8 posts tagged “music”

Not at all happy with eMusic today, as I discovered that starting next month they're going to cut my download allowance in half.  Or double the price, whichever suits you better.  I've been using eMusic off and on since 2003 and a member continuously since early 2005 and I think this is a pretty shitty reward for my loyalty.

I do understand the soundness of this repricing as a business move, as eMusic is finally deploying itself to move out of 3rd place behind iTunes and Amazon.  To this end it's finally doing business with major labels (specifically Sony) and promises that formerly out-of-reach artists like Springsteen and the Clash and Beyonce will soon be available.  Now, Ms. Knowles I give not a fig for and I already have everything I want by The Boss and the Four Horsemen, so I can't say I think I stand to benefit much by this development.  But I'm glad that my scrappy little eMusic is ready to play with the big kids, and they're going to be getting a whole lot of new customers who generally don't give a fig for the Cold War Kids or Six Degrees Records while still appreciating the low impact on their bank account.

I just wish there was some sort of grandfathering plan for long-time members, which would IMO be truly in the indie spirit eMusic's operated under until now.  But no: instead of the 65 downloads/month I've been getting for $15 - cheap! - I'm only to get 37.  (Not even 38 - fuckers wouldn't even eat half a free download!  Argh.)   Which comes out to something like $.43 apiece and compared to the big kids is still cheap, but am I mollified?  Not by this.

Neither by eMusic's version of easement, which is promising a one-time bonus pack of 25 downloads sometime in August.  Almost an insult when I remember it was a no-limit service back when I first signed up.

OTOH, they are instituting album pricing.  Finally.  No album will be charged for more than 12 downloads, no matter how many tracks are involved.  This helps - just a little.

All this aside, I'm sticking with eMusic for the immediate future.  Not just for the price, but because the selection is enormous and as a service it's the best way I've found yet to discover stuff I'd never hear of otherwise.  And even with the changes I still think they've got a better business model than their competitors.

For now, anyway.  Because loyalty is such a fickle thing when it goes unrewarded for too long.

P.S. I know that as news this price increase is almost a month old but I just found out about it two days ago, and rather circuitously at that.  eMusic certainly didn't go out of its way to inform me.  Which is another reason I'm not at all happy with it.

Because the essential nature of the internet is that one things leads to another ad infinitum, signing up for Facebook was only the very barest beginning.  Of course it was. It led me to was the aforementioned Suzy the guitarist, who in turn pointed me to a site dedicated to bygone Bard bands, and next thing I knew I was digging up the piece I wrote on the subject 27 long years ago and measuring it for redrafting because lord knows it would be a huge shame if the Lost Cause and the Samoanz got no digi-ink.

The Dead Rabbits: Michael, Suzy and myself

So that’s largely what I’ve been doing the last month: dicking around on Facebook and hacking apart hoary old scribings.  Facebook also puts me in touch with most of the ex-Samoanz so I can reasonably hope their rewrite will be thoroughly fact-checked.  The Lost Cause probably not so much as the sole Cause member I find doesn’t seem too interested in responding to my various invites.  This is a shame because we used to be good friends but since there’s a number of former BFFs I’ve stopped speaking to over the years I’m just letting it drop.

Me, Suzy and Abdi

On the upside I’ve now got something back I thought I’d lost forever, namely photographic proof that I did actually once play drums in a band.  I don’t know how Suzy managed over the years to hang on to these shots but god bless her.  I barely remember that gig myself and now I won’t have to.  I can’t put into words how soothing it is to have this small and rarely-mentioned part of my past in my grasp again.

Michael with special guest/stage crasher Ivan from the Lost Cause

Presented here then for your enjoyment are The Dead Rabbits in front of Stone Row, May 1982: our last show, or close to it.  The wind kept kicking up that day and blowing over my cymbal stands, which alarmed me no end because it wasn't my drum set - as usual it was Stu Wood's, the only person left on campus who'd let me use his gear because I battered so hard.  He said after letting legendary basher Marc Bell borrow it at a Voidoids gig some years before he didn't see how I could do more damage to it.

(Our band went by several names but Dead Rabbits was the last so it's the one stuck in my mind all these years.  Imagine my dismay to find a NY street gang had already claimed it 130 years before.)

Once again I seem to have forgotten I’ve got a blog here.  How con-veen-yent.  Even though it’s been a month since I let myself exhale you wouldn’t know it from my output here.  Nor that I’ve been to Big Bend and have a lot of pretty pictures to show you.  Or even that we’ve finally got single-stream recycling in Austin and the huge new household buckets are a thing of beauty.  Nope, I just… forgot.  Apologies.

(You won’t get more than the token Big Bend pics here anyway, since I’ve now got my own personal website and plan on using it instead to show off my photos.  That site is under my real name so you’ll have to write me for its URL, unless of course you already know my name in which case it’s followed by .net.)

Token Big Bend pic #1: Boquillas Canyon

While I haven’t been blogging here I’ve been busy with geeky little projects to get my shit organized.  Summer and early fall was restructuring the iTunes library and making it grow: now up to 64.5 gigs and almost 11K songs (I like long songs).  However for all the increased volume the closest I’ve come to addressing the deficiencies written about in July has been to add a lone Petty album (Damn the Torpedoes, of course).  

Also, in a surprise move, a double-CD Best of Foghat.  That’ll single-handedly do to represent crappy ubiquitous 70s FM rock because if you grew up listening to WMMR and WYSP like I did there was no more ubiquitous, crappy band to be found on the dial.  I’m slightly ashamed at how many of the songs in that best-of I know by heart but quite handily managed to forget until now.

Since the iTunes project got mostly done I’ve been digging into another long-deferred task: indexing old blog entries.  I’ve been blogging/online journaling since this month nine years ago, averaging 3-4 posts a week and that’s a lot of words.  Blogs written under aliases (three and a quarter if you count the one I use here as it’s a minor variation) and posted on four different providers (five if you count my month-long 2001 dabble in Livejournal-ing).  The second provider, from March 01 to February 04 was Diary-X which is no more; all I have of those years are PDFs scanned from hard copy I’m glad I printed out while I still could.  I have at best a vague memory of what I thought important enough to put into words in each of those entries, and since memory is about as reliable as, say, your penis the farther you get past 40 that’s been a problem.

Indexing takes time.  I ramble enough these days, but lord did I seem to be trying to make it a science those early years.  I’ve finished all the Diary-X entries and few lend themselves to a simple summation like f’rinstance The J-con entry that pissed some people off so much.  Most of them are instead crazy-quilts like Not working and preparing for NV trip; Grosskopf book on forgiving parents and my self-pity; missing Angela's devotion; writing groups and Slacker; Blair.  And even that’s not everything in that particular entry, just the items I think are important based on what’s important to me now.

TBBP #2: Chisos Mountains

Indexing the Diaryland period from 12/99 to 3/01 is going to be proportionately greater work still.  At the beginning I had no idea what to do so I just threw everything in and hoped that it would be valuable some day.  9 years later I can safely say it is, if only as a lesson in the need for developing blogging discipline.

After that it’s on to the Typepad blogs spanning 2/04 on.  Not so urgent now that Typepad has restored its search function, but that really works only when you’re looking for something specific.  I’d still like a snapshot of each entry, which works a lot better when you’re trying to get a sense of any trends emerging over the years.

Finally of course is this site.  You’d think that Six Apart was kind enough to let you search on Typepad they’d build the same feature into Vox but noooooo.  You get what you pay for.  Redheaded stepchild though my Vox may be, it still gets its turn at the index eventually.

I figure I’ll still be at this in June.  I don’t think it’ll be that long before the next entry, though.

You know how some people are able to reel off (effortlessly, it seems) a list of their favorite things?  Books, movies, foods, places they've been?  I'm not one of those.  I love what I love fiercely, but can rarely summon up the things I do on command.  It's embarrassing, especially for someone who takes such private pleasure in inventorying the pieces of his world.

So I started keeping running lists of those things most dear to me over the years.  Music came the easiest, as music is my most constant companion and always has been and my allegiances to songs or albums shift a lot less rarely than they do with other things.  (Also because I can look at my CD rack or iTunes library for prompting.)

So here are the first 60 CDs/albums I could think of I call all-time favorites.  Note that this doesn't necessarily reflect favorite songs or favorite artists - different lists, for the future.  (Though there will doubtless be a lot of crossover.)  This also is in no way to be construed as my version of a "60 Best" - there's some stuff I love I know is a bit sucky (or worse, unhip) but still evokes a certain place or time that I like to remember.  Sentimental, that's me.

There's a lot that got left off this list I can think of already so look for another edition of this eventually.

1. Banco de Gaia -10 Years (disc 1)
2. Beatles - Abbey Road
3. Blondie - Eat to the Beat
4. Blue Oyster Cult - Agents of Fortune
5. David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
6. Clash - The Clash
7. Lloyd Cole - X (solo debut)
   
8. Colvin, Shawn - A Few Small Repairs
9. Julian Cope - Peggy Suicide
10. Elvis Costello - Get Happy
    
11. Counting Crows - Recovering the Satellites
12. Doors - LA Woman
13. Eagles - Desperado
14. Echo & the Bunnymen - Heaven Up Here
15. Michael Franti & Spearhead - Stay Human
16. Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball
17. Heart - Little Queen
18. Jam - All Mod Cons
19. James Gang - Rides Again
20. Joy Division - Substance
21. Kruder & Dorfmeister - The K&D Sessions (disc 1)
22. Little Feat - Waiting for Columbus
23. Loop Guru - Loop Bites Dog
24. Mary Lou Lord - Got No Shadow
25. Massive Attack - Mezzanine
26. Grant McLennan - Horsebreaker Star
27. Midnight Oil - Scream in Blue
28. Mission of Burma - Vs.
29. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook - Night Song
30. Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
31. Pearl Jam - Vs.
32. Pixies - Trompe Le Monde
33. Psychedelic Furs - Psychedelic Furs
34. Ramones - Rocket to Russia
    
35. Rancid - Life Won't Wait
36. REM - Murmur
37. Replacements - Tim
38. Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
39. Roxy Music - Stranded
40. Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, A True Star
41. Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends
42. Simple Minds - Sparkle in the Rain
43. Patti Smith - Horses
44. Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight
45. Soundtrack (musical) - Hair
46. Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
47. Al Stewart - Modern Times
48. Sundays - Blind
49. Rachid Taha - Made in Medina
50. Talking Heads - Fear of Music
51. The Who - Who's Next
52. Transglobal Underground - Dream of 100 Nations
    
53. U2 - Boy
54. Velvet Underground - Live 1969 (disc 1)
55. Tom Verlaine -Tom Verlaine
56. Wilco - Being There (disc 1)
57. Wire - Pink Flag
58. X - Los Angeles/Wild Gift
59. Neil Young - Ragged Glory
60. Youngbloods - Elephant Mountain

The last few weeks have seen me on a major iTunes-reorganizing kick, segregating and categorizing and shuffling files around for hours at a time.  I’ve now got playlists buried down even to a fourth level of folders and thank god at least I know where they are because once finished they’d never see the light of day otherwise.  My total iTunes library is something like 54 gigs and 9000 songs – there should be more songs at that gig count, but I have a thing for really long trance-like dance and groove world pieces (see: Transglobal Underground, Nation Records, DJ Cheb I Sabbah etc.) – which is why I’m nowhere near the end of the project after several weeks.  It beats looking for a new job, I’ll say that much.

Putting music into categories helps me realize how deficient my collection is in most areas that aren’t world-groove, classic punk or modern indie pop.  To that end I’m currently ransacking the Austin Public Library for the folk-rock or just plain radio-rock I grew up with.  Already I’ve added Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Joni Mitchell’s Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira, Steely Dan’s Countdown to Ecstasy, the Zep's Physical Graffiti (which I somehow got to 48 without once hearing all the way through), Tull's Stand Up and Benefit, Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy, the Floyd's Wish You Were Here, and Elton John’s Honky Chateau and Tumbleweed Connection, with more to come as I can find 'em and get the holds available.  The APL only lets you put 10 items at a time on hold – can you believe it?

Also: the Ramones’ first album.  Because I can’t believe I ever let that bugger go.

Yet there are still glaring omissions, big honking gaps you can drive a flower-painted microbus through.  I’m not sure how it happened that my collection includes absolutely no:

• Hendrix
• Dylan
• Moody Blues (staple of my middle-school years)
  
• Allman Brothers (ditto)
  
• Grateful Dead (OK, I've got a few select tracks from Deadicated, and the Dead generally made shitty studio albums anyway, but still.  I thought enough of them to see them play live something like five times, y'know)
• Clapton (although: fuck Cream [except Disraeli Gears and maybe Goodbye], fuck Blind Faith, fuck Derek and the Dominoes [yes, I know that includes Duane Allman], and fuck Clapton's whole spineless mumbling solo career.  The guy is massively overrated)
• Tom Petty

just to name a few.  Give it time and the grace of the APL, I guess.

Slightly more bothersome are all the bands that had one or three moderate-size hits on Philadelphia radio in the years right before New Wave that nobody but me and the DJ will remember.  Detective, featuring Michael Des Barres and Tony Kaye (“Grim Reaper,” “Recognition”).  Charlie (“No Second Chance,” “Watching TV,” “Johnny Hold Back” – from England, weren’t they?).  Racing Cars (“Downtown Tonight”), Skyhooks (“Crazy Heart”), Sad Café (“Run Home Girl”), Metro (“Black Laced Shoulder”), Backstreet Crawler ("Stone Cold Sober").  Bands that barely had a chance on the radio then but would have none at all in this ultra-tight formatted era. 

Except maybe Detective, since Jimmy Page produced both their albums.  They always got a little extra push on the Philly 'waves.  One long-ago day I remember a WMMR jock concluding a spin of “Grim Reaper” in all its slashing-opener-riff glory with, “Man.  That just sounded so good… the only thing to do here is play it again.”  And he did.  Right then.  When was the last time you heard a DJ who wasn’t left of the dial abuse his/her privilege like that?

I wouldn’t know how to go about locating all those songs.  Not sure I want to, since some of them were as much out-and-out shite as, say, Rock of the Westies.  But just like everything from that album, it would be good to get them out of my head where they’ve been stuck since 1977.  Believe it.

Went to the Million Musician March again this year.  This time I didn't feel like marching so I just shadowed it on my bike and took pictures.  It was a spectacularly beautiful day and everyone was in high spirits.  I estimate full attendance at something like 1000, same as last year, although there seemed to be more people playing instruments.  Someday maybe some of those SXSW slackers will get off their hungover asses and join in.  Until then, there certainly seem to be no shortage of folks in Austin who think this is a fun time.

Waiting for the March to spill out from the Capitol grounds

That guy with the Fuck Bush sign came out again.  Some old man tottered down the sidewalk, groped in the return-coin slot of a nearby pay phone, then turned to me and asked, "Did they say that about Truman?  Or Johnson?" and tottered off.  It wasn't until later I realized he was talking about the sign (which, I might add, had an advertisement for Coke - "2 liters $.99!" - on the back) or I would have told him, Why yes.  Yes they did say that about Johnson, and a lot of other things besides.  Just not out on the sidewalk at 11th and Congress.

And here they come

And come

Hey, wow!  Jackson Browne found a time machine and went back!

Surely must be a million by now

A good angle can always make it seem like more people than there are.

Gotta be hot under there

I don't care whatever message these guys were trying to send, or how legitimate it was.  They still gave me the creeps.  (As I guess they were supposed to.)

Hitting Sixth Street during SXSW

By now the leading band was well into "When the Saints Come Marching In."  You can only play "Down By The Riverside" so many times, evidently.

Doubt he's feeling very hot

Of course there's always got to be a bagpiper.

We loved the bubble machine

This float was right ahead of the Molly Ivins Pots and Pans Brigade.  May their ranks swell with the years.

Just so you don't forget this is serious business

The badass rearguard APD escort.  There was no reason to keep that visor down except to be a badass.

Code Pink makes the scene

As always - smashing!  That's my friend Deb in front of the banner, for once not dressed in pink.

Portable PA in a shopping cart

Bringing up the rear.  These guys were wailing on "Fortunate Son," forever and always.  Still I suppose it's an improvement on "Kumbaya."

It’s spring break week with virtually nobody in the office and correspondingly little work to do and in such circumstances the mind tends to wander.  More than usual, I mean.

You’d think that with all the directions in which it could do so the mind would choose something to fixate on a little bit more relevant than that mix tape I made 23 years ago.  This fixation has been increasing for months because it bothers the shit out of me that I can’t remember everything I put on that damn tape more and more every time I think about it.  It was only 45 minutes of one type of songs – covers, which I didn’t have a lot of at the time – so it shouldn’t be so hard to remember.  

Should it?  Especially when I played that fucker to death for a year and more after.  It was one of the few tapes I packed in June of 85 when I flew east to pick up my little white Civic and drive it back to my new home in San Francisco.  My co-driver was my boss Ken and he didn’t much like my music so I had to use his Walkman when I was behind the wheel, but that tape saved my ass during the deadly stretch of early morning hours when we left Minneapolis at midnight.  I’ve always hated driving at night but Ken was a vampire, that’s the only way I can explain how much of that drive we made in darkness.

Anyway, since I got an iPod songs from that tape have popped up here and there and every time one does I think “Hey!  How did I forget this was on it?” and every time decide to try to recreate the entire playlist because it just seems very important all of a sudden. Today it must be super-important because here’s a stab at it, 1985 in all its glory:

• Sisters of Mercy, Gimme Shelter.  This was the opener, of that I’m sure.  I still love this song even though someday I’m going to cut the ending minute of Eldritch’s a cappella croak off the MP3 like I did on the tape.
• Gen X, Gimme Some Truth.  Wish I'd had at least one more Gimme song, y'know?  Still have never heard Lennon’s original.
• Simple Minds, Street Hassle.  With which the Minds actually built some cred by semi-cleverly truncating the bloated original.  Then they blew it all to hell a year later with that stupid Breakfast Club song.
• Gun Club, Run Through the Jungle.  This song shows how small the early indie world was.  Club bassist Patricia Morrison later joined the Sisters of Mercy; founder Jeffrey Lee Pierce died in Paris just like Stiv Bators (Lords of the New Church - see below).  And so on.
  
• Damned, Looking At You.  I think I put this song on damn-near every tape I made for a 3-year period starting in 83, until I finally got my hands on the original MC5 version and started using that one every time instead.
• Dickies, Communication Breakdown.  Mostly for filler.  I actually hated this version.
• Magazine, Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin.  A spooky one that I grew to loathe very quickly.  Don't you be fuckin' with my Sly, Howard.
  
• Stranglers, Walk On By.  I think they were actually trying to do Light My Fire.  The structure is exactly the same.
• John Cale, Pablo Picasso.  Truth is I’m not sure if this was on or if I even still had the Guts album then.  It was one of Stu’s I borrowed for a long time but can't remember when or if I gave it back.  I’m blaming all the nitrous oxide I did with burners in 98-99 for destroying the patch of brain cells where that memory was stored.
• X, Soul Kitchen.  No doubt about this one.  It kicked the tape into high gear just like it was supposed to.
• True West, Lucifer Sam.  Another not-sure.  I think I was pretty sick of it by then.
• Three O’Clock, Feel A Whole Lot Better.  If I’d really wanted to be a smart-ass I’d have used their version of Lucifer back-to-back with True West’s but it’d have only been for my own benefit and I wasn’t interested in that much self-inflicted punishment.  Not that this featherweight, note-for-note cover didn’t provide plenty on its own.
• Lords of the New Church, Question of Temperature. There was maybe a 3-month span when the Lords didn’t suck but that was years before when the first album was new.  I still have no idea who did the original and don’t care.

As it turns out I wasn’t as familiar with my record collection as I could have been because I overlooked the Undertones’ Under The Boardwalk, which has since become one of my Favorite.  Covers.  Ever.  On the other hand I’m proud of having eschewed the obvious - I Fought The Law, Take Me To The River, Dear Prudence – even if it means I did end up with that stinky LotNC number instead.  That’s one that today I wish would have also been erased by  the nitrous.

Last night after I finished compiling the list I compared it to the covers mix CD I sent Steph last year and was amazed at the general lack of overlap. Yeah, the Sisters and Gun Club and Stranglers are forever treasures, they might just turn up on every covers mix I ever make, but the rest?  Time to move on.  Although I do wish I still had Stukas Over Disneyland because, 23-year-old hatred notwithstanding, I wouldn't mind hearing Lenny & co. speed-mangle the Zep just one... more... time.

Aw shit.  Dan Fogelberg is dead.

I’m really of mixed feelings here.  On one hand, he did some of the most awful dreck perpetrated on the mass market by anyone short of post-Terry Kath Chicago.  And what is with this “soft rock” moniker, anyway?  Something so mooshy as that “longer than there’ve been fishes in the ocean” vomit can’t really be called rock in any way, can it?  God.  Even Bread had cojones in comparison.  I’m at least glad we’re guaranteed there will never be any more of that brand of fresh hell coming our way.

On the other, he did provide a good part of the soundtrack for my pre-college years.  And I did put money down for Captured Angel and Nether Lands.  The latter was a gift for my best bud Amanda (who even now is apparently still on the soft-rock tit; a recent email quoted, eek, Sheryl Crow), but before I wrapped it I slit the cellophane and home-taped the bugger and my god, did I listen to that cassette endlessly through senior year.  It still plays frequently and uninvited on the jukebox in my head and to this day I can quote most of the lyrics for the title track and “Loose Ends” and “Love Gone By” without batting an eye.  You can’t say that for Hall and Oates, hell no.

One of the places we used to go walking

Kind of the same for Angel, too.  Amanda was a Young Friend like me and before she came to Westtown we’d only see each other at weekend conferences at various meetinghouses around the Phila area, usually going out for long heart-to-hearts in the attached boneyards, so the line in “The Last Nail” about walking together through the gardens and graves seemed to have special import.  Because of it that song too is graven on my soul.

You’ll recall that around the time I started this blog I had my first prostate exam in a good long while.  It’ll definitely be a yearly thing without too much complaint from now on.  56 is way too soon to go.