The Salad Garden (Remnants of VH)

I always associate the Van Halen split with sliced roast beef. If I tune into a classic rock station and hear “Why Can’t This Be Love” or “Best of Both Worlds” or David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose” I instantly smell my Rax Roast Beef uniform. Sweat, roast beef and the remnants of my once favorite band on the stereo. It was summer, 1986.

I was too young to use the slicer. That was okay though. I was too young to earn minimum wage as well, and I guess you really should be making at least the minimum your employer can possibly pay you if your limbs are at stake. I was willing to smell like a roast beef and cheddar to finance my tape collection, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my fingers before I even get to my sophomore year of high school. Besides, I just started smoking and was quite fond of the way a cigarette fit between my index and middle fingers.

My responsibilities included busing the tables and stocking the salad bar. Instead of having large receptacles labeled TRASH with a little shelf on top where you could put your tray when you were done with it, Rax thought it would enhance the dining experience if they hid them. Only the bus boys knew where they were. So after years of being conditioned to dispose of their own food wrappers, our customers would stand at the door with trays in hand completely dumbfounded. “Oh, let me take that,” I’d have to say and quickly dispose of their hideous messes of catsup stained French fries and half eaten sandwich buns.

High class dining extended to the care of the salad garden as well. We didn’t want people to think of it as a salad bar. No, that was far too Mickey D’s. We wanted people to think of this as a garden. You start out with iceberg lettuce and you pick some frozen peas and cauliflower and top it off with some bacon bits and a little dressing we brought in from the ranch. Rather than exposing the garden for what it was, we covered up the ice that was packed around the containers with tough plastic lettuce. Or something that sort of looked like lettuce. It was actually a real plant. Kale. Years later when I found out it was edible, I was horrified.

We stored it in 5-gallon pickle buckets filled with bleach and water. Everyday I’d ring the solution out of that stinky weed and put it out on the salad bar. As the days and weeks went on the stuff started to look less and less green. It was soggy, slimy and its stench started to smell more and more like rotten trash. But a job’s a job, and they wanted their salad bar to be a garden.

One day I’m sitting in the break room, flicking my Marlboro Light into an aluminum foil ashtray and nursing a Mr. Pibb. Jason, the fry guy is bitching about his new Triumph album. Apparently there was some slip up at the manufacturing plant and even though the cassette was labeled correctly, when Jason put it his car’s deck it played the previous Triumph album. So much for the magic power. I guess even the band realized their better days were behind them.

So anyway, I’m back there enjoying the final moments of my smoke break when the assistant manager tells me to come out to the garden. Apparently there was something wrong with the salad bar. I get out there and see this older lady wrinkling up her face and holding her nose. Her plate is pushed to the far edge of her table and she’s looking back at the garden in horror. Her husband looks at me and says, “that’s the stinkiest salad bar I’ve ever seen”. I wanted to correct him and tell him that it was actually a garden and that sometimes gardens didn’t smell so good, but I resisted.

I look back at the assistant manager and he’s got a bucket. Only this one doesn’t have bleach in it. He starts grabbing the kale and frantically pulling the weed from the garden. I go around to the other side to help out. I grab the slimy stuff and start to throw it in the bucket and in a few minutes we’re done.

He runs in the back looking for fresh kale and I try to look busy by collecting all the miscellaneous pieces of lettuce, egg and cottage cheese that had managed to slip under the guard of the kale. When I looked over at the old woman she instantly shoots me another look. That’s when I took a whiff and knew that the kale had spewed its nasty stench far beyond its bleach stained exterior. The ice, the containers and even the food were all victims of its fowl menace.

The assistant manager comes back empty handed. He’s sweating profusely. His uniform is now wet under the pits and he’s adjusting his visor to keep his hair out of his face. He must’ve ripped open every box of produce we had looking for the kale only to find out it’d been months since someone had thought to order it. He tells me to get more ice and make it look nice. I keep thinking of the older lady though. But I don’t need to tell him. He gets close and realizes the whole garden has been compromised. He starts to dismantle the thing and tells me to tell the cashier that the salad bar is closed.

I get in a little scuffle with the cashier. I try to quietly tell her that the garden is closed but she keeps shouting at me that she has customers. When I get a little louder she doesn’t believe me and starts to shout for the assistant manager. He’s furious and looks over at me and shakes his head. Slamming a German potato salad down on the garden’s counter he shouts, “the salad garden is closed”.

As I walk back from the register I see the older lady again. She’s standing where she thinks the trash bin should be. I walk over to her and say “let me take your tray ma’am.” It was the least I could do. We were a classy joint.

How I learned to love Frank

The Pixies were one of the best bands of the last twenty years. Nirvana may have broke things wide open, but the Pixies pretty much invented that loud chorus/quiet versus thing.

Between 1987 and 1991, they released four amazing albums and an ep. One a year. They became a soundtrack for my late high school and early college years. When I decided to switch over to cds and could only afford one, I bought Doolittle. Everything was so perfect about it that I didn't really care about buying anything else for quiet a while.

Drunken dorm room sing alongs to Allison were just the beginning. Trompe La Monde came out my sophomore year of college, and my roommate and I dissected that thing as if it would lead to the path we should lead our lives down.

We saw them live on that tour. You could tell there were tensions within the band. Every time Black Francis said something, Kim Deal would roll her eyes. Of course the rest of the time I though she was looking right at me with a big grin on her face.

I was in love with the Pixies. Sure, I liked Kim. I followed her Breeders side project, and I loved her background vocals. Joey Santiago and David Lovering were pretty amazing too. But Black Francis was what it was all about for me. What an amazing character. Songs about slicing up eyeballs, incest, being alone on thanksgiving "here I am with my ham", wanting to be a singer like lou reed because he likes lou reed, and of course the girl with the tattooed tit that said number 13.

The tour tshirts said "Death to the Pixies". But nobody believed it or wanted them to end. In early 1993 when they called it quits I was sad. I went to a party that night and felt like I lost a friend.

"Just look at it this way", a friend of mine said, "now we'll have the Breeders AND Black Francis solo albums." He was only partially right.

Black Francis was killed off. Frank Black absorbed him into his ever-widening torso in early 1993.

The first couple Frank Black albums were okay. "Los Angeles" and "Headache" were great singles, but the albums lacked that something special that the Pixies had. Namely Kim Deal and Black Francis. The newly christened Frank Black was a totally different animal. Much tamer and more professional.

By the time The Cult of Ray came out, I'd lost interest. Frank Black annoyed me. On occasion I'd read positive reviews and pick up an album of his. I even saw him live on the first Frank Black and the Catholics tour. He played 2-3 early Pixies songs and shocked everyone that he still had those chops, then he bullied us with every Frank Black rarity and b-side he could dig up. And he has a lot of them. The boy is productive.

Flash forward to 2004 and the Pixies reunite. If ever there was a band that it seemed would never get back together, it was the Pixies. They had more bad blood than Pink Floyd. Their reunion, as well as the brief reformation of Pink Floyd, proves that bands never really break up anymore. They just go on hiatus.

The Pixies reunion was thrilling. At least when viewed from afar. The warm up show was here, but it would have been more accessible had it been in Africa. Tickets were impossible to get. The tapes sounded great though. It could have been 1989 again. Frank Black as Black Francis was back.

By the time I saw them on their regular tour stop here in Minneapolis, a lot of the excitement had died out. It was cool, but it sort of seemed like they were just going through the motions. Just one new song too.

About a year after I saw them live a peculiar thing happened. Instead of being annoyed that Frank Black put out a solo album while he continued to tour as a Pixie and deny us new band material, I started to like what I heard. Sure, I held out. At least six months. But eventually I checked out Honeycomb and was pretty impressed.

I'd like to say that I was blown away by Frank's latest. But Honeycomb isn't the type of record that blows you away. It's as familiar as a back porch on a rainy day, and it take a while for its sound to slowly envelop you. I didn't really notice the songs so much when I played the album straight through, as I did when I had my itunes on shuffle. Wait...what's this.

Apparently Frank had been in therapy. His marriage had ended, and he was searching for meaning. Not only did this result in the Pixies reunion, but it also provided the background for a much more serious singer-songwriter album.

Honeycomb was initially going to be called Black on Blonde, as a tribute to Dylan's Blonde and Blonde and the Nashville musicians who accompanied both Dylan and Black. The songs are loose, but not careless. And they're a million miles from the Pixies. Maybe it took this amount of distance for me to respect Frank Black and not curse him for abandoning Black Francis. Or maybe it was seeing the Pixies reunion and realizing it verged on becoming an oldies act.

Either way, I'm now a Frank Black fan. From 2004 on, anyway. He's set to pull a bit of a Red Hot Chili Peppers or Smashing Pumpkins by releasing a double cd in June called Faster Man/Raider Man. It may be a wealth of material, but I know that even if I can't digest it in one sitting, it'll always sound good when it comes up in a shuffle.

And I've stopped caring so much about the current Pixies too. If I want to listen to a little Black Francis, I'll pull out Surfer Rosa. But if I want to hear Frank Black I'll put on Honeycomb. I've even started filling my Frank Black section away from my Pixies section in my cd case. He deserves to stand on his own, and anyway, Frank Black was never in the original Pixies.

the long player, our old friend 33 1/3

Double Album in 1966: 71 minutes and 40 seconds

Single Album in 2001: 72 minutes and 50 seconds


Both are classics. This is rare. Most artists don't have an album as good as either one of these in their entire career, yet just about everybody today is putting out double albums. At least by vinyl standards.

Vinyl records had limits. Rules. Formats you had to stick to. Roughly 22 1/2 minutes per side. Rarely would you find a record over 50 minutes. The extra songs were used as b-sides, or they found their way into the band's vault. And I doubt most bands were forward thinking enough to envision the 5 CD box set.

The Ramones first album was 28 minutes and 53 seconds. Nobody called it an ep. The Fiery Furnaces put out an ep last year which was 40 minutes and 54 minutes long. Its title? EP.

Now, with 80 minute CDs artists can pretty much fill up the thing. Maybe they want to take a stab at a reggae song. Or the drummer wants a chance to write. Or they want to play jam band on a track or two. Many band arguments are probably solved by maxing out CDs.

We're constantly being told that we increasingly work longer hours and have less leisure time. So maybe it's good that you don't have to flip over the cd like you did a record. It saves a little time.

But do we really have the attention span for 70+ minutes of music on a single CD? I'm pretty into My Morning Jacket, but I end up buying their new albums before I've fully digested the older ones. They're just too long. And don't even get me started on The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie or that new Red Hot Chili Peppers double CD? 2 hours of music with people as grating as Billy Corgan and Anthony Keidus? That's equal to almost four records in vinyl terms. Fuck. Even Bob Dylan couldn't pull that off.

Songs in the key of life: Neil Young's Living With War

Neil Young has the touch again. For a while there was this theory that at the end of every decade he had a creative rebirth. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in 1969, Rust Never Sleeps in 1979 and Freedom in 1989. I'm not sure whether or not Silver and Gold from 2000 counts or not. It was a year late, and six years later it's really not that memorable.

The other theory around Neil Young is that his best work follows periods of intense personal conflict. The "doomsday" or "ditch" trilogy of Time Fades Away/On The Beach/Tonight's The Night, followed the deaths of his guitar player and roadie. And now following a near-fatal health scare and a corrupt US administration, we have 2005's Prairie Wind and this year's Living With War.

If Prairie Wind sounds like the redheaded stepchild of Harvest Moon's bastard son of Harvest, it's understandable. At least initially. It seems slightly hokey with odes to his guitar, Elvis Presley and of course the wind which blows across his prairie childhood home in Canada. But once you marry the songs with moving pictures, you'll never hear the album the same way again. Heart Of Gold, the Jonathan Demme concert film of Neil's performance of Prairie Wind and other acoustic-Neil classics, does that job, and it's a masterpiece. Watch the film and you really understand how important Neil is, and how close we came to losing him. Prairie Wind was written and recorded in a brief period of time after Neil was diagnosed with a brain tumor and told he had to have surgery. The album is reflective and conceptual, and it's the sound of old friends coming together to record new music under what could be dire circumstances.

Now, with Heart Of Gold still generating plenty of press and not even out on DVD yet, and a mere 7 months after Prairie Wind was released, Neil Young has a new album out. Living With War was written and recorded in late March and early April, it is truly amazing that this album is already on record store shelves. Credit should be given to Warner/Reprise for rush releasing this album instead of riding out the Heart Of Gold marketing plan and setting a release date for Living With War six months from now. But what's even more amazing is how good this record is.

It's easy for people to attack Neil for this record. It's anti-Bush. It has a song called "Let's Impeach The President". It has over the top lyrics and song titles like "Shock and Awe" and "Looking for a Leader" And Neil's from Canada, in case you didn't know. Never mind that he's lived in California for decades and raised his kids here. But what is truly amazing about this record isn't the press surrounding it.

Easily his best since Sleeps With Angels or Mirrorball, this album is the sound of Neil fired up and pissed off, as well as passionate and hopeful, despite the current political situation. While many artists have released political songs in the past five years, most of them are buried under metaphors and preach to the choir. Living With War is in your face, and doesn't know what subtlety means.

Recorded with a spare backing band, a trumpet player and a 100 piece choir, Neil confronts the Bush administration head on. He's living with war in his heart every day and damnit, he's going to say something about it. He's not going to rock out like Crazy Horse either. There are no extended solos here or any sort of jams. The songs are short and build off of each other. It's the sound of an artist writing a batch of related songs. There aren't any hanger on's from previous sessions. Everything is fresh and timely in a way few records are capable of today. It's simple dirty rock and roll. The type of music that would fit in well in the "ditch" trilogy. Or maybe "doomsday" was the better word after all.

Neil is back though. And whether it's his own mortality or that of a soldier's fighting a questionable war, Neil's found the perfect vehicles for delivery.