POO: Red House Painters

"katy song"

followed by

"grace cathedral park"

"Medicine Bottle" is my personal favorite ... on his latest "Cruiser" is entrancing.

Is there any news on another release? Considering how long Old Ramon was in the can and all the covers he did while waiting for its release I was hoping for a backlog of RHP material.

For me, I'd likely say Katy Song, Michael, Summer Dress, and Uncle Joe (sorry, can't pick just one). Oh, and I highly recommend you all try to track down the demo version of Smokey, which was on that Shanti Project CD. Far superior to the Old Ramon version, imho.

I think I'm gonna do a google search to see what I can find about Sun Kil Moon's current activities.

SKM is up to nothing right now. Kozelek was playing solo in the States, but just cancelled his UK tour for "personal reasons."

http://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_thefreelancementalists_archive.html

oh, and cuz i like spreading the love.

Oh! An interesting bit of RHP trivia I noticed. The bridge verse of "Uncle Joe" always struck me as oddly-phrased. Til I worked out why:

And I am not very well read
And did you say that I will lose my house
And can you spare me of my pain?
And can you spare me of my tears
Oh Uncle Joe...

Re(a)d House Pain-tears. Har har! That card Kozolek.

RHP were very, very important to me for a while; I still love them but listen to them less often these days. Drop is a masterpiece though, a resonant well of horrifying beauty I don't Kozelek ever really matched again. Old Ramon gets a bad rap (even from me), but it has a couple of great tracks alongside some songs that just didn't work at all. the SKM album (which may as well have been an RHP album, it at least has Jerry and Anthony on it, which is more than you can say for Blue Guitar) was a massive improvement.

I used to go see RHP all the time, they would play forever, they were usually amazing. Koz solo can get dull; but the "SKM" show I saw (Koz with Phil and someone else on guitar, and two violin players) was astounding.

Good individual songs and moments, though. "Michael" probably my choice, though "San Geronimo" would be the followup.

This song has always gotten me; it starts off sounding like one of the band's usual slow, spooky wanderers, but somewhere along the way it blazes up into something full of drama. How? It's a loss-of-innocence song, or a coming-of-age song, and maybe it really is drawn in emo terms. But there's also something incredibly un-emo about it, something almost literary: Kozolek manages to come at the thing from two different perspectives, even using different parts of his vocal range to delineate different points of view. It's very nearly a short story, and it's through that approach that he gets to capture both sides of that loss-of-innocence: at moments it seems like a kindness ("the good things that we've done for you" / "show you life"), and at moments it seems violating and cruel ("we know who you are / I read your palm while you were sleeping").

It's hard not to imagine that the "new kid" in this song is Kozolek, whose backstory seems to have had him troubled and drugged-up by the age of 13. The low voice at the opening comes from that point of view, and sets him apart: he sits listening to the kids drink in the next room, "lose control and get louder," thinking of the one girl out there who might worry about him. Sure: emo. But then the voice shoots up an octave, and we're out there, louder, in the other room, talking about the new kid; "he's not like us," "he says nothing," "he's afraid to drive a car." These aren't kind voices, and in the second verse they border on assault. That high Kozolek voice is the perfect vehicle for their taunts -- they know his secrets, they've read his diary. Just imagine: they sing "We know who you are" and it sounds like the scariest thing in the world. The kid is quiet and frightened and they barge in and shout: We know who you are.

But there are those "good things we've done for you," and it's in the chorus that both sides come perfectly together. The chord structure goes from spooky to anthemic, nearly a hymn: "It's our duty," they sing, "as Californians ... to show you life." And just check out the literary value of the arrangement! Suddenly overdubbed voices swim in around the central one, and it's like actually being surrounded by these kids -- maybe frightening, maybe bullying, but right about to take you out and show you the world.

I can't think of many songs where the progress of the music is quite so perfectly and subtly geared to drive home the text of the story; I can't think of many songs that have a "story" on this level in the first place. Emo? No. Emo-as-badthing is one-sided, self-absorbed, personal, solipsistic; this song is none of those. This song, no matter how much the lyrics wander freely into opacity, is a snapshot of something weirdly universal. Who hasn't gotten that mix of fear and excitement when someone grabs you roughly and thrusts you out into a world you don't feel ready for -- whether it's older friends or the "cousins from L.A.?" Who hasn't had some variant of the Kozolek story that seems to be on show here -- going somewhere new and falling in with people who scare and excite you and are ready to drag you out?

So on the train this morning I finally noticed just how well the elements of this song pattern into that story, and I'm absolutely floored.

Also: is it me, or is there a rich history of new-kid-in-California stories that work a lot like this song? Something about it feels very, very Californian, but I can only come up with three referents for what I mean -- something like The Lost Boys, the Karate Kid, and every Coloradoan friend of mine who spent summers in LA with divorced parents and went through exactly all of this.

Incredible note gathered from Kozelek: "The chorus of Strawberry Hill ... was sung by a group of strangers we gathered from outside the Divisadero Street studio where we were recording."

faves right now. picking one...probably Katy's Song b/c its nearly perfect lyrically and pop-wise (and still obsessed with the "rad da ta ta" at the end.) Medicine Bottle and Down Through...cannot believe the lyrics on those. wow. almost makes you wince but its pretty darn amazing at same time.

anyone else think he sounds sooooooooooooooooooooo bay area?

chris (upthread), i was listening to one of his songs in the dark deep woods northern calif and nearly had a panic attack. totally ruined my vacation. m.k. be makin us crazy.

Incredible note gathered from Kozelek: "The chorus of Strawberry Hill ... was sung by a group of strangers we gathered from outside the Divisadero Street studio where we were recording."

-- nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, June 23, 2005 10:25 AM

Shit that song "Dragonflies" is amazing- I just listened to it for the first time while reading along to the lyrics that Chris V. posted up thread- fucking spine-chilling! And I've had the album for years!

Summer Dress

Anyone else gets a tiny bit annoyed when he rhymes "nice" with "nice" on Have You Forgotten?

And my pick would be their cover of the Cars' "All Mixed Up", also one of the best musical recontextualizations I've heard.

SF folx, do you know which studio this was?

― Steve Shasta, Thursday, April 12, 2007 9:10 AM (4 years ago)

I'm pretty sure there used to be a recording studio by where the Little Chihuahua is on by Page Street in one of the old Victorians. I used to get pizza at that Bus Stop pizza when I was a freshman in college and I remember one being around there. I used to live at Page @ Pierce at the time.

Sundays and holidays hits home hard when my wife got sick.

And i started this thread long time ago

Anyone else gets a tiny bit annoyed when he rhymes "nice" with "nice" on Have You Forgotten?

no. find it more annoying that he is the thousandth person to lift that "fade into you" chord progression on the title track

such a weird, flawed record. i don't think i've ever even listened to it all the way through. in my estimation old ramon is a much better weird flawed record and yet with much more egregious lyrical moments

also why do rhp people fixate over katy song? overwrought pretentious lyrics...the only good part is towards the end where he runs that mantra into the ground,

fade into you and blue guitar are both copped from a velvet underground song though

what song? i don't know velvet undergorned's music that well. i always think of it as knocking on heaven's door thing

Tonight: "Shadows". She didn't say anything I didn't already know, so I went home and put on Ocean Beach.

drop for me.

or katy

grace cathedral park.

or katy.

strawberry hill is pretty amazing actually. not sure if i ever listened to it before. i don't understand why it is not on my ipod which has only the first ten songs from rollercoaster. have there been different cd editions? i can't check as i have the cd near frankfurt and i am in berlin now.

I don't think there's been different editions, neither wiki or allmusic had anything about that. So no answer to your little mystery. Maybe your ipod was full?

Void, live @ Hultsfred 1997. I remember how disappointing the studio version seemed in comparison when Old Ramon finally dropped.

Discogs is a great place to find out about all of the versions of something.

I can never figure out if "Funhouse" is really great or really bad.

Make Like Paper, yall. and like welcome to obvioustown but Have You Forgotten has to be one of the greatest singer-songwriter-y tracks released in my lifetime.

most recent obsession is Between Days from Old Ramon tho

Good stuff upthread about Strawberry Hill. Hadn't listened to it in gawd knows how long. That chorus is spectacular.

Still, though -- Wop-a-Din-Din.

most recent obsession is Between Days from Old Ramon tho

aw man this song is super great

love the guitar tone throughout old ramon and then also on ghosts

"Take Me Out"

;_;

in response to a comment made a few posts upthread, i find Funhouse to be an astonishing commentary on nostalgia. soberingly despondent and engulfed in alien emotion, yet wholly atmospheric and grounded in memory -- a tribute to arbitrary snapshots of life and their meaning.

these days, i would put Dragonflies forward as the best representation of the impact this band has on me.

just listened to Funhouse and to add to the remarks i made just now, it's one of the shortest 9-minute journeys that i can think of. i mean it's slow, but not slow for slowness' sake, more as a means of zoning in for extended lengths on fragments of activity and emotion suspended in another time and place, like a slideshow set on crawl.

by "shortest", i mean it has me under its spell and i never pay attention to the playing time.

I meant musically, and was referring to many of the dissonant chord movements that appear during some bridges and elsewhere, like the heaviness of the song is making it hard for the notes to hit their marks. It would sound sloppy to someone without knowing Mark's ability as a guitar player. The love/hate comes from my enjoyment of it by myself but the awkwardness of making someone else sit through it with me, understanding how it sounds like it's trudging it's way through the nine minutes if you aren't paying close attention to it's intended mood. The point where the song begins to unravel is where the distortion comes in, or when the la's happen soon afterwards, and for a song with an already slow pace this part feels like walking through mud. Again, I love it normally but if you throw someone unfamiliar in the room with me, I am immediately sensitive to what makes it a chore to listen to.

I also agree upthread about Have You Forgotten, this is the song that I discovered them with. It's one of those songs where I wish I knew how to arrange strings so I could transpose this for an orchestra to add heartbreaking swells behind him as he plays.

Evan, to the uninitiated i'm sure Funhouse would be a very trying slog and a lot of hard work. it's kind of funny really -- i get a lot of emotional resonance from it, but never feel confronted or destabilised as i'm sure a lot of listeners do. i guess that that in itself is a testament to the impact of the song, that it turns people off or makes them feel uncomfortable to the extent that their mood or outlook is affected. i think it's interesting what you say about the end of the song and its means of rendering an already a-musical and unconventional soundscape even more jarring and bare. in many ways it's a retread of the structure of Katy Song, albeit with less humanity and warmth. i think Funhouse has some of the qualities that are representative of Rollercoaster as whole -- it's long, indulgent, sprawling and intermittently sloppy, but there's still the sense that every last inch of it needs to be there, laid bare just as it is. i can't imagine any of it missing.

More great originals from me

Katy Song
New Jersey (either version depending on mood)
Have you forgotten
Grace Cathedra Park

Ok sorry - pressed too early- big zzzs

Katy Song

Okay, nabisco's post led me to listen to Strawberry Hill ~20 times in the past few days. Favorite part: the fuzzed out guitar that shows up on the "now for dinner" line. Could listen to that chorus for days and days. Actually wish the song were longer...

the demo of "funhouse" does something a little more lively with the ending https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8xNJmtIx1k

you really wonder how it got the way it did on record. but i love the song; i think justin broadrick (from godflesh and jesu) has talked about how much he loves red house painters, and the last few minutes of "funhouse" are pure godflesh.

wow, the demo is pretty cool and probably more of a palatable length for most people to accommodate.

what's everyone's opinion of Mother? for me, that was the most challenging song for me to approach on Rollercoaster. RHP never got more mopey than that.

i'm currently obsessing over River from Old Ramon. i think there might be an element of tribute to Neil Young at play. it's a deeply complex song, gentle and free-flowing as a whole, but somehow really dark with sporadic forays into unsettling and obscure territories. strikes me as a bit of a precursor to Duk Koo Kim.

holy shit, "Helicopter", what a sleeper of a song. it has actually been caving into my everyday thoughts quite a bit. i really enjoy the RHP songs that probe the symptoms of a problem in intense detail to the point that Koz riles himself up and emerges as a bit mentally imbalanced. "Uncle Joe" is a similar kind of song in that respect. the Bridge album is a bit undervalued, i think. it's basically one harrowing slow-burner after another.

I had never picked up that Bridge record until a few months ago and became obsessed immediately with it. "I Am A Rock" was in my head for days. The original version of that does not have the same effect on me.

bridge is so great. was listening to it a few days ago, always forget how great "helicopter" is, and the full band version of "new jersey" >>>>>>>>> everything

any band i have a long obsession with i eventually focus on their playing but man anthony koutsos is a great drummer.

don't really know how i want to express this but i love that this music, which is so slow and flooding, so often has a really intricate beat married to it that's also locking it into a specific direction

He is really a great drummer though some of his parts are a bit too similar on a few tracks, but I do like that he consciously shaped a RHP drum sound in the same way that exists for the bass and guitar parts, too.

Down Through, lovely chords in that song. I forget how much RHP sound like Rain Parade.

used to have a problem with Down Through because of the lyrics. but then i realised how effectively they offset the beauty of the music to create a sense of ambivalence and conflict of idealised and painful memories.

anyway. this fucking band.

I think it's "Bubble" for me now

I was staying in a caravan on a headland in Cornwall in 2001. One night, after walking miles along the coast into Padstow (it was right in the middle of it being taken over by Rick Stein and attendant halfwits), I ended up in a boozer drinking with a couple of blokes who were stunned I'd not heard of Kozelek and who invited me back to their house to listen to RHP. The track I remember getting sunk in (through the haze - of drink and memory) was Smokey - the guitar tone, the languor, the edge-of-meaning of Kozelek's reluctant delivery, the oddly flat depths of it - and despite going backwards and forwards with Kozelek since, it's still the track that has the most impact on me. It's one of those tracks that's like dropping a time capsule pill: when I put it on, I can still access the onset of a hangover, see the cheap fake mahogany sideboard and hear the traffic outside.

So yeah, Smokey. I'd not heard that acoustic version before. Lovely.

i feel like the songs on old ramon tend to attach themselves to really specific times and places. whenever i hear "smokey" i'm always driving back to my apartment in reno from class, the highway covered in snow

"void"

Yup. I recall that waiting for the eventual release of Old Ramon, this was THE VERSION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rhjAF9oQyc

loosen and stretch its ancient strings until it sounds the way i feel

That photograph in the youtube link is perfect. Kozelek music up until 2014 always transports me to those peaceful but eerie & lonely winter rural-suburban landscapes where I grew up (northern NJ - Hudson Valley).

whereas his new music transports me to some suburban mall of hell where there is nothing to eat but cold Sbarro (this is the name of his next album)

It's dawning on me, that Old Ramon might be my favourite RHP.

i'll always love rollercoaster the most but it's close between the two

This version of Smokey. Jeesh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUjVspW4kvQ

whereas his new music transports me to some suburban mall of hell where there is nothing to eat but cold Sbarro (this is the name of his next album)

― akm, Tuesday, January 7, 2020 5:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yup, or a poorly formatted blog by that annoying guy at all the town hall meetings

This thread and the mention of Old Ramon remind me that I ought to finally check out that album and Songs for a Blue Guitar. In spite of being a RHP fan for twenty-odd years now, I've never gone beyond the 4AD years, since Ocean Beach seemed like such a fitting capstone to the albums that came before it.

it's kind of funny bc he definitely reached a sort of pre-peak prior to GotGH i think w some of his records that got relatively little attention att (old ramon i guess for the obv label fallout reasons, the ac/dc/john denver ep's, bc they were seen as oddball side projects). Old Ramon is incredible. I was going to look at his website the other day to look at what he's been up to or what his end of the year favorites were or whatevr, but I think it would just kind of bum me out

his transition seemed so extreme and dramatic that I almost want to attribute it to some neurological diminishment or something, but i guess he just got bored of doing whatever he had been doing w rhp and earlier skm. oh well...

Yeah I've said this before but I really wish, and it would have made no sense from a marketing standpoint given the success of Benji, that at that point he changed to a new moniker. I hate having to say one of my favorites is SKM but with a flashing red asterisk. It's just so much different but has been so consistently THAT ever since Benji. This project should have had its own name. I don't think he's even capable of doing anything different, which kind of plays into your neurological diminishment theory but we shouldn't go there.

"His transition seemed so extreme and dramatic that I almost want to attribute it to some neurological diminishment or something."

^ I've had this thought about Morrissey.

Old Ramon grew on me; it was mythical for a few years there and then someone slipped me a tape of it before it finally came out and I was pretty disappointed and it took a long time to get over that. I preferred how those songs sounded live, etc. But I like it a lot now.

Songs for a Blue Guitar is magical, one of his best albums. Maybe it shouldn't have been called RHP since none of them are on it but you wouldn't really know that from listening to it.

(GotGH has more RHP members on it than Songs)

huh i wonder who on earth plays on songs for a blue guitar beyond koz

occurs to me that altho i love RHP i think I've only heard the first 3 albums

Songs for a Blue Guitar has Michael Urbano on drums and Davey Faraghar on bass; Bruce Kaphan played pedal steel on Have You Forgotten. I'm not sure if there was another guitar player, probably not, doesn't sound like it. Anthony and Jerry both played on GotGH.

Dan Barbee was also thanked but I don't know if he played keys or something, or just worked on engineering.

Yeah I've said this before but I really wish, and it would have made no sense from a marketing standpoint given the success of Benji, that at that point he changed to a new moniker. I hate having to say one of my favorites is SKM but with a flashing red asterisk. It's just so much different but has been so consistently THAT ever since Benji. This project should have had its own name. I don't think he's even capable of doing anything different, which kind of plays into your neurological diminishment theory but we shouldn't go there.

i remember reading some interview w todd rundgren in which he said he got "bored" of writing perfect pop songs (e.g. I Saw The Light) and that prompted his divergence(?) into prog and whatever. my working theory is something like that w koz. got bored of doing really pretty guitar things and neil young-ing poignant lyrics about love and love lost and life and life lost, and became fixated on the modest mouse guy and goodness knows who else's approach to doing music/vox. i guess he's always been super-contrarian and whatever, so in a sense it's on brand? He wrote/sang a bunch of stuff about hating touring, being in the "indie" musician ghetto etc. i think at some point, or still he really wanted to pursue acting. i mean, God bless him, and I feel bad for speculating about his career path or being annoying guy posting on a message board about his choices... just confusing to me. Benji was awesome of course, but it's not something that you can listen to repeatedly obv. But I also don't want to listen to someone's audio diary about eating drunken crab at his favorite thai restaurant.

I think I said this elsewhere, but if feels to me like he was experimenting with looser/less fussy songwriting and arranging on Benji, and its success made him realize he could invest way less sheer effort into a given song and be equally or more rewarded commercially, especially since he can be a lot more prolific that way.

one thing is that there are signals of that shift in direction as early as "wop a din din," a song about how much he loves his cat and hates going on tour bc he has to leave his cat behind

overall i think he should've written more songs about cats though

kozelek can have a little cat

I guess we've all got bored of something? Or found that we couldn't do something that we previously could?

I haven't listened to anything since Perils and don't feel the need to at the moment. I think it's worth taking the long view though. The Dylan comparison is fraught and lazy but who knows what it's like up there. He might have a New Morning moment, work this out and find a new space.

I think 'Blue Guitar' and 'Old Ramon' are my favourite RHP albums. I always liked how they sound, and I think 'Old Ramon' was the first RHP studio album I bought.

I started to drift away from Sun Kil Moon when the nylon strung guitar took over. I wish Mark well as he follows his instinct.

leaves are turning brown
all over the ground