Tortoise >> Millions now & beyond

Tortoise - "Glass Museum"

(Thrill Jockey Records, 1995)

Tortoise are one of the best-known bands in indie history, so I shouldn't have to say much about them.  I would post their genre-defining classic "Djed," but it constitutes about half of the album's running time.  "Glass Museum" is no slouch, friends.  It lives up to its name with elegant pacing, a waltz beat, and a shimmery, sun-dappled overall feel.  There's also a jazzy, subdued, impressionistic guitar solo at 1:13, and a pretty dramatic ramping-up of intensity at the 3-minute mark that always catches me off-guard.  I'd probably play this song for someone who has never heard this band before.  Before Tortoise went on autopilot and became Bonnaroo darlings, they were pretty great, at least on their 2nd and 3rd albums.  (I dislike their bafflingly overrated debut album.)  I think one unintended consequence of early Tortoise was that the vibraphone / xylophone became so ubiquitous that later post-rock bands disassociated themselves from it and tried to up the "intensity" levels and make lots of "climaxes" at the end of every song, which eventually spelled the downfall of the genre as it was once known.  (Though bands like The Six Parts Seven, The Mercury Program and The Dylan Group based their entire sound around hypnotic vibraphone.)  As All Music Guide said, after raving about "Djed," "The other songs on Millions Now Living are hardly afterthoughts, though; highlights 'Glass Museum' and 'The Taut And Tame' display the band quickly growing out of the angular indie rock ghetto with exquisite music, constructed with more thought and played with more emotion, than any of their peers."

In 1997, I was getting into this post-rock thing that all the zines were talking about.  I had first read about it in the Feb. 1996 issue of Guitar World magazine, which ran a long article on the genre, with a heavy focus on The Sea And Cake, Laika, Pram, and Long Fin Killie.  It didn't mention TSAC's sister band Tortoise at all, though.  Anyway, I bought Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die CD (in apparently-rare paper gatefold packaging) that summer as a birthday gift for my dad.  But I got antsy and opened it to listen for myself, which turned out to be a wise decision.  (Keep in mind there was no way to preview songs online back then.)  I also did the same for Jale's So Wound, and eventually gave him Guided By Voices' new CD.  That fall, I remember developing photos in Loyola's darkroom for my Fine Arts Photography class, and I heard "Djed" coming from a radio inside one of the private darkroom booths.  So I knocked on the door and he opened it and I asked if he was a Tortoise fan.  It turned out that his radio was playing WTUL, which is the radio station of the college right next door, Tulane.  I don't know if the guy in the room, Brad, was impressed when I told him the name of the track, but we ended up becoming something like friends, and we saw Macha in '99.  He later put out a solo CD-R under the name Sad Smile or SadSmile, which I have somewhere.  By late '97, anticipation amongst bespectacled indie rockers was building to a fever-pitch for Tortoise's next album.  To tide fans over, Option magazine even ran a two-page article about the recording process of it.  In the interim I bought Isotope 217º's stunning debut album The Unstable Molecule, simply because it was a Tortoise side project.  In March '98, I ordered and received this new album, TNT, a few weeks before it even hit stores.  I then saw them live, as mentioned in my previous post:

I bought a Tortoise shirt and tour-only 7" there, and there was a hip-hop / dub afterparty DJ'ed by a person or persons from WTUL's "Below The Basement" hip-hop show, but I think I only caught a little bit of it while milling about at the merch table.  I sold the shirt to my friend Andrew a few years later.

Fun Fact: I recently learned that Millions Now Living Will Never Die is a Jehovah's Witness slogan, but I always thought it was a reference to the school of fish on the cover.  (The school continues to the back cover when you open the paper case.)  In any case, it's a brilliant merging of title and artwork.

Fun Fact 2: After composing this post, I was pleasantly surprised to see that "Glass Museum" is Tortoise's second-most-downloaded song on iTunes; I had thought it was one of their more obscure cuts.

Fun Fact 3: I saw Modest Mouse & Califone the night before at a Baton Rouge club called The Bayou, where all the bar scenes in Sex Lies And Videotape were filmed.  There were a few dozen people who were specifically there to see the bands, whereas most of the crowd was apparently frat boys who were there to play pool and try to hook up.  The club burned down several years later and is now a Reginelli's Pizza.

The only thing I can say about Whitney Houston's death is that I'm still mad at her for derailing Bobby Brown's career trajectory, and I hope Maya Rudolph will still dust off her Whitney impersonation from time to time.  Please, folks, no jokes about the band Krackhouse that I mentioned a few posts ago.

I showed the above disques to my family before we watched the Grammys, and my dad mentioned that they must be worth a lot of money.  I didn't have the heart to tell him I got them all at various thrift stores for around 50 cents each.  My mom almost died when her favorite band, The Civil Wars, performed.  The only other collections of 7"s that I own that rival this one are probably of Madonna, Unwound, Janet Jackson, and The Police, with Simple Minds slowly gaining momentum.

After trimming some palm trees on a gray, drizzly Monday, I took this cactus I've had for 14 years to a few plant nurseries to see if they could diagnose what its orange spots meant.  (Probably a fatal fungal disease.)  I ended up stopping by Sunrise Trading as a last-ditch effort.  This is the local grower of most of the cacti & succulents that are sold in the New Orleans area, and my cactus was presumably grown by them long ago.  It's supposed to be only a wholesale operation, but I asked if I could look at the greenhouses, and the guy, Steve, said sure.  (Note the coincidental relation to the concept of "glass museums.")  So I went in and had my mind blown for about 2 hours, picking out kewl plants.  He said he didn't think my cactus would die, but I believe he just said that to make me feel better.  He told me some fascinating anecdotes about varieties of plants that are named after people he knew, and some of the lengths to which he has gone to ensure the survival of some of his specimens.

Tuesday was a pretty strange day.  I went down to Houma to exchange a Mammillaria hahniana cactus, buy this space-saver rack at Bed Bath & Beyond, buy a mini pitchfork for my mom, and play some basketball.  My Beyonding wasn't successful, but I did snag Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul on CD for only about $5.  They also had the latest Liz Phair dud, among other random albums.  Who knew?  While sizing up a photo of four birds in a bare tree, I noticed lots of chemtrails in the sky.  Two of the birds flew away when I turned the music in my car off, so I decided to aim upward and take a shot mainly of the sky instead:

Taken facing NE at 2:52 PM

These long streaks are each probably 20 or so miles long; regular-old vapor contrails from planes are only a few hundred yards long and evaporate quickly, whereas chemtrails stay suspended in the sky for hours on end.  Then I went and shot hoops about 10 miles away literally right under some chemtrails that I had just seen being laid down, kind of as an experiment to see if I would feel ill effects from them.  There was a helicopter making lots of suspicious trips back and forth through the area, presumably to check on the concentrations of the chemicals.

I was unable to part with the cactus, so I brought it home with me; at least it got to go on a fun field trip in my center console cup holder.  I shot threes at Gray Park for about an hour, then hit Rouse's in Thibodaux.  They were out of Guinness and Murphy's, so I settled for some Killian's Red, which I had never tried before.  That night at 9PM, I made a literally last-minute decision to drive to NOLA to see A Silver Mt. Zion, or Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, to be more exact.  I had bought their debut album at a Godspeed You Black Emperor show in 2003, and an EP in 2006, but otherwise had never paid much attention to them.  I was holding a cup of coffee (instant coffee in Lactaid milk) in my hand at the aforementioned time, and said to myself, "Well, if you drink this, you have to go, otherwise you'll be up all night for no reason."  So I chugged it and went.  By this time I had a massive headache and some brain functioning problems, but I couldn't figure out why; then I remembered the Houma chemtrails.  "Better living through chemistry," I said, and popped a Tylenol Extra Strength.  Zion is not the kind of band whose music I listen to very much, and their sample clips at online vendors' sites don't impress me, but I had a feeling that they would have a certain vitality live, and I went by the rule of "It's better to go to a concert and have it suck then to not go and wonder for the rest of your life if you missed a great show."  With my head exploding and right on the verge of falling asleep, I did the 50-mile drive in to New Orleans.  Getting stuck in standstill traffic for half an hour was the icing on the cake.  About a block from the club I noticed a restaurant called Vacherie, so I stopped in.  The bartender guy told me they were closed, but I asked for a menu and said "I'm from a city... well, town, called Vacherie."  I walked into One Eyed Jacks as the Zions were doing their first song (there was no opening act), so I had to chuckle a bit at my good fortune.  They turned out to be just as endearingly annoying and pretentious as I had expected, but in a good way.  The dual violins and upright bass made for an excellent sonic bed over which singer Efrim Menuck could yelp about various abstract problems and existential musings.  Efrim did some funny banter with the crowd during two Q&A intermission sessions.  Example: Someone in the crowd asked him his name.  He very casually said "Jack White.  Ask me again."  So the question was asked again.  "The Edge.  Ask me again.  I could go on like this all night..."

I took this during the encore, an extended rendition of "Horses In The Sky." 

I just noticed that the people up front were pretty nattily-dressed, whereas towards the back and middle there were lots of anarchist types with face tattoos, leather jackets, dreadlocks, etc.

Man stricken eating 'Triple Bypass' burger - "'It was no joke,' said Jon Basso, who promotes himself 'Doctor Jon,' his scantily-clad waitresses as nurses, and customers as patients."

Fox News commenters respond to Whitney Houston's death with deluge of hatred and racism

Megadeth lead singer Dave Mustaine endorses Rick Santorum - I knew this guy was a douche, but this shocked even me.  "Holy Wars" indeed...

Planets with similar climates: Tristeza - "City Of The Future" (2000), The Mercury Program - "Fragile Or Possibly Extinct" (2002), Isotope 217º - "La Jetée" (1997), The Dylan Group - "Running In Pairs" (1999).