I like clever songs. Silly songs. Novelty songs. I’ve attempted to write many such songs. I believe making someone laugh is one of the most important things you can do in life. But at some point in the last few years, sitting at the piano to pull together a new song began to feel weighty. If we were going to perform it night after night, it felt essential that each song mean something.

The two traditional routes were out. I’ve never been a fan of confessional songwriting, and End Times is a diverse bunch politically. But there is at least one thing we do all stand behind: science. Not just as a collection of facts about cool things, but as Ann Druyan put it:

It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life’s preciousness on our tiny planet.

Take a look at this Hubble ultra deep field photo.

To the naked eye, that patch of sky is a void between visible stars, one tiny patch of black in the sky, but when you look closer you find countless worlds. This is the world we live in. How can that not affect your views? Yet it’s difficult to find songs that express this.

That’s the realization that struck while I was struggling with a song about the more harmful branches of pseudoscience (the anti-vaccination movement in particular). I’d hoped to write something clever, but it was hard to shake off my rage and keep it light. On my coffee table was a copy of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It made me think about the great statement attributed to Sagan (though apparently unsourced): “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” I decided I was having trouble because I wasn’t saying what I meant: that the world is far more interesting and worthy of exploration than most of the drama we invent.

Here’s an mp3 of us playing it live on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special back in March. The lyrics are below.

Sound Sound Sound (live)

We’ve been playing “Sound” live since December, but we’re still polishing it. I hope you enjoy this take, and maybe some day we’ll have a studio version.

Thanks for reading this. I hope to write more song explications like this as we begin to work them into the live set and make demos.

Sound Sound Sound

The world speaks as you and I speak
The starry seas, the tidal leaves parley together.
Syllable by syllable its coda repeats
Through peaceful eves or stormy weather.
So why does the music of last month’s newspapers
Pull on your heartstrings so much greater?
Put down that megaphone I do insist
And turn, yes, turn upon the abyss of…

Sound, sound everywhere
And not a drop of meaning,
Chitchat shed with idle care
While donning profound seeming.
Somewhere something incredible
Is waiting to be known,
Signals lost within the lull
Uncertain, faint, alone.

Listen to the stars
On the backyard radio.
Their blips and squeals have meaning
Above, beyond “Hello.”

Someone’s whispers interfere
With unattended thoughts.
Nonsense flitters lips to ear,
And great unknowns are lost.

This accelerating world
Will leave you trembling, pale.
There’s no escape from dreaming
When you let go of the stale.

Someone’s whispers interfere
With unattended thoughts.
Nonsense flitters lips to ear,
And great unknowns are lost.

Whereof one can’t speak,
Silent one must be

We had a day off and it was beautiful outside, so our dear friend Ashley Rolling took a few photos of us.

In the early days of the 20th century, “spasm band” referred to a group of street performers who played in a hot style on whatever instruments they could wrangle. <em>The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz</em> quotes New Orleans musician Danny Barker as saying that spasm bands

played all sorts of gadgets that produced sounds: musical saws, washboards, spoons, bells, pipes, sandpaper, xylophones, sets of bottles (each with a different amount of water), harmonicas, jews harps, one string fiddles, guitars, small bass fiddles, tub basses, kazoos, ram horns, steer horns, bugles, tin flutes, trombones, and many others… These performers and musicians were welcomed by the patrons in the joint, although the first time it was mainly out of curiosity.

The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band (pictured above) may have been the first. In the late 1890s, Emile “Stalebread” Lacoume was a newsboy who attracted customers by playing harmonica and eventually by leading a band of neighborhood kids. Cheese box banjo, soap box guitar, a barrel bass strung with a clothing line, and a primitive contraption kit with random home-assembled percussion. These items sound more like the instrumentation of a jug band than the first jazz band, but the Razzy Dazzy kids are sometimes credited as the originators of jazzed up tunes. In one unlikely story adults stole the band’s name, and when the kids protested, the adults renamed themselves the “Razy Dazy Jazzy Band.” Nobody’s found a definitive origin for the word jazz, but this story is sometimes used to suggest a kinship with spasm.

Over the years, many have tried to indentify the one single element that makes jazz jazz. Everyone agrees that jazz overlaps with other American musical traditions, but many suspect that has some secret ingredient, the presence or absence of which makes a thing definitively jazz or not. Jelly Roll Morten thought it was latin rhythm. The revivalists of the 1940s thought it was group improvisation. When west coast jazz appeared, some said it’d lost the claim to jazz by losing touch with the blues, but at the same time others criticized artists like Cannonball Adderley for relying too strongly on blues licks. If I had to pick just one element, I’d be tempted to point to the jazz musician’s sense of humor and a particular adventurous approach the music. The spasm bands had this. So might have early black brass bands and dance bands in New Orleans who played the standards repertoire of the time with individual flare and the rhythmic shifts that would eventually be named swing.

Humor has a constroversial place in jazz history. Early jazz was considered novelty music by record companies, music publishers and white audiences. Had they not inspired musicians like Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” might have lived forever on the shelf next to novelty “hillbilly” records of the time.

Some historians view the humor of early jazz as an impediment to its destiny as a supreme form of self-expression. I don’t think that view can be supported when you listen to the joy and life present in the following recordings.

I wonder whether the comb and junk percussion on that Red McKenzie’s Mound City Blue Blowers clip were inspired by stories of spasm bands past or if the musicians learned to express themselves on hand-crafted instruments all on their own.

As corny as some early jazz humor sounds now, it’s worth remembering that this was the style at the time. It wasn’t old-fashioned yet: it was new, daring. Many like to imagine a direct, unbranching line between early jazz, the more harmonically adventurous big bands, and bebop, but not every musician followed that trajectory. Clifford Hayes, recording in the late 20s, found a lot of use for those old spasm instruments in his various jug bands – which often sounded as much like King Oliver as other jug bands of his day.

I love Billie Holiday’s bleaker songs and Duke Ellington’s innovative suites, but jazz is large enough to accommodate more without losing it’s integrity.

The Music Moms’ Ken had a few nice things to say about us.

While Squirrel Nut Zippers were the cool older brother that listened to The Who and Zeppelin, The End Times Spasm Band are the punky little sister that prefers the Ramones and The Clash. Led by singer Lyndsy Rae, The End Times Spasm Band craft a unique blend of 1920s blues and New Orleans Jazz. Her personality and free spirit gushes out of the songs, making it nearly impossible to stand still while listening. It’s a throwback that fits in perfectly with the new wave of folk and bluegrass coming out today.

Read more of “Band to Watch – The End Times Spasm Band.”

Thank you, Ken!

DA Fisher’s “My Heroes of Local Music” in last week’s Fort Wayne Reader reads like a list of good friends.

And so I made a list of some of my favorite local heroes. The people who are currently putting their money and their time and their energy where their gobbers are. Not so much the writers who cover the activities, because they’re pricks. I know this much. And not really the capitalists or even the musicians. The movers. The shakers. The balls-y folks who make the good times happen because they have that age old drive to improve their community. The real bastards of young. The sons of no one.

I’m flattered to have made the list myself. Someone tell Mr Fischer I owe him a fancy beer.

Heather McKeag very kindly reviewed our show at Iowa City’s The Mill earlier this month. She included a video of us playing “My Dear So-And-So” and “Medea.”

And our cover of Edif Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose.”

Read “Show Review: The End Times Spasm Band”.

We have a relatively light April on the way, but we’re breaking some new ground in the north east and playing the Free Range Music Festival in Belfast Maine.

On the 20th, we play a spaghetti dinner benefit for Doctors Without Borders sponsored by The Secular Alliance of IU, which Bart actually co-founded. (Facebook event)

We’ll also welcome back our pals The Two Man Gentlemen Band, whose new limited edition 12″ record just came out. (Facebook event)

04/04/12	Fort Wayne, IN	The Brass Rail
Add	w/ Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps
04/08/12	Iowa City	The Mill
Add
04/10/12	Columbia, MO	Mojo’s
Add
04/12/12	Fort Wayne, IN	The Brass Rail
Add	w/ The Two Man Gentlemen Band
04/19/12	Toldeo, OH	Ottawa Tavern
Add
04/20/12	Bloomington, IN	Doctor’s Without Borders Benefit
Add
04/27/12	Salem, MA	Gulu Gulu Cafe
Add
04/28/12	Belfast, ME	Free Range Music Fest
Add
04/29/12	Morrisville, VT	The Bee’s Knees

Scott Atkinson, a writer for MLive, listened to “Summer Song” a few days ago.

So imagine my surprise when I’m listening the first song on this band’s album, and what do I hear? You guessed it: coney dogs. Check out the song below. At 56 seconds in, there it is.

I don’t know what’s happening here. I can’t escape the coneys. But at least I’ve got some new good tunes to listen to while I eat them.

We may have to check out his Michigan coney recommendations when we head back next month.

Read more of “Coney Dogs Everywhere“.