33 rebellions per minute
"And all regrets go whiz thunk zam"
1998
Mike Keneally + Beer For Dolphins, SLUGGO!
There's good news and bad news about SLUGGO!, and while I've decided for myself that the bad news doesn't count, I'll present both.
- Happily, SLUGGO! is an extroverted, cheerful album full of hard-rock songs that have been taken pretty close to the theoretical maximum amount of harmonic, rhythmic, and textural adventurousness you could fit and still have them serve as kick-ass anthems. The lyrics aren't profound, except off-handedly (I'll get to that), but they aren't stupid, and the low-key singing is ingratiating; the album thus nicely melds hard-rock with jazz in a way that eliminates almost all the traits that would make either genre appalling. It reminds me of the first Crack The Sky album, in its song structure and its guitar-sound, and I consider CRACK THE SKY the best guitar-rock record before 1980.
- However, Keneally used to make his musical living as Frank Zappa's touring "stunt guitarist" (e.g., he's the guy who listened to some REVOLVER track where the Beatles had recorded two of George Harrison's best solos on top of each other, and taught himself to play the whole part without ever suspecting it was supposed to be impossible), and his first two albums are, though regarded as highly inventive, 70 minutes each of instrumental guitar wankery. You can still tell.
More problematic, perhaps, is the _other_ key inheritable Zappa trait. Mike's lyrics are never obscene, but I can see how you might perceive an unbearable smugness to them. The opener "Potato" marries the instant-classic drive of the Who's "Substitute" to an angularity and drama more like "Baba O'Riley", then flaunts the nonsense of (most of) its words: "We went to Maine cause we're friends with Mike Gaito/ and Briggs's charts flew away in tornado/ and I was up all night writing potato/ Australia- a-a-a!/ Potato- o-o-o-oh! And it's potato, potato, potato. Yes it's potato, potato, potato". "Frozen Beef (Come With Me)", an even catchier song with a punk/grunge urgency to its Stevie Wonder-ish melody, is an unsympathetic Zappa-esque portrait of a complete loser. "Tranquillado" is about a dog who "dreams of having sex with a frog" and who sings "If I were the king of make-believe, I'd pay the cameraman to give me more close-ups than anyone or I'd leave". "Chatfield Manor" paints an improbably wide-screen portrait of a luxurious hideaway and enthuses "I want to be drunk in your Jacuzzi forever", while "Voyage To Manhood" salutes drunken stupidity in detail. "Beautiful", sounding like Steely Dan guest-hosting Mister Rogers's Neighborhood, pleasantly wishes mass death on assholes everywhere. If you're already irritated by the instrumental showboating, the lyrics could turn you off completely.
Thing is, I think you'd be misunderstanding Mike entirely. Not that it has to matter: this music could more than survive pointlessness as far as _I'm_ concerned. But the songs can be re-read, and in light of Mike's self-presentation--- as a playful, bespectacled dork who loves his wife, dedicates his album to late heroes (Kevin Gilbert of Toy Matinee, John Coltrane of John Coltrane), and good-naturedly exposes his teenage poetry on his website--- I'll help with the re-reading. "Potato" is, for two verses and a prechorus, a contented reflection on mortality and entropy, the resultant brief lifespan of any wisdom, and why, though sad, it's probably better and more creative than immortality on the whole; in which light its meaninglessness is a thoughtful use, not a wasteful misuse, of probably the best anthem music recorded all year. "Tranquillado" doesn't have to respect the dog and award it Albert Schweitzer-like motives to be a song of love for it, and how many people bother to write songs for their dogs? Too few. "Chatfield Manor" is probably a generously grandiose tribute to the home of band friends Scott and Karen Chatfield, prominently thanked twice in the credits. "Frozen Beef" I can't really justify (though it's my musical favorite, so there), but "Own" is written to a similar sort of loser with clear empathy. Mike's wife gets two love songs, plus Mike stops to buy her some Kleenex for her cold in "Beautiful".
It's "Beautiful"--- subtitled "December 2, 1993"--- and "Voyage..." that do more than anything to make this album for me. The former, though exaggerated, is a song about people's ability to select their own company in life (and the limits of this power, and the biasing effects of it on people's perceptions of human nature) that I can very directly relate to. "For years I believed that 90% of the people in the world were useless and should just die/ the thought accompanied me and sometimes kept me warm/ but today I thought about how many wonderful people I've met in the last couple fo years/ in fact the vast majority of the people I've had contact with recently have been wonderful/ and if I am to take them as a representative sampling then most of the people in the world are wonderful/ This made me kinda happy and I took the newspapers to recycle them", it starts, and yes, unlike Alanis Morissette, Mike _does_ sing this all essentially in rhythm. He recounts his very happy and productive day, which includes buying Flipper's GENERIC FLIPPER CD for $1.98, and recounts "driving west on Wilshire to see Chad Wackerman" when someone smashed his windshield with a rock, damaged his car, and could have killed him. "So I want to thank that person for reminding me that in this world are people who should just die". A unique take on an important topic, presented casually. "Voyage..." duplicates the feat, moving from a poetic account of party revels ("the night progress, the tempo mounts/ and all regrets go whiz thunk zam/ one hundred? two? we've all lost count/ throwing coasters at a ceiling fan") to an intriguing hint that most of mankind's biggest problems wouldn't exist if no-one ever got sober and deliberate and stodgy enough to cause them. It's largely nonsense, I realize. We'd simply have different problems, as well as some same ones; it took a huge quantity of unpaid straight-world assistance to keep even the brief anarchy of Woodstock from being a pit of fatal dehydration and mass illness. But it's tempting and cute. Besides, for three brief lines--- "Ceiling fans and coasters! Ceiling fans and coasters! Distribute them equitably today!"--- B.F.D. drop the instrumental wizardry and sound exactly like a They Might Be Giants that had titled their second album TROTSKY. That wins me over any day.
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