Karma Goose

So, let me take a moment to praise Dean and Britta, a photogenic pair of pedigreed indie rockers who aren’t going anywhere they haven’t already been, but who spent 50 minutes tonight making me happier to be alive than I had been previously. I think that’s both a lot to ask of music, and enough. If anyone does that for you – whether it’s Captain Beefheart or Captain and Tennille – you and I have something in common. And if no one does that for you, I am going to play you all the records I personally love until I find someone that does, because I don’t think there’s any better place to start. 

Dean and Britta didn’t just make me happy to be alive, they made me look forward to the rest of CMJ, and that in itself is a Herculean feat, especially since the pricey badge that’s supposed to get me in to all the CMJ shows is basically worthless – I got to the Bowery Ballroom pretty early, but the bouncers were already shouting, “NO MORE BADGES!,” which pretty much happens every year. Luckily, an excellent human being named Mike (“but everyone calls me Goose”) handed me a spare ticket, for no reason whatsoever, and wouldn’t even let me buy him a drink in return. Mike/Goose is a fantastic person, who I can just tell would never ridicule anyone for his choice of beer, or for liking music that doesn’t “swing.”

Back to Dean and Britta. They did not change my life. They just made it better, briefly – especially when they covered Lee Hazlewood’s “You Turned My Head Around” and Britta belted out the word “Baaaaaaaaaaaabbbbbby!!!!” in a register and at a volume that was shockingly at odds with every enjoyably narcoleptic thing they’d played beforehand.

You didn’t have to know where you’d heard the song before to love it (I had to look it up when I got back to my hotel room, as it happens), but you could tell the crowd understood it was a cover, if only because we all cheered a little louder.

And that, ultimately, is what I’ve always loved about most indie rock bands: they’ve always been music fans as much as musicians, a part of the crowd rather than apart from the crowd. It’s not the only or the best way to make music, but it’s pretty goddamn admirable, and I’m likely to smash my Tecate bottle across to head of anyone who suggests otherwise.

(Dean and Britta didn’t stop with the Lee Hazlewood cover, mind you. They moved on to “Ceremony,” a Joy Division song that Dean Wareham’s original band, Galaxie 500, once covered. New Order recorded a cleaner, studio version after Ian Curtis hung himself. If it’s not clear already, I kinda love the way every song I hear leads to three more I haven’t heard yet, and if it weren’t already so late and I hadn’t already depleted the mini-bar in my hotel room of beers that jackass in Austin would make fun of me for drinking, I would write another 500 words on songs by musicians I love about musicians they love, like this Eddie Floyd hit that he apparently wrote while waiting for a plane home from Europe to Otis Redding’s funeral, or this Lucinda Williams tune about the joys of ZZ Top records, or this Bob Dylan track that randomly name drops Alicia Keys. But it’s late and I’m tired so I won’t. But the point remains: musicians like all kinds of music, and so should you.)