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gayenerd · 4 years ago

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The Band You Love To Hate By Tom Lanham of RIP (There’s no date on this but I would say 1995 or 1996?)

Eyes wide as a barn owl's. Spines stiff with anticipation, like a hungry scorpion. The two teenage girls sit stock-still in their booth at a posh Berkeley diner, practically bursting with excitement, but without the faintest clue how to handles it. Clueless, you might call them. A few feet across the linoleum aisle--with his back to them, oblivious to all the oh-my-gawd facial expressions--sits the object of their adulation, dressed in unassuming black jeans, black T-shirt, shredded black Converse, and a beat-up black baseball jacket. But even with his once-green dreadlocks tamed to a short black business cut, Billie Joe Armstrong--yes, the snaggle-toothed MTV ragamuffin from megaplatinum neo-punkers, Green Day--is as easy to spot as Michael Bolton at a Rogaine convention. Although the kids want to leap up from their seats and race over for an autograph or a jittery hello, they don't dare. Instead, they're forced to deal with their seething emotions as if they were eating post-tonsillectomy ice cream: a lot of numb gulping and a quick pain chaser. This is the blessing of being Billie Joe Armstrong. Alas, it's also his curse. By the time you read this, the irascible little rocker will have turned 24. And exactly two years ago, he and his wacky bandmates--drummer Tré Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt--lolled around the trashy basement flat they shared, getting stoned and sneering at the idea that Dookie--their just-released "sellout" on big-time Reprise--would ever amount to more than a nice drink coaster. Fame? They were more preoccupied with their bong collection, stacks of rock 'n' roll bubblegum cards, and a thriving sea monkey tank displayed prominently on a window-sill. Most of their furniture had springs poking through--they didn't care. Armstrong regularly picked boogers from his gold-ringed nostril and then flick them onto the scary shag carpet--what did he have to worry about? Too bad he couldn't have foreseen the all-too-near future. Green Day happened to be in the right place at the right time. The three-chord slam-a-rama Dookie--a pop-edged return to decade-old punk ethics--became the surprise hit of '94, going on to sell over 11 million copies. Armstrong, accustomed to frenetic club performances, began translating the group's infectious energy to larger and larger venues. Demand continued to grow at a staggering pace; Green Day fought back. They turned a satellite MTV Video Awards performance into a "spit-cam" fest by urging the crowd to gob any camera lens it could ("[The cameramen] tried to make it look like it was cool, but it wasn't"). Last October, Armstrong and company issued their 32-minute follow up, Insomniac, almost as an afterthought, with little promotion, a visually offensive video (for "Geek Stink Breath") and--at least initially--a strict no-interview policy. Simultaneously, they ditched their high-powered Cahn-Man management team and are now virtually managing themselves. Along the way, Armstrong married his long-time sweetheart Adrienne and last March fathered a son, Joey. In typical down-to-earth fashion, the couple spent their honeymoon a few blocks from home at Berkeley's prestigious Claremont Hotel, not on some exotic island. Beginning to see the problem here? How does a street-smart kid from humble beginnings skyrocket to world-class notoriety and yet--with his music in millions of homes and his privacy suddenly a right that needs defending--still adhere to the simple ideals, the simple lifestyle that spawned him? Is "successful punk" an oxymoron? Insomniac provided few clues--it was more of the same slacker-ennui sentiment, more defeated, disenfranchised grousing set to speedy, memorable hooks. Or, as Armstrong barks in the aptly-dubbed "Walking Contradiction," "My wallet's fat and so is my head...I'm a victim of a Catch-22." And that, in essence, was the topic this tortured artist wanted to discuss at the diner. The old "be careful what you wish for" adage. The classic "problem with success is finding someone to enjoy it with you" truism. Armstrong, who takes occasional sips from a vanilla milkshake, but mostly stares morosely at the floor, seems to be dealing with superstardom in a relatively normal way. Don't be fooled by the steady stream of negative vitriol that follows; he's analyzing it, breaking it down, figuring out ways to disconnect his kinetic career. Or at least turn down the volume for awhile.

RIP: We know what's going right. But what's going wrong?

BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG: Lots of things, really. Actually, when I came here today, I said I didn't wanna talk about anything good, because I don't really have anything good to talk about. Goin' on tour pretty soon--don't really wanna go. Just because I've been kinda torn. I wanna stick around at home. I don't like playing arenas, and I realized I didn't know what I was getting myself into on the last tour, but I went into it being positive and getting excited about it. But I didn't realize that I was the kind of person to whom it's too much of an event and not really a personal thing anymore. And I started to realize how much I liked being the background music to this scene at the club. And now it's.... I dunno. People expect so much. It's cool and stuff, and it can be a lot of fun, a really good experience. But when you play that many arenas.... The first time we ever played those big kinds of shows at the Shoreline (Amphitheater in Mountain View, California), there was weirdness--we were playing for a lot of f?!kin' people. And I hate to say it, but sometimes it just feels like another gig. We played every day, 50 gigs this last leg, and it just wears on ya. There's all these people, and they think "Alright. I paid my $15--you better impress the f?!kin' shit outta me right now!" And I realized that for Joey, the rock and roll touring life is not a good atmosphere for a kid. I tried to make it to where it would be, bringing lots of his toys out. But there are no familiar surroundings for him. And he likes all the attention--people come up and say hello to him every day, people who are on tour with us. But he doesn't have his own room or a home to go to every day. So, no more touring for Joey.

RIP: Turned on Regis and Kathie Lee this morning to find their gossip columnist dishing dirt on Green Day. How Insomniac didn't do nearly as well as predicted, how it was a disappointment to the label. A failure, supposedly.

BJA: Well, it's like, we didn't set up this record. We didn't. We didn't do any promotion beforehand, we completely quit doing interviews, and basically we just wanted to go on into it. We weren't even sure if we wanted to do a video. And then when we did a video, it got yanked from daytime rotation because people were getting grossed-out by it. So I think we did alienate a lot of people. So that was expected, that it wasn't going to sell a lot of records.

RIP: NOFX have taken it one step further. They refuse to talk to press, make videos, pander potential singles to radio. They don't want to get any bigger.

BJA: I dunno, maybe I'm just getting jaded or something. But I just got cable again and I can't stand anything. Six years ago you could hear something that was different and know that it was different. So it'd be "alternative" or whatever. But now it's like you get this Joan...Osborne? With the ring in her nose, waving the alternative rock flag, when she's just...not, ya know? And I'm thinking, I hate all this music that's coming out now--the past year was just hell for music. But people are buying it, so then I'm thinking, Maybe they're the ones that are good and I'm the one who sucks? I just don't know if I really wanna be involved in the rock world anymore at all. Period. I don't necessarily have anything against a big record company or people who what to join up with a big record company. It really is right for some people, but more and more, I don't think that I'm really meant to. And I hate to sound like that, because I don't like taking things for granted. I don't like to talk about my problems when there's some kid struggling in his garage somewhere saying "F?!k him! He's just taking it for granted. Shit, I wish I could do something like that, but I'm just stuck here in Biloxi, Mississippi, and I can't even get a gig." I'm so confused right now.

RIP: It must be odd to know that, with all those millions of albums sold, drunken frat boys are probably staggering around to your music right now. Your audience grew far beyond your control.

BJA: Oh, totally! We became what we hated. Which is, the people I despised in high school--and now--are buying our records. We initially became a trend, so there was no way I expected to sell as many records with Insomniac as with Dookie. That's one of the biggest-selling records of the decade. We get slagged by the punk rockers, and it's like, I don't blame them. If you draw that much attention to yourself, that's what you're gonna get--attention--and it's not personal anymore.

RIP: Ever think about giving it all up?

BJA: There isn't a day goes by in the past year and a half that I haven't thought about quitting. I went to this party on New Year's Eve, and this band Juke, and another band, the Tantrums, played in a friend of mine's backyard. And a lot of my old friends showed up, and everybody was just dancing. And I was dancing, and getting really muddy, and I was having a great time. I can't remember the last time I sat down and listened to a record from beginning to end and felt this incredible spine-chilling music. And it's because I haven't been able to go out and watch bands play at my free will. I'm not gonna live in a closet, I'm not gonna vegetate myself.

RIP: But it has to be difficult, when tons of kids know your face. You're on your way to Michael Jackson-dom, where you have to wear a disguise in public.

BJA: If you think about the Beatles, at that time all people had to go by were the photographs on the records and every now and then a television appearance. So when they'd come to town, people would just flip out--it became this huge public event every single time. Whereas now, everything is so saturated kids don't even have to leave their home to go to a show anymore. They can sit in the comfort of their living room, and your favorite rock star is gonna be entertaining you while you sit down and have your microwave burrito.

RIP: The Milwaukee cops weren't pleased with aspects of Green Day's Milwaukee show last November. Why were you arrested?

BJA: I dropped the pick and--actually, I even forgot about it--I just mooned the crowd, which is pretty harmless compared to what I've done before. And I wasn't even thinking about it--I just went out and started playing again. Then I went backstage and was hanging out with Adrienne, and this guy Jimmy who does security for us goes "Come on--there's a car waiting for you outside right now. You've gotta get out of here!" I said "What's wrong?" and he said he didn't even know. So we get in the car and all of a sudden about ten cops come walking over, fully surrounding the car. So the guy puts the cuffs on me, throws me in the car, and I get tossed in the holding tank for two, three hours. I wasn't in the bullpen--I was in with the other ones, the not-so-bad ones. They made me take all my jewelry out. And my shoestrings, so I wouldn't hang myself or something. I dunno. I just don't know how to fit into rock music anymore. I don't know what I like about it anymore. I don't like anything about it anymore, to tell you the truth. To tell you the real truth, I'm a pretty miserable person right now. I'm totally depressed, and my wife can vouch for that because she's around me. In fact, she's the only person who's really around me. I dunno, the whole thing with the mainstreaming of punk rock. I just feel lost in the whole thing...I don't really know...I don't wanna...I dunno...It's miserable, it really is. It's f?!ked up.

RIP: For every original voice that comes along, there will be countless mad signing dashes for any and all sound-alike artists, with no thought given to the artist's longevity. Just throw the record out quickly and hope it sticks.

BJA: The thing is, a lot of musicians have gotten so comfortable with this big so-called "Revolution in Rock Music" over the past decade. First it was like, "F?!k the corporations! F?!k the corporations!" And then people just sorta got cozy with that, and forgot that these bands are getting lost in the shuffle. And I'm talking about the ones that never get noticed at all and just get kinda bitter. The 15 minutes of fame is getting shorter and shorter. And now music is totally going backwards--the first half of this decade, there were a few things going on that were interesting. It wasn't my favorite kind of music, but it had a sensibility about it. If you think about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and that whole Seattle scene, and even the Offspring--there was this thing going on that was more honest, in a lot of ways. It wasn't like, beer, drugs and pussy, like what went on through the '80s with all the hair bands. But now what we've got is Hootie & the Blowfish....

RIP: Who are probably a lot like you. They seem like nice, regular guys who--through no real fault of their own--are suddenly assimilated into pop culture.

BJA: Yeah, but that's the problem, is that they are nice regular guys. And they're totally comfortable with that, and they sort of put that out, to where they don't really have...I dunno, there's a certain amount of attitude that, say, someone like Cobain or Vedder has that they don't have. But it's becoming way not...real anymore or something. Maybe not real to me. It's just turning back into what it was in the '80s. It's like, "Hey, everyone! We're Huey Lewis and the News!" I dunno. Maybe nobody knows what the f?!k I'm talking about anymore.

BJA: I get so irritated by people. I think I'm more bitter than I've ever been in my whole life, to tell you the honest truth. I think Insomniac is much more of a bitter record than Dookie. And I think the older people get, the more they kinda get angry. I think a lot of people feel like they get cheated by lief somehow--no-one is ever completely satisfied. There's maybe a few. But I mean, I'm in a place where I don't really wanna be. It's like, sometimes I feel like we're losing our passion for playing music. And that's the f?!ked-up thing, when you lose passion for what you love, then it's like, Is this marriage headed for divorce or what?

RIP: Theoretically, you can fight back a couple of ways. Like Cobain, you could make a record almost calculated to offend all the bandwagon-jumpers. Or take as much time off as you'd like. Who says you can't go live on a desert island for two years?

BJA: That'd be nice. I'm just not enjoying life right now. I'm really not. I'm so cluttered, I can't even speak. Yeah, I do feel like I'm getting old, and I'm kinda bitter about that. I'm not excited about being onstage anymore, and I was really trying to convince myself that I was. Really. Before we did this last U.S. tour, every time I did an interview--I don't know if you read the last Rolling Stone piece--I was like "Yeah! I'm excited! I wanna play these arenas!" and stuff. And then just every night, it started sucking, it felt like a routine or something. It felt almost choreographed in a lot of ways. And I was yelling "f?!k you!" to people, but I didn't know who I was yelling "f?!k you" to anymore.

RIP: Last time we spoke, you said you went out of your way to change every single show, make each one different.

BJA: Well, I think it's just the stress of getting up in front of all those people all the time, every day. It's like, "Do I really feel like downing another f?!cking pot of coffee and a bottle of wine before I walk onstage to do this again? Just to get myself ready to go?" You know, for all those people. And every night I always do something different and stupid. But at the same time, it'd be really cool to just say "F?!k you!" to people and like, walk off. And then they'd get it. It's like, "I'm really telling you to f?!k off this time! Time to pack up and go home." It'd just be so nice to start from scratch again.

RIP: In many ways you can. That's the music-making system trying to program your behavior. And obviously you've broken quite a few rules already--you don't even have to be talking to me right now, actually....

BJA: Oh no. I really wanted to do this interview, just because the last interviews that I've done, I've been miserable, and I was pretending not to be. I really was, I was lying. Not to the reader, not to the person I was doing the interview. But I was lying to myself, convincing myself that I was really happy with how everything is going.

RIP: So you always knew what you wanted, and now you've got it, in spades. You're having trouble figuring out what's next?

BJA: I didn't even know what I wanted back then. I really didn't. I didn't know if I wanted to be huge, totally successful. I never knew that. I was struggling so hard even to sign that f?!king contract--when I was sitting there, I was contemplating, "Should I just run outta here right now? Am I making the biggest mistake of my life?" A lot of people say, "You're totally disillusioned with what money can do for people," but money never meant shit to me. There's something very passionate to me, very romantic, about living on the street in a lot of ways. Just because I really like my lifestyle back then. I was totally content, in retrospect. A lot of it has to do with the fame. I dunno, I'm trying to talk right now and just totally stuttering.

RIP: It's not like you chose music--it chose you, and you can't help it.

BJA: Yeah, it's cool when people really get it. But what a lot of people don't understand is that we're a band that's been around a lot longer than people know. And that's the thing. The difference between this and what happened between Kerplunk and Dookie--in a year, I got married, I had a kid, and I sold 11 million records worldwide. That can do something to ya, ya know?

BJA: Sometimes I think it'd be cool to just hang out with my friends, drink beer, smoke cigarettes. The more I think about it, the more I'd be really happy with that. I don't think that we're feeling quite like a band anymore--that's one problem we have. There was this certain rock 'n' roll underdog think that we always had--we always drove for something, always drove from town to town in a small van. And you know, I f?!kin' like touring like that--it's like culture shock, really, driving around in a van, setting up my amp when I get there, and playing. That's rock 'n' roll, that's what it started out as. A bunch of sweaty pigs in some tiny f?!kin' bar having a hootenanny, that's what punk rock was to me, that's what drove me to it. I love rock music in its simples, rawest form. And I think we're the only band, really, that plays rock 'n' roll.

RIP: Has all this put a strain on your old friendships? Do your pals treat you a little differently now?

BJA: When I come up to friends I haven't talked to in a while, there's a weirdness. And the ones who are really close to me don't really bring up anything, but that thing is still there; it's still in the air. And sometimes I'll just not say anything the whole time we're hanging out. I'll be totally quiet, because the only thing I'll have to talk about is my band, and I get so sick of talking about my band and myself. So I'll just be quiet, since that's the only thing there is to me, except for my son and my wife.

RIP: Pretty soon, you'll be boring everyone with slide shows--"There we are at Yosemite!"

BJA: Ha! Adrienne was telling me the other day, "When you were in there dancing with all your friends, while the band was playing, you were so happy because you were so in your element." And I've even gone as far as saying we're not a punk band anymore. But no matter what, that's still gonna stick with me forever, because I love the music, I love the energy of a new band coming out that creates this sense of urgency about 'em. I'll never be able to kick that habit. I love hangin' out with my friends who have small fanzines--kids just writing their guts out about whatever the hell's bothering 'em, and putting it on a Xerox machine and then handing it out for a quarter apiece at shows or at a party. All I wanna do is just try and work it out. I was sitting there the other day, counting all the records that the Replacements put out, stuff like that, Dan thinking how [Paul] Westerberg totally came across to his audience and did everything, everything that the wanted to do in music. He wasn't extremely successful for it, but the guy has influenced people, and a lot of 'em don't even know that they are influenced by him. All I wanna do is just write good songs and stick to it. I wanna develop--not being experimental--but go into different styles, go across my boundaries of the two-and-a-half minute punk song with a three-and-a-half minute jazz song, or maybe get into a little bit of swing or rockabilly.

RIP: With such staggering success, you could walk into Reprise and tell 'em you're doing an album of saxophone solos and they'd allow you that creative luxury.

BJA: Well, I never wanna be that experimental. I don't wanna get into synthesizers and shit like that. The thing that was cool for me with Insomniac was that I think we definitely set a foundation for ourselves, because we put out our hardest record to date, totally in-your-face all the way through, and now we're able to go anywhere we want. We can do that now--we do have that going for us. That is, if people are still interested. Which is kinda weird for me to say....

RIP: Your craft will always remain the most important thing of all, even if you're just writing for your own amusement.

BJA: Yeah. No matter what, I'm gonna be writing songs for the rest of my life. I mean, I already have a shitload of new songs right now. But I just wanna do some other things with it. We've sold a million of Insomniac so far. But I definitely want to be respected as a musician. Well, more as a songwriter than as a musician. I wanna be f?!kin' normal, is what I wanna be. The thing is, I've seen so many freaks and so many weirdos and crazy punk rockers and drunks and junkies. But for a lot of those people being weird is easy. It's so easy to be strange--the hard thing is to try to be normal. There's no such thing as normal, ya know.

RIP: How's your mom feel about all this?

BJA: She's kinda worried about me. She doesn't know what to think of everything. We have a hard time communicating with each other, just because I don't like to talk about it that much. So she feels like she has to walk on eggshells around me all the time.

RIP: You buy her anything cool once the money started rolling in?

BJA: Nah--she doesn't want anything. I've asked her. She's been living in the same house for over 20 years, and she's content living there. But I did give her a trip--she went to Hawaii, her and her boyfriend. And I think travelling is really good--if you paid for someone to travel, so they can go and explore and see some things they've never seen before. But I think that's probably where I get it from. I get so content with not having much. And then you get all this stuff, all this attention, and you don't really know what to do with it. You don't know how to channel it.

RIP: Most outrageous thing you've bought for yourself?

BJA: I got my car primered! And one thing I did do was build a home studio. So I've been recording all my friends' bands for free. I produced this band called Dead and Gone, and Social Unrest, Fetish and the Criminals. And I have this side-project called Pinhead Gunpowder--nothing's up with it right now, but we played at the beginning of '94 a few times. RIP: Sounds like you've got more than enough pressure valves to let off the steam. Still, do you worry about death?

BJA: Yeah, I do. But I have too many reasons to stick around. One is my son and my wife. And I don't feel like I'm finished yet. I'm not done, ya know? And the beauty of it is that death is forever and your problems aren't. And that's why I'm talking about my bad shit, because you vent that, you get it off your chest and you can move on to something else. There's gotta be a positive side to all this--so you just sort of try and dig it out. Get rid of all the bad--out with the bad air, in with the good air.

RIP: You said about Green Day that you think your "bandwagon is coming to a close and all that's gonna be left is just a band. Hopefully." So then will you start writing happy songs?

BJA: I thought about writing a totally sarcastic song called "I'm So Goddamn Happy," just talking about how happy I am. Actually, I'd like to put out a double record--I'd like to put out tons of music. But I never wanna become an egomaniac. I just wanna keep things down to earth, so I think it's really important for us to take a long break after all this stuff. We just put out two records back to back, one year after another, and now we can sit back and work on ourselves as people again. So we don't parody ourselves. And it's so hard to be a father and a musician at the same time. If I get into one thing and I pay close attention to it, like if I'm with Joey and I start neglecting my music, then I feel like I should play more often. So I start playing my music, and then I'm going, "Am I neglecting Joey?" So it becomes hard to do everything at the same time.

BJA: I wanna create a very mellow and sound atmosphere for him, because I don't wanna make any mistakes for him--I want him to be able to make his own mistakes. And even when it comes to swearing--I don't cuss in front of my kid. I'd rather him get it from some dirty-mouthed kid at school. Then at least I'd know, I could go "Thank God--my kid is in a real world and he's learning these things from his surroundings." That'd be a good thing. Because the best things you ever learn are the things you learn in kindergarten.

Finally, after more than an hour worth of gut-spilling, Armstrong suddenly observes four brace-faced girls, each no more than 12 years old, idling over by the cash register. They're there on the pretext of getting change. In reality, they just want to ogle punk icon and pin-up darling Billie Joe, stare at those caterpillar eyebrows and chiselled cheekbones up close. Another oh-my-gawd event. "I gotta go--it's gettin' weird," the reluctant rocker whispers, literally leaping up from the booth. "I can feel eyeballs all over me already...." And as fast as that, he's gone. "Was that...was that...B-B-B-B-Billie Joe?" stammers one swooner. "No," says the waitress, with a subtle smile. "That was just some guy who usually eats here alone, nobody famous at all. You know, just an average guy." A little white lie to herd the young 'uns out. But nevertheless the truth.

#i know it wasn't healthy for him #but i miss when he would use interviews as free therapy #the discussion about how he hates playing bigger shows is interesting #obviously he figured it out because i think he genuinely likes playing arenas/stadiums now #i wonder how he did that #like did he get tips from other rock stars #or did he just work thru his emotional baggage about selling out #article #interview #articles

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bubblesandgutz · 5 years ago

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Every Record I Own - Day 548: Hella Tripper

I’ve only listened to this LP once or twice. That’s no slight on either Hella or their last album, 2011′s Tripper. Hell, this record was recently ranked as the 35th greatest math rock album of all time, and I’m not here to argue that distinction. It’s just that Hella, for me, was always a live entity, and while their records were cool documents of their manic energy and dizzying guitar-and-drum interplay, they never really served as an adequate substitute for seeing the duo (or quintet, or whatever other incarnations I may have missed) tear it up in the flesh and blood. That said, even though I haven’t spun this LP in nearly nine years, it felt immediately familiar when I threw it on this morning. So Spencer Seim and Zach Hill deserve bonus points for weaving some bona fide hooks into their whacked out mathematical exercises.

These Arms Are Snakes had the pleasure of doing a tour with Seim’s short-lived project sBACH back in 2008. sBACH had the same overdosing-on-Adderall vibe as Hella, but Spencer’s guitars were equipped with midi pickups, so all their tones sounded like 8-bit Nintendo instruments. They were a fun, weird, ripping band, and a fitting offshoot from Hella’s hyperactive weirdness. So it also made sense that sBACH sold Hella merch alongside their own wares. And at the end of the tour I walked away with a Hella shirt bearing a dismal review by future Pitchfork contributor Brandon Stosuy for Spin magazine (side note no. 2: Stosuy is a solid dude and was one of the few critics at P4k that actually seemed keen on advocating for underground rock bands after the website shifted most of its attention to poptimism, so cut the guy some slack).

This is where I normally circle back to my general grumblings about music criticism. Why would Spin even bother reviewing a Hella album? It’s outside their demographic. Or why would someone even review a Hella album period? As I mentioned earlier, Hella was a band I loved because their live show was such an adrenaline rush, and on some level I never expected a studio album to replicate that experience. I suppose that in and of itself is a review: Tripper doesn’t manage to capture the power of the band live. But that’s true of most music in that realm. A studio recording can’t surpass the power of a live performance unless the live performance kinda sucks and the producer / engineer is really good at polishing a turd. So does Tripper have value to me? Absolutely, because it reminds me of watching Hella and it triggers the memory of that thrill. Do I expect someone who delves into Tripper without any other exposure to Hella to enjoy the record? Well, this is still considered one of the best math rock records of all time, so... sure!

But ultimately, when I think of Hella I think of an old fIREHOSE interview where Mike Watt said his band was the inverse of the usual rock n’ roll paradigm. Most bands toured to sell records, whereas fIREHOSE made records to promote their tours. I love that philosophy. Plenty of artists can make good records with enough time and resources, but to be an artist that can conjure magic in real time, to create an experience rather than just a product... that is the true art. And that’s how Hella rolled.

#hella #everyrecordiown

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soundsof71 · 7 years ago

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David Bowie, “Kooks”, solo acoustic, from Bowie at the Beeb, recorded June 3, 1971, broadcast June 21.

Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones (b. May 30. 1971) was by no means the first rock kid, but he was perhaps the first whose dad wrote a song to him and put it on an album, 1971′s Hunky Dory.

That version of “Kooks”, recorded in July, was quite elaborate, featuring the band soon to be known as The Spiders from Mars, with Trevor Bolder adding trumpet to his unusually busy bass, Mick Ronson’s string arrangements, and guest Rick Wakeman’s dance hall piano (who also played on “Changes”, “Life on Mars?”, and “Oh! You Pretty Things”). I think it’s perfect, one of the highlights of the album, and of David’s discography.

This is the first recording of “Kooks”, though, recorded live by the BBC, with just David and a guitar, only 4 days after Duncan was born. This one is perfect in its own way, too, and quite a revelation. Before he starts the song, David notes that he’d been at home listening to Neil Young when he got the news of Duncan’s birth (Angela’s labor went on for 30 hours, so David left?), and this version of “Kooks” really does sound like it could have come straight off of After The Gold Rush.

That may seem an odd point of origin, especially given how very, very English “Kooks” sounds in its released version, but don’t forget that David started 1971 with his first trip to the US, traveling cross-country (from Washington DC to Los Angeles) by bus on a three-week press tour.

As he said in 1999, “The whole Hunky Dory album reflected my newfound enthusiasm for this new continent that had been opened up to me [in 1971]. That was the first time a real outside situation affected me so 100 percent that it changed my way of writing and the way I look at things.”

It was reflected in songs inspired by Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol (both of those by name, of course), and Lou Reed, among many others, including yes, Neil Young. After the Gold Rush spent that entire year on the Billboard charts, and landed as the 20th-best selling album of 1971. It would have been inescapable for David (as indeed it was for all of us!).

In fact, David’s next recording of “Kooks”, the first official demo, was even more Neil Young-inspired, verging on the downright derivative – slower, sleepier, folkier, and honestly, a little spooky. Neil would’ve been all over this, I think. You can hear that version over @bowiesongs, Chris O’Leary’s companion tumblr to his Wordpress blog Pushing Ahead of The Dame (named for the great line from Hunky Dory’s Velvet Underground tribute, “Queen Bitch”), one of the best fan-based resources for any artist on the web, and the best textual resource on Bowie, period, as well as the first volume of the book(s) coming out of it, Rebel Rebel: All the Songs of David Bowie From ‘64 to '76 (needless to say, highly recommended).

There was another version of “Kooks” that aired on the BBC on September 21, 1971, “Bob Harris’ Sounds Of The Seventies”, which had been recorded for what turned out to be an extremely rare (500 copies) Hunky Dory promo called BOWPROMO1, featuring 7 songs from David on side 1 and 5 from Dana Gillespie on side 2. (The Bowie tracks were officially released on Record Store Day 2017.)

It’s quite charming, too – starting to sound considerably more British with Trevor Bolder on bass (but no brass), and Mick Ronson on acoustic guitar and vocals (but no strings) – but to me it falls short of both the polished gem of the Hunky Dory version, and the intimacy of the first BBC version. Still, you can hear David’s laughter as the song begins, and the smile of his that you hear throughout will wind up on your own face too.

(Young Duncan sucking Dad’s finger, June 29, 1971, by Ron Burton.)

My favorite versions of “Kooks” are definitely the ones from Hunky Dory and the June 1971 BBC version that I brought you at the top of this post, but all four are completely unique, and very much worth hearing. You’ll come away with an even clearer picture of how much craft David put into every aspect of his presentations, as well as a razor-sharp view of how much of it was all the way there from the very first moment.

And yeah, a reminder of how closely connected David remained to Duncan through the rest of his life. Theirs is my favorite parent-child relationship in the rock pantheon, and you can hear the beginning of it right here, days after they met for the very first time.

#david bowie #1971 #david bowie 1971 #kooks #1971 album #hunky dory #duncan jones #david bowie with long hair #bbc #youtube #1971 music #1971 school #long post #me #text post #father's day #father #essay

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fionaapplerocks · 7 years ago

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A few hours after her morning stroll, Apple, 28, sits in the lounge of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, her long hair damp from a shower and curled into a loose bun. Her eyes are so startlingly big and blue that a direct gaze almost feels accusatory. She's still in her trench coat, which she wears over a turquoise T-shirt and long black skirt. She made the mistake of having some coffee earlier and is a little shaky from the caffeine. She used to take medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder, but over the years, she's gotten better at handling stress. ''As frazzled and tired and kind of jittery as I am right now,'' she says with a smile, looking down at a trembling hand, ''I'm actually doing great and I'm very happy.''

After six years of silence, Fiona Apple finally reveals the real reason her mystery-shrouded ''Extraordinary Machine'' took so long By Karen Valby EW | Sep 23, 2005

Fiona Apple knows how to take care of herself. She has to go for a long walk every day or she gets a little crazy. So on a recent morning in New York City, she woke up at 4:30, put on sneakers and a navy blue trench coat, and left her midtown hotel. She moved slowly with her hands stuffed in her pockets, listening to her new iPod on shuffle, and the music in her ears made her feel like she was wandering through a movie.

She walked through Central Park just before sunrise, the light soft and gauzy, with Elliott Smith singing 'In the Lost and Found.' She walked to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where as a child she sang in Christmas pageants. She walked all the way up by Columbia University to her mother's apartment building, where Apple was raped in a hallway by a stranger when she was 12 years old. She kept walking and eventually found herself in front of the Dwight School on 89th Street, where she once worked as a receptionist while attending night school. Here her iPod randomly settled on 'Pale September,' a ballad from Apple's first CD, 1996's aggressively confessional Tidal. Normally she freaks out and skips her own songs. But today, looking at the place where as a teen she jotted down some exquisite lyrics that jump-started a multiplatinum career, she forced herself to listen.

All these years later, and back to the beginning. Which is really the only place to start a story about the mercurial artist, who vanished from the music scene after the critically adored 1999 album When the Pawn... and told herself she'd never return. Six years later, her new record, Extraordinary Machine, which was supposedly shelved by her label, which in its early stages was mysteriously leaked to the Web, which inspired elaborate conspiracy theories and a fan-driven campaign to 'Free Fiona,' is coming out. And Fiona Apple is finally ready to set the record straight about why she went away, and why it was such a battle coming back.

A few hours after her morning stroll, Apple, 28, sits in the lounge of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, her long hair damp from a shower and curled into a loose bun. Her eyes are so startlingly big and blue that a direct gaze almost feels accusatory. She's still in her trench coat, which she wears over a turquoise T-shirt and long black skirt. She made the mistake of having some coffee earlier and is a little shaky from the caffeine. She used to take medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder, but over the years, she's gotten better at handling stress. 'As frazzled and tired and kind of jittery as I am right now,' she says with a smile, looking down at a trembling hand, 'I'm actually doing great and I'm very happy.'

She knows what people assume about her: 'That I'm crazy. Annoying. Bratty. Sullen. All the things that I definitely am sometimes.' (During a two-hour conversation, she's also funny, frank, and self-aware.) She blames these perceptions on the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, where she was named Best New Artist. Fresh off her breakthrough 'Criminal' video, in which she crawled moodily around in her underwear, Apple delivered an acceptance speech full of regret and disgust, telling the stunned room that 'this world is bullshit!'

'I felt like it wasn't my music that had gotten me there,' she says today, 'and I felt very resentful of that and of myself for that. It had been so important to me to get to this point, to be in this crowd, and once I got there I saw it wasn't anything I could really feel proud of. I thought that even if I can't articulate what I'm feeling, if I don't get up and say what's on my mind then I never will. So when I finished I felt great. But you should have seen the cold shoulders I got backstage. It was the moment where I realized that I was in control and could say whatever I wanted to. That is not something that makes people you work with very comfortable.'

Another often-mentioned low point is Apple's public meltdown at New York's Roseland Ballroom during a February 2000 stop on her When the Pawn... tour. Complaining that she couldn't hear herself, she fled the stage mid-show in hysterical tears, and never returned. (At a makeup concert several months later, Apple apologized to the audience, saying 'You said you wanted me to be self-confessional; I thought you said selfish and unprofessional.')

Sick of the public life ('I was cast in the crazy role and I was perfect for it'), heartbroken by how misunderstood she felt ('to feel hated is really, really awful'), Apple went back to Los Angeles and dropped out of the spotlight. When she and her boyfriend of three years, Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson, broke up in 2001, Apple moved out of his place into a house in Venice Beach. Other than a twin mattress in the living room that served as both bed and sofa, three dog pillows for her stray pit-bull mix Janet, a boom-box radio, and a TV monitor for videos, she left her house unfurnished for nearly two years. Tell her this sounds incredibly sad and lonely, and she says it wasn't really. 'I had so many other people's voices in my head that I just needed to take away everything.'

She took walks, she read plays, and she watched movies. But mostly Apple just sat in silence out on her lawn. 'You can call it a very long-drawn-out day-to-day meditation,' she says. 'I went through a period where I had a razor blade and was carving things out of wood. I would just do that all day, sitting there and thinking.' (Ask Apple if she was high as a kite out there on the grass and she laughs and says no. She admits to a short drug phase, when she smoked pot every day, but that was before this.) Friends needled her, saying she was wasting time and needed to get back to songwriting. 'And I would be like, 'No, this is exactly what I need to be doing right now.' I just had to sit there and figure the f--- out who I was. I didn't have an appetite for music in any way.'

Apple was ready to retire. But Jon Brion, who played many of the instruments on Tidal and produced When the Pawn..., who's worked with everyone from Kanye West to Rufus Wainwright, wasn't prepared to let that happen. 'This is one of my favorite artists alive,' he says. 'She needs to be out there.' Brion would casually check in about her work when they met for their weekly Tuesday lunch at Hal's, a restaurant in Venice. 'Most of the time,' she remembers, 'it would just be as simple as 'Writin' anything?' 'Nope.'' They went on like this for a while, until Brion finally broke down in the spring of 2002 and told his friend that she simply couldn't give up on music. 'You should really, really, really, really do this,' he remembers pleading. 'You really need to do this, because most other people suck.'

Apple gathered together some pieces for songs, songs that she says she 'wouldn't have finished until I was 50 or 60,' if Brion hadn't gotten her out of the house. 'I did need a kick in the ass,' she says. The two moved into the Paramour, a 1920s Los Angeles mansion on four and a half acres of land, for a few months. She wrote and finished a bunch of songs, and they settled in to record Extraordinary Machine. And while Apple says that she's incredibly proud of the work she did there with Brion, she just wasn't happy enough with it to release it as her third album. She decided she wanted to give these songs another shot?with a different producer. 'I just wanted to explore,' she says. 'If I did this song a different way, what would it be like? It was like moving into my house again: I really didn't know what color fucking couch I wanted.'

'It's an artist's prerogative to change their mind,' says Brion (only two of his original recordings remain on the finished CD). 'It's an artist's prerogative to be unsure of themselves or of anything else. It's just not that big a deal. My concern from the get-go was that there be another Fiona Apple record. I don't need to have more records with my name on them.' So Brion introduced Apple to his friend Mike Elizondo, a producer best known for his work with Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent. Elizondo started noodling around with the songs, adding his own beats. Apple loved what she heard and wanted more. She went back to Epic and asked for the money to rerecord her album with Elizondo.

But by this time, Epic had gotten a first listen to the Paramour recordings and, according to Apple and Brion, didn't like what they heard. 'They wanted 'Criminal 2' and everybody knows it,' says Brion. 'Come on, she's 10 years older now! I told them, 'You have to look at Fiona like you look at a Thom Yorke or Bjˆrk. We're living in a time where there's a lack of really forthright artists, and the ones who are ? people really care about them and they're going to be there for them.' And [the response] was pretty much, 'If she doesn't have a single, her career's going to be over.'' (Michele Anthony, COO of Epic parent company Sony Music, insists that Apple 'is a rare and special artist who puts out albums that are bodies of work. She is not an artist where you worry about whether there is a hit single.')

According to Apple, Epic then told her that she could rerecord the album one song at a time. If the label approved a track she deemed finished, she'd get the money to record another. (A label rep denies this was ever Epic's plan but acknowledges that 'many things were likely miscommunicated to Fiona during this time period.') 'I fucking smell a rat here,' Apple remembers thinking, 'because let's say I hand something in that I'm happy with. They're going to own something that now I'm really happy with, which they can shelve if they want, or they're going to tell me, 'We don't like it this way, why don't you change this?' And that would be the death of me. No one's ever told me how to write a song before.'

Apple, who calls herself a compulsive self-doubter, waffled over whether she should work under the constraints of what she understood to be Epic's new deal. 'Should I do it? Should I not do it?' Then she came to her senses. 'I remember very clearly sitting in my house, going outside, sitting on the step, calling my manager and saying 'I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do any of it. Forget it.' So where everybody thinks [Epic] shelved the album, that is actually when I just said, 'I quit.' It was the only thing I thought I could do.'

She wasn't bluffing. 'You could call it brave if it had been some strategy,' says Apple of her decision to walk away from Extraordinary Machine. 'When I wasn't sure I could put out the album, it hurt but it didn't hurt. I figured, 'Oh, that's just what was supposed to happen. I'll just find a new place in the world.'' She had done some volunteer work with kids with emotional difficulties years before and loved it. Now she filled out an application to intern for an organization called Green Chimneys in upstate New York, which uses farm 'therapy' animals to help troubled kids.

But then, in June 2004, two songs from the Jon Brion sessions ? the title track and 'Better Version of Me' ? were leaked onto the Internet. (Apple, Brion, and Epic all vehemently deny being the source of the leak.) Fans, who'd been waiting since 1999 with growing frustration for new music from Apple, went into an uproar. 'I was not thrilled with the idea that there was Fiona Apple music out there that I couldn't listen to,' says 21-year-old Dave Muscato, a Columbia, Mo., musician who a few months later launched FreeFiona.com, a site devoted to rescuing Apple's music from purgatory. 'We decided to do something about it and get a petition going.'

Apple was visiting her mother in New York last January when her manager called and told her about a protest being staged in her name. Muscato, along with 45 other die-hard fans, were picketing outside Sony's Manhattan offices, demanding they release her album. 'I remember very clearly going into the back room of my mother's apartment and my sister was sitting at the computer,' says Apple. 'I said, 'Look up Free Fiona.' First I started laughing, saying, 'This is hilarious, people are protesting and I'm sitting on my ass watching reruns of Columbo. I'm not on the phone with my lawyers trying to get my album released, I'm applying to Green Chimneys!' And then I started crying because I really felt touched. It's an incredible feeling to feel like all these people who you don't know care about you. And it was bigger than me, it was about what was going on in the music industry and anybody deciding what's sellable. And then I started feeling guilty, because it wasn't the truth. The album hadn't really been shelved. What was I going to do, tell all these people to stop, tell them that I had done the quitting? But I quit because I felt that what was going to happen was what they thought was already happening.' (Sony says that they would never have shelved her CD. 'We would have put out any record that Fiona turned in to us as a finished album,' says Anthony.)

But while Apple thought she could walk away for good, the pull of her unfinished album sucked her back in. She reached out to her former manager Andy Slater, who now heads Capitol Records, and asked him to buy out her contract. But those plans were thwarted in March, when a Seattle radio DJ somehow got his hands on the entire album and played it on the air. Fans promptly spread it on the Web. 'I had just gotten a computer and I found out that Extraordinary Machine was on there,' says Apple. 'My heart started beating really fast. It really f---ed things up. It made it so that no one could buy out my contract, because the album's already been heard. And I also felt bad because whoever did this thought they were doing the right thing. Because everyone thought that the record had been shelved [by Sony]. So I was torn between feeling like 'Thank you!' and 'God, no!''

Ultimately, Apple credits all the press attention from the Free Fiona campaign for spooking her label into finally giving her the money and creative freedom to rerecord the album on her terms with Elizondo. In June of 2005, three years after she first started working on Extraordinary Machine, Apple and Elizondo spent five weeks rerecording the songs in his backyard studio outside of Los Angeles.

The Free Fiona message boards are rife with speculation that Apple and Brion had a falling-out, that Epic forced her to cannibalize her record, and that Elizondo was a lackey brought in to gloss up Brion's work. 'Her fans adore her,' says Elizondo. 'They adore Jon. There's such a relationship there. It's probably what Beatles fans felt like when they heard they were working with Phil Spector instead of George Martin. But hopefully now they'll understand there's many different ways to be creative and make records.'

Brion has less patience for fans clinging to conspiracy theories. 'I almost feel like, Hey, anybody who got [Apple's unreleased music] off the Internet ? I understand your interest in hearing it. But [the finished version] is what she's putting out. This is the person you dig and this is what she thinks is cool and get on that.'

These days, Apple's Venice Beach house is nice and cluttered. It's a home she says she loves too much to ever leave. (She still needs a real bed to replace her futon, and a dresser for all the clothes she keeps in bags in a guest room, but there's time for all that.) She's been playing gigs at the L.A. club Largo with Brion on the acoustic guitar and Elizondo on the upright bass. And she stands behind her new record, and also the early version that leaked this year. 'I would not have dealt with any of this bulls--- if I wasn't proud of the songs that I've written.' And Sony is, says Anthony, 'just so happy and excited for her that she's finally done and she's happy with the record.'

Early stories about Extraordinary Machine painted her label as the big bad corporation that pushed around a vulnerable little girl. In the end, isn't it nice to know that she herself did the pushing? 'I've been in the driver's seat throughout this,' Apple says. 'Sometimes not driving. Sometimes not actually moving. I was stalled for a long time, but I've definitely been in the driver's seat. And by the way, that's something I learned very early on by giving a certain speech [at the VMAs]. I can make these decisions and no one can force you to do anything. No one could have tied me up and they couldn't have made me sing. You can't squeeze the notes out of my throat.'

Ask Apple if she's thought about what she'll say if she wins at next year's VMAs, and she claps her hands and leans in conspiratorially. 'Not enough people would get it, so I would never do this. But there's a part of me that would really want to make a completely sweet speech and then at the end say, 'This world is bulls---!'' Her big eyes light up at the idea and she bursts out laughing. 'I just think it would be really funny if people were like, 'Oh, God. Not again.''

Source [x] via Wayback machine current truncated version on EW.com [x]

#Fiona Apple #interview

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krispyweiss · 7 years ago

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The Sound (Bites) of Live Music - 2017 in Review

It was another fabulous year in live music.

Concerts big and small; acts Sound Bites has seen scads of times and acts that broke his Sound cherry; festivals and “an evening with;” old timers and newcomers. These concerts were the sound of live music in 2017 and Sound Bites has the best of them below.

Shows are ranked in the approximate oder of quality with the number of times seen in parentheses. The concerts took place in Columbus, Ohio, unless otherwise noted and are ranked by grade. Any shows that merited a B+ or lower are excluded.

A+

Rhiannon Giddens/Steep Canyon Rangers (6)/Pokey LaFarge/Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, Music Hall, Cincinnati, Nov. 12: The third of three concerts/recording sessions took place on a Sunday afternoon as Giddens, the Rangers and LaFarge focused on post-World War I American compositions. A sublime mixture of classical music and Americana’s best contemporary artists and the show of the year. It’ll be released sometime in 2018 as the second in an ongoing series.

Punch Brothers (3)/I’m With Her/Julian Lage, Taft Theatre, Cincinnati, Aug. 12 Playing alone, together and in various combinations on the American Acoustic tour, the co-headliners slayed the audience with originals and covers of everyone from Adele to Randy Newman.

Tommy Emmanuel and David Grisman, Speaker Jo Anne Davidson Theater, Nov. 10: Emmanuel played an opening solo-acoustic set before appearing with Grisman for songs from their duet LP, Pickin’, and other selections. Pure, jaw-dropping virtuosity.

Roger Waters (2), Nationwide Arena, July 20: A left-wing, multi-media assault on the senses that found Waters revisiting politically minded tracks spanning from Pink Floyd’s Meddle to his own Is This the Life We Really Want?

Steve Martin (2)/Martin Short/Steep Canyon Rangers (5), PNC Pavilion, Cincinnati, Sept. 16: Mostly a comedy show - and one so hilarious Mr. and Mrs. Sound Bites walked out with sore throats and tummies from laughing so hard - this concert also featured the Rangers playing bluegrass alone and with their patron, Martin. And when Short danced across the stage in drag and with humongous fake boobies during “Pretty Little One,” the two art forms merged in perfection.

Willie Nelson (11)/Van Morrison (3)/Avett Brothers, et al. Hersheypark Stadium, Hershey, Pa., Oct. 10: At the Hershey stop of Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival, Nelson was in top form with an expanded, guest-filled band; Morrison played a spellbinding concert that was the best of the three the Sound Biteses saw this year; and the Avetts proved all the fuss is legit.

Brian Wilson, Palace Theatre, April 21: Backed by an enormous band that included former Beach Boys Al Jardine and Blondie Chapman, Wilson revisited Pet Sounds and surrounded it with big hits (“I Get Around”) and deep cuts (“California Saga”). Sublime doesn’t touch it.

Van Morrison (2), Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater, Fla, Jan. 18: After seeing Morrison for the first time the night before and thinking nothing could be better, the man came back and proved Mr. and Mrs. Sound Bites wrong, playing a different set and wailing away on saxophone, guitar and harp.

Van Morrison, Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater, Fla., Jan 17: The only thing better than seeing Morrison for the first time is seeing him subsequently.

Los Lobos (13), Music Box Supper Club, Cleveland, March 31: The band played Kiko in its entirety and stretched it to two hours, keeping the essence of their high-watermark album while futzing with the arrangements enough to keep things interesting for those of us who have the LP tattooed on our brains from repeated listenings over the past 25 years.

David Crosby & Friends, Kent Stage, Kent, Ohio, Nov. 5: Sound Bites endured a solo, three-plus-hour drive through thunderstorms and a tornado warning and arrived at the Kent Stage stressed out, soaking wet and with just minutes to spare. The bad vibes melted away about 40 seconds after Crosby and his stellar band took the stage with “In My Dreams” and the ride home was just fine after an amazing performance from rock’s premier male singer.

Tedeschi Trucks Band (8)/Wood Brothers (3)/Hot Tuna (7), Rose Music Center, Huber Heights, Ohio, July 22: All three bands were in top form on this stop on the Wheels of Soul tour, even if the Woods and Hot Tuna didn’t get enough stage time. All was forgiven when each band joined in during Tedeschi Trucks’ typically searing headlining set, which featured high-test originals and covers and made Mr. and Mrs. Sound Bites wish they had attended the previous evening in Cincinnati.

Chicago (12), Rose Music Center, Huber Heights, Ohio, May 20: Playing a set short on schlock and long on tracks from the Terry Kath era, Chicago played the best of the dozen concerts Sound Bites has seen of the band since 1982. Chicago was a rock band at first and it is a rock band now.

Robert Cray Band (8), Midland Theatre, Newark, Ohio, Sept. 29: Cray doesn’t mess around - he plays his songs in a workmanlike manner, plays them well and still sounds almost exactly like the guy who first came on to the scene nearly four decades ago. Ageless. And timeless.

Wood Brothers (4) Stuart’s Opera House, Nelsonville, Ohio, Nov. 9: Debuting tracks from their forthcoming album and playing old favorites, the Woods played the best of the four concerts Sound Bites has been lucky enough to see from the band. Though their named after brothers Oliver and Chris, multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix is the trio’s secret weapon.

Martin Barre (2), Natalie’s Coal Fired Pizza, May 3: Playing acoustic and electric sets, Barre and his spectacular, three-piece band nailed Jethro Tull songs from across the band’s catalog, mixing them in with periodic selections from Barre’s solo career.

Rosanne Cash (2), Kuss Auditorium, Springfield, Ohio, Feb. 11: Performing in an acoustic-duo setting with husband John Levanthal, Cash showed herself a better singer live than in studio and Leventhal’s arrangements made her songs sparkle in the sparse, in-concert setting.

Dweezil Zappa (6), Express Live!, Jan. 22: Fomerly known as Zappa Plays Zappa, Dweezil and his crack band somehow managed to pull off Daddy’s songs in a way that was both appropriately reverent and appropriately irreverent. Don’t think of Dweezil and company as a tribute group. Think of them as a rock ‘n’ roll symphony interpreting one of the 20th century’s most-important composers.

Los Lobos (14), Music Box Supper Club, Cleveland, April 1: With Kiko in the rear view, a looser Lobos took the stage the following evening with a retrospective set of originals and covers that found the band members switching instruments, taking requests and inviting up a local ringer on stage to shred with the wolf pack. On any given night, Los Lobos are capable to going places only a few bands can go - this was one of them.

Leo Kottke (4), Thirty One West, Newark, Ohio, Oct. 24: All by his lonesome but sounding like a quartet, Kottke showed once again why, like Tigger, he’s the only one.

Old Crow Medicine Show (2), Express Live!, May 31: Playing Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde from front to back, the Crows put a new twist on an old standby, adding a bunch and taking away nothing. There was a nice tribute to the recently departed Gregg Allman via “Midnight Rider” in the encore, which also featured (natch) the Dylan co-write “Wagon Wheel.”

Bruce Hornsby (10), Midland Theatre, Newark, Ohio, Sept. 22: If there’s anyone more versatile than Hornsby, Sound Bites is yet to meet him. This solo-piano workout took the concept of recital to a whole ‘nother level.

Southern Culture on the Skids (2), Skully’s Music Diner, May 9: “Too Much Pork for Just one Fork.” “House of Bamboo.” The only thing that outshines SCOT’s sense of humor is SCOT’s musicianship. Flying fried chicken and fans dancing onstage only add to the shenanigans when they come to town.

Bob Weir & the Campfire Band, Proctor & Gamble Hall, Cincinnati, Jan. 12: Backed by members of the National in an acoustic-centric set that was heavy on songs from Blue Mountain, Weir put on the best performance Sound Bites has seen out of him in a decade or more and proved he should do more shows that move away from his Grateful Dead legacy. When “Oh Boy” popped out of “Dark Star,” all was right with the universe.

Del McCoury Band (2), Stuart’s Opera House, Nelsonville, Ohio, March 4: There’s bluegrass. And then there’s the Del McCoury Band.

The HillBenders, Fur Peace Ranch, Pomeroy, Ohio, Aug. 5: The Who’s Tommy is even creepier when performed in a bluegrass setting. The HillBenders opened for themselves with a set of originals before diving into the tale of the deaf, dumb and blind kid. If this tour comes to your town, go.

Tedeschi Trucks Band (7), Palace Theatre, Jan. 23: This was the weakest TTB show Sound Bites has ever seen. It was astounding.

Lake Street Dive, Newport Music Hall, Aug. 10: Rachael Price is mesmerizing - impossible to take your eyes and ears off. The rest of the band is just as potent and Lake Street Dive is probably the only band in the world that could make Sound Bites shake his tail feather to George Michael’s “Faith.” Their version of Wings’ “Let Me Roll It” - like the rest of their performance - also did not suck.

A-

Ray Wiley Hubbard (2), Woodlands Tavern, June 23: Hubbard likes to call his music “an acquired taste.” It takes about three seconds to realize this guy should be at the top of everyone’s must-see list.

Elizabeth Cook (2), Rumba Cafe, Oct. 23: At turns funny and heartbreaking, Cook possesses a gorgeous voice and an irresistible, smart-ass stage presence. She’s like Todd Snider in drag and her solo-acoustic show is anything but a drag.

Todd Snider (9), Stuart’s Opera House, Nelsonville, Ohio, Feb. 4: At turns funny and heartbreaking, Snider possesses a laconic voice and an irresistible, smart-ass stage presence. He’s like Elizabeth Cook in jeans and his solo-acoustic show is a terrific mix of music and comedy.

Jerry Douglas Band, Thirty One West, Newark, Ohio, Aug. 15: Eschewing bluegrass for jazz, the Dobro player extraordinaire brought a huge band to Newark and nullified any disappointment by delivering a barnburner of a concert that made you wonder why he didn’t do this sooner.

Los Lobos (15), Stuart’s Opera House, Nelsonville, Ohio, Aug. 20: With bassist Conrad Lazano and guitarist Cesar Rosas MIA, the Wolves nevertheless delivered with a set heavy on rarities and covers. The pit was packed with dancers for most of the second set, proving a short-handed Los Lobos is still among the country’s best live acts.

Yonder Mountain String Band (2), A&R Music Bar, July 6: Adding more heat to an already sweaty and packed bar, YMSB proved there is life after Jeff Austin.

Holly Bowling (2), Woodlands Tavern, Feb. 10: The classical pianist who specializes in Phish and Grateful Dead covers delivered two sets of Phish and Grateful Dead covers arranged for classical piano and knocked off plenty of socks in the process.

Steel Wheels (2), King Center for the Arts, Dec. 9: When a bluegrass band features a drum solo early in the concert, you know you’re in for something different. The Steel Wheels are something different. And they’re something else as well.

12/20/17

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cadpadawan · 5 years ago

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31-Day Music Challenge

The social media is now flooded with all kinds of funny challenges, as people are stuck at home with nothing much to do. I guess online gaming, or getting shitfaced, becomes increasingly boring, when all kinds of tiresome responsibilites, like work, do not present any restrictions and limitations anymore. In a way, Facebook has started to resonate the air of those naive first few years, when your newsfeed was basically just one continuous stream of challenge that and challenge this.

Well, why the hell not?

What else is there to do, in order to pass the time with your mental health intact?

So, here I am...just another bored individual to join this endless crusade to make life worth living again, to make my personal life great again. Thus, I jumped on the wagon, and took on this fancy 31-day music challenge, that has been circulating in Facebook (for years, I think).

Although, I didn't find it challenging enough to just type the daily keyword in the Spotify search box and post the result in my Facebook wall. Because: more is more.

(Go ask Yngwie Malmsteen, if you don't believe me...)

The challenge for day #1 was to pick a song with a colour in the title.

I could immediately come up with a bunch of songs, only to realize that the vast majority of the song titles were themed around two basic colours: black and blue. I guess songwriters are a lazy bunch, when it comes to colours. It's pretty obvious, why lyricist everywhere find these two colours exceptionally appealing and resort to the abundant use of them, neglecting all the wonderful possibilites posed by the other colours of the spectrum. Of course black and blue, in terms of emotion and imagination, are much stronger than, say, yellow and orange. So, instead of just settling with the first few titles that came to mind, I wondered if I could come up with one song for each colour I can think of. I mean: a song that bears some personal meaning to me. In practice, this challenge basically meant that I would have to think hard while rummaging through the main three Spotify playlists that I have compiled with something like +16k or +17k songtitles, with the addition of my personal collection of some +2600 cd's – at least the rarities section for songs that are not available in Spotify.

Let's see if I have the stamina to go through my cd-racks, though. I had the forethought to organize my cd's in alphabetical order, by the name of the artist, years ago. For some weird reason, my beloved spouse has not yet agreed to the idea of re-furnishing our apartment with the central theme being those precious compact discs. That's why the cd-racks are placed in somewhat random and impractical fashion: most of them are located in the living room, with a few sections located in our bedroom. I guess, it's a good thing I had disposed of my vintage Rhodes-electric piano by the time when we started dating 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure she would have opposed strongly to the idea of having the instrument as a kitchen table, with the giant lid down. My Rhodes-piano was the so-called suitcase model, with a keyboard of 73 keys. When I moved out from my parents' house in the mid-90's, I decorated my one-room-apartment in the ethos of Japanese minimalism, due to the fact that I spent most of my income on records and alcohol. That Rhodes-piano served as a kitchen table, when I wasn't actually playing with it. Because: why the hell not?

Ok, then. The first colour...it shall be black.

Oh, boy! What a multitude of choices it presents! Should I pick an iconic 90's grunge anthem, like Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun? After all, I saw the band on stage in Helsinki cirka 1995. (I say ”cirka” because I'm not 100% sure about the year, and I'm too lazy to look it up in Google) The fond memories of those grungey early years in the 90's instantly remind me of a couple of equally important bands: Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. Although, I've never seen either of them live. Pearl Jam had a song titled Black on their breakthrough debut album Ten. Alice in Chains had a killer track titled Black Gives Way to Blue. That epochal Pearl Jam album played non-stop in my car stereos at the time of its' release. I had it copied on a C-cassette. Remember that vintage format, anyone? (Yes, I'm THAT old...) With this particular AIC song I fell in love much later, as it was the title track on the band's comeback album, released in 2009 with the new singer William DuWall. First, I kinda hesitated to give this new AIC line-up any chances, but it turned out to be pretty damn good. Obviously, nothing can top the impact, that the Laney Staley-fronted AIC made with their Dirt-album in 1992. At the time of its' release, that album was a full-blown mindfuck! In retrospect, the year 1992 seems to have been pretty kick-ass, in terms of album releases:

Alice in Chains: Dirt

Rage Against The Machine: Rage Against The Machine

R.E.M.: Automatic for the People

Pantera: Vulgar Display of Power

Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes

Faith No More: Angel Dust

Dream Theater: Images and Words

Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85-92

Prince & The New Power Generation: (Love Symbol Album)

Stereo MC's: Connected

Tom Waits: Bone Machine

Sade: Love Deluxe

The Prodigy: Experience

Megadeth: Countdown to Extinction

Eric B. & Rakim: Don't Sweat the Technique

The Orb: U.F.Orb

k.d.Lang: Ingenue

Suzanne Vega: 99.9 Fº

Stone Temple Pilots: Core

Curve: Doppelganger

Nick Cave: Henry's Dream

Neneh Cherry: Homebrew

Maybe I should choose something less obvious? At least, it would make this challenge less arduous for me, because it's evident that making a choice between two particularly dear songs from the past is nothing short of impossible. When in doubt, go for the dark horse! So, here goes: my choice for the song with the colour black in the title is:

Bonobo: Black Sands

Being something of a jazz aficionado, despite not really possessing any of the musical prowess to actually play jazz myself, it was love at first soundbite, when I chanced to hear the title track from Bonobo's 2010 album Black Sands on Bassoradio's morning special back in the day. Bonobo is the musical alias of British DJ-producer-musician Simon Green. His career spawns from the 90's trip hop aesthetics, with heavy influences of jazz and world music. Spicing up electronic beats with raw jazz samples, or even live musicians, was the thing to do, somewhere along the mid-90's. I guess it all started with a few insightful hip-hop artists layering their ghetto stompers with the occassional hardbop jazz sample back in the late 80's. For a short period, acid jazz was the coolest shit ever in the early 90's. In a somewhat natural chain of events, jazz eventually made its way to the brand new genres that evolved around the middle of the decade, trip hop and jungle, too.

That's how I got sucked into the all-consuming whirlpool of this abominable voodoo music – jazz. It's a wonder no-one has come up with a gateway theory yet, regarding the highly addictive nature of jazz music. It usually starts with small doses: an occassional jazz sample is slipped in the hip-hop track, or the breakdown section of a rock song is ornamented with a brief, improvised saxophone lead. Then you find yourself craving for more, and start delving into the depths of acid jazz, nu jazz, or whatever new genre that has incorporated jazz as an inherent element in its' aesthetic toolkit. After this honeymoon period, that might spawn over years and years, you eventually catch yourself red-handed, holding a genuine jazz album in your hands at the local record store, probably the usual entry-level drug-of-choice jazz classic: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. It has been awarded the title of the greatest jazz album of all time – and for a reason, too. Multiple times. Then you're hooked. Next thing you know, you'll be blasting John Coltrane at a family reunion, with your beloved relatives giving you the dead-eyed stare, doubting the state of your mental well-being. Long story short: you simply cannot go wrong with a mellow waltz rhythm that's punctuated with the organic groove of a flesh-and-blood jazz drummer, and topped with hauntingly beautiful brass harmony.

Next up: the colour blue...

Again, I could go for something utterly obvious, like the song titled Blue by A Perfect Circle. Those lucky few, who know me in person, should be well aware of the fact, that I'm quite a diehard fanboy of the band. I was lucky enough to see the band's live performance a few years back, when they paid Finland a visit. Nevertheless, I think I can come up with something more unexpected.

Just let me think for a sec...

Remember the band Europe? Of course you do! (Unless you were born yesterday, like some, eww, millennial!) I think it would've required some exceptional measures in the noble art of cutting contact with the external world to not have been exposed to the band's 1986 megahit Final Countdown, during the past 34 years. (Fuck! Do I feel old yet?!?) BUT...before you dismiss the band as yet another hair-metal has-been, check out this song:

Europe: Not Supposed To Sing The Blues

It's pretty damn hard to believe it's a song by the same band that's responsible for that Final Countdown atrocity. To be honest, that particular throwback 80's hard rock ear-worm wouldn't probably get under my skin in such a thoroughly repulsive fashion, had I not performed the song countless times myself. It was quite an essential part of the live repertoire of the party band, that I toured with cirka 2004-2008. The modus operandi of this covers-only band was to play the most annoying 80's megahits, with the lyrics translated in Finnish with a liberal amount of tongue-in-cheek references to gay erotica. (On a side note, the band was actually quite popular in certain small regions, despite this dubious approach and the substantially high level of bad taste incorporated in the lyrics and live performances. We even ended up playing in a genuine gay wedding once. The humour of the band was, after all, benevolent albeit a bit harsh, at least in the context of these politically correct times...)

The song Not Supposed to Sing the Blues was released in 2012. It's pretty evident, that during this 26-year-period, following the release of Final Countdown, Europe managed to grow some serious balls, hidden somewhere below my musical radar. The oriental sounding motif, played with some cool mellotron string patch in the refrain before the chorus, has a nice Led Zeppelin-esque feel to it. You can't really go wrong with a slowed-down hard rock blues that is sugar-coated with a grain of Kashmir-strings, now can you?

Next up: white...

What first comes to mind? Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum, and Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, obviously. You see, I had both of these tracks in vinyl format, way back in the early 90's, when I was going through my ”moustache prog from the 70's”-phase. (Although, this particular Procol Harum song was actually released in 1968, and the Moody Blues song in 1967 – but, in order to be consistent and thorough, I had to dig deeper, to the roots of the prog...to the very dinosaur fossils)

I could throw in White Room by Cream, too. I used to listen to these particular tracks A LOT! In the age of vinyl, conducting a music marathon themed around, say, 60's and 70's ”moustache music”, was actually quite a laborous ritual. Every 25 minutes, or so, I had to flip the side of the record. Shuffling songs totally at random was simply a no-go-zone. Nowadays, it's so easy to compile a lengthy set of personal favorites in Spotify, WinAmp, iTunes, or whatever the fuck application you'd prefer, and just hit the randomize-button...fucking millennials, they have it SO easy. They have no idea of the struggle.

That's why we had those vintage C-cassettes: to copy that very special selection of songs, compiled with tender love and care, onto a format, that didn't require you to be on a constant lookout for when the album side was closing to an end. Besides, before the onslaught of cd-players, those vintage C-cassettes were the only way to impress people with either your refined taste in music, or with the lack of it, while you were occupied with the gentle art of pussy racing, driving around downtown in your awkwardly tuned-up mirthmobile, every goddamn Friday night.

I could pick White Wedding by Billy Idol, too...

It was one of those 80's hits that I used to play with the ”covers only”-party band.

Nah...

I think I will have to choose between Aisles of White by the Aussie soft-prog band the Butterfly Effect, and The Heart of a Cold White Land by the Finnish doomsters Swallow the Sun.

My beloved wife introduced me to Aussie prog, some 10 years ago. The gateway drug, I think, was Karnivool with their music video for All I Know. One day, when I was coming home from work, I caught my wife watching this particular video in YouTube. A little bit later, she unearthed a shitload of Aussie bands in Spotify. I guess she must've been hitting that ”similar artists”-link quite relentlessly. The Butterfly Effect was one of those magnificent bands she discovered. I remember hearing the song In A Memory for the first time. It struck a chord with me, in such a profound way, that I felt compelled to order the album Imago ASAP from some Australian music webstore. At the time, the back catalogue of the Butterfly Effect wasn't available in Finland. I don't know, if it's available even now, because the band is no longer active, I think. Aisles of White is the track #2 on that album, released in 2006. The band released one more kick-ass album in 2008, titled Final Conversation of Kings, and then I don't know what the hell happened.

Swallow the Sun is a bit doomish Finnish metal band, and I'm not really sure, when I actually found the band's music. I think I had their debut album The Morning Never Came (2003) in my cd-rack for years, but it wasn't until 2012, with the release of the magnificent Emerald Forest and the Blackbird album, that I truly fell in love with the band. It took me some five years to actually haul my ass to their gig for the first time. Every single time, when I found out that they were touring nearby, I was too busy with some utterly meaningless work-related bullshit to make it. Finally, in 2017 it happened. I had managed to get rid of my soul-sucking job, although due to a pretty hardcore reason (a brain tumour), so when I found out that Swallow the Sun was performing in Helsinki, in the legendary rock venue Tavastia, I definitely made sure that I was there – and fuck me sideways! It was indeed one of the best live performances that I have ever experienced, hands down!

In 2015, Swallow the Sun released a monolithic triple album Songs From the North, and this particular track, The Heart of a Cold White Land, is on the disc II, that is focused on the beauty side of the band's doom palette.

Swallow the Sun: The Heart of a Cold White Land

Next up: Red

Sielun Veljet was one of the most iconic Finnish rock bands in the 80's. The band released only a couple of albums with lyrics in English, of which the 1989 release Softwood Music Under Slow Pillars was the only one with the songs originally written in English. There was some other attempts to gain international fame and fortune, but in those cases, the songs were merely English translations of their most beloved hit songs, initially written in Finnish. This particular album was planned for international release – but the label executives were pretty disappointed, to say the least, when the band came up with an album full of acoustic psychedelia. It was released only in Finland and Sweden. The artwork on the album cover is actually a painting by a Peruvian artist Pablo Amaringo, depicting the shamanic ayahuasca ritual. Listening through this album in one go is somewhat similar experience, I would guess: a rewarding journey into the depths of the human psyche, albeit potentially exhausting, especially if you're not exactly in the proper mindset to begin with.

Well, ever since I got exposed to the oriental psychedelia of, say, Jimi Hendrix, Kingston Wall, and the like, I seem to have acquired a taste for this kind of weird and druggy, over-the-top freeform musical expression.

Sielun Veljet: Hey-Ho, Red Banana

Ok, then...What next?

What other colours are there, anyway? The three primary colours are: red, yellow and blue. All the other colours can be derived from these three fuckers. To be precise, I think black does not actually qualify as a colour... So, I've got most of these covered already. Of course, in order to pick some hairs, printers actually use magenta, yellow and cyan as their primary colours – and black, obviously. I can't recall a single song with ”magenta” or ”cyan” in the title, though. I could come up with a band or two, with these colours in the band name, such as Magenta Skycode, or Cyan Velvet Project, but song titles?

Nada.

Maybe, if I combed through my post-rock and soundtrack archives, I could come up with some epic 15-minute instrumental with either cyan or magenta mentioned in the lengthy piece of contemporary literature, that is supposed to be the title of the song...but I guess those tracks would not exactly mean worlds to me, as I clearly cannot remember them now. If something comes to mind, while I'm writing down this epistle, I'll address that particular colour and song, accordingly. Now, I shall get on with this challenge journal, onto the next ”normal”, everyday colour...

Which is?

The colour green.

Having played keyboards in a dubious number of proggy bands, with the tonal preferences leaning heavily toward everything vintage, I might as well pick a mellow Hammond-organ classic, such as Green Onions by Booker T. & the MG's, or a vintage synth classic from THE motion picture soundtrack album of all time: Memories of Green by Vangelis, from the timeless Blade Runner soundtrack.

But I won't...

It wasn't actually easy to come up with that many titles with the colour green mentioned. Excluding these two aforementioned classics, I could barely come up with four! As much as I like the desert rock stonerism of Kuyss, the song Green Machine is not my personal favourite in their back catalogue. So that narrows my options to three. The problem is that two of these songs seem to defy the laws of quantum physics: they both take a firm stranglehold on my soul, and throw it casually down the dark and dangerous alleys of nostalgia.

In the midst of 90's acid jazz boom, I had a peculiar habit of buying compilation cd's at random, if the heading on the cover somehow suggested that the contents of the cd had anything to do with this particular genre of music. By impulse-buying music I discovered a lot of gems, like the song Apple Green by Mother Earth. The band was an English acid jazz outfit, virtually unheard of in Finland, despite the tidal wave of acid jazz washing over also these rural perimeters. If Jamiroquai, the Brand New Heavies et al. rub you the right way, you definitely need to check this band out. I can still remember clearly, as if it happened yesterday, how I picked this acid jazz compilation from the vaults of the local record store that no longer exists.

Mr. Big was a band everybody just loved to hate at the turn of the decace, when the gigantic hair-do's of the 80's started to flatten out, and flannel shirts were showing faint signs of becoming the next level shit in the never-ending quest for cool. At the time, I was an under-aged college drop-out, devoting my attention to the finer things of guitar playing techniques, instead of studying for a decent profession. I had received my first electric guitar from my parents in 1988, and for the following 5-6 years, I spent most of my time and energy in an attempt to unravel the secrets of how to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix. I listened to quite a lot of speed and thrash metal on the side, too. Y'know, bands such as Anthrax, Metallica, Slayer and Stone, which was quite a legendary Finnish speed metal band in the late 80's. My budding personal artistic expression was anyhow more influenced by legendary old timers, like Hendrix. I simply loathed all sorts of pyrotechnical wankery (with the exception of certain tracks by Steve Vai and Joe Satriani). Mr. Big's lead guitarist Paul Gilbert was famous for that very special blend of technical stuff, that I wasn't interested in, not in the slightest. So, I never really gave the band a chance. I think my misconception of the band's music as some kind of a shit-show of technical masturbation was due to some instructional videos hosted by Gilbert. After all, his fame as a highly skilled guitarist must have derived from his contributions to several guitar magazines and instructional videos, instead of his career in Mr. Big. So, everytime I heard the intro of, say, To Be With You, on my car radio, I simply had to change the channel. In order to do so, I had to manually rotate the tuning knob. Yes, my first car stereos were THAT vintage! What a time it was to be alive! Years later, with the maturity of age like with a fine wine, I finally listened to the worn-out hits of this horrid band only to find out that – bummer! - in terms of songwriting, those goddamn Mr.Big hits were actually not that bad at all. The song Green-Tinted Sixties Mind was released on the album Lean Into It in 1991. Now, everytime I am exposed to this particular song, I am instantly reminded of what a stuck-up elitistic music snob I used to be during those emotionally tumultuous times.

So, I could resort to the luck of the draw, but luckily I've got one more candidate to go.

Lonely the Brave is one of my most recent findings. It's an English alt.rock band from Cambridge, formed in 2008. I really don't know much about the band, just this one song titled The Blue, The Green. I was exposed to it while playing the music trivia game Songpop 2 with my mobile phone during the past two years, I think. The game is about guessing songs within the timeframe of a 15 second clip. Pretty addictive at first, actually. This 15-second-soundbite was enough to gain my full attention, so I had to check out the song in full, instantly. I cannot pinpoint what exactly it is, but this particular song has that vague feeling of ”something”, that draws me to listen to it, time and time again.

Lonely The Brave: The Blue, The Green

Next up: yellow.

I was first introduced to Frank Zappa's unique music in the late 80's, by my classmate Jussi, who kindly exposed me to the timeless classic Bobby Brown Goes Down. At the delicate age of 15, it was a pretty anticipated reaction that the explicit song lyrics would strike a chord. A few years later, as I was browsing through the vinyl section at the local second hand record store, I came across a pure treasure: the gatefold vinyl edition of Roxy & Elsewhere by Frank Zappa & The Mothers. In mint condition, too! Dropping the needle on the first groove on the black vinyl back home was like taking the first hit of some mind-altering illegal substance. My perception of reality changed in an instant – and there was no going back. Such an exciting mixture of fusion jazz, rock and harsh satire was sure to make me an addict. So, in no time at all I built up enough tolerance and moved onto semi-lethal dosages, and purchased the albums Hot Rats, Grand Wazoo and Apostophe('). The last one was released in the year, when I was born (1974), and it included the hilarious 4-part rock suite about the unfortunate adventures of an eskimo named Nanook. One part of the suite is titled: Don't Eat the Yellow Snow. Sound advice at the time of a global pandemic, that originated from some peculiar pathogen spillover event in China, don't cha think?

Frank Zappa: Don't Eat The Yellow Snow

Not many colours left, I think...

Next up: purple.

I was exposed to the music of Jimi Hendrix via a documentary on TV, when I was a rosy-cheeked 7th grader in junior high. It happened around the same time, when I got my first electic guitar. So, I guess it must have been written in the stars, or something. The universe simply wanted me to focus on the noble art of guitarism, instead of getting a college degree on psychopathological marketing or accounting (fuck no!). My first guitar was a cheap stratocaster-copy with a Williams-logo on it. In a way, it resembled the vintage Mellotron keyboard: it simply would refuse to keep in tune. One of the first songs that I learned, despite the frustrating limitations imposed by the crap tuners on the guitar, was Purple Haze by Hendrix. I had to learn it by ear. You see, back in the gloomy days of the late 80's, there just wasn't that many guitar tabs around. Not in Finland, anyway. Later I did find an instructional guitar playing manual at the local library, with a few pages dedicated to the art of Jimi Hendrix. Mainly, the only viable option to learn any contemporary rock song, or even any classic from the days long gone, was either to learn it by ear, or to resort to the occassional tabs provided by the international guitar magazines – if you were fortunate enough to spot these much-sought publications at your local bookstore. (These fuckin' millennials have it SO easy!) On the other hand, learning to play primarily by ear must have developed my improvisational skills a great deal, as an added bonus. Improvisation is not so much about throwing up some pre-programmed fancy gimmicks at any given chance, but actually LISTENING to what your fellow musicians are playing and responding accordingly.

Next up: grey.

I think it was my dear wife, once again, who first introduced me to the band Thrice, by playing the song Digital Sea from the band's double album Alchemy Index, a long, long time ago. The band's vocalist/guitarist Dustin Kensrue is one of those few singers, who are blessed with a distinctive voice that speaks, or to be more precise, sings volumes. He might not have the same gravitas like Mark Lanegan or Tom Waits, but nevertheless, he has the voice of a protagonist who's been to hell and back. Mark Lanegan sounds like he's got a season ticket, and Tom Waits sounds like he's the devil running the show – or, to put it in Waits' own words:

”Don't you know, there ain't no devil,

that's just God when he's drunk...”

 Tom Waits: Heartattack and Vine

Anyways, the lyrics in a Thrice song could be compiled of a list of phone numbers, or the decimals of Pi (like Kate Bush actually did), and it would still sound like a profound wisdom concerning the transformative journey of being fully human.

Thrice: The Grey

Last but not least, the colour: turquoise.

For years, I actually thought that Boards of Canada was indeed a Canadian outfit. Y'know, indie bands in particular come up with these band names that have some funny and ironic twist. Somewhere along the way, it finally dawned on me that this magnificent electronic duo is actually from Scotland. Well, of course it is! If my memory isn't playing any tricks on me now, I'm pretty sure that Soulsavers and Hidden Orchestra are Scottish, too. And they all have something in common. Each of these electronic outfits has an extraordinary and unique, boss-level prominance in the way they manage to capture emotion in their instrumentals.

Boards of Canada released a 5-minute electronic epic titled Turquoise Hexagon Sun on the album Music Has the Right to Children in 1998. The name of the song is actually a reference to the duo's recording studio Hexagon Sun. It makes it even more marvellous, that an instrumental track with a title deriving from something so mundane can touch your heartstrings so deeply. It's not that often, when an electronic instrumental with a hip-hop beat, glassy vintage synth motifs and deliberately lo-fi production paired with grainy samples, manage to do that. These Scottish bastards must've been onto something...

Well, that's pretty much all there was to the first day in this music challenge! I was supposed to pick one song, and I ended up writing a fucking novel about it...Tomorrow the plot shall thicken even more, when I introduce you to the theme of the day #2.

In the meanwhile, you can do yourself a favour and listen to:

Boards of Canada: Turquoise Hexagon Sun

Stay tuned! Cheers!

0 notes

weshallneverrevolt · 7 years ago

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Porter Robinson - Worlds (2014)

I like EDM. There, I said it.

I think it’s a fun genre, music made for feeling alive and happy and young. Yes, it is a genre of clichés, rehashed ideas, and fans that tread the line between endearing and grating. But the sheer output of its artists results in a sort of centrifuge of ideas that, when it finally spits a new one out, is brilliance.

It’s also a very millennial genre. EDM is arguably the first genre of music we can claim as our own. Sure, electronic music has been around for years, but the especially melodic, loud, fist-pumping festival anthems of “EDM” are something new. They’re ours.

So much as records like Illmatic and The White Album pushed their genres and subgenres forward, there have been some definite trailblazers in EDM. My state’s very own Porter Robinson is one of those guys, and his album Worlds might do the same for our genre. Only time will tell if it holds up with those records above, but it’s still pretty damn good.

To explain why I think Worlds deserves more attention, I’m going to take a little detour into a very different genre of music.

I love Billy Joel. His album The Nylon Curtain (released 1982) has stirring songs about America reconciling itself with a world after Vietnam, a world where globalism was fast eclipsing the American dream. “Goodnight Saigon” tracks soldiers from training through the jungles of Asia; “Allentown” looks back home at blue collar workers.

But it stands out because the wounds were still fresh. Some had aged a bit – America left Vietnam in 1973 – and some were still ongoing, like the decline of Detroit and steel plant closures of the early 80s. It blended emotional immediacy with wisdom, expressing the fear of times still coming and gratitude for times long gone. Responsible nostalgia, if you will.

The Nylon Curtain’s songs are very authentic in that way, which is why they still resonate. Parts of “Allentown” sound like something Bernie Sanders would say:

“Every child has a pretty good shot To get at least as far as their old man got But something happened on the way to that place They threw an American flag in our place.”

As I mentioned in my entry about Kesha’s Rainbow, authenticity is extremely important for great music. Kanye put it best: when you try hard, that’s when you die hard. It’s why we cringe now at emo bands: the whole struggle feels a bit like a ruse.

I promised this would somehow connect to an EDM album from 2014. Worlds works because of who made it and the time he grew up in. Porter’s lyrics are escapist rather than introspective, and I doubt his synths will age as well as Billy Joel’s piano. But his album’s sound is one that evokes a very specific aesthetic, one that only someone from his time could represent accurately.

Above: Visuals from the “Worlds” tour by the Invisible Light Network.

Wordsworth said that poetry is a “spontaneous overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquility.” Worlds is a spontaneous overflow of 90s-00s geek nostalgia, reflected in tranquility. With bangers.

If you’re reading this, you likely had a similar childhood to Porter Robinson. He grew up in the 1990s, surrounded by video games, anime, and a world whose technology outpaced its maturity. It was an exciting and overwhelming time to be a kid.

Worlds is an album that owes a great debt to those influences, and that sensation of wonder.

The music is the most obvious part, marrying 16-bit video game synths with the brighter, clearer ones of modern dance music. Much of the album sounds like the soundtrack of a video game that never got made. ”Flicker” is a funky groove that would fit in a Final Fantasy item shop, complete with a cute Japanese counter girl. The thick textures of “Hear the Bells” would fit perfectly in a full-motion video ending, where a spiky haired hero watches an airship soar into the distance.

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Despite that, this is not a chiptune album, very much adopting the modern principles of EDM: chopped and screwed samples, sing-a-long choruses, and lyrics that evoke togetherness and the power of the moment. Though the driving melody of “Years of War” soars above a pixelated skyline, its lyrics evoke burning it down. That mix of rage and youthful energy is echoed in the festival-friendly chorus of “Lionhearted.” Even “Sad Machine” would work at a festival despite its sci-fi tropes, with its hymn-like chorus of “she depends on you.”

Porter’s nostalgic sounds do distance him from his contemporaries, as do his lyrics. Take “Polygon Dust” for instance. Many an EDM banger has mentioned the importance of “tonight,” but this song also seems to mourn something, maybe tonights that weren’t so carefully guarded. “Sad Machine” is also a very lonely song, where the only characters are a protagonist and a mysterious robot girl they’ve just awakened.

That balance places the nostalgia of this album in the same category as The Nylon Curtain. It’s not idealized: it’s wistful. It wishes nostalgia was more powerful than it actually was. There’s a longing in these scenes, from the adolescent male fantasy of “Sad Machine” to the long-distance friendship in “Fresh Static Snow.”

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A lot of period pieces feel fake because their creators never experienced their subjects. Worlds feels so authentic because, like Billy Joel, Porter lived through his influences. He escaped into those worlds just like we did.

But despite all that retro navel-gazing, Worlds is an album made today. And the world today sucks.

It’s easy to see why the predictable heroism of 90s RPGs, the bright futures of science fiction, the colors and whimsical stories of anime, the decisive victories of superheroes all comfort us as adults. They’re a tattered blanket, fragments of the world outside our windows before adulthood peeled back the curtains. They’re what we spend our nights at home doing when we’re tired of Facebook and the news and each other.

Nostalgia is the purest form of escapism because it involves a world we once knew. It’s one that requires no influence other than living, and one that lets us pretend more than any costume. Worlds, the EDM musicians it learned from and the culture that inspired it are all about pretending, about being somewhere else.

More than escapism in and of itself, Worlds is an ode to escapism. It’s a memorial for all the places that both never existed and have always existed inside of us. Perhaps that’s why Porter moved away from his first EP’s heavy dubstep influences: he missed those places.

Those places, more than any of Porter’s Worlds, are what he pines for in this lyric from “Fellow Feeling:”

“I cried, for I did not think it could be true; That you and I might have always known one another And that we could not only evoke, but conjure a place of our own That everywhere - that has ever existed Was all in service of our dream.”

Further Listening

“Sad Machine” Cover by Didrick and Ember Island – a beautiful rock version of Worlds’ most popular song with non-vocaloid vocals and real instruments.

“Shelter” – a collaboration with Madeon, another great EDM producer who shares Porter’s influences. The video is an anime short made with Japanese studio A-1 Pictures.

“Goodnight Saigon” – a hella dope EDM banger! Just kidding, it’s a piano rock ballad from The Nylon Curtain.

“Language” - a song from Porter Robinson’s pre-Worlds career that showcases the origins of some of the sounds on his debut album.

#porter robinson #shelter #sad machine #worlds #music #edm #electronic #2014 #criticism #nostalgia #90s #anime #weebs get out reeeeee #madeon #fellow feeling #dance music #billy joel

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sheilacwall · 5 years ago

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hip hop isn’t dead.: Ice Cube

Somehow War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) is only the sixth solo album from rapper-slash-actor-slash-professional basketball league founder O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson. It feels like we’ve been discussing this motherfucker forever, or at least since 2007, right? Obviously the man has been doing a lot since his entrance into our chosen genre via N.W.A.: aside from his whole actor/writer/director side gig, he’s released compilations, been a part of multiple soundtrack releases, and even found time to create an entirely separate group, Westside Connection (alongside his protégée Mack 10 and his friend WC). But the man hasn’t ever truly stepped away from his solo career, which is part of the reason we’re talking about today’s subject.

War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Album) is the second half of a project that Cube conceived way back in the previous century (read: 1998). War & Peace, curiously named after the soft drink and not the Tolstoy doorstop, served as our host’s excuse to deliver the gangsta rap and social commentary he was best known for post-Jerry Heller, along with some attempts to construct a much broader audience through radio airplay, club bangers, cautionary tales, and skinny-dipping in the waters of different musical genres. Although for some reason I’m remembering this being announced as a double-disc effort, Ice Cube released the first volume, subtitled The War Disc, close to the Thanksgiving holiday in 1998, with The Peace Disc scheduled to follow soon after, as they were recorded and compiled at the same time.

The War Disc was met with mixed reviews, as Cube rested on his laurels a bit too much: there’s one song that is a direct sequel to one of his classic tracks, “Once Upon a Time In The Projects 2”; he leaned heavily on a younger artist signed to his label, Mr. Short Khop (who, interestingly enough, doesn’t appear on The Peace Disc at all); there’s a collaboration with motherfucking Korn called “Fuck Dying”. (Cube also appeared on Korn’s 1998 album Follow the Leader: both songs helped cue up the inaugural Family Values tour, which they were both headliners on.) But aside from a couple of tracks that played into his storytelling skills, The War Disc quietly vanished from rotation, leaving our host to retool the planned follow-up in an effort to course-correct.

War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc), the final album released under Cube’s deal with Priority Records, is definitely not what was already completed when The War Disc was released. For one, the very first track, “Hello”, is a collaboration with former N.W.A. bandmates MC Ren and Dr. Dre, a move which wouldn’t have happened in 1998, but made more sense in 2000 after N.W.A. officially reunited for a song off of the soundtrack for Cube’s Next Friday (and also after Dre released 2001, a blockbuster project that put him back on the map). In addition, the first single, “You Can Do It”, came from that same soundtrack and was Cube’s most popular radio hit since 1997’s “We Be Clubbin’”. So I get why he’d want to retool the project to capitalize on those strengths.

The Peace Disc vanished seemingly quicker than its predecessor, possibly due to the chart dominance of his friend Dr. Dre and Dre’s artist Eminem at the time. It did manage to sell over five hundred thousand units in the United States, but find me somebody who proudly has this one displayed in their collection. I dare you. I double dog dare you, motherfucker. Nobody gives a fuck about War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc), and I include Ice Cube in that description. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the album is entirely bad, so let’s peek under the hood and review this sucker.

1. HELLO (FEAT. DR. DRE & MC REN)

O’Shea hits the ground running, commissioning an N.W.A. reunion that is much more successful than their official comeback on the Next Friday soundtrack (“Chin Check”, for those of you keeping score). A simplistic Dr. Dre. prescription, which bangs, lays the groundwork for Dre, MC Ren, and our host Ice Cube to… complain about the current (as of 2000, anyway) state of hip hop like the elder statesmen they are: they have a specific grievance regarding not being credited for “start[ing] this gangsta shit” (which absolutely isn’t true, but regardless of who you think kicked off the sub-genre, the various members of N.W.A. are cited as influences all. The. Goddamn. Time. Maybe not Yella). As far as old dudes talking shit as though evolution in language and culture hadn’t ever occurred, Ren comes across as alright (his comment about lesbians not exactly homophobic but still iffy nevertheless), while Andre sticks with his “I’m rich, I don’t have to do shit” mentality. Thankfully, O’Shea tears through his verse with a ferocity he hasn’t displayed since Westside Connection’s Bow Down, and I say that even though the phase of his career where he insisted on nicknaming himself the “Don Dada” is still represented on here. So yeah, this was a success overall. Thank God, right? I mean, can you imagine two subpar late-period N.W.A. reunion tracks in a row?

2. PIMP HOMEO (SKIT)

I know Cube’s trying to be funny here, but this was bad. At least it wasn’t homophobic, though, as the title may have implied. Absolutely misogynistic, though.

3. YOU AIN’T GOTTA LIE (TA KICK IT) (FEAT. CHRIS ROCK)

Fairly confusing, as “You Ain’t Gotta Lie (Ta Kick It”) isn’t really the love rap sort-of promised by the preceding skit. O’Shea spits his boasts-n-bullshit, which, interestingly enough, include proclamations of being a great father, while guest Chris Rock threatens to undermine the entire operation with his contributions to the hook. The concept isn’t set up well enough for this three-man production (this was credited to former Bad Boy Hitman Chucky Thompson along with Rich Nice and Loren Hill) to make any fucking sense, as Cube isn’t really hitting on anyone as much as he’s offering up facts about himself as though he recorded his bars while standing behind a podium, while Rock tries to come up with the most ridiculous lies during the hook. Dude is kind of amusing toward the end, but overall this shit was a misfire. It was good while it lasted, though.

4. THE GUTTER SHIT (FEAT. JAYO FELONY, GANGSTA, & SQUEAK RU)

LOL there’s a rapper named Gangsta? Have we officially used up all of the words? Anywhoozle, our host envisioned “The Gutter Shit” as a collaboration with like-minded West Coast artists, but could only convince Jayo Felony and two other no-names to commit, and my Lord does this Cube- and T-Bone-produced aural interpretation of a sad face emoji suuuuuuuuuck. The two artists on here that you’ve never heard of before or since seem excited enough for the opportunity but flounder when called upon, while Jayo is terrible as always. But the true loser here is our host, who somehow found the time to contribute two awful verses that wouldn’t even be stocked in the same type of store as the gutter shit he was once capable of. And what the fuck is with that reference to the previous track?

5. SUPREME HUSTLE

There is no planet within our galaxy where Ice Cube could have honestly believed that “Supreme Hustle” was a song good enough to make War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc). My guess is that the production trio from “You Ain’t Gotta Lie (Ta Kick It)” had called in a collective Make-A-Wish, as this elementary excursion into simplistic rap boasting is embarrassing as shit to listen to. At least our host sticks with his theme: each of the three verses places emphasis on “I”, “you”, and “we”, respectively. But there is no hustle to be found on here, and O’Shea’s hand-waving about what he considers to be the cause of domestic violence was puzzling as hell. I cannot stress enough how fucking godawful this shit was.

6. MENTAL WARFARE (SKIT)

…

7. 24 MO’ HOURS

When critics mention older rappers struggling to sound relevant with their newer songs, “24 Mo’ Hours” is what they’re referring to. If War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) were released today, the Battlecat instrumental, which both sucks and doesn’t fit our host’s general aesthetic, which is a strange critique given Battlecat’s history of producing Cali-based bangers, would almost certainly be swapped out for something from the likes of Metro Boomin’ or Zaytoven, and it would still sound terrible. Ugh.

8. UNTIL WE RICH (FEAT. KRAYZIE BONE)

I heard “Until We Rich” on the radio once probably in 2000 or so, and then have apparently never thought of it again until right now, which I believe is an accurate representation of how forgettable this Chucky & the Thompsons production was. Guest star Krayzie Bone, still riding a Bone Thugs-N-Harmony career wave at the time, circles and underlines Slick Rick’s “Hey Young World” with his performance, which is dull, while O’Shea tries his darnedest to give listeners an optimistic, motivational speech, even going so far as to censor his own cursing, so as to reach as wide an audience as possible. Sure, “Until We Rich” fits the ‘peace’ requirement of this project, but at what cost?

9. YOU CAN DO IT (FEAT. MACK 10 & MS. TOI)

You two already know this song, which first appeared on the soundtrack for Next Friday in 1999 but was popular enough to justify Priority Records placing it on as many projects as possible, I suppose. For the handful of readers who somehow missed this footnote in popular culture, “You Can Do It”, a spiritual follow-up to “We Be Clubbin’”, the hit single from our host’s directorial debut The Players Club, finds Cube, Ms. Toi, and his boy Mack 10 putting their asses into a One Eye-produced club effort that is slight on lyrics, but is rather catchy otherwise. It sounds so fucking absurd today that it somehow shifts from “corny” to “entertainingly corny” during Cube’s opening verse and never once budges again. At least our host sounded engaged on here, unlike most everything else on War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) thus far, and having Mack 1-0 perform over a fast-paced beat forces him to match that energy or die trying. Inessential, but it brings the pretty girls at the club out onto the floor, in case that helps you in any way.

10. MACKIN’ & DRIVING (SKIT)

Playing War & Peace Vol. 1 (The War Disc)’s first single, “Pushin’ Weight”, in the background of this interlude only reminded me of rapper Mr. Short Khop, whose career was abruptly halted after Cube stopped giving a shit about his young charge. I mean, why else would he not have been a good enough performer to make it to the second volume? Good call by the way, O’Shea.

11. GOTTA BE INSANITY

Curious, but not entirely out of left field when you remember “You Can Do It” was a hit, so why wouldn’t O’Shea go back to that well? The funky-ish guitar loop on this Mario Winans (!) production reminded me of Jermaine Dupri’s “Going Home With Me”, except I like that song and found this one to be middling at best, as Cube panders to the lowest common denominator while trying to get back inside the club. I can’t be sure who our host thought his audience was when he recorded “Gotta Be Insanity”, but he’s done enough good work and has earned the ability to record and release whatever he wants. Still doesn’t mean we’re all required to listen to any of it, however.

12. ROLL ALL DAY

As we all know and agree with every third Wednesday at our meetings, the best storytelling raps are the ones where you don’t realize the artist is even telling a story until the third verse. That’s what happens on “Roll All Day”, anyway. Over a One Eye beat that doesn’t entirely gel but has its moments, Ice Cube boasts about having purchased a full tank of gas (a fact repeated throughout, with a humorous callback toward the end) and offering to cruise around with a woman he just met in exchange for sexual intercourse. You know, standard-issue rap-type shit, but it begs the question: why is she so interested in the car? Has the woman in question never been inside an automobile before? Cube could have probably rolled up on a pedal bike and worked out a similar proposition just because he’s Ice Cube, but I suppose there’s no vehicle for a story there (pun intended). Regardless, he never gets that far, as by the third verse she’s [SPOILER ALERT FOR A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD SONG] broken the car’s windows and, later, stolen it outright. His flow is strictly boasts-n-bullshit until the ending, where he reveals some of that sense of humor he tapped into while writing Friday. “Roll All Day” is meh, but the effort was appreciated, at least.

13. CAN YOU BOUNCE?

This was fucking terrible, and that’s without O’Shea making a Pokemon reference, which he absolutely does on here. So that happened. (Also, Younglord apparently produced the beat. Was War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) designed as Ice Cube’s covert demo reel to hopefully snag a label deal with Bad Boy Records? Because the gambit hasn’t paid off yet.)

14. DINNER WITH THE CEO (SKIT)

…

15. RECORD COMPANY PIMPIN’

The flip side of EPMD’s “Please Listen To My Demo”, down to the same Faze-O “Riding High” sample being used, as Ice Cube and producer Bud’da urge the youth not to get involved in the rap game without learning the business side of the industry first. Advice such as this can only come from someone who was famously jerked around by their label in the past, as Cube was during his short stint with Ruthless Records, but while the man clearly knows of what he speaks, that doesn’t mean “Record Company Pimpin’” (a topic many artists have tackled before and since O’Shea put pen to paper) is an entertaining song to actually listen to. Our host should have taken these ideas and given a TED Talk instead. That’s not a joke: imagine how many people he could help in the process. But you can skip this track outright.

16. WAITIN’ TA HATE

So it turns out that War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) is a stealth EPMD tribute album filtered through a Puff Daddy lens. That’s a lie, obviously, but “Waitin’ Ta Hate” is the second song in a row to pay homage to Erick and Parish specifically, although this time around producers One Eye and DJ Joe Rodriguez (that name gets to the point, can’t be mad at that) get lazy by choosing to just sample “So Wat Cha Sayin’” directly. For his part, O’Shea sounds downright angry on here, which informs an entertaining performance that isn’t reminiscent of his finest work, but let’s be real, it’s the best we’ll get at this point. The production doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from the EPMD standard, but maybe, this time around, it isn’t such a bad thing. (Side note to E-Double: you should give Cube a shout for a future collaboration, as the man is clearly a fan.)

17. N—A OF THE CENTURY

Accompanied by someone that could be that Pain In Da Ass dude whose entire shtick was aping flicks such as Scarface and Goodfellas to open up early Roc-A-Fella Records projects but likely isn’t, which means there were two of these guys in our chosen genre at some point, which seems wasteful somehow, our host caps off the evening lobbying for an award that doesn’t exist. Charley Chap’s production is too dull to properly reward Ice Cube as a winner of any competition, and O’Shea’s own bars aren’t worth wasting a paragraph on. At least we’re done here.

FINAL THOUGHTS: War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) approaches self-parody at points, as Ice Cube genuinely seems to not understand just what it was about his work that listeners connected with back in the early 1990s. It certainly wasn’t this shit: nobody ever wanted to hear what it would have sounded like had Cube signed with Bad Boy Records twelve years after his prime. The O’Shea Jackson found on this project is a man who is content with his station in life: the only time he ever really comes across as passionate about anything is when he’s schooling younger artists on the inner workings of the music industry, a topic that obviously resonates with him. Even his generic threats on “Hello”, a song I fucking liked his performance on, sound more like amiable suggestions than anything. When Cube gets in his storytelling bag, he seems to at least be having some fun with this shit (not that it always translates for the listener), but when he’s simply talking shit, the momentum on War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc), or whatever little momentum exists, halts immediately. Twenty years removed from his debut solo project, this album proved that Ice Cube was no longer vital to the ongoing health of the local hip hop concern. He has all of his other ventures to fall back on, and of course he’ll always be welcomed at the barbecues, but unless he’s laser-focused on targets (we’ll always have the first Westside Connection effort), he loses the plot very quickly, and one can only coast on charm and the acclaim derived from your prior work for so long. I won’t go so far as to say that War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) is a “peace” of shit, because that pun is beneath me, but it’s plenty awful.

BUY OR BURN? Neither. If you absolutely must, stream the tracks listed below, but, you know, life is short.

BEST TRACKS: “Hello”; “Waitin’ Ta Hate”

-Max

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devils-gatemedia · 6 years ago

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Rich Robinson, onstage again with Marc Ford? The guitar partnership on The Black Crowes’ ‘Southern Harmony And Musical Companion’, one of the most bona fide classic albums… period? Where do I sign? Along with fellow Crowes alumni Sven Pipien, the pair are back making sweet music together. Throw the incredible vocals from Britain’s John Hogg into that mix, with drummer Joe Magistro and keys man Matt Slocum, and the end result is The Magpie Salute. A travelling musical family, on their long-awaited debut UK tour.

Kent four-piece Maker have the task of warming the crowd up at the most un-rock n’ roll time of 7.15pm. Vocalist Alessandro Marinelli asks what kind of time is that to start a gig. Guitarist Andrew Donaldson jokes that the band have only just woken up. There are about thirty people savvy enough to get in for the early doors. Thirty or so lucky people having their ears caressed by the “Rock N Soul, Rhythm N Roll” outfit.

Early indications from the nodding heads gathered on the barrier, is that Marinelli sounds like Steve Marriott. High praise indeed. Yes, there are moments (when the sound stops misbehaving) when you might get flashes of the much-missed Small Faces and Humble Pie legend. There is a lot of soul in his voice, and there is a spark about him that says, ”pay attention”. Maker get thirty minutes to make their mark (too predictable?) and they make the most of the short time. It’s a classic ‘70’s inspired sound that the band purvey, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all when it’s played with such passion and skill. Andrew Donaldson can make that guitar sing as he lays down, not just the usual beefy riffs, but also some soulful licks with a hint of funk. With Gavin Donaldson on drums, the pair have family in attendance, and they are making their presence felt! By the time Maker (completed with bassist John Austin) end their set, the room has started to fill up. It’s still relatively quiet though, which is a great shame, as Maker are another band to add to that already bulging list of young British bands to watch out for. They have a new album out, ‘Dead Ends & Avenues’. Do check it out, it’s very smooth.

With very little fanfare, The Magpie Salute take to the stage, plug in, and gently ease their way into ‘High Water’ from the album bearing the same name. Marc Ford is over on the far side gently caressing a beautiful tone out of his stunning white Gretsch. All eyes are on him as he takes the first solo of the evening. Damn, it is good to have him back on stage again. The Magpie Salute are not a cookie cutter band, the live versions of songs are lengthier than the ones you will hear from the studio. Hence, the opening trio of ‘High Water’, ‘Omission’, and a gorgeous rendition of ‘For The Wind’, stretch out to twenty or so minutes. Both Ford and Rich Robinson add their flourishes to each song, giving them an extra dimension. Think of the album as the DVD version, whereas the live versions are the 4K UHD equivalent.

‘Take It All’ is another moment that benefits from the freshness that The Magpie Salute bring to their material live. Oodles of sweet slide guitar from Ford, who makes it look effortless. From here, it’s into cover version territory. If you have the self-titled live album they released last year, then you should know what to expect. With a massive songbook to choose from, we get Delaney & Bonnie’s ‘Comin’ Home’, and the Small Faces’ ‘Rollin’ Over’. Later on the band deliver a cosmic version of The Flying Burrito Brothers’ ‘Christine’s Tune’. Marc Ford takes lead vocals on one of his own songs, ‘Smoke Signals’, with Hogg saying that “we’re all going to sing one of Marc’s songs”. Hogg is a revelation. Having previously played with Robinson in the short-lived Hookah Brown, there is a chemistry between the two that is obvious for all to see. The warm vocals reaching through the muggy sound. Just one of the many highlights of the evening.

Mid set, Pipien, Magistro, and Slocum leave the stage, as Hogg, Ford, and Robinson break out the acoustic guitars. It’s a strange fifteen minutes or so. It’s incredible watching the trio run through ‘Sister Moon’, the aforementioned ‘Christine’s Tune’ and ‘Oh Josephine’, especially when they all gather round the same microphone. Acoustic segments won’t drown out the chatterers in the crowd. So much so that during ‘Oh Josephine’, Robinson stops singing and addresses the guilty parties…”Every time I stop, I hear an asshole yapping away… I’m sure what you are saying is really important… why don’t you finish your conversation?” Cue loud roars of approval from the crowd! Fingers are pointed at those at the bar, and it’s noticeable that when the full band kick back in, the sound is ramped up.

During a mammoth jam, where Matt Slocum flexes his muscles on the keys, the atmosphere starts to dip, and to an extent, you can sense what is coming next. It’s got to be a big Crowes track, and the intro to ‘Sometimes Salvation’ comes pouring off the stage. The energy levels rise again as most in the crowd recognise it. The Magpie Salute stay with Robinson’s iconic forerunners as they tear into ‘Gone’ and a surprising show-stopper, ‘By Your Side’. It’s show-stopping in many ways, as Robinson explains that they have to finish now to make way “For the disco, and the kids dancing. It kinda sucks as music is going away…” With artists like The Magpie Salute, there is no danger of music ever going away.

Review: Dave S

Images: Dave J

Live Review: The Magpie Salute – Glasgow Rich Robinson, onstage again with Marc Ford? The guitar partnership on The Black Crowes' ‘Southern Harmony And Musical Companion’, one of the most bona fide classic albums… period?

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sheilacwall · 5 years ago

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hip hop isn’t dead.: Ice Cube

1. HELLO (FEAT. DR. DRE & MC REN)

2. PIMP HOMEO (SKIT)

I know Cube’s trying to be funny here, but this was bad. At least it wasn’t homophobic, though, as the title may have implied. Absolutely misogynistic, though.

3. YOU AIN’T GOTTA LIE (TA KICK IT) (FEAT. CHRIS ROCK)

4. THE GUTTER SHIT (FEAT. JAYO FELONY, GANGSTA, & SQUEAK RU)

5. SUPREME HUSTLE

6. MENTAL WARFARE (SKIT)

…

7. 24 MO’ HOURS

8. UNTIL WE RICH (FEAT. KRAYZIE BONE)

9. YOU CAN DO IT (FEAT. MACK 10 & MS. TOI)

10. MACKIN’ & DRIVING (SKIT)

11. GOTTA BE INSANITY

12. ROLL ALL DAY

13. CAN YOU BOUNCE?

14. DINNER WITH THE CEO (SKIT)

…

15. RECORD COMPANY PIMPIN’

16. WAITIN’ TA HATE

17. N—A OF THE CENTURY

BUY OR BURN? Neither. If you absolutely must, stream the tracks listed below, but, you know, life is short.

BEST TRACKS: “Hello”; “Waitin’ Ta Hate”

-Max

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