Stumbling Locomotive I

"Keep A-shovelin' That Coal"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

One of the earliest of the pre-modern mixes¹ was Stumbling Locomotive.  Like most of the pre-moderns,² this was made to play at parties, and its central conceit was that it would feature songs that started off a bit slow, perhaps staggering around a bit, but then eventually worked up a full head of steam and went rolling and rollicking along.  Such songs are great for parties, in my opinion, because they provide natural breaks: particularly when you’re dancing, as one song fades and the next one begins, if the new song starts off slow, that gives you a little break, a short time to cool off before the song eventually hits its stride and you can get back to your frenetic gyrations.

Now, like all the pre-modern mixes, the original version was both chock full of songs from the period of my second college attendance (roughly 1989 – 1992) and riddled with bad choices.  Not meaning bad songs, of course, just songs that didn’t really fit the theme.  For instance, “Sin” by Nine Inch Nails was originally on this mix.  And that’s a fantastic song, and great to play at parties, but in no way does it fit the description I gave above.³  So this is probably the pre-modern mix that’s been most extensively reworked: less than half the tracks from the original mix survive, and only a third of what remains falls into that college timeframe that tend to dominate the other pre-moderns.⁴  As I started to get the vibe for the mix, it was easy to find songs that fit the theme.

For instance, songs about trains are common, and many of them actually tend to sound like trains.  And that’s sort of the epitome of what this mix is about.  If you can write a song about a train that has the same rhythm as a train rolling down the tracks (and if you can manage to avoid it being a country song), you’ve really got something kinda cool.  “Train” by 4 Non Blondes is perhaps the best example of this; if you’re familiar with that album,⁵ it’s even got a picture of a train right on the cover.  It’s a kind of wacky, cartoon train, sure, but there it is nonetheless.  And, on this album with a train on the cover, there’s a song called “Train” that both sounds like a train and is about a train.⁶  Plus it has a harmonica!  Totally trainy.

Many songs on that album have that train vibe, though none are quite as on the nose.  Still, “Old Mr. Hefffer” gives “Train” a run for its money, so it earned a spot here as well.  But, for powerful female vocals belting out train-inspired lyrics, Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes has a powerful competitor in Liz Phair, whose “Baby Got Going” not only has the harmonica, but also gives us our very trainy volume title.  And we can’t leave out Johnette Napolitano: Concrete Blonde’s “Carry Me Away,” which is the transition song between the “Day Side” and “Night Side” of their amazing album Free actually throws the line “Today I saw a train roll by the river” into its first verse, and the song follows the now familiar pattern of starting off slow and then kicking it into high gear.

Of course, that brings up the question of how Stumbling Locomotive differs from Creeping Rageaholic.  The main thing is, songs on that latter mix tend to burst forth into being; these mostly ramp up gradually.⁷  And these songs have a rolling quality that is reminiscent of riding on a train.  Perhaps the best example of this is to look at Pete Yorn, who has tracks from his musicforthemorningafter featured on both mixes.  “For Nancy” is a song you belt out when you’re in a joyous mood; “Life on a Chain” is one that just carries you along in its wake while you bop your head and carry on with what you were doing.  Heck, some of these tracks actually don’t have the slow start: “Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Primitives has that rhythmic rolling right from the opening notes and it maintains a frenetic pace throughout.  And “Railroad Steel” by the Georgia Satellites—a band which is very good at cozying up to that line that separates Southern rock from country without ever crossing it—keeps a pretty steady pace throughout as well (plus it has lots more train similes).  On the other hand, “Burn Up” by Siouxsie and the Banshees really does start out a bit slow in the first half of the first verse, picks up the pace in the second half, and finally hits its strides with the chorus.  No train imagery in this one, but the harmonica is back, and I challenge anyone to listen to this track (which is about a pyromaniac) and not think “train.”

As much as this rework diverges from the original version, there’s one place they’re exactly the same: the opener.  It was always “It Makes No Difference” by the Darling Buds.  Once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives” by 120 Minutes music critic Dave Kendall, this band from Wales⁸ produced a great Britpop first album (Pop Said), and, while their follow-up Crawdaddy was not quite as impressive, its opening track will always epitomize this vibe for me.  It doesn’t really sound like a train, but it starts out slow and quiet, building gradually, with some breathy vocalizations from Andrea Lewis, and eventually that driving bassline kicks in, and that carries the song (and the listener) along for the rest of the journey.  It’s just brilliant.

In fact, several of the tracks here are less reminiscent of trains so much as they remind me of galloping horses.  One of the first additions to the rework was in fact “Shadow of Love” by the Damned, off the brilliant Phantasmagoria.  With Dave Vanian at his gothiest, the rhythm section of Brynn Merrick and Rat Scabies turned in some of their best work on this track.  The song takes the occasional break from that strong canter, but the sonic reflections of hoofbeats always come back, driving on and on and on.  It was an early choice for second track here.  And another track that showcases that rolling equine gait is “Take Me I’m Yours” by Squeeze.  This was actually their first single, originally released back in 1977, but I never heard it until I picked up what is quite possibly the best greatest hits compilation ever: Singles: 45’s and Under.  Every song on that collection is a winner, and this, the opening track, is a great example of what we’re looking to achieve here.

For another song that gives that riding-on-a-horse vibe, there’s the aptly named “Ride,” also from Liz Phair (she can do trains and horses, on the same album, even).  The titular ride is more of a car ride, granted; here’s my favorite lyric from the song:

I don’t know, but I’ve been told
That the road to heav’n is paved with gold
And, if I die before I wake,
I need a ride ...

The best thing about this bit is that she compresses “heaven” down to a single syllable, which makes it sound remarkably like “hell,” so you’re not quite sure which one she’s singing.  Chef’s kiss.  And I follow that up with KT Tunstall’s “Push That Knot Away,” from her magnum opus Tiger Suit.  As I’ve said before,⁹ Tunstall reminds a lot of Phair, in both style and attitude, but with significant enough differences that pairing them isn’t repetitive.  So I put these two back-to-back in the closing triptych of the volume: “Knot” has a slightly different rolling gait than “Ride,” but it’s quite insistent as well.  But perhaps the best example of this rolling beat outside of “Shadow of Love” is another late-80s-early-90s classic, “Away” by the Feelies.  With two drummers, a great bassist, and some guitar work that somehow manages to sound like lonely train whistles, “Away,” with its Jonathan-Demme-directed video, was my introduction to the Feelies, and still stands as their greatest achievement in my opinion.  It was a natural choice to open up the back third.

Stumbling Locomotive I
[ Keep A-shovelin' That Coal ]

“It Makes No Difference” by the Darling Buds, off Crawdaddy
“Shadow of Love” by Damned, off Phantasmagoria
“Old Mr. Heffer” by 4 Non Blondes, off Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
“Life on a Chain” by Pete Yorn, off musicforthemorningafter
“Say Amen (Saturday Night)” by Panic! at the Disco, off Pray for the Wicked
“On the Corner Where You Live” by the Paper Kites, off On the Corner Where You Live
“Take Me I'm Yours” by Squeeze, off Singles: 45's and Under [Compilation]
“Railroad Steel” by Georgia Satellites, off Georgia Satellites
“Baby Got Going” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Burn-Up” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow
“Cakewalk” by House of Freaks, off Cakewalk
“Carry Me Away” by Concrete Blonde, off Free
“Train” by 4 Non Blondes, off Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
“Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Primitives, off Lovely
“I Wonder Why” by the Heart Throbs, off Cleopatra Grip
“Cecilia Ann” by Pixies, off Bossanova
“Away” by the Feelies, off Only Life
“The Bosses Daughter” by the Lucky Bullets, off Dead Man's Shoes
“Shine On” by the House of Love, off The House of Love [Butterfly Album]
“Add It Up” by Violent Femmes, off Violent Femmes
“Gipsy Threat” by Ratatat, off LP3
“Ride” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Push That Knot Away” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“400 Bucks” by Reverend Horton Heat, off The Full-Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat

Total:  24 tracks,  80:23

There are 3 bridges used here, of which “Cecilia Ann” by the Pixies is easily the one which hews closest to the theme: it’s a hard driving instrumental with impeccable basswork from Kim Deal (as always) and a great beat from Lovering, though it’s (somewhat surprisingly) Black Francis’ rhythm guitar that provides the “chunk-a-chunk” that gives it its impetus.  And of course Joey Santiago’s great Western-sounding ringing guitar chords.  I thought it made a nice lead-in to “Away.” Next, the title track of House of Freaks’ third full-length album Cakewalk has that great Johny Hott percussion and the now familiar rolling beat; it introduces the middle stretch of the volume.  Finally, I felt that the back third needed a little something in the middle to introduce the return of Liz Phair, so I found a bit of electronica from Ratatat¹⁰ which also featured that galloping hoofbeat rhythm that features so heavily here.

There’s not too much surprising going on.  I did want to add a few newer tunes, so I slotted in “Say Amen” by Panic! at the Disco, which is, to be fair, more of a happy trot than a proper canter, but I think it still works here, followed immediately by “On the Corner Where You Live” by the Paper Kites, a lovely Australian band that I discovered through a coworker at my current job.  They’ve been around since 2010, and this album (of which “Corner” is the title track) is from 2018, but I never heard of them until 2020, when this coworker suggested a song from their 2012 EP as our “push song.”¹¹  That song had more of a Simon-and-Garfunkel vibe to raised-by-my-record-collector-father me, but it was intriguing enough to me to send me scurrying to listen to more of their work.  As it turns out, Corner is a fantastic album, and this track is one of those not-quite-downbeat songs with a very steady pace that I thought was quite excellent coming off the much more ebuillient “Amen.” Finally, the Lucky Bullets is a Norwegian rockabilly band (as unlikely as that sounds) that also treads dangerously close to that country line, although they rarely trip over it.  “The Bosses Daughter” [sic] trades the harmonica in for a trumpet, giving it a Western hoofbeat that’s almost enough to earn it a spot on Tumbledown Flatland.  But I thought it worked well here.

For more late-80s-early-90s goodness, “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes is a classic that, again, starts off slow and quiet, then picks up the pace.  As always, Brian Ritchie’s basswork is the stand-out, giving it the requisite rhythm.  Meanwhile, “Shine On” by House of Love hits the pace right out of the gate, then alternates between slowing down (but never too much) and speeding up (but never to a reckless level).  Both are perhaps a slight stretch here, but they match well with “Away,” and using “The Bosses Daughter” to break up the 80s goodness just seemed to work.  Our final track from this period is from the criminally forgotten Heart Throbs, who hail from Reading, home to the lead singer of the Sundays.  And Cleopatra Grip was even released the same year as Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, but the latter was a huge hit while the former produced one song that hit #2 on the Modern Rock charts and then they seemed to fade from the spotlight.¹²  And there’s no good reason for it: Cleopatra Grip is a fantastic album with consistently good songs, and “I Wonder Why” has the perfect beat for this mix.

Our volume closer is one of those patented screech fests from the Reverend Horton Heat, “400 Bucks.” The psychobilly auteur is going off this time about some money owed by an ex-girlfriend.  The relentless pace just adds to the desperation in Heat’s voice, and I thought it worked well to wrap up the set.

Next time, it’s time to get dark again.

__________

1 You can find a definition of that term in the series list.

2 Probably all of them, with the exception of Wisty Mysteria.

3 Which is why now you can find it on an entirely different mix.

4 The worst offender on that score being HipHop Bottlerocket, whose volume I is still 80% composed of tracks from that narrow slice of music history.

5 Yes, “album” singular.  4 Non Blondes only ever had the one, and it was primarily known for containing “What’s Up?” Which, as songs go, was ... fine.  It was fine.  Perfectly lovely.  But, like I said about Natalie Imbruglia: the rest of the album is so much better.

6 I mean, technically the song is about something else, but it uses a bunch of train imagery, which is close enough.

7 To be fair, “Carry Me Away” is a bit of an outlier there, and it might have qualified for Creeping Rageaholic if it weren’t for the obvious train imagery.

8 Perhaps oddly—or perhaps not—the Primitives are from Coventry, which is just a bit to the right of Wales on the map.

9 Specifically, on Sirenexiv Cola.

10 You may recall them from Paradoxically Sized World VI.

11 Specifically, it was “Leopold Street,” off Young North.

12 Technically, they produced two more albums, but I didn’t even know that until doing the research for this blog post.  I may have to track them down.

Feeling so good-natured I could drool

This month, we’re getting new Heroscape for the first time in 14 years, and a new edition of D&D (despite the fact that they refuse to admit it’s a new edition) for the first time in 10.  Exciting times for my two primary gaming passions.  So far all we’ve seen are previews, but I’m cautiously optimistic.  Probably more so for the Heroscape “Renegade wave 1” (really wave 14) than the D&D “Fifth Edition 2024 rules” (really 5.5e, or, as the great Dael Kingsmill has dubbed it: “5e2e”).  But still looking forward to both.  Good times for fantasy gaming fans.

Actual Play Time, Part 1: Discovery of the New World

[This is the first post in a new series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[If you’re wondering why D&D is such an important part of my life, I encourage you to read my D&D and Me series.  Parts of this post are adapted from part 8 of that series.]

While I am safely on the Gen X side of the Garofalo curve, I have to cop to being on the backside of that arc.  And one of the things I never understood was the fascination with watching other people play games, especially videogames.  My brother (11 years younger than I) and his friends would do it all the time: I specifically remember going out with him and his friends our first Christmas home after his high school graduation.  We went to someone’s house to play videogames; there were about six of us, and two controllers.  And, when people weren’t playing, they were avidly watching.  I was bored.  I don’t specifically remember thinking to myself “I’m too old for this shit,” but I may as well have.  (And, given that the rest of the crowd was only 10 when the R-rated movie which that quote references came out and so likely never got to see it, it would have been oddly appropriate.)

Later, when I had kids, there was a lot of watching other people play videogames, because: YouTube.  Twitch and YouTube have made videos of watching other people play games something of a new artform (often called “Let’s Play” videos).  These are often very long videos—hours and hours, sometimes—and yet our children, with their suppoedly short attention spans, watch them all the time.  Sometimes this is to see if they want to purchase the game (videogames can be quite pricey, so it’s a good way to be smart with your allowance money), and sometimes it’s just background noise while they do other things, but often they just enjoy watching the people play.

And I was always someone to whom this seemed kind of silly.  Why watch other people play? just play yourself!  Or so I would think.  And I always just shook my head in a “kids today” sort of fashion.  I didn’t tell them not to watch, of course—nothing makes your child want to do a thing more than forbidding them from doing it—but I thought it was a dumb thing that hopefully they would grow out of eventually.  Certainly I never imagined that I would ever spend hours watching someone else play a game.

I can no longer remember when this happened—hell, I can’t even remember which kid it was at this point—but it was most likely in 2016 or ‘17 when I happened to wander through the room where one of my kids was watching a Let’s Play video.  No clue what game it was either, but I distinctly remember the joy in the player’s voice, and the lilting Irish accent.  The guy was hilarious.  “Who’s that?” I asked, drawn to watch over my child’s shoulder.  And, the answer, delivered in that “what are you, stupid?” tone that only your children can deliver, was: ”Jacksepticeye.” This was unlike any of the other Let’s Play videos I’d ever seen: Jack wasn’t trying to make me love the game, he wasn’t trying to make fun of the game, he wasn’t trying to do some artsy or clever commentary on the game ... he was just playing the game, and having fun, and being damned entertaining while doing it.  Even though I can’t claim to have become a big Jacksepticeye fan after that—I didn’t go around watching a bunch of his other videos or anything—I have to credit him with changing me in a fundamental way.  Before I discovered Jacksepticeye, I didn’t think watching other people play games could be fun.  Afterwards ... it was like discovering I’d been fundamentally wrong about something my whole life, and, now that I had realized it, I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.  Pretty much exactly like that, in fact.

And I began to understand that my whole attitude (which, from hanging out on the Internet, I already knew was not unique to me) was kind of stupid.  Why watch someone else play a game when you could just play yourself?  By that logic, the entire sports industry becomes meaningless, and yet there’s a multi-billion-dollar business—several, even!—in having people play games so other people will watch them.  But of course this illuminates why it’s tricky: sure, watching an NBA game can be pretty damned exciting, but that doesn’t mean that watching any random game of people playing basketball will be fun.  There are many factors to consider: the talent of the players, the production value of the presentation, the knowledge of the commentators, and so on. 

But, still, Jacksepticeye proves one thing: it is possible to make watching other people play videogames entertaining.  And, if I could enjoy watching someone else play a videogame, when I don’t even like videogames all that much, surely I could enjoy watching someone play D&D, which I absolutely adore.  Because, up until that point, the idea of watching other people play D&D had seemed just as stupid as watching other people play videogames.  How could that possibly be entertaining?  But now I was living in a whole new mental paradigm.  And I knew that there were a lot of these D&D videos out there (what would eventually come to be called “actual play” shows) ... not just videos, but podcasts too.  The field was still fairly young back then, but there was already a bewildering array of choices.  So, cautiously, I decided to try a few.

And, honestly, none of them were that great.  Oh, sure, they had their moments, but they weren’t sucking me in the way good ol’ Jacksepticeye had.  There were a bunch of “CelebriD&D” videos on YouTube, but they were edited to hell and back.  In a way, this makes sense.  Going with the sports analogy, D&D is not basketball.  It’s more like baseball, at least in terms of pacing (if not golf).  And, if you don’t have time to watch the 3 or 4 hour baseball game, what do you do? you watch the highlights, of course.  But the thing is, you can boil a baseball game down to just highlights.  There’s not a whole lot of context required for any given play, and what little there is can be described by a competent color commentator in a few brief sentences.  But D&D is different: there’s an underlying story, and, without that context, the exciting moments are far less exciting.

Eventually I came across Force Grey (this would have been the first season).  Now, I didn’t really know who this Matt Mercer guy was, though I recognized him from a bunch of the other videos (apparently he was quite popular for running D&D actual plays).  And I’m sure I knew Ashley Johnson because I had almost certainly started watching Blindspot by that point.  But mainly I was here for Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray.  A couple of comedians I knew and liked, playing a game of D&D?  This should be good!  And ... it was okay.  Mercer was competent, and discovering Utkarsh Ambudkar was an unexpected joy, and the story was decent, but it just didn’t grab me.  Some of the players were competent, others were just learning, but it was obvious they were having difficulty gelling as a team.  Once again: you can’t just throw 10 people off the street onto a basketball court and expect magic to happen.  Season 2 would eventually come along and be much better, but season 1 was just ... meh.

And then I heard that a new show was going to come out with Deborah Ann Woll, who I knew (and liked) from True Blood and Daredevil.  And, back then, it was still fairly unusual to see a woman in the DM’s chair, and I thought that might be worth checking out.  Episode 1 was set to feature Matthew Lillard, who most probably think of as Shaggy or “that kid from Hackers,” but I always preferred him in Scream and Thirteen Ghosts, so that seemed promising as well.  As soon as the first episode was out on YouTube, I sat down to watch it.

Relics and Rarities was all I’d hoped for, but also much more.  First off, it was perfectly edited: not just the highlights, like the failed attempts in the “CelebriD&D” videos, but not completely unedited, as seemed to be popular in other, longer videos.  It was still people sitting around a table and actually playing the game—no cheap gimmicks like animation or puppets—but the set dressing was excellent, and there were sound effects.  When Woll described the party as being in a dank castle with a fierce thunderstorm raging outside, a crack of lightning could be seen in the faux window set into the faux stone wall behind the players, and peals of thunder punctutated the table talk.  Just enough, mind you: not so much as to be distracting, but not to little as to make no difference.  Lillard knew what he was doing, obviously; I could tell he was a long-time player, but I could also tell that he was one of those folks for whom D&D is somehow a competitive game, even though it very much is not.  He was the sort of player who competes with his fellow players (and sometimes himself) to always do the optimal thing, always do the coolest thing, and often got frustrated when he couldn’t (or tried to and failed).  But the other four players were very solid: two were obviously actors, and the other two (who I would eventually come to know as two of the best players in the actual play space) were consummate professionals.  Watching Jasmine Bhullar and Xander Jeanneret play was perhaps not like watching Jordan play basketball, but certainly as satisfying as walking into a no-name dive bar and realizing that the rhythm section of the band that just happens to be playing that night is more amazing than three-quarters of the musicians on the albums you own.  And, by the end of the first episode, they had changed Lillard in a fundamental way, teaching him something about the game that he seemed surprised he could still learn.  And Woll herself?  A master storyteller, fond of setting puzzles for her players, always understanding how to motivate the PCs, perhaps a bit more lenient than I personally would be, but always in service of the Rule of Cool.  I was blown away.

Because, you see, I realized that I had been watching this new actual play thing all wrong.  I was treating it like sports: the thrill of watching people at the top of their game perform amazing feats, the empathy of experiencing the highs and lows, the satisfaction of armchair-quarterbacking a game that you yourself play well (or used to).  But, no: actual play is not that.  Or, it sort of can be that, and some of it is nothing but that.  But those aren’t the good ones.  The good ones are the ones that are taking advantage of this entirely new medium of storytelling to tell tales that you can’t really see anywhere else.  Just as a novel can tell stories that a movie can’t (and vice versa), or a comic book series can tell stories that a TV series can’t (and vice versa), actual play can tell stories that nothing else can.  Unlike a novel, it’s collaborative, and far more so than a comic.  Movies and plays and televsion are more collaborative, but still there’s usually one writer (or at most a handful), and the characters in all those other media serve the plot.  If someone forgets something, it’s because they needed to forget that thing for events to be set in motion.  If one character hurts another, it’s because the one character needs to learn from it, or because the other character needs to have something to regret, or because the audience needs to pick a side.  Characters die because an author or screenwriter decided it would have maximum dramatic effect.

But, in actual play (at least when done well), the GM builds a world and sets the PCs loose in it.  Each character has their own arc, and that arc is completely controlled by the “actor” portraying them.  Normally an actor, whether in film, television, or stageplay, has the constraint of playing the character as written on the page, using the words they’re given.  But, in actual play, a player can do anything they want with their character, take them in any direction that feels natural.  And, most importantly, there are dice.  The element of randomness the dice provide adds something that no other medium can compete with.  A good DM harnesses that unpredictability, never letting it derail the story, but letting it add wrinkles and twists and complications.  The resulting tapestry of big swings and near misses, huge triumphs and massive failures, is both complex and beautiful, and unlike any other form of storytelling.

Actual play is a new medium.  The fact that you’re watching people play a game is almost incidental to that fact: it’s a bit fun, especially if you know the game yourself, but it’s totally unnecessary to enjoy the story.  The story is the thing, the thing that makes actual play special.  The stories told via actual play are unique, amazing, engrossing, and transcendent.  And that’s what this series will explore.

Next time we look at some of the different forms actual play can take.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

This week, I had yet another computer go down on me, which means my weekend went to shit pretty fast.  So there’s no time to tell you that I won’t be posting much of anything this week.  So just imagine that I did.  Should be fairly easy.