personnamedrose: Artwork of a purple humanoid cat wearing a grey shirt with an M on it. (Default)
ruminating

forgot to dreamwidth for a while. whoops! i was gonna start typing this immediately all stream-of-consciousness like but i got distracted and listened to i wuz nothin' by ween on loop for like half an hour instead. sometimes it's just kinda like that.

uhhh... i went for a walk today. i've been doing that more and more recently, i go out and walk a mile and a half (split in the middle because i just head to the liquor store and back, not for liquor though). usually it takes me 40-ish minutes so i have time to get an album in but this time it took me more like 30-ish, which is surprising. maybe i ought to do longer walks, my legs have been getting less tired when i do that recently. i guess the main problem there isn't really many other places i can go within like, a mile of me, but i can figure something out. i guess i could walk up to a diner that's the opposite direction i normally go but it feels a bit funny to walk up to a Place Of Eating and then not, like, enter. to eat.

there's a punk show on the 16th i'll be taping! as usual it's in the back lot of this real estate agency or something that's hosted a lotta concerts recently - i don't know some of the bands playing so i'm very excited about that. still gotta ask them if they're cool with me recording though... i'll do that when i wake up tomorrow. probably. or i could just like not ask but that might be mean.

oh yeah! speaking of tomorrow, and by tomorrow i mean the tomorrow that will happen after i wake up and not tomorrow as in the 15th californian time, I'M GONNA BE ALONE IN THE HOUSE!!!!!! aw yeah. time to do my makeup and put on my fem stuff. i'm gonna be SO fucking girly. it's rare i get an excuse to without being secretive now so i'm very very excited!!!! i might do some stuff on my 4-track too, ive been a little creatively burnt out recently but i think cooking up some lo-fi synth punk might fix that. in the words of logan whitehurst, "nothing like a little drum loop to break you out of a songwriting slump."

god i love logan's music. everyone should listen to goodbye my 4-track if they don't mind songs that get silly with it sometimes - I was gonna quote a song from its predecessor How Does An Electrostatic Motor Work? in the title at first ("I wrote a letter to the devil / & I sealed it in an envelope of fire" from I Am So Important) but i didn't really feel like it. that's all i guess, i hope you're well.
personnamedrose: Artwork of a purple humanoid cat wearing a grey shirt with an M on it. (Default)
today i'm gonna talk about another ween bootleg! well, actually, this one isn't a bootleg. in fact, it's the first side of their 1988 release "The Live Brain Wedgie/WAD Excerpts", which as the name suggests consists of live material on Side A and fragments from their WAD era (which were the first writing sessions for the album that became GodWeenSatan) on Side B. specifically, the live material is from a live show they did in May of 1988 at the always wonderful City Gardens in Trenton.

song-wise, we actually have the full setlist for this! for a while i think it was believed that only what was recorded for the vinyl was played since it's a round-ish 10 minutes, but at some point the entire setlist wound up in circulation. and it rocks!! i haven't heard the songs not on Live Brain Wedgie and I don't really espect to, but judging from their live renditions at Maxwell's c. 1987 + Pranzatelli's c. 1989 in the case of Red as Satan it was probably pretty rockin'. as far as I know, the only song with missing live footage from their pre-GWS years is Boobs, since they've only done it the once on record.

recording-wise? it's a damn good soundboard! crackle permeates the copy that I have, and some of the louder tracks (ESPECIALLY You Fucked Up) get a bit distorted, but it's nothing that fully breaks my immersion, i imagine the crackle is probably cause it's a pretty old record anyways.

performance-wise? at least to my ears, this is a huge step up from Maxwell's about half a year earlier. dean goes pretty crazy on the pedals in Nippy Wiffle and the yelly-noisy outro of I Drink A Lot, and gene sounds waaay more into songs like Refrigerator and Jelly. hell, i think this show has THE best recording of Jelly period, though I guess that comes from the other two (that I know of) being a sloppy version from 1985 and the other being the Maxwell's show where the first verse starts a few bars too early. oh yeah, the version of I Like You rocks too, and the solo in the middle of Nippy Wiffle this time rocks - I'm not sure if it's a quote from something as it is in Maxwell's (with the bit of Third Stone), but if it's not it's one hell of a cool lead.

oh yeah, also there's some funny banter where Gene introduces I Drink A Lot as Nippy Wiffle and dean goes "no it's not, this song's called I Drink A Lot". i dunno why that got a lol out of me, but it did.

anyways! as a show, this is probably THE best representation of their early stuff. part of me wishes they reheated some of these in studio versions, but i dunno how well stuff like I Drink A Lot would fare amongst, like, Wayne's Pet Youngin' or Never Squeal or the duo of Licking The Palm and Mushroom Festival. if you can track down a copy, i highly recommend it - it's one of my fave things from the period where they were still kinda figuring stuff out and were leaning more into the punk side of stuff.

aside from the ween show review though, i got my friend tenille to do dreamwidth-y stuff there! she's one of my coolest friends and i enjoy talking to her a lot, if you dig my posts you'll probably enjoy her writings. i'm gonna go for a walk now, up to a local liquor store and back. not for liquor though, i have a few winning scratchoffs (a whole four dollars!!!) and also i just kinda enjoy the air y'know?

hope you're well. be bold with your love. never let the bad team tell you what you're living for.
personnamedrose: Artwork of a purple humanoid cat wearing a grey shirt with an M on it. (Default)
i forgot to dreamwidth for a while, whoops. uhhh still haven't gotten a job yet :/ i'm trying but even though everywhere is hiring it feels like no one is accepting, which kinda stings but not like i have much of a choice. typing this out made me spend some time applying to semi-local places though so hey, that's a good thing!

today i relistened to the earliest ween show we have full video and audio of - a show at Maxwell's from November 1987! the audio's kinda distorted but it is what it is. a lot of the songs are their usual brand of noisy punk songs from around this era (the only song on the setlist that would make it to their debut is a kinda embryonic version of its opening track You Fucked Up) but refined past the cruddy recordings they made with a radioshack DJ kit as 14-15 year olds. the version of Nippy Wiffle on this is nearly equal to the officially released live version from about half a year later, if only for the fact dean quotes Third Stone From The Sun in the middle (3:42) and that rocks.

aside from that, other highlights are the admittedly sloppy but kinda charming rendition of the beatles' Why Don't We Do It In The Road (6:20) that never resurfaced as a studio demo and the only known live recordings of the Axis: Bold As Boognish tracks I'm Killing It (10:41) and The Iron Whore (12:43 the banter is important). also, Refrigerator rocks, as usual.

i feel like kind of a weirdo for enjoying their super early stuff because like, objectively, even the first album has miles and miles of more talent over this, nevermind all the stuff afterwards (the mollusk? quebec?? hell even la cucaracha???). i feel like part of it comes from the fact i used to make similar bad noise punk like they did at my age then, it was me and a school friend with a crappy practice amp and his bass + guitar and we did covers of dead kennedys + SOAD songs and wrote about our math teacher being bald and born 2 shit and stuff. and like, objectively all that stuff is worth about as much as a political promise or a grain of sand, and yet i get more enjoyment out of it than like... our attempts at writing serious songs, or MY attempts at writing serious songs when the pandemic hit.

i dunno, this music shit is weird sometimes. i have no idea if anyone's reading these as i post them but i like keeping that a secret in my head, unless you wanna like tell me you read them in which case that's cool by me! it's just like, this is a good space to type things i don't normally talk about because it's like... a quiet place. i like quiet places.

oh yeah!! also wait one more thing. since the last time i posted here i got a drum machine and it's so cool, it's the Mattel Synsonics which is i think probably the last cheap analog drum machine. this comes at the caveat of it being super primitive, but it's still a cool thing i like toying with. here's a thing i recorded with it about a guy who's one inch tall.

maybe i'll write about things outside of my comfort range next time. like obviously not like stuff that's tooo deep but stuff i don't usually discuss that i probably ought to, just to get it "out". y'know? like gender and stuff, it's hard for me to talk about my gender because it's super complicated but i figured out how to describe it in one sentence the other day which was mind blowing to me.

but that's for future me to find out because it's 1 am oh my GOD i am going straight the fuck to bed.

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