Bongwater >> I don't dream about you, but maybe I do

☀ Bongwater - "Free Love Messes Up My Life" ☀

☂ (Shimmy Disc, 1991) ☂

Well, I'm always posting longtime favorite songs on here, so I thought I'd go with something I heard for the first time yesterday, literally yesterday.  One of my pet peeves is when people use the word "literally" to describe things that they did not actually do or that did not literally occur, such as: "I was so hungry last night that I literally ate everything in the house," or "I will literally move to Canada if John McCain becomes President."
I got this CD for 50 cents last week and grudgingly slipped it into my car CD player the other day during a 100º+ heat wave while going to buy a cactus, expecting maybe some goofy, Ween- or King Missile-esque stuff before surely selling it off for a dollar or two to another store for a massive profit, so I was literally blown away when this song came on.  I never knew Ann Magnuson had such an amazing voice.  I knew her from her minor role as an FBI employee in my dad's favorite movie, Clear And Present Danger, and I knew she had a solo career.  Overall, she's a singer, actress, and performance artist, as summed up here.  Bandmate Mark Kramer (who goes by just Kramer) is credited with "Musics, Instruments & Voices," and Magnuson is credited with "Words & Voices."

I despise when band members appear on their own covers, but in this case it was necessary in terms of the album's theme.  I love the washed-out '70s sofa / curtains color scheme and wine-label font for the big "B":

Fine print can be interesting

The back cover is great too.  I found an interesting page showing how college radio DJs at KCMU had a lot of fun dissecting the album's art, including mentions of Magnuson posing for Playboy and interviewing Soundgarden for Spin.

I think the song might be somewhat of a parody of Everything But The Girl's '80s jazz-pop era (many years before EBTG went techno and had the global hit "Missing"), or of '60s sunshine pop bands in general.  The melodic sense is just so jarringly perfect, with an undercurrent of dark clouds.  As I was listening to the choruses unfold, I kept waiting for a wrong note to be hit that would ruin the eerie flow, but it never happened.  The cover art's fine print is really tantalizing because it makes me wish this song had been released as a single... Maybe if it had been a hit, grunge would've never happened.  The only other song on the album that's like this one is "You're Like Me Now."  It's sort of a concept album about a band that gets big, gets a bloated sense of worth/ego, then deteriorates.  Ironically, the album has a song called "Her Litigious Nature," and Magnuson and Kramer later got into a bitter legal battle that broke up Bongwater and bankrupted Shimmy Disc, the label Kramer himself founded.  Life imitating art is usually not as fun as you'd think it would be.  Shimmy Disc was an early home for bands like Ween, Boredoms, Daniel Johnston, GWAR and King Missile, all of whom later sold out to major labels, fittingly enough, so maybe they all mistook this album as a career guide rather than as a parodic warning.

Speaking of my dad and Clear And Present Danger, he just had his birthday the other day; I rode my bike a few miles in a bad rainstorm to buy him that movie on DVD for his birthday in '03.  This year I got him this self-adjusting ratcheting wrench and a cigar.  The jury is now deliberating in the Casey Anthony trial, which in my opinion has been even more lurid and pathetic than the OJ and Phil Spector ones.  I can't believe I've been actually following it to some degree, mainly as a joke in the beginning, until I actually kinda got into it.  See the species of cactus I got yesterday.  Here's a photo I took on 2/14/11 of a few of my hundreds of palms.  I should've posted it back then, but I think it's more interesting to look at it today, when the heat index is around 105º, since the pic was taken when it was in the 40's.  I've always been fascinated by how temperatures and other sensory factors affect how we view photos and videos.  Out of all the people on earth who can potentially view this photo, only one (me) would get a wintry shiver from looking at, whereas the other 7 billion would get a nice warm, tropical feeling.  The palms are all Phoenix dactylifera 'Medjool' (Medjool date palm) except for a Phoenix sylvestris (Silver date palm) on the far left, plus a little Mammillaria cactus and a baby Taxodium distichum (Bald cypress) on the far right, and an unknown species of Illicium (anise) at the base of the Quercus virginiana (Live oak) on the right.

Speaking of the far right (my segues have been impressing even myself recently), let us all celebrate the end of Glenn Beck's TV show, which occurred yesterday.  We will celebrate it by inhaling all manner drugs and booze for 15 straight years, as he admits to having done (from age 16 to 31, to be exact).  When you're too douchey for even Fox News to keep you onboard, you know it's time to reassess the way you do things.

Up next in August is his publicity-stunt "rally" in Jerusalem, which is where millions of these date palms flourish in the harsh desert climate.  But more on that in an upcoming post.

Planets with similar climates: The Free Design - "Never Tell The World" (1967), Jale - "Despite" (1996), Slowdive - "So Tired" (1991), The Sundays - "Blood On My Hands" (1992), The Mamas & The Papas - "Monday Monday" (1966), Astrud Gilberto - "It Might As Well Be Spring" (1964), The Lotus Eaters - "The First Picture Of You" (1983), Ween - "Bananas And Blow" (2000).