weird, yesterday i was thinking how funny it is that people who don’t live in California get weirded out by the idea of earthquakes like they happen frequently here. then in the middle of the night i get woken up by one at 4:45am. it actually seemed pretty strong, but i find out it was only a 4.2 and none of my crap fell over, surprisingly. epicenter turned out to be over in oakland. on the news, they were showing all these stores with like 20 broken bottles of wine on the floor mixed in with cotton balls or fallen books mixed with boxes of tylenol and hair products. there’s a bookstore/pharmacy over on Claremont which seems strange to me, but i guess isn’t really. i was hoping they’d show a store with like 30 raw steaks scattered on the floor with lots of calculators. i’m still really tired and haven’t had any coffee. if a 7.0 or greater hits in the middle of the night, i’m gonna be in serious trouble because i’d be too sleepy & apathetic to take any kind of cautionary action.

anyway, this lil psychedelic gem from the first Red Krayola album came on my ipod this morning and i hadn’t heard it in a while, thought i’d share it. Mayo Thompson’s voice is an acquired taste much like David Thomas from Pere Ubu or David Byrne with that faux-neurotic offkey singing, but i don’t think it’s too much here. This is off of The Parable of Arable Land and it doesn’t really have a name. Most of the tracks on there are simply called “Free Form Freakout.” i know this is probably really ignorant of me to say, but it’s curious to me that a band/person as strange as Mayo Thompson could come from Houston, TX but i guess you can say the same thing about the Cleveland punk scene in the 70s. there’s a line off one on the songs on parable where Mayo blurts out “eating babies for nourishment!” and it makes me laugh so hard.

“Free-Form Freakout”

[audio:redkrayola.mp3]

i used to think for the longest time that Thompson couldn’t sing straight or turn the art-school filter off on his vocals and composition, but then i heard this song with Gina Birch from the Raincoats singing backup. it’s slightly off-kilter for enough charm appeal, but for the most part it’s traditional and poignant sounding. i’m posting this for contrast, but bear in mind there is approx 15 years difference spanning between the two:

“Old Tom Clark”

[audio:oldtomclark.mp3]