Blossoming Flowers in Black and White

Magic Cat - “Photograph” (2020)

Before I kick today’s JTL entry into gear, I just wanted to say that I’ll be deactivating my account on the flaming shit-show known as Twitter in the next few days. So on the off chance that you, dear reader, have been relying upon that particular forum for alerts of my latest entries here, I would advise you to just hit the “Subscribe now” button instead. It’s free (unless you want to toss me the price of a pint for a little extra monthly content, in which case don’t let me dissuade you), you’ll be notified of each new post via email, and you won’t have to rub virtual shoulders with racists and antisemites. Sounds like a pretty good deal, huh?

Anyway, on to our regularly scheduled programming…

---

This, as some of my readers already know, is Angus. He is a magical little orange boy whose sweet, loving and silly disposition made him a most valuable addition to our home when Katie and I adopted him in August 2020. His endearing, rambunctious personality really helped us weather the worst stretches of the past two years; and now that Katie and I have split up, he has been the real MVP in helping his brother Otis and me adjust to our new shared reality in Kingston, NY.

Just two days ago, in fact, I was feeling pretty lousy from a winning combination of work/world/apartment-search stress, lack of sleep (undoubtedly related to the aforementioned stress), and the arm-aching combo of my annual flu shot and the new Covid booster. As I lay down to take a much-needed nap, Angus came right over, tenderly touched his paw to the exact place on my arm where I’d received the vaccines, and promptly fell asleep in the position seen above. Magic, I tells ya…

What does this have to do with music, you ask? Well, there’s another Magic Cat you should know about — a psychedelic rock band out of Rome that happens to be similarly hitting the spot for me right now.

I’ve actually known (or at least known of) two of the Magic Cat guys — lead vocalist Massimo Di Gianfrancesco and drummer Diego Filippi — since back in the early 90s, when I bought the self-titled debut of their band Head And The Hares. I discovered it via Distortions Records, a label out of Pennsylvania that was also putting out reissues of obscure 60s psych and freakbeat bands like Powder, Herbal Mixture and Gary Walker & The Rain.

While I was generally kinda leery of 80s and 90s bands that tried to reproduce 60s sounds, the blurb in the Distortions catalog about them being a modern Italian garage band heavily influenced by the moody “60s New England teen scene” piqued my interest; between that unusual flavor combination and a name like Head And The Hares, I simply had to check ‘em out. Glad I was that I did so, too; though they were clearly influenced by that particular sound and period, songs like “Try to Forget” and “I Don’t Know” definitely had their own alluring personal touch.

The same thing can also be said for For Friends Only, the 2012 full-length debut from Magic Cat, which Di Gianfrancesco formed around 2010 following the demise of his mod band The Victorians. For Friends Only’s wah-wah guitars, fuzzed-up bass and throbbing rhythms all point to the original lysergic era (as well as such latter-day mind-benders as Spacemen 3 and Brian Jonestown Massacre), but the album’s haunted, darkly-hued songs feel right at home in our current messed-up century.

Earlier this week, Di Gianfrancesco — who has been a friend of mine on Facebook for a while now (Filippi as well) — reached out to let me know that their single from 2020, “Indian War Is Over” b/w “Photograph,” had finally been made available on Bandcamp. Wait a minute — a Magic Cat single from 2020? How did I miss this?

Obviously, like all of us, I’ve had a lot on my mind as of late; so many things have been blurred and obscured by the Covid era that I have a hard time fully recalling the whats, whens and wheres of the past “two-tree” years. Still, I think I would at least vaguely recall a mention of the single’s existence, right? Then again, the single itself hasn’t exactly had the easiest road from creation to release…

Back in 2019, the current Magic Cat lineup of Di Gianfrancesco, Filippi (who joined the band on drums following the release of For Friends Only), lead guitarist Andrea Lauri, organist Fabrizio D’Auria and original bassist Massimo Galati convened at Trafalgar Studios in Rome to cut the tracks for the single. A limited-edition vinyl release was planned, and then the pandemic screwed everything up; the single was finally released in the fall of 2020, but the band couldn’t promote it like they’d hoped. And then in 2021 Di Gianfrancesco gave us all a big scare by almost dying from bacterial meningitis, which put him in the hospital for a month and a half and required significant recovery time thereafter. So when he told me that they’d finally just gotten around to uploading the single to Bandcamp, it kind of all made sense.

But hey, no time like the present to check some cool sounds, regardless of vintage! And there’s plenty to dig about “Indian War Is Over” — the groove is a total dance floor filler, the chorus is catchy as hell, the arrangement throws in some unexpected twists, and the organ break that starts at the 1:46 mark puts a goofy grin on my face every time. But for me, it’s all about the flip side; “Photograph” is, hands down, one of my favorite things I’ve heard all year.

Everything about “Photograph” is absolute perfection — and I say this as someone who has listened to it over and over during the last few days, trying to mentally isolate and analyze the different elements and figure out exactly why I love this monolithic blast so much. The mood, the atmosphere, the meaty fuzz tone, the evil carnival organ, Di Gianfrancesco’s impassioned vocals and abstract existential lyrics, the band’s single-minded intensity, the way the slow-burning verse explodes into the chorus, the pained cry of “Oh no!” that introduces the guitar solo, etc.; every aspect of it fits together like a finely-machined puzzle, and I wouldn’t change any damn thing about it.

And yet, there’s something else going on here — something that goes well beyond “just” the combination of a great song, a great performance, a great recording and a great mix. It’s that sense of tapping into the same eternally bubbling cosmic spring that gave us, say, Elvis’s Sun recording of “That’s All Right Mama,” Billy Stewart’s “Sitting in the Park” or the Flamin’ Groovies’ Sire version of “Shake Some Action” — to name three songs which sound nothing at all like “Photograph,” but still share that same ineffable sense of having (in the immortal words of Roky Erickson) “always been here before”.

That feeling of temporal dislocation — obviously a favorite topic of mine — also reverberates loudly through the song’s spare but evocative lyrics:

Did you take a photograph of your life

Time lapse, childhood of your time

Blossoming flowers in black and white

I paint it white, you ask me black

A photograph

Of your life

Did you take

This photograph

The words leave plenty of room to concoct your own interpretation, but I can’t help thinking about the three years that passed between the time when the song was recorded and the day this past week when I first heard it. What was life like back in 2019, before any of us had an inkling of the global health crisis that was looming on horizon? What was Di Gianfrancesco’s life like before he almost died in the hospital? What was my life like when I still believed that I would be married forever? Do any of us truly remember the “before times,” or have those memories been forever colored and warped by what came after? Looking back at photographs from those days, do we even recognize ourselves in them anymore?

As I ponder these questions that “Photograph” conjures, I feel compelled to spin the song one more time… and then maybe once again…

Well done, Cats; thanks for the magic.

---