Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop: The Last Gasp

A look at Jeff Beck's 1989 album Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop, with Terry Bozzio and Tony Hymas.

The Kung Fu of Ten Hands: A Chat with Paul Slavens

A discussion about the relatively obscure classic Ten Hands' 1988 release Kung Fu...That's What I Like, with very special guest Paul Slavens.

Relevant Links: An older text post on Alphabet Girls Vol. 1

The extended edition:

The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 1: "Bellybutton" at the Root

Looking back on the time after I graduated from high school and began my undergraduate degree, I can clearly see how I tried to cling to my life in Austin while a new one stretched out before me in Denton. I traveled with alarming regularity on the weekends, and tried to maintain a career as a record store employee over longer breaks. During my first summer break in 1990, I got a job working at the Hasting’s at Barton Creek Mall. Predictably, I discovered a lot of music during that time. Jellyfish, a band that was brought to my attention by a fellow employee and working musician, was one such discovery. Although their debut Bellybutton seemed like a retro-pop curiosity at the time, in the long term it became hugely influential on me.



Just for context, when Bellybutton was released, 2 Live Crew’s lewd and ultimately substandard rap had created a McCarthyesque witch hunt for profanity and lewdness in popular music. Jellyfish’s album cover, if examined closely, is a naked female body covered in what looks like blue gel toothpaste. When I purchased my copy of Bellybutton back then, it was folded to hide the perhaps more socially sensitive areas of the cover art. I have not seen this in subsequent pressings of the album. Bellybutton found its way into my CD stacks at the end of that summer, and subsequently went back up to Denton with me when I returned to the dorms.

Aside from being located across the street from the music building, Bruce Hall was lacking many amenities back then. Truthfully, we were secretly proud that there was no air conditioning, and that there was one centrally located TV for the entire dormitory. We were often left to ourselves for entertainment, and listening to music was a pervasive social activity. By this time, I had acquired a decently idiosyncratic collection of CDs, so when people would congregate in our room to hang out I prided myself on having a constant supply of offbeat tunes.

Although I was pushing a lot of King Crimson in those days, when Bellybutton found its way into the player, it quickly became the favorite of many. The sunny exterior of Jellyfish’s songs harbors a dark, bittersweet lyric narrative, and for nearly two years, this incomprehensibly well-crafted juxtaposition kept Bellybutton in rotation as it was requested by a seemingly endless queue of people living in my wing. It started with my roommate, but very soon, anyone coming to hang out asked me to put it in. I listened to Bellybutton over and over, and in all those playings, it never really got old.



Instead, the more I listened to it, the more deeply it affected me. As I slowly understood the meaning of Bellybutton, and also saw its meaning unfold to my friends, I realized that it harbored more than dark commentary, but a life-weary angst that belied the age of its members. Concurrently, the harmonic and melodic complexities of the album seemed to have a nearly endless depth which, I would find out later, the band could render live with consummate ease.



Over the next decade, I found that I was not alone. Although Jellyfish never rose far above a cult following, they inspired a whole wave of underground power pop in which I, for a time, also swam. Their career as a band was regrettably short-lived, but their albums and the albums that their members made in subsequent years drove my musical interests throughout the 90s. Just by keeping track of what Jellyfish’s members did after the band's demise, I came across some amazing music.

Earlier this year, I did a retrospective on Rush’s catalog. The length of their timeline lends itself well to this sort of coverage, and as a whole, I think that it represents the role that Rush plays in my overall musical concept. In their own way, Jellyfish played a similar role, but their catalog is so small that a similar retrospective won’t do them a similar justice. Therefore, for this new project, I plan to recreate my ascent up the Jellyfish family tree, and hopefully shed light on a succession of albums that bent my ideas about what were possible in pop music.

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The Year in Rush Part 7: Focus on the Song

I took the first few steps in my music education degree while living in the ad hoc “music dormitory” at UNT, Bruce Hall. Although I was a pretty active musician for a high school kid, this was an entirely different environment with a ridiculously high level of musicianship. There was also an unfortunate bouquet of jazz snobbery that, as an insecure freshman, was hard to ignore. With a world-class 18 year-old bassist across the hall warming up on Portrait of Tracy every day, it felt a bit bourgeois to examine Presto too closely.  A self-taught garage band bassist like me seemed to have no place, so my playing relationship with Lee abruptly ended late in 1989. The last passage in Rush's catalog I learned was the bass break at 3:15 in Show Don't Tell.



Rush generally conceived their work was as "instrumentals with words,” but in the 90s, they made a concerted effort to hone their effectiveness as songwriters,  This had a noticeable effect on the energy of their music. Show Don’t Tell notwithstanding, if you look at Presto in terms of the flash and bang of their previous work, overall, it doesn't seem to add up. For example, Rush consistently cites The Pass as one of their favorite songs. Certainly, I loved it when it came out, but I found its relatively laid-back energy and circumspect melancholy perplexing. Seeing it performed live on the Presto tour, however, was revealing for both the song and the album as a whole.


I eventually became a staunch advocate of Presto, although I admit that I was confused by some of Rush's musical choices on the album. The title track from next album, Roll the Bones, was also controversial amongst their fan base for its infamous spoken-word “rap” section. Time has allowed me to appreciate this experiment, but the mohawk-endowed skull from the video is still a bit cringe-worthy.

Rush's endeavors to become songwriters in the 90s did not transform  them into a power pop group, but on Roll the Bones, it did result in a more radio-friendly sound. Although their intention to simplify for the sake of accessibility sometimes felt a little forced, there are tracks when Rush’s cleverness lends itself incredibly well to pop songwriting.

Roll the Bones also recaptured some of the vigor that characterized Rush's streamlined trio sound, which I missed on their previous releases. When the album came out in 1991, I had moved downstairs and around the corner into a room at the base of a stairwell, and I was much more confident, perhaps even a bit brash, about my identity in our little community. I vividly remember bringing he album home from the Sound Warehouse store on Fry Street and, putting my oversized stereo speakers in the doorway, defiantly flooding the halls with the crackling energy of Dreamline.

It’s important to note that from here on out, things seem to change for Rush quickly in retrospect because the pace of their output began to slow. Up until the mid-80s, they released an album virtually every year. In the 90s, they averaged two or three years between albums. The inspiration behind the changes in their sound became more difficult to track, and I think that the gap between their studio-influenced compositions and their live persona resulted in some inconsistencies. The albums from this period may not have won Rush any new fans, but they are still stronger releases than the best albums of the majority of early 90s bands.

Jump to the previous post in the series here.
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"Dead Man's Party:" A Halloween Tradition

Perhaps over the years, I've just become a stick-in-the-mud.  Unless I have a really clever costume, I don’t usually dress up for Halloween, and, at least in recent times, I make a concerted effort to avoid refined sugar. To most, it would seem that the holiday is a bust for me, but I do have a few very specialized traditions that I keep every year. During my more bachelorish times, I would invite over some unsuspecting victims and watch Peter Jackson’s voodoo zombie splatterfest Dead Alive. That ritual has fallen by the wayside in recent years, but another that still remains is to put Oingo Boingo’s 1985 classic Dead Man’s Party in rotation for a few days.



This tradition has its roots in high school, when my old friend Snoopy and I decided the piercing Jokeresque stare of Danny Elfman, who was then lead singer and songwriter for Oingo Boingo, harbored a macabre genius. Before his scoring career took off with the soundtrack from the first Batman movie and the now ubiquitous Simpsons theme, several songs from Dead Man’s Party were featured in television and films, not the least of which was the song Weird Science.



Dead Man’s Party is as a particularly well-evolved example of the post-punk/new wave/ska movement and overall, I think that it truly is a classic 80s album. Its distinctively wild-eyed menace is creepy in that enjoyable, wax-museum sense, where an immobile Frankenstein in the shadows with bolts in his neck is cause for simultaneous unease and glee. Although Snoopy and I pegged it as having a somewhat pleasantly morbid undercurrent, Dead Man’s Party did not become an official “Halloween Album” until a couple of years later.

In 1989, after being in college for just a few months, I went to a Halloween drumline party in the country with some people I knew from marching band. It turned out to be a somewhat bizarre scene. Freshman members of the drumline were being subjected to a knuckle-busting round of “rat trap roulette” while others were being recruited to throw an old piano onto the bonfire. This latter activity was particularly cathartic to those of us enrolled in the brutal piano classes that UNT used to weed out the weaklings.  The piano crashed into the flames with a thunderous clap and, as its frame began to warm and its strings began to break, it conjured an incredible death knell that lasted for almost an hour.  John Cage himself could not have come up with a better performance.

As the din began to die down, I remember standing on a hill and looking out on the scene with a mixture of admiration and disbelief.  Then, from behind me, I heard the distinctive synth-marimba intro of Just Another Day, the opening track from Dead Man’s Party, rolling out from the stereo in the house.



The hosts played the entire album at length to its end, and I was pleased see people I didn’t know singing along with even its deeper cuts. Since then, I have played Dead Man’s Party every year almost without fail for the Halloween season and strangely, the album has transcended nostalgia. I still find it to be a pleasurable way to acknowledge the holiday, even if I am not doing anything particularly festive.

These days, Dead Alive is pretty much off the table. I don't think its wife-appropriate, much less kid-appropriate. Perhaps in a few years, when the Little One is a bit older, The Nightmare Before Christmas can replace it as the official Halloween movie, and Elfman’s distinctive croon can make another appearance as the singing voice of Jack Skellington. For now, though, I think that Dead Man’s Party would be great to have on as we get on our costumes and get ready to go trick-or-treating for the first time.

Many Steps to the Stones: "Goat's Head Soup"

I have never really been into the Rolling Stones. My younger years were defined by a progressive rock high horse that arrogantly looked down on their loose mimicry. As time moved on, though, it seemed like I was missing out on something. I noticed it during the first half of my undergrad, when I lived in an un-air conditioned dormitory called Bruce Hall. Bruce was across the street from the music building, so despite its comparatively dilapidated state, it was the ad-hoc “music major” dormitory. I made many close friends there, many of which were incredible musicians and many of which I m sadly no longer in touch with. The whole experience was eye-opening, to say the least.

When I started living in such close quarters with all of these phenomenal musicians, I was surprised to find out that a lot of them were into the Stones. Many of the justifications they used for their adoration sounded uncomfortably similar to those I had for my own unconditional Rush fandom. One of my closest friends, the self-proclaimed Mr. McKoolChords, would often describe Keith Richards as the “best worst guitar player ever.” There were also several Mick Jagger impersonators in my hall that developed heated rivalries, sometimes spontaneously erupting into hilarious competitions.

I describe my undergraduate as occurring in two halves because it was bifurcated in 1993 by a reflective, soul-searching year away from the concerns of the music major. During this “sabbatical,” I continued my retail career as a Sound Warehouse record store employee. One of the few benefits of any record store gig was the promotional materials. Promo CDs, which were arguably for in-store play, could be “held” by employees and adopted when promotion was done. The best stuff was almost always snatched up by the check-in guy. The day that the materials for the remastered Stones back catalog came in, however, he just happened to have the day off and I was fortunate enough to work the early shift. It seemed like the chance to hop on board and figure out what I had been missing, so by the power of the Post-it note, I laid claim to three albums: Exile on Main Street, It’s Only Rock and Roll, and Goat’s Head Soup.

Those three albums have generally sat in my record collection since them. I think I have played the first two a couple of times, but I can’t remember if or when I have ever listened to Goat’s Head Soup. Of the three, it has the least amount of fan support, but I still could not bring myself to get rid of it. Recently, I had a desire to get some new music, but really no good leads on anything interesting. It seemed like it might round out the mix, so after eighteen years, I finally put it in rotation. Despite the criticisms that the average Stones fan seems to level at this album, it kind of clicked for me.

The Stones have always had more attitude than substance in their work, but my recent encounter with Goat’s Head Soup has forced me to consider the possibility that the Stones' attitude may actually be their substance, and possibly their most relevant innovation. By pure charismatic will, the Rolling Stones convince their listeners that they are the sexiest, baddest boys around, despite the fact that they clearly aren’t. I mean, if I was a woman and Jagger whispered in my ear like he does on Angie, I would probably be genuinely frightened. Still, when he does it, it somehow works. This song was always one of Mr. McKoolChords favorites, and it is impossible for me to hear it without thinking of him fluidly switching between the melodramatic wail of Jagger and the drunken swagger of Richards. It is his impersonations that make the song captivating and memorable for me – probably more than the song itself.

Four Hands of Ten: Paul Slavens and the Dead Kenny G's

The setting: August 1989.  My parents had just walked out of my dorm room in Bruce Hall at the University of North Texas.  For the first time, I was alone and acutely aware of the changes I was about to go through, and to say the least I was in a state of silent panic.  My roommate, whom I owe a debt of gratitude for putting up with me as I learned to be a roommate myself, suggested we go see a band called Ten Hands.  Music can be a salve when life changes around you, and Ten Hands not only provided the soundtrack and many Thursday evening social events during that confusing time, they also ended up being an influence on my personal musicking (their bassist was the first person I had ever seen play a Chapman Stick).

Ten Hands struggled to “make it” in those pre-internet days, and, sadly, despite having incredible material, stellar musicianship, and great, great live shows, after probably too long they fizzled out.  There were many incarnations of the band, but my introduction came in the form of a tape called “Kung Fu….That’s What I Like.”  If you were around me at all during this period in my life, I probably stuffed that tape down your throat like it was the cure for what was ailing you.

Ten Hands released three CDs, but I have to say that if you were not there during the time that they were in their ascendancy, you missed it.  None of their recordings came close to capturing what the band did live, and filming a band in those days meant lugging a huge and unsexy camcorder around.  As a result there is very little documentation of them in their prime.  The album that should have been their breakout was “Be My Guru,” which you can still get, and its good, but due to a production problem, you will have to turn up your stereo ridiculously loud to even hear it.  I’m afraid you just had to be there.

Just because a band dies off, however, does not mean that its members do.  Some members of Ten Hands became sought-after studio musicians, while others quit the music scene altogether.  Last year, two ex-Ten Hands members had albums that made my personal top ten, and since you are probably not going to run across these albums anywhere else, it’s time for more medicine.

For all intents and purposes, Paul Slavens was Ten Hands.  He was the lead singer and primary songwriter, and his charismatic humor and musical ability was the glue that held the band’s performance together.  After the band dissolved, he eventually became a bit of a personality in the Dallas/Fort Worth area as a radio host.  His self-titled radio show plays every Sunday night at 8 and it’s a great source for getting exposed to new music (that’s where I got into Deefhoof).  Until recently, Slavens was also known for his longstanding Monday night gig at Dan’s Bar in which audience members would tip him to create a song based on a title that they would provide.  These improvised songs were always entertaining, often pretty good, and sometimes ingenious.  Just don't ask for any Ten Hands songs.  Trust me on this one.

Last year, he released his first solo album, “Alphabet Girls Vol. 1,” which is pretty ingenious all the way through.  Each title in this collection is based on a woman’s name that starts with one of the first 14 letters of the alphabet.  In lesser hands, this concept might be considered a constraint, but Slavens effortlessly imbues each piece with unique character.  In some cases, it is not hard to visualize the archetypical smoky piano bar that may have inspired songs like “Abigail” and “Frieda.”  In others, though, the bar is closing and the pianist who has exhausted his role as an entertainer reveals a more intimate and intellectual side in compositions such as “Clara” and the minimalistic “Janice” (this latter song has my favorite lyric delivery of almost any song in 2010).  This is a radio performance of the “L” entry, “Lucy:”

On the total other end of the stylistic spectrum, percussionist Mike Dillon was a very early member of Ten Hands.  Dillon went on to form his own group Billy Goat, and performed with several experimental groups such as The Black Frames, Critters Buggin, and, most visibly, Les Claypool’s Flying Frog Brigade.  His most recent project, however, is the Dead Kenny G’s.  

I know, right? Best.  Name.  Ever.

At least the most appropriate.  Undoubtedly, Kenny G stands for everything that these guys are against: musical ignorance, record company intervention, commercialism, disingenuous performances, managers, et cetera.  These guys are angry and cynical, and have the chops to really drive that point home.  Getting these three innovators onstage in a live setting is like watching nuclear fusion up close with no sunglasses.  Of particular note is saxophonist Skerik, whose electronically altered “saxophonics” never pushes the instrument past what is essentially a saxophone sound.

Additionally, I suspect that Dillon is a soundman’s nightmare.  The entire right part of the stage is dedicated to his percussion setup, which includes drumset, vibes, tabla, electrics, timbales, a whole mess of effects, and God knows what else he is messing with when he disappears.  It’s not just all for show, either - he plays all of it.  Often, he plays vibes and drumset simultaneously, holding combinations of sticks and mallets in both hands.  Still, he plays as if he just can’t get enough sound out of what he has in front of him.

Gotta say, it’s hard to capture that on a recording, but The Dead Kenny G’s album “Bewildered Herd” is right up there with Mr. Bungle and John Zorn as some of my favorite avant-garde punk-jazz-whatever out there.  Incidentally, the ghost of Fela haunts this band, too – they were covering “Zombie”” for awhile.

I apologize for making this one a little longer than usual this time, but there are multiple threads between these two CDs that make me resist breaking them up.  The main point is, despite having watched these two musicians grow in totally different directions (and grow they have), that first Ten Hands show in 1989 is still reverberating in my listening today.