I'm running out the door to go listen to Paul Krugman (who's basically the Mary Catherine Guidera of John Bates Clark Medal-winning Princeton economics professors who write columns for The New York Times) speak at the Miami Book Fair. But when I get back, looks like I got some downloading to do, thanks to our friends at American Laundromat:
We promised you we'd be releasing the "Deal Breaker Demos" on iTunes and we have. Just after the break-up of Pee Shy and the formation of the Caulfield Sisters, Cindy and Mary recorded a demo for their old label under the moniker Three Wheeler. The demo was never released and Cindy and Mary went on to form the Caulfield Sisters and record "Say With Fire" which was a stunning debut that earned glowing reviews, landed them opening slots for bands like Interpol, and charted on college radio for months. The Deal Breaker Demos are a fantastic collection of songs that could have been part of the Say It With Fire sessions; haunting melodies, great hooks, and all the cool we've come to expect from The Caulfield Sisters. Sean Glonek at SRG Studios (Kristin Hersh, Frank Black, Tanya Donelly, Dresden Dolls) mastered the tracks for us. Buy it on itunes now.
I have nothing constructive to add, just thought it worth noting that a cool person named Stacey took some photos at this month's Caulfield Sisters/Hornrims show at Don Hills. Besides the one above, you can see the others in their natural habitat here.
Did anyone else know that besides Look It, Cindy and the flute goddess Suzanne Thorpe were in a second band called The Forest For the Trees? Suzanne mentions it here, and here's an atmospheric photo of them in action. Apparently Cindy concocts bands the way Bush keeps coming up with excuses why we need to spend an extra 6-18 months in Iraq.
Also, it seems that the Caulfield Sisters are trendy. I didn't know that, but let's hope the trend continues.
Meanwhile, it turns out that there's a second Caulfield sisters video on YouTube. But it's just a home movie made by two sisters named Caulfield. I wonder if they know about their namesakes.
Another loss in Tampa: There was some very sad news a few days after the show: Jeff Wood, the former drummer for the Hornrims' Joe Popp, along with Barely Pink, the Fugitive Kind, one configuration of Monday Mornings and a slew of other Tampa bands, died Sept. 12 after a long fight with brain cancer. He was only 42. My condolences to those who knew him. Joe has set up a tribute site here, and you can read more here, here, here and here.
I'm guessing that the Sisters have departed the stage by now, that their faithful fans have enjoyed the comeback show at Don Hills, and that the Earth has resumed spinning on its proper axis. I hope it was everything a Caulfield Sisters performance should be -- life-changing, psoriasis-curing, the type of experience that leaves you with your soul cleansed, your hedges trimmed and your cuticles sparkling. Or something like that.
Did the Sisters have another show scheduled for this week? I thought I saw one mentioned on the message board before it succumbed to all the spam.
Anybody who's still hanging around the tri-state area might want to check out Kristin's other band Gloria Deluxe peforming Must Don't Whip 'Um at the Philly Fringe Festival. The shows run Wednesday through Friday at Temple University.
Anyway, I just wanted to say welcome back. Now when's the world tour?
Yowza yowza yowza. I mean, damn -- when those Sisters pull a comeback they don't fuck around. No, they just go ahead and stage the most glorious resurrection since a certain Nazarene kicked a stone out of his way a couple of millenniums ago. Here are the tidings of joy from American Laundromat:
"The Caulfield Sisters will be playing a show on September 8th at Don Hills in NYC."
"In the next few weeks we’'ll be releasing the original demo version of Fine” on iTunes. The demo version is much different than the Say It With Fire –EP version and fans will love having this track in their collection."
"Cindy and Mary have agreed to allow American Laundromat to exclusively release the 3 Wheeler“Deal Breaker Demos” on iTunes. The 3 Wheeler demo was recorded after Pee Shy disbanded and before The Caulfield Sisters formed. The songs are a perfect blend of dreamy indie rock and smart pop we’'ve come to expect from The Caulfield Sisters. Mary herself is working on artwork for both the Fine single and Deal Breaker Demos."
Can it get any better? Oh yes it can: "Look for both in the next few weeks."
All I can say is: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Seriously, I just need to faint somewhere.
The Don Hills show seems like it should be especially magical, since the club's calendar says the Sisters will be appearing with The Hornrims, whose members include Cindy's old Ybor City co-conspirator Joe Popp. Perhaps Cindy and Joe will bring back the old Ybor Orchestra while they're at it, maybe do an impromptu rendition of "Fiddle on the Griddle." We can dream, can't we?
No we can't. Not now. This is far too much great news in one sitting to possibly justify hoping for more.
OK, one final question: Will these iTunes releases be available in iTunes Plus? The only thing better than hearing new music from the Sisters is hearing them at 256kbps resolution instead of 128, plus not having to engage in annoying technical rigamarole to play them on your non-iPod player. That would make all this beyond perfect. But hell, I'll take them on eight-track if that's all that's available. (Hmmmm ...)
In any case -- thank you, thank you, thank you for the great news, and congratulations to everyone involved for all the hard work that no doubt went into making this happen. You guys rock.
Great news: Various folks who know much more than I do say the Caulfield Sisters juggernaut is getting ready to roll, to which all I can respond is a mighty yee haw. See these snippets from the American Laundromat message board plus the comments to my prior blog post for more. Really, I was just expressing my fears out loud so they'd turn out not to be true.
Meanwhile, anyone looking to get their sororal fix can listen to a few new songs featuring Kristin on her other, other, other band Gloria Deluxe. The GD is also working on two new albums, has a bunch of shows coming up in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chapel Hill in the next few months, and has set up a new website for Accinosco (a\k\a the Accidental Nostalgia Company), which is essentially Gloria Deluxe plus a bunch of supporting players. Think of them as the Talking Heads circa 1983, as opposed to the Talking Heads circa 1977. Sure, they're not the Sisters, but they've been known to put out a snappy tune now and again.
So is this the end of the Sisters? Have the Caulfields gone off to that great musical-literary rye field in the sky? Is it possible that a band that hasn't performed in public for almost two years might not technically, you know, exist?
Interpret this as you will, but Cindy's gone off and formed yet another band, according to this alert passed on by Caulfield Sisters mega-fan madtempest:
From: Cindy Date: Jun 10, 2007 11:21 PM
My new band, MOSTLY WATER will be playing this Thursday June 14th at Matchless in Greenpoint. 557 Manhattan Ave at Driggs. 10 pm For those of you who know Sarah P from Beacon's her band BEZOAR will play @11pm. So come on out and get blasted some sweet ass rock.
wheel
The Sisters' MySpace page offers similar tidings as well, without offering any details on what this means for the rest of the Trinity:
Cindy W from The Caulfield Sisters new band MOSTLY WATER play it's first show. Please come and behold AMPLIFIED AUTOHARP WITH LOTS OF PEDALS...
As always with Cindy's bands, Mostly Water sounds extremely intriguing, especially since we all are, of course (mostly water, I mean). No idea if she's drawing any parallels with the radical activist Canadian news site of the same name, but maybe she can work out a sponsorship deal with them. Perhaps we'll see her performing at G8 summits and anti-globalization rallies while the tear gas rains down. And then maybe, as the accordion feedback wafts over the barricades and into the shuttered conference rooms of the world leaders, Bush and Putin and Sarkozy and the rest of them will look up from their scripted talking points and say in unison: "Hey! Why don't we cut out all this shit and just fucking give peace a chance?"
Or maybe the Caulfield Sisters could come back to us and stage a glorious resurrection. Which seems more likely?
Anyway, if you're in New York on Thursday night, you know what you gotta do.
Comparing the Pee Shy video with the Caulfield Sisters' concert footage can be both fun and educational. For instance, ponder Cindy's sultry swaying-back-and-forth in "Little Dudes" (perhaps amped-up for purposes of the video) versus her ironclad gravitas when playing the accordion in "Some Candy Talking." In the latter, I was struck especially by how strong her upper arms must be, how she wields the instrument as if it were a part of her body, and especially by the epic way she fucks with it toward the end of the song. (She was messing with accordion feedback as far back as Who Let All the Monkeys Out?, of course, but not nearly to this extent.)
There's probably not enough evidence here to say for sure whether Kristin is a better drummer than Bil. At the very least, she has more to do here than Bil did in "Little Dudes," which after all was originally an accordion-and-clarinet song with no drum part.
To make the comparison complete, of course, we need to see Jenny performing one of her own post-Shy songs. So here she is rocking out on "Harbour" last October in St. Pete:
For some reason, the Monkeys version of "Little Dudes" has always struck me as suffocating and inert, as if everyone had been locked in a tiny room unable to move, not at all as jaunty and organic as the original demo version from Don't Look. Fairly or not, I've blamed that on Rick Chertoff, the head of the Mercury/Blue Gorilla label, who apparently insisted on producing "the big hit" himself.
Chertoff brought along his recording pal William Wittman, who had worked with him on Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, along with two-fifths of The Hooters. In my opinion, the results don't have nearly the fun or dynamism or even the melancholic twinge of the rest of the album, which was produced by Dean Wareham of Luna and Galaxie 500. Wareham really seemed to get what Pee Shy were about; I can't imagine a better recording of "Smoking Gun" or "Dance Motherfuckers" or "Red Ink" or "It's the Love" or "Godforsaken Baby."
This is not to diss Chertoff, who after all had the supreme good taste to release not one but two Pee Shy albums and deserves major props for keeping their musical vision intact. But the band members apparently were smart to pick Wareham to produce the rest of the album. Anyway, their presence in the video seems to restore the song's personality somehow, even though the audio is identical to the CD version.
It's easy to focus on what some consider the "perverted" aspects of the "Little Dudes" lyrics (I prefer the term "gleefully demented"). After all, this is a song that uses the word "pedophile" to humorous effect and references the ick factor of the Barry Williams/Florence Henderson dalliance. And it does appear on the same album as other classic Wheeler lyrics such as "dance, motherfuckers" and "bend over, want you to meet a friend of mine."
But there's more to the song, as one of the commenters on that song-meaning website hints at:
I don't really think it's about these women wanting sex with younger guys, but rather them wanting a 'relationship' without the complications that come with normal relationships with other adults (maybe even sex?).
More to the point, I think, is Cindy's subtle feminist critique, for instance in the women's appreciation that the younger guys "never try to tell us what to do." They value their autonomy and don't want to surrender it solely for the sake of being with some guy, even though folks like the website commenter think that this kind of submission is just one of "the complications that come with normal relationships." Compromise is a part of any relationship, but Cindy appears to have a problem with the notion that it's supposed to be one-sided. And of course, the statement "when you were born I was already 10" would be no major obstacle at all if the genders were reversed, at least if both people were adults.
Did Pee Shy belong on a major label to begin with? Cindy has said she doesn't think so. This video seems to revive that question, with its combination of the patented made-for-VH1 alternapop panning and color schemes, mixed with Cindy's circa-1993 just-learning-to-write-songs lyrical style and Pee Shy's classically unorthodox subject matter. It's a fascinating combination but clearly wasn't as marketable as Mercury had hoped. And from what I've read about the label's lack of promotion, whatever success the band had was due largely to the members busting their collective ass.
On the other hand, the two major label albums made their music available to many more people than might have heard them otherwise, and have ensured that the CD's remain widely available in the Amazon Marketplace afterlife to anyone who wants to catch up on what they missed. So yay for that.
After 11-12 years of being locked in some forbidding, Dick Cheney-style netherworld in some record company's vault, the video for Pee Shy's "Little Dudes" single has finally surfaced. So for anyone who ever wondered what the Sisters were like before they were Sisters, back when Jenny was still in the mix, Bil was just being Bil and the Shy's classic configuration was fully and absolutely in command of Da House, feast your eyes:
I'm not sure if this video ever got any airtime in 1996, so for the past decade it's been an object of intense curiosity among Pee Shy fans -- as eagerly sought after as those original Velvet Underground acetates, or a missing Gutenberg Bible, or maybe even the lost tapes of the Butt Chakra sessions. Many have embarked on manic quests to find this footage only to be driven mad in the attempt, waking up years later, naked and in a drunken stupor, in the middle of some uncharted Antarctic penguin colony just as the ice sheet is breaking off into the sea amid an ecological apocalypse.
Did I say "many" have done this? I meant "none." Can you tell that at this point I'm basically just making shit up?
But that's a sign of how amazed I am to have stumbled upon this piece of Shy history. Look at how young they are! (Not that they're not still young now, of course.) Look at how much hair Cindy and Mary have, and Jenny's blond little 'do, and that wonderful clarinet waggling back and forth, and the ivory Bernini accordion that doesn't seem quite as beat up as in the Sisters' 2004 Rothko video. Mainly, just feel that vibe among them, back when the band was cohesive, still having fun and seemingly about to conquer the alternative-pop music world. (I was predicting the cover of Spin within six months. Of course, I also didn't think they needed to add a bass player. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong.) Witness the assemblage of charisma and brains and talent that so captivated audiences all the way from the Blue Chair record store to the Stone Lounge.
Now, granted, this video takes a somewhat creepy Mary Kay Letourneau-ish turn beginning around the 2-minute mark, freaking out even the child actors by 3:19. Clearly, this was just an attempt to match the light-hearted theme of the song, unless maybe the label was trying to provoke controversy. Either way, it seems unlikely that this approach would be able to fly nowadays (as one of the folks on the YouTube page asks, "Did Debra LaFave write this song?").
One could also question: Is the video even chronologically accurate? Jenny and Cindy were both pushing 30 when they wrote the song. "When you were born I was already 10." Do the math. I never got the impression that the real-life Little Dudes were 12, as is portrayed here. And what self-respecting Nineties kid was going to sit around playing Pong? Wasn't that a game for ironically detached Gen-Xers?
But that's just quibbling. The label's hopes for "Little Dudes" to become a sleeper hit never came true; one could even suggest that the company was way too fixated on this one song, when by '95 the band had written stronger ones that would have made much better singles. (*Cough* "Yellow Race Car." *Cough*). But at least they've left us this glimpse back to the early days of this musical dynasty, and for that the universe can be grateful.
Bonus round: Can't get enough of "Little Dudes" reminiscences? OK, maybe you'd like to join these folks, all of two of them, who are having a grand old time debating what the heck these cryptic lyrics mean. "I love this song because it's so perverted," writes one.
For anyone who's interested, looks like those message boards at American Laundromat are finally back. And there's a special corner all set up for discussions of everyone's favorite accordion-, bass- and drum-slinging trio -- even though it's accompanied by some disquieting hints that the Holy Trinity have retreated into their own state of Salinger-like seclusion:
What can we say about these ladies? Even though they are on a semi-indefinite hiatus, we still have the candle lit for an eventual reunion, new 48 song CD, and world tour...
Semi-indefinite? Isn't that term they used for the Iraq war? Or was that a "slam dunk"?
Anyway, this has me wondering anew what's going on with the Sisters' official site, which apparently expired on April 24 (looks like the name can be renewed for a year for only $30, according to these folks, in case anyone's thinking of getting them an early Christmas present). Or why the MySpace page for that Cinnamon Girl Neil Young tribute lists Cindy, not the Caulfield Sisters, as contributing.
I just hope all is well with them (aside from that whole new-motherhood, not-sleeping-for-two-years thing that Mary has no doubt been going through). Then again, Cindy has always said they're taking a zen approach to this Caulfield Sisters business. And it has always seemed like her projects take a long time to percolate. They happen when they happen, and the results are almost always glorious. So I'm happy to light another candle, set it by the window and wait.
So I finally got around to packing and took a cab to the airport and now my Southwest flight has been delayed at least an hour because of bad weather and I figure, hey, I might as well use this free wifi connection they have here, and then I start to think about the YouTube video I posted here a few hours ago and start to wonder if maybe, just maybe some performance of the Sisters has been immortalized here in this corner of Googledom Rupert Murdochdom, and then ...
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
I'm fainting. I need to lie down. I think I might have the vapors, whatever they are.
Watch. Just watch:
Update: My apologies for initially maligning YouTube by insinuating they were part of the Murdoch empire. I was thinking of MySpace. YouTube, of course, is part of the Google empire, which is collecting an enmormous database on all our web surfing, searching and purchasing habits, no doubt leading someday to some massive data leak that will embarrass 86 percent of the sentient beings on earth. Yes, I'm expecting lots of shamefaced questions about why I seem so interested in pee shyness.
Anyway, I still can't get over this clip -- many, many thanks to the person who posted it. Midway through watching it I realized with a shock that I was finally getting a chance to see the Sisters perform. The last time I witnessed Cindy slinging that accordion she was in Pee Shy, and it looks like she's picked up a few more moves since then (I don't remember her swinging it like a pendulum, for instance). Wondrous, wondrous, wondrous stuff.
Believe it or not, I've had a lot of things to say here, just haven't been motivated to say them. But I hate doing what I really should be doing right now, which is packing, so here goes:
American Laundromat got a new website a while back. Yay! But apparently they're running out of Say It With Fire, so y'all better hurry and stock up.
Um, what's the deal with the Sisters' official site?
Kristin's probably been on tour with Gloria Deluxe in support of the new show, Must Don't Whip 'Um, although I'm really just guessing about that.
The amazing Gina Vivinetto has a a blog of her own to showcase her musings and let the lame-ass St. Petersburg Times know once and for all what sorts of coolness it's missing. What, that's not enough Vivinettiness for you? OK, go listen to Gina sing in her wonderful band The Peabodies, or go listen to her sing in her wonderful early-1990s band Bullwinkle (what? no 400 Blows? or Oh My Stars? and did anybody else here not know that "Mess" wasn't always a-capella?), or hell, go hassle Boulevard magazine to see if they still have any copies of that back issue with her award-winning short story "Avert Your Eyes." Still not enough? Well, in that case you might be out of luck.
The current issue of Magnet magazine includes XIII, by Pee Shy's old stablemates Home, in its cover story on "Lost Classics," the "75 underappreciated albums that have graced our pages over the last 14 years," blah blah blah. Uh, didn't the cable channel TNT used to brag about having the Lost Classics, or was that something else? Home's mention is very appropriate and deserving, and kudos to the editors for noticing XIII and not mindlessly joining the usual critical stampede for XI. But ya know, I keep looking and for some reason still haven't found the item about Pee Shy. 'Cause you know there's got to be one.
rumors are flying they are in the studio weekly now april 2007 will spring
I wonder: was that intended to be a haiku?
Finally, a treat. I never got around to posting anything about that magical, joyous event that was Come The Freak On 2006 in St. Pete, but here's some video from the second evening of Jenny performing "It's the Love." For anyone who never saw Pee Shy back in the day, it's a tiny glimpse of what you missed. Just squint and pretend that Cindy's somewhere off to the side holding an accordion, and that it's Mary instead of Eric holding the guitar:
By the way, Jenny totally rocked the clarinet on the Homehunters' song "Burden," too.
