“The Incredible Casuals Play Ernest Noyes Brookings” – As many of you know, my longtime lyricist and favored colleague David Greenberger has developed quite a cottage industry over the last four decades or so based on his magazine “The Duplex Planet”, a wonderful publication consisting mostly of his interviews with elderly nursing home residents, originally at the Duplex Nursing Home in Brookline, MA. In addition to the magazine, there have been movies, theatrical productions, books, comic books, and CDs, including five CDs featuring a varied and eclectic assortment of bands and musicians (including XTC, Yo La Tengo, Ben Vaughn, Morphine, Peter Blegvad, Brave Combo, the Young Fresh Fellows, Fred Frith, and many others) setting the poems of Duplex resident Ernest Noyes Brookings to music.
The Incredible Casuals were fortunate enough to be called on to contribute four songs to various Duplex compilations, and most of those tracks have never been released elsewhere, until now, on this EP, which also serves this week as a preview of a much larger set (23 tracks!) of Casuals singles, compilation cuts, and various studio rarities (a lot of currently unavailable in any other form), that we expect to unleash in another week or so called “Bottomless Pit: Singles, Rarities, and Sundries, 1980 – 2010”
If you’ve never read “The Duplex Planet”, you’re missing a totally compelling alternate reality full of memorable characters, humor, and soul, and we very much recommend catching up! You’ll find the original magazines (full of interesting questions like “Which do you prefer, coffee or meat?”, as well as a whole bunch of very original answers) here, most of the original compilation CDs here, and general all-things-Duplex-Planet here.
ps
Seems like I should fess up to an unprecedented density of Who steals on this bunch; oddly, in our minds, apparently, the Who and Ernest Noyes Brookings seem to go together like quaaludes and drooling! “Spiders” is the only one on here that’s not completely chockful of Who references, and even that… well, you didn’t think we’d get all the way through a song called “Spiders” without reminding you at some point of Boris, did you?