Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
Robyn Hitchcock
And when the sun goes down on her
So beautiful, my heart just stops
Robyn is one of my very favorite musicians. I liked his early records a lot as a kid, then mostly forgot about him, and rediscovered his music as an adult.
He has a huge catalog of records; the two that played possibly the largest role in rekindling my interest were Moss Elixir and Perspex Island.
Nearly all of Robyn's lyrics are online at The Asking Tree. You can download a huge number of live recordings for free, from Archive.org.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
"We live for the strike of a match." Here's video of him recording on NPR for the Bryant Park Project -- more audio here -- Laura Conaway writes about another episode of BPP mentioning "I Often Dream of Trains" here. Will try and embed it later on. Here's audio of him on KQED's California Report. Also: he will be playing at Symphony Space in November, with Captain Keegan.
...Also: Here is a live performance of "Creeped Out", from Irene Trudel's show on WFMU. Hitchcock has an interview in this episode of "Paul Morley's Guide to Musical Genres" on BBC2.
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Sylvia and I get in the car, and Robyn Hitchcock is playing "Glass Hotel".
Sylvia: I have that guy's voice stuck in my head. Me: Me too! Sylvia: Because every time we go in your car, he's singing... about his wife and his dead wife and the rocking chair. I don't get that: if she's dead how could she be combing her hair?
...A little later "I Something You" starts playing.
Sylvia: How come he's saying "I haven't got a wife", if he had a wife and a dead wife? Me: Well the songs don't have to be about him, they could be stories he made up. Sylvia (laughing): "I something you", like he forgot what he was going to say!
posted evening of May 5th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
(I should note: the performance of "If I Fell in Love with You" in the encore last night totally blows away my theory about Robyn Hitchcock being unable to cover the Beatles. Being wrong about that is not at all a bad thing.)
I got into the theater and discovered it's a lovely room. Who knew there was a beautiful ballroom on the top floor of Manhattan Center? I did not. My seat was in the front row -- the dance floor had been covered with rows of seats -- about 15 feet away from the performers. The crowd was mostly white, but exhibited a wide diversity of age and of fashion sense.
Robyn walked out onto the stage and informed us the building was originally an airship, until it was taken out of comission in the thirties, "around when many people believe the Marx Brothers peaked." -- From there he segued into a story about Groucho Marx traveling cross-country on ducks, "very long ducks that moved on rails and belched coal;" this was by way of introducing his first song, "Heaven," which I did not recognize though I believe I've heard it before -- it is a sweet love song. Next was "Daisy Bomb," which I'm sure I've never heard. It is startling and catchy, and I thought, Awesome, this is going to be a night of new songs for me.
Sometimes a bomb is not enough To express the way I feel
Robyn spent a minute tuning his guitar and explained how tuning as part of the show is very important, "tuning up a guitar is the sex part of" sex, drugs, rock n' roll. You see, if you as the audience absorb the tuning-up vibes through your coccyx, you will be able to radiate them outwards later on, when you go up to the tower to feed your pet hamster, or gerbil, or rodent. Be careful, you don't fall over and set fire to his straw! And he played "I Got the Hots," beautiful and funny. He seems to play this very frequently and that is alright by me. A lovely pantomime with his guitar at the beginning of it.
Robyn talked about his being "Nick Lowe's psychedelic younger brother," and how that was reflected in the shirts they buy and wear. Then he played "Wax Doll" and "The Cheese Alarm," two more songs I was not familiar with. I guess a large area of his catalog remains for me to explore!
A little more tuning -- Robyn talked about how he was "tuning by consensus -- you see if two strings agree, I will tune the third to match them, even though the third might have been the one that was correct all along... like the people who thought we should not invade Iraq. The majority rules." He played "Full Moon in my Soul," which I love, love, love, and "One Long Pair of Eyes," and then talked about how Gandhi kept a Stratocaster and a Marshall stack next to his bed, but never played -- it was an exercise in resisting temptation -- "He never even touched the strings..." and played "Glass Hotel," which I think he plays nearly as often as "I Got the Hots," and which I like, but not quite as well as the other.
The last song of this all-too-short set was a new song, possibly called "I declare that we are free," written for the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. Robyn said he had been asked to write it on short notice "because David Crosby was not available," and that it is going to be performed in a stadium in Holland, so we should imagine that it is "produced and in tune".
And he left the stage! But, came back out for encores after Nick Lowe did his set. The final two encores were just tremendous, the best thing in the whole show: Robyn and Nick and surprise guest Elvis Costello playing "If I Fell in Love with You" and "Mystery Train", the whole audience was a single body. Robyn took lead vocal on both, totally appropriate given that he has the best voice of the three.
Lowe's set was, well, a little corny it must be said. He is a handsome man and an excellent, charismatic showman; but his songs are lacking in the spark of genius. He played "Cruel to be Kind," "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding," "All Men are Liars" and some other tunes I thought I recognized, plus some new stuff. Some lovely tunes but just a bit corny.
Update: Here are some pix from SketchGuy... who blogs about the show here.
I told Bill I will be happy with whatever Robyn plays tonight; and that's true, short of Beatles covers, which I'll suffer through if I have to.* But... it would totally make my year if he would play "Birds in Perspex". (Listen to it here -- aah, beautiful.) He seems in interviews to have sort of repudiated the album "Perspex Island" but it's hard for me to figure out why, precisely. So I guess I will just cross my fingers, and maybe get lucky.
*(Not that I don't like the Beatles or anything, I just don't think Robyn does a very good job of covering them. OTOH he's done some great covers of Lennon's and McCartney's solo work so who knows.)**
Wednesday evening I will go into the city to see Robyn Hitchcock! I'm so excited! It is now just about exactly a year since my interest in Hitchcock was reawoken by Ms. Irene Trudel. In that year (in the year since I last saw him play) I've been listening to his music really heavily -- you probably already know this if you read the blog much. This time I am going to have a much fuller notion of what I'm listening to. Can't wait, can't wait.
Also on the bill (and indeed, actually at the top of the bill) is Nick Lowe, about whom I know almost nothing at all, but from what I've been reading it sounds like he'll be a lot of fun too.
Listening in the car to Robyn Hitchcock's April '96 concert in Bilbao, and Sylvia says "I want to hear the one about the street." Cool -- I fast-forwarded to "De Chirico Street". Listened for a minute and then Sylvia says, "There's too much stuff happening on that street."
&
.
!) 
