I'm a lowlife

The quality of this is not awesome, but you get the idea. Reform School Girl by Nick Curran and the Lowlifes.

Ok, so old music Thursday, and pretty much all other blogposts have fallen by the wayside. I'm crazed hormonal incubator on a mission from Venus (or Mars) to sew quilts, stay in bed all day with my kid, and avoid all human contact. And that apparently extends to writing. I have completed so many projects and had so many thing happen in the last few weeks, but the thought of writing them down feels monumentally difficult to begin, and also somewhat pointless. But then I get an email or a text message from another person, saying "what gives?" and I feel guilty. So I eat another scoop of cinnamon ice cream to drown my sorrows and promise to find time the next day.


I've eaten A LOT of cinnamon ice cream in the last few weeks.

Did I ever mention I went to reform school? Not really. It was a boarding school in Maine, but it wasn't exactly Exeter. It was like a progressive liberal reform school for kids who smoked too much pot, and whose parents were hippy yuppies trying to be better parents. Yay me. 

I thought I'd start back easy and tell you guys what I've been listening to lately. Nick Curran and The Lowlifes. So good. Nipper Knapp found this guy on a song of the day thing from some hipster college radio station out of Seattle(?) he listens to online. 


They're kind of like Rockabilly meets The Misfits, Meets Jack White, meets Howlin Wolf, meets The Ramones. The lyrics are pretty grim, and I'm sure my mother would not approve, but I kind of dig pulling out of the Joann Fabrics parking lot in my prius blasting "I'm Gonna Kill My Baby". Puts everything back in it's natural order.


Also they remind me of this band, whose name I can't remember, that played in Ann Arbor when I was about 16. Any of my readers from A2 in that era know who I'm talking about? They were all Rockabilly boys, and I dated one of them, mostly because he had a 1957 Chevy Bel Air, and a 1950s truck, and wore his hair in a super slick pompadour, smoked Lucky's, and his dad was one of those hair dressers who did hair shows, who may or may not have been dead of AIDS. He and other guys in the band were emancipated minors who lived in this crappy house near campus, and they had a paraplegic dog who wore diapers, and had a little trolly back made of skateboard wheels so he could pull himself around the house. All of these things blinded me to the fact that he was a short, ignorant, grifter, who now may or may not be aspiring to be the night desk man at a hooker hotel. The good life. Ah youth, where have you gone?


Ok back to sewing nursery curtains, and cuddling on the couch with my fellas. 

Wait! What? You guys have to tell me what's going on!

I'm buried under a deep soft blanket of Muffintop love and adulation, and even though THREE of you sent me an email with this link, I missed it! What is going on? Did Conan play with Jack at Bonaroo? Are Conan and Jack doing an album together. I'm so out of it. Is Conan going to do a spoken word album for Third Man Records, Henry Rollins Style? It says June 10th. Was there a private show? I know I could google this, but I'm too busy tipsy typing to do that.

Remember when you could see that your favorite band was coming to town, and just buy tickets? Remember THAT? We saw Wilco last year, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. They were both awesome. Seeing live music is like oxygen. But we had to drag ourselves to both shows. The whole babysitter, I'm going to be tired tomorrow, I'm already dead thing...

I would tag this one as #itsjustnotthesameanymore

Did I mention I've been twitter stalking the entire female portion of the staff at the NY Times, Huffington Post about My Muffintop and anyone at anywhere I can think of. What's a good abbreviation for twitter stalker?

Au revoir ennui. Bonjour piano?

I've mentioned before that I was in a fake band. It was fake because even though I wrote a few songs, and we learned to play a few songs, it was mostly me and my friend Sadie getting together, trying to figure out how to fit Claude Debussy, Dave Brubeck, and Jack White into one band. Also I can't sing. I can carry a tune. I can fake sing. But I can't hear music the way a real singer can. I have no idea how to harmonize, unless someone else does it for me. Oh, and I need to be wearing ear muffs. Sadie doesn't sing either. She plays the piano. You see where I'm going with this?

A couple of times we rented rehearsal space and got our drummer friend, who is in several totally non fake bands, and his friend, who plays bass, to play with us. One time Janeane Garafalo showed up just in time to watch me sing one of my embarrassing songs. That was the peak of our fame.

None of these facts stop me from buying THREE guitars, a red glittery amp, and many, many, prom dresses, from Target. I'm going to say this right now. I had band jackets made for us, for Christmas. They cost more than I can admit to spending on such a thing, and I still wear mine sometimes when I feel I need, a little je ne sais quoi. I read Lester Bang's Biography. I grilled my dad on seeing the MC5 one time in Detroit. His recollection was, that they were, very, very, loud. I wanted to eat, sleep, drink rock and roll. It's like I missed out on something in high school, and somehow at 30, I had to let this daydream play out.

Ok, so where is this going? One of the guitars I bought was a vintage 1960s red reso-glass Airline from Montgomery Ward. I found it on ebay, and bought it from a guy in Liverpool. It was SO cool. It was small, and red, and adorable, and oh yeah, Jack White (my hero) played one just like it. Except of course, Jack White, can actually... you know... play the guitar... LIKE A WIZARD. SO I bought this thing and I bought a glass slide, and tried my very best to play the blues. Oh man, if I could just have played the blues. The saddest thing in my whole life, is my total inability to sing like Ella Fitzgerald, and play guitar like Jack White. Can you imagine that person? It's not me. I'm more like, if Lisa Loeb was irritated, and out of tune, and didn't have any stick-to-it-ive-ness.

So this week, as I was cleaning out the garage, emptying out the closets, rearranging everything, I realized that it's time for the guitar to go. I put it on craigslist two nights ago. Nipper Knapp and I went to see "It Might Get Loud" this afternoon, and it was awesome. It was a nice little going away party for my rock and roll alter ego. Tomorrow a nice boy, who seems to know everything in the world about this guitar, is coming by to pick it up. He is a musician, who's in a real band, and he will play it, and give it the home it deserves.

I was thinking about using the money to tile the backsplash in the kitchen. The tile that the previous owner installed, makes me think of refried beans every time I look at it. I've trained myself not to look at it. But I'm thinking I might use the money on a piano. I'd love for Jack to learn how to play. We always had a piano growing up, and even though none of us ever played it, or played it well at least, there was this idea of music in the house. Maybe that's all you need.