perfidy

So there's this website I am doing some work for, that's run by the Herb Alpert Foundation. Yes, that Herb Alpert as if there were any other.

In any event, while cruising through the site's content library I recently came across proof positive that being old kicks ass. Some of you may have heard of Teo Macero, the legendary jazz producer who basically helped Miles Davis invent like four kinds of jazz, plus fusion, funk and electronic besides. Well, he's old now and kind of cantankerous. But he's got awesome stories.

Watch this great clip of Teo talking about working with Miles Davis, and wait for the part where he says "so I said book it, you white motherfucker!"

I'm g-dd-mn dying here, with the laughing. You can't make Blazing Saddles today, and you can't tell that kind of story if you're under sixty-five. Absolutely priceless.

Gogol Bordello, if you are even less cool than I am, is an amazing gypsy punk band out of NYC. It's a mix of klezmer and thrash punk. Or as I put it last night, it's punk music with an actual melody.

Everyone has their favorite, the violinist, the bass player, the lead guitarist, the dancers, etc.

I'd never heard their music till I went to the show. Everyone I know went last year and said it was by far the best show they'd seen in ages and no one had a bad thing to say about them, so when tickets went on sale, I bought them blind. It did not disappoint at all. I haven't rocked out like that in I don't know how long, at least a year. I haven't truly danced and thrashed like that in years. I can tell I should pop a Tylenol now because it's going to hurt.

My friend R, put it well:

Everyone, please STOMP extra hard for me, wear your combat boots, dance with big legs, and crowd surf! Then, tell me who won the concert!

I can tell you without a doubt, I won the concert. It was amazingly high energy, melodic, funny, exciting, electrifying.

There aren't that many US tour dates left. Most of them are on the West coast, but if you can go, GO! GO! GO! DAMMIT!

I guess today is video day at the Ministry. I first saw Bjørn Berge a few years back at the Iota in Arlington (a fantastic music joint if you're ever in the DC area) and was stunned by his guitar mojo. A Norwegian blues man? Who'd a thunk. But here's an video I just stumbled across, from his new album. Forgive the annoying Frenchiness at the beginning.

[wik] Another cool thing that I forgot to mention is that he's covering a Morphine tune off their Cure for Pain album. Morphine rocks, and his take on it is cool in its own way and still somehow true to the original. Here's the Morphine vid:

Joe Boyd: The main inspiration was losing my job running Hannibal Records. I mean, I always thought I might write a book one day. I've always enjoyed writing and when I found myself out of a job, I thought, this is the time. Hannibal had become part of Rykodisc in 1991, and Rykodisc in 98 became part of Palm Pictures, the Chris Blackwell company. And that never really worked very well. There was a lot of downsizing, and all the people who got downsized were my people and the people who didn't really understand or sympathize with the music I was doing were the people who were kept. It got pretty impossible to look an artist in the eye and say, "I'm going to do a good job for you." I made demands to change it, and they said, "No. You're obviously not very happy, so why don't you go away?" That was 2001.

Yep, that's pretty much how that went down. I was there. And now I don't have to write that chapter of my autobiography.

The whole interview, by the way, with former Hannibal Records label honcho Joe Boyd, is pretty great. He's been around everywhere, knew everybody, did everything and then some and more than that too, and has a million great stories to tell.

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

A recent visit to my personal abode and culture bunker by Clan Johno included a soundtrack provided by Band of Gypsys.

In subsequent discussion, I explained that someone who hears "Machine Gun" and is not moved has no soul. And I didn't mean "soul" in the James Brown, real supabad sense. I'm not saying you have to like it- you could be moved to loathe it. OK. But the energy and the wailing and the wah wah wah weeeoooooDRAAAAAANNNNNNNN ah wa wa wa wa wa awaw provokes all who hear.

Which days later got me to thinking about dying in a horrible plane crash.

Assuming I had it with me, and I had the time to listen, and I was together enough to make my player work at that moment, and not flipping the fuck out at the prospect of my imminent demise, I decided I would like "Machine Gun" to be my terminal music. The last music I heard before impact and non-existence.

Yeah.

So. All the assumptions listed above apply to you. What is your terminal music?

Can you imagine the pressure, being the heir apparent to immortal greatness? That kind of thing can do a man in.

Robert “Junior” Lockwood was more than just a close personal friend of the great Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. Due to an on-and-off ten year romantic entanglement between Lockwood's mother and the dashing, skylarking Mr. Johnson, Lockwood found himself with a big brother, a stepfather of sorts, and a musical mentor who would teach him all the tricks he had to tell. It was this relationship that gave Lockwood his “Robert Junior” nickname and the keys to his future.

And as with most such family dramas, it would be wonderful to write that the three of them, Robert, Robert Junior and mom, retired to a long and happy life on a farm somewhere in Arkansas or western Mississippi and ended their days in the company of beloved friends and family.

But instead, Robert Johnson found himself dying in a warm Mississippi night, poisoned by the jilted partner of one his many female companions, Robert Junior found his way out of the Delta by feet and inches, and only his mother had a shot at the idyllic storybook ending (God only knows if she got it).

As it turned out, Robert “Junior” Lockwood, heir to immortal greatness, was made of pretty stern stuff. Armed with all the tricks of music and showmanship he'd learned from his mentor, and cut loose from home at a fairly young age, he made a name for himself in juke joints and fish fries up and down the big river, wound his slow way North, and eventually became the go-to guitarist for dozens of recording sessions in the golden age of the Chicago blues.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Lockwood appeared with some of the all time greats of the Chicago blues style, like Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Little Walter and even Muddy Waters, adding what needed to be added, always staying out of the spotlight. Along the way he continued to teach himself more about the guitar, getting jazz lines and chords under his fingers, even mastering the art of the blues on the notoriously cumbersome 12-string guitar.

In the wake of Lockwood's death late last year, the Delmark label is reissuing once again their CD release of his first session as a bandleader, Steady Rollin' Man, recorded in 1970.

I have to admit, I was all set to politely pan this album. Its plainer moments are nice enough, sure, but not really incredibly distinct from any one of dozens of worthy Chicago blues albums recorded in the last half-century. But then I found myself walking down the street on a cloudless Massachusetts afternoon, with the sunlight slanting just so from the west and a beautiful melancholy mood coming down, and the song playing in my head was Robert "Junior" Lockwood's "Western Horizon."

Structurally, the song is nothing more than a stock Chicago blues by way of the Delta: start the song with the little turnaround where one voice descends chromatically from the flat-7 to the dominant, kick in the twelve bar shuffle vamp, and then cue a lyric whose first two lines are the same and begin with "I believe, I believe... I believe I'll...."

Trust me, you know this song. Whether it's sung as "Sweet Home Chicago" or "Dust My Broom" or any one of dozens of alternate lyrics, you know this song.

But what I forgot when I got ready to politely pan the album is that in this kind of blues, it's all in the details - the bent notes, the vibe of the song, the little turns of lyric and phrasing that make a blue performance just right.

And there's lots in "Western Horizon" that is definitely right. Lockwood studied jazz, and you can hear it sometimes in the way he pulls a phrase behind the beat, the way he swings a line, the way he builds some altered harmonies into his rhythm vamps. On “Western Horizon,” he sings behind the beat and then creeps right up to it, rushes some words and draws others out, and generally sounds like he was born singing the song in that same unhurried way. The effect is cool and stylish, and is a neat twist on top of the late-night saloon mood that he and the band kick up on this song and the album in general.

And what a band! For this session, Lockwood tapped some of the best that Chicago had to offer - Fred Below on drums, Dave Myers on bass, and Louis Myers on second guitar. The arrangements and tempos they dig into are less aggressive, less slick, than some of the work that Lockwood was doing as a session man around the same time.

Instead, Lockwood and the band let a whiff of country mud into their jazzy urban blues by laying back into grooves, moving some of the rhythm playing up the neck of the guitar (like Junior's ‘godfather’ used to do) and pulling out some great old turnaround riffs that could have come straight from the pines of Arkansas in 1937. On the slower grooves, like "Take a Little Walk With Me," "Mean Red Spider" and "Western Horizon," the band sit back in a simmer that showcases their sedate rock-steadiness and country overtones. But on the jump blues numbers like the overtly jazzy "Lockwood's Boogie" they sit right up in the pocket and deliver all the energy you could ever want to power a Chicago blues bar.

With repeated listens, the jazz elements drift to the front of the record. Jazz harmonies and a cool late-night vibe are all over songs like the instrumental "Tanya" and even the by-the-numbers "Take a Little Walk With Me" and "Steady Rollin' Man," and Lockwood's solos on any song may at any point quietly pass over from basic pentatonic flat-five scales into something that's no longer just the blues. The cumulative effect is pretty impressive, a nice balance of influences that don't often play well together but on this album fit together almost seamlessly.

So, okay. Maybe there are one or two too many straight-ahead numbers on this disc which sap a little energy from the running order. But that really doesn't hide the fact that I was wrong, and that Steady Rollin' Man is a minor masterpiece of the blues, pulling together the city, the country, and even jazz into one unassuming and masterful demonstration of why Robert “Junior” Lockwood was thought so highly of. Good stuff.

It's an unjust world that doesn't hail Andrew Bird with parades and midnight fetes.

Eight years ago or so, when the Chicago-based violinist and songwriter formed Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, I nearly wrote him off right then and there. At the time, Bird,a Suzuki-trained musician who claimed to have barely heard any rock music at all, ever, was a hot-jazz violinist somewhat in the mold of the great French player Stéphane Grappelli and a sometime member of swing revivalists The Squirrel Nut Zippers. Given that the neo-swing revival lasted all of two years, and my patience with it considerably less time, I was disinclined to give Andrew Bird a pass.

With The Bowl of Fire, Bird put out Thrills (Rykodisc, 1998) and Oh! The Grandeur (Rykodisc, 1999), two albums which I received as basically updated museum pieces, kind of neato like a garage-built replica of a Model T Ford, but like a Model T replica more curiosities than accomplishments. His archly retro songs and arrangements were entertaining amalgams of ragtime, hot jazz and swing, Weimar-era cabaret, Eastern European folk music, and other similarly unfashionable influences, but their appeal (for me, at least) stopped at the eardrums. The albums seemed to sell passably well, he built a small and dedicated fanbase, but for my part I had my fill of Andrew Bird pretty quickly. (Full disclosure: I was working for the label that put out Bird's first three albums. As if that makes me any more patient with nonsense.)

And then it all got weird.
Bird's third album went in what you might call a completely unexpected direction. I suspected it might be getting interesting when, one afternoon, I was instructed to find a Hohner Beatle bass on short notice for Andrew to make use of in the studio (luckily for me, Manhattan is sick with Beatle basses for rent), and my suspicions were borne out when he delivered his third Bowl of Fire album, The Swimming Hour (Rykodisc, 2001). Gone were the hot jazz, the Hungarian folk music and the two-step beats. Gone were the one always-arched eyebrow and the sense that every note was part of some elaborate in-joke.

Instead, Andrew Bird had learned in his own way to rock.

But, being a classical music junkie and polymath, Bird didn't just sit down and pen a raft of "easy" by-the-numbers garage rock songs and dress them up with electric violin and Beatle bass. No, no no. Instead, Bird sat down and listened to what must have been the entire history of rock and roll music from Elvis up to Pavement, and then went off and encapsulated that history in one neat and quirky package. From the clattery Ray Charles jump blues of "How Indiscreet" (which featured a Raelettes-style backing chorus) to nods to Latin music, Burt Bacharach chamber pop, that Weimar cabaret again, it was a dizzyingly accomplished leap forward. Every song still featured his signature violin, but it appeared in a thousand disguises - distorted, plucked, and echoed, and his light and mellow voice became a secret weapon as he slyly intoned little stories about rest stops and mistaken identity. It was rock music, yes, but coming from a wholly original place and sensibility that had little to do with the blues, Chuck Berry, Zep or the Stones. In short, The Swimming Hour was a smart and original album of marvelous songs played in a marvelous fashion, and I thought to myself, "no way" that Andrew Frigging Bird "is gonna top this."

Boy, was I wrong. Having gone solo starting with 2003’s Weather Systems (Grimsey Records,) each of his subsequent albums has been better, deeper, more mature and masterful than the last. His songwriting has become more confident as he has developed his own voice - his own genre - that nods at but does not rely on anything else that's been done before. Ever. His lyrics have become sharper, blending keen observation with poetry and Tin Pan Alley wordplay, and he has become (check this out) a master whistler.

Andrew Bird's latest album, Armchair Apocrypha (Fat Possum, 2007) was released in March to... thunderous silence. I don't get it. Andrew Bird has made the album of the year, an absolutely breathtaking tour de force of beautiful and brilliant... something... pop? I don't know what it is... and the only press I'm seeing is in the usual places that review indie-rock (Pitchfork, The Onion). No ticker-tape, no guest stint coaching the vocal gymnasts on American Idol, and it's a crying shame.

Bird created Armchair Apocrypha with the help of electronic-music experimentalist Martin Dosh. Dosh's influence seems mainly to be in the way that most of the productions are big as Western vistas, full of nuance and texture and sweeping motion, even when they are quiet as whispers. When Bird takes full advantage of his singing voice - a light, agile tenor not too different from Jeff Buckley's - or his multifacted violin, or the whistling that sounds more like a Theremin than something human, and sets these monstrous talents off against Dosh's expansive productions, the effect is breathtaking. When from time to time, the electronic flourishes intrude a little more, as with the canned shuffle beat on "Simple X" or the storm of drums that ends "Armchairs," it's usually to the song's advantage. (But not always; “Simple X” is probably the weakest track, relatively speaking, on an otherwise stellar album.)

Somewhat like David Byrne (whom he resembles in eyebrow and cheekbone), Bird's lyrics are full of wordplay and detached observation that seems to come from a wry weariness, taking on the persona of someone who's seen enough to know that he doesn't want to see any more. On Armchair Apocrypha, disaster seems to lurk just underneath every surface. You find yourself grooving to "Heretics" well before you figure out that the chorus runs, "Thank God it's fatal," and the album-opening "Fiery Crash" seems to contemplate the titular tragedy in order to ward it off.

Bird even delves obliquely into politics for what I believe is the first time with "Scythian Empires," which pulls together three millennia worth of Middle East conquests and their subsequent fiascos over a gently driving beat built on acoustic guitar, plucked violin, and that ever-present Greek chorus of Bird's otherworldly whistling:

five day forecast bring black tar rains and hellfire
while handpicked handler's kid gloves tear at the inseams

their Halliburton attaché cases are useless

while Scotch-Guard Macintoshes shall be carbonized

now they're offering views of exiting empires
such breathtaking views of Scythian empires

Scythian empire
horsemen of the Russian steppe
Scythian empire
archers of an afterthought

routed by Sarmatians
thwarted by the Thracians
Scythian empire

kings of Macedonia
and the Scythian empire

Halliburton attaché cases, by the way, are fantastic.

No matter whether Bird is punning on, well, birds on "Spare-ohs" and the clever album art, or contemplating mortality and the game of Operation on "Dark Matter," every shot hits the target dead center. This album is as career-defining and as one of a kind as Pink Moon, Tapestry or Dark Side of the Moon, and I'm frankly shocked that music this good - even if it's not immediately comprehensible as "pop" - isn't burning up the adult alternative radio charts, being written up in Rolling Stone, and generally being lauded as great.

Today, I'm at the point where I'm tempted to run to my nearest music store, order a 30-count box full of Armchair Apocrypha and run into the streets thrusting the album into every passing hand. It's that good, that different, that lovely. Not to everybody's taste, maybe not your particular cup of tea, but objectively a great, great album.

Andrew Bird has come a long way since I rolled my eyes at "Ides of Swing" and "Candy Shop" from Thrills and Oh! The Grandeur. Before I said it because I still doubted his ability to pull off anything he wanted; now I'm saying it because practically nobody makes two albums this good in a career (even while I hope that this is not true): no way is Andrew Frigging Bird gonna top this.

Midriff Records has a really nice thing going. Founded in 2001 by the New England band The Beatings for the purposes of releasing their own music, they have built a stable of high quality indie-pop bands who mostly trend toward (from what I've heard) to the bittersweet and hooky side of the spectrum. In some respects (notably in that Midriff bands seem to all be friends and in some cases brothers), Midriff is becoming a power-pop version of Elephant 6 or K Records, two labels who took a friends-and-family approach to artist development and who are now legendary in some circles. Indeed, the last year or so has seen at least three high-quality releases that should cement Midriff's reputation as a label to rely on: a stellar release from The Beatings themselves; an excellent solo album from Beatings guitarist Eldridge Rodriguez; and now Scuba with a self-titled debut.

Like The Beatings, Scuba exist to invoke (and improve on) some of the most revered sounds of the past thirty years or so. But where The Beatings draw on The Pixies, Mission of Burma and Sonic Youth, Scuba are best described as - get this - shoegazer revivalists.

Shoegazer! When's the last time you thought about that word? For me it musta been back in college in Ohio in the mid-1990s, hepped up on Mickey's Big Mouths and listening to My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr., and leaving the room every time anyone put on anything by the execrable Sebadoh. Remember when The Jesus and Mary Chain were on Lollapalooza? When The Cure were having hits? When Bob Mould was releasing records as Sugar and even got on the radio? I sure do! And I loved it!

But it's both condescending and limiting to describe a band as solely the sum of their influences. On their website, Scuba themselves acknowledge their fuzzy and moody pop roots, saying "We're not a shoe-gazer band. Though we look at a lot of things apparently our shoes are not one of them. Or rather they're not looked at for long enough to become a quote-unquote 'gaze' unquote."

Okay, so fair enough. "Shoegazer" implies that Scuba are a tribute band, which isn't correct. So what's the deal with Scuba? Well, the fuzzy guitars and washes of noise aside, they play sumptuous and hypnotic power pop that delivers on what Neil Young said about Crazy Horse, his backing band: "It's all one big, growing, smoldering sound, and I'm part of it. It's like gliding, or some sort of natural surfing." Although you can namecheck great bands of the past one after the other as the songs pass by (right now I'm listening to the leadoff single "Gary Powers' Spy Plane" and dreaming of Boston's late lamented The Sheila Divine), the truth is the songwriting is strong and original and more than the sum of its (My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, New Order, Sugar, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure) influences.

The big trick with playing noisy pop-inflected rock is to have it not all sound the same. I've heard literally dozens of boring bands who play boring music that sounds great for three point five minutes until they start their next song and you realize that one song is really all they have. Luckily, Scuba duck the "samey" tag with aplomb by using studio and songwriting tricks to good effect, sometimes washing the sound-field with enormous distortion, other times pulling back to a tunneling bassline and a few chimed guitar notes, sometimes compressing everything into angular chords.

Scuba manage to duck the other great pitfall of modern power-pop as well, which is the "softLOUDsoft" formula that The Pixies invented and Nirvana made famous. Instead, in the great tradition of their shoegazer forebears, Scuba manage the flow of each song beautifully, creating new textures and moods through smart production and layering of sounds, rather than the crass expedient of stomping the distortion pedal and blasting out the windows every time the chorus comes around.

Highlights include the album opener "You Break My Heart in 1000 Different Ways," the echoey suspended overdrive of "Freight," the gorgeous Joy-Division wail of "Maybe It's Different With Johnny" and the gigantic suspended-chord riff of "Into The Water, Down To The Bottom." In a just world, or a different time, any one of these songs should be, or shoulda been, a monster underground hit, part of the lingua franca of cool youth to be passed down by word of mouth.

Simply put, Scuba have made a well-written and beautifully produced debut record in a decidedly unfashionable genre, one that makes aging hipsters like me feel like rock has a future that isn't limited to Franz Ferdinand, Pink, and tenth-generation SoCal punk. Granted, for the time being the band are leaning hard on their influences, but they're a long way past merely paying tribute to them, which is a whole lot more than million-sellers like Queens of the Stone Age, Sum 182, or, heaven forfend, Nickelback can claim with a straight face.

My favorite rock album of 2006 was by the New England collective The Beatings, whose sweet-tart invocation of the greats of Boston's postpunk history (The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma) on Holding Onto Hand Grenades struck me as much more than just attribute to their influences.

In the wake of the release of that album, Beatings guitarist E.R. (aka the improbably named Eldridge Rodriguez) kept going, writing and recording his own stuff under his own name, finally releasing in late February of this year an album of his own, This Conspiracy Against Us.

Many of the songs on Rodriguez' album could fit comfortably on a Beatings record, but where the band as a whole tended toward tense, rigorous arrangements featuring loud and layered guitars, Rodriguez alone is much more relaxed, at times a little more acoustic, and in a welcome way, weirder. He's still comfortably within the basic genre definition of "indie rock" or "postpunk" or whatever, but he sounds like he's having a ball.

What do I mean by "weirder?" Well, for example, although the Beatings have a nice way with a hook, I can't imagine a Beatings song featuring hand claps, 'sha-la-la' backing vocals, or a cheerleader chorus bleating "a-c-t-i-o-n, action, action, we want action" underneath the big hook. But there they are, the female chorus on "You Get What You Want," adding a winsome dimension to what's already a hooky modern rock song.

And I can't imagine, well, anybody with the courage to write a Bowie song and record it in a Bowie voice like Rodriguez does on "Black History Month." Yet, there it is in the middle of what, by rights, ought to be a mildly interesting set of songs by one member of a not-famous-quite-yet rock quartet. This Conspiracy Against Us is full of songs like this, quirky enough to stand out, but strong and restrained enough not to just be irritating, cutesy or precious.

This Conspiracy Against Us probably isn't going to win any awards, and probably isn't (such a crime!) going to break huge and move a million units at retail. But Eldridge Rodriguez has made a very impressive, accomplished and most of all interesting debut album, and that's good news for the future.

The 20 Worst Lyrics Ever

In a codicil to my recent posts about the slow death of the major music labels, Daniel Gross of Slate points out that the compact disc, though bruised and somewhat diminished, is alive and well. Classical and boutique sales, as well as nontraditional distribution schemes, continue to thrive as they always have.

About this, I ain't surprised at all. One of the labels I worked for back in the day had made its reputation - and its fortune - in catering to the long tail. They pioneered nonmusic retail partnerships (like what Starbucks is doing now), direct-to-consumer internet sales, and grassroots marketing, and for a long time did fabulously at it. And in a micro-parable of how the industry now goes, only got into serious trouble when they tried to get too big too fast and found themselves caught flatfooted, too small to compete at the level of the majors and too big to effectively cater to the grassroots fanbase that was a big part of their cachet and bottom line. At the end of the day, or at least the end of my career, the Big Giant Album from a Faded Popstar lost money hand over fist with as many returned lots flooding back in as had gone out the door in the first place, and the little record of birthing room music that had sold twenty to forty copies a week for fifteen years continued to sell twenty to forty copies a week, week in and week out.

Guess which one's still in print?

It's not the compact disc that's dead - it's the entire major label system that lives and dies by selling millions of them at a time.

The Onion has a pretty good featurette on songs that work as stories. I don't know all their choices, but the ones I do know are top notch. A couple of my personal favorites, not on the list, are "Can You Fly" by Freedy Johnston, which is about a farmer and his son who find an angel lying bleeding in their field, "Wreck of the Old 97," which by now has transcended everything to become part of the American DNA, and "Poncho and Lefty" as written by Townes van Zandt.

That last one's just amazing. Let's look at the lyrics.

Livin' on the road my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron, and your breath is hard as kerosene
Weren't you mamma's only boy, her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said, goodbye, and sank into your dreams

Poncho was a bandit boy, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel
Poncho met his match, you know, on the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dyin' words, but that's the way it goes

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

Lefty he can't sing the blues, all night long like he used to
The dust that Poncho bit down south, ended up in Lefty's mouth
The day they lay poor Poncho low, Lefty split for Ohio
And where he got the bread to go, there ain't nobody knows

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

The poets tell how Poncho fell, and Lefty's livin' in cheap hotels
The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold, and so the story ends we're told
Poncho needs your prayers, it's true, but save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do, and now he's growin' old

All the Federales, say
They could have had him any day
They only let him run so long
Out of kindness I suppose

A few grey Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him go wrong
Out of kindness I suppose

The way I see it, the narrator of this song is some middle-aged guy who's seen it all, probably missing a finger or two. He's talking to some 22 year old punk he's known since he was a kid who thinks he's hot shit and is bragging about how he's gonna knock over the mail stage or something, he and this other guy you see, this real tough son of a bitch. And our narrator sighs, kicks back, and tells him all about how bulletproof Poncho thought he was, how badass Lefty thought he was riding with Poncho, and how he was there that day when they laid Poncho low, and saw Lefty piss himself behind a rock, then crawl out as the Feds closed in, snatch the moneybag, and light out for God only knows where. And down through the years, word has gotten back to Colorado how so and so saw Lefty one December in a bar in Cleveland, looking like shit and still waiting for the hammer to fall, with the money long drunk up and all the good parts of his life behind him. And then our narrator gets up, tosses a buck on the table, and leaves the punk kid to contemplate whether any deed is worth a life spent hiding out in Cleveland.

[cue Paul Hogan....] Now that's a knife.

Apropos of recent music wonkery by Johno, I got to thinking about vinyl albums...erm, "alba"?...Maps, "alba"?...and was trying to recall the last vinyl record I bought.

As longtime readers may recall, I worked one summer in a record store ca 1997. It was at the end of the Old Ways, when most of the store was CDs but there was a cassette wall at one end and, no crap, a small bin of re-issued 45s (that's as in "rpm", Buckethead, not "ACP"- if only!) opposite the register. The experience was good in many ways- heard tons of great music, got some decent swag, decent discount on the few things I bothered to buy- and terrible for all the usual reasons that come from dealing with the public, fortified by that public's complete resistance to buying anything good. I swore that if I sold one more single of Butterfly Kisses I was going to start replacing the discs with Straight Outta Compton. But that summer was spent right on the terminator, where forever after music would be dominated by digital collection and players.

Which brings me back to vinyl. I'm pretty sure the last vinyl I bought was a real nice specimen of Axis:Bold as Love- because I do like to wave my freak flag high, although not as often as I used to- but that was purely for its own sake. I was trying to remember the last one I bought because it was the best medium available- I didn't have a CD player yet, and always thought tapes sounded like poop so tried to refrain from those. I'm pretty sure it was Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time, ca 1986.

What about you?

[wik]In other reflections or musing about digital musics, I've just learned that if you're copying a CD into itunes while writing a Ministry post, and, once copied, take it out and put in a new CD, your entire post vanishes. I wasn't sure how to build that into a digital-music-hates-the-analog-Ministry riff, so I just left it alone and rewrote it as best I could recollect.

In a followup to my thoughts the other day about the self-destructive tactics of the music bidness, the New York Times has an interesting article about the sunset of the album as the dominant commercial musical medium. Last year, digital singles outsold physical albums for the first time, which is bad news for the labels as their per-unit take on digital singles is several orders of magnitude lower than on traditional album sales. In a fascinating turn of events, the Times article also profiles a young group who have signed a singles deal with Universal, and who are thrilled at the low-risk exposure they'll get for recording three to five songs, total, for a major label. The majors in turn are contemplating turning this sort of contract, previously reserved for novelty records and one-off all star fiascos, into one of their most common deal structures. This is a surprising and ironic turn of events.

Well, perhaps it's not surprising to you, but it sure as hell is to me. Not six years ago I sat in a room with the management team of the label group I worked for and listened to them announce that we would be getting out of the singles business forever.

To be fair, it made sense at the time. Back in early 2001, the music industry was even farther away then it is today from figuring out how to make money off of digital downloading, and sales of physical singles had dwindled. The singles floor racks of the 1960s had shrunk in the 1980s to a singles wall, and by the turn of the millennium was just a couple singles next to the checkout counter. Albums ruled the day. All across the industry, labels were getting out of the singles business as sales dried up. Sure, there were a couple markets where they still moved, but for the most part, it was dead as disco. Digital media wasn't even a blip except insofar as it could help market traditional CDs.

And that's the central insight that I think is missing from the usual narrative of how the music industry is hidebound, venal, greedy, etc. etc. etc. (all true anyway no matter what, but still...). For fifty years or more, the music industry has been able to dictate, or at worst, adapt readily, to major shifts in media. This is because new form factors came along at a slow pace, and were never all that disruptive to the current status quo. The grooved record had more than three quarters of a century in the sun, from its introduction in the early years of the 20th century to the late 1970s, before it was supplanted by the tape. Tapes too, had a good twenty-year or more run before they were indisputably tackled by the compact disc. And the compact disc, again, had about twenty years between its major commercial adoption and the current seven-year slow strangulation the industry is currently undergoing.

And this time, it's not just form factor and playback technology that's changing. This time it's the entire distribution chain that's been upended, the very business processes that the labels and their affiilated industries (manufacturing, distribution, commercial radio, retail) have built their success around for, in some cases, a hundred years. That's hard to understand, much less accept. I can't imagine any industry agile enough to turn on a dime like the record industry should have when Napster first came on the scene, so a few years delay in getting their act together is no surprise. But now that seven years have gone by, it's still pretty clear that the industry as a whole is still trying to sell buggy whips to consumers who have never even seen a horse.

As for the irony, I do find it ironic that what seemed like a very sound business decision in 2001 - shutting down the singles shop because singles don't sell - turns out to be an early indicator that the music industry was not only unequpped to adapt to the implications of downloadable music, but at the time the technology matured were actively shutting down the only parts of their business that could even comprehend any part of what the future would hold.

Buckethead recently sent me a link to an interesting article in The Consumerist on how one regular innocent music fan found himself driven to desperate piracy by the perversity of the record industry.

In short, this music fan, who has given in his estimate about $20,000 to the various labels in revenues over the years, found himself stymied by the DRM on the most recent Luna album.

Last week while I was busy importing my CD's into iTunes so I could listen to them on my iPod (a most tedious task), I hopped on the internet. iTunes was busy importing a Luna CD, one of my favorite bands, so I decided to see what they were up to since they disbanded a few years back. After a few clicks in Google, I found a blog site describing a posthumous, internet-only release of a collection of covers the band had recorded throughout their career. While I already had many of the songs (they were often featured on b-sides and imported singles, etc.), I couldn't resist tracking down this compilation. As I read further on the blog site I encountered a link to a .zip file containing the entire collection ripped as 128kbps mp3's.

While I must admit being tempted to simply click away and download the collection, I though to myself, "Well, if I buy the music it's only $10, and this way I will get high quality .WAV files. Besides, it's not like Luna were getting rich off of their careers, they could use the money..."

So I headed to Rhino's online store, purchased the music, and downloaded the files.

A little later that evening, I tried to move the .WMA files into iTunes, when I received an error message telling me that iTunes could not import them because they were copy protected. I downloaded the files again (which took another 12 minutes) and again, the same message.

So I called Rhino customer support and after an 8 minute wait spoke with a representative. She informed me that the files were indeed copy protected so that I could only play them on specific music players, most notably not iTunes.

"You don't understand," I said, "These files were not copied or pirated, I actually purchased them."

"Well" she responded, "You didn't actually purchase the files, you really purchased a license to listen to the music, and the license is very specific about how they can be played or listened to."

There's much more there, about how Rhino eventually advised him to keep trying illegal maneuvers until he found a way around their DRM to make the files work with iTunes.

Now, leaving aside the perversity on display here - do the right thing and get giant hassles in return - I am appalled that Rhino, of all labels, hasn't gotten their act together in the eight-odd years since Napster first came on the scene. Eight long years of missing opportunities, making mistakes, and alienating the same public that should be their partners in sharing awesome music together.
And yet, the song the labels sing now is exactly the one they sang when I left the music business four years ago: electronic files are murder; physical media is the past, present and future; consumers are licensees, not purchasers, of the music they consume; and what the hell is with this tech-mology stuff anyway? And that's a death warrant.

Some of you will remember a couple years ago that a Harvard Business School professor did a huge study of the effect on downloaded music on retail music sales (recently published in the Journal of Political Economy as "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis." At the time, he found that the effect was exactly "none." Declines in music sales could be explained through other means, for example the proliferation of other forms of media entertainment competing with music for the public's attention and dollars, as well as the end of the long era in which record and tape owners were upgrading their old media catalogs to compact disc. Indeed, downloaders either tended to download music they'd not have bought anyway, or to treat downloading as a way to sample new music that they then might pay for. In fact, the evidence suggested that there was a significant 'long-tail' effect at work - the million-sellers lost some sales to downloading, but the download-assisted boost in sales of the other thousands of half-forgotten albums out there more than made up for the decline at the top.

Whether or not you agree that downloading in and of itself has a minimal net negative impact on record sales, the facts are that CD sales are down 20% from last year. It now takes far fewer sales to have a #1 hit than it did even three years ago. Right now, indie band The Arcade Fire have the number-two album in the country. What!?! They're fine. They're alright. But they're just The Arcade Fire, and their new album has gotten a lot of good press. Whoop-de-doo. Since they haven't shot platinum yet, I can only surmise that they the overall sales pool is indeed shrinking. Further evidence: abrasive 80s revivalists !!! (that's pronounced however you want - "bang bang bang" or "chick chick chick" are the ones I've heard) are also in the Billboard Top 200. Now, I've heard !!!'s new album, and yeah sure it's fine. But I'm a little bewildered as to why a band whose closest antecedents are cult heroes like Wire and Television and whose name isn't even pronounceable on the radio have a charting album.

I will probably get tired of saying this some day, but not yet: The idiots who run the music industry are slowly strangling their baby by steadfastly refusing to pursue creative ways to adapt to changing realities and partner with their audiences to create new means of selling and buying music. Instead, they are suing the dead and prepubescent children, lashing out at the exact same people they should be embracing, the exact same people who are the key to their future. (Except the dead guy, of course, but he did leave behind children who are currently being sued in his place.) They are even forcing out executives, like EMI's Ted Cohen, who have advocated forcefully and articulately for the industry to stop shitting where it eats its dinner.

For a while, I felt a little bad about all the old-school executives who knew music and only music, who I assumed were ignorant of computers and digital media and only needed some time to get used how things work today. Then, I thought, they'd turn it around and stop it with the lawsuits and the rootkits and the $18 compact discs and the single-vendor licensed media files. But I'm now convinced I was giving them far too much credit. No, those money-grubbing bastards deserve every ounce of pain and humilation that is undoubtedly coming to them.

[wik] Just a final observation. A computer recently came through the tech support shop where I work, that contained more than 12,000 files purchased from iTunes. Can you count with me the ways in which this person has used his money unwisely?

Go here. Now.

A friend and one of my wife's bandmates is creating a documentary on the life and music of John Hartford. I did their website, as part of my soon to be announced part-time bidness of blog consulting. So far, I've designed one website, consulted with a Senate office, and have my next client on deck. Things may be moving quick, but in the meantime, check out Twangcentral, and give them money so that they can finish the damn movie, already.

No, really. I mean it. Rock is dead. Ahmet Ertegun has passed from this world, meaning the single most influential, visionary, and musically aware record label chief of the past century is no longer with us. In every sense, this marks the end of an era.

I was going to eulogize him at length, but everything that needs to be said has already been said, by Reason's Jesse Walker:

To sign Ray Charles, and to refuse to sign Jackson Browne -- Ahmet Ertegun was a man with taste.

Rest in peace, my favorite Turk

Electric blues in this day and age is, I think we can all agree, about ritual rather than absolute novelty. A good night in a blues bar in Chicago or for that matter in Kiev is about going to the familiar source, reconnecting with the trinity of I-IV-V, with the familiar language of the twelve bars, the bent note, the repeated phrase, and the sweet release of finding company in blackest misery. The blues structure is as well known, as dear and familiar to its devotees, as the Mass is to lifelong Catholics. Sure, okay, all the songs sound alike - it's the ritual that counts.

But what ritual! The rhythms don't always change much and the melodies don't either, but that's not the point. The point is the astonishing amount of energy, of feeling, of meaning a good player can put into one little moan, one note, one line that skids right across the song without regard for the form or the changes, that makes you want to stand up and holler right along. That's where the originality comes in - a good blues player can find something new for you in material you know by heart. A good band on a good night can do practically anything and leave you wrung out, serene, and (for a little while anyway) all right with the world.

So, sure yeah all right, to nonbelievers the blues sounds like the same basic thing over and over again. Bu then again, so is sex, and I don't see many folks getting tired of that. And like sex, (wait, John... so you contend the blues is like sex? How novel!), it's all about the moment. That band, on that night, in that room, is going to put on a show and try to make some magic happen.

Case in point: Delmark has just released Live at Theresa's 1975 by the great Junior Wells, a legendary blues harpist and certified magician, that shows why he was considered one of the Chicago's all-time finest. Wells was a prototypical harp player (that's "harmonica") in the Chicago mold, blowing riffs and phrases through a warm and fuzzy microphone that muddies up the sound and buffs the sharp edges off the harmonica's shrill sound. When he was on, his playing was incredibly thrilling, one of the definitive sounds of the Chicago style.

Wells was a regular at Theresa's Tavern, a now-defunct venue on Chicago's South Side, and Theresa's doesn't have the swing-for-the-fences atmosphere of a big festival show. According to the archives of the Chicago Reader, Wells and his band played Theresa's at least fifteen times in June of that year, so it's safe to say that Wells felt at home in the venue. So rather than being a big-budget spectacle, Live at Theresa's, which was originally recorded for broadcast on Chicago's WXRT, captures Wells and his band in a relaxed mood, hanging out for a late night of blues and casual profanity and whipping off a gem-studded set designed solely to entertain the good people of the greater Chicago metropolitan area.

Wells got his early start in Muddy Waters' band, but by the mid-1960s had migrated to a slicker, smoother sound. He was probably an early influence on James Brown's move to funk, and sometimes took heat for the R&B sound of some of his compositions.

On , Wells opens with his hit "Snatch it Back and Hold It," a slick and bubbling workout that features great guitar work from journeymen Phil Guy and Byther Smith and a vocal contribution from Wells that definitely invites comparisons to the Godfather of Soul. From there, Wells and the band pan out to cover a lot of Chicago Blues territory, turning out polished numbers, roadhouse crawls, and more than a few tracks (notably "Love Her With A Feeling" and the instrumental "Juke") either written or inspired by Muddy Waters. The set as a whole rambles from style to style and song to song, as Wells holds court in a supremely casual mood; 'let's do this one, next we're gonna try this.' In the hands of lesser musicians this kind of set would never catch fire. That's not a problem here.

The music is broken up by plenty of stage patter: some of it rambles, some of it is downright filthy, and all of it is priceless. Junior's just hanging out, his friends are in the house, and he has business to transact right then and there. And although some of the between-song talk is of dubious historical importance, it's a thankful thing that Delmark made the decision to preserve it, because it really makes the show. It was some guy's birthday that night, so the band does a little bit of "Happy Birthday" and then joshes the birthday boy about being a virgin. Somebody's Jewish. Or not; maybe it's Junior, or so he claims. Or not. Junior denies being a blues singer and introduces "Come On This House" as a Perry Como number. Junior starts telling a story that turns out to be the first line of a song. Great, great stuff.

Musically, highlights include all the aforementioned tracks, plus an eight-minute version of the standard "Goin' Down Slow" and a set-closing version of Wells' "Messin' With The Kid" that, although the band is totally out of tune and ragged by that point, is the exact sound of a pie-eyed and happy last call.

Overall, the album captures a great band on a good night at a good club, and, you know what? That's enough. Sure, the blues is three chords over and over again, but that only matters if you're not a believer. Live at Theresa's shows one of the finest blues musicians of all times in his element, relaxed and hanging out with nothing to prove, making magic just for the hell of it.