Joe Franke Guest Blog

The music industry is changing, and in some cases, as we know it, collapsing. Technology is at the crux of these changes, with artists successfully self-representing themselves with the aid of the internet, people downloading music rather than purchasing a tangible objects or packages, and digital recording, editing, and mastering becoming ridiculously affordable.
Near the beginning of the record industry, an artist would enter the studio for a very short time and "Cut some sides," recording only a few songs meant for sale or broadcast. These early formats played at fast speed, the playing time was limited, and the songs were short. A single, either a 45 rpm or 78 rpm record, was released with the intent of broadcasting (or selling) one song, primarily. With exceptions (such as a song continuing from the beginning of one side of the record to the end of the other side), a record had a "A" side, and a "B" side. the "A" side was the popular track at the time and, in some early cases and many later cases, the "B" side was the earliest example we have of "filler."
When these records were packaged in album format, it was literally an album, a booklet with removable records, consisting of "sides" recorded on many occasions, and if they were all "A" sides, the album was the equivalent of a "greatest hits" package. Collections, even posthumous presentations on LP format, had the same result.
With the advent of the LP format, methods of recording changed. Bands would enter the studio and record many songs, more than a half hour's worth of material, and release the singles after the fact. Artists were freer to experiment with longer songs and concepts, and, alas, forgettable recorded material.
With the advent of the Compact disc, the time the artist had available to them was now doubled (to 70 minutes!). Both artists and record labels were unsure what to do with this additional time. Early editions of albums on CD had bonus tracks or E.P.s tacked on. Rap artists would add skits, or "Shout-Outs" to fill up the disc. Though the opportunity for more than an hour of great music was there, the reality was that the ratio of "filler" would sadly increase.
That brings us to the present. Music fans download entire albums (or parts) without walking into a record store or leaving their house. They enjoy music without opening a record sleeve or turning on a stereo. Record stores are disappearing. Chains of record stores are disappearing. Record labels are disappearing. Record labels are consolidating and reconfiguring. Some of the most notable bands and artists are leaving their labels and, by using the internet, are often doing better. This is known in the pimp world as "working as a free agent."
Anyway, folks are downloading music. Sometimes they're paying for it, sometimes they're not. But in this downloading age, people aren't going to buy an $18 CD for "one good song." They will download one good song, they may pay for one good song, but there is no reason for them to buy, beg, borrow or steal "filler" at this point. Importantly, nor is there reason for bands or artists to record "filler". It is a free musical country still (in some ways more egalitarian), so artists can remain self-indulgent and fans can remain obsessive. Because there is no longer a format, there is no package which must be purchased (or stolen) completely.
So, while the downloading of music may continue to destroy the music industry, it may redeem itself by being a slight return to a time in which music was good, or at least, when the standard of quality was higher.

Joe Franke.

(I took the liberty of adding Joe's business links below--US)
http://www.axisrecordsandcomics.com
http://www.calendarofdeath.com
Fracas

Born in the USA

Here is Springsteen doing a cover of Suicide's Dream Baby Dream.

Watching this makes me wonder how may steps he was away from playing at CBGB back when he was writing songs for Patti Smith and being managed by MC5's former manager. Surely Little Steven would have been up for it.

Week 83: Zenph Studios 2

Our culture is a slave to the clock. We are slaves to a mechanized experience of time that rules our lives more strictly than any Nurse Ratched ever could. It is maybe this aspect of our modern experience that has fostered our fascination with time. This fascination has many manifestations, from science fiction to theoretical physics, mathematics to music. In every part of our culture people are dealing with time, trying to make more of their time, get somewhere on time, find some free time... Time has us in its unrelenting iron grip, so we look for ways to escape, ways to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.

Over the past century music has become one of the prime resources for escaping the unrelenting forward march of time, allowing us short breaks from its inevitability. Music in itself is able to modulate time, slowing it down, speeding it up, allowing us a different experience of time. Maybe because it can make time a little flexible, music has become the object of many attempts to capture time, to freeze a moment in time for future listeners to experience. From phonographs to multi-track recordings to digital sound, each new technology attempts to create an even more faithful reproduction of a musical moment so that at a later time we can re-live that moment in all the splendor that it had when it was happening.

So far the escape is just a fantasy, we are not yet truly transported away from the present and to another time to hear the actual performance that took place. Therefore, the technology must continue to advance. Upon multiple listenings the seams of the fantasy always show. But the dream remains, to one day be able to recreate an experience so faithfully that it will be indistinguishable from the original event it recreates. When the dream comes true we might then be free from the grip of the linear clock and able to experience time in a fluid, non-linear way of our choosing.

It is easy to be cynical of such dreams, but dreams like that have gotten us to Mars, inside protons and neutrons, and to the ever-rising top of the Burj Dubai, among other places. So why not dream about going to a Thelonious Monk performance at the Five Spot Cafe? Or to a Hector Lavoe show at the Cheetah Night Club? Or to a Pink Floyd (with Syd Barrett) psychedelic blowout at the UFO?

Of course some of these listening experiences are available on CD or DVD today, but can we make the experience more real? Zenph Studios, in North Carolina, is taking some giant steps towards fulfilling that dream. They are working on recreating the experience of a live performance so faithfully that one will hear it as if one where at the performance 10, 30, 50, 100 years ago when the original performance took place.

A few weeks ago I went to Zenph Studios in Raleigh for a demonstration. Zenph CEO, John Q. Walker, Ph.D., welcomed me and another musician who had also called for the demonstration, and lead us to the listening room. The room is one of the most beautiful sounding rooms I’ve been in. It is approximately 35’ x 35’, with adjustable wood paneling all around, a moderately vaulted ceiling, a slightly elevated stage area, and not a single right angle anywhere. Dr. Walker told us the room usually sits about 65 people, but that day there were five pianos in the room, two on stage and three more where the seating area would be. And there were three of us there to listen.

The Zenph team produces re-performances. For a re-perforamance, the Zenph team does a careful study of an original recording from which they then create a digital map of the performance. The map digitally describes in painstaking detail the velocity, attack, intensity, and any necessary details (pedal use for pianos, for example) of each note played in the original performance.

Other technology is then used to convert the digital map into actual notes being played on an instrument. Currently the best technology is that available for piano, so the Zenph public re-performances and recordings of re-performances have focused on solo piano compositions.

For the piano re-performances, Zenph uses high resolution MIDI along with various piano playback systems such as the Yamaha Disklavier Pro. The resulting re-performances are truly a wonder to hear.

The first re-performances we heard were a couple of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as played by Glenn Gould in 1955. The complete re-performance of Gould’s Goldberg Variations have been recorded by Zenph and released by Sony BMG to critical acclaim. And it’s easy to hear why. In 1955 Gould recorded with the technology of the day, the Zenph team, on the other hand, had available the best in modern recording technology. Live, however, it’s just a mind blowing experience. It’s sitting a few feet away from a master pianist listening to him play while watching the keys and pedals move without being blocked by the body and hands of the pianist.

Dr. Walker reminded us that the original recording was done in a different room, on a different piano, and in a different context to which Glenn Gould was responding. The re-performance would not respond to the piano, the room, or us in the same way Gould might have, had he actually been there. Fair enough, but being that Gould passed away in 1982, I can safely say that this is as close as I’ve felt to being in the same room listening to him play. And this was just the opening act!

After listening to Gould, we were treated to a sample from a turn of the 20th century Rachmaninoff performance, re-performed on a 1909 Steinway Grand equipped with an SE (Stahnke Edition) playback system. Dr. Walker explained that the original Rachmaninoff recording was live in front of a large audience so that the re-performance would sound big in the moderately small listening room we were in. He was right, Rachmaninoff was an expressive pianist and the chords on that re-performance landed on that concert grand like they were being played for a packed house at Carnegie Hall. However, this did not detract from the experience, to the contrary, the contrast between the Gould and the Rachmaninoff only helped make the performer's personality stand out even more.

The Zenph team is already developing digital maps for bass re-performances and working with other companies to develop the technology to be able to get those digital maps to play on actual basses. In the meantime, however, Dr. Walker was able to play for us a bass re-performance using a high-end loudspeaker.

We listened to Kadota’s Blues originally recorded by the Oscar Peterson Trio (Peterson, Ray Brown, and Ed Thigpen) in 1961. For the re-performance, the Oscar Peterson part played on a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand with a CEUS playback system while the Ray Brown part played through an MBL 101e Radialstrahler loudspeaker designed by Wolfgang Meletzky.



The Peterson and Brown re-performance was so vivid that I could almost see them right in front of me smiling and making faces as they responded to each others notes. It seemed like a strange reverse creative process where instead of the performers creating the music, the music was creating the performers.

After the Peterson and Brown re-performance came the headliners of the day, Fats Waller and Art Tatum.

The Waller re-performance was played on the same 1909 Steinway Concert Grand that had earlier played the Rachmaninoff. The differences were striking. While Rachmaninoff was heavy and dramatic, even a little scary, Fats Waller’s playful humor had us laughing as if he had been sitting right in front of us winking at us as he cleverly toyed with melody and rhythm.

But the real headliner of the day was Art Tatum. In 1949, Tatum recorded Piano Starts Here, live at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. On June 3rd Zenph is releasing a recording of the re-performance of the complete Tatum album, plus a few bonus tracks, recorded in front of a live audience at the same Shrine Auditorium where the original was recorded. How's that for bending time? Furthermore, on June 19, 20 and 21 the re-performance is also being played to a live audience at the Apollo Theater. What I wouldn’t give to go hear that.

We heard several Art Tatum re-performances including an incredible version of Tiger Rag. I’d heard several versions of Tiger Rag before by Tatum and others, but watching the Steinway re-perform Tatum’s blistering runs complete with pedal moves and the humor, flair and depth of a true live performance really made me feel like I was time traveling. Bravo Zenph!

Of course there is nothing like the real thing; nothing like listening to an unexpected performer in an unexpected situation playing some music that truly transports you to another place and time. And although Zenph is focusing on classic recordings from years ago, the technology could very well be applied to new music as well. I imagine home performances that can be experienced around the world on real instruments and not just via television or a stereo, for example.

When I asked at what point the technology would be so readily available and affordable that we would be able to hear re-performances in local piano bars, Dr. Walker, pointed out that the technology is still in its early stages of development. The re-performances that they have been developing are of very specific moments in time and place. A Carnegie Hall performance on a 10-foot grand probably won’t work as well re-performed in a small bar with an upright piano. The instruments themselves, and pianos in particular, have their own idiosyncrasies as well. But the Zenph team is working on it. After bass, they’ll be working on drums, then saxophone, then guitars and eventually voice. But their ultimate objective, their holy grail, is to be able to find the signature for each performer’s style, their musical DNA, the algorithms that would allow us to hear not just a re-performance, but a re-performer who could then perform in any number of contexts and any number of musical compositions, even ones the original performer might never had played. I know, the whole thing sounds a little spooky and it makes me a little uneasy, but that is the same feeling I imagine we’ll get when we are actually able to time travel, it’s the feeling of the future happening in the present.

Memorials and Napcast 666

Memorial Day Weekend, historically wet and cool, came hot and humid late Saturday morning and melted in place until early Tuesday when we woke to a hot boiler and wide open house.

We started feasting early with a trip to the lip smacking good Sweet Cakes Bakery where we had some of those fashionable cupcakes. We shared a rootbeer float cupcake and a chai tea cupcake. BOTHR2DIE4

Then we drove forever to spend money on guitar and baby stuff (including a Hummer-sized jogging stroller).

(a blog aside: the guitar errand was a nice long drive just to place me in a spot where I had to wait for some young stud guitar repairman to take his sweet time looking at some really hot rocker chick's even hotter Fender Bassman just to tell the guy that I was there looking for some blank nuts)

We got road relief with Sukhadia's sweets up on Devon Avenue, the heart of Chicago's Indo-Paki community.

Sunday we made our own feast that grew with each guest and kept the grill going for hours: tequila-lime chicken legs, sun-dried tomato sausage, green beans, mushrooms, asada, coconut-chicken, peppers, and of course (Midwestern "of course") brats.

We listened to the scratchy sounds of !!!, Hot Snakes, and the Detroit Cobras from my NEURO HD30 though its frequency was barely caught by the dusty porch jam box.

And we looked out over the NAP Label corn sprouts© and we smiled knowingly (Midwestern "knowingly").

On Monday, after a Hummerized lake shore jog it was back to the grill for roasted Indian eggplants basted with sesame oil and served with cool yogurt, grilled okra topped with tomato curry, and smoked potatoes with garlic.

To finish off the three day extravaganza we walked to the paletaria. I got the rum paleta and Tricia got cookies and cream.

Without further food ado, napcast 666.

Totally Bushwicked

I am white. I am a white guy. There’s no shame in it, it’s just a fact is all. I will never be mistaken for being anything other than a white guy. Well, okay, maybe with my current beard set-up I might be mistaken for an Arab by some xenophobic doofus ready to make a poorly informed decision. In my past life I played guitar and sang in a band here in Houston called Project Grimm. We were, if nothing else, a band of white guys. Seriously. In the sun we would bake in minutes, so pale a swath did we cut through the glades of luminous ultraviolet splendor. Whatever that means.

If you were a Houston resident in the late 80s and liked punishing yourself by frequenting truly defiled locales like, say, oh, Emo’s, then you might have had the pleasure of catching my band. If you never actually saw us, then know that we were fucking brilliant.

One night, one sweltering, humid soup of a night, we stood upon the sweat soaked stage and lumbered our way, gracelessly (as one ex Houston Press music editor referred to us) through our set when before our eyes appeared a miniature apparition of Hip-Hop royalty. Who was this wraith of great cultural import? Why none other than the world’s most famous rapping midget, The Geto Boys’ own micro badass himself, Bushwick Bill.

And the word on the street was that if Bushwick was drunk enough then your band might have the incredible honor of a guest appearance. As we tore through one of our more torpid numbers, the one-eyed madman took to the stage.

Yeah, he was definitely drunk enough. A blind man could have called a visual on that one. Bushwick was lit.

Guest appearance time.

So, you’ve gotta picture this. Here is this tiny little man, this tiny little black man with his googly glass eye, his backpack, and his drunken lack of posture. Here’s this tiny giant in the world of Rap. Here is one of the people who have helped create a well-deserved place in the pantheon of Black American music in the 90s, and what is his current goal in life, on this muggy, stifling night?

Bushwick has come to rap. And tonight, Project Grimm is his backup band.

Into his backpack and out comes his notebook. This must be where the magic is stored. And to think that this little man simply carries around the future of urban culture in a bag on his back. It’s almost too much to believe, almost certainly too much weight to bear for such a small man. He assumes heroic posture with each fluid and intoxicated gesture. And who could blame him? Such a role this little man has played/must play in this our modern world. He is an icon, perhaps even an entertainment genius, the sort of cultural signpost from which all can hitch their steed and ride forth into the darkness of that wicked night, confident of their course, steered by the light of this little seer in baggy (wait, are they soiled?) trousers.

Oh but then it begins. We shamble back into the number we just played, which in the long run can’t matter since nobody was listening the first time anyway (well, nobody save for Bushwick).

And there he goes, on the mic, notebook in hand, crowd on their feet, the excitement palpable… almost too much to bear…

And, no.

He is an auditory atrocity. He is an arrhythmic abomination. Bushwick is far and away the worst rapper I, no wait, man has ever heard. There is simply no way to describe how idiotic and perversely forgettable his lyrics were, how tortuously banal his tone, how staggeringly limp his delivery. Look, I know the guy is drunk. I get that. I too have been very, very drunk on many occasions, but come the fuck on. I once played quarters with tequila shots. Cheap, gallon jug tequila. The kind that has you shitting as much as you are vomiting the next day, hating all that is good and praying for a quick death. Even that night, even after John Woodcock gave me a ride home in his Mystery Van as I rolled from wall to wall with every turn, convinced that I had finally met the devil himself who was both nice enough to give me a lift and evil enough to make it hurt, even on that awful night had John taken me to Emo’s and shoved me up on stage with, say, the Roots or something, I still would have done a better job at the mic than Bushwick.

In mere moments it goes from hopeful, to embarrassing, to outright insulting. We have come nowhere in all these years, the modern day minstrel show in full splendor, the circus in full swing and the tiny, dark skinned clown is acting foolish to the delight of everyone involved.

I could wax rhapsodic about all the ways in which the honorable Dr. Wolfgang Von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother Funky Stay High Dollar Billstir made short work of both popular Black culture, and worse, the entirety of the Civil Rights movement, but suffice to say that having a “posse” of hangers on years past the time during which you might have been able to actually claim you were viable is not only shameless on the posse’s part, it’s way beyond pathetic on Bill’s.

And you know what?

You’re motherfuckin’ welcome.

P.S. - Tomorrow marks the NAP's 666th post. That only comes around once. What a great responsibility weighing down around the shoulders of a one Mr. Wednesday. To think that I was off by one post. It hurts me. Sure, I could throw together a podacast and usurp that slot, but I will leave it be and defer to my colleague. I only hope he can do enough with his pronounced lack of evil to appease the Dark Lord and grant us safe passage into the undetermined future. If I know only one thing, it's that you don't want to get all ignorant and piss off the devil. That guy is trouble with a capital-T.

ceci n'est pas une poste

In honor of my laptop being stolen hours ago when my house was broken into, I'm not posting today. If somebody wants to, run with it.

If the sine wave continues to oscillate like this, next week will be freaking amazing.

welcome to mars

hi. i promised at least one of you faithful NAP posters that i would make efforts to post earlier in the day sunday so that other faithful NAP readers would have something fresh to read on sundays. well, i fully intended to write something last night, but then i decided that i wanted to talk about mars this week. there's a pretty good reason for this - we landed there today. yaay!

one of the best things about working at NASA is the unexpected opportunities that come up. like last week i was working away in my little cubicle and i overheard my boss on his way over to the smithsonian institution for a private tour backstage in the meteorite collection. i stood up and asked if i could come, and by the time we got out the front door, we were a nice gaggle of HQ science mission directorate folk.

on our walk down and across the national mall, my boss mentioned that he had been talking with the phoenix team and had heard that they weren't planning to turn on the microphone. originally, the mars descent imager, after we discovered a potentially fatal problem, was cancelled. that meant that no descent images would be taken and the microphone would remain off. my boss wasn't happy with this - he started talking about how exciting it would be to have sounds from mars, and how he wanted to hear recordings from the microphones. he said that he had instructed the phoenix team to turn the micrphone back on after landing.

that got me thinking (again) about sound on mars. to date, we have no recordings from sound on the surface, and so we can only model and simulate how things would sound. a few people have looked at this in detail. google searches come up with a few serious researchers like amanda hanford, who have gotten press for papers on this subject. she did some nice monte carlo simulations of sound on mars. and there are other little things on the topic here and there on the web. but i want recordings! please?

i like the idea that if you were able to breathe carbon dioxide the way we breathe helium in a balloon, our voices would be lower. according to hanford's models, because of the reduced pressure on mars and the difference in molecular weight, the speed of sound is slower and the increased absorption means it doesn't travel as far. this article says that if you screamed on mars, the scream would only travel a few hundred feet as opposed to a kilometer on earth. don't get mugged on mars.

my boss got unexpectedly animated when talking about hearing sounds from mars. this made me pretty happy. he's a cool guy - very enthusiastic about space, and the perfect guy to be heading up the planetary science division. i saw him today in the control room at the phonix landing. he looked relaxed and happy. it was good to see.

all i can say is that i hope that his word is gospel, and they turn that microphone on. if it happens, i will post the results here.

i want sounds. i really want to hear the wind and lightning and the sound of dust smashing against rocks. if only we'd found the budget to send a speaker so we could record sounds we made ourselves.

i guess we'll have to wrangle that onto mars science laboratory.

anyway, yay! we made it to mars. i am unspeakably relieved, along with a few hundred of my closest colleagues. given our track record at mars (painfully recounted in the first chapter of my thesis), landing there is not something we take for granted.

Playing with the Electromagnetic Spectrum: The Sound of Speakers

On May 24, 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse dispatched the first telegraphic message over an experimental line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore.

-- from the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/may24.html

Electromagnetism is a term which describes the interaction between electric currents and magnetic fields. This interaction was first noted in 1820 by the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted when he saw that an electric current passing through a wire affected the needle of a magnetic compass. Experimenters soon discovered that electromagnetism could be harnessed to perform useful tasks. Less than a quarter of a century later Samuel Morse had constructed a device, based on electromagnetic principles, by means of which a coded message could be sent almost instantaneously from one location to another many miles away. Since then, a succession of scientists and inventors have added to our knowledge of electromagnetism and created thousands of devices which exploit that knowledge: Telephone. Phonograph. Vacuum Tube. Loudspeaker. Radio. Stereo. Television. Computers. The Internet...

Of course the effect of this technology on music and on people's relationship to music has been profound. Consider the fact that, up until 1877, when Thomas Edison first recorded a human voice on a tinfoil cylinder, the sound of a human voice could only be heard if a human was speaking or singing or crying or...well you get the idea. Similarly, music could only be heard if musicians were playing. The invention of the phonograph ushered in a new era in human experience where sounds could be recorded and then listened to over and over, possibly far removed in time and place from the source of their original creation. This phenomenon has been labelled "schizophonia" by Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schaefer.

Now the phonograph, in its original form, was a purely mechanical/acoustic device. Electromagnetism was not introduced into sound recording until later. First, the electric motor for spinning discs, then, later, the introduction of electronic recording in 1925.

So what's the significance of all this?

Music performance has become portable. What was once the unique experience of a musical performance, an event/spectacle which occured only in one place and time, is now reproducible and may be experienced in many times and places.

Of course, there is one major problem with all this talk about reproducible sounds. What we are really talking about is clever fakery. The sound of the guitar you hear coming out of your stereo in not the sound of a guitar. It is the sound of a loudspeaker, an electromagnetic device which turns electronic audio signals into sound waves in the air.

First, a bit about sound, and why it is impossible to actually capture sounds and turn them loose later. Sound happens when something vibrates, causing air pressure waves, much like the waves that radiate outwards when you drop a stone in a pool of water. To capture sound means to capture air. Once it is contained, the waves will dissipate and the sound disappear. So when we talk about recording or capturing sound we are really talking about recording a facsimile that is analogous, or similar to, the original sound.

When the guitar in our example is recorded, the vibration of its strings causes air to move which causes a small diaphragm in a microphone to vibrate, which, thanks to electromagnetism, creates a small electrical signal. That signal, is encoded onto a storage medium. The medium and method of encoding varies depending on whether the recording process is analog or digital.

For playback, the information is retrieved from the storage medium and converted into an electrical signal which is amplified electronically and fed to a speaker, causing it to vibrate. The vibration of the speaker causes air to move, which the human brain perceives as the sound of a guitar.

But it is not, in fact, the sound of a guitar. It is the sound of a loudspeaker. It is a facsimile, a clever fake.

But this bit of electromagnetic trickery has transformed music in the last 100 plus years.

Let's look at some of examples of this transformation and the effect it has had on the way people experience music.

Recording turned the performance of music, which was at once a spectacle and a social event, into disembodied sound which could be experienced by one person in private. With the exception of sound shorts and, later, TV and music videos, the experience of recorded music was an aural experience only. The listener could not see the performer picking or strumming the guitar, or the performer's movement, facial expression, costume, etc. It is rather curious that electromagnetism was used to eliminate a part of music experience which depends on another part of the electromagnetic spectrum; the part we know as visible light.

The same is true of radio. Radio uses certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation to send signals through the atmosphere. So radio delivers music via certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, but does not deliver the part of music that exists in the visible light bands.

Commercial radio broadcasts began in the 1920s in the U.S. Vocal music was preferred by broadcasters and programmers in those early days because it was feared listeners might not be able to take long periods of disembodied sound without human contact. In instrumental music, that contact was traditionally provided by the sight of the musicians performing. So vocal music, often with verbal interjections added during instrumental sections (as in the recordings of Fats Waller), was seen as the way to keep that human contact and keep listeners tuned in.

The length of a piece of music was determined by the technology of recording. Until the introduction of microgroove long play records in the late forties, records were limited to about three minutes per side. Hence the three minute pop song.

Microphones, introduced into music recording in the late 1920s, allowed singers to perform in a softer, more intimate fashion, giving birth to the crooner style of pop singing best exemplified by Bing Crosby.

In the 20s and 30s electric and electronic instruments such as the theremin, electric organ and electric guitar began to appear. Over the next few decades, these instruments along with the development of the synthesizer and various electronic effects would totally change the sounds and timbres in pop music.

Recording changed the way music was learned and the way musical styles spread. In the 1920s, a group of suburban kids from the west side of Chicago were introduced to New Orleans jazz from records they heard at an ice cream parlor. From then on the Austin High Gang devoted themselves to playing jazz. Generations of musicians since have learned to play by listening to records of other musicians. This has, in some cases, eliminated the need for a teacher/pupil relationship. A guitarist in Austin, Texas can learn to play Nigerian Juju without ever having travelled to Africa or studied with an African guitarist.

Another effect of recording on music was that innovation became necessity. The glut of music that resulted from radio and records required that artists and producers come up with new sounds and new styles in order to keep the public interested. And so jazz progressed from New Orleans brass bands to bebop within the span of 25 years. Rock and Roll went from Bill Haley and the Comets to Black Sabbath in the span of 15 years.

One of the biggest effects of recording was on the economy of music and the place of musicians in that economy. By the 20s the recording companies discovered that it was more profitable to sell many copies of one record by one artist than it was to sell many different records by many artists and so the star system was born. This has resulted in a situation where a few musicians (the stars) become very wealthy while most musicians cannot make a decent living from their profession and must work other jobs to support themselves. I'll return to this in a moment.

Recorded music and sound also created the possibility of a whole new way of composing music: using bits and pieces of existing sound recordings to make new compositions. This new technique was pioneered by French composer Pierre Schaeffer in 1948. Schaeffer and other pioneers of the new technique such as Karlheinz Stockhausen used records, tape loops and such to create compositions using existing sound recordings. This style of composition was called musique concrete or concrete music. Experiments with tape machines and ways of manipulating tape loops led to the development of the mellotron, the first commercially produced sample player, in a sense.

By the 1980s the use of prerecorded music to make new music took a new form. Rap and Hip Hop artists looped beats from earlier records in the practice known as sampling.

A transformation also has occured in the way people relate to music.

Because of the fact that sound recording enables sounds, or a facsimile thereof, to be stored on a physical object or device, it has become possible to own a copy of a musical performance. This is really significant, particularly in a capitalist society. Recording enabled capitalists to sell sounds as objects and set in motion a kind of commodity fetishism among the public. Owning records became a kind of status symbol and a means of creating identity for consumers. You could know something about who someone was by that person's record collection. Now, with mp3s and the Internet, collecting recordings has become something of a mania. How many days worth of music do you have in your iTunes library?

Today many people navigate their day in musical cocoons. The car with the sub woofer rattling windows as it passes defines for it's owner a physical space. It is a way to dominate space; to drown out competing sounds with your sound. The personal stereo or mp3 player allows one to exclude outside space; to move around in your own space, cut off sonically from the rest of the world.

It is impossible to make it through a day without hearing music, often someone else's music. In the office, at the job site, in a restaurant, in the car. Silence is unheard of. For some people it is actually unbearable.

Another effect of recording on music performance and music appreciation is that recordings have become definitive and authoritative. The music industry has traditionally made its money from selling records. Musicians would go on tour in order to promote sales of records. This is changing due to the Internet. Now artists are beginning to release recordings in order to promote their live shows. In any case, it is the human contact that is absent in a disembodied sound recording. An interesting paradox has resulted. Fans place great importance on seeing their favorite artist perform live, but are often disappointed if that performance varies from the one on record. A good performance is often equated with how well the artist can reproduce the sound of the record on stage.

Another way to look as this is as a fulfilment of E. M. Forstner's prophetic short story "The Machine Stops" in which humanity has come to distrust direct experience of the world in favor of mediated facsimiles.

By now some of you may be wondering whatever happened to Sam Morse and his clickety-clack telegraph.

The ability to send electrical signals over wires has facilitated, along with computers, the emergence of the Internet. Electromagnetism is again transforming our relationship to music.

In the era of recordings encoded in physical objects, i.e. tapes and records, Capitalists could control both the means of production and intellectual ownership of recordings. The technology to make commercially competitive records was expensive as was the promotion and distribution of recordings. Record companies could get artists to sign away ownership of their creations in exchange for recording and promoting their music. The carrot was stardom.

Technology has changed all that. Competitive recordings can be created by an individual with a computer and some relatively inexpensive studio gear. The Internet has provided a way for artists to promote and distribute their music to a worldwide audience. Music that is owned by major labels is routinely pirated and downloaded in mp3 form from peer to peer networks. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the traditional music industry to control the ownership, production and distribution of recordings.

So, are we on the brink of another transformation?

It would seem so, at least in terms of production and distribution. The music industry as it existed in the 20th century is in deep trouble. The star system, one in which a few artists sold the most records and became, in some cases, fabulously wealthy while the vast majority of musicians could not earn a living may be undergoing a signal change. With the ability to produce and distribute music in the hands of musicians, maybe a more just system will come into being. I would like to see a world in which musicians could earn a living from their work. There are many problems for independent artists trying to sell records on the Internet. Copying and pirating affects the DIY people as much as the major labels. Nevertheless, artists who, a few years ago, would never have dreamed their music might be heard by people around the world now have the ability to put it out there where it can be heard. And maybe this is a start.

But one thing won't change. Our electromagnetic toys have changed music and how we experience it and there's no going back.

Yet Another Week

This week I only went to two shows.

Show number one was Radiohead at the Woodlands. I've seen Radiohead on every American tour they've done and this show may be their best. The lights were fantastic. They seemed to be having fun. They experimented with the songs (something they haven't done in the past). I don't really have any complaints, other than having to deal with thousands of people. And I hate people.

Overheard in the foot traffic bottleneck on the way out:

Random drunk guy number one [to nobody in particular]: "Anybody know a good bar around here?"

Random drunk guy number two : "I'm from Austin. I only know bars in Austin. Houston sucks."

Show number two was the Police for the second time in a year. Also at the Woodlands (I hate that place). They were reasonably good last time and I was a big fan in my teen years, so I felt some strange obligation to see them again. The band members seemed to be working on this same level of interest. After what I presume has been a year of playing these songs that they wrote over twenty years ago, they seemed like they were going through the motions. Sting made a few good efforts to throw his bandmates curve balls, but they didn't respond with anything particularly grand. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't anywhere near great. I feel sorry for the people who paid $285 to see that mediocrity up close.

I seriously pondered seeing Iron Maiden this week, just to make this the second week in which I went to three musical events, but I really didn't want to drive all the way out to the Woodlands yet again. So no reportage on that one.

My neighbor is out of the hoosegow, it seems, and is now back to singing.  It's gonna be another good week.

Week 82: Movies and Music

Today I’m going to recommend a couple of movies about music that you may or may not have watched. I hadn’t watched either until recently and I’m glad I did. Both are available in Netflix.

The Great World of Sound

I wanted to catch this at the theater to support local filmmaking in North Carolina, but with the baby and all, it’s hard to get to the movie theater these days. Luckily the movie is now on dvd and available for home viewing.

This is a really good movie. It’s about a guy who gets a job as a talent scout with an artist management company called the Great World of Sound. It’s like the poor man’s version of American Idol. Martin and his partner Clarence get sent to towns where ads have been placed for auditions. They then audition the people and sign everyone who is willing to put a down payment to show their good faith and commitment to being part of the Great World of Sound team.

It’s an obvious shark operation, and in case you wouldn’t immediately jump to that conclusion, the first scene of the movie is of someone spray painting a regular black vinyl record in gold. From then on every time you see a gold record hanging on an office wall (and you see a lot of them in this movie) you know it’s just spray painted. Makes me wonder about all those gold records in the office of the Accountant to the Stars.

The interesting thing about this movie, however, is not the subtleties of the shark operation and how it cons people out of their money. The interesting thing is how people willingly participate even against their better instincts, and the arguments everyone makes to convince themselves and others that it is not a scam, or that even if it is, so what. And by everyone I mean from the top head shark to the musicians themselves who audition. And in an interesting production twist the movie was made by actually placing fake ads for auditions and having real performers audition as if it was a real audition and interacting with the two actors playing the talent scounts in a very seamless way. This is a twist which the movie website is not shy about communicating, and it puts a weird spin on the whole experience through a sort of self-referential trick, which puts the audience in the midst of a certain kind of shark scheme in and of itself.

It’s a grim salesmen movie, not as angry as Death of Salesman, not as bitter as Glenngary Glenn Ross. But the scary thing to me was that before it reminded me of either of those movies with which it has lots more in common, the only movie that kept running through my head while watching it was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The main character in GWS, Martin, has a detachment from himself that was eerily reminiscent of Henry. It is obvious to the viewer that they are part of a scam operation, yet Martin doesn’t seem to react to the very obvious clues. It is similar to the way an unsuspecting cast member in a horror movie doesn’t see that he is about to be chopped to bits by some monster with an axe and continues walking right into that dark basement. Even as Martin’s conscience begins telling him that he is part of a mean scam, he is unable to take himself out of it. Almost like his conscience is not really his own.

It’s a spooky kind of movie, Pat Healy and Kene Holliday do a great job as the tag team talent scouts, and the dialogue is very convincing, the “training” scenes especially almost had me sold on why it's ok to take peoples money. It takes a lot of flunky college students paying tuition for the subsistence of the university out of which a few great minds will emerge, something like that was one of the arguments.


Hustle and Flow

The other movie I watched recently that really impressed me is Hustle and Flow. This movie came out in 2005 and I probably would’ve ignored it altogether, thinking it was another rappers and pimps movie, which it is. But man, this is an incredibly good movie. I would’ve given Terrence Howard the Oscar for best actor if I could. It’s a movie about a pimp, who in his 40s decides he wants to do something else with his life and decides to record a rap record.

But these are not the pimps and rappers you see in every video you ever saw, sporting gold chains and teeth and driving convertibles and yachts surrounded by dozens of bikini clad women. The only bling in this movie is the rollers that Djay (the main character) puts on his hair to curl it. He only has two woman working for him and one is his girlfriend who is pregnant with his child. He barely has enough money to buy equipment at the local pawn shop. It’s all sweat and tears for this pimp and his hos, but somehow the dream of making a record and how he inspires that dream into those around him makes their situation joyful, difficult but joyful.

The recording scenes are some of the best I’ve seen on film. A bunch of old crappy equipment, casio keyboards, taped up microphones, cassette recorders (even though they know that CDs are the standard, they can’t afford that technology), and yet the life they get from working on the project, and the excellent quality of the music they are making do not depend on the quality of the equipment.

On top of that Terrence Howard really gives an incredible performance. The language, his accent, his demeanor, everything is perfect. Apparently he spent a year living in Memphis with various pimps to prepare for the role. If he really did that then it totally paid off.


By the way, the music in both of these movies is outstanding.

Is Ozzy Osbourne still a creative genious?

I wonder, but don't worry, about the loss of creativity with age. I personally don’t feel any loss of creativity, yet anyway. Certainly in my early twenties I was a more prolific song writer. But there are many factors at work with this statistic, such as: a) songwriting is mainly driven by emotional peaks and valleys of which I have fewer, b) creative outlet is not song writing alone (as if my posts here prove anything).

But making this a reflective exercise is a bit premature since artistic creativity studies show the quality drop off to be at an older age than I find myself today. Actually, Studies show the drop off for most people to start around first grade. And let's face it, we do get jaded early. Creativity however isn't necessarily synced with innovation nor then with youth.

In the larger arena, music has yielded many significant late-life works - arguably more so than any other creative medium. Though that can't be said of the pop artist - even the ones with staying power like Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan.

This has more to do with youth-driven pop culture than the artists themselves, don't you think? Creatively speaking, I think what Bob Dylan has done with his image, influence and output in his late years far exceeds what Mr. McCartney has done though he stays truer to pop form.



The beauty of late-life creativity is the opportunity to be honest; and to approach old things in a new way (only one of which pop culture is very good at). Franz Liszt, in his old age, paved a new road over the old to what became atonal music. Ornate Coleman's last album might very well be his opus magnum. And Ozzy Osbourne....

well he helped reformat reality TV.







Speaking of staying power, my little nephews, just entering junior high, recently sent us personal-survey emails. It was incredible to see in their music preferences the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC. For all the fleeting vacuity of pop, the song remains the same.



Is this a lack of creativity on a cultural level? Oh boy, where to stop with that thought.


From my youth, the equivalent of a modern junior high kid putting Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC on his musical tastes list would be for me to list Elvis or Little Richard. Which isn't to say that's a bad thing. The fact of the matter is that in junior high (though I'm eons away from my nephew's age) , I think I too would have listed Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC.

Napcast 68: The Wicker Man

Watch your back, 'cause it's the season for sacrifice, and the flesh on your bones will do quite nicely...




Click here to get your own player.

Isolated

I got caught behind the exhaustion 8-ball this week, and the Unspeakable was kind enough to put together this amazing post and show once again that she's better at this than I am anyway. So please enjoy, and to the Unspeakable... Thank you.

John





I am in Nelson Lagoon, Alaska (pop 50) as I write this. I thought I would be back in False Pass, Alaska (pop 30ish) where I own a house and spent the last decade of my life, but... no. Travel became a confused affair today, and I decided to juggle reservations and catch a chartered flight with the visiting doctor in a couple of days, so I wouldn't have to hole up in Cold Bay, Alaska-- stuck in a dive of a hotel called the Bear Foot Inn. Hopefully the weather won't totally suck and we can get out of here. I'm not saying I haven't enjoyed my time working as one of two providers in this little town.. but I will say that watching The Wicker Man dvd I brought-- since there is only one snowy television station that plays Beastmaster reruns here-- has me watching my back.



Last week was kind of a big deal for all of the residents here. It has been a brutal year in so many ways for this tiny fishing village. Tragedy struck in October, when a beautiful young woman was killed while joyriding with some friends/cousins. The small village shares about 5 last names. A young man who was driving the vehicle is facing manslaughter charges and was unable to make his own graduation here. How many students walked the aisle at this ceremony? Two.




They may not have been able to graduate at all, if a couple of teachers hadn't been willing to fly here and help the students finish their school year. The teachers who were contracted to take these students through this school year, actually bailed on them a few months ago. Up and left. Couldn't handle the town. Basically they took a huge shit on the roughly 14 children in attendance. Children who were already reeling from a hellish year full of relentless mourning-- on a tiny isolated sand spit in the middle of no where. It wasn't until recently that outside traffic began making its way through the area, and only because bear season just opened. Hunters are constantly being ferried between the lagoon and a string of lodges miles out-- with their prized dead grizzlies. 10 1/2 foot is the tallest I have heard killed in the past week.

So, anyways.. there was a graduation of two students here, and the town raised money to hire a band. They were flown in from Sand Point, AK to perform for the kids here. Having no idea what the music or the turn out would be like, I was totally curious. I spoke to the band briefly as they set up and they showed me their set list. Avenged Sevenfold, Good Charlotte, Seether.. and my god.. my eyes went blurry trying to process the rest. They did have original music, they said, but would only be playing songs that all the girls had requested. All the girls? yes. The show was set up in the community recreation center. A four piece, a couple of lights, a smoke machine and about 10 girls between the ages of 7 and 17, and a little boy of about 8-- who spent the entire time spinning on his back.


The show started late, and the girls all lined one wall of the small civic center. Tight jeans, Avenged Sevenfold tees, studded belts, Scandalous eyeliner, and big fat tennis shoes. It took about three songs for the girls to get into the music, but when they finally did.. it was a beautiful sight to see. I didn't even care what the covers were or how the space just wasn't really doing the sound justice. I still can't decide WHY I almost cried watching them all scream and point and fling their hair while yelling Good Charlotte's ANTHEM . I'm 35, and pretty jaded and sure as fuck am NOT in love with the pop punk blah blah of today.. but something about this small group of girls (especially given the bullshit year of pain they have had), cutting loose-- representing possibly the most isolated group of fans for possibly the most isolated rock n roll show, really touched me. I only returned to my sad and bitchy senses when the singer launched into a song saying, "I know you guys know this next one.. you're all wearing the shirts"... and I watched them sort of struggle and look at each other desperately trying to recognize the song. And then they gave up trying to impress anyone with memorized verses and decided to rock out instead.




The band took a break, and the girls all went through their choreographed "fuck me" dance steps to some of the most hideous jock jams shit I can rememeber, as they scrolled through someone's ipod. I'm not going to lie. Watching 9 year olds try to be seductive is frightening as all hell. If I had brought my satchel of condoms, HPV shots and STD educational leaflets, I would have been shoving them up their noses with a terrifying earnestness... luckily I know this is a harmless right of passage.. OR IS IT? Scroll down to see a pair of shoes I shot on the feet of a young teen attending the graduation ceremony. I think they were taped on. I go both ways on this one. I understand their search for identity--but I am scared for them, knowing full well what wolves can do to the curious who roam the perimeter. Wouldn't it be amazing to live in a place where we weren't so fucking repressed- that beautiful young people could dress however they wanted without it meaning they were "asking" for something sinister?


Wanna be my lover. Wanna be my lover... (god help me) But in this environment, you can't be a hater. You can try, but you'll soon see how bad you suck at it.


I took some video of the band playing, but don't have any way to share it right now. When I asked a couple of the girls who their favorite band members were, they said "Shit.. I'm related to all of them." Imagine being a teen, in a town, where everyone around you WAS related to you. Life is totally fucking different up here, and I take my hat off to the natives in the Aleutians for making smiles look easy, because I have witnessed first hand, that nothing about living up here is remotely close to easy. Nothing, and I'm ready to come home.

the sine wave goes in both directions.

I am roughly as happy this week as I was unhappy last week, despite not having any more time to do much or even read the last few days of posts (much less comments).

I did the 48HOURS filmmaking challenge this weekend as director, co-producer, and co-writer. Our group, consisting of everybody from friends from my earliest days at film school to people I literally met on the night, drew the most dreaded genre: "dance or musical".

Somehow, we made a dance film with a musical sequence, despite me having seen, perhaps, four dance films in my life. We also threw in time travel, a hip-hop musical sequence, references to 2001 and PLANET OF THE APES, and a silly amount of bright spandex, amongst other things. Slightly unexpectedly, it was wonderful. I mean, as a filmmaking experience, though truthfully I'm quite proud of the film as well. Actually, proud is the wrong word, as it was a true collaborative experience, and I am humbled by all the work old and new friends put in to making the film. This is not a film I would have ever come up with on my own, which is not an insult to it.

But I am brain dead, pretty much, and need to sleep so that I can finish my last two weeks on the music show and make the episode about South Africa even better than the ones about Brazil and Israel. So I leave you with this, a song by the incomparable Vusi Mahlasela:

taikonaut

i think it's funny that the english media term for a chinese professional space traveler uses the same word as the japanese word for drum. they're not related, but they're spelled the same.

springtime always makes me think of taiko. when i was in graduate school, i spent three of my least productive aeronautics and astronautics phd years performing with stanford taiko. this was a serious undertaking (~30-50 hrs/week), as this was a serious group of seriously committed people with seriously sick amounts of energy. if anyone went to school at a college where a capella groups were the rage, this was in a similar category of performing groups. a few slots opened up each year and 50-60 people would audition in a tense multi-phased competitive selection process. once in, practices and performances started immediately. there was intense peer pressure never to miss or be late to a practice, which occurred three or sometimes four times a week. we made our own drums (and went to workshops on how to make the drums), sanding wine barrels and stretching the hides ourselves. we designed and sewed our own costumes.

my last year in the group, we took things to a new level of insanity: we decided we would write and perform all original pieces at our spring concert. since we did all our lighting and stage design and set changes ourselves, this not only required writing/designing/choreographing/teaching/practicing the songs, but also working out complicated transitions moving drums and changing costumes.

my song employed all 18 group members and twenty copper pipe fittings i carefully selected from bins in palo alto and mountain view hardware stores. if i had not just given away my only vhs video player, i would volunteer to upload the video of this song, which also involved passing the cups in a rhythmic way based on a drinking game i had seen at a party the previous quarter. here are some crappy photos of the copper pipe fittings (almost nicely filling out a c-ish minor scale)




after passing the cups to the center, where they were placed in a certain order on a table, two people sat across from each other and played a repeated melody by mirroring a series of different loops around the layout of the cups. it's hard to describe without a video, but if anyone wants to come visit me, i will happily demonstrate.

anyway, i think of that year as a legendary one in stanford taiko history, but it could be that they've continued this tradition of composing all original pieces ever since. it doesn't appear that anyone has uploaded the (televised) video of our spring concert to youtube, but there are some cool videos of a few songs from a more recent concert in 2005.



many members of our group went on to great successes. in a freakish small-world connection, one of our other NAP posters knows chris tin, who is scoring films now. shoji and chris started their own taiko performance group, the on ensemble. if anyone is in LA and has a chance to see these guys, they are amazing.



i'd recommend checking out any taiko group that might come your way, especially if you've never experienced it.

Saturday Guest Post: Ted Plank

Tonight in Los Angeles 2 rockabilly legends are playing, Glen Glenn and Mac Curtis. By this point in time most practitioners of that particular subgenre are under the sod. Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Charlie Feathers, Johnny Burnette, all gone. There is an upcoming Las Vegas conclave of the Last Survivors Of Sun in October, with near great luminaries Billy Lee Riley and Sonny Burgess atop the bill, and Jack Earls, Carl Mann and Hayden Thompson (all of whom had regional Memphis hits that eventually became semi-classics) rounding out the roster. Living legend Jerry Lee Lewis, the last of the label's heavy artillery, is not scheduled to attend.
Mac Curtis had a Dallas area run of hits as a high schooler back in 1956. "If I Had Me A Woman" and "Grandaddy's Rockin" have become minor staples of Roots Rock lore, a couple of toe tappers that only slightly stick in one's skull in comparison to Charlie Feathers or Gene Vincent. Once finishing high school he was drafted off to Korea only to come home in 1960 to a universe dominated by Pat Boone and Bobby Rydell. He was able to penetrate the nether regions of the Country / Western charts in the late 60's before playing sporadically to Rockabilly revival audiences from the 80's up to present.
Glen Glenn, on the other hand recorded two flat out classics: "Everybody's Movin" and "One Cup Of Coffee," both of which one must hear to appreciate. Esteemed connoisseur of fine Americana Bob Dylan himself considers "Everybody's Movin" essential enough that he's been playing it in concert the past few years, even hauling Glenn up onstage to open his shows.
Glenn came up under the tutelage of white trash genius Fred Maddox, who introduced him to Elvis Presley backstage at a San Diego gig in 1956.Like most white musicians of the time, Glenn (real name Troutman) started off as a hillbilly picker, playing the Hometown Jamboree out in El Monte, CA. With the Maddox Brothers And Rose circling the drain due to sister Rose splitting off solo, Fred had ample time to pump into fresh meat like Glenn and guitar picking sidekick Gary Lambert. Realizing that Presley had changed the dynamic of show biz forever (and that girls were far more inclined towards the dashing new rocker than old tobacco chewing fuddy duddies), Glenn embraced the stripped down, revved up mishmash of Country music and R & B.
There is a unique quality to Glenn's recordings unduplicated elsewhere. Where Gene Vincent's initial Capitol tracks had a dreamy echo wafting throughout, and Sam Phillips used the effect at Sun to round off his artists frequently rough edges, Glenn's recordings take echo right up to the line of ridiculousness. It's as if echo is it's own member of Glenn's primitive band. Yet, it works. And it doesn't hurt that Glenn's voice rises above the rockabilly norm, in a way that Mac Curtis's voice does not. Not a howler like Johnny Burnette or Billy Lee Riley, Glenn instead caresses the lyric while letting the band control the pace. "Everybody's Movin" in particular is the definition of minimalism, right up there with Slim Harpo's "Got Love If You Want It." The verse features just a walking bass with a hypnotic two note guitar line, kicking in with a snare on the chorus and an austere guitar break. Broken down into parts it looks unlikely. Assembled it becomes a minor American musical classic.
"One Cup Of Coffee" also firmly bolts itself into your mind on the first listen, another crude masterpiece that sounds like no one else. Pedestrian versions of songs such as Presley's "Baby, Let's Play House" and Vincent's "Be Bop A Lula" round out Glenn's 50's recordings, with a lukewarm nod to the upcoming Frankie Avalon / Fabian craze in the tune "Laurie Ann." Oddly, the third song Glenn recorded that could be considered timeless was a version of Mac Curtis's "If I Had Me A Woman," which in my opinion blows the original out of the water.
With singles now under his belt, Glenn went out on tour with Porter Wagoner, who futilely tried to steer him back into the hillbilly fold. Country music in the wake of Rock And Roll was going the way of the dinosaur, and Glenn's upbeat repertoire won over young crowds to the point where Wagoner could no longer argue. Just when Glenn's career was beginning to get some traction, along came the bane of 50's Rock And Rollers - the draft board. Like Curtis and Presley, Glenn was whisked off to the Army.
When Dick Clark wanted to feature Glenn singing "Laurie Ann" on American Bandstand, Glenn's commanding officer in Hawaii refused to give him leave. And so ended the first phase of Glenn's career.
Like Curtis (and unlike Elvis), the music business that Glenn came home to after his army stint had no place for him. He got a job at General Dynamics and spent the next thirty odd years driving a desk. In the 80's, the Ace reissue label out of the UK started putting "Everybody's Movin" and "One Cup Of Coffee" on their rockabilly compilations, eventually giving Glenn an entire album. Horror punk purveyors The Cramps were known to work "Everybody's Movin" into the odd set, and college radio stations had a fondness for it as well. I first heard the song on KCMU in Seattle back in the late 80's, and it was one of the rare occasions where I had to pull the car off the side of the road, find a pay phone (those were the days...), call the station and find out who it was. Glen Glenn. Like many artists from the days of Blues, Country and Rock And Roll yore, I found that Glenn didn't quite have an album's worth of good songs. Nonetheless, I turned many people on to "Everybody's Movin."
A few years later, I was the Jazz, Blues, Country and Oldies buyer at Aron's Records in Hollywood. Catering to the informed snob clientele of showbiz LA, I kept sections chock full of obscure German, UK and Japanese imports. There was a burgeoning roots music scene in the late 80's / early 90's centered around Ronnie Mack's Barn Dance at The Palomino club in North Hollywood. Artists such as the Dave And Deke Combo, Big Sandy And The Fly Rite Trio, The Hyperions, Dee Lannon And The Rhythm Rustlers and Russell Scott all played carbon copy versions of the 1956 Hit Parade, without any of the corny cutesiness of The Stray Cats. Though derivative, it was a good time, with quality music and dedicated crowds.
One day Glen Glenn walked into the store, along with his old guitar player Gary Lambert. He'd heard I was stocking his albums and CD's. Happy to meet such a source Rock And Roll greatness, I was stunned to hear him go on at length about his career at General Dynamics, when what I really wanted to hear was more stories about madman Fred Maddox and popping pills with Porter Wagoner. It was deflating, to say the least.
A couple nights later he got up onstage at The Palomino, and again, whatever greatness had blown through his lungs some 35 years past had well dissipated. As a novelty it was pleasant enough, but riveting it was not. He seemed rusty and not very sure of himself, as if he couldn't quite believe anyone would be interested after all these years.
And that was it.
Roughly a decade later I heard Dylan was doing the song in concert. Then, that he was actually having Glenn open for him. Interesting. Glenn had retired from General Dynamics, maybe to find new focus reliving his brief window into Rock stardom.
Perhaps tonight will be a new Glenn. I'm on the fence as to whether to go or not. Having seen a bleak percentage of truly stellar shows from the Godlike Greats Of Yesteryear (I blew a thousand bucks to travel to Brooklyn to see The Sonics, who were painful to behold - a near myth shatterer), I'm wary. A decade and a half older since I last saw him onstage, Curtis and he will probably not be setting the woods on fire.
Then again, I can always stay home, put on the iTunes playlist, sprinkle "Everybody's Movin" and "One Cup Of Coffee" in with some Wanda Jackson and Ricky Nelson and rock out to the man in his prime. There was a time when an innocuous California teen in thrall to a mutant from Memphis could unwittingly blow a hole through the mountain of fake bullshit that surrounds us almost all of our lives, and cut two songs that exemplify Greil Marcus's phrase "The Old Weird America" as well as any Appalachian hoedown or Delta Blues tune strummed by some illiterate farmhand back in the 20's. My impression was that he himself barely comprehended it, just like inept Palestinian terrorists that blow themselves up with explosives.
In George W. Bush / American Idol America, where even punk rock and hip-hop is sterilized and marketed to the point of pasteurized flavorlessness, where the music industry is dying hard while the virtual (ie., fake) reality / video game industry is booming, it's easy to forget that we live in a world created by freaks. Freaks like Elvis, freaks like Fred Maddox, freaks (though I'm doubtful he'd enjoy being called such a thing) like Glen Glenn.
If anything gets me out of the house tonight, that will be it.

Hat Trick

One

I went to see the Palestinian hip hop show that came though my town. This show didn't start until after midnight, so I was pretty sleepy well before I got there. But when I got there I discovered that this show wasn't just one Palestinian hip hop act; it was two. So tired.

First was something called Palestinian Rapperz (yes, with a "z," presumably to keep it real, yo). Now I'm not the world's foremost authority on hip hop, but my ears told me that these guys are kind of lame. They had low energy, which is like death for a genre that relies heavily on personality in live performance. There is nothing else to focus on in a hip hop show, so usually there is an abundance of charisma. This show had very little charisma, other than a few shout-outs to the homeland and that wasn't helping my marginally wakeful state.

DAM, the next act act, was a different story. They had much more energy and the rhythms were complex and interesting. The crowd seemed to agree with my ears as they were much more into these guys. Unfortunately, three songs in, I was too sleepy to continue standing, so I made my way home.

That's more or less all I have to say here, but I would like to report more on the audience before I'm done. First, here is a photo of a guy wearing one of the keffiyeh hats that they were selling. Palestine reprezent.

The composition of the audience was one part Palestinians, one part hip hop fans, and one part middle-aged listeners of NPR. Here is one of them pumping her fist in the air, while she balances--and I kid you not here--a totebag on the other shoulder. I wish the photo were better.

Two
I went to see Wilco for the third time since this time last year. This time was in Austin for the first night of their two night stand. It was the best of my three performances. This is possibly because Austin loves Wilco and Wilco, in turn, loves Austin. As Jeff Tweedy put it in some between song banter, "You are far superior, Austin." They know, Jeff. They know.

Three
I went to see Old 97s play an in-store show at the somewhat recently re-opened Cactus records. Their set consisted of one new song alternating with one old song which an audience member would shout out. It was surprisingly less low-key than most in-store shows are, but under the fluorescent lights it was clear that these 97s are, in fact, Old. Even baby faced Rhett is starting to look his age.

Bonus
Meet Black Cab Sessions, a considerably less stylish version of La Blogoteque. Won't somebody buy both of them mics that don't suck?

Week 81: Telephone Call from Televisionland

Opening scene for Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, lots of dancing and being chased by girls, but everyone stops to dance together at some points.

Stones 1981 Start Me Up tour plaing Shattered and Neighbors at breakneck speed, flawlessly, I almost wanted to jump up my seat. I forgot how good the stones are (were? – haven’t seen them since 1987).

Some duet called Bosco and Wifer in that CMT duets show. You all should totally work the hippie thing they were told. No one else looks like them according to the girl in the duet. Now some other duet is doing Marshall Tucker Band. Gonna take a freight train…

Mick Jagger playing guitar on Just My Imagination… a mistake. He looks as old in 1981 as he does today 25+ years later. Amazing. They were already dinasours in 1981. What are they now? Still rocking I guess. Snorting ashes. Mick Jagger is such a freak. Bill Wyman just took a look at him shaking his rump for thousands of people and just snickered. 19th Floor Nervous Breakdown. Again at breakneck speed. Charlie Watts is one boogie machine. Ok that song was over before I finished the sentence. Now, Let Me Go. Again at breakneck speed, How old are these guys? I want some of that geritol they’re taking. Now Mick is running through the audience with about 10 bodyguards around him and the audience is trying to grab at him and he’s singing let me go. Its like the british 60s people were obsessed with chasing and being chased. That’s freedom baby.

Commercials everywhere, when will they ever go away? Geckos dancing to Thriller with a girl, and that horrible new Subway jingle, scientifically created for the sole purpose of drilling into your head four notes that you then can't help but repeat over and over in your mind. Thank god for local car dealer commercials.

Mother Judd hands down harsh judgements on two guys who want to make it as a duet. Now she’s shaking her head, these poor chumps trying to sing for the “judges”, trying to “impress" the "judges”. Trying to be what they think they want them to be. Sad really. And not very good to see them try to fit into a certain size of jean, then look like its not their size and sound like crap singing. The song selection doesn’t help either.

Did Ron Wood get picked because he and Keith smoke cigarettes the same way? What would Mother Judd think of Mick and Keith singing a duet for her? Keith has a horrible voice. Mick walks around like my daughter, shrugging shoulders, pointing at nothing and everything, not rough enough, not tough enough. This song is not doing it, not making love to you Mick. Sorry.

Austin Powers is talking to the blind man in the bathroom and over-powdering with pimp powder. He’s English. Tom Arnold as a cowboy. Youre gonna blow your o-ring. Show that turd who’s boss. We’re gonna get through this. How about a courtesy flush.

The million dollar song is coming up after commercials in a show called Don’t Forget the Lyrics. Sounds pretty exciting, but Country Crock Omega Plus? I don’t think so.

Now there’s a duo called LB and Oakley. On the name alone I am going to "judge" them and say with Mother Judd, no thanks. And what is up with that guy’s haircut?

Alright! the million dollar song! And it's Blame It On The Rain by Milli Vanilli, 1989! #1 for 2 weeks. The contestant lady has to remember it to “get her money.” 11 missing words she has to remember. This is a horrible song, and even worse, the host and the contestant are singing it together. She’s gonna be the very first millionaire if she remembers the 11 words.

At the Stones concert its night time now. Before it was daytime. How long have they been playing, 40+ years? You can’t always get what you want. Unless you want Mick shaking his rump. I’m thinking they’re about my age in this movie. Forty or so. All class.

I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette.

The wife saw today a girl scout from the local Girl Scout Carrboro NC Troop 420. She had a girl scout uniform that said Troop 420 on the back. In case you had doubts that I live in a hippie town. Someone asked if they then had an opium den mother.

Oh and Bret Michaels has a new solo record coming out. Why?