Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

Mingering Mike

Review
Playboy.com
May 2007

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Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar
By Dori Hadar
Princeton Architectural Press, 192 pages, Paperback $24.95

Record collectors live for the moments when obsessive hunting for rare vinyl unearths an undiscovered treasure. Dori Hadar, a Washington D.C. criminal investigator and DJ, discovered a different kind of rarity while digging through music at a flea market a few years ago. Browning at the edges and wrapped in plastic painstakingly removed from other albums, he found a series of meticulously hand-drawn record covers filled with blank cardboard discs. These dummy releases were examples of the work of unlikely D.C. artist Mingering Mike, a life-long music fan who channeled his passions and “creative juices” into a vast, fake discography. Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar, is Hadar’s retrospective on this shy and introverted artist’s career and an homage to cover art at a time when digital distribution is eroding the medium.

Mike’s work is a rich homage to familiar themes, a DIY collage of re-imagined funk and soul clichés. Fake blaxploitation film soundtracks (Stake Out) sit next to albums of social commentary (Drug Store). There are catalogs of records from imaginary labels like Spooky, Sex and Nation’s Capitol that would be great subjects for a Numero Group reissue, and some of the promotional lines adorning the labels are hilarious (“Ohio Players Eat Your Hearts Out,” or “It’s so brilliantly good, they couldn’t help but put three albums in this pack”). A few essays and an interview with Mike provide the necessary background to appreciate Mike’s art.

Based on his prolific output, varied roster and sales figures — when you’re playing games, why not go platinum? — Mike would have made Barry Gordy jealous. But his hyperbole and fake career wouldn’t have been as powerful if he didn’t allow reality to seep in. Many characters on his albums were named after or inspired by friends and family, and one live concert album was recorded at the famous Howard Theater, only miles from his D.C. home. Mike’s experiences being drafted and then going AWOL in boot camp in 1970 inspired a series of anti-war covers, including The Two Sides of Mingering Mike, which dramatically depicts the divided singer, one hand reaching for the microphone and one reaching for a rifle. Like some Harvey Darger for the crate-digging set, Mike used the medium of cover art as a way to create a rich fantasy world partially based on his own experiences.

Mingering Mike has kept up with technology and created a MySpace page, which includes samples of his recorded work. The crude a cappella tracks — he can’t play an instrument and hums all the melodies — are revealing, but diminish his charm. Hearing an actual Mingering Mike track takes away from the mystery. His cover art was so visually distinct and poignant, viewers’ minds could run wild, imagining what untethered soul and funk was playing in his head while he was drawing.

Paths of Rhythm: Battles Brains

Interview
XLR8R
April 2007
Link

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In their prime, Bad Brains was transcendent. In 1979, these four African-American punk pioneers from D.C. stormed the music world. They were Rastas capable of rattling your skull with intense rock, then seamlessly shifting gears into loping reggae rhythms and positive vibrations. The recently released concert DVD, Bad Brains: Live at CBGB’s 1982 (Music Video Distribution), hints at the band’s true power. It’s a tantalizing look at one of rock’s most vibrant, and occasionally unstable, groups–one that wouldn’t have existed without the passion and charisma of singer Paul “HR” Hudson.

John Stanier–who saw Bad Brains’ power firsthand at a Florida show in 1989–knows plenty about riveting performances. Originally known for drumming in innovative hard rock outfit Helmet, Stanier now bashes out lock-step grooves for Battles, an aural juggernaut that threads together experimental electronics, guitar riffs, and addictive, jazz-influenced rhythms. While the original lineup of Bad Brains worked on their new album in Baltimore and Stanier awaited the release of the debut Battles full-length in New York, the pair linked up on a telephone call to discuss brotherhood, hallowed punk moments, and the not-so-subtle influence of hip-hop grooves.

XLR8R: Both of you played at New York club CBGB’s back in the day. What was the significance of that venue?

HR: It was an open venue that gave us a way to channel, to release our talent, and I’m very grateful. We came and pulled it together, made it work, expanded our souls, as they say, and there was always a groove on. It was always a very educational experience. We kept the music as authentic as possible.

John Stanier: I agree. For me, it was really more about my old band Helmet. Our second or third show ever was at CB’s. The sound system was amazing. It was definitely one of the best in the city. The people were nice and it was just a cool place to play and run into all your friends. The first time I ever played there, I was sitting behind the drums on a riser where your brother Earl from Bad Brains, The Ramones, Cro-Mags, and all the greats had sat. It was a temple in a weird way.
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Madlib + Peanut Butter Wolf

Interview
Stop Smiling
April 9, 2007
Link

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As a high school student in California, Chris Manak wrote an essay about starting a record label. It’s difficult to imagine that Manak, who would later emerge as Peanut Butter Wolf, had a clear vision even then of how his quixotic label, Stones Throw, would operate.

One thing he didn’t lack was the knowledge — or the hustle — to be a music entrepreneur, having spent years making beats and compilations, spinning records and soaking up hip-hop culture before he founded the label in 1996.

The label’s name reflects the passion and kinship that Peanut Butter Wolf strives for in music. A turn of phrase used by Peanut Butter Wolf’s mother, stone’s throw is something he would joke about with his friend Charles Hicks, a rapid-fire MC known as Charizma. The duo started performing together as teenagers. After a short-lived record deal with a Walt Disney subsidiary, a promising partnership was cut short when Charizma was shot and killed in East Palo Alto in 1993. PBW quit music for six months before returning to beatmaking and DJing. When he founded the label three years later, the first release was “My World Premiere,” a 12” by Charizma and Peanut Butter Wolf.

Otis Jackson Jr., better known as Madlib, is the primary architect of Stones Throw Records’ sonic diversity. A producer known for his prolific output of “dirty ass loops” under various guises, including helium-voiced degenerate Quasimoto and one-man jazz band Yesterday’s New Quintet, Madlib has collaborated with much of the Stones Throw roster, along with other hip-hop underground geniuses like MF Doom and J Dilla. His work ethic — “When I do music, I wake up, do music, go to sleep, that’s it,” he says — stems in part from his musical roots. His father, Otis Jackson Sr., was a 1960s R&B singer; his mother, Senesca, wrote music; and his uncle, trumpeter Jon Faddis, performed with Charles Mingus and played on The Cosby Show theme.

I met Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf before the soundcheck for the Stones Throw Chrome Children tour last fall in the lobby of Chicago’s Metro.
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The Art of Emory Douglas

Review
XLR8R
March 2007
Link

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The history of the Black Panther Party is filled with the bold-faced names of key leaders, martyrs, and political prisoners. But as Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (hardcover; Rizzoli, $35) demonstrates, those images of raising fists and black berets wouldn’t have become such iconic images of black pride without the benefit of Douglas’ bold graphic design and communication savvy.

From 1967, when he laid out the second issue of the Black Panther newspaper, to 1979, when the paper folded, Douglas was the Panther’s official Revolutionary Artist, working mainly in posters and newsprint to spread the party’s beliefs. His rich body of work created a recognizable revolutionary “brand.” His raw, almost Orwellian caricatures of cops as dirty swine, with clouds of flies buzzing around them, helped popularize the term “pigs,” but Douglas was much more multi-faceted. He illustrated powerful political statements; one striking poster shows Bobby Seale strapped to an electric chair with a salivating vulture, representing the government, hovering overhead. Douglas was able to communicate the Panthers’ struggle against poverty and inequality beautifully, creating stunning images of dignified people, fighting injustice with rifles in hand.

Containing a wealth of images, along with interviews with key figures like Kathleen Cleaver and Amiri Baraka, this first-ever compilation of Douglas’ work documents the relationship of art and propaganda to party doctrine and history, while linking the images to the art of related Third World independence struggles. While comparisons between Douglas’ work and that of his 1960s American contemporaries would have been welcome, this volume makes a convincing case that Douglas’ art “provoked a new consciousness.”

Five Star by RJD2

Interview
XLR8R
March 2007
Link

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Expanding upon the themes of the primarily instrumental Since We Last Spoke (Definitive Jux), The Third Hand finds former sampling maestro RJD2 doing his own drum programming, instrumentation, and vocals.

“It got to the point, with sampling on the MPC, where it just got stupid,” RJ says of his new direction. “I was lifting such minute samples, it was just easier to make them myself. Also, I’m a little dude making little records on little independent labels. I’m not in a Just Blaze-type situation where I have the resources to clear all those samples.”

While figuring out the intricacies of placing microphones and engineering, RJ is also grappling with putting feelings into words. “[Songwriting is] the most intimidating and daunting part of making music,” he says. “I’m in awe of people who can put such eloquence in their songs. I feel like words are much more concrete than chords and riffs.” With that in mind, we asked RJ about some of his favorite songwriters.

1. The Teeth
One of my new favorite bands is Philly’s The Teeth; they sound a lot like the early Kinks’ records. They have really great chord progressions and vocal harmonies and are one of the few groups that have impressed me with their writing.

2. The Zombies
I feel like Odessey and Oracle is a record I’m never going to be able to live down. If I built a small list of records that shaped the way I think about music, [this album] would be on it.

3. The Beatles
Everything about them is perfect. The more I listen to Paul McCartney’s singing, I realize he has such clarity–his ability to hit every single note without any melisma is unbelievable. And [their engineers], George Martin and Geoff Emmerich, were really pushing the boundaries.

4. Donny Hathaway
He and Curtis Mayfield are both lyrically inspiring. There are a lot of people I find terribly poetic, and both these guys have written some songs that are amazingly poignant.

5. Radiohead
They know grooves and know how to make it work. It was really exciting to me when they first made that transition to Kid A. It was like the second season of The Wire: the show just kept widening its focus without dumping the previous season. That’s what Radiohead does.

Somewhere: Stockholm, Sweden

Article
XLR8R
January, 2007
Link

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Neither Arctic chill nor a buttoned-down reputation has kept a healthy homegrown hip-hop scene from taking root in Stockholm. The capital city teems with record stores, where you can pick up the latest from local labels like JuJu Records, DvsG (David vs. Goliath), and Raw Fusion, which has successfully exported beat-makers like Up Hygh and Freddie Cruger to the US. Numerous American acts have performed here, especially at now-defunct clubs like Fatmilk and the Jump-Off. You can even check out the “hip-hop school” in the suburb of Farsa, where students learn breakdancing and beat-making.

Sweden’s first hip-hop records were reputedly released in the mid-’80s, adapting American style and slang and setting a template for the genre’s development. Artists rapped predominantly in English until the early ’90s–spurred on by a long-running hip-hop video program called 1200–until The Latin Kings (TLK), a group of Venezuelan and Chilean immigrants from the Stockholm suburb of Botkyrka, started spitting in Swedish, recording their hit album, Välkommen Till Förorten (Welcome to the Suburbs), in a slang dialect known as Rinkeby (named after the highly African-populated suburb of the same name). Stockholm hip-hop names like ADL and Petter followed suit; the latter’s 1999 album, Mitt Sjätte Sinne (My Sixth Sense), helping to usher in a huge expansion in the country’s hip-hop community. Now, rappers like Ison & Fille and Promoe and producers like Drumz, DJ Large, Embee, Breakmechanix, and Soul Supreme are redefining Swedish hip-hop.
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Lily Allen: Mighty Aphrodite :: Is the Foul-Mouthed Sweetheart Really the First MySpace Music Star? Or Did an Old-Fashioned Hustle Push Her Into the Spotlight?

Cover Story
URB
March 2007
Link

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When Lily Allen steps onstage at Chicago’s Double Door, one of the year’s most talked about new singers suddenly becomes an enigma. Her face, framed in strands of jet-black hair and a jade headband, is greeted with applause as she strolls past a trio of horn players limply bobbing to the carnival-esque melody of her song “LDN.” And when she sings, the crowd reacts warmly to her sweet voice and wry lyrics about the dark side of London life-no surprise considering that only a few months ago, critics were tripping over each other to find new ways to praise her breezy debut album, Alright, Still.

But on this, the final stop of her first American tour, England’s Lily Allen is more than just hype generated by glowing reviews and MySpace downloads. She is a slightly nervous 21-year-old squarely in the spotlight. She sings softly but not quietly, bantering briefly with the crowd between songs and periodically borrowing a lighter from the front row to spark a cigarette. She is far from a seasoned vet, but she shows cheeky confidence. After she announces that the two new songs in her abbreviated set might sound terrible (they don’t), she plunges right in. Allen is just being herself, which, more than any buzz or online marketing, has made her a singer who is capable of more than a few hit singles.

“I’d tell you all to buy my album,” she deadpans, “but it won’t actually be out here until January.”
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Payback for a Hip-Hop Pioneer

Interview
Chicago Tribune
January 12, 2007

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“The Payoff Mix,” a Frankenstein according to one of its creators, was a song that raised questions that still haunt artists and record labels.
In 1983, New York producer Steve Stein and his friend Douglas DiFranco, a studio engineer, created the tune, a technically precise and occasionally humorous reworking of “Play that Beat Mr. D.J.” by G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid, and entered it in a remix contest sponsored by the Tommy Boy label.

While it wasn’t the first track to juxtapose samples, it was certainly memorable. Recording under the name Double Dee & Steinski, the pair blended the original track’s early hip-hop beats with dozens of unauthorized musical samples including a snippet from a Boy George song and a Humphrey Bogart vocal clip from “Casablanca.”

The duo went on to record two similar tracks, “The James Brown Mix” and”History of Hip-Hop,” which together with “The Payoff Mix” are collectively known as The Lessons, before amicably splitting up in 1985. The pair received$100 and a few T-shirts for their contest victory at the time, but the tracks have since lived on as early examples of the potential and artistry of sampling.

“There was nothing that got in our way, certainly not copyright,” said Steinski, who appears at the Smart Bar on Friday. “The vapor and fog of intellectual property was not so thick as it is now. We had completely molded this piece and made this Frankenstein monster.”
While “The Payoff Mix” received limited radio play after it won the contest, the “monster” never saw official release, since clearing all the samples would have been a nightmarish task for the Tommy Boy legal staff.(While numerous bootleg versions of the tracks have been pressed, Steinski says the original prize from Tommy Boy is the only money he’s ever made from The Lessons.)
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Greenskeepers: Character Study

Interview
XLR8R
December 2006
Link

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House music has eccentric artists aplenty, but few can consistently turn out tracks with the twisted humor of Greenskeepers and keep a straight face. A live house outfit from Chicago, started by former golf caddies Nick Maurer and James Curd, the group delivers serious, floor-burning funk amped up with silly and endearing lyrics. They’ve turned The Silence of the Lambs psycho Buffalo Bill into a house diva (on “Lotion”) and revived the career of Fantasy Island midget Hervé Villechaize in the music video for their song “Filipino Phil.”

Now a quartet–with the inclusion of bassist Coban Rudish and guitarist/keyboardist Mark Share–Greenskeepers has just released Polo Club on San Francisco’s OM Records. Overflowing with loony lyrics and an excellent Huey Lewis cover, it begs the question: Where do these guys come up with this stuff? XLR8R spoke with Rudish, who comes from a very animated and artistically inclined family, about where he gets his creative inspiration.

XLR8R: Tell me about your brother, who works as an animator.
Coban Rudish: My older brother Paul started out as a character designer on the Batman cartoon, then worked at Hanna-Barbera. Then he moved on to [Cartoon Network show] Dexter’s Laboratory as a character designer and storyboarder, which led to Powerpuff Girls. Then he did Clone Wars, the Star Wars cartoon, and won an Emmy for it. Now he’s trying to start his own studio in partnership with the Orphanage, a computer-effects studio that wants to do 3-D features. They already hired on Genndy Tartakovsky (who created Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls). Paul is kind of Tartakovsky’s right-hand man. And he is a dork just like me. We talk about Star Wars all the time and have our own dork support system.

It seems like this creativity is a very big part of the family, since your dad Rick also drew.
It was a big part of growing up in my household, since my dad was an artist. But his main interest was horses. While he was in veterinary school, he was caught drawing a horse by an art teacher, who then got him to switch to art school. He graduated in 1964 and was recruited by Hallmark. He was drafted to go to Vietnam before he could start, but avoided real service by doing propaganda illustrations. After he finished that, he went to work at Hallmark. Then my dad started up a little farm and raised horses. The cutesy Hallmark art was kind of his way to afford his hobby. He also judged horse shows and was actually pretty high up in the Arabian Horse Association, which is unfortunately now associated with that dumbass [Michael] Brown, [director of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina].

Did you and Paul draw a lot with your father?
We would sit in his studio, across his drawing table in our high chairs, and draw along. Of course, when my dad would put on a Bee Gees record’ would get distracted and dance, while Paul would keep drawing.

How did your dad become involved with Rainbow Brite?
Hallmark decided they needed a property to compete with Strawberry Shortcake. My dad was asked to help create the character. Of course, my dad put a horse in it. Mattel picked up licenses to do toys, and then it kicked into gear and they made a full-length movie.

Did you get to work on the movie at all, since you were a kid at the time?
My dad went to work for the studio that made the movie–he was the art director–so Paul and I got to go and help design characters. Our names are in the credits as character designers. I designed the wise old wizard-sprite in the movie. Paul and I got to sit in with the writers, kind of like kiddie consultants.

Was there any notoriety to being the kid whose dad created Rainbow Brite?
I definitely tried to use it to my advantage trying to get the girls at school to have a crush on me. That’s also the reason I started playing music, I’m not afraid to admit.

How does Greenskeepers capture that sense of fun so many bands lack?
I think it’s a little more magical than that. Nick and Jim started Greenskeepers, and Nick is just a silly dude. He’s just a crazy, fantastical mind. At the same time, that vibe comes naturally for all of us.

How did you guys come up with “Lotion?”
I think Nick came up with the idea. Mark came up with the guitar riff and Nick just started flowing with the creepiness. I personally thought the song was a joke, and lo and behold, it was the breakout hit of the record.

Was it tough for you to adapt to playing house music?
In my mind, it was electronic disco, in many ways. I was disappointed with the way the hip-hop stole from all these old records I had. It was like, if you like that beat, let me play you the real song by Roy Ayers, because it’s even better. But James is so good at disguising, and picking and editing things.

What inspired Polo Club?
The title track was one of Nick’s whims. He started singing “polo club” over and over again. We were like, ‘Why the hell do you want to get into the damn polo club?’ We try not to be political–we usually just try to put some humor back into things–but it was a ‘Screw you’ to rich people. And once Mark re-edited it, it sounded awesome.

It seems like a real ’80s vibe is going on here with the Huey Lewis cover and the Talking Heads-style singing.
People talk about the David Byrne stuff, but that’s just what came out. We weren’t thinking about it at the time. I grew up in the ’80s, so when I started digging in my mind for rock riffs, that’s what I looked for. We’re products of where we came from, and I listened to a lot of INXS songs growing up.

Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68

Review
Stop Smiling
November 2006
Link

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If you were booking jazz shows in Chicago in the late ’50s, a press release with the following exhortation might have crossed your desk: “Be good to your mind’s mind/eye Earthlings… Give is a chance to do what all Earthlings must do before they cross the River Styx… be bombarded with the living-cosmic-soul-force-vibrations of Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra!!!!!” It’s a bold and wildly eccentric pitch for a band to make during the Eisenhower era, or any era. But it also boldly proclaims the unapologetically deep philosophical and musical forces ushered in by one Herman Poole “Sunny” Blount, better known by the name he later chose for himself, Le Sony’r Ra, or Sun Ra.

Many fans and curious cultural onlookers first encountered the fringe figure and jazz experimenter as he presented himself: a robed mystic from Saturn. The remarkable thing about Pathways to Unknown Worlds, a new exhibit of Sun Ra ephemera at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, is the way it gradually reveals the intense dedication and rigorous reflection that coalesced into Ra’s main theories, many of which influenced artists from Parliament to hip-hop producer Madlib and beyond. Space is certainly the place, but Ra’s path to the cosmos intrigues not only because of the ultimate destination but because of the singular way he achieved liftoff.

The main portion of the exhibit is a collection recovered from the home of the late Alton Abraham, who John Corbett, one of the exhibit’s curators, had previously interviewed for his 1994 book Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein.

“When I first met Alton at a restaurant in my neighborhood, he told me he would show me something that proved he was who he said he was,” said Corbett. “He then produced the forms documenting Sun Ra’s name change. My heart stopped for about 10 minutes.”

A fellow mystic, Abraham managed Sun Ra’s business affairs under the corporate banner Saturn Research and also was part of Thmei Research, a secret society that the bandleader formed on the South Side of Chicago to study everything from African history and numerology to future technology and the paranormal. The rare art and artifacts, almost all from Abraham’s home, document the period Sun Ra spent in Chicago, when he grew from a composer and arranger to a visionary bandleader of a forward-thinking jazz ensemble.

Sketches and album covers dominate, all containing a mix of elemental and futuristic motifs like crashing waves, Egyptian symbols and dime novel sci-fi images. But there’s a lot of philosophical heft behind the images, some of which recall B-movie posters. Strewn between the visuals are scores of press releases, record catalogs and wood printing blocks for decorating record sleeves, all evidence of the revolutionary independent business Abraham and Sun Ra were running. According to Corbett, the duo would strike deals with labels to print small runs of records and would make their own covers, all in an effort to spread their beliefs through music.

During his Chicago years, Sun Ra also literally spread the word through broadsides and leaflets, which he read from and handed out at local parks. Ra’s written work and poetry, collected in The Wisdom of Sun Ra, a book available for purchase at the Hyde Park Art Center, is a vital part of this history. Pivoting and playing with words like Muhammad Ali taunting an opponent, Ra opined on the dire truth about race relations and personal freedom for black Americans. He often used jovial language and homonyms — one of the only instruments on display is a cymbal covered in symbols — but they don’t mask his strong feelings. As Ra said in his 1976 film Space is the Place, “The negro in America is a myth.”

Sun Ra wanted to take his listeners to the space age, but he didn’t mean Sputnik and space stations. As the text and images of this exhibit demonstrate, his seemingly outlandish personal image and artwork were in large part an extension of his belief in self-determination — that we could build our own myths through force of will and inhabit our own space. Sun Ra traveled the spaceways, but Pathways to Unknown Worlds makes it clear more earthly concerns and conceits led to his exodus.

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