A Second Hand Conjecture

I was in the supermarket earlier tonight buying candy and they had a rack of Halloween themed t-shirts. I didn’t notice it at first, but the slogan on each shirt was an old Misfits song. “Ghoul’s Night Out”, “Astro Zombies”, “Die, Die My Darling”, “I Turned Into A Martian” you name it. Pretty damn fine, thought me. Time to kick some Misfits in all its noisy low-fidelity, punk rock glory methinks. “Halloween”:

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I’ve mentioned before that I lived (in the fullest sense of the word) in Charlottesville, VA for many years in the 90’s. During that time I got to know a great many talented musicians including Dave Matthews. We weren’t buddies or anything but, like many small towns, our paths crossed enough to know who each other was at the time. Dave likely wouldn’t remember me nowadays, but I surely enjoyed his concerts at Trax back then, and I’m always happy to reprise bits of happy moments.

While searching for something entirely different, I came across this is a rendition of “Warehouse” delivered near UVA’s campus at (I believe) a former used record store on Main Street. I thought you all might enjoy it:

In less happy news, the saxophonist for The Dave Matthews Band has, tragically, died:

Dave Matthews Band saxophone player LeRoi Moore, one of the group’s founding members and a key part of its eclectic jazz-infused sound, died Tuesday from sudden complications stemming from injuries he sustained in an all-terrain vehicle accident in June. He was 46.

[...]

Moore, who liked to wear his trademark dark sunglasses at the bands’ live concerts, had classical training but said jazz was his main musical influence, according to a biography on the band’s Web site.

“But at this stage I don’t really consider myself a jazz musician,” Moore said in the biography. Playing with the Dave Matthews Band was “almost better than a jazz gig,” he said. “I have plenty of space to improvise, to try new ideas.”

Lead singer Dave Matthews credited Moore with arranging many of his songs, which combine Cajun fiddle-playing, African-influenced rhythms and Matthews’ playful but haunting voice.

The band formed in 1991 in Charlottesville, Va., when Matthews was working as a bartender. He gave a demo tape of his songs to Moore, who liked what he heard and recruited his friend and fellow jazzman Carter Beauford to play drums, and other musicians.

RIP, LeRoi.

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A treat for Velvet Underground fans, Bud Benderbe reinterprets the seminal alternative band:

More over at Airforce Amazon.

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Feist, the glorious female vocalist from Broken Social Scene who went solo and got her song in an iPod commercial, recently made an appearance on Sesame Street:

I don’t know if it’s creepy or not, but it is most definitely surreal. And awesome. I wish I had learned to count like this.

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Yo Yo, a flash in the pan empowered-but-sexless female rapper (try selling that today), got her big break by teaming up with Ice Cube on her 1991 debut Make Way for the Motherlode. Why, here she is, being so early-90’s empowered.

Unfortunately, she was overtaken by Salt ‘N’ Peppa, and later Missy Missdimeanor Elliott, and now the kaleidoscopic variety of rapper-sluts that pollute our previous cable music channels… like how Flava Flav fell from being an outspoken and effective voice for black frustration at their marginalization to spawning atrocities like Flavor of Love and I Love New York. Something is missing, somehow.

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Rock & Roll lost one of it’s brightest and most penetrating stars yesterday, even if one of the least well known. The founder of the jungle beat heard in too many songs to count over the last 50 years succumbed to heart failure at his home in Archer, FL, at the age of 79.

Bo Diddley was a musical innovator who helped forge the sound and contributed to the style of rock ‘n’ roll. He sported a trademark fedora, played an iconic square-shaped guitar and from it he extracted a deep, rusty reverb and a peculiar playing style that influenced generations of players.

[...]

“He was by far the most underrated of any ’50s star,” says producer Phil Spector. “You listen to those (reissued box sets) and the rhythmic invention, the consistent high quality of imagination and performance, the excellence of the writing, the power of the vocals - nobody else ever did it better or had a deeper, more penetrating influence.”

Perhaps no guitarist was more influenced by Diddley’s sound and style than ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, who carries on Diddley’s tradition of strange-looking instruments and full-bodied guitar riffs with prickly solos.

Gibbons called Diddley “the ‘artiste.’

“He was the man who constructed the sound we all grew to revolve around,” he said. “And a vision of simplicity delivered through effortless expression and sense of humor. Many times, Bo made a point to say, ‘I’ll always be around,’ and we know he will.”

In other words, when it comes to rock music, if you don’t know Bo you don’t know Diddley. Eric Burden and the Animals offered the best testament to Bo’s prophetic words:

R.I.P. Ellas Otha “Bo Diddley” Bates.

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Reading through our spam comment queue is like listening to Feel Good Hit of the Summer.

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This post + this post = This.

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Previously posted on last.fm, now with political addendum at the end.

The concept of the price of fame is usually applied in the sense of the personal cost to the famous, from the relatively mild annoyance of not being able to go out without being recognized, to the deep existential crises and insanity of megastars like Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson. You could certainly argue that Kurt and Michael would have been crazy anyway, but clearly becoming famous was not healthy for either of them.

But there is another cost of fame that is a little harder to pin down, because it’s the cost that is charged to a band’s account of cool points when the band gets too famous. In some contexts, this cool-points account might be called “indie cred” or “punk cred” or (more generally) “authenticity.” I’m sure there are specific equivalents for jazz and metal and klezmer and so on, but it all comes down to the same thing.

If you are an indie kid or a hipster of any stripe, or have spent any time around hipsters, you have experienced or observed the phenomenon of the band that gets too famous for its original fans to tolerate, as if the band’s quality is dependent upon its obscurity. Of course that’s objectively ridiculous, but music fandom is no science, and people naturally enjoy music for more than its purely musical qualities. So it’s understandable why a fan might grow bitter at the object of his (gendered pronoun intentional—it’s usually guys who do this) affection’s success. Now he has to share with a bunch of bandwagoneers who weren’t there during the lean times and who can’t possibly understand what made this band really great. That’s a bit of a caricature, of course. Sometimes when a band gets famous the quality of the music really does decline, sometimes via intentional changes (the “sell-out”), sometimes because the band has started to run out of ideas, and sometimes because the band has plenty of new ideas but they aren’t very good.

With that groundwork laid, I want to posit a kind of weird argument: that ZZ Top is an underrated band today. Yes, that band that is enshrined in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, the one that played to packed stadiums and sold multi-platinum heaps of records. That band that played a Super Bowl halftime show with James Brown. I realize that the concepts of “underrated” and “overrated” are thrown around a lot, usually meaning “this band is way too good to be so obscure” or “this band isn’t good enough to be this popular.” That’s not really what I’m interested in. Instead, I’d like to talk about ZZ Top’s critical reputation and its lack of currency or buzz among contemporary hipsters, and to argue that ZZ Top is (critically) underrated precisely because of their MTV-era success.

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Robby and I got back to our roots a few weeks ago, garage band roots that is. We went to see the Fleshtones. Robby shared his thoughts over at Last Fm. I figure they belong here as well. First, my verdict. Maybe the most fun band ever live. Yeah, click the links, go listen to the music.

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Since forming thirty-plus years ago at the dawn of the punk era in New York, The Fleshtones are not only still together, but they still bring the Super Rock party to whatever bar they play in. It’s the same classic lineup they’ve always had, except for their “new” bass player Kenny (who has only been with the band since 1992).

Last night at the Spanish Moon, an embarrassingly small crowd of about 40 (which coincidentally seems to have been the median age of the audience as well–I saw lots of old friends from my Here Comes a Regular years) showed up for the masters of garage rock; many bands that count on lots of audience interaction might have felt deflated by the sparse crowd and come out flat. Not The Fleshtones. They don’t depend on a crowd to show up stoked, they instead always create the audience they want, enticing people to the front of the stage, frequently foraying out onto the floor of the club, constantly dancing, playing the whole time. It’s infectious. I don’t like to dance much, but The ‘Shtones have a way of loosening the locks on my joints.

To describe the specifics of their stage show (jumping up on the bar, the semi-choreographed stage moves, guitarist Keith Streng’s high kicks) makes it all seem cheesy and cliched to someone who hasn’t seen them live. Believe me, I’ve seen bands that do all that exact stuff, and they come off cheesy and cliched, like they’re aping the rock star moves they’ve seen. (For example, The Cynics. Nice records, but posers live.)

It’s hard to say exactly how The Fleshtones pull it off, except to conjecture that it’s because they’re not ACTING. They are rock stars in every way that matters, and professional entertainers to the core. It’s not so much that they do things differently from other down-and-dirty bar bands, they do everything that’s already been done better. The only other band of this genre that I’ve ever seen put on a show in their league was The Lyres.

The music, in itself, is competent guitar-and-farfisa garage rock, not significantly different from hundreds of other bands of this type. Listen to their records, yes; but they’re really all about the live show, the bright kinetic energy of which is all the more amazing considering they’re really kind of old. I mean, I first saw The Fleshtones in Baltimore about 1990; they had already been together about a decade and a half at that point. That show was 18 years ago, which is the same amount of time that passed from The Beatles‘ first singles until John Lennon’s shooting. And here we have the ‘Shtones, still bringing it to the stage with the same energy and enthusiasm they had back when I was a kid.

When they last played Baton Rouge, it was 1983. Singer Peter Zaremba promised to be back in another 25 years. “Tell your children,” he urged us. “Tell your children about The Fleshtones.” I would add to that, if you have children, don’t let them see The Fleshtones before you do: trust me, you’ll be embarrassed. And younger folks, don’t skip seeing them because you think they’re old. You’re right; they’re old. But you are guaranteed to have a good time at a Fleshtones show. You’ll leave sweaty, and tired, and grinning.

http://www.last.fm/event/547950

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Heh, a response to Richard Dawkins and the unbelievers amongst us. Right or wrong, arrogant condescension does not go unpunished.

Hat tip: D.A. Ridgely

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A worldwide celebration is happening tonight. Yuri’s Night!

The local arts organization I am a member of, Art Mob, is supporting our local version. Unfortunately Art Mob’s sight is having trouble, but the temporary site can be found here. I just spent the afternoon at a juried art competition and art walk we organized, “Smock Paper Scissors.” It was raising money to support the arts programs for Baton Rouge’s new Autonomous Schools Network. My job was to take students around to all the exhibits, discuss the art, engage the artists and students, etc. Great fun, the kids were wonderful, the artists eager to discuss their work and art with the kids.

To find your own version of Yuri’s night:

Yuri’s Night is like the St Patricks Day or Cinco de Mayo for space. It is one day when all the world can come together and celebrate the power and beauty of space and what it means for each of us.

You can go here. If there isn’t one, it isn’t too late to start an impromptu one. Ours will be at a local alternative bar downtown, Redstar. I am attached to the place because the jukebox is fantastic (The lovely lady pictured at the Jukebox is certainly a consideration as well.) I think it is the only place in town that I can count on being able to play the Stooges. Sometimes you just need to hear Search and Destroy while you are out drinking beer.

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I actually enjoyed American Idol tonight, in past years I couldn’t say that (though Carrie Underwood was hot.)

One of them performed this song, and did a pretty good job. No graphics, but the best sound quality of the video’s I found:

There was also an interesting copy of the Carpenters Superstar. However, to hear the definitive cover, one needs Sonic Youth

(Update: I have no idea what the problem is, but the video works on YouTube. Here is the link.)

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Two things you probably don’t know about me and one you probably do:

(1) I’m a pretty decent musician and singer.

(2) I love American Idol.

(3) I hate John Lennon’s “Imagine” because of the message, even though I’ve always enjoyed the tune itself.

This is 17 year old David Archuleta singing his own version of “Imagine” tonight on American Idol. It, and he, are both something very special. Enjoy:

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Did you ever wonder what it would be like if The Beatles had written Stairway to Heaven instead of Led Zeppelin? Yeah, me neither. But the Australian tribute band, the Beatnix, give us some insight anyway [via: Marginal Revolution, and Michael Blowhard]:

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Last week?

…but I can no longer stand idly by and watch the media and independent voters continue to throw themselves at the feet of John McCain.

Because I’m trying to remember anyone swooning over McCain and I’m not having much luck at all.

The John McCain they fell in love with in 2000 — the straight-shooting, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may maverick - is no more.

Oh. EIGHT YEARS AGO. Now it all makes sense.

But… I have felt fondly for McCain. It happened when I saw this:

McCain sings Streisand.

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Love letter, 1982-1985.

In between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a section of I-10 stretches out as a low, dead straight bridge across 25 miles of swamp. This is the story of how I came to be hauling ass across that long, low bridge at 120 mph (still and forever the fastest I have ever driven any car) on my way to an R.E.M. show in a baby blue Ford LTD festooned with vestigial cop antennae.

I had bought the Ford for $300. Its name was Lyman T. Droogworth, and it was a heavy, creaking metaphor for an MC5 song. It had begun life as an unmarked cop car, primarily used to catch speeders on the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge, and when I bought it, all the electronic cop radio guts had been taken out, but the state didn’t bother to remove the antennae. That meant that cops thought that I was also a cop, and that I could pretty much go as fast as I wanted to. This irony was not lost on me. Lyman did not go in reverse, and it took a long time and a half gallon of gas to get up to top speed, but once it got there, it was one terrifying hunk of Detroit steel. The terrifying part was especially pertinent for the people inside the car.

One of my passengers that night was Lance, who has been my best friend since high school. Lance is the kind of generous person who used to supply beer for all his roommates and assorted hangers-on simply because he had a very little bit of money and the rest of us didn’t. At one point he decided it would be cheaper just to buy kegs rather than keep running to the store for cases. He was incorrect in that assumption, since we just drank more beer during the time of the keg experiment, but what a grand experiment it was. Hats off to Lance.

Lance also performed the priceless service of introducing R.E.M.’s music to me. He had seen a show they performed at our local dive, The Bayou, when we were seniors in high school, and told me he thought they were pretty good. I had heard “Radio Free Europe,” and thought it was a good song, but I wasn’t motivated to check out the rest of their work. Lance wasn’t a huge fan either, but he continued to bring up the little band from Athens from time to time over the next couple of years. By that time we were attending college at Loyola University in New Orleans, and when R.E.M.’s Reckoning tour took them to Tulane’s McAlister Auditorium (walking distance from our dorm), it sounded like a good time to go check them out live.

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Can be found here. For those who missed the tale of REM, Robby and I, I am promoting it to the front page.

Hat tip: Instapundit

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My first thought was something along the lines of that soliloquy from The Commitments where Jimmy Rabbitte encourages his erstwhile band to internalize the thought “I’m black, and I’m proud.”

Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.

This is actually funnier than that (via, Jim Henley):

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This BLAST from the PAST comes to you from the glam pop rock band SWEET!

Dude…

Sweet…

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Carla Bruni.

Quelqu’un m’a dit

Ten things to know about Sarkozy’s bride:

5. Criticise her intellect at your peril: her last album, released in 2007, was based on poems by W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker. She has sold more than two million records in a singing career launched in 2002.

[...]

9. The new Mrs Sarkozy has not always praised marriage. Last year, she told Le Figaro newspaper: “Monogamy bores me terribly.”

10. A British journalist who visited her exclusive Paris apartment for an interview last year was astonished when the singer greeted him topless.

Category: Foreign Affairs.

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And now for an unscheduled musical interlude:

Bill Withers wrote and recorded that song while he had a job installing toilet seats on 747’s. Apparently, he had intended to write more lyrics to replace the 26 consecutive “I know’s” but was convinced by friends that he should just leave it the way it is … a timeless classic.

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18 years ago when I was in the Philippines a somewhat similar song was popular. The song advised, “Not all the World is America.” Well, I figured then that the point made was a good one. It’s a good one now. What I think is significant, though, if you can manage to watch a Rammstein video all the way through, is that this is primarily a song about cultural dominance. “Sometimes war” he sings, but only as an after thought to Coca Cola.

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To love a song, it’s not important that you understand the words. And I say that as a onetime lyricist and singer. As one of my guitarists often reminded me, “the words don’t matter.” Well, yeah they do, but not as much as lyricists like to think. For example, I enjoy Elvis Costello’s lyrics tremendously, but I don’t always know what he’s singing about. It’s enough for me that EC’s words are interesting in and of themselves, given how great the musical elements of the songs are.
On the other hand, understanding the meaning of the words can enhance my appreciation of a song. Case in point is Tom Waits’s “Walking Spanish,” which for the last 20 years I have completely misapprehended. Until recently, I carried around the idea that “walking spanish” was just a kind of funny way of walking, like John Leguizamo doing a pimp roll or something. I know that is a ridiculous thing to think, but I have a lot of odd notions that are probably wrong, and I’m comfortable with that.

Anyway, I recently discovered that “walking Spanish” means, literally, being forcibly carried from a place by one’s collar and belt, with one’s tiptoes scrabbling at the floor, so that the Spanish walker is being forced to go somewhere he doesn’t want to go. The expression derives from being made to walk the plank on a pirate ship, but a more modern example might be being thrown out of a bar.

“Huh!” said I upon being given this information. Maybe Tom Waits isn’t just growling about a funny way of walking in that song. So I went back to the lyrics, and whaddaya know, “Walking Spanish” is a song about death.

The first three verses tell the story (in an elliptical, Tom Waitsish way) of Mason, a man who “got himself a homemade special”(a gun) and committed a crime. He thinks “his glass is full of sand,” but he’s got less time than he thinks, as he is arrested and sent to death row. The song offers the possibility of spiritual and material comfort (respectively a picture of Jesus, or “a spoon to dig a hole” to escape through), but neither can change Mason’s ultimate destination.

Jesus appears again in the last verse, as one who “wanted just a little more time” when he was walking Spanish down the hall. In Christian theology, Jesus stands in for all of us, taking on the sins of the world, etc., and so the song expands from the story of a single death row inmate to everyone’s story: we’re all walking Spanish from our very first staggering baby steps, and no matter how full of sand our glass seems, it is sand, and it is an hourglass, and it does that hourglass thing where the sand runs out. Damn gravity.

But Waits is neither weepy nor solipsistic about that grim conclusion. The loose, relaxed blues riff that anchors the song suggests a wry acceptance of facts, and one death or many deaths doesn’t change the equally pertinent fact that “tomorrow morning there’ll be laundry.” That is, there’s always work to do, so quit your bitching, death-boy.

Discussion: what other songs might be good for a “Death Mix”? I mean songs (like “Walking Spanish”) that are at least a bit subtle, that don’t hit you over the head with their deathily deathish deathiness (e.g. The Doors or Cannibal Corpse). A couple that spring to mind would be “Glowworm” by The Apples in Stereo or “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel.

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I’m probably the last one to see this, but this song/commercial is really well done. I especially like the homage to the Beatles.

And I think this comment sums it all up:

why cant real apples sing like that?!?!?!?!?!,

Heh.

As a bonus, here’s the video for that other commercial that’s stuck in my head:

Technorati Tags: “Blue”, The Fruit Guys, Feist, “1 2 3 4″, cool commercials, iPod, Fruit of the Loom

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This is highly amusing…

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=paLydon_Thurs_14_Lydon_carcass&show_article=1

Punk legend John Lydon has lashed out at Sting - calling The Police frontman a “soggy old dead carcass”.

The Sex Pistol, also known as Johnny Rotten, poured scorn on the Eighties band’s recent comeback.

Lydon, 51, was speaking as the Sex Pistols prepare for a one-off gig to mark the 30th anniversary of their album Never Mind The B*****ks.

The former punk rebel dismissed Sting as “Stink”, saying: “That really is a reformation isn’t it? But honestly that’s like soggy old dead carcasses.

“You know listening to Stink try to squeak through Roxanne one more time, that’s not fun.

“It’s like letting air out of a balloon.”

Especially after seeing this the other day…

The Sex Pistols have joined the growing list of 1970s bands hitting the comeback trail, after announcing a one-off gig in London later this year.

The four surviving members of the band will take to the stage at the Brixton Academy on Nov 8 to mark the 30th anniversary of their album Never Mind The Bollocks.

Their announcement follows the ticket scramble sparked by last week’s news that Led Zeppelin are to play a charity gig at London’s O2 arena, also in November.

The Sex Pistols - the most celebrated and notorious British punk band - split in 1978 shortly before the death of bassist Sid Vicious.

They last reformed at a poorly-received show in Crystal Palace in south London in 2002.

Frontman John Lydon - formerly known as Johnny Rotten - told music website NME.com that “all of Britain” was welcome to attend the Brixton show, which coincides with the re-release of their first album.

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Lance was teasing me for not posting this here. I may be mistaken, but my review of Laurence Jarvik’s article on NGOs in Central Asia, which I had posted at The Registan, is re-posted without attribution on the subscription section of a newspaper’s website in violation of our Copyright. More info here.Now, in case any of you wish to draw attention to the spat MichaelW and I had over the property rights of file sharing, know this. Since the Times of Central Asia is a for-profit publication that makes money by stealing—meaning, it is a routine occurrence for them and can be considered part of their business model—and because I specifically don’t mind (and in fact rather enjoy) the copyright on my writing, which allows copies and modifications so long as it’s non-commercial and properly attributed, they’re not the same.

Also, writing and music are not the same—the economics, business models, and property rights involved are totally different (the “sampling” criteria alone, which is limited to three notes in music but paragraphs in writing, is but one example). Besides which, an analogous situation would be me pasting my name on a Rakes CD and selling it under my name, which isn’t at all what file sharing entails.

File sharing is much more akin Lance’s initial treatment of my news briefs, which I am totally fine with and found rather flattering. Like the indie bands who to a large degree enjoy the broader exposure they get with increased torrent downloads (which then translates into bigger shows, which nets them more money at negligible cost), I appreciated (and do appreciate) similar exposure for the same reason, as it makes it more likely that I will get future paid writing assignments (the writer’s equivalent of the musician’s show). Taking my writing and locking it behind a subscription firewall denies me any windfall, thus removing the otherwise compelling argument that more sharing is better for the producer.

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Einstein may have had an inauspicious start as prodigies go, but this four year old has gotten a bit of notice.

Technorati Tags: drummer, drums, prodigy

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I am loving my new discovery Jason Forrest (his myspace here and his main site here[some pages NSFW]). Well, I didn’t really discover him. I mean, other people were already there, and since I do not have a technological advantage over them (quite the opposite, probably), colonization is out of the question. (more…)

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People who love music sometimes identify a little too closely with the musicians/songs they love, to the point that any criticism of those musicians/songs becomes, in the music lover’s mind, a personal attack. That’s true even if the music lover himself had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the music, which is usually the case.
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(Lance’s listening notes: I just spent the evening with my wife and a friend at a little bar, in a very little town, Fordoche Louisiana, called the Red Monkey. I loaded up the Juke box with what interested me (no The Jam, Clash or Pixies) which ended up being The Band, Van Morrison, Creedence and Janis Joplin, plus Johnny Cash. Since I have reprised a couple of posts, I thought it would be a good time to bring you once again Robby’s excellent discussion of Sunday Morning Coming Down. Listen at the bottom.)

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One of the most durable traditions in American popular music is the drinking song. Our national anthem’s melody and structure is based on “To Anacreon in Heaven,” an 18^th-century drinking song, a fact that tells me 18^th-century drinkers were far more ambitious than we are today, the melody being much more challenging to sing than “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” I guess that’s why we sing the anthem at the beginning of sporting events, anyway: by the 7^th inning stretch, everybody would sound like Harry Caray. (more…)

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Note: Google, and thus YouTube, is down. So the video is unavailable at the moment. Please check back later. The entire online world seems to be suffering from rolling outages right now. I don’t know why.

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I love good covers; always have. There’s something about hearing a familiar song in a new context that can make me appreciate both original and cover all the more, if the artists remaking the original put something new into their interpretation. On the other hand, there’s nothing more boring to me than a band trying their best to make their version of a song sound exactly like the original. I want to say, “I already know what they sound like-what do you sound like?”

The best covers are those that completely re-imagine the original; canonical examples in that category would include Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Devo’s “Satisfaction.” The Scissor Sisters’ “Comfortably Numb,” which transforms Pink Floyd’s bloated classic into a spangly glitter disco romp, is another in that group. Even if the genre is not your cup of tea, you’ve got to admit that recording a disco cover of Pink Floyd–as a serious enterprise,