TEAM LAST CALL

Last month, Team Last Call began an inspirational series of columns for English majors addressing issues like masculinity, grammar mastery and the remarkable way in which those two things cancel each other out.

As a general rule, all English majors are fueled by the same basic elements: Pringles, Little Debbie snack cakes and a crushing set of insecurities. And TMZ. We are not an outdoor breed, and as such shouldn’t ever be expected to participate in activities that involve dirt, shirtlessness or roughhousing of any sort. We also have poor motor skills and tend to struggle with things like 1) upper body strength, 2) lower body strength and 4) math.

But we have positive qualities too, such as our ability to write self-help articles. Which brings us to today’s column, in which we will examine the practice of writing for a living and how it relates to fatherhood. There’s nothing quite like theresponsibility for another human life to really drive home the point that, by nature of the fact that you’re an English major, you don’t know how to do anything. Yet, as a father, you’re expected to have all the answers – especially if you’re having a little boy. There are things that you as a father need to teach your son. Tough things. Manly things. Things you know nothing about, like carburetors and leaf blowers and … what do you call those things again? The ones that are always denting your car when you’re not looking? Wives.

No, you don’t know about any of that stuff because you, the English major, were too busy crying over Artax dying in the Swamps of Sadness to learn anything useful growing up. While the other little boys played soccer and earned their Boy Scout badges, you spent your summers pretend-making out with Winnie Cooper in your elbow and trying in vain to get past Soda Popinski on Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.

But it’s important not to let the past get you down. Just because you never learned how to “change a tire” or “fix a leaky faucet” or “develop pectoral muscles” doesn’t mean you’re not fit to be a proper male role model. Your son will simply have a different kind of father figure to look up to and emulate. The kind that has Lady Gaga on his iPod. On the plus side, by the time everyone’s kids are all grown, yours will be able to punctuate circles around the rest of them. Sure, he might be plump and dateless, but he’ll be able to write a sonnet like it’s going out of style. Which it undoubtedly has.

While some little boys grow up with images of their fathers fighting crime and rescuing kittens from burning buildings and felling trees with their bare hands, your kid will have visions of you curled up on the couch with a laptop balanced on your stomach, watching reruns of What Not To Wear when you thought no one was looking. But in your sedentary state, you’ll be able to teach him such invaluable manly lessons as 1) A scoop top and an A-line skirt can have a slimming effect on the hips, 2) It is too possible to make a meal out of Easy Cheese, and 3) As long as you’re wearing sweatpants, things like tissues and napkins will always be redundant.

Some little boys learn how to fish, or build furniture, or design little wooden racecars that speed down the track and win first prize like the one in that Subaru Forester commercial. You know the one I’m talking about. The one that makes you feel like a horrible father, even if you’re a teenage girl, for not knowing how to help your son build a car like that. Well, winning first place in the Pinewood Derby might seem nice for some kids, but it’s not in the cards for yours. Your son is going to enjoy advantages of a different variety. Other fathers could teach him how to drive a stick shift or properly grill a steak. I guess that’s exciting, if you’re into “knowing” how to “do stuff.” But only you, the English major, can teach him the crucial, panty-dropping art of correct semi-colon usage; you can also teach him the best way to hand a credit card to the plumber, how to eat his weight at Hot Diggity Dog and, most importantly, how to hide it from his wife when he gets home for dinner.

In summation, English majors have nothing to fear when it comes to fatherhood, apart from the certainty of failure. But other than that, you’ll do just fine. And who knows? If you keep your child focused on the right kind of activities, maybe in a few years he can show you how to knock out Soda Popinski.

“I don’t necessarily want to have the first line of my obituary be, ‘He played a good organ patch.’”

Ah, the plight of the sideman, the second fiddle, the often-faceless, underpaid, rarely laid unsung hero of rock and roll. As far as the breed goes, Franz Nicolay is among the more recognizable, as much for his kooky handlebar mustache as his high-profile gigs in The Hold Steady and the World/Inferno Friendship Society. He’s a magnificent musician, an accomplished guitarist and accordion player whose fired-up piano is often the match to the Hold Steady powder keg. But does Nicolay get the glory? Of course not. He’s a sideman.

So what’s a Number Two to do? For better or worse, the answer in most cases is “solo album,” which is music speak for “vapid, masturbatory disaster.” Ever hear a Gene Simmons record? OK then.

In Nicolay’s case, however, the solo album is a revelation in its own right – if not for breaking new ground musically, then for illuminating exactly where his bands get a good portion of their spunk from [he also performs in Balkan klezmer band Guignol and chamber-pop collective Anti-Social Music]. Major General, released in January, is a curious, vibrant record that skips audaciously from all-American barnburners to gypsy romps. Flanked by a roster of musicians that includes members of World/Inferno and Dresden Dolls, Nicolay bellows cathartically and operatically about everything from subway graffiti to Jeff Penalty, a replacement singer for the Dead Kennedys. The music can be melodramatic and over-earnest, but at least it’s honest. Above all, it’s obvious that the album is less of a vanity project than a means for Nicolay to find a home for some the nomadic songs wandering around his brain.

“I didn’t feel like I had much to prove,” says Nicolay. “I had just built up a collection of songs that didn’t have an obvious home in World/Inferno or The Hold Steady or any of the other bands. A couple of the songs I’ve had around forever, and I just felt like, ‘Even if I don’t ever play this song live, I just want to get it on a record and move on.’”

Major General is the beneficiary of Nicolay’s lifelong musical wanderlust. The songs cascade off each other, punk bleeding into gypsy bleeding into – was that a clarinet solo? When isolated, only a few songs (”Jeff Penalty,” “Dead Sailor”) raise the pulse the way a Hold Steady song might, but as a whole, the album captivates with its sheer scope and ambition.

“I get excited about novelty,” Nicolay says. “I’ll get really excited about Balkan music for six months, and then I’ll get really excited about the Beach Boys for six months. There’s always some tidbit that I’ll get out of each of them about ways to sing background vocals or where you put the glockenspiel overdub or how the string arrangement for a George Jones record differs from a string arrangement on a Divine Comedy record.And all that stuff goes in the cauldron and can bubble up in unpredictable ways.”

Nicolay brings his mustache, his guitar and his botanist friend (he’ll have to explain that one himself) to ABC for a special solo show this month.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

Lancaster Countians get a crash-course in Tuvan culture when Alash Ensemble, a quartet of master throat singers, visits the area for a special performance.

Tuva, a Siberian neighbor of Mongolia and a republic of the Russian Federation, has inspired curiosity around the globe with its singular form of singing, in which the vocalist produces a low, guttural tone and, through careful manipulation of the vocal tract, splinters the tone into two, three or even four notes simultaneously. Depending on the singer’s specific mode of throat singing, the “extra” tones resemble anything from a whistle to a songbird to, in the “kargyraa” style, the cries of a yak. It’s a surreal, improbable-sounding exercise that requires excruciatingly nuanced control of muscles that most humans rarely, if ever, use.

The only thing as unlikely as the sounds these men are producing is the story of Sean Quirk, an Ohio-born, Wisconsin-raised man who now travels the world as manager and interpreter for the group.

Quirk first encountered throat singing while in school in St. Paul, Minnesota. His fascination with an album he heard by master singer Huun-Huur-Tu eventually led him to try the artform for himself – for better or worse.

“I started imitating a couple months after I first heard and was blown away by the music,” he says in a Fly Magazine interview during Alash’s latest North American tour. “I made a lot of bad noises.”

After learning what he could on his own, Quirk earned a Fulbright fellowship and soon packed his bags for the south of Siberia to study at the feet of the masters. Soon after arriving in Tuva in 2003, he met Alash, a group of young men as beloved for their steadfast commitment to tradition as their vision for marrying the music with modern influences.

“They had been an ensemble going on five years at the time and were all members of the newly formed Tuvan National Orchestra,” Quirk recalls. “Being of a similar age, and musicians, they and the orchestra took me on as a student in Tuvan music. Naturally, we became friends, as the orchestra kind of adopted me in a sense, to the point of letting me sit in on the bass doshpuluur [a Tuvan lute], a post which eventually became my official job in Tuva to the present.”

Over the next six years, Quirk would marry a Tuvan woman, have two daughters and set up a permanent home within the culture that still holds his fascination today.

“Nothing can describe hearing and feeling it live. I have been living there a long time and seen a lot of Alash shows, and it still gets me deep each time to hear it up close,” he attests. “People also shouldn’t just expect ‘fancy vocal tricks,’ but rather a deep and richly developed music involving instruments and vocals which simultaneously feels exotic and intimately familiar.”

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

My wife and I found out a few weeks ago that we are going to be having a baby boy. Since that time, I’ve been busy making a mental list of all of the things I need to teach him about being a man, including how to blow a good snotrocket and how to wear blue socks with black pants.
Then I need to teach him how to properly woo a woman, which is something I know a thing or two about, what with me being an English major and all. English majors, if you didn’t know, have been proven by science to be the world’s single sexiest demographic, thanks in part to our way with words and in part to the fact that we can put total lies into print and make them look like actual facts.
I decided to major in English for the same reason that all young men major in English: zero upper body strength. But I also had a desire to pick up women, and I figured that one way to go about that was to learn the seductive art of language. Because everybody knows that nothing’s a bigger turn-on to a college girl than having her grammar corrected.
I could hardly wait to make the ladies swoon with my masterful grasp of semi-colon usage. “Come over here, baby girl,” I’d say. “Daddy is going to punctuate your sentence in ways you never dreamed of. You heard me right, sweet thing. I’m about to parse this verb from the infinitive all the way down to the subjunctive. Trust me when I say that as long as we’re together, my participles will never dangle.”
Pickup lines like these never really “worked” on high school girls, but I always chalked that up their own lack of sophistication. If they couldn’t appreciate some well executed iambic pentameter, then that was their problem. Except for the part where they wouldn’t make out with me, at which point it became my problem. But in college, it would be different. In college, the girls would recognize genius when they saw it.
In college, the girls did not recognize genius. It didn’t take long for me to discover the ugly truth that an English major is about as attractive to college girls as a lip fungus. We are simply not cut from the same cloth as people like McDreamy and McBulge-pants, or whatever his name is, with their “chiseled physiques” and their “salaries that are big enough to live on.” And that, I’m sorry to say, is the kind of man that college girls go for.
English majors, on the other hand, tend to be introverted, lumpy, melodramatic Beta Males who, generally speaking, aren’t considered to be “hunks,” except for in the following sentence: “Once the team captains had selected their players, all that remained on the gymnasium floor were a discarded jock strap and the English major, a blubbering, asthmatic hunk of dough in navy shorts and tennis shoes.”
We do have our good points, though, including our soft, uncalloused hands and our ability to weep openly during that one scene when Frodo gets stung by the giant spider and is carried off by the orcs into the castle of Cirith Ungol. Or maybe that’s just me.
But no matter how hard we try, we English majors will never be the objects of lust for those young college women. We will never be able to titillate them with our gerunds. And our writing, while eloquent and emotive, has zero alcohol content, rendering it virtually useless to nine out of 10 college girls. And the tenth probably has a unibrow or wears Crocs.
But Darwin be damned: in the end, we somehow always find a way to get the girl. I personally succeeded – and this is something I recommend to every English major I meet – by making fart jokes.
Women love it when you can make them laugh. Which is something we English majors rarely do, or at least not without getting naked first. But through the magic of fart jokes, I found a way to use my otherwise useless degree to attract a beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird girl who under normal circumstances would have always looked at me like I had just stepped in a big pile of caca-doodie.
Fast-forward 10 years, and here we sit, awaiting the arrival of our son – who, by the way, has already been proven by science to be the single most beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird baby ever. And that one’s no lie.

Sonic Youth have been perpetuating (and defining) noisy indie rock since 1981. And no one is less impressed by that fact than Sonic Youth, who last month released The Eternal, an album so full of romantic wanderlust and sloppy ferocity that it sounds more like the work of a group a third their age. Apparently, 56 is the new 19.

Where The Eternal doesn’t stray is in its uncompromised approach to rock as a genre to be manipulated, exploited and plundered as a limitless art form. It’s gloriously loud, sparse in places, unnervingly complex in others. While it’s the band’s first indie release in nearly two decades, The Eternal is about as far from a swan song as you can get.

Team Last Call: This album is getting your usual spread of responses, from “This is the best album ever made” to “Here’s more crap from Sonic Youth.”
Steve Shelley: Right! It can go either way. I just try not to get too involved. [laughs] We put a lot of heart and soul into making records together. When you’re finished, you really hope that people will love it and you’ll sell a million albums. But we’ve been making albums for a while, so we kind of know what to expect to some degree: The record will sell OK and some people will really love it and some people will not like it.

TLC: Popular opinion is that The Eternal is a little more raw and ferocious than recent albums. Where do you think that extra fire came from?
SS: I honestly don’t know. Maybe one of the things that influenced this record was, just recently, we had gone out and played Daydream Nation in its entirety, which is a really, really well-liked record of ours. And it’s a bit more of a high-energy record than some of our recent records. We hadn’t played a lot of those songs in almost 20 years, so we had to go back and relearn that album. There’s certain things that you did 20 years ago that you don’t do the same anymore. I think it just made us hear things in our music that we haven’t heard for a while.

TLC: Sometimes it seems so unlikely that a band can make music as challenging as yours and still be able to headline a place like the Electric Factory. What resonates so deeply with your fans?
SS: I imagine it’s the same things that I love about my favorite artists. People are attracted to storytelling or a sound or “I like the way that guy’s guitar tone is.” I don’t know what makes a Sonic Youth fan, but I’m glad they exist. It enables me to play music and enjoy a lot of things that I didn’t really ever think I’d be able to do in this life.

TLC: You just ended a long relationship with the major label system. Does that seem like a big deal to you?
SS: It doesn’t bother me who we make the records for. We’re happy to be on Matador, and there are a lot of things that improved as far as our relationship with our label goes. The good side of working with Geffen is that they never, ever did bother us. When we were making our records, no one ever came by. No one ever asked us to do something differently. We did have all that artistic control that they promise you when you sign the dotted line. I think the things that we had a more difficult time with them were CD pricing a few years ago when CDs were still listing for $18.98, and just business stuff like how they marketed the band. And often we would start a new relationship with someone at the record label – and this happened more than one time – where they would be let go, like, the week before our new album would come out. These people are supposed to help you in the time of a new record.

TLC: You occupy an interesting space between living legends in one respect and, in the pop world, relative anonymity. What’s your perspective on that?
SS: I think we’re kept pretty humble as we travel along. [laughs] A lot of people have not heard Sonic Youth. A lot of people have heard of Sonic Youth, but they’ve never actually heard us. We’re not as popular as whatever music is on American Idol or something like that. But then, you mentioned legends and stuff like that – I think most of the band would deny even being rock stars to you, let alone legends. Thinking about rock star status or legend status is way down on the list of priorities when you’re just trying to live your life.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

There’s some weird love affair between Brooklyn and Bukowski that I have yet to figure out. As reviled for his boorish behavior as he was revered for his blunt, anti-literary poems and stories, Bukowski lived in a world of misery, misogyny and selfish conquest that hardly seems in line with the delicate sensibilities of today’s indie rock scene. And yet, three Brooklyn bands in a row – Chairlift, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart and minimalist pop duo Hank & Cupcakes – have declared their affinity for the old kook during Team Last Call interviews.

The latter even lifted their name from the writer, who called himself Hank in his semi-autobiographical books, and one of his countless sexual adventuresses, nicknamed Cupcakes for her legendarily ample bosom. But beyond their moniker, the husband-and-wife duo of Hank & Cupcakes share very little with Charles Bukowski apart from a brazen, devil-may-care approach to art and the prescribed notions of form and function.

Armed only with a drum kit, a bass guitar and a complete disregard for their own limitations, the two smack and slap their way through herky-jerky dance-pop songs that bristle with sass and sexuality. Hank steers the ship with imaginative, lyrical bass lines that provide both melody and pulse, carefully eschewing flashy showmanship for steady, artful loops. In that sonic sandbox, Cupcakes builds her castle, layering sturdy disco rhythms and fractured rock beats with sultry vocals chiseled on Pat Benatar’s battlefield of love. She plays the drums standing up for maximum vocal power, which is a spectacle, so much force being projected from such a diminutive package.

The same could be said for Hank & Cupcakes’ music, which, while almost comically minimalist, seems all the more ferocious plowing forth without the distraction of competing textures or countermelodies. It’s like the theory that the best way of commanding attention in a noisy room is to talk softly. But as Cupcakes explains, while the duo’s music is almost as much fun to hypothesize about as it is to hear, it’s hardly conceptual.

“There is absolutely no theory involved in what we do,” Cupcakes explains. “We just do it because that is what we find stimulating at the moment. We’re not committed to the minimalist thing. We have no problem adding 10 more players to the band if the music takes us there.”

The media buzz surrounding Hank & Cupcakes belies the fact that they’ve been performing in the States for less than a year. Prior to moving to New York last August, the couple had been playing in bands both together and separately for a decade throughout their native country of Israel. It wasn’t until after a six-month stint studying music in Cuba that the two decided to try their luck in America, where they stumbled upon the idea for their skeletal drum-and-bass arrangements almost accidentally.

“The plan was to come to New York with a tight rhythm section and find more musicians here,” Cupcakes says, “but pretty soon we found ourselves totally turned on by this new sound we were exploring. We started rehearsing on a daily basis and as we progressed, we lost the need to add more instruments to the music.”
The lovebirds preserved their sound for posterity in June, recording a seven-song EP (all in analog) that they hope will be ready for release in time for their trip to PA this month.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

“I hate when people are like, ‘So, if you had to choose …’ Why do I have to choose?”
Julianne Hough was born to dance. She was also born to sing, act, model, write novels, split atoms, cure cancer and apparently anything else on Earth she feels like doing. She’s not really into limitations.
Until last year, the 20-year-old Utah native was best known as the winner of two championships on Dancing With The Stars. She then decided to try her hand at music and, one Juicy Fruit commercial later, was the proud owner of the nation’s number one country album. Now Hough has her eyes set on the movie industry. At press time, the starlet was awaiting final word on her casting in the remake of Footloose, due out in June 2010.

Team Last Call: You were born in Utah, lived in London and then moved to L.A., and yet your first love is country music. How did that happen?
Julianne Hough: Even though I grew up in Utah, it’s very country music-orientated out there. I grew up listening to it with my family. I always felt like this is the kind of music I wanted to sing one day. When I was thinking about my career and where I wanted to take it, people were like, “Well, you should do pop music because you dance.” That’s not really true to who I am. It might work for a little bit, but I want a long career, and this is where my heart is. So we went for it.

TLC: You grew up studying dance, but you’ve called music your first love. At what point did music eclipse the other stuff?
JH: I grew up dancing, singing and acting. When I was in London, I was doing all three. I just more heavily emphasized the dance because I was competing rigorously with it. But the music has always been there. I’ve always wanted to do it. I want to entertain, whether it’s dancing, singing or acting. They all fit together. It’s not like I’m trying to be a singer and an astronaut.

TLC: I read about the audition you did for Footloose, so I figured acting couldn’t be far behind.
JH: As long as it makes sense. I really want to focus on one thing at a time and make sure I do the very best that I can at whatever I’m doing. But the music is the priority for me.

TLC: Since you’re only 20, some people are questioning whether you have the depth of experience to be an authentic country singer.
JH: It’s funny, even though I’m only 20 years old, I’ve lived a pretty crazy life already. I lived away from my family from when I was 10 to 15 in London. I’ve competed all over the world. I immediately graduated from high school and moved out and lived on my own with two thousand dollars – I haven’t asked my parents for a cent yet. Even though I’m 20, I’ve definitely had a worldly life. It hasn’t been sheltered at all. I feel like I grew up really, really fast and had to take on a lot of responsibility. So to me, my age and maybe how I look is 20 years old, but I feel like I’m, like, 30.

TLC: On 20/20, they called you “one of the best dancers on the planet.” Are they right?
JH: Oh my gosh! That’s amazing. That’s a huge accomplishment and an honor to be called that. I don’t know. I’m sure that there’s plenty of better dancers out there. I just happen to be shown on TV.

TLC: You were also number 25 on this year’s Maxim’s Hot List. Is that good news, bad news or no news?
JH: To me, of course it’s flattering, but it’s not like, “Oh my gosh, I’m 25 on Maxim!” I’m gonna take it and be like, “Oh, that’s cool,” and then I’m gonna leave it there.

TLC: What do you make of the fame that comes with being a successful singer and dancer? Is that part of what you’re after?
JH: I’m definitely not after that. There’s people out there who just want to be famous, and then there’s people out there that want to be recognized for their talents and their abilities. I want to do everything. I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to act. I want to do all that, and not because I need the recognition. I want to do it because I love to do it and I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else. It’s so fun and exciting.

TLC: Are you comfortable being in the spotlight?
JH: I think you kind of have to be. But I mean, I’ve noticed a lot of paparazzi lately. If I see paparazzi, I’ll go the other way. I’m not going to ham it up.

TLC: You’re portrayed as a goody two-shoes. Is that image true to life?
JH: I try to be as good as I can. I’m not going to try too hard – otherwise, I’m not going to relax and be myself. But I have nieces and younger siblings. If I were to look up to somebody, I’d want to look up to somebody who’s really cool and down to earth and is still a good girl. I want to be that person too.

TLC: It’s funny that you’re making news just for being well behaved.
JH: I try to be! I think I’m too busy to get in trouble. I don’t know how [other celebrities] get in trouble. They should be too busy to! That’s what my parents’ philosophy was when we were growing up: “Just put ’em in a bunch of lessons so they don’t get in trouble!”

TLC: You won Dancing With The Stars twice, your album hit number one on the country charts, you won Top New Artist at the CMAs. You’ve got all of these accomplishments and accolades. At what point do you think you’ll be satisfied?
JH: Oh my goodness. I’m the type of person that’s always grateful for everything that’s happened. But I want to learn more. I want to accomplish more. I want to just better myself as an artist and as a person. Nothing is ever perfect – it can be great and outstanding, but you can always strive for perfection. And that’s what I go for.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine