Armed Forces Franklin Bruno Continuum
Bruno and Niimi both have entries in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series, each volume of which is devoted to a short but obsessive treatment of a much-loved album, from James Brown’s Live at the Apollo to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. They’ll appear together next Saturday at Quimby’s, where Bruno will read from his book on Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces and Niimi will read from his on R.E.M.’s Murmur. The two have known each other since 1994, when one of Niimi’s bands toured through Pomona and played with Bruno’s group Nothing Painted Blue.
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Niimi, who started freelancing as a music writer around the same time he entered the master’s program in liberal arts at the University of Chicago in 2002, is a former recording engineer who played drums and guitar in Aden, Holiday, the John Huss Moderate Combo, and Ashtray Boy, a group fronted by Randall Lee of the Cannanes. He now writes for the Reader and Spin, among other outlets, and cohosts a weekly rock show on WHPK called Radio Zero. Bruno began writing professionally not long after starting the PhD program in philosophy at UCLA in 1994, and these days his work appears in places like the Village Voice and Salon. He got his doctorate in 2003 and this fall accepted a yearlong position as a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern. Taste the Flavor, likely the final album from Nothing Painted Blue, comes out later this month on Shrimper.
One thing that happened was the now infamous hotel-bar incident in Columbus, Ohio. On tour behind the album in 1979, a drunken Costello traded insults with singer Bonnie Bramlett and members of Stephen Stills’s road crew and tried to provoke them by calling Ray Charles a “blind ignorant nigger.” The resulting furor nearly aborted his career. “I think there are some themes about power and politics that are in the record, and a certain way of approaching them by being blatant or offensive, or using ‘charged language’ as Costello puts it,” says Bruno. “That stuff jumped off of the record and into real life.”
Though reviews for both books have been largely positive, both Niimi and Bruno are still hoping to hear directly from their subjects.
Where: Quimby’s, 1854 W. North
