We put them in our cocktails, but how well do we know them?

Here's some biographical detail on the men behind your favorite tipples:

1. Captain Morgan

The Captain wasn't always just the choice of sorority girls looking to blend spiced rum with Diet Coke; in the 17th century he was a feared privateer.

Not only did the Welsh pirate marry his own cousin, he ran risky missions for the governor of Jamaica, including capturing some Spanish prisoners in Cuba and sacking Port-au-Prince in Haiti.

He then plundered the Cuban coast before holding for ransom the entire city of Portobelo, Panama.

He later looted and burned Panama City, but his pillaging career came to an end when Spain and England signed a peace treaty in 1671.

Instead of getting in trouble for his high-seas antics, Morgan received knighthood and became the lieutenant governor of Jamaica. Mental Floss: 5 drinking stories that put yours to shame

2. Johnnie Walker

Walker, the name behind the world's most popular brand of Scotch whisky, was born in 1805 in Ayrshire, Scotland.

Walker became a very successful grocer in the town of Kilmarnock and even sold a whisky, Walker's Kilmarnock Whisky.

Johnnie's son Alexander was the one who actually turned the family into famous whisky men, though.

Alexander had spent time in Glasgow learning how to blend teas, but he eventually returned to Kilmarnock to take over the grocery from his father.

Alexander turned his blending expertise to whisky, and came up with "Old Highland Whisky," which later became Johnnie Walker Black Label.

3. Jack Daniel

Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel of Tennessee whiskey fame was the descendant of Welsh settlers who came to the United States in the early 19th century.

He was born in 1846 or 1850 and was one of 13 children.

By 1866 he was distilling whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Unfortunately for the distiller, he had a bit of a temper. One morning in 1911 Daniel showed up for work early and couldn't get his safe open.

He flew off the handle and kicked the offending strongbox. The kick was so ferocious that Daniel injured his toe, which then became infected.

The infection soon became the blood poisoning that killed the whiskey mogul.

Curious about why your bottle of J.D. also has Lem Motlow listed as the distillery's proprietor? Daniel's own busy life of distilling and safe-kicking kept him from ever finding a wife and siring an heir, so in 1907 he gave the distillery to his beloved nephew Lem Motlow, who had come to work for him as a bookkeeper. Mental Floss: The many myths of Jack Daniel

The Nation Blue - ‘I See Colours’

For a while there, The Nation Blue were Australia’s premiere post-hardcore / rock’n'roll band, garnering some big-name supports and trekking across the globe, making it as far as Brazil. Their 2007 disc Protest Songs built them quite a fan base and a few friends (such as Dave Grohl, which publicists LOVE to include in their press releases). And then… they kinda fell off the radar.

‘I See Colours’ is the latest release from this Melbourne trio and it comes with a pretty harrowing backstory courtesy of vocalist/guitar Tom Lyncoln.

“‘I See Colours’ is about having my drink spiked on New Years 1999/2000 and falling down a flight of stairs onto a slate floor and then waking up during a CT scan and thinking I was dead… I ripped the tube outta my arm and bent the needle and destroyed my arm…took me three days to sit up in bed, four days to walk again and a week of phone calls to find out what happened to me.

“Still don’t really know but think it was a girl at party… toxicology report says I had 3 x the maximum dosage of MDMA in my system and this song is a description of what I saw when I first woke up. In contrast I wanted to write a really tweaked chord progression and pack the song full of ghost notes. Tick.”

The band are playing a couple of shows this week, and they’re on their MySpace page.

http://www.myspace.com/thenationblue

Field Rituals
Koen Holtkamp
Type Records

This is the debut album from Holtkamp, who has gotten well-known as one-half of the ambient duo Mountains. Holtkamp utilizes twinkly field recordings (children playing), warped-phased-finger-picked guitar playin’, and the (usual) panned waves and squiggles. It is the sort of cultivated rustic fuzziness for non-dancing ambient fans. The album will endure comparisons to Boards of Canada and being described as “warm” and “organic-like.”

Field Rituals deserves better. I am not a huge ambient guy. I dig one of these albums about every three years: Boards of Canada, Mum, Piano Magic, Hood . You want a band that will match the coming cold front–you could do no better than Hood. You want a record that will blend well with your daily walk or green-line ride? This is it.

I road tested Field Rituals a few weeks ago. The album blended so well with my shuddering Metro ride, the squeaking brakes, the idle chatter of bored commuters. I wanna say it enhanced by boring slog to Chinatown. The album insists you listen hard, that you take it seriously; it’s not dinner music.

But Field Rituals songs aren’t endurance tests, requiring the listener to figure out each pixel, each shivering note. You’ll try just the same. Be patient. The songs work like time-lapsed photography. Except they grow without building, without ramping up the tension (like guitar squall, bigger and bigger beats). or even conventional resolution. They’re like a series of moments, unfolding and folding, unfolding and folding. So yeah, be patient.

By far the most intimate Live at Lime recording, our session with Juliana Hatfield probably comes closest to nailing what we hope for every time we enter the studio with an artist: something raw, honest, and unscripted.  To say this session is un-self-conscious would be an understatement — close your eyes and it’s like she’s sitting on your bed playing just for you.

The set list here is comprised of impromptu requests (“My Baby...”), the requisite hit (“My Sister”), and a classic Blake Babies track (“Your Way or the Highway”).  But the real standout track is the brand new, never-before-released “I Picked You Up” — a song so poignant and personal it almost seems wrong to be listening to it. If “I Picked You Up” isn’t the answer song to Ryan Adam’s “Come Pick Me Up”, then it should be.

You can check out Juliana's entire catalog, including August's cricitically-acclaimed release How to Walk Away, over at the LimeWire Store.

When I wrote about Ne-Yo’s “Miss Independent” last week, I mostly wanted to talk about timbre — the effervesynths that seem to give it so much of its tingly, zeitgeisty affect. But I did find myself discussing things like form and rhythm and harmony too. Actually, I pretty much passed on any real harmonic analysis, as a quick ear’s glance suggested to me that the surface simplicity of the song (I called it a “two/three-chord” progression) betrayed a much more complicated — and in some ways not so easily / usefully reducible harmonic structure.

So I decided to seek out some expertise from a dear, old friend, Greg Brown, a colleague from UW-Madison working on a PhD in music theory. A student of Brian Hyer and Lee Blasius, Greg writes really beautifully about Sigur Ros, but he’s also quite able to walk the walk and talk the talk on some 18th/19th century “common practice” sump’m sump’m, knomesayin. So I look to Greg when in need of high theoretical perspectives that remain well grounded. Below, he lends his ears to those of us who’d like to attend a little more closely to the harmonic bedding for Ne-Yo’s r&b fantasy. All hyperlinks are his.

Here’s the audio for those who want to follow along –

Take it away, Greg…

…

Ne-Yo’s “Miss Independent,” harmonically speaking, isn’t going to fit into any neat Schenkerian plan, and not just because of your and my justifiable skepticism of music-analytical reduction.

Because of the meter, I’d argue (and maybe I’ll even use the present, non-conditional tense starting now) that we have to hear the first chord as some sort of I. But we can’t, if we’re gonna be Zocchian about it. (For the benefit of anyone reading this who’s not Wayne or I, I’ll just say “Zocchian” is an inside-joke, a reference I use with tongue firmly planted in cheek. It’s a shout-out to a mutual friend, who’s an awesome pianist who can provide a play-by-play harmonic analysis, score, unseen, of even the fastest, most complicated tonal music.) So, straight off the bat, we lose the ability to proceed through a convincing harmonic analysis of this song in any traditional sense.

Of course, we can (and I will) do so anyway, which isn’t a bad exercise. In fact, the process might help us connect to the music on another level.

With philosophical disclaimers out of the way, I’m thinking we have to hear the song as being in B-flat minor. With no altered keys (five flats: BEADG, if you’d like a refresher).

Whereas the Romantics (not the band, as far as I know) — perhaps in an attempt to ride the coat-tails of Beethoven after the “controversy” — which stemmed from the fact it opens with a series of V-I, not I-V or I-V-I progressions — of his First Symphony, we can’t say it’s surprising or innovative that “Miss Independent” doesn’t start on I. Starting on IV is a little weirder, but not really too weird, because the producers are likely not thinking tonally, per se.

As a side note, this goes well with my theory that contemporary music (lots of dance music, but lots of other music, too) has effectively replaced V with IV. IV used to serve to prepare V (so sayeth the Schenkerians), or otherwise it was simply used to expand I. Today, IV tends to be the place I moves to and from — thus playing a role traditionally given to V — but IV still retains a sense that it’s “expanding the tonic” (another word for I, the root harmony, which defines the key), which is why the music we both love so much keeps flowing, pushing forward even as it asks us to listen to things that aren’t harmonically relevant.

Back to the beginning of the song: the first chord is E-flat minor. But because we initially hear it with that gay (sorry, I couldn’t resist) effervesynth, which starts on — and folds back to — D-flat, the chord is effectively a seventh chord. So it starts on a (minor) IV-7.

So the progression, as I (am asked, for the historical record, to) hear it is:

iv7 — i — VI — VII

(Note: I’m capitalizing major chords and not minor, as most theory students are asked to do unless they attend UW-Madison.)

This (non-)progression is repeated over and over until the bridge, which, by the way, I haven’t given much thought to yet, other than to briefly think about how cheesy it sounds to me. Have fun with that!

Now, I could spend way too long on this. Hell, I probably already have. But one thing is worth noting in particular. If you were to remove the iv7 (which would likely change the song beyond recognition), you get a familiar progression of some pop music (and note: it’s not really a classical progression, since it doesn’t — to Zocchian ears — “progress”). I’m thinking of some hardcore metal songs, the verse of Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” or the entirety of Stevie Nicks‘(s) “Edge of Seventeen.” Weird, actually, I think the Prince reference would be on key. Keep in mind we’d have to hear both those songs as I — II — iii instead of VI — VII — I.

So yeah, it’s complicated, mostly because we’re forcing harmonic theory where it doesn’t belong. Still, even leaving that opinion aside, it’s also complicated because the iv7 makes it complicated. It’s a lush, energetic chord that displaces the tonic (i) harmony on the downbeat. When you play it on the piano …

D-flat      D-flat
B-flat      D-flat
G-flat      F
E-flat      F

… you can feel and hear how the iv7 results from a double-appoggiatura of sorts. G-flat and E-flat narrow in on F, and when they get there, it’s just a i-chord.

Jammin!

To help you out, let me finish by writing out for you how I’d play it to really feel what I’m getting at. The middle lines are the right hand (start with your pinky on the top note, thumb on the bottom). It looks like four lines, but think of it as triads. I just want you to see (and feel) the two pitches converging into one. The bottom (bold) line is the left-hand bass line, which I think matches the bass of the song. I positioned the right-hand triads to give smoother voice leading between the first and second chords, and also so that you can hear the riff’s melody on the top, which is where it is in the actual mix. Finally, I just noticed that the melodic instrumental riff follows what I had already notated as the top line of the right-hand triads, but it fills in the F-to-D-flat interval stepwise, while rhythmically anticipating the chord changes. This melodic hook (for your own safety, don’t try to play it at the same time) is in italics at the very top, but there’s no space to notate anything other than each pitch the first time it’s heard. (I’m not notating repeated pitches or rhythm there.)

By Louis Peitzman

Don't let the name fool you: MC Frontalot is serious about rapping. He just does it a bit differently than most other hip-hop artists.

Frontalot (real name: Damian Hess) has been called "the godfather of nerdcore" for his role in establishing a genre where it's cool to be uncool. He raps about everything from Internet porn to Magic: the Gathering - exposing nerds to hip-hop culture, and vice versa. Along with his band, he's the subject of the documentary Nerdcore Rising, currently screening in select theaters. In a phone interview, I chatted with Hess about the film and the direction nerdcore is taking. He performs at the Uptown Night Club tonight.

SFBG: My first question is about the name - is it ironic, or do you feel as though you actually front?

Damian Hess: I mean, I picked it out originally because I thought there'd be no other rapper who would want to steal that from me. Because rappers generally eschew fronting and, you know, try to convince everyone that they're not fronting at all.

I also sort of felt it was descriptive at the time, just of the amount of fronting I have to do just to pick up a microphone and pretend like everyone ought to pay a lot of attention to me. Seems like a lot of fronting.

Actually I picked the name because someone had taken a snapshot of me rapping on stage with a funk band that a friend of mine was in. I had just sort of stepped up with them for a second. And I was just looking at this picture of myself, like, you know, grinning and holding this mic up to my mouth like all the real rappers, and I was gripped with self-hatred, and I wrote, "MC Frontalot's Raptacular Funfest" on there with like a Sharpie, just kind of stabbing at myself. But I don't know, then I thought it was intriguing and/or funny, and I kept it.

SFBG: Do you worry about being taken seriously as an artist? Obviously there's an aspect of humor to it, but you are a serious musician, so how do you reconcile that?

DH: I guess I don't usually worry about it. I know that everyone who's sort of within the core audience will be attracted to the humor in it, and there's plenty of humor in it. And I love almost everything that I'm into to have some humor in it. Even all of the politics I consume is funny.

You know, I like to read Wonkette and 23/6 and stuff like that. I like my horror movies to be funny. I like everything to be funny. I don't like anything to be disposably funny, and I'm not interested in parody at all. So I do worry, of course, that someone here's like, "Oh, nerds rapping, that's just going to be some kind of a gag, or a one-note joke."

But I don't worry that the people who are gonna have the potential to be my fans are gonna think that, 'cause they'll take one listen and they'll hear what's going on lyrically, and they'll hear that we're serious about the music, and I hope that they'll find there's something worth listening to over and over in there. The way MC Lars put it in the documentary is, the goal is to be funny without being a joke. And that's a thin line potentially, but I'm pretty happy with how most of the stuff comes out.

SFBG: In the film, there's an issue raised of nerdcore being construed as racist. How would you respond to those allegations?

DH: Well, there's a lot of kids doing nerdcore, and I guess you'd need to look at everything case by case. I know there are some kids who are calling themselves nerdcore and don't take rap very seriously, who think that by sort of rapping badly that that's funny and that they're somehow exposing some weakness of hip-hop itself. Of course, those people are idiots. I have no interest in approaching music that way. That would be a big waste of time.

Are those kids racist? I'm not sure. I've certainly heard a lot of, like, indie rock consumers dismiss rap out of hand, and there's always seemed to me to be some seed of racism in that dismissal. But the kids who are making the nerdcore that I like and these kids that I tour with, I think it all comes from a deep and an aware respect of the fact that hip-hop is a piece of black culture that we're happening to try to create something that's associated with it. But like I said, unless you delve into parody, there's no aspect of it that's critical of rap itself. I certainly am never trying to expose anything absurd about rap culture.

SFBG: Another question Nerdcore Rising touches on is whether or not nerdcore can ever become popular to the masses. Can it go mainstream, and will it?

DH: It's not inconceivable. Anyone could make a song from anything that seems to be a niche genre and have a good enough hook to it that everyone's ears perk up when it comes on, and it becomes popular. But just on the basis of it being nerdcore, could the idea of nerdcore become mainstream? That seems unlikely based on what it is.

It's something that's speaking to an identity that's by definition non-dominant, non-mainstream, separated from all the things that make the top strata of pop culture popular, you know, like glossiness, shininess, glamour, beauty, popularity.

SFBG: Returning to the film, what was left out of it - whether about the music or about you personally - that you want people to know about?

DH: What was left out of the film? God, I don't know. What was left out of the film? Hey, Brandon, what was left out of the documentary that the public should have known? What did Negin [Farsad, the director] like hide from the public about nerdcore and what it all means? Exactly the sort of question I don't know how to answer.

I remember the first time I saw the movie I realized, like, the whole thing is sort of from a perspective outside of, like, nerd-ness, you know, outside of nerd culture. It's sort of like an introduction, like, here's what nerds are like. It's almost like you're in a zoo or something. That was sort of her approach, to make this sort of general interest movie, but I guess it ends up leaving out all of the real sort of dorky stuff that we tend to talk about. You know, we'll sit and talk about game mechanics for an hour or something, but that's the kind of thing that would have massive interest to our fans if they were watching the movie but of course, like, no interest to a general movie audience.

SFBG: Have you seen your fanbase increasing with the movie kind of spreading around?

DH: I've been noticing a ton of e-mail from people in Europe, I think because they're all pirating it off Danish torrent servers.

SFBG: The rest of my questions are more about nerd culture in general. First, are there any nerdy things that you just don't get or otherwise aren't into?

DH: Oh, yeah, there's a bunch. Like, I'm not into Harry Potter. I'm not into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm not really very into Star Trek, although many people are on one side or the other of a Star Trek/Star Wars divide.

SFBG: So you fall more on the Star Wars side, then?

DH: Oh, yeah.

SFBG: Do you have a favorite Star Wars?

DH: Well, Empire, of course.

SFBG: And how many hours a day would you say you spend on the computer?

DH: Um, usually, it's like seven to 18. I mean, I just get up and I'm on the computer a lot. I have to walk the dog. I come back, I'm on the computer a lot. I mean, you go on tour and you're not in front of the computer at all for six weeks at a time. Or you go out and actually do something with your day, but most days, it's computer all day.

SFBG: And to close it off back on the music, what's next for you and for nerdcore? Where do you see yourself and the genre moving?

DH: Well, there's this current sort of pop culture fascination with nerds and nerderie. You know, there's like IT Crowd and whatever that other sitcom is. And there's all these comic book movies becoming hits. God, what were we looking through? Like, Maxim, or something. You know, there's this almost entirely naked fashion model sprawled out in a big spread, and the big pull quote is like, "I consider myself a nerd, really."

So there's this little moment of trendiness of it right now. I don't know if that's driven by the techno surge performing culture very slightly, or if it's just one of the many random ebbs and flows of American culture. But it sort of seems like the moment when nerderie could, you know, catch the eye of the kind of people who push culture into the mainstream. You know, the big record companies or whatever could conceivably seize this moment to make nerdcore be much more noticeable than it's been.

But I don't know if that would really, in the long-run, serve us and do us any good. The grassroots approach of actually reaching dedicated fans ourselves through the Internet has been serving us really well. And its trajectory is such that it seems like the handful of us who are viable touring bands and who are very serious about the music side of it - it seems as though we are on trajectory, even without any kind of cultural wave, to continue to have successful careers with it, no matter what the fickle tastes of the general public might otherwise dictate.

So I don't know really whether it would be good or bad to get the traditional success model applied to us. Surely, it would be lucrative in the short-term, but I don't know whether that would be our best bet. You do hear of many bands who hit a moment of their particular style's emergence, and then four years later, feel very ripped off by the hundred grand they still owe their label, or scoffs that they receive from talking heads on I Love the '90s.

(Some time later…)

DH: Yeah, I didn't mean to blow off the racism question. I really contemplate that a lot. It's difficult to, like, hop into the two genres of music that ever emerged out of America, both of which were created by black Americans, and create a small amount of success as someone's who's not black. I don't know quite how I feel about that.

I come from Berkeley, so I have a predisposition for sitting around worrying about the racial politics of everything that I do. I don't know. I don't quite know how to resolve it, so I just kind of hope that the respect I feel for the origins of the things that I'm appropriating is clear enough that no one ever feels offended by the music.

SFBG: I think the music does speak for itself, but I just wanted to get your take on it, because I felt like it was something that was brushed on in the movie, but I wanted to hear your side of it more.

DH: I'm glad it was touched on a little in the movie. I think it would've been interesting if that came out more. Actually there's something I thought there was not enough of in the movie, were people reacting critically to the band.

There was only that one segment of like, sort of meatheads and snobs brushing us off. Like, I think there's probably a lot of very non-meathead, non-snobby hip-hop fans who would have a bad reaction to me. And you didn't see that much of that in the movie. I kind of even think that would have made the narrative of the movie stronger, because there's so much about this idea of the nerds as an identity group being underdogs, but there's not that many people, like, kicking us around in the movie.

And, you know, in adult nerd life there's not all that much of that anyway, if you're not like sitting around in a bar trying to talk to the pretty girl that the guy who was a jock in high school also has his eye on. You don't tend to have those interactions after you leave the world of school. But there definitely was plenty of that in all of our lives when we were younger.

MC FRONTALOT
With MC Lars and DJ Omar
Wed/19, 9 p.m., $15
Uptown Night Club
1928 Telegraph, Oakl.
(510) 451-8100

Mr. Simon continued being awesome with a stop over at Stephen Colbert's place last night. Paul was on hand to promote his new book Lyrics 1964-2008, a title which Colbert deemed utterly unpoetic (his suggestion: Word Salad Jazzmatron). Simon's stay spanned two segments. The first had Stephen ask Simon to defend some of his hippie-era lyrics, explain what exactly Julio was doing down by the schoolyard, and why Paul needed to walk out on Cecilia to wash his face. ("Well it was the '60s so I don't remember.") After wits were traded, Paul performed "American Tune," with the stars of the flag and the city skyline hanging behind him. Utterly poetic.