embalmed ones

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February 23, 2010

Small minded man

Posted by Ryan Jerving under embalmed ones | Tags: , , , , |
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As I prepare for The Viper’s upcoming guest spot with The Golden Horse Ranch Band on Sunday, March 7 at The Whistler in Logan Square, Chicago, Illinois, I offer this taste of a new song written specially for the occasion.

This is a bit of a piece of a scratch recording of the last verse and chorus of a number titled “Big Headed Small Minded Man,” a song, as far as I’ve been able to determine, about dry cleaning, .

“Big Headed Small Minded Man” (scratch track)

click right to download

You’re also welcome to view the video version of roughly this same part of the song as filmed by my daughter, Irene, with some help from Ventriloquitty.

on YouTube

 

December 23, 2009

Jingle Bells

Posted by Ryan Jerving under embalmed ones | Tags: , , |
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The Viper’s seasonal side project, The Reds and the Blues, are back — this time performing James Lord Pierpont’s winter classic from 1857 originally titled “One Horse Open Sleigh.” As usual, Irene Vipersdottir Jerving sings while The Viper plays ukulele (here, doubling on jug).

on YouTube

For just the music:

“Jingle Bells”

download the mp3

For the story of The Reds and the Blues, and our recording of Irene’s original “Christmasy Blues,” see our previous post.

 

December 18, 2009

So be good

Posted by Ryan Jerving under embalmed ones | Tags: , , , |
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Here’s a song to open your advent calendar by: “The Christmasy Blues,” music and lyrics by Irene Vipersdottir Jerving, age 5. There’s some good advice in here, so listen up.

‘The Christmasy Blues”


download the mp3

The song is from a forthcoming CD to be titled Christmasy, as recorded by the two-person band (me and her) that she calls The Reds and the Blues. The entire run of the CD will be 1 copy, which she plans to give to our upstairs neighbors for Christmas.

 

December 10, 2009

Viper ringtones – just in time for Hanukkah!

Posted by Ryan Jerving under embalmed ones | Tags: , , , |
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If you’re looking for a holiday-specific ringtone — or just enough audio gelt to cover the gifts you’ll need for the first three nights of Hanukkah — then The Viper has got your back. I’m no Orrin Hatch (see below for the video), but I try.

Below are some 15-20 second-long clips from The Viper and His Famous Orchestra playing “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke (Hot Latke Cold Latke)” during our Champaign-Urbana show of August 9, 2009. They feature Rob Henn on trombone, Edward Burch and Victor Cortez on dueling suitcases, Kenneth P.W. Rainey on the electric 5-string mandolin, Riley Broach on the double bass, and The Viper on the cümbüş banjo mandolin. Three different bits have been selected for your pleasure and served up hot. Sour cream and applesauce are not included.

Instrumental verse
Featuring the mandolin and cümbüş . This is the ringtone the Viper is currently using.
mp3 | midi | wav

Vocal chorus
Sing along!
mp3 | midi | wav

Slow trombone chorus
It’s the plumber — he’s come to shvitz the sink.
mp3 | midi | wav

These are being provided in different formats (mp3, midi, and wav) since different phones have different needs. (Mine requires me to e-mail a midi file to my phone as a “picture” attachment and then save it as a ringtone.)

Here’s an mp3 of the whole recording, unedited and unequalized. (I’ll get around to archiving the whole show one of these days.)

The Viper and His Famous Orchestra, “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke”
Live at Mike N’ Molly’s, Champaign, Illinois, August 9, 2009
mp3

And for more than you ever wanted to know about “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke,” here’s the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 part series I wrote last year at about this time when I was in the middle of moving to Milwaukee and leaving behind Maryland and the Paint Branch Ramblers, the group with whom the song had its first livelihood.

And now, as promised…

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

 

June 9, 2009

Das Kapital 2.0

Posted by Ryan Jerving under embalmed ones, mermaids, those included in the present classification | Tags: , , , , , |
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Ask not what The Viper can do for you: ask what you can do for The Viper. And today, The Viper is asking you to contribute some of  late capitalism’s current favorite euphemisms.

One of the songs we’ll be playing at our shows this summer is our old standby, “Das Kapital,” which boils down Karl Marx’s three volumes and 150 years of marxist theory sense into 3 minutes and 24 seconds of vaudeville patter with a structure borrowed (shall we say “liberated”?) from The Music Man’s “Trouble in River City” song. That’s trouble with capital “T” and that rhymes with “C” and that stands for “Capital.” Here’s what it sounded like:


click here to download the mp3

Well, it’s 10 years since we recorded this song for our Everything for Everyone CD. And some of the bits in the lyrics that were supposed to sound like crazy ranting seem scarily uncrazy now. In fact, we’re going to have a hard time keeping up with reality.

And this is where you come in. I need your help in bringing up to date the middle “trouble, trouble, trouble” part that starts at 1:58 in the recording above. This is where, like Harold Hill, I ask if the audience has noticed that in their son or daughter’s speech, “certain words [are] starting to creep into their conversation, words like…”  And then I list some of the current “anglo-saxon monosyllables” of which James Agee (in an appendix to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) once noted that “a careful man will be watchful of, and by whose use and inflection he may take clear measurement of the nature, and the stature, and the causes, and the timbre, of the enemy.” On the recording above, these were, for summer of 1999: “the new economy,” “labor shortage,” “wage inflation,” and “reformer with results.”

I’ve started a list below for 2009, that might include:

  • toxic assets
  • derivatives
  • too big to fail

Now, it’s time for you to add your favorite words and phrases. Either send these as comments or, even better, type them directly in the wiki page I’ve created for this song at http://theviper.wikispaces.com/kapital (you’ll just click the “edit” button you’ll see on the top of the page, then save when you’re done). The death of the reader is the birth of the contributor.

 

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