Here's the Tower

The public transit in Stockholm is pretty great. The subways are clean and quiet and the buses even have curtains for those summer occasions when the sun shines all day long.

Unfortunately, even the best systems have their flaws. Every once in a while I end up in a bus that is screaming for mercy. This bus from Gullmarsplan to Norra Sköndal is one such bus. It has one of those bendy accordion things in the middle and, well, it sounds like this.

My apologies in advance for sharing this with you.

There are a handful of podcasts that I never miss. One of my favorites is the amazing Cocaine & Rhinestones from Tyler Mahan Coe.

The program has taken deep dives into stories about some of my favorite musicians from 20th century country music including Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Ernest Tubb, and my fellow Kentuckians, Loretta Lynn and Tom T. Hall. Some other country artists I didn’t especially appreciate previously, like the Judds, have also been featured, and their stories have been just as fantastic as the ones I looked forward to.

What most people notice first about Cocaine & Rhinestones is that Coe has an unusual presentation style. His way of talking about history has a unique tone and is quite different than how he sounds in conversation, for example, on his other show Your Favorite Band Sucks. His deliberate and enunciated delivery on Cocaine & Rhinestones quickly becomes addictive and captivating.

The next thing people notice about Cocaine & Rhinestones is Coe’s obsessive attention to detail. After each episode, he runs through an extensive discussion of the source materials he used as reference to assemble the story. He never does interviews on the show, so each episode is essentially him staging a meticulously researched historical account of a particular artist, song, time period or chapter in country music. Related videos, songs, books and other such materials are all linked from comprehensive per-episode posts on the show’s website.

It’s all relentlessly impressive and enjoyable and it’s a gold mine for people like me who love classic country music.

That brings us to today’s episode of Here’s the Tower. This episode takes elements of what I love about Cocaine & Rhinestones, mashes them up with my appreciation for absurd novelty music. This first episode of Kazoos & Sequins discusses the music of my favorite novelty organist Mambo Kurt.

I first saw Mambo Kurt unexpectedly back in 1999. My band, the Metroschifter, was on tour in Europe and we had a night off in Frankfurt, Germany. We have some great friends in Germany who we always stayed with while in Frankfurt. They suggested that we should go out to a club to see “this guy who plays pop songs on the organ.” We were all skeptical and hesitant, but when Mambo Kurt took the stage he blew us away. He was absolutely amazing, so hilarious and so German. I bought his CD (people used to do that at shows) and had him sign it.

I still have that disc. I have gotten a lot of joy from his music over the years, and I am pleased that he is still performing twenty years later.

(The artwork for this episode was ripped off and adapted from Cocaine & Rhinestones‘ original design by Rachel Urquhart from Pony Gold Studio. She does really great stuff and you’ve likely seen her iconic portrait of Chris Stapleton.)

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been made into movies and mashed up with zombies. Now you can enjoy all the breathtaking romance of this classic 1813 novel without missing any of your GPS driving directions.

Here’s a little song I wrote a few weeks ago in the beautiful town of Linköping, Sweden. I took a road trip there with my friends Arvid Ringborg and Johan Angantyr and we spent the weekend in a studio recording some songs of our new band Jazzbrunch.

The song you’re hearing right now is not Jazzbrunch, it’s just me. This song is something I made up on one of the pianos in the studio while we were waiting to get started one morning. I liked its simplicity and feel, so I made a note of it using the indispensable Music Memos app on my iPhone. Today, just for you, I recorded a clean version of it here in my apartment.

The songs we recorded with Jazzbrunch have some piano on them, but mostly they are loud and metal and screamy and melodic and psychedelic. We’re really not sure what kind of music it is, so when people ask, I’ve just been telling them that it sounds like a cross between Liberace and Slayer. Our recording has been shipped off to America where it will be mixed by a big-time professional, so the end result could really land at any point along that wide spectrum, depending on his interpretation of the material.

In Jazzbrunch, Johan wrote the music and plays the guitar. Arvid wrote the lyrics and sings. We enlisted the relentless drumming skills of a young fella named Sebastian Engström. I play bass, piano, and I make some guitar feedback noises reminiscent of my old band Metroschifter. That band incidentally played a show in Linköping way back in January of 1999. But that was a loooong tiiiime ago.

And again, this song is not Jazzbrunch. I just happened to write it one morning while hanging around with those guys. That makes a better story than just saying, “Here’s a song,” right?

Photo by Johan Angantyr

I have a vintage, framed portrait of Bobby Kennedy hanging on my wall. It has moved to new apartments with me for 15 years or more. When I moved to Sweden, it was one of the few things I brought with me. During that move, I sold or gave away most of my belongings, but this, I kept.

Every November 20th, I’m reminded that it’s Robert Kennedy’s birthday and he’s not around. I was born 15 months after he was taken away, so he and I were never alive at the same time. I am older now than he ever was.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how things could have been different had he not been killed just before securing the Democratic nomination and if he had won the presidency in 1968.

What would it have been like to have been born into a country where Bobby Kennedy was the president instead of Richard Nixon?

If President Robert Kennedy had spoken to the Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the Moon upon the fulfillment of his brother’s challenge? If the Vietnam War had ended in the Sixties? If Watergate had never happened? If the president hadn’t resigned in shame and turmoil?

We’ll never know.