separated at Birth?

R. Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket, and Kansas State men's basketball coach Frank Martin.

You make the call.

The Big To-Do - Drive-By Truckers

I'm not quite ready to post a review yet, but I can say without equivocation that the album to beat for my Album of the Year is "The Big To-Do," by Drive-By Truckers. Here, you can hear a couple of songs, plus Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley talking about their partnership in the band.

Song Titles

I bought the new album by Drive-By Truckers today. I haven't given it a listen yet, but if the album is as good as some of the song titles, it's going to be good:

• The Fourth Night of My Drinking
• This F*cking Job
• The Wig He Made Her Wear
• (It's Gonna Be) I Told You So
• Eyes Like Glue

Yep, those are some good song titles.

Spring

Another Capitol

California State Capitol, taken March 20.