IEM Training Update- Vol. 13; Issue 7

February 1 status:

WEIGHT: 183.4

CONSUMED ON 2/1 (IN ORDER):

• Omelet (1 full egg, 2 egg whites, 1 Tbsp. shredded cheddar)
• 1 glass blended chocolate milk (2 cups fat free milk, 4 Tbsp chocolate syrup, ice cubes)
• 1 glass blended chocolate-banana milk (2 cups fat free milk, 4 Tbsp chocolate syrup, a frozen banana, ice cubes)
• 1 blood orange
• Half of a 14oz. container of OOP Haagen Dazs Brown Sugar ice cream (I bought the last remaining containers at the Berkeley Grocery Outlet. Oakland Groc Out had already exhausted their supply. If you see this stuff, buy it immediately, because it's about to become rarer than that Honus Wagner baseball card, the stamp with the upside down biplane, and the first pressing of The Rotters' "Sink the Whales" 45 combined. Those items can be stored in a vault. After a couple of years, ice cream will start to evaporate, even in a deep freeze.)
  

DEFECATION: (what my turd looked like): A fudge matzo ball in beef broth

EXERCISE: I ran the lake again. It took 24 minutes.

LISTENING:

The Poppy Family- A Good Thing Lost: 1968-1973:

To paraphrase Nazi playwright Hanns Johst, "When I hear the word 'psychedelic,' I reach for my gun." I have zero interest in expanding my consciousness or going on a "trip," either with chemicals or via music or art. The only challenge I want to experience related to culture is when I have to walk up the stairs at the museum.

Despite my predisposition against psych, occasionally, I encounter some vaguely psychedelic music that I enjoy. The Poppy Family, a Canadian group fronted by spouses Susan and Terry Jacks, is such an example. Terry went on to go solo and had a huge hit with "Seasons in the Sun." Susan had a solo career, too, and cut some great songs (e.g. "Anna Marie"), but she didn't achieve the same level of notoriety as her ex-husband, at least not in the US. Neither of the former spouses' solo work is nearly as good as the Poppy Family.

The Poppy Family are often thought of as a bubblegum pop group, but they seem a lot darker than that. There are a lot of psych touches in their music (sitar, tabla, weird stereo panning effects, fuzz, tape manipulation, heavy reverb, echo, etc.), but that's not the source of the darkness. Susan, who does most of the vocals has an unbelievable melancholy in her gorgeous voice and the lyrics all seem to have a hidden undercurrent of death and/or evil.

The first track on the comp, the "Beyond the Clouds" sounds like a lost track by 90's gloomy pop band, The Sundays, but with better production and vocals. The Poppy Family's biggest hit was "Which Way You Goin' Billy," a depressing pop song that implies impending suicide and seems a prequel to Terry's hit, "Seasons in the Sun." "There's No Blood in Bone" sounds like a Stone Roses song- if they were fronted by Mariska Veres from the Shocking Blue. The drum beat on that track seems like a prime candidate for sampling by a trip-hop artist, if that genre still exists. Other great songs on the comp include "That's Where I Went Wrong," "Shadows on My Wall," "Free From the City," and "Where Evil Grows."

The Poppy Family are like a Cannuck melange of proto-shoegaze, folk-country, ABBA, the Carpenters, Mazzy Star, Lee & Nancy, and the Everly Brothers. And the band's East Indian percussionist was Satwan Singh, a real-live Indian! This comp is a real find. I'd like to get the band's original LPs and 45s, if I can find them for cheap, but this will tide me over in the meantime.