LESS

If less is more, wouldn’t nothing be everything?

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CLASSICS ERRATA AND ADDENDUM

1) Uh, the demo version of Let’s Get It On is not, in fact, “laid bare” of the saxophone at all. It’s right there where it should be. We were so dizzied by Marvin’s startling performance that we just didn’t notice it. Incidentally, according to the extensive liner notes, the “official” version’s yearning whoops, desperate moans and ecstatic hollers reveal the sound of Marvin falling under the spell of his producer’s 16-year old daughter, who had popped by the studio that day. A relationship ensued. Oh, Marvin.

Anyway, on the demo he’s singing, more or less, to God.

2) While looking for an Amazon page to send you to so that you could more fully peruse the contents of the record, we noticed that there is also a deluxe version of Marvin’s What’s Going On, which is kinda exciting but also kinda annoying, since we only just a while back bought the “Motown Master Series” version of that record, with its cute box and its obsessive liner notes. Now we are going to have to buy it again.

3) But god damn! We love records. This is fun.

4) Also while poking around on Amazon, we found some delightfully intelligent reviews of various dub, soul and jazz records by a guy named Derrick A. Smith. Here we quote from Smith’s review comparing the merits of the What’s Going On that we own and the new “deluxe” reissue:

“The previous ‘deluxe edition’ of the album (the one with the slipcase and the David Ritz essay) still may be the ideal issue, although I’ve noticed the remastering on the newest edition de-emphasizes the bassiness of that remastering (of the released mix.) Some may find this a step backward, but it’s my feeling that this time around the technical team was aiming for a more ‘authentic’ mastering - U.S. engineers watched the levels more closely in the early 70s!”

Isn’t that something? Reminds one of why one loves the internet in the first place. Since we are going away for a few days, you might amuse yourself by reading all of Mr. Smith’s reviews right here. Included are comments on Miles Davis’ On The Corner, which we are currently thinking about exploring.

5) You may not know that our good friend the Gaijin is the number one scholar of soul. Our petty complaints about reissues pale in comparison to his problems. We quote here from a letter just received:

“For me, the master reissue tracks in the Marvin dept. are the bonus tracks on the box set recorded with Bohannon. The almost instrumental track - Double Clutch is without doubt the most truly groovy thing I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard a lot of groovy stuff, er, dawg! Marvin does the soul recipe thing, introducing the band, obviously nodding out or smoked up or some such thing.

But for sad stuff – yet equally time-endingly soulful – try Piece Of Clay from the same session and source, the sound of a heart in pain, man.

Some day I must buy that box set, though it always feels shit buying one for three unreleased tracks when you already have all the albums containing the other hundred and nine tracks.”

6) While we’re on the Gaijin, he also takes issue with our sneering dislike of Sound Of Music, advising us to play The Lonely Goatherd at 78 rpm for guaranteed uncontrollable pants-peeing laughs.

Now a bunch of our younger readers are scratchin’ their heads, thinking, “What’s 78 rpm?”

7) We wish to clarify that when we refer to the “blue-and-white Dutch ceramic kitchen knick-knack world of our parents”, the Dutch part refers only to the ceramic kitchen knick-knacks. Our parents are not Dutch. They are German.

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CLASSICS, LOVED AND LOATHED

Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we’ve had a day of loving and loathing the classics. In the loathing department, we have the iconic film version of The Sound Of Music, which our long-suffering girlfriend Killer rented as a snowy afternoon’s holiday project. She ensconced herself in front of the TV with her big woolly blanket and a cup of cocoa. Not Mango Pudding Blues, though. At Mango Pudding Blues, we’d rather clean the bathtub ring than watch the Sound Of Music. We’d rather do our laundry. We’d rather do the dishes, even if it wasn’t our turn.

So we cleaned the bathtub ring, did our laundry and did the dishes, even though it wasn’t our turn.

Look, we like old-school musicals as much as the next guy. Give us your Annie Get Your Gun. Give us your King and I. Give us your High Society with Bing and Frank. But from the trilling opening notes to the final desperate escape from the Nazis, there isn’t anything we like about Sound Of Music. Christ! The haircuts! The shrill songs! The weirdly bland Technicolor color palette! The pink-cheeked earnestness! The edelweiss! Everything about it just gives us the heebie-jeebies. Especially the goddam edelweiss. It reminds us of the blue-and-white Dutch ceramic kitchen knick-knack world of our parents; it’s the last great gasp of the western world before rock and roll came and swept everything away, and as such, it hasn’t a funky bone in its body. It just hasn’t got a beat in its soul.

Which brings us to the loving department. The funky, soulful classic we love today is this year’s awesome fucking double disc deluxe reissue of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On.

There are 29 tracks in addition to the original disc’s eight, with related demos, alternate takes and outtakes from the legendary sessions that produced the ’73 classic. Most thrilling is the demo of the title song, recorded a few days before the album version. Laid bare of the sax and the background vocals, the track still soars with a completely different but equally astonishing vocal. There’s also a full demo version of its companion piece, Keep On Gettin’ It On, and a host of instrumentals, never-before released bits and some previously difficult-to-find items. All this from the old-school days before sampling and synthesizers, when men were men and Marvin was god. Absolutely stunning, and we recommend highly that you buy this set rather than whatever shitty current thing you were thinking of buying with the money your Aunt Enid sent you for Christmas. We mean it. This will be infinitely more satisfying.

The only beef Mango Pudding Blues has with this set is that it reveals a gap in our media diet. We stumbled across it in the record store today by accident, much to our chagrin, while lookin’ for Shuggie Otis. In the past, we would have read about it, perhaps ad nauseum, in several of the magazines we were reading obsessively back then. We have since mostly dumped those magazines because of their increasing vapidity, in favour of reading a bunch of blogs just like this one. Hmmm. What else are we missing?

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THE NEW AUSTERITY

More.

That was the watchword, the catchword, the buzzword for us here at Mango Pudding Blues last year. In our personal life, that is. We were determined to take on more of everything. More money, more food, more drink, more fun and more work. More art, more color, more power, more travel and more words. More more more. We have always been known for our staggering appetites, and our intention was to indulge ourselves throughout the year in each one of them without braking and without remorse.

And yes, we have indulged ourselves.

More is what most of the year was all about. More of this and more of that. More of the other thing. And now, in the holiday season, we have reached a climax of more. We are gooned on port and icewine and brandy and hot rum toddies and eggnog. We are gorged on candies and cakes and fine cheeses and exotic mushrooms. We are blubbery with calories and gassy, drooling and belching, covered with a rancid sheen of oil and alcohol and sugars that our desperate pores have pressed out of our pale, bloated body. We are, at last, sated.

And so our thoughts have turned to the new year, and the promise of a new austerity. We have seized upon an exciting thread that somehow twisted itself through the lush tapestry of 2001. A single thread that quietly introduced us to a new and surprising possibility.

Less.

Yes, we are thinking of less for 2002. We are declaring for ourselves a new minimalism, a back-to-basics theme in which we will find, we expect, a clarity and crispness, a quiet, simple power, through reduction. We are embracing less. Less of everything.

Yes.

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FIGGY PUDDING BLUES

Today, we wish to be known as Figgy Pudding Blues.

Today, we at Figgy Pudding Blues join Pope John Paul in condemning the dark clouds of war.

Today, we are delighted that NORAD was able to keep track of Santa Claus while he worked last night.

Today we are goin’ to Montreal with a big fat batch of Killer’s homemade eggnog.

Today we are aching a little bit for the really horrible number of people around the world who lost loved ones this year in all of its tragic misadventures.

Today we are nevertheless filled with an impossible amount of joy, and we wish you the same. Merry Christmas.

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SQUASH AND MY PENIS (PART ONE)

This happened today. Killer and I are at the grocery store, to stock up on everything we’re gonna need over the couple of days that the stores are closed for Christmas. We’re loading up on pasta and dry goods, slightly panicky at the thought of two days with no grocery store. We go to the grocery store a lot. The joint is jumpin’, with everybody else also stocking up, also panicky. It’s a fast world. Two days is like an eternity. There’s a small Latin combo on the balcony that overlooks the produce section, serenading the harried shoppers with pedestrian but thoroughly enjoyable covers of Ricky Martin songs. I can go on for hours about how grocery stores here in Ottawa suck compared to the ones in Calgary, where good ol’ western get-up-and-go has built Safeway into a modern miracle of cleanliness, friendliness and organization. But here, in our grocery store, they’ve got live music on weekends, and I will never ever get blasé about that. I always do a little dance, right there in the produce section, and Killer always gets a little embarrassed, but I mean, live music in the grocery store!

Our grocery store is a Loblaws. Owned and operated by Bob Loblaw, I like to say. If you don’t get it, say it out loud.

Anyway, we’re in the produce section and the joint is truly jumpin’ and I’m in high spirits and we’re heading over to the fresh herbs to get some basil, Killer up ahead of me because I’m doing my little dance and also because she always walks fast and I always walk slowly, and I see a big display of butternut squash, including one that is kinda misshapen and weird and looks, gentle reader, kind of like my penis when flaccid except it’s huge (the squash. The squash is huge.). And so I call over to Killer to come here, mischievious glint in my eye, figuring I’m gonna wave the big penis squash at her and say something really funny.

I’m 36 years old, in case you’re wondering.

Anyway, so I bend over to pick up the big flaccid penis squash and as I’m picking it up I realize that, uncharacteristically, I really can’t think of anything clever to say. The sharp double entendres are simply not coming forth. However, I am undaunted. I figure that in the case of coarse jokes with lewd props, one really needn’t break one’s back writing the material. One can just let the joke make itself, no? So I whirl around with the big flaccid penis squash in hand and a big lascivious grin on my face and there’s Killer and I’m all ready to say, “Hey baby what’s this remind you of?”

But it’s not Killer. It’s some other lady in a black coat, and Killer is still over at the fresh herbs, looking at me with a rich amusement, having easily identified the mischievious glint in my eye and having immediately put two and two together vis-à-vis my glint and my proximity to potentially penis-shaped squash, and has my number after nearly three years of dealings with me and ergo simply didn’t fall for it for a second. And the lady who is not Killer is looking at me and I’m looking at her with this mask of lascivious college-boy naughty humour now grotesquely frozen on my face and a big flaccid penis squash thrust out toward her.

And Killer’s whoops of laughter pierce the din as my eyes fill with hot tears of embarrassment.

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