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The Thorns of Life news has me digging back into my Jawbreaker archives like crazy. Which is saying a lot because I never really stop listening to them, rather I cycle albums. I’ve been listening to Dear You non-stop for the last few years but recently dove back into 24 Hour Revenge Therapy which was my favorite thing in the world for years and years. If I’ve ever spoken to you in person about this band then chances are you wanted me to just shut up because I went on and on and on and on about how pretty much everything they ever did was the best thing ever and how I can pinpoint each song to a pretty specific moment in my life. Or maybe the other way around. Regardless, I’m fairly certain Blake is the greatest lyricist to ever put words on paper. Big statement I know, especially coming from a Shane MacGowan fan.

Given that, I’ve picked out a song from 24 for the weekend, it’s always been one of my favorites on the album and it’s called In Sadding Around [listen at last.fm]. Lyrics after the jump so you can play along at home.

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In case you missed my twitter freak out this week, pretty much the biggest news in the music world (for me anyway) is not that Chinese Democracy finally came out, but that Blake Schwarzenbach and Aaron Cometbus are in a new band together. Seriously, this is earth shaking news for me. Both Jawbreaker and Crimpshrine were massively influential to me growing up, and those two working in harmony is enough to make my head pop. Oh yeah, they are called Thorns of Life.

I’m going on record right now and saying that next time they play (apparently they are only doing house shows in Brooklyn?), assuming I’m not on the other side of the world, I’m hopping on a plane and flying to NY for it.

That said, speaking of Chinese Democracy, it actually did come out. Trust me, I’m as shocked as anyone. Before I heard it, and I’m actually listening to it right this second as I type this, I read Chuck Klosterman’s extremely in depth review of it and I think that put me in the right mindset to hear it. Klosterman writes:

“Because McKagan worked in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N’ Roses, he became the de facto arranger for many of those pre-Appetite tracks, and his philosophy was always to take the path of least resistance. He pushed the songs in whatever direction felt most organic. But Rose is the complete opposite. He takes the path of most resistance. Sometimes it seems like Axl believes every single Guns N’ Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N’ Roses has the capacity to do—there needs to be a soft part, a hard part, a falsetto stretch, some piano plinking, some R&B bullshit, a little Judas Priest, subhuman sound effects, a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks, wind, overt sentimentality, and a caustic modernization of the blues… His ambition is noble, yet wildly unrealistic. It’s like if Jeff Lynne tried to make Out Of The Blue sound more like Fun House, except with jazz drumming and a girl singer from Motown.

Throughout Chinese Democracy, the most compelling question is never, “What was Axl doing here?” but “What did Axl think he was doing here?” “

I’m still listening to it, but I can definitely say it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It’s no Appetite, but it’s lightyears better than the Illusions. Man, Obama getting elected sure did bring about change eh?

On the drive home tonight I heard a song by a band I’d never heard of called The Knux, it’s instantly catchy as hell and I was singing along about a minute or so into it. Which I thought was weird since I’d never heard it before, but then I realized the part I’d just sung wasn’t written by them, but by Busta Rhymes in a cameo he did for Tribe on “Scenario.” It’s a great line and I laughed at the reference and wonder who else might pick up on it. The DJ followed that up with the Beastie’s “She’s Crafty” which I also knew by heart. This got me thinking, which albums, not songs but full albums have I listened to so many times that I know every word to every song by heart? I’m sure there’s plenty where I know half the songs or most of the songs, but how many do I actually know every single song inside and out? I made a quick list off the top of my head…

- Beastie Boys - License to Ill
- Gorilla Biscuits - Start Today
- Jawbreaker - Unfun
- Operation Ivy - s/t
- Minor Threat - Out Of Step
- Slayer - Seasons in the Abyss
- Wu Tang Clan - Enter the 36 Chambers

I’m sure there’s others, positive in fact but those were the ones that all rushed into my head the moment I asked myself that question. What about you?

Today would have been Sean Patrick McCabe’s birthday. He would have been turning 37. He died on August 28, 2000. I found an old blog post I wrote about him and thought I’d republish it for today.

I just found a wikipedia article on Ink & Dagger and realized that there really needs to be one for Sean at some point. I don’t recall the first time I met Sean Patrick McCabe in person but it was early 90’s - 93 or 94 perhaps. I’d known him for quite sometime prior to that from the #sxe IRC channel that all 14 of the straight edge kids who had internet connections at the time used to hang out on. He also wrote a lot on his university provided “homepage” which I wish I had archives of all these years later. He quickly became a very close friend of mine, probably because of our similar tendencies towards causing trouble to keep people on their toes although he was much better at it than I was.

Over the next few years we talked hundreds of times about every topic I can think of and I frequently stayed at his apartment when passing through Philly although was never able to return the favor. For a while he worked at Kinkos and a handful of the first Toybox Records releases had printing that was done with his “help.” Before I officially stopped doing Toybox there were only a few records that I had ever hopped to put that had not actually come to fruition. One of those was the Frail Album (Don later went on to Join Sean in Ink & Dagger) and the other was a CD of all the songs from Sean’s first band, Crud is a Cult. Frail never ended up recording the album, but with Crud it wasn’t even that good of an excuse. Sean and I had the whole thing planned out and it was all recorded, the problem was he couldn’t get ahold of the masters. Some were being held by ex band members, some by other labels that had planned to release them. What he had he sent me and I still have some of those songs but wish I had the others. Once I moved to Chicago we didn’t talk as much but it was for no reason other than hectic schedules which I’m finding out is a worse excuse all the time. I did see him a few times when Ink & Dagger was on tour through town but we only talked every few months, if that. A lot of the people who used to look up to him in the early 90’s turned their back on him when he started drinking (as most straight edge kids from that era did) but I never really gave a shit about that, and I think he knew that. I never bought into the “if you aren’t now you never were” bullshit that holier than thou flag wavers used to preach. Sean was my friend and that was way more important that what he did or didn’t drink. Or maybe judgement has just never been my thing.

It had probably been almost a year since I talked to him when I heard that he died a few months earlier. At first I didn’t believe it, it seemed very much like the kind of prank he would have tried to pull on everyone. I tried to contact some of our mutual friends to no avail but a few weeks worth of searching seemed to confirm it. He was found dead in a hotel room in Indiana in 2000, after choking on his own vomit or something like that. I wish I could make the Spinal Tap joke about how they couldn’t prove that it was his own vomit but the whole thing still bums me out too much. His birthday just past about a month ago, November 13th. He would have been 35 this year. For some fucked up reason a lot of people I knew died while I was in High School and College but Sean was the first one to really get to me. He was easily one of the most influential people I’ve ever known and someone that I still think about all too frequently. The crazy thing is, the very few people who knew him that I’ve talked to about him since he died have all had similar memories of him. One of those really bright stars that burned out too quickly.

I’ve written before about my problems managing my iTunes library and it’s just getting worse and worse so I’m posting again in hopes that someone has figured out a solution or something that can help make it a bit less sucky.

So here’s my problem, I have a huge iTunes library. Easily 100 gigs. My main computer is a laptop, which doesn’t have the HD space to hold 100 gigs of MP3s. Moving it to an external HD was my original solution except if for some reason iTunes was launched without the HD being plugged in (by clicking an iTunes link, plugging in my iPhone, or any number of other reasons) then iTunes would not see the external HD, redirect the music links to the internal music folder which of course didn’t contain anything and then break all the links. Upon plugging the HD back in, iTunes would not look at it and the songs would remain broken and would need to be fixed by hand one at a time, or reimported creating duplicates. Argh!

My follow up solution was to have my full library at home, and a separate library, much smaller and mostly newer, on my laptop. Occasionally I’d dump the new stuff on to the old larger library and keep fingers crossed that this synced. Well it never did and I’m back with two different libraries both with tons of duplicates and missing songs, even though the files are there.

This really sucks.