Category Archives: the pharmacy of dr spin

by Dr. Spin

Perhaps over the years, I’ve just become a stick-in-the-mud.  Unless I have a really clever costume, I don’t usually dress up for Halloween, and, at least in recent times, I make a concerted effort to avoid refined sugar. To most, it would seem that the holiday is a bust for me, but I do have a few very specialized traditions that I keep every year.

During my more bachelorish times, I would invite over some unsuspecting victims and watch Peter Jackson’s voodoo zombie splatterfest Dead Alive. That ritual has fallen by the wayside in recent years, but another that still remains is to put Oingo Boingo’s1985 classic Dead Man’s Party in rotation for a few days….rotate to the Pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

In 2001, on an uninhabited stretch of road between Denton and Allen, I decided that Amnesiac was a bust. Radiohead had presented rewarding challenges with every album up to that point, but after struggling with it for quite awhile, I could not convince myself that the jarring differences between its burbling sound experiments and jagged songwriting would have a payoff like Kid A did. I shelved it and forgot about it. Don’t forget to stop by the Pharmacy…

by Dr. Spin

Jellyfish deliberately used the familiar melodic and harmonic conventions of yesteryear as a nostalgic vehicle for expressive musicianship. That band cratered under the weight of its own talent, but a few years later, keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and touring guitarist Eric Dover reconvened under the name Imperial Drag.

Although this project was stylistically different from Jellyfish, it operated under a similarly constructed identity. Instead of recalling The Beatles and other late 60s/early 70s pop groups, however, Imperial Drag’s image scaffolded on the conventions of T. Rex and glam rock….   go velvet over at The Pharmacy.

by Dr. Spin

I was primed for a new release from a band like Änglagård. Despite my efforts to keep my prog box shut with the Jellyfish project, its top was blown off by the release of Rush’s Clockwork Angels and Astra’s The Black Chord earlier this year. Once I caught wind of Viljans Öga, I became determined to purchase a legit copy, hopefully from as close to the band as possible. Unsurprisingly, however, getting a hold of a new release by this incredible but relatively obscure Swedish band involved a little more diligence than a simple trip to the local record store. I lurked and lurked on their site, and when the CD release was announced, I placed my order immediately ….and waited.

by Dr. Spin

In 1993, I took a hiatus from my undergraduate studies and moved back to Austin.  By this point, I had listened to Bellybutton hundreds of times, and I was fortunate to pick up a promo copy of Jellyfish‘s follow-up.  There was a lot that I liked about Spilt Milk.  It had the same amazing songwriting, and in terms of its production, it was a major step forward from Bellybutton. Initially, however, I did not connect with it in the same way as I did its predecessor, mostly, I think, because I did not share it amongst a circle of friends.

Coming from the close quarters of Bruce Hall and its denizens to living at home with the fam, I had relatively little time to hang out and listen to music with a close community of people… hang over at the Pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

As a prog-rock fan, I feel somewhat obligated to at least appreciate Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, but their work confounds me.  On the one hand, I recognize that their oeuvre is pockmarked with the kind of self-indulgent bombast that ultimately caused progressive rock to fall out of favor.  Conversely, there are moments in their catalog that represent the finest progressive rock of the 70s, so every now and then I put one of their albums in rotation just to make sure I haven’t missed any of those moments….bombast the prog over at the pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

I made a pretty big deal last summer about watching Fraggle Rock and listening to the Flaming Lips with the Little One, and I would not have traded it for anything. There were times, however, that I missed the freedom of doing whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. This is what made naptime so awesome.

If I was on point for my workout schedule and the house was relatively clean, I would sometimes indulge in some kind of hyper-violent and completely child-inappropriate movie, just so that I could feel like I was keeping my dude-dad cred. Of course, it had to be watched at a low volume so that any unexpected explosions wouldn’t wake her up and preempt my adolescent catharsis. One of my favorite entries in this “Quiet Time Movie” series was Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.   I had forgotten just how compelling the soundtrack was, so subsequently, I put the soundtrack in rotation...  rotate to the pharmacy to kill that bastard Bill

by Dr. Spin

Looking back on the time after I graduated from high school and began my undergraduate degree, I can clearly see how I tried to cling to my life in Austin while a new one stretched out before me in Denton. I traveled with alarming regularity on the weekends, and tried to maintain a career as a record store employee over longer breaks. During my first summer break in 1990, I got a job working at the Hasting’s at Barton Creek Mall. Predictably, I discovered a lot of music during that time. Jellyfish, a band that was brought to my attention by a fellow employee and working musician, was one such discovery. Although their debut Bellybutton seemed like a retro-pop curiosity at the time, in the long term it became hugely influential on me…under the influence at the Pharmacy