The Goat Man's Tale

 

I've been away... I'm back... A lot of work and a lot of music has kept me from blogging for a while... But the surprise appearance of a wonderful new book has kicked me into writing something about it.

In all my travels over the decades and among all the amazing people I've encountered, one has to stand out... Tommy DiMaggio (aka the Goat Man).

Having hiked across the Arizona desert with him and his pack goats, I knew he was a master of many things. But I didn't realise he was such a damn fine writer.

Maybe that's because he has such great stories to tell... but it's also because he has a no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase way of telling them. In fact, he writes like he speaks...

All My Employees Are Animals is part-autobiography, part-cookery book and all heart. There is laughter – and food – on just about every page as Tommy takes us from a warm but gritty childhood along the somewhat crazy road to his development as a cook and an extraordinary character.

I had just been re-reading The Real Frank Zappa Book when All My Employees Are Animals arrived unexpectedly. And I have to say there are some similarities on the page between Frank and Tommy... They are both honest American voices telling it like it is... 

Sadly, Tommy's book doesn't get as far as his Arizona goatpacking days... so surely there has to be another volume... or two?

All My Employees Are Animals is available here. 

Time Piece

Virgil Donati is an amazing drummer. Understatement. And now he is also a classical composer. He wedded these two talents together for "The Dawn Of Time", an album which is breathtaking in its ambition and achievement.

Any drummer who has attended a classical concert must have tapped a foot or two to some powerful rhythms – and wondered why the band doesn't have a proper drum kit and instead limits itself to a few timpani and a couple of cymbals.

But Donati hasn't just added drums to a series of orchestral pieces, he has enmeshed the drums into the music, giving them equal billing with the other instruments and sometimes taking centre stage. On top of this he has mixed up some stunning time signature changes and juxtapositions. And, as with Frank Zappa's orchestral work, he has created something new and urgent inside an established genre.

Brown Shoes (Still) Don't Make It

A report by the Social Mobility Commission, quoted by the BBC, suggests that candidates who wear brown shoes to interviews tend not to get the job. People who get hired tend to be those "who fit in".

Loud ties and ill-fitting suits also have much the same effect as brown shoes, apparently. 

This is hardly news. Frank Zappa observed, at some length, on the Mothers of Invention 1967 album "Absolutely Free" that "Brown Shoes Don't Make It". Anyone who has heard that early Zappa magnum opus on the ills of society would hardly need the Social Mobility Commission, whatever that is, to tell them that brown shoes don't make it...

Freak Show

Take some heavy, heavy riffing, mix in some psychedelic rock and then add some delicate funk.

That's what we got at the studios the other night... not in our room but in the chillout area. We being the Monkey Fingers rhythm section. We had nothing much to do, while we were waiting for the vocalists to finish recording their tracks, but hang out — and listen to the sounds blasting out of three other rooms.

From one: industrial bass, guitar and drums that sounded like the awakening of a monstrous beast. From another: far-out hippie guitar noodling and a crazed voice. From the third: cool keyboards and great grooves.

The strange thing is that although sometimes it was a cacophonous sound storm, for much of the time that we sat and listened it actually meshed together really well: a battle of the bands that ended with everyone playing on the same side. Chaos — and yet somehow a bizarre intelligence at work. It could have been a piece of vintage Frank Zappa.