Dinner Music #196: The weekly lineup

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This week, we’re listening to country surf, lofi, and dirtbag rock. A good friend turned 40 over the weekend and I gifted him a copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1958 poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind (an early publication from New Directions, only #74). Ferlinghetti, alongside Peter Dean Martin, founded the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco (after he died, SF deemed March 24th, his birthday, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day). Ferlinghetti’s style:

is a unique combination of Whitmanesque proclamation and Dionysian celebration, where a deep love for life and art is interlaced with call for the human race to finally begin living up to its potential.1

If I’m playing a game of word association, Coney Island always jumps directly to Lou Reed, which still makes sense in the context of Ferlinghetti, whose work, and bookstore, influenced the counterculture movements of the decades after publication. Here’s poem 26:

And here’s some lyrics from Lou Reeds “Coney Island Baby,” which came out twenty years later:

And you start thinking again about all those things that you’ve done
And who it was and what it was
And all the different things that made every different scene

Ah, but remember that the city is a funny place

What is it about the pattern “and, and, and, ah” that feels so compelling? Maybe it mirrors this feeling of forward action that gives way to epiphany? I think here, with the music this week, that epiphany is not the epiphany of change, but the epiphany of knowing that things won’t change, or that there’s no personal choice in the change that’s happening. Something like, “ah, well, life goes on.” And it does!

We begin with American Brunch from The Buttertones, a moody, punkish surf rock band from Los Angeles. I have plenty to say about this album, which is a dopamine hit, but this comment on Bandcamp hits the heart best: some grimy grime a shwangy shwang must. A shwangy shwang must! Next, we have Frog For Sale from Frog, an album that came out earlier this year. If Kermit the Frog were a dirtbag with a glockenspiel, it might sound something like this. That is a high compliment. Frog For Sale is weirdo rock for the real weirdos out there. We jump back fifty years to a compilation of Rolling Stones songs called Metamorphosis, which Rolling Stone, delightfully, called “both interesting and embarrassing, a curio and an outrage.”

Anyone who has been following the real metamorphosis of the Rolling Stones over the last decade can look at these tracks as experiments, jokes, curious artifacts and at worst, nice tries, all infused with the mysterious energy of that elemental Stones consciousness.

I love a good pan. Context is key. Proceed with caution and glee. Next, we have Les Jaguars, an instrumental Quebecoise group that played a lot of local dances and hotels in the 1960s. Still, they were big in the French Canadian rock ‘n roll scene due to their experimental style, with lots of distortion and fuzz that cut against the doo-wop sweetness and twang they riffed on. We end with another 2026 record, Florida Water Blues from the New Orleans-based Twisted Teens, which tells the story and evokes the feeling of just scraping by through a melancholy twang-rock sound.

Enjoy.